Two faced SCOTUS

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Thursday April 25, 2024 · 4:38 PM PDT

2024/04/25 · 16:38

The Heritage 6 Supremes dearest wish is to not release their opinions on the question of whether or not POTUS is above the laws of the U.S.A., is to wait until AFTER the results of the November national election have been determined. IF Hier Trump wins, all is Right and the dear leader can do whatever he wants, and grab anyone by whatever body part that is convenient. In this outcome their decision is that POTUS cannot be held accountable for any illegal act. IF Mr. Trump does not win, the opinion would be that of course POTUS MUST obey U.S. Laws otherwise he could put anyone in jail whether or not they wear black robes and have seats on the SCOTUS.

Since opinions are due at the end of this SCOTUS term in June, I firmly believe that they will punt the issue back to the court of appeals, which will delay any actual findings until after the November elections.

Where to jail a convicted ex-president?

jjhaydeniii

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Friday August 25, 2023 · 1:34 PM PDT

2023/08/25 · 13:34

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA - OCTOBER 27: (EDITORS NOTE: Image has been reviewed by U.S. Military prior to transmission.) A "non-compliant" detainee is escorted by guards after showering inside the U.S. military prison for "enemy combatants" on October 27, 2009 in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Although U.S. President Barack Obama pledged in his first executive order last January to close the infamous prison within a year's time, the government has been struggling to try the accused terrorists and to transfer them out ahead of the deadline. Military officials at the prison point to improved living standards and state of the art medical treatment available to detainees, but the facility's international reputation remains tied to "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding employed under the Bush administration. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

As the number of counts of felonies associated with the former president increase, the likelihood that he will be convicted on one or more of those charges increases. This has caused media talking heads to ponder the complications of jailing a former POTUS. Would his Secret Service detail be incarcerated with him? Would a regular federal correctional institute be able to keep him safe, much less a state institution?

There is an existing facility that would allow him to serve his time without is security detail being incarcerated too. It is just south of Florida, Guantanamo Bay where the cells are already set up and waiting.

A Republic, if we can keep it.

jjhaydeniii

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Thursday June 15, 2023 · 7:35 PM PDT

2023/06/15 · 19:35

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Profile/TrailTrekker15

A Republic, if we can keep it.

At the end of the constitutional convention Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have said to “Mrs. Elizabeth Willing Powel, a prominent society figure and the wife of Philadelphia Mayor Samuel Powel, asked Dr. Franklin: Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy. A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.”

Not a monarchy but a republic.

Even though the delegates were all men and aristocrats and in many instances slave owners, they agreed that the new form of government in the colonies would be one of, by and for the people with equal justice for all. Putting side the hypocrisy of slave owners committed to equal justice for all, as well as who comprised the “all” - landed gentry - in their minds, the point was that some monarch and associated sycophants would not be the embodiment of the law of the land. The people of the country would not be subject to agents and officers of the monarch seizing them and throwing them in prison or executing them without a trial with jury of their peers.

In short this new land would be governed by the rule of law, not the whims of the king or other nobility.

There would be rules, laws, to which everyone would be subjected, equally. That was and is the basic idea even though the idea, the goal, has not been reached in every instance.

From the time of deciding on a democratic republic until today, there is a sect within the U.S. that holds that the citizenry is not capable of self-rule. We are too stupid; we don’t understand that only through the administration of power can a society long endure.

In short, only a strong ruler can keep a civil society.

At the start of the 21^st century, we are again confronted with a collection of very wealthy and powerful men, and a few women, who believe that they can achieve the goal of converting our democratic republic into an aristocracy with a titular head of the government controlled by a cabal of the wealthy. A goal that as been sought for at least 250 years.

Set aside the difficulty of controlling a dictator; for example a mega-narcissist sociopath, such as D. J. Trump.

As is the case with many dictators, Trump is telling us exactly what he would do if he were to become the dictator of U.S.A. He as shown that he as already tried to turn the Department of Justice, the FBI and the IRS into his tools to punish any who oppose his will. He has no concept of public service, only self service and aggrandizement. We the people would become Me and the peons. In place of the rule of law would be the Rule of his excellency the Trump. The sycophants should be particularly concerned of what an omnipotent ruler could do to them as history has shown time and again.

All of us need to be aware of this ongoing attack, back here on Earth 1, where there are such things as facts, truth and lies.

Timeline of Trump’s dealings with classified documents

jjhaydeniii

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Saturday June 10, 2023 · 8:14 AM PDT

2023/06/10 · 08:14

FBI agents loading boxes; Merrick Garland, with glowing eiyes; caption Game Over

Timeline of Trump’s dealings with classified and other U.S. Government documents originating the executive office

The following information comes from the indictment of Donald J Trump and Waltine Nauta.

January 20, 2017 to January 21, 2020 – Donald J Trump held the office of President of the United States and had access to document pertaining to the activities of the United State government that we both unclassified as well as classified as levels of secrecy across the full spectrum of classifications.

A significant number of these documents under Trumps direction, were gathered into boxes to be transported to Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach Florida with his departure from the White House.

When Trump ceased to be the President of the United States, at noon on January 21, 2020, he lost his security clearance and his right to access of any classified materials.

January 2021 through August 2022 – Mar-a-Lago Club hosted tens of thousands of members and guests. Mar-a-Lago was not authorized to store classified documents. The club was staffed by more than 150 full, part-time and temporary employees. Trump did not inform his Secret Service detail that he was storing classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

January through March 2021 – documents stored in Mar-a-Lago’s White and Gold Ballroom

March 2021 – Waltine Nauta Trump’s personal aid and others moved some of the boxes from the ballroom to the business center at Mar-a-Lago Club.

April 2021 – Some boxes were moved from the office center to a bathroom and shower ay Mar-a-Lago’s Lake room.

May 2021 – National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) demands Trump turn over any Presidential records he may have in his possession.

June 2021 – NARA warns Trump that failure to turn over the material would cause NARA to notify the Department of Justice (DOJ) of the missing records.

June 24, 2021 – a total of 80 boxes were moved from the Lake room to the Storage Room.

July 2021 and August or September 2021 – Trump shows classified documents in meetings at Bedminster with authors and their staff as well as members of Trump’s PAC who did not hold security clearance.

December 7, 2021 – at least one box was found on its side and its contents, including documents with classified markings, spilled on the floor. No explanation as to why the box had fallen over or who might have accessed it to cause it to be found in that condition.

November 2021 through January 2022 – at Trump’s direction, Nauta and another employee ferries boxes from the storage room to Trump’s office for Trumps review.

January 17, 2022 – Nauta loads 15 boxes into his car from Trump’s residence to his car and then into a commercial truck to be delivered to NARA. 14 document were found to have classified marking by NARA.

February 9, 2022 – NARA informs DOJ of classified document found in the boxes from Trump.

March 30, 2022 – FBI opens criminal investigation.

April 26, 2022 – federal grand jury opens investigation.

May 11, 2022 – federal grand jury issues a subpoena for all documents with any level of classification.

May 22, 2022 – Nauta removes one box from the storage room.

May 23. 2022 – Trump learns that his attorney will arrive on June 2^nd to search the boxes in the storage room for classified documents.

May 23 to June 2, 2022 – at Trump’s direction Nauta transported 64 boxes from the storage room to Trump’s residence.

June 2, 2022 – before Trump’s attorney’s arrived to examine the boxes, Nauta moved 64 boxes from the storage room to Trump’s residence and returned 30 boxes to the storage room. Neither Trump nor Nauta informed the attorney if the movement of these boxes.

3:53 – 4:23pm – Trump’s attorney examines boxes in the storage room and transfers 38 documents with classified markings into a Redweld folder and sealed it with clear tape.

That evening Trump’s attorney (attorney 1) contacts FBI and arranges to meet with them June 3 to turn over discovered classified documents. Attorney 1 contacted attorney 3 to come to Mar-a-Lago and act as custodian of the records and sign a document certifying the search for classified documents.

June 3, 2022 – Attorney 1 had attorney 3 sign a document as custodian of the records. Attorney 3 did not participate in the search for the documents in the storage room. The documents and certification of the search was turned over to the FBI.

Early on the 3^rd, Natua and others loaded boxes into Trump’s plane to take with Trump to his summer residence.

July 2022 – FBI and grand jury obtained and reviewed surveillance video from Mar-a-Lago showing the movement of the boxes describes above.

August 8, 2022 – FBI executes warrant to search for and removes classified documents from Mar-a-Lago.

HE GOAL IS TO SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT

jjhaydeniii

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Friday May 12, 2023 · 7:36 AM PDT

2023/05/12 · 07:36

FILE - Rioters wave flags on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. Federal prosecutors are employing an unusual strategy to prove leaders of the far-right Proud Boys extremist group orchestrated a violent plot to keep President Joe Biden out of the White House, even though some of the defendants didn't carry out the violence themselves. AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)

THE GOAL IS TO SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT

Just for argument’s sake, suppose you were an authoritarian and wanted to stay in power in democratic republic. You could stage a coup at the time that the government was to change from you to the person elected in a free election. But what if your plan was deeper: suppose you want to end the government altogether with one stroke. You could accomplish this if there were a way to shut off the ability to pay bills, thereby destroying the credit of the country and in essence shutting down the operation of governing.

There is no path for negotiating when the goals of the different sides are 180 degrees apart.

In case the Biden administration and the elected Democrats don’t get it: the Trumpists want to destroy the democratic republic and install their dictator.

Look at the little chihuahuas!

jjhaydeniii

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Saturday April 08, 2023 · 11:40 AM PDT

2023/04/08 · 11:40

Growing up in rural Mississippi, on of the rights of passage for a young male was to become an accomplished squirrel hunter. That meant becoming sufficiently adept that you could kill a squirrel with a .22 round while it was moving across the limbs of trees in the fall. The reason for the .22 was that blasting them with a shotgun round, even with a .410 gauge and most certainly not with a .12 gauge, tended to leave little but squirrel meat that looked like chocolate chip cookies except the chip were lead pellets. Not especially appetizing. The protocol was to deliver head shots which both preserved the meat and made for easier retrieval of the body. This precluded the delicacy of broiled squirrel brain not a great loss in my experience.

The end of my Great Squirrel Hunter days came when I delivered a brace of squirrel bodies, absent the head, skin, and internal organs, to my mother to cook for supper. She broiled them and put them along with side dished I do not recall, on a platter in the center of the table. At the time, there were five of us sitting around the table, my parents, brother – 6 years than me and my sister, 12 years younger. The meal progressed just fine until my little sister pointed to the squirrel bodies and proclaimed, “Look at the little chihuahuas!”. That was the end of that meal and my hunting the elusive gray and red squirrel because there was no use going through the effort if there was no appetite for the harvest.

Killing children is the main use of assault weapons.

jjhaydeniii

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Friday April 07, 2023 · 11:01 AM PDT

2023/04/07 · 11:01

Uvalde, TX May 24, 2022 Shooting at Robb Elementary School kills 19 students and 2 teachers. Early stages outside the school..Credit: Uvalde Leader News.free of charge. .Contact: Meghann Garcia: mgarcia@ulnnow.com 830 278 3335

“Everyone needs an assault weapon to fight the U.S. government when it comes for you” is a justification heard across the country. However,the usual target is children.

This is the popular theme heard again and again as justification for owning an assault weapon or three.

The most common use by someone not in the U.S. military or a member of law enforcement, is to blowup targets at a firing range, such as melons or gallon water bottles.

The second most common use is to ambush and massacre young children, church goers and people attending musical productions or night clubs.

Data available at this time indicates that law enforcement officers injured by assault weapons happens in a standoff with individuals known to have used assault weapons.

The evidence appears to show that murdering unarmed children and adults is the main reason to own an assault weapon in the U.S.

Sit down and shut up!

jjhaydeniii

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Sunday March 19, 2023 · 2:16 PM PDT

2023/03/19 · 14:16

Sit down and shut up.

Regressives – those hiding under the shield of Conservative while not acting like anyone who wants to conserve anything except power, want anyone who disagrees with them and speaks up to just shut up and don’t do anything that would bring unwanted attention. The goal of Regressives is to establish an authoritarian politic, ideally a one-man dictatorial rule. Any power sharing is only a way station on the way to totalitarian control.

The Regressive, Authoritarian rules are:

Any opposition in any form is not tolerated.
Facts have no bearing on the rules.
Injury and Death has no bearing on the rules.

People are resources that can be consumed in the process of furthering the goal of absolute power.

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” H. Truman

“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.” — Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

“How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!” Samuel L Clemens

I WOKE up to the immorality of the MAGAs

jjhaydeniii

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Monday January 30, 2023 · 9:01 AM PST

2023/01/30 · 09:01

I'm awake and see what you are trying to do

I WOKE up to the immorality of the MAGAs and their sociopath leaders.

Woke is the past tense of wake. The Merriam-Webster definition is “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues”.

The first 35 years of my life was spent near the coast of Mississippi. I was fortunate to have been raised in a Christian religion that expects and lets you make up your own mind. I am an Eagle Scout. I was a Boy Scout leader in the 1970s. The philosophies of loving your neighbor as you love yourself and do to others as you would have done to you. I still think that the Scout Oath: “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.” is a good standard to use to measure my actions.

This was not easy to do in the society of south Mississippi in the 1960s. I was and have been disquieted because of the conflict between my moral and ethical guideposts and what I saw all around me day in day out. I tried not to add to the social assault on my “neighbors” that I saw all around me. The simplistic meme of “white is good an black is bad” was the moral and ethical salve used to keep 99% of the population from waking up (being woken) to the ongoing landslides of injustices that fueled and supported the societal tensions between the “Whites” and everyone else. In an authoritarian society, it is critical that the peons be kept at each other’s throats and not woke to the systematic injustices universally applied to all those in the “lower class”. This includes whites, blacks, browns, yellows and anyone without sufficient resources to be in the ruling class.

I tried to walk a path of helping the least of these and avoiding adding to the societal problems. The ultimate solution to stop assisting the problems, not continuing to be a direct and indirect enabler was to move. The saying foes “there are lot of good people from Mississippi”.

In 1984 I moved to Indianapolis Indiana, and it seemed to me that I had moved into a liberal enclave. It turns out that circumstances are relative. At that time Indiana was focused on business and financial success and except for the southwestern part of the state, was not consumed with keeping “those people” in their places.

I have lived in a mixed-race suburb of Atlanta for the last 27 years. Once again, I tried to not make thing worse and help where I can. In 2021 I made a pilgrimage to Montgomery Alabama to visit several sites with monuments to the struggle for civil rights for blacks in the south. Two sites had a profound impact on me: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum. Both memorials were and continue to be funded by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) which is made up of private donners and uses no public monies.

The Memorial for Peace and Justice contains rectangular steel boxes suspended from the ceiling. Each box has the names, places and dates of lynchings have been incised, one box per county in the U.S.A.

I was emotionally struck when, at the entrance to the memorial, I saw that a former salve who had my surname, was lynched in an Alabama county in the nineteen tens. I continued to look for the counties I am familiar with to see how many and when lynchings occurred in those places. The EJI has duplicate boxes laid out by state just outside the hanging building. Any county, that agrees to appropriately display one of these memorials can do so without charge. The last time I was there in 2022, there were no missing slabs in the inventory of memorials.

My next awakening was the visit to the other half of the EJI memorials, the Legacy Museum. The displays in this museum show the migration of the use of slaves from colonial times to emancipation. It graphically and in abundant describes the systematic racial injustices inflicted by the white supremacist regimes across the southern U.S. from after the insurrection to almost the present. I left the exhibit wondering how I could have been so blind to the acts of inhumanity going on around me. I also became woke to the realization that this cancer of injustice was raging right now, today.

The evolutionary successors of the Tea Party and the MAGA followers of Donald Trump, are fighting as hard as they can, backed by near infinite monetary support, to put the genie back in the bottle. They are fighting against the tide of population growth and biology. Their hope is to re-establish the U.S. version of apartheid as practiced in South Africa, that was shattered when the U.S. elected a black man as President. By erasing and suppressing our history they hope to stop the inevitable awakening that will happen as our population becomes woke.

What being woke means to me, is that I am aware of the significant baggage that I have as a southern male. The chains, like Marley’s in the Christmas Carol which represents his “sins in life and his guilt in failing to help his fellow Man” are both societal and personal. Like Scrooge, we must change our relationships. We must wake up to our failings and commit to implementing different outcomes if not solutions.

We must become woke to the instances were we are not loving our neighbor or treating he or she as we want to be treated.

Woke, in this instance is not a bad thing but a necessity if our society, a democratic republic, is to survive.

Equal Justice Initiative: https://eji.org/

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice: https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial

The Legacy Museum: https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/museum

There is a line that cannot be crossed

jjhaydeniii

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Saturday March 05, 2022 · 10:26 AM PST

2022/03/05 · 10:26

There is a line

There is a boundary, a Deadline which when crossed means death. In this instance it could mean the near extension of the human race along with most other life on earth.

FYI the term deadline comes from the Confederate prisoner of war camps: “a boundary line in a prison that prisoners can cross only at the risk of being shot” Free online dictionary.

Putin appears to be running right up to the edge of that line.

That war crimes are being done in Ukraine, at Putin’s direction, are obvious. The tragedy and pathos are mind numbing.

It is like watching a cruse ship, full of passengers, burning up and there is seemingly little outside observers can do.

The monster waiting to be unleashed is mutually assured destruction. Putin is betting that the NATO allies will not start a nuclear Armageddon and he is correct. It is like sinking the ship to put out the fire.

Putin’s army will occupy Ukraine. They will not pacify it. The loss of life and human mayhem will be mind boggling. The Russian population will not be cable to ignore the cumulative loss of life by their military. The Russian economy and social structure will become a version of what is seen in North Korea. This has happened before in Russia; in fact, it has happened several times. The creation of a national prison has led to popular revolts; the last one caused the breakup of the Soviet Union. It also provides an example of what can happen when a country cannot keep a republic.

The G.W. Bush presidency undercut our authority (if we ever had it) to call out countries that start unprovoked war. The neo-cons wanted to show that a capitalist, Ayn Rand style version of the Marshall plan that rebuilt Europe, would turn Iraq into a free-market country in the middle of the dictatorial kingdoms in the middle east. The plan was not to occupy and control a country. The capitalists and free marketeers would do that for us. It turned out that Iraq is now an Arab version of a kleptocracy.

The free world has been trained to expect nearly instant gratification, much like a toddler, but this is the time for adult, delayed gratification, even to the point of abandonment.

We must contain this wildfire of aggression with economic and social firebreaks. Putin’s Russia and all other aggressors must see that the world will not idly sit by and do nothing. There must be consequences.

This will take time, patience, skill, and innovative thinking to use all the levers of an internet connected world to prod Russia to wake up and reset the Russian governmental structure once again.

Unfortunately, climate change may be an unfortunate ally.

Stop misusing Conservative

jjhaydeniii

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday December 01, 2021 · 7:27 AM PST

2021/12/01 · 07:27

Looking up "conservative" in the dictionary.

Words matter

Using the label Conservative to identify anyone who isn’t a liberal or is a member of the Democratic party is like calling a mob collector/enforcer an agent of economic redistribution.

The definition doesn’t fit the reality, but then denying reality is the first premise of the right.

Regressive is the label which should be used. Regressive is the opposite opposite of progressive, not conservative. A Conservative wants to halt progress. If their actual desire is to return to some imagined time in the past when “things were better/easier/clearer/” then they are in fact regressives who want to move in opposition to progress.

The main problem with using conservative as the descriptor of the right, is that it dresses the individual’s or group’s actions in the garb of preservation: wanting to preserve the status quo.

Any person or group that aims to take us back to the good ol’ days, no matter how far back, deserves the correct label: Regressive. For example imagine reading about or hearing a news reader say the following:

“Regressives in congress voted unanimously against protecting the right of fill people to elect their public office holders by free and fair elections.”

“Regressive (fill-in-the-blank) called for reducing funding for all social program that do not exclusively benefit the .01%.”

IMHO Such clear descriptions would be most beneficial to public understanding and informative to the decision-making process.

Traige

jjhaydeniii

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday September 23, 2021 · 9:29 AM PDT

2021/09/23 · 09:29

HOUSTON, TX - JUNE 30: (EDITORIAL USE ONLY) (EDITOR'S NOTE: Image depicts death.) A member of the medical staff wearing full PPE prepares a disinfectant solution to wipe a deceased patient in the Covid-19 intensive care unit at the United Memorial Medical Center on June 30, 2020 in Houston, Texas. Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations have spiked since Texas reopened, pushing intensive-care wards to full capacity and sparking concerns about a surge in fatalities as the virus spreads. (Photo by Go Nakamura/Getty Images) — Who get medical care? Who deserves it? who has priority?

Triage

“[T]he sorting of patients (as in an emergency room) according to the urgency of their need for care” MW online.

Georgia is dying its way out of its COVID caused hospital emergency. Sufficient numbers of unvaccinated COVID patients have yielded their hospital space by leaving the mortal plain to relieve the stress on the hospital systems such that a state of emergency has been avoided. This isn’t the case for several states where their hospital systems have been forced into triage mode to allocate medical resources.

The crux of the matter is deciding the parameters of the urgency of care.

Is the need for medical care greater for those who refused vaccinations, that would have almost completely prevented hospitalization, than of those who have long time critical need, such as special dialysis equipment or heart related treatments for example? Before the advent of the COVID vaccines, this decision was moot. Now when significant numbers of people have chosen not to protect themselves and their family, friends and random contacts, the question of personal responsibility could be part of the decisions about who receives medical care and who doesn’t.

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