New Crow Time 🐦‍⬛🦊🌟

TALKING HEADS - TAKE ME TO RIVER.

47 years ago today,

One particular and climactic highlight of 'Stop making Sense' came when the band took Al Green’s TAKE ME TO THE RIVER farther and deeper than ever imaginable – first an enormous boom-boom from Chris Frantz, then the doubled bass (Busta Jones and Tina) making the earth move, next the Baptist choir chanting of the title by Nona Hendryx and Dolette McDonald (the crowd was roaring), and finally "I don't know why I love you like I do."

the funny thing is that i don't think younger people - and i mean those under the age of 40 - really have a grasp on how many of today's issues can be tied back to a disastrous reagan policy:

war on drugs: reagan's aggressive escalation of the war on drugs was a catastrophic policy, primarily targeting minority communities and fueling mass incarceration. the crusade against drugs was more about controlling the Black, Latino and Native communities than addressing the actual problems of drug abuse, leading to a legacy of broken families and systemic racism within the criminal justice system.

deregulation and economic policies: reaganomics was an absolute disaster for the working class. reagan's policies of aggressive tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, and slashing social programs were nothing less than class warfare, deepening income inequality and entrenching corporate greed. these types of policies were a clear message that reagan's america was only for the wealthy elite and a loud "fuck you" to working americans.

environmental policies: despite his reputation being whitewashed thanks to the recovery of the ozone layer, reagan's environmental record was an unmitigated disaster. his administration gutted critical environmental protections and institutions like the EPA, turning a blind eye to pollution and corporate exploitation of natural resources. this blatant disregard for the planet was a clear sign of prioritizing short-term corporate profits over the future of the environment.

AIDS crisis: reagan's gross neglect of the aids crisis was nothing short of criminal and this doesn't even begin to touch on his wife's involvement. his administration's indifference to the plight of the lgbtq+ community during this devastating epidemic revealed a deep-seated bigotry and a complete failure of moral leadership.

mental health: reagan's dismantling of mental health institutions under the guise of 'reform' led directly to a surge in homelessness and a lack of support for those with mental health issues. his policies were cruel and inhumane and showed a personality-defining callous disregard for the most vulnerable in society.

labor and unions: reagan's attack on labor unions, exemplified by his handling of the patco strike, was a blatant assault on workers' rights. his actions emboldened corporations to suppress union activities, leading to a significant erosion of workers' power and rights in the workplace. he was colloquially known as "Ronnie the Union Buster Reagan"

foreign policy and military interventions: reagan's foreign policy, particularly in latin america, was imperialist and ruthless. his administration's support for dictatorships and right-wing death squads under the guise of fighting "communism" showed a complete disregard for human rights and self-determination of other nations.

public health: yes, reagan's agricultural policies actually facilitated the rise of high fructose corn syrup, once again prioritizing corporate profits over public health. this shift in the food industry has had lasting negative impacts on health, contributing to the obesity epidemic and other health issues.

privatization: reagan's push for privatization was a systematic dismantling of public services, transferring wealth and power to private corporations and further eroding the public's access to essential services.

education policies: his approach to education was more of an attack on public education than anything else, gutting funding and promoting policies that undermined equal access to quality education. this was, again, part of a broader agenda to maintain a status quo where the privileged remain in power.

this is just what i could come up with in a relatively short time and i did not even live under this man's presidency. the level at which ronald reagan has broken the united states truly can't be overstated.

Trump & the Military

(This was shamelessly copy/pasted from OP on Reddit (u/myusernameiscool1234, thanks dude!) because it needs to be spread and I wanted to update a tad, add links and reformat it so it's easier to follow. I'm sure I'm missing stuff, so feel free to add to it and I'll try to update accordingly. Please Share!)

On Military Service

• Trump dodged the draft 5 times, 4 for college and 1 by having a doctor diagnose him with bone spurs.

• Trump said having unprotected sex was his own personal Vietnam (1998)

• Trump said “I felt that I was in the military in the true sense because I dealt with those people” because he went to a military-style academy and that he has “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military”. (2015 biography)

• Trump accepted a Purple Heart from a fan at one of his rallies and said: “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.” (Aug 2, 2016)

• ⁠No Trump in America has ever served in the military; this spans 5 generations, and every branch of the family tree. In fact, the reason his grandfather immigrated to America was to avoid military service

• Trump made his 2nd wife, Marla Maples, sign a prenup that would have cut off all child support if Tiffany joined the military (reported on June 4th, 2019)

Use & Treatment of Military

• He sent commandos into an ambush due to a lack of intel, and sends contractors to pick them up, resulting in a commando being left behind, tortured, and executed. (Trump approved the mission because Bannon told him Obama didn’t have the guts to do it) (Oct 4, 2017)

• He forgot the aforementioned fallen soldier’s name during a call to his pregnant widow, then attacked her the next day (Oct 23-24, 2017)

• He urged Florida to not count deployed military votes (Nov 12, 2018)

• He used troops as a political prop by sending them on a phantom mission to the border and made them miss Thanksgiving with their families (Oct-Dec, 2018).

• He stopped using troops as a political prop immediately after the election. However, the troops remained in muddy camps on the border (Nov 7, 2018).

• He called troops on Thanksgiving and told them he’s most thankful for himself (Thanksgiving, 2018)

• He fired service members living with HIV just before the 2018 holidays (Dec 19, 2018-present)

• He finally visited troops 2 years after taking office, but only after 154 vacation days at his properties (Dec 26, 2018)

• Trump lied to deployed troops that he gave them a 10% raise. He didn’t give them a 10% raise (Dec 26, 2018). He initially tried to give the military a raise that was lower than the standard living adjustment. This was before Congress told him that idea wasn’t going to work. Then after giving them the raise that Congress made him, he lied about it pretending that it was larger than Obama’s. It wasn’t.

• He revealed a covert Seal Team 5 deployment , including names and faces, on Twitter during his visit to Iraq. Endangering both the operatives and their families. (Dec 26, 2018)

• He refused to sign his party’s funding bill, which shut down the government, and forced a branch of the military (see below) to go without pay. This branch of military was forced to work without pay, otherwise they would be AWOL. However, his appointees got a $ 10,000 pay raise (Dec 22, 2018 – Jan 25, 2019)

• He didn’t pay the Coast Guard, forcing service members to rely on food pantries (Jan 23, 2019)

• He denied female troops access to birth control to limit sexual activity (on-going. Published Jan 18, 2019)

• He banned service members from serving based on gender identity (Jan 22, 2019)

• He diverted military housing funds to pay for border wall (Feb 15, 2019). A judge subsequently denied this. In July 2019, SCOTUS ruled that Trump could in fact divert military housing funds to pay for his wall.

• Trump pardoned war criminals (May, 2019)

• In May 2019, Trump turned away US military from his Memorial Day speech because they were from the destroyer USS John S. McCain. Trump initially ordered the USS John McCain out of sight during his visit to Japan (May 15, 2019) which led to the ship’s name subsequently being covered. (May 27, 2019)

• In June 2019, Trump sent troops to the border to paint the fence for a better “aesthetic appearance” (June 7, 2019)

• Trump demanded US military chiefs stand next to him at 4th of July parade (reported July 2, 2019)

• Trump made the U.S. Navy Blue Angels violate ethics rules by having them fly at his July 4th political campaign (July 4, 2019)

• On July 31, 2019, Trump ordered the Navy rescind medals to prosecutors who were prosecuting war criminals.

• On ⁠October 8th, 2019, Trump plans to withdraw from Open Skies treaty giving Russia the ability to target our military aircraft.

Attacks on Service Members

• Trump said he doesn’t consider POWs heroes because they were caught. Says he "prefers people who were not caught" (July 18, 2015)

• He said he knows more about ISIS than American generals (Oct 2016)

• Trump attacks Gold Star families including: Myeshia Johnson — a gold star widow and the Khan family—gold star parents (2016-present)

• He called a retired general a ‘dog’ with a ‘big, dumb mouth’ (Jan 1, 2019)

• Well documented dislike of Sen. John McCain, going back to his statement on POWs (see above) and leading up to McCain’s passing. On March 20, 2019, Trump complained that deceased war hero, Sen. John McCain, didn’t thank him for his funeral.

• Trump started his D-Day commemoration speech by attacking a private citizen (Bette Midler, of all people) (reported on June 4th, 2019)

• Trump used his D-Day interview at a cemetery commemorating fallen US soldiers to attack Robert Muller, former FBI special counsel and a Vietnam veteran (June 6, 2019)

• Children of deployed US troops will no longer get automatic American citizenship if born overseas during deployment. This includes US troops posted abroad for years at a time (August 28, 2019)

• After he pleading with superiors in a letter asking to offload most of the sailors on the ship in order to allow for social distancing and sanitizing the USS Theodore Roosevelt, Trump attacks Capt. Crozier calling his letter “terrible” and "not appropriate” leading the Secretary of the Navy to remove Capt. Crozier from his post. 114 of 4,000 sailors on the ship had already tested po sitive for COVID-19. (April 3, 2020)

• On June 24, 2020, the White House ends the National Guard's deployments to assist the American people during the COVID-19 pandemic, the day before thousands of National Guard members would qualify for early retirement and education benefits under the Post-9/11 GI bill.

Immigrants in the military

• He deported veterans (2017-present)

• He ordered the discharge of active-duty immigrant troops with good records (2017-present)

• Trump doubled the rejection rate for veterans requesting family deportation protections (July 5, 2018)

• Trump deported active-duty spouses (11,800 military families face this problem as of April 2018).

• Trump deported a spouse of fallen Army soldier killed in Afghanistan, leaving their daughter parentless. The US has since overturned this as of April 16, 2019.

• In July 2019, Trump denied a United States Marine of 6 years entry into the United States for his scheduled citizenship interview (Reported July 17, 2019)

Treatment of Veterans

• For a decade, Trump sought to kick veterans off of Fifth Avenue because he found them unsightly nuisances outside of Trump Tower. Being quoted as saying, “While disabled veterans should be given every opportunity to earn a living, is it fair to do so to the detriment of the city as a whole or its tax paying citizens and businesses?” in 1991.

• Trump sent funds raised from a January 2016 veterans’ benefit to the Donald J Trump Foundation instead of veteran’s charities (Jan, 2016). The foundation has since been ordered shut because of fraud and Trump to pay $2 million in damages as of November 2019.

• The controversy surrounding wether or not he said vets get PTSD because they "aren’t strong" (Oct 3, 2016)

• He blocked a veteran group on Twitter (June 2017)

• Trump changed the GI Bill through his Forever GI Act.

• Trump changing the GI Bill caused the VA to miss veteran benefits, including housing allowances and forced many veterans to run out of food and rent. “You can count on us to serve, but we can’t count on the VA to make a deadline,” one veteran said. (reported October 7, 2018)

• While in Europe commemorating the end of WWI, he didn’t attend the ceremony at a US cemetery due to the rain – but other world leaders went anyway (Nov 10, 2018)

• He got three Mar-a-Lago guests to run the VA (unknown start – present, made well-known in 2018)

• He increased privatization of the VA, leading to longer waits and higher taxpayer cost (2018)

• He tried to slash disability and unemployment benefits for Veterans to $0, and eliminate the unemployability extrascheduler rating (Dec 17, 2018)

• He canceled an Arlington Cemetery visit on Veterans Day due to light rain (Nov 12, 2018)

• He tried to deport a marine vet who is a U.S.-born citizen (Jan 16, 2019). He deported countless other veterans (2017-present)

• When a man was caught swindling veterans’ pensions for high-interest “cash advances,” Trump’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined him $1. As a reminder, the Trump administration’s goal was to dismantle the CFPB, installing Mick Mulvaney as the director, who publicly stated the bureau should be disbanded. (Jan 26, 2019)

• Trump purged 200,000 veterans’ healthcare applications (due to known administrative errors within VA’s enrollment process and enrollment system) (reported on May 13, 2019)

• On August 2, 2019, Trump requisitioned military retirement funds towards the border wall.

First screen Batmobile from 1948. 

Sertraline/Venlafaxine/citalopram/mirtazapine/fluoxetine/escitalopram/klonopin/buspirone/abilify/quetiapine/propranolol/amitriptyline the list goes on!

So if you're unlucky enough to know what these tablets are or know a loved one who takes them, then I don't have to describe to you what this post is regarding. But if you don't I will fill you in.

That medication allows people to deal with a normal day to day life. Although most days it leaves them tired, spaced out and emotionless. Crazy right? 🤷🏼‍♀️Why would anyone want to feel like that. Well this is why.

You see some people suffer from depression, anxiety, ocd, ptsd and borderline personality disorder.

In their brain it doesn't sit right, something seems different. They notice little differences that 'normal' people wouldn't notice.

That comment you didn't tag them in, but you tagged other people? They see that, and say to themselves why didn't you tag me? What's up with me?

You read that message they sent and they see that you did, but you didn't reply.. why didn't you reply? And they feel like they have done something to upset you?

You didn't say I love you on the phone.. do you not love them anymore? Do you love someone else instead?

They just made a comment about them was it a joke? Was that person supposed to laugh? Or did they mean it? Are they being nice? Are they talking about them? Do they talk about them? And they then think I bet they don’t like me really.

They say sorry all the time. They feel like they annoy everyone. Are you mad at me? Because they feel like you’re mad at them ALL.THE.TIME!

And for all those questions they will spend hours trying to answer. Let it all build up in their mind, until it sends them to tears...... it's mental isn't it!!! They see things that way.

It's not only mental changes, but physical changes. They don't eat a lot, mainly rubbish, because they need it now and need the energy from lack of sleep. Insomnia, up all night answering questions to situations that don't even exist, or sleep too much and waste half their day still feeling tired.

They still smile and they have every excuse for when you ask why.

But the tablets can help them.

Because they know when they start to feel this way or think this way, they need help.

They know that when their behaviour starts to change, they need guidance.

And they understand that they don't need to be ashamed. They don't need to be understood. They just need to be accepted. Everyone is fighting a battle and sometimes you need to be kinder.

So I may just be another person who's talking about mental health....

Living with this illness is hard, but trying to understand it, is even harder. It’s also 100 times harder if they have another condition on top of this.

Don't suffer in silence.❤

How Republicans Abandoned Democracy in 1960

Fifty-four years of Republican presidents using treason to achieve the White House (or inheriting it from one who did) has transformed America and weakened our democracy

Dwight Eisenhower was arguably the last Republican president who believed in democracy, the rule of law, and that government should do what the people want.

From 1960 to today a series of leaders within the Republican Party have abandoned the democracy that American soldiers fought the Revolutionary War to secure, the Civil War to defend here at home, and World War II in Europe and the Pacific to defend around the world.

This has brought us a series of criminal Republican presidents and corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices, who’ve legalized political bribery while devastating voting and civil rights.

None of this was a mistake or an accident, because none of these people truly believed in democracy.

This rejection of democracy and turn toward criminality and it’s logical end-point, fascism, started in the modern GOP with Richard Nixon.

He took millions in now-well-documented bribes both while Vice President to Eisenhower and as President (his VP, Spiro Agnew, resigned rather than go to prison for taking bribes). Nixon saw public service as a way to bathe himself in money, power, and adulation.

He didn’t care a bit about democracy.

As Lamar Waldron and I point out in detail in Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination, then-President Eisenhower’s then-Vice President, Richard Nixon, was getting beat up badly in the 1960 election by his opponent, Senator John F. Kennedy.

Most of it had to do with Cuba, where mobsters affiliated with Nixon for decades had just lost fortunes, millions and millions of dollars in annual revenue.

After the Cuban revolution of 1959, Castro came to the US to seek military and economic aid for his island nation; Eisenhower left town, forcing Castro to meet instead with VP Nixon.

Given that Castro had just overthrown the dictator Batista, a friend of both Nixon and his mafia patrons, VP Nixon essentially blew off Castro, sending him into the welcoming arms of Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union.

Thus, throughout the 1960 presidential race, Senator Kennedy pounded on Vice President Nixon for having “let Cuba go communist” on his watch. In response, Vice President Nixon put together a series of CIA and Mafia plots to assassinate Castro, timed to happen before the November 1960 election.

His hope was that if the Eisenhower/Nixon administration could be seen as having successfully overthrown Castro in 1960 it would de-fang JFK’s attacks and make Nixon — who Eisenhower had put in charge of Cuba policy — a national hero just in time for the election.

Nixon figured that would be enough to help him beat JFK at the polls. It was going to be his “October Surprise.”

For Nixon democracy was just an inconvenience, an obstacle to be conquered. He never really believed in it.

You can imagine Nixon’s frustration when plot after plot was bungled or foiled and, by election day, Castro was still happily ensconced in the Havana presidential palace. This appears to be the moment Nixon decided that, if he had a chance to run for president again, he’d not just consider a CIA-Mafia plot but would embrace far more extreme measures.

Thus began the first Republican plot to commit full-out treason to win a presidential election.

It started in the summer of 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war. It had turned into both a personal and political nightmare for him, and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was running for President in the election that year against a “reinvented” Richard Nixon.

Johnson spent most of late 1967 and early 1968 working back-channels to North and South Vietnam, and by the summer of 1968 had a tentative agreement from both for what promised to be a lasting peace deal they’d both sign that fall.

But Richard Nixon knew that if he could block that peace deal, it would kill VP Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the 1968 election. So, Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend upcoming peace talks in Paris.

The bribe was straightforward: Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he’d give them a richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then.

The FBI had been wiretapping these international communications and told LBJ about Nixon’s effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, President Johnson phoned the Republican Senate leader, Everett Dirksen, (you can listen to the entire conversation here):

President Johnson: “Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out ’til November 2nd they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is treason.”

Sen. Dirksen: “I know.”

Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon who Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.

At that point, for President Johnson, it was no longer about getting Humphrey elected. By then Nixon’s plan had already worked and Humphrey was way down in the polls because the war was ongoing.

Instead, Johnson was desperately trying to salvage the peace talks to stop the death and carnage as soon as possible. He literally couldn’t sleep.

In a phone call to Nixon himself just before the election, LBJ begged him to stop sabotaging the peace process, noting that he was almost certainly going to win the election and inherit the war anyway. Instead, Nixon publicly announced that LBJ’s efforts were “in shambles.”

But South Vietnam had taken Nixon’s deal and boycotted the peace talks, the war continued, and Nixon won the White House thanks to it.

An additional twenty-two thousand American soldiers, and an additional million-plus Vietnamese died because of Nixon’s 1968 treason, and he left it to Jerry Ford to end the war and evacuate the American soldiers.

Nixon appointed Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court, pushing it hard to the right and setting up the predecessors of Citizens United.

Rehnquist, we later learned, didn’t believe any more in democracy than did Nixon. He’d made his chops in the GOP with Operation Eagle Eye, standing outside polling places in Hispanic and Native American precincts challenging every voter who showed up there’s right to cast a ballot.

Nixon was never held to account for that treason, and when the LBJ library released the tapes and documentation long after his and LBJ’s deaths it was barely noticed by the American press.

Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon’s treason.

Ford pardoned Nixon and appointed John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court.

Next up was Ronald Reagan. He not only didn’t believe in democracy, he didn’t even believe in the American government.

He ridiculed public service like joining the military or getting a job with a government agency; he joked that there were no smart or competent people in government because if there had been, private industry would have already hired them away.

So, if you don’t believe in democracy and you think the US government is a joke, it’s not a big deal to betray your country to get the wealth, power, and fame that goes with the presidency.

During the Carter/Reagan election battle of 1980, then-President Carter had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the fifty-two hostages held by students at the American Embassy in Tehran.

Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor, successfully ran for President that summer on the popular position of releasing the hostages:

“I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign…. I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote…. Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking].”

Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr’s help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979.

But behind Carter’s back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran’s radical faction — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini — to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election. Khomeini needed spare parts for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased for Iran, and the Reagan campaign was happy to promise them.

This was the second act of treason by a Republican wanting to become president.

The Reagan campaign’s secret negotiations with Khomeini — the so-called 1980 “October Surprise” — sabotaged President Carter’s and Iranian President Bani-Sadr’s attempts to free the hostages. As President Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:

“After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

And Reagan’s treason — just like Nixon’s treason — worked perfectly, putting a third Republican president in office after Nixon and Ford. Neither Nixon nor Reagan believed in or held up democracy and the rule of law that underpins it as a value.

The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter’s re-election hopes. And the same day Reagan took the oath of office — to the minute, as Reagan put his hand on the bible, by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal — the American hostages in Iran were released.

Keeping his side of the deal, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981 and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called “Iran Contra” scandal.

Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court, solidifying its rightwing tilt. We’d learn, in the Bush v Gore case in 2000 when they awarded the White House to the son of Reagan’s VP, that none of the three of them valued democracy.

And, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office.

After Reagan, Bush senior was elected but, like Jerry Ford, Bush was only President because he’d served as Vice President under Reagan. And, of course, the naked racism of his Willie Horton ads helped keep him in office.

The criminal investigation into Iran/Contra came to a head with independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh subpoenaing President George HW Bush after having already obtained convictions for Weinberger, Ollie North and others.

For the first time in history, the President of the United States could go to jail for criminal conspiracy. Bush was sweating.

Bush’s attorney general, Bill Barr, suggested he pardon all six co-conspirators — who could point a finger at Bush — to kill the investigation. Bush did it on Christmas Eve, hoping to avoid the news cycle because of the holiday.

Nonetheless, the screaming headline across the New York Times front page on December 25, 1992, said it all: “THE PARDONS: BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, ABORTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS ‘COVER-UP’”

If the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980, you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988.

That’s four illegitimate Republican presidents.

President GHW Bush appointed Clarence Thomas and David Souter to the Supreme Court. We learned quickly that Thomas doesn’t value democracy. We now know his wife actively worked to subvert it, in fact.

Which brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court.

In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount  and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency, Justice Antonin Scalia (appointed by Bush’s father’s boss) wrote in his opinion:

“The counting of votes … does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.”

Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida and won the popular vote nationwide by over a half-million, did not constitute “irreparable harm” to Scalia or the media.

And apparently it wasn’t important that Scalia’s son worked for a law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (with no Scalia recusal).

Just like it wasn’t important that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife worked on the Bush transition team — before the Supreme Court shut down the recount in Florida — and was busy accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida…which he did. There was no Thomas recusal, either.

None of them believed in democracy.

More than a year after the election a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount of the vote in Florida — manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year — and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.

As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story so that it would attract as little attention as possible because the 9/11 attacks had happened just weeks earlier and the publishers of the big newspapers feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush lost the election would further hurt a nation already in crisis.

To compound the crime, Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore in the election as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s voter rolls just before the election.

Tens of thousands of African Americans showed up to vote and were turned away from the polls in that election in Florida. BBC covered it extensively, although the American media didn’t seem interested.

So, for the third time in 4 decades, Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one. And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.*

President George W. Bush appointed Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Alito not only doesn’t believe in democracy, he also doesn’t believe in a woman’s right to get an abortion. He’d put a judge like himself between a woman and her doctor, with a police officer and a prison to enforce his decree.

Most recently, in 2016, Trump ally Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters — most people of color — from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.

Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs and the Russian state, and possibly pro-Trump groups or nations in the Middle East, funded a widespread program to flood social media with pro-Trump, anti-Clinton messages from accounts posing as Americans, as documented by Robert Mueller’s investigation.

And on top of that, we learned in 2020 that Republican campaign data on the 2016 election, including which states needed a little help via phony influencers on Facebook and other social media, was not only given to Russian spy and oligarch Konstantin Kilimnik by Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort, but Kilimnik transferred it to Russian intelligence.

Even with all that treasonous help from Russia, Donald Trump still lost the national vote by nearly 3 million votes but came to power in 2016 through the electoral college, an artifact of the Founding era designed to keep slavery safe in colonial America.**

And then, in 2021, after losing to Joe Biden by 7 million votes, Trump mounted a seditious effort to overturn the election he’d just lost.

Trump didn’t believe in democracy in the least; he openly fawned over autocratic and fascistic states and their leaders.

After Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans blocked President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump filled Garland’s spot with Neil Gorsuch, the son of Reagan’s disgraced former EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch.

For reasons that are still unclear, shortly after Trump mentioned Kennedy’s son to him publicly at the Gorsuch ceremony, Justice Kennedy decided to resign. Whether it had anything to do with young Justin Kennedy — then working at Deutsche Bank and having signed off on over a billion dollars in corrupt loans to Trump — is still unknown, and Kennedy, still in good health, isn’t talking.

Kennedy was replaced by “Beerbong” Brett Kavanaugh, who had previously worked in the Bush White House. Republicans refused to turn over 95 percent of Kavanaugh’s papers to the Senate Judiciary Committee and jammed through his nomination after an epic meltdown on live television.

When Ruth Bader Ginsberg died just before the 2020 election, McConnell decided his “Garland Rule” was irrelevant and jammed through Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett in about six weeks; she was sworn in on October 27, 2020. When Democrats raised questions about Barrett’s role as a “Handmaid” (what she called herself) in a bizarre Catholic cult they were brushed aside.

Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanuagh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. We now know none of the three of them believe in democracy, either.

Fifty-four years of Republican presidents using treason to achieve the White House (or inheriting it from one who did) has transformed America and dramatically weakened our democracy.

Those presidents have contributed their own damages to the rule of law and democracy in America, but their cynical Supreme Court appointments have arguably done the most lasting damage.

Republican appointees on the Court during this time have gutted the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, union rights, the Affordable Care Act, and legalized Republican voter purges. They legalized the bribery of politicians by billionaires and corporations.

In short, they’ve done everything they can to weaken democracy and enforce minority rule in America.

One of their wives appears to have been involved in the January 6th attempted overthrow of our electoral process and thus our republic. Republican justices and judges openly flaunt the judicial code of ethics and routinely hand decisions to the GOP’s largest donors.

Today’s fascistic behavior by elected Republicans and their appointees on the courts has a long history, deeply rooted in multiple acts of treachery and treason.  “Power at any cost” has been their slogan ever since Nixon’s attempts to assassinate Castro in 1960 to beat JFK in that year’s election.

Democracy? They laugh.

Which is why it’s time to call the Republican Party what it is: a criminal enterprise embracing fascism to hang onto power, a threat to our republic, and a danger to all life on Earth.

*For more detail, this is extensively documented and footnoted in my book The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

**This is covered in depth in my book The Hidden History of the War On Voting.

A reminder.