South Carolina Spit Shine
The Washington Post has just told us that, on January 6, Gamecock Graham, the Palmetto State’s cheap imitation of a US senator, urged the Senate’s sergeant-at-arms to “Take back the Senate! You’ve got guns. Use them! … What are you doing? … We give you guns for a reason — use them.” He said this as […]
Theocrats’ Obsession With Religion and Sex
Six reactionary hearts at One First Street in Washington beat faster this week. The new term offers them the arousing chance to exercise, in the name of half the country, American society’s obsession with religion and sex which, intertwined since the Republic was founded, is at the core of the perpetual “culture wars”. The Supreme […]
Inherent Contempt Power: Why Not?
Why does the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol not use its powers under the Constitution to get what it needs? It has the inherent contempt power over individuals who refuse to cooperate with the its investigation. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) chairs the Committee, which recently invited […]
Sedition – Part 1
Federal law defines clearly the crime of sedition — more precisely, “seditious conspiracy”— in 18 USC 2384: “If two or more persons … conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by […]
Disinformation and Menace
Is the present-day right-winger a product of disinformation poured into an empty vessel? Or does disinformation land on fertilized ground, a type of pre-existing condition that makes its sufferer believe in unbelievable things? Should the distinction matter to the competent half of the citizenry which remains persuadable by reality? No and no. Right-wingers are a […]
Accountability American-Style
The predictable American accountability pantomime is in full swing: Who lost Afghanistan?!?! Just as the endeavor itself was a 20-year exercise in bloodlust, deluded expectations, venality, and performance art, so is the pale imitation of the reckoning with its end. Never mind the absurdity of the question, though telling as it is about the mentality […]
Saint Merrick and the Halo
Your appointment as AG became official in March 2021. The country’s sensible half hoped for a reckoning with Bill Barr’s perversions of justice, and accountability for those who had contributed to them. Half a year later, near as we can tell, you have returned DOJ to something akin to normal; we no longer have to […]
Saint Merrick and Omertà
In March of this year, you inherited — by choice — the country’s law shop, a place soiled by your predecessor. In the soft-shoe shuffle with the denizens of a sclerotic upper house, you promised to restore public faith in the integrity of the Justice Department. Everyone agreed: you were a transcendently swell guy, the […]