The "Go Directly To Jail" Amendment
Let's stop fucking around
Links are at the end, in a deep deep hole.
Turns out Rudy Giuliani is a racist, Jew-hating rapist. Worst Person of the Day, today.1
“This is not a policeman. This is not even a human. This is a computer, making thousands of robocalls with the same folksy voice.”
The New York Times has a scoop on a fundraising scheme raising funds almost exclusively for the fundraisers.2
About 90 percent of the money the groups raised was simply sent back to their fund-raising contractors, to feed a self-consuming loop where donations went to find more donors to give money to find more donors. They had no significant operations other than fund-raising, and along the way became one of America’s biggest sources of robocalls.
You will be shocked to learn that gambling is going on in here.
The groups also paid $2.8 million, or 3 percent of the money raised, to three Republican political consultants from Wisconsin who were the hidden force behind all five nonprofits, according to people who worked for the groups and who in some cases were kept in the dark by the consultants about the finances of the operations.
Not all thieves are Republicans but.
“Hold on a second, Congressman. Did you just say that the whistleblower or the informant is now missing?”
Also from The Daily Beast (and elsewhere too) comes the tale of Republicans on the House Oversight committee losing track of an informant supposed to have The Goods on The Biden Crime Family.3
“Well, we’re hopeful that we can find the informant,” Comer said. “Remember, these informants are kind of in the spy business, so they don’t make a habit of being seen a lot or being high-profile or anything like that.”
Up and Comer.
“Of the 84 countries codified as autocracies under the Regimes of the World system in 2022, the United States sold weapons to at least 48, or 57 percent, of them.”
The Bidennaires have reconsidered their evidently hypothetical refusal to support autocracies.4
In a speech in Warsaw last year, [Biden] said the battle between democracy and autocracy is one “between liberty and repression” and “between a rules-based international order and one governed by brute force.” The White House’s 2022 National Security Strategy adds, “The most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy.”
Fiscal year 2022 was their first opportunity to sell weapons to the baddies, and they did so to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.
To be fair, every administration sets a new record in weapons sales to regimes which are openly and obviously anti-democratic, and every administration is mealy-mouthed about it (with the recent exception of the Trumpettes, who were publicly indifferent to the behavior of their customers).
The U.S. not only sells weaponry to awful regimes, but trains them how to use the stuff and sometimes, as with the Saudis and other recipients of U.S. largesse in the war on Yemen, helps them aim it, which is to say we help them to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, which is to say that we’re often enough accessories when we’re not committing them ourselves, which we do with demoralizing regularity.5
Money don’t care.
“You’re going to prison, and you’re going to prison, and you, and you, and . . .”
Which brings us to our vastly underappreciated “Go Directly To Jail” constitutional amendment, which would mandate a minimum five-year post-presidency prison term for the people to whom we entrust our nation’s morality.
Everybody makes excuses for their homies, but without exception they belong in jail. Selling weapons to villains is enough to warrant prison, even though it’s putatively legal, but every president breaks the law in matters large and small.
Some readers here may admire Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, for instance, to the point of well they would never. But Carter helped Suharto’s Indonesian government commit genocide in East Timor—
In mid-1977, Carter Administration officials, led by then National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, blocked attempts (Document 23) by a U.S. Congressman, Donald Fraser (MN) to obtain a copy of the explosive cable transcribing President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger's December 6, 1975 meeting with Indonesian President Suharto in which Ford and Kissinger "went out of their way on the eve of the GOI move on Timor to assure Suharto of an understanding attitude by the U.S." Twenty four years later, in December 2001, the National Security Archive published the full text of this cable.
In a May 10, 1978 meeting with President Suharto in Jakarta (Document 29), then Vice-President Walter Mondale discussed with the Indonesian President the Administration's desire for expanded arms sales to Jakarta and recommended "how to handle public relations aspects of the [Timor] problem" in ways that would "have a beneficial impact on U.S. public opinion."6
—and Obama violated the U.N. Convention Against Torture each and every day of his presidency, in chief by refusing to hold our confessed torturers accountable for what they did, but also by blocking torture victims from legal redress.7
A year has passed since the US Senate released the summary of a still classified report detailing CIA torture of terrorism suspects. Though President Barack Obama has publicly acknowledged that the US "tortured some folks," not a single official has been charged with a crime.
Under the UN Convention against Torture, states are required to investigate and hold perpetrators accountable. Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday slammed the Obama administration for failing to uphold those responsibilities.
"They are in violation of the convention," Laura Pitter, HRW's senior national security council, told DW. "They claim that they've investigated, but it has to be thorough and credible and it wasn't. There's no doubt about that."
And of course Republican administrations are at least as bad or worse, which is to say that all of these motherfuckers belong in prison. Putting them there while they’re in office is impractical; impeaching them isn’t easy, and convicting them even less so, and convicting them of something that would warrant immediate imprisonment even less than that.
Better, then, to let shit play out, short of a coup, and then shuttle them to Leavenworth as soon as they’re out the White House door.
Some people might object to the amendment, thinking it would discourage the best candidates from running, but that’s unlikely for anyone other than those who run considerable risk of dying during their five year bit. Ask a candidate if they’d serve five years for the privilege of serving their country for four or eight, and whom among us would say no?
Nobody, that’s whom.
“Josh Hawley Won’t Let Go of His Manhood”
That’s the wonderful headline on a Jon Schwartz review of Josh Hawley’s book on how to be a brave, stand-up-in-the-face-of-anything-but-a-mob-howling-for-your-blood kind of guy.8
Music to serenade an imprisoned ex-president by
Magnapop, “The Circle Is Round;”9 K. Flay, "Inside Voices/Outside Voices;"10 Jennifer Trynin, "Cockamamie."11
That, Comrades, is all there is, and it is sufficient unto the day
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Be well, take care.