Enough is enough.  TFG, who has done, and continues to do more to destroy our country than anyone in US history, should have his bail revoked and jailed until trial.  Not only has he made fascism and authoritarianism acceptable in polite society, he is intentionally stepping over the limits of the law by defaming and threatening judges, their staffs, prosecutors, and witnesses.  Worse, he regularly defames their families with intensely personal and childish attacks insulting everything from their looks to their politics, which are definitely off limits and none of his fucking business.

Last week, almost immediately after NY judge Juan Merchan, who’s presiding over TFG’s hush money case, imposed a limited gag order against him, he attacked the judge’s 30 something year old daughter, calling her a “Trump hater”, among other vile accusations.  Yesterday, he posted a video of a pickup truck festooned with Trump flags including a tailgate mural of Biden hogtied in the bed of the truck.  The post went viral instantly, blowing up the internet.  Contrary to normal conduct, his lawyers are actively enabling this behavior by filing a continuous stream of idiotic motions demanding that TFG be given special rights because being forced to not threaten others is required because doing so is “election interference” and a violation of his “First Amendment rights”.

TFG regularly and loudly complains that he’s being singled out while falsely claiming that Biden is behind all the prosecutions, including the state cases.  That’s all bullshit, of course, except for the being singled out part; but it’s not like he says.  He is definitely being singled out, allowed WHILE ON BAIL to freely travel, use social media to attack his perceived enemies, shoot off his mouth, spread vicious lies about witnesses, attorneys, judges, and their families, and generally be a 24 karat gold asshole.  No other indicted felon on bail would be allowed to do anything close to what he does on a daily basis.  Yesterday, former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance said that if anyone else had posted a picture of Biden being kidnapped the Secret Service would be knocking on that individual’s door within hours.  TFG gets a pass because he’s, well, TFG.  She also said this about TFG conduct:

“Actions have consequences. Judges have the ability to compel good behavior from defendants on bond pending trial in their court. They can go so far as taking away their guns once they’re indicted or prevent them from contacting and threatening witnesses and victims. They should tell him he can’t threaten the President of the United States. It’s time for the courts to stop bending over backward to protect Trump. He’s entitled to all the constitutional protections any other criminal defendant receives, but he’s not entitled to more.”

TFG is a threat to the nation, to individuals personally, and to the rule of law.  And we know why he’s doing what he’s doing – he’s trying to run out the clock to the election, AND is working hard to intimidate witnesses and the jury pool in 4 different jurisdictions.  It’s simply go to stop.  As Vance says, the courts are bending over backwards to accommodate his behavior.  Judge Cannon is actually in the bag for him as well as more than a few of SCOTUS justices.  It’s up to the state or federal judges to take action.

Take custody of this shitbag and confiscate his phone.  Let him sit in jail wearing an orange jumpsuit until his trials.  If they do that, I’ll guarantee his lawyers will then stop the delaying tactics.  Time to return to the rule of law.  Jail him. NOW.

I’ve never been much of a Twitter user, primarily finding it occasionally useful to follow breaking stories.  When Elon took over the platform, though, I decided to follow him and others to see the effects on the platform itself as he consolidated power in the company.  My conclusions, as you can imagine, are not good.  First, just an observation, and it’s no secret – Twitter is already an open sewer of nonsense, misinformation, and dumbasses who don’t know how many hours are in a day, those who can’t do simple arithmetic, and those who have very low reading comprehension.

Then Elon took over, and it’s gotten worse.  A lot worse.  First, Musk is as impulsive and immature as a high school freshman complete with erratic behavior and childish judgment.  Add that to the fact that he has no guardrails to guide him, and being the richest man in the world there’s no one around him to keep him from acting out his worst tendencies.  After the takeover on Thursday, he fired the senior management team including those in charge of moderation of the platform, and has been hinting at massive layoffs of other employees.  He’s also on record of being opposed to blocking racists, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists, anti-semites, and outright weirdos.  He’s more than hinted that he’ll let TFG and Kanye West back on the platform.  Use of the N-word on Twitter  is up over 500% since he took over.  Worse, he’s participating in misinformation himself retweeting, then later deleting an idiotic homophobic conspiracy theory that Paul Pelosi’s attacker was actually a male prostitute that Pelosi had brought to the house. His deleted retweet was directed at…wait for it…Hillary Clinton.  That’s right, the “Chief Twit” showed such poor judgment that he amplified this idiocy to his 112 MILLION followers.

Elon’s control of Twitter has a LOT more downside than upside for not only him financially, but for simple common decency.  Twitter is highly influential over global society and it’s critical that it gets it right between balancing free speech principles against threatening language and intentional disinformation.  He’s demonstrated that he has no qualifications to not just manage this issue, but even to recognize it exists.

I am not hopeful for any good coming from this takeover, and can only hope that twitter goes the way of MySpace and Lotus 123.

This one’s been brewing for a while, but finally rose to the top of my list to talk about.  Remember early in the fall when “Let’s Go Brandon!” started circulating through conservatives, signs and bumper stickers started popping up, and the meme starting appearing everywhere?  I even saw a baseball cap worn at Game One of the World Series by an otherwise respectable young business man with the slogan emblazoned on it.

What’s the orgin of this meme?  Well, Brandon is actually a real person, Brandon Brown. He’s the perfect American story – started racing go-carts when he was 8 years old, and over the past 20 years worked his way all the way up to driving in NASCAR stock car races.  But he’s not some fancy schmanzy high paid driver sponsored by Mountain Dew.  He has his own car, funded by himself and his father with minor sponsors.  He started running out of money this year, and as a final appeal for sponsors, he posted an ad on social media saying “put your name on my rear”, and that landed him two sponsors with enough money to keep racing.  With that extra money, he raced at Talladega and brought home the victory.  In the excitement of the win, he didn’t notice the event that threatens to wreck everything he’s earned.

In the live post race interview on the track broadcast on national television, some assholes in the stands started chanting, “Fuck Joe Biden!” over and over.  As the chant grew, the interviewer tried to make light of the chant, saying the crowd was chanting, “Let’s Go Brandon!” and a meme was born.  Like everything else that occurs in the right wing echo machine, the meme took on a life of its own, even being repeated on the US House floor, and by governor Ron DeSantis who rebranded the Biden administration as the “Brandon administration.”

Ha ha.  It’s super funny to use someone else’s name as a swear word, right?  Brown at first thought it was funny right up to the point where sponsors started backing away from him, not wanting to get embroiled in partisanship, especially when the name of the sponsored person is being used in a phrase substituting his name in an expletive that implied the word “fuck”.  Right wingers often ignore the fact that the fully HALF of all Americans who disagree with them also spend money.  Sponsors of television shows, sports teams, and yes, NASCAR sell their goods to everyone, not just radical partisans who believe that their political opponents must be denigrated and even eliminated from the public stage.  That belief is called eliminationist, and is exactly what bred the violent insurrection that actually attempted to murder those who disagreed with their leader and overthrow the US government.  Most responsible companies don’t want to be associated with that kind of hatred because it’s bad for business.  Brown is even trying to get ahead of this issue by changing the meme from “Let’s Go Brandon!” to “Let’s Go America!” in an attempt to walk the fine line between not pissing off the NASCAR base and not losing sponsors.  It’s not easy, and most likely impossible.

The “Let’s Go Brandon!” meme perfectly encapsulates a key feature of the right wing noise machine – they repeat these kinds of memes so much that it develops callouses in the users’ psyches to the point that hateful and violent rhetoric it is no longer shocking to them.  Why do  I say that?  I say that because it’s true.  Think about it – at the beginning of the pandemic that’s now killed almost 1 million Americans, Dan Patrick actually said that old people needed to die for the sake of the economy. Instead of being excoriated for such eliminationist rhetoric,  Far right Americans AGREED, screaming, “Right! The economy is more important than old people!”  Tucker Carlson feeds a continuous stream of this radical hate speech every night on national television.  Hate speech is now embedded in the DNA of the right wing and drives the public policy they espouse.

People repeating this hate speech don’t give a flying shit about the consequences of that hate speech, but the damage is real and gets people hurt and even killed.  Brandon Brown is the innocent victim as this massive meme threatens to destroy his sponsorship chances  and career just so they can say “Fuck Joe Biden!” in public and get away with it.  The real tragedy here is not that this kind of behavior is a flaw of conservatism today, it’s a feature.

This week Texas Monthly announced its 2022 Bum Steer Awards and the ones you expected were winners.  The only question was who was going to be the Top Bum Steer.  You won’t be surprised that it is none other the National Embarrassment of Texas, Greg Abbott.  The magazine ripped him a new one with these choice quotes:

“From the beginning, Abbott was attuned to the 4 percent of Texans who decide Republican primary elections and that group’s many peculiar priorities.”

“This has been a hard year for everyone, and no governor in the U.S. has had it easy. (“At least we don’t have Andrew Cuomo,” Texans could say.) But every step of the way, Abbott has made it harder for nearly everyone, rendering life more difficult, the death tolls higher, and the experience of being a Texan more demoralizing.”

About the blackout: “Who was the responsible party? Two days into the crisis, Abbott took the time to appear on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and blame renewable energy—a field in which Texas has been a leader, thanks in large part to his Republican predecessors—even though the blackout was caused mostly by problems with the distribution of natural gas.”

About COVID-19: “And Abbott’s handling of the situation was comically erratic. He ordered a lockdown and then, under pressure from his right, crusaded to free Texans imprisoned by his lockdown.”

“But Abbott had other priorities. With his approval, the Legislature passed voter suppression legislation that rivaled the worst in the country as well as a law placing bounties on the heads of those who help others get abortions.”

And finally, “Over the course of 2021, Texans learned that Greg Abbott was not so colorless after all—somewhere along the line, he learned to be ruthless. ”

The article is a must read.  Close runners up were Ted Cruz for obvious reasons, and 25 Texans who participated in Trump’s effort to overthrow the US government and steal the presidency from Joe Biden.

After 26 years of single party rule where the GOP has controlled the governor’s mansion, both state houses, and virtually all the courts including the Texas Supreme Court, our state has become a cesspool of corruption, weirdos, felons, and fascists.  I have little hope that much will change as long as the federal government and courts are tolerant and complicit with Texas’ post-democracy fascist regime.

On January 6, Donald Trump, Jr. sent an urgent text to his dad’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

From the Washington Post:

Trump Jr. to Meadows: “He’s got to condemn this … ASAP. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough.”

Of course, it isn’t the substance of the text message that is revealing – it’s that Donald Trump Jr. has to go through Mark Meadows to talk to his own father.

That’s really something, isn’t it?

The Washington Post is reporting that Wisconsin Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder, who is presiding over the murder trial of young gun nut Kyle Rittenhouse, who gunned down two protesters last summer, has ruled on how lawyers can refer to the dead.  Recall that Rittenhouse, who was a minor at the time, was illegally in possession of an AR-15, and had illegally crossed state lines to join a white supremacist group “guarding” private businesses in Kenosha Wisconsin.  He killed two protesters who had confronted him for carrying an assault weapon in public.

Schroeder’s ruling?  During the trial, lawyers can refer to the people Rittenhouse killed as “looters”, “rioters”, and “arsonists”, but not as “victims”, because “victims” is a “loaded term”.  We’ve fallen down the rabbit hole and we’re not coming back.