Professional Left Podcast Episode 925: A Hundred Shells A Minute.

"I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." -- Ellen Ripley, 'Aliens'

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A Hundred Shells a Minute Until They Surrender

All Epstein, all the time.  

What Major General Alfred Terry and Rear Admiral David Porter did with shot and shell to take Fort Fisher in January 1865, we must do to the Trump administration with words, pictures, music, video, formal speeches, letters to the editor, protests, signs, buttons and votes in the House, the Senate and statehouses across the country.

Continuous, relentless bombardment.

No Half Measures

This Feels Like Winning

(h/t Crooks and Liars)

It's fair to say that, since we began this blogging journey together more than 20 years ago, there are two major themes on which this blog has focused more attention and expended more words than any others, Themes which we also carried over to The Professional Left Podcast more than 15 years.

And they are, false equivalence and memory.  Or, in our own parlance, "Both Sides Don't" and "No Fair Remembering Stuff".

So when I saw Republican scumbag Doug LaMalfa get shouted down when he tried to whip out the Both Sides Do It lie, in the heart of the reddest district in California (R+12) at the first town hall he's held in eight years... it felt like something important might finally be getting into the ground water of American politics.  

And, once the crowd had been calmed, when I heard one citizen yell "We'll never forget!" that gave me a little bit of hope that, just maybe, ordinary citizens might be unlimbering the greatest Liberal superpower of all, remembering stuff, and turning its awesome power against the American fascist party.  

No Half Measures

An Anthem For Our Times

"I'm Still Here" sung by the late, great Elaine Stritch

No Half Measures

Keep Firing.

No Half Measures

We Who Were Never Trump Long Before Trump

As you know, twenty years ago, before the Frankenstein's monster they'd built kicked the doors off the lab and came for them, most of your favorite Never Trumpers were either grinding out Weekly Standard paeans to the genius of George W. Bush and the idiocy of Liberals suggesting there would ever be deficits again, or they were fresh out of college and working as low-level gofers in the campaign of one Republican goof or another, or one Conservative think tank or another. 

None of this is disputed.  It isn't talked about by the legacy media or by Never Trumpers because it is hugely inconvenient, but when skipping very lightly down the byways of history, they don't pretend the past never happened, they just own up to a very highly expurgated and redacted version of the past.

What is disputed, aggressively, is that any of that has any bearing on the state of things as they are now.  That yesterday has any real connection to today, which is ludicrous on its face:  look into the mists of time at the George Wallace and Richard Nixon campaigns of 1968, and you will see Donald Trump's face leering bask at you.

What is also aggressively disputes is that, even if the past has some bearing on the present, there is no way anyone could possibly (to borrow a little phrasing from Bill Shakes)  "look into the seeds of time/ And say which grain will grow and which will not."  It is an article of faith among the that they are guiltless because no one could have seen the disaster that was coming, not even the savvy political savants who make of the Never Trump elite.

Except, at exactly the same time they were working hard to elect cranks, or cranking out political propaganda for the Bush administration about how swimmingly the Iraq war was going, a cohort of Liberal bloggers were not only diagnosing the bigoted and deadly impulses were raging through the heart of the GOP with astonishing accuracy, but also generously explaining in clear, simple language what exactly Republican leadership needed to do to stop the party's headlong plunge down the long, dark, fascist road that led to Donald Trump.  

All the signs were there, long ago, and this is the advice we offered to our Republican fellow citizens, free of charge, that would disenthrall them from the madness that was quickly overtaking them:

Kick [the bigots and monsters] out. It’s as simple as that.

Call out Republicans who use intolerance as just another tool in the get-out-the-vote toolbelt by name.

Repudiate them.

...quit pretending that racist policies are just falling unbidden out of the sky, and that you have no control over them. Quit pretending the behavior of Republican candidates has nothing to do with the Republican party.

But you have to actually do that shit, instead of trying to market reeking poison as yummy-yummy pecan pie and assuming the rest of the world is too stupid to notice. 

This is also why it is so fucking exhausting to hear people who absolutely know better but who's professional lives would be wrecked by admitting it, yammer on about how all this came upon us suddenly, spontaneously and with no warning in 2016.  

That's a lie.  And everyone who can remember past events beyond what they had for breakfast, knows it's a lie.

Because one of those Liberal bloggers who were giving very clear instructions about how to save the Republicans party from itself were was me.  And they were published on the blog twenty years ago.

From me, August 7, 2005:

“I was born a Poor Black Child.”

Is he kidding?

You decide.

Here’s a line from near the end of this article: “[Mehlman] also invoked his late grandfather, a Baltimore shopkeeper, who was a member of the NAACP."

Well if that’s not hard-currency street cred, well I just don’t know what is!

OTOH, I have a relative who, word has it, was the last man hanged for horse thievin’ in Montana. I also have one who’s an Evangelical Christian slightly to the Right of Ralph Reed. And there are some moonshiners, and rev’nuers, and teachers and drunks.

All of which means ab-so-lute-ly nothing...except that Kenny Mehlman’s grandfather would probably by deepy, deeply ashamed of him if he knew the kind of Gadarene Swine he was running with.

Read on...

GOP Plans More Outreach to Blacks, Mehlman Says
Goal Is to Broaden Party Base, Help Swing Future Races

ATLANTA -- Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman stood before a roomful of black journalists last week fielding pointed questions about his party's mostly shaky relationship with black voters.

Asked about the southern strategy that used race as an issue to build GOP dominance in the once Democratic South, Mehlman acknowledged that Republican candidates often have prospered by ignoring black voters and even by exploiting racial tensions. But he pledged that such neglect is a thing of the past. "Our plan for 2006 and 2008 is to increase African American turnout," he said crisply.

Republican candidates who exploited racial resentments to solidify white support, he added, were simply wrong.

Unconvinced, one questioner asked whether President Bush was guilty of appealing to those very resentments when he appeared at South Carolina's Bob Jones University when his GOP primary campaign was listing in 2000, even though the fundamentalist Christian school banned interracial dating. Mehlman did not flinch -- but neither did he directly engage the question. Bush "has been a model" of how the GOP and blacks can "restore their historic bond," he said.

Distancing the party from its recent past and promising a more inclusive future has become a ritual for Mehlman since he became chairman of the GOP in January. It is part of an audacious bid to chip away at the Democratic Party's most loyal constituency: black voters.
...
Despite periodic Republican outreach efforts, nearly nine out of 10 blacks voted for Democratic presidential candidates over the past four decades.

But Bush's success in modestly increasing black support in battleground states such as Ohio with a culturally conservative message during the 2004 election caused some religious and cultural leaders to see an opportunity for the GOP to overcome its difficult history with black voters.

"I can't go to the party with Democrats right now because they are playing some strange music," said Bishop Harry R. Jackson Jr., a registered Democrat and pastor of Hope Christian Church in College Park. Jackson said he opposes abortion rights and same-sex marriage.
...

Since conservative icon Barry M. Goldwater ran for president in 1964, Republican presidential candidates have, on average, captured less than 12 percent of the black vote, according to David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington research organization.

The problem he said, is that Republicans often are perceived as hostile to the concerns of black voters, whether it is affirmative action, the stubbornly high black unemployment rate or better funding for urban schools.
...
"The willingness to go after the black vote is the first big hurdle we had to overcome," Gillespie said. Now, he said, "there is a cultural barrier we have to overcome, in terms of the long-standing affiliation black voters have with the Democratic Party."
...
"There are some obvious signs that we are on the verge of a breakthrough when you look at what we have to do to be successful," said Michael Williams, a black Republican elected to the Texas Railroad Commission, a statewide energy board. "If we can just move to 20 or 25 percent of the African American vote, that is a cataclysmic change in vote count."
...
Often, Mehlman speaks in deeply personal terms. He told the black journalists that he views open housing, voting rights and civil rights bills passed in the 1960s as the most important laws of the 20th century. He also invoked his late grandfather, a Baltimore shopkeeper, who was a member of the NAACP.
...

At some point one is compelled to ask, do Republican’s all collectively suffer from that “Memento” neurological disorder?

Do they simply lack the ability to form any new memories past, oh, 1952?

You hear Gingrich daubing his piggy-eyes and decrying the lack of civility in public discourse... apparently hoping that the rest of us are so politically A.D.D. and distracted by shiny objects as the average Republican that we’ll all forget that it was Newt! (with his GOPAC Little Red Book) who worked tirelessly to make using a specific, approved list of hatespeech words and phrases to personally vilify and destroy opponents as routine a Republican tactic as the jerking off into the Confederate Flag.

You hear the Republicans categorically refusing the discuss the Downing Street Memo, the complete collapse of the casus belli for the war in Iraq, the rampant corruption and looting and terrorist recruiting windfalls that war has led to...not because any of it lacks the whiff of High Crimes for which the GOP are always anxious to persecute others (even when they have to make it up) , but because all of that happened five minutes ago.

And you hear Ken Mehlman anxious to market Lincoln to the masses while at the same time very pointedly ignoring the fact that the unreconstructed lineal descendants of the same traitors who went to war again Lincoln’s United States over their right to keep human beings as chattel...these despicable Jeff Davis worshippin’, American Swastika flyin’ chuds now run the political party for which Ken Mehlman is the hired spokesmodel?

Poor, poor Republicans.

They’ve got this, uh, “Negro” problem.

Which, to be brutally candid, comes down to this: Can’t live with ‘em, and can’t lynch ‘em anymore.

And there is a certain, weird synchronicity between the card Ken Mehlman is trying to palm, and the current Intelligent Design nonsense, and basically the whole rest of the Republican Agenda.

Specifically, that to believe a single word that comes out of their lying Gin Holes you have to step way, waaaaay over the “open minded”-line and smack into I-Drink-Gasoline blind-assed, brain-damaged petro-snockered not to notice the veritable Forest Primeval of Big, Ugly Truths about the GOP that tower over the whole party, positively striking anyone who is not a congenital idiot hip and thigh, cheek and chin.

As wretched a sliver of toenail fungus as Ken Mehlman is, I would have given him good marks for identifying the problem -- “Republican candidates who exploited racial resentments to solidify white support, he added, were simply wrong.” – if he didn’t turn right around and try to pretend that Bush did not use appeals to intolerance (specifically his speech at Bob Jones) as a routine party of the GOP Southern Strategy.

Distancing yourself from your past because you have actually changed your wicked ways and atoned for your sins is one thing: trying to distance yourself for what you did FIVE MINUTES AGO, while you are still spattered with the fresh blood of your crimes, is ludicrous and insulting and the hallmark of drunks and sociopaths.

See Ken, it is not a few, isolated Republican Candidates in some misty past that exploited hate to snag elected office: that is the Republican Party. That is your playbook. This is how you win, and to hear the spokesminion of the GOP whinge on with a wink-an-a-nod about how he is “Shocked, shocked to learn that Gambling is going on inside the GOP,” while his pockets are stuffed to overflowing with electoral ill-gotten gains would be cartoon-laughable if it weren’t also so grotesquely insulting.

You want to show you’re serious?

Kick them out, Ken. It’s as simple as that.

C’mon, Ken: 2004 shows what Republicans do when they’re deadly serious. Crack open the GOP piggy-bank and hire a top-shelf marketing firm run a couple of hundred Swiftboat”-strong ads against the haters in your party. Call out Republicans who use intolerance as just another tool in the get-out-the-vote toolbelt by name.

Repudiate them.

Which leads me to ask, believe it or not, What do the 2004 Elections and Ohio’s surprise insurgent candidacy of Paul Hackett have in common?

Numbers. Stats. The little thingies under the !@#$%^&*() symbols on your keyboard that makes a Quant Jock’s heart sing, baby!

2004 was the GOP maxing out their Douchebag Credit Card. 2004 was them spending every last bit of energy and cunning to pick the shelves clean of every last racist, gay basher, and Christopath, under optimal conditions, during a time of war, with the Commander-in-Chief (when he wasn’t getting that all-important beauty sleep down in Rancho Jim Beam) was personally out stumping, deploying the whole, vast resources of the Executive Office to tell people that if your didn’t vote Buch/Cheney...terrorists would kill your children.

And he only won by 100,000 votes in Ohio.

One can disagree about the honesty of those numbers, or the means used to get them, but you can’t ignore the fact that, running flat-out, afterburners WIDE open, leaving no reservoir of slime untapped – with the wind roaring at their back -- the All Powerful GOP came thiiiis close to losing it all.

Like the parasitic organisms that they are, they have ridden their Segregation Hobby Horse as far as they can, and it’s still not enough. It’s still not a reliable source of nutrients. They need more. They need a “nest egg”.

The problem, of course, is that if the day ever dawned that the Jeff Davis Dance Party ever started making serious, concrete efforts at rapprochement with the African American Community, AND started backing up the weak reeds of Kenny’s words with actual action, the Dixiecrats -- who form that solid, I-doesn’t-matter-how-much-you-piss-in-our-faces, cancerous heart of the GOP -- would bail.

And the Republican Party would collapse overnight.

However, for no additional charge, I will let the Kenny-bunk-mate in on a little secret: If ever the Republican Party were to actually bother to disinter the Rosetta Stone of its Original Values and act on them, they and I would have a lot to talk about.

Step away from the Dominionists and bigots and the traitors who ginned up ruinous war, and start talking about Old School conservative principles – good stewardship of the environment (instead of shitting on Science because facts are inconvenient), sane fiscal discipline (instead penury of peons and tax-cuts forever for the richest humans who ever lived) and not trying to ram some wretched perversion of Christianity down everyone else’s throat – and there is room to have a discussion.

Here’s another, small idea.

Go over the website of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies – one of the organizations cited in the article – and actually read this quote from their front page:

“Blacks depend on the Social Security System (OASDI) more than whites. 37% of black seniors depend exclusively on Social Security for their income, compared to 18% of white seniors." Black workers are also nearly twice as likely to collect disability insurance payments (4.2%) as whites (2.8%), and proportionately more black children receive survivor benefits (21.6%) than are in the general population (15.2%).”

And then stop trying to gutfuck Social Security.

Walk the Talk, Ken, and quit pretending that racist policies are just falling unbidden out of the sky, and that you have no control over them. Quit pretending the behavior of Republican candidates has nothing to do with the Republican party.

But you have to actually do that shit, instead of trying to market reeking poison as yummy-yummy pecan pie and assuming the rest of the world is too stupid to notice.

Until them you’re just a mumbling fraud, trying to pick a few pockets with blood-slick hands and hoping no one will notice.

Until then, CUE...

Ken Mehlman, holding the GOP in his clammy hands.

Priest: Ken Francis Mehlman -- do you renounce Dixiecrats?

Ken: I do renounce him.

Priest: And all their works?

Ken: I do renounce them.

Priest: And all their pomps?

Ken: I do renounce them.


Uhhh, then again...



...maybe not so much.


Still, Godfather, that whole “McCain has a black baby” thing?

Worked like a fucking charm.

So you've got that going for you.

End of 2005 repost.

No Half Measures

It’s 2025 and America’s Clocks Are Striking Thirteen

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." -- 1984 - Part 1, Chapter 1.

The New Republic, August 5th, 2025:

Bondi’s Obama Grand Jury: The Authoritarian Moment We’ve All Feared

It’s officially happening: the use of the machinery of justice to go on fishing expeditions about political predecessors. Absolute madness.

It’s the moment we’ve feared—the moment the Supreme Court invoked in giving Donald Trump immunity, and the moment that marks an authoritarian government at its most vulgar and vicious.

On Monday, Attorney General Pam Bondi signed an order directing an as-yet-unidentified federal prosecutor to convene a grand jury to investigate whether prominent officials in Barack Obama’s administration, including Obama himself, purposely manufactured an intelligence assessment in January 2017.

The supposed purpose of the Obama officials’ scheme: to promote a “false narrative” that Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, engaged in an operation to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election with the intent of helping Trump win.

Problem #1: There’s nothing whatsoever false about this narrative.

The Intelligence Community Assessment, or ICA, prepared by career professionals and our intelligence agencies, indeed concluded: “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”

...that conclusion has been repeatedly reaffirmed in multiple investigations—including those of special counsel Robert Mueller, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and special prosecutor John Durham.

The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously found in 2020 that the ICA was “coherent and well constructed” and reconfirmed that Russia “engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence” the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.

MAGA loves Big Brother.

No Half Measures

Professional Left Podcast Episode 924: The Con Man And GOP Civil War

"You say I acted atrociously. Yes. I did. I do it for a living." -- Mike, House of Games

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