SATURDAY IN KRAYZEETOWN

There are 73 days to the midterms.

In 1944, General George S. Patton Jr. was very upset with a 22-year old Sergeant who drew cartoons for “Stars and Stripes”. The Sergeant was Bill Mauldin, creator of two cartoon characters, Willie and Joe, who were considered to be the voice of American GIs on the front lines. Willie and Joe were always tired, needed a shave, were wearing the filthy fatigues they lived in on the front lines in Italy, and viewed the U.S. Army as a more threatening personal enemy than the Wehrmacht. The GIs agreed with everything they said. By 1945, the war in Europe was a slog through the coldest European winter in a century. In March 1945, General Patton summoned Mauldin to his Luxembourg headquarters, where over 45 minutes he accused Sgt. Mauldin of inciting mutiny and destroying military discipline through his unkempt character portrayals. Mauldin defended his work as a “safety valve” for combat infantrymen, resulting in a tense 45-minute standoff that ended in a stalemate.

It took an intervention by Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower to protect Mauldin and preserve the editorial independence of “Stars and Stripes,” preventing Patton from banning the paper or jailing the cartoonist. Eisenhower fiercely believed that “Stars and Stripes” should belong entirely to the front-line troops, famously declaring: “This newspaper should be the equivalent of a soldier’s hometown newspaper, with no censorship of its contents, other than for security.” Ike recognized that Willie and Joe served as a vital, non-destructive psychological safety valve. He knew that letting G.I.s laugh at their miserable conditions and blow off steam about overbearing officers actually preserved army morale. Too bad the current dildo running the Pentagon and his short-fingered thin-skinned felonious boss are too fucking stupid to understand that Eisenhower was smarter than all ten of them combined.

Originally when it was created by Congress in 1942, Stars and Stripes occupied a unique place in American journalism: funded by the government, read by the military, but mandated by law to report the news independently, without editorial interference. This was because the America that could actually win wars believed US servicemen deserved real news, not Pentagon horseshit. (That happens to still be the law, should any congressional moron care to see it enforced.)

Mauldin’s Time cover for winning the Pulitzer Prize

On to the rest...

This morning,

The New York Times lost its first defamation case in 50 years, and this is not good for journalism, especially under the Trump regime. It comes as Trump is also suing the NYT for defamation, and has just appealed his defamation case against CNN, which reads as if he is hoping to chill opinion as well as facts. The “paper of record” was found liable for defamation by a jury after the paper incorrectly reported that a college basketball player was present at the scene of a fatal shooting, did not fully correct the piece even after being told by multiple people that the player was not present. On Thursday, it was reported that the Alabama jury ordered the paper to pay the plaintiff $9.25 million in damages. At issue was March 2023 article about a deadly shooting in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, incorrectly identifying university basketball player Kai Spears as someone who was in a car involved in the shooting death of 23-year-old Jamea Harris. Spears was not present and was not accused of any wrongdoing. Reporter Billy Witz had relied upon an anonymous source who was described as a “high-level person, professional.” “The Times corrected the article and added an editor’s note after Mr. Spears filed his lawsuit, which disclosed the identity of the passenger in the car for the first time,” the NYT reported Thursday. The plaintiff in the NYT Alabama case was a private citizen, and thus did not have the burden of proving “actual malice” in his lawsuit against the paper. While public figures like Trump must prove “actual malice” (knowing falsity or reckless disregard for the truth) to win a defamation suit, Spears only needed to prove that the statement was false and published with negligence. If the NYT were to reinstate the public editor position they canceled in 2017, it might go a long way to restoring trust from readers.

The paper is also facing, like so many news outlets, a defamation suit from Trump, so losing a defamation case is not a great precedent for journalism. Trump wants $15 billion from the Times, alleging the paper sought to undermine his reputation as a businessman and his 2024 candidacy for president. A question that could be at issue is how could anyone undermine Trump more than his own actions, bankruptcies, adjudicated sexual assault finding, and convictions have? He need only find a mirror for the blame for the hits to his reputation.

Also on Thursday, it is reported Trump asked the Supreme Court to hear his repeatedly dismissed $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN after a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld the dismissal. In an appeal to the Supreme Court filed on August 14 but docketed on August 20, Trump alleges that using words like the “Big Lie” to describe Trump’s lies about the 2020 election is defamation. The argument reads as if Trump is coming for opinion, per SCOTUS Blog: “Trump then came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to take up his case. He pointed to the court’s 1990 decision in Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., holding that the First Amendment did not shield an article that was “categorized as ‘opinion’ as opposed to ‘fact’” from a defamation claim. Four courts of appeals, he said, use “contextual, multi-factor tests to consider whether a statement of opinion conveys objectively verifiable facts to a reasonable observer.” But the 11th Circuit in this case effectively made “a ‘subjective assessment’” instead, he argued. Having determined that the phrase “Big Lie” was ambiguous, he contended, the lower court “ignored the false factual claims for which CNN used the ‘Big Lie’ as a shorthand, including its use of photographs comparing President Trump to Hitler.” Even if the Supreme Court doesn’t hear this appeal, it has a chilling effect.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 Friday that John A. Sarcone III, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York, was never lawfully in his post and has permanently banned Trump’s chief persecutor in New York from investigations targeting Attorney General Letitia James, who beat him in court. The ruling bars Sarcone from both cases brought by New York Attorney General that Trump has tried to reverse through the Justice Department - the civil fraud case against the Trump Organization and a separate case against the National Rifle Association. The court ruled, “We further hold that the general delegation to Sarcone of all the duties of the U.S. Attorney’s office was an unlawful use of general delegation authority to circumvent the FVRA’s exclusivity provision. Because Sarcone lacked authority to obtain the subpoenas on either theory, we AFFIRM the district court’s order quashing them. And because the government on appeal did not provide any argument as to why the district court erred in disqualifying Sarcone from future involvement in the underlying investigations, the ban is permanent - the government never argued otherwise on appeal, forfeiting any challenge.” This follows a similar ruling from the Ninth court of Appeals that Sigal Chattah was unlawfully installed as the acting U.S. attorney for Nevada.

Wild horses couldn’t keep Trump away from the chance of making a kill, according to a new report. Under Maladministration II, thousands of wild horses have been rounded up with helicopters, packed into metal trailers, trucked hundreds of miles, and sold off to be slaughtered, the New York Times reported Thursday. “The Bureau of Land Management is saying to the public that slaughter is off the table, but they’re doing it in plain sight,” Clare Staples, who runs a wild horse sanctuary, told the Times. “They are turning a blind eye. And the only ones getting punished for what is going on are the horses.” The BLM has been exploiting a legal loophole that bans slaughtering of wild horses by selling them cheaply to third parties to be sold abroad and slain, according to the Times’ analysis of government records. After Trump took office, the bureau more than doubled its sales to more than 3,700 horses, according to the report. The mustangs are sold at a huge loss, as the government can spend $3,000 to capture a mustang it will sell for as little as $25, then the buyer can make up to $750 per horse at a slaughter plant. It collects about 9,500 horses every year, putting half up for adoption and the rest into a “holding system” that now stores 58,000 wild horses at an annual cost of $100 million, according to the report. The BLM has pitched buying a gas chamber to kill the horses and cut the costs, but Congress has barred such action over fears of an outcry, according to the Times. (Ya think?!)

Corky and Sebastian

Black war hero Doris Miller’s family denounced Trump’s reported move to rename the USS Doris Miller. Thursday, it was revealed the Navy is taking steps to rename the USS Doris Miller, an aircraft carrier that’s still being built, and has already stopped referring to it by the name meant to honor the Pearl Harbor hero. Thursday night, CNN anchor Laura Coates spoke to Thomas Bledsoe, great-nephew of Doris Miller. Bledsoe relayed the reaction and concerns from Miller’s descendants and surviving family. “For our family, it was quite a shock to hear that there was conversation about the possibility of renaming the Doris Miller carrier. Not only was it a shock, but it was also a shock that we found out from a news outlet, comparably from the Navy.” Finding out “caused a lot of concerns and uncertainty,” Bledsoe said. CNN reported that the Navy is considering awarding Miller the Medal of Honor, the highest honor in the military, and renaming another ship after him, but Bledsoe said his family was concerned about the “timing” of those decisions. Coates asked him what he would say to SecDrunk Hegseth, and Bledsoe said, “I would really want someone to take the time to realize the true impact of changing the name and what it would do to society. Doris Miller stands for so much about America and who we are today.” Rep. Jason Crow said during a CNN interview on Thursday,”Who could possibly be surprised that Donald Trump thinks that he’s more befitting an honor like this than a World War II and American war hero? Doris Miller, this is a man. Donald Trump is a five-time draft dodger. He’s called veterans suckers and losers. He refused to go to an American military cemetery in Europe because it was raining.”

James O’Keefe, a Far Right provocateur best known for his operations to try to trick government officials or members of liberal organizations into embarrassing or compromising positions, showed up to an Alaska polling place, falsely identified himself as the brother of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, and filmed himself being allowed to cast a ballot without the required ID. Murkowski has come under outrage by MAGA activists over her refusal to back Trump’s SAVE America Act that, as Murkowski has explained, would cost some rural Alaskans thousands of dollars to comply with. When O’Keefe emailed Murkowski’s Senate office what he had done, a staffer replied, “I appreciate your acknowledgement that a member of your organization actively engaged in voter fraud by impersonating me at a polling place in Alaska. If you could please relay the individual’s name, I will happily include it in my complaint to the Division of Elections and the Department of Law.” Former Maricopa County, Arizona elections clerk Stephen Richer, a Republican, debunked O’Keefe’s stunt piece by piece, stating he was “a liar and a bad person” and explaining that in fact Alaska poll workers followed the law in that video. “When O’Keefe, impersonating a registered voter, asked to vote, the poll workers repeatedly asked for his identification. He said he didn’t have identification and asked if he could still vote. The poll workers told him yes, he could vote, but it must be a ‘questioned ballot’ that goes into a security envelope,” said Richer. “O’Keefe did not expose an opportunity fraud. He did not expose unlawful conduct by election administrators. He did, however, record some seemingly sweet, civically-minded older Americans working the election site who tried to help him with his alleged issue. Aside from putting those poll workers in danger by recording them, Richer continued, O’Keefe may have broken the law himself, as he was in a polling place unauthorized and tried to impersonate a voter. O’Keefe is the kind of Mick moron who proves the English were right. Lastly, noted Richer, “nothing O’Keefe did in the video would be changed as a result of the SAVE America Act. Nothing.”

The threat of a corrupt federal law enforcement apparatus run amok in America is a threat to everyone. No one is spared the risk, even if not everyone is eventually targeted. The arbitrary and capricious nature of corrupt justice creates an oppressive atmosphere of fear, doubt, and suspicion. It erodes civic life. It pushes people to stay in the good graces of the regime. It encourages ambitious scoundrels in and out of government to use the corrupt system to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of their foes, whether in politics, business, or their personal lives. One of the most pernicious effects of corrupting federal law enforcement is that it undermines public confidence in everything the Justice Department does. It’s impossibleto have a DOJ or FBI doing corrupt work with one hand and normal, legal work with the other and expect anyone to decipher which is which in any given case. That is what losing the “presumption of regularity” is all about. It casts doubt on everything. It’s only because Trump is such an unrestrained raving moron that the early vindictive prosecutions were so obviously driven by his desire for retribution. He could have picked less sympathetic characters, people who had less obvious reasons for being in his crosshairs than Letitia James or James Comey. The news yesterday that former Rep. Eric Swalwell is now under federal criminal investigation related to the sexual misconduct allegations against him is case in point. You cannot separate Trump’s repeated threats against Swalwell and the prior investigation of him, and Trump’s eagerness to target political foes like Swalwell, from the possibility that there’s a valid legal and factual predicate to justify the feds looking into him. Because of their illegal actons, the TrumpDOJ must be treated as operating for illegal reasons in all cases now. The suspicion, rumor, and conjecture arising from the TrumpDOJ’s now-presumed corruption is in the darkest sense the fruit of that corruption. It’s everyone getting the message that the Trump DOJ is open for business. And that is a loss for America that will not easily be corrected come 2029. The Democrat who takes office will have to use the authority the Supreme Court gave Trumo to fire federal employees at will, to clear out every federal employye hired between January 21, 2025 and January 19, 2029. And that will just be for starters.

Remember, you are not the crazy ones, and we were made for these times. Regardless of what you may feel right now, act as if you believe that and redouble your efforts.

“Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it.” - Abraham Lincoln

Me and Molly

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