It’s straight from Mike Godwin, the author of Godwin’s Law — you know, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” He wants us all to know that that is not a proscription, just a description. When he coined it, it was intended as a joke, but it’s not funny anymore.

But when people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.

And that’s why Godwin’s Law isn’t violated — or confirmed — by the Biden reelection campaign’s criticism of Trump’s increasingly unsubtle messaging. We had the luxury of deriving humor from Hitler and Nazi comparisons when doing so was almost always hyperbole. It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore.

It used to be that you could use Godwin’s Law to accuse someone of hyperbole, but not in the case of Trump. He really is a bombastic racist who wants to take over the government and round up his critics in camps. He has said so!

The steady increase in Hitler comparisons during the Trump era is not a sign that my law has been repealed. Quite the opposite. Godwin’s Law is more like a law of thermodynamics than an act of Congress — so, not really repealable. And Trump’s express, self-conscious commitment to a franker form of hate-driven rhetoric probably counts as a special instance of the law: The longer a constitutional republic endures — with strong legal and constitutional limits on governmental power — the probability of a Hitler-like political actor pushing to diminish or erase those limits approaches 100 percent.

Will Trump succeed in being crowned “dictator for a day”? I hope not. But I choose to take Trump’s increasingly heedless transgressiveness — and, yes, I really do think he knows what he’s doing — as a positive development in one sense: More and more of us can see in his cynical rhetoric precisely the kind of dictator he aims to be.

Godwin is so confident that “more and more of us can see” how awful Trump is, but there is a troubling exception. The major media haven’t figured it out. Or they have, and are doing the bidding of their wealthy masters. Rather than calling out the wanna-be dictator, they’re instead doing their best to raise doubts about his opponent, Biden. I’m not a great fan of Biden, but he is a competent bureaucrat, and a far, far better person than Trump. This election ought to be sliding towards a total blowout, but I still see ridiculous headlines and op-eds that are desperately trying to inflate the contest into a nail-biter, and they might succeed.

Every article that whines that Biden is “too old” needs to recognize that yes, he is old and we’d prefer someone younger, but he’s a fit and active man, in contrast to the guy who is only four years younger, has to paint his face orange to look less corpse-like, and who thinks driving around a golf course on a cart is exercise. And is so bad at golf that he has to cheat.

Every article that blames Biden for the economy needs to be taught about relative comparisons. The economy is better than it was under the Republicans, as it always is. If the state of the economy isn’t good enough for you now, why do you still give the time of day to an incompetent crook who is guaranteed to make it worse?

Oh no, his poll numbers are down. Who cares, a year before the election? Poll numbers are going to be jittering up and down like the chart lines on a Trump lie detector test. They’re a game the media plays to drive up interest in their lazy reporting, and no one should care. This should not be a popularity contest, it should be a competence contest. But that isn’t entertaining enough.

Here’s what I want: the presidency should be an office filled by a civil servant, not a drama queen. It’s work. It’s a job. It’s well-rewarded, but the office holder should be recognized for how efficiently and smoothly they keep the country running, and that person should be eminently replaceable — they represent a set of policies that can be promoted by anyone with a history of training in government. Right now, the media are treating it as if it were a reality TV show, and are auditioning for someone sufficiently clownish, who can stir up conflict from week to week and keep the ratings high, and nothing could be more stimulating to the viewers than a needy, narcisstic, Hitler wanna-be. Stupid stereotypes and annoying characters are what made “Big Bang Theory” a commercial success, so let’s repeat that formula in our government.

Biden is far from perfect and, like anyone, has flaws, but at least he’s a sane grown-up, and that’s all I want for my president. You know the Republicans aren’t going to promote one of those, ever again.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Best pratfall ever.

Rudy Giuliani, who has spent the last several years hitting rock bottom and somehow keeps hitting rock bottom again and again and again, has been ordered to pay an astonishing $148 million in damages to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, the election workers he defamed in an effort to keep Donald Trump in power. The figure is more than three times the high-end amount that the women had been seeking, which the former mayor’s lawyer had warned earlier in the week would constitute a civil “death penalty” and “be the end of Mr. Giuliani.”

The jury came to the $148 million by awarding Freeman $16,171,000 for the damage Giuliani had caused to her reputation, awarding Moss $16,998,000 for the damage to her reputation, giving each woman $20 million for emotional distress, and adding $75 million in punitive damages.

He’s been disintegrating for years. Freeman & Moss shouldn’t count on getting the money they’re owed, because I bet Giuliani crumbles into dust and slime before he pays up.

A tragic story in six panels.

Some clarification is required. People did go back into the hospital later.

You may not want to read what they found.

[Read more…]

Regulation isn’t free. It costs money to compel for-profit companies to comply with the rules that benefit them in the long run, but cost in the short run. Conservatives don’t like that, and want to be free to ignore, for instance, conservation regulations (I know, it’s sad that conservatives don’t like conservation). Now the Supreme Court is getting into the act.

On New England fishing boats, cramming another person into a space that barely fits a half-dozen employees already is a big ask. But the National Marine Fisheries Service, a federal agency within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Commerce, requires that herring fisheries notify it before embarking on fishing trips, and on half of such trips, a federal inspector rides along. The inspector checks the crew’s compliance with federal rules about where they can fish, how many of which types of fish they can catch, and what kind of gear they can use in the process. The rule also requires that companies help foot the bill for its inspectors’ salaries—about $710 a day. Fishery owners say this reduces their annual returns by about 20 percent.

Last year, four fisheries challenging the rule asked the Supreme Court to put a stop to this practice. And last week, the Court granted certiorari in the case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The justices will hear oral argument sometime next fall.

You can trust the Supreme Court to do the right thing, right? Ha ha, no. The Supreme Court doesn’t believe in science.

The Supreme Court is one of the most scientifically illiterate bodies in government, but why don’t we let it take over federal regulation? That is the basic question behind Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, scheduled for argument next month at the Supreme Court, and it should scare you. To those only recently paying attention, the court’s disdain for the scientific consensus, as evidenced in cases like West Virginia v. EPA, may seem surprising. However, even before the installation of its conservative supermajority, the court had long viewed scientific evidence that runs contrary to its policy preferences with contempt.

Skepticism of an inconvenient scientific consensus is nothing new for the Supreme Court, particularly for the conservatives. In Stanford v. Kentucky, the 1989 case on the constitutionality of capital punishment for 16- and 17-year-olds, Justice William Brennan pointed out the conservative majority’s “evident but misplaced disdain” for scientific evidence, particularly that of the social sciences. In Lockhart v. McCree, Justice William Rehnquist took it upon himself to disregard 14 of 15 submitted peer-reviewed studies, stating that the only reliable study happened to be the one that supported his position, contrary to the scientific consensus. Chief Justice John Roberts has gone so far as to call certain fields “sociological gobbledygook.”

Conservatives’ dislike of science does not stop at social sciences, though. In recent years, conservative justices have made statements completely at odds with the scientific consensus, including saying that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and taking the position that a surface connection between navigable waters is necessary for pollution of wetlands to matter. There is a strong scientific consensus contrary to each of these contentions, but the conservative justices chose to disregard it in favor of their prior opinions.

This is what happens when you let theocrats pack the courts. The only laws they’ll accept are the ones they’ve invented for themselves. You may recall this notorious quote.

The aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” [The New York Times Magazine]

That’s the law of the land now.

I know it’s hard to believe, but George Santos has been expelled from congress.

By a vote of 311-114, the House voted to expel Santos, with 206 Democrats and 105 Republicans voting for expulsion, and two Democrats and 112 Republicans voting against it. This was just the sixth time in U.S. history that the House has expelled one of its own and the first time the House has done so without a criminal conviction, though Santos doesn’t dispute that he lied about most of his resume. (He does, however, dispute that he broke the law, despite the 23 criminal counts against him and substantial evidence in his indictment—as well as an Ethics report released two weeks ago—that detailed a number of alleged legal violations.)

As members voted on Santos’ removal, the serial fabulist was in and out of the chamber, at one point leaving, and then reappearing with his coat draped over his shoulders to watch the finally tally and shake hands with certain members.

It is revealing, though, that lying on your CV and misappropriating campaign funds can get you expelled, but enabling pedophiles and committing statutory rape, as people like Jordan and Gaetz have done, doesn’t even get you a slap on the wrist, and the ethical standards of the Supreme Court are a joke. It’s the money that matters.

News from the Florida GOP:

Christian Ziegler, Florida’s GOP chairman and husband of Sarasota County School Board member and Moms of Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, is under criminal investigation after a woman filed a complaint with the Sarasota Police Department alleging the longtime Republican official had raped her, according to a heavily redacted police report obtained by the Florida Trident.

The complaint was filed on October 4 and the alleged sexual battery occurred inside the woman’s home in Sarasota on October 2, according to the report. Among the few words that went unredacted in the report are “rape” and “sexual assault complaint.”

The woman, according to sources close to the investigation, alleged that she and both Zieglers had been involved in a longstanding consensual three-way sexual relationship prior to the incident. The incident under investigation by Sarasota police occurred when Christian Ziegler and the woman were alone at the woman’s house, without Bridget Ziegler present, the sources conveyed.

At least this time, everyone involved was a full-grown adult.

I’ve never been to Cambodia.

But this makes me want to desecrate a corpse.

Gotta remember, though, that he fucked up nations on every continent but Antarctica.

Oh no! The Republican party’s coffers are low in cash because people don’t want to donate to them!

The Republican National Committee disclosed that it had $9.1 million in cash on hand as of Oct. 30, the lowest amount for the RNC in any Federal Election Commission report since February 2015. That compares with about $20 million at the same point in the 2016 election cycle and about $61 million four years ago, when Trump was in the White House.

The Democratic National Committee reported having $17.7 million as of Oct. 30, almost twice as much as the Republican Party, with one year before the election.

This shouldn’t be surprising. The party is in disarray, they have an uninspiring field of candidates, and they’ve got Mr Polarizing Asshole himself, Donald Trump, waiting in the wings and making a lot of noise. If I were a Republican, I’d either be waiting cautiously with little confidence that the Republicans can win, or I’d be a frenetic lunatic throwing my money at some random bozo who promised to pander to my biases. It’s not a good situation for coherent campaigning, and the Republicans know it.

In an interview, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said that donors are currently more focused on giving to individual candidates during the presidential primary and that the party’s fortunes will improve once there’s a nominee.

“I think there’s more donors just fully committed to their candidate right now, saying I am all in, and once the nominee is set, I’ll be there. That’s what I hear more than anything. And they’re really solidly in the camps of their candidate, which is normal,” McDaniel said. “There’s nothing unusual about this, because they know that once their candidate gets in that we will merge and that we’ll be working together to win the White House.”

Yeah, right. Once they go eeny-meeny-miney-mo and pick Ramaswamy, or Desantis, or Haley, the donors will come flocking. None of those candidates are going to thrill the electorate. Maybe Trump would fire up some segment, but the MyPillow guy is pretty much broke and won’t be cutting them a big check.

Also, they have to worry that if it is Trump, he has a different plan about what to do with the money.

Good news! Changpeng Zhao, Sam Bankman-Fried’s brother-by-another-mother, just got slapped with a $50 million fine and was forced to resign, while his company, Binance, was fined $4.3 BILLION.

Court papers filed by the government say that Binance chose not to implement anti-money laundering measures, essentially allowing the firm to become a clearinghouse for all manner of illicit financial transactions. Between 2018 and 2022, that led to nearly $900 million in financial transactions that violated sanctions against Iran, the court papers charge.

In June, the Securities and Exchange Commission came after Binance and Coinbase, another crypto exchange, asking Binance to freeze all assets on its U.S. platform and accusing Coinbase of acting as a securities exchange, broker and clearing agency.

The plea deal is the latest victory in the Securities and Exchange Commissions’s effort to rid bad crypto actors from the United States, said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

Wait, how do you tell a bad crypto actor from a good one? Is it because the latter doesn’t exist?

Look at this guy. Phillip Fisher Jr.’s CV is like his destiny was predestined.

• Pastor

• Republican ward leader

• Trump supporter

• Campaigner for Mehmet Oz

• Faith coordinator for Moms for Liberty

Are you surprised by this little revelation?

Fisher was convicted in 2012 for aggravated sexual abuse of a 14-year-old boy, with the charging documents saying that Fisher, then 25, engaged and oral and anal sex with the boy.

It’s as if extremist right-wing groups are magnets for pedophiles.

He repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and called his conviction “one blip” in his background. He blamed it all on a dispute about his trying to break away from the LaRouche organization, and said the 14-year-old boy and his parents were part of that group.

“One blip.” He has a spotless record, except for that one time he put his penis in a 14 year old boy. Got it.

Besides, he was framed.

“It was a political situation that happened between me and Lyndon LaRouche,” Fisher said. “It was a member of his camp, his party, that made the accusation. They pushed it through. It was really a railroad job.”

Ew, ick. He was a LaRouchie? Unforgivable.

Moms for Liberty really needs to vet their volunteers more thoroughly.