Jack Healy & Orlando Mayorquín of the New York Times: “Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah on Sunday provided new information about the background and political leanings of the 22-year-old accused of killing Charlie Kirk, saying that the suspect had a 'leftist ideology' and had also been in a romantic relationship with a partner who was in the process of transitioning from male to female. Mr. Cox, speaking on NBC’s 'Meet the Press,' described the suspect, Tyler Robinson, as a 'very normal young man' who appeared to have been 'radicalized' some time after he dropped out of college and moved back to his hometown in southern Utah, where he had spent the past few years.... Mr. Cox said Mr. Robinson had spent much of his time immersed in online gaming, message boards and parts of what the governor called the 'deep, dark internet.'” The NBC News story is here. MB: I don't suppose the “deep, dark internet” could have “radicalized” this “very normal (i.e., Republican) young man.”
Yes, the FBI Is in Very Capable Hands. Sakshi Venkatraman of BBC News: "Fourteen staff members at a US animal shelter have been taken to hospital after the FBI used an incinerator at the facility to burn two pounds of seized methamphetamine. Staff and some 75 cats and dogs were evacuated from the Yellowstone Valley Animal Shelter in Billings, Montana, when the building filled with smoke on Wednesday. The incinerator is usually used by animal control officers to dispose of euthanised animals, but local authorities said it can also be used by law enforcement to burn seized narcotics. The cats and dogs have been relocated, and the animals which experienced the most smoke exposure are now under supervision."
O'Kavanaugh Unaware of His Own Rulings. Mark Sherman of the AP: “Justice Brett Kavanaugh says the genius of the American system of government is that no one should have too much power, even as he and other conservatives on the Supreme Court are facing criticism for deferring repeatedly to ... Donald Trump. Invoking the list of grievances against King George III that the nation’s founders included in the Declaration of Independence, Kavanaugh said Thursday the framers of the Constitution were set on avoiding the concentration of power. 'And the framers recognized in a way that I think is brilliant, that preserving liberty requires separating the power. No one person or group of people should have too much power in our system,' Kavanaugh said at an event honoring his onetime boss, Kenneth Starr.... The court’s liberal justices also have objected to the conservatives’ repeated votes in favor of Trump’s emergency appeals to the Supreme Court....” Thanks to RAS for the lead.
~~~ Marie: So it isn't that O'Kavanaugh has no idea of the principle of balance of powers on which this country was founded. He knows. He just doesn't think it should apply when a president*/dictator of his own party holds all of the power. ~~~
~~~ He Comes to Bury Starr AND to Praise Him. Of course Starr merits all that honoring. Besides writing the infamously salacious Starr report (with help from O'Kavanaugh himself), Sherman points out that Starr "represented Jeffrey Epstein when the financier was first accused of having sex with underage girls ... and accepted a light sentence.... Starr ... [was] president of Baylor University, also in Waco. But he was forced out of the Baylor job in 2016 in the midst of a sexual assault scandal involving players on the school’s football team.... Then in 2020, Starr joined Trump’s defense team that won Senate acquittal of the president after his first impeachment." That is, Ken Starr was horrified that Democrat Bill Clinton "did have sexual relations with that young woman" (who was legally of age), but he was good with Jeffrey Epstein sexually abusing hundreds of underage girls and with football players routinely assaulting young women. Then of course he helped Republican Trump beat the rap for trying to bribe an ally into falsely accusing Democrat Joe Biden of wrongdoing. AND kudos to Sherman & the AP for pointing out the head-spinning hypocrisy of both Kavanaugh and Starr.
Here's Another Sample of What American Fascists Think the Country Should Look Like. Stephen Prager of Common Dreams: “Free speech advocates are sounding the alarm about a bill in the US House of Representatives that they fear could allow Secretary of State Marco Rubio to strip US citizens of their passports based purely on political speech. The bill, introduced by Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), will come up for a hearing on Wednesday.... Rubio has previously boasted of stripping the visas and green cards from several immigrants based purely on their peaceful expression of pro-Palestine views [including Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk], describing them as 'Hamas supporters.'... Journalist Zaid Jilani noted on X that 'judges can already remove a passport over material support for terrorism, but the difference is you get due process. This bill would essentially make Marco Rubio judge, jury, and executioner.'” Thanks to RAS for the link. ~~~
~~~ Marie: The bill, as described, could not possibly pass a judicial smell test, but it's depressing that at least one member of Congress (and most likely many more) thinks it's fine to deprive U.S. citizens of their fundamental First Amendment rights.
~~~~~~~~~~
Akhilleus recommended in yesterday's Comments that you listen to Heather Cox Richardson, speaking with Dan Pfeiffer "on the 'Pod Save America' podcast [where she provides] a superb look back at the historical context of our present MAGA shitshow." You can listen to the podcast here (it's the third one down the list) or on any of the other feeds linked on the page. MB: I recommend watching it on YouTube here. (Despite the fact that I was born in radio days, maybe I never believed in something I could not see with my own eyes.) ~~~
~~~ AND in her most recent "letter," Richardson demonstrates how Trump, et al., are using (a) Joe McCarthy's tactics of broadcasting "outrageous statements and outright lies" as the basis for getting what they want, and (b) Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt's strategy of dividing the world into friends and enemies.
Tyler Pager & Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times: Donald “Trump and his top advisers are escalating their attacks on their opponents in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, placing the blame for political violence on Democrats alone and signaling a broad crackdown on critics and left-leaning institutions. Mr. Trump blamed the 'radical left' almost immediately after Mr. Kirk was shot, before the authorities had identified a suspect.... Mr. Trump has an expansive view of those he deems radical, applying that term to almost https://www.commondreams.org/news/rubio-thought-policing-bill all of his political adversaries. In his second term, Mr. Trump has pushed the boundaries of his authority to exact retribution on political opponents and institutions.... Stephen Miller, a top adviser to the president, characterized the current moment in America as a battle between 'family and nature' and those who celebrate 'everything that is warped, twisted and depraved.'” Looks like a gift link. ~~~
~~~ Marie: What you have here, for the umpteenth time, is mainstream reporters writing, "The President of the United States is a sociopath," without ever daring to use the word "sociopath." ~~~
~~~ And Now, Crazy, Angry Old Man Rants. Peter Nicholas of NBC News: “... Donald Trump said he hopes the nation will heal following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk..., 'But we’re dealing with a radical left group of lunatics, and they don’t play fair and they never did.' The suspect arrested in Kirk’s murder ... [registered to vote] with no political party declared.... Trump, in the interview, said: '... They [the left] don’t like what’s been happening. We’ve been winning very big.'... In reply to a question from NBC News about [progressive megadonor George] Soros, the president said that he should be put in jail.'” MB: And Trump is sickening very big.
Few of us would have gazed into our crystal balls in 2017 and predicted that a voice of reason in 2025 would be Donald Trump's fixer Michael Cohen. But in this Substack post which RAS linked yesterday, Cohen again proves that he gets Trump, whom he describes as the "single political figure [who] has done more to foment, condone and sanction political violence and instability in America...."
David Ingram of NBC News: “A stew of hypertoxic rhetoric has surged through social media and American discourse after the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, inflaming a political environment that was already deeply polarized. The most concerning messages, experts told NBC News, are proclamations from far-right activists, Republican politicians and conservative influencers about a coming civil war and the need for retribution or payback against the left for Kirk’s killing. The phrase 'civil war' has spiked on social media and in Google searches. 'The Left is the party of murder,' Elon Musk posted on X..., shortly after the shooting and before the gunman’s identity was known. He separately posted, 'If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is fight or die,' without saying who 'they' were.” ~~~
~~~ Alan Feuer, et al., of the New York Times: “In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, right-wing influencers and at least one Trump administration official have actively encouraged people to scour the internet for remarks celebrating the killing and to expose those who have posted them online. The widespread and fast-moving campaign of naming-and-shaming has already resulted in countless lost jobs, professional suspensions and internal investigations, exacerbating the already fraught tensions over the shooting that exist online.... Several online social media personalities, some with enormous followings, called almost in unison for 'war' to be waged against those on the left they perceive to be their enemies. Among those personalities have been far-right agitators like Laura Loomer and Chaya Raichik, who runs a large account on X called Libs of TikTok. Since the shooting, they and dozens of other online influencers have taken it upon themselves to recruit ordinary Americans to turn in fellow citizens for making comments about Mr. Kirk that may be nasty or disparaging, but are likely protected by the First Amendment.... A Secret Service employee was placed on administrative leave after stating on Facebook that Mr. Kirk had 'spewed hate and racism on his show,' said the agency’s spokesman....” The link appears to be a gift link. ~~~
~~~ Marie: This is rather careless reporting, IMO. The reporters don't make much of a distinction between "celebrating the killing of" and "criticizing." And there is a significant difference. Punishing a person for writing that Kirk "spewed hate and racism" is not justifiable, especially because that is true. "Celebrating the killing," on the other hand, could be or could morph into a form of inciting political assassination, so that's a different sort of speech, which might be unlawful. ~~~
~~~ Don Moynihan on Substack: When a deranged person murdered a Minnesota Democrat and her husband this summer, “Democrats abhorred the rising tide of violent rhetoric..., but did not announce that they planned to initiate a civil war, or broadly restrict the rights of those on the right. By contrast, significant public figures on the right, including elected officials or advisors to Trump, declared war on the left.... [After the suspect in the Kirk case was apprehended and identified as coming from a Republican family,] the civil war was cancelled, at least for now, to be replaced by Young Male Mental Health Appreciation Week.... Kirk was celebrated as a champion of free speech by those looking to close down the speech of others.” ~~~
~~~ Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times: Charlie “Kirk’s eulogists have praised him for his commitment to discourse, dialogue and good-faith discussion. Few if any of them have seen fit to mention the fact that Kirk’s first act on the national stage was to create a McCarthyite watchlist of college and university professors, lecturers and academics.... To speak of Kirk as a champion of reasoned discussion is also to ignore his frequent calls for the state suppression of his political opponents.... And then there is Kirk’s vision for America, which wasn’t one of peace and pluralism but white nationalism and the denigration of Americans deemed unworthy of and unfit for equal citizenship.... He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk’s influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.” Bouie provides evidence of Kirk's views.
Through a Dark Wood, Blindly. Eileen Sullivan of the New York Times: “A federal judge late Friday ruled that the Trump administration’s mass firing of probationary employees earlier this year was illegal, a victory for the labor unions and nonprofit groups that had sued the government over the terminations. The ruling did not call on the government to return the fired probationary employees to their jobs, as would be the 'ordinary course,' Judge William H. Alsup of the Northern District of California wrote in a 38-page opinion. Because the Supreme Court allowed the administration to continue its purge for months while the case proceeded, he said, 'too much water has now passed under the bridge.' Many of the fired probationary workers in the 17 agencies covered in the lawsuit have been reinstated to their posts, have found new jobs or do not want to return to their old jobs, Judge Alsup said. And for some workers, agency reorganizations over the past few months have eliminated their positions. Even so, the plaintiffs saw the ruling as a significant win.”
Annals of “Journalism,” Ctd. Hillary Hanson of the Huffington Post: “Fox and Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade suggested this week that homeless people suffering from mental health issues who refuse help should simply be killed.... [In a discussion of how to manage people who refuse to accept treatment, Kilmeade suggested,] 'Or uh, involuntary lethal injection. Or something.... Just kill ’em.' The other two hosts barely react to his remark before continuing their discussion.”
~~~~~~~~~~
AP: “Personnel from a U.S. warship boarded a Venezuelan tuna boat with nine fishermen while it was sailing in Venezuelan waters, Venezuela’s foreign minister said on Saturday, underlining strained relations with the United States.... While reading a statement on Saturday, Foreign Minister Yván Gil told journalists the Venezuelan tuna boat was “illegally and hostilely boarded by a United States Navy destroyer” and 18 armed personnel who remained on the vessel for eight hours, preventing communication and the fishermen’s normal activities. They were then released under escort by the Venezuelan navy.”
11 comments:
Brian Kilmeade of Fox suggests that homeless people with mental problems who refuse
treatment should just be killed.
I have a suggestion: News people who spread lies and propaganda should just be
killed. How about them apples, Brian?
NBC News
No more lockeroom talk.
"Pete Hegseth tells Pentagon staff to hunt for negative Charlie Kirk posts by service members
Several people have already been relieved of their jobs because of their posts on social media, defense officials told NBC News."
Speech
"New Bill Would Allow Rubio to Strip US Citizens’ Passports Over Political Speech
The legislation would allow the Secretary of State to strip anyone’s US passport with no legal due process."
Iowa
"REPORT: Iowa County Faces $1 Million/Day Fine For Refusing GOP Governor’s Order To Lower Flags For Kirk"
New Eyes, Smile Wide.
Implanting a tooth to restore vision. This is precisely the kind of research that does not get done without academic funding because no company would bother with the research in the first place because of the costs and probability that nothing comes of it.
Timothy Snyder on substack writes "there is a difference worth noticing, and noting, between" Free Speech and Me Speech
"“Me speech” is a common practice among rich and influential Americans. Practitioners of “me speech” use the phrase “free speech” quite a bit. But what they mean is free speech for themselves. They want a monopoly on it."
Then there is the speech that our search engines promote or censor:
On Bluesky, Sherrilyn Ifill notes an example where two individuals are presented with different content: Alternate Kirks
"This may explain why there’s an aggressive response to people who merely post Kirk’s own words. It threatens the existence of the alternate Kirk - the motivational speaker that had been marketed to young kids and white Christian groups through selective quotation & clips."
Rebecca Solnit, in The Guardian, reminds us that Epstein represents the "mainstream culture" of his time. Feminism exposed the ubiquity of child abuse, rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence – and helped fight that culture
Like Rebecca, I too remember -
"... how normalized the sexual exploitation of teenage girls and even tweens by adult men was, how it showed up in movies, in the tales of rock stars and “baby groupies”, in counterculture and mainstream culture, how normalized rape, exploitation, grooming, objectification, commodification was."
And for years now the Right has railed against the Left's so-called "cancel-culture."
Now they want to cancel passports. Of course, Kilmeade, et. al. want to cancel people.
Give me a break.
"Critics say..."
"Justice Brett Kavanaugh says the genius of the American system of government is that no one should have too much power, even as he and other conservatives on the Supreme Court are facing criticism for deferring repeatedly to President Donald Trump.
Invoking the list of grievances against King George III that the nation’s founders included in the Declaration of Independence, Kavanaugh said Thursday the framers of the Constitution were set on avoiding the concentration of power.
The court’s liberal justices also have objected to the conservatives’ repeated votes in favor of Trump’s emergency appeals to the Supreme Court, including the most decision this week to allow the resumption of sweeping immigration operations in Southern California."
I'm wondering if Fat Hitler's tantrums in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting have anything to do with his own escape from assassination. He is infamous for projection and here he probably does a bit silly syllogism hippity hop: Someone who would try to shoot me must me evil. My enemies (Democrats, liberals, minorities, anyone uncomfortable with authoritarianism) are evil. Therefore, the person who tried to kill me is a Democrat, liberal, minority, etc....
Same with Charlie Kirk, whom he clearly has substituted for himself in this instance.
But Fatty seems incapable of expressing, or even considering personal, intimate emotions, so he simply lashes out, like an little child. But he's also able to compartmentalize in a way that keeps real emotions at bay (because unlike most rational, well adjusted adults, he is unable to deal process big feelings) so a day after swinging from the rafters about Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk, when he is asked how he's holding up, he can say (legitimately, I think) that he's fine, and look! We're breaking ground on my Big Beautiful Dance Hall, In'it great?
if you had a relative who behaved like this, you'd put them away, or...never have anything to do with them again. But this damaged and debased thing is the president!
The standard cover here is to say "Hey, I'm not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but...But here's the thing about that. We are all psychologists of a sort in that we've been around all sorts of people are entire lives, and now and then, we've come across people who are both truly weird and seriously damaged, and whether or not we can apppend a clinical name to their psyches, we know "fucked up" when we see it. And this guy is fucked up in so many ways that a bevy of psychology PhDs could all make their careers on parsing this prick.
Just consider his connection to Jeffrey Epstein. From what I've been reading, Epstein and Trump cleary shared an interest in taking advantage of (ie, raping) young girls, But they were different in other ways. It seems that Epstein, although a master manipulator, also knew how to make friends and how to be a good friend to those in his circle. This may have been part and parcel of his ability to ingratiate himself into the good graces of so many rich and powerful acquaintances, but it also seems as if many of these people saw him as someone they could confide in, rely on, and trust. He apparently was instrumental, through his many contacts, in being able to help those in his inner circle (and not just with access to young girls). This is a complex, complicated person, who because of his status and social position, offered many in his circle a certain feeling of "Well, we can trust this guy, he's one of us, and he's a good guy".
Enter Trump. When Trump met Epstein, he was pretty much a failure. He had botched a slew of big deals but was working overtime to present himself as a Great Man. In Epstein, he found not only kindred spirit whose interest in young girls and a sybaritic lifestyle had enormous appeal to Fatty, but he also may have been one of his only real friends, especially after the death of Roy Cohn.
These people inhabited a world so different from anything the vast majority of people in the world had any knowledge of or interest in, that very few people they met out in the world could meet them in that domain. This was probably as close to real friendship as Trump ever knew.
All damaged assholes, but they recognize each something in the other. Maybe Trump saw something similar in Charlie Kirk. Both scumbags.
Finally signing in for comment. I am working on the other side of the world right now. 9/11 passed without much comment here, but I stopped and thought for a while.
There was a kernel of understanding for the motivation of the attackers. The US had been treating some populations badly. But the attack was outsized, rather like in 2010 when a man flew his single-engine plan into an IRS office in Austin, Texas.
The world rallied around the US on 9/11. Even the world that knew we were doing bad stuff.
I wonder if the world would still rally around the US if we were attacked in a similar manner today. The current *administration is doing everything possible to destroy the goodwill we received from other nations, through belligerent tariffs, killing foreign aid in so many forms, and treating our allies like dirt.
When you are an arrogant bully superpower, they let you do whatever you want, but they curse you when your back is turned.
Would expressing the above be enough to revoke my passport?
Post a Comment