Gotham City Digest, 9/5/18

Where we mock the mentally disabled man in the White House.

---

     Let's take stock of this Kavanaugh charade.Two years after refusing to even give Merrick Garland a hearing, this is what the White House and the furtive Republican scumbags in the Senate have done:
1) Up to 93% of the documents about Kavanaugh are hidden from the Senate Judiciary Committee, up to 96% of which is unavailable to the American public that owns them.
2) Senate Democrats have to nonetheless clear with the Committee chairman, Orrin Hatch, each and every single document they wish to present for public viewing.
3) 15 hours before the hearing, there was a document dump of 42,000 pages that neither the Senators and their staffs had time to read.
4) Chuck Grassley outright lied about there being as many documents available about Kavanaugh as Elena Kagan. Again, up to 96% of the documents on Kavanaugh have not been released to the American public. In Kagan's case, there was 99% transparency.
5) Of the document dump from Monday night, there were many duplicated documents of no importance or relevance whatsoever, meaning the Senate was trying to pad the paper count with garbage.
6) Some nonentity named Bill Burck, who is neither an elected official or a government employee, seemingly has full and total control over which documents gets released and which don't.

---

     This is the mark of a malignant narcissist. Donald Trump nominates an Attorney General with the naked intention of giving him cover from the Russia probe. Then he nominates to the Supreme Court an ideologue who's notorious for his thoughts on the Unitary Executive. Now he wants to change Washington's libel laws to stop Woodward's book from coming out. This is a guy who would rewrite the laws of gravity to keep his man boobs from sagging. Donald Trump thinks nothing of making permanent changes to our most important laws, institutions and offices just to give himself short term gain. That's what a classic sociopath does.

---

     This is the Twitter account of the same man who once tried to uphold a ban on dildos and recently criticized Beto O'Rourke for cursing, drinking beer and eating hamburgers. Which Texans and all real Americans NEVER do, by the way...

---

     The scene yesterday outside Kavanaugh's circus of a confirmation hearing. Margaret Atwood lives.

---

     I've got to tell you- After watching him snub Parkland father Fred Guttenberg's handshake and admitting he name-checked all the girls on his daughter's basketball team, Brett Kavanaugh revealed himself to be one sleazy prick.

---

     Isn't Kathy Griffin available?

---

     I don't necessarily go for that Socialist dream of a guaranteed income for everyone regardless of whether or not they're working. But I believe those with prior military service, especially for those who'd survived combat, should get that guaranteed income until they can get back on their feet. In all epochs in human history, in every civilization, there are accounts of former soldiers begging in the streets they fought to defend and I'm going back to the days of the Roman Empire. But in this, the most powerful and richest nation in the history of the planet, this sight should never be seen, much less become a common one. Instead, we squander our resorces on oligarchic elected officials, Cabinet Secretaries, Chairmen & CEOs and a moral quadriplegic of a "president" who never tires of devising ways of giving the 1% even more during a time of record gluttony. Speaking as a veteran, it sickens me to see men who'd fought and killed for this country lower and debase themselves by publicly begging to keep their children alive while right wingers empty our Treasury vaults for those least deserving and under the most transparently false rationalizations ("trickle down economics"). Before we start new wars and making new veterans in preparation for casting them aside after they outlive their usefulness, let's take care of the veterans that we already have.

---

     I wouldn't read too many tea leaves into this but the news coming out of the primaries in Massachusetts is very interesting in our 7th District. Ayanna Pressley just beat ten term incumbent Michael Capuano. Now, I've got nothing against Capuano (he wasn't even my congressman) and he had a reliable progressive voting record. But the people of MA-7 just decided it was time for a change. What truly makes this upset interesting is #1, she was endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez and, #2, tonight she was essentially pre-elected to Congress as she won't have to run against a Republican challenger.

---

     Making America Germany Again.

---

     Of course right wingers would see this as an example of "liberal intolerance" and a suppression of their free speech rights. But the way decent-thinking people see it is a refusal to normalize hatred and bigotry. And the only reason there's a controversy over this whole "liberal intolerance" thing is their utter lack of self awareness, their inability to grasp that every single fucking thing that Trump or Bannon touches, dies. Bannon's very invitation, and lord only knows what the hell the New Yorker was thinking, could have very well killed the festival over a month it was to be held and cancelling Bannon's interview will not bring back the headliners who'd already pulled out. A reporter who'd been working on an article on spec just decided to kill it. There's such a thing as the normalization of hatred and that's what these fascists count on, a forum to air their toxic grievances and to be able to do so frequently, they depend on our tolerance and willingness to allow their intolerant bigotry into the public discourse. This is how the Nazi party got a toehold in 1930's Germany. They came out of a democratic Republic just like ours. But at some point, you have to draw a line in the sand and say in no uncertain terms, "This will not be normalized and get woven into the national moral fiber."

---

     Wow, we've come to this, now? As if Valerie Plame wasn't bad enough, now Paul Ryan's PAC just doxed a Democratic candidate by releasing her security application. These people are pure scum.

---

     "OK, those cats, they're too hard on the rats." Honestly. Rudy Guiliani actually wrote to the anticorroption president of Romania and told him he was going too far with the anticorruption program.

---

     Speaking of Mayor Rudy, what does it say when the "president's" own lawyer promises he'll censor a report issued by the man investigating him?

---

     While having absolutely no access to the files Mueller and his team has gathered over the last 15 and a half months and offering not a single shred of evidence, professional Hillary Clinton stalker "Judge" Jeanine Pirro pronounces Donald Trump innocent of all charges.

      IOW, he did nothing wrong and if he did, it's not a crime and if he did commit a crime, then you can't indict a sitting president and if you can indict a sitting president... Oh, look! Hillary! Uranium! Emails!

---

     Betsy DeVos says, "Guns not books!" Luckily, her brother Erik just happens to be an unindicted gun runner.

---

     It's about Goddamned time someone took down this right wing conspiracy theorist. What really angers me is the lower courts were ignoring basic points of law in their persistent attempts to provide legal cover for Kobach.

---

     When you're so ashamed of your father, you change your name. And finally...

---

     Seriously? Since when did Donald Trump become president of Africa? Is this asshole's administration going to be exclusively devoted to racist conspiracy theories?