If a politician is just a whore without the desire to please a customer, what's a YOUTUBER?
That's an answer we'll get too slowly. We're still limping from the wounds of last week. Those who felt 2017 was a bad year have learned now what a bad year really is. It was as though we'd awoken in QUINN MARTIN'S TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED and were trapped in episode seven with no way to move towards the eighth and final episode. It was a horror show as a runaway, activist Court tossed aside precedent and custom and delivered one devastating blow to democracy over and over.
The John Roberts Court has proven to be as illegitimate as it is crooked. The appalling corruption revelations regarding -- among others -- Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuc and Samuel Alito -- though still disgusting, are no longer as shocking due to the fact that the Court has abandoned any pretense of dispensing justice in one ruling after another over the last two weeks.
Hassan Kanu's "US Supreme Court shows indifference to wrongful convictions" (REUTERS) probably summed up the Court's June 22nd ruling in MARCUS DEANGELO JONES V DEWAYNE HENDRIX:
But in Jones' case, the Supreme Court held 6-3 that he couldn't raise his innocence claim because he had filed an earlier, separate motion to vacate, based on ineffective assistance of counsel, rather than arguing that he is legally innocent. The justices said the “inadequate or ineffective” exception applies only in exceedingly rare circumstances, like if the sentencing court were to be dissolved by Congress, for example.
In dissent, the three liberal justices wrote that the decision produces “bizarre outcomes” and “disturbing results.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that the ruling, coupled with other
recent limits on appeals imposed by the court, have transformed “a
statute that Congress designed to provide for a rational and orderly
process of federal postconviction judicial review into an aimless and
chaotic exercise in futility.”
In other words, America's chief Court ruled that guilty or innocent does not matter to the court system -- a rather novel concept of justice.
As depraved as that ruling was, it's only getting worse. Last week, the Court ended affirmative action for college applicants. It's a post-racial world where all problems have been fixed apparently. Or that's what the conservative majority wants to pretend. Sherrilyn Ifill (SLATE) noted:
[. . .] Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court striking down the use of race-conscious admissions at Harvard and UNC was no less devastating for being expected. The destructive force of the majority opinion is not only that it removes the ability of critical institutions of our democracy to directly recognize the significance of race as they build educational communities where students can learn from and about one another’s experiences and perspectives. The majority opinion’s shattering destruction, its cruelty even, lies in its cynical ahistoricism, the weakness of its analysis, its manipulation of precedent, all in service of the completion of a project undertaken by conservatives—and begun on this court decades ago—to dismantle the legal framework that supports even the most modest efforts to level the playing field for those who have been most marginalized in our country.
The court is on a mission, and the more transparently it betrays the aims of that mission, the more we must confront the danger in which this democracy finds itself. This court is also reckless in its zeal. This means that the methods it uses in furtherance of its mission are crude, shortsighted, thin, and thus easily exposed to charges of illegitimacy. The scope of the court’s hubris is breathtaking. It supplants its judgment over that of the most prestigious educational institutions in the country, as well as 74 major American companies that filed amicus briefs to the court, including Microsoft, Verizon, Starbucks, and American Express.
Dahlia Lithwick (SLATE) observes:
If the past year has taught us anything at all, it’s that some of the justices on the current Supreme Court really don’t live under the same sky as everyone else. Some of them use private planes to travel to better, bluer skies. And some, like the chief justice, simply insist that nobody has a right to question or comment on judicial doings because these justices really do live under a separate sky. So, it’s hardly surprising that in their dissents in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson offer what is more or less a guided tour of the skies under which everyone else in America is still forced to live, every day, without respite. As they lay it out, one man’s “color-blind” is another man’s “blinkered.”
Which reminds me: The word blind appears 73 times in the 237-page opinion for Students for Fair Admissions. It is deployed most frequently by Justice Clarence Thomas for the proposition that the 14th Amendment is a colorblind directive; “that requires the government to, at long last, put aside its citizens’ skin color and focus on their individual achievements.”
In her dissent, Sotomayor accuses the majority of imposing on Thursday
“a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in
an endemically segregated society.”
The Center for Constitutional Rights explained, "With this decision, the Court grotesquely co-opts and distorts the reasoning of Brown v. Board of Education and its heroic advocate, Thurgood Marshall. Brown and its progeny were designed to end what
the Court now calls race neutrality – known at the time as “separate
but equal.” No amount of gaslighting by the right-wing ideologues who
have captured this Court should obscure the fact that the aim of Brown and Reconstruction was to produce race-conscious justice. To suggest, as this Court does, that taking race into account to help
those that society has historically repressed is the legal or moral
equivalent of using race as a reason to repress is confusing the
medicine for the disease. Integration is not segregation."
As the country was still reeling from that inequity and muttering, "This is not America," the corrupt Court handed down a decision in 303 CREATIVE V ELENIS. This decision they handed down also was segregation. Mark Joseph Stern (SLATE) recapped the ruling:
On Friday, the Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination laws, carving out a First Amendment exception any time a law “compels” a business to “express” a message about sexual orientation with which it disagrees. In the words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, the opinion “is, quite literally, a notice that reads: ‘Some services may be denied to same-sex couples.’ ”
The case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, was manufactured by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian law firm that opposes LGBTQ+ equality in all walks of life. 303 Creative is a for-profit Colorado business owned and operated by Lorie Smith, who opposes same-sex marriage. No same-sex couple has ever tried to hire Lorie Smith to create a website for their wedding. Represented by ADF, however, she filed a preemptive lawsuit demanding a First Amendment right to turn away any same-sex couples who request a wedding website. So the case is built entirely on hypotheticals, and there is no real record to speak of.
Justice Neil Gorsuch’s 6–3 opinion for the court got around this problem by insisting that Smith faces a “credible threat of enforcement” because Colorado acknowledges that it will enforce its civil rights law. He went on to declare that “Colorado seeks to compel speech Ms. Smith does not wish to provide,” speech that would be “celebrating marriages”—those of same-sex couples—of which she does not approve.
The Center for Constitutional Rights pointed out, "Together with yesterday’s decision
invalidating affirmative action, this ruling lays bare the values of
this Court. In six justices’ view, the Constitution says it is just fine
for a business to exclude someone on the basis of their protected status (LGBTQI+), but it is unconstitutional for a university to include
someone on the basis of their protected status (race). This is bigotry
masquerading as law. And, in so ruling again, this Court continues to
advance a Jim Crow jurisprudence in which the white, male, Christian
insider’s freedom is made meaningful only through the subjugation of
vulnerable populations. For this conservative movement, as for John
Calhoun or George Wallace, discrimination fuels their feelings of
freedom. These six individuals somehow retain the power to impose their
18th Century values on a democratic majority that believes in equality
and fairness. The Court has little legitimacy left."
It did a lot worse than that.
We now, again, have two legal classes of citizenship. The Civil Rights Movement did a great deal to end that system -- a system enshrined by a racist Supreme Court in decisions such as 1896's PLESSY V FERGUSON -- which ruled barring equal access was not discriminating against Black people as long as they had access to something similar -- it was 'separate but equal' -- a laughable concept then and now.
LGBTQ+ persons -- and this can be expanded out to other groups, grasp that, this Court is just getting started -- are not full citizens anymore. Full citizens have legal protections and rights. Period. No question mark, no qualifier. A gay man now? He has legal protections and rights as long as it doesn't offended some religious nut.
Clue to the Court: Freedom of religion means the rest of us don't have to suffer from your religious delusions that call for hatred and discrimination.
When the ruling came down, we flashed on two things -- fetish porn and a NETFLIX documentary. Sadly, we aren't joking.
Benjamin Cantu's ELDORADO: EVERYTHING THE NAZIS HATE is a documentary that started airing last week on NETFLIX. It deals with the rise of Nazism in Germany and the way it rose by targeting groups of people.
And it echoes in the US today because, as one person points out, "Even now you can have these liberties and they can be taken away from you."
As The Proud Boys -- little boys in mannish bodies -- have spent the last months showing up at drag events -- obviously horny and envious -- with guns and threats, bigots like Jonathan Turley have ignored this while freaking out over ANTIFA repeatedly. He's a Nazi, Turley is. And his Proud Boys are the SA in Nazi Germany. As historian Ben Miller explains in the documentary, "The SA is the Nazis' paramilitary. They do the dirty work. They destabilize democracy. They fight other people on the street. They beat people up outside events."
Yeah, that's The Proud Boys.
Miller also explains, "The SA is a really huge part of the Nazi's plan to take control of Germany and to establish a racially pure empire, free of Jews, free of Communists, free of disabled people, free of Roma and Sinti people, and free of queers."
Are you getting what's happening right now?
These are not isolated incidents. This a path that certain people want to take this country down.
Let's move over to the fetish porn. Back in May of 2021, we tackled it in "Media: Gay Rights and Gay Wrongs," and we especially called out a porn favorite of Glenneth Greenwalds -- Miles Striker. As we noted then, the porn industry should not be supporting Striker with awards when he was making garbage like GAY RIGHTS REVOKED -- something we're ever closer to now. They shouldn't have given any award. He's a fat, small dicked man. We know he's small dicked, we've seen the videos. It's small and it's thin. "Pencil dick" would be praising him. And he's fat. And he's pretty much hairless. And he's short. And he's ugly. But somehow, he's convinced himself that he's catnip to gay men. He was celebrated and by idiot straight people who brought this loser on to their radio programs and their YOUTUBE nonsense. What were you people thinking?
Disgusting.
Again, he's Glenneth's boy -- probably even more so now that the Widow Greenwald tries to get through the lonely nights and the crippling guilt for not being there for his husband when his husband was dying.
Glenneth is the self-hating gay. If you need to tie him in with the documentary, he's Ernst Rohm. The documentary explains that Rohm, who was gay, flew up the Nazi hierarchy and did so while being with other men, aspiring to ''hyper masculinity" and wanting only to be around men because he found women "disgusting."
That pretty much nails Glenneth down, doesn't it? He's a sexist pig and we've noted that for years. He flits about online from man to man. And he's convinced that other right-wingers, like himself, have accepted him even though he's gay. They never really accepted Rohm. They went along with him, they used him, they took what they needed from him. Then they arrested him, tried to get him to kill himself and, when he wouldn't, they executed him.
Hopefully, it won't get that far in America. However, if it does, and the hate merchants chop off Glenneth's penis then maybe feed it to him? Don't make cow eyes at us, Glenneth, you've brought it all on yourself while doing real damage to non-self loathing members of the LGBTQ+ set. He mocks transpeople all the time and now he's taken to rushing over to right-winger Brad Polumbo to trash the entire LGBTQ+ community. Along the way, he's celebrating the demise of affirmative action in higher education.
These are disgusting people.
They are not your friends. They are grifters and they are liars.
Some of you were upset when Katie Halper revealed her true colors last Friday. We weren't No longer did we have to leave her unnamed when calling out idiots who brought Cornel West on their programs because they loved and respected him so much despite . . . not knowing how to spell Cornel. ("Cornell" in Katie's case.) No longer did we have to avoid saying who it was when we were talking about an idiot announcing Cornel was the Green Party's presidential candidate. She corrected it, after we called it out, she did. But what an airhead, right? The Green Party's going to select their presidential candidate at their convention in the summer of 2024. Not until then.
Where could she have heard otherwise . . . Oh, that's right, she's friends with liar and serial plagiarist Chris Hedges.
If you missed it, last Friday, faux feminist Katie Halper and her boss Aaron Matte (yes, we know it's spelled Aaron Mate, we just don't care -- we also pronounce the name as it was pronounced on DEMOCRACY NOW! for years, not as the pipsqueak wants it pronounced today) interviewed and promoted Scott Ritter. That would be convicted pedophile and registered sex offender Scott Ritter -- not that Katie and Aaron told their audience that.
Good. She's trash and we don't have to pretend anymore. She's not a feminist. She's a grifter and, if that surprises you, maybe you've missed all the recent USEFUL IDIOT videos that were lucky to average 4,000 views (some have barely hit 2000). Pedophile Ritter's appearance did get the right wingers on board and did inflate their numbers finally. But the pattern was that the numbers were low. The glory days of their podcast are long over. They're hoping this reach out (reach around?) to right wingers we'll help them return to their past glory.
But it's doubtful. The right-wing already has a lot of podcasts.
The left was fleeing USEFUL IDIOTS. Original co-host Matt Taibbi is now an exposed transphobe. And Aaron and Katie? They don't cover LGBTQ+ issues. They hang out with Matt and with Glenneth. People started putting two and two together and coming up with: Whore.
Friday, Mike said to us, "A politician is just a whore without the desire to please a customer." We told him that was funny and congratulated him on it. He replied he was quoting us. We wrote it in 2012, the day after the presidential election.
Let us expand on that to now include YOUTUBERs as well. They love to beg for money, they just don't like to work.
Katie and Aaron waste everyone's time pretending they have something to say each Monday as the trot out the same old tired nonsense of how they watch the Sunday chat & chews so you don't have to. That was maybe funny 18 years ago. It's not now. And the reality is, you're not watching them for anyone but yourself. If someone wants to watch, for example, MEET THE PRESS, they're going to watch it. You're not saving anyone anything.
But, hey, whores have to claim they're a great lay, right? Otherwise, how would they stay in business?
Katie has two platforms: THE KATIE HALPER SHOW and USEFUL IDIOTS. She's made clear that abortion really isn't an issue to her on either. She's made clear that the LGBTQ+ community does not exist in her eyes. She's made clear that she doesn't want to talk to women. So what if they make up 50.4% of the US population, she's only got time for them to be on 3% of her episodes.
She was never a feminist.
Last Friday, she finally stepped out of her Phyllis Schlafly closet.
She needs to be her true self because she's got nothing else.
ROLLING STONE isn't hiring her back. THE HILL fired her as well. JACOBIN hasn't been interested in her since the whole explosion that saw Katie's former co-host of THE KATIE HALPER SHOW abandon ship and stick with JACOBIN RADIO, USEFUL IDIOTS is sinking in streams . . . Professionally, she's become the daughter her father can't marry off.
At last, some symmetry between her work life and her personal life.
She showed you who she really was on Friday. You should be thankful to be free of the illusion that she's on your side. She's not. Aaron Matte isn't, Glenneth isn't and Matt Taibbi isn't. They're a bunch of hate merchants -- some are just more honest about it.
As you grasp that, you should grasp something else.
They're covering a Green Party candidate (though not a member of the Green Party). Why is that?
They don't usually do that, do they?
No. But they're doing it now.
Katie's chicken fat face may fool some people, but she's over forty. She popped onto our radar back in 2008. She was Spencer Ackerman's roll dog and she was part of the trash Hillary crowd. She went around trashing Hillary and promoting Barack.
Do we need to draw a picture for you? She doesn't give a damn about Cornel West or about Marianne Williamson. This is about defeating Joe Biden. That's what it's about for her, what it's about for Matt, what it's about for Aaron -- for all those grifters.
Her whole point is to defeat Joe Biden. To take him down.
This election cycle we will be voting Democrat for president. Regardless of who the nominee is.
Well that's not true.
If the nominee is Robert F. Kennedy, we won't be voting Democrat. But then, there's now no chance in hell that it's going to be Robert.
Last week, Marianne found her voice.
Good for Marianne, good for her campaign, good for the country.
She might end up with the nomination. We'll be glad to vote for her. We'll be glad to vote for Joe.
Robert can go f**k himself.
Excuse us, Junior can go f**k himself.
Not even the Court's decision could prompt Junior to say the word "gay." He's a choir boy in The Church of DeSantis these days -- emphasis on boy.
And his apologetic Tweets where he objects to the affirmative action decision -- but apologizes for objecting?
Pathetic.
Little Junior. Little boy going through life too scared to stand up and be a grown up. Just a little boy named Junior. Never be a big man like Daddy, right, Junior?
The country doesn't need a mannish boy as president.
We wanted to support RFK Jr. But he refused to be authentic. And he refused to be a man.
Here's the thing. We do our piece here and that's fun, usually. But what we really do is speak to groups and speak to the press. So what we'll be talking about this week is RFK Jr.'s Daddy and Uncle fixation.
That's what he's running on, his name. And if he wants to invoke RFK and JFK, invoke them. And let's all invoke them together.
For example?
RFK and JFK both used and brutalized Marilyn Monroe. They did that to so many women.
Let's talk about that.
Let's talk about JFK and same-sex relations. We can do that, right? It's 2023. We don't need to pull out Peter Lawford's letters for that, do we? There's one stapled in a 1983 journal volume explaining how Jack and Robert Stack used to see who could sleep with what woman first and used to see which woman they could get in bed with for a three some and, when there weren't any women around, would pleasure one another. Peter's very descriptive about walking in on that. The biggest mistake the Kennedy family ever made was exiling Peter and treating him like a leper. All that did was make sure he told all the secrets. Are we letting a cat out of the bag?
There are so many many cats in so many bags. Maybe it's time for the country to know not just how JFK was killed in full detail but also how he lived in full detail and how his brother Bobby lived as well.
You want to run for office on Daddy and Uncle? Okay. Talk about them. Talk about the above. Talk about how they both worked overtime to halt the Civil Rights Movement and to halt Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Need a starting point? How about this from REUTERS:
For both Kennedys, King meant trouble -- a distraction from the things, like managing the Cold War or the American economy, they'd come to Washington to do. "Until the end of 1963, every big demonstration or turmoil that Martin King led was a problem for the president, so that affected the way Bob Kennedy would look at it," Robert Kennedy's key deputy at the Justice Department, Burke Marshall, later said.
Don't want to delve into that? Then how about RFK's work on McCarthyism? Is Baby Junior too nervous to talk about that? Let's help the baby out, from PBS' AMERICAN MASTERS:
But RFK honed his anti-communism working side-by-side with the nation's leading red-baiter, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.
A Kennedy family friend, McCarthy vacationed with the clan on Cape Cod, and even dated two kennedy sister, Pat and Jean. When Bobby needed a job in 1952, after working on his brother Jack's successful Senate campaign, his father Joe Kennedy picked up the phone. By January, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had a new lawyer.
He would last barely six months, done in by a rivalry with McCarthy's chief deputy, Roy Cohn, as well as disenchantment with their overzealous style. But the months with McCarthy would follow Kennedy for the rest of his life, helping define the "Bad Bobby" that many liberals could never quite forget.
That's your daddy, Junior. That's Daddy!
Naomi Klein (Guardian, 6/14/23) documented that Robert Kennedy has turned against some of his own policies on fighting climate change, has embraced free-market solutions on the environment, and is enthusiastically supportive of the Israeli government. The founders of Heal the Divide, a new Kennedy Super PAC, "have a deeply pro–Donald Trump bent -- including ties to arch-MAGA officials such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos and Herschel Walker" (Rolling Stone, 6/23/23).
That's on top of the big business support behind RFK Jr. that betrays his populist facade. Former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey is backing Kennedy (The Hill, 6/5/23), while venture capitalists/podcasters David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya are planning to hold a Bay Area fundraiser for him (Axios, 6/8/23). CNBC (6/21/23) reported that Kennedy "has another wealthy backer in his corner: veteran Wall Street executive Omeed Malik."
Junior's gone over to the dark side and, unlike some people, we're not here to coddle him.
Even as his polling has dipped, even as his negatives rise, he doesn't want to be a Democrat. He doesn't want to stand up. His father eventually found a backbone. And he did so before the age of 69.
Little Junior needs a nap and a diaper change.
We're voting for the Democratic nominee. That might be Joe Biden, that might be Marianne Williamson, it might be someone who has yet to emerge. And we're doing so because of the corrupt court and the rise of the hate merchants and the similarities between now and Germany during the rise of the Nazis.
You vote for who you want -- whether it's who we vote for, a Green Party nominee, a Trump-DeSantis ticket, whatever. We're not going to tell you who to vote for, that's not our role and it never has been.
Unlike a number of YOUTUBERs, our role is also not to try to trick you. We believe in imparting knowledge and tools so you can make your own decisions -- even if those decisions disagree with our own. We're not Chris Hedges working behind the scenes to install a presidential nominee and then lying to you about it. We know how we're going to be voting and we're telling you that so you can factor that into everything you read by us between now and the election. That's because, unlike Katie Halper, we do believe in disclosure. Katie, speaking with Brie-Brie, revealed that, since she's an opinion journalist, she doesn't believe she has to disclose things. That's a funny interpretation of journalism ethics and one that any editor of a newspaper or periodical would disagree with -- as would most columnists.
A politician is just a whore without the desire to please a customer, Or to be honest with a customer. That's something that the Katie-Matt set have in common with politicians. And these days, it's also something they have in common with the Supreme Court. Yes, the Roberts Court will now be an ugly mark on history and John Roberts' own legacy will be that of discrimination. We're stumbling through the age of corruption. Hoping the whole times that we'll be able to emerge from it -- otherwise we'll be buried under it.
----
Jim note: Ava and C.I. wrote this and they're now going to crash. I'm reading over it and it's too good to hold. They think when they get back from a nap, we're going to work on an edition. No. This is going up now. It's too good to wait. And too important. I could just post this but it would result in e-mails [I'm going on vacation so e-mail common_ills@yahoo.com so Martha and Shirley can route your e-mail to someone] of people asking who made the decision, are the rest of us mad, blah blah blah. I made the decision and this is strong enough and important enough to serve as an entire week's edition.
