#criminal administration

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

David Horsey, The Seattle Times :: @davidhorsey

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 21, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jan 22, 2025

“I JUST GOT THE NEWS FROM MY LAWYER… I GOT A PARDON BABY! THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP!!!” Jacob Chansley, dubbed the QAnon shaman as a reflection of his horned-animal headdress and body paint at the January 6, 2021, riot inside the U.S. Capitol, posted on X shortly after President Donald Trump commuted the sentences of or pardoned all those convicted of crimes related to the events of that day.

“NOW I AM GONNA BY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!! I LOVE THIS COUNTRY!!! GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!!” he continued. “J6ers are getting released & JUSTICE HAS COME… EVERYTHING done in the dark WILL come to light!”

A Scripps News/Ipsos poll conducted in late November, after Trump had won the 2024 presidential election, found that only 30% of Americans supported pardoning the January 6th protesters. In early January, many Republican lawmakers suggested they would not support pardons for those who committed violence against police officers, and on January 12, 2025, then vice president–elect J.D. Vance told Fox News Sunday that “if you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

This puts Republican leaders, who claim to defend law and order, on the back foot. When CNN’s chief congressional correspondent, Manu Raju, asked Republican senators what they thought of the blanket pardons, even MAGA senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) said it was unacceptable to pardon people who assaulted police officers but claimed he “didn’t see it,” although the footage of the violence is widely available. Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME) both criticized the pardons.

Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) tried to blame Trump’s pardons on former president Joe Biden, saying he had opened the door to broad pardons, although Biden preemptively pardoned people who had not been convicted of crimes but were in Trump’s crosshairs: people like former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, whom Trump appointed but later accused of “treason” for being unwilling to execute an illegal order. In one of his first moves as president yesterday, Trump had the official portrait of Milley removed from the hall in the Pentagon where portraits of all previous chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are displayed—all, now, except Milley.

The D.C. Police Union expressed its “dismay over the recent pardons,” reiterating its stance that “anyone who assaults a law enforcement officer should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, without exception.”

Trump’s blanket pardons signal to his MAGA base that the judicial system that tried to hold him—and them—accountable is corrupt and that he will protect those who fight for him in the streets. But those pardons do not appear to have popular support.

At the same time, Trump is demonstrating that he intends to create a country dominated by the right-wing, white men who supported him. It is not clear that that intent is any more popular than his pardons for the January 6 rioters.

In that Scripps poll, only 23% of Americans supported restricting women from military combat. But today, Trump fired the first uniformed woman to lead a branch of the armed forces, U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Lee Fagan. A senior official for the newly-staffed Department of Homeland Security said she was fired for an “excessive” focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.

Demonstrating his determination to advance a particular kind of Americanism, Trump announced he would rename the Gulf of Mexico, calling it the Gulf of America, and that he would change the name of Denali in Alaska, the tallest peak in North America, back to the name it held between 1917 and 2015: Mt. McKinley, in honor of the nation’s twenty-fifth president, who was famous primarily because he was assassinated in 1901.

Trump has made McKinley a touchstone of his second administration, saying yesterday that he would “restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs. President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.”

Senator Murkowski strongly objected to the change. “Our nation’s tallest mountain, which has been called Denali for thousands of years, must continue to be known by the rightful name bestowed by Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans, who have stewarded the land since time immemorial,” she said.

But it is in his executive order concerning birthright citizenship that Trump most clearly demonstrated his determination for white men to dominate the United States, and for Trump to dominate those men. In an executive order issued last night titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” Trump sought to overturn the U.S. Constitution and its consistent interpretation. He wants the power to decide who can be considered a citizen, and he apparently wants to force the U.S. Supreme Court to give him that power.

In 1868, in the wake of the Civil War, as southern states were passing laws that relegated Black Americans to subservience, Americans added the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to enable the federal government to override those discriminatory state laws. The Fourteenth Amendment provided that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” and then it charged the federal government with guaranteeing that no state could “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The Fourteenth Amendment made it clear that being born in the United States made someone a United States citizen.

That clarity meant that the Supreme Court reinforced the amendment’s intent, even in the late nineteenth century during a period of anti-immigrant sentiment that was most virulent against the Chinese who made their way to American shores.

In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting the immigration of workers from China. Thirteen years later, in 1895, Wong Kim Ark, an American-born child of Chinese immigrants, was denied reentry to the U.S. after a visit to China. He sued, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship, and he won. In the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the Supreme Court determined that the children of immigrants to the U.S.—no matter how unpopular immigration was at the time—were U.S. citizens, entitled to all the rights and immunities of citizenship, and that no act of Congress could overrule a constitutional amendment.

Trump would like the Supreme Court to award him the power to override the Constitution that a previous Supreme Court denied to Congress, but his attempt to overturn our foundational law has already launched lawsuits. Twenty-two Democratic-led states have sued the Trump administration for violating the U.S. Constitution. Washington, D.C., and San Francisco—fittingly, the city where Wong Kim Ark was born—have joined the lawsuits. So have the American Civil Liberties Union and an expectant mother.

Trump’s administration is facing lawsuits not only on his attacks on birthright citizenship, but also on the executive order that would enable Trump to fire nonpartisan civil servants and replace them with loyalists. And, within minutes of Trump taking office, at least three lawsuits were filed in Washington, D.C., against the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, run by Elon Musk—Vivek Ramaswamy has been pushed out—charging that it was breaking transparency laws.

The new administration has other problems as well. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, Trump’s first day on the job was “a dangerous display of rapid mental decline.” Bunch recorded Trump’s slurred speech, rambling, and nonsensical off-the-cuff speeches and said that his “biggest takeaway from a day that some have anticipated and many have dreaded for the last four years is seeing how rapidly the oldest new president in America is declining right in front of us.”

Even before he took office, Trump began to walk back his campaign promises—on lowering food prices, for example—and the administration is continuing to move the goalposts now that he’s in office. Last night the Senate confirmed former senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) 99–0 for secretary of state. Today, when CBS asked Rubio about Trump’s repeated promise to end the war in Ukraine on Day 1, Rubio said that what Trump really meant was that the war in Ukraine needs to come to an end.

But Trump is not helping those trying to defend his presidency. Tonight he pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who founded and from January 2011 to October 2013 ran an online criminal marketplace called Silk Road, where more than $200 million in illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services, such as computer hacking, were bought and sold with cryptocurrency. Most of the sales were of drugs, with the Silk Road home page listing nearly 13,000 options, including heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and LSD. The wares were linked to at least six deaths from overdose around the world. In May 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison and was ordered to forfeit more than $180 million.

In May 2024, during his presidential campaign, Trump promised to pardon Ulbricht in order to court the votes of libertarians, who support drug legalization on the grounds that people should be able to make their own choices. They saw Ulbricht’s sentence as government overreach.

Tonight, Trump posted that he had pardoned Ulbricht (although Trump spelled his name wrong), saying: “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[nando161mando]

[captain-casual]

Next up: Biden continues to be a crusty piece of shit who ignores his voters

Story here

[thedaddycomplex]

Oh, no. Guess we better keep an eye out.

[thashining]

Accurate

[cavalierzee]

The Legacy

Joe Biden displays his legacy while Palestinian Children beg for food.

By California Sculptor: Laura Harling

[sayruq]

The Israeli government warned the Biden administration that if the International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants against Israeli leaders, it will take retaliatory steps against the Palestinian Authority that could lead to its collapse, two Israeli and U.S. officials said. Why it matters: Israeli officials have grown increasingly concerned over the last two weeks that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is preparing to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Herzi Halevi. Driving the news: The ICC, which is based in The Hague, Netherlands, has been investigating since 2021 possible war crimes by both Israeli forces and Palestinian militants dating back to the 2014 Israel-Hamas war. That investigation has been extended to the Oct. 7 attacks and the war that has been raging in Gaza since then, according to the prosecutor's office. Behind the scenes: Over the last few weeks, Israel has told the U.S. that it has information suggesting Palestinian Authority officials are pressing the ICC prosecutor to issue arrest warrants against Israeli leaders, two Israeli officials said. U.S. and Israeli officials said Israel told the Biden administration that if arrests warrants are issued, it will consider the Palestinian Authority responsible and retaliate with strong action that could lead to its collapse. One possible action could be to freeze the transfer of tax revenues Israel collects for the Palestinian Authority. Without these funds, the Palestinian Authority would be bankrupt. A senior Israeli official told Axios the threat of ICC arrest warrants is real and stressed if such a scenario happens the Israeli cabinet would likely make an official decision to punish the Palestinian Authority, which could lead to its collapse.

[isawthismeme]

[eugenedebs1920]

Well well well… Let me show you my surprised face 😶

Imagine that! Trump terminating the government watchdogs tasked with impeding corruption and protecting tax payer dollars. It’s just incredible that there is not ONE. Not f*ckin one Republican who would speak out and denounce this corrupt behavior. I guess that bastion of modern times, a man with his finger on the pulse of a new generation, the 90 something year old Chuck Grassley isn’t pumped about it…

It’s monsterously reminiscent of the war on fact checking. Who are the people that would protest fact checking? F*cking liars!!!

So why fire the civil servants tasked with defending the American people and the taxes they contributed? Because you intend to pillage the funds and engage in illicit activity.

Seriously! Wtf?!

[spacenoirdetective]

I don't have a shred of respect for this absolute pile of failure. Biden has never EVER EVER taken responsibility FOR LITERALLY ANYTHING HE HAS EVER DONE IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE THAT HAS RESULTED IN FINANCIAL DEVASTATION, SKYROCKETING CRIME, AN INCIPIENT COMMUNIST REVOLUTION, A TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENT THAT HAS TRIED TO DESTROY ITS OPPONENTS THROUGH MASS PSYCHOSIS AND BRAINWASHING AND ABSOLUTE SOCIAL MADNESS. If you don't see this ruthless, bitter, sabotaging, incompetent supremely entitled dullard for the asinine fraud and sociopathic compulsive liar he is, you are FUCKING BLIND!! SERIOUSLY, WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!

If a perianal abscess had a face, it would be this motherfucker.

He's also a decrepit, mentally deficient, obviously mentally impaired, dementia addled pustule spawned from Satan's asshole protected by the same elites who want to enslave you that he vows to punish as your false savior figure through nonsensical policies whose only goal is the total control over your body, your speech, your actions and your thoughts.

Fuck. You. You dumb, worthless sack of bat shit with your laughing prostitute of a vice president who is literally just a whore in a pantsuit. Fuck your worthless degenerate drug addled son with his Russian human trafficking ring and endless obscenities against God. Fuck your whole family and their criminal influence peddling, embezzlement, pyramid schemes, money laundering and THE ENDLESS NONSTOP HYPOCRISY. FUCK YOUR COWARDICE AS YOU BOW TO THE MOST INSIDIOUS COLLECTION OF AUTHORITARIANS WHO HAVE CONSPIRED TO DESTROY WESTERN CIVILIZATION AND FUCK YOUR ENDLESS FAKE OUTRAGE AGAINST THE ONE PERSON WHO HAS MANAGED TO STOP YOU FROM YOUR PLANS OF A NEW WORLD ORDER.

And fuck you if you keep supporting these people. They hate you. They hate America. Every fucking thing they have ever said is a constructed lie, a designed control mechanism. They hate freedom and democracy. They hate God. They hate Jesus. They hate everything pure and good. They hate everything but power and money. They want to replace worship of God with state worship. They have zero morals. They deluge you with propaganda and if you support them your head is just stuck so far up your asshole you refuse to see it because your ego won't allow it.

I want to shit on his grave.

[nando161mando]

[rejectingrepublicans]

[belle-oftheball34]

Heard they were deleting evidence of this so ofc I had to post it

[sky-daddy-hates-me]

"The blood is on your hands biden, we can see it all, and fuck no, Im not voting for you in the fall"

Hind's Hall by Macklemore