A day ending in "y"...

So, after a year of magisterial thumb-sucking the U.S. Supreme Court issued it's ruling that confirms, in the same sense that your eyes "confirm" seeing a barn in broad daylight, that, no, the executive branch cannot - simply by calling some random things an "emergency" - grift the power of the purse explicitly assigned to the legislative branch by the foundational documents of the republic.

Tl:dr; fuck you, Fatso, your "big beautiful tariffs" are illegal.

I'll get back to this in a bit, but the most annoying-to-the-point-of-infuriating part of this is the whole "No, duh?" part.

Everyone with a functioning hindbrain knew this the moment the felonious fucker came storming off his gilded toilet to announce that We the People were going to do a big ol' round of McKinleynomics. I wrote a whole post about this idiocy back in April 2025 when the nitwit spammed everything with his first round of them, and then revisited the subject with my own Tariff Tale in November. 

(Oh, and at this point I should throw in the most recent chapter of my personal encounter with Dumbfuck Don's Tariff Turgidity, in which I received a reply to my disputation of duties in January, 2026. UPS sent me the following:

"I am the Post-Entry Researcher assigned to the attached dispute. Your shipment has been flagged for aluminum duties, and U.S. Customs requires the attached Section 232 form to be completed. If the items do not contain aluminum, please enter the commodity name in the description field and indicate “N/A” in all remaining fields."

Okay, now; keep this in mind. The time and expense of all of this nonsense, from the billing for, and initial payment of, the duties on the object (a replica sword manufactured in Japan), the additional 200% tariff demand, my dispute of the additional demand, and now UPS' dispute of my dispute, were being borne by U.S. citizens. Neither a nanosecond nor a penny of this stupidity was coming from Tozando, the Japanese retailer.

Per UPS the duties on aluminum imposed by the administration's both then- and now-clearly-illegal fuckery were, indeed, 200%. Which sent me back to the calculator and, after that, the laptop keyboard, to compose the following reply:

"Here's the Section 232 Form with the information from this item, based on the following:
The item is a replica sword.
The aluminum is contained only in the blade.
The weight of the blade is approximately 5kg
The amount of aluminum in the blade is 13.5% per the manufacturer's declaration.
Based on this the approximate weight of aluminum is approximately 0.675kg.
The price of aluminum in Japan is listed as $86/ton for Q4 2025.
Therefor the value of the aluminum in this item is ($86/907.185)*0.675, or about  $0.14."

At which point I came damn near to dropping three dimes in an envelope and mailing them to the Post-Entry Researcher's address in San Diego. I resisted, but, fuck, it was a damn near-run thing.

I'm debating whether to now go ahead, or turn around and demand my initial $54 back from Felony Fats' crew of gormless idiots).

Here's the larger, and more infuriating, point of my ranting about this. It's just one more goddamn thing that this crew of acephalic numbskulls does every fucking day. And...

What's

The 

Fucking

Value

Of 

ANY 

Of 

This 

Trumpy

Bullshit?

To any of us not 1) in the two-yacht income brackets, or 2) utterly baked in gibbering racist, sexist, xenophobic, Christopathic lunacy to the point where "fucking with those people" is "in my best interests" (i.e. nuttier than a Snickers bar). 

I mean, pick one. Any one. Of the fucking things these treasonous Nazi fucks have wrangled up over the past year and change, like these ridiculous (and now officially illegal) tariffs.

Deporting everything and everyone in sight? Drywallers, bean and pear pickers? Bodega grannies? School kids? (Oh, and ass-beating and murdering random passersby in the process)?

Sluicing tax cuts to fatcats?  

Pimping coal mining?

Deregulating everything in sight so the fatcats and coal miners and all the other GOP remoras get to wet their fucking beaks while the world overheats and the clean air and water disappear?

Trashing things like the vaccinations and the medical care and research and disease control that made 20th Century medical care the safest and healthiest in human history (for those who could afford it, anyway...)?

Doing bizarre, random, vicious and/or stupid acts of violence all over the place, from South and Central America to the Middle East as they destroy the post-1945 Western alliance systems?

And that's just the legal stuff. We haven't even turned towards the grotesquely Trumpy corruption that makes Warren Harding's crew look like rank amateurs and the policeman in Arrijan green with envy.

At least the OG Nazis had World War 1 and Versailles and occupation and hyperinflation and depression to blame. And actual, no-shit Commie Reds right next door.

Doesn't excuse the murderous fuckers, mind. But you can see how Joachim and Marta Mittagessenkasten could see voting for the sonsofbitches.

What's our excuse?

That transsexual illegal Haitian porch pirates are cooking up Labrador au gratin? 

Give me a fucking break.

That, as I've repeated over and over, is the truly infuriating piece of all this Trumpfuckery.

It's more than the destruction. It's more than all the toxic "isms" aimed at people just trying to live a life; poor people, brown people, immigrant people, non-binary people, gay and lesbian people, liberal people, urban people. It's more than the vile, repugnant, evil shit that these fucksticks love and plan and do every fucking day.

It's the obvious pointlessness for everyone - liberal or MAGAt - who's not living off daddy's trust fund or some sort of credit-default swap scam or who isn't, as noted above, so mentally baked as to be functionally an intellectual house plant.

None of this shit "makes America great".

If the average Republican wasn't in a Trump cult the GOP would have been tossed in the trash bin of history after 2008 the way they were for the two decades after their post-1929 plutocratic fellatio made it clear whose trouser snake they were Hoovering.

 (I see what I did there)

Here's the problem for the rest of us, though.

The mention of 2008 dredges up the ugly reality that, much as the non-insane factions of political power are an order of magnitude better than the MAGAtraitors, they're not that great for the rest of us.

It was as plain as a dog in the daylight that the wealthy, the financial rentier class, the finance bros and banksters, the government "regulators" and fiscal manipulators that were and are in their pockets, are largely in control of the government's hand on the economy. Fiscal policy. Tax policy. Employment and education and almost every other aspect of life in the United States is grotesquely tilted in the direction of the "rich, the well-born, and the able".

It's not "conspiracy theory" for those of us not born with a trust fund to suspect that even if every MAGAt was raptured tomorrow the chances of us and ours getting a better deal for medicine, for college, for solid, reliable, good, rewarding work followed by an honorable and comfortable retirement are...not exceptionally high.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, & Money has an excellent explanation of the problems with the notion that "we" just need to "take the country back from the MAGAts" by voting out Republicans and then joy and happiness will reign: 

"The approach required by this profounder corruption (the "financialization" or elite capture of the economic as a whole, of the sort that 2008 was a symptom, not a cause) is not recovery: returning to where we were means going back to a state of affairs that was manifestly unsustainable. To borrow from the architect of the Democratic Party’s most enduring platform, any recovery that simply restores things as they were will see us all right back where we are now before too much time has passed. Franklin Roosevelt argued in 1934 that the nation needed not merely recovery but “reform and reconstruction . . . much of our trouble today and in the past few years has been due to a lack of understanding of the elementary principles of justice and fairness by those in whom leadership and business and finance and public affairs was placed.” Reconstruction—Roosevelt was well aware of the word’s legacy after the Civil War—meant that leadership, and the conditions that kept them in place, “had to be corrected.” 

My only quibble is that it needed more ropes and lampposts, just as 2008 should have, but you take what you can. What we need, though, is a thorough cleansing of the Augean stable of corrupt elite wealth and privilege that has metastasized in the American system. A complete revision of the post-Reagan tax-cut-and-deregulation schemes that have returned the nation, economically and socially and politically, to 1929 if not 1899.

The failure of the First Reconstruction must be reversed, and the success of the Revolt of the Rich and the Rise of the Second Confederacy that has taken place over the past forty-six years, must be destroyed.

Can the United States post-2025 do that?

I'm not sure.

But, goddamn it, we have got to fight for it.

Because the alternative is to be ruled by these idiots.

 

Bang Bang Crazy (GFT Edition - Uvalde, Part 2)

 

Just look at 'em. 

The Uvalde, Texas Police Department Special Weapons and Tactics Team.

Pretty badass, aren't they? All dress-right-dress-and-covered-down, got their GI on, tac boots and blue fatigues, locked-n-loaded and ready to protect and serve, right?

Except they didn't.

When an angry but untrained young man with a similar weapon turned up to kill a bunch of the kiddies their P.R. claimed were the reason for their existence, these heroes stood around with their thumbs up their collective ass for an hour or so letting the dude wax those kids.

What you and I and every other American needs to get is that this was a feature, not a bug.

Think about who those coppers actually work for.

You? Me? Those kids or their parents?

C'mon. Pull the other one. That's enough to make a cat laugh.

The Uvalde cops work for "the City of Uvalde" just like the Portland Police Bureau works for the "City of Portland". 

When was the last time your city or town did something because you wanted or needed it?

That's not to say that the people who the cops do work for - the federal, state, county, or city governments and those who have outsized influence on them such as wealthy donors or corporations or political action groups - don't do things that help work for you.

But they don't do it for you.

And neither do the cops.

Instead, given the way most police in the United States have been infected with Soldier-Cop Disease, it's more likely that these rascals look at you and me as nuisances at best and enemies at worst. We're not why they do their job; we're a problem that has to be solved for them to do what they see as their job. We're the randos in Nisour Square that scare the shit out of them, that put them on edge and make them reach for their weapons.

Now.

I have a tiny amount of sympathy for the coppers, given the immense number of firearms wandering around the U.S. public. It's kinda hard to avoid being paranoid and trigger-happy when any rando could be a whackaloon with a hogleg and a hard-on for killing someone.

Not that they usually kill coppers, mind. That's hard and risky; it's a lot more fun and easy to kill kids or shoppers or folks in church or massage parlors.

But my sympathy is hammered pretty flat by the hard cold facts that those coppers will willingly shoot your or me but are unwilling to risk going in hard on some whackaloon with a black rifle.

Frankly, it's time and past time for We the People to get over the ridiculous tongue-bathing we give our coppers.

I get it; we've had years and years of copaganda, going all the way back to the old Dragnet- and The FBI-style TV shows, telling us that these jokers are the Thin Blue Line between us and anarchy.

But think about it.

Coppers don't "prevent" crimes.

Unless the copper is literally standing right there, the cop has no way to "prevent" crime. Or anything else, when you stop and think about it, from a riot to a hobo taking a dump on your lawn.

Portland has a whopping 0.0012 sworn officers - actual cops - per person. How the ever loving fuck is one-thousandth of a cop going to stop me from whipping up on your head. Like I said two years ago; what maintains our civil society isn't some thin fucking blue line. It's us, you and me, being good citizens and good neighbors.

Coppers don't "solve" crimes, either.

I'm old enough to remember Sergeant Friday locking up all the baddies every week. Crime didn't pay, at least not on TV.

In real life?

The cops barely clear half of all murder cases. Here in Portland? It's less than half.

And that's THE big crime, felony murder. Figure out for yourself how the Blue Line does with stuff like robbery, rape, or burglary.

Yeah, like that.

So what do these tax-fattened fucksticks do?

Largely exactly what their owners - the governments and wealthy government-influencers - want them to do; keep the canaille in line, show the flag so the plebs see who's in charge, do the minimum to intimidate the normies from misbehaving and to ensure that there's no visible opportunity to break loose and run wild.

I'm not against that, exactly. That's what We the People seem to be fine with, and, besides, someone has to roust the smelly crazy homeless people off the Safeway parking lot and it's sure as Hell not gonna be me.

But there's no reason to valorize or even defer to the people we pay to do that sort of stuff.

It's not like they're going to charge a looney murderer with a rifle for us, right?

No.

The coppers won't save us from these lunatic killers and their semiauto hard-ons.

Next time, let's discuss what, if anything, is possible.

Hyacinthum hora

"The sun has set, but night has not yet fallen. It’s the suspended hour… The hour when one finally finds oneself in renewed harmony with the world and the light," (Guerlain)

The sun has set on the brightest promises of the American Experiment.

Night has not yet fallen, but the darkness is visible in the person of Tom Cotton, the Republican Prince of Darkness that Charlie Pierce likes to call the "bobbleheaded slapdick from Arkansas" whose editorial in Wednesday's New York Times went full Nazi. He is the competent fuhrer that the GOP thought they had in Trump only to find that, while the Leader can be capricious and inane He cannot be too openly a buffoon.

Cotton is not a buffoon.

Dangerous. Unprincipled. Rapacious. Vicious.

But not a buffoon.

But here's why I think we're done, a dead republic walking; the current protests.

It shouldn't take genius-level civics to understand that a land where the state is openly run by and for the wealthy, where a substantial portion of the "citizenry" are obviously not citizens but subjects, bound by the law but not protected, liable to be arrested, injured, or killed by the state at any time, is not, in fact, a democratic republic ruled by "equal justice under law".

It should be painfully obvious to even the stupidest of inhabitants that if "they" can do to "them" what police regularly do to "them" that there is no legal reason "they" cannot do it to you.

No. The only reason "you" are safe is structural, and that structure is founded on oligarchy and built of racism.

We the comfortable, largely white, majority have never been willing to honestly see - much less actively tear out - the dark pillar of race and the ugly beam of plutocracy that support our house.

To do so would have required long and painful years and even decades of sacrifice and humility to tear down and rebuild our nation without those things. Humans have never been good at that; it's not like we're some sort of uniquely awful nation.

But that remains a uniquely difficult task.

To do the things the protestors are demanding; to rebuild the large police forces (and courts and legal codes...) across the country to provide that actual equal justice, to rejigger the national economy to provide true equality of opportunity, would require an M9-seismic-event level of change.

In a sensible nation, in a true democratic republic, dedicated to ensuring that all people are "We the People" these protests would have caused a massive national reflection, would have sparked a balefire of action, of decision, to make the sorts of changes that would provide and rejigger and do all those things.

Instead, this is a nation where roughly four out of ten "citizens" - who were just weeks ago prancing around with military rifle knock-offs claiming that having to wear a surgical mask and order pizza to go was the most horrific tyranny since the rule of the tsars, mind you - are at best silent and, at worst, prepared to use those rifles on the others of their own fellow citizens who are now in the streets demanding that equal justice.

That part of the People who are huge Tom Cotton fanbois and fangirls.

And because we are in fact a house divided there has been, after nearly a week of nightly protests across the nation, no serious discussion, much less action, about the changes in our nation and in our laws and how they are enforced, that would address what these thousands of people are in the streets demanding.

So it's not so much the line of armed and armored police that stand across the road the protests are trying to open.

Behind them stands Tom Cotton like a colossus and around his feet all the little Cottons who refuse those changes.

And around them...all of those people, like me, who are unwilling or unable to make the sacrifice to bumrush the line and risk ourselves and our lives to make them change.

We the People cannot even force our government to act sensibly about the Plague. We know better, we know how we can save lives, but to do so would require some of us to make sacrifices, to act with humility and patience, to spend money we have in excess but are unwilling to part with.

We won't, because enough of us won't, because enough of us are Tom Cotton and refuse to accept any alternative but a full-on charge through the minefield, because waiting for the engineers and the flail tanks is for cowards and pussies.

If we can't do that - in the face of a pathogen that can kill or maim any one of us - how will we take an even harder and more difficult path to equity when inequity only harms some of us, and those largely "them", the people the Tom Cottons despise?

Here's what I wrote thirteen years ago:

A nation grown suddenly great, enlarged by war, troubled by disturbance abroad and contention at home.
A people divided, made complacent by wealth and power yet enervated by political strife and economic uncertainty.
A government given over to the wealthy, whose vicious infighting consumes their ability to make sound choices for the betterment of the People, or the nation.
A military made hard, and indifferent to democratic ideals, by decades of professionalism and unremitting war.
An economy dominated by great corporations, relentlessly pressing down the opportunities for the individual and the small company.

Even the very structures of civilization itself crumble as, it seems, the nation both implodes and explodes.

So.

No.

It's been a long time fading but now the light seems to be failing fast. The darkness just seems all the more threatening loured by teargas smoke and backlit by the light of the flares and the flash-bangs and the burning barricades.

While we are still suspended in this blue hour it is difficult for me to see anything but darkness in the falling night ahead.

Acting 1SG Lawes reads the morning formation announcements

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

At ease.

Okay, listen up. Coupla things here, but we got a busy day so imma be quick.

Night bakers.

Can anyone here. Anyone? Tell me what the ever-loving-come-to-Jesus fuck inspired you people to set out what I am led to understand was a "deep fried Mars bar turnover" in the pastry tray yesterday morning?

Was it because you knew the battalion commander would be eating breakfast in our D-fac? And that he would be hosting the Brigade Sergeant Major, who is well known to covet pastries like a huge camouflage-wearing pizza rat covets pepperoni slices?

Because whatever the reason, I have been hearing from that pastry-fattened individual every hour on the hour since then about our dining facility, a circumstance which I am highly displeased with.

Goddammit, people. Donuts, maple bars, and apple-fucking-fritters were good enough for the Children of Israel as well as our hardy pioneer forebears and, as such, they are fucking good enough for our fucking mess hall. Whilst I appreciate your artistic flair and need for new challenges during what the Yadkin Road Ford dealership commercial last evening assured me were "trying times"...KISS, people. KISS. Keep it fucking simple. This is not fucking Kilmarnock and y'all are not standing with Mel Gibson facing down the fucking Sassenachs.

Donuts. And maple bars.

Fried Mars bars. Jesus wept.

Okay, only one other thing.

I am hearing talk about our being deployed to Charlotte or Raleigh to act in support of the civil power given the unrest there.

I am here to remind you that we are United States Army Airborne soldiers. We follow the lawful orders of our civilian leadership. If our national command authority through our corps and division and brigade and battalion orders us to load the riot gear into the 80-pax and hey-diddle-diddle up I-95 to stand around looking all billy badass, we will salute and move out smartly.

However.

Note that I cannot emphasize strongly enough the word lawful.

The Constitution that, if you people recall we all swore to support and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic, guarantees The People the right to peaceably assemble. It guarantees them the right to petition our government for the redress of grievances, and as such to speak freely, including the speech of act and deed. And in another foundational document our forefathers accused his royal highness King George of sending the goddamn redcoats to oppress them and deny them those very rights and that was cause for breaking the contract between citizen and sovereign government.

I am here to tell you people: We. Are. Not. Fucking. Redcoats.

You will need to rely on the Old Man. He is a stand up guy as well as a hell of a soldier and officer. He will not allow us to be used to beat the living shit out of peaceful Americans in the sort of shameful fucking ways that certain of our colleagues were used in the District of Columbia Monday night.

You will need to trust me to follow, and issue, only lawful orders.

I realize that requires a lot of trust. I hope that as your acting First Sergeant I have earned that trust. And I trust that you can and will behave in ways that will continue to earn mine.

But at the final remove you can trust me on this:

We.

Will not be the cause.

For breaking the contract between citizen and sovereign government.

On that you have my solemn fucking word.

That is...no, wait. One last item.

Remember; we are still in the fucking Plague Year. Keep your masks on and do not bunch up! If you do as surely as your doom followeth hard after you Mister Grenade will be there to remind you what a miserable buddy-fucker he is. Judas was a buddy-fucker, people, and look what happened to him.

Now that is all.

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

Platoon sergeants, take charge.

Blue on Blue

I don't really have anything to add here to the rage exploding across my country other than, yeah, well, what did you expect?

We have, those of us with the attributes that signify "meaningful" in our country; wealth, economic position, political engagement, whiteness...we've been fine that many of our cities are policed in ways that range from unpleasant to onerous to lethal for those citizens that lack those attributes. We didn't have to worry about fixing that busted taillight because we knew we wouldn't get pulled over for not signaling the lane change.

Or, if we did, we wouldn't get yanked out of the car and roughly body-searched and, if we got a little arsed about that, tased or arrested or just plain curb-stomped by somebody who felt no need to stop his inner asshole from coming out to play.

For example, I know for a fact that Portland Police Bureau has been the home for wannabe Klansmen and Nazis for decades. What have I done about that, other than vote for commissioners and mayors who have promised, usually ineffectually, to "do something" about what I knew perfectly well was so baked into PPB that the only way to "do something" would be to do a Saddam's Army on the whole outfit - just fire 99% of the sonsofbitches, burn the bastard to the ground, and start over?

Yeah, nothing. You, too? Thought so. Most of us who aren't a shade darker than that crayon color that used to be labeled "flesh" (and think about that for a moment...) haven't really been troubled enough to get het up over the problems.

So here we are.

Will we do anything about those problems now?

Don't make me laugh. You know better and so do I. We'll throw clubs and gas and "non-lethal" rounds at whoever makes a fuss. Christ on a crutch, we can't even do anything semi-intelligent about a fucking Plague, you think we're going to do anything sane about this, the miserable way we've treated our poor and our former slaves and current subjects, and everyone else who can't play the "get out of jail free" card?

Nope. I got nothin' for you on that.

What I wanted to make a brief comment on, though, was one of the stupider and more irritating American affectations all this rioting and anger over killer cops reminded me of: the "blue line" thing.

You've seen it. Fucker has it's own flag, forChrissakes. Even here in the People's Republic of Portland you see the little blue-line-flag stickers from time to time, on cop cars and even some regular old pickups and sedans and SUVs.

Anyway, the point of this blue line nonsense seems to be to try and impress people that the coppers are the only thing - the "thin blue line" - standing between civilization and a howling wilderness of Hobbsean war-of-all-against-all chaotic savagery.

And, hey...who can blame the coppers for wanting to believe this LARPing fantasy of heroic defenders of civilization, and trying to sell it to the public?

Beats the fuck out of accepting the reality that your grunt-level street cop is basically an over-armed mall security dude with better transportation who spends most of his or her day dealing with crappy little problems that can't and won't be solved by policework (Gee. Somebody clouted your car? That sucks. Well, fill in this report. Bye!) or, frankly, assholes. Any sergeant will tell you that ten percent of your people are the ones who'll give you ninety percent of your problems, and so it has to be with policing. Most of the people your beat cop interacts with are probably assholes, either because they're high and/or drunk, have some sort of mental issues, or are, well, just assholes.

I can see how that would make me want to think that breaking up pukey drunk-fights and dealing with speeders flipping you shit was manning the ramparts of Civilization against the Dark Hordes.

But there's no reason that us Dark Hordes need to buy into this cop cosplay.

Because it's pretty simple; the actual "defenders of civilization" is everyone. You, me, your Aunt Louise. We are the "thin line", and not that thin, either, that keeps our community and nation and civilization going.

Because the reality is that if the vast bulk of human beings weren't quiet and peaceful and generally "law-abiding"?

No number of coppers could stop them from running wild, anymore than the village watchman of Podoloversk could stop the Mongols from tearing the place apart.

No. The "blue line" bullshit is designed to convince us groundlings that whatever coppers do is "holding the line" of civilization against the Darkness. So when they blow up someone's house trying to arrest someone else who isn't there, when they kill someone in the process of "arresting" them for selling loose smokes or just being an asshole - and, let's recall that if being an asshole was a capital crime there's a whole bunch of people, up to and including a fairly significant portion of Trump Adminstration, who're dead meat - or when they go wild and start beating and shooting people, as you do every so often, y'know...to convince us that all this shit we'd normally look at and go "...the FUCK!?" and get agitated about our tax dollars going to fund this idiotic and destructive-to-civil-order nonsense is really Defending Civilization.

But run the numbers.

It ain't.

If We the People wanted to tear the living hell out of "civilization" we could, and no bunch of blue-suited mall cops would be able to stop us.

And the mere fact that this "blue line" bullshit is floating around out there and hasn't been viciously mocked offstage? The fact that paid-for-by-your-taxes coppers are apparently bought into and trying to broadcast the nonsense? The fact that our political "leaders" - from both Left and Right, I'm afraid; this truly IS a "both sides do it" problem - aren't willing to cram down on these idiot coppers and their Dungeon Defenders idiocy and tell them to STFU and go be good public servants and wrestle the pukey drunks and arrest the assholes without turning this into a war between The Force of Law and the people who the law in its impartial majesty prohibits from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges?

Says something very, very problematic about us and the country we've created.

Which, if you've been paying attention, shouldn't be news at all.

I could go on. About the insanity of coppers going Full Metal Jacket on regular people but palling around and sucking face with armed traitors (Amon Bundy, c'mon down! Proud Boys, represent!) and the ridiculous position of the "conservative" talking heads who were foaming with rage about the kneeling during songs that warned us that this day was coming if we did nothing but rage about kneeling.

But what's the point?

You know as well as I what the problems are, what should happen, and what won't.

Nope. That moronic "blue line" flag is really the white flag of our country surrendering to the reality that if you White, you Right.

Errata

I don't have much of anything to add or detract from my post of yesterday, except this:

THIS is Nitty Kitty sleeping on the deck. At the time I wrote the post I hadn't downloaded the correct cat photo, so I went with one I had, showing Drachma the Merkitty sprawled on the front steps the previous week. He stretched out there in the heat of the afternoon and just lay around for an hour or so until the shadows moved and he had to retreat from the sunshine. Never did go inside the air-conditioned house.

Goofy cat.

And, though I don't want to rant more about the loss of the America I thought I knew, I came across this piece today:

"Some immigrant U.S. Army reservists and recruits who enlisted in the military with a promised path to citizenship are being abruptly discharged, the Associated Press has learned.

The AP was unable to quantify how many men and women who enlisted through the special recruitment program have been booted from the Army, but immigration attorneys say they know of more than 40 who have been discharged or whose status has become questionable, jeopardizing their futures."

The Army I knew was always hurting for linguists. With a gajillion cabinet wars going on all over the global South as well as southwest and central Asia I can't imagine that things are any better.

So why this, now?

You know perfectly well why, and so do I.

What baffles me is this seemingly insane pursuit of "immigrants", from wanna-be recruits to legal residents with old infractions on the books. This isn't going after badass gangstas. This is exactly what I predicted the Trumpkins' henchpeople would do; pluck all the low-hanging immigrant fruit. Granny in the bodega. Achmed the janitor.

Melania the mail-order bride...no, wait...

But all those little, harmless people would go first. Why risk your ass shooting it out with Hector the Vato when you can just walk up to Nonna Sissi and huck her in the back of the truck and she counts just the same?

If there was some sort of genuine, real, scary social problem here I could almost get it.

Almost; the way Orange Foolius and his mouthpieces are yakking this up as OMFG Alien Carnage!!! is still some seriously fucked-up neo-Nazi shit right there.

But this is a complete nothingburger. There's no "immigrant crisis". Immigration, legal and otherwise, doesn't produce any quantifiable "problems". No crime, no poverty, no threat of insurrection, nothing.

This is government-by-the-fucked-up-things-old-white-people-get-off-FOX.

That's ridiculous, but that's the way my country works right now.

So, just some cute cat pictures and your daily reminder;

Ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam.

The End of the End of History

Hardly anyone now remembers Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, the 1992 publication that argued that the 20th Century had been, in effect, a massive, bloody, melodramatic argument over the question "what is the best way to govern human polities and organize human economic activities?" and that the collapse of the Soviet Empire proved that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism were the answers.

Well, of course Mr. Fukuyama ended up walking that back a bit. But I think that we, especially here in the United States, still see Fukuyama's End of History as durable and desirable endpoints for society as well as the inevitable and immutable state of American society.

It might be well to consider, however, that perhaps the arc of history is bending a trifle, and not - at least, not for those of us who see both of those (in one form or another...) as, at the very least, preferable to autocracy - towards the End that Mr. Fukuyama - and many of us - hoped to see.

In Turkey the now-president-for-life has effectively become an autocrat. The Philippines - admittedly never exactly a global ideal of political stability - appears to be heading towards autocracy under Duarte. Poland has made a fairly hard turn towards some sort - there appears to be a disagreement as to whether this turn is harder-left or harder-right - of authoritarian rule. An outright neo-fascist has a considerably-less-than-zero chance of being elected President of the Fifth French Republic in 2017. Russia was never anything but an autocracy but has now abandoned even the pretense of being anything but a dictatorship; the romantic in me almost wishes that Trump's pal Putin would quit kidding around and become Tsar Vladimir the First.

And, speaking of Il Douche, arguably the United States has elected as President a man who has made some very autocratic statements on the stump (and elsewhere...) and who has appointed an openly white nationalist his "primary advisor".

Since 11/9/16 I have been hearing quite a bit of tut-tutting about the actual authoritarian content of the inside of President-elect's tangerine-combover and a fair bit of "there-there" at my raised hackles over the likely changes to come. I'm hearing about "veto points" and "the durability of democratic institutions" and "waiting for Trump to show his hand".

All of which sounds very reasonable.

It probably sounded reasonable in the general headquarters of the French Army in April of 1940.

But one of the first rules I learned when assessing military intelligence is to attempt to determine "What is the enemy's most dangerous course of action?" Because that would be the move that had the potential to utterly overset you. Other attacks might be dangerous, or do damage...but the real danger was that action that could completely unhinge your defenses, as the mounted attack through the Ardennes and the breakthrough at Sedan did to France the following May.

We the People tend to think of ourselves as a "democracy", a "republic" because that has been our default setting for generations. We like to think that we are immune to this sudden burst of authoritarian rule. But, you'll note, that the places that are getting (or are likely to get) autocrats thought (or think) that they had or have strong democratic institutions. And, in many cases, those institutions "remain". They just don't work anymore.

We've watched for years as the state Republican parties suppress the votes of anyone not likely to vote GOP. About 24% of the U.S. public has now elected a man whose entire public life has been a squalling tantrum of greed and thin-skinned anger, usually expressed in litigation. Now, of course, Trump has all the resources of a nation-state to pursue his vendetti, assuming that he doesn't change his thin-skin or his spots.

One difficulty with trying to assess what the incoming Administration's "most dangerous course of action" for liberalism and the America founded in the New Deal of the Thirties is assessing the difference between policy and political danger.

To me, as a child of that New Deal America, the policies pursued by Trump's Republican cronies in Congress are a fearful danger. People like Paul Ryan have had a boner for destroying the social safety net that is visible from space. The probability is overwhelmingly good that a Ryan-controlled House will send a President Trump bills that will attempt to throw Social Security to the Wall Street wolves (oh, and how is YOUR 401K these days..?) and voucherize Medicare represents to me the insane likelihood of returning America;s social fabric to 1930. Old people will be impoverished - not the genteel poverty of Social Security but the deadly poverty of the Depression - sicken and die. People unable to work because of injury or illness, physical or mental, will have no recourse but to hope for private charity or relatives probably themselves living precariously.

We look to have some sort of climate-change "skeptic" idiot in charge of our national environmental policy. Wall Street regulation - never the strictest under Obama - appears to be going to turned over to the Bank of America. The Trump cabinet so far is populated by some of the wingiest nuts in the wingnut basket, people who never met a public thing they didn't want to deregulate, privatize, sell off, or monetize.

And there are no "checks and balances" on all of this. The GOP controls the White House, Congress, and will soon have the Supreme Court back.

It's like an Ann Coulter wet dream, and I can't imagine anything more dangerous to the America I grew up in than that.

(Also, eeeew).

Because, like a sort of vindictive and petty tribe of Bourbons, the GOP has become the Party that learns nothing yet never forgets a slight. Still smarting from the public's loathing of their feudal politics and ridiculously-plutocratic "economics" they forget what a turbulent, dangerous place the United States was prior to the long capital-labor peace won by the New Deal.

Riots, strikes...troops sent into the mills, bomb-throwing "anarchists" under every bed, soldiers gassing Bonus Marchers, strikers and scabs and Pinkertons battling in the streets and frightened editorials about rage and revolt and anarchy in every newspaper. Remember that that cunning old aristo FDR didn't give pensions to the proles because he loved them. He gave them because knew that if he didn't ameliorate the miseries of vulture capitalism the bad examples of Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy stood as beacons for those who thought that the ends of hanging bankers from every lamppost justified the means of revolution.

So, to me, this Trumpist indifference to the GOP desire for a return to the oligarchic rule and the Dickensian capitalism of 1929 is, indeed, the "most dangerous course of action" that must needs be mobilized against. I have a hard time imagining anything more dangerous.

But Dan Nexon can.

"...the thing about institutions — domestic or international — is that you often don’t realize until too late that they’ve changed beyond recognition. Or how fragile they are until they collapse. The other thing about democratic norms and institutions is once they break, they’re very hard to put back together. What is true domestically is doubly true internationally.

In other words, we can change policies. If you’re a libertarian, you can hope to undo Trump’s likely military budgets. If you’re a liberal, you can rebuild the welfare state. If you’re a conservative, you can push for balanced budgets. Climate is a bigger problem—because major reversals now could make meeting optimistic targets very, very hard—but even here environmentalists can live to fight another day.

But if we lose our institutions, we are in serious trouble. Often, the United States has played the “White Knight” pushing democratization. What country can play that role for the United States if we head towards a hybrid regime? What all of this means seems to me quite clear: We should hope for the best—that Trump is a successful President who tames his worst impulses and receives wise council—but prepare for the worst.

That means building a broad political coalition with one goal: keeping these institutions alive. Doing so requires setting aside policy differences (in fact, on routine policy matters I see no problem with Democrats and country-first Republicans working with Trump). It requires putting country over party. And it requires doing this because of something basic we know about creeping authoritarianism and hybrid regimes—the strongest force for democracy is a united opposition; divide-and-rule tactics are the first resort of the autocrat."

So is the bigger danger not the destruction of the Paris Agreement and a massive federal coal subsidy, or the zeroing-out of the OSHA budget...but, rather, the institutionalization of the FBI as the D.B. Norton Motor Corps for the personal use of President Trump in hunting down and destroying people who are mean to him on Twitter, or the end of NATO?

This whole "most dangerous course of action" thing is beginning to look more complex than I originally thought.

I will say this, though; I still contend that the time is now to begin. We need to take the potential autocrat at his word. The Turks did not. The Filipinos did not. The French, apparently, will not. And as the Russians could tell them; once the autocrat is in charge resistance is futile. Russia never had the chance we have, Turkey seems to have lost what chance they had.

We have not, but the example of all this dictatorship should be like a firebell in the night for us who have no love for our country, as flawed, as much of an oligarchy as it is already, to go even further down that easy path to the Rule of One.

For by the time the sound of tank engines is heard in the forest, it's too late.

Cop-killer

So, in quick succession, a couple of different coppers killed some black people, and a black person killed some cops.

As is almost always the case, depending on their outlook, various other people mourned and defended the people killed by the coppers and excoriated the coppers, and various other-other people exalted and mourned the coppers and excoriated black people.

Well, you know my position on the whole business of being so fucking easy to kill people with guns in this country, so I'm not going there

But, if you want, here's Fred Clarke with a good point on the whole business of coppers, badges, and guns:

"This is why our constantly armed law enforcement can be police, but can no longer really be police officers. The office, like the badge, is overshadowed by the gun as an insufficient, subordinate source of authority, meaning and legitimacy."

Is it possible to "enfore the law" in this country without firearms?

Sadly, no. But it's a hell of a brilliant thought.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

First of all, and kind of beside my point, if the joker who sniped five coppers in Dallas wanted to discredit everybody who's pissed off because American coppers have killed about an infantry battalion's worth of people in 2016 already (and it's not even halfway through July...) he couldn't have done a better job. Every right-wing ding-dong who throws up a little in their mouth when they see the words "Black Lives Matter" will now have enough rocks to throw at their non-wingnut "BLM" fellow citizens from now until Christmas. Good job, sniper. You done fucked your own cause like a football bat. Asshole.

Second, the cop-shootings allowed every talking head from here to Fox and Friends to trot out the nauseating little trope of "hero coppers".

That nursery rhyme may be my second-most hated thing in the entire world after "hero soldiers". I practically grind my teeth down to nubs when I hear it.

I mean...I realize this may be a difficult concept to convey in the "news", or to people in general and the public-is-an-ass people in particular, but...just being a copper doesn't make you a hero...or, possibly anything...other than, possibly, a total asshole.

Yes. It's entirely possible to do a stressful, demanding, occasionally-dangerous-but-usually-just-boring-and-aggravating, difficult job and yet still be a complete scumbag.

Or not.

But - just putting on a damn badge doesn't make you a better human being, any more than putting on a tree-colored suit makes you a hero.

So I posted this to my FB feed and got an immediate reply from a very nice but fairly simple and politically conservative person:

"...seriously john... would you do that job? those guys are doing a job most of us would not want to do and they deserve our prayers and i know that you will shoot back and put me down for my thoughts. But that is how i feel. May God have mercy on us all."

To which I, in turn, replied and, in so doing, realized what irks the shit out of me about this stuff:

"I've DONE that job, (person's name). I've worked riot control. I've been a "cop" in foreign lands where the residents really DID want to kill us. And I still managed not to kill anybody.

I'm not "putting you down" for your thoughts. I'm putting you down because your thoughts are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

And like I said; putting on a uniform - whether it's colored blue or colored green or colored like a tree - doesn't make you a good person. It makes you...a person in a uniform. Some good. Some bad. Mostly in between.

And that's just the truth. Some cops are terrific. Some are assholes who use their authority to make other people's lives miserable. Most of them just try and get through their day as best they can, not doing great, not doing evil, just bumbling through.

So using the actions of some murderous a-hole to try and turn cops into saints and martyrs (and "heroes") is stupid, counterproductive, and wrong. It doesn't help the good ones, and it lets the bad ones (and the "enh"-ones who let the bad ones slide, which a lot of them do because, people...) cover their bad deeds with the mantle of heroism.

So. Cops. Some are great. Some are total scumbags. Most are just regular jamokes.

Killing some of them doesn't make the scumbags any better.

And, more importantly, making heroes out of dead coppers doesn't solve our single big problem with coppers - that we've let our coppers, a hell of a LOT of our coppers, begin to think of themselves as soldiers in an occupying army, to think of their fellow citizens as "civilians" whom they are ordered to rule by force and fear, and whose task it is to suppress any hesitation to accept, or any attempt to question, their authority.

And that authority is to be ruthlessly applied with deadly force - often not as a last resort but as a first.

(And, as an aside, I note that the usual suspects who were all there about the Bundy clan and the Malheur Moron Mulisha's armed sedition and threats to fire on federal law officers are suddenly and curiously silent about the black man shooting down law officers. Hmmm...I wonder if race has...nah. Unpossible.)

But we cannot exist if our law officers become unquestioned figures of authority, and that authority comes, predominantly, from the barrel of a gun.

As Clarke says: "(The point) at which we must arrive if we are to be a free people under the rule of law in a community where badges and offices and law are to mean anything more than who has the biggest gun."

"Just walk away, Cletus..."

Dear remaining traitors in arms.

No. Not just no, but fuck no.

The only place you get to be a heroic rebel and then use your awesome Jedi mind powers to force the Evil Stormtroopers that you're not the rebellious fucksticks they're looking for is in George Lucas' head.

So when you say:

"We are willing to leave peacefully...if the FBI will let us leave without arrest or forcing us through the checkpoint, we will all go home."

you're talking complete nonsense. It don't work that way, Cletus.

And CNN? When traitors in arms tell you that they will either walk away without facing the consequences of their armed sedition or they will make the earth and sky red with blood? That's not "saying they're ready to leave peacefully". That's demanding that they escape the consequences of their armed sedition and giving the rest of us peaceful citizens the big ol' rebel-in-arms finger.

Figure it out, goddamn.

But you...you're going to get a wonderful choice, my dear traitors.

You are going to get to surrender without being hung out of hand as has been the traditional fate of traitors in arms. You will get an expensive and public trial in which you are very likely to be given a ridiculously vast amount of privilege to spout your idiotic, treasonous nonsense and justify your greedy and selfish seizure of our public patrimony. And, even if you are convicted of the crimes you have so self-evidently committed, you will have careful and relatively benign jailers who will ensure that you are released unharmed to resume your deluded and delusional defiance of both republican government and common sense which I know you will because...well, you're you and can no more stop being you than a howler monkey can stop flinging its poop.

In short, you are some seriously lucky sonsofbitches and you need to accept that and go quietly to the lawmen and surrender.

Before your fellow traitors find out why the snacks were gone.

Because, looking at you?

It's not that hard to guess where all the Cheetos went, genius, and no matter how slow your pals are they'll figure it out eventually and then who's gonna save you when they go all Second Amendment Solution on your porky ass?

Just sayin'.

Crimestoppers

I got pulled over the other night.

Reason I thought about that is that Mannion - whose opinion on cinema I just cited - has a post up about being jacked around by cops.

The thing about my experience is that it was clearly a bullshit stop. I was under the speed limit, in a very quiet street, and other than that these gomers had no real reason to pull me over. The excuse the sheriff's deputy used was that I "had a headlight out", which is something you can see every night you drive around here - we have no annual state inspection, so there's no real pressure to replace a dud headlight - but the real reason is that I was tired and driving cautiously which to these jokers probably meant "this guy's probably had a few, so let's stop him and see what we can find."

They went into full-on "Cops" mode; lit up the searchlight, came up on both sides of the vehicle...and suddenly realized that 1) I was a white guy wearing a safety vest 2) driving a pickup with a company logo on the side. They did the usual ID check just because otherwise it would have been WAY too obvious that is was a bullshit stop and then let me walk even though the insurance card I presented was expired (I had the current one in the key-pouch but had forgotten that was where it was).

I didn't get jacked around...other than 15 minutes of my life that I'll never get back. And I was very polite and cooperative, so there were no other consequences. But I drove away swearing a blue streak at the Washington County Sheriff's Department from the Sheriff himself to the lowest garage mechanic as a bunch of ticket-happy officious assholes.

There's been a lot of coverage about "militarized police" and the like in the wake of fairly obviously moron-grade fuckup shootings by trigger-happy cops. But IMO these sorts of bullshit traffic stops are just as bad for the coppers' standing in the public eye. They're so obviously about "we can fuck with these peons so let's do it and find out what happens" that it's difficult for the citizens involved to walk away with much respect for the cops. Which is pretty crucial, given that when the impartiality of the enforcers of the law becomes obviously questionable respect for the law itself comes into question as well.

So much for Officer Friendly.

My Little Droney - Simple is Magic!

Al over at MilPub finally brings to light the official answer to the question Ron Paul should have asked:

"The White House responded to Paul's concerns Thursday, when Press Secretary Jay Carney read a letter Attorney General Eric Holder sent to Paul at the top of his daily briefing. "It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: 'Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?'" Carney read. "The answer to that question is no."

This does not appear to have penetrated the foot-thick skull of the man Chas Pierce likes to call "Senator Aqua Buddha"; his filibuster ran well into today for no more apparent reason than...well, because he's who he is and the Five Minute Rule still applies.

So the good news is that the rule of law still applies to the Land of the Free.

The bad news is that whether this is consolation to the survivors of these sorts of attacks we've been running in the less-paved portions of the world has not been determined.

Court of Drone Chamber

Frankly, I'm not sure what irks me more; the implication that the Attorney General of the United States considers that there is an "extraordinary circumstance" in which, without a declaration or war, without determining that you are in arms against the United States, but through secret evidence secretly reviewed that you or I may be executed without arrest, without charge, without trial, and without sentence, or the extraordinary slippery weasel-speak that said Attorney General uses to deliver this pronouncement.

Of course this would be an "extraordinary circumstance". That's the entire point. At present a U.S. citizen in Yemen or Pakistan accused of being an "al Qaeda leader" can - and has - been killed without legal recourse or any hope of pursuing such recourse. No, duh; his first fucking hint that he's on the Kill List is Mister Hellfire Missile sailing in through the bathroom window. We know that.

And the President of the United States has the absolute authority to kill without trial an American citizen in armed rebellion against the United States. There's a reason that the Army of the Potomac showed up at Antietam and not the Attorney General; the fucking Rebs were looking for trouble at the end of a Springfield and they found it in spades. That's what happens to rebels in arms. We know that, too

The question Paul was asking - and keep in mind that I yield to no one in my estimation of the Paulites as semianthropoid gomers and in this case Paul's question was both intended as a "gotcha" and poorly phrased, to boot - was aimed directly at the gray area between the two.

Given that we don't seem to, either as a nation or as We the People, have problems with killing "them" over "there" but do have qualms about extrajudicial murder of "us" "here"...what happens if one of "us" "here" might - might - turn out to be one of "them" in the same way "they" are eligible for a missile-o-gram from Uncle Sugar? Not taken in arms. Not planting a bomb. Not in active combat. But accused by some unnamed informer of being a "person(s) he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons?"

For all that we have beavered away at our own protections under the law since 2001 it has always seemed to me that there is and should be a simple bright line defining the fundamental relations between a citizen of the United States and the U.S. government and between peace and war.

And that is, if that citizen is not openly in arms against that government, is located where the agents of conventional law enforcement may apprehend that person, and has not been convicted in open court of treason or proved beyond a reasonable doubt to be a rebel or an agent of a power at war with the United States, then that citizen has not forfeited the protections of the law. And if they wish to do harm to that citizen then it is incumbent on the U.S. government and its agents to do everything in their power to do that harm as they are required to do by the Constitution and federal statute.

And, if Holder and his department believe this to be true, then the answer to the question Paul should have asked is simple; No. No, I do not have the authority to summarily execute or otherwise do extrajudicial harm to this person, regardless of what "extraordinary circumstances" exist.

Instead, what Holder appears to be doing is doubling down on the precedent of Korematsu (a precedent that his own department had previously determined to be based on official error); that in times of danger the U.S. government is free to act in contravention of its own law, regardless of the fragility of the evidence (or the lack of evidence), to harm its own citizens.

Our government has done great harm to us citizens in times of crisis; indeed, one of the reasons that wars and emergencies are greatly to be feared is that they afford great opportunity for frightened or ambitious men to do great harm to the rule of law. But in the main our government has, upon reflection, been willing to admit that such harm WAS harm. Our courts have ruled against those actions, and later administrations have disavowed them.

This opinion appears to, instead, insist on the right to do such harm.

And whether it is done with a missile or with a knife, I cannot find that reassuring.

(h/t to Pierce for the original article and the link to the Holder document)

Perilous Seas

I'd like to blame the lack of posting on business, or writer's block, or harmonic convergence.

The sad fact is that I've had a post simmering on the hob here and just haven't had the heart to finish it.

Because it depresses me just to look at it, for what it says about my country.

The roux that started it is found here; the now-public Department of Justice "white paper" laying out the grounds for executive killing of U.S. citizens in league with "Al Qaeda or its associates."

Let me start off by saying this; this isn't "news" in the sense that it is nothing new and nothing startling. The bit about eliding the legal limits on extra-legal killing of citizens is, a bit, but as the position paper spells out there are precedents there for the recommended military actions. This is who we are, and where we've been, since 2001. All this memo does is recapitulate the current views of the executive agencies of the U.S. government regarding the "law of war" of the "War on Terror".

No, what I find so miserably bleak about this is not what it does but what it promises.

For a moment let's step away from the specific circumstances involved, the "non-international conflict" between the United States and whatever it may define as "Al Qaeda and its associates". Let's try and remove the self-fanned furnace of fear and suspicion that fuels the sorts of flights of conspiracy-theory and terror-fantasy and look at the specific acts that this paper justifies.

It posits that the U.S. government can, and should, deploy military force against an individual if

"...an “informed, high-level” official of the U.S. government may determine that the targeted American has been “recently” involved in “activities” posing a threat of a violent attack and “there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities.”

Most commentators have remarked, and worried, about the implications of the vague definition of such terms as "informed, high-level" and "activities". The primary concerns of the critics seem to be about both the very limited sorts of oversight on who gets be the Chooser of the Slain and what "evidence" they need to have to make that choice.

I want to suggest that our concerns, as citizens of a republic that is technically a "government of laws not of men", should be broader and deeper.

Because I want to argue that this memo is simply another link in the chain, the chain we have forged link by link since 2001, that is dragging us closer to a place we may not want to go, a place where the fundamental relationship between the nation-state, our nation-state, and individual people are sharply redefined.

First, I would posit that since the codification of the concept of the modern nation-state a system of law and the status of legal authority differentiates how states deal with each other and how they deal with individuals, persons subject to their own authority as well as foreign nationals.

Relationships between nations are dominated by the reality that there is no higher authority that can bind or loose those nations.

"Higher" levels of organization which do exist, such as the United Nations, have no legal authority, and in practice lack the power of force majeur, to impose conditions or judgements on contending nations.

Rulers of those nations, therefore, often have (or see themselves as having, which comes to the same thing) no practical recourse outside of armed force when dealing with disputes with other nations. There is no functional way to impose legal constraints on a sovereign state outside those imposed by the state itself. Ideally those nations find some way short of force to solve their issues, but failing that force of arms has and presumably will remain the ultimate argument of sovereigns. So we say that "in times of war the law falls silent".

But this rule has a corollary; nations do not make war on individuals, even during wartime. They may kill or maim those individuals as part of that conflict. But AS individuals, when taken as individuals - even as spies - they are dealt with under law, albeit often the laws of war.

A nation-state, at least in theory and typically in practice, that has a disagreement with one of its own citizens will prosecute that conflict through its legal system. Such a system might be corrupt, or misused, or ineffective, or biased...but the very basis of civil society, the place beyond Hobbes' "war of all against all" is that the individual can - must - feel secure that the nation must pursue him or her through the forest of the law.

And this even applies to persons citizens of or subject to foreign nations.

During wartime captured enemies may be tried for violations of the laws of war, or as spies. During the Cold War both foreign nationals and U.S. citizens were tried and convicted and even executed under the law for their actions.

Such citizens may be pursued through the laws of their home country, or may be extradited (or their extradition pursued) to face the rigors of the law of the pursuing nation.

But they remain, as individuals, within the boundaries of the law. Not before this time has the U.S. attempted to deal with individuals or groups of individuals as it has with other nations, arguing that no law exists, that such people should be attacked as a nation may be attacked because there is no alternative.

What I want to suggest that this memo should remind us, and warn us, of the deep, dark, dangerous waters we have ventured out upon with the passage of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force that give the President of the United States the authority "...to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

Because, as the DOJ paper merely echoes, this is a revolutionary change in the way the United States defines war, nations, and individuals.

By making "organizations" and "persons" subject to military force this law gives the Executive the power to, in effect, define anyone as an enemy of the state, and as such unprotected by the traditional measures that have shielded individuals from the monstrous power of the modern industrial nation.

And - so long as this law remains in force - there is no legal recourse for any of us who are so defined.

Worse; given the veil of security around the entire process of collecting "evidence", of determining what are "future acts of terrorism", of what constitutes "aiding terrorists" it is entirely likely that an individual's first intimation that he or she was a terrorist would be the arrival of a missile through the living-room window.

We have all read of the recent fulminations of those Americans who are beyond incensed by what they see as the U.S. government's frightful plan to violate their rights under the Second Amendment. Groups, often angry groups, have rallied, protested, are even now speaking out in strident tones at the dreadful spectre of the loss of individual liberty inherent in the proposals now debated in various public fora.

But this...this vast and restless expanse of unlimited power, this immense, lethal sea-change in the relationship between the individual, whether foreign or citizen, and the U.S. government...remains there in public view largely not just unfought but unexamined. The broader implications - implications that frighten me when I consider the possibility that actions that I might take, say, to protest some act of my government or its allies might place me beyond all legal safety into that Hobbesean bourne from which few travelers may hope to return safely - are taken simply as an accomplished fact, the new reality of our world, the fixed bounds of the power of our nation and the settled relations between it and us.

I know this, and yet, like most of us I pass through the days without thinking about it, like a sailor who sails calm seas and gentle breezes, never considering what might happen if the winds began to rise and the sea turn rough. It is only when I am forced to contemplate the perils of the deep waters charted by such documents as this one that I am fearful of the storms we may be brewing for ourselves.

And, of course, these are the wastes to which these storms will drive you; from Charles Pierce's observations on the Brennan hearings today:

"It was most clear when Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a persistent critic of the administration's drone program, asked Brennan point-blank whether the president could order a drone strike on an American citizen inside the United States and Brennan didn't — or couldn't — give him an answer. What evidence, Wyden asked, does the president need to engage a drone strike? And could that power be used inside the United States?

"I have been a string proponent of being as open as possible," Brennan answered. "I believe we should optimize transparency and optimize secrecy and national security concerns. We can do both. The Office Of Legal Counsel advice established the boundaries, and we don't operate at those boundaries."

The man whom the administration has put up to head the CIA would not say whether or not the president of the United States has the power to order the extrajudicial killing of a United States citizen within the borders of the United States. (And a thousand heads on conspiracy websites explode.) And the hearing, remarkably, went on as though nothing untoward had happened.

He also couldn't answer straight out whether waterboarding is torture. He hid behind legalities as Carl Levin fumed. "I am not a lawyer," Brennan kept saying. People kept congratulating him for the blunt, straight answers he was giving. It was like watching an exotic tribe worship in its native tongue. This was not America as it would recognize itself. This was the worship of a different god."

And not, needless to add, a god of the bright shallows and clear skies, but a deity of an entirely different, and frightening, ocean.

Over the Mountains

Sorry for the light posting - I was out of town all last week working in Walla Walla, WA (a place I am told by a native drysider should always be referred to as "the town so nice they named it twice") and was off the net. I have a crazy busy day tomorrow than then should be back on schedule.

I did want to make a brief observation on the latest news-time obsession; the murder of young Trayvon Martin.

Y'know what the really messed up part was?

That the shooter wasn't immediately escorted to the Crossbar Hotel.

Because I'll give you all the rest of the "backstory" here. You know what I'm talking about, right? All the things this is supposed to "tell" us about the U.S. circa 2012?

The perception of young urban black guys as dangerous and scary. The possobility that young urban black guys ARE dangerous and scary. The degree to which this makes it dangerous to be a young black guy. The throwaway quality of life as a young black guy.

Race. RacISM. Class. Bad Laws. Inequal Justine Under Bad Laws. Republicans vs. Democrats.

The fucked-up-ness of writing a law that makes it possible for a knucklehead with a weapon to, in effect, go looking for a fight. The overarching place that race and class plays in American life. The sociology of race, class, weapons, and American urban life. The propensity for places like Florida, where being an ignernt goober is no disqualification for public life, to make fucked-up laws that enable knuckleheads with a 'tude to pull a hogleg whenever they feel disrespected, or spooked, or like scaring somebody, or for no goddamn reason at all.

Let's just take all those as a given, K?

But even given all this, the fucked up part of this story, for me, doesn't come until the local constable doesn't even attempt to take the shooter downtown and book him for manslaughter.

At least.

Because, as we discussed earlier about the Afghan shooter, when you don't do that, you make it obvious to everyone that the dead guy (or women, or kids) doesn't really matter to you.

And when you do that you prove that you've forgotten that the important thing is that the village remained quiet.

Let's thing about what the law is for; what it's "supposed to be for, and what it really IS for.

We all like to cling to the ideal that the law is ground rules for our society; the lines on the playing field. And how we're supposed to be all "equality of opportunity", liberty, and justice for all. But, look, we already know that there are two laws in this country, or, rather, one law that, in its impartial majesty, forbids rich and poor alike to steal bread and sleep under bridges.

Steal a car, steal a stereo, and you'll probably end up in jail.

Steal an entire pension fund, steal a family's house, steal a company and run it into the ground and put thousands of people out of work?

You'll probably get a job on the Securities and Exchange Commission and never lose a night's sleep.

So we've pretty much admitted by our actions that we don't really CARE about that part of our laws.

But the other part of what the law is for is to keep everyone inside society's fences. To maintain just enough public order that we don't get convinced we're in some sort of Hobbsean war of all against all and then start acting like that. To maintain "public order" in the same way that the rules of engagement of an Army of Occupation are there to convince the occupied that doing what the foreigner tells them to is healthier than planting mines in the roads at night.

So, sure, I'd like my country to actually have one law for rich and poor, powerful and powerless. I'd like to believe that the magnificent words over the courthouse door "Equal Justice Under Law" were true. I'd like for there to be good work, decent work, living-wage work for everyone who wants it. I'd like for my country to be the best it can for the most people it can.

But I'll settle for just enough equality to keep the village quiet.

Because unlike a lot of people - unlike nearly all of our wealthy white folks, the people who are benefiting from the kind of nation where people like Trayvon Martin are, and are shown to be, disposable - I remember what happened the LAST time this country was so open an oligarchy that even the dimmest prole could figure out that both ends of the stick he or she was going to get were dirty.Yeah, that.

We forget that the Gilded Age and the Ragtime Era had a scary edge to them, because the people on the Outside knew they had no way in and many of them decided to kick the thing to pieces rather than put up with that. We had a president assassinated, the first one outside wartime. Anarchists and Reds were under every patrician's bed, and armies of Pinkertons and goons - and the real Army - was employed to "fight them". This damn situation lasted until the Depression, when the New Dealers forced some of the oligarchs to bend a little to stave off what happened to Italy in 1922 and Russia in 1917.

And I'm on the wrong side, here: the kind of people I was then were the ones shot down by troops breaking strikes, beaten by company goons, lynched by American Legion thugs, and railroaded by corrupt judges. They were shot by people very like this Zimmerman who shot the kid Martin; because they didn't like the way my sort of people; poor people, union people, working-class people, looked.

Like I've said here before; the United States was founded as a sort of oligarchy and can work perfectly well as one.

But it's not much fun unless you're an oligarch and, can you tell me, sitting there reading this, that you feel lucky?

I didn't think so.

So while I'm sorry for Martin, his family, nice black guys everywhere, and my country in that we've made it possible for jackholes like Zimmerman to exist, because of who I am and where I am I have a vested interest in keeping the lid on enough to keep my society from flying apart.

So, for me, the important thing here, now, is that this shooter goes to jail. Goes to trial. Gets convicted - assuming the evidence shows that he did what he seems to have done, pursued an unarmed man into a fight and then killed him - and spends a long, long time in prison. Hell, we all have an interest in seeing that the people who use bloody-handed methods to emphasize the fucked up things we believe swiftly take the long step to the end of the short rope that German soldier took in Pont-avec-Crap back in 1878.

Because if we don't; if we convince enough people that the law is for you and not for me, that they might as well be hung for what they did do rather than what they didn't and some ignernt asshole thinks they did...well...

...then the village becomes unquiet and we've taken the first steps up the pass over the mountains of madness.