Green Eagle

Will they ever learn? And what is that mortal sin?  Despite decades now of painful lessons to the contrary, they still insist on pretending that there is one God damned thing the Republicans ever do that is done honorably or out of a sense of right and wrong. The case in point today?  The one week FBI "investigation" the Republicans announced yesterday.  Democrats (and the mainstream press, of course) fell hook line and sinker for the preposterous notion that there is one Republican on the face of the earth who cares about decency; in this case, Senator Jeff Flake, who "negotiated" this one week halt in the process of putting a lying right wing hack with a rage control problem so great that he can't help display it on national television, on the Supreme Court. Well, once again, let me explain what is going on here.  The combination of Ms. Blasey Ford's overwhelmingly powerful testimony, and the hateful monkey show put on by Kavanaugh made it immediatel...

I would like to share with you a letter that I wrote to my two Senators today, both of whom sit on the Judiciary Committee: "Senator ......., In his voluntary statement to the Senate Judiciary committee yesterday, Judge Kavnaugh made the following statement, as you obviously know: "This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political ...revenge on behalf of the Clintons..." May I point out to you that imagining plots against yourself by famous individuals is a classic sign of schizophrenia.  I request that you demand that any confirmation vote of Kavanaugh not take place until he can be subject to psychiatric examination. Sincerely, ........."

1.  Kamala Harris My mother was an attorney, and I remember when I was in high school reading a book she had, My Life in Court, by Louis Nizer, one of the most famous trial attorneys of his day.  In the introduction, he talked about the notion that trials were won by great speeches or razor sharp cross examination.  No, he said, trials are won or lost before the attorneys ever set foot in the courtroom.  Preparation, not histrionics wins the day, and there never was a better example of that than the one provided by former prosecutor Kamala Harris, in her comments to Rachel Mitchell, the woman who has spent thirty years  in Maricopa County, Arizona, trying people arrested by Joe Arpaio.  Let this be a lesson to Ms. Mitchell: a county prosecutor should be wary against going up against someone like Harris, the former attorney general of the nation's largest State. Harris, apparently alone of all of her colleagues, thought to do a little research on Ms. Mi...

Here's a picture that is making it around the right wing world today: It took me less than five minutes to do a reverse image search and find what is apparently the original picture: Not to dwell on details too much, but notice that the ground under the picnic table is identical in both pictures; only the part above the table was replaced. Needless to say, this picture has absolutely zero to do with Christine Blasey Ford, but that is not stopping the disgusting dregs of humanity on the right from circulating it.  I left a comment at one place that had posted the smear photo, and the answer I got was that they didn't care whether it was her or not, she should still be "put in a cage." There is absolutely no possibility of ever entering into a rational relationship with these people.  They have been infected with a terminal mental disease.  Every one of them is evil, and we will have to live with them until they all die off, by whatever means.

I want to mention something my wife said several years ago, in response to a previous outbreak of Republican sleaziness.  She suggested that, in response to the fact that a few Republicans showed a conscience in regard to the Nixon impeachment, civil rights legislation and other such things, the leaders of the Republican party decided that nobody would be allowed to advance in Republican politics unless they had some disgusting secret that could be held over their heads, to keep them from making one move outside the party line.  I think she was pretty much joking when she first said that, but over the years, both of us have more and more begun to suspect that something like this is true.  Well, here's another piece of evidence that she might be right.

So, the near miracle happens and the Democrats win back the House in November.  The Republicans, knowing perfectly well that both Trump and Pence are up to their necks in treasonous collusion with the Russians, are aware that the minute the new House is sworn in, a Democrat will become next in line to be President, and will therefore force Trump and Pence to resign in December, and Paul Ryan, a miserable, morally bankrupt man with a long record of putting party over country, will become President of the United States. If they are willing to stoop to any kind of dirty behavior to rig the Supreme Court, don't think for a second that they wouldn't do the same with the Presidency.  I don't know what kind of threats it would take to get Trump out of the White House, but I am sure they are up to it.

Let's first of all be clear who Brett Kavanaugh is.  He is not an honest jurist, he is a right wing hatchet man who has made his career by promoting the worst behavior of Republicans.  As an aide to Ken Starr. it was he who induced Starr to reopen the long discredited story that Bill and Hillary had Vince Foster murdered, and spent two years, knowing every second that he was lying, keeping this smear in the news.  Working for George W. Bush, it was Kavanaugh who induced Bush to go on his absolutely despicable campaign involving the brain-dead Terry Schiavo, inflicting her family and the nation with more years of pain, over something that, once again, he knew was a lie.  He perjured himself over and over again in his original judicial hearings and he has done it one more time with the Supreme Court appointment: every single sentient person in the country knows perfectly well that he is lying over and over again when he attempts to deny his clear intention to mangle th...

In a miserable article from the Washington Post about today's Republican resort to a criminal libel against a totally innocent man to try to cover up the degraded nature of their Supreme Court nominee: "On Thursday night, a conservative legal scholar took to Twitter to suggest a man who looked like Brett Kavanaugh, rather than Kavanaugh himself, might have sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford 36 years ago. The scholar, Ed Whelan, even named the man and provided a recent picture... It also epitomizes how the Kavanaugh imbroglio has become extremely ugly — and is likely to get even uglier. ...With the stakes so high, the facts so fungible and the clock ticking louder, it’s almost a perfect storm for ugliness. And it’s hardly over." At no point in this article is it never acknowledged that the crime (and it is a crime against all of us, given the stakes) was perpetrated solely by Republicans.  No, it's just that things have gotten ugly, and everyone involve...

With all the distractions going on, I wish to point out that, once again, the mainstream press is totally ignoring the war on Talk Like a Pirate Day.

From Guitar Coach Magazine: Someone in the comments says the woman was actually photoshopped into the picture, but I still got a good laugh out of it.

September 16th. The king. Here's my favorite early B. B. song, with lead playing so clean and straightforward that it has always been, for me, a pinnacle of classic blues guitar playing:

The endless string of abominations by the Trump administration is so great that this one is essentially going unnoticed, but it is so grotesquely cynical that I cannot resist bringing it to your attention.  From the Los Angeles Times, which does as good a job as any mainstream news source I know of in reporting on Latin America: "A robust anti-corruption agency, seen as a model for Latin America, was created 12 years ago in Guatemala with strong U.S. support, and notched up an enviable record. The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala has prosecuted and jailed a former president, vice president and hundreds of corrupt police officials, politicians and businessmen. But Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales announced on Aug. 31 that he was shutting the acclaimed commission, citing vague national security concerns. The panel was investigating Morales for possible campaign fraud." A President shutting down a corruption commission which just happened to...

Donald Trump today, going to a 9-11 memorial.  What is he cheering with this gesture, and what kind of demented mind causes anyone to have this expression on his face on such an occasion? He looks like a rabid animal. This is a truly sick individual, and I want to make something perfectly clear:  There has been plenty of talk lately among Republicans and the complicit press about the alleged mental decline of Trump over the last year or so.  This is utter rubbish; he has been exactly the same as long as we have known anything about him.  What is really going on here is an ex post facto rewriting of history, so they can claim, "well, he's crazy now, but that doesn't mean that I was wrong when I supported him in 2016.  It's just a sad story, like all the other right wing monsters who are mentally ill, unlike Muslims who act the exact same way but are hateful criminals.  No conclusions to draw here about our party and the abominable thing we did to the coun...

Once again, Green Eagle has a chance to report on the massive pro-Trump movement around our land. "A big pro-Trump rally called “The Mother of All Rallies” (or MOAR for short) is taking place (Saturday) in Washington, D.C...The MOAR rally began its opening ceremonies at the north end of the Mall, near the Washington monument, at 11 a.m. Eastern, according to their website...The organizers originally wanted one million people at the event." Here are a couple of representative photos of the massive crowd: One million people?  Well, they fell about 999,800 short of their goal.  Close enough for winguts to declare victory, I guess. I'll leave the final remark to commenter James McMullen: Technically, does it still count as a HUGE rally if most of the scant crowd who showed up there are seriously overweight?"

"TRUMP, questioning whether one of his senior officials acted illegally about an administration effort to thwart his agenda: “TREASON?” — tweet Wednesday." There is no statute of limitations on treason, as far as I know.  Well, if spreading "fake news*" about the President is treason, is not Trump himself guilty of treason for having led a national media campaign to accuse President Obama of being a foreign born Muslim, something he knew perfectly well was a lie?   Maybe it's time for some fair minded Federal prosecutor to charge Trump with that. Just asking. *Of course, we know that the charges in the recent New York Times op ed are not fake news, but real news, except in the sense that it is not news at all since every sentient human being already knew it was true.

The Republicans are engaged in a full throated demand that the Mueller investigation must not take any actions in the sixty days before the upcoming November 6th election.  They are obviously deadly afraid that anything Mueller might reveal will further tip public opinion against themselves, so they are citing this informal Justice Department rule as an inviolable law of political conduct. Well, here is a question that I have not seen asked.  I would assume that if this rule has any standing at all, it would only apply to people who are actually running for office in the upcoming election.  Otherwise, why wouldn't every criminal defendant in the country demand that his prosecution stop for the two months leading up to any election?  Well, Donald Trump and his corrupt associates are not running for any office.  Regardless of the viability of this rule, there is no reason on earth to believe that it applies to him.  Let the investigation and the indictments...

Now that it is all but inevitable that the country is going to be saddled with one more Republican Supreme Court Justice, rammed through by systematic hiding of his record and beliefs, I want to make perfectly clear a point that I have heard nobody make in a straightforward way. Rehnquist, Thomas, Scalia, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh...these are not Conservative Justices, they are not right wing Justices.  They are corrupt justices.  Their only intent is to aid the half century long Republican plan to turn the country into an oligarchic dictatorship with a few hundred rich families, and with three hundred million citizens living in poverty, without the slightest chance to affect the government's behavior. Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, District of Columbia v. Heller, and a thousand other decisions, made not on the basis of the Constitution, but on the basis of what serves the interests of those few hundred families; criminal decisions made by criminal Justices.  And even...

Epicycles As most people are aware, until well into the Renaissance, it was the common belief, at least in Europe and the Middle East, that the sun, the planets and everything else revolved around the earth.  This widespread belief came to be attached to the name of one Ptolemy: "Claudius Ptolemy was a Roman astronomer who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 2nd century AD. His attempt to explain the motions of the celestial bodies became the accepted theory throughout Europe and the Middle East for almost 2000 years. Only during the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries did people such as Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei call the Ptolemaic model into question. According to Ptolemy, the earth sat in the center of the universe with all of the planets (including the sun and the moon, which were also described as planets during this time) sitting within nested crystalline spheres surrounding the earth. They were ordered according to the amount of time...