If you’re a sick, warped pedophile, that is.The news is not good this morning.

Did you know that if you work for the CIA, or are even a contractor doing work for the CIA, that “the agency resists prosecution of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets”? So you can get away with all kinds of evil acts if you work there (which, I guess, shouldn’t be at all surprising, given that it is the CIA).

Over the past 14 years, the Central Intelligence Agency has secretly amassed credible evidence that at least 10 of its employees and contractors committed sexual crimes involving children.

Though most of these cases were referred to US attorneys for prosecution, only one of the individuals was ever charged with a crime. Prosecutors sent the rest of the cases back to the CIA to handle internally, meaning few faced any consequences beyond the possible loss of their jobs and security clearances. That marks a striking deviation from how sex crimes involving children have been handled at other federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Administration. CIA insiders say the agency resists prosecution of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets.

It’s all rather horrifying, especially given that these secret agencies have been blacklisting homosexuals for decades and acting aghast at the very idea of a gay person acquiring a sensitive position. They might be blackmailed, don’t you know. But pedophiles…just a slap on the wrist and a dismissal.

Speaking of pedophiles, there’s new news about dead child rapist Jeffrey Epstein. New records, flight logs, have been unearthed that reveal hundreds of additional flights we hadn’t known about. Epstein was just happily flitting about the globe for years, doing…what? I don’t know. Maybe the CIA does, but they’re not telling. This jumped out at me, though.

Epstein owned a Gulfstream II (sold in November 2013), a Gulfstream IV (sold before his arrest), a Gulfstream GV-SP, and a Boeing 727 (nicknamed the “Lolita Express”) that notoriously ferried notable passengers and girls around the globe. According to flight manifests unsealed in a defamation case against Maxwell, travelers on Epstein’s planes included public figures from Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton to the supermodel Naomi Campbell and the astronaut John Glenn.

Why? How? How does a guy without any kind of college degree, who started out as a math teacher at a private school (he wasn’t even very good at that), and then drifted into banking and finance, get such ridiculous sums of money that they can afford their very own 727? What did he do to earn that kind of money?

Don’t ever try to tell me that the wealthy worked hard and deserve all that money.

Paul Waldman has suddenly figured out that the conservative justices lied in their confirmation hearings. And now, just now, it’s time to admit it.

They lied.

Yes, I’m talking about the conservative justices on the Supreme Court, and the abortion rights those justices have now made clear they will eviscerate.

They weren’t just evasive, or vague, or deceptive. They lied. They lied to Congress and to the country, claiming they either had no opinions at all about abortion, or that their beliefs were simply irrelevant to how they would rule. They would be wise and pure, unsullied by crass policy preferences, offering impeccably objective readings of the Constitution.

It. Was. A. Lie.

We went through the same routine in the confirmation hearings of every one of those justices. When Democrats tried to get them to state plainly their views on Roe v. Wade, they took two approaches. Some tried to convince everyone that they would leave it untouched. Others, those already on record proclaiming opposition to abortion rights, suggested they had undergone a kind of intellectual factory reset enabling them to assess the question anew with an unspoiled mind, one concerned only with the law.

It is astonishing that the media took this long to realize what was obvious to everyone. The Trumpkins knew it, and were giggling behind their palms about getting away with it. Everyone else knew it, too, but felt trapped by an unwarranted respect for norms and knowing that the media was in the bag and would ridicule the simple words, “they’re lying”. It was a real emperor’s new clothes kind of situation and everyone went along with it.

What’s also appalling is that those fuckers knew that had to lie. That opposing the established law of Roe v. Wade would instantly scuttle their nomination, that the electorate would rise up and make it impossible for many politicians to support their nomination. So they lied. They misled everyone until they could hide behind their Supreme Court tenure. Now they get to wreck civil rights in this country, their aim all along.

They were ashamed of their position. They knew it could only be whispered in the darkness until they got power, and then once they’d brought down that veil of darkness on the land, then and only then could they shout it out loud.

You know what else burns?

But sometimes the right puts its purposes in the open. There was a particularly striking exchange between Laura Ingraham and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) on Fox News, where Ingraham grew inexplicably enraged over the mere possibility that Roe might not be overturned.

“If we have six Republican appointees on this court,” she said, “after all the money that’s been raised, the Federalist Society, all these big fat-cat dinners — I’m sorry, I’m pissed about this — if this court with six justices cannot do the right thing here,” then Republicans should “blow it up” and pass some kind of law limiting the court’s authority.

“I would do that in a heartbeat,” Cruz responded.

In other words: We bought this court, and we’d better get what we paid for.

Yep, we’re a third-rate banana republic where the law is for sale to the highest bidder.

“Endorsed by the Federalist Society” ought to be a huge black mark against any judicial nominee. Will our representatives see it that way? Don’t count on it.

It was all a lie, a scam, a con: the assurances that they were blank slates committed to “originalism” and “textualism,” that they wouldn’t “legislate from the bench,” that they have no agenda but merely a “judicial philosophy.”

Somehow that philosophy nearly always produces results conservatives want: undermining voting rights, enhancing corporate power, constraining the rights of workers, enabling the proliferation of guns, and now most vividly, allowing state governments to force women to carry pregnancies to term against their will.

From this day forward, no one should be naive enough to believe a word any conservative says on this subject, except for those few who forthrightly proclaim that the Supreme Court must read right-wing policy preferences into the Constitution. There was never any mystery about who these justices are and what they would do. There were only liars saying otherwise, and fools who chose to believe them.

Fools run the media in America, then.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is setting a new low. Here she is comparing the COVID-19 pandemic to cancer.

1. Every single year more than 600,000 people in the US die from cancer.

The country has never once shut down.

Not a single school has closed.

And every year, over 600,000 people, of all ages and all races will continue to die from cancer.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) December 4, 2021

Did you know that cancer is not generally contagious? Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t.

So she proposes that we should target fat people and take more ivermectin.

3. It’s time to take a different approach based on the facts.

Covid predominately targets obese & older people.

Shutdowns, masking, and vaccines are not stopping covid, that is just government control.

Ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies, & other treatments are saving lives.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) December 4, 2021

It seems to me that the effective solutions that she avoids mentioning — vaccines and masks and lockdowns — would be more direct in addressing the problem than vilifying fat people, taking useless drugs, or using relatively expensive post-infection treatments. But then, the stupid people run the country.

Good news just in time for a too-brief Thanksgiving break.

The three White men who chased and killed Ahmaud Arbery in coastal Georgia last year were convicted of murder Wednesday in a case that many saw as a test of racial bias in the justice system.

Travis McMichael, his father, Greg McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan were found guilty of felony murder in the shooting of Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man. Travis McMichael was also convicted of malice murder, or intent to kill. All three men, who still face federal hate crime charges, could receive life in prison without parole.

That whole assault was a horror show, as were the Rittenhouse murders. It’s exhausting that the law in this country so abjectly panders to armed white men and their sense of entitlement that whether one of them goes to jail after killing someone is a crap shoot. The dice came up for justice this one time.

Besides out-generaling the treacherous Confederates and putting down one rebellion that split the country, Grant also was an advocate for an important law after the war: the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

President Ulysses S. Grant asked for the law after the rise of the KKK following the Civil War, and it was passed within a month with broad support. The law targeted Klan activity, making it illegal to use force, intimidation and threats to prevent people from voting, serving on a jury or testifying in court. The law specifically makes it illegal to “go in disguise upon the public highway or upon the premises of another” and allows victims to sue perpetrators in civil court.

Grant’s administration then used it to almost completely dismantle the KKK in America for years, bleeding them dry with civil suits.

That sounds like a good law. Maybe we should go after the Republican party with it. But for now, I’ll settle for the fact that it’s being used to dismantle openly Nazi-affiliated groups, like those that rioted in Charlottesville.

More than a dozen of the nation’s most prominent white supremacists and hate groups conspired to intimidate, harass or commit acts of violence during 2017′s deadly Unite the Right rally, according to a jury that also decided the men and their racist organizations should pay $26 million in damages.

The 11 jurors couldn’t come to an agreement on two federal conspiracy claims, but they found that every defendant — including former alt-right leader Richard Spencer, rally organizer Jason Kessler and Christopher Cantwell, dubbed the “crying Nazi” after sharing a video of himself weeping — was liable under Virginia law.

“We think that is a resounding verdict today and frankly a good sign for the future on the remaining counts,” plaintiffs attorney Karen Dunn said, referring to the allegations that the men conspired to commit racially motivated violence and failed to stop it — accusations her clients might pursue again in a future lawsuit.

Twenty six million dollars. $26,000,000. That’s got to sting, and there’s the threat of further suits. Good work, Ulysses.

The lawyers who accomplished this worked hard and made personal sacrifices to corner these rats and bring them to justice, so good for them, too. When lawyers and judges fail, we get results like we’ve seen recently, with murderers walking free. This group did not slack in their duties.

They can’t think about what will happen if they aren’t successful. They see this case as not about one incident, but about all right-wing violence in America. Unchecked, we end up with more events like Charlottesville, and like the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

So, it’s all on the line: democracy, the ability of people to live without fear.

Plus, Spitalnick pointed out that they’ve already made it harder to be a Nazi in America ― or, at least, more expensive. Spencer has no attorney because he’s out of money. Defendants can’t raise money because they’ve been deplatformed from fundraising sites. White supremacist group Vanguard America has been ordered to pay $16,000 for disobeying court orders in the case.

It’s a slow bleed of access and money until what was once the dapper face of terror, illuminated in fire, is revealed for what it always has been: nothing more than hatred.

So raise a glass to President Grant on Thanksgiving Day. His legacy lives on.

It’s yet another example of how judges can ignore justice in favor of their feelings. In this case, a judge used prayer to justify letting a rapist go free.

A New York man who pleaded guilty to rape and sexual abuse for assaulting four teenage girls during parties at his parents’ home will not face jail time after a judge Tuesday sentenced him to eight years’ probation.

Niagara County Court Judge Matthew J. Murphy III said he “agonized” over the case of 20-year-old Christopher Belter, who was accused of committing the crimes when he was 16 or 17. Belter pleaded guilty in 2019 to felony charges that included third-degree rape and attempted first-degree sexual abuse, as well as two misdemeanor charges of second-degree sexual abuse.

Although Belter faced a maximum sentence of eight years in prison, Murphy concluded that time behind bars for the man “would be inappropriate.” The ruling shocked the courtroom.

“I’m not ashamed to say that I actually prayed over what is the appropriate sentence in this case because there was great pain. There was great harm. There were multiple crimes committed in the case,” Murphy said, according to WKBW. “It seems to me that a sentence that involves incarceration or partial incarceration isn’t appropriate, so I am going to sentence you to probation.”

Don’t worry, though. The rapist was white and from a wealthy, influential family, so you can trust that he’d never, ever do it again. And God said he was OK! Yeah, that’s how justice works in America. Yay.

This seems to be a never-ending pattern. Texas has a huge collection of schools, and in their usual stupid wisdom, has put a small group of professional assholes in charge of dictating what textbooks they use, and then, because capitalism, all the textbook publishers fall in line and the rest of the country is afflicted with their choices. The Texas Freedom Network tries to oppose the State Board of Education (SBOE), but Texas don’t care. Here’s the latest dollop of poison the SBOE delivers.

This week’s Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) hearing proves once again that the board is where textbooks go to be censored.

In an astonishing series of votes, the SBOE rejected all but one publisher’s health textbooks for our public schools. The reason? Board members caved to critics who attacked the textbooks because they included topics related to sex education or because they acknowledged the existence of LGBTQ people.

The one publisher to gain approval was able to do so only after making significant changes at the behest of the board.

It is a sad day for Texas students who deserve the best information with which to make healthy decisions. It is also a sad day for the LGBTQ young people who are in our schools and the board continues to exclude.

This is a repeat of past instances of the board censoring textbooks. And it is a troubling sign of what is to come in 2022 when the SBOE revises social studies curriculum standards, a process that takes place not long after Gov. Abbott signed a law designed to limit discussions about the true history of racism and inequality in this country.

Fuck Texas. No, really, it’s a drag on the rest of the country. Sorry if you live in Texas, but could you get a little more loud and tear down this terrible system? I can tolerate you using your educational budgets to build nothing but football stadiums, but this is where you’re hurting everyone else, not just yourselves.

I guess corrupt old cronies of the Trump administration can’t simply fade away, they have to constantly pop up in the news, over and over again. But at least I learned something new to me: Steve Bannon is one of those creepy fanatical Catholics? Yikes. I thought he was just a garden-variety fascist, but apparently he has a philosophical ethos.

Bannon’s philosophy has been written about quite a bit, including by yours truly [Heather Digby Parton], because it is extremely radical and very, very weird. It’s all wacky mysticism mixed with antediluvian, pre-enlightenment, authoritarianism posing as nationalism based upon the writings of an obscure French writer named René Guénon from the early 20th century and the teachings of one of his followers (and Mussolini adviser) Julius Evola. The school of thought is called “Traditionalism” and it is like no tradition you’ve ever heard of. But Bannon is not alone with this philosophy. It’s held by members of far-right leaders’ inner circles throughout Europe and in places like Brazil and Russia. If there is an intellectual rationale for Trumpism beyond the Dear Leader cult of personality, this “traditionalism” is it.

No, I do not want to know more. But Digby gives a couple of sources, and like a doomed character in a horror movie, I can’t resist the urge to go down into the dark basement alone. So here’s one.

From an early age, Bannon was influenced by his family’s distinctly traditionalist Catholicism and he tended to view current events against the broad sweep of history. In 1984, after Pope John Paul II permitted limited use of the Latin-only Tridentine Mass, which was banned by the Second Vatican Council, Bannon’s parents became Tridentine Catholics, and he eventually followed. Though hardly a moralizing social conservative, he objected bitterly to the secular liberalism encroaching upon the culture. “We shouldn’t be running a victory lap every time some sort of traditional value gets undercut,” he once told me. When he was a naval officer in the late 1970s, Bannon, a voracious autodidact, embarked upon what he described as “a systematic study of the world’s religions” that he carried on for more than a decade. Taking up the Roman Catholic history first instilled in him at his Catholic military high school, he moved on to Christian mysticism and from there to Eastern metaphysics. (In the Navy, he briefly practiced Zen Buddhism before wending his way back to Catholicism.)

Bannon’s reading eventually led him to the work of René Guénon, an early-20th-​­century French occultist and metaphysician who was raised a Roman Catholic, practiced Freemasonry, and later became a Sufi Muslim who observed the Sharia. There are many forms of traditionalism in religion and philosophy. Guénon developed a philosophy often called “Traditionalism” (capital “T”), a form of anti-modernism with precise connotations. Guénon was a “primordial” Traditionalist, who believed that certain ancient religions, including the Hindu Vedanta, Sufism, and medieval Catholicism, were repositories of common spiritual truths, revealed to mankind in the earliest age of the world, that were being wiped out by the rise of secular modernity in the West. What Guénon hoped for, he wrote in 1924, was to “restore to the West an appropriate traditional civilization.”

No. Enough. Stop. Wait…what’s that creepy figure crawling out of the television set?

Bannon acknowledges affinities with the philosophies of Julius Evola and Dugin in relation to his conservative vision for world politics. Like them, Bannon believes in an Eurasian Christian empire led by “the church militant” that will reform religious, economic, political and social foundations around the world. Such views underlie his speech about conservative Christianity as a bulwark against liberalism at the Vatican in 2014, and it’s no coincidence that Bannon has been integral to the establishment of the conservative Catholic Dignitatis Humanae Institute in an 800-year-old monastery.

All of this should give pause. These appropriations of the Middle Ages by figures like Dugin and Bannon pose an odd reversal of the problem of calling things we don’t like “medieval.” Yet these appropriations are equally misleading and even more dangerous. The resulting racist, xenophobic, misogynist, “traditionalist” construction of the Middle Ages is pervasive in conservative spheres. This ideology is now not only Dugin’s construction but also the view that informs many right-wing thinkers like Putin, Bannon and Trump.

No more, please. I’m going to have nightmares about Catholic fanatics under the bed.

It’s a little bit difficult to sort out exactly what Bannon does believe since he’s definitely a populist and nationalist. Mostly, it seems, he’s a sort of spiritualist, like the Russian Rasputin. According to Green, Bannon’s most important influences are René Guénon, a French writer whose 1929 book “The Crisis of the Modern World” stated that everything started to go to hell in 1312 when the Knights Templar were destroyed; and Julius Evola, an Italian writer whose 1934 book, “Revolt Against the Modern World,” influenced Mussolini. Interestingly, that book was also a seminal work for the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, Vladimir Putin’s most influential ideologue, and the man who once called Steve Bannon his ideological soulmate.

Alexandra Nemtsova at the Daily Beast reported:

According to Alexander Verkhovsky, director of Russian SOVA, a Moscow-based NGO monitoring ultra-nationalist groups, “Dugin is talking about creating some new cross-cultural nation of anti-Atlantic, traditional ideology—his theory often sounds like a pretty fascist approach. He said and wrote a lot, calling for a war in Ukraine; many Russian nationalists who listened or read Dugin’s texts actually joined the insurgencies in Ukraine afterward.”

I don’t think Bannon looks quite strong and healthy enough to put up as much of a fight as Rasputin, but you never know. He could be like Jason, or Michael Myers, impossible to kill.

“This devil who was dying of poison, who had a bullet in his heart, must have been raised from the dead by the powers of evil,” Yusupov wrote. “There was something appalling and monstrous in his diabolical refusal to die.”

It’s moms.

Monday evening’s discussion was spurred by parents of a Riverbend student, who brought their concerns to the meeting.

The mother said during public comments that she was initially alarmed by “LGBTQIA” fiction that she said was immediately made available upon accessing the library app. After doing more research, she discovered a book in the collection that she found more upsetting.

The book, “33 Snowfish” by Adam Rapp, concerns three homeless teenagers attempting to escape from pasts that include sexual abuse, prostitution and drug addiction.

Oh no! The LGBTQIA stuff was just the tip of the iceberg! Down below we find stories of homeless kids who are sexually abused, which never ever happens in Spotsylvania, Virginia.

Don’t you worry, though. The school board has a cure.

Two board members, Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg, said they would like to see the removed books burned.

“I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”

There’s a solution that has never ever gone wrong in the entire history of humanity.

Have you ever read the news and wondered how the loons and right-wing terrorists can get away with it all? We had an insurrection on 6 January, 10 months ago, and the wheels of justice, we are told, grind exceedingly slow, so all we see is slaps on the wrists delivered to the low-level dupes. The ring-leaders are sheltered by doubt and fear, the propaganda sources continue to spew poison in the name of “free speech”, and Donald Trump gets to run free and plan his 2024 campaign for president. It’s doubly unjust, because while the so-called “patriots” get all the benefit of the doubt, their victims get swift and decisive condemnation from the opinion pages of the New York Times, the offices of Fox News, and too often get executed by the police. IOKYAR — It’s OK If You Are Republican — has somehow become the unwritten law of the land.

Reuters has published an article on the ongoing campaign of fear.

In Arizona, a stay-at-home dad and part-time Lyft driver told the state’s chief election officer she would hang for treason. In Utah, a youth treatment center staffer warned Colorado’s election chief that he knew where she lived and watched her as she slept.

In Vermont, a man who says he works in construction told workers at the state election office and at Dominion Voting Systems that they were about to die.

“This might be a good time to put a f‑‑‑‑‑‑ pistol in your f‑‑‑‑‑‑ mouth and pull the trigger,” the man shouted at Vermont officials in a thick New England accent last December. “Your days are f‑‑‑‑‑‑ numbered.”

The three had much in common. All described themselves as patriots fighting a conspiracy that robbed Donald Trump of the 2020 election. They are regular consumers of far-right websites that embrace Trump’s stolen-election falsehoods. And none have been charged with a crime by the law enforcement agencies alerted to their threats.

They were among nine people who told Reuters in interviews that they made threats or left other hostile messages to election workers. In all, they are responsible for nearly two dozen harassing communications to six election officials in four states. Seven made threats explicit enough to put a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death, the U.S. federal standard for criminal prosecution, according to four legal experts who reviewed their messages at Reuters’ request.

You can shout all the terroristic threats you want because FREEEEZEPEEEECH, you can try to intimidate others at will because FREEEEEEEEEEDOMMMMM. The intimidator/terrorist gets the freedom, though, at the cost of the terrorized. And part of it is that the cops and justice system are useless at best, enablers most often, fellow terrorists at worst.

The examination of the threats also highlights the paralysis of law enforcement in responding to this extraordinary assault on the nation’s electoral machinery. After Reuters reported the widespread intimidation in June, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a task force to investigate threats against election staff and said it would aggressively pursue such cases. But law enforcement agencies have made almost no arrests and won no convictions.

In many cases, they didn’t investigate. Some messages were too hard to trace, officials said. Other instances were complicated by America’s patchwork of state laws governing criminal threats, which provide varying levels of protection for free speech and make local officials in some states reluctant to prosecute such cases. Adding to the confusion, legal scholars say, the U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t formulated a clear definition of a criminal threat.

I’ve had a small taste of that. Remember Dennis Markuze, the nutjob who sent death threats to me practically every single day for years? He wasn’t alone, either; I still get email, at a lower frequency, fortunately, from people who make explicit threats. I’ve had people announce that they were going to show up at my university office and shoot me in the head. I’ve gotten detailed descriptions from Catholics and atheists (it turns out, atheists were the worst) telling me how they were going to cut me up at public events, and horrific threats against my family. There was a time when I would document them all, gather IP addresses and even names and home addresses of these lunatics and take them to my local police department and ask them to forward them to the parties that could take action. I’d get dumb cow-like looks, nothing more, and the information would get filed away and ignored.

I eventually just learned to accept the fact that someone could promise to murder me, and all I could do was note it down so that maybe the investigation into why I was turned into a bloody corpse would have a lead. I don’t even have that confidence anymore. What I see in the justice system is that justice doesn’t matter anymore. I could be murdered in public in broad daylight and I think the cops would spend their time trying to rationalize why the culprit did it, and the media would be speculating about what I did to deserve it.

And I’m a privileged white guy! I can’t even imagine the despair and futility minorities must feel in this country. I’m a member of the older white demographic that is trampling all over decency in America, and that won’t protect me at all.

Most galling is that the 9 people who made these over-the-top threats in the story are not ashamed at all and aren’t even shy about confessing their identities and admitting that yes, they did tell an election official that they were going to “pop” them and talk about firing squads and torturous deaths; they leave abusive phone messages with horrific promises of murder with clear intent to threaten them, they get passed on to the bumbling, incompetent cops, and what do they do? They hide behind excuses to do nothing.

The officials referred the voicemail to state police, who again declined to investigate. Agency spokesperson Adam Silverman said in a statement that the message didn’t constitute an “unambiguous reference to gun violence,” adding that the word “popped” – common American slang for “shot” – “is unclear and nonspecific, and could be a reference to someone being arrested.”

Legal experts didn’t see it that way. Fred Schauer, a University of Virginia law professor, said the message likely constituted a criminal threat under federal law by threatening gun violence at specific individuals. “There’s certainly an intent to put people in fear,” Schauer said.

The article includes the recorded audio from a number of these messages. You can’t possibly listen to them and think that golly, the wording is ambiguous…they are crystal clear and no doubt is left in the listener’s mind that this person wants to do them serious harm to prevent them from doing their job. The journalists consulted multiple legal scholars about whether these were actionable threats, and got responses that were rather different from what the cops would say.

Three legal experts said the message met the threshold of a threat that could be prosecuted under federal law. “The whole purpose of the threats doctrine is to protect people from not only a prospect of physical violence, but the damage of living with a threat hanging over you,” said Timothy Zick, a William & Mary Law School professor.

Yeah, that’s the whole story, over and over again, at length. Angry crank screams death threats at an official. Cops shrug and do nothing. And then we all wonder why the madness is escalating.