Contrary to the noise from the tangerine traitor and his cult members, on one is clamoring to bring violent criminals back to America.  What those of us who truly love America are distressed about is the lack of due process.  As you consider the following, don't think about Venezuelan gang members.  Mentally, picture these "rules" (or lack thereof) being applied to you or someone you love.

In the middle of the night, over 260 Venezuelan immigrants are rounded up and detained by the government.  Using wartime powers when we are not at war, even as a hearing is underway to adjudicate their status, they are placed on planes and sent to an El Salvadoran prison.  The administration screams that these people are violent gang members who have committed heinous crimes in America, "the worst of the worst".  Only....without due process, how do we know? Are we just supposed to take the administration's word for it?

We don't know that any of these people were gang members.  We don't know that any of them were criminals.  We don't know that no American citizens were among them.  Hell, we don't even know that they were Venezuelan.

The administration has now admitted in court that many of those spirited off to a black hole prison (with no access to legal representation) were NOT gang members.  One of the deported had a tattoo of his mother; ICE represented that as a gang tattoo.  Are we just rounding up anyone with tattoos now?  And the administration has now admitted in court that many of those deported had committed no crime.  But the administration responds that they are confident that they WOULD have committed crimes.  Based on what?  "Well, we're certainly not going to share that intelligence with you."  Ah, "thought crimes".  I believe I read about those in Orwell's 1984.

So if this is allowed to stand, none of us is safe.  One man and his agents can round you up in the middle of the night and disappear you to a black hole prison in another country without ever having to justify themselves.  You had a tattoo, or you were the wrong nationality, or you said something that they didn't like in a Facebook post, or we merely THOUGHT that you MIGHT commit a crime at some future date.  And you're just...gone...forever...poof.  This is not America.

There is a reason the Constitution guarantees every "PERSON" the right of due process (not just every citizen).  Because if they can do it to anyone, they can do it to you.

It's well known that Trump has been unhappy that his deportation numbers are lower than Biden's.  So he put on a show.  If you saw the film they produced for the news (complete with music), you should be smart enough to recognize a propaganda film when you see one.  And Trump knows that most people aren't going to actually look into this or think about it much.  They're just going to hear "worst of the worst" and that some "lowly" judge is trying to dictate foreign policy to the president and put murderers and rapists back on our streets.  Impeach the judges!

The judges in question are simply doing their jobs--protecting YOUR rights by upholding the law and the Constitution.  If a president can waive away the Constitution on no more than a pretext and never have to disclose any actual evidence to back it up...then there's a pretext waiting for you, my friend.  I'm sure the propaganda film will be glorious.

And, make no mistake, federal district court judges do have the right to stop a president and his minions from illegal and unconstitutional acts.  Ask George Bush or Barack Obama or Joe Biden.  And a president does not have the right to ignore the orders of a federal district court judge.  That's how our system works, you see.  We have three CO-EQUAL branches of government.  Congress (and only Congress) writes the laws, the president ensures that those laws are carried out AS WRITTEN, and the judiciary decides what the law is.  There's an appeals process if you disagree with a lower court's ruling.  If anything, the courts thus far have been TOO deferential to Trump.

Conservatives have, since well before Trump, pushed the theory of the "unitary executive".  The logic goes that there are over 500 people in Congress and some 1700 federal judges, but only ONE president.  Based on that, they say, the president is the ultimate authority.  The corollary being that no one can question the authority of the president.  Like most conservative theories, it almost makes sense...if you don't actually think about it.  If that were true, then we'd have a king or a dictator.  The theory fails because it is inconsistent with the plain language of the Constitution.  The founding fathers made Congress Article One.  The president is merely a number two, whose domestic "powers" are to do whatever Congress tells him to do.  He has more powers in foreign policy.  But, even there, Congress and the courts operate as a check.
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I'm sure there are many who think, "Well, I'm not a Venezuelan gang member.  This will never happen to me."  Throughout the campaign and since, I have encouraged Trump supporters to read Martin Niemoller's famous quote...and to keep reading it until it sinks in.  "...and then they came for me".  Without due process we are, all of us, fucked.  They will, eventually, come for you, too.  That's how countries with unitary executives (i.e. dictators) work.

I watch a fair bit of news on the telly, but I saw no reporting on this recent Supreme Court decision...which signals that Labor is about to have every right and protection we ever fought and died for stripped from us by this current rogue, fascist Supreme Court.  Fortunately, it was reported extensively online.

As background, the Supreme Court held in 1959 (San Diego Building Trades Council v. Garmon) that the NLRB gets first crack at determining whether or not a job action or strike is legally protected under the National Labor Relations Act BEFORE any court action can be taken.  The courts are supposed to take a “jurisdictional hiatus” while the NLRB makes its determination.  If the NLRB determines that the action is legally protected, that’s the end of the matter.  If they determine it is not, then the business can pursue its grievance in court.  The reason for this is simple.  The members of the NLRB are trained in the specialized area of labor disputes.  They adjudicate thousands of cases a year while the judiciary hears only a few.  The NLRB has the expertise and experience in the field while the judiciary does not.

In the case before this Court, Glacier Northwest v. Teamsters, contract negotiations had broken down in 2017 after Glacier refused to provide information to the Teamsters they were legally required to provide.  The Teamsters called a strike.  Glacier is a ready-mix concrete company and, at the time the strike was called, there were 16 trucks that had been loaded with concrete not yet delivered.  The company, which had to have known the strike could come at any moment, had made no contingency plans.  So, although the striking drivers were careful to leave the mixing drums rotating--thus ensuring that no damage would come to the trucks--the concrete, itself, was ruined.

Glacier sued the Teamsters and, the NLRB having made a preliminary finding that the action was “arguably protected”, the lower court declined to hear the case, citing the 1959 Supreme Court precedent in Garmon.

But the fascist right wing of this Supreme Court has never met a precedent they weren’t willing to rip to shreds in their fervor to return to days when employers could do whatever the fuck they want while workers beg for scraps and starve.  Writing for the majority, Amy Coney Barrett (arguably the LEAST qualified person ever nominated to the high Court) chastised the union for damaging both the concrete and the trucks (we’ve already explained that they took care NOT to damage the trucks, but the right will lie their asses off about anything and everything) and, therefore, this action was NOT protected under the NLRA and Glacier’s suit may proceed.  Oh, she cries, the financial damage potentially done to the employer.  Oh, the humanity.  Under the Court’s own precedent in Garmon, this was NOT the Supreme Court’s call to make...not until the NLRB has officially made their final ruling on the matter.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissent.  "Workers are not indentured servants,” she wrote, "bound to continue laboring until any planned work stoppage would be as painless as possible for their masters. They are employees whose collective and peaceful decision to withhold their labor is protected by the [National Labor Relations Act] even if economic injury results.”  Jackson continued, “it is indisputable that workers have a statutory right to strike despite the fact that exercising that right risks economic harm to employers,” adding, “the threat of economic harm posed by the right to strike is a feature, not a bug, of the NLRA.  Unions leverage a strike’s economic harm (or the threat of it) into bargaining power, and then wield that power to demand improvement of employees’ wages and working conditions.”

No doubt, fans of the political hack portion of the Court will point to the fact that this decision was 8-1.  But the votes of Kagan and Sotomayor were strategic.  Three justices--Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch--wanted to go much further and essentially put an end to the NLRB once and for all.  It was much more likely that two of the remaining conservatives would have sided with them than with the liberals on the Court, if the liberals did not sign on with the three who favored just gutting precedent “a little” rather than tossing it out entirely.  That won’t save us, of course, unless we expand the Court in the very near future; Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch let it be known that they want the case back, should the decision at the lower court favor the workers rather than the business.  Like Trump or any other authoritarian power, they believe a result is only legitimate if its the one they want. 

And of course we all need to understand why this is so...because no individual, nor even union, can shower these corrupt right wing justices with lavish vacations and trips on yachts and private planes, nor purchase real estate for their relatives or pay college tuition for their kids.  Only the obscenely wealthy can do those things.  The people of this country are little more than lint in their pockets or gum on the bottom of their shoes.  Understand that these criminals despise you and I.  We just aren’t rich enough to matter to them.

"You cannot teach about an abomination in polite terms. Monstrous acts deprived of monstrous language will always, always fail to relay the depravity of these events. It has to be upsetting. Has to be unsavory. Has to be ghastly. Or it’s a lie."--Mark Sumner, author and journalist

The Tennessee school board voted unanimously, earlier this month, to remove the graphic novel "Maus" from the curriculum and school library.  The Pulitzer Prize winning book, drawn from the author's own life, tells the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of a survivor and his son who is attempting to understand it all.  Germans in the book are depicted as cats, while Jews are depicted as mice.

The Tennessee school board says they banned the book based on profanity and nudity.  The language they cited was the use of the phrase "God damn".  Seriously, you will hear far worse than that on any TV show, today.  And, even in my era, kids knew all the dirty words by the time they hit First Grade.  As for the nudity...  Remember, Jews in "Maus" are depicted as mice.  We're talking about an image of a naked mouse, for Pete's sake.  The Tennessee school board counters that they found the image of the naked mouse gratuitous.  But both the "GD" and the naked mouse have to do with the suicide of the author's mother.  I find nothing gratuitous there.

In Texas, over 200 books have been removed from the shelves "pending review".  And Texas teachers have been instructed that they must teach "both sides" of the Holocaust.  There are NOT two sides to the Holocaust.  In Indiana, a bill is pending that would forbid teachers from taking a side or giving any value judgements on the Holocaust.  If we can't agree that the genocide of over 6 million people is a bad thing, then we're already lost as a society.  Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with protecting children and will not stop at school libraries.  The book banners are already attacking public libraries and the book stores will be next, then the Internets.

​We know what this is really all about, of course.  The same thing book banning and burning has always been about.  When knowledge and ideas are deemed by the powerful "too dangerous" for the public at large, what they really are saying is that it is too dangerous to THEM and THEIR hold on power.  Ideas and information in the hands of the people are a far more powerful weapon against an authoritarian government than any gun or bomb.

"When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a Bible"--unknown, but often falsely attributed to Sinclair Lewis

"When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled 'made in Germany'; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, 'Americanism.'"--Halford E. Luccock

​Fascism is here.  It's home is the Republican Party.  They are the party that is banning and burning books.  They are the party that is trying (and succeeding) to take away rights Americans have enjoyed for a generation or more.  They are the party that promotes the theory of the "Master Race".  They are the party that preaches violence as an acceptable solution to any disagreement you may have with government.  They are the party of The Big Lie, "alternative facts", and endless propaganda.  They are the party that has given up any pretense of believing in democracy.  And they persuade their audience through time-honored authoritarian methods of distraction and misdirection.  Do you think it's just a coincidence that the right is seemingly flipping out over the sex appeal of cartoon candy at a time when the economy is going gangbusters and the Nazis are banning books?  Find a phony grievance, make it much much bigger, and then blame it all on some group of "the other"--a disfavored minority.  When someone--anyone--tells you, "I alone can fix it", you should run as fast as you can in the other direction.  When someone tries to take away voting rights, you should throw them to the curb.  When someone or some group starts banning books and any attempt to teach about racism and the Holocaust, you should understand that fascism is here, now, today.  Be prepared to stand your ground and fight against it, lest we become what hundreds of thousands of our forefathers died to defeat.