Why are Gaetz, Brooks, Biggs, Gohmert, and Perry still in office?

“The only reason I know to ask for a pardon, because you think you’ve committed a crime.”

After gripping testimony from former Justice Department officials describing Donald Trump’s efforts to undo the 2020 election results, House lawmakers on Thursday identified five Republican lawmakers who allegedly sought pardons — suggesting not just their own fear of criminal exposure, but a belief that the outgoing president would preemptively protect them from the investigations that followed the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.

Videotaped testimony presented at the end of Thursday’s hearing named Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Mo Brooks (Ala.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Louie Gohmert (Tex.) and Scott Perry (Pa.) as the lawmakers who sought preemptive pardons after or, in at least one case, before the Capitol breach. They were among the most active and outspoken supporters in Congress of Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

They’ve confessed to treason. Strip them of any powers they might have, impeach them, and if found guilty, begin the criminal proceedings. Those five, at the very least, need to have the full weight of the law, the law that they sought to avoid, brought down hard on them.

Marjorie Taylor Green also belongs in that rogue’s gallery. They’re all desperately trying to deny that they wanted a pardon, but that’s what criminals say — they were all quite vocal about supporting Trump’s insurrection.

Treacherous scum, every one of them.

Can we please fire Ron Johnson now?

We’ve got a nest of traitors in the Senate, yet to my disappointment there has been no effort to eject these clowns. Maybe we’re getting close to smacking Ron Johnson down, though. That would be a start.

Johnson is the senator from our state next door, and he’s an idiot. If there were a competition for the dumbest guy in the Senate, it would be a struggle between Johnson, Tommy Tuberville, and Steve King, and Johnson would be a contender. King is in Iowa, our neighbor to the South, so I think we’re being surrounded. He’s a gun nut, he opposes acting against climate change (carbon dioxide is “good for the trees”, he says), he opposed the Affordable Care Act, he believes in that “Great Replacement” nonsense (yeah, he’s racist), he doesn’t like vaccines and pushed hydroxychloroquine, and he’s a devoted follower of Donald Trump. All that wasn’t enough to get him kicked out — it’s stuff that appealed to his dumbass electorate — but now his prominent role in the insurrection might get him in trouble.

Weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) held a hearing on election fraud in an attempt to legitimize former president Donald Trump’s false allegations of voting irregularities. Four days before the attack on the Capitol, Johnson signed a statement with nine other Republican senators that they intended to object to certifying Joe Biden’s electors and demand “an emergency 10-day audit of the election.”

This week, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot revealed that Johnson’s chief of staff tried to deliver to Vice President Mike Pence a slate of fake electors backing Trump, raising questions about the Wisconsin Republican’s role in a deliberate and coordinated plan to block Biden’s win and give Trump the presidency.

The disclosure also underscores the extent of Johnson’s role as one of Congress’s most prominent election deniers and Jan. 6 apologists — spreading conspiracy theories about rigged votes and playing down the severity of the violent assault on the Capitol as mostly “peaceful,” while floating the idea that it might have been an inside job by the FBI.

Now it’s revealed that he was part of a plan to deliver an alternate slate of electors for Wisconsin and Michigan to Mike Pence. These were not valid electors, they were just a mob of self-appointed MAGA twits with no legitimate standing, but the goal was to sow sufficient confusion in the ballots that Pence would throw up his hands and toss the election into…the Supreme Court. That corrupt, untrustworthy gang of barely qualified theocratic hacks, who would then rule that Donald Trump was president.

It’s becoming obvious that Johnson was cheerfully poised, about to throw a spanner in the works of our clumsy election apparatus, and that there’s good evidence that he was prepared to do so. Maybe he’ll finally get drummed out of office, which is the least of what I want to see done. Maybe the chickenshits of the Senate will decide to drag their heels and hope that he loses his election in the fall. Maybe nothing will be done, ever, about him and all the other traitor Republicans in Washington DC.

I think I might be a little bit disillusioned about the people in power. Axing one bozo might restore a tiny shred of confidence.

I voted for Hillary Clinton, once

I’m sorry.

My only excuse is that her opponent was even more awful, but she should never have gotten to that level in the first place, except that she does appeal to conservative Democrats. I also liked the idea of a woman for president (still do), so I was willing to accept a compromise in what I valued.

Somewhere, I wish I could remember where, I read that the Clintons managed to replace the Democratic party with Republican Lite, and that one of the consequences of that is that real Republicans were free to run far, far off into crazy town. That rings true to me.

What finally convinced me that the Clintons were a huge mistake was a recent chatty (so much pointless detail about what she had for lunch!) in the Financial Times. The whole thing made me feel ill.

My espresso has arrived. Clinton asks for more iced tea. I cannot allow the lunch to end without questioning the direction of her party. I say that Democrats seem to be going out of their way to lose elections by elevating activist causes, notably the transgender debate, which are relevant only to a small minority. What sense does it make to depict JK Rowling as a fascist? To my surprise, Clinton shares the premise of my question.

“We are standing on the precipice of losing our democracy, and everything that everybody else cares about then goes out the window,” she says. “Look, the most important thing is to win the next election. The alternative is so frightening that whatever does not help you win should not be a priority.”

Whatever helps you win. That’s a phrase that belongs on the Clinton coat of arms. No principles, no goals, just whatever gets you power, that’s all that matters. Just once, I’d like to see a Democrat stand up and forthrightly say what they value, so I’d know if I agreed with them, and they’d get my vote.

Oh, hey, there is one: John Fetterman is running for the Senate in Pennsylvania. This is what I want to see from everyone who thinks they belong in the Democratic party.

Don’t hide from it. Don’t tell me you’ll tolerate transphobia in the name of winning.

I’ll never vote for a Clinton again. To put it in terms she might understand, she’s a loser. Isn’t that all that counts?

The Texas GOP party platform — the madness continues

How deep into madness is the conservative agenda?

The new platform would call for:

  • Requiring Texas students “to learn about the humanity of the preborn child,” including teaching that life begins at fertilization and requiring students to listen to live ultrasounds of gestating fetuses.
  • Amending the Texas Constitution to remove the Legislature’s power “to regulate the wearing of arms, with a view to prevent crime.”
  • Treating homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” language that was not included in the 2018 or 2020 party platforms.
  • Deeming gender identity disorder “a genuine and extremely rare mental health condition,” requiring official documents to adhere to “biological gender,” and allowing civil penalties and monetary compensation to “de-transitioners” who have received gender-affirming surgery, which the platform calls a form of medical malpractice.
  • Changing the U.S. Constitution to cement the number of Supreme Court justices at nine and repeal the 16th Amendment of 1913, which created the federal income tax.
  • Ensuring “freedom to travel” by opposing Biden’s Clean Energy Plan and “California-style, anti-driver policies,” including efforts to turn traffic lanes over for use by pedestrians, cyclists and mass transit.
  • Declaring “all businesses and jobs as essential and a fundamental right,” a response to COVID-19 mandates by Texas cities that required customers to wear masks and limited business hours.
  • Abolishing the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, and guaranteeing the right to use alternatives to cash, including cryptocurrencies.

Don’t forget this!

My idiosyncratic criterion for how bad is getting that years ago, I was focused on the creationist perspective they were always pushing. They still are! The traditional (for creationists) “strengths and weaknesses” language is still being promoted in the official Texas GOP platform.

Scientific Theories: We support objective teaching of scientific theories, such as life origins and climate change. These shall be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change as new data is produced. Teachers and students shall discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these theories openly, without fear of retribution or discrimination of any kind.

The thing is, now they’ve got so much more and so much worse evil advocacy in their platform that no one is bothering to mention the old stupidities. I’m actually kind of impressed at their restraint. They’re happy to come right out and say homosexuality is bad and they want to end gay marriage, the income tax, and that they oppose transgender normalizing curriculum and pronoun use, but they can’t quite summon the courage to openly push for a seven day, young earth creation…even though that’s what they want.

I don’t know what’s going on in Ukraine

This is symbolic of the conflict: Citizens of the Russian Federation from the Free Russia Legion fighting for Ukraine captured Ukrainian citizens from the LDNR formations fighting for Russia.

In other words, the guys with the guns are Russians fighting on the Ukrainian side, and the two prisoners looking hangdog are Ukrainians fighting on the Russian side. It’s all very confusing.

I read the newspapers, and the impression I get is that Ukraine is getting desperate with serious ammunition shortages, while Russians are getting desperate over increasingly heavy casualties, as are the Ukrainians. Ukraine wants to join the EU, but France and Germany are dragging it out, saying it might take decades to negotiate. I don’t think they have decades. No one is going to win this war, are they?

How are your cryptocurrency investments holding up?

I don’t have any, and I hope you don’t, either, since crypto is going ka-boom.

Bitcoin tumbled below $24,000 on Monday, hitting its lowest level since December 2020, as investors dump crypto amid a broader sell-off in risk assets.

Meanwhile, a crypto lending company called Celsius has paused withdrawals for its customers, sparking fears of contagion into the broader market.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency bitcoin dropped below the $24,000 mark, according to CoinDesk data, and traded around $23,575 at 7:45 a.m. on Wall Street.

Over the weekend and into Monday morning, more than $200 billion had been wiped off the entire cryptocurrency market. The cryptocurrency market capitalization fell below $1 trillion on Monday for the first time since February 2021, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

$200 billion gone? That’s gotta sting.

Reminder: podish sortacast this afternoon

Yep, this is happening:

I’ll be listening in, but won’t be on it. I don’t think grimaces and moans would be a helpful contribution (although maybe it would be representative of America), and I have to concentrate on not moving in a way that doesn’t antagonize the disc between L3 and L4, which is very angry with me right now.

Ever try not thinking about your spine? Usually it’s easy, except when it’s yelling at you all the time.

Traitors, traitors, traitors

I did not watch the Jan. 6 Committee hearings last night, but my wife did. I’m suffering from a serious lack of capacity to sit in horror watching pretty much anything, and today I’m waiting on medical information. Yesterday I got an X-ray to check out the state of my spine, and now that they know I’ve got one (it’s leaked out that I’m a registered Democrat, so the existence of a spine had to be tested first), I’m awaiting a probable MRI and an informed treatment plan.

I’ve seen a bit of the hearings on video, and caught up with summaries in the newspapers. At least I’ve confirmed that Liz Cheney has a spine, I guess my party had to import a Republican to get one.

I like the tenor so far: this was a violent insurrection by traitors to the country, and the person responsible was the man at the top, Donald J. Trump. They’re definitely implying that the end result of these hearings is going to be justice for the wicked, and they’re doing a fine job of laying the groundwork of the magnitude of the crime, but I’ve been an American for so long that I’ve become cynical, so I’m anticipating a failure of nerve and a complete collapse of the case, followed by a feeble handslap and prizes and applause for the assholes who collaborated, but are now playing the role of pious witnesses (I see you, Bill Barr and Jared and Ivanka Trump, you ought to be in a holding cell right now.)

I’m just saying, I don’t expect the Democrats or the media to maintain a strong position. Liz Cheney might, though.

Tell me I’m wrong. I wish I had more faith in our political system.

Other countries have judicial systems that aren’t as screwed up as the American ones

On Saturday, the international squad here at FtB will be providing diverse perspectives on judicial systems and government. It turns out it’s useful having a number of non-Americans around.

I’m hoping to make it, but no promises right now. I just got zapped with X-rays, and tomorrow I probably will get an MRI, and who knows what’s wrong with me. I could get needles, I could get knives, maybe it’ll be a load of addictive narcotics.

Neoreactionaries, a gang of idiots

I read Neoreaction a Basilisk a few years ago. It was a hard slog, trying to wade through all the neoreactionary conservative garbage, and stories about Thiel and Yudkowski and Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug. They’re all terrible writers and communicators who are only intelligible to people who have already been infected with their mind-virus. No, don’t try to defend Less Wrong to me — I tried giving them the benefit of the doubt long ago, and found myself sinking into a quicksand of nonsense generated by people who insisted they were the most logical and rational people on Earth.

I don’t generally recommend the book, because it’s very much a specialist tome. It’s like maybe a professional journal on the psychology of mass murderers is a good thing for experts to read, but for the rest of us, no thank you, we don’t need the nightmares. That’s Neoreaction a Basilisk, thorough and expert, but my god, it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of hemlock.

If you really want to savor the flavor, Tucker Carlson interviewed Yarvin. It’s amazing. Carlson starts by saying that pretty much all of modern philosophy is an exercise in narcissism, but Yarvin is one of the few philosophers who sees through all the liberal nonsense. Yarvin is not a philosopher. He’s a software engineer with no expertise in philosophy at all, which tells you something about Carlson honesty and neoreactionary pretense.

Maybe this interview with the author, Elizabeth Sandifer is enough of a taste to let you know how awful and horrible and inane the whole neoreactionary movement is, without listening to pair of pompous asses on Fox News.

Her summary of Yarvin:

I think that there is a long tradition of right-wing “philosophy” that’s really popular among right-wing nutters and as soon as it gets outside that little bubble, it gets absolutely shot to hell by other philosophers. And I think to describe Yarvin in terms he would probably take as a compliment—and I very much mean as an insult—he’s kind of a modern day Ayn Rand.

So his broad philosophical idea is he’s just really obsessed with order. He thinks that order is the absolute best thing that can happen. Chaos, unruliness, rebelliousness—all these things are inherently very, very bad.

And so his belief, as he expressed back in his Moldbug days—and he’s not really backed down off of it in any substantive way—is that basically, California should secede, become its own nation, and simply impose a CEO with monarchic, godlike powers. At the time, he suggested Steve Jobs would be a particularly good pick for the absolute monarch of California and that the purpose of owning California and running it as a corporate monarchy is explicitly for profit. That was also a part of Yarvin’s philosophical vision for what the world should do.

I don’t want to pin him too much with the slightly satirical and deliberately over-the-top clickbait-y idea of making Steve Jobs king of California—that is him using a rhetorical device to get attention. But he does very, very much believe that rich elites should be in absolute control of everything, and people who are not landowners and do not have a ton of money should basically be thought of as the equivalent of slaves.

I think you can see why he appeals to authoritarians. I love this pithy summary of the whole movement.

To engage in Alt-Right thinking is to turn oneself into a vacuous skinsuit animated by raw stupidity. There is literally not a single shred of non-stupidity in the entire thing. Mencius Moldbug, stupid. Milo Yiannopoulos, stupid. Donald Trump, Vox Day, stupid, stupid, stupid. MAGA and The Daily Stormer are stupid. Every single detail of every single aspect of this entire cratering shitstorm in which the human race seems hell bent on going extinct is absolutely fucking stupid.

Yes! That is the entire right wing right now. It’s true of Republicans, creationists, and flat-earthers. Tucker Carlson, stupid. All the idiots saying we can’t enact reasonable gun control, stupid. The people demanding that we punish women for getting abortions, stupid. Billionaires, stupid.

If you get through that interview, you might also enjoy Sandifer’s deconstruction of Slate Star Codex, yet another scion of the poisonous bowels of Less Wrong.

The stupidity might be congenital.