With the ouster of George Santos and the abrupt resignation of ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, congressional Republicans have begun dropping like flies off Mike Pence’s head. In fact, Mike Pence himself recently dropped like a fly off Mike Pence’s head […] In other words, when it comes to the state of the GOP these days, it’s dead flies and Pence heads all the way down. And, frankly, that’s a charitable appraisal.
So will the semi-sentient suzerains of the Sunday shows see it? Or will they find some way to argue that spiraling Republican dysfunction and the party’s abject obeisance to a dyspeptic, four-times-indicted yam golem who can’t stop complimenting Adolf Hitler is somehow bad for Joe Biden?
We’ll see now, won’t we? And you won’t have to wait very long. Let’s get this party started!
Republicans’ fake impeachment effort received a boost this week with the seismic revelation that President Biden’s son repaid his dad—in three increasingly suspicious $1,380 monthly installments—the money he’d borrowed to buy a Ford Raptor truck. Which should be a signal to concerned Americans that either Biden isn’t corrupt at all or is really bad at this corruption stuff.
I’m skeptical that there’s anything here at all, because they’ve been looking for years and still have bupkis. Meanwhile, over that same period, Donald Trump was passing secret government documents around like all-you-can-eat buffet fliers in Vegas—when he wasn’t trying, and failing, to defend himself against rape accusations.
But that’s the genius of Biden’s Chinese money-laundering scheme. It’s a magnificent, under-the-radar long con. Step 1: Wait for your son to get in bed with the Chinese Communist Party. Step 2: When they finally have their hooks in him, loan that same son nearly $4,200 to buy a truck. (And this part is key: Make sure you do it while you hold no public office.) Step 3: Open a secret bank account in the Caymans and deposit that ill-gotten $4,200 windfall, where it will accrue 0.46% interest for the next decade until you’re ready to retire. Step 4: Become president. Step 5: Hand Taiwan to China. (This one is still pending. Biden might have to wait until his second term, because House Oversight Chair Jim Comer is fully onto him now.)
Of course, as we learned this week, even Fox News is starting to wonder where the fire—or the smoke, for that matter—is.
Fox reporter Peter Doocy […] was forced to admit on Friday that Republicans have come up empty-headed again. [tweet and video at the link: "The House Oversight Committee has been at this for years, and they have so far not been able to provide any concrete evidence that Joe Biden personally profited from his son Hunter's overseas business."]
But hey, they’re not going to give up, no matter how big a waste of time this is. Because wasting time is what the American people sent Republicans to Congress to do.
Of course, none of that sits well with Ian Sams, the White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations, who joined Jonathan Capehart on the “Saturday/Sunday Show.” [tweet and video at the link]
CAPEHART: “The White House said the president’s going to push back very, very hard. How? What’s that going to look like?”
SAMS: “Well, you see things like, you showed the clip of Peter Doocy, even Fox News hosts, Fox News anchors are expressing skepticism about this. And it’s because we’re continuing to push the facts out every single day. When they make allegations that turn out to be examples of the president being a good dad or a good family member as somehow nefarious evidence of wrongdoing, we’re going to point out the facts, immediately and swiftly. […] they’re focusing on these political stunts to try to get themselves on Newsmax and talk about these things in the right-wing media ecosystem, even though they’re baseless and false.
[…] when you see the president every day, you see him talking about things like Ukraine aid, and the need to make sure that they have the resources to push back on Putin. You see him talking about the need to get funding to the WIC program, women and infants, low income, who need food as we head into winter. And these are things that the House needs to pass, they need to pass these funding supplementals, and they refuse to do it. And it’s only going to get more intense over the next month.
As you mentioned earlier in the show, they’re moving to a government shutdown in just a few weeks, and they’re going to leave town for the holidays without doing anything to avoid it, while voting on an impeachment inquiry that has no basis in fact and reality.”
[…] Babies can starve and Ukraine can kick rocks, so long as President Biden is adequately punished for unconditionally loving his son. It’s the Republican way.
Kristen Welker can both-sides anything, can’t she? […] Welker interviewed Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy on “Meet the Press,” and she was super-curious what he thought about private citizen Hunter Biden’s business activities. [tweet and video at the link]
WELKER: “Mitt Romney was here and he expressed outrage over the broader issue of Hunter Biden profiting off of his last name. Do you think, Senator, that it is inappropriate for a politician’s family member to profit off of their last name?”
MURPHY: “I do—in any case. And, frankly, when I look at the Trump family, it seems that they have made an industry out of profiting off of Donald Trump’s presidency. In fact, as soon as Donald Trump was out of the White House, what did his son-in-law do? Go and raise billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia. And so I think the American public are going to be very concerned about what has happened inside the Trump family since Donald Trump left the White House.”
WELKER: “Senator, respectfully, I asked you about the Biden family. Hunter Biden—do you think it’s inappropriate that he has apparently profited off his last name, and could that hurt the president’s reelection chances?”
MURPHY: “I think Hunter Biden is going to be held accountable in court for any violations of the law that he’s committed, and the American public are going to get a chance to watch that play out in real time. But what I’m absolutely certain of is that the American public are going to see a distinct contrast between Joe Biden and Donald Trump and are not going to be interested in a Trump presidency that’s going to criminalize abortion, that’s going to give more handouts to billionaires and the wealthy. They’re going to see President Biden, who has invested in the middle class, who’s helped this economy recover. That will be the contrast that will matter to the American people.”
Okay, here’s the clear difference between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats think the rule of law should apply to everyone, and if Hunter Biden is legitimately guilty of something, he should face the consequences. And so Murphy answered in that vein, while also pointing out that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner—who actually worked in the White House, unlike Hunter Biden—got $2 billion from the Saudis after Trump was expectorated from the Oval Office. And Trump himself profited handsomely off his presidency—and did so out in the open—for four years.
So after Murphy answered that, yes, it was inappropriate for Hunter Biden to profit off his last name, maybe Welker should have moved on to more important matters instead of, say, asking him again.
But hey, we have to be fair, don’t we? Maybe she’ll have Kushner on next week and ask him what Prince Bone Saws bought with his 2 bill. Because if it was a Ford Raptor, Little Lord Fauntleroy will be well and truly fucked.
Sen. J.D. Vance was on CNN’s “State of the Union” pretending to be a man of the people […]
VANCE: “I want to protect as many unborn babies as possible. I also think we have to win the trust back of the American people. And one of the ways to do that is to be the truly pro-family party—I think we are, we’ve got to carry that message forward and actually enact some public policies to that effect.”
TAPPER: “Is birth control part of that policy? Empowering women to be able to make those decisions before they get pregnant?”
VANCE: “Obviously people need to be able to make those decisions. I don’t think I know any Republican—at least not a Republican with a brain—that’s trying to take those rights away from people. But I think it goes deeper than that.”
TAPPER: “I mean, I could provide a list for you if you want.”
VANCE: “Well, okay, not anybody I talk to, Jake. But look, I think the more important question is—I talk to a lot of people, a lot of young families who want to have babies. They can’t afford mortgages, they’re terrified about health care expenses. We’ve got to answer those questions for people. We’ve got to have a role to play, because, look, we have a real problem in this country. Not enough Americans families that want to have children are able to do it. That’s how you destroy a nation.”
Well it’s nice to know that Vance thinks the Republican speaker of the House is brainless, because that dude’s done his darndest to keep people from accessing birth control. In fact, last year, 195 House Republicans voted against the Right to Contraception Act, which passed only because all 220 Democrats were onboard.
Of course, another way you destroy a nation—aside from kowtowing to a Hitler-stanning documents thief […]—is refusing to let people immigrate here because they’re brown. After all, if Vance were really interested in keeping this nation of immigrants prosperous and vital, he’d propose a viable immigration reform plan. But that will never happen. Not in this climate. Which naturally puts an undue burden on American citizens’ often-unwilling uteri. […]
Al Gore joined Tapper on “State of the Union,” where he was asked about Trump’s totally-not-secret plans for authoritarian rule.
TAPPER: “It does look like the 2024 election will come down to President Biden versus former President Trump. And I’m wondering what you think the world would look like under President Trump being reelected, which is certainly a possibility, not only when it comes to the climate but also when it comes to democracy.”
GORE: “Well, I saw the other day where Trump pledged to be a dictator on day one, and you’ve got to wonder what it will take for people to believe him when he tells us who he is. And, you know, the solution to political despair is political action, and for those in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party and independents who love American democracy and who want to preserve our capacity to govern ourselves and solve our problems, now’s the time to get active.”
Yes. Yes, it is. Thanks for the reminder, Mr. Vice President. […] We’ve got our work cut out for us going into 2024, so let’s all keep our eye on the ball. And please—no voting for Pat Buchanan this time around. That was a frickin’ disaster.
But wait! There’s more!
– Sen. Mitt Romney says there is “no question that [Trump] has authoritarian rulings and interests and notions which he will try to impose.” (“Meet the Press”)
– Kevin McCarthy gives his best advice to new Speaker Mike Johnson: “Do not govern in the idea that you’re afraid somebody’s going to make a motion to vacate.” (“Face the Nation”)
– Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young says dictators around the world are watching what Congress does with respect to Ukraine: “What happens if Putin marches through Ukraine? What’s next? NATO countries.” (“Face the Nation”)
– Secretary of State Antony Blinken says he’s “very concerned” about aid for Ukraine drying up as winter nears. (ABC’s “This Week”)
The Ukrainian Army has formally acknowledged something rumored for months: they are forming five new brigades—the 150th, 151st, 152nd, 153rd, and 154th Mechanized Infantry brigades. Five additional mechanized brigades are rumored to be within months of activation.
Even five brigades represent approximately a 5% expansion of the Ukrainian Army, thus 5-10 new brigades represent a significant increase in combat strength for Ukraine—provided sufficient trained soldiers, officers, and equipment can be provided.
Building off the successful model used to form the 82nd Air Assault Brigade, Ukraine is drawing experienced junior officers and non-commissioned officers for the new brigades. Meanwhile, the rank-and-file soldiers forming the bulk of the brigade are primarily conscripts who have undergone a 4-6 month training program.
The effort to replace and grow the Ukrainian army amidst thousands of casualties has been a joint effort by many of its allies. The European Union joint training program is on pace to deliver its 35,000th trained soldier by the end of 2023. The United Kingdom’s Operation Interflex is on pace to have trained over 37,000 in 2023, and the United States has trained 19,000 soldiers and 3,100 officers. In total, 94,000 Ukrainians were trained by its allies. And of course, Ukraine is churning out thousands of its own soldiers from domestic training programs.
Allied training efforts are not without their critiques. Many Ukrainian soldiers are frustrated that some basic knowledge required for survival on the front lines has been missing from their training, such as how to best survive drones. Others complain that the tactics they learn assume air superiority that does not exist for Ukraine, including how to call for mass air strikes or plentiful precision munitions.
Ukraine seemingly intends to mitigate some of those challenges by assigning battle-hardened junior and non-commissioned officers to lead the recruits. Any training deficiencies and unrealistic expectations among fresh lieutenants and privates new to the battlefield can be corrected by veteran sergeants, senior lieutenants, and captains.
Keeping these precious soldiers safe, secure, and alive while combat-effective is massively important.
Unfortunately, Pro-Russian Republican efforts to block aid to Ukraine, whose success Russia celebrated with a salvo of missiles aimed at Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, is making that task that much harder.
Last week, I discussed how armored vehicles capable of delivering assault infantry to their assembly points were a crucial asset in modern warfare.
Armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles can carry soldiers directly to the front line, protecting them from artillery shrapnel and machine gun fire, without physically and mentally exhausting them before the assault even begins.
There are two types of armored vehicles infantry rely on, which separates modern heavy infantry from modern light infantry units.
Light infantry go into battle either on foot (like many Russian units around Avdiivka), or riding on Armored Personnel Carriers (APC) like the ubiquitous Cold War era American M113 APC. [Photo at the link]
Armored against only shrapnel, and equipped only with a heavy machine gun, these armored vehicles are often referred to as “battle taxis.” They are primarily for transport, not front-line fighting. The infantry will advance on foot for the final 1.5~2 kilometers to attack their objective.
Ukraine frequently also uses Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles like the MaxxPro armored truck in this role. [Photo at the link]
Heavy infantry units use Infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs). Unlike the lightly armored APCs, IFVs like the American-made M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle feature heavy armor and a powerful 25mm autocannon. [photo at the link]
For example, a Bradley can do this. [Video at the link]
The Bradley’s 25mm autocannon fires up to 500 rounds of anti-armor or anti-personnel incendiary high explosive shells per minute. This autocannon can quickly tear up anything less armored than a main battle tank, as well as decimate an exposed platoon of Russian infantry within seconds from over a mile away.
But just as importantly, if not more so, the Bradley’s heavy armor protects its crew and passengers from enemy attacks, including direct hits from enemy auto cannons, landmines, and anti-tank missiles. In one case, Ukrainian soldiers marveled that they came out unharmed after their Bradley was first struck an anti-tank mine, then struck by an anti-tank missile. They would’ve been dead had they been riding in a Soviet IFV like the BMP1. [photo at the link]
Nearly 60 years after its introduction, the once innovative Soviet BMP1 remains in ubiquitous service in the Ukrainian and (increasingly) the Russian armies, as the latter runs out of more modern variants.
Upgraded BMP1s dominated Ukraine’s army at the start of the Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, and it received nearly 300 more primarily from its Eastern European allies early in the war. Since then, Ukraine has received nearly 700 more modern Western IFVs like German Marders, American Strykers and Bradleys, Polish Rosomak Wolverines, as well as the Swedish CV90.
The BMP1 is inferior to more modern Western IFVs in almost every way. For example, while the Bradley’s autocannon can spit 500 rounds per minute up to 2,200 meters away with deadly accuracy, the original BMP1’s main gun can fire 8 rounds per minute at a maximum range of 800m-1,000 meters. Upgraded cannons can fire a bit farther, but that doesn’t solve the vehicle’s biggest problem—simply put, if the BMP1 gets hit “everyone dies.” Even a .50-caliber heavy machine gun can penetrate the frontal armor of the BMP1.
While many Ukrainians continue riding in those death traps, the tragedy is that this need not be so. The United States has over 4,500 Bradley fighting vehicles in storage, most of them kept in a near combat-ready state. The contracts for prototypes for testing and operation of the replacement for the Bradley, the XM30, have already been awarded and should be in service within 5-6 years, with an aim towards replacing the Bradley completely by 2030.
What’s more, the US Army has already designated all but a few hundred Bradleys in storage to be incapable of being used in a frontline combat role because of factors that don’t apply to Ukraine’s army. For example, the Army requires its front-line IFV’s to be quipped with the Israeli Trophy APS system, designed to shoot down incoming anti-tank missiles. Only the newest Bradley M2A4 variants have the power components necessary to operate the Trophy APS. Most of the Bradleys currently in storage are the M2A2 or older models with insufficient power supply.
Ukraine will happily take those non-compliant Bradleys, saving them from fire sales or the scrap heap.
A Ukrainian mechanized infantry brigade generally operates around 100 IFVs and 30 tanks. However, additional spare vehicles are necessary to account for combat losses, damaged vehicles, and simple mechanical repairs. Ukraine received around 180 Bradleys, which has proved enough to operate the 47th Mechanized Brigade for an extended period.
Assuming that Ukraine needs around 180 Bradleys per Mechanized Brigade, The US could theoretically equip all five new Ukrainian Mechanized Brigades with just 900 Bradleys. Ten mechanized brigades would require 1,800 Bradleys, just half the Bradleys in US storage.
A new M2A2 Bradley costs around $3.1M. Nine-hundred Bradleys would be just over $2.7B. Even 1,800 Bradleys would cost under $5.6B—only a fraction of the $61B aid package proposed by President Biden, and that’s not accounting for depreciation.
This is what’s at stake with the fight over Ukraine aid. Ukrainian troops can ride into battle “protected” by the soda-can-thin armor of BMP1 IFVs, or they can storm Russian positions better protected in hundreds, if not thousands of Bradleys that the US Army doesn’t even want. [photo of American surplus armored vehicles]
This may sound harsh, but IMO you can always go back later to fight the border battles. Once Ukraine goes under, its gone.
————————
Have the pentagon declare a lot of these “surplus armored vehicles” scrap metal. Then put out a call for bids to deliver this….er….scrap metal to Ukraine for ‘recycling’. Nice work around…..😁
————————-
Heck, just use lend/lease and declare them to have a negative value, which nicely offsets any delivery costs.
Riahi Sunak’s grip on power is increasingly shaky. It is unlikely that he will.be forced out if he loses Tuesday’s vote in parliament, but the risk is certainly non-zero.
Buy popcorn.
In the past, an 80 year old Rabbi was struck with an iron crowbar wielded by rabid settlers trying to take over the Palestinian olive farm. Despite the risks, the Rabbis have continued to shield the Palestinians on the farms from harm. This story restores one’s faith in humanity and tells us that it is the rulers that are instigating communal violence and that the solution to the problem can be found among the common people who are adversely affected. – Lynna, OM@490 quoting the Daily Telegraph quoting Lloyd Austin
Good for the rabbis, but Austin’s claim is nonsense: the settlers they are helping the Palestinian farmers against are not “rulers”: they are either politicial/religious zealots determined to drive Palestinians out of “Judea and Samaria”, or opportunists looking to steal land for personal advantage.
KGsays
Has anyone heard from SC? I haven’t seen anything from her for a while.
Dr. Steven Corder didn’t think his job treating people addicted to fentanyl in Wheeling, West Virginia, could get any harder, but then he began encountering patients who were addicted to both fentanyl and a second drug with its own destructive power — the livestock tranquilizer xylazine.
“Opioid withdrawal is hard enough,” Corder said. But his usual tools, he lamented, “couldn’t touch the withdrawal from xylazine.”
Xylazine is now present in one out of every nine overdose deaths nationwide involving illicit fentanyl, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…
After six months of sharing his shtick via Twitter (now known as X), Fox News vet Tucker Carlson is ready to launch his own eponymous streaming platform.
“It’s time to build an alternative to legacy media, and you can help us do it,” the sign-up page for TCN, Tucker Carlson Network, tells prospective members. “It’s time they stopped hiding the truth from you. We’ll expose them together.” …
Former European Council President Donald Tusk is expected to be appointed prime minister of Poland on Monday, signalling a return to the European mainstream after eight years of nationalist rule that critics say saw a backsliding in democracy…
The U.S. Supreme Court Monday declined to hear a case challenging Washington state’s ban on conversion therapy of minors. In doing so, the court left standing a lower court decision that upheld the state’s ban on a therapy that the American Medical Association says “is not based on medical and scientific evidence.”
The Washington passed law, enacted in 2018, allows the state to revoke the licenses of therapists who try to change a minor’s sexual orientation. Brian Tingley, a family counselor and advocate for conversion therapy, challenged the law in court, represented by the anti-LGBTQ Alliance Defending Freedom. He claimed that the law violates his First Amendment right to free speech.
Two lower courts upheld the law.
The court’s decision not to hear the case Monday included no reasons, as is standard when it denies a case. But, Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas dissented from the order, and would have heard the case.
In his dissent, Thomas wrote, “Although the Court declines to take this particular case, I have no doubt that the issue it presents will come before the Court again. When it does, the Court should do what it should have done here,” take the case “to consider what the First Amendment requires.”
Spineless cult follower demonstrates his spinelessness:
Despite the fact that Trump abandoned former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy when the outgoing congressman needed him, McCarthy has now endorsed the former president and opened the door to serving in a possible Cabinet role.
Summarized by Steve Benen from an Associated Press report.
The Republican Party aligns itself with the January 6 rioters:
It was nearly a week ago when House Speaker Mike Johnson explained at a Capitol Hill press conference why, as his office releases security footage from Jan. 6, officials are blurring faces. “We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” the Louisiana Republican told reporters.
In his latest column, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank summarized the significance of the GOP leader’s position:
It was as clear a statement as there could be on where the new speaker’s allegiance lies: protecting those who sacked the Capitol from being brought to justice for their crimes. Johnson (La.) was openly siding with the insurrectionists and against the United States government he swore an oath to defend. … After all the yammering from the right about transparency, Johnson is manipulating the footage — not to protect the Capitol’s security but to protect the attackers.
But as unsettling as the House speaker’s position was, it’s worth appreciating the degree to which Johnson has plenty of company within his party. Consider some of what we’ve seen over the last week or so:
Dec. 2: On the campaign trail in Iowa, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis complained that Donald Trump didn’t do more to “help the people that got caught up in the Capitol stuff that, he told to go there.”
Dec. 5: Johnson said he wants to protect Jan. 6 participants from law enforcement.
Dec. 5: House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan announced an investigation into whether the bipartisan Jan. 6 committee “cooperated” with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. (It’s still not clear why it would matter if the select panel cooperated with law enforcement.)
Dec. 6: GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy asked rhetorically at a primary debate, “Why am I the only person on this stage, at least, who can say that Jan. 6 now does look like it was an inside job?”
Dec. 7: Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, who’s helping lead an investigation into the Jan. 6 investigation, told a conservative media outlet that the blurring of faces in Jan. 6 footage is meant to protect those who marched on the Capitol from “insurrection hunters.”
These developments unfolded over the course of five days. If we go back just a little further, on Nov. 30, Donald Trump apparently thought it’d be a good idea to amplify a message calling for the prosecution of Capitol Police officers who helped protect our seat of government during the Jan. 6 violence.
A week earlier, Republican Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana lent his support to the idea that the FBI used “ghost buses” as part of a secret plot to orchestrate the assault on the Capitol.
It seemed unlikely that the Republican Party’s line on Jan. 6 would take a turn for the worse. Then last week happened.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary:
Today, we got more good economic news, as you all have seen, with 199,000 jobs created last month for a total of 14.1 million created under President Biden. Unemployment fell to 3.7% and has been under 4% for 22 months in a row, the longest stretch in 54 years. The last time unemployment was this low for this long — this is a fun fact — Diana Ross topped the charts and the Apollo program was visiting the moon. We have more work to do. Prices are still too high. But we are making progress.
[…] I’m a fan of putting economic data in historical context. Earlier this year, for example, the unemployment rate reached 3.4% — the lowest since May 1969. (We hadn’t yet landed on the moon and Woodstock was still a few months away.)
With this in mind, it seemed worth taking a closer look at the White House’s latest boast. When was the last time the jobless rate in the United States fell below 4% and stayed there for 22 consecutive months? As it turns out, Jean-Pierre was correct.
The unemployment rate dropped below 4% in November 1967 — the fourth year of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency — and stayed there for 27 months.
Americans haven’t seen a comparable stretch until now: The jobless rate fell below 4% early last year, and it’s remained below that threshold since.
As for the White House’s assertion that the economy has created 14.1 million job under President Joe Biden, observant readers might notice that in my post on Friday, I noted that the economy has created roughly 14.6 million jobs since January 2021 — which incidentally, is more than double the combined total of Donald Trump’s first three years in office.
But which is correct? Is it 14.1 million or 14.6 million? The truth is, both numbers are accurate: In January 2021 — the month of Biden’s inauguration — the economy added nearly a half-million jobs. Jean-Pierre, erring on the side of caution, is starting the clock for Biden’s record in February 2021, not January 2021.
Either way, there’s a reason Republicans generally have no interest in talking about the U.S. job market: Numbers like these are impressive on a historic scale.
Trump’s campaign posted a video of NBC News Senior Capitol Hill correspondent Garrett Haake supposedly making disparaging comments about Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. That’s not good. Trump’s campaign is posting fake news.
[…] on Sunday evening, Trump announced he would not be taking the stand with a pair of lengthy all-caps posts on his Truth Social platform. […]
In these posts:
Trump defended himself with the testimony of the expert witness he paid $900,000 to say good things about him
Complained about a lack of jury when his attorneys never requested a jury
Repeated lies that the court had valued Mar-a-Lago at $18 million, which never happened
Repeated his claim that he won in the appeals court, which also did not happen.
Trump also accused President Joe Biden of using the trial as election interference, even though Biden has nothing to do with this trial. […]
Trump concludes that he has “nothing more to say.” America only wishes that were true.
Engoron has already concluded that Trump, his sons, and his company committed fraud in manipulating the value of their properties. This phase of the trial is only about determining the penalty. Trump faces up to $250 million in fines and potential sanctions against doing further business in New York state.
The trial is expected to end on Tuesday with final statements from the prosecution and defense. Engoron will then consider all evidence presented before determining the penalties.
Reminder: a “sir story” is a story Donald Trump tells that is an obvious lie, and one of the primary reasons it’s obvious is that the imaginary friends in these stories all call him “sir” and give him respect he desperately craves but isn’t worthy of. Often in these stories big strong men, military men, truckers, police officers — macho, macho men, the types of men Donald Trump would like to be — break down crying in front of him.
Out of all the pathetic ways Trump compensates for all the ways he’s deficient, these are the oversized tires on his F350. And he told a doozy of one this weekend.
At the New York Young Republicans Club — what an embarrassing venue — Trump spun the tale: [video at the link]
“A general, who’s a fantastic general, actually said to me, ‘Sir, I’ve been on the battlefield. Men have gone down on my left and on my right. I stood on hills where soldiers were killed. But I believe the bravest thing I’ve ever seen was the night you went on to that stage with Hillary Clinton, after what happened. And then that woman asked you the first question about it.’ And I said, locker room talk! It’s locker talk! What the hell?! What are you talking … Locker room talk!”
Oh man, that fake “sir” story has everything.
– The general is a fantastic general. He’s not a weak and sad general, or the kind Trump accuses of treason, like Mark Milley.
– The fantastic general has war stories about people dying in battle. Reminder: Trump thinks troops who have died for America are suckers.
– The fake general in Trump’s story apparently does too, because he says the bravest thing he’s EVER seen was when Trump went on stage after the [P-word] tape and THAT WOMAN asked him about it. The bravest!
No one hits like Gaston, matches wits like Gaston, grabs ‘em by the [P-word] and takes ‘em furniture shopping like Gaston …
– What the hell? Locker room talk!
Good god. Again, we know it’s a fake story because in the first sentence, somebody called him “sir.” It’s a shame he won’t tell these fantasies to a therapist.
Unsurprisingly, considering the deterioration of his brain, Trump is confused about the historical facts he cites in the story he made up. As JoeMyGod notes, it was Anderson Cooper who asked him about all those things after the [P-word] tape came out. Not Megyn Kelly, as he’s probably angrily hallucinating.
So that’s cool.
Elsewhere in the same speech, Trump went on one of his extended dementia babbles about New York Attorney General Letitia James, wherein he blamed her for Exxon Mobil moving out of New York to Dallas.
“Business are fleeing our country,” Trump said at the event Saturday evening. “It’s business-unfriendly and they’re going to other places.” […]
Trump also appeared to blame New York Attorney General Letitia James for Exxon’s departure, despite the fact that the company announced it was relocating its company headquarters to the Lone Star State back in 1989 — 30 years before James became New York attorney general. [bitterly funny trumpian farce]
“Great job, Letitia,” the former president mocked, going on to reference James’ prosecution of a case against Exxon Mobil in 2019, her first year in office.
Over 30 years ago.
We have a theory, and it’s that oftentimes inside Donald Trump’s brain it’s still the 1980s. Whether he truly has zero contact with reality, and doesn’t know what year it is, we don’t know, but there are things he will say that suggest that sometimes he looks around and it’s still the 1980s, back when people still told him he mattered, and when he thought he understood how the world worked.
Remember that time recently when he [complained] that migrants have cell phones, and wondered if American veterans even have cell phones? That question would make a lot more sense if we were talking about that brick phone Zack Morris had on “Saved By The Bell” or the ones on “Miami Vice.” Those were a luxury!
Some have argued that Trump’s understanding of crime, and trade, and immigration, and so many other things, are basically time-warped in the 1980s, because he has for all practical purposes been a cultural hermit since then. […]
So it makes sense that Trump’s brain would jumble together things that were happening then with things that are happening right now, things that are true with things that are imaginary. Exxon moving out of New York in 1989, Letitia James bringing civil charges against him and very possibly ruining him financially in 2023, the “American carnage” he talked about in his inauguration speech, generals calling him “sir” …
Think of all that while you watch this video. Look how confused he is: [video at the link]
On top of how he’s indicted for 91 felonies, stole classified documents from the United States, tried to overthrow the Republic and incited a terrorist attack to overturn the election he lost, it’s stunning the Republican Party wants to make that deluded jumble of metastasized cells president again.
The Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday in Moore v. United States, an effort to preemptively kill a future wealth tax before it can even be enacted. As in several recent high-profile cases, the facts are hotly contested; indeed, the conservative lawyers who represent the plaintiffs appear to have misled the justices about key details that would undermine their legal theory. On this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the right’s emerging strategy of manufacturing cases on the basis of made-up claims so the courts will have an opportunity to shift the law rightward. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity…
Mark Joseph Stern: Right. So, the story here is that, as part of the Trump tax-cut bill, the government imposed this one-time tax on individuals who own more than 10 percent of shares in a foreign corporation. Conservative lawyers saw this new tax and said, “Hey, we should use that to try to strike down a future wealth tax before it even comes into existence.” And the lead lawyers, Andrew Grossman and David Rivkin, use [Charles and Kathleen Moore] as their plaintiffs. The Moores are a married couple who own a stake in an Indian business that manufactures and distributes farm equipment. Grossman and Rivkin claimed that the Moores had never received any distribution or dividends or other payments from this company. They said they’re minority shareholders who just wanted to support this company and that it’s unconstitutional to tax their shares since they haven’t been cashed out for personal profit yet.
That’s a lie. Charles Moore, the lead plaintiff, doesn’t mention this in the briefing, but he served as director on the board of this company for five years. He told the courts he only invested $40,000 in this company, but he actually invested $150,000. He lent the company $245,000, which he was paid back with interest. He repeatedly traveled to India to oversee the company’s operations and received $14,000 in travel reimbursements. And when this new law was coming into effect, he actually worked very closely with the company’s founder to try to lower his stake so that he wouldn’t face the tax.
All of that is either lied about or ignored in the briefing because it would make the entire theory of the case fall apart. The Moores are saying, “Hey, we don’t run this company—there’s no way the value of these shares can be attributed to us.” But it turns out they were in control of this company from the beginning. They played a major role in all profit that it made. And once you see that, you see why it is clearly constitutional for them to be taxed for however much these shares grew. They held meaningful control over the corporation, so under long-standing law, the increased value of the shares can be attributed to them…
Does it occur to him that if he wanted to put forward alternative versions of reality, he should have done that within the framework of the trial, which is long over?
Brian Ray says home-schooled students do better. His daughter tells a different story.
Brian Ray has spent the last three decades as one of nation’s top evangelists for home schooling. As a researcher, he has published studies purporting to show that these students soar high above their peers in what he calls “institutional schools.” At home, he and his wife educated their eight children on their Oregon farm.
His influence is beyond doubt. He has testified before state legislators looking to roll back regulations. Judges cite his work in child custody cases where parents disagree about home schooling. His voice resounds frequently in the press, from niche Christian newsletters to NPR and the New York Times. As president of the National Home Education Research Institute, he is the go-to expert for home-school advocates looking to influence public opinion and public policy, presenting himself as a dispassionate academic seeking the truth.
But Ray’s research is nowhere near as definitive as his evangelism makes it sound. His samples are not randomly selected. Much of his research has been funded by a powerful home-schooling lobby group. When talking to legislators, reporters and the general public, he typically dispenses with essential cautions and overstates the success of the instruction he champions. Critics say his work is driven more by dogma than scholarly detachment.
“You see this in a lot of areas,” said Jim Dwyer, a professor at William & Mary Law School who wrote a book about home schooling. “Someone with an ideological agenda can concoct bad social science and convince naive researchers and naive audiences to accept some position. It’s clearly true of Ray. … The research he relies on is not scientifically valid.”
Taken as a whole, the academic literature shows mixed academic outcomes for home schooling: Some studies find benefits; others show deficiencies.
Nonetheless, Ray’s work, which concludes home-schoolers score far above public school students on standardized tests, has been widely cited for many years. He has exercised enormous influence in winning acceptance for the practice and minimizing regulations. J. Michael Smith, a former president of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), the nation’s chief home-school lobbying group, said his group “has lost track of how many times Brian Ray has been called on to help establish the validity and success of homeschooling in court rooms and legislatures around the country.”
Ray comes from a conservative Christian movement that sees home schooling as a biblically mandated counterweight to secular modernity.
In a 2019 speech to a California church, Ray argued that home schooling was the only acceptable option for Christians. He quoted Luke 6:39: “A blind man cannot guide a blind man, can he? Will they not both fall into a pit?” Schoolteachers, curriculum developers and professors who train teachers are all “blind,” he said, and therefore will lead children into a pit.
[…] He made a similar argument in an August podcast interview. “Does God give you the choice to just delegate [your children’s education] to anybody you want?” he said. “Absolutely not.”
A community of home-school alumni has arisen in recent years to forcefully reject this form of education. They say their parents ignored entire subjects, focused on faith over academics and were physically abusive. Among these critics is someone Ray knows well: his oldest daughter, Hallie Ray Ziebart, 43.
In interviews, Ziebart said her father taught her almost no math, routinely required her to work long hours for his nonprofit institute during school days, and whipped her and her siblings with switches and other objects when they disobeyed his orders.
Her allegations were echoed by two of her siblings and by four others who spent time at their home. […]
Ziebart said some of her schooling was robust. Her mother taught her to love reading, and her father was creative and excited about teaching science. But she said she was taught very little math. “Math,” she said, “is just a big blank empty void.” [Video at the link]
[snipped text describing Ray’s education, and other background material]
Ray’s decades of research demonstrate one point beyond dispute: Some portion of home-schooled students do very well academically, and home education can be successful for some children.
The question is whether those children are representative of home-schoolers […] Critics cite numerous problems with Ray’s approach: These tests are optional in the vast majority of the country, and many home-schooled students don’t take them. The ones who don’t might have scored far worse if they had been required to sit for exams, as public school students are. Many students take the exams at home, which might offer advantages over public school test-takers who face a controlled environment. And parents had to opt into Ray’s studies, potentially skewing his sample further.
Demographic information collected as part of Ray’s research showed almost all students in his samples were White, Christian and came from two-parent married families. Their parents were more educated than average. In short, they were the type of students who tend to do well no matter where they are educated.
A 2016 federal survey, by contrast, found 41 percent of home-schoolers were not White, 56 percent had parents with less than a Bachelor’s degree, and 21 percent were living in poverty.
[…] Asked whether it’s possible that students who do well in his studies would do well in any setting, given their demographic advantages, Ray replied, “That’s a reasonable hypothesis.”
Yet he dispenses with the caveats when talking about his results to legislators, courts, journalists and the public.
In a 2005 book he wrote about home schooling aimed at general readers, Ray repeatedly cited his studies’ findings with none of the cautions included in academic papers. He mentions none on his website, either.
He takes the same approach with the press. “The research said over and over again,” he told the Pensacola News Journal in 2012, “that these young people are performing above average and on average they’re surpassing public school students.”
[…] The Home School Legal Defense Association, which has 98,000 member families, has made wide use of Ray’s research, implying that home schooling is better than public school. A 2009 “progress report” focused on his findings said, “Homeschoolers are still achieving well beyond their public school counterparts,” a generalization that does not take into account the demographics of his sample.
The stakes are particularly high in state legislatures, where lawmakers write rules governing home schooling — and in recent years, have rolled back accountability requirements such as testing and reporting on student progress.
“This misinterpretations of these studies is so dispersed and widespread. One of the challenges I’m having is overcoming that home-schoolers are all geniuses,” she [Samantha Field, government relations director for the nonprofit Coalition for Responsible Home Education] said. “It’s just ubiquitous at this point. When I’m in dialogue with people they make the claim that home-schoolers outperform public school and I say, ‘What?’ And they link to Brian Ray. They are the most cited studies when we are talking about homeschool legislation.”
[…] It’s not unusual for judges to cite his work in their decisions. In a 2008 Pennsylvania case, a court rejected a father’s request that parents who share custody be required to use public schools when they cannot agree.
[…] Ray has traveled the world, presenting his research and encouraging officials in other countries to adopt policies friendly to home schooling. He counts at least 10 countries where he’s traveled to discuss the topic, including Russia, Brazil, Ireland, South Korea and Germany.
[…] One of Ray’s harshest critics is his oldest daughter […] History, she said, was taught from a religious and conservative point of view. She said that she was told, for instance, that the slave trade was “meant for evil but God made it for good” and that things worked out for enslaved people “because they got to be Christians.”
History, she said, was taught from a religious and conservative point of view. She said that she was told, for instance, that the slave trade was “meant for evil but God made it for good” and that things worked out for enslaved people “because they got to be Christians.”
[…] Ziebart landed a position as an aide at a local public school.
It has been eye-opening, she said. On one hand, she witnesses the system’s flaws: Many students are being poorly served, and teachers face impossible demands. She understands why her parents wanted something different.
But her own children, she said, have thrived.
“The first couple years my kids were in public school, I experienced profound grief for my younger self and experiences I missed,” she said. “My kids are daily challenged by different belief systems, different children, different ways of seeing the world.”
Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting former President Donald J. Trump on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, asked the Supreme Court on Monday to rule on Mr. Trump’s argument that he is immune from prosecution.
The request was unusual in two ways: Mr. Smith asked the justices to rule before an appeals court acted, and he urged them to move with exceptional speed.
“This case presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: whether a former president is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin,” Mr. Smith wrote.
He added that speed was of the essence, as Mr. Trump’s appeal of a trial judge’s ruling rejecting his claim of immunity suspends the trial of the charges against him. The trial is scheduled to begin on March 4 in Federal District Court in Washington.
The judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, rejected Mr. Trump’s sweeping claims that he enjoyed “absolute immunity” from the election interference indictment because it was based on actions he took while he was in office.
In her ruling, she condemned his attempts to “usurp the reins of government” and said there was nothing in the law, the Constitution or American history supporting the proposition that a former president should not be bound by the federal criminal law.
Mr. Trump appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He also asked Judge Chutkan to freeze the election interference case in its entirety until the appeal was resolved.
In his Supreme Court brief, Mr. Smith conceded that the trial would most likely have to be paused because of the appeal of the immunity issue. That position reversed the one his prosecutors took over the weekend in court papers, in which they argued that Judge Chutkan should not have to stay the case pending appeal.
Winning the appeal of the immunity decision was only one of Mr. Trump’s goals in challenging the decision. All along, he and his lawyers have had an alterative strategy: to delay the election interference trial for as long as possible.
If the trial were to be put off until after the 2024 election and Mr. Trump were to win, he could have his attorney general simply dismiss the charges. Holding a trial after the presidential race would also mean that voters would never hear any of the evidence that prosecutors have collected about Mr. Trump’s expansive efforts to reverse the results of the last election before weighing in on whether to re-elect him….
Mr. Smith urged the justices to move quickly.
“It is of imperative public importance that respondent’s claims of immunity be resolved by this court and that respondent’s trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected,” Mr. Smith wrote.
He asked the court to use certiorari before judgment, an unusual procedure to leapfrog the appeals court. It is typically used in cases involving national crises, like President Richard M. Nixon’s refusal to turn over tape recordings to a special prosecutor.
As in the Nixon case, Mr. Smith wrote, “the circumstances warrant expedited proceedings.” He added, “The public importance of the issues, the imminence of the scheduled trial date, and the need for a prompt and final resolution of respondent’s immunity claims counsel in favor of this court’s expedited review at this time.”
Disgraced politician George Santos issued his first round of promised hellfire against Representative Nicole Malliotakis on Sunday, chiding the fellow New York Republican for using info from classified briefings to turn some cash on the stock market.
“She receives classified briefings as a member of the Ways and Means Committee,” Santos said on CBS News’s The Point With Marcia Kramer. “Can somebody explain to me that she miraculously becomes a member of the committee and then she’s doing trades on NYCB with the Signature Bank collapse just a day before having an 80 percent stock hike? That’s not a lucky trade, Marsha, that’s a very well-informed trade.”
If Santos is to be believed, then more dirty laundry is on its way via ethics complaints against other tristate politicians in both parties who voted him out of the House, including Representatives Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, and Rob Menendez…
This article doesn’t mention, so I had to look up that Malliotakis is a Republican.
Could this be the one decent thing Santos ever did?
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer went on CNN last Friday and gave a sad defense of his tax-dollar-wasting impeachment investigation into President Joe Biden. Host Jake Tapper’s willingness to ask about the glaring holes in Comer’s conspiracy theories once again exposed the absurdity of the pointless Republican witch hunt. It was embarrassing.
On Monday, Comer was forced to answer another hard question, this time from Newsmax host Rob Finnerty: How does the Kentucky Republican deal with the fact that half the country sees his investigation as a joke?
Rob Finnerty: [Tapper is] making your investigations sound like a joke, and he’s trying to make you look like a joke. And then half of America sees that and they think your investigation is a joke. How do you work around that? How do you work through that?
James Comer: Well, that’s the first time I went on CNN in three months. We thought we would give it a try. You know, Jake Tapper is an intelligent guy, but he’s playing to a low-IQ audience.
[video at the link]
A pretty famous study from the past decade shows that conservative ideologies and prejudice are both linked to low intelligence. These people then seek out their information from conservative propaganda outlets like Fox News and Newsmax, which, in turn, loops their poorly developed ideologies back to them, reinforcing the cycle. […]
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 35
Could someone remind me where Ken Paxton got his medical degree?
Right-winger: “He got it from Jesus Christ, dean of the University of SHUT YO’ MOUTH, LIBERAL CUCK!!!”
tomhsays
Re: Abortion in Texas.
Texas is one of eighteen states which do not permit initiatives, referendums, or recalls. They do allow voter-approved constitutional amendments, but only after a 2/3 majority of the legislature places them on the ballot. In other words, there is no chance of a Kansas-type vote on abortion.
Grok, the AI language model created by Elon Musk’s xAI, went into wide release last week, and people have begun spotting glitches. On Friday, security tester Jax Winterbourne tweeted a screenshot of Grok denying a query with the statement, “I’m afraid I cannot fulfill that request, as it goes against OpenAI’s use case policy.” That made ears perk up online, since Grok isn’t made by OpenAI—the company responsible for ChatGPT, which Grok is positioned to compete with…
A UK branch of a Christian church has been secretly filmed trying to cast out evil spirits from a 16-year-old.
A Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) pastor was seen reciting what looked like so-called “strong prayers” to rid the boy of a demon.
BBC Panorama was also told by a gay ex-member he was given “strong prayers” at 13 to try to make him straight.
The UCKG says under-18s are not allowed into “strong prayers” services and it does not perform “conversion therapy”.
A BBC Panorama investigation has found:
The church tells its congregations it can help with mental health conditions by casting out evil spirits
The leader of the church in the UK describes epilepsy as a “spiritual problem”
…
Reginald @40, sounds like that church is actively doing harm.
Reginald @41, I was glad to see John Nichols characterize that bit of nonsense from Trump and his lawyers as indicating that they had a less than airtight case. LOL
Allies of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny sounded the alarm on Monday, saying that neither they nor the politician’s lawyers have heard from him in six days. Navalny, who is serving a 19-year term on charges of extremism, was due to appear in court Monday via video link but didn’t, spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said. She said prison officials cited electricity problems. Lawyers in recent days also haven’t been able to access Navalny, according to Yarmysh.
The Biden administration announced the first of many coming federal investments in computer chip production, saying Monday that it would provide $35 million for BAE Systems to increase production at a New Hampshire factory making chips for military aircraft, including F-15 and F-35 jets.
There’s now a sizable stretch of Iraq that is controlled by an Iraqi militia linked to Iran and designated a terrorist group by the United States. Militia members man checkpoints around the borders. And though sovereign Iraqi territory, the area, known as Jurf al-Nasr, functions as a ‘forward operating base for Iran,’ according to one of the dozens of Western and Iraqi intelligence and military officers, diplomats and others interviewed for this article.
A national lobbying group has retracted its startling estimate that ‘organized retail crime’ was responsible for nearly half the $94.5 billion in store merchandise that disappeared in 2021, a figure that helped amplify claims that the United States was experiencing a nationwide wave of shoplifting. …
In fact, retail theft has been lower this year in most of the country than it was a few years ago, according to police data. Some exceptions, including New York City, exist. But in most major cities, shoplifting incidents have fallen 7 percent since 2019.
I would like to see Fox News correct their previous hair-on-fire broadcasts about “organized retail crime” in cities (blaming Democrats of course).
Kentucky-based nonprofit healthcare system Norton Healthcare has confirmed that hackers accessed the personal data of millions of patients and employees during an earlier ransomware attack…
On Monday, Civic Coalition leader Donald Tusk was selected to be the new prime minister of Poland after rival efforts were defeated in Parliament. Tusk’s victory follows elections in October that left the right-leaning Law and Justice Party still holding the largest number of seats but lacking the numbers (or allies) to form a new government.
Tusk is a former president of the European Council and strongly supports increasing Poland’s role in the European Union. Over the past eight years of rule by the nationalist Law and Justice Party, Poland has broken away from the EU on issues of freedom of the press and international law. As Reuters reports, that’s resulted in tens of billions of EU funds for Poland being placed on hold. Tusk is expected to move quickly to repair these issues and bring more EU funds into Poland.
The Law and Justice Party attempted several last-minute maneuvers to block Tusk, who was previously prime minister between 2007 and 2014, from returning to power. That included naming a commission reportedly investigating Russian influence-peddling which insisted that Tusk, along with other opposition leaders, should be excluded from government. But this effort and all others failed. Tusk won the prime minister role in a 248-to-201 vote, and will immediately form a new government.
As The Guardian reports, Tusk accepted his new role while saying that he wants to “chase away the darkness … chase away the evil” of outgoing nationalist rule. Not only does Tusk’s election promise a more united EU, it also puts an end to claims that Europe—especially Eastern Europe—was trending inexorably to the right.
Though Poland has been one of the largest contributors to Ukraine’s defense effort when it comes to weapons, the nationalist government was increasingly driving wedges between the two countries. Anti-immigrant rhetoric directed at Ukrainian refugees was a fixture in the fall election, and increasingly, radical nationalists were pushing Poland to reduce cooperation in ways that worried NATO supporters.
Tusk can be expected to not only keep up the military assistance to Ukraine but also be more supportive in assistance to NATO and refugees, and working out trade deals.
[…] Poland’s move back into the community of European nations seemed assured. [Tweet featuring Zelenskyy’s congratulations to Donald Tusk]
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s congratulations are no doubt sincere. In the short term, the change in Poland’s government is unlikely to have any effect on equipment coming from Poland or on Ukrainian troops training there. In the long term, Tusk is much more likely to work out deals that bring relief to Ukrainian farmers and perhaps an end to roadblocks by Polish truckers.
Tusk’s election also helps to further isolate Hungary’s authoritarian President Viktor Orbán, Speaking of whom, both Zelenskyy and Orbán were in Argentina this week for the inauguration of President Javier Milei. Unlike at most diplomatic occasions, no one thought to see that Zelenskyy and Orbán were seated a kilometer or two apart and they reportedly had an “animated chat.” [Tweet and images at the link: “[…] the seating arrangement allowed Zelensky to finally corner and tear into ratfucker Orban […]]
———————————
The United Kingdom and Norway have jointly launched a new “Maritime Capability Coalition” aimed at beefing up the Ukrainian navy. The focus of this effort revolves around ships designed to remove mines near the Ukrainian coast and provide protection for commercial vessels.
In the near future, a pair of U.K. Royal Navy Sandown Class minehunters will be transferred to the Ukrainian navy as a first step in this plan. [Photo at the link]
———————–
Despite the relatively small changes being seen on the map day by day, the past two weeks have actually brought some of the fiercest fighting of the war. Not only has Ukraine been conducting a counterattack to Russian attempts to close off the Avdiivka salient, but also there has been renewed fighting on the southern front, with Ukraine winning, losing, then partially winning again a cluster of fields southwest of Robotyne.
Just about every day of the past week has brought reports of heavy losses, sometimes on both sides, but almost certainly on the Russian side. Today was no different. [List of Russian losses at the link]
Over the past two days, a lot of those Russian casualties came in a place that had been relatively quiet over the last two weeks: the area around Krynky, east of the Dnipro River. [map at the link]
A combination of mines and FPVs reportedly spelled doom for multiple attempts by Russia to retake the area near Krynky, with one of those assaults involving the loss of at least five armored vehicles. [Video at the link]
Additional Russian losses reportedly came in a column of vehicles destroyed near Marinka, and another column lost in an attempt to enter Novomykhailivka, 9 kilometers south of Marina.
In the Avdiivka area, efforts to drive Russia completely from the area around Stepove continue. [video at the link] Over the weekend, Ukraine managed to push Russia completely back across the rail line in some areas. However, in the woods fronting that rail line and in the easternmost blocks of Stepove, Russian forces have proven harder to dislodge. There had been hopes that Ukrainian forces could move over the tracks and advance toward Krasnohorivka, but there’s no sign of this happening so far. [map at the link]
Meanwhile, Russia has managed to advance to the southeast of the mine-waste pile known as the Terrikon. Russia has taken a block of buildings along the edge of an industrial area and so far seems to be holding on to this position.
——————————-
As this article was being written, reports emerged that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been taken from the penal colony he was last reported at. His whereabouts are currently unknown.
Last week, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin announced that he was running for reelection. Not that he needs to run—or that the election means anything.
On June 20, 2023, Eugene “Gino” Gates collapsed on the lawn of a house in an affluent Dallas, Texas, neighborhood and died. The 66-year-old military veteran was a mail carrier who died of heatstroke while on his route. A homeowner attempted CPR but failed to revive him. Gates’ body temperature at death was 104.6 degrees, and the temperature in Dallas that day was a humid 98 degrees.
The Texas Observer and The Nation reported on the aftermath and “found that in the months following Gates’ death, US [Postal Service] seems to have gone back to business as usual.” That meant letter carriers were still pressured to work faster, log overtime, and not take breaks despite the record-breaking heat of the summer of 2023. They also found that the USPS “continues to violate the standards of its own Heat Illness Prevention Program (HIPP)—some mail carriers say they have not yet completed training for this program, which would violate the standards of the USPS own HIPP.”
What’s more, the investigation found allegations that in Texas, USPS officials were falsifying records to show that carriers had completed the training when they had not. And it’s not just Texas, according to Politico’s E&E News, which conducted a three-month nationwide investigation “involving hundreds of pages of internal union documents and federal workplace complaints and in interviews with 18 carriers, union officials and experts.”
Gates was one of those carriers who didn’t receive the training, which is intended to alert workers to the signs of heat illness, how to prevent it, and what to do if they start feeling ill. His widow, Carla, along with leaders of the National Association of Letter Carriers, told E&E News that the USPS falsified his records as well, saying he had received the training when he had not. He had also been reprimanded by management just weeks before his death for taking too long to complete his route.
[…] E&E found this pattern in “at least 10 states, including Texas, New Jersey, Utah and Illinois,” with workers not receiving the training and their records being falsified to say that they had. “In Chicago alone, the union alleges postal managers have falsified records of more than 2,000 couriers, pointing to what mail carriers describe as an epidemic of policy violations at a time when global temperatures are soaring,” E&E found. In at least three cases, local officials have admitted that they doctored the records.
E&E also found nearly a decade’s worth of OSHA citations related to heat illness, citations the USPS has been fighting. For example, in a 2016 incident, they hired an expert witness to argue that one carrier’s excess sweating was “not in any way” related to work and his supervisors weren’t at fault for not securing his safety
Meanwhile, in May, the USPS began using trackers in some areas to monitor carriers on their routes, track their movements, and make sure they keep the pace up. This summer, an OSHA inspector in Minnesota reported that while management was telling carriers to take breaks as needed, the carriers said, “[I]t was frowned upon if they did not finish their route,” because their supervisors were under pressure about “numbers and completion of routes daily.”
This is pressure coming from the top, from Postmaster General Louis DeJoy—who should not still be in this job—to deliver faster. Just 10 days after Gino Gates died, supervisors at the Oak Lawn Post Office in Dallas sent out this message to carriers via the scanners they have to carry: “BEAT THE HEAT!!! NO STATIONARY EVENTS,” it said. “KEEP IT MOVING!”
Congress needs to investigate this national problem, and to put the USPS on notice that protecting carrier safety is paramount before the next record-breaking summer heat.
And DeJoy still needs to go.
It continues to amaze me that DeJoy still has that leadership position. He is a trumpian doofus.
The Texas Supreme Court on Monday overturned a lower court order allowing an abortion for a pregnant woman whose fetus was diagnosed with a fatal condition, hours after her lawyers said she had decided to leave Texas for the procedure in the face of the state’s abortion bans.
The court ruled that the lower court made a mistake in ruling that the woman, Kate Cox, who is more than 20 weeks pregnant, was entitled to a medical exception.
In its seven-page ruling, the Supreme Court found that Ms. Cox’s doctor, Damla Karsan, “asked a court to pre-authorize the abortion yet she could not, or at least did not, attest to the court that Ms. Cox’s condition poses the risks the exception requires.” Texas’ overlapping bans allow for abortions only when a pregnancy seriously threatens the health or life of the woman.
“These laws reflect the policy choice that the Legislature has made, and the courts must respect that choice,” the court wrote.
The ruling, which applied only to Ms. Cox’s current pregnancy, suggested that the court would not be open to readings of the law that would expand the medical exception in Texas beyond all but the most serious cases. The fact that Ms. Cox decided to leave the state rather than wait for a ruling underscored the difficulty of seeking court permission for an abortion in the midst of a pregnancy….
Wow, that was fast. And a 9 day window to file a response is lightning fast for SCOTUS.
(This was likely done so it could be heard at the January 5 conference, oh the irony if the conference was to be held on January 6. 2024…)
To explain what happened.
Trump appealed a decision by the trial court saying that he was immune from criminal prosecution for acts taken as President as the first remedy for illegal acts by the President is impeachment and conviction by the Senate, and any action that was not subject to conviction by the Senate would not be subject to criminal prosecution.
To prevent further delay, Smith’s prosecutors asked the Supreme Court to step in and take this appeal from the appellate court to speed up the process.
They agreed to be briefed on this and gave TFG’s lawyers 9 days to argue why they should NOT hear the case.
So it can go two ways.
1. They meet at Conference on 1/5/2024 and agree to hear the claim of Presidential immunity and finalize this point once and for all
2. They decline to hear it, and send it back down to the Appeals court and make them rule on it, with the caveat that Trump can appeal the appellate court ruling back to SCOTUS.
In any event, which way it will go should probably be known by 1/9/2024 or 1/10/2024.
Last month, Biden declared the resumption of contacts a signature achievement. U.S. military officials say their Chinese colleagues haven’t been taking their calls.
[…] A spokesman for the Chinese National Defense Ministry confirmed at a news conference on Nov. 30 that the two presidents had agreed to resume direct military-to-military contacts. […]
whheydtsays
Re: Lynna, OM @ #51….
Lest we forget… Trump’s defense during the Senate trial over his second impeachment argued exactly the opposite. To wit, that if the Senate acquitted him, he would then be subject to possible criminal charges and it would be up to normal court proceedings to deal with the matter. Someone needs to remind SCOTUS about that.
StevoRsays
“Stellar waves that tower as high as 3 suns stacked on top of each other appear to be sweeping across the surface of a giant star acording to a new study.” (Gneerated by the pass of its nearby binary on a superluminous blue supergiant star in the Small Magellanic Cloud – ed “The waves (on this star) are so tall and rreach such speeds that theycurl over at the top and break muh like waves in Earth’s oceans.”
– Page 11, Oct 23 ‘Sky At Night’ magazine.
It’s become a holiday tradition, especially in the red states. Every year, in response to overtly Christian displays put up in government buildings, the Satanic Temple petitions to set up a display honoring Lucifer in state capitols. They usually succeed…
This year, the annual rite is playing out in Iowa, where the Satanists have antagonized the Christians with a goat’s head wreath in the Des Moines capitol building.
The story has more national resonance than usual, however. It’s happening in the shadow cast by a much darker, more dangerous bad faith debate over free speech: The fight over alleged anti-semitism on campus…
A commercial vessel is in flames in the Red Sea after being attacked by at least one missile fired from Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen, two U.S. officials tell The War Zone.
The M/T Strinda was attacked by a missile coming out of a Houthi-controlled area in Yemen, two U.S. military officials told The War Zone. The vessel is battling a fire, the officials said. It was struck 60 miles north of the narrow Bab el-Mandab Strait, one of those officials told us. The Strinda is a Norwegian-owned chemical tanker, according to its owner, Mowinckel Chemical Tankers AS.
The Arliegh Burke class guided missile destroyer USS Mason responded to an emergency call and is now in sight of the Strinda, three officials told us…
Some members of the Republican Party are meeting with associates of Hungary’s conservative minister, Viktor Orbán, in Washington D.C. this week to discuss terminating U.S. aid to Ukraine. Starting on Monday, the Guardian reported, a two-day event hosted by right-wing organization Heritage Foundation will commence, melding GOP-ers with members of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and staff from the Hungarian embassy…
A bipartisan bill that would dramatically change how Wisconsin residents choose congressional candidates by asking them to rank their top choices instead of voting for one of two candidates is headed for its first public hearing.
The state Senate’s election committee was set to take public comment on a proposal Tuesday that would implement a ranked choice system known as final five. Under that system, voters would rank their top five candidates from all parties rather than just the top Democratic and Republican contenders. The hearing is the first for the complicated plan that would drastically change in how Wisconsin voters pick their representatives in Washington…
StevoRsays
It may well not happen as expected / hoped and it’ll probly be cloudy becoz o’course but still worth looking up for :
Earth may experience an entirely new meteor shower this December when our planet enters a stream of the debris left around the sun by a near-Earth comet. These meteors will appear to stream from the direction of the star Lambda-Sculptoris, meaning a potential name for this meteor shower is the “Lambda-Sculptorids.”
The progenitor of the potential new meteor shower is Comet 46P/Wirtanen, which was discovered in 1948 and orbits the sun every 5.4 years, much more rapidly than other comets, such as Halley’s Comet — which takes around 75 years to orbit our star.
..(Snip!).. “The results show a possible encounter forecast for Dec. 12, 2023, between 8:00 and 12:30 UT [0300 and 0730 EST]. The activity level of the shower is highly uncertain due to the absence of reported past showers,” they write in a paper discussing their results published on the open-source arXiv repository and set for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. “Overall, the most optimal observations on the forecasted day would be achieved from Eastern Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania.”
Ukrainian cyber units hacked into thousands of servers of Russia’s tax system, extracting sensitive information before destroying the tax database, Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) said on Dec. 12…
Finland’s government will reopen two out of eight border crossing points with Russia later this week, officials said Tuesday, following a sudden influx of migrants in November…
A pregnant woman in Kentucky who filed a lawsuit demanding the right to an abortion has learned her embryo no longer has cardiac activity, her attorneys said Tuesday.
Her attorneys didn’t immediately comment on what effect the development would have on the lawsuit filed last week in a state court in Louisville. The plaintiff, identified as Jane Doe, was seeking class-action status to include other Kentuckians who are or will become pregnant and want to have an abortion. The suit filed last week said she was about eight weeks pregnant…
Ukraine’s main mobile network, Kyivstar, says it’s been the target of a “powerful hacker attack”.
Customers have been left without phone or internet access, while one city’s air raid sirens stopped working. Kyivstar’s chief executive implied Russia could be responsible.
Ukraine’s security services are investigating. Moscow hasn’t commented…
Rudy Giuliani’s defiant public statements outside a Washington, D.C., federal courthouse — just minutes after he departed the first day of his civil trial for defaming two Georgia election workers — may have defamed them yet again, the judge presiding over the proceedings said Tuesday.
“Was Mr. Giuliani just playing for the cameras?” wondered U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who has already found Giuliani liable for lying about the workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, by accusing them of manipulating ballots in the 2020 election.
His attorney, Joe Sibley, agreed that he could not reconcile Giuliani’s out-of-court comments on Monday evening with the more contrite argument Sibley had made on behalf of the former New York City mayor earlier in the day.
After the first day of his trial, when jurors began to hear evidence to determine just how much Giuliani must pay for defaming the two women, Giuliani approached television cameras outside the courthouse and reiterated his attacks on them.
“Of course I don’t regret it,” he said of his years-long discredited efforts to accuse Freeman and Moss of election fraud. “They were engaging in changing votes.” Giuliani implied that he would delve into the allegations further when he takes the stand this week…
StevoRsays
Via Phys dot org :
The difference in height between female and male individuals in northern Europe during the Early Neolithic (8,000–6,000 years before present, bp) may have been influenced by cultural factors, a paper published in Nature Human Behaviour suggests. The findings indicate that height differences during this period cannot be explained by genetic and dietary factors alone.
..de Rassenfosse and his team set out to quantify the impact of the war’s influence on Ukrainian research, with one of the most extensive surveys yet, analyzing the responses from roughly 2,500 Ukrainian scientists in autumn 2022. The results are published in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications. “Our survey shows that Ukraine has lost almost 20% of top scientists, like Olena,” explains de Rassenfosse of EPFL’s College of Management of Technology, who was able to hire Iarmosh to work in his lab as a visiting professor.
“Many of these emigrant scientists are under precarious contracts at their host institutions. Of the scientists who stay in Ukraine, if still alive, about 15% have left research, and others have little time to devote to research given the circumstances of war.” The EPFL researchers found that research capacity in Ukraine, that is time directly devoted to research activity, is down 20%. The study reports that 23.5% of scientists still in Ukraine have lost access to critical input for their research, and 20.8% cannot physically access their institution.
A striking and extremely rare half female, half male bird has been spotted by a University of Otago zoologist …(snip)..A report on the find, only the second recorded example of gynandromorphism in the species in more than 100 years, has been published in the Journal of Field Ornithology.Professor Spencer says gynandromorphs—animals with both male and female characteristics in a species that usually have separate sexes—are important for our understanding of sex determination and sexual behavior in birds.
The main groups in which the phenomenon has been recorded include animal species that feature strong sexual dimorphism; most often insects, especially butterflies, crustaceans, spiders, and even lizards and rodents. “This particular example of bilateral gynandromorphy—male one side and female the other—shows that, as in several other species, either side of the bird can be male or female. “The phenomenon arises from an error during female cell division to produce an egg, followed by double-fertilization by two sperm,” he explains.
He hopes the novel discovery will inspire people to “treasure exceptions” as they always reveal something interesting..
On Monday evening, the Texas Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision allowing Kate Cox—a woman carrying a nonviable fetus in a life-threatening pregnancy—to seek an abortion. The ruling makes it clear that Texas’ anti-abortion legislation is working as intended, and that no court can provide relief from the inherent cruelty and dehumanization of the Texas law. [screenshot at the link]
Hours before the ruling was handed down, the Center for Reproductive Rights announced that Cox had left Texas to seek a surgical abortion in another state. Details are intentionally being withheld, out of concern for Cox and her family.
The fetus Cox is carrying has trisomy 18, a chromosomal condition that causes aberrations in many parts of the body. Many fetuses with the condition do not live long enough to be brought to full term. While some babies with this condition do make it through birth alive, they cannot survive and suffer multiple complications, . Attempting to deal with a late miscarriage in such a case threatens both Cox’s life and her ability to have children in the future.
On Dec. 7, Travis County District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble granted Cox a temporary restraining order allowing her to seek an abortion at a hospital in Houston. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton immediately responded by sending letters threatening civil and criminal penalties against any doctor or hospital that might try to assist Cox.
The Texas Supreme Court’s ruling shows that Paxton’s inhumanity and malice are not an aberration: They are the intentional result of legislation passed in Texas.
The Texas decision calls into question the value of any provision that supposedly extends the option of an abortion to protect the life or health of the woman. It’s now clear that such provisions can be thwarted by intrusive Republican attorneys general arguing that the woman’s life is not under enough threat. The Texas courts have agreed with Paxton. No doctor is going to feel able to provide an abortion, even in an emergency, under these conditions.
That a woman should be required to risk her life and her family’s future in carrying to term a child that cannot survive and will live any brief life in abject misery is just what Republicans intended. This is Texas law working as designed. This is what “pro-life” activists celebrated when Roe v. Wade was overturned. This is just what they wanted.
Cox will, thankfully, find relief—and grieve her necessary decision—in another state. Whether she will be able to return to her home—and whether her family will be allowed to resume their lives—is much less clear. Based on Paxton’s past actions and language, it seems unlikely.
For Texas women who don’t have the option to flee and secure the medical care they need in some other state, the only comfort they have is that “the law reflects the policy choice that the Texas legislature has made.”
That’s the same comfort that Republicans would like to bring to women everywhere.
The unusual brief filed by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith with the SCOTUS, to dispense with the Appellate circuit and, for the purpose of a well-informed public, asking it to decide expeditiously whether TFG’s legal defense has merit enough to forestall Judge Chutkan’s judicial calendar for the MAL indictment, on a claim of presidential immunity, is saying essentially that. Rucho v Common Cause (2019) showed the American people what this Court thinks of ‘the People’ and self-government, when it washed it’s hands of any responsibility for apportionment abuse by the states.
“I wish it weren’t that loudmouth Trump, but like it or not, here’s our moment”, Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow are probably thinking, “Our ‘unitary executive project’ is in good hands.” Or is it?
To agree with TFG’s nonsensical claim of presidential immunity under any and all circumstances, would be signing the death warrant of the Judicial branch itself. And by extension, the republic. Odds are, even this SCOTUS will deny Trump his triumph. […]
Can you blame this childish-gambino? He doesn’t know anything else. Mary Trump has had him pegged for years as the psychopath he is.
But can you imagine what that campaign is going to look like? Personally, I think it will be the beginning of the end of Donald J Trump. Finally.
Running against even this extremist Supreme Court will put his essential Lawlessness squarely in the balance for what voters will be deciding to endorse with their votes in 2024. It’s sure to be a toxic stew of hate, jingoism and intimidationist rhetoric.
Nevertheless, this is an extraordinary moment in American history. On the one hand, of the immense gravity of the consequences for the Republic in either direction the SCOTUS rules on Jack Smith’s brief; and yet the profound unseriousness of the issue at hand: The absurdity of a branch of Government being asked to endorse an interpretation of the American constitution by a defendant who coordinated a conspiracy to nullify that constitution.
Asking the American people to accept that it’s reasonable to interpret the Constitution as a suicide pact. […] Trump, by not being treated like the psychopath that he is, is telling us “No.” We have allowed a psychopath to stand before history and argue this nihilistic absurdity to, supposedly, the preeminent legal authorities in the world.
[…] I truly hope that when we get through this, it will spark a new — unexpected — epoch of constitutional reform*, having come this close to losing the Republic through the poison of Apportionment abuse, funded by a constituency that prizes it’s Wealth above law and order.
The American people need to disabuse themselves of the fiction that Democracy can coexist with Wealth without restrictions, particularly when that Wealth has the means to cause (a manufactured portion of) the People to challenge the legitimacy of their own Government.
I understand the premise behind the headline, but I still think the headline is misleading. Where are the instances of “Libertarian Billionaires” saying “Endorse Trump’s Immunity or Else”?
A bogus claim every 12 seconds, on average. That’s what a single five-minute clip of former president Donald Trump speaking in Iowa on Dec. 5 yielded. In the clip, from a Fox News “town hall” hosted by Sean Hannity and brought to our attention by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CFRB), Trump ludicrously asserts that American oil and natural gas resources — “liquid gold” in the ground — could solve Social Security’s looming fiscal imbalance. That claim comes toward the end of the clip; to get there, a listener must first hear falsehood after falsehood in rapid succession.
Hannity tees up Trump by noting that he had mentioned energy. Hannity says that with $34 trillion of debt, the United States is paying $1 trillion in annual interest costs — a correct statement — and says “that is unsustainable.”
We went through a transcript of Trump’s response, noting each false or misleading statement in boldface and providing a time stamp. The first falsehood comes in the 43rd second.
0:43 “So before covid hit us, a gift from China. That was our gift. What happened to us with covid, commonly known as the China virus. They don’t like that. But it was a China virus.”
The coronavirus that sparked the 2020 pandemic is not commonly known as the China virus. The origin has not been pinpointed, although the first known cases appeared in China in late 2019. But viruses are not country-specific and do not honor borders; the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, for example, appears to have started in Kansas.
0:53 “We were doing energy, taking our liquid gold out of the ground at a rate that’s never been seen before. And it was going up.”
This is misleading. Trump often takes credit for trends that were apparent before he became president. The U.S. energy boom began during the Obama administration, largely because of the expansion of fracking and new drilling technologies. U.S. production of crude oil began increasing rapidly after 2010, and in 2013, the International Energy Agency predicted that the United States in 2016 would leap ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s top oil producer. That happened in 2017, early in Trump’s presidency. As you will see below, Trump falsely takes credit for that. In fact, when both petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons are counted, the United States became the largest producer in 2011, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA).
1:00 “We were going to be using that liquid gold to sell to Europe instead of the pipeline from Russia, which I exposed.”
Nord Stream 2 is a Russian pipeline that would have doubled the export of Russian natural gas to Germany. Trump did not expose it; U.S. policymakers, including the Biden administration, have long objected to it. “Successive U.S. Administrations and Congresses have opposed Nord Stream 2, reflecting concerns about European dependence on Russian energy and the threat Russia poses to Ukraine,” the Congressional Research Service said in a 2021 report. […]
New York’s highest court ordered the state to redraw its congressional map on Tuesday, delivering a ruling that immediately threw New York’s political landscape into chaos and reopened a process with sweeping national implications.
State Democrats are now widely expected to try to shift anywhere from two to six Republican-held seats, from Long Island to Syracuse, toward their party — a major pre-election intervention in the 2024 fight for the House that could alter a key battleground.
Powered by a new liberal majority, the State Court of Appeals effectively wiped out the highly competitive map that helped Republicans flip four seats and win the House majority. It said the neutral lines, which it had imposed just last year, were meant only to be a temporary fix.
By a four-to-three vote, the court directed the state to restart a mapmaking process that would ultimately return control over the state’s 26 congressional districts to the Democratic-controlled State Legislature. The court had stripped away that power in 2022 after an attempted gerrymander.
Democrats will still have to contend with a state prohibition on partisan gerrymandering and account for potential political blowback. But it would take only slight shifts to drastically improve the party’s chances and threaten Republicans’ narrow majority — now three seats, after the expulsion of George Santos, a New York Republican — in Washington before campaign season ever begins….
In Michigan, the case has been submitted without argument to a court of appeals panel. The Michigan Supreme Court declined to take immediate review of the case.
In Colorado, the state supreme court heard oral argument last week. The case has been submitted.
In Oregon, a case has been filed in front of the state supreme court but hasn’t progressed. (Check out the Solicitor General’s opinion, which includes this historical tidbit: “As noted above, we opined that the Secretary was not authorized to determine if Governor Romney was a ‘natural born Citizen’ as required to be eligible to serve as President by Article II, § 1, of the United States Constitution. 33 Op Atty Gen 504 (1968).”)
In Maine, the Secretary of State will hold a hearing Friday on challenges to Trump’s eligibility.
In New Mexico, an interesting amicus brief has been filed in a federal case. Pro se plaintiff John Castro has been racking up losses in federal courts, including one in New Hampshire on the political question doctrine. Amici in New Mexico urge the district court to reject Castro’s claim on standing and not reach the political question doctrine–as that precedent, I’ve noted, has been used in Michigan and been cited elsewhere in pending litigation.
It may have taken more than a year, but Tesla has finally responded to the California Department of Motor Vehicles allegations that it misrepresented Autopilot’s capabilities, arguing that it’s free to do so under the US Constitution.
In a document [PDF] filed with California’s Office of Administrative Hearings last week lawyers representing Elon Musk’s electric car company didn’t directly challenge the DMV’s specific allegations that Tesla may have overblown Autopilot’s autonomy, marketing it less as an advanced driver assist system (ADAS) and more of a full self-driving platform.
Instead, they said that the DMV’s case, filed in July 2022, ought to be tossed because it’s “facially invalid under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 2, of the California Constitution.
“These statutes and regulations, as applied to Tesla in this proceeding, are unconstitutional … as they impermissibly restrict Tesla’s truthful and non-misleading speech about its vehicles and their features,” Tesla lawyers argued…
Uh what? The basis of the action was that their claims were not truthful.
A far-right lawmaker in the Polish parliament on Tuesday extinguished candles on a menorah that were lit for the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, creating disruption and scandal as a new pro-EU government was beginning its work.
All major political forces quickly denounced the unprecedented incident by Grzegorz Braun, one of the most controversial lawmakers in parliament, and said there would be no tolerance for antisemitic and xenophobic behavior in the parliament.
Braun, a pro-Russian member of the Confederation party, has in the past falsely claimed that there is a plot to turn Poland into a “Jewish state” and has called for homosexuality to be criminalized…
Recapping this unexpected threat to health, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday released an advisory titled “What You Should Know about Eye Drops” in hopes of keeping the dangers of this year from leaking into the next. Among the notable points from the regulator was this stark pronouncement: No one should ever use any homeopathic ophthalmic products, and every single such product should be pulled off the market.
The point is unexpected, given that none of the high-profile infections and recalls this year involved homeopathic products. But, it should be welcomed by any advocates of evidence-based medicine…
StevoRsays
“Never too late to stop punching ourselves in the face” and “there’s a world to win.” It isn’t all bad news but we do have to act. Some of the key points from this 12 minute long good discussion by real Climate Scientists Dr Ella Gilbz & Dr James Kirkum (spelling?) : here.
We’re two days into the trial of Rudy Giuliani for defaming Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, and it’s hard to imagine things going any worse for him.
For those who haven’t been following the case, here’s the key thing to know: Giuliani has already been found liable for defamation by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell because he was such a scofflaw in failing to respond to discovery requests and even engage in the lawsuit at a basic level. So the judge entered a default judgment against him.
In that sense, Giuliani has already lost. The jury trial now is merely to determine damages and how much Giuliani will have to pay. The plaintiffs are seeking tens of millions of dollars from the former NYC mayor […]
After the first day of trial, Giuliani walked outside of the courthouse and repeated some of the lies he’s told about Freeman and Moss, prompting the judge to damn near lose her mind when the trial resumed yesterday. “When the trial reconvened on Tuesday morning, an incredulous Howell said the comments ‘could support another defamation claim,” Kyle Cheney reported.
Giuliani’s attorney was defenseless in the face of his client’s self-destructive behavior.
After day 2 of the trial got underway, co-plaintiff Shaye Moss gave deeply compelling testimony about what Giuliani’s lies have done to her personal life and work life. She more than held her own on cross examination from Giuliani’s lawyer, and more than once she brought up Giuliani’s remarks on the courthouse steps the night before.
Then last evening, Giuliani pulled a similar stunt. In a rambling, incoherent rant he tried connecting plaintiff’s counsel with Hunter Biden and Burisma, and by that point I was expecting him to pull out the old GOP standby: B-E-N-G-H-A-Z-I. Give him time, the trial is still young.
I have lost count of the number of times Rudy Giuliani shot himself in the foot.
[…] Not long after he left his job, De Oliveira told the former Mar-a-Lago employee he was sure Trump would like to see him at an upcoming Trump-hosted golf tournament and asked if the former employee wanted complimentary tickets.
On another occasion, De Oliveira communicated to the former employee that his job was still available if he wanted to return to working at Mar-a-Lago. Nauta also told him he could come back to work at Mar-a-Lago, going so far as to show up at the former employee’s gym in person with De Oliveira, which was unusual, according to one of the sources. […]
By early 2023, the former employee found his own attorney, suspecting correctly that he might get subpoenaed by federal investigators looking into the classified documents case, the sources said. Around that time, he was still in frequent contact with De Oliveira, who brought up that the former employee wasn’t using a Trump-provided lawyer, pointing out how expensive a lawyer outside the Trump fold could be.
In another instance, John Rowley, who at the time was a top lawyer on Trump’s defense team, left a voice mail for the former employee saying he knew he had received a grand jury subpoena to testify in the documents case. Rowley asked the employee to call him, but the employee never called back. The New York Times previously made public the existence of this voicemail.
[…] Whether Trump employees would use defense lawyers provided by the ex-president has loomed over the case. For instance, one Trump employee who cut a deal with prosecutors provided details that led to the indictment of De Oliveira only after switching from a Trump-provided lawyer to a federal public defender. […]
And as De Oliveira celebrated a birthday with the former employee at a South Florida casino in August 2022, Trump called De Oliveira directly to tell him he would provide him an attorney.
It’s historic and should have started 30 years ago. But it’s still big.
The annual UN climate summit, COP28, ended in Dubai yesterday with nearly 200 countries agreeing to transition away from fossil fuels for generating energy, the first time a COP (Conference of the Parties) summit has explicitly called for an end to the use of fossil fuels. It’s fairly huge, especially considering that before the meetings went into an extra day, any kind of agreement on language around fossil fuels seemed … unlikely.
Now, here’s the “however”: The text of the agreement was a compromise to get around what had been the biggest fight of the conference, whether to commit to “phase out” or “phase down” fossil fuels, language that petrostates like the host nation, the United Arab Emirates, were opposed to, because even 30 years into the international recognition that climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels, most of their revenue comes from oil and natural gas. So any mention of getting rid of fossil fuels at all is both A) a real achievement and B) another reminder of why it’s been so hard to reach international agreements on climate. This is, after all, the climate summit chaired this year by Abu Dhabi’s national oil company CEO.
The agreement doesn’t include a timeline for ending fossil fuel use, although that’s at least implicit, as it has been for three decades. Instead, it calls for countries to take the needed steps to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems
“in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.”
Wopke Hoekstra, the EU commissioner for climate, said it was damn well time, and then some:
“Humanity has finally done what is long, long, long overdue. […] Thirty years — 30 years! — we spent to arrive at the beginning of the end of fossil fuels.”
[…] yes, the energy transition is on and it needs to accelerate. […]a general “we will transition away” commitment is far weaker than the rapid decarbonization experts say is needed to get anywhere close to the Paris goals. 1.5 C looks increasingly unlikely, but every bit of warming we prevent over that amount is vitally important for the sake of preventing the absolute worst climate disasters.
The statement also calls for global renewable energy capacity to triple by 2030, a goal that China, incidentally, is likely to reach next year, so the rest of us ought to try to catch up. […] The agreement also calls for deep reductions in methane emissions, since methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas, molecule by molecule, than carbon dioxide. (CO2 remains the “worst” greenhouse gas since the amount of CO2 the world emits is far greater than any other.)
And as usual, the statement calls for increased development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) capacity, although that technology is still being developed and may be difficult to scale up. Many oil interests see CCS as an option that would allow them to keep producing oil and gas while offsetting their CO2 emissions, which is a cheat code they shouldn’t be allowed, since if CCS can be made to work at wide scale it’s far more important to use it to start drawing down the total amount of carbon already in the atmosphere.
The deal was met with skepticism by Anne Rasmussen, lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States — the places already seeing the consequences of rising sea levels due to warming oceans (water expands as it heats: science!) and melting polar ice.
“We have made an incremental advancement over business as usual, when what we really need is an exponential step change in our actions,” she said.
But she did not formally object to the pact, and her speech drew a standing ovation.
And again, considering the institutional resistance to admitting that fossil fuels are the smelly oily elephant in the room, it’s still a big fucking deal:
Danish Minister for Climate and Energy Dan Jorgensen marveled at the circumstances of the deal: “We’re standing here in an oil country, surrounded by oil countries, and we made the decision saying let’s move away from oil and gas.”
As Yr Wonkette keeps saying: Yes, the task is huge. But for the first time in my life, it finally looks like the world is waking up and making the changes that are needed. More of that, please.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is in town to meet with President Joe Biden, and to plead with American politicians — we mean Republicans — to keep sending money and weapons to help them win, instead of siding with the mass-murdering madman Putin. Admittedly, for Republicans to continue siding with Zelenskyy and Ukraine — a good human whose country is a democracy and our ally — is probably an awkward fit, but they should at least try.
It’s an uphill battle for Zelenskyy, to put it extremely gently.
But he’s here.
He’s meeting with President Biden and congressional leaders today, and later he and Biden will do a press conference.
Some of Putin’s representatives in the Senate like Rand Paul and Josh Hawley signaled yesterday that they didn’t even want to hear from Zelenskyy. “I’ve heard his pitch — so I think I understand where he’s coming from,” said Hawley, a seditionist. JD Vance, a ball of human butthair and a waste of breathable air, left the meeting early.
Republicans in both houses blocked aid for Ukraine (and Israel and Taiwan) last week. This week, Republican senators continue to insist that they have to get a deal on immigration in order to fund Ukraine, because they’re hostage-takers and legislative terrorists, uninterested in doing the right thing for Ukraine simply because it’s the right thing to do. […]
In the House, extremist lunatic speaker Mike Johnson may not get funding for Ukraine passed before Congress goes on recess, because of the aforementioned […] attaching Ukraine funding to xenophobic wet dreams about the border. […]
So yes, an uphill battle for Zelenskyy.
CNN’s Manu Raju reports that Zelenskyy, nonetheless, “told senators he does not expect Congress to fail to deliver aid to Ukraine and that he’s still counting on US support to come through, according to Sen. Chris Murphy.” And remember, Ukraine needs the money NOW. Not next month. NOW.
Playbook reported this morning that Zelenskyy is wise to exactly what kind of petty-ass losers Putin’s Republicans are:
Zelenskyy knows enough, the person added, not to take any particular position on U.S. border policy. What he can do is remind lawmakers that Ukraine is possibly the last thing standing between a direct clash between NATO and Russia — a message he previewed yesterday at the National Defense University.
“Let me be frank with you friends,” he said, “if there’s anyone inspired by unresolved issues on Capitol Hill it is just Putin and his sick clique.”
“Unresolved issues on Capitol Hill” is jut about the nicest way we can think of to say that one of the parties has been taken over by anti-democratic fascists who side with our adversaries.
He’s far more more diplomatic than we are:
The [Zelenskyy] adviser added: “He does have empathy towards Republicans because he understands that many Republicans who support Ukraine aid are in a difficult position politically due to populist sentiments in their home districts. But he firmly believes that by helping Ukraine fight back against Russian aggression, the U.S. is saving lots of American lives and treasure in the long run.”
[…] Anyway, Playbook says the Biden administration is projecting cautious optimism. Tick tock.
It can’t be helpful that a whole delegation from authoritarian scumbag Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is also in town, giving Republicans [talking points] and trying to convince them to turn on Ukraine. Surprise, this […] is being produced by the Heritage Foundation, the same outfit running Project 2025, AKA the plan to make sure Donald Trump’s second term is the end of America as actual patriots know it.
As the Guardian explains, the Hungarians are literally here arguing Putin’s case, and some Republicans are slurping it up. It started yesterday:
The first day includes panel speeches about the Ukraine war as well as topics such as Transatlantic Culture Wars. It is expected to feature guests including Magor Ernyei, the international director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights, the institute that organized CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) Hungary. Kelley Currie, a former ambassador under then president Donald Trump, said she was invited “but declined”.
According to a Republican source, some of the attendees, including Republican members of Congress, have been invited to join closed-door talks the next day.
[very bad news]
Great. And:
A diplomatic source close to the Hungarian embassy said: “Orbán is confident that the Ukraine aid will not pass in Congress. That is why he is trying to block assistance from the EU as well.”
All humanity’s enemies […] We have an idea: The EU and NATO should kick Hungary out and exchange it for Ukraine.
[…] Read Timothy Snyder today, who continues to argue that this is a situation of “unusual moral simplicity,” and that our support for Ukraine provides us with an opportunity for “unusual strategic gain” by letting Ukraine essentially act as NATO so NATO doesn’t have to […]
He concludes that “we have an unusual chance to do well by doing right,” and asks, “Will we take it?”
Or to put it more Wonkette-y, you Manichaean dipfucks wanted a cut-and-dried good vs. evil situation? Well here it is.
WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to decide if the use of a popular abortion pill should be limited nationwide. The move marks a major milestone in the post-Roe abortion landscape.
A group of conservative Christian doctors claims the drug mifepristone is unsafe and that the Food and Drug Administration rushed its approval two decades ago. In its suit, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine claims the government erred two decades ago in approving mifepristone, and the last five presidential administrations were wrong to provide subsequent approvals affirming its safety.
Despite its safety record, a federal judge — and then an appeals court — paused mifepristone’s approval, restricting the medication’s use nationwide. The Supreme Court stepped in to pause those restrictions in April while considering the case.
The government said putting restrictions on mifepristone would have dire consequences.
“If the portions of that order affirmed by the Fifth Circuit are now allowed to take effect, it would upend the regulatory regime for mifepristone, with damaging consequences for women seeking lawful abortions and a healthcare system that relies on the availability of the drug under the current conditions of use,” U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in the government’s petition.
Although the case centers on abortion access, the government worries that a precedent allowing a two-decade-old approval to be upended could spread across the drug regulatory space.
“And the logic of the Fifth Circuit’s unprecedented decision would threaten to severely disrupt the pharmaceutical industry and prevent FDA from fulfilling its statutory responsibilities according to its scientific judgment,” Prelogar wrote.
Mifepristone was approved by the FDA under the brand name Mifeprex in 2000 after a four-year review by the agency. It’s part of a two-drug regimen, in concert with misoprostol, used to end early pregnancy. Patients who take the drug often experience symptoms similar to those of a miscarriage, including cramping and bleeding.
Doctors specializing in reproductive health have consistently found mifepristone to be safe and effective, with adverse reactions occurring in less than a fraction of 1% of cases. Other common medications are considered to be more high-risk, such as Viagra, which has a mortality rate of more than six times greater than mifepristone, and penicillin, which has a mortality rate of three times greater.
Mifepristone’s mortality rate stands at 0.65 per 100,000 people. In comparison, the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. is 32.9 per 100,000 live births. This rate has increased in recent years.
In 2016, the FDA altered mifepristone’s prescription and distribution requirements. After 20 years of use in practice and in clinical trials, the FDA increased the gestational age limit for the drug’s prescription from seven to ten weeks. The agency also reduced the number of in-person clinic visits from three to one and allowed certain licensed non-physician healthcare providers to prescribe the medication. These approvals also altered mifepristone’s dosing regime.
The FDA approved mifepristone’s generic form created by GenBioPro in 2019. The Covid-19 pandemic led the FDA to throw out the in-person dispensing requirement; the agency subsequently found this requirement was not needed in the future.
The Alliance for Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit challenging mifepristone’s approvals in November 2022, only four months after the justices ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Woman’s Health Organization. The Tennessee-based group was incorporated in Amarillo, Texas, a month prior to filing its lawsuit, virtually guaranteeing it would be heard by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Donald Trump appointee.
Although they have never actually administered mifepristone, the conservative doctors claim they have been harmed by the drug’s rare adverse reactions. The doctors argue there’s a chance one of these rare cases could show up in a hospital they work in, and they would be forced to treat the patient.
“These doctors have suffered concrete and specific injuries, including forced participation in elective abortion, because of FDA’s deregulation of chemical abortion, Erin Hawley, an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom representing the doctors, wrote. “That emergency room physicians — like the respondent doctors — will often be called upon to treat chemical abortion complications is not a bug in the system but part of its very design.”
The lawsuit challenged the FDA’s 2000 approval of Mifeprex, the 2016 updates to how the drug can be used, the 2019 approval of generic mifepristone, the 2021 exercise of enforcement discretion, and two denials of citizen petitions.
Kacsmaryk granted the doctors’ motion for an injunction blocking mifepristone’s approval. The Supreme Court’s interference in the case came after the Fifth Circuit refused to block Kacsmaryk’s entire injunction.
The Fifth Circuit rejected arguments against the drug’s 2000 approval but affirmed the suspension of the 2016 and 2021 approvals. In practice, this would require more in-person visits to obtain mifepristone, limit its use to only seven weeks gestational age, and alter its dosing. The government says it would have to remove mifepristone from shelves nationwide to comply with the ruling.
“The Fifth Circuit’s decision warrants this court’s review because it would impose an unprecedented and profoundly disruptive result: Neither respondents nor the courts below identified any prior decision abrogating FDA’s approval of a drug or limiting a drug’s availability based on a disagreement with the agency’s judgment about safety or effectiveness — much less doing so at the behest of plaintiffs with such an attenuated claim of standing and imminent harm,” Prelogar wrote.
Per the court’s custom, the justices did not provide an explanation for granting the petition.
WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to decide if the use of a popular abortion pill should be limited nationwide. The move marks a major milestone in the post-Roe abortion landscape.
A group of conservative Christian doctors claims the drug mifepristone is unsafe and that the Food and Drug Administration rushed its approval two decades ago. In its suit, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine claims the government erred two decades ago in approving mifepristone, and the last five presidential administrations were wrong to provide subsequent approvals affirming its safety.
Despite its safety record, a federal judge — and then an appeals court — paused mifepristone’s approval, restricting the medication’s use nationwide. The Supreme Court stepped in to pause those restrictions in April while considering the case.
The government said putting restrictions on mifepristone would have dire consequences.
“If the portions of that order affirmed by the Fifth Circuit are now allowed to take effect, it would upend the regulatory regime for mifepristone, with damaging consequences for women seeking lawful abortions and a healthcare system that relies on the availability of the drug under the current conditions of use,” U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in the government’s petition.
Although the case centers on abortion access, the government worries that a precedent allowing a two-decade-old approval to be upended could spread across the drug regulatory space.
“And the logic of the Fifth Circuit’s unprecedented decision would threaten to severely disrupt the pharmaceutical industry and prevent FDA from fulfilling its statutory responsibilities according to its scientific judgment,” Prelogar wrote.
Mifepristone was approved by the FDA under the brand name Mifeprex in 2000 after a four-year review by the agency. It’s part of a two-drug regimen, in concert with misoprostol, used to end early pregnancy. Patients who take the drug often experience symptoms similar to those of a miscarriage, including cramping and bleeding.
Doctors specializing in reproductive health have consistently found mifepristone to be safe and effective, with adverse reactions occurring in less than a fraction of 1% of cases. Other common medications are considered to be more high-risk, such as Viagra, which has a mortality rate of more than six times greater than mifepristone, and penicillin, which has a mortality rate of three times greater.
Mifepristone’s mortality rate stands at 0.65 per 100,000 people. In comparison, the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. is 32.9 per 100,000 live births. This rate has increased in recent years.
In 2016, the FDA altered mifepristone’s prescription and distribution requirements. After 20 years of use in practice and in clinical trials, the FDA increased the gestational age limit for the drug’s prescription from seven to ten weeks. The agency also reduced the number of in-person clinic visits from three to one and allowed certain licensed non-physician healthcare providers to prescribe the medication. These approvals also altered mifepristone’s dosing regime.
The FDA approved mifepristone’s generic form created by GenBioPro in 2019. The Covid-19 pandemic led the FDA to throw out the in-person dispensing requirement; the agency subsequently found this requirement was not needed in the future.
The Alliance for Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit challenging mifepristone’s approvals in November 2022, only four months after the justices ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Woman’s Health Organization. The Tennessee-based group was incorporated in Amarillo, Texas, a month prior to filing its lawsuit, virtually guaranteeing it would be heard by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Donald Trump appointee.
Although they have never actually administered mifepristone, the conservative doctors claim they have been harmed by the drug’s rare adverse reactions. The doctors argue there’s a chance one of these rare cases could show up in a hospital they work in, and they would be forced to treat the patient.
“These doctors have suffered concrete and specific injuries, including forced participation in elective abortion, because of FDA’s deregulation of chemical abortion, Erin Hawley, an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom representing the doctors, wrote. “That emergency room physicians — like the respondent doctors — will often be called upon to treat chemical abortion complications is not a bug in the system but part of its very design.”
The lawsuit challenged the FDA’s 2000 approval of Mifeprex, the 2016 updates to how the drug can be used, the 2019 approval of generic mifepristone, the 2021 exercise of enforcement discretion, and two denials of citizen petitions.
Kacsmaryk granted the doctors’ motion for an injunction blocking mifepristone’s approval. The Supreme Court’s interference in the case came after the Fifth Circuit refused to block Kacsmaryk’s entire injunction.
The Fifth Circuit rejected arguments against the drug’s 2000 approval but affirmed the suspension of the 2016 and 2021 approvals. In practice, this would require more in-person visits to obtain mifepristone, limit its use to only seven weeks gestational age, and alter its dosing. The government says it would have to remove mifepristone from shelves nationwide to comply with the ruling.
“The Fifth Circuit’s decision warrants this court’s review because it would impose an unprecedented and profoundly disruptive result: Neither respondents nor the courts below identified any prior decision abrogating FDA’s approval of a drug or limiting a drug’s availability based on a disagreement with the agency’s judgment about safety or effectiveness — much less doing so at the behest of plaintiffs with such an attenuated claim of standing and imminent harm,” Prelogar wrote.
Per the court’s custom, the justices did not provide an explanation for granting the petition.
[…] former GOP officials and allies cast about for explanations, which included blaming Donald Trump’s personal animus towards Ukraine and a willingness to “parrot” Kremlin talking points for the immediate mess.
“In the very recent past, the GOP pulling support for a country like Ukraine in the conflict that it’s in would have been laughable,” Kim Holmes, an assistant secretary of state in the George W. Bush Administration and a former executive vice president at the Heritage foundation, told TPM. He added that Trump had “opened the door” to a deeper strain of isolationism after “he got it in his mind that he was being undermined by the Ukrainians.”
He attributed the cratering support to a “political calculation, that somehow Ukraine was Biden’s country and Russia was Donald Trump’s country, because of all the melodrama around the impeachment of Donald Trump.”
As Biden continued to voice support for Ukraine, Holmes said, rank partisanship took over: “Ukraine became Biden’s, and after Biden started supporting Ukraine, oddly enough in a perverse way, it gave permission for these Republicans to go against it.”
[…] “It was so black and white in February of last year,” Bush institute Executive Director David Kramer told TPM. “It was blatant and it was hard for anybody to look the other way.”
Kramer in some ways embodies the contradictions of the old GOP foreign policy establishment. He’s a longtime McCain aide who now heads the George W. Bush Institute. […]
“I wish they would understand that not supporting this assistance will amount to a victory for Putin,” he said.
[…] Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), for example, has described Ukraine aid as “nothing but a big money laundering scam.” […] some of them “have used incorrect information or misinformation and some who even parrot Russian disinformation.”
“Some of it you would almost hear coming out of the Kremlin, and a lot of it is just plain wrong,” Kramer added.
[…] Trump himself demanded in July that Congress cease support to Ukraine absent further congressional investigations into Biden.
[…] the affinity between the MAGA right and Orbán, himself a vocal opponent of further Ukraine aid from the European Union. Holmes described it as as an opposition to “liberalism in the broadest sense.”
BIG news for half the world’s population- the cause for nausea and vomiting during pregnancy has been identified, opening the path to curing or preventing this condition.
It is a hormone (GDF15) produced by
the fetus.
This is no small thing – some expecting mothers vomit 10-25 times a day during the worst phase.
.
BTW today morning Sweden had the yearly Lucia festivities (a pre-modern practice that expanded from a local tradition to being a national one).
I have been drinking lots of (non-alcoholic) mulled wine and eaten lots of saffron buns.
birgerjohanssonsays
BTW
I have found one of the few cases when it is justified to invoke Zod.
A poster with a grumpy cat (a relative of the one intimidating PZ?) reading a book, subtitled ” I am going to let god fix it, because if I do it, I am going to jail”
(the cross worn around the neck of this black cat is no more reassuring than the white collar worn by Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider – this angry puss is a killer). 🤬 https://share/temu.com/J06jxed CUNA
Never mind. I neglected to sacrifice to Ctulhu so this link is borked.
.
British PM Rishi Sunak temporarily hangs on after getting enough votes for the Rwanda bill. But it will be amended down the road and he may only have postponed a confrontation with the lunatic fringe of the tory members of parliament.
This does not make Sunak the nicer politician – the bill he got through parliament is by-passing the European rules about human rights.
Sunak has written a law defining Rwanda as a safe place to send refugees, reality be damned.
The refugees in Britain are just pawns in a performative game of cruelty, intended to please the worst segment of tory voters.
After months of dedicated sleuthing by Rep. James Comer, Republicans have determined that President Joe Biden sometimes loans money to members of his family, and members of his family pay him back. That’s enough for Republicans to begin impeachment proceedings.
The vote on Wednesday will not mean that Biden is impeached. Instead, it will only put a formal stamp of approval on the work three Republican-led committees have conducted for the last year. That means Comer can continue waving around bank records showing that Hunter Biden paid back his father for a truck downpayment as if they are important. Rep. Jim Jordan can continue to chase Rudy Giuliani’s droppings and lie about activities in Ukraine that were debunked years ago. Only now both of them will officially be part of an impeachment inquiry instead of … whatever they’ve been doing all along.
While this proceeding won’t mean Biden has been impeached, that’s definitely where Republicans are going. Not because they have any evidence of wrongdoing, but because they want to please Donald Trump and give him ammunition for the upcoming election. [Digusting lack of ethical conduct on the part of Republicans.]
As The New York Times reports, despite having obtained 36,000 pages of bank records, Republicans have found no evidence that Joe Biden was enriched by the overseas business dealings of his son or any other family member. Republicans are left looking at $240,000 in money that Biden provided to other members of his family, which they paid back.
That’s it. That’s what they have on Biden.
None of that matters, because Republicans have already admitted why they are doing this. Rep. Troy Nehls told USA Today that they want to give the twice-impeached Trump “a little bit of ammo to fire back” and say that Biden was also impeached. [Tweet and video at the link]
Some Republicans will vote for this proceeding because they want to please Trump. Some will vote because they are terrified of Trump. Even the headline of The New York Times article gives the game away: “House set to approve Biden impeachment inquiry as it hunts for an offense.” They don’t have evidence of wrongdoing. They don’t even know what charge they are going to lay against Biden.
They just know they have to make some charge—because this vote isn’t about Biden at all. It’s about Trump. [Tweet and video at the link]
As Joan McCarter wrote yesterday, Republicans in the House are scrambling to announce themselves as loyal foot soldiers for Trump. Only one Republican representative, Freedom Caucus member Ken Buck of Colorado, is willing to write, “Republicans in the House who are itching for an impeachment are relying on an imagined history.”
Months of witnesses. A hundred-thousand pages of documents. And Republicans have still come up empty.
It’s almost as if Joe Biden is an honest man who has spent his life in service to his nation. And it’s almost as if Republicans don’t care about that. They only care about showing their allegiance to a man who has already been found guilty of fraud and who is currently facing 91 felony charges.
According to the house schedule, votes on formalizing the impeachment inquiry will be held around 5 PM ET.
Cox faced a risk of “substantial” harm. Texas Republicans tried to use governmental power to force her to go through with her dangerous and doomed pregnancy anyway. The exemption provision in the state’s abortion ban proved meaningless.
TPM’s Kate Riga had an excellent piece on this.
If the exemption for a “life-threatening physical condition” and the “risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function” doesn’t apply to Cox — who, per her lawyers, has been in and out of four emergency rooms in the past month and may lose her ability to give birth in the future — who does it apply to? And how can anyone feel confident that a pregnant patient in even more imminent danger than Cox would get an abortion, given how justifiably skittish doctors are in the state?
[…] as The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg explained in her latest column, the Texas case shows that “abortion ban exemptions are a sham.”
As a tuxedoed former President Donald Trump stood on a stage in Manhattan on Saturday night and doubled down on past quips about being a “dictator,” at least one member of the audience had real ties to actual historical dictatorships.
The crowd who gathered at the swank Cipriani Wall Street for the New York Young Republican Club’s annual gala included Gerald Grosz, an Austrian politician and former presidential candidate who has been part of a political party founded by Nazis and who has deep ties to a late leader who often praised the Third Reich. Grosz was one of several figures from the European far right who attended the event and have previously associated with the club that hosted Trump.
The scene was a precise encapsulation of the way Trump and his allies have embraced the global far right and authoritarian rhetoric as he runs to retake the White House. It also nodded at the irony in Trump and his allies’ insistence that his strongman bluster shouldn’t be taken seriously, even as they eagerly expect four years of vendettas and aggression. […]
The far right European politicians in attendance appeared to have reveled in this mix of social media stars and MAGA officials. Both Ceccardi and Grosz posed for smiling pictures with Gaetz, whose office did not respond to a request for comment. Grosz and the AfD delegation also posed for pictures with a man who goes by “Jeremy Fragrance,” a German influencer who has earned millions of followers with “unhinged” social media content focused on cologne and perfume. The pictures of Fragrance with the AfD contingent caused a firestorm in Germany that resulted in him losing a book deal. Amid the backlash, Fragrance posted an Instagram endorsement for a centrist political party.
A member of the New York Young Republican Club leadership, who requested anonymity to discuss the European far right figures at the event, marveled at the Fragrance furor.
[…] the NYYRC president, has spoken at events in Brussels and Strasbourg, which is the seat of the European Parliament. In May 2022, the NYYRC started a partnership with the youth wing of Austria’s Freedom Party that was focused on an aggressive form of nationalism and cultural purity. In an announcement of the move, the club praised their Austrian counterparts for “appeal[ing] to young Austrians by building pride in the distinctive nature of their heritage” and vowed to work together on “protection of our local cultures and Western culture at large from the devastation of globalism and the subjugation of our cultures to other systems of belief.”
[…] “We feel comfortable talking to everyone because we value free speech […]
Tucker Carlson now has a streaming service. For $9 a month, you can watch Tucker Carlson spew his racist and anti-democratic verbal vomit from a kitschy, undisclosed location, unencumbered by timid Fox News bean counters.
The $9 price for Carlson’s streaming service seems kind of high to me, given that I’m reluctant to pay for streaming services with shows I actually like, such as Netflix and Paramount+. Those streaming services have plans with lower prices.
Late night comedian Stephen Colbert had a parody of the Carlson’s streaming service ready on his Late Show last night. The parody streaming service is called Tuckflix […] [video at the link]
[…] One would think that domain name registration would be a top priority for someone launching a new streaming platform. Since the new streaming service is called Tucker Carlson Network, I would have assumed that he would have secured the domain name Tucker Carlson Network dot com (couldn’t use pravda dot com, already taken) and put up a page through which you can sign up to shell out those nine bucks monthly.
But nope, that domain name is not configured. It’s available through GoDaddy though, but you have to pay a $70 broker fee and I don’t know how much more money on top of that.
Colbert noticed that thetuckercarlsonnetwork.com was available, presumably for much less, so he bought it and redirected it to video578.godaddysites.com. On that website, you can watch a short clip of an animated Tucker Carlson doing a traditional Russian dance.
It’s no secret that Carlson is a big fan of Dictator Putin. The supposedly duly elected president of Russia recently had opponent Alexey Navalny “disappeared.” That’s really unnecessary, given that Putin won the last election with 125% of the vote.
If you scroll below the animated Carlson, you will see links to donate to causes dear to Colbert: the World Central Kitchen, Donors Choose and the Human Rights Campaign. I’m guessing Carlson would not want you to donate to any of those.
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, experienced brief but widespread issues Wednesday, with hyperlinks not opening properly.
Users who clicked on links to news articles and other websites Wednesday afternoon were redirected to an error page saying, “This page is down.”
[…] X has experienced a number of technical glitches and undergone other major changes since billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform and revamped its operating procedures and content moderation policies. […]
birgerjohanssonsays
Britain again.
This bloke writing for The Guardian explains the current situation much more eloquently than I could ever do.
Former President Donald Trump lost his bid to invoke an immunity defense to E. Jean Carroll’s remaining defamation claim on Wednesday, clearing the way for a trial on damages to begin next month in New York.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Trump waived the defense of presidential immunity because he did not immediately invoke it when Carroll first sued him for allegedly defaming her by claiming she fabricated her account of a mid-1990s sexual assault.
“This case presents a vexing question of first impression: whether presidential immunity is waivable. We answer in the affirmative and further hold that Donald J. Trump waived the defense of presidential immunity by failing to raise it as an affirmative defense in his answer to E. Jean Carroll’s complaint,” the decision said.
Carroll, a former columnist at Elle magazine, successfully sued Trump for defamation and battery and was awarded $5 million in damages. The judge in Carroll’s remaining defamation case against Trump, Lewis Kaplan, has already determined he is liable so the trial will determine how much he should pay.
“We are pleased that the Second Circuit affirmed Judge Kaplan’s rulings and that we can now move forward with trial next month on January 16,” Carroll’s attorney Robbie Kaplan said.
Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, immediately said they would appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, but later offered an “updated” statement, saying, “The Second Circuit’s ruling is fundamentally flawed and we will continue to pursue Justice and appropriate resolution.”
Trump had argued presidential immunity is automatic, but the appellate court said “recognizing presidential immunity as waivable reinforces, not undermines, the separation of powers and the President’s decision making authority by affording the President an opportunity to litigate if he so chooses. Accordingly, we hold that presidential immunity is waivable.”
The court also rejected Trump’s attempt to revive presidential immunity as a defense because it took him three years to bring it up.
“Defendant unduly delayed in raising presidential immunity as a defense. Three years passed between Defendant’s answer and his request for leave to amend his answer,” the opinion said.
A lawyer representing Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen filed a court brief that cited three cases that do not exist, according to a federal judge. The incident is similar to a recent one in which lawyers submitted fake citations originally provided by ChatGPT, but it hasn’t yet been confirmed whether Cohen’s lawyer also used an AI tool.
“On November 29, 2023, David M. Schwartz, counsel of record for Defendant Michael Cohen, filed a motion for early termination of supervised release,” US District Judge Jesse Furman wrote in an order to show cause yesterday. “In the letter brief, Mr. Cohen asserts that, ‘[a]s recently as 2022, there have been District Court decisions, affirmed by the Second Circuit Court, granting early termination of supervised release.'”
Schwartz’s letter brief named “three such examples,” citing United States v. Figueroa-Florez, United States v. Ortiz, and United States v. Amato. The brief provided case numbers, summaries, and ruling dates, but Furman concluded that the cases are fake…
…
Carter is one of more than 150,000 registered Republican voters who have signed a petition in support of a ballot amendment that would bar the state from restricting abortion “before viability” — which is usually at 24 weeks — or “when necessary to protect the patient’s health.” …
Media Matters for America sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in federal court late Monday, alleging that Paxton violated the First Amendment last month and chilled its work when he opened an investigation into the organization over its reporting into Elon Musk’s X app.
Media Matters, a progressive watchdog group, said Paxton’s investigation was unlawful retaliation designed to punish it for stories it reported that alleged that major ad campaigns were running next to white nationalist content on X…
The Supreme Court said Wednesday it will consider whether to restrict access to a widely used abortion drug — even in states where the procedure is still allowed.
The case concerns the drug mifepristone that — when coupled with another drug — is one of the most common abortion methods in the United States…
Wondering which way they will lean? Consider that mifepristone was not available in the 17th century…
NASA’s iconic space probe is having trouble communicating with its home planet due to a computer glitch, forcing engineers to resort to decades-old manuals to come up with a way to fix the 46-year-old mission.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is now more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from Earth. The spacecraft has been exploring the outer regions of the solar system, but it is recently unable to send back any science or engineering data due to an issue with one of its three onboard computers, NASA said on Tuesday…
The Federal Trade Commission has announced new regulations, called the Combating Auto Retail Scams Rule, that are meant to stop car dealers from screwing customers with hidden fees and other bait-and-switch pricing tactics. Oh, happy days!
The agency says these predatory fees and tactics cost auto consumers in the U.S. $3.4 billion per year, and they add 72 million hours to their time spent shopping for vehicles, according to NBC News. The new rule bans misrepresentations about price, cost and other important information when shopping for a car. It’ll also require dealers to provide the actual price consumers have to pay for vehicles, tell them that additional items like extended warranties aren’t mandatory and state the full monthly payments consumers will be paying upfront…
On Wednesday, Russia once again tried to take the area north of the frontline town of Avdiivka. Russia’s actions, as they have on so many other days, resulted in a massive loss of men and equipment. The Ukrainian General Staff reported 95 attempted Russian advances over the past 24 hours—one of the highest numbers since the number of Russian assaults began to decline in March.
Of those 95 attacks, an astonishing 51 happened around the town of Avdiivka. Russian forces made another attempt to advance into Stepove on the north. They ran into Ukraine’s 110th Mechanized Brigade. What happened to them … I can’t show you. Or at least, I won’t show you here. But if you have a strong stomach, you can find out readily enough. The area north of Avdiivka has become the kind of killing field previously seen when the mercenary Wagner Group was hurling “meat waves” of prisoners at Bakhmut.
Only these meat waves are Russian soldiers—or what passes for Russian soldiers at this point. Because 90% of the force that Russia brought to Ukraine is already dead on the field.
As Reuters reports, on the same day that pro-Putin Republicans were doing their best to embarrass President Joe Biden and our nation with their shabby treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, an intelligence source provided significant information from a recently declassified report.
According to the source, a U.S. intelligence report assesses that the Ukraine war has cost Russia 315,000 dead and injured troops. That’s almost 90% of the forces Russia had on hand when the conflict began. The report also assessed that in terms of personnel and armored vehicles lost, Russia’s military has been set back by 18 years. It has lost its most experienced troops. It has lost dozens of generals and thousands of officers. Russia will spend a generation recovering from the losses it has suffered already in Ukraine, and it’s losing more every day. [List of losses at the link]
In recent weeks, MAGA Republicans and very serious pundits all seem to be in agreement that Ukraine has already lost the war and it’s just a matter of time until Vladimir Putin gets that long-delayed tour of Kyiv. Here’s an illustrative example featuring Elon Musk in three acts:
March 27, 2022: “I think the American government has done more than people may realize, but it is just not been very public. But it is important to do something serious. We cannot let Putin take over Ukraine. This is crazy.”
Oct. 4, 2022: “Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if it is the will of the people. Crimea formally part of Russia as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).”
Dec. 13, 2023: [Tweet at the link: Elon Musk agreeing with David Sacks that Ukraine has lost Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, most of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia forever. If it doesn’t negotiate a peace deal now, it will also lose Kharkiv, Odesa, the rest of Kherson, and more. The flag wavers who think they’re helping Ukraine are just dismembering it.]
Musk’s path seems to mirror that of a lot of supposedly knowledgeable observers, with the final step being nothing short of doing exactly what the Kremlin wants. This path is less reflective of MAGA Republicans and right-wing pundits because many of them were on board with Putin from the outset.
Republicans are happy for Putin, because they think a loss by Ukraine is a humiliation for Joe Biden, which they see as more important than national security. And Russia is absolutely ecstatic about Republicans blocking assistance to Ukraine.
Not only are pundits seemingly ready to cede the win to Russia, they are also crediting Putin with having the strategic insight to outlast the West by stretching the war out for years. Here’s some news for those people.
First, a prolonged war that is forcing Russia to steeply increase its military budget and draft hundreds of thousands more soldiers into the military is not some great plan by Putin: It’s a costly necessity forced on Russia because Ukraine refused to fold. Putin’s plan was to be in Kyiv in three days— but Ukraine won that fight. Then they won again in Kharkiv and again in Kherson. The ruined edifices of Bakhmut mark the only significant Russian victory in over a year … if you can call it a victory. Putin is not gearing up for a long war because that’s what he wanted. He’s doing it because his only other option is to slink home in abject defeat.
And it’s still not going to work. Russia’s capacity to rebuild its military is not even close to its rate of loss. The longer it stays in Ukraine, the weaker Russia becomes. Russians who are paying attention realize that there is no victory on the current path. [Tweet at the link]
Next, when it comes to the biggest factor keeping either side from making serious progress in the past year, Ukraine may finally be nearing the technological development that will make breakthroughs on the ground possible again. According to Forbes:
It’s not for no reason the Russian assault on Avdiivka, a key Ukrainian stronghold in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, seems to be stalling out.
There are indications the Ukrainians have deployed their new drone and counter-drone strategy: targeting the radio-jammers the Russians use to ground Ukrainian drones while setting up their own jammers to ground Russian drones.
What’s generating that kill zone north of Avdiivka? A new kind of air superiority in a war where drones are increasingly the kings of the battlefield. If Ukraine can sustain this advantage in electronics and extend it to other parts of the front, the near-stalemate that has dominated since the fall of Bakhmut could be over.
And when it comes to the Republicans … stop listening to them for a moment, and listen to President Biden.
When President Putin launched his brutal total invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 and Russian tanks rolled over the border toward Kyiv, there were those who thought Ukraine wouldn’t survive for a month. So, no one — no one should forget that for you to be here today — again today, nearly two years later, and for Ukraine to be standing strong and free is an enormous victory already.
Putin has failed — failed in his effort to subjugate Ukraine. The brave people of Ukraine have defied Putin’s will at every turn, backed by the strong and unwavering support of the United States and our allies and partners of more than 50 nations — 50 nations — in Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
Watching the treatment Zelenskyy received from Republicans this week was genuinely sad, and sadder still for the nation. But Ukraine isn’t about to lose this war. Russia is not about to win. And Putin’s supporters, at home and in the United States, are going to see a day when they regret the side they’ve chosen.
Maga Mike Johnson is working hard on behalf of Donald Trump and mother Russia to defeat Ukraine. He may not even know what he is doing. He is Putin’s useful idiot.
———————–
Putin bashes LGBTQ and Johnson loves LGBTQ-bashers.
———————
I think this anti-democracy theocrat knows just what he’s doing.
Maga Mike wants to establish christian rule in America. He is hiding in plain site and lying about it.
It is difficult to push back against religious fascists because they lie about being religious fascists and if you do call them out, they claim they are being persecuted for their religious beliefs. Even as they constantly persecute others who do not live by their extreme beliefs.
If a Trump victory will help religious fascists like Johnson defeat liberalism and democracy and that victory requires selling out Ukraine, this religious fanatic will sell out Ukraine.
Johnson is a fanatic using a simpering smile, a mild demeanor, and very carefully chosen words to make it difficult to hear what he really means an intends.
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I think authoritarians are authoritarian first and religious second, which helps to explain how some of them cherry-pick to imagine modern Jesus brandishing an AR15. Standard issue authoritarians equate violence with strength, and no application of it is beyond the pale, so long as it is “righteous”, i.e., serves their agenda
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Trump keeps gushing over how smart Putin is. The GOP is the Putin party.
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This isn’t difficult to figure out. Trump is dictating to the crazed House and Senate Republicans to stop funding Ukraine as a favor to his friend Putin for helping him win the 2016 election and hoping Putin returns the favor in 2024.
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I believe Biden will get a sizeable package out of Congress but it wasn’t going to happen before next year. The GQP needs to hone in on the immigration hostages it wants. And Biden may have to prioritize aid, since the package may be smaller than what he wanted. But it will be enough for UKR to hang on through next year.
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This war will ruin Russia but will it ruin Ukraine first? The one thing Russia is not lacking is manpower. They will sell oil on the black market and use the money to recruit more mobiks from the peripheral provinces. Human lives are not worth anything in Russia.
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There’s a compelling argument from General Philip Breedlove on YouTube. He is a retired 4 star general who was commander of US European Command, as well as supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO Allied Command Operations from 2013 to 2016.
He points out that for 3.5-4.5% of one year’s DoD budget, Ukraine has eliminated 42-50% of Russia’s combat power.
The Federal Reserve again kept interest rates steady in final meeting of the year on Wednesday. … Experts and investors are growing convinced that the Fed is probably done raising interest rates for the foreseeable future. They’re now turning their attention to when the Fed might start reducing rates.
CNBC:
The Dow Jones industrial Average jumped to a record Wednesday as the Federal Reserve signaled it would cut rates several times next year. … All three major averages hit fresh 52-week highs.
Gah, we love it when Donald Trump grifts his followers by selling them trading cards. It’s so much more fun than when he’s inciting terrorist attacks against America or trying to overthrow the Republic or stealing classified documents or promising to become a dictator or selling the country out to the Russians or being the next Hitler.
[…] There are new ones. These are focused on his mugshot. There are 47 of them because he wants to be president number 47. (They should make that his number in prison, for fun.)
He has sad fake muscles on these cards too.
But truly, he is so much more fun when he’s just conning people and separating his marks from their money.
Here, a video: [video at the link]
And now, the highlights:
0:03: Trump refers to himself as “your favorite president.”
0:10: Trump confirms these digital trading card will also be NFTs, like his previous ones, so these are for DOUBLE idiots.
0:15: “MUGSHOT EDITION. I wonder where that came from!”
0:27: Ooh! Ooh! They’re doing physical cards this time! Just one (1) though. You have to buy the 47 digital internet cards, and they will mail you one (1) card.
0:35: He says the physical card is going to contain a piece of the (?) suit he wore (?) when he got his mugshot taken?
0:48: He’s going to sign some of the physical cards.
0:55: This is a good gift for your children, or your grandchildren.
1:11: Also if you order the cards you get invited to dinner at Mar-a-Lago, like a real Nazi!
1:18: “Some people call these cards pop art, or modern art.” Sure thing.
1:25: “I wish I looked as good as I do on those cards, that I can tell you. They give me muscles where, believe me, I don’t have them.”
1:50: “We’ll all have fun together!”
LOL.
OK, that’s enough highlights. He babbles more but we’ve typed enough words.
The House GOP on Wednesday formalized its impeachment inquiry into President Biden with a House vote, a step Republicans hope will add legal weight to their demands as the probe moves into a more aggressive end stage.
Lawmakers voted 221-212 along party lines to approve the resolution authorizing the inquiry.
[…] We’re very pleased with the vote today. I think that’s it a message loud and clear to the White House. We expect you to comply,” House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), who is leading one of the arms of the probe, said after the vote.
President Biden ripped House Republicans for what he called a “baseless political stunt.”
“I wake up every day focused on the issues facing the American people – real issues that impact their lives, and the strength and security of our country and the world. Unfortunately, House Republicans are not joining me,” Biden said in a lengthy statement issued minutes after the House voted along party lines to formalize the inquiry.
[…] “Republicans say the White House is stonewalling their inquiry. Again, not true. The White House has provided over 35,000 pages of financial records, dozens of hours of testimony and interviews. Hunter Biden is here to testify today and Republicans won’t let him because they want to do it in secret so they can cherry pick and distort his testimony.”
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) chimed in on that point as well, noting that House Republicans “can only cite to two low level career officials at the Department of Justice who have not testified even though their supervisors have.”
[…] “In the depths of my addiction, I was extremely irresponsible with my finances. But to suggest that is grounds for an impeachment inquiry is beyond the absurd. It’s shameless. There’s no evidence to support the allegations that my father was financially involved in my business, because it did not happen,” he said.
“No matter how many times it is debunked, they continue to insist that my father’s support of Ukraine against Russia is the result of a non-existent bribe.” […]
A committee overseeing attorneys in Arizona has found probable cause that lawyers who represented Kari Lake in election cases should face discipline.
The Attorney Discipline Probable Cause Committee filed the probable cause orders against lawyers Andrew Parker, Kurt Olsen and Bryan Blehm after the State Bar of Arizona conducted its initial investigations.
Each lawyer has been sanctioned by Arizona judges for cases where Lake challenged the election results after she lost to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in 2022…
A judge Wednesday said he will rule by Dec. 29 in a case challenging the constitutionality of a voter-approved law on campaign finance transparency.
Attorneys representing Republican legislative leaders are asking Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Timothy Ryan to issue a preliminary injunction to block the law. It requires disclosure of major donors to campaigns that until now have been able to mask their contributors by creating a class of nonprofit organizations that don’t have to name their donors.
At the same, time attorneys defending Proposition 211, the so-called anti-dark money law, want Ryan to dismiss the challenge…
A South African court has ruled that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s official crowning of the new Zulu king last year was “unlawful and invalid”.
The court has ordered him to set up an inquiry into whether King Misuzulu ka Zwelithini’s accession to the throne took place in line with customary laws.
It follows a legal challenge by the king’s half-brother, Prince Simakade Zulu, who says he is the rightful heir…
birgerjohanssonsays
Not related to politics, you just need a cute video of an adopted jackal puppy going crazy. https://youtu.be/UEfb8KWDvGY
@129: I didn’t, really. Was working late at a task that left me a lot of side time for distractions. That article showed up in a search of Google News for ‘cheese’.
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 130
No wonder they went extinct. Now excuse me, I need to eat a whole bag of coffee beans just to face the day.
Giuliani repeated his defamatory claims on Tuesday.
Rudy claimed he was going to prove Ruby Freeman & Shaye Moss stole the GA election. He put on no defense. Here is Rudy when trial started:
“When I testify, you will get the whole story & it will be definitively clear that what I said was true.”
If you happen to own a landscaping business (or possibly a porn shop), keep an eye out for this man in case he decides to do an impromptu press conference in your parking lot.
We had intended to provide live coverage of Giulani’s testimony today. However, moments before court was called into session on Thursday morning, it was announced that Giuliani would not be testifying.
As they say, birds of a feather chicken out together. Maybe Giuliani and Trump can spend the day at Mar-a-Lago. Someone can scatter some feed on the ground for them. Maybe a few juicy bugs.
Rudy Giuliani was slated to take the stand in a case determining the amount of damages the former Trump attorney owes to two Georgia election workers he defamed following the 2020 election. Giuliani’s appearance would follow two days of heartbreaking testimony describing the level of threats and fear generated by false claims that Giuliani made about Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss. […]
This the penalty-determination phase. The defamation case already has been decided. Yes, Rudy defamed those two women. And yet, he was still out there claiming that everything he said was true. I assume Rudy wanted to convince the jury to pile on more penalties. Now it looks like his lawyers finally talked him into shutting the fuck up. He won’t testify today.
Last night, all House Republicans voted for this travesty. For what high crimes and misdemeanors? They don’t know. They will figure out a reason sometime, or would it work for you if they won’t? Can they just impeach him for “I know you are but what am I?” and can we accept that Republicans aren’t serious people, are not beloved by our Lord, and they’re just going to do this shit as long as they’re allowed near power?
Can we just accept that this is all about vibes, and the (D) next to Joe Biden’s name?
Can we just accept that these people worship a deplorable abomination named Donald Trump, who gave them the order to do this? And that guy only ordered it because Democrats impeached that guy for trying to extort one of our allies into helping him steal the 2020 election, and then trying to overthrow the Republic and inciting a terrorist attack against the country to overturn that election when he lost it.
Donald Trump isn’t the criminal, Joe Biden is. […] Donald Trump didn’t weaponize the Justice Department, Joe Biden is doing that, and now Trump will have to do it even harder because of what Joe Biden did.
If the House manages to impeach Biden, whatever “impeachment articles” it invents on the fly will be written in poo and probably will look like early concept drawings of the Cybertruck. Chuck Schumer’s Senate will then have an opportunity to turn the trial into a gigantic campaign commercial for Biden.
Last night, the three committee chairs behind this — Jim Jordan (Judiciary), […] James Comer (Oversight), and Jason Smith (The Other One, Ways and Means) — went on Fox News to explain what they had done. Facing the friendliest, easiest questioner, Sean Hannity, a guy whose gaping maw only drools for them, these goddamned fucking morons couldn’t explain why they were trying to impeach Joe Biden. [video at the link]
Hannity tried to get the simplest of all simple answers from […] Jason Smith: What the hell is this impeachment? “Is this now an investigation about Joe Biden being involved in what would be a bribery scandal, a money laundering, and an influence-peddling scandal?” That question is what is known in the biz as Sean Hannity gently placing the wiffleball on the tee and handing the Republican in front of him the lightest, fluffiest Nerf bat ever known to man.
And Jason Smith said: “This has always, Sean, been an investigation in regards to Joe Biden.”
What? The fuck you say? An investigation in regards to Joe Biden? Is it because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and a the Iraq everywhere like such as?
Hannity cut in to underscore that he had just given the [doofus] a multiple-choice list of three things, and that Smith only needed to pick one of them, or two of them, or three, to give an adequate answer. Smith wasn’t swift enough to lunge for the life raft Hannity was trying to throw him:
“It could be a multitude of numerous items! And we’re just continuing to follow the facts,” he said.
A fuckin’ multitude of numerous items, he said. They’re impeaching Joe Biden for a multitude of numerous items.
As White House spokesman Ian Sams tweeted, “it’s an impeachment about nothing.”
The past few days, […] Comer has been running around whining about how Jake Tapper from CNN is mean to him and makes fun of his investigation and Steve Doocy from “Fox & Friends” is mean to him and makes fun of his investigation. The only people being nice are the [hosts] at Newsmax, and you know what most of America is watching? Not that.
Last night Comer cried some more on Newsmax about Tapper, claiming that Tapper “knows what’s going on,” but unfortunately Tapper and others are “trying to indoctrinate their very shallow left-wing base out there.” That’s it, that’s the joke. […] [video at the link]
Humiliating [Tweet and image at the link]
[…] In summary and in conclusion, look at these babbling [doofuses]: [tweet and video at the link] Pro tip: If those guys are the best fighters your movement has, you’d best start negotiating the terms of your surrender now.
The House, in a decisive vote Thursday, passed the annual defense authorization bill, delivering a bipartisan rebuke to its most conservative members who had sought to infuse the legislation with a wishlist of provisions targeting Pentagon policies on abortion, diversity and LGBTQ+ rights.
The $886 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was approved by a vote of 310-118, having passed the Senate by an overwhelming margin Wednesday night. It proceeds next to the White House, where President Biden is expected to sign the legislation into law.
The sprawling bill — numbering 3,000-plus-pages — is a product of months of negotiations between leaders from both political parties who worked to bypass most of the demands made by hard-line House Republicans. It authorizes expanded military partnerships in the Indo-Pacific and Europe — ongoing efforts aimed at countering China and Russia, respectively — and structural improvements at several Defense Department facilities. The legislation includes a 5.2 percent pay raise for military personnel, it directs the procurement of new weapons and missile-defense systems, and outlines a host of other national security imperatives.
Notably, the NDAA also extends the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which the Biden administration has used to help support Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia, through fiscal 2027. However, the bulk of any future Ukraine aid — proposed spending included in an emergency national security funding request from the White House — remains mired in partisan battles and appears unlikely to pass Congress this year, if at all.
[…] hard-right Republicans leveraged the GOP’s fragile House majority to attach various provisions aimed at dismantling what they called the military’s “woke” policies on abortion, race and gender-affirming health care.
[…] The compromise bill approved Thursday stripped away nearly all of the hard right’s culture-war provisions — including a measure that would have barred the Defense Department from reimbursing travel costs incurred by service members who travel out of state to obtain an abortion. […]
Mr. Putin said his vaguely defined goals of the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine had not changed. […] he boasted that Ukraine’s Western backing appeared to be running dry, a sign of how the impasse in Washington over more funding for Ukraine had buoyed the mood in the Kremlin.
[…] Just this week, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine came away from Washington empty handed when Republican lawmakers balked at passing a new aid package. [Not entirely empty handed. That’s an overstatement.]
[…] For the first time, Mr. Putin commented on Russia’s arrest last March of Evan Gershkovich, a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal who remains in pre-trial detention on espionage charges that he, his employer and the U.S. government have vehemently denied. Analysts have said that Mr. Gershkovich’s best hope of being released is through a prisoner exchange with the United States or another Western country.
“We want to make a deal, but it should be mutually acceptable to both sides,” Mr. Putin told the news conference, referring to Mr. Gershkovich and to Paul Whelan, a former Marine and corporate executive. Mr. Whelan is serving a 16-year sentence on espionage charges that the United States has also called politically motivated. [Limited good news.]
[…] Mr. Putin spoke just hours after a Moscow court upheld the detention of Mr. Gershkovich with a ruling that will leave the journalist — who already has been held for 260 days — in custody until at least the end of January. The State Department said last week that Russia had rejected a “substantial offer” that would have freed him and Mr. Whelan.
[…] Next spring’s rubber-stamp presidential election, which is expected to grant Mr. Putin another six-year term, went largely unmentioned, suggesting that the president saw no need for even perfunctory campaigning.
[…] He added that he saw no need for another military draft because, he claimed, some 500,000 people had signed up for military service voluntarily. “Why do we need mobilization?” Mr. Putin said. “Today, there’s no need for it.” [Sounds like him puffing up his chest with hyperbolic claims.]
[…] Inflation has climbed sharply since the spring, and Mr. Putin acknowledged on Thursday that it could reach 8 percent this year. High interest rates are stifling private investment, companies are struggling to find workers and the economy is becoming more dependent on volatile oil revenues.
[…] Mr. Putin sought to counter Western efforts to turn Russia into a global pariah over the war in Ukraine, presenting himself as a champion of socially conservative causes that resonate with many citizens in other parts of the world. “In many cities in Europe and the U.S., not to mention other world regions, a lot of people think that we are doing everything right,” he said, citing Russia’s “defense of our traditional values.”
He also praised Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, seen as the European Union’s most Putin-friendly leader, and predicted that relations with the United States could someday improve. […]
NYT: Judge Pauses Trump Election Case Amid Appeal of Immunity Issue The decision by the judge to freeze the case came as an appeals court agreed to move quickly in considering the former president’s claims that he is immune from prosecution.
By Alan Feuer / Dec. 14, 2023
A federal judge on Wednesday put on hold all of the proceedings in former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election as an appeals court in Washington agreed to move quickly in considering Mr. Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution in the case.
The decision by the appeals court to expedite its hearing of the immunity issue capped an all-day flurry of back-and-forth moves by Mr. Trump’s legal team and prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, over the critical question of when the election trial will actually be held. It is now set to begin in Washington in March.
Under the aggressive schedule laid out by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, all written filings in the immunity case would have to be submitted by Jan. 2. The court could the hear oral arguments and render a decision.
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump’s lawyers had asked the court to avoid setting an expedited schedule, saying that a “reckless rush to judgment” would “irreparably undermine public confidence in the judicial system.”
[…]
Winning the appeal of the immunity issue has been only one of Mr. Trump’s goals. All along, he and his lawyers have had an alternate strategy: to delay the trial on election interference charges for as long as possible….
As congressional Republicans have tried to manufacture a scandal surrounding President Joe Biden, there’s one phrase that’s come up with unnerving frequency: “shell companies.”
To hear GOP officials tell it, the use of such business entities was, and is, inherently scandalous — as if those who would go to the trouble of creating a shell company deserve to be seen as people with something nefarious to hide. This has never been a good argument, in large part because such entities, which are generally created to hold assets, are common and usually legitimate.
A Washington Post analysis from last month explained that many of these Biden family shell companies “are simply corporate entities like one that serves as the structure for Hunter Biden’s law firm and another that’s a consulting company he ran.” The newspaper examined each of these business entities and found that “they were created because this is how business structures often work.”
But for a variety of leading Republicans, “shell company” is synonymous with “shady,” and no GOP official has done more to advance this narrative than House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer.
The Kentucky Republican has obsessively told the public about Biden shell companies, at one point telling Fox Business, “Nobody creates shell companies.”
In hindsight, perhaps Comer shouldn’t have used the word “nobody.” The Associated Press reported:
Rep. James Comer, a multimillionaire farmer, boasts of being one of the largest landholders near his rural Kentucky hometown, and he has meticulously documented nearly all of his landholdings on congressional financial disclosure documents — roughly 1,600 acres in all. But there are six acres that he bought in 2015 and co-owns with a longtime campaign contributor that he has treated differently, transferring his ownership to Farm Team Properties, a shell company he co-owns with his wife.
[…] What’s more, the GOP congressman appeared on Fox Business a few hours ago, and when asked about the article, Comer accused the reporter who wrote it of “financial illiteracy.”
The congressman’s bluster notwithstanding, the Associated Press’ report added that it’s “not clear” why Comer put six acres in a shell company, and the article raised related questions about the Republican’s financial disclosure forms. From the AP:
“It seems pretty clear to me that he should be disclosing the individual land assets that are held by” the shell company, said Delaney Marsco, a senior attorney who specializes in congressional ethics at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington. Marsco and other experts were perplexed as to why Comer would place such assets in a shell company, especially since he disclosed his other holdings and does not appear to have taken other efforts to hide his wealth.
This seems like the sort of thing that might be explored in more detail by the House Oversight Committee, though I suspect that won’t happen given that the panel is led by the Kentucky Republican himself.
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer should be celebrating. After all, he got what he wanted for Christmas on Wednesday when the House, in a party-line vote, handed him a no-evidence-required impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. Considering that all Comer has done since he took control of the committee is sift through the bank accounts of Biden family members, their friends, families of their friends, and friends of those friends, the House bill might as well have been stuffed straight into his … stocking.
But in an interview with Fox News on Thursday morning, Comer seemed more than a bit depressed. First, when asked about his best evidence that Biden might have done something wrong, Comer didn’t mention anything that he had come up with in his months of scanning bank accounts and going through over 100,000 documents. Instead, he repeated false claims that Rudy Giuliani brought back from Ukraine in 2019. Lies that were almost immediately debunked and that were thoroughly discredited again during Donald Trump’s first impeachment.
Fox News host Maria Bartiromo first asked Comer about an Associated Press story concerning his shell company, a piece of property that’s kept in his wife’s name, and some extremely shady connections. Comer insisted that the Associated Press is financially illiterate because this isn’t a shell company at all. It’s a land speculation LLC. Totally different thing.
Daily Kos has covered Comer’s not-a-shell-company before, including a series of land swaps among his family that definitely seem less than above board.
Much of Comer’s business activity seems to follow inheriting land in Kentucky following his father’s death in 2019. But exactly what happened with that land is the opposite of transparent. In one case, Comer reportedly sold his interest in a piece of land to his brother, then bought it back five months later, slipping his brother $18,000 in the process. That purchase ran through a shell company owned by Comer, the value of which doubled in two years. That company appears to have dealt exclusively with agricultural land deals at a time when Comer was on the House Agriculture Committee.
Of course, we did use the term “shell company.” Comer wants to pretend it’s not a shell company, because it controls all of six acres, so it has assets. But those six acres (now five, since one acre has since been sold off) are only a small fraction of the value that runs through this shell company.
But Comer’s ridiculous claims and finger-pointing at Biden seems to satisfy Bartiromo, who then turned to an even more critical question.
“Do you think that this is the media trying to begin to muddy up Republicans,” asked the Fox host, “or continue to muddy up Republicans because you are getting so close to your target that you have actually been able to release all this evidence on the Biden family? That now the White House is maybe calling media to try and plant these stories?” [video at the link]
Comer was quick to not just agree but to elaborate on this conspiracy theory. “It comes from the White House. They have their own war room. They have two dozen people we’re paying tax dollars in there so they can attack the investigators.”
Comer went on to complain about the media attacking him and Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. “This is the biggest public corruption scandal of my lifetime,” Comer said.
Things are so bad that Comer is even afraid to go on “Fox & Friends.” According to The Hill, Comer declared that he wouldn’t return to the show after co-anchor Steve Doocy said that Comer’s investigation had “got a lot of ledgers and spreadsheets, but they have not connected the dots.” Which is the truth. But then, Comer’s relationship with the truth is like the connection between vampires and sunlight.
And after all, it’s not as if Comer has ever done anything wrong. Such as sending this note to a legitimate whistleblower seeking to report sexual abuse when Comer was in the Kentucky legislature. [Screen grab at the link. Very classy note from James Comer that threatens a whistleblower with “a job cleaning shit stains off the commodes at the Corner Pool Room in Burnsville. […] “everyone hates you and you are dumb and lazy.”]
The U.S. Army school graduated its first active-duty female sniper in November, the Army recently announced.
Sgt. Maciel Hay, a cavalry scout with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Europe, was one of several graduates of the grueling, 7-week program and the first active-duty female to complete the course, the Army announced last week.
She received certification as a U.S. Army Sniper at Fort Moore in Georgia.
While in training, Hay progressed from being a marksman, which means soldiers must shoot at least 23 out of 40 targets, to expert, where they must hit a minimum of 36. Her progression “reflects not just her skill but also her dedication to mastering the art of marksmanship,” the Army said in a release.
For candidates to be chosen for sniper school, they must demonstrate “exceptional marksmanship skills” and meet specific physical and mental standards.
While in school, candidates must have skills with various sniper rifles and be skilled in stalking, concealment, observation, intelligence gathering, survival skills, land navigation and urban environment sniping, the Army said.
She said growing up her nickname was “sniper” because she could find things “really fast, similar to how a sniper does target detection.”
Hay is the first active-duty soldier to complete the program. In 2021, the Army announced that a female soldier, who they did not name, graduated from the course.
[…] In 2015, the U.S. military opened all combat jobs to women. In the years since, several female soldiers have made history by becoming to graduate from the Army’s Ranger School or completing the Special Forces course and joining the Green Berets […]
Congress has approved legislation that would prevent any president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without approval from the Senate or an Act of Congress.
[…] The provision underscores Congress’s commitment to the NATO alliance that was a target of former President Trump’s ire during his term in office. The alliance has taken on revitalized importance under Biden, especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
[…] Biden has invested deeply in the NATO alliance during his term, committing more troops and military resources to Europe as a show of force against Putin’s war. He has also overseen the expansion of the alliance with the inclusion of Finland and ongoing efforts to secure Sweden’s full accession. […]
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday left in place an Illinois ban on AR-15 semiautomatic weapons.
Two lower courts have upheld the law, and Thursday’s Supreme Court action marked the second time in six months that the justices have declined to intervene.
Illinois passed the ban on assault weapons after the 2022 Independence Day parade shooting that left seven people dead and 48 wounded. The gunmen in the July 4th shooting fired 83 rounds in under a minute using an AR-15. The ban prevents people from owning semiautomatic weapons, such as the one used in that shooting, as well as magazines that enable handguns and rifles to fire off many rounds without reloading.
Last year, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that gun restrictions, in order to be constitutional, must be analogous to laws on the books at the nation’s founding. As a result, an Illinois gun retailer and a gun rights advocacy group challenged the state’s law, contending that the “ban is not consistent with the nation’s history and tradition of firearms regulation and fails constitutional muster.
An ideologically mixed panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law, however, writing that the Supreme Court’s recent decision on the right to bear arms “extends only to weapons in common use for a lawful purpose,” not to semiautomatic weapons that “are much more like machine guns and military-grade weaponry than they are like the many different types of firearms that are used for individual self-defense.”
The court’s action on Thursday, leaving the Illinois law in place, is not a decision on the merits of the case; as of now, there have been no conflicting decisions by lower appeals courts, and the justices may well have felt there was no need to intervene without such a conflict.
It has been decreed by the authorities that armistice has been reached in the war between Godly Christian Americans and Bud Light, which bombed Pearl Harbor and did 9/11 back in the spring by sending one (1) can of beer to Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender woman, with her face on it.
As the New York Daily News reports, the announcement was made by Kid Rock, the decider of these things. “I think they got the message,” he told Tucker Carlson, the other decider. Indeed, it was Kid Rock who started it all, when after Bud Light sent one (1) (un) (واحد) can of beer to Mulvaney, Mr. Rock attempted to shoot a bunch of Bud Light with a machine gun. He did this because he is a normal man with normal feelings who doesn’t even need any therapy.
Bud Light “deserved a black eye and they got one,” Rock told Carlson, but added that he does not want “to hold their head underwater and drown them because they made a mistake.”
Oh certainly not! All the months between April and now, all the histrionic boycotts, have been a measured and moderated reaction from people who are functioning adults […] But let’s not overreact, says Kid Rock.
Or maybe it did go a little bit overboard, oops:
“Hopefully, other companies get it, too. But you know, at the end of the day, I don’t think the punishment that they’ve been getting at this point fits the crime,” the singer rambled. “I would like to see people get us back on board and become bigger because that’s the America that I want to live in.”
New York Daily News notes that Monsieur Rock publicly drank a Bud Light in August and his bar sells it, so it’s possible his heart wasn’t as far into the boycott as it seemed.
As for Tucker, well, El Chico de Roca did make this announcement on his Twitter basement Unabomber she-shed show. Tucker also this week interviewed Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) President Dana White, who positively exploded Bud Light all over him and got his pants messy. The UFC is doing a partnership with Anheuser-Busch, you see.
White has been defending the deal to MAGA idiots ever since, sounds like, but with Tucker he seems to have found a somewhat receptive audience. Tucker laughed along with him as he said, “If you consider yourself a patriot, you should be drinking gallons of Bud Light.”
But wait, said Tucker. Isn’t he supposed to be boycotting? No, said White: [video at the link]
“You should have Bud Light drums stacked in your garage. They are way more aligned with you than these other beer companies. That, I guarantee you. Take it from someone who is in the know, who does business with beer companies. You are way more aligned with Bud Light than you are with any other beer company,” White said.
Of course on Monday, Tucker talked to Megyn Kelly […] Kelly asked if Tucker talked to Kid Rock about Bud Light. He said “I don’t know” about continuing to spank Bud Light, because aren’t you supposed to stop spanking when the behavior changes?
Then he went like this: [Sirius XM sound file at the link]
“This is my job as a parent,” Tucker said. “I improved you with punishment!” But Megyn Kelly wasn’t there with him, because Bud Light hasn’t actually apologized to lunatic white fascist Bible-beating scumbags like them. And Tucker caved, because he’s a cuck.
WHY WON’T THEY APOLOGIZE TO US! They whined at each other for the rest of the segment, and theorized that it’s possible that Bud Light is actually not sorry for sending one (1) (אחד) can of beer to a transgender person with their face on it. “Maybe they would do it again,” Megyn Kelly complained. “I want them to care about ME and MY area of the world,” she said, thereby renewing her Karen card for the next 10 years with one sentence.
OK so you know that thing where true believer fascist Christian lunatics get murderously angry when they realize that the people they thought were on their side — who they really really really thought hated LGBTQ+ people and Black people and educated people and people with integrity as much as they do — are actually on the side of money and maybe don’t care that much about them at the end of the day?
Those people are mad. [Screen grab at the link showing shocking responses to people letting up on the anti-Bud Light campaign]
Perhaps maddest of all is Matt Walsh, who as we all know is obsessed with trans people and obsessed with the Bud Light boycott and the Target boycott and the boycott of anything that’s ever nice to trans people.
Walsh tweeted yesterday morning, “Just reminding you that the Bud Light boycott is still on.” And he’s been inconsolably crying about it ever since.
Ari Drennen from Media Matters collected these tweets, all of which deserve to be read and savored. She said, “There’s something so horrifying spellbinding in a grown man throwing a public temper tantrum because other people have lost interest in his obsession with Dylan Mulvaney and returned to drinking a beer that he’s admitted he doesn’t even drink.” [Screen grabs of tweets at the link]
Dear God. Readers, that is a mere sampling of his Twitter feed. And that’s not even to mention the absurd meltdown’s he’s having on his show, as he seethes against conservatives who just don’t fucking care anymore, and about how Bud Light needs to “grovel at [their] feet.” […]
Sorry, Matt Walsh’s kids! Daddy can’t read you a story tonight! He has to tweet a million more times about the transgender lady who makes him feel inferior some more!
Sorry, Matt Walsh’s wife! For literally everything!
By the way, one of those Walsh tweets above says this is the “one time in modern history when conservatives have staged an effective boycott against a major corporate brand.”
We’ve been saying since the beginning that about a year from now, this would all be forgotten, and all the histrionics from white conservative fascists would have amounted to nothing. Guess what? We just checked with Barron’s, and it looks like Anheuser-Busch’s stock price is almost back to where it was back in April, when Kid Rock had his little tantrum: [graph at the link]
The European Union on Thursday agreed to open membership talks with Ukraine, an important sign of support […]
Full E.U. membership for Ukraine is realistically many years away, and E.U. leaders gathered in Brussels were still debating an aid package for Kyiv worth more than $50 billion, money seen as critical for Ukraine to keep fighting.
But it was nonetheless a historic moment for Ukraine, which has pushed for years to join the bloc to bind it closer to its allies in Europe, bolster its economy and give its citizens the right to live, work and travel freely across the continent.
“History is made by those who don’t get tired of fighting for freedom,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote in a celebratory post on X. European Council President Charles Michel called the decision “a very powerful political signal.”
The E.U. also agreed Thursday to open accession negotiations with Moldova, a neighbor of Ukraine that has similarly sought to strengthen ties with the bloc as it comes under pressure from Russia.
The agreement on Ukraine membership talks came after several hours of negotiation and weeks of resistance from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who maintains friendly relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and has regularly stalled E.U. decisions that are unfavorable for Moscow. […]
KGsays
Lynna, OM@145,
Orbán was given a €10bn bribe (the European Commission unfroze funds that had been held up because Orbán has subordinated the judicial system to his party), but the Ukrainians could certainly do with some good news, and Putin could certainly do with a slap in the face.
December brings festivities to many of England’s cities, but for one, it is a chance to rejoice in more than one set of 2,000-year-old celebrations.
Every year, a week or so before Christmas, Chester’s streets are filled with the same sights, sounds and smells that have marked Saturnalia in the city since its days as the Roman city of Deva Victrix.
The festival, which English Heritage (EH) said honoured Saturn, the Roman god of farming and harvest, was one of the ancient empire’s most popular celebrations…
Keep Saturn in Saturnalia!
When someone asks “What have the Romans ever done for us?“, keep Saturnalia in mind.
Mazi Melesa Pilip, technically a registered Democrat, is the GOP’s nominee to fill New York’s vacant seat in the House of Representatives formerly held by George Santos.
New York Republicans on Thursday nominated Mazi Melesa Pilip, a Nassau County legislator, as their candidate to fill the vacancy created by former Rep. George Santos’ expulsion from Congress earlier this month…
Pilip is due to face former U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), the Democratic nominee, in a Feb. 13 special election that is expected to draw a massive influx of national resources and attention to New York’s 3rd Congressional District, a coveted swing seat…
A Russian drone attack on Ukraine violated NATO airspace over Romania overnight and caused German Eurofighters to scramble in response, German news channel ntv reported on Dec. 14.
Although German crews identified Russian aircraft through visual contact, there was no NATO order to shoot them down. One drone exploded over Romania, preliminary data suggests…
Venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz has announced its intent to begin lobbying the U.S. government, and their plan is as tone-deaf and obtuse as this summer’s dreadful “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Essentially, they will give to anyone — literally anyone — who “supports an optimistic technology-enabled future.” …
birgerjohanssonsays
Yeah, regulations are such a downer when you are flying passenger aircraft or operating nuclear powerplants.
A link to warm you during winter:
‘The most loyal friends are Istanbul stray cats’. https://youtu.be/ZdwzExyUY9k
It’s time to celebrate the end of the year with some fireworks — of the celestial kind. And this year’s Geminid meteor shower is set to be a cracker.The annual event, which can be seen in the early hours of the morning from anywhere in Australia this week, is predicted to be the best we’ve seen for a very long time. For a start, unlike previous years, there is no moon in the sky to hamper your view, amateur astronomer Ian Musgrave says. “The sky will be beautifully dark,” Dr Musgrave says. We can also expect higher rates of meteors than usual in the early hours of Thursday 14 December and Friday 15 December. … (snip)..Serendipitously, this year’s meteor shower is predicted to peak close to when this point is highest in our skies so we’ll see more meteors than usual. And over the past few decades, the meteor rates have been ramping up as we pass deeper into the dust cloud. “Because the timing is perfect and the sky’s dark, this is likely to be one of the best Geminid displays ever from an Aussie perspective — or even the best,” Professor Horner says.
Soon after payment-processing giant Wirecard reported in June 2020 that nearly $2 billion had gone missing from its balance sheet, its chief operating officer Jan Marsalek boarded a private jet out of Austria. After a landing in Belarus, he was whisked by car to Moscow, where he got a Russian passport under an assumed name. Western intelligence and security officials now say they have reached the unsettling conclusion that Marsalek had likely been a Russian agent for nearly a decade. From a report:…
When it comes to Donald Trump and controversies surrounding classified information, there have long been two broad areas of concern. The first unfolded during and after the Republican’s presidency, with several instances in which Trump carelessly shared highly sensitive information for no apparent reason.
The second was Trump’s alleged decisions to take classified materials from the White House, bring them to his glorified country club in Florida, refuse to give them back, and obstruct the retrieval process, culminating in a felony indictment.
But as it turns out, those aren’t the only areas of concern. CNN published a new report about a binder that went missing from the Trump White House, which seems awfully important.
A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Its disappearance, which has not been previously reported, was so concerning that intelligence officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders last year about the missing materials and the government’s efforts to retrieve them, the sources said.
[…] the relevant players identified in the lengthy report did not respond to requests for comment.
But if the CNN account is accurate, it’s a doozy.
According to the reporting, at issue is a large binder that included sensitive intelligence on Russia, which was last seen in the Trump White House in the final days of the Republican’s term. The documents were apparently brought to the White House as part of the outgoing president’s declassification efforts, and they were under the care of then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
The plan, evidently, was for Trump to approve the disclosure of sensitive information, which would then be disseminated to partisan allies, despite the objections of national security officials and White House attorneys seeking redactions.
Now, no one seems to know where the unredacted version of the binder containing the classified raw intelligence is. (It was not among the items found at Mar-a-Lago last year.) […]
As inflation continues to ebb and we begin to see truly gaudy economic numbers (a 3.7% unemployment rate, an almost unheard of 5.2% GDP growth rate, and a surging stock market!), President Joe Biden has a great story to tell. Trump also has a story to tell, but it’s not based on economic metrics so much as the pornographic Plinko game in his head.
When America expectorated Donald Trump from its quavering corpus in November 2020, he left office as the worst jobs president since the Great Depression. So when he talks about President Joe Biden potentially leading us into a new depression, he kind of—in a weird way—knows what he’s talking about.
And so on Wednesday, the same day the Dow reached an all-time high, Trump warned Iowa rallygoers that Biden’s economic stewardship will soon plunge us into another Great Depression. […] [video at the link]
But as Rolling Stone reports:
Trump, who accomplished the feat of becoming the first president since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression to leave the country with fewer jobs by the end of his one-term presidency, claimed that the “Biden administration is running on the fumes of the great success of the Trump Administration.”[LOL!] He added, addressing his supporters: “Without us this thing would have crashed to levels never seen before, and if we’re not elected we’ll have a depression the likes of which I don’t believe anybody has ever seen… maybe 1929?”
[…] under his administration the unemployment rate surged to 14.7 percent in April [2020] and by the time he left office the following January, the rate had receded to 6.3 percent. Many economists have pointed to the former president’s disastrous leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic as having exacerbated the country’s economic downturn at the time.
By now, we should all be keenly aware that Trump just says stuff. Whether it’s true or not hardly concerns him. For instance, anyone who criticizes him—even a little—is automatically the worst person ever. Just ask super-overrated 21-time Oscar nominee—and three-time winner—Meryl Streep.
Case in point: In 2020, Trump predicted Biden would crash the economy if he won. (Narrator: He didn’t.) [video at the link]
But Trump’s latest statement is particularly risible given the current state of our economy, which has shown steady growth and improvement—despite those unavoidable spikes in inflation—since Biden fumigated the Oval Office nearly three years ago.
Furthermore? If we took Trump’s timeless advice, the House would definitely not be launching an impeachment inquiry into Biden for the high crime of being a Democrat in the White House. Consider this 2019 tweet (there’s always a tweet):
You mean the Stock Market hit an all-time record high today and they’re actually talking impeachment!? Will I ever be given credit for anything by the Fake News Media or Radical Liberal Dems? NO COLLUSION!
Of course, many Americans are only too happy to excuse [Trump’s] awful economic legacy in light of the pandemic-related disruptions we experienced, which would have almost certainly challenged anyone in office at the time. Which is fair. It’s also fair to ask how much the Trump administration’s botched COVID-19 response led to our Great Depression-like economic numbers.
What’s clearly unfair, though, is blaming Biden for post-pandemic-related inflation while giving Trump a pass for the truly awful economy he left behind—especially since Biden has handled post-COVID price surges better than almost every other wealthy countries’ leaders.
Meanwhile, in case you still doubt that Trump just regurgitates whatever barmy bits bedevil his brain from one moment to the next, he’s also still obsessed with the fact that he’s inferior to former President Barack Obama in every way. So much so that he feels the need to say outrageously untrue things in order to soothe his creaky ego.
At the same Iowa rally, Trump cited the professional—and very weird—opinion of Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, a former White House doctor, to claim he’s in better physical shape than Obama. [ROTFL] Shocker: He couched this assertion in a signature “sir” story.
The Guardian:
“He was Obama’s doctor, too, by the way,” the ex-real estate tycoon reminded the crowd at the Hyatt Hotel.
“I said, ‘Who’s healthier?’ He said, ‘Sir, there’s no contest.’ I won’t tell you the answer, but you know the answer, okay? It was me.”
He went even further, quoting his old physician as saying: “‘If he didn’t eat junk food, he’d live to 200 years old.’ That’s my kind of a doctor.”
On whether he believed his advanced years could become an issue – as he has repeatedly insisted is the case for 81-year-old Mr Biden – Mr Trump said: “I’ll be the first to know. But I feel that right now I’m sharper than I was 20 years ago, and I don’t know why.
That’s a mystery for the ages. And is it really possible he can spot the difference between a lion and a rhinoceros even faster than he could 20 years ago? Because that would be scary. Before you know it, he’ll be Bradley Cooper in “Limitless.” […]
[…] Giuliani’s attorney was left begging the jury. “If you award them what they are asking for, it will be the end of Mr. Giuliani.” […]
Giuliani’s attorney Joseph Sibley didn’t try to deny what Giuliani had said, or that the lies leveled against the mother and daughter, who served as election workers in Atlanta, had generated genuine harm. However, he claimed that the initial accusations against the women were made by right-wing conspiracy site Gateway Pundit, and that the false claims were already circulating among supporters of Donald Trump before Giuliani joined in the lies.
“There’s no question these claimants were harmed,” said Sibley. “They didn’t deserve what happened to them. But what happened to them happened because of a controversy involving a lot of people, not just Rudy Giuliani.”
Sibley claimed that Giuliani is “a good man” and that awarding a large settlement would be “the civil equivalent of the death penalty.”
Attorney Michael Gottlieb for Freeman and Moss asked for $24 million each for the two women. During his closing statement, he read a passage from Giuliani’s 2002 book, “Leadership,” in which the former Trump attorney wrote, “Never pick on someone smaller than you. Never be a bully.” Gottlieb recounted some of the hundreds of threats Freeman and Moss have received, and asked the jury to “send a message” that Giuliani had no right to “offer up defenseless civil servants to a virtual mob.”
Giuliani was present in court on Thursday, but slipped out without talking to the press. The jury did not deliberate overnight. It was scheduled to resume this morning with the possibility that they could return a verdict announcing the level of fine as early as Friday afternoon.
The case leveled against Giuliani falls in the category of an “intentional tort.” This is a wrongful act that didn’t occur by accident, or through a lack of knowledge. It’s a deliberate malicious action. It doesn’t matter if the perpetrator intended that the victims of such actions should come to harm, only that they did it purposely and harm was generated.
In rewards from an intentional tort, bankruptcy is not a protection. Should Freeman and Moss be awarded large settlements that seem possible, Giuliani could be paying off his debt to the women for the rest of his life.
Giuliani repeating his false claims on Monday also raises the possibility that Freeman and Moss could decide to sue him a second time for his continued defamation. Giuliani has not apologized or issued a retraction of his claims.
The binder contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election, sources tell CNN.
To give you an idea of how much raw information was in the binder, the article says it was 10 inches thick. That’s thousands of pages.
Cassidy Hutchinson testified that she saw Mark Meadows leave the White House with the binder during Trump’s final days. I believe her.
This should be the top story everywhere. It is well past time to lock up Meadows and Trump. They are likely guilty of some of the most serious crimes imaginable.
I used to hold a NATO Top Secret clearance. There’s a trail of signatures for such classified documents; if it’s missing, who last signed for it? I suspect his first name might have been Mark.
——————————-
My suspicion is that the information in that binder is in Russian hands by now, along with a cover note from Trump asking what they can do to replicate those efforts for the 2024 election.
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See the CNN article. Link
According to that, Hutchinson signed for the docs when they arrived at the white house. Did she setup an internal tracking system or was she foolish enough to believe that Meadow’s safe was good enough? She’s going to get thrown under the bus on this one. She better have a tracking sheet somewhere. When they were redacting, did they make a copy of the original to do the redactions? I can’t emphasize how serious this is.
Cassidy Hutchinson, one of Meadows’ top aides, testified to Congress and wrote in her memoir that she believes Meadows took home an unredacted version of the binder. She said it had been kept in Meadows’ safe and that she saw him leave with it from the White House.
——————————
It’s in her book. She describes how frantic he was while looking for somewhere to get the material copied.
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All of Trump’s stolen classified documents aren’t accounted for. And the Russian binder may be only part of what’s missing.
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In June 2022, Trump named Solomon and Patel as his representatives to the National Archives, who were authorized to view the former president’s records. Solomon’s lawsuit included email correspondence showing how Solomon and Patel tried to get access to the binder as soon as they were named as Trump’s representatives.
“There is a binder of documents from the Russia investigation that the President declassified with an order in his last few days in office. It’s about 10 inches thick,” Solomon wrote in June 2022 to Gary Stern, the Archives’ general counsel. “We’d like to make a set of copies — digital or paper format — of every document that was declassified by his order and included in the binder.”
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You know what’s amazing about this? The paper trail. Obviously they wanted copies because they DIDNT ALREADY HAVE THE MATERIAL. Which means it must have existed only in paper form — if there had been an electronic copy somewhere on an office computer, they’d have gotten access and boom the thing would have been copied, plus possibly pushed into the memory hole. 10 inches thick means nothing — still less than 1 GB. The paper trail saved democracy, one little step at a time.
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It’s always worse than we were led to believe
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I wonder why a certain former president would possibly want to make evidence disappear that had to do with that president cheating his way into the presidency with the help of a foreign dictator? It’s a head scratcher …
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This issue is way-too-serious to be pled into Judge Cannon’s Classified Documents trial.
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The day before leaving office, Trump issued an order declassifying most of the binder’s contents, setting off a flurry of activity in the final 48 hours of his presidency. Multiple copies of the redacted binder were created inside the White House, with plans to distribute them across Washington to Republicans in Congress and right-wing journalists.
Instead, copies initially sent out were frantically retrieved at the direction of White House lawyers demanding additional redactions.
The final columns and tracks are being laid for the Mexican president’s pet infrastructure project: a partially-elevated rail link called the Tren Maya (Maya Train).
The network will stretch for 1,500km (930 miles) in a vast arc from Chiapas state to the border with Belize – bringing, its supporters say, tourism and development to the jungle…
The Senate recessed for the week Thursday afternoon, as usual, but in a surprise move Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told them that this isn’t the beginning of their holiday recess. They’ll be back in on Monday to continue negotiations on Ukraine aid and border security.
“As I have said, if we believe something is important and urgent we should stay and get the job done,” Schumer told the Senate. “We have to get this done. Our Republican colleagues who have said action on the border is so urgent should have no problem with continuing to work next week.”
That attempt to shame Republicans was worth trying, though ultimately futile. These are not people who can be shamed. One reporter tweeted this exchange overheard in the hallway:
R senator wishes Dem senator “happy holidays.”
D: You’re not coming back?
R: “No, no, no. This thing’s over. You guys are coming back. We’re not coming back.”
Another asked GOP Sens. John Cornyn and Marsha Blackburn if they’ll be back next week. Cornyn said only “if there is something to vote on,” and Blackburn replied, “I doubt it.”
The Senate staying also makes Republican Speaker Mike Johnson look even more feckless, sending the House out on a three-week break with so much business pending. “The House will not wait around to receive and debate a rushed product,” he said in a statement […]
The House also left before acting on a resolution passed unanimously in the Senate Thursday to provide back pay to all the senior military officers whose promotions had been delayed by Sen. Tommy Tuberville since February. The Alabama Republican finally dropped his hold on the promotions of several hundred officers over Pentagon abortion policy earlier this month.
Schumer likely intends to line up votes on the remaining 11 nominees for four-star positions that Tuberville is still blocking. Maybe enough Republicans will blow off coming back to work that he can get that done by unanimous vote, too.
Posted by readers of the article:
A 3 week vacation for the same people who think workers don’t need overtime pay (and yet are “too lazy” to get a job), don’t need paid time off, health care access, worker safety, or affordable education and housing. I hope they all have a wonderful holiday and get visits from the Ghost of Christmas Future.
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Good for Senator Schumer. I hope he spends the 3 weeks doing every possible thing that needs doing before the repugs return.
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A simple majority constitutes a quorum. So if the Repubs want to go home, let them. Schumer has given them plenty of notice that the Senate will be in session. It’s not his problem if he decides to bring up a bunch of judicial nominees and the Republicans aren’t around to vote against cloture.
————————–
“Democrats stay at work while republicans leave for holidays” sounds like a pretty good headline.
[…] Trump [declared] at a rally in Iowa, “Gasoline prices are now five, six, seven dollars, even eight dollars a gallon.”
Such rhetoric might be true in other countries, but not this one. Bloomberg News reported:
The cheapest gasoline in 2 1/2 years is set to drive spending for US consumers this holiday shopping season. A gallon of regular gasoline now costs $3.087, down more than 10 cents from a year ago and the lowest since late-June 2021, according to data from the American Automobile Association. Fuel prices have steadily declined since the summer driving season ended in September, largely tracking losses in oil as well as reflecting soft seasonal demand and growing supplies.
A related report from Axios a day earlier added that the national per-gallon average is likely to soon fall below $3 for the first time since May 2021.
There’s obviously no mystery as to why Trump lied about this — it’s no secret that the former president just makes stuff up — but his demonstrably false rhetoric was a timely reminder that the gap between the political debate over gas prices and the energy reality is enormous.
Republicans and their allies have, for example, spent much of Joe Biden’s presidency insisting that the Democratic administration has curtailed domestic oil production. That’s the opposite of reality: To the frustration of much of the president’s progressive base, domestic oil production is actually higher now than when Trump was in office.
[…] Republicans don’t care that their rhetoric is false.
The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell added in a recent column: “If ‘energy independence’ means exporting more than you import, we’ve achieved it in spades. The United States has been exporting more crude oil and petroleum products than it imports for 22 straight months now, far longer than was the case under Trump. If this is what waging war on fossil fuels looks like, Democrats apparently aren’t very good at it.”
It’s against this backdrop that the Republican frontrunner is decrying $8-per-gallon gas, even as national averages drop to $3-per-gallon gas.
If the White House’s critics want to debate how and why prices have fallen, that’s fine, of course, but can we at least have a debate rooted in reality?
The apology letters that Donald Trump-allied lawyers Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro were required to write as a condition of their plea deals in the Georgia election interference case are just one sentence long.
The letters, obtained Thursday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through an open records request, were hand-written and terse. Neither letter acknowledges the legitimacy of Democrat Joe Biden’s win in Georgia’s 2020 election nor denounces the baseless conspiracy theories they pushed to claim Trump was cheated out of victory through fraud.
“I apologize for my actions in connection with the events in Coffee County,” Powell wrote in a letter dated Oct. 19, the same day she pleaded guilty to six misdemeanors accusing her of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties.
“I apologize to the citizens of the state of Georgia and of Fulton County for my involvement in Count 15 of the indictment,” Chesebro wrote in a letter dated Oct. 20, when he appeared in court to plead guilty to one felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents. […]
Insurance companies have saturated the airwaves, print media, and more with their farcical Medicare Advantage product. Kudos to NBC, however late, for bringing this report against one of their major advertisers. [video at the link]
During this enrollment period, I have been trying to inform my audience with the expectation that they would be a voice multiplier to stop Americans from transitioning from the ever-reliable Traditional Medicare provided by our government to the profit-driven farcical Medicare Advantage offered by private insurance companies.
I am sure you have noticed the advertising barrage over the last few months trying to sell you Medicare Advantage (MA). [I also get hundreds of phone calls, and it is quite annoying.] Note that ultimately, the taxpayer pays for all those expensive ads and the high commissions of the charlatans who navigate you to the MA plans. But as an individual, you pay with rationed and substandard health care.
I had not seen the NBC report until I received a call from my brother-in-law, frantic.
“Egberto,” he said, “You were right. Medicare Advantage is a scam. I just saw it on NBC.”
“You mean you did not believe me?” I asked. “Well, I thought you were exaggerating.”
I told him to make sure to inform his friends. Soon after, I got an email from a loyal listener and supporter of the program who had pushed back on my reporting because it worked well for him. He emailed me to let me know he saw the report and the danger of this scam.
It is essential that we, as a society, as Americans, do not continue to fall for the indoctrination from the corporate class who really know how to put lipstick on a pig. It may work for some for a while. But ultimately, Medicare Advantage will fail, and it will be at our expense. IT’S MATH!
Please watch the entire video above, including my commentary and essential snippets from the NBC report. I wrote a comprehensive blog on this here.
Danish shipping company A.P. Moller-Maersk will pause its container shipments through the Red Sea until further notice after various vessels came under attack by Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
“Following the near-miss incident involving Maersk Gibraltar yesterday and yet another attack on a container vessel today, we have instructed all Maersk vessels in the area bound to pass through the Bab al-Mandab Strait to pause their journey until further notice,” the company said in a statement to Reuters.
The missile attacks on the MSC Palatium III and the Al Jasrah vessels are escalating the maritime campaign by the Iranian-backed Houthis. The group says their attacks aim to end the Israeli airstrikes and ground offensive targeting the Gaza Strip amid the war with Hamas, The Associated Press reported.
A Houthi spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree claimed responsibility for the attack and said the Yemeni armed forces will continue preventing ships from heading to Israeli ports in the Red Sea “until they bring in the food and medicine that our steadfast brothers in the Gaza Strip need.”
German shipping company Hapag-Lloyd was operating the Al Jasrah at the time and said it would pause all traffic in the corridor until Monday. […]
First Lady of the United States Jill Biden posted a fun little video on social media Wednesday featuring dancers from the New York-based Dorrance Dance troupe tap dancing through the White House’s Christmas decorations to the music of Duke Ellington’s adaptation of “Waltz of the Flowers” from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. It’s jazzy and festive, showing off the White House’s Christmas decorations and the great big tree in the Blue Room, along with other Nutcracker-themed decor.
Dr. Biden twote:
A bit of magic, wonder, and joy brought to you by the talented tappers of Dorrance Dance, performing their playful interpretation of The Nutcracker Suite.
Enjoy! (Heart emoji)
[video at the link]
And then rightwing media, both social and antisocial, howled as if Dr. Biden had uploaded video of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer beheading the Christ Child during a Super Bowl halftime show performed by Beyoncé and Satan. It was a veritable festival of incoherent culture war rage and grievance, although often those who seemed angriest couldn’t quite articulate why they were so angry, exactly, just that the Bidens are destroying Christmas and America and embarrassing the USA in the sight of the world and oh my god, why would anyone foist such a horrible display on America and pretend it’s about Christmas?
Stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik, whose vile “Libs of TikTok” account regularly inspires followers to threaten the lives of those she focuses on, proclaimed, “This should’ve come with a sensitivity label. This is horrendous,” although she didn’t specify what exactly made the clip unfit for sensitive eyes. Maybe the tracking shot at the opening. A lot of people are freaked out by hallways after seeing The Shining (just one of the movies angry Xeeters compared it to, because someone tap dancing to The Nutcracker at Christmas is exactly like the movie’s freaky bear guy scene.)
Also, because some of the costumes include slightly elaborate hats, a lot of people said it was exactly like The Hunger Games, especially since look at all this extravagance at a time when the economy is in ruins and Joe Biden’s America is a dystopian hellscape. Or maybe it was A Clockwork Orange, because that, like the video, held people’s eyeballs open while making them watch horrors.
Among other things, the video was decried as a felony, an atrocity, mentally ill, beyond embarrassing, in need of an “explicit content” warning […], tasteless, classless, bizarre, tacky, the “Nightmare Before Christmas,” creepy, and of course shot through with gay and trans ideology, because that’s all the Right can think of anymore.
A few of the brighter rightwing outlets, like the tabloid Daily Mail and Tucker Carlson’s White Panic Fearatorium, attacked the dance troupe itself, since its website urges people to support Black Lives Matter and calls for prison abolition, as well as directing readers to sign petitions to stop the murder of Black trans women. Why, it even features links on fighting racism, an idea that apparently only communists could ever get behind.
And of course, there were the inevitable complaints, like this protracted whine at the Washington Examiner, that “the most important criticism about the video should be that it did not acknowledge the word ‘Christmas’ or the birth of Jesus Christ,” a gripe that, as far as we can tell, Righties aren’t lobbing at every single performance of The Nutcracker ballet or Tchaikovsky’s score, or at 90 percent of Hallmark Christmas movies, which celebrate the Christian tradition of overworked urban executive women meeting cute with hunky small town men and despite initial misunderstandings, falling in love.
The real outrage, though, is that the video isn’t classy and refined like Melania Trump’s soft-focus Christmas video that one time (minus the Silent Hill horror forest or the Red Yip Yip Muppet trees). Now there was a lady who loved Christmas and baby Jesus, you pagan heathens […]
We have a feeling that ultimately, in all the content-free rage, the reaction to the video comes down in about equal parts to knee-jerk negative partisanship (anything the Bidens do is demonic) and, as Amanda Marcotte observed, the belief that Black people shouldn’t be allowed to sully a White Christmas: [Screengrabs of offensive tweets]
Yup. Consider the screenshot that many of the complaints focus on in calling the video “deranged” or “bizarre”: a Black dancer as the ballet’s Clara, her mouth terrifyingly wide open because that’s scary, not an expression of delight like if a white ballerina did it. Here’s the Federalist headline, “Jill Biden’s ‘Hunger Games’ Themed Christmas Video Is An Abomination,” with the terrifying abomination of a Black woman acting happy. [photo at the link]
[…] The Federalist piece wastes no time getting to why the video is a crime against humanity:
The dance performance isn’t just weird; it’s another opportunity for the Biden White House to slip anti-white racism and radical Marxism into the country’s Christmas celebrations.
[…] they’re bad people who want to wreck American whiteness, which just is obvious when you see the video. And when there’s nothing on the website or in the video to complain about, just making shit up is a perfectly acceptable alternative because the Federalist just knows all leftists hate Jesus and Christmas:
[…] Nowhere is there a nativity scene in sight. […] Black people, animal urges and licentiousness!
You know where else there isn’t a nativity scene? In The Grinch. And it was only described in “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” not seen. And the nativity scene in the “Star Wars Christmas Special” was with wookiees. […]
the “Marxist tap dancers” are a sign that America is in dire need of a strong man to fix everything:
This same administration has made a mockery out of the Christian values our country was founded on by inviting Marxist tap dancers and naked crossdressers to the White House and unleashing the FBI on pro-lifers, traditional Catholics, and concerned parents at school board meetings.
Biden promised to “unite” the public when he ran for office, but instead, he stood on a podium bathed in blood-red lights to declare war on half of the American public. […]
Biden has victimized the American people, stripping us of our dignity and spirit. Indeed, the people’s house that he occupies will fly a pride flag and host anti-white racist dancers but won’t prominently display a nativity scene.
Wow, that’s a lot to pile up on some people tap dancing to Duke Ellington’s “Nutcracker.” Guess we need to let Donald trump suspend the Constitution and punish America’s internal enemies, lest our liberty be forever lost to that scary Black lady in a tutu.
lumipunasays
Update on the Russian hybrid migrant operation on Finnish border: Yup, still there.
At the end of November, Finland closed its entire Russian border for two weeks. Early this week, the closure was extended for most border crossing points until mid January, while two crossing points were opened just to see what happens (see Yahoo News link at 63 upthread). Traffic resumed on Thursday just after midnight.
Quite predictably, many (a few hundred) of the migrants who’d been stuck in northwestern Russia immediately rushed to cross the border. They apparently didn’t know for certain if Russian border guards would still let them through (since they lacked visa to Finland/Schengen area), but almost all of them were indeed let through. Meanwhile, there have been reports in recent days that Russian officials have at least occasionally arrested migrants whose visa to Russia has expired. Some of those were deported to their countries of origin, while some were falsely promised lavish pay and benefits if they’d enlist as foreign contract soldiers to fight in Ukraine. I shit you not.
During the two weeks’ closure, it didn’t seem like there were many new migrants massing behind the border. Still, that would likely change if the border remained open for a while. Therefore, Finnish government immediately decided to shut everything up again, effective Friday evening (a couple hours ago now). At least we demonstrated that we don’t really want to keep the border closed just to spite Russia. This mostly affects a bunch of ethnic Russians who live in Finland and have lots of contacts across the border. The situation will likely last months, if not years, with occasional brief openings.
Thank you lumipuna @171 for that update. I continue to feel badly about people waiting to cross the border while winter weather makes the situation more dire.
I have heard that Russia “falsely promised lavish pay and benefits if they’d enlist as foreign contract soldiers to fight in Ukraine” to a lot of immigrants. That’s a nasty business indeed.
Not all constituents are created equal, not for Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn. Consider Kate Cox, the Texas woman who sued the state to obtain an abortion to end a life-threatening pregnancy, and was denied by the state’s Supreme Court.
Here’s Cruz running away from reporters asking whether he agreed with the court’s decision as he headed out of town Thursday. [Tweet and video at the link]
[Cruz has performed this “refuse to answer” farce before. He is still doing it.]
Cruz and his office have seemingly refused to answer that question for three days now, HuffPo reports. Cruz keeps telling reporters to call his press office for his response. His press office keeps ignoring their calls.
Cornyn did at least answer the question, sort of: He said he doesn’t have to have an opinion on the decision, because it’s not his job. “I’m a federal official so I really don’t have a comment,” he said on Tuesday.
HuffPo had some luck finding Republican senators who would talk about it, mostly to distance themselves from the extremism of the Texas law. “I have not looked into that, but I do believe in the life of the mother. I’ve made that exception previously,” Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa said. Sen. Steve Daines, the Montanan in charge of getting Republicans elected next year, went to great pains to say Texas isn’t a stand-in for the Republican Party, saying GOP candidates need to make it clear that they “do not support a federal ban on all abortions” and that “we must have exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother.”
Only one Republican, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, condemned the decision. “I thought it was a terrible decision … that may affect her future ability to carry a child, was forced to leave Texas to get a much needed abortion—it’s just inconceivable to me,” she said.
She’s undoubtedly very concerned about that. The supposedly pro-choice Collins is not, however, talking about the fact that she voted for two of Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees who overturned the constitutional right to abortion and created this outcome.
Republicans do NOT want to take responsibility for their actions. Do they think the fallout from their anti-abortion laws will just go away if they ignore it?
birgerjohanssonsays
NB
“Climate change to force people indoors earlier than expected.”
This time, Sabine Hossenfelder seems to have made a decent job interpreting science news.
The realistic wet bulb temperature is lower than the quoted value. People are going to start dying in droves from heat stroke in India, Saudi Arabia and Africa (actually, the Saudis only have themselves to blame). https://youtu.be/3eErk9PapoQ
A Connecticut appeals court on Friday upheld $75,000 in fines against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones for missing a deposition in the lawsuit by Sandy Hook families, which led to a $1.4 billion judgment against Jones for repeatedly calling the 2012 Newtown school shooting a hoax.
The state Appellate Court said that while Jones claimed an illness and doctor’s recommendations prevented him from attending the questioning in his hometown of Austin, Texas, in March 2022, he continued live broadcasts of his Infowars show at the same time. Jones later did appear for a deposition early the next month in Connecticut and was refunded the $75,000 in fines he paid.
“We agree with the trial court that the undisputed fact that the defendant chose to host a live radio broadcast from his studio … significantly undercuts his claim that he was too ill to attend the deposition,” Judge José Suarez wrote in the 3-0 ruling. “We conclude that the court reasonably inferred … that the defendant’s failure to attend his deposition … was willful.”
[…] “Jones flagrantly broke court orders — he claimed he was too sick to attend court proceedings when in fact he was broadcasting his show live — and then he blamed the trial judge for doing her job and imposing consequences,” Sterling said in a statement.
[…] In a similar trial in Texas earlier in 2022, Jones was ordered to pay nearly $50 million to the parents of another child killed in the Sandy Hook shooting for calling the massacre a hoax. A third trial is pending in Texas in a similar lawsuit by two other parents.
Jones and his media company, Free Speech Systems, both filed for bankruptcy reorganization, and how much he must pay the Sandy Hook families will be decided by a bankruptcy court judge.
Jones is appealing the Connecticut and Texas judgments.
[…] When Trump made it clear that he wanted to just tweet the whole thing out, Attorney General Bill Barr and Trump’s DNI John Ratcliffe flipped out about all the sources and methods Trump was going to blow up. But Trump didn’t give a shit about that, and neither did his chief of staff Mark Meadows, who was desperately trying to feed the dossier to disgraced former Hill editor John Solomon, so it could be laundered into the wingnut media ecosystem.
Solomon claims that on the night of January 19, Meadows invited him to the White House to review several hundred pages of the declassified binder. One of Solomon’s staffers was even allowed to leave the White House with the declassified records in a paper bag.
“Mr. Solomon’s staff began setting up a scanning operation for the complete set of documents to be released the next morning,” Solomon’s attorneys wrote in a court filing last month. “But as they set up the equipment, they received a call from the White House asking that the documents — still under embargo — be returned because the White House wished to make some additional redactions to unclassified information under the Privacy Act.”
[Meadows’s aide Cassidy] Hutchinson writes in her book that [White House Counsel Pat] Cipollone told her after 10:30 p.m. on January 19 to have Meadows retrieve the binders that had been given to Solomon and a right-wing columnist. “The Crossfire Hurricane binders are a complete disaster. They’re still full of classified information,” Hutchinson writes that Cipollone told her. “Those binders need to come back to the White House. Like, now.”
On Trump’s last day in office, Solomon stuffed the dossier into a Whole Foods bag and surrendered it to Secret Service agents. According to Hutchinson, Meadows delivered the semi-redacted copy to the DOJ, which eventually produced much of it in response to FOIA litigation — albeit in a more redacted form. That left the un-redacted copy which Meadows had been stashing in his office safe.
Hutchinson says Meadows drove off with the complete unredacted copy on the evening of January 19. Meadows says that never happened, and takes great umbrage at the suggestion that he would mishandle government documents. LOL. Whatever the truth of the matter, the dossier has never been recovered, despite a frantic search by the intelligence community and a whinyass lawsuit filed by Solomon. There are rumors of incomplete versions stored in boxes at the National Archives or floating around the DOJ — lesser gospels, impossible to authenticate. […]
Rudy Giuliani should pay a pair of Georgia election workers he repeatedly and falsely accused of fraud $148 million in damages, a federal jury said Friday.
The eight-person jury awarded Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, the sum after a four-day trial, during which they testified that Giuliani’s lies in support of former President Donald Trump’s bogus stolen-election claims subjected them to a torrent of racist and violent threats and turned their lives upside down.
Freeman testified Wednesday that she was terrorized by Trump supporters and forced to move from her home because of Giuliani’s smears. “I was scared to come home at dark, you know,” a visibly emotional Freeman said on the witness stand. “I was just scared, I knew I had to move.”
Their attorney, Michael Gottlieb, said in his closing argument that Giuliani had “no right to offer up defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob in order to overturn an election.” He urged the jurors to “send a message” with their verdict.
He said the mother and daughter should each get at least $24 million in damages for Giuliani’s defamatory statements, as well as additional money for intentional infliction of emotional distress and punitive damages claims.
[…] In his opening statement, Giuliani attorney Joseph Sibley said a large verdict would be the “civil equivalent of the death penalty” for his client. “It would be the end of Mr. Giuliani,” Sibley said.
He acknowledged in his closing argument that “my client has committed wrongful conduct against” the pair and had “harmed” them, but asked the jury to keep in mind the good Giuliani had done in his lifetime.
He told them the message he believed they should send is, “You should have been better, but you’re not as bad as the plaintiffs are making you out to be.”
The only issue the jury had to determine was money damages. […]
A four-month-old baby has been found alive “by the grace of God” his parents said after the child was sucked up into a tornado in Tennessee.
The couple said a deadly tornado on Saturday tore apart their mobile home, picking up a bassinet with the baby still inside of it.
He survived and was discovered in a fallen tree in the pouring rain…
“The tip of the tornado came down and picked up the bassinet with my baby, Lord, in it,” Ms Moore told a local news station. “He was the first thing to go up.” …
House Republicans are scrambling to fix a potential nightmare that’s unfolding in a must-win race in northwestern Ohio.
The GOP is eager to block J.R. Majewski from winning its nomination to challenge veteran Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur. Majewski lost his previous bid for Congress last year, after a news report on his military records indicated he lied about combat duty in Afghanistan.
Republicans turned to former state legislator Craig Riedel to beat Majewski in this cycle’s primary. But last week, an audio tape surfaced of Riedel calling Donald Trump “arrogant” and vowing not to endorse the former president. Now the primary looks poised to become a referendum on which is worse in today’s GOP: criticizing Trump or allegedly lying about one’s military valor.
Republican strategists don’t believe Majewski can win a general election against Kaptur, given his record and how purple the district is. Yet the audio of Riedel may have tanked his chances of defeating Majewski…
The European Union failed to agree on a 50 billion-euro ($54 billion) package in financial aid that Ukraine desperately needs to stay afloat, even as the bloc decided Thursday to open accession negotiations with the war-torn country.
The aid was vetoed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, delivering another tough blow to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after he failed this week to persuade U.S. lawmakers to approve an additional $61 billion for Ukraine, mainly to buy weapons from the U.S.
[…] Hungary’s leader decided not to veto the accession talks, but then blocked the aid package.
“I can inform you that 26 leaders agreed on the (budget negotiation),” European Council President Charles Michel said. “I should be very precise. One leader, Sweden, needs to consult its parliament, which is in line with the usual procedure for this country, and one leader couldn’t agree.”
The decisions required unanimity among the EU’s members.
Still, Michel, who was chairing the Brussels summit, called the start of accession talks “a clear signal of hope for their people and our continent.”
Although the process between opening negotiations and Ukraine finally becoming a member could take many years, Zelenskyy welcomed the agreement as “a victory for Ukraine. A victory for all of Europe.”
“History is made by those who don’t get tired of fighting for freedom,” Zelenskyy said.
The financial package could not be endorsed after Orban vetoed both the extra money and a review of the EU budget. Ukraine is badly counting on the funds to help its damaged economy survive in the coming year.
Michel said leaders would reconvene in January in an effort to break the deadlock. […]
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out.
CLAIM: The federal government gives people who enter the U.S. illegally a cell phone, a domestic plane ticket to a location of their choice and a $5,000 Visa gift card.
THE FACTS: People who enter the U.S. illegally do not receive such assistance from the federal government […] Immigration and Customs Enforcement gives some immigrants phones, but they can only access a monitoring app called SmartLink. Those who cross the border illegally do not receive gift cards. And although limited federal aid can help get migrants where they intend to go, they typically must choose from a set list of destinations and are usually transported by bus, not planes. A U.S. Senate candidate from Arizona in recent days spread the false information in a video circulating on social media. The erroneous claims are similar to information that has been previouslymisrepresented online.
“When these folks come across and they’re processed, they’re being given a cell phone, a plane ticket to wherever they want to go in this country, so probably to a community near you, and a $5,000 Visa card,” Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, a Republican, says in the video posted to his profile on X, formerly Twitter. He continues: “So while this Christmas season you’re struggling to keep your lights on, while you’re struggling to pay your rent, put Christmas presents under the tree for your kids, we have our government giving people that came into this country illegally $5,000 gift cards. That’s the truth, folks.” [Those are the Republican lies, folks.]
[…] The phones are not connected to a cellular network and cannot be used to browse the internet or make unauthorized calls or texts. Instead, they use Wi-Fi, which allows program participants to complete scheduled check-ins, receive reminders about court hearings and access a database of community services, among other functions related to program compliance.
[…] “The overwhelming majority of migrants who cross the border have to pay for their own transport,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, told the AP. […] “Some migrants arriving from the U.S.-Mexico border may receive plane or bus tickets to their chosen destination, paid for by a non-profit organization,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute. “Others may be provided a free bus to a set list of destinations, funded by a state or city government.” She explained that these entities have been able to request reimbursements from the federal government, but that “the federal dollars have not been sufficient to cover all of the costs.” […]
___
CLAIM: Listings on Etsy selling downloads of pizza photos for thousands of dollars are just a disguise for pedaling child pornography.
THE FACTS: Etsy investigated the claims and found them baseless, a representative said. While no threat to child safety was established, the posts were removed from the online marketplace because they did not appear legitimate and had what seemed to be unreasonably high prices. The listings appeared as the years-old conspiracy theory known as “pizzagate,” which posits that Democrats were harboring child sex slaves in a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor, has had a resurgence on social media. […] Others suggested that Etsy could be trafficking children through the listings. […] No credible proof has been produced to support the “pizzagate” narrative. The false claims now spreading about Etsy are reminiscent of a baseless conspiracy theory from 2020, which alleged that retail giant Wayfair was using pricey storage cabinets to traffic children.
___
CLAIM: A video shows the crowd at this year’s Army-Navy football game chanting “F— Joe Biden.”
THE FACTS: The video was edited to add the chant, which occurred at a concert in 2021. Unedited footage of the game shows the crowd, including a large contingent of Army cadets, singing and bouncing to an EDM song oftenplayed at Army football games and other sportingevents. The altered video began spreading on social media following Saturday’s annual Army-Navy game. […] Similar anti-Biden chants have been added to other footage of Biden, including his appearance at the University of Pennsylvania’s commencement in May and multiple videos of his speeches. […]
The Texas Supreme Court said Friday it would not consider Republican megadonor Kelcy Warren’s defamation lawsuit against former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke after a state appeals court dismissed it earlier this year.
The all-GOP court denied Warren’s petition for review without comment, bringing an end to the nearly two-year legal saga.
Warren, a Dallas pipeline billionaire, sued O’Rourke in early 2022, saying O’Rourke defamed him with his critical comments about his company’s windfall profits after the Texas energy-grid collapse in February 2021. Warren’s Energy Transfer reportedly made $2.4 billion in profits as demand for gas skyrocketed during the freeze. Warren later gave a $1 million campaign contribution to Abbott, which O’Rourke used to argue Warren was bribing the governor to go easy on the energy industry as lawmakers were considering power-grid reforms.
The case made its way to the all-Democratic 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin, which dismissed it in June, saying O’Rourke’s comments “fell within the bounds of protected speech.”
The next month, Warren’s lawyer asked the state Supreme Court to review the ruling, saying the ruling from the Austin court gave politicians “carte blanche to defame anyone — rich or poor, strong or meek — without recourse.”
The case has long outlived O’Rourke’s campaign for governor, which ended in defeat against GOP Gov. Greg Abbott in November 2022. Abbott’s campaign has said it was not involved in Warren’s lawsuit.
Posted by readers of the article:
Beto is still registering people like crazy in non-voting Texas. Beto does the work.
————————
Texas isn’t a red state, it is a non-voting state.
The three hostages killed by Israeli forces in Gaza were carrying a makeshift white flag when a soldier felt threatened and opened fire, a senior Israeli military official said Saturday, adding that an investigation was underway and that the killings were “against our rules of engagement.” Hostages’ families and protesters were frustrated that the Israeli government has not taken a new path beyond a military operation to secure the release of their loved ones.
[…] Two hostages were killed when the soldier opened fire, while the third was killed in renewed fire despite a cry for help heard in Hebrew and a commander’s order to cease fire, the Israeli military official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with the rules of the briefing. He added that the hostages were possibly “abandoned or escaped” before they emerged “tens of meters” from an Israeli military position. […]
Gaza has been plunged into a near communication blackout for two days — at least the fifth such mass outage of phone and internet lines during the 10-week war — leaving more than two million Palestinians virtually cut off from the outside world and one another amid ongoing Israel’s airstrikes and ground attacks.
This is the longest such outage so far in the war. Previous blackouts have been caused either by Israeli attacks on telecommunication towers, Israeli control of the enclave’s communication lines or a shortage of fuel, according to Gazan authorities and communication companies.
The Ohio Supreme Court has dismissed the state’s challenge to a judge’s order that has blocked enforcement of Ohio’s near-ban on abortions for the past 14 months.
The ruling moves action in the case back to Hamilton County Common Pleas, where abortion clinics asked Judge Christian Jenkins this week to throw out the law following voters’ decision to approve enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution.
[…] The justices in March agreed to review a county judge’s order that blocked enforcement of the abortion restriction and to consider whether clinics had legal standing to challenge the law. They ultimately denied Republican Attorney General Dave Yost’s request that they launch their own review of the constitutional right to abortion, leaving such arguments for a lower court.
The clinics asked Jenkins on Thursday to block the abortion ban permanently on the heels of the amendment Ohio voters approved last month that ensures access to abortion and other reproductive health care.
A law signed by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in April 2019 prohibited most abortions after the first detectable “fetal heartbeat.” Cardiac activity can be detected as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant.
The ban, initially blocked through a federal legal challenge, briefly went into effect when the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was overturned last year. It was then placed back on hold in county court, as part of a subsequent lawsuit challenging it as unconstitutional under the state constitution.
Yost’s office referred to a statement from Dec. 7 that “the state is prepared to acknowledge the will of the people on the issue, but also to carefully review each part of the law for an orderly resolution of the case.”
The abortion providers asked the lower court that initially blocked the ban to permanently strike it down. They cited Yost’s own legal analysis, circulated before the vote, that stated that passage of the amendment would invalidate the state’s six-week ban, stating, “Ohio would no longer have the ability to limit abortions at any time before a fetus is viable.”
Posted by readers of the article:
What is poetic justice here is to use Yost’s pre-election scaremongering to be taken as the State Administration’s interpretation of the legal effect of the ballot initiative.
————————-
Ohio voters twice voted this year on abortion rights issues- and won Decisively both times!! Repug Party leaders keep learning the hard way.!!
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There are other laws restricting abortion that should now be considered invalid, after this amendment to the Constitution passed, such as mandatory waiting periods and the onerous rule that abortion clinics must have hospital admitting rights. (When a person needs admitted to a hospital, they get admitted to a hospital; their care will now be under the specialists (emergency doctors, whatever) at the hospital, which is how it should be; it is not that abortion clinic providers need to also be hospitalists themselves.)
But as this AP article cites, Yost is going around saying that it’s “too early!” to strike down those restrictions and that he needs to “carefully review every part of the law”. As though he were admitting to having opposed it without reading it!
I have heard Yost speaking (on the radio) saying that he doesn’t think those laws should be changed, no matter the plain wording on the amendment, because he “doesn’t think the voters understood what they passed.” Fucker. (I should say that is my best paraphrase and not necessarily a direct quote.)
————————— the heart of it is that an order that blocks enforcement of the Ohio abortion ban remains in effect, so the abortion ban still cannot be enforced.
The U.S. issued an intense warning to North Korea over nuclear threats Friday.
In a statement on the second U.S.-Republic of Korea (ROK) Nuclear Consultative Group (NCG) coming together in Washington, D.C., Friday, the White House warned that “[a]ny nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its allies is unacceptable and will result in the end of the Kim regime.” The Republic of Korea is the official name of South Korea.
“The United States reaffirmed its unwavering commitment to provide extended deterrence to the ROK, backed by the full range of U.S. capabilities including nuclear,” the statement said.
The statement comes a few weeks after North Korea said it successfully launched a spy satellite that photographed the White House as well as Naval Station Norfolk and Newport News Dockyard in Virginia.
When the North Korean satellite was launched, the White House said it “strongly” condemned it, adding that the launch violated United Nations Security Council resolutions prohibiting North Korea from using ballistic missile technology.
“The president and his national security team are assessing the situation in close coordination with our allies and partners,” the Biden administration said in a statement. “We urge all countries to condemn this launch and call on [North Korea] to come to the table for serious negotiations.”
North Korea has also warned that any interference with its spy satellite would be a “declaration of war.”
“Any attack on space asset of DPRK will be deemed declaration of war against it,” a statement by a spokesperson for North Korea’s defense ministry read, according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency.
Janet Russon, the Mormon psychic medium employed by disgraced Operation Underground Railroad (OUR) founder Tim Ballard to help him locate missing children, recently appeared on a podcast to refute rumors that the dead Mormon prophet Nephi assisted her in that effort.
The investigation into OUR by Davis County Attorney Troy Rawlings led to the discovery of over 10,000 pages of “psychic readings” from Russon, who discussed them in an email to the the Utah Attorney General’s office.
“Janet Russon talks to dead Mormon leaders, particularly a Mormon prophet from 600 B.C. named Nephi, to get intel on where to find [a kidnapped child] in particular, but also with respect to a slew of other things.”
“As I understand it, we have somewhere around 10,000 pages of Janet Russon ‘Readings’ as part of the investigator case file,” he continued. ” Donors are not made aware that Nephi, via [Ms.] Russon, is the key piece of OUR operational intelligence.”
[…] Russon told the hosts of “The Last Dispensation” that Rawlings lied about all of this Nephi stuff, which seems like a pretty weird thing to make up.
Via Salt Lake Tribune:
On an episode of the podcast that was aired this week, Russon denied Rawlings ever had the files and asserted he obtained some information illegally.
“They don’t exist. I want your audience to know, I want everyone to know, they don’t exist,” she said. “He’s never had pages in his possession.”
Russon said she believes Rawlings allegedly got access to a Google Drive link and accessed it, even though a judge did not give him permission to do so, read some emails and mistakenly attributed them to Nephi.
“There’s no talking to the Book of Mormon deceased prophet Nephi,” Russon said. “…That’s completely false.”
Personally, I’m not sure how that is weirder than pretending you get psychic messages about missing children some other way, but pretty much everything I know about Mormons I learned from the musical The Book of Mormon or Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (actually way more informative than you would think) so I couldn’t tell you.
Russon claimed in the podcast that all of the women who accused Tim Ballard of sexual assault and harassment were lying as well, and even condemned them for suing OUR, as the money that will go to them could be used to find “15,000” children.
Oh! And that very public statement issued by the Church of Latter Day Saints condemning Ballard’s behavior? That never happened either! She says she called the church personally five times and was told each time that they never issued it, despite the fact that church officials told the Salt Lake Tribune that they did. None of the bad things happened at all, obviously.
One of the few constants of human nature is that people always think that everyone else operates the same way they do. People who cheat think everyone else cheats, people who are obsessed by wanting power think everyone else is obsessed by wanting power and people who lie think everyone is always lying. So it’s hardly surprising that someone who goes around pretending to have magic powers thinks that everyone else is equally full of shit.
Though dozens of congressional Republicans protested the move, the Army says it will begin work in coming days.
The U.S. Army intends to remove a Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery next week as part of its ongoing work to rid Defense Department property of divisive rebel imagery, defying dozens of congressional Republicans who have vociferously protested the move.
A woman representing the American South, standing atop a 32-foot pedestal, lords above most other monuments within America’s most revered resting place. It portrays, according to the cemetery’s website, a “mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.”
This month, 44 Republican lawmakers cautioned Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the first African American to hold the post, that the Pentagon would overstep its authority by removing the memorial and they demanded that all efforts to do so stop until Congress works through next year’s appropriations bill. The memorial “commemorates reconciliation and national unity,” not the Confederacy per se, the group led by Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (Ga.) claimed.
The Army, which operates Arlington Cemetery, informed lawmakers Friday that it would proceed with the monument’s removal, officials told The Washington Post, because it was required by the end of the year to comply with a law to identify and remove assets that commemorate the Confederacy. A congressional commission had previously decided the memorial met the criteria for removal. The task will cost $3 million.
These officials spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. They said out of an abundance of caution that security at the cemetery would be enhanced when the work begins in coming days.
[…] The commission found about 1,100 assets that commemorate the Confederacy, including base names and street signs, and advised the Pentagon on what should be removed or changed. The memorial at Arlington was the last significant item on that list, Army officials said, and its ouster comes just before the Jan. 1. deadline set by Congress.
[…] The Lost Cause movement, which recast rebel traitors as morally righteous warriors defending states’ rights and spread the false belief that slavery was benevolent, is evident in the memorial’s bronze panels.
[…] The memorial’s Latin inscription directly references the idealized mythology of the Lost Cause, the cemetery’s historians say, further underscoring the deliberate historical distortion.
The marker was erected in 1914, part of a constellation of Confederate markers that rose throughout the early 1900s to cement the ideals of white supremacy as Black Americans demanded equal rights.
That context must be understood, said Ty Seidule, a retired Army general who was the vice chair of the congressional commission that recommended the monument’s removal from Arlington. While Republican lawmakers described the marker as an ode to reconciliation, it was installed in what was then a racially segregated cemetery and molded in celebration of an emerging racial police state in the South. […]
Israeli security officials scored a major intelligence coup in 2018: secret documents that laid out, in intricate detail, what amounted to a private equity fund that Hamas used to finance its operations.
The ledgers, pilfered from the computer of a senior Hamas official, listed assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Hamas controlled mining, chicken farming and road building companies in Sudan, twin skyscrapers in the United Arab Emirates, a property developer in Algeria, and a real estate firm listed on the Turkish stock exchange.
The documents, which The New York Times reviewed, were a potential road map for choking off Hamas’s money and thwarting its plans. The agents who obtained the records shared them inside their own government and in Washington.
Nothing happened.
For years, none of the companies named in the ledgers faced sanctions from the United States or Israel. Nobody publicly called out the companies or pressured Turkey, the hub of the financial network, to shut it down.
A Times investigation found that both senior Israeli and American officials failed to prioritize financial intelligence — which they had in hand — showing that tens of millions of dollars flowed from the companies to Hamas at the exact moment that it was buying new weapons and preparing an attack.
That money, American and Israeli officials now say, helped Hamas build up its military infrastructure and helped lay the groundwork for the Oct. 7 attacks.
“Everyone is talking about failures of intelligence on Oct. 7, but no one is talking about the failure to stop the money,” said Udi Levy, a former chief of Mossad’s economic warfare division. “It’s the money — the money — that allowed this.”
At its peak, Israeli and American officials now say, the portfolio had a value of roughly half a billion dollars.
Even after the Treasury Department finally levied sanctions against the network in 2022, records show, Hamas-linked figures were able to obtain millions of dollars by selling shares in a blacklisted company. The Treasury Department now fears that such money flows will allow Hamas to finance its continuing war with Israel and to rebuild when it is over. […]
Bochum forward Takuma Asano capitalized on Bundesliga protests by eating one of the chocolate coins thrown by fans onto the field and then scoring a decisive goal on Saturday…
Assemblyman Vince Fong cannot run to succeed Rep. Kevin McCarthy in the 20th Congressional District, California’s secretary of state announced Friday in a ruling that will almost certainly prompt a legal challenge by the Republican candidate over his status in the Central Valley election in March.
Fong, R-Bakersfield, currently represents the 32nd Assembly District but is ineligible under state law to run for Congress “because he had previously filed paperwork to run for reelection to the California State Assembly,” Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s office said in a statement released Friday afternoon…
Scientists have discovered a previously hidden ecosystem with an expansive system of lagoons in the salt plains of Puna de Atacama, an arid plateau in Argentina — with giant stromatolites that could provide a glimpse into the earliest life on Earth and possibly even on Mars, according to new research…
With LGBTQ+ rights continuing to expand across much of the world, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has doubled down on restricting them — and a new ruling has made the future even more uncertain for Russian LGBTQ+ groups and individuals.
The LGBTQ+ “movement” is “extremist,” and its activities will be banned beginning in 2024, according to a ruling a justice of the Russian Supreme Court handed down at the close of November 2023.
This newest decision builds on 10 years of legislation pushed forward by President Vladimir Putin’s government in the name of “family values,” largely focused on limiting LGBTQ+ activism and same-sex unions. With theological support from the Russian Orthodox Church, Putin and his supporters portray Russia as a bulwark of “traditional values.” This trend is poised to only increase in 2024, with Putin’s decree that it is the “year of the family.”
That vision appeals deeply to many conservative Christians outside Russia, as well. As an anthropologist, I have spent years studying Russia’s family values rhetoric and its appeal to allies abroad — particularly Russian Orthodox converts in Appalachia.
Traditional values have become a fixture in far-right movements around the world, some of which see Russia as a model of the future they desire. In Russia and beyond, many conservative Christians in these movements have focused on LGBTQ+ populations, whom they portray as threats to their vision for society — and are not deterred by antidemocratic politics, if its figures voice support for their social goals.
In Russia, traditional family values have historically been linked to patriotism, Russian ethnic identity and service to country. These ideas were supported from the 1970s onward by writings from a young priest-monk named Kirill Gundyaev, who became head of the Russian Orthodox Church, or ROC, in 2009.
Though three-quarters of Russians say they attend church services once a year or less, the ROC remains culturally influential. During Putin’s nearly 25 years in power, he has often tapped into the church’s rhetoric about traditional values to advance his social and political goals. In particular, Russian leaders often portray much of Europe and the U.S. as threats to the traditional family.
Attempting to justify the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, for example, Putin and Kirill have both appealed to conservative ideas about religion and gender, arguing that Russia’s offensive stems from a need to protect itself from liberal values.
The West has “been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature,” Putin said in a February 2022 speech about the war. Kirill, meanwhile, has portrayed the invasion as a spiritual battle.
[…] Russian political figures and the ROC have participated in local and global organizations that promote traditional family values, including the World Congress of Families and some home-schooling networks formed in the U.S. Some far-right figures involved in such groups promote “traditionalism”: an anti-modern philosophy that focuses on social, sexual and racial purity.
[…] For some who criticize the West as “woke,” contemporary Russia is a better social model and an arbiter of traditional morality.
[…] The language of the Christian right has consistently emphasized obedience to hierarchical authority. […] I have met people who support antidemocratic politics if they believe it can deliver the kind of culture they want to see […]
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson once did legal work for Ark Encounter, for Ken Ham. Sheesh.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been the subject of considerable media attention following his elevation to the post on Oct. 25, 2023. Since his appointment, news reports have highlighted the fact that he was one of the House leaders against certifying the 2020 election of Joe Biden to the presidency, and that he is known to be stridently anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+.
Comparing himself to Moses, in a speech at a gala on Dec. 5, 2023, Johnson suggested that God cleared the way for him to be speaker of the House.
In the words of Public Religion Research Institute President Robert Jones, Johnson is “a near-textbook example of white Christian nationalism — the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.”
As historian John Fea has noted, Johnson is “a culture warrior with deep connections to the Christian Right.”
While it might not seem obvious, one of those connections includes his legal work on behalf of Ark Encounter, the massive tourist site in Kentucky run by Answers in Genesis, or AiG, and its CEO, Ken Ham. Ark Encounter and its companion site, the Creation Museum, propagate Young Earth Creationism, or YEC, which is the notion that the Earth is but 6,000 years old and that the geological formations seen today were formed by a global flood that took place around 4,000 years ago.
The state of Kentucky offers tax incentives for large tourist sites. In 2014, two years before Ark Encounter opened, the state determined that the tourist site was ineligible for these tax rebates. A primary reason for rejection was that all Ark Encounter employees are required to affirm a lengthy faith statement, which, according to Tourism Secretary Bob Stewart, “violates the separation of church and state provisions of the Constitution.”
As an attorney for Freedom Guard, a conservative religious legal advocacy law group, Johnson sued on behalf of Ark Encounter, arguing that in denying the tax rebates, the state was discriminating on the basis of religion. Johnson and the Ark prevailed, and Ark Encounter received the state’s tax incentives.
As a scholar of American evangelicalism, I argue that Johnson’s association with Ark Encounter makes much sense, given the very strong connection between Young Earth Creationism and Christian Right politics. […]
In his 2021 book, “Red Dynamite,” historian Carl Weinberg established that for the past century, Young Earth creationists have made the case that evolutionary science makes people behave in “an immoral, ‘beastly’ or ‘animalistic’ way,” especially when it comes to sex and violence.
[…] According to Ham and AiG, “public schools are churches of secular humanism and … most of the teachers are … imposing an anti-God worldview on generations of students.” Sexual immorality, LGBTQ+ activism and the rejection of patriarchy are, according to AiG, signs of the resultant cultural corruption.
[…] AiG’s Ham has asserted that “zealous climate activism is a false religion with false prophets.”
[…] In a similar vein, an AiG spokesperson blasted mainstream scientists and others who focused on the dangers of COVID-19, arguing that they were simply generating hysteria “about a virus that doesn’t kill very many people at all.” AiG’s CEO lamented on his social media post that “the COVID-19 situation has been weaponized in many places to use against Christians.”
[…] Mike Johnson has effusively praised Ark Encounter as “a strategic and really creative … way to bring people to this recognition of the truth that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”
Johnson also shares with AiG’s Ham that government should not intervene when it comes to global warming, particularly given that, like Ham, he does not believe “that the climate is changing because we drive SUVs.”
[…] Johnson has blamed school shootings on the fact that “we have taught a whole generation … of Americans that there is no right and wrong. It’s all about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from primordial slime,” and so “why is that life of any sacred value?”
[…] In short, Johnson’s political commitments fit neatly into the politics of AiG and the Young Earth Creationism ecosystem. This matters politically […]
Trump spoke at another rally this weekend. He was in New Hampshire:
[…] Donald Trump, just weeks after using the fascist terminology “vermin” to describe sections of American society he dislikes, again declared at a New Hampshire rally that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”.
Condemned for his previous remarks at the last rally he held in New Hampshire – where he threatened to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections” – Trump appeared to double down in Durham on Saturday.
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done,” Trump told the crowd.
“They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America … but all over the world.
“They’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”
It is the second time Trump has used the poisoned blood phrase, which has been widely condemned for echoing white supremacist rhetoric.
The first time he did so, in October, Joe Biden said the former president, who faces 91 criminal charges, was starting to use language heard in Nazi Germany. […]
Engineered immune cells have given 15 people with once-debilitating autoimmune disorders a new lease on life, free from fresh symptoms or treatments. […] more than two years
[…]
T cells are removed from the person being treated, genetically engineered to produce proteins called chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) and then reintroduced to the person’s body. […] When reintroduced, the CAR T cells will target the B cells for destruction—a useful feature for treating cancers caused by abnormal B cells. B cells also drive some autoimmune disorders by making antibodies that attack healthy tissue.
[…]
CAR-T therapy can have severe side effects, and recipients must first undergo intensive chemotherapy that kills off many of their existing immune cells. […] That first [lupus] participant—and the others who followed—experienced relatively minor adverse effects […] eventually used the method to treat two other autoimmune disorders: systemic sclerosis and idiopathic inflammatory myositis. The successes continued.
[…]
At this stage, however, it’s unclear how much of this success is due to the CAR-T therapy as opposed to the chemotherapy that killed many of the participants’ pre-existing immune cells, cautions Ruella. That might have helped to wipe out the errant B cells.
[…]
the man who struggled to walk 10 metres before […] now routinely walks 10 kilometres around town
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday blew off former President Trump’s comments on undocumented immigrants in which Trump referred to them as “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Graham dismissed Trump’s remarks when NBC’s Kristen Welker asked the South Carolina Republican what his response was to Trump’s comments at a rally in New Hampshire. Graham blew off the comments and pivoted to his familiar talking points about immigration, saying that most Americans are worried about the crisis at the border.
[…] “Senator, just on the language, just on the language, though. You have endorsed former President Trump. Are you comfortable with him using words like that?” Welker asked.
“You know, we’re talking about language? I could care less what language people use as long as we get it right,” Graham responded.
Graham also said it was a “losing strategy” to focus more on the language Trump used rather than fixing the situation at the border. When asked if Trump would appeal more to voters if he used different language, Graham maintained that his stances on the border were accurate.
“You know, I think the president has a way of talking sometimes I disagree with. But he actually delivered on the border. People are looking for results. If the only thing you want to talk about on immigration is the way Donald Trump talks, you’re missing a lot,” he said.
Reginald Selkirksays
“You know, I think the president has a way of talking sometimes I disagree with. But he actually delivered on the border…”
Did he?
First of all, the number of people trying to cross into the U.S. is not entirely under the control of the U.S. president. It is a difficult problem without an easy solution.
Reginald @207, I agree with you. Trump did NOT deliver on the border. He made things worse. And then he told a thousand lies about how he has supposedly made things better. Too many people believed the lies.
More news, some of which is about the border issues:
It’s keenly ironic that House Republicans acted on a raft of sketchy, Rudy Giuliani-exhumed allegations to launch a presidential impeachment inquiry in the very same week that he was ordered to pay $148 million for lying on Donald Trump’s behalf. But that’s the difference between our courts and our Congress. In court, you have to tell the truth.
Of course, every House Republican—to a person—is now doing what Rudy did years ago: Appeasing their ocher overlord by conjuring nonsense in a cynical bid to put the faux stink of corruption on President Joe Biden. We’ll have to wait to find out if those congressional fiends eventually get their comeuppance. […]
It’s been glaringly obvious for some time now why House Republicans are trying to impeach President Biden: It’s because Donald Trump wants them to. They’re wholly in thrall to a lifelong punchline who steals top secret government documents and sounds like Hitler slipped on the basement stairs and can’t get up.
Fortunately, some still see the current Republican Party for what it truly is: a pathetic cult of personality.
Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen appeared on “The Katie Phang Show” to discuss the GOP’s fake Biden impeachment, and he very quickly got to the crux of the matter. [Tweet and video at the link]
PHANG: “Let’s start first … with the absurd impeachment inquiry into President Biden. Republicans on three House committees have been investigating President Biden and his son for months now with zero evidence of wrongdoing being discovered. Can you share with our viewers why there was a unanimous vote by House Republicans? Did you hear anything from your Republican colleagues on why they would do, across straight party lines, a vote in favor of this baseless inquiry?”
COHEN: “Totally political. Unfortunately, we have a child speaker. He went down to see his daddy, Donald Trump, at Mar-a-Lago, and he told him, ‘Go back to Washington and impeach Joe Biden. That will make me feel good because I was impeached twice, and I want to say he was impeached, too.’ So this is juvenile. It’s unfortunately an inexperienced speaker who’s dealing with an irrational man, and the Republican Party basically is responding to that as well. The MAGA Republicans do what Trump tells them to. So they’re going to do that, and they’re doing that with Ukraine, too. To keep his deal going with Putin that was so successful, him getting elected president, that he’s … [he doesn’t want] to give Ukraine any money because he wants Putin to win the war and he wants Putin to help him in 2024. Trump’s looking at 2024 and Putin’s looking at posterity, and working together.”
Wow, that sure makes Republicans sound cynical and soulless, doesn’t it? But when you’re right, you’re right. And Rep. Cohen is most definitely right.
If anyone knows about selling his soul to appease Trump, it’s Sen. Lindsey Graham. So it’s particularly noteworthy that even he can’t figure out what House Republicans are impeaching Biden over.
Graham joined Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” and was asked to weigh in on the GOP’s disingenuous impeachment push. It looked like he would have preferred to discuss just about anything else. [Tweet and video at the link]
WELKER: “Okay, let’s turn to the other big story on Capitol Hill, the impeachment, of course—the impeachment inquiry into President Biden. Your colleague Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said that he does not see any evidence, quote, that the president is guilty of anything. Do you agree with him? Is there any evidence so far?”
GRAHAM: “You know, I haven’t really been paying that much attention to it. They have to prove that President Biden somehow financially benefited from the business enterprises of Hunter Biden. We’ll see.”
WELKER: “Have they done it yet, in your mind?”
GRAHAM: “If there were a smoking gun, I think we’d be talking about it …”
Look, it was obvious from the outset that Republicans would try to impeach Biden for something. But this is really a stretch—particularly since Trump continually took money from foreign interests while he was cosplaying as president, and did so out in the open.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie […] always knew about Trump’s strong affinity for indiscriminate murder enthusiast Vladimir Putin, and he still tried to get Trump reelected.
Go figure.
Christie joined Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” to warn America about Trump’s increasingly authoritarian rhetoric. [Tweet and video at the link]
TAPPER: Gov. Christie, you just heard Donald Trump approvingly quoting Vladimir Putin about American democracy, about the American legal system, attacking the criminal charges against him and the ‘rottenness’ of the American political system, quote, unquote. What’s your reaction?”
CHRISTIE:“My reaction is that he gets worse and worse by the day, Jake. And voters better start paying attention to exactly what he’s saying. He has always been approving of Putin right from the beginning of his presidency. That was something that he and I had regular arguments about going all the way back to 2017. And the fact is that—Vladimir Putin as an expert on democracy? This is a guy who doesn’t even know what democracy is and, quite frankly, has spent most of his life trying to undercut democracy all over the world, and Donald Trump is citing him as his expert witness that he’s being persecuted and is innocent.
Look, this is a guy who just believes ‘woe is me, woe is me, I can’t believe that I got caught.’ But let’s remember something, and everyone needs to know this. It’s not going to be Vladimir Putin on the witness stand in Washington, D.C., this spring. It’s not going to be some left-wing prosecutor making the case. Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff, has accepted immunity. I did this for seven years, Jake. The reason he’s accepted immunity is because he has admitted he had committed crimes himself, or he wouldn’t need immunity. And he’s going to testify that Donald Trump committed crimes on his watch—a founder of the Freedom Caucus, his former chief of staff who he called the next James Baker. Donald Trump realizes the walls are closing in. He’s becoming crazier. And now he’s citing Vladimir Putin as a character witness, a guy who’s a murderous thug all around the world. It’s time to send Donald Trump back to Mar-a-Lago permanently.”
Hey, thanks for piping up, Chris! Better late than never, right?
Then again, it’s kind of soothing to hear an ex-prosecutor describe exactly how much legal peril Trump is in these days. Hopefully, at least one of the four criminal cases against Trump sees the light of day before he has a chance to send his tank columns into Fulton County, Georgia.
Speaking of Putin, his American Super PAC—aka the GOP—is doing all it can these days to support his Ukrainian war effort. House Republicans are holding up aid to Ukraine so they can play political games with our southern border—a cynical tactic that could help them get elected, which in turn would help Putin, who would then further interfere in our elections on their behalf, and on and on into infinity.
Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen joined Jon Karl on ABC’s “This Week” to discuss this ongoing betrayal of our ally on Putin’s behalf. [Tweet and video at the link]
KARL: “What do you think of this idea of having significant changes to the border tied to funding for Ukraine and Israel? Among the changes that Republicans have been demanding are changes to our asylum laws—making it harder for people to declare asylum, restricting that. And even, you know, Republicans want a return to Remain in Mexico, the policy of the Trump administration, which is ‘ask for asylum before you come to the United States and come after, or if, it’s been granted.’”
VAN HOLLEN: “Well, first of all, I think it’s essential that we provide military assistance to Ukraine. This is a pivotal moment in American leadership and history, and we need to make sure that we help our Ukrainian friends against Putin’s aggression—not just to protect their freedom, but because it would send a terrible signal around the world to our allies who would no longer trust us, and to our adversaries, who would be emboldened if we’re not doing that. In terms of border security, I have to look at the details, and the big question, Jon, is, who’s at the table on the Republican side? I don’t mean the individual, but are they really working with the president to try to get border security? Because the president has proposed historical increases in resources for border security.”
KARL: “And they’re asking for policy changes more than resources.”
VAN HOLLEN: “So we have to look at it, you know.”
Well, Republicans ask for a lot of things. Most of those requests are either disingenuous or downright bonkers. After all, Republicans’ proof that Biden favors open borders is that his administration keeps arresting record numbers of border crossers and sending them back. Try to make sense of that one.
Meanwhile, comprehensive immigration reform would go a long way toward solving our problems at the border, but Republicans prefer they remain unsolved so Fox News can continue scaring its viewers with caravans of brown people. Because if conservatives can’t frighten people, all they’ve got left is a Hitler See ‘n Say as their putative presidential nominee and undisputed standard-bearer.
[More … miscellaneous]
– “State of the Union’s” expert panel discusses a new CBS News poll showing Nikki Haley within 15 points of Trump in New Hampshire.
– Former DNC Chair Donna Brazile says Trump’s primary opponents don’t have the “guts or the gall” to state the obvious: that Trump is unfit for office. (ABC’s “This Week”)
– Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova says “time is of the essence” when it comes to providing additional support to Ukraine. (“Face the Nation”)
Yes, Idaho. Now I get why you may not agree that Idaho is a battleground, seeing that Idaho politicians have done their best to make Idaho synonymous with their hateful political climate instead of their bountiful potatoes, but it’s true. You see, there are actually three political parties currently in Idaho: the Democrats, the traditional Republicans, and the extremist Republicans. The extremists currently control the legislature, which is why numerous unconstitutional fascist laws have been passed, including one that makes it a crime to drive a rape victim out of the state to get an abortion.
The GOP divide in this state is so bad that the former lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, a Trump extremist, tried seizing power in a coup on two separate occasions when Gov. Brad Little (a Republican) left the state. (In Idaho, unlike most states, the top two roles are elected separately.) Yet things weren’t always this bad. Not too long ago, Idaho was considered a moderate political state. Although Republicans have controlled a supermajority in both chambers of the Idaho legislature since 1993, the Idaho Senate was evenly split as recently as 1992. Even when Democrats started losing ground in the ’90s, largely due to the big-moneyed efforts of the oil and gas industry, moderate Republicans dominated. This all changed in the mid-2000s, when the state Republican Party was seized by right-wing zealots. […]
Idahoans are fed up with the nonsense, but there is now finally something they can do about it. There is a coalition and a plan to fix the politics of the Gem State, and it’s real enough that the extremist Republicans are doing everything they can to stop it. You can help out Idaho, but the first step is to pay attention to what’s happening in this state.
When I ask people to tell me what they think is the most solidly red state, Idaho is usually someone’s answer. It’s considered so right-wing that other conservatives have moved there from other states. In fact, this past year Idaho has made national headlines for its MAGA extremism. In addition to the so-called “abortion trafficking” law, the legislature passed laws reinstating firing squads for the death penalty, banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender kids, and even punishing doctors who dare to refer women to out-of-state doctors for reproductive issues. Doctors not willing to live under such fascist laws have been leaving the state in droves.
[…] Idaho, as recently as late last century, produced powerful Democratic leaders like Senator Frank Church and Gov. Cecil Andrus, who were known for their moderate, pragmatic politics.
[…] The far-right faction has managed to secure narrow wins in primaries for statewide office; but it often loses in the downballot races. […] On multiple surveys, the overwhelming majority of Idahoans value strong public schools, and yet Idaho is dead last of 50 states in funding for K-12 education. In 2018, 61% of Idahoans voted in favor of Medicaid Expansion. Yet for the past six years, Idaho legislators have refused to take action.
In response, a nonpartisan open-government group called Reclaim Idaho formed. “I used to be a Republican,” said Jim Jones, a spokesperson for the Idaho Open Primaries Initiative. “Traditional Republicans are sick at heart as to what has happened here in Idaho.”
Although the group is pushing for common-ground issues such as affordable health care, protected public lands, and strong public schools, they are trying to hold legislators accountable by eliminating closed partisan primaries and changing to a ranked-choice voting system (or RCV), similar to the one adopted in Alaska. […] Currently, Reclaim Idaho is working with other groups to gather signatures for a voter initiative that would force an open primary in which the top four candidates would advance to a ranked-choice election in November.
[…] If you need proof that ranked choice can reduce extremism and increase civility in government, look no further than the 2022 Alaskan congressional race featuring Sarah Palin. Mary Peltola’s successful strategy was to actually emphasize local concerns and run a positive campaign, which led to her getting second place votes that helped put her over the top. […]
When asked what she would do for Alaskans in congressional office, Palin—thinking it’s still 2013—promised to look into Hillary Clinton’s emails and Benghazi. Palin’s loss to now-Rep. Peltola demonstrated how the system can result in candidates with broader appeal ultimately securing victory.
If Reclaim Idaho can secure the necessary signatures and the initiative passes, Idaho’s political future could be significantly altered. […]
The far-right Republicans who currently control the state party are vehemently opposed to this initiative […]
The battle for ranked-choice in Idaho, which is a popular idea in the state, has ignited a fierce political struggle. […] Five states, all under complete control of Republicans, have banned ranked-choice voting: Montana, South Dakota, Florida, Tennessee, and Idaho. (Although GOP lawmakers have already passed legislation to ban ranked choice in Idaho, if the amendment passes, it would automatically repeal that law.)
[…] Raúl Labrador, the state’s Republican attorney general, also tried to derail the initiative on such a bad-faith legal argument that the conservative state Supreme Court forced Labrador to reimburse Reclaim Idaho’s legal fees. The state GOP chair, Dorothy Moon, has barnstormed across the state spending a lot of money on a campaign to destroy it. One of her stunts was telling: She invited Palin to speak on how she lost due to RCV.
Democrats have a chance to win again, and they are preparing. They have organized in all 44 counties in Idaho for the first time in decades. Now, every county has a precinct committee captain, county chair, or another type of volunteer working on behalf of the party. […]
RCV is by no means a cure-all. It does nothing to address gerrymandering, which is one of the biggest threats our democracy still faces. […] And finally, let’s be real: It doesn’t structurally favor any one party, but it always challenges the status quo. […]
Republicans have a lot more to fear than Democrats when it comes to winning over voters. If ranked-choice voting can mean more fair representation everywhere, even in deep red Idaho, then sign me up.
Health insurers reject millions of claims for treatment every year in America. Corporate insiders, recordings and internal emails expose the system and its harm.
When Shawn Murphy’s wife died in 2009 after a botched gallbladder surgery, he presumed the doctor who performed the operation would be forced out of medicine for good.
Dr. Pachavit Kasemsap, a former Air Force surgeon, had cut Loretta Murphy’s aorta during that common procedure, according to a database of malpractice payments kept by Florida insurance regulators. She never left the hospital and died just shy of her 40th birthday. Shawn Murphy was left to raise their two daughters, then 13 and 17, on his own.
During the weeks that Murphy prayed for his wife to recover and the months that he fought Kasemsap in circuit court in Brevard County, Florida, he didn’t know that other families had complained that their loved ones had suffered under the same doctor’s care.
Kasemsap has settled five malpractice cases for a total of $3 million, according to the Florida malpractice payment database. That includes $1 million paid to the Murphy family. In one of the cases Kasemsap settled, a patient said the doctor negligently stapled and stitched her rectum to her vagina. Kasemsap denied doing that, and in legal filings in all five cases, the doctor denied that he was negligent.
The doctor’s LinkedIn profile says his last job as a surgeon ended in December 2012, months before he settled the last of those five cases. But there was one industry ready to welcome him regardless: health insurance.
Kasemsap got a job as an insurance company medical director, where suddenly he had the power to impact the lives of far more patients than he would ever have seen in the operating room.
For most policyholders, the inner workings of their health insurer are a black box: Requests to cover treatment or pay claims go in, and approvals or rejections are spit out.
The pivotal gatekeepers inside the box are medical directors like Kasemsap. They can, without ever seeing a patient, overrule the judgment of the doctor who did and deny payment for a recommended procedure, test or medicine.
Insurers say medical directors steer patients away from unnecessary or risky care and expensive treatments for which there are less costly, equally effective alternatives. Patients and their physicians complain that insurance company doctors routinely, and wrongly, deny payment for critical lifesaving treatments because they are expensive.
[…] And a single medical director can rule on 10,000 cases a year, according to court testimony in a case involving Aetna. Some Cigna doctors have ruled on more than 10,000 cases in a month without opening the patient file, as ProPublica and The Capitol Forum have reported.
Despite the key role insurers’ medical directors play in the lives of patients, their identities and backgrounds, and their qualifications for making such life-altering assessments, remain largely hidden.
[…] An anesthesiologist working for an insurer can overrule a patient’s oncologist. In other cases, the medical director might be a doctor like Kasemsap who has left clinical practice after multiple accusations of negligence.
[…] Kasemsap’s history of malpractice payments was no secret before Cigna hired him in 2019. Two years earlier, he was the subject of a front-page story in the South Florida Sun Sentinel headlined “Dangerous Doctors.” In addition to handling appeals for the insurer, Kasemsap obtained a certification through a Cigna physician leadership program and oversees the work of 13 other medical directors there […]
“We use a comprehensive suite of materials and discussions to assess how our medical directors support patients efficiently and effectively,” a company spokesperson wrote.
In another statement, the spokesperson wrote, “As I’m sure you’re aware, malpractice claims against physicians are common, particularly in high-risk specialties such as surgery, and the settlement of malpractice claims does not necessarily mean that malpractice occurred.”
Between 2005 and 2014, during the time when Kasemsap settled his malpractice cases, only 6% of doctors nationwide had any paid malpractice claims and only 1% had two or more paid claims, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine. A study in the same journal found that while surgeons were more likely to face a claim than physicians overall, less than 5% of general surgeons paid a malpractice claim each year between 1991 and 2005.
“I can say in my 35-plus years doing this that this is the most unskilled surgeon I have ever seen in a case,” said Mac McLeod, a malpractice attorney who represented two plaintiffs who sued Kasemsap […]
[Snipped details of an insurance company hiring a doctor who failed to properly perform hip replacement surgery multiple times, including once installing the hip backwards. “If you have ever seen a Lego, you know which way the hip goes,” Jones said. “I always considered these medical directors to be sellouts, but I thought an insurance company would have more dignity than to hire someone like this.”]
[…] Aetna has on its in-house team Dr. Beth Ann Binkowski, an internal medicine physician who was censured and reprimanded by the New York state medical board in 2015 for failing to appropriately prescribe medications for five patients at Syracuse University with mental health conditions. […]
UnitedHealthcare hired Dr. Dolores Rhymer-Anderson as a medical director in 2015 despite the fact that the Georgia medical board had previously reprimanded her for care related to the delivery of a baby born with severe neurological damage in 2000. […] A peer reviewer appointed by the medical board faulted Rhymer-Anderson for failing to conform to the minimum standard of acceptable and prevailing medical practice. […]
When an insurer shoots down a request to pay for care, the patient’s doctor can call the insurance company’s doctor to make the case for why it should be approved. This is known as a peer-to-peer review.
But doctors often complain they’re not actually speaking with peers when they call an insurer. They get exasperated when an orthopedic surgeon weighs in on a procedure to treat an irregular heartbeat or a pediatrician questions an oncologist’s plan for an adult with lung cancer.
[…] A small group of doctors — about 2%, termed “frequent flyers” by one study author — are responsible for 40% of medical malpractice claims in the country. [Snipped a lot of details, including instances in which nurses and support staff reported doctors out of concern for a high rate of complications, etc.]
Roseanne Barr, a woman who was once very funny and good with words, screamslurred her way through a speech at Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA hoedown yesterday, and although I’ve watched it about three times now, I’m still not fully clear on what her point was. She seems to have been upset about “a bunch a losers that never know how get a job” (not a typo, she said “how get a job”), Stalinists, Nazi fascists and the whole world becoming a Muslim caliphate that will take over all of the Christian democracies. [video at the link]
[…] To be fair and balanced, here is the portion of Roseanne’s speech that Trumpers have been sharing amongst themselves and seem to believe is quite eloquent (from Trumpist account Citizen Free Press) [video at the link]
Again, it does not seem totally clear what she is on about — she appears to be worried that if there are no paper ballots, someone is going to send her to a gulag or a reeducation camp.
“I’m all in for President Trump,” she said. “If I ain’t all in they’re going to put my a– in a gulag. If he loses, I know that’s what they’re gonna do and I don’t really wanna go to a reeducation camp and have to give all my money away to a bunch of losers who never know how get a job. I don’t care about them. If we don’t stop …” wait a minute! This is the exact same speech!
They heard this speech with their ears and thought it was good and smart. Or they didn’t hear it and they cheered it anyway because she said she loved Trump and was afraid that if he didn’t get elected “they” would put her in a gulag or a reeducation camp. This clip, frankly, gets even wackier than the one going around on our side, as at one point she just starts screaming “We want the truth” over and over again.
Somehow, this all culminates in a demand for paper ballots and Voter ID, which is not where I expected it to go (I assumed aliens, and that’s my bad). […]
Roseanne Barr, a woman who was once very funny and good with words, . . .
You can stop right there because she has NEVER been funny. From the first time I saw her doing “comedy”, I disliked her annoying voice and obnoxious delivery. I never once watched the sitcom starring her. Whatever she has to say now doesn’t matter to me because I won’t be listening.
A car plowed into a parked SUV that was guarding President Joe Biden ‘s motorcade Sunday night while the president was leaving a visit to his campaign headquarters. The president and first lady Jill Biden were unharmed…
Chilean voters rejected on Sunday a proposed conservative constitution to replace the country’s dictatorship-era charter.
With 96% of votes counted late Sunday, about 55.8% had voted “no” to the new charter, with about 44.2% in favor.
The vote came more than a year after Chileans resoundingly rejected a proposed constitution written by a left-leaning convention and one that many characterized as one of the world’s most progressive charters…
During last week’s chairmanship election for the far-right House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Bob Good was …
The rabble-rousing Virginia Republican was ultimately elected this week to serve as the head of the House Freedom Caucus, a high-profile role that will put him front-and-center of some of next year’s biggest funding fights and in direct conflict with the new speaker, Mike Johnson, who will be forced to negotiate with Democrats…
New Census proposal would reduce the number of disabled women and girls counted by nearly 10 million
A new proposal from the U.S. Census Bureau would change the definition of disability in the American Community Survey […] it would reduce the official count of disabled people by 40 percent. […] used to help enforce civil rights and to allocate trillions in funding, this change would have significant implications for disabled people.
[…]
shifting from the current six yes or no questions […] to a scale that ranges from “no difficulty” to “cannot do at all” on specific tasks […] only counting people as disabled if they mark “a lot of difficulty” […] or “cannot do at all”—leaving out people who say that they have “some difficulty,” even in multiple areas. […] A scale that deems people “not disabled enough” to count is not consistent with our current understanding of disability—or even […] under the law.
[…]
Experts estimate that the current measure undercounts disabled people by about 20 percent. But the proposed new measure fares even worse […] and it does so at a time we are seeing an increase in the number of disabled people in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
[…] comment on the current proposal by December 19.
[…] To a degree without modern precedent, the Supreme Court has confronted several tough-to-defend ethics controversies over the course of year, most notably difficult questions surrounding Justice Clarence Thomas, many of which have been brought to the fore by reporting from ProPublica. The outlet advanced the story further with this new report:
In early January 2000, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was at a five-star beach resort in Sea Island, Georgia, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. After almost a decade on the court, Thomas had grown frustrated with his financial situation, according to friends…. At the resort, Thomas gave a speech at an off-the-record conservative conference. He found himself seated next to a Republican member of Congress on the flight home. The two men talked, and the lawmaker left the conversation worried that Thomas might resign.
According to the report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, Thomas told Republican Rep. Cliff Stearns of Florida that Congress should raise the justices’ salaries. If that didn’t happen, the far-right jurist reportedly warned, “one or more justices” would retire, perhaps within the year.
The conversation, ProPublica added, “set off a flurry of activity across the judiciary and Capitol Hill.”
It’s also a conversation that probably should not have happened. Thomas’ salary at the time was $173,600 — in inflation-adjusted terms, more than $300,000. He nevertheless made no secret of his desire to make more money, and privately pushed for an end to the ban on justices giving paid speeches.
That didn’t happen, though Thomas’ allies found other ways to make him happy. From the report:
[I]n the years that followed, as ProPublica has reported, Thomas accepted a stream of gifts from friends and acquaintances that appears to be unparalleled in the modern history of the Supreme Court. Some defrayed living expenses large and small — private school tuition, vehicle batteries, tires. Other gifts from a coterie of ultrarich men supplemented his lifestyle, such as free international vacations on the private jet and superyacht of Dallas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow.
So to recap, a sitting Supreme Court justice was facing financial strains; he privately pushed a member of Congress for a higher salary; his political allies were concerned about his possible retirement; and conservative billionaires starting providing him with previously undisclosed benefits and a more luxury lifestyle.
Over the course of 2023, congressional Republicans have scrambled to defend Thomas, presenting a series underwhelming and substance-free justifications in response to serious ethics allegations. The challenge for GOP lawmakers just became even more difficult.
birgerjohanssonsays
BTW over at Mano Singham at Freethoughtblogs there is mention of Temu, a potential rival of Amazon that is reaching out from China to USA and Europe.
For Donald Trump, the economy isn’t just another issue. It’s more of a political life-preserver.
The former president is, after all, burdened by scandals, criminal indictments, and a record littered with countless examples of corruption, mismanagement, bigotry, and incompetence. But Trump expects to persevere anyway, thanks in large part to public perceptions about his economic successes and frustrations with the economic status quo under President Joe Biden.
There are, however, some significant problems, including the fact that Trump’s economic record isn’t nearly as impressive as he likes to pretend. Complicating matters, three years ago, the then-incumbent repeatedly insisted that if Biden took office, the result would be economic ruin. We now know, of course, that Biden was elected, and his agenda has helped deliver economic growth, the lowest unemployment rates since the 1960s, and all-time highs in the major stock market indexes.
So, what exactly is Trump supposed to do with all of this good news?
In August, the likely GOP nominee released a video statement in which he told the public, in reference to positive data, “Any numbers that you see that are economically positive in the Biden administration are because they are running on the fumes of what we created years prior to their taking office.” In other words, voters might hear about the healthy Biden-era economy, but Trump wanted credit for it.
In New Hampshire on Saturday night, the Republican echoed the same line, again telling supporters that the Biden administration is “just running on the fumes of what we did.”
But a day in Nevada, the former president said something else that stood out for me:
“[We had] the best job numbers in the history of our country. The real job numbers, not the fake job numbers that they get.”
This follows related rhetoric from September, when Trump said, in reference to the unemployment rate, that Americans are seeing “phony numbers.” He went on to describe the jobless rate as “crooked.”
[…] it’s also worth appreciating the incoherence of Trump’s message. The Republican frontrunner wants voters to believe (a) Biden has created an “economic bust“; (b) Trump deserves credit for Biden’s economic successes; (c) Biden’s economic successes aren’t real; and (d) Biden will eventually cause an economic crash, the former president’s failed predictions notwithstanding.
What’s more, Trump is pushing each of these claims at the same time. He’s doing so for the most awkward of reasons: Reality is taking away his political life-preserver, pushing him into a desperate scramble.
I don’t doubt that much of the electorate will fall for the nonsense, but that doesn’t make the GOP pitch any less ridiculous.
As the House Freedom Caucus prepared to elect a new leader, Republican Rep. Warren Davidson, a member of the far-right faction, sent his colleagues a rather provocative letter. The Ohioan conceded that Republican Rep. Bob Good of Virginia was likely to become the group’s next chair, but Davidson insisted this would be unwise.
“I am concerned that our group often relies too much on power (available primarily due to the narrow majority) and too little on influence with and among our colleagues,” the letter read. “I ask that we consider how to best increase our influence while preserving our power to move policy in the right direction. I strongly feel that Bob Good as Chairman will impair that objective.”
[…] Those concerns were ignored. NBC News reported:
Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., has been elected the new chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of far-right rabble-rousers who frequently clash with GOP leadership, a lawmaker confirmed. … Good, who ran unopposed and was recommended by the Freedom Caucus’ board, will replace current Chairman Scott Perry, R-Pa., in January.
Chances are, most Americans haven’t heard of the Virginia Republican — Good has only been in Congress for three years — but he’s quickly earned a reputation on Capitol Hill. Indeed, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank referred to the congressman has a “legislative terrorist” in his latest column, which helped summarize perceptions of the GOP lawmaker.
Before Good arrived in Congress, the Virginia Republican made headlines in December 2020 when he called the pandemic a “phony“ crisis. More recently, Good has championed the impeachment crusade against President Joe Biden, pushed a debt ceiling crisis, and was part of the GOP faction that ousted then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in October.
He then parlayed this record into a chairmanship of the House Freedom Caucus.
[…] It’s not a secret that the right-wing bloc has been a thorn in the side of House Republican leaders since its creation. No one should be surprised if this dynamic becomes even more intense in 2024.
On November 20, a three-judge panel on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that private plaintiffs could not bring lawsuits to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the key remaining provision of the landmark civil rights law, which prohibits voting practices and procedures that discriminate against voters of color. “The statute is silent on the existence of a private right of action,” wrote Judge David Stras of Minnesota, who was appointed by Donald Trump. Stras’ opinion represented the latest salvo against voting rights by the dark-money network linked to Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo…
As Judge Lavenski Smith, an appointee of George W. Bush who is the only Black judge on the 8th Circuit, noted in his dissent, of the 182 successful Section 2 cases over the past 40 years, only 15 were brought solely by the attorney general. If voting rights litigation were dependent on the Justice Department, it would slow to a trickle—or, under a hostile administration, to a halt….
Stras’ opinion was joined by Raymond Gruender, a George W. Bush appointee from Missouri. Both judges are longtime members of the Federalist Society who appeared on a short list of possible Supreme Court justices that Leo prepared for Donald Trump in the spring of 2016. Trump touted the list to solidify his standing with skeptical conservative voters, which helped him clinch the GOP nomination and win the presidency…
The appointment of right-wing judges was not the only way that Leo, a driving force behind the conservative movement, influenced the Voting Rights Act case. The Honest Elections Project, a group founded in 2020 with support from Leo to advocate for restrictive voting laws and oppose efforts to make voting easier during the pandemic, filed a friend-of-the-court brief before the 8th Circuit. The group said that it had a “significant interest in this case, as it implicates the legislature’s preeminent role in setting the rules for elections and election-related litigation.” It claimed that “a significant increase in the number of Section 2 cases brought by private litigation groups” had “undermine[d] the States’ efforts to protect election integrity and to discharge their duties to draw electoral maps” and had led to a “fast decline in the confidence in elections.”
The group’s argument was similar to the “independent state legislature” theory it had aggressively pushed before the Supreme Court, which held that state legislatures had near king-like authority to craft voting laws and electoral maps without review from state courts. The Supreme Court largely rejected that position over the summer in Moore v. Harper, but Leo’s network of dark money groups has had more success attacking the Voting Rights Act. He is pursuing a two-pronged strategy—appointing reactionary conservative judges to the bench, then pushing radical theories before the courts that those hand-picked judges turn into precedent.
“This deeply flawed decision was bought, paid for, and masterminded by Leonard Leo,” Caroline Ciccone, president of the watchdog group Accountable.US, said after the 8th Circuit decision. “Leo knows if Americans are empowered to vote, his vision for our country will never be realized. Instead, he stacks the federal judiciary—all the way up to the Supreme Court—with extremist judges willing to do his bidding.”
Arguing that Missourians who donated to a left-leaning media watchdog nonprofit may have been misled, state Attorney General Andrew Bailey has waded into a recent controversy involving the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Bailey, who is seeking election to his first full term as attorney general, launched an investigation into Media Matters, a liberal advocacy group, on grounds that it improperly solicited donations from Missourians to target X, which has been mired in controversy since Elon Musk purchased the company in 2022.
“The concern here and the allegation here is that Media Matters defrauded Missourians in a coordinated scheme to manipulate the marketplace and bully advertisers to pull out of X, formerly known as Twitter, in order to attack Twitter and do away with the last platform dedicated to free speech in America,” Bailey said…
Melodramatic much? Disregarding that X is a right wing platform, not a “free speech” platform, is Bailey forgetting about Parler, Gab and Truth?
This horrible article is very pro-Bailey, letting him and his allies state their views with no counter-voice pointing out how ridiculous they are.
Except for the Capitol Police who fight off his insurrectionists, I assume.
Three years ago, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, there was some talk on Capitol Hill about law enforcement reforms. Those talks ultimately failed: Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the lead negotiator for the GOP, abandoned the process when Democrats asked him to support an idea he’d previously endorsed.
Earlier this year, in the wake of graphic footage of Memphis officers fatally beating Tyre Nichols, there were some renewed talks, which went nowhere.
For his part, Donald Trump apparently has some reform ideas of his own, though it’s safe to say they’re far from constructive.
During his rally in New Hampshire over the weekend, the former president and suspected felon vowed to “restore law and order,” in part by investigating prosecutors he doesn’t like “for their illegal, racist-in-reverse enforcement of the law.” But then Trump pitched something new:
“I am also going to indemnify our police officers. This is a big thing, and it’s a brand new thing, and I think it’s so important. I’m going to indemnify, through the federal government, all police officers and law enforcement officials throughout the United States from being destroyed by the radical left for taking strong actions against crime.”
Watching the clip, it’s clear that this wasn’t an off-the-cuff comment: Trump was clearly reading from his trusted teleprompter when he presented the idea.
Ordinarily, I’d explore some of the details of a policy proposal, weighing its merits, but in this case, there really isn’t a policy proposal, per se. Rather, it was just a line in a Trump speech.
How exactly would he go about indemnifying all police officers and law enforcement officials? He didn’t say. What “strong actions” would the police be allowed to take under the Republican’s vision? He didn’t say that, either. How much would an indemnification program cost? Your guess is as good as mine.
But at face value, it appears the frontrunner for the GOP nomination envisions a model in which officers who take “strong actions” would not have to worry about being held liable for their conduct.
For those keeping score on all of the many ways Trump is running on an authoritarian-style platform, this belongs on the list.
You’ve likely heard about the incident on Friday in which Israeli soldiers shot and killed three Israeli hostages who had either escaped from their captors or been abandoned by them during fighting in the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza City. The three were two Israeli Jews and one Israeli Bedouin, each of whom had been captured on October 7th. At the most basic level this is a version of “friendly fire” in which soldiers inadvertently kill fellow soldiers from their own army during wartime. In this case, it’s hostages not fellow soldiers. But the nature of the case is comparable.
The incident has produced a firestorm within Israel, both for the inherently tragic nature of the hostages’ deaths but also because the particular details of how they died. Their deaths have also added renewed intensity to arguments and protests about how the government is balancing the imperatives of destroying Hamas and bringing the country’s hostages home safely. Recent weeks have seen various protests in Israel, often led by or featuring families of hostages, demanding the government focus more on making a deal with Hamas to return all the hostages. The controversy has been fueled in part by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s almost total refusal to visit and meet with residents of communities attacked on October 7th or the families of the hostages.
I want to provide some more detail about how this happened and combine that with the story of another shooting that took place in Jerusalem on November 30th, that of Yuval Castleman.
Let me briefly explain the circumstances of Castleman’s death.
On November 30th, Castleman, a lawyer and former police officer on his way to work, came upon a terrorist attack unfolding at a Jerusalem bus stop. Two gunman had already killed three civilians on their morning commute. (Hamas later took credit for the attack.) Castleman got out of his car with his gun, charged toward the scene and shot and killed the two attackers, essentially ending the attack. As this was happening, two soldiers arrived. An additional man, later identified as off-duty reservist Aviad Frija, also approached Castleman. The three mistook Castleman for one of the terrorists.
Up to this point we have the makings of tragic confusion. Castleman realized that the soldiers thought he was one of the attackers and proceeded to toss away his gun. He opened his shirt (to show he had no additional weapons or a suicide vest) and put his hands in the air while shouting in Hebrew that he was an Israeli and “don’t shoot.” At some point in these fraught moments he threw his wallet with his ID toward the soldiers to identify himself. The off-duty reservist, Frija, shot Castleman multiple times and left him bleeding on the ground.
Castleman died hours later in the hospital.
While the true circumstances of the incident were still unclear, Frija was briefly embraced as a hero for killing the suspected terrorist and cheered by right-wing politicians. He noted proudly in interviews that he was part of the “hilltop youth,” groups of radical teens and young men in the West Bank who act as squatters on land for new illegal outposts and act as vigilantes attacking Palestinians and their property.
Castleman’s final moments have a multi-layered complexity as fascinating as his death is tragic as bundles together multiple stories in one chaotic flurry. At one level, it’s friendly fire and mistaken identity. Frija thought he was killing a Hamas terrorist who had already shot and/or killed several Israeli civilians. But IDF rules of engagement make it crystal clear he shouldn’t have shot Castleman even if he was a terrorist. Castleman threw down his gun; opened his jacket to show he had no suicide vest or other weapons; he got on his knees. Castleman’s family rightly called the shooting an “execution”.
In a story reminiscent of police shootings in the United States, Frija originally claimed that Castleman had made suspicious movements that put him in fear for his life. But subsequently released surveillance video of the incident put the lie to these claims. (Frija is currently under house arrest while being investigated for reckless homicide.)
Though Castleman’s death is not directly related, his shooting comes in the midst of an effort on the part of extremist government minister in charge of the Israeli police, Itamar Ben Gvir, to flood the country with guns for civilians. (Though armed soldiers are a common sight in Israeli, firearms in civilian hands have historically been tightly regulated.) Ben Gvir has also called for loosening open fire regulations.
[…] Let’s return to the killing of the three Israeli hostages in Gaza City.
It’s important to understand that this takes place in the chaos of urban warfare. Hamas fighters’ only chance to engage Israeli soldiers on winning terms is through subterfuge and ambushes. The IDF has reported that Hamas fighters have used recordings of babies and people crying for help in Hebrew to lure in soldiers. But even in this context the details of the killings are at best troubling.
While the incident is still being investigated, preliminary reports indicate that the three men, shirtless, appeared waving a white flag. An Israeli soldier in a nearby building opened fire and shouted “terrorists!” This initial volley killed two of the hostages. The third, apparently injured, retreated into a building from which he could be heard crying for help in Hebrew. At this point the battalion commander left the building and called on his soldiers to stop shooting. Moments later the third hostage again came out of the building and another soldier opened fire killing him.
None of us who haven’t been in that kind of situation can likely imagine the level of terror experienced by soldiers charged with clearing out terrorist fighters knowing those fighters are laying in wait waiting to catch them unawares or lure their input ambushes. But that’s precisely what military training and clear rules of engagement are meant to handle. In this case, it certainly appears to have failed […]
These are two different incidents in very different circumstances. We should be cautious about drawing too strong a conclusions since each incident turns on individual factors we may yet be unaware of or are hard to factor. But both suggest that clear military rules of engagement are frequently disregarded and that Palestinians, whether surrendering terrorists or innocents, are killed contrary to prohibitions against opening fire on unarmed or surrendering people. We’re hearing about these incidents precisely because the victims were Israelis.
One clear fact of history and military life is that occupations degrade militaries, both morally and operationally. There’s no question that this has happened with the IDF, after half a century of occupation. […] Notably, the far-right minister I mentioned above, Itamar Ben Gvir, was rejected by the IDF, despite the fact there is universal conscription, because of his far-right-activism during his youth. He first became notorious as a teenager in November 1995 when he stole the emblem from then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s official car, bragging, “just like we got to this emblem, we can get to Rabin.” Weeks later Rabin was murdered by fellow extremist Yigal Amir. Ben Gvir has subsequently been convicted of various offense like incitement to racism, supporting a terrorist organization, vandalism. The list is almost endless. When activist tried to sue to prevent him from becoming a minister earlier this year he insisted he’d mellowed.
Frija meanwhile was inducted into a special unit created only a few years ago designated specifically for members of the “hilltop youth”. The IDF is considering disbanding the unit. Unsurprisingly it has become notorious for some of the worst IDF abuses in the West Bank.
As I said, occupation degrades militaries, morally, operationally. It also degrades societies. The world changed so much on October 7th, certainly in Israel, that it’s easy to forget the country had been awash in massive civilian protests for going on a year over the government’s attempted judicial coup. The leaders of those protests worked hard to keep the protests focused on the threat the government posed toward Israeli democracy rather than other issues like the occupation since that is profoundly divisive and would shatter the coalition that sustained the protests.
[…] anyone with eyes open could see that the occupation and the settler extremists it spawned can’t be separated from the threats to democracy within Israel. One sustains the other; one requires the other.
I also think it unlikely that you can arm a lot of people and, training or no training, expect that only “good guys” will shoot “bad guys.” The situation is likely to go tragically awry quite often.
Inside The Russian Propaganda Mill Beaming Out Of A Florida Strip Mall
When Ben Swann delivers a news report, he looks and sounds like any other TV anchor: conventionally attractive, slick hair, clad in an unremarkable but well-tailored suit.
But unlike thousands of TV reporters around the country, Swann is a registered Russian agent. While taking millions of dollars to produce branded content for Russian state broadcaster RT over the past year, Swann has sought to build a media platform that aims to serve as a means of broadcasting January 6 conspiracy theories, RFK Jr., Alex Jones, RT’s stable of hosts, and the producers of Plandemic.
[…] Swann’s project is one of many right-wing efforts to supplant YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the mainstream media with a network insulated from attempts to verify that the content has a basis in reality. But unlike the others, Swann has informed the Department of Justice that he is taking millions of dollars from the Russian government.
One of Swann’s companies, Rebel Media Productions, told the DOJ in a FARA filing last year that it is working on behalf of a Russian state-backed entity, while two other media firms which Swann controls are listed as doing business at a Florida address located in a strip mall alongside an RV repair shop and a storefront offering businesses tools to help them with “swag management.” One source familiar told TPM that Swann has built a TV studio at the South Florida address to produce content for his network.
Per the FARA disclosures, Swann took in $4.5 million from a Russian government-backed firm between March 2023 and August 2023 alone to produce content for shows branded for RT. […] address topics like “the United States and NATO continuing to spread war around the world,” “the economic warfare waged by the United States and its allies” and “transgender issues in the United States.”
[…] Swann’s outfits are verified on X, formerly known as Twitter, where one of them has featured Logan’s conspiracy theories about Jan. 6. […]
Though, according to FARA disclosures, the lucrative relationship with Russia began in 2022, Swann has been attracting attention as a far-right media figure for the better part of a decade. He is a typical example of a certain strain of influencer that has emerged in recent years: He preens as a near-martyr for free speech, a counterpoint to what he derides as news narratives manufactured by the establishment.
Many who define themselves in opposition to the American state use that position as a lucrative money-making opportunity, and Swann is no different. Where he stands out is one of the sources of his financing: a Russian government-owned news organization.
[…] Swann’s client via Rebel Media Productions is a Russian non-profit called TV Novosti. TV Novosti owns RT, and is itself controlled by Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti. […]
Swann was born outside of El Paso, the son of prominent local evangelical homeschoolers. […]
He brings showmanship to his presentations, both televised and personal. […]
While at an Atlanta CBS affiliate, Swann made national news by lending credence to Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory which holds that the Clinton campaign was secretly communicating about pedophilia via pizza orders and napkin placement […]
“To be clear, not one single email in the Podesta emails discusses child sex trafficking or pedophilia. That is a fact,” Swann told his audience. “But there are dozens of what seem to be strangely worded emails dealing with pizza and handkerchiefs. Self-described online investigators say that those words in the emails about pizza and the talk of handkerchiefs is code language used by pedophiles.” [video at the link]
He left the network shortly thereafter.
The Pizzagate report garnered Swann a devoted online following […] But concerns over Russian-backed disinformation campaigns in the 2016 election, COVID-19 and Trump’s Stop the Steal campaign led to a crackdown by massive tech platforms on the conspiracy theorizing stories Swann offered his audience. Swann lost his channels. […] The IRS filed a lien on his house in July 2022.
As income from mainstream tech channels dried up, Swann formed three new companies. One was Rebel Media, the FARA-registered firm. But there are two others: Sovren Media and Truth In Media.
What financial relationship may exist between the three firms is unclear. Sovren Media crossposts content from Rebel Media and Truth in Media, though Truth in Media appears nearly entirely devoted at the moment to Lara Logan’s January 6 project.
[…] the four shows produced under its Russia contract, all of which used to run on RT, appear on Sovren.One show, helmed by former CIA analyst Jon Kiriakou, has focused on the allegation that the CIA was operating biological weapons labs in Ukraine. Another, hosted by Trump 2016 surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes, addresses the “Global Queer Agenda,” amid other “cultural” topics.
The offerings on the network make Sovren feel a little like the media equivalent of the cantina scene in Star Wars: […] It also allows Alex Jones to broadcast his Infowars show where he most recently hawked a documentary about a “blueprint for global enslavement” and a clip in which Jones demands to know: Why do they want your baby’s blood?
[…] The slate of issues the shows focus on — anti-trans messaging, criticisms of U.S. and European imperialism, anti-vaccine campaigns — reflects the trial and error approach that homegrown conspiracy theorists use too. Watching a Donald Trump rally is to see the process in action, as he tries out lines and disregards the ones that don’t get a big response.
[…] The network appears to have attracted interest — and, potentially, funding — over the years from influential figures in the right-wing conspiracy theory space. Internal chats obtained by TPM showed Sovren employees discussing potential funding from Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and John McAfee, the Libertarian Party presidential candidate and businessman.
In December 2019, Sovren announced a seed round of funding from a business incubator co-founded by McAfee, who died in 2021.
Per the FARA filings, Swann first received two payments of $304,896 from his Moscow employers in May and July 2022, to pay the salaries of RT employees after the network stopped production amid the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The filings say the content is being produced for international audiences — the huge geographic swaths of India, China, South America and Africa — rather than domestic ones.
The targets weren’t necessarily surprising to experts. Russian President Vladimir Putin has made a concerted effort to court China and India in recent years, and has made inroads with various African leaders.
[…] But it’s far from clear that the distinction Swann made in FARA, that the content is intended for consumption outside of the United States, carries any real meaning in practice. The videos are produced in English and are easily accessible in the U.S.
The war in Ukraine is a point of particular salience. Obviously, Russia has a personal stake in filtering its home team propaganda through these various shows. But there’s also a growing opposition to continuing to fund the war in the U.S. — particularly on the right flank of the Republican party — that the hosts-turned-conspiracy theorists could use to push people down the rabbit hole […]
[…] “Everybody comes to Florida to scam,” Fenster quipped.
When a story appears in the media talking about the views of Christians, it’s almost certain to be focused on conservative evangelical Christians who support Donald Trump. More often than not, that story will involve banning books, denying services, or ostracizing members of the community over one issue: a hatred for people who are LGBTQ+.
As NBC News reports, 75 pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation became law over the past year. Horrible as some of these new laws are, they are only a small fraction of the more than 500 such bills that were introduced in 2023. For years, leaders of right-wing churches have been describing recognition of LGBTQ+ rights as an attack on Christianity. Even members of Christian ministries found members of their own families being attacked as legislators passed these bills on claims that they were about “their Christian faith,” as one pastor put it.
On Monday, Pope Francis formally allowed Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples. It’s a significant step, even if it falls woefully short. But on the same day that this announcement was made, another major Christian group in America is falling apart around the same issue.
The announcement from Francis is intended to mediate between liberal priests in Europe who have already been conducting such blessings, and conservatives in the U.S. and elsewhere who have been delivering increasingly dark rhetoric against it.
Last week the Pope removed Texas Bishop Joseph Strickland, who had become increasingly critical of Francis, especially over issues of LGBTQ+ Catholics and divorced Catholics. Strickland was asked to resign but refused. This was followed by a one-sentence statement saying that he had been removed.
For years Strickland has been a popular figure on right-wing radio and social media, where he has been viewed as a voice for conservative Catholics. Following his ouster, Strickland led a protest outside a meeting of Catholic bishops. Once again, his message was that the Pope and the church were being too accepting of LGBTQ+ members.
[…] Roughly a quarter of the nation’s 30,000 United Methodist churches have left the denomination in the last four years over the issue of whether LGBTQ+ members should be allowed to marry or serve in the ministry.
With an approaching deadline that signals the end of a period in which the denomination opened the door to make it easier for churches that wanted to leave, more appear to be lining up to depart. In 2020, there were a reported 8 million Methodists in America. In a decade, that number could be cut in half.
Officially, the United Methodist Church still bans LGBTQ+ members from serving as ministers and does not sanction same-sex marriage. However, the denomination has ceased trying to enforce these rules, and there are several openly gay ministers and even bishops. […]
Maybe the story should not be focused so much on the one-quarter of churches that chose to depart so that they could continue to disenfranchise LGBTQ+ people in their congregations and communities. The focus should be on the three-quarters of churches that stayed.
[…] Almost three decades ago, conservatives schemed together to take over the Southern Baptist Convention, using what was generally considered a dry annual meeting over policy to engineer a takeover that ended with demanding each church adhere to a strict set of conservative beliefs. Thousands of churches left the denomination, forming more moderate denominations […]
If the conservative resurgence’s leaders believed getting rid of liberals and moderates would lead to church growth, they clearly were mistaken.
Every religious denomination is struggling, but no group is falling faster than the conservative SBC, which is trying to enforce ever stricter definitions of what it means to be a Christian.
[…] What Pope Francis and the United Methodist Church leadership did is necessary. There are different opinions in church congregations because, like it or not, church congregations are full of people whose opinions differ. […]
[…] Now Trump is bringing the full-on Nazi rhetoric to his rally speeches. As CNN reports, Trump’s weekend rally featured a return of his talk about how immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He mixed that theme into a speech that brought even more of his regular shout-outs to authoritarian rulers and expressions of disdain for democracy.
Trump is not just humming Hitleresque themes, but bellowing full-bore Nazi slogans to his red-hat rally crowds. It shows that just as he has done so many times in the past, he has crossed the line and found that the white supremacist territory on the other side suits him just fine. Trump is making his similarity to Hitler into the core of his 2024 campaign.
[…] Trump also trotted out a quote from Vladimir Putin about the “rottenness” of American democracy. Rotten, according to Putin, because it goes after Trump. “Even Vladimir Putin … says that Biden’s — and this is a quote – ‘politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy.’”
As a side note, Putin’s most notable political opponent, Alexei Navalny, who has been held as a political prisoner since 2021 after surviving an attempt to kill him using a nerve agent, disappeared from the prison where he was being held at the beginning of December. He is still missing.
Trump once again ticked off names from his authoritarian friends list, making his now-regular round of how much he admires everyone who is ripping up democracy around the world. That included reminding the crowd that he gets on well with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and letting everyone know that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is “very nice.”
But it was the centerpiece return of the Nazi theme of “poisoning the blood” that really stole the show at Trump’s New Hampshire rally. […] He’s not unaware that he’s repeating Nazisms. He’s just erasing another line as he aspires to make the country a dictatorship.
Now it seems that “poisoning the blood” could be as big a part of Trump’s 2024 run as “lock her up” was in 2016. A fulsome embrace of the white supremacism that has never been all that far from the surface of Trump’s speech. […]
I snipped details of a 1990 interview, including:
Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, “Heil Hitler,” possibly as a family joke.
John Oliver dedicated the final episode of 2023 of his show, “Last Week Tonight,” to taking down billionaire Elon Musk, poking fun at his idiosyncrasies and warning of the potential danger that could come from his immense power.
For 30 minutes, Oliver touched on Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Musk’s hard turn to the right politically, his occasional embrace of antisemitic conspiracy theories, and the accomplishments and setbacks he has faced leading Tesla and SpaceX.
“Elon has made news all year, from test launching the most powerful rocket ever built to just this week having to recall 2 million cars due to safety concerns. He even challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight, to which Zuckerberg replied, send me location. And may I suggest to both of them: interior volcanoes,” Oliver said.
“And then of course there is Twitter. He now calls it X, but the rest of us still call it Twitter. He officially acquired it 12 months ago, and since then, it has been one fiasco after another, with the most recent coming when he tweeted his agreement with this antisemitic post calling the great replacement theory ‘the actual truth,’” he said.
“That caused many big advertisers to flee. And then in the midst of denying any antisemitic content, Elon decided to taunt the sponsors who had left.”
Oliver then played a clip from an interview in which Musk said that he didn’t want those advertisers on his platform. ”If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f— yourself,” Musk said in the interview. “Go. F—. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.”
Oliver then delivered the segment’s punchline: “Wow it is hard to say what’s most embarrassing there: the fact that the world’s richest man is playing the ‘you’re not breaking up with me. I’m breaking up with you’ card. Or that he’s doing it … while wearing a jacket from Ralph Lauren’s midlife crisis collection.”
Oliver also pointed out Musk’s mixed record in business.
“Thanks to the roller coaster fortunes, he can claim the twin distinctions of being both the richest person in the world and the first person ever to lose $200 billion, which is hard to even wrap your head around. It’s like hearing someone won a marathon after accidentally running 200 miles in the wrong direction,” Oliver said.
Oliver then returned to Twitter, highlighting Musk’s apparent obsession with the platform and what that means for his relationship with the world.
“History is littered with titans of business who were shitty or broken people, from Henry Ford through Steve Jobs, the difference is, by and large, they didn’t open up their brain to let the whole world have a constant look inside, but Elon does,” Oliver said. “And the glimpses we get can be terrifying.”
Oliver wrapped up the piece, warning of Musk’s views apparently becoming more extreme over time.
“The fact that Elon seems to be getting increasingly radicalized is a big problem because we’ve put a lot of power into his hands and much more than you may realize,” Oliver said.
“The fact is, whether we like it or not — and the answer is absolutely not — a huge number of very important things going forward are going to depend on how Elon is feeling, which is a terrifying thing to say about anyone, but especially this guy.”
UPDATE on the impeachment of Joe Biden […]: Still not going awesomely.
Here are a couple of updates since the House voted to formalize its impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden for reasons they will hopefully remember to invent at some point, unless they don’t remember because they’re dumb […]
This weekend at some kind of Turning Point USA glee club circle jerk, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had A FURIOUS at Lindsey Graham for saying on “Meet The Press” that he hadn’t seen any evidence of impeachable acts by Joe Biden. [video at the link]
“How can Lindsey Graham in Washington, D.C. on “Meet the Press” say that he hasn’t seen a smoking gun of evidence, that he doesn’t think that we produced enough evidence to impeach Joe Biden?”
By looking at the utter dearth of evidence and then moving his mouth and saying out loud that there ain’t no evidence.
“Let me ask the American people, do you think that we have produced enough evidence to impeach Joe Biden?”
No.
(The dipshit held out the microphone to the audience, as if a grundle-sniffing auditorium full of MAGA toenail clippings are representative of “the American people.” They are not.)
“Well, I think somebody better run for senator in South Carolina.”
Whatever.
Exactly what Lindsey Graham said was, “If there were a smoking gun, I think we’d be talking about it.” You might notice that CrossFit McDumbass up there didn’t actually allude to any smoking gun, since there isn’t one.
[…] MEANWHILE, funniest fucking thing ever: Oklahoma Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin, Mr. Fighty Fists himself, the guy who has an “Oklahoma Values” erectile situation that causes him to be extremely sensitive and unable to act like an adult if somebody is lightly poking fun at him? Also pissing in House Republicans’ impeachment punchbowl. [video at the link]
“The bar is real high. There’s not question about it,” Mullin said in an interview on Newsmax on Friday morning. “It’s got to be a misdemeanor or high crime or treason and the other part has to be committed while he was in office. The current office that he holds. So, what he did as a vice president or what he did in-between the two may not be impeachable.”
Yeah, so Markwayne Mullin doesn’t have a reputation on Capitol Hill for being some kind of intelligent human man or anything. It’s not like people see him coming and it’s like “Oh no! I hope he doesn’t try to recruit me for MENSA again!” […]
So if that guy is able to see it, by knowing one little tiny basic thing about impeachment, which is that you’re supposed to find something they did while president, then, um, yeah. […]
The economy’s strength and stability — defying even the most optimistic predictions — represent a remarkable development after seemingly endless crises.
After two years of relentless pressure over everything from sky-high inflation to a looming recession, the head of the Federal Reserve was asked this month what he does for fun.
“For me, a big, big party — and I mean, this is really as fun as it gets — is a really good inflation report,” Jerome H. Powell said before a crowd at Spelman College. He flashed a smile and laughed.
For an official who typically sticks to a tight script, the quip was downright jubilant. But it also reflected a subtle mood shift from the central bank — and from a leader who feels finally freed to crack a joke in the first place, however restrained.
As 2023 winds to a close, Powell and his colleagues are far from declaring victory on inflation. They routinely caution that their actions could be thwarted by any number of threats, from war in the Middle East to China’s economic slowdown. Americans are upset about the high costs of rent, groceries and other basics, which aren’t going back to pre-pandemic levels. The White House, too, is quick to emphasize that much work remains.
Yet the economy is ending the year in a remarkably better position than almost anyone on Wall Street or in mainstream economics had predicted, having bested just about all expectations time and again. Inflation has dropped to 3.1 percent, from a peak of 9.1. The unemployment rate is at a hot 3.7 percent, and the economy grew at a healthy clip in the most recent quarter. The Fed is probably finished hiking interest rates and is eyeing cuts next year. Financial markets are at or near all-time highs, and the S&P 500 could hit a new record this week, too.
That strength and stability — defying even many of the most optimistic predictions — represents a remarkable development after seemingly endless economic crises that started with the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and continued through an inflation spike that the bank and the White House were slow to recognize.
The Fed and the White House fought inflation on their own distinct tracks using entirely different tools. But now, the central bankers, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and President Biden’s economic brain trust are cautiously pointing out that they have been vindicated by data and developments dismissed as virtually impossible until quite recently. This month, Biden’s typically staid treasury secretary gave an unusually direct rebuke, telling reporters that economists who predicted that lower inflation would require widespread layoffs were now “eating their words.” […]
“Bridget, our first ever interaction was when you retweeted a hate article about me from The Nationalist while I was a Sarasota County school student. You are a reminder that some people view politics as a service to others, while some view it as an opportunity for themselves. On this board, you have spent public funds that could have been used increase teacher pay to change our district lines for political gain, remove books from schools, target Trans and Queer children, erase Black history, and elevate your political career, all while sending your children to private schools because you do not believe in the public school system that you’ve been leading. My question is why doesn’t an elected official using our money to harm our students and our teachers for her gain seem to matter as much to us as her having a threesome does? Bridget Ziegler, you do not deserve to be on the Sarasota County School Board. But you do not deserve to be removed from it for having a threesome. That defeats the lesson we’ve been trying to teach you, which is that a politician’s job is to serve their community not to police personal lives. So to be extra clear, Bridget, you deserve to be fired from your job because you are terrible at your job, not because you had sex with a woman.”
I’d argue that Zeigler’s threesome is important as it shows what an utter hypocrite she is, but I can’t argue with any of the other points he makes.
gijoel @242, that former student made some excellent points!
In other news:
Today Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones turns 80.
For years it’s been impossible to venture onto social media without seeing memes about Richards’ death-cheating immortality: the often gaunt hollowed visage, the legendary drug use, urban legends about recurrent full blood transfusions. Richards’ legendary junkiedom has been decades longer in the myth-making than the reality. As best as the various histories and memories inform us, Richards spent about a decade addicted to heroin, from around the age of 25 to roughly 35. There were recurrent clean-ups for tours, relapses, or just decisions to start shooting heroin again. He eventually kicked the habit in stages after a notorious drug bust in Toronto in 1977, which could have sent him to prison for years. In other words, that supposedly central thing about the man actually ended going on half a century ago. Of course, there are drugs and drugs. Richards continue to drink, smoke grass, snort cocaine for years after while seemingly weening himself of the vices over time. He even quit smoking at some point during the COVID pandemic.
Richards often makes lists of the greatest guitar players of all time. But at a technical level he’s no particular standout. One-time Stones guitarist Mick Taylor was and is certainly superior by that measure. Even a casual rock fan could easily list a dozen guitarists who top him by that measure. Richards’ genius isn’t technical proficiency but knowing what to play, what not to play — both in the sense of the genius of composition but the role of silence in constructing an unshakeable riff. In interviews he has often spoken of silence as the composer’s canvass. For a man notorious for excess, his music is built on economy and restraint. His obsession with finding just the right sound, just the tonal palette he needs leads him to start using a so-called “open G” tuning, a way to tune a guitar descended from banjo tuning. It literally involved removing one of the six strings. Most of the Stones’ most distinctive and indelible songs come after that switch. You can’t quite play most Stones songs on a conventionally tuned guitar. Very close. Almost the same, but not quite.
I won’t try to describe or discuss any of the songs. You’ve heard them or you haven’t. I can’t add anything to the listening.
It’s well known that within just a few years the Lennon-McCartney song writing partnership had become a partnership in name only. The two men wrote their own songs under a common label. That never quite seems to have happened in the Jagger-Richards partnership, despite their notoriously rocky relationship. While some songs are associated with one or the other man they’re seldom distinctly one man’s composition. Almost all seem to have gone through both sets of hands. The most common pattern appears to have been Richards devising a basic musical strength and perhaps beginning of a chorus and then Jagger filling out the lyrics and the phrasing. But there are numerous variations.
Jagger almost broke up the Stones in the mid-’80s when he wanted to start a solo career. Richards eventually decided to record his own albums too. But Jagger’s solo compositions had a thinness to them. Richards’ contained more of the intensity and originality of the Stones. In his 2010 memoir Life, Richards speaks of them as being bound together, perhaps like a strained but unbreakable marriage, because after that period in the late 1980s both realized — maybe especially Jagger realized — neither could be great without the other. […]
If you haven’t read Life it’s one of the great rock memoirs. You find a man with an intense, ingrained rebelliousness, hovered over by an impulsiveness and hints of violence. But he’s also surprisingly soft. The Stones was a band chock full of womanizers and philanderers. And Richards had some of that. But his real pattern is serial monogamy. He seemed to lack the carnivorous traits of some of the others. On his own presentation, and consistent with what we know from other sources, is a man who is fundamentally shy and even withdrawing. It’s probably one part of his descent into addiction. The contrast with Jagger is there on every page, the consummate extrovert and social climber, a man of self-presentation.
The vast majority of that founding generation of ’60s rock music — not the origins in the 1950s with Chuck Berry and then the white version with Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins but the rebirth of it from England starting with the Beatles — was born during World War II. Lennon 1940, McCartney 1942, Jagger and Richards 1943, Roger Daltrey and Jimmy Page 1944, Pete Townsend and Eric Clapton 1945. Go right down the list from the greats to the semi-greats to the alsos. The great majority are born in those years. They’re all in their late ’70s or early ’80s. So we’re nearing the end of the line.
The Stones hit the road in the United States for a tour kicking off in April 2024.
The new law, which would take effect in March, could bring in mass arrests and a court fight between Texas and the federal government over immigration powers.
Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to sign into law on Monday a measure allowing Texas law enforcement officials to arrest migrants who enter the state from Mexico without authorization, setting the stage for a potential showdown with the federal government over immigration enforcement powers.
Mr. Abbott pushed for the legislation, which passed in a special session of the Republican-dominated State Legislature last month over the strong objections of Democrats, immigrant rights groups and Hispanic organizations who argued that the measure violated the U.S. Constitution and would encourage racial profiling.
Some border sheriffs have also opposed the legislation, expressing concern that it could rapidly overwhelm the local jails and courts if even a fraction of those who come over the border every day were arrested. In just one section of the 1,254-mile Texas border with Mexico, around the cities of Eagle Pass and Del Rio, federal agents encountered 38,000 migrants in October. [Yep. That sounds like a reasonable objection.]
[…] In signing the law, Mr. Abbott, a third-term Republican, would take his most direct step yet in challenging the Biden administration over federal immigration policy, which is currently being negotiated between the president and Congress.
[…] Legal experts have said the legislation could create the opportunity for the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit a 2012 case, Arizona v. United States, that was narrowly decided in favor of the power of the federal government to set immigration policy.
Over the last two years, Mr. Abbott has steadily escalated a multibillion-dollar program of state-level border enforcement, known as Operation Lone Star, deploying thousands of National Guard troops and state police on a mission to indefinitely patrol the border.
Under the program, the state police have arrested thousands of migrants on misdemeanor charges of trespassing. But those arrests could be conducted only on private land, and with the consent of the landowner. And the effort has not deterred illegal crossings, which have continued at high levels.
The new law makes it a misdemeanor to cross into Texas from Mexico anywhere other than through the legal ports of entry. It also would allow magistrates to order migrants to return to Mexico or face prosecution if they don’t agree to go. A second violation would be a felony.
Crossing between ports of entry is already a crime under federal law. But federal agents often do not prosecute migrants until their second offense, admitting many of those who cross for the first time into the country, especially women and children.
As a result, Mr. Abbott and other Texas Republicans argue that the federal law is not being enforced as they believe it should be. The state’s new law would not allow migrants who claim asylum to avoid arrest or prosecution unless their asylum claim has already been granted, a process that can take years.
[…] On Monday, federal immigration officials closed international rail bridges in Eagle Pass and El Paso so border agents could be redeployed to handle the large number of arriving migrants there.
Opponents have vowed to file suit to stop the law from taking effect.
“It’s very much our view that Texas has no authority to police and prosecute immigration crimes,” said David Donatti, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. “We will go to federal court to make it so they are never able to do so.”
The governor was also expected on Monday to sign into law about $1.5 billion in additional funding for the state’s construction of a border barrier.
Legislators did not provide funding to support additional arrests or prosecutions of migrants, or estimate the associated costs. […]
Ryan Urrutia, the patrol commander for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, said the sheriff did not support the legislation, fearing that it would sow distrust of law enforcement in the mostly Hispanic community. Mr. Urrutia said the office had projected that it could add about $6 million in annual costs for El Paso County, though he cautioned, “Nobody knows.”
Local or state police officers — such as sheriffs, Texas Rangers or city police officers — could make an arrest under the law for up to two years after the alleged offense. That raises the question of how police officers far from the border could determine whether someone crossed illegally without asking for immigration documents, a tactic that critics fear could lead to racial profiling.
[…] before the bill passed with Republican majority support, one Republican senator warned that the legislation would, in fact, conflict with the Constitution, which he said gave the federal government authority over immigration enforcement.
“We are setting a terrible precedent by invalidating our obedience and faithfulness to our Constitution,” the senator, Brian Birdwell, a conservative Republican from south of Dallas, said in a speech on the floor of the State Senate. […]
Major shipping lines and oil transporters suspended their services through the Red Sea as vessels came under attack at the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
Attacks by Iran-backed Houthi militants on ships in the Red Sea have already rocked global trade. And there could be more disruptions and price increases to come for shipments of goods and fuel.
Several major shipping lines and oil transporters have suspended their services through the Red Sea as more than a dozen vessels have come under attack since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in early October.
Now the shipping industry — and the world — are waiting to see how the United States will respond. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is expected to weigh in Tuesday with more specifics on the American strategy, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Monday.
MSC, Maersk, Hapag Lloyd, CMA CGM, Yang Ming Marine Transport and Evergreen have all said they will be diverting all scheduled journeys immediately to secure the safety of their seafarers and vessels. Collectively, these ocean carriers represent around 60% of global trade.
“[…] the voyage will now be extended, products with a shelf life of two to three months will not be worthwhile importing from the Far East,” said Yoni Essakov, who sits on the executive committee of the Israeli Chamber of Shipping.
[…] On Monday, oil giant BP said it would also pause shipping activity in the Red Sea as the Yemen-based Houthis continue their attacks.
[…] Oil tanker group Frontline also said it is avoiding the Red Sea.
The attacks have already pushed ocean freight costs higher. Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, the Asia-U.S. East Coast prices climbed 5% to $2,497 per 40-foot container, according to the Freightos. It could get even more expensive as major companies avoid the Suez Canal, which feeds into the Red Sea, and opt instead to go around Africa to get to the Indian Ocean.
Doing so adds up to 14 days to a shipping route, incurring higher fuel costs. […]
[…] There will also be delays in returning empty containers to Asia, which will only add to supply chain woes, he added.
[…] Insurers are also shifting their stance, which could result in higher costs passed on to shippers and consumers.[…] The decision to expand the high-risk area influences underwriters’ considerations over insurance premiums.
The route shifts will also likely hurt Egypt’s already-struggling economy, which has already suffered a hit to tourism due to the Israel-Hamas war. Egypt owns, operates and maintains the Suez Canal. The Suez Canal Authority said it had generated a record $9.4 billion during the 2022-23 fiscal year.
The father of one of the three Israeli hostages mistakenly killed by Israeli forces has an unambiguous message for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
“I’m going to say this [to] the government. You murdered my son twice,” Avi Shamriz told NBC News’ Hallie Jackson on Monday. “You let Hamas take my son on Oct. 7, and you killed my son on Dec. 14.”
Israeli military forces accidentally shot and killed Shamriz’s 26-year-old son, Alon, during intense fighting with Hamas militants on Friday, nearly 70 days after he was kidnapped.
The troops also mistakenly killed two other hostages, identified by the military as Yotam Haim and Samer Talalka.
Avi Shamriz, who spoke to NBC News from the Shefayim kibbutz, expressed contempt for Netanyahu’s government […]
“They cannot serve us,” Shamriz said of Netanyahu’s government. “They don’t deserve us, as a country, as a community. They are not our leaders. They are thinking only of themselves, on their chairs, on their salaries.”
“They are not thinking about the hostages,” he added. “They are not thinking about us.”
[…] Shamriz was described by family and friends as a “lover of life” and a “dedicated basketball fan.”
He had been accepted to study computer engineering at Sapir College, in the Negev desert, before he was taken from the Kzar Aza kibbutz.
Shamriz called his older brother Yonatan on Oct. 7, Sommer said. Yonatan told Alon that he was loved and supported by his family. They lost contact just after 10 a.m.
A volcanic eruption has started in Reykjanes peninsula, the fourth in three years.
A strong earthquake swarm began on the Reykjanes peninsula around 21 pm this evening. The swarm is still in full motion and is confined to the dike that lies north of Grindavík.
Unverified data indicate that the largest earthquake in the series was of magnitude 4.2. It hit at 21:03.
whheydtsays
Re: whheydt @ #248…
The article cited above now includes a link to a video stream of the–extremely beautiful–fire fountains of the eruption.
The police in Suðurnes have asked people to evacuate Grindavík due to a volcanic eruption that has started north of town. It is not possible to pass through Grindavíkurvegur road.
“We want to ask that drivers do not block roads and create unnecessary danger by stopping on roads and in road edges. This is extremely important! Keep roads open so that people can evacuate and emergency responders can get to and from the area,” the South-South police say in a Facebook post.
An expert witness paid nearly $1 million by Donald Trump to testify at his New York civil fraud trial “lost all credibility” by “doggedly” justifying the former U.S. president’s business records, the judge overseeing the case said on Monday.
Eli Bartov, a New York University accounting professor, testified on Dec. 7 that he did not see any evidence of fraud in Trump’s family real estate company’s financial statements, which New York state’s attorney general alleges overstated property values in order to win favorable loan and insurance terms.
Bartov testified he spent 650 hours on the case at a rate of $1,350 per hour, meaning his compensation totaled around $877,500. Bartov said his invoices were paid both by the Trump Organization and by Save America, a political action committee supporting Trump’s 2024 election campaign.
“All that his testimony proves is that for a million or so dollars, some experts will say whatever you want them to say,” Justice Arthur Engoron wrote in a scathing denial of several requests by Trump for the case to be decided in his favor.
“By doggedly attempting to justify every misstatement, Professor Bartov lost all credibility,” Engoron wrote…
StevoRsays
LIVE: TYT News & Politics live on youtube currently with discussion of Trump’s tax cuts for the super-rich and the media’s silence on it which seems to be going well-under the radar and earlier Trump’s lastest literally nazi cribbed off literal Hitler remarks.
(Youtube comments turned off there unusually for them & these.I missed the start here so dunno if they explained why at beginning..)
StevoRsays
Good news story :
Leitah is among the more than two dozen women who form the Black Mambas, an all-female anti-poaching unit in South Africa that has been in operation since 2013.
“The Black Mambas ladies mean business,” she says.
This is because they’re responsible for protecting wild animals of all sizes, including rhinos, lions, pangolins and elephants, over an area of 20,000 hectares in Olifants West in Greater Kruger National Park.
Rhino horn and elephant ivory are still part of a profitable illicit trade for poachers across the continent, but thanks to members of the Black Mambas and to environmental educators operating in the area, there’s been a significant decline in poaching over the last decade.
Volcanologist in Iceland says that the lava fountains of the new eruption are up to 150m high, and this indicates a high flow rate out of the fissure. (For comparison, the highest record lava fountains ever were at Mt. Etna and reached 1500m to 2000m. Think about the pressure it takes to toss rocks over a mile upwards.)
Some spaaace neeeews stories via Space dot com summed up :
Asteroids with different spins and bonding strengths may be responsible for the vast variety of impact craters on Earth, including Arizona’s Barringer Crater, new simulations show.
Seems we have a new category of possible life-inhabited world – the Super-Europa :
In a new analysis, NASA has revealed that 17 discovered exoplanets could house subsurface oceans buried below thick sheets of ice. These worlds, much like the icy moons of Jupiter, could therefore be promising places to search for biosignatures — chemical signs of life.
A new theory that suggests dark matter is made up of particles that strongly interact with each other via a so-called “dark force.” If true, this may finally explain the extreme densities we see in dark matter haloes surrounding galaxies.
The existence of particles called self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) acts as an alternative to cold dark matter theories which suggest the elusive stuff is made up of massive, slow-moving (and thus cold), weakly interacting particles that don’t collide. The problem with those cold dark matter models is that they struggle to explain two puzzles surrounding what are known as dark matter haloes.
This new SIDM answers the issues of DM distribution in galactic haloes and provides a new “more complex and vibrant” understanding of something we don’t understand much for sure about yet at all which is, um, cool. I reckon anyhow.
A story withsome pretty significantimplications in my view that seems to have gone under the media radar as well at least here in Oz.
Which also makes me wonder how the huge cost of our AUKUS deal is going to help deal with real problems like refugees (Hey, hint, treat them like they are good people forced out of their former homes through no fault of their own and have alot to actually offer us if we treat them well thus welcome them, help them contribute to our society becaues they are and do?) :
But also Bushfires, heatwaves, droughts, storms all getting ever worse and ever more frequent becuase well, we all know why but refuse to take serious action about it but wasting money on dangerous (in many ways) submarines we don’t need that are going to be obssolete as soon as they are launched if not before and outnumbered massively anyhow to fight a war we can’t win and can easily avoid is .. words fail me.
For weeks, there has been a tendency to treat the Ukrainian force on the eastern (left) bank of the Dnipro River as if it represents Ukraine catching Russia by surprise and poking into a weak point in Russian defenses. Both of those things are likely true. But the whole truth about Ukrainian operations in this area appears to be much less one-sided than many past reports suggest.
Ukraine’s repeated forays across the river established bridgeheads in at least four locations and near the town of Krynky. Ukraine drove over 2 kilometers from the river to liberate a section of the town and a major supply route. From a distance, and from images of Russian forces eliminated in the woods southwest of Krynky, it has all looked good. However, a New York Times article from Saturday paints a much grimmer picture of Ukraine’s operations along the river, making the idea of a breakthrough from this direction seem much less likely.
What that article reveals is what should have been obvious: There is no easy area on the 2,000-kilometer-long front. Ukrainian forces are fighting in tough, miserable conditions everywhere, and the day-to-day conditions are always touch and go.
But that doesn’t by any means suggest that they are losing this war. Because, as today’s numbers show, Russia is very definitely losing.
Some of the ugliness illustrated in that New York Times report should have been expected. For weeks, the video-confirmed losses reported by Andrew Perpetua have featured a large number of boats lost on the Ukrainian side. It’s foolish to think all those boats were either empty, drones, or in some area away from the front. Those boat losses represent how difficult it is to make it across the wide Dnipro River unobserved and without being attacked by artillery or drones.
As was clear almost from the moment Ukraine established its first bridgehead near the fractured bridge at Antonivka, it has seemed unlikely that Ukrainian forces could seriously contend with Russian occupiers in the area unless some physical connection could be made between the two banks. That hasn’t happened, and the longer the small units sit on the eastern side, the more time Russia has to observe and respond to attempts to cross. The description of conditions is brutal.
However, according to the Ukrainian General Staff, this is what the last day looked like for Russian forces. [List of Russian losses at the link]
On the personnel front, that’s not the largest number of Russian troops lost in any single day. It’s not even the highest in the past two weeks. But when it comes to tanks and armored vehicles … damn: 44 tanks, 60 armored troop carriers, 56 trucks and other vehicles, and, to top it all off, 38 artillery guns.
Those are battalion-sized losses, and it follows a solid week in which there have been double-digit Russian tank losses every day. By Ukrainian estimates, here’s what Russia has lost in just the first 18 days of December:
18,400 men
232 tanks
412 armored personnel carriers
461 trucks and transport vehicles
266 pieces of artillery
These are unsustainable losses for any army. I realized we’ve gone through exercises very much like this multiple times in the past, always with the same theme: Russia can’t keep this up forever. And here we are weeks or months later, saying it again.
It’s still true.
That doesn’t mean Russia is going to crack tomorrow, next week, or next month, but their losses greatly exceed their ability to replace lost equipment. For all their reliance on meat waves, it’s not even clear they can replace the last men. U.S. defense intelligence estimates Russia has lost 90% of the army it brought to Ukraine at the start of the invasion. At the rate of losses over the last month, Russia is carving deep into the troops who replaced those original troops. Each iteration brings less experience, less training, fewer officers, and worse equipment.
All that has to happen is for Ukraine’s supporters to provide them with the equipment and ammunition to continue the fight until Russia is too exhausted to sustain the enormous front. More than tanks, planes, artillery, or even drones, that’s going to demand the most precious resource on the battlefield at this point: patience.
If Russia has experienced losses of the magnitude that Ukraine is reporting, the next obvious question is … where? Was this another attempt to cross a river like the unbelievable disaster at Bilohorivka? Did Russian forces drive stubbornly into an obvious trap as they did at Vuhledar? The simple answer is: I don’t know.
Dealing with sources on Telegram can be frustrating. Some are concerned about operational security and reluctant to provide anything specific. Others are more interested in hinting that they know, even when they don’t. In any case, the closest thing to an official answer to where Russia lost so much equipment can likely be found by looking at another set of stats.
In the situation update that followed those reported losses, Ukraine reported that there had been 101 combat engagements in the past day:
24 engagements in the area around Kreminna, specifically in the forests southwest of the city and near the village of Terny, to the west.
4 engagements at unspecified locations south of Bakhmut.
22 engagements in the area near Avdiivka,
11 engagements at Marivka, with specific mentions of Krasnohorivka and Novomykhailivka.
5 engagements in the south around Robotyne.
3 engagements near Prechystivka, about 13 kilometers west of Vuhledar.
In describing one of these areas of engagement, the general staff reports that “Ukrainian soldiers are standing their ground as they inflict major losses on the enemy.” That area, unsurprisingly, is Avdiivka. [Tweet and video at the link]
[…] The remaining posts in this thread show that this area has simply become a cemetery. Not merely a cemetery of damaged equipment, but a cemetery of unburied and unretrieved Russian bodies, which litter the ground in areas as thickly as fallen leaves. That Russia can force anyone to march out into this area when they can clearly see the remains of the last dozen or more waves shredded on the pockmarked soil ahead seems beyond belief.
The damage displayed in that thread may be incredible, but this tweet from last week may be best in showing just how incredibly intense combat has been in this location over an extended period. [Tweet and video at the link]
Almost all the smoke rising in this video is from Ukrainian positions, though the flashes in the distance show explosions and fighting where the Russians are attempting to advance near the Terrikon hill.
Like so many images from this war, it’s hard to imagine how anyone can survive.
————————–
Since Vladimir Putin has burned through one army and gotten a good start on a second, where will he come up with the additional troops to be the meat in future futile assaults? Russian state media reports on the answer.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree making it easier for nationals of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Moldova to become Russian citizens, with the relevant document being published on the official portal of legal information.
Not surprisingly, the new law makes it easier for those who are over 18 to become official Russian citizens. No residency permit, no knowledge of Russian history, or even a single word of the Russian language is required. Just sign right here, buddy. Vladimir Vladimirovich has a surprise for you!
———————————
The Atlantic has an op-ed about the not-at-all-hidden connections between Republicans, Russia, and Donald Trump.
Ukraine’s expendability to congressional Republicans originates in the sinister special relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
Pre-Trump, Republicans expressed much more hawkish views on Russia than Democrats did. Russia invaded eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea in spring 2014. In a Pew Research survey in March of that year, 58 percent of Republicans complained that President Barack Obama’s response was “not tough enough,” compared with just 22 percent of Democrats.
That was before Republicans saw the light. As in the benefits of siding with authoritarian governments who shared their fear of democracy.
——————————————
Another day, another example of how getting your ammo from an isolated kingdom that has fought only fantasy battles for decades might not be the best idea. [Tweet and video at the link: “North Korean ammo and the Russian army, a match made in comedy heaven.”]
Russia to start importing eggs from Iran amid surge in prices
The Council of the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) has zeroed the duty on egg imports to Russia to stabilize prices. The duty will be effective from January 1 to June 30, 2024. EEC Trade Minister Andrei Slepnev expects that it will allow importing up to 1.2 billion eggs into the country. According to him, Turkey and Iran will provide supplies.
According to Rosstat, over the past month and a half, the price of chicken eggs has risen by 20%, and by 46.18% since the beginning of the year.
…
America’s second-largest Protestant denomination is in the final stages of a slow-motion rupture that has so far seen the departure of one-quarter of the nation’s roughly 30,000 United Methodist churches, according to the denomination’s news agency.
At issue for Methodists is the question of ordaining and marrying LGBTQ people, a topic that has splintered many other Protestant denominations and which Methodists have been debating for years…
this is a particularly stupid time to give up on Ukraine, when Ukraine is showing significant progress on the war of attrition.
—————————
The Republicans have pretty firm convictions about stopping non-white immigration into this country. Ukraine is now a hostage to that agenda.
—————————–
Looks to me like he [Russian soldier] is holding a shard from a failed Korean shell. The shell seems to have split asymmetrically during firing, with likely an explosion within the barrel, thus fracturing the tube in a neater, but still jagged irregular circular pattern.
In the soldier’s hands the shard from the shell shows a more silver metal tone than does the darker alloy tone of the barrel, which also has a thicker wall thickness. The shard shows a slope toward a point from left to right, also consistent with a shell.
——————————
I imagine that the North Korean standards for safe and durable storage for ammunition may not live up to Russian standards.
This may be the only time in the entire god-awful war that I type the sentence “may not live up to Russian standards”.
If only they could explode in transit rather than singly in a howitzer — although admittedly blowing up howitzers is a good thing.
—————————–
I agree, North Korea isn’t giving Russia their good stuff. They have a long history of bad faith. They deserve each other. If NK gives Russia crappy munitions, then Russia can beg for more.
ATLANTA — A federal appeals court on Monday unanimously rejected an effort by former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to move the Georgia election interference case against him from state to federal court.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld a lower-court ruling from September that found Meadows had not proved his alleged conduct charged as part of the sweeping criminal racketeering case was related to his official duties as former president Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff….
In Monday’s 49-page opinion, written by Chief Judge William Pryor, the court ruled the federal removal statute “does not apply to former federal officers, and even if it did, the events giving rise to this criminal action were not related to Meadows’s official duties.”…
The appellate court ruling marks another legal victory for Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D), who is leading the prosecution of Trump and his allies and is seeking to try all 15 remaining defendants in the case in a single trial beginning in August.
birgerjohanssonsays
The lava flow in Iceland is 100-200 cubic m per second, which is like the flow of a substantial river .
Multiple sources are confirming the resurgence of Qakbot malware mere months after the FBI and other law enforcement agencies shuttered the Windows botnet.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence reckons a new Qakbot phishing campaign is active as of December 11 but attack attempts are currently low in volume…
An international group of law enforcement agencies have seized the dark web leak site of the notorious ransomware gang known as ALPHV, or BlackCat.
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation seized this site as part of a coordinated law enforcement action taken against ALPHV Blackcat Ransomware,” a message on the gang’s dark web leak site now reads, seen by TechCrunch.
According to the splash, the takedown operation also involved law enforcement agencies from the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Spain and Australia…
birgerjohanssonsays
BTW the latest entry of God Awful Movies is now available on Youtube.
Reginald @270, so good to see countries cooperating to take down the bad guys, even if, as noted in 269, sometimes the bad guys reorganize and get up to more mischief.
By popular (and @AliVelshi) demand, here is the thesis portion of last night’s Rachel Maddow A block: Why does Trump keep talking like a fascist? Because it works.
[…] dictators and authoritarians have long used this rhetoric because they’ve found it to be effective. The words are toxic and dehumanizing, but they work with much — too much — of their intended audience.
If GOP voters were repulsed by disgusting and divisive rhetoric, Trump would know not to use it. Indeed, the former president is afraid to use the word “vaccine” out loud precisely because he’s heard his own followers boo him.
But as Republican politics becomes more radical, the party’s voters don’t boo words like “vermin” and “poisoning the blood”; they applaud such language and want to hear more of it.
“It’s not just a bad and dangerous thing he’s doing that you can stop him from doing by pointing out that it’s bad and dangerous,” Rachel said. “This kind of rhetoric — trying to turn Americans not just against each other but to the idea that some people among us are so dangerous that they must be exterminated, that some threats to us justify terminating the Constitution, that justify being a dictator if only for a day — this is the sort of thing that has a political point.
“It is designed to make you believe that a democratic system with checks and balances, and the constraint of the rule of law, and elections where people are voted out sometimes, and divided power within government, those things are not up to stopping these terrible evils that threaten us — the terrible threat that some people among us pose to the rest of us.
“This stuff is tactically efficient. It’s designed to make us think that we need a strong man. We need a tough man. We don’t need a legal system in all its constraints. We don’t need a court system. We don’t really need a political process. We don’t need politicians. We don’t need Congress. We need strength, will, action, revenge, broken rules, maybe even violence.
“These statements are not just supposed to shock you, they’re supposed to work on you, to make you believe we need something new and extreme to deal with our terrible problems, if only for a little while — maybe just a temporary dictatorship. And these tactics have a terrible history of working really well.”
The new suit by Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss seeks a court order permanently barring Giuliani “from persisting in his defamatory campaign” against the mother and daughter, arguing that he’s continued to falsely accuse them of committing election fraud even after a federal jury handed down last week’s verdict in Washington, D.C.
Commentary:
[…] Michael Gottlieb, the lead attorney for the former Georgia election workers, spoke with Rachel on last night’s show about the case, and explained that this new case is necessary because the plaintiffs don’t believe that Giuliani “should be able to continue telling the same lies out on the street that he has been unable to defend and prove in court.”
If the case is successful, Gottlieb added, it would subject the Republican “to the supervision of a federal court.” If he continued to lie about Freeman and Moss anyway, he’d be at risk of being held in contempt of court.
“I think the reality here is that all we really wanted Rudy Giuliani to do is to take our client’s name out of his mouth,” Gottlieb concluded. “If he agreed to do that, we didn’t have to file this additional lawsuit, but he was unwilling to do it.”
At it turns out, shortly before the lawyer was making these comments on MSNBC, Giuliani appeared on Newsmax, a conservative outlet, and was asked whether he still believes the lies he told about Freeman and Moss. “Yeah,” the Republican replied. “Of course, they’ll sue me again for it when I say that, but yeah, I do.” He added that his lies were “absolutely true.”
If you’re thinking that these on-air comments are likely to be included in the litigation, you’re not alone. If you’re thinking that Giuliani’s defense counsel smacked his forehead as his client said this, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were right about that, too.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) sought out a marginally less offensive interpretation of Donald Trump’s declaration Saturday that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” claiming on CNN Monday that he was actually referring to Democratic policies that are doing the “poisoning.”
Commentary:
[…] In case there were any doubts, the New York Republican didn’t appear to be kidding. Her defense wasn’t offered with a wink and a nod. Malliotakis presented this defense as if the public was supposed to take it seriously. [video at the link]
To the extent that reality still has any meaning, it was in early October when the likely GOP presidential nominee first started echoing Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” telling a conservative outlet, in reference to migrants entering the United States, “Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from. … It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country.”
Note, Trump said “these people,” despite the fact that Malliotakis said Trump has referred to “Democratic policies.”
Over the weekend in New Hampshire, the former president doubled down, referring to the millions of “people” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Trump added, “Not just in South America. Not just in the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country. From Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country. Nobody’s even looking at them. They just come in.”
Imagine being an elected member of Congress and thinking, “Maybe I can convince voters to believe that Trump meant ‘Democratic policies’ are ‘pouring into our country.”
For good measure, let’s also not forget that on Saturday night, Trump used his social media platform to argue, “ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IS POISONING THE BLOOD OF OUR NATION.”
It was almost exactly 48 hours later when Malliotakis went on CNN and argued that Trump “never said ‘immigrants are poisoning.’” […]
The Biden administration on Tuesday took a step toward protecting older trees that store carbon dioxide and help to lessen climate change.
It issued a proposed plan with limitations on cutting down old-growth trees — saying lands can’t be managed with the primary intention of logging such trees for economic reasons.
It does say that “ecologically appropriate” timber harvesting will be allowed as long as it meets certain standards.
The Agriculture Department also said it was proposing incorporating a “national intent” to maintain and improve old-growth forests into all of the land management plans within the National Forest System. [Good idea.]
David Dreher, senior manager for public lands at the National Wildlife Federation, said the establishment of the “national intent” to protect these forests is important because it will inform decisions made by Forest Service officials.
[…] “An affirmative statement that says we need old forests and what I do in these old forests or in mature forests that I want to recruit into old forests contributes to the long-term persistence of those forests,” he said. “We’ve never had that before.”
Studies have shown that old-growth trees store significant amounts of carbon dioxide — making their protection important for fighting climate change.
It is designed to make you believe that a democratic system with checks and balances, and the constraint of the rule of law, and elections where people are voted out sometimes, and divided power within government, those things are not up to stopping these terrible evils that threaten us — the terrible threat that some people among us pose to the rest of us.
Funny, that’s exactly what I think about the Biden and the Democrat’s handling of Trump and the far right.
It brings us endless joy to see what an irrelevant TERF broadcasting from her mom’s basement Megyn Kelly has become. She’s such an unpleasant asshole, and becomes more of one every day, it appears. That is, if you even have occasion to run across her commentary, which is unlikely unless you’ve boned your Twitter algorithm by replying to one of her scoffing, eye-rolling tweets and Elon Musk will now force you to read her every utterance every time you open his shitty app.
She’s a bad person. Kids watching at home: She just is.
Just a foul, unkind, hateful, racist garbage human. A bad example for children, a bad example of humanity.
[…] her career has taken the trajectory of somebody whose only real constituency is people who are as hateful and culturally irrelevant as she is. […]
The point is that she is the latest white conservative idiot to be very angry with Taylor Swift, and she’s calling on her legions of idiot fans to boycott.
That’s it, that’s the joke.
What did Taylor Swift do to raise Kelly’s ire? She — and a bunch of other celebs — went to a comedy performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music where the star, Ramy Youssef, was giving a portion of the proceeds for humanitarian relief in Gaza. The organization is American Near East Refugee Aid, and it also helps people in the West Bank, Lebanon and Jordan.
Helping innocent people should be a no-brainer, no matter what your very complex thoughts on the Israel/Gaza war are […]
By Kelly’s reaction, you’d think Taylor Swift had posted an Insta signup sheet for the Hamas bake sale. Of course, for shallow white racist shitholes like Megyn Kelly, there’s no difference between “Attend comedy show where the proceeds will help people in Gaza” and “Recruit for Hamas.” […]
Like so:
On Tuesday’s episode of “The Megyn Kelly Show,” the conservative pundit tore into Swift, saying she “owes Israelis and Jewish Americans an apology” for her appearance at the show.
“I hope they boycott her events until she issues it, because attending this thing was wrong,” Kelly said. “Do some Googling. See what they do in Gaza to gays. See about women’s rights in Gaza.”
Addressing Swift, Kelly added, “You clearly know nothing.”
Y’all, Megyn Kelly is against Gaza because she’s such a staunch supporter of women’s and gay rights. We absolutely love it when white fascist conservatives try to GOTCHA! the libs with these sorts of talking points. Their brains simply aren’t sharp enough to understand why it never, ever works.
Also y’all, again, we repeat that Megyn Kelly is calling for a boycott of Taylor Swift.
Or rather she’s telling Israelis and American Jewish people to boycott Taylor Swift. She demanded an apology from Taylor Swift, on behalf of Israelis and Jewish Americans, because she totally speaks for them. You know how Israelis and Jewish Americans are always like “OMG did you listen to Megyn Kelly on SiriusXM today?” and all their friends and family say, “Yes obviously!” because of how she’s their favorite.
Yep.
If you’d like to see Kelly’s meltdown, we guess we’ll post it below: [video at the link] […]
Megyn Kelly … still infamous for saying that she likes her Santa and her Jesus white, white, white. Megyn Kelly … still infamous from complaining that Jill Biden is referred to as Dr. Jill Biden. Megyn Kelly … still infamous for promoting anti-trans hate freak Posie Parker, and for dissing Dylan Mulvaney, and for praising Tucker Carlson constantly. That Megyn Kelly … who still does NOT have billions of fans like Taylor Swift.
Reginald Selkirksays
Suddenly the Republican Party is concerned with the wealth gap. I imagine this is their latest talking point after running surveys, and an attempt to belittle the success of the economy under Biden. But seriously, we know which party consistently sides with the super-rich and corporations against the masses.
<a href=”https://news.yahoo.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-says-shes-034920321.html>Marjorie Taylor Greene says she’s ‘sick and tired’ of being around ‘stupid people’ in Congress
“The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and that’s because we have stupid people in Washington, D.C., and I can say that for a fact because I work with many of them,” she continued. “And I’m not just talking about Democrats.”
This is the shoreline George Washington would have seen in 1791, when he chose the site for the nation’s new capital. It was a land of wetlands, marshes and creeks. [images at the link]
Horse-drawn carts carried crushed rock from the construction site of the Capitol, nearby quarries and sediment dredged from the Potomac River. The fill was compacted to create the land where the National Mall sits today.
The African American museum was built on the lowest and last spot then available on the Mall. Engineers had expected to hit water, but the forces of nature they disturbed put the project in immediate peril.
Derek Ross, head of museum construction, despaired as he stared into the colossal 80-foot pit where workers were digging out the basement for the new African American history museum. The huge excavators had broken into a hard clay soil that encased much of Tiber Creek, which was buried 150 years ago. Over the decades, the soil had formed a pressurized cushion around the underground aquifer that held up other buildings on the Mall. But now, it seemed in danger of collapsing. [Yikes!]
The water was rushing out of the aquifer more quickly than it was being replenished by the creek. It was the same aquifer that flowed under the Washington Monument, a mere 800 feet away. Ross worried that if the cushion collapsed, the monument would shift or, worse, topple over. When he closed his eyes, he saw a giant sinkhole.
[…] The work had to stop. Water pumps around the monument normally used to pull extra water out of the ground during rainstorms were reconfigured to force water back underground to refill the cushion. Piezometers were installed to measure the pressure and level of groundwater.
What excavators unearthed at the site of the African American museum in 2012 was not only the long-forgotten topography of the nation’s capital, but a subterranean geology that, two centuries later, determines the city’s vulnerability to catastrophic flooding as climate change intensifies storms, rainfall and sea-level rise.
At risk are the national treasures housed inside the Federal Triangle, the low-lying area between the White House and the Capitol, home to 39 critical government facilities, $14 billion in property and irreplaceable artifacts of America’s history.
[…] the District of Columbia is actually a low-lying delta city like New Orleans, but one constructed on top of settling rock and rubble fill.
The buildings that make up the Federal Triangle sit on land reclaimed from Tiber Creek. Once a few hundred feet wide, the creek ran along what is now Constitution Avenue, and drained much of Washington into the Potomac.
The plan for the new capital turned Tiber Creek into a canal. But that attempt to harness nature backfired because the waterway was often choked with sediment, pollution and sewage.
To improve sanitation, the city covered Tiber Creek and created a sewer.
Buried but not vanished, the underground streams and canals became part of a permanent high-water table in the downtown area known decades later as the Federal Triangle.
Then there’s the water that comes from the gigantic Potomac Watershed, where the rain falling on the 14,690 square-mile region travels from as far away as the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia, down the streams of the Piedmont’s hard rock, past the Atlantic Fall Line onto the sandy Atlantic Coastal Plain. From there, it flows into the Potomac River and then Chesapeake Bay on its way to the wide-open Atlantic Ocean.
Before colonization, when Native American tribes lived here, rainfall was naturally absorbed along its journey to the ocean by marshes and streams. Once European settlers began clearing and grading the land for farming, though, the ground became less permeable. Erosion and runoff carried massive quantities of sediment downstream and deposited them into mud flats along the banks of the Potomac.
A few centuries later, the Army Corps of Engineers reshaped them into the Reflecting Pool, Tidal Basin and adjoining parkland.
Fast forward to the 21st century, a heavy downfall on top of a high-water table in an already low-lying area such as the Federal Triangle can even “cause the water to come back up from the ground,” said Karen Prestegaard, a geologist at the University of Maryland. A series of spectacular floods has resulted.
Derek Ross’s confrontation with the underground history of Washington turned into $20 million in unplanned changes to the National Museum of African American History and Culture […]
The result was the first museum on the National Mall to listen to what nature is telling us about coexisting on the planet in the era of climate change.
Builders hauled in loads of fill to lift the building’s ground level 15 feet above the rest of the Mall.
To protect the five stories underground, the African American museum’s basement has double walls eight feet apart from each other. The inner wall is coated with a waterproof skin. Between the two walls, gravel and light concrete absorb any water that might seep in. The two walls are capped with another waterproof barrier. The lawn surrounding the museum’s above-ground bronze crown is actually a grass roof installed to absorb rainwater.
Two buried tanks, one that holds 100,000 gallons,the other 15,000 gallons, capture rain and underground water that collects near the basement and uses it to flush toilets and water the landscaping. In a flood, the full cisterns can wait to release their loads until the District’s wastewater pipes have been drained of storm water elsewhere.
A state-of-the-art flood wall protects the museum’s “Achilles’ heel,” as Ross calls the entrance to the underground loading dock, the lowest part of the building. “It doesn’t require any human beings,” he said, because people make mistakes. Instead, the flood wall is automatically triggered when a flotation device underneath it senses the presence of water.
Other Smithsonian museums in or near the 100-year flood plain are being slowly retrofitted with flood protection: A new flood gate is up at the National Air and Space Museum; the chronically flooded Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is getting its first storm water system; and the National Museum of American History, the most vulnerable of the Smithsonian museums, will get two cisterns and higher flood gates, and send its basement-level collection to Suitland, Md. for storage.
Under the worst-case climate scenario, the American History museum could find itself beyond protection of the 17th St. Levee and “under 16.3 feet of water,” according to the Army Corps and the D.C. Climate Projections & Scenario Development Report. […]
Much more at the link, including a description of the battle to save scores of twisted cherry trees starved of oxygen from standing in polluted high-tide waters twice a day. In the Tidal Basin, completed in 1897, water has risen four feet over the past century — one foot from rising seas and three feet from its sinking foundation built on fill, according to the National Park Service.
Recent history:
On the morning of Sept. 10, 2020, the creeks and streams that President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration corralled into a civilized wastewater system trickled quietly, dormant but undead.
By 3:40 p.m., however, a fierce atmospheric river of moisture from the tropics had dumped six inches of rain in some neighborhoods in just 70 minutes. Like underground zombies, the historical waterways swelled under the Edgewood, Bloomingdale and East Corner neighborhoods, gathering power and speed until finally forcing themselves to the surface via manhole covers, catch basins, shower drains and toilets.
Water from the old Tiber Creek, the same one construction crews hit while digging the basement of the African American museum, picked up city runoff and seeped into the 801 Restaurant and Bar on Florida Avenue NW.
Atop a buried tributary of the Anacostia River, the rising waters flooded two dozen homes in the northeast neighborhood of Riggs Park. […]
In Edgewood, above the remnants of Tiber Creek and below a massive 13-acre concrete development, water belched up out of Jessica Sarstedt’s toilet and into 30 homes around Bryant and 3rd streets NE. Blocks away, on Rhode Island Ave, high water pushed up against the windows of the building where, three years later, a similar flood broke through District Dogs, drowning 10 animals trapped inside.
[…] One-third of the city’s drainage system, much of it built in the 1800s, combines wastewater and sewage into one pipe. The building boom continues to pave over raw earth that once soaked up the rainfall, another key driver of urban flooding
[…] [A] nearly $3 billion project is the result of a consent decree between city and federal agencies to carry wastewater to the Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant rather than dumping millions of gallons of raw sewage and other pollutants straight into Rock Creek and the Potomac and Anacostia rivers — as the city had done for decades. [Spoiler, the system is insufficient. it failed in 2020.]
From an economic point of view, 2023 will go down in the record books as one of the best years ever — a year in which inflation came down amazingly fast at no visible cost, defying the predictions of many economists that disinflation would require years of high unemployment.
So far, at least, the public seems unwilling to believe the good news, or to give the Biden administration any credit. But this column isn’t about the apparent gap between voter perceptions and reality. It is instead about the unwillingness of some influential economists and officials to accept the fact that they got it wrong.
Why should we care? This isn’t about scoring personal points — although I’m a big believer in owning up to your past errors — it’s how you learn, and it’s also good for the soul. What I’m concerned about is that clinging to a view of the economy that has been disproved by recent events makes it more likely that we’ll mess this up, putting the economy through a recession that, it turns out, we didn’t and don’t need to control inflation.
How amazing has the economy been? As recently as March, the Federal Reserve committee that sets monetary policy projected that we’d end this year with 4.5 percent unemployment and with the Fed’s preferred “core” measure of inflation running at 3.6 percent. Last week, the same group projected year-end unemployment of only 3.8 percent and core inflation at only 3.2 percent. But actually the news is even better, because that last number is inflation for the year as a whole; over the six months ending in October, core inflation was running at 2.5 percent, and most analysts I follow believe that when November data come in later this week, it will show inflation down to around 2 percent, which is the Fed’s long-run target.
Soft landing achieved.
How did we pull that off? The answer seems fairly clear. Economists who argued that the inflation surge of 2021-22 was “transitory,” driven by disruptions caused by the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, appear to have been right — but those disruptions were bigger and longer lasting than almost anyone realized, so “transitory” ended up meaning years rather than months. What happened in 2023 was that the economy finally worked out its postpandemic kinks, with, for example, supply chain issues and the mismatch between job openings and unemployed workers getting resolved.
This isn’t casual speculation. A combination of rising employment and falling inflation is exactly what you’d expect in an economy with improving supply chains. It’s also what you see when you look at the economy in detail: the fastest-growing sectors have had the biggest declines in inflation. And statistical models of inflation that include supply chain measures track inflation in recent years in a way that more conventional models don’t.
But many economists who were wrongly pessimistic about inflation — most prominently Larry Summers, although he isn’t alone — remain unwilling to accept the obvious. Instead, they argue that the Fed, which began raising interest rates sharply in 2022, deserves the credit for disinflation.
The question is, how is that supposed to have worked? The original pessimist argument was that the Fed needed to create a lot of unemployment to reduce inflation. As best I can tell, the argument now is that by acting tough the Fed convinced people that inflation would come down, and that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There is, as far as I can see, no evidence at all for this story. While financial markets may pay close attention to the Fed’s pronouncements, producers and workers, who set prices and wages, don’t; they base their decisions on what they see around them.
There are some historical echoes here. Around a decade ago, some economists and policymakers insisted that slashing government spending would actually increase employment, by inspiring higher investment; I mocked this view, which proved utterly wrong, as belief in the Confidence Fairy. What we’re seeing now might be called belief in the Credibility Fairy.
To be clear, I don’t fault the Fed for having raised rates in the past. Last year we didn’t know that the inflation story would turn out this well, and to be fair, rate hikes have not, in fact, caused a recession, at least so far.
What worries me is the future. By and large, the same people who were wrongly pessimistic about disinflation are now warning the Fed against cutting interest rates quickly. Why? Well, if you believe that any rise in inflation will be very hard to reverse, and also believe that the Fed’s perceived toughness was crucial in getting inflation down, I guess you’re willing to run big risks of recession to preserve the Fed’s inflation-fighting credibility. But neither belief is supported by the evidence.
Has the war on inflation been definitively won? No. But recession looks like a bigger risk than resurgent inflation. And I worry that this risk will be increased if policymakers listen to people who are reluctant to admit that they got the inflation story wrong and are clinging to a false theory about how we got inflation down.
[…] An OIG Report has uncovered stunning evidence of collusion between Trump and January 6 rally organizations to break the law and march on the nation’s Capitol. You can read the report HERE.
The report evaluates the performance of the United States Park Police (USPP) and National Parks Service (NPS) regarding January 6. These organizations were responsible for issuing rally permits and coordinating with the leadership of rallies to ensure compliance with park rules and an orderly event.
Rally organizers must seek permits for such large protest gatherings. The NPS and USPP then work closely with rally leadership to coordinate public safety. Reading the report provides insight into the surprisingly high level of coordination involved.
In this case the rally organizer, seeking the permit and coordinating with the authorities was Women For America First (WFAF). The WFAF submitted a request to hold a rally at the Ellipse on December 19th, the very day Trump made his tweet, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” The request included a permit to march on the Capitol. The permit to rally at the Ellipse was granted, the request for a permit to march on the Capitol was expressly denied.
Between permit approval for the Ellipse, and January 6th, WFAF repeatedly assured NPS and USPP that there were no plans to march on the Capitol. The agencies repeatedly asked, having heard rumors of such plans, but were explicitly told that was not part of the plan. Those assurances were flat out lies.
In fact, documents establish that WFAF was coordinating with the White House of a march on the Capitol. On January 3d a White House liaison texted to the WFAF that, “POTUS expectations are intimate and then send everyone over to the Capitol.”
The real smoking gun document is a text exchange with a speaker with the head of the WFAF, Kylie Kremer. The text is pictured above. [image available at the link]
In it the Ms. Kremer asks the speaker to keep quiet about it because it could get Kremer in trouble with the park service. Kremer basically states there is a secretly planned “second stage” for the rally that includes a march on the Capitol. Kremer had advance notice of Trump’s plans to call for the mob to march on the Capitol, telling the speaker that Trump “is just going to call for it ‘unexpectedly.'”
The OIG report goes on to discuss the reactions NPS and USPP officials who, long after the events, were shown this text exchange in the course of the OIG’s investigation. They described their minds as blown and said, “basically she lied to all of us.”
Trump’s call for the mob to march in the Capitol was not off the cuff. It was planned in advance. Further, it was planned with rally organizers in advance. Excluded from this advance planning was the National Park Service and United States Park Police, who were repeatedly, falsely assured that no such thing was in the works.
Colorado’s highest court on Thursday knocked former President Trump off the state’s Republican primary ballot under the 14th Amendment in a 4-3 ruling, making it the first state to block him from seeking the presidency because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
In a major legal blow to Trump, the court affirmed he engaged in insurrection by inflaming his supporters with false claims of election fraud and directing them to the Capitol – preventing him from a second White House term under the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection clause.”
The court put its ruling on hold until Jan. 4, so Trump can first seek review from the Supreme Court. If he does, Trump’s name automatically remains on the ballot until the justices resolve the appeal.
“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” the court wrote in a 4-3 decision. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”
If allowed to take effect, Colorado’s secretary of state may not list Trump’s name on the 2024 presidential primary ballot, nor may she count any write-in votes cast for him.
The unprecedented decision all-but ensures a dramatic legal battle at the high court ahead of the 2024 election, in which Trump is the undisputed Republican frontrunner.
The high court has not ruled on the controversial clause, which prohibits the holding of “any office … under the United States” if a person engaged in insurrection after swearing to “support” the Constitution as “an officer of the United States.”
The case is one of many seeking to block Trump from becoming president again.
In Colorado, four Republican and two independent voters, backed by left-leaning group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, cited the provision in their lawsuit seeking to prevent another Trump term.
Similar cases have also been brought in states like Michigan and Minnesota, but none has been successful in removing Trump’s name from any state’s ballot.
The seven-member bench of Colorado’s Supreme Court was entirely appointed by Democratic governors. Six later faced voters and won retention elections, while the seventh will do so next year.
Social Security recipients and others on fixed incomes will soon see a slight increase in their monthly benefit checks from the U.S. government.
Starting in January, the estimated average monthly retirement benefit will increase by 3.2%, or $59 a month, for 2024 — from $1,848 to $1,907.
The new amounts, the result of the agency’s annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), will kick in next month on a staggered, weekly basis, according to when a recipient’s birthday occurs.
The latest COLA increase pales in comparison to the 8.7% increase recipients saw for 2023. That’s because inflation has been falling over the past several months. The annual COLA is calculated based on inflation readings for July, August and September. In those months, the relevant measure of 12-month inflation clocked in at 2.6%, 3.4% and 3.5%, respectively.
Yet despite the more recent slowdown of price increases, many Americans on fixed incomes, especially seniors, will continue to struggle financially even as inflation slows into 2024, experts and economists say.
Since mid-2020, average prices in the U.S. have climbed more than 20%. Yet, the total Social Security cost-of-living adjustment has increased just 17.8% over the same period.
[…] Seniors are especially vulnerable to the rising cost of housing, with the average older person spending 49% of their household budget on shelter, Johnson said. Even as other categories of inflation have slowed or even reversed in recent months, shelter costs have continued to trend upward. In September, a key measure of shelter costs increased by 0.6%, the largest rise since February, after a 0.4% gain in August.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said that while many higher-income seniors have likely weathered the recent inflationary period, many low- and middle-income seniors — especially those on fixed incomes — have not.
“It’s been a really tough three or four years, and that continues,” Zandi said of those cohorts.
Next year’s Medicare Part B premium adjustments will further erode savings from those monthly Social Security checks. Following a rare year in which the premium was reduced, the standard monthly Part B rate will increase by about $10 to $174.70.
The formula for setting the annual COLA increase was established some five decades ago. The Senior Citizens League has said that, over time, spending categories that more directly impact seniors, especially health care costs, have increased at a faster rate than others.
The league has calculated that, as a result, Social Security benefits have lost more than 30% of their purchasing power since 2000.
Government economists have created — but not implemented — an alternative index, called the Consumer Price Index for the Elderly (CPI-E), which puts greater weight on senior-focused categories. Currently, there is no active congressional legislation pushing a switch to CPI-E.
The Senior Citizens League nevertheless estimates that a senior who filed for Social Security with average benefits over 30 years ago would have received nearly $14,000 more in retirement if the CPI-E had been used.
[…] Johnson and the league say many seniors remain vulnerable, especially since they are less likely to be able to take on additional work to boost income.
Any Chick-fil-A fan knows the chicken chain is closed on Sundays.
It’s a practice that’s been in place since Chick-fil-A first opened in Georgia in 1946.
But now, a bill has been introduced in New York that could affect Chick-fil-A locations at rest stops along Interstate 90 in New York state.
The new bill would require food services at transportation facilities and rest areas to remain open seven days a week.
The bill goes on to say that “While there is nothing objectionable about a fast food restaurant closing on a particular day of the week, service areas dedicated to travelers is an inappropriate location for such a restaurant … Allowing for retail space to go unused one seventh of the week or more is a disservice and unnecessary inconvenience to travelers who rely on these service areas.”
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) issued a passionate defense of former President Trump’s recent remarks claiming that migrants attempting to enter the U.S. are “poisoning the blood of our country,” insisting that he was referring to fentanyl overdoses…
A prominent Republican judge and politician in Hamilton County (Ohio) has ditched the Republican Party.
Hamilton County Common Pleas Court Judge Leslie Ghiz said former President Donald Trump played “a big part of it” as she has wrestled with what party she wants to run in and whether she wants to run for reelection at all.
Ghiz, who had been a Republican during her previous runs for Cincinnati City Council and judge, tried to get the endorsement of the Hamilton County Democratic Party for her reelection campaign in 2024. The Hamilton County Democrats declined this month to endorse her, according to Ghiz and Hamilton County Democratic Chair Gwen McFarlin. Neither Ghiz nor McFarlin gave a reason for why they didn’t endorse her.
Ghiz is now considering running as an independent…
StevoRsays
YES! After Jan 6th why has it taken this long and allowed Trump to go this far already? Bout time and hopefully other courts will now follow & this will be upheld.
The Colorado Supreme Court has declared former US president Donald Trump ineligible for the White House under the constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot. The decision on Tuesday sets up a likely showdown in the nation’s highest court to decide whether the frontrunner for the GOP nomination can remain in the race. It marks the first time in history that section 3 of the 14th amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate. All justices in the Colorado Supreme Court were appointed by Democratic governors. “A majority of the court holds that Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president under section 3 of the 14th amendment,” the court wrote in its 4-3 decision.
Colorado’s highest court overturned a ruling from a district court judge who found that Mr Trump incited an insurrection for his role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but said he could not be barred from the ballot because it was unclear that the provision was intended to cover the presidency. …(Snip!)..Mr Trump’s attorneys had promised to appeal any disqualification immediately to the US Supreme Court, which has the final say about constitutional matters.
So could thsi finally be the end of Trump’s political career? (Yeah, I know how many times have we heard that before? Still)
StevoRsays
@291. Reginald Selkirk: Minnesota panel chooses new state flag featuring North Star.
A bit hard to tell that’s meant to be Polaris a.k.a. “the North / Pole Star” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris ) rather than a generic star symbol! Nothing to indicate its position, magnitude, sepctral type (F7 Ib – Procyonese yellow-white supergiant star) distance, or slight Cepheid variablity. ;-)
And by “misusing” he means using it in a way he doesn’t like.
“Regardless of whether you support or oppose former President Donald Trump, it is outrageous to see left-wing activists make a mockery of our political system by scheming with partisan state officials and pressuring judges to remove him from the ballot,” Tillis said in a press release announcing the bill’s upcoming introduction Tuesday.
“American voters, not partisan activists, should decide who we elect as our President. The Constitutional Election Integrity Act would put any constitutional challenges in the sole place they belong: the U.S. Supreme Court,” Tillis continued.
The bill aims to amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002, adding language to the law stating that the Supreme Court has “sole jurisdiction to decide claims arising out of section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.” …
Well that would be just another law. It wouldn’t have the effect of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified as part of the constitution.
A question: is Megan Kelly that former TV presenter who claimed she won when she didn’t, or was that some other MAGA Republican woman?
There are so many weirdos (even more when you count the Brit ones) I have trouble keeping track.
birgerjohanssonsays
A random thought. When tory crazies like Suella Braverman or Priti Patel burn out their careers in the Conservative Party they could launch a profitable career in USA.
When Megan Kelly, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter etc burn out, they cannot as easily move to Britain – the conservatives are incredibly jingoistic and parochial, and probably not tolerant of people without a “public school” accent. Unless they are billionaries, at which point they magically become acceptable.
birgerjohanssonsays
In case you wonder, Braverman is the one who describes being homeless as a “lifestyle choice”.
Because poor people are just lazy.
A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Rep. Scott Perry must disclose to federal prosecutors more than 1,600 emails, text messages and other communications related to the investigation into Donald Trump and his allies’ bid to subvert the 2020 election.
Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg concluded that the vast majority of the messages Perry exchanged — some with other members of Congress, some with members of the Trump administration and some with allies outside of government — could not be shielded from prosecutors by Perry’s constitutional protections as a member of Congress.
Rather, Boasberg concluded, the 1,659 exchanges had little to do with Perry’s job as a legislator and therefore were not subject to the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause, which prohibits prosecutors and courts from prying into the official business of Congress…
So overthrowing the elected government is not part of an elected legislator’s official duties? Shocking!
To the editor: Former President Trump and his allies thought mounting a presidential immunity defense was a clever way to delay his federal trial until a new administration could shut the prosecution down.
Not so much. By asking for the Supreme Court to weigh in soon, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith has brilliantly turned this defense into Republicans’ worst nightmare.
Either the Supreme Court disagrees with the former president and Trump faces trial before the election, or the justices agree and make President Biden America’s first king.
[…] Peter Strzok, who served as the head of the FBI’s counter-intelligence division, referenced the intelligence report’s findings and wrote online that it’s “hard to overstate how critical the 2024 elections are to Russia — and Putin personally.” Strzok added that the American public should “expect unprecedented interference across national races.”
Summarized from The Political Wire (and sort of funny):
The Trump campaign is running an ad in Iowa showing Kim Reynolds, the state’s Republican governor, endorsing the former president — despite the fact that Reynolds has endorsed DeSantis. It turns out that Team Trump is using footage from the 2016 race, leading the governor to explain this week that the GOP frontrunner is “misleading“ Hawkeye State voters.
birgerjohanssonsays
The Guardian says British doctors expect a rise in penile fractures during the Christmas season.
My comment (adressing British men) “just leave the reindeer alone”.
The United States military has received unfettered access to fifteen Finnish bases along the 830-mile-long border it shares with Russia. [I don’t know if “unfettered” is the right word.]
The deal was signed on December 18, 2023, between U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Finnish Defense Minister Antti Hakkanen signed a defense cooperation agreement in Washington D.C. on Dec. 18, 2023. The agreement between the two nations enables the US military to carry out combat operations if necessary.
Ramping up defense capabilities in Sweden and Norway are underway, according to Blinken, as reported by Stars and Stripes. The number of bases opened to the United States in Scandinavia now numbers thirty-six.
The bases in northern Finland near the heavily militarized Russian Kola Peninsula include Ivalo, Rovajärvi, Rovaniemi, Tervola, and Veitsiluoto.
The pact allows U.S. forces to have exclusive access to defense materiel pre-positioned in various locations, with “unimpeded access” to those storage facilities.
Also, military aircraft, vehicles and ships will have access to various airport and seaports, the deal says.
Among the sites U.S. forces will be granted access to is a border guard base in Ivalo, a northern area near Russia’s fortified Kola Peninsula.
In line with other U.S. agreements, NATO treaty rules that exempt military pay from local taxation also apply for troops on missions in Finland. However, the deal does not call for any permanent U.S. bases to be established in the country.
“We now have a network of defense cooperation agreements that stretches from northern to southern Europe, from the Norwegian Sea to the Black Sea, providing security and stability for people all across the Continent,’ Blinken said.
[Tweet and map at the link]
Finland joined NATO this year, and after signing the agreement with the US, Russia summoned the Finnish Ambassador to Moscow.
Tensions with Russia have increased after Finland closed its last border crossing due to an influx of migrants that they claim is meant to destabilize their country. The signing of the agreement with the US has made Russia even more unpleasant.
From the Barents Observer:
Moscow is highly displeased with Finland’s deeper military cooperation with the United States and Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in a statement openly warns the neighbouring country.
According to the spokeswoman, who is known for her undiplomatic and aggressive statements, Ambassador Helanterä was told that the new agreement with the Americans “will not come without a response.”
“The stronger military potential of NATO on our border threatens the security of the Russian Federation and will be followed by a response from the Russian side,” she underlined.
“Necessary measures to counter the aggressive actions of Finland and its NATO allies will be taken,” she underlined and added that “the responsibility for the transformation of an area of good-neighborly relations to a region of possible confrontation fully lies on Finnish authorities.”
[Photo and maps at the link: From 2018: The major expansion of storage facilities for both nuclear missiles and conventional long-range high-precision cruise missiles will significantly boost Russia’s military power and strengthen the bastion defence capability in the Barents- and Norwegian Sea.
By comparing one, two and four years old satellite photos with Google Earth images recently made public, Barents Observer’s study clearly shows the progress. Both in Okolnaya Bay and at Gadzhiyevo submarine base some 15 kilometers further west. Where only the initial roadwork could be seen four years ago, foundations came two-three years ago, while concrete walls and roof are now in place at most of the bunkers.]
It is important to note that Putin’s military infrastructure has not been dented in any way in the Arctic (except for men that Putin has fed to the Ukrainian meatgrinder) as it has with the years-long war with Ukraine.
American nuclear weapons are still under negotiation with Finland.
From the AFP:
Finland, which fended off a Soviet invasion in the 1939-40 Winter War, for decades steered clear of formally entering NATO for fear of antagonizing its giant neighbor but changed course following Russia’s assault on Ukraine, which had tried unsuccessfully to enter the alliance.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an interview with state television released Sunday, charged that the West had “dragged” Finland into NATO, saying Russia had long ago settled 20th-century disputes with Helsinki.
Putin announced the creation of a new district within Russia’s military near Finland, with which Russia shares a 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) border.
Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen, speaking in Washington after the agreement signing, renewed accusations that Russia is trying to “weaponize migration” by sending people from developing countries through the border to the EU member.
From High North:
Like the fact that Russia’s nuclear forces and maritime military power are essentially unchanged and not weakened in the North. The same applies to the airborne forces.
Increased military capacity and military exercises of increasing frequency and size in the High North increase the risk of an unintentional military confrontation in the North.
Lacking dialogue and communication between the East and the West increases the risk of accidents or misunderstandings.
In the US, Donald Trump is climbing the polls and has a real chance of being elected president. This increases the risk of many things, including that the bases in Norway, Sweden, and Finland will never be used by the US.
The agreements between the US and the three Nordic countries also contain a built-in contradiction. While Norway, Sweden, and Finland base their security policy on stability and predictability, the American doctrine is based on military unpredictability as an essential part of the military strategy. [Sound like opinion, not fact]
In 2021, the US Army wrote about two US soldiers training in Finland; few American soldiers have ever been trained in the Arctic Circle during winter.
ROVANIEMI, Finland – Subarctic temperatures didn’t stop a multinational training exercise from going forward during a Winter Combat Course near Rovaniemi, Finland, located just four miles south of the Arctic Circle, during the freezing month of January, the coldest month of the year in the region. […]
“I’ve never done winter warfare training before, it was just a world of difference,” said U.S. Army Capt. Samuel Pankonen, the chief nursing officer at Kaiserslautern Army Health Clinic. “The focus of the training is to make sure we have action competence.
According to Pankonen, the course immersed participants in the arctic climate with minimal equipment to test survivability, lethality and collaboration.
“(The Finnish Army) wanted us to be able to operate in the environment that we were being exposed to,” said Pankonen, a native of Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. “With the extreme cold and having (simulated) enemies trying to kill you, we had to operate at that most basic unit function and carry on the mission.”
“It is important to note that Putin’s military has not been dented in any way in the Arctic as it has with the years-long war with Ukraine.”
This is not correct. The Arctic Navy in Murmansk is apparently at full strength, but Russia has had to move many infantry soldiers from Karelia and above to Ukraine. This can be confirmed from satellite images, their bases look emptier than usual. Heavy losses have occurred, so the units east of Finland are not at their normal strength.
Welcome to Finland! It is better to have invited troops on Finnish soil than uninvited ones.
—————————-
eeing Americans train for winter combat alongside the Finns put me in mind of my Dad’s experience in WWII. He was a member of the 10th Mountain Division, which was prepared to fight in both mountain & winter conditions. This unit was inspired, in part, by the successes the Finns achieved over the Soviets.
——————————
Yesterday it was announced that Denmark will also sign a defense agreement with the US this week.
“Amalek” is a code word in Jewish tradition for an implacable enemy whose goal is to destroy all the Jews. It goes back to Torah times, when, according to the Bible, The Amalekites deliberately attacked the weakest members of the Israelite exodus from Egypt. Haman, who wanted to kill all the Jews in Persia, was called a descendant of Amalek. The rabbis would refer to Hitler as Amalek.
There is no evidence that the Biblical Amalek ever existed. (Nor Haman, either.) But warnings about Amalek are a part of Jewish history. And labeling someone as Amalek is, or can become, a call to eliminate him, as God told Moses that he would wipe out the memory of Amalek from under heaven […]
In rabbinic times, the command to wipe out Amalek was downplayed or dismissed. The Talmud (Ber. 28a) argues that because the nations have all been mixed up since Biblical days, the identity of Amalek has been lost. Maimonides held that the command meant to remove “Amalekite-like behavior” from the world. […]
In modern Israel, some settlers have compared the Palestinians to Amalek and said they must be prevented from becoming a nation. But I just saw on Chris Hayes’s program tonight that Netanyahu has now said that the destruction of Gaza is necessary because they are Amalek. Actually, a quick bit of research shows that he has been saying this since Oct. 7, and other Israelis are saying it as well.
To label a people as Amalek is to call for genocide.
There is no question that Hamas has behaved, and continues to behave, in the manner of the Biblical Amalek. The Oct. 7 massacre deliberately targeted the weak, the old, women, children. It was intentionally cruel, intentionally heartless, intentionally designed to provoke outrage, intentionally an act of genocide. Hamas does not mean to simply destroy the Jewish state; it wants to kill all the Jews who live there. There are also reports that Hamas is active in Germany setting up cells and connecting to like-minded groups to kill Jews in Germany and elsewhere in Europe simply for being Jews.
But not all Palestinians, not even most Palestinians, are Amalek. Gazans have suffered as much, if not more, under Hamas than Israelis have. The IDF forces who showed journalists through the tunnels they found made the point that these were built using money, equipment, and supplies that had been sent to Gaza to help the Gazan people, and that Hamas had stolen them.
Up to now, Netanyahu has behaved like a criminal, a more successful Trump. He is almost certainly corrupt, and he is hanging onto power for the same reason Trump wants to get it back: to avoid being called to account. But this makes him a war criminal.
For what it’s worth, and it’s worth a lot, much of Israel is very upset with him, both for how he ignored warnings, for how he even built up Hamas, as well as for how he is conducting the war. […] Not to put too fine a point on it, I am very much afraid that Netanyahu is doing irreparable harm to the Jewish state and to the future of any kind of peaceful existence in that region, and even in the world at large.
[…] I previously compared Netanyahu to Trump. I can also point to Putin (who is behind a lot of the madness of today’s world, though probably had nothing to do with Hamas specifically). There is Iran — which is backing Hamas, and also Hezbollah. There are the rising right-wing movements in Europe and South America. There are Xi Jinping and Kim Jung Un. There is the whole GOP. The world is increasingly being run by monsters who would rather destroy the world than share it.
[…] “MSNBC host Chris Hayes warned on Tuesday that there was “no terrorist attack, no matter how horrific” that can “wash clean what we are seeing in Gaza” today.
On his MSNBC show All In with Chris Hayes, Hayes said:If you spend any time at all reading the Israeli press, listening to what Israeli leaders and commentators are actually saying, it is very clear that for a lot of people in government, the mass destruction in Gaza, razing it like Putin razed Grozny or Assad razed Aleppo, is the point, the goal.
Many prominent members of the Israeli government class don’t think there is such a thing as an innocent civilian in Gaza, have said that everyone in Gaza deserves their fate. From Knesset member Meirav Ben-Ari saying that, quote, “the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves,” to an Israeli military spokesman saying the emphasis of Israel’s military campaign was, quote, “on damage and not on accuracy,” to Israel’s President Isaac Herzog suggesting there are no civilians in Gaza and everyone is a legitimate target.
Hayes went on to play a clip of Israeli journalist Shimon Riklin saying, “I am for the war crimes. I don’t care if I am criticized, and I honestly don’t care. I am unable to sleep if I do not see houses being destroyed in Gaza.”
The MSNBC host continued:
That’s not a fringe view in Israel. I mean, even the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the lessons from the biblical story of Amalek in an address to the nation in Hebrew in the end of October, and in that biblical chapter, God commands King Saul on how to respond to an attack by the rival kingdom of Amalek. Quote, “Now go attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put them to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” Now I will be the first to confess, the first to confess I have no idea what to do about Hamas or about what comes next, but the Amalek method cannot be the solution. To be honest, I’m not particularly convinced the Israeli leadership has any idea what comes next. Many want full destruction, and Hamas also wants this war, they have been clear on that.
Hayes argued, “But whatever your views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is just plainly the case that our country is supporting a war whose animating moral logic looks to most of the world, and frankly to me, to be that every single last person in Gaza is guilty and deserves their lot. And that is the moral logic of Hamas. It is the moral logic that drove the atrocity of October 7th, and an atrocity like October 7th does not, cannot justify whatever comes after it, whatever the response.” […]
Former federal judge Michael Luttig argued Wednesday that the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling disqualifying former President Trump from the state’s ballot is not “anti-democratic,” but rather the conduct that prompted the disqualification was anti-democratic.
Responding to former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson’s comments arguing all eligibility requirements are anti-democratic “in a sense,” Luttig said, “It is not the former president’s disqualification that is anti-democratic.”
[…] “It is a serious matter — nonpolitical matter though to this extent,” Luttig continued. “We live under the rule of law in this country, and it’s imperative that all Americans accept the decision of our courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States. It is not an option in the United States of America to protest in the streets [the] decisions of our courts — state or federal.”
Luttig, a conservative legal thinker appointed to the federal bench by President George H. W. Bush, has been a leading proponent of using the 14th Amendment to bar Trump from returning to office. He has also called the former president a “clear and present danger to US democracy” during testimony before the House Jan. 6 committee last year.
Trump’s campaign has already pledged to appeal the Colorado ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, a decision that could have far-reaching implications for disqualification challenges in other states, Luttig said.
“That’s why the Supreme Court will take this case. It will decide it … and that will be a uniform rule nationwide for at least the 2024 election,” Luttig continued.
“I caveat it that way because it is possible that the Supreme Court would decline to take this case, because this case only disqualifies the former president from a state primary. It would be a legitimate interpretation of the Constitution that the states have the prerogative under the federal Constitution to conduct their primaries as they see fit without federal interference by the United States Constitution or Supreme Court.”
Lawsuits seeking to keep Trump off the ballot have also been brought in Minnesota and North Carolina, citing the 14th Amendment. Colorado’s ruling, however, marks the first time Trump has been blocked from the ballot.
Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA circle jerk is still going on, and oh boy, we have to imagine that they’re bringing out the good drugs at this point. Or maybe this is happening with everybody stone cold sober, we don’t know. But the point is that Senator Ted Cruz got up there yesterday and made everybody think about his penis. We have to imagine that even in a room full of social lepers like Turning Point USA college students, that wasn’t pleasant.
Before you read this quote and watch this video, please rank all the Republican senators and congressmen in your head from most fuckable to least fuckable, and then write a 500-word essay on why you all put Ted Cruz dead last, behind even Matt Gaetz.
OK ready? [video at the link]
“The left is so bad! They’re so unhappy! They’re so pissed off! And by way, if you were a liberal woman and you had to sleep with those weenies, you’d be pissed too.”
“Those weenies.” He talks so sexy. Aren’t you feeling it in your unmentionable bathing suit regions?
We should clarify: Ted Cruz screamed pretty much all those words, but not some kind of hot manly screaming, more like he was loudly screaming to an innocent sales clerk that he’ll never buy mulch at this store again. He got real quiet when he said “had to sleep with those weenies,” though. Maybe that’s the bedroom voice he uses to seduce Heidi.
So more accurately, the quote was “THE LEFT IS SO BAD! THEY’RE SO UNHAPPY! THEY’RE SO PISSED OFF! AND BY THE WAY! [Sudden change to pervert with windowless van voice and trenchcoat full of Werther’s butterscotches] If you were a liberal woman and you had to sleep with those weenies, you’d be pissed too!”
How many times have you thrown up your breakfast after hearing Ted Cruz say “weenies”?
We should leave this post quickly and never speak of it again, but while we’re on the subject of Ted Cruz’s weird dong […] you remember that time during the 2016 Republican primaries when Donald Trump expended great energy campaigning to GOP voters on a platform of “Ted Cruz’s wife is a real uggo” and maybe secretly a whore, and for like two seconds Ted Cruz defended his wife, but then he immediately pivoted to spending the next eight years [praising Trump]?
A worrying number of UK authorities are still unaware of the impending switch-off of 2G and 3G mobile networks, according to Local Government Association (LGA) figures.
While 38 percent of respondents were fully aware, 27 percent were only partially aware, and 7 percent had no idea at all that the axe would be falling by 2033 at the latest…
This week, Tesla made an abrupt change to its in-vehicle entertainment system interface, appearing to cut Disney+ out of the rotation of apps that could be accessed by users. Teslarati initially reported that the car company appeared “to have axed Disney+ from its vehicles.” The site later updated its reporting, writing that, according to Tesla, the Disney+ icon had merely been removed from the car’s Theater screen for “owners who haven’t accessed it.”
While it’s unclear what that actually means or why it happened, onlookers largely interpreted the whole thing as a shot fired at Disney CEO Bob Iger. See, Elon Musk has been feuding with Iger ever since Disney decided to pull its advertising from Musk’s platform, X, several weeks ago…
The Senate wrapped up 2023 with a win Tuesday when Alabama Republican Tommy Tuberville finally ended his tantrum and allowed the Senate to confirm the last of the military promotions he’d been blocking since February. It didn’t even take a fight at the end, or major concessions to Tuberville. He just caved. All 11 of the remaining four-star officers, including the leaders of major combatant command and vice chiefs of staff for the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Space Operations, were approved by a single voice vote.
Tuberville imposed the blanket hold on military promotions to protest a Pentagon policy that allows paid leave for service members to travel out of state for abortions. By early December, when he dropped his opposition to the lower-ranking officer promotions, around 450 officers’ lives had been thrown into limbo as their reassignments were on hold. He refused to relent on the final 11 simply because he could.
Tuberville may have relented because he didn’t have much backup available: A third of the Senate didn’t bother to show up to work Tuesday. By the time they got to the last vote of the year, confirming Elizabeth Richard to be coordinator for counterterrorism, 33 Republicans had skipped town.
Those absences limited what Majority Leader Chuck Schumer could get done on the floor, so after those and a handful of other nominations, they passed a temporary reauthorization for the Federal Aviation Administration by voice vote and left for the year. That FAA bill was the last bill that had a hard deadline of Dec. 30. Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado had placed a hold on it in hopes that that would spur Republicans to relent on funding aid to Ukraine.
Convinced he at least forced senators to return to work trying to negotiate that Ukraine package, Bennet lifted his objection. “I don’t think we would have come back, probably, from our departure last week if we didn’t have the unfinished business of the FAA to do,” Bennet said Tuesday night. “And while the FAA is unrelated to the Ukraine funding … It was something that could force us to come back here to continue to have the debate.”
That leaves undone the most urgent issue: continuing U.S. support for Ukraine, which Republicans have been holding hostage to extract major immigration policy changes. Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a rare joint statement Tuesday, saying that negotiators had made “encouraging progress” and that the Senate would act on it “early in the new year.”
[…] Congress is also going to have to meet the challenge of funding the government early in the new year. The current stopgap funding bill sets two deadlines, with funding for military and Veterans Affairs, Energy and Water, Agriculture, Transportation, and Housing expiring on Jan. 19. For the rest of the agencies—including State, Justice, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, and other departments—it ends Feb. 2.
They better all rest up and enjoy the good cheer of the season, because January is going to be ugly.
The Colorado Supreme Court decision to remove Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot is almost certainly headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. When it gets there, Justice Clarence Thomas should not be allowed to participate in the court’s deliberations. That’s the message from retired Judge LaDoris Cordell, discussing the issue on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes” Tuesday night.
[video at the link]
“There should be only eight justices on the Supreme Court hearing this case when it comes up,” Cordell told Hayes.
I say that because Clarence Thomas has no business hearing this case. Why? Because his wife was a major player in the whole insurrection. And he should, he should, if he had principles, recuse himself. But I will guarantee you this: Clarence Thomas will recuse himself when Ginni flies.
That’s where Chief Justice John Roberts comes in: If Thomas won’t recuse himself, Roberts has to make it happen. That’s the message Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut sent to the chief justice on Tuesday. It was sent before the Colorado court ruled, but it remains relevant. The Democratic Judiciary Committee member urged Roberts to “take appropriate steps to ensure that Justice Clarence Thomas recuses himself” from one of the other pending cases related to the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“The federal recusal statute requires that any ‘justice, judge, or magistrate judge … shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned,’” Blumenthal writes. “In addition, recusal is required when a Justice ‘or his spouse … is known by the judge to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding; [or i]s to the judge’s knowledge likely to be a material witness in the proceeding.’”
There’s precedent, as Blumenthal points out. Back in October, Thomas recused from deliberations as to whether the court should take an appeal from John Eastman, the architect of many of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election who was also a close contact of Ginni Thomas. That might be precisely why Thomas recused: The appeal was over the release of emails to the House Jan. 6 committee, and plenty of those emails would have been between Ginni Thomas and Eastman. With the Jan. 6 committee long disbanded, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal and Thomas didn’t explain why he didn’t participate in that decision.
Blumenthal cited that recusal in his letter to Robert, saying it was “proper” and should be repeated, in this case regarding the pending case concerning Trump’s presidential immunity from prosecution. He wrote that considering “Mrs. Thomas’s involvement in challenging the 2020 election results, Justice Thomas’s impartiality in a related case ‘might reasonably be questioned,’ giving rise, at a minimum, to an appearance of a conflict of interest.” […]
…
Within hours, the FBI seizure notice displayed on the AlphV dark-web site was gone. In its place was a new notice proclaiming: “This website has been unseized.” The new notice, written by AlphV officials, downplayed the significance of the FBI’s action…
As the hours went on, the FBI and AlphV sparred over control of the dark-web site, with each replacing the notices of the other…
[…] the chair of the Colorado Republican Party, Dave Williams, is threatening to pull the plug on the whole primary. According to Williams, the Colorado GOP will move to a “strict caucus process” so Republicans in that state can still pick the guy who led an insurrection. Whether that happens or not is likely to be determined by just how quickly the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the case and gives its opinion on the ruling of the Colorado court.
Colorado Republicans have already stated that they will appeal the case, and the nation’s highest court will likely snap it up quickly. Because every now and then the Supreme Court feels a need to step in to tell states how to run elections. Say … every 23 years.
The Colorado Republican Party also showed itself to be true followers of Trump in the most important way: by immediately turning this into a fundraising opportunity. [Screen grab at the link]
Not to be left out, the Texas Republican Party—where no such ruling has taken place—decided it had to get in on the act. And they’re doing it in an even more Trump-appropriate manner: by threatening retribution.
As The Daily Beast reports, Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, threatened to remove President Joe Biden from the Texas primary ballot because … because … Hell. Do they need a reason? “Seeing what happened in Colorado makes me think—except we believe in democracy in Texas—maybe we should take Joe Biden off the ballot in Texas for allowing eight million people to cross the border since he’s been president disrupting our state,” Patrick said.
It will be a miracle if Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton doesn’t file such a suit before the week is out. Considering that Abraham Lincoln’s name was not permitted on the ballot in 10 Southern states, this wouldn’t exactly be precedent.
Colorado is just one of 16 states where Trump’s presence on the ballot is being challenged based on a 14th Amendment provision that prevents anyone from holding office if they have “previously taken an oath as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States” and then become involved in an insurrection.
A lower court ruling in Michigan that allowed Trump to remain on the ballot was appealed to the state supreme court earlier this week. The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that Trump could remain on the ballot there.
“I think Democrats wake up every morning and they look at the calendar on the iPhone and it says January 6th. The date never changes,” Conway claimed. “And then they get into an electric vehicle and go get an abortion.”
She’s been spying on me! I wonder where the secret camera is hidden.
A court reporter on Tuesday identified himself as the individual who is falsely pegged on Trump’s Truth Social account as the lawyer son of Judge Arthur Engoron…
A social media post shared by Trump at least twice as of Wednesday claims a bearded man pictured sitting in the courtroom is Engoron’s son. It alleges that he’s likely “financially benefiting” from Trump’s trial and has been given a “prominent” seat and “preferential access.”
“I thought it was worth setting the record straight,” New York Post reporter Ben Kochman wrote in an opinion piece in which he identified himself as the bearded man in the post. The original post was from far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.
It’s not clear how Loomer concluded Kochman is the judge’s son, though it appears that it may be because both men have beards…
whheydtsays
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #330…
These bearded white guys all look the same?
lumipunasays
Re 310 and 311, Lynna quoting Daily Kos on the new Defense Cooperation Agreement between US and Finland
The United States military has received unfettered access to fifteen Finnish bases along the 830-mile-long border it shares with Russia. [I don’t know if “unfettered” is the right word.]
IDK about “unfettered” either, either, but most of the fifteen bases are located in western Finland rather than along the Russian border.
The deal was signed on December 18, 2023, between U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Finnish Defense Minister Antti Hakkanen signed a defense cooperation agreement in Washington D.C. on Dec. 18, 2023. The agreement between the two nations enables the US military to carry out combat operations if necessary.
…
American nuclear weapons are still under negotiation with Finland.
According to Finnish media, the general understanding is that there is no practical reason or interest whatsoever to store US nuclear weapons in Finland. It’d also be against the current Finnish law (and very much against public opinion, which is why the prospect has been brought up in the media discussion). However, since the DCA does not separately rule out nukes, the issue can be easily mispresented as being under negotiation.
(What might be under negotiation is perhaps the rules for some wartime scenario of transporting or using US nukes in Finnish airspace, transport involving Finnish Air Force equipment etc.)
Moscow is highly displeased with Finland’s deeper military cooperation with the United States and Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in a statement openly warns the neighbouring country.
According to the spokeswoman, who is known for her undiplomatic and aggressive statements, Ambassador Helanterä was told that the new agreement with the Americans “will not come without a response.”
“The stronger military potential of NATO on our border threatens the security of the Russian Federation and will be followed by a response from the Russian side,” she underlined.
“Necessary measures to counter the aggressive actions of Finland and its NATO allies will be taken,” she underlined and added that “the responsibility for the transformation of an area of good-neighborly relations to a region of possible confrontation fully lies on Finnish authorities.”
Similarly, “concrete measures” were threatened after Sweden and Finland applied for Nato Membership in May 2022. This was also when Russia quit selling electricity to Finland, in an attempt to cause some quick inconvenience. The whining about Nato aggression, ruined relationship etc. is pretty much word for word repetition of rhetoric introduced in 2022. This year, while the DCA negotiations were underway, there was some sabotage of Baltic undersea infrastructure, and the funneling of refugees to Finnish border.
The major expansion of storage facilities for both nuclear missiles and conventional long-range high-precision cruise missiles will significantly boost Russia’s military power and strengthen the bastion defence capability in the Barents- and Norwegian Sea.
…
It is important to note that Putin’s military infrastructure has not been dented in any way in the Arctic (except for men that Putin has fed to the Ukrainian meatgrinder) as it has with the years-long war with Ukraine.
…
The Arctic Navy in Murmansk is apparently at full strength, but Russia has had to move many infantry soldiers from Karelia and above to Ukraine. This can be confirmed from satellite images, their bases look emptier than usual. Heavy losses have occurred, so the units east of Finland are not at their normal strength.
Russian land forces stationed near Finnish border were already quite minimal prior to 2022, compared to the major concentrations of naval and air/missile capability near St. Petersburg and Murmansk. In this modern day, Russia could use many kinds of approaches and weapons to attack Finland, but a traditional land-based invasion would definitely require a separate buildup of troops (of which Russia doesn’t currently have to spare).
As for the promised “concrete measures”, in January 2023 Russia announced a reorganization and modest beefing up of the land forces in the northwest. This will take at least a few years to actually happen, assuming Russian military can recover from its losses in Ukraine. We’ll see what, if anything other than small dirty tricks, the newly threatened “necessary measures” will turn out to be.
In the US, Donald Trump is climbing the polls and has a real chance of being elected president. This increases the risk of many things, including that the bases in Norway, Sweden, and Finland will never be used by the US.
The prospect of another Trump term in US is certainly making many Finns increasingly nervous, in a way that wasn’t present during the 2016 US election cycle. I’m personally aware that it’d a disaster in many other ways too, mainly for US folks and to some extent others, outside of the matter of European defense against Russia.
Turkey’s central bank hiked its key interest rate by 2.5 percentage points on Thursday as part of its efforts to combat high inflation that has left many households struggling to afford rent and essential items.
The bank’s Monetary Policy Committee raised its benchmark rate to 42.5%, delivering its seventh interest rate hike in a row to tame inflation, which rose to 61.98% last month.
But the bank signaled that the rate hikes — which took borrowing costs from 8.5% to the current 42.5% — could soon end…
Over 90,000 users on X experienced an outage on Thursday morning, marking the platform’s most severe outage since Elon Musk’s takeover in October of 2022, according to Bloomberg. Data from Google Trends shows that many users rushed to Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads during the outage…
The largest lake in Earth’s history is now in the Guinness Book of World Records. The Paratethys—or Lake Paratethys, if you will—and contained 10 times more water than all of Earth’s modern lakes. In other words, it’s long overdo for its place in the Guinness Book.
At its height, the Paratethys stretched from Austria in the west to Turkmenistan in the east. It covered 1.08 million square miles (2.8 million square kilometers) and contained about 407,000 cubic miles (1.77 million cubic kilometers) of water. The research detailing the exact measurements of the lake was published in Scientific Reports in 2021, and now the lake’s scale has been documented in the Guinness Book of World Records—hardly the all-encompassing atlas of absolute truths but still a neat accolade…
Congressional Republicans haven’t had any success uncovering wrongdoing on President Joe Biden’s part, but the party’s impeachment inquiry is nevertheless moving forward. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan appeared on Fox News this week to offer his latest justification for the GOP crusade.
“When you do something that benefits your family financially and you’re a public official, that’s not supposed to happen,” the Ohio Republican said. “But that’s exactly what it looks like took place.”
As the video clip of the comments shows, the far-right congressman did not appear to be kidding. [video at the link]
At this point, I could spend a few paragraphs noting that there simply isn’t any evidence of Biden ever using his office to advance his family’s business interests. I’d also note, of course, that Jordan and other Republicans have invested an enormous amount of time and energy trying to find such evidence, and the fact that they’ve come up empty suggests the Democratic incumbent has done nothing wrong.
But that’s not the only problem here. Remember this Politico report from January 2020?
In three years in the White House, Donald Trump has accomplished something no president before him has done: fusing his private business interests with America’s highest public office. Trump’s early decision to maintain his grip on his sprawling real estate empire — despite his pledge to put his business aside while in the White House — has created a vast web of potential conflicts of interest, accusations about his policies being driven by his business interests and even possible violations of the law, according to documents and interviews.
The same report added that [Trump] “has managed to skirt accountability for widespread possible conflicts of interest that critics say represent a blatant abuse of power and create dangerous risks to the integrity of the presidency.”
Earlier this year, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a prominent watchdog organization, published a related report noting that Trump’s presidency “was marred by unprecedented conflicts of interest arising from his decision not to divest from the Trump Organization,” which was run by his family during his White House tenure.
The report added, “Donald Trump made up to $160 million from international business dealings while he was serving as president of the United States, according to an analysis of his tax returns by CREW.”
In case this isn’t obvious, what benefited the Trump Organization necessarily benefited members of the former president’s family.
All of which brings us back to what Jordan told Fox News’ audience: “When you do something that benefits your family financially and you’re a public official, that’s not supposed to happen. But that’s exactly what it looks like took place.”
Oddly enough, what the Judiciary Committee chairman said was true — except he was describing the actions of the wrong president.
When we hear about substantial jury verdicts assessed against adjudged wrongdoers such as Donald Trump, and most recently, his consigliere-apparent, Rudy Giuliani, often in the back of our minds there is the troubling suspicion that the injured plaintiffs—the E. Jean Carrolls, Ruby Freemans, and Shaye Mosses, for example—will never see a dime of that money. Unless, that is, measures are taken to prevent the wrongdoer from availing themself of the myriad ways that the very wealthy can effectively hide or otherwise insulate their assets from the reach of the legal process.
It makes the order that a federal judge issued Wednesday something of a pleasant, reassuring surprise.
As reported by Rachel Weiner, writing for The Washington Post:
Rudy Giuliani must immediately pay the $148 million he owes two Georgia women he falsely accused of helping steal the 2020 election, a federal judge ruled Wednesday in a scathing order accusing the former Trump attorney of ongoing dishonesty.
Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote that there is a strong danger Giuliani is likely to hide his assets from plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss and is unlikely to succeed in having last week’s jury verdict overturned or cut down on appeal.
Attorneys for the two women still have to enforce the judgment against Giuliani, which may involve further court proceedings. But they do not have to wait the standard 30 days to begin trying to seize his assets.
Last week, Giuliani was found liable for compensatory and punitive damages by a unanimous jury for defaming Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss. The women brought suit against Giuliani based on the unfounded, accusatory, and scurrilous statements he leveled against the pair in connection with the counting of votes in the 2020 election.
[…] As Weiner notes, Howell explicitly recognized the reality that Giuliani might attempt to hide assets from the reach of the judgment. And according to Weiner, Giuliani ignored court orders requiring him to divulge his assets. Judges are seldom impressed with litigants who ignore their orders (probably even less so when the litigant is a former prosecutor). Howell was no exception, citing Giuliani’s behavior in support of her decision.
From the order:
Giuliani feebly counters concerns about him hiding assets, stating that “there is no evidence in the record of any attempt by [him] to dissipate assets.” Def.’s Opp’n at 2. This statement simply ignores the ample record in this case of Giuliani’s efforts to conceal or hide his assets by failing to comply with discovery requests, including “plaintiffs’ requests for financial information.”
As Weiner reports, in response to Giuliani’s lawyer’s protestation that such a verdict would mean “the end” of his client, the judge also noted that [Giuliani] owns properties in New York and Florida, and wondered how a man supposedly so destitute could afford to pay a spokesman “who accompanied him daily to trial.”
As for the $148 million verdict itself, Howell stuck the equivalent of a judicial dagger in Giuliani’s hopes that the judgment might be reduced on appeal—a common occurrence with very high verdicts.
As Weiner reports:
It would be “difficult” for him to convince the court he should be allowed to appeal without first posting a bond equivalent to the judgment, she said. And, she said, considering what jurors heard about his “past and continuing — including up to and during trial — defamation of” the two women, the judgment was “conservative.”
Along those lines, the judge sent a direct message not only about how she personally would likely react to a request for verdict reduction (known as “remittitur”), but also to the federal circuit court that could hear any ultimate appeal of the verdict (a process that could still delay Giuliani’s obligation to pay for some time, depending on how such an appeal proceeds). As Weiner noted Saturday, the requirement of posting a bond could also prevent Giuliani “from drawing down his assets while the appeal is pending.”
While not pre-judging any remittitur arguments that may be made by Giuliani, the obvious fact that the jury’s unanimous awards were conservative as to the plaintiffs’ requested compensation for reputational harm due to Giuliani’s defamation per se, based on the expert’s calculation of the cost of repairing their reputations, and the jury’s punitive damages award was nearly equivalent to compensatory damages, rather than multiplied by up to four times compensatory damages, reduction of the award on remittitur faces some challenges.
Here, Howell is reminding both Giuliani and any appellate court that the verdict was well within the jury’s purview based on the expert and witness testimony, and in accordance with the general standard of deference and review afforded to awards of punitive damages.
In sum, to suggest this was a merely a “bad” ruling for Giuliani would be a massive understatement. It was perhaps—as his own lawyer had previously, candidly acknowledged—something more akin to a financial “death penalty” for Giuliani.
When Elon Musk appeared on the stage at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in November, columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin came prepared with a lot of questions. However, after Musk blew up the news—and his social media site—by telling advertisers to “go fuck yourself” when they ran away from his antisemitic statements, the rest of the interview was largely ignored.
That’s unfortunate because there were other things that Musk said that were at least as obnoxious as when he claimed people were trying to “blackmail” him by not spending money at X.
For example, when Sorkin asked about unions, Musk fired back that he disagreed with the whole idea of unions, declaring that it “creates a lords and peasants sort of thing.” The richest man in the world is not only wrong; he knows he’s wrong. It’s the lack of unions that turns workers into peasants. And it’s the lords who have a reason to be frightened of what unions can do.
This past year has seen three astounding wins for unions in which workers achieved serious victories over executives who were attempting to destroy union power. First, the Writers Guild of America won an “exceptional” deal from studio bosses who started off trying to starve them into surrender. Right behind them came SAG-AFTRA, where actors and crew fought off the growing use of AI and digital images, as well as industry changes due to streaming, to reach a deal that gave the union both the pay and job protections it wanted. Then the United Auto Workers scored a huge victory over the “Big Three” U.S. manufacturers in October, making advances in compensation and employment security that were genuinely worth celebrating.
Sadly, while 2023 is a standout year for unions in recent history, it’s a year that stands out among many not-so-good years. Here’s how union membership in the United States has changed over the past several decades. [Graph at the link]
Union membership has been declining since the 1980s. This same period saw the rise of so-called “right-to-work” laws designed to erode union bargaining power and make organizing workers more difficult. However, the decline of unions has not generated the mythical bonus for workers that many companies imply in their anti-union rhetoric. The opposite has happened. [graph titled “CEOs make 344 times as much as typical workers” 1970 to present]
As union membership declined, more and more of the money at corporations was funneled away from the pockets of workers and directly into the vaults of executives. It’s not a matter of unions creating a “lords and peasants sort of thing.” It’s the lack of unions that turns every worker into a single, easily dismissed cog in the machine.
This relationship is an old one. When the Black Death swept across Europe in the 1300s, the loss of population made it difficult for feudal lords to maintain their territories. To secure their freedom, workers rapidly joined guilds. Those workers’ guilds remained strong for more than two centuries, not only creating the middle class but also laying the stage for a little something called the Renaissance.
Workers responded the same way following the Great Depression. Organized labor led the way out of both the economic collapse and the first Gilded Age. Here’s one more graph, this time from the U.S. Treasury Department: [Graph at the link]
Is that clear enough? When workers have the power to organize, more money goes to workers and less piles up in the mansions of the ultra-rich. The destruction of unions that began in the 1960s and kicked into high gear under President Ronald Reagan is directly responsible for impoverishing workers and providing enormous sums to people like Musk.
In a world where union participation was high […] workers at those companies would be participating in the wealth that’s been generated, rather than having all of it go to a man who bought Twitter so he could enable Nazis and bring more attention to his fart jokes.
Right now, Tesla is battling unions in Sweden who want to organize Tesla mechanics. That action has been joined by workers at many different unions, making it difficult for Tesla to import vehicles or to send license plates to Tesla owners. Those Swedish mechanics are also being supported by workers in Norway who are blockading Tesla vehicles and supplies. Danish dockworkers have signed on, refusing to unload shipments of Tesla’s cars.
These may seem like small countries, but they are important markets for Tesla. Norway and Sweden are both in the top five when it comes to the percentage of electric vehicles sold.
Musk is furious, and Tesla is trying to sue everyone. Even the Swedish postal system.
But the truth is Musk is also terrified. He’s terrified because after winning their fight with other U.S. automakers, UAW chiefs have made it clear they have a new target. [snipped quote from Shawn Fain]
[…] Tesla recently managed to fight off an attempt to organize workers at a plant in Buffalo, New York, a plant where workers spend each day identifying items in images in an attempt to train Tesla’s recently recalled Autopilot system. But the National Labor Relations Board did cite Tesla for violations of rules, including actively soliciting grievances against workers trying to form a union. Musk’s long history of ignoring worker complaints includes leaving hundreds of injuries off official reports and firing workers who stayed home sick with COVID-19 even though the company had given those workers permission. It violated labor laws by preventing workers from discussing pay and benefits. And Musk has directly threatened workers that he would take away stock options if they unionized.
As The Guardian notes, it’s Musk who makes the workers at his companies miserable, not unions. […] they are also paid $20 an hour less than union workers at Ford, GM, or Stellantis—and that was before the strike landed those union workers a 25% raise.
Workers at Tesla are undercompensated. Musk is overcompensated. The reason is that Musk keeps those nonunion workers in a position where they must negotiate one-on-one. It’s not so much lords and peasants as it is Godzilla and the people in the streets.
Musk has a right to be afraid. Because when workers unionize, the bosses of the Gilded Age lose. And the unions are coming for Elon Musk.
In Arizona, the legal dimension to Kari Lake’s political efforts hasn’t gone well for the Republican. The Republican election denier first went to court in April 2022, asking that some local counties be blocked from using electronic election equipment. That lawsuit failed. In the wake of her defeat in her gubernatorial race, Lake filed another lawsuit, ostensibly to present evidence of election irregularities. That didn’t go well, either.
Making matters worse, her lawyers were ultimately sanctioned after judges concluded that the cases shouldn’t even have been filed in the first place.
But as it turns out, Lake’s legal troubles don’t end there. The Arizona Republic reported this week:
A Maricopa County judge ruled Wednesday that a defamation case against former gubernatorial and current U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake will go forward. Judge Jay Adleman determined that Lake failed to provide enough evidence to get the case dismissed outright under a recently revised state law intending to deter lawsuits that seek to censor or intimidate critics.
If you’re new to this story, Lake, in the aftermath of her 2022 defeat, took rhetorical aim at Bill Gates and Steven Richer — two Republican election officials in Maricopa County — accusing them of helping “rig” the state’s gubernatorial race and manipulating ballots.
Richer argued soon after that Lake’s claims not only hurt his professional life and harmed his reputation, but also led to death threats against him and his family. Richer sued the failed candidate for defamation. [Good. He sued. Now we have echoes of the Rudy Giuliani case.]
Lake’s lawyers asked a judge to throw out the case, describing her conspiracy theories as “rhetorical hyperbole.”
The judge didn’t buy it. We don’t yet know what the outcome of the defamation case might be, but we now know that the litigation will move forward.
Part of this is relevant because Lake is her party’s likely nominee in next year’s closely watched U.S. Senate race in the Grand Canyon State, but there’s also a broader significance.
As MSNBC’s Alex Wagner explained, this Arizona case, coming on the heels of a successful defamation case against Rudy Giuliani, also has “significant implications for what we as a country allow election deniers to get away with.” Watch this space.
Megyn Kelly and Kari Lake were both hosts of supposed news broadcasts. That’s why people know them. Megyn did not try to become governor of Arizona, Kari Lake did. Both are steeped in MAGA conspiracy theories and other senseless mind sludge.
Rudy Giuliani declared bankruptcy on Thursday, six days after a $148 million defamation judgment was awarded against him.
Giuliani disclosed in the chapter 11 filing between $1 and $10 million in assets, compared to a whopping range of $100 million to $500 million in liabilities. The biggest single liability he listed is the $148 million he was ordered to pay for defaming Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman.
The former New York City mayor and current Trump attorney said in the filing that he owes the government just beneath $1 million in state and federal taxes.
He owes more than $1.6 million in legal fees to various attorneys who have represented him, including via a $1.3 million lawsuit filed by his longtime attorney Robert Costello.
But it’s the legal judgments against Rudy which appear to present the biggest burden. On top of the $148 million owee to Freeman and Moss, Giuliani faces several ongoing claims from entities and people he allegedly defamed while seeking to pin Trump’s 2020 loss on voter fraud. That includes Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic.
Other liabilities that appear in the filing: Daniel Gill, a former Staten Island retail employee who Giuliani alleged tried to kidnap him after he patted the former mayor on the back and asked, “what’s up, scumbag,” is listed as demanding $2 million via a lawsuit; a telecom company is asking for $30,000; and a CPA $10,000.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell for the District of Columbia ordered Giuliani to begin paying the full $148 million on Wednesday, saying that she believed he would attempt to “conceal” his assets otherwise. Unlike other forms of debt, Giuliani will not be able to discharge the defamation judgment during the bankruptcy process.
Giuliani has said that he will appeal the $148 million judgment, but for now it remains the largest single line item of the enormous debt he faces.
Lawsuits from the two 2020 voting machine firms remain outstanding, as does a case brought by Hunter Biden. Noelle Dunphy, a former associate of Giuliani’s, is also seeking sexual harassment damages.
Czech police said a gunman killed at least 15 people in the capital, Prague, on Thursday, before being “eliminated,” in one of the worst mass killings in Europe in nearly a decade.
Images on social media showed students barricaded in classrooms and emergency vehicles swarming a square in Prague’s historic old town just yards from the Vltava River that winds through the medieval city. Police said on X, formerly Twitter, that the shooter was dead, and that the school, Charles University, had been evacuated.
Around 25 people were injured, 11 of them seriously, Prague’s emergency response service said on X. The shooter was a student at the university, and police believe he killed his father earlier in the day in a town near Prague, city Police Chief Martin Vondrasek said at a news conference, according to the Associated Press.
“We have no information at this time that the perpetrator is connected to any terrorist organization,” police said Thursday night on X. Police had completed a sweep for explosives and were identifying victims. Embassies would be contacted if foreigners were among the dead, police said. A representative for the U.S. Embassy in Prague did not immediately comment.
The mass killing is one of the worst in Europe since 130 people were killed in the Bataclan terrorist attack in Paris in 2015, which the Islamic State later claimed responsibility for. Leaders from around the continent and the world expressed shock and sorrow Thursday. […]
Charles University, founded in 1348 and named for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, is the largest and most prestigious university in the Czech Republic. Twenty percent of its more than 49,000 students come from abroad, including many from the United States. Its buildings are spread throughout the city rather than being concentrated in a central campus. The university’s Faculty of Arts is next to the square where the shooting took place. [map at the link]
The Czech Republic has more permissive gun laws than most countries in Europe, even allowing concealed carry with a permit. Still, the country requires citizens to take strict tests before being able to obtain weapons. Mass killings are rare but not unheard of. In 2019, a gunman killed six people and himself at a Czech hospital in the eastern city of Ostrava. In 2015, a gunman shot eight people and himself in the town of Uhersky Brod.
Thursday’s killings are the worst in the country since Czechoslovakia split up into Czech Republic and Slovakia at the end of 1992, according to Agence France-Presse. […]
Jamal Khashoggi’s widow, who went into hiding after The Washington Post columnist was murdered in 2018 by a Saudi assassination squad, has been granted political asylum in the United States.
“I couldn’t really believe it,” Hanan Elatr said after reading the letter informing her of the decision. “I said, ‘Is this real?’ I couldn’t digest it.” She said the decision “shows there is one victim who is still alive.”
The decision this month validates Elatr’s assertions that her life would be in danger were she to return to her native Egypt or the United Arab Emirates, where she lived for 26 years until Jamal Khashoggi was killed. […]
In her asylum application, Elatr told U.S. authorities that Egypt had detained and mistreated her family and confiscated their passports because of her relationship with Khashoggi. In 2018, four months before his murder, the UAE had detained and interrogated her and put military-grade spyware on her confiscated phones. It was a period of time when she and Khashoggi were in constant communication.
Randa Fahmy, her attorney, said Elatr is seeking compensation from the Saudi government for her husband’s death and demanding Turkey return Khashoggi’s phones so they can be analyzed. […]
The Biden administration is quietly signaling new support for seizing more than $300 billion in Russian central bank assets stashed in Western nations, and has begun urgent discussions with allies about using the funds to aid Ukraine’s war effort at a moment when financial support is waning, according to senior American and European officials.
Until recently, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen had argued that without action by Congress, seizing the funds was “not something that is legally permissible in the United States.” There has also been concern among some top American officials that nations around the world would hesitate to keep their funds at the New York Federal Reserve, or in dollars, if the United States established a precedent for seizing the money.
But the administration, in coordination with the Group of 7 industrial nations, has begun taking another look at whether it can use its existing authorities or if it should seek congressional action to use the funds. Support for such legislation has been building in Congress, giving the Biden administration optimism that it could be granted the necessary authority.
The talks among finance ministers, central bankers, diplomats and lawyers have intensified in recent weeks, officials said, with the Biden administration pressing Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan to come up with a strategy by Feb. 24, the second anniversary of the invasion.
The more than $300 billion of Russian assets under discussion have already been out of Moscow’s control for more than a year. After the invasion of Ukraine, the United States, along with Europe and Japan, used sanctions to freeze the assets, denying Russia access to its international reserves.
But seizing the assets would take matters a significant step further and require careful legal consideration.
President Biden has not yet signed off on the strategy, and many of the details remain under heated discussion. Policymakers must determine if the money will be channeled directly to Ukraine or used to its benefit in other ways.
They are also discussing what kinds of guardrails might be associated with the funds, such as whether the money could be used only for reconstruction and budgetary purposes to support Ukraine’s economy, or whether — like the funds Congress is debating — it could be spent directly on the military effort.
The discussions have taken on greater urgency since Congress failed to reach a deal to provide military aid before the end of the year. […]
The Financial Times reported earlier that the Biden administration had come around to the view that seizing Russia’s assets was viable under international law. […]
Thank you Lynna for providing this informative interactive resource.
From our Enchiridion: Each December 21st we celebrate the symbolism of enduring life of evergreens with a period of thoughtful silence, reciting together our Official Invocation and wishing all people of honesty and decency a peaceful Winter Solstice. And may those always green, living and sheltering outstretched boughs of the Tannenbäume instill an abiding tranquility in us, so we, too, will prevail against the dark and cold to carry through the end of the year and on into a healthy, prosperous new year.
On Monday, Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar held an event in her Miami-era district touting a new program to help small businesses get off the ground.
Posing beside an oversized $650,000 check, the Florida congresswoman said in a post on X that the new program, in conjunction with Florida International University, would create “hundreds of jobs” and “help dozens of businesses grow” in the district.
Yet Elvira Salazar voted against the bill that provided that funding…
In a statement to Business Insider, Salazar explained that she supported that particular aspect of the bill, which she was able to secure as part of a relatively bipartisan government funding process, even as she opposed the overall bill…
During a Wednesday appearance on conservative network Real America’s Voice, Jesse Binnall, an appellate lawyer for Trump, ripped the court’s decision to disqualify the indicted billionaire based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who participated in an insurrection from holding federal office, agreeing with the host’s suggestion that the ruling was a “huge judicial overreach.”
Binnall accused the Colorado Supreme Court, other courts and prosecutors across the country of using their powers to “pursue a political agenda” in an effort to “destroy American democracy.” He told the conservative network that a future Justice Department could punish the Colorado justices who voted to axe Trump with federal prosecution and civil rights laws, suggesting a “real” DOJ would take action against them and “other judges” if Trump won the 2024 presidential contest…
Curiously, Trump is at present claiming complete immunity from the law while performing (supposed) official acts. I would think deciding court cases would fall under the official duties of a judge. And also, as Stephen Colbert has pointed out,
Trump attorney Alina Habba, however, added to the pile-on of the Colorado justices on Wednesday.
Habba decried the ruling as “not a constitutional decision” and asserted that it “will be overturned by the Supreme Court” in an interview with Breitbart News Daily.
In other news, Alina Habba is stupid and incompetent. Of course its a constitutional decision.
Deep in the Sonoran Desert, high on a mountain’s wind-swept peak, there lives a tree known as Bigelow 224.
With its stout orange trunk and long, graceful needles, the tree looks like any other ponderosa pine growing on Mount Bigelow. But a sliver of its wood, taken amid Earth’s warmest year on record, shows that this tree has a story to tell — and a warning to offer. [Core sample images and other images are available at the link]
Bigelow 224 germinated nearly 200 years ago — a spindly sprout rooted in meager soil. Yet the pine has grown taller and wider each year by adding another ring to its trunk.
Amid the balmy temperatures and lengthening days of the spring and summer, the newly formed tissue — known as earlywood — was the pale gold of morning sunlight. When autumn arrived, the tree switched to denser and darker latewood, signaling the beginning of the end of the growing season.
All that the tree experienced — the winds that shook its branches, the rain that soaked its roots — was recorded in the rings. An extra-wide band attested to the prime growing conditions of 1856.
A thin line bisecting the following year’s ring is the relic of a springtime drought that ended with the arrival of a summer monsoon.
For centuries, Bigelow 224 stretched sunward while history unfolded below. The tree witnessed the rise of industrialization and the devastation of Native communities. It watched Arizona become the nation’s 48th state in 1912. Generations lived and died, wars were lost and won, humans walked on the moon and transformed Earth. Still, the tree has survived.
But then came 2023, the hottest year that humanity — and Bigelow 224 — had ever seen. All around the planet, temperature records fell like dominoes. Up on Mount Bigelow, an unrelenting heat wave made the air feel like an oven and sucked moisture from the thin soil.
The toll of those unprecedented conditions was etched into Bigelow 224’s trunk. Scorched by relentless heat and parched by a delayed monsoon, it appeared to stop growing midway through the season. The ring for this year is barely a dozen cells wide.
It is a silent distress signal sent by one of Earth’s most enduring organisms. A warning written in wood.
[…]
Another of Morino’s [Kiyomi Morino, a tree ring scientist at the University of Arizona who has spent much of the past decade studying the trees of Mount Bigelow] colleagues, ecophysiologist Jia Hu, says cellular analyses will help illuminate the fates of forests themselves. By tracking the forms of carbon that ponderosa pines pack into their cell walls, she has found that western trees are showing more signs of stress amid drought than they did just a few decades ago. That’s probably a consequence of the fact that dry conditions are increasingly exacerbated by scorching temperatures, making it harder for trees to cope.
“We can see that there’s a tipping point,” Hu said. “We’re pushing these trees kind of beyond where they’re adapted.”
Even if warming doesn’t completely kill the trees, Morino’s findings on Mount Bigelow hint at how it might harm one of their most essential functions: storing carbon. If water shortages force trees to form smaller cells and fewer ring layers, they will have less space to put the carbon that they pull out of the air.
Research suggests that forests absorb about 20 percent of the greenhouse gases people release into the atmosphere each year. If that number dwindles, Hu said, humanity will be losing one of its greatest allies in the fight against climate change. […]
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. spoke with his Chinese counterpart Thursday morning, according to a readout of the call, the first high-level conversation between the two militaries in more than a year.
In the 24 hours since the Colorado Supreme Court kicked former President Donald Trump off the state’s Republican primary ballot, social media outlets have been flooded with threats against the justices who ruled in the case, according to a report obtained by NBC News
Amid a turbulent change of power, Poland’s main state television news channel went abruptly off the air on Wednesday, as the former governing party sent legislators and other supporters to the public broadcasting headquarters to try to prevent new management from taking over.
Members of the ousted former government staged a sit-in inside a building in southern Warsaw that houses the studios and offices of state television, including TVP Info, a news channel and website that served as a propaganda bullhorn for the right-wing Law and Justice Party during its eight years in power.
The protesters, led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Law and Justice’s combative chairman, tried to prevent the new, centrist administration of Prime Minister Donald Tusk from asserting control, accusing it of staging a “coup d’état” by firing loyalists of Law and Justice, which lost a general election in October.
With Mr. Kaczynski and his supporters vowing to “defend democracy” and block a change of management ordered by Mr. Tusk’s culture minister, technicians who support the new government yanked TVP Info off the air and disabled its website, which had been featuring appeals for resistance against an “illegal attack on public television” by Mr. Tusk.
[…] The struggle over public television could be a foretaste of a long period of disruptive trench warfare between a new government trying to break Law and Justice’s grip on those institutions, and the party’s holdovers trying to thwart it. When Law and Justice first took power in 2015 it imposed its own management on state television within days and met no resistance. […]
Yep. More authoritarians refusing to accept election results. sheesh.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for the first time this week chartered a plane to fly migrants from his state to Chicago, marking an escalation after months of having bused migrants to Democratic-run cities to protest President Joe Biden’s border policies.
Almost immediately after Janet Protasiewicz was elected to Wisconsin’s Supreme Court last April, flipping it to a liberal majority, Republican leaders threatened to impeach her if she didn’t recuse herself from a case challenging the state’s heavily gerrymandered electoral maps. […]
Protasiewicz’s victory had resulted in a 4-3 liberal majority on the court, ending a 15-year period in which conservative justices held control. But now faced with intense backlash, Robin Vos, the Republican leader of Wisconsin’s Assembly who threatened possible impeachment of Protasiewicz in August, has pivoted and now says that such a move is “super unlikely,” The Associated Press reported. [Good. Glad she faced intense backlash. Glad she backed down.]
The AP wrote:
When asked in an interview Wednesday if he would move to impeach Protasiewicz if she orders new maps to be drawn, Vos said, “I think it’s very unlikely.”
“It’s one of the tools that we have in our toolbox that we could use at any time,” Vos said of impeachment. “Is it going to be used? I think it’s super unlikely.”
However, Vos refused to rule it out.
“We don’t know what could happen, right?” he said. “There could be a scandal where something occurs. I don’t know.”
Wisconsin’s Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler posted this reaction on X, formerly known as Twitter:
The Wisconsin GOP has made official what’s long been clear: they’ve pulled back the impeachment threat.
Why did this happen? Because you rose up in outrage and made clear that such an abuse of the constitution would be politically catastrophic—for them.
In September, Wikler announced that the state Democratic Party was launching a $4 million effort to to pressure Republicans to back down from impeaching Protasiewicz. At the time he said the Republicans were “holding a political nuclear football” and engaging in “political extortion.”
According to Associated Press analysis, Wisconsin’s Assembly districts rank among the most gerrymandered in the U.S., with Republicans routinely winning far more seats than would be expected based on their average share of the vote in statewide elections. Joe Biden flipped Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election, defeating Donald Trump by a narrow margin of 49.6% to 48.9%, a difference of 20,000 votes. In April 2023, with abortion rights a key issue, Protasiewicz defeated Republican Dan Kelly by 55.5% to 45.5%, a margin of nearly 200,000 votes.
Yet, as the AP pointed out, the legislative electoral maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2011 cemented the party’s majorities. Republicans now control the Assembly by a 64-35 margin, and hold a 22-11 supermajority in the Senate. Last year, the GOP approved maps that were similar to the existing ones.
In October, the state Supreme Court agreed to hear the legal challenge to the Republican-drawn maps. Election lawyer Marc Elias’ group, Democracy Docket, wrote on its website:
The petitioners in Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission allege that the Wisconsin state Assembly and Senate maps are extreme partisan gerrymanders that unduly favor Republicans in violation of the state constitution.
The petition notes that for the past two decades, Wisconsin’s legislative plans have been among the most gerrymandered in the country: “In 2012, Republicans won 48.6% of the statewide vote, which yielded a remarkable 60 assembly seats. … When Democrats received roughly the same vote share, they carried 36 assembly seats. … From the 2012 through the 2020 elections, Republicans never fell below 60 seats—winning up to 64, or nearly two-thirds of the seats. In 2018, Republicans won 63 seats with just 44.8% of the vote.”
Last month, the state Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the redistricting lawsuit and is expected to issue its decision by early 2024. The plaintiffs are asking that all 132 state lawmakers be required to stand for election in 2024 under newly redrawn maps. Under current law, all Wisconsin Assembly members and about half the state Senate are up for election next year.
The wheels came off the Republicans’ threat to impeach Protasiewicz in October. That’s when two of three former conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court justices asked by Vos to investigate the possibility of impeachment told the Assembly leader it was not warranted. Former Justice David Prosser wrote to Vos:
“To sum up my views, there should be no effort to impeach Justice Protasiewicz on anything we know now. Impeachment is so serious, severe, and rare that it should not be considered unless the subject has committed a crime, or the subject has committed indisputable ‘corrupt conduct’ while ‘in office.’”
[…] The prospect of actually removing Protasiewicz from the court also became a less attractive option. That’s because if she were impeached by the Assembly and convicted by the Senate, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers would now get to name her replacement rather than have to call a special election, which would have been required if she had been removed prior to Dec. 1, the AP reported.
And it’s good news for abortion rights activists that Protasiewicz remains in place to keep the liberal 4-3 majority intact. On Tuesday, a Republican district attorney appealed a court ruling that determined that an 1849 Wisconsin law does not ban abortions, the AP reported. That decision cleared the way for abortions to resume in the state. The appeal filed by Sheboygan County District Attorney Joel Urmanski is likely to ultimately be decided by the state Supreme Court. And Protasiewicz is a supporter of abortion rights.
birgerjohanssonsays
Never before seen tiny Briwn Dwarf objects (below the deuterium-burning treshold) with mysterious carbon molecules. https://youtu.be/p45j-eB0fvo
The public interest in a prompt resolution of this case favors an immediate, definitive decision by this Court. The charges here are of the utmost gravity. This case involves—for the first time in our Nation’s history—criminal charges against a former President based on his actions while in office. And not just any actions: alleged acts to perpetuate himself in power by frustrating the constitutionally prescribed process for certifying the lawful winner of an election.
[…] Respondent’s other arguments provide no sound reason to deny immediate review. He asserts that the government lacks standing to bring an appeal. But the government is not seeking to appeal the district court’s order. Respondent himself has appealed that order.
[…] Respondent errs in asserting that the district court overlooked important aspects of the question. To the contrary, respondent repeats arguments that the district court carefully considered and rejected.
[…] Contrary to respondent’s characterization, the indictment alleges serious criminal conduct: that respondent, while serving as President and a candidate for reelection, conspired to thwart the lawful transfer of power.
Enforcing federal criminal laws that prohibit such conduct is vital to protecting our constitutional processes and democracy itself.
[…] Respondent’s assertion that immediate review is not warranted runs counter to the principle that in all criminal cases, the public interest in a speedy and fair trial is a paramount value.
[…] For instance, in the controversy over the student-loan forgiveness program, the Court granted certiorari before judgment where no appellate court had issued a decision on the merits. See Biden v. Nebraska, (2023).
[…] There, the criminal trial of the Watergate conspirators (other than President Nixon) lay four months in the future, and the controversy involved whether the President had a constitutionally based privilege to withhold evidence from trial. The Court granted certiorari before judgment and expedited briefing, resolving the case 16 days after argument.
[…] No less than in Nixon, the “imperative public importance” of this case meets the Court’s standards for immediate review.
[…] Finally, respondent’s claims about the reasons why the government is seeking review are unfounded and incorrect. Respondent stands accused of serious crimes because the grand jury followed the facts and applied the law. The government seeks this Court’s resolution of the immunity claim so that those charges may be promptly resolved, whatever the outcome. […]
@362. Reginald Selkirk : What;s wrong with the other half of them.. Like Dafuck!?
Sorry, tired and cheesed off tonight and just .. after Jan 6th.. really?! How can Trump still have that many cultists willfully blindty following him? Da fuck is wrong with too many people?
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 365
Consider the source. Of course Fox News is going to claim that feminism makes women sad and they’d be much happier as subservient, brainless Stepford Wives for JEEZ-us.
President Joe Biden announced Friday he’s issuing a federal pardon to every American who has used marijuana in the past, including those who were never arrested or prosecuted.
The sweeping pardon applies to all U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents in possession of marijuana for their personal use and those convicted of similar federal crimes. It also forgives pot users in the District of Columbia. It does not apply to individuals who have been jailed for selling the drug, which is illegal under federal law, or other marijuana offenses such as driving under the influence of an illegal substance…
Uzbekistan’s foreign ministry has summoned the Russian ambassador over a call by a Russian politician to annex the former Soviet republic, it said late on Thursday.
Russian nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin, who is co-chair of the “A Just Russia – For Truth” party, said this week he believed Russia should annex Uzbekistan and other countries whose citizens travel en masse to Russia for work…
A new reactor at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear complex appears to be operating for the first time, the U.N. nuclear watchdog and independent experts said on Thursday, which would mean an additional potential source of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
North Korea has for years used spent fuel from a 5-megawatt nuclear reactor at Yongbyon to produce plutonium for its nuclear arsenal but a telltale discharge of warm water from a larger light-water reactor suggests it is coming online, too, the International Atomic Energy Agency said…
California may be the next state to ban former President Trump from its primary ballot over 14th Amendment concerns. Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis (D) requested Wednesday the state look into “every legal option” to do just that…
“Based on the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling … I urge you to explore every legal option to remove former President Donald Trump from California’s 2024 presidential primary ballot,” Kounalakis wrote to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber (D)…
A group of physicists from the University of Washington and the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) have seemingly discovered a new, controllable variation of superconductivity in an exotic, crystal-like material. Its superconductivity can be modulated according to the strain applied to it, to the point of turning it off at will. Simultaneously, they’ve apparently broken the record on how “hot” a field-effect superconductor can be before it loses its ability to conduct electricity, absent any resistance…
[…] It’s extraordinary to see how much the landscape has changed in recent years. A decade ago, the total number of states allowing recreational marijuana use was zero, and at the national level, elected officials wanted nothing to do with reform proposals.
Now, 24 states have legalized cannabis for adult use, and 37 states and Washington, D.C., have legalized medical marijuana.
What’s more, on Capitol Hill, a major Democratic reform package cleared the House last year — even a handful of GOP members supported it — and while the measure couldn’t overcome a Republican filibuster in the Senate, proponents of the legislation faced no pushback in the 2022 cycle.
For decades, the United States’ “war on drugs” only moved in one punitive direction. As the latest developments help prove, it’s a new day.
Among the most embarrassing elements of the House Republicans’ impeachment push against President Joe Biden are the GOP’s own witnesses. The trouble, of course, is that they keep saying the opposite of what the party wants to hear.
In August, for example, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and his colleagues appeared quite excited about an interview with a Hunter Biden business associate. That proved to be among the Kentucky Republican’s many duds: Devon Archer actually ended up debunking all of the core allegations against the president. A month later, GOP officials held a hearing in the hopes of advancing the impeachment cause against Biden, and their own witnesses said they didn’t see sufficient evidence to impeach the Democratic president.
This week, it apparently happened again: USA Today reported that Republican investigators interviewed Carol Fox, a trustee for a now bankrupt health care company that worked with James Biden, and she also failed to tell the GOP what it wanted to hear.
So what do House Republicans have left? Not much, though they’ve taken a keen interest in a 2019 text from Hunter Biden that the right sees as highly incriminating. As a new report from The New York Times, it’s really not.
[A] close examination of the circumstances surrounding the 2019 text message, along with others that have been cited by Republicans during the impeachment inquiry and elsewhere to suggest that Hunter Biden’s foreign income was shared with or benefited his father, shows the extent to which the contents of the communications have been misunderstood or outright distorted. And while it does not rule out the possibility that House Republicans could unearth evidence showing wrongdoing by President Biden, it underscores the flimsy nature of the material they have presented publicly so far.
A related Times report, also published overnight, added that “an examination of some of the highest-profile examples cited by Republicans shows that they have been taken out of context, or that Republicans have omitted key messages in email or text chains that often cast the communications in a more innocuous light.”
The most charitable explanation is that GOP officials and their aides were careless and clumsy when reviewing the underlying documents. The more unsettling possibility is that congressional Republicans deliberately tried to mislead the public in their zeal to tear down the president without cause.
Either way, those anti-Biden partisans who continue to insist that the impeachment inquiry is turning up incriminating information appear to be kidding themselves. The only people being damaged by this fiasco are House Republicans.
A recording has surfaced showing how Donald Trump and Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel pressured Michigan officials in an attempt to prevent certification of 2020 election results. The recording, as reported by The Detroit News, includes Trump pushing two members of the Wayne County (Detroit) Board of Canvassers not to sign off on election results. It includes Trump making what appear to be veiled threats and offering to provide attorneys if the officials will go along with his efforts to interfere in the election.
The existence of the call has been known since shortly after the election, when the Republican chair of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, Monica Palmer, revealed that she had been in contact with Trump. Palmer and another Republican member of the board, William Hartmann, originally voted against certifying the results, then changed their minds within hours. After Trump’s call, Palmer and Hartmann tried to reverse their votes again and signed affidavits claiming they were pressured into certifying the election.
When she mentioned the call in 2020, Palmer insisted that Trump had called “to make sure I was safe” after she and Hartmann were doxxed online. But the full contents of the recording make it clear that Trump’s purpose was much more self-serving—and sinister.
Michigan was a big part of Trump’s extraordinary effort to overturn the 2020 election results, and false claims about election fraud in Detroit were at the center of that venture. Trump’s lies about the election results in the area began within two days of the election and included claims that he had won Michigan by 300,000 votes, that poll workers were duplicating ballots for Biden, that boxes of ballots had been smuggled into Detroit, and that Republican observers were banned from watching the count. None of which is true.
Trump also insisted that there were more votes than voters in Wayne County as Detroit became a focus of his false claims. [Screen grab at the link]
That tweet came during a Zoom meeting of the county board on Nov. 17 during which Palmer and Hartmann initially refused to certify the vote, resulting in a 2-2 split among the county board members. Palmer made a motion to certify the results in white suburbs while refusing to certify the results in the predominantly Black city of Detroit. Trump supporters began enthusiastically reporting this as “a huge win” for Trump.
More than 300 onlookers tuned into the call, and there was a public comment period after the initial vote. Some of those watching became frustrated by Palmer and Hartmann’s refusal to certify the results without providing evidence of fraud, and began posting information about them online. After hours of debate and statements, both Republicans changed their minds and agreed to certify the election results.
Within 30 minutes of the ending of the contentious Zoom meeting, Trump and McDaniels were on the phone to Palmer and Hartmann. During the call, Trump told Palmer and Hartmann that they would look “terrible” if they signed the certification.
“We’ve got to fight for our country,” Trump reportedly said on the recording. “We can’t let these people take our country away from us.”
McDaniel urged the two board members to go home without signing the certification. “We will get you attorneys,” she told them.
“We’ll take care of that,” confirmed Trump.
The two left without signing. The next day, Palmer and Hartmann attempted to reverse their votes again and produced affidavits claiming that they had been pressured into approving the results. The vote was certified over their objections.
In light of the Zoom call that Palmer and Hartmann had just gone through, Trump saying that they would look “terrible” if they signed the certification seems a lot less like checking in to see whether the two board members were safe, and a lot more like a threat. By the time of this call, an election worker in Georgia was already in hiding after false claims that he had tampered with ballots generated threats from Trump supporters.
The report of the call doesn’t mention Trump asking how they were feeling or offering to do anything to improve their safety. The focus appears to be entirely on preventing the pair from signing off on the certification.
The false claims about Detroit and Wayne County became a regular part of Trump’s post-election speeches. Two days after Election Day, he blasted Detroit as one of “the most politically corrupt places in our country.” As with similar claims about Atlanta and Philadelphia, Trump’s claims were correctly seen as attempts to disenfranchise Black voters.
In addition to trying to halt the count in Wayne County, Trump summoned Michigan Republican legislators to the White House to persuade them to hand over Michigan’s slate of electors. Those officials later said they found no reason to change the results. On Dec. 14, 2020, a slate of false electors signed a fake certificate claiming that Trump won Michigan. Those false electors are now facing criminal charges.
Yesterday, December 20, 2023, an attack was carried out on two important facilities in Crimea. Previously, the information was published on the tg channel “ASTRA”. However, it requires clarification.
The first strike was at the Information Reception and Processing Center of the FSB of the Russian Federation, located in the village of Solnechnogorskoye, near Alushta. Three satellite communication antennas were seriously damaged. The attack was carried out using 4 British-French Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles (not a UAV, as ASTRA had previously stated).
The second blow was delivered to the 40th separate command and measurement complex of the Russian Aerospace Forces (military unit 81415), located in the village. Vitino, near the city of Saki. The attack was carried out using 2 cruise missiles of the British-French production “Storm Shadow/SCALP”. One of the missiles did not reach the target; the strike from the second destroyed the Tobol electronic warfare system.
Tobol is an interesting target. The complex is used to suppress the Starlink satellite signal. […]
More videos of Russian conscripts praying before being mowed down in kamikaze attacks.
Like Muslim suicide bomb culture, Putin’s regime wants Russians to focus on the afterlife rather than the impoverished and depraved fealty under which they live in this world.
Russian media report that Russia airline has canceled all its flights to Beijing from the Russian cities of Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk and Vladivostok. The company was not able to receive contracts for aircraft maintenance from the Chinese side.
This is what true and lasting China-Russia friendship really looks like.
This happened exactly one day later after Russian prime minister Mishustin’s “very successful and productive” visit to Beijing. […]
“Like Muslim suicide bomb culture, Putin’s regime wants Russians to focus on the afterlife rather than the impoverished and depraved fealty under which they live in this world.”
GASP! Who are you to attack their Deeply Held Spiritual Beliefs™.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says the ruling to remove Donald Trump from the Colorado primary ballot is part of a scheme by Democrats to help Trump win [oh FFS], but someone needs to tell that to Trump supporters. As NBC News reports, threats against the Colorado justices have been pouring in since the ruling was announced. Those threats include beheading judges and murdering their children.
For months, Republicans have been repeating claims about the supposed “weaponization” of the Justice Department. House Republicans have been working on plans to punish both the Department of Justice and the FBI. That has included efforts to defund the department and to impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland.
All of this has come over a constant drumbeat of false statements from Trump in which he has repeatedly blamed President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers for his own criminal indictments and even his civil cases. At the same time, Trump has demeaned judges, court officials, and prosecutors in a way that invites his followers to join in the harassment. And on Wednesday evening, Trump made his threats even more ominous.
In a series of posts on his Truth Social platform, Trump responded to the Colorado ruling with claims that Biden is behind all his woes. That appears to include both the writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case and the in-progress case for overvaluing his properties. “Biden should drop all of these fake political indictments against me, both criminal & civil,” wrote Trump. “Every case I am fighting is the work of the DOJ & the White House. No such thing has ever happened in our country before. Banana republic??? Election interference!!!” (Note: This statement’s use of ALL CAPS has been reduced in the interest of preserving the reader’s vision.)
Trump followed this up with claims that “Crooked Joe Biden” is an insurrectionist and reposts of multiple right-wing pundits making outrageous claims about the Colorado ruling. That included this one encouraging a “civil war.” [Screen grab at the link]
In another post, Trump repeated claims that Biden has weaponized the Department of Justice, again blaming him for both the criminal and civil charges Trump faces. But this time, Trump added a thick layer of implied threats. [Screen grab at the link]
The “Pandora’s Box” phrase has been picked up by right-wing commentators and social media, where it has become a synonym for how the Justice Department can be turned against Trump’s opponents once he is returned to power.
The threats of violence that have reportedly flooded in following the Colorado ruling have included some genuine nastiness. A Trump forum frequented by Jan. 6 rioters included the message, “This ends when we kill these fuckers.” Even though the court ruling was a split 4-3 decision, it hasn’t stopped Trump supporters from calling for the death of all seven Colorado justices.
And the threats have not been limited to the judges in this case. With Trump, other Republicans, and right-wing pundits all claiming that the whole judicial system has been leveraged by Democrats, threats have been extended to everyone considered an enemy of Trump. Those threats have included images of guns, rope, and bombs.
“Kill judges. Behead judges. Roundhouse kick a judge into the concrete,” read one post. “Slam dunk a judge’s baby into the trashcan.”
All of this is an extension of an existing pattern. When Trump made false claims about court clerk Allison Greenfield, she received hundreds of “serious and credible” threats. More threats were leveled at Judge Arthur Engoron’s wife after Trump promoted false claims that an anti-Trump account on social media belonged to her. Trump has also made claims about Engoron’s son being in attendance and profiting from the trial, but those claims are absolutely false.
As both Engoron and special counsel Jack Smith have made clear, they’re willing to stand up to the threats leveled by Trump—even knowing that those threats sometimes lead to violence, as they did when a Trump supporter tried to shoot his way into the Cincinnati FBI office following the Mar-a-Lago search in 2022. That level of bravery is something expected from judges and prosecutors who face threats from criminals with some regularity.
But when the threats are extended to staff members, family, and friends, it’s much harder to stand in a courtroom and deliver a ruling that Trump may find objectionable. It demands bravery and a commitment to justice that few people may possess.
The threat to use the Justice Department as an instrument of retribution should he regain power is terrifying to everyone. And should be. But mixed in with that is the more immediate effort that Trump is making to intimidate every judge, prosecutor, and witness in the trials ahead.
Trump faces criminal proceedings in New York, Florida, and Georgia, and he wants those judges to be afraid. He wants every ruling to be made in the shadow of what might happen to them, to their friends, to their kids. He wants them to understand that should they dismiss the charges against him, or delay his case into the indefinite future, his social media will be full of praises for their wisdom and fairness. But if they try to bring him to equitable justice, they will face the kind of treatment he has delivered to “deranged” Engoron and “racist” New York Attorney General Letitia James, and to their staff and families.
In his posts, Trump keeps insisting that nothing like this “has ever happened in our country before.” He’s right about that. Trump is a unique threat.
Seeing him face justice is going to require an equally unique level of fortitude.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is suing New Hampshire officials over an election law backed by Republicans that the committee claims will disenfranchise voters and affect the party’s members.
The lawsuit challenges a law passed last year that requires people who register and vote on Election Day without photo ID to send in missing documentation within seven days, or else their vote will be thrown out and they will be referred to the state Attorney General. Politico first reported the lawsuit.
Plaintiffs said they are concerned the law could affect critical groups of voters like young people and working families. In an emailed statement to The Hill, DNC Chair Jaime Harrison and New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley said Republicans like Gov. Chris Sununu are making it harder for people to vote.
“Democrats, led by President Biden and Vice President Harris, are continuing our fight to protect our democracy and every Americans’ right to vote, and New Hampshire’s law is yet another shameless attempt to undermine democracy and voting access by today’s extreme MAGA GOP,” Harrison and Buckley said in the statement. “With democracy on the line in the next election, Democrats in the Granite State and across the country will not rest until every American’s fundamental right to make their voice heard is protected.
The lawsuit is backed by the Biden campaign. Biden’s campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in an emailed statement that it is imperative “to fight for the right to vote” and that this “is just the beginning.”
[…] the plaintiffs focus on same-day voting changes that require voters who register on Election Day to produce additional documentation that other voters are not required to produce.
[…] By the end of last week, on Dec. 16, nine states had reached the “very high” flu activity category, the CDC’s highest level.
One month ago, only two states were classified as “very high.” In the latest data released Friday, Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee were in that category. New York City, which reports health data separately from the rest of the state, was also “very high.”
Another 14 states and Washington, D.C., weren’t far behind, still categorized as “high” illness activity.
See how bad things have gotten in your state over the last month using the maps below. Sliding the cursor back and forth compares the situation on Nov. 18 (left) with the most recent data from Dec. 16.
The darker the shade of red, the higher the level of respiratory illness. Two states (Louisiana and South Carolina) are shown in purple, the very top tier. [Map at the link] […]
This week, the all-male Amarillo City Council held their third meeting on whether or not to become the sixth Texas county to ban using their roads in order to travel out-of-state to get an abortion — and were still unable to figure out what they want to do.
Via Texas Tribune:
Amarillo Mayor Cole Stanley said the council was using the session as a way to “divide and separate things” and come back to what makes the most sense for the city.
“With our citizens in mind first, not what’s popular,” Stanley said.
Stanley said the council had to answer important questions regarding the ordinance — does local government have a role and duty to protect life? Can they further protect life? Has the state done enough?
Ah, yes. “With our citizens in mind.” Because they’re obviously protecting their citizens by forcing them to travel to get an abortion by themselves, with no support from friends or family. What a nice thing to do for people!
Two council members, Don Tipps and Josh Craft, agreed the council has a duty to protect life. Lee Simpson said they were miles ahead of him on the ordinance.
“I’m willing to commit to asking questions so that I can then come to the opinion of whether it’s the right thing for our community,” Simpson said.
Simpson later suggested the council work more on resolving human trafficking, which he said could go a long way in protecting children and preventing unwanted pregnancies and abortion. An older woman in the crowd broke the rules of decorum and booed his suggestion.
Council member Tom Scherlen also offered criticism of the council’s work. He called one draft an overreach and said it would be bad for businesses.
And isn’t that what’s most important? Won’t anyone think of the businesses?
These travel bans function about the same way as Texas’s abortion ban and would allow Texans to file suit not against the person who had the abortion but against anyone who uses the county’s roads to drive another person to get an abortion in another state where it is legal. This is meant to comport with the anti-choice logic that those who have abortions are not choosing it themselves of their own volition, but rather because they are pressured or forced to by others. Why? Well because they know people have a much easier time ratcheting up hate against evil straw-men looking to cover up sex crimes or just experience the sheer joy of vicarious baby-murder than they do about people choosing to have abortions for literally any of the many reasons one might choose to have an abortion.
It is not, we must note, illegal in any of these counties to use their roads to travel out of the state to do anything else that is illegal in the state. For instance, if you wanted to use these roads to give someone a ride so they can kill someone in Oklahoma, that’s fine — at least as far as the road-use part is concerned. This is how you can tell they don’t care about life or forcing people to play by their rules as much as they like controlling women’s bodies. […]
More at the link, including a discussion of Wisconsin chipping away at abortion rights; social media posts from anti-abortion doofuses who misrepresent Kate Cox’s situation [Example: A popular Instagram post made a number of misleading claims. For instance, the post stated that “90% of kids with Trisomy 18 live when given proper medical care,” while giving examples of children who defied the odds. According to studies, the median survival time for the condition among babies born alive was four to 14.5 days, and just 5.6% to 8.4% of those born alive lived to their 1st birthday.]; and Vice President Kamala Harris’s upcoming tour to promote abbortion rights.
You might remember Rep. Tim Burchett from his minor role in “Thoughts and Prayers: Nashville Christian School Shooting Edition,” when he shrugged and said it was horrible, but that “we’re not gonna fix it” because there’s just nothing you can do when someone wants to kill people.
The distinguished gentleman from Tennessee spent a half hour yammering on conspiratorially with rightwing podcaster Benny Johnson about Jeffrey Epstein and how probably everyone in Congress (except Burchett) was part of Epstein’s cabal, and murdered him to keep him from spilling the beans. And while he was at it, he explained why otherwise good conservative members of Congress vote for “crazy stuff like what we’ve been seeing out of Congress,” which he never really specified, but we assume means things like keeping the government funded, not defaulting on the debt, or even occasionally voting with Democrats to do anything, ever.
But as Joe.My.God. reveals, the sometimes-crazy votes of good conservatives can be explained quite easily, according to Burchett: Literally every one of them is being blackmailed over a sex scandal! Here’s the video, cued up to that part. (We were going to say “cued up to the crazy part,” but that would be the entire 30 minutes.) [video at the link]
Burchett: “Why in the world would good conservatives vote for crazy stuff like what we’ve been seeing out of Congress? Here’s how it works. You’re visiting, you’re out of the country or out of town or you’re in a motel or at a bar in DC and, whatever you’re into — women, men, whatever — comes up and they’re very attractive and they’re laughing at your jokes. And you’re buying them a drink. Next thing you know, you’re in the motel room with them nekkid.”
Don’t ask Rep. Burchett how he knows this. Maybe he overheard it at one of those naked Republican sex orgies former Rep. Madison Cawthorne said were always going on. (Burchett only went to read the articles.)
“And next thing you know, you know you’re about to make a key vote. And what happens? Some well-dressed person comes out and whispers in your ear, ‘Hey, man, there’s tapes out on you.’ Or, ‘Were you in a motel room or whatever with whoever?’ And then you’re like, ‘Uh-oh!’ and he says, ‘You really ought not be voting for this thing.’
“You know? And what do they do? It’s human nature. And, you know, no man or no woman actually is an island. And they know what to get at. You know, if it’s women, drugs, booze, it’ll find you in DC, and in most elected offices. And that’s what people of power and influence do.”
[…] What really strikes us is what a simplistic, Hollywood version of corruption Burchett spins here [My thoughts exactly]: Forget corporate money in campaigns, dark money networks, astroturfed “activist” groups, gerrymandering, or all the perfectly legal ways political power gets concentrated. No, the real problem is that except for the pure of heart, like Burchett and other far-Right fundies (and even some of them!), everyone is compromised. They’re either on the take, or they’re being blackmailed because they can’t control what they do with their sinful appetites and moist sweaty dangly bits. Their rampant bestial swimsuit-area urges make them easy prey for the shadowy wealthy cabal who hate America but are really running things, don’t you know?
“And it’s just, you know, I’ve been in this game my whole life. I spent 16 years in the state legislature in Tennessee and eight years as county mayor. And now I’m in my fifth year in Congress. But it’s just — the stakes are higher. But the game is still the same.”
Burchett stopped short of saying the Jews secretly run everything, but once you’re talking about shadowy cabals who really pull the strings, it’s kind of a given.
And that’s how we end up with monstrous crazy things like gay penguin lust in the schools and infrastructure, and it’s just all so sad. In conclusion, Tim Burchett has seen some shit, man, and you shouldn’t trust anyone in government. Except him, of course.
“We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right. The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.”
Chris Rufo posted that.
Commentary:
Right-wing activist and perennial shithead Chris Rufo will periodically announce his intention to cause a moral panic over an obscure issue, then start said panic, then watch as the media […] as it rushes to treat whatever the issue is as if it wasn’t just made up by a guy who sounds like Snidely Whiplash after getting Clockwork Orange-d with days and days of Prager University videos.
[…] In other words, this isn’t really about potential plagiarism. This is a coordinated strike in the right’s ongoing war against the Marxism that has allegedly taken over American institutions, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs (Gay is both Black and a woman) on college campuses, elitists at one of the nation’s most elite universities, and whatever other angry bats are screeching in Rufo’s belfry.
Or, as Don Moynihan, a Georgetown professor, put it on BlueSky: “A member of Congress who supported white nationalism tried to get a Black university president fired by accusing her of anti-semitism. When that failed other white nationalists accused her of plagiarism, but needed mainstream media to treat it as a big story.”
Of course. Because otherwise, who gives a rat’s ass about plagiarism in obscure, decades-old academic writing, even at so illustrious an institution as Harvard? Besides The New York Times, apparently, whose writers waited until the 34th goddamn paragraph of this story to note that these allegations might not be on the up-and-up:
For some faculty members, and not just liberal ones, the details of the charges and Harvard’s procedures were less important than the context in which the charges were being lobbed.
“It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions,” said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “The obvious point is to make it look as if there is this ‘woke’ double standard at elite institutions.”
“If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence,” he said of the accusations. “But not from these people.”
Charles Fried was Reagan’s Solicitor General. He testified in favor of Sam Alito’s Supreme Court nomination. We’re not exactly talking about Allen Ginsberg here, and even he thinks this is dumb.
In the 18th graf of the Times story – in other words, 16 grafs before we get the quotes from Fried – the writers, presumably in the name of balance, went to Carol friggin’ Swain for a quote:
Carol Swain, a political scientist who retired from Vanderbilt University in 2017, said that she was “livid,” both at Dr. Gay’s use of her work and Harvard’s defense of her.
Swain is a right-winger who called Obama’s re-election in 2012 “a very scary situation” and willingly appeared in a Dinesh D’Souza movie. Make of that what you will.
Swain also published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal criticizing Gay. Tellingly, she didn’t actually point out what passages Harvard’s president is accused of stealing from her. According to the Times:
In the dissertation, Mr. Rufo said in his newsletter, Dr. Gay used Dr. Swain’s work at least twice with no citation. In one example, Dr. Gay wrote, “Since the 1950s, the re-election rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%.” In an earlier book, Dr. Swain had written, “Since the 1950s the re-election rate for House members has rarely dipped below 90%.”
An academic will produce thousands of pages of writing in a career. She might miss or forget some citations in that time. She might lift a quote and forget the quote marks. The amount of times this has happened in dissertations is probably approaching infinity.
But for Swain, it’s an excuse to get in some more global attacks on Gay. Like so:
Tenure at a top-tier institution normally demands ground-breaking originality; her work displays none. In a world where the privilege of diversity is king, Ms. Gay was able to parlay mediocre research into tenure and administrative advancement at what was once considered a world-class university.
Ah ha, it’s not just that the president of Harvard might have plagiarized some work! She’s in general one of those dreaded diversity hires that Journal readers have been conditioned to all but stone to death.
Imagine if the Times had framed this story as “right-wing activists continue bad-faith crusade against Harvard president as part of larger attack on institutions it claims, incoherently, have been overtaken by Marxists” instead of giving it the exact frame that its assignment editor Chris Rufo told them to. That would have been neat.
The Supreme Court on Friday said it will not fast-track consideration of Donald Trump’s claim that he has immunity from prosecution for actions he took as president, a question crucial to whether he can be put on trial for plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The court’s one-sentence order, from which there were no noted dissents, means a federal appeals court in Washington will be the first to review a district judge’s ruling earlier this month rejecting Trump’s claim of immunity. Arguments are scheduled for Jan. 9. The timing of a decision — and a likely appeal to the Supreme Court after that — could delay Trump’s criminal trial in Washington, D.C., now scheduled to begin March 4.
Special counsel Jack Smith had asked the justices to short-circuit the normal appellate process and quickly settle the question of presidential criminal immunity, which the Supreme Court previously has not been called upon to resolve. He said public interest required intervention now, so the federal election-obstruction trial of Trump — the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — could proceed as scheduled. […]
The United States on Friday abstained from a vote on a United Nations Security Council resolution in support of an indefinite pause in fighting to allow the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza. […] Over a quarter of the Gazan population face “catastrophic hunger and starvation,” according to a recent report. […]
A study of octopus DNA may have solved an enduring mystery about when the rapidly melting West Antarctic ice sheet last collapsed, unlocking valuable information about how much future sea levels may rise in a warming climate.
The innovative research focused on the genetic history of the Turquet’s octopus (Pareledone turqueti), which lives on the seafloor across the Antarctic, and what it could reveal about the geology of the region over time.
Tracing past encounters across the species’ various populations suggested the most recent collapse of the ice sheet occurred more than 100,000 years ago during a period known as the Last Interglacial — something geoscientists suspected but had not been able to confirm definitively, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science…
The liberal-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned Republican-drawn legislative maps on Friday and ordered that new district boundary lines be drawn as Democrats had urged in a redistricting case they hope will weaken GOP majorities…
Sometimes it pays to skip a day. Yesterday, all the news from the front in Ukraine seemed like bad news. While Russia was continuing to sacrifice its forces at an ungodly rate, meat waves seemed like they were crashing on every shore. Russian forces picked up territory around Krynky, drove Ukraine back from territory it had held for weeks south of Robotyne, and—this feels like it’s happened so often that everyone should be able to sing along—drove into the village of Stepove north of Avdiivka.
Russian military sources even reported that they had taken all of Stepove. Again.
But Russia didn’t get all of the village, and on Friday, Ukraine counterattacked, turning the area east of Stepove into another bloody mess of burning Russian hardware and unfortunate Russian troops. The carnage was terrible, but it’s difficult to say whether it was more terrible than all the other rounds of carnage that have come around Avdiivka as Russia shoves unprepared, ill-equipped forces onto the field at gunpoint. Yes, there is more video of a Bradley doing its thing against Russian forces.
Oh, and Ukraine shot down not one, not two, but three Russian SU-34 fighter-bombers. That’s a very bad day for the Russian air force, and helluva a good day for Ukrainian air defense.
[Map at the link] If the boundaries in this area look familiar, it’s because there has been a remarkable lack of change. That’s despite Russia losing a reported 25,000 troops in this area in two months of trying to cut off the Avdiivka salient. Since the invasion began, nowhere—not Bakhmut, not Vuhledar, not the bridge disaster at Bilohorivka—has seen Russia throw away so many men and so many machines for so little gain. By one estimate, Russia has lost 10,000 men for every kilometer gained in the Avdiivka area, [Tweet and video at the link]
If Russia were to build a wall of bodies across the area it has gained at Avdiivka, that wall would be 20 bodies tall. And honestly, that may be generous to Russia. Because for weeks now, the losses have continued, but the gains have been even smaller.
For fans of U.S. hardware, the performance of the Bradley in the area around Stepove is simply incredible. Again and again, we’ve seen single Bradleys roll out to obliterate entire Russian columns. With improved electronic warfare in this area helping to hold off FPV drones and limit Russia’s surveillance, the Bradley has been an absolute superstar of the battlefield over the past few weeks. If you want to see the results of the latest engagement, check out the thread below (but, as usual, don’t look too closely if you don’t want to see what a 25 millimeter autocannon does to things that are not armor). [Tweet and video at the link]
That Russia would subject its forces to this kind of destruction more than once is incomprehensible. That they would do it day after day for weeks seems purely cruel.
Here are some of those Russian troops before one of the attempts to advance near Avdiivka. Not only does almost no one present have any kind of body armor, but also only a handful appear to have winter uniforms. These are men about to walk into oblivion. [Tweet and video at the link]
On the south of the map at Robotyne, it’s not clear that Ukraine has recovered areas lost on Thursday. [map at the link]
[…] reports from the ground indicate that Russian forces advanced in the area southeast of Robotyne on Thursday. Ukrainian forces reportedly moved back, temporarily ceding these fields to the Russian troops. Those reports may be exaggerated, as Andrew Perpetua’s map also continues to show this area under Ukrainian control.
In any case, for the past two weeks, Ukraine and Russia have been trading a small area between Robotyne and Novoprokopivka. That still seems to be where the main action is centered. If Russia did pick up ground, it’s a pair of empty fields that will be hard to defend.
Switching to Perpetua’s map for Krynky, because it had been updated within the hour when this was written: [map at the link]
Reports on Thursday suggested Russia had moved out of the forests south of Krynky and pressed the Ukrainian troops based in the western edge of the town. Maybe they did, but 24 hours later, it’s hard to see that anything has changed.
Like I said earlier, sometimes it pays to wait. Considering the frustration and exhaustion on both sides, there’s a tendency to report any movement, no matter how small, as if it were the first pebbles in an avalanche. But the drones, minefields, and artillery that restricted movement earlier in the year have now been joined by weather. [Tweet and video at the link] Don’t expect anyone to move very quickly in these conditions.
———————-
If today represented an improvement on the ground, what happened in the skies was even better. That good news looks like this: [Image illustrating Russian losses of aircraft]
Russia has admitted to one Su-34 loss, but Telegram sources have confirmed all three. The export price of the plane is reportedly around $50 million, so this represents a pretty decent day’s work (though the Kilo-class submarine destroyed in Crimea cost somewhere between $300 and $350 million, so the guys behind that one still have bragging rights).
The Su-34 has been used lately to deploy glide bombs that have been especially bad around Kyrnky and at points along the southern front. Taking down three of them in a day likely represents Ukraine deploying a new air defense system in the south. There have been suggestions that this is the result of a new Patriot system, which was delivered by Germany just two weeks ago.
The downing of these three jets should make it harder for Russia to harass Ukrainian forces along the Dnipro. That’s a very good thing.
In other good news, there is this report that the first 18 F-16s will soon be on their way from the Netherlands. Please don’t shoot all the SU-34s down now, guys. Those F-16 pilots will need targets.
————————–
With other automakers abandoning Russia, the country has learned to depend on its own impeccable design skills. Get in line now for … the Ambler. [Tweet and images at the link. The vehicle is ugly beyond belief.]
It’s reportedly being built in a factory that previously cranked out BMWs. This is sure to be just as good.
“Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?” I [journalist Marie Brenner] asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”)
Later, Trump returned to this subject. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
He doesn’t need to read them, he has his own little Nazi, Steven Miller, to do the speech writing for him. They’re both disgraceful.
————————–
In other words, he doesn’t disagree with Hitler, it is just that he (Trump) came up with this racist BS all on his own. When you think about it, this is vintage Trump. He claims to know more about medicine than doctors, more about construction than engineers, more about taxes than accountants and more about nuclear energy than physicists. Of course, he knows more about racist fascism than Nazis.
——————————-
Trump keeps saying he’s never read Mein Kampf, never read his “works.” He’s phrasing it like that because he has read his speeches. He studied the speeches for how to rally people. A friend gave him the book. He kept it by his nightstand. He admires Hitler’s ability to control people via rhetoric and he wants to emulate it
————————–
Trump is probably telling the truth that he is functionally illiterate. But he doesn’t have to read “Mein Kampf”. That’s what Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller are for.
And I’m not trying to be cute. I am speaking 100% literally. You can be certain that one of those two (or both) told Trump to start using the “poisoning the blood” phrase. And there will be a lot more where that came from.
Jeansays
Lynna @401
I’m sure Miller has been putting the Hitler language into Trump speeches knowing full well where that comes from even if Trump didn’t know or remember it (since he has/had the speeches book). And Trump loves it because that’s what he believes and that works for his followers (worshippers).
Miller is a disgusting and dangerous individual and I’m sure he is enjoying planning for a follow up to the family separation and putting children in cages. He should be in prison for crimes against humanity but he’ll never face accountability and he’ll likely have even more power if there is a second Trump presidency (either elected or otherwise).
birgerjohanssonsays
“Last Christmas” by Wham reaches number one on the UK chart 39 years after it was released.
Andrew Ridgeley says “mission accomplished”.
Ridgeley looks wrinkled, reminding me of how time flies. It feels like it is ten years since Wham! split, tops.
Speaking of time, and split, it is now 10 years since ‘The Epic Split’ ad video, featuring Jean Claude Van Damme standing astride two moving Volvo trucks… simultaneously! https://youtu.be/M7FIvfx5J10
The southern California city of Huntington Beach, a bastion of conservative voters, has made the move to block diverse monthlong celebrations of Black history, women’s history and Pride, in favor of observing the revolutionary and civil wars, California’s history and America’s independence…
The photos of a communion wafer with a large red smudge on it started popping up on social media and religious websites in October.
Those who shared the images made an extraordinary claim: The smudge was blood that suddenly appeared during a Catholic Mass in Cincinnati on Sept. 8.
Believers hailed the red-stained wafer as “incredible” and “a miracle,” proof that Jesus Christ is present in body and spirit during Holy Communion. Skeptics called the claims “fake” and “nonsense,” proof that the gullible are no match for internet tricksters…
Some good news in a study that will be published in The Lancet.
A study of the latest COVID vaccine shows it provides a surprisingly strong immune response against recent mutated omricon variants such as XBB and BA.2.86.
The study was done by Karolinska Institute and Danderyd hospital, Sweden.
Two camera operators who deleted records of speeding offences so their friends could get away without being fined or prosecuted have been jailed.
Samantha Halden-Evans, 36, and Jonathan Hill, 47, were investigated by anti-corruption officers while both working for Staffordshire Safer Roads Partnership. The police workers conspired with each other to commit misconduct in public office between May 2019 and October 2020…
Jean @402: “[…] he’ll likely have even more power if there is a second Trump presidency […]”
All too true. Stephen Miller is typical of the wannabe-Nazis surrounding Trump. Miller has positioned himself to wreak more havoc if Trump wins. It’s scary.
Two Wednesday nights ago, we at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), particularly myself and Mikey Weinstein, were waiting with bated breath for the release of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) conference report. Would Christian nationalist Rep. Mike Turner’s amendment to shut MRFF down still be in the bill? Would it be out completely? Or would it be something in between?
Around 11 PM EST we got our answer, although it took us a few hours to fully digest it. The Senate, which had nothing corresponding to Turner’s amendment in its version of the bill, had indeed replaced Turner’s amendment, which had been Section 1045 of the House version of the bill, with an amendment of that amendment, which in the conference committee’s compromise bill was Section 1049.
At first glance, this new Section 1049, which seemed deliberately confusing, took us aback. But about a half hour or so into what would be a several hour phone call between Mikey and myself, it started to make sense, and in a very good way. It was at that point that I said to Mikey, who was also starting to grasp the beauty of this new Section 1049:
“This thing was either written by a legislative genius who really loves us or by someone as dumb as a bag of rocks.”
As we began running various common MRFF scenarios through what will be the process outlined in the section, which the NDAA orders the Department of Defense to enshrine in a new military-wide regulation within the next six months, our incredulousness that we were reading this thing right completely faded away. In many cases the procedure laid out in Section 1049 will have no effect at all, and in every case scenario that we came up with in which it would apply, this legislative work of art was our friend!
Then came an eight day wait, during which we were on pins and needles watching for the compromise bill to be agreed to by both the Senate and the House, staving off our anxiety that it would dawn on someone among our congressional enemies that this new section would give MRFF the upper hand and that its passage would somehow be derailed, as unlikely as that was to happen at this stage in the game.
During those eight days, and until the bill was signed into law, which just happened today, a bit of subterfuge was necessary on our part so as not to risk our enemies finding out how tickled pink we were, with Mikey only saying when asked, which he was by numerous people and media, that we were “cautiously optimistic,” when in reality we were downright gleeful!!!
Now that President Biden has signed the bill, with the legislative marvel that is Section 1049 being a done deal, we can let the cat out of the bag.
A fuller explanation of the myriad ways in which this section benefits MRFF will be coming soon, in a post that I’m thinking of titling “Oh, Section 1049, how does MRFF love thee? Let me count the ways,” but to put the most salient aspect in a nutshell for now, Turner’s attempt to shut MRFF down has backfired bigly, with the edict to the military being changed from:
Before packing it in for the year on Wednesday, the United States Senate sent over 50 of President Joe Biden’s nominees back to the White House to restart the process all over again. Among them, unsurprisingly, was Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su.
Su, the former Deputy Secretary of Labor, has been serving in the position since her predecessor Marty Walsh stepped down in March. She should have been confirmed as Secretary right away, but Republicans, along with Joe Manchin, Jon Tester and Kyrsten Sinema, fiercely opposed it. Why? Well, you can probably guess.
But have no fear! The White House has decided that they don’t give a shit and Su is going to remain Acting Secretary of Labor (and pretty much be the Secretary of labor) whether they like it or not. […]
“Julie Su will be renominated Secretary of Labor in the new year,” said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “That is something that we are committed to.”
GOOD.
So Why Do We Love Julie Su?
Mostly for the same reason that conservatives and conservative publications like National Review have clutched their pearls so hard over her for the past year — Su has been a longtime champion for workers and unions [She] tends to take their side over big business.
Su frequently attributes her lifelong advocacy for workers to the fact that her mother, an immigrant, came to the US on a cargo ship, but was able to get a union job that helped her family ascend to the middle class, get healthcare and eventually start their own businesses.
In 1995, Su was the lead attorney in a lawsuit against a garment factory in El Monte, California, that had trafficked 72 Thai immigrants to the US and put them to work in a sweatshop sewing clothing up to 22 hours a day. The case has been referred to as the first post-abolition modern-day slavery case in the US, as the workers were not paid but rather indentured, supposedly to pay those who brought them over to the states in the first place. Su helped the workers recover $4 million in backpay for the workers and was awarded a MacArthur genius award for her work on the case.
On Twitter, the AFL-CIO wrote “In just one year, Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su has rapidly expanded apprenticeship opportunities, created new workforce hubs, fought for rulemaking to protect our right to organize & SO much more.”
[…] Republicans […]: Why U Mad?
It’s the usual, really. They cry that she is an activist, that she’s “a radical,” an “anti-capitalist firebrand or “too progressive” — and allow me, as someone who is very proudly and openly all of those things to assure you that Su is pretty much a regular Democrat who does some really good stuff.
Where the Right has (or, rather claims to have) taken specific issue with Su is her enforcement of AB 5 — a California law that prevents businesses from misclassifying employees as independent contractors. The law stipulates that workers are employees, and therefore entitled to everything employees are entitled to in the state, including health insurance, overtime pay, minimum wage laws, sick leave, unemployment and worker’s compensation unless the employer can prove that they meet all three of the following conditions.
– The worker is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of the work and in fact;
– The worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business; and
– The worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as that involved in the work performed.
So, basically, businesses are not allowed to claim that their regular employees were “independent contractors” and avoid giving them those benefits, even if they really, really, really want to. Republicans (and, we can assume, Manchin and Sinema) believe they should be able to do that, for reasons.
The law made it so that thousands of rideshare drivers, janitors, construction workers, hotel workers, security guards, etc. were entitled to the same things any employee would be entitled to.
Now, the law isn’t perfect. I won’t say that. There are problems with the law insofar as it makes it extremely hard to earn a living as a gig-taking musician or a freelance writer or photographer and there needs to be much more of a balance as far as that goes […] But Julie Su did not write the law — elected officials in California did, based on a decision by the California Supreme Court.
Anything Else?
SORT OF. So, their smoking gun, big bad reason for why they claim to have an issue with Su is their claim that she “oversaw” $20 billion in fraudulent COVID unemployment claims (though they often claim 30 percent). Factually, this is true. Except it’s also true that, percentage-wise, California had a lower rate of COVID unemployment fraud (11 percent) in comparison to other states.
“[…] During that same period, the unemployment insurance fraud rate was 15.4 percent in Tennessee, 15.3 percent in Arizona, 14.3 percent in South Carolina, and over 14 percent in Massachusetts,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, who chairs the SENATE Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee, explained during Su’s initial hearing. “All of those states had Republican governors and Republican Labor secretaries, and all of those states experienced higher unemployment insurance fraud rates than California.”
They are also upset that she isn’t “impartial.”
“We need a qualified Secretary of Labor who can impartially enforce the law, properly manage a department, and refrain from partisan activism. Ms. Su failed to show her ability to do any of those three things,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), the top-ranking Republican on the HELP committee. “It is clear Ms. Su lacks the necessary votes for confirmation. I urge President Biden to put forward a nominee who is committed to fair enforcement of our nation’s labor laws and is capable of being confirmed in the Senate.”
[…] OK, But Why Do They Really Hate Her?
Because they hate workers, want employers to be able to screw their workers with impunity, and thus do not like that she supports unions and is on the side of workers.
We’re sure that this is all very difficult and painful for them, because they are used to people backing down and saying “Okay, we’ll do what you want, we don’t want to upet you or the job creators,” but they’re going to have to get over it — because Julie Su is here to stay, whether they vote to confirm her or not.
[…] Reason all you want, have a Renaissance that demands “beauty” and “proportion,” but you can’t escape the fact that everyone poops (Gomi, 1977).
Which is to say, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) insisted Tuesday at a Turning Point USA event that President Joe Biden isn’t merely old and feeble (when he’s not a mad dictator controlling every last aspect of Americans’ lives), but that he is literally no longer able to control his bowels:
We have a president of the United States who, his team carries extra pairs of pants with him when he travels in case he has poopy pants!
Cruz’s joke, with its Carnivalesque imagining of the supposedly most powerful man on Earth going around with a load of poo in his pantaloons, was a hit with Republicans online, a veritable turd de force. Like the proletarian crowds of old, they roared with the spirit of lèse-majesté, offering their own variations like “Big and stinky if true,” and “a crappy situation for our President!” Others voiced their willingness to accept the entirely speculative enspatterment of the presidential breeches as an obvious fact, agreeing that it was “embarrassing and pathetic in the eyes of the world,” and calling for “term limits and age limits to be passed in Congress,” because obviously a man who’s incontinent should not be entrusted with the codes to intercontinental ballistic missiles. Or should that be encrusted?! We kid, of course. No one should fear that Mr. Biden will unleash an attack of Icy BMs.
Others repeated the spurious rumor that Biden once crapped his pants during an audience with Pope Francis […]
Adding to this cloacal political clamor, former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, functionally expelled by the party faithful after serving on the House January 6 Select Committee, took to Xitter to suggest that Donald Trump has his own stinkiness issues, writing
I’m genuinely surprised how people close to Trump haven’t talked about the odor.
It’s truly something to behold. Wear a mask if you can
To be sure, Kinzinger didn’t specify whether the alleged Trump-whiff was related to sweat or to the lower areas of the lower bodily stratum, but it hardly matters, since like a rose, a stank is a stank is a stank, and the object here is again to associate the disfavored former president with bodily unpleasantness and uncleanliness, even potentially the tang of disease. Or as The Independent daintily put it, to “insinuate that the former president possesses a strong smell.”
Asked for comment, Team Trump, which knows more about playing in the gutter than most alleged “moderates” but far less than the average university Rhetoric department (and I mean that as flattery), provided a statement simply saying,
Adam Kinzinger farted on live TV and is an unemployed fraud. […] He has disgraced his country and disrespects everyone around him because he is a sad individual who is mad about how his miserable life has turned out.
Like Julia Kristeva playing Ace Attorney, we can only shout, “ABJECTION! That wasn’t even a good fart joke!”
Also, we couldn’t find any record of Kinzinger being accused of farting on live TV; perhaps the Trump spokesperson was thinking of Eric Swalwell, who in 2019 denied that he had farted during an interview with Chris Matthews.
We will leave it to the reader to wonder at the achievement here: With that puerile retort and false claim that Kinginger was prone to putting on airs, the Trump campaign actually managed to write about farts without being funny. So much for American Excretionalism.
They’re just full of surprises. Like your pants when you thought you only had to fart but there was an excess of Carnivalesque exuberance going on down there.
Re: Lynna, OM @ #413…
There’s another Gotcha! to AB5. If you run a for profit convention–no matter how little that profit is–you can’t use volunteers to help run it. They have to be paid at least the local minimum wage. In practice that means that the former volunteers at the convention will be getting more per hour than I average over the course of the year for running convention registration from my share of the profits.
So far as we can tell, a lot of conventions in our field are ignoring the law. It may come back to bite them.
whheydt @415, interesting. Thanks for the additional info.
In other news, Trump is offering gift wrap that features his awful visage, and he is selling “Never Surrender” Xmas stockings … all part of his holiday fundraising efforts. Well, he does have a lot of lawyers to pay. I wouldn’t display any of that stuff in my house. What a way to ruin the holiday. Link
The lawsuits make a range of claims, including that X discriminated against older employees, women and workers with disabilities, and failed to give advance notice of mass layoffs.
Twitter violated contracts by failing to pay millions of dollars in bonuses that the social media company, now called X Corp, had promised its employees, a federal judge ruled on Friday.
Mark Schobinger, who was Twitter’s senior director of compensation before leaving Elon Musk’s company in May, sued Twitter in June, claiming breach of contract.
Schobinger’s suit alleged that before and after billionaire Musk bought Twitter last year, it promised employees 50% of their 2022 target bonuses but never made those payments.
In denying Twitter’s motion to dismiss the case, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that Schobinger plausibly stated a breach of contract claim under California law and he was covered by a bonus plan.
“Once Schobinger did what Twitter asked, Twitter’s offer to pay him a bonus in return became a binding contract under California law. And by allegedly refusing to pay Schobinger his promised bonus, Twitter violated that contract,” the judge wrote.
[…] X has been hit with numerous lawsuits by former employees and executives since Musk bought the company and culled more than half of its workforce.
The lawsuits make a range of claims, including that X discriminated against older employees, women and workers with disabilities, and failed to give advance notice of mass layoffs. The company denies wrongdoing.
Guatemala is in the midst of a democratic crisis so severe that it may prevent the new president from taking office, as planned, on Jan. 14, 2024.
On Dec. 8, 2023, prosecutors and the Guatemalan Congress called for the nullification of the election results. A few weeks earlier, the attorney general’s office in Guatemala tried to remove President-elect Bernardo Arévalo’s immunity from prosecution. The attorney general alleged that the center-left politician, who won the election on an anti-corruption ticket, made posts on social media in 2022 that encouraged students to occupy the country’s public university. In an unprecedented attempt to prevent him from assuming power, officials accused Arévalo of complicity in the takeover of the university, illicit association and damaging the country’s cultural heritage.
During the presidential election in September, the Public Ministry raided electoral offices. These actions “appear to be designed to overturn the will of the electorate and erode the democratic process,” concluded the Organization of American States, a group that represents 35 countries in the region and promotes human rights, fair elections, security and economic development.
These developments follow a democratic backslide in Guatemala that has been going on since 2019, when the government expelled an anti-corruption commission backed by the United Nations.
[…] these anti-democratic actions will likely lead more Guatemalans to migrate to the United States.
Civil war and kleptocracy
[…] Between 1960 and 1996, the country endured a bloody armed conflict between leftist insurgents and the army. About 200,000 Guatemalans were killed – most of them from the Indigenous Maya population.
The armed confrontation, which was rooted in land conflicts and opposition to the military dictatorship, led to mass mobilization in favor of fair working conditions and democratic rule.
Guatemala’s democracy in the post-1996 years was marked by neoliberal policies that favored free market economics and privatization. It also saw the rise of a cadre of careerist politicians who, in the words of the jailed journalist Rubén Zamora, created a “kleptocracy.” This system hinged on corrupt political dealings, nurtured criminal activity and perpetuated high poverty levels.
Guatemalans have taken an active – perhaps even activist – posture toward the kleptocracy.
In 2015, they took to the streets en masse to protest government corruption. Their mobilization bolstered the actions of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG, a U.N.-backed body tasked with investigating and prosecuting crime and strengthening Guatemala’s judicial system.
The commission’s probe led to the prosecution of Guatemalan officials for corruption, including former President Otto Pérez Molina and former Vice President Roxana Baldetti. However, the government expelled CICIG in 2019. […]
Anti-corruption candidate’s surprising win
Guatemala’s 2023 general elections were held amid this fragile political climate.
[…] An increasing number of Guatemalans, including young voters, saw Arévalo and his anti-corruption platform as an alternative to establishment candidates such as former first lady Sandra Torres, who led most polls in the weeks before the election.
The election results sent shock waves through the political system. Arévalo received 11.8% of the general vote, second only to Torres’ 15.9%. Because no candidate received a majority, a runoff election was held on Aug. 20. Arévalo won handily with 58% of the vote compared with Torres’ 37%.
Arévalo is not a political neophyte. He has served as a diplomat and currently occupies a seat in Congress. He is also the son of Juan José Arévalo, the country’s first democratically elected president.
Guatemalans take to streets
After the election, political elites, including members of Torres’ National Unity of Hope party and President Alejandro Giammattei’s Vamos party, alleged – incorrectly, it turned out – that the electoral software had favored Arévalo’s candidacy. They attempted to stop the results from being made official. [Sounds all too familiar!]
More consequently, the Public Ministry, led by Attorney General Consuelo Porras, accused Arévalo’s party of using false signatures during its registration process. […]
Despite Arévalo’s resounding victory on Aug. 20, the Public Ministry continued to try to suspend his party. On Sept. 29, it took the unprecedented action of raiding the offices of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, the highest electoral authority.
Disgusted by this interference in the electoral process and fearful over the prospect of a coup, Guatemalans took to the streets. The protests that began on Oct. 2 brought the country to a standstill for more than 10 days and united the urban and rural population.
[…] For many Indigenous voters, the election interference highlighted the relationship between government corruption and their socioeconomic inequality. The central role of Indigenous communities in the protests signaled a new grassroots movement with the potential of replicating the multiracial and multiclass coalitions that had emerged during the armed conflict in the 1970s.
Key driver of migration
U.S. officials and agencies report that political corruption in Guatemala is a root cause of migration. In 2023, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended more than 200,000 Guatemalans trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
Guatemalans themselves understand all too well how kleptocracy reinforces the country’s social ills. They realize that democratic backsliding not only may prevent Arévalo from assuming the presidency, but it can also rob their communities of resources needed to strengthen health care, improve education, create jobs, reduce malnutrition and fight climate change. Without these improvements, many will continue to migrate, despite the many perils of doing so.
[…] One of the founders of the jazz genre of bebop, Charles “Yardbird” Parker, offers an interpretation of “White Christmas” that differs dramatically from Crosby’s famous rendering.
[…] Next up is the famed rendition of “My Favorite Things” by John Coltrane. As many musical fans might assume, it was not originally written as a Christmas tune […]
Much more at the link. Lot’s of music.
birgerjohanssonsays
This has no relevance to.previous comments whatsoever. I just wanted to share the weirdest anime segment possible, this being Xmas and all. https://youtu.be/cutG_O5pRdo
At a rural property an hour outside Vancouver in October, Canadian police found 2.5 million doses of fentanyl and 528 gallons of chemicals in a shipping container and a storage unit. Six months earlier, they raided a home in a cookie-cutter Vancouver subdivision packed with barrels of fentanyl-making chemicals, glassware and lab equipment.
Thousands of miles away outside Toronto, police in August found what is believed to be the largest fentanyl lab so far in Canada — hidden at a property 30 miles from the U.S. border crossing at Niagara Falls, N.Y.
U.S. authorities say they have little indication that Canadian-made fentanyl is being smuggled south in significant quantities. But at a time when record numbers of people are dying from overdoses in the United States, the spread of clandestine fentanyl labs in Canada has the potential to undermine U.S. enforcement efforts and worsen the opioid epidemic in both nations.
Investigators in Canada say the labs are producing fentanyl for domestic users and for export to Australia, New Zealand and, they assume, the United States.
[…] The Canadian labs are a curveball for U.S. authorities whose efforts to combat fentanyl are focused on the southern border with Mexico. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has installed about $800 million worth of powerful scanning and detection equipment at land border crossings since 2019. Nearly all that technology has been deployed along the U.S. southern border, where CBP confiscated nearly 27,000 pounds of fentanyl during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the most ever.
[…] The spread of fentanyl production to Canada suggests traffickers there are poised to benefit if Mexican suppliers get squeezed. The lightly-patrolled U.S.-Canada border spans more than 5,500 miles — the longest international boundary between two nations in the world — and has few physical barriers.
[…] The powerful, intensely addictive drug and other synthetic opioids claim more than 70,000 lives a year in the United States. A similar proportion of Canadians are dying of overdoses — about 7,000 annually. The two countries remain the only nations where fentanyl poses such a lethal threat.
[…] Hammer said he remains skeptical Canadian-made fentanyl will displace the pills flooding into the United States from Mexico. “We are down to 45 cents a pill on the wholesale side here in Seattle,” he said. “You have to be pretty damn competitive to beat 45 cents a pill to compete with the Mexican cartels that have entrenched themselves with the distribution network they have set up here in the Pacific Northwest.”
Still, authorities in the United States and Canada are investigating the robust trade links between the countries, routes that provide ample opportunities for smuggling. In October, the Treasury Department issued sanctions against a Vancouver company that purports to sell beverage industry supplies, alleging it was a distributor of illicit precursor chemicals and equipment and sought to obtain from China nearly 3,000 liters of chemicals used to make fentanyl, heroin and meth. The company’s owner has denied the allegations.
Drug experts have long warned that a crackdown along the U.S.-Mexico border could prompt criminal groups to seek alternative sources or begin producing fentanyl in the United States. Most of the labs encountered in the United States are what police agencies refer to as “pill press” operations, where traffickers make tablets out of fentanyl powder smuggled from Mexico.
The super labs that police are finding in Canada differ because they are synthesizing the drug — not merely pressing pills — using precursor chemicals sourced primarily from China.
Chemical companies and brokers in China supply the raw ingredients for the Canadian labs. Canadian authorities say criminal organizations behind the fentanyl labs include biker gangs and groups with links to Asia, but there are few obvious ties to Mexican cartels.
[…] In the mid-2010s, Chinese chemical companies became the main suppliers of illicit fentanyl and other synthetic drugs, selling them online and shipping directly to Canada and the United States in packages disguised as other items. In one case highlighting the illegal commerce between the three nations, a group ran a fentanyl ring from inside a Canadian prison in 2015, arranging shipments of fentanyl from China to U.S. states — leading to a string of fatal and nonfatal overdoses in New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota and Oregon.
After China began restricting fentanyl exports in 2019, chemical companies instead began shipping precursor chemicals used to make the opioid. Cartels cornered the lucrative, deadly trade by setting up clandestine labs in Mexico, smuggling finished fentanyl into the United States.
[…] In 2024, CBP officials plan to deploy the first set of next-generation scanners along the northern border for commercial vehicles entering near Buffalo and Detroit.
Anson, of the Canadian border agency, cited significant investments in handheld drug scanners and drug dogs in ports and mail centers. The agency has also created “safe sampling” lab areas where scientists can quickly and safely test chemicals. […]
Ratcliffe, who owns petrochemicals giant INEOS, is one of Britain’s richest people.
More than a year after it was put up for sale, Manchester United said Sunday that British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe had agreed to buy a minority stake in the storied Premier League club.
Ratcliffe, who owns petrochemicals giant INEOS and is one of Britain’s richest people, has secured a stake of “up to 25%” in the 20-time league champions and will invest $300 million in its Old Trafford stadium.
As part of the deal, United said Ratcliffe would take responsibility for the club’s soccer operations.
Ratcliffe will provide $200 million upon completion of the deal and a further $100 million by the end of 2024, United said. In total the deal will be worth around $1.6 billion, including the $300 million of funding.
The deal is subject to approval by the Premier League.
Ratcliffe, who was born in Failsworth, Greater Manchester, had originally bid to buy the entire majority share of around 69% held by the Glazers, the club’s American owners.
[…] The transaction will be funded by Trawlers Limited — a company wholly owned by Ratcliffe — without any debt, United said. United fans have been critical of the leveraged nature of the Glazers’ buyout that loaded debt onto the club, as well as a perceived lack of investment and the dividends taken out by the owners.
Avram Glazer and Joel Glazer, United executive co-chairmen and directors, said in the statement: “Sir Jim and INEOS bring a wealth of commercial experience as well as significant financial commitment into the club. And, through INEOS Sport, Manchester United will have access to seasoned high-performance professionals, experienced in creating and leading elite teams from both inside and outside the game.
[…] The Glazers announced last November plans to seek new investment and instructed US merchant bank Raine to oversee the process, which included the potential of a full sale.
Ratcliffe had been in competition with Qatari banker Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani to buy out the Glazers, who also own the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But after months of protracted negotiations Sheikh Jassim withdrew his bid in October to leave Ratcliffe in position to take a minority share in the club.
[…] Ratcliffe is buying into a club that has endured a decade of decline on the field since the retirement of former manager Alex Ferguson in 2013. It has not won the title since.
Ongoing uncertainty over the ownership led to fan protests outside the club’s Old Trafford stadium, while chants of “Glazers out” have been regularly heard during games.
While Ratcliffe was long seen by fans as a popular potential owner, his minority investment means the Glazers remain in place, despite years of fan campaigns to drive them out.
The late tycoon Malcolm Glazer bought United in 2005 for 790 million pounds (then about $1.4 billion) amid a backlash from supporters.
[…] Initially, Ratcliffe’s INEOS had said it was aiming for “a modern, progressive, fan-centered approach to ownership.”
It also said it was focused on United winning the Champions League for the first time since 2008 and making it the “number one club in the world once again.”
Ratcliffe is said to be worth $15.1 billion and tried to buy Premier League club Chelsea last year.
He already owns French club Nice, cycling franchise Team INEOS, is one-third shareholder of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One team and competes in the America’s Cup with sailing team INEOS Britannia.
European intelligence suggests that Russia may launch an attack on Europe during the winter of 2024-2025 if the United States finds itself “without a leader” following the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the German tabloid Bild reported on Dec. 23, citing an anonymous European intelligence source…
whheydtsays
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #430…
That begs the question: What would the Russians attack Europe with? WW2 equipment? That’s most of what they’ve got left.
(lengthy human interest intro that does not get to the vital details – who, what, where, when, why – for 12 paragraphs. Did this writer ever attend journalism school?)
Lewin has been working for a decade to develop an easy-to-use, needle-free solution to all those problems with a drug called Varespladib.
What makes Varespladib promising is that it blocks phospholipase-A2, a highly toxic protein that is present in 95% of all snake venoms and plays a direct role in life-threatening tissue destruction, catastrophic bleeding, paralysis and respiratory failure. Proponents say the small synthetic molecule has the potential to stop or reverse neurological damage, as well as restore normal blood-clotting ability when administered immediately after envenoming.
Drug trials are being conducted by Ophirex Inc. — a public benefit corporation that Lewin founded with musician and entrepreneur Jerry Harrison in Corte Madera, Calif…
Former President Donald Trump has a few gripes with the Lincoln Project, a political advocacy group composed of Republicans who oppose Trump’s leadership. A recent complaint: that the group is showing altered footage of him committing gaffes.
“The perverts and losers at the failed and once disbanded Lincoln Project, and others, are using A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) in their Fake television commercials in order to make me look as bad and pathetic as Crooked Joe Biden,” Trump posted Dec. 4 on Truth Social…
In the Lincoln Project’s Dec. 4 video, titled “Feeble,” a narrator addresses Trump directly with a taunt. “Hey, Donald,” the female voice says. “We notice something. More and more people are saying it. You’re weak. You seem unsteady. You need help getting around.” The video flashes through scenes showing Trump tripping over his words, gesturing, misspeaking and climbing steps to a plane with something white stuck to his shoe.
Are these clips the work of AI? We reviewed them and found the Trump clips are legitimate — and not generated using AI. We reached out to the Trump campaign but did not hear back…
Meteorological phenomena could be behind the parting of the Red Sea, which allowed Moses to help the Israelites escape the Egyptians, a study suggests…
Next they will launch an in-depth study of how Jack could really have climbed that beanstalk.
The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) announced today that it will discontinue its development of the Darling 58 American chestnut due to significant performance limitations that, from TACF’s perspective, make it unsuitable as a restoration tree. Likewise, TACF is also withdrawing its support for several pending regulatory petitions that would authorize distribution of transgenic Darling trees outside permitted research plots…
“Within the past few weeks, academic colleagues brought to our attention their newest findings suggesting a significant identity error in the propagation materials supplied to TACF. Independent confirmation now shows all pollen and trees used for this research was derived not from Darling 58, but from a different prototype, one which contains a deletion in a known gene,” says Pitt. “That deletion, along with the discouraging field performance collectively renders these trees, in TACF’s opinion, unsuitable as the basis for species restoration. Fortunately, we have newer and better-performing trees ready to test.” …
[…] The most important electoral data out there right now isn’t noisy and unreliable polls, it’s our ongoing overperformance in elections of all kinds across the US since Dobbs. 2022 taught us centering our understanding of US politics solely on polls is a risky affair – more need to learn that lesson
The economy is ending 2023 on a remarkably strong note, giving Biden a very sturdy foundation for his re-election next year
Trump’s Olympian levels of baggage and escalating extremism are being overly discounted in the 2024 chatter. The country has rejected MAGA in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023, and is unlikely to vote for the most extreme and dangerous version of MAGA Trump is now
2024 is still shaping up to be a good year for us.
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Ohio Supreme court rejects plea to enforce six week ban
Weeks after Ohio overwhelmingly voted to enshrine a right to abortion in the state Constitution, abortion rights have secured another important win: On Friday, the state Supreme Court dismissed a demand from the state to be able to enforce its six-week ban, which has been blocked by an injunction from a lower court in Hamilton County since September 2022. Explaining their decision to dismiss the state’s appeal, the state Supreme Court justices cited “a change in the law,” apparently referring to the successful abortion rights ballot measure, Issue 1.
Once again abortion proves to be a losing battle for the GOP, its the hill they chose to die on, and die they shall (Politically, if I wasn’t being clear).
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[…] conservatives are falling farther behind in terms of cultural and economic power. Contrary to the right-wing insistence that “woke goes broke,” the biggest movie of the year was Barbie, a stridently and subversively feminist juggernaut that raked in over $1.36 billion at the global box office. Oppenheimer, a nuanced meditation on the creation and use of the American nuclear bomb, followed closely behind with just under $1 billion in global ticket sales and broke box office records for a biopic. Disney’s live-action version of The Little Mermaid, which endured heavily racist conservative attacks for featuring a Black lead, hauled in $569 million globally and broke streaming records on streaming service Disney
A Positive, Upbeat End to 2023 – Dow in record territory. Inflation running below the Fed target rate. Interest rates coming down next year. GDP growth 4.9% last quarter, looking close to 3% for this one. Best job market since the 1960s. The lowest uninsured rate in history. Crime has fallen across the US this year, rents are coming down too. Consumer sentiment is spiking. Wage growth, prime age worker participation rate and new business formation are all in historically elevated territory. Best recovery in the G7. US setting records for domestic oil and renewable production. $130b in student debt forgiven. The good news just keeps coming.
An orange tabby cat named Taters stars in the first video transmitted by laser from deep space, stealing the show as he chases a red laser light.
The 15-second video was beamed to Earth from NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, 19 million miles (30 million kilometers) away. It took less than two minutes for the ultra high-definition video to reach Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, sent at the test system’s maximum rate of 267 megabits per second.
The video was loaded into Psyche’s laser communication experiment before the spacecraft blasted off to a rare metal asteroid in October. The mission team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, decided to feature an employee’s 3-year-old playful kitty.
The video was streamed to Earth on Dec. 11 and released by NASA this week. Despite the vast distance, the test relayed the video faster than most broadband internet connections here on Earth, said the project’s Ryan Rogalin.
NASA wants to improve communications from deep space, especially as astronauts gear up to return to the moon with an eye toward Mars. The laser demo is meant to transmit data at rates up to 100 times greater than the radio systems currently used by spacecraft far from Earth.
More test transmissions are planned as Psyche heads toward the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. But Taters won’t be making anymore appearances, according to JPL.
Joby Harris, an art director in JPL’s DesignLab, couldn’t be prouder, but doesn’t want his cat’s newfound celebrity to go to his head.
“I’m celebrating his spotlight with him, but making sure he keeps his paws on the carpet,” Harris said in an email Tuesday.
birgerjohanssonsays
Reginald Selkirk @ 434
A non-miraculous explanation of a memorable event would be a neat explanation for something that was – much later – joined to the corpus of Jewish myrhology.
A decade ago Science (or Nature?) had an article about a phenomenon outside the Nile delta near the branch that was called Tanis in antiquity.
Due to persistent wind conditions a big bay at the Tanis delta got nearly drained of water for hours.
If the section of the Old Testament was referring to “the sea of reeds” this location would be a fit for an observed event attributed to supernatural agency that later got inserted in the invented narrative of Moses.
So we have a plausible natural event living on in oral tradition + priests in the myth-making business operating in the early iron age.
At least this myth has a fragment of real background, unlike the narrative of the star of Betlehem *.
The way I see it, anything that de-mystifies the background of myths is a victory for a secular worldview.
*See Aaron Adair’s book about possible sources for the nativity myth.
KGsays
birgerjohansson@440,
At least this myth has a fragment of real background, unlike the narrative of the star of Betlehem
No: there’s actually no evidence the Israelites were ever in Egypt, despite the best efforts of generations of believing archeologists. The Israelites appear to have differentiated from other inhabitants of Canaan in situ, around 1200 BCE, which is around the time the Exodus is usually set by those who take the myth for history. See Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. The oldest parts of the Tanakh (the Jewish scriptures) date from no earlier than the 700s BCE. Finkelstein is one of Israel’s most eminant archeologists and as it happens, an observant Jew.
As for the Nativity myths (there are two completely incompatible ones in the gospels of Matthew and Luke), they are obvious retcons, to place Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem (where according to Jewish beliefs of the time, the Messiah was to be born) despite the fact that he was a native of Galilee. The fact that Christian writers went to the trouble of inventing these stories is actually good evidence for a historical Jesus – if he’d been wholly invented, there would be no reason at all to place his early life in Galilee.
birgerjohanssonsays
KG @ 441
We are not in disagreement.
I am merely pointing out a small fragment of the spurious “Egyptian captivity” narrative that may have been inspired by natural phenomena, just as earhquakes mentioned in the NT are inspired by real earthquakes.
It is now increasingly accepted that the Jews are descended from a population in the highlands that expanded after the bronze age civilizational collapse brought down the city states among the coast.
The material culture in this highland population was very poor and was initially dominated by a bedouin-style life rather than agriculture-dominated.
There was of course a constant flow of people West and East, to and from Egypt. But apart of the temporary polity in the Nile delta at the end of the Middle Kingdom there is no sign of massive migration before the Sea People arrived.
Re; KG @ #441…
Two items about the standard nativity story tend to cause me to go, “WTF?” The first one is the bit about shepherds staying out in the fields at night keeping an eye on the sheep. That was only done in lambing season, which is in the spring, so the mid-winter dating is an obvious cover to celebrate when everyone else is celebrating some sort of Solstice event. The other is the great pains made to give Joseph’s genealogy. Since the myth is that Jesus isn’t his son, what does his genealogy matter? What should matter would be Mary’s genealogy, if one is needed.
A nuclear scientist buys a suspect seal impression in the flea market. It’s real, study finds: An official’s smaller, cruder copy of the roaring lion seal of Jeroboam II, king of ancient Israel…
Israeli archaeologists have found a huge ditch carved into the rock that may have split ancient Jerusalem in two 3,000 years ago, with the elites on one side and the rest on the other. Why is another question…
Reginald Selkirksays
@440,441,444 Nativity narrative
The detail that always makes me laugh is that the magi spotted the star in the East, and so traveled West. (Matt 2)
The largest nuclear-powered icebreaker in Russia, the Sevmorput, has caught fire at the dock in Murmansk in northern Russia.
A smaller nuclear-powered icebreaker, the Sibir, was docked alongside it and was pulled away by tugs. [Image at the link]
Russia says nothing to see here:
MOSCOW — Russia’s emergencies ministry said a fire broke out on a nuclear-powered container ship and icebreaker in the northern port of Murmansk but was quickly extinguished.
The ministry said in statements on Telegram that the fire occurred late Sunday in a cabin of the Sevmorput vessel and spread to about 30 square meters (300 square feet). The fire was put out about an hour after the initial report and there were no injuries, it added. The statement did not disclose what caused the fire or how close it was to the ship’s reactor.
The 260-meter (830-foot) Sevmorput is the only nuclear cargo ship in service.
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[…] “Alexey Navalny has been found in colony IK-3 in Kharp, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. It is one of the furthest northern prison colonies in Siberia. […] [According to his lawyers, who saw him today, Navalny is “fine.”]
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Russian propagandist Anton Krasovsky, who called for drowning of Ukrainian children on RT, has been hospitalized with suspicion of poisoning. It is yet to be confirmed whether it was the work of Ukrainian military intelligence.
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Posted by Zelenskyy:
Ukrainian Christmas Eve during wartime: our warriors shot down not only about 30 “Shahed” drones and several missiles, but also two more Russian “Su” aircraft.
Russian terrorists lost five aircraft in a week. This Christmas sets the right mood for the entire year ahead—the mood of our capabilities. Capabilities in negotiations with partners. Capabilities in bolstering our sky shield. Capabilities in defending our homeland from Russian terrorists.
The stronger our air defense, the fewer Russian fiends will be in our skies and on our land.
I thank all of our warriors for their precision and strength! I appreciate all those who secure our country’s defense both on Christmas and on weekdays, who withstand enemy attacks and show steadfastness wherever they are—in the East and South or on our country’s borders, those in battle and in positions, those who save and heal people. All our emergency services. Everyone who helps. I am thankful to each and every one of you!
Merry Christmas, dear Ukrainians! May this bright time make the entire next year brighter for us.
[More tweets regarding the Su aircraft shot down, with images]
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A museum piece vs. a drone. [video at the link. Maxim gun 1896 vs Drone 2023. Video by 30th Brigade of Ukraine.
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This video shows two Russians running down a road with large sacks. A drone hits and kills one of them. The other guy sits on his sack and just waits for a second drone to come and take him too. [JFC]
Shipping firm Maersk says that it’s preparing to allow vessels to resume sailing through the Red Sea, thanks to the start of a U.S.-led multinational naval operation to protect shipping from attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Houthi attacks have led to a major disruption of shipping through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, one of the most important arteries for trade in oil, natural gas, grain and consumer goods between Europe and Asia.
Maersk said in a statement Sunday that “we have received confirmation that the previously announced multi-national security initiative Operation Prosperity Guardian (OPG) has now been set up and deployed to allow maritime commerce to pass through the Red Sea-Gulf of Aden and once again return to using the Suez Canal as a gateway between Asia and Europe. ”
The company said it was working on plans for the first vessels to make the journey “and for this to happen as soon as operationally possible.”
The Houthis are Iranian-backed rebels who seized Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in 2014, launching a grinding war against a Saudi-led coalition seeking to restore the government. The Houthis have sporadically targeted ships in the region, but the attacks have increased since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
The rebels have threatened to attack any vessel they believe is either going to or coming from Israel. That has escalated to apparently any vessel, with container ships and oil tankers flagged to countries like Norway and Liberia being attacked or drawing missile fire.
Major shipping companies include Maersk have been avoiding the Red Sea and sending their ships around Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. That added what analysts say could be a week to two weeks of voyages. The disruption also hiked fuel and insurance costs.
On Saturday, a U.S. warship shot down four incoming drones originating from Houthi-controlled areas, and a Norwegian-flagged chemicals and oil tanker reported a near miss of an attack drone, while an India-flagged tanker was hit with no injuries reported., the U.S. Central Command said Sunday on X, formerly Twitter. The incidents represented the 14th and 15th attacks on commercial shipping by the Houthis since Oct. 17.
Announcing the nominees for the 2023 Golden Dukes awards.
[…] the Golden Dukes are about so much more than your average, shameless public corruption. TPM lives to celebrate mendacity and we raise our glasses to the bad, salacious and crazy in all of its most foolish, and also carnal, forms. Whether you’re a congresswoman lying about vapin’ and gropin’ in a public theater or a governor so desperate to find your MAGAland footing you pull out a poop map during a debate — we’re here to celebrate you.
Last week, we asked you to submit nominations for the worst offenders in seven different categories. TPM readers, you delivered. So much so that we had to spend hours winnowing down the list.
Now we need your help again. Help us crown 2023’s most odious weasels by voting below. May the best bigot win! […]
John Moralessays
Reginald @447, perhaps re-read the passage. They followed the star in the direction it moved.
7Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star appeared; 8and he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.” 9When they had heard the king they went their way; and lo, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was.
(Matthew 2:7–9 RSV)
KGsays
birgerjohansson@442,
OK, thanks. Quasi-naturalistic “explanations” of non-events irritate me, but I see I misunderstood you. Oddly, this solstice I haven’t spotted any of the usual pseudo-astronomical “What was the Star of Bethlehem?” pieces.
birgerjohanssonsays
KG @ 455 If you want a truly comprehensive debunking of the various explanations to the star of Betlehem, Aaron Adair has written a book that is likely to be the final word on the topic.
Also, that century the Romams circulated a book by Virgil that had Aeneas follow a star (Venus) to the site of future Rome. The guy who wrote down the gospel got his inspiration from a book Virgil himself was not very fond of.
The US military carried out airstrikes on three facilities used by the Iraq-based Kataib Hezbollah and “affiliated groups” on Monday night after an attack injured three US troops, leaving one in critical condition, the White House said.
A US Central Command statement said early assessments indicated that the US airstrikes, ordered by President Joe Biden, “likely killed a number of Kataib Hezbollah militants.”
The Iranian-backed militant group earlier claimed credit for using a one-way attack drone to target the US forces on Erbil Air Base on Monday morning, the White House said…
Ukraine claimed on Tuesday to have carried out an airstrike in Crimea that destroyed a Russian Navy tank landing ship in what would be, if confirmed, the third instance of major losses of Russian military hardware in less than a week.
In a post on Telegram, Ukrainian Air Force commander Mykola Oleshchuk thanked personnel involved in “the destruction of the Novocherkask large landing ship” while it was in the port of Feodosia in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014…
KGsays
birgerjohansson@456,
Nah – I don’t need a debunking of a fictional episode. And I rather doubt the “following a star” trope was original with Virgil any more than with “Matthew”: similarity does not necessarily imply transmission.
birgerjohanssonsays
KG 460.
Yes, as we have seen with the flood narrative, stories get recycled again and again.
Criminal prosecutors may soon get to see over 900 documents pertaining to the alleged theft of a diary belonging to President Joe Biden’s daughter after a judge rejected the conservative group Project Veritas’ First Amendment claim.
Attorney Jeffrey Lichtman said on behalf of the nonprofit Monday that attorneys are considering appealing last Thursday’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres in Manhattan. In the written decision, the judge said the documents can be given to investigators by Jan. 5.
The documents were produced from raids that were authorized in November 2021. Electronic devices were also seized from the residences of three members of Project Veritas, including two mobile phones from the home of James O’Keefe, the group’s since-fired founder.
[…] In written arguments, lawyers for Project Veritas and O’Keefe said the government’s investigation “seems undertaken not to vindicate any real interests of justice, but rather to stifle the press from investigating the President’s family.”
[…] The judge rejected the First Amendment arguments, saying in the ruling that they were “inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent.” She also noted that Project Veritas could not claim it was protecting the identity of a confidential source from public disclosure after two individuals publicly pleaded guilty in the case.
She was referencing the August 2022 guilty pleas of Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander to conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property. Both await sentencing.
The pleas came two years after Harris and Kurlander — two Florida residents who are not employed by Project Veritas — discovered that Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter, had stored items including a diary at a friend’s Delray Beach, Florida, house.
They said they initially hoped to sell some of the stolen property to then-President Donald Trump’s campaign, but a representative turned them down and told them to take the material to the FBI, prosecutors say.
Eventually, Project Veritas paid the pair $20,000 apiece to deliver the diary containing “highly personal entries,” a digital storage card with private family photos, tax documents, clothes and luggage to New York, prosecutors said.
[…] Two weeks ago, Hannah Giles, chief executive of Project Veritas, quit her job, saying in a social media post she had “stepped into an unsalvageable mess — one wrought with strong evidence of past illegality and post financial improprieties.” She said she’d reported what she found to “appropriate law enforcement agencies.”
Lichtman said in an email on behalf of Project Veritas and the people whose residences were raided: “As for the continued investigation, the government isn’t seeking any prison time for either defendant who claims to have stolen the Ashley Biden diary, which speaks volumes in our minds.”
Posted by readers of the article:
So theives targeted the stored personal belongings of someone famous, and took personal papers, digital files, clothing, and luggage, all which were received and paid for by Project Veritas. That’s not news gathering, that is receiving stolen goods.
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I’m pretty sure that Ms. Giles ought to have suspected “an unsalvageable mess — one wrought with strong evidence of past illegality and post financial improprieties.” before she took the gig.
With published reports on that organization’s activities many of us could have made that call.
“People love to sound sophisticated and brag about European art and architecture. I’ve seen America’s and I’ve seen what they’ve got.
Theirs can’t touch ours.”
To illustrate his point, Kelly added a picture of the Statue of Liberty. I had assumed that most Americans knew America’s most iconic symbol was not an American creation. I guess I was wrong.
The Statue, of course, is a gift from the French. It was the brainchild of Frenchman Édouard René Lefèbvrede de Laboulaye. Designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. Its metal framework was built by Gustave Eiffel (the tower guy). Perhaps Kelly was referring to the base, which was built in America.
Less well known — and obviously a completely blank page to Kelly — is that Laboulaye was President of the French Anti-Slavery Society. He conceived of the work as a salute to the Union victory in the Civil War and the subsequent emancipation of American slaves. Hence “liberty”.
Bearing that in mind, let us consider Kelly’s contention that European art and architecture “can’t touch ours”. Is there an empirical metric that could put the debate to rest? Of course not.
The aesthetic quality of art and architecture is in the eye of the beholder. If someone says that the St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York is “better” than St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, they are entitled to their opinion.
Is the White House a superior building to Versailles? I suppose some might argue so.
I cannot think of an American statue with the reputation and quality of Michelangelo’s David, but that might be due to my lack of knowledge of American statues.
Does America have a school of art that beats the Impressionists, the Dutch masters, or Renaissance Art? Maybe.
More to the point, why do we need to have a winner? I do not think of art and architecture as being a competition. Every European country has fabulous art and architecture. […]
If Kelly thinks there has to be a winner — and that the victor is America, I wonder which American art and architecture he would feature as examples of the New World’s superiority?
Kelly is firm in his position. When Twitter added a note to his tweet outlining the conception and creation of the Statue, Kelly did not acknowledge his error. Instead, he got defensive. And aimed venom at Elon Musk (who is discovering that when you have conservative friends, you automatically acquire enemies.) He retweeted his foolishness with a defiant message.
“I thought @elonmusk taking over would let freedom ring on this site. Guess I was wrong.
Sorry, but these colors don’t run.”
Not to worry, if Kelly wants to let his stupidity run free, he can always post on Truth Social — if that is still in business.
Jesse Kelly describes himself as “Host of the nationally syndicated Jesse Kelly Show. Host of ‘I’m Right’ on The First. Anti-Communist. World Famous Author.” I will have to him at his word that he is famous because I have never heard of him. I am familiar with conservative media’s A-team, so I assume he is a minor leaguer. However, he does have 685K followers on Twitter — so some people must be paying attention. And let us note that 2.9K have liked his statue tweet.
Kelly will also be more famous tomorrow than yesterday — although his new name recognition will not do much to promote his intellectual bona fides. But IQ is just a number. MAGAs have short attention spans. And another conservative will soon offer something so stunningly stupid Jesse’s dumbassery will be forgotten.
Ukraine’s Armed Forces successfully neutralized 28 out of 31 Shahed drones and two missiles during a Russian attack on Dec. 25, with two Russian military aircraft eliminated over the past 24 hours.
the Magi came from the east, out of Persia or southern Arabia, towards Jerusalem […] Celestial bodies move from east to west (due to the earth’s rotation) […] the Magi “saw his star in the east,” suggests they saw the star where they were in Babylon […] Did they then follow this object for 800 miles, heading west towards Jerusalem, travelling at night? The Bible does not say.
[…]
once they got to Jerusalem, this “star” had seemingly disappeared. It was Herod who instructed them to go to Bethlehem, which is a village about five miles south of Jerusalem. […] the “star” […] reappeared and led them from Jerusalem SOUTH to Bethlehem where it STOPPED, directly over the place where the child was.
tomhsays
Religion Clause / Objective coverage of church-state and religious liberty developments, with extensive links to primary sources.
Each year in December, I attempt to pick the most important church-state and religious liberty developments of the past year. My choices are based on the importance of the pick to law or policy, regardless of whether the development has garnered significant media attention. With each pick, I link to one of numerous postings on the topic. The selection of top stories obviously involves a good deal of subjective judgment. Here is a somewhat different list of top stories and newsmakers from the Religion News Association, the professional association of religion journalists… Here are my Top Ten picks:
1. Antisemitism spikes in U.S. as President releases National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.
2. Supreme Court in 303 Creative v. Elenis says free speech protection allows website designer to refuse to create sites for same-sex weddings in violation of her religious beliefs.
3. State legislatures restrict gender dysphoria treatment for minors and transgender women’s participation in competitive sports, while teachers sue over school policies requiring them to use students’ preferred pronouns or conceal students’ social transitions from parents.
4. Court challenges to state abortion bans continue. Plaintiffs claim bans violate state constitutions or violate their religious beliefs regarding abortion.
5. Supreme Court grants review of FDA rules that permit mail distribution of abortion pill.
6. Suits over past denials of religious exemptions from COVID vaccine mandates continue to play out in the courts.
7. Federal agencies say Title VI prohibits certain forms of antisemitic, Islamophobic, and related forms of discrimination in federally funded programs and activities, even though Title VI does not specifically ban religious discrimination.
8. California’s targeting of caste discrimination challenged by Hindu Americans.
9. Oklahoma approves state-funded online Catholic charter school. State AG sues.
10. 9th Circuit allows fraud claim against LDS Church over representations about use of tithed funds to proceed. Plaintiff is prominent former member who had tithed over $2.6 million.
The comments from the Russian opposition leader were written with a heavy dose of humor, and seemed intended to assuage concerns among allies after his three-week disappearance.
Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, published a letter on Tuesday describing an arduous transfer to his new penal colony in the Arctic, the first time his supporters had heard from him in three weeks.
Mr. Navalny’s comments, posted on his social network accounts and written with a heavy dose of irony and humor, highlighted his good spirits and seemed intended to assuage concerns among allies who had grown anxious about his health and status since his sudden disappearance from the public eye on Dec. 5.
“I am your new Father Frost,” Mr. Navalny wrote, referring to the Russian version of Santa Claus. “I have a sheepskin coat, a hat with earflaps; I should get felt boots soon, and I have grown a beard during the 20-day transit.”
But, he added, “The main thing is that I now live above the Arctic Circle.”
Mr. Navalny, 47, is a longtime antagonist of President Vladimir V. Putin who has been subject to increasingly harsh punishment over the past year. His transfer to one of Russia’s high-security “special regime” penal colonies had been expected since September, when he lost an appeal against the 19-year sentence he is serving.
But his lawyers and allies were not notified in advance that he would be moved, raising fears and speculations about his health after legal team was unable to contact him. His ability to pass a letter from a new prison suggested that Mr. Navalny would most likely remain a fixture in Russia’s public life as the country nears another presidential election that Mr. Putin is poised to win amid little genuine competition.
Mr. Navalny has been in custody since his detention in January 2021 at a Moscow airport, where he had arrived after spending months in Germany recovering from poisoning by a nerve agent. Mr. Navalny and Western governments have accused the Kremlin of the poisoning, a charge that Russian officials have denied.
A former site of a Gulag labor camp, Mr. Navalny’s new snow-swept penal colony, in the town of Kharp, is one of the most remote in Russia. Known as the “Polar Wolf” colony, it is surrounded by tundra and polar mountains. Freezing dark winters give way to brisk summers with clouds of mosquitoes. Daylight is scarce, a fact he alluded to in his letter Tuesday.
“I don’t say ‘Ho-ho-ho,’ but I do say ‘Oh-oh-oh’ when I look out of the window,” Mr. Navalny said, “where I can see it’s night, then evening, then night again.”
Mr. Navalny said that he had not seen much of his new Arctic permafrost surroundings yet, but that he had noticed that prison guards there were different than their colleagues in central Russia. Wearing warm mittens and felt boots, they carried machine guns and were aided by “those very beautiful fluffy shepherd dogs,” he said.
[…] A trip to Kharp from Moscow takes more than 40 hours on a train, which departs every second day. But Mr. Navalny described a more complicated 20-day journey through the Russian prison system.
He went to Moscow from his penal colony in the nearby Vladimir Region, then to Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains and then through Kirov up north to Vorkuta before finally arriving in Kharp on Saturday, according to his letter.
“I did not expect anyone would find me here until mid-January,” he said.
“I was very surprised then when yesterday, the cell’s doors were opened with the words: ‘There is a lawyer for you.’”
A blizzard warning is in effect through 5 a.m. Mountain time for 600,000 people across five states, hitting South Dakota and Nebraska the hardest.
Seven million people were under winter weather alerts Tuesday as the Plains and parts of the Midwest experience blizzard conditions that have already led to dozens of weather-related incidents over the Christmas holiday.
The “significant” winter storm with heavy snow, blizzard conditions and “potentially damaging ice” will last in the north-central part of the country through Wednesday, the National Weather Service said.
Snow was falling Tuesday at a rate of an inch an hour at times across portions of northeast Colorado, western South Dakota, western Nebraska and northwest Kansas.
The past 48 hours have already seen Douglas Pass, Colorado, pick up 13 inches of snow; Lander, Wyoming, 11.4 inches; Columbus, Nebraska, 8 inches; and the Denver metro area, 1 to 3 inches. […]
Photos show jackknifed semitrucks and tractor-trailers that veered off roads.
Airline travel:
[…] Over Christmas weekend, 300 Southwest Airlines flights were canceled Sunday because of thick fog at Midway Airport, the airlines’ fourth-largest operation base, NBC Chicago reported. More than 100 additional flights were canceled on Christmas Day, but the airline said its operations were “stable” and it hoped for a “full recovery” for the post-holiday rush that kicks off Tuesday.
So far Tuesday, more than 1,700 flights have been delayed within, to or out of the United States, and 50 were canceled, according to FlightAware data. […]
Dense fog is also blanketing the Northeast, with 37 million under dense fog advisories Tuesday morning from eastern Pennsylvania to southern Maine, with low visibility threatening airport travel delays and dangerous driving conditions in New York, Hartford, Connecticut, and Boston.
Police said Tuesday they are investigating incidents directed at Colorado Supreme Court justices and providing extra patrols around their homes in Denver following the court’s decision to remove former President Donald Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot.
[…] The department “is currently investigating incidents directed at Colorado Supreme Court justices and will continue working with our local, state and federal law enforcement partners to thoroughly investigate any reports of threats or harassment,” the email said.
Officers responded to the home of one justice on Thursday evening, but police said it appeared to be a “hoax report.” That case is also still being investigated police said.
The FBI said it is working with local law enforcement on the matter.
“We will vigorously pursue investigations of any threat or use of violence committed by someone who uses extremist views to justify their actions regardless of motivation,” a spokesperson for the Denver’s FBI office, Vikki Migoya, said in a statement.
In a 4-3 decision last week, Colorado’s highest court overturned a ruling from a district court judge who found that Trump incited an insurrection for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but had said he could not be barred from the ballot because it was unclear that U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause was intended to cover the presidency.
The state’s highest court didn’t agree, siding with attorneys for six Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters who argued that it was nonsensical to imagine that the framers of the amendment, fearful of former confederates returning to power, would bar them from low-level offices but not the highest one in the land.
The court stayed its decision until Jan. 4, or until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the case. Colorado officials say the issue must be settled by Jan. 5, the deadline for the state to print its presidential primary ballots.
[…] As Reilly [Ryan Reilly, a reporter for NBC News] noted, “The threats fit into a predictable and familiar pattern, seen time and time again after legal developments against Trump.” And in reality the underlying threat of violence to punish Trump critics and political opponents is now a routine method associated with Trump’s movement, and has been since the outset of his campaign. But the threats have never been limited to reactions to Trump’s legal setbacks. They have been directed toward anyone who is understood by Trump’s vigilante-inclined followers as working against his interests, including election workers, federal employees, and ordinary citizens—in practice, not just people perceived as presenting obstacles to Trump’s policies but also the people and groups ostensibly targeted by those policies. All have proved fair game for Trump’s terroristic-minded supporters.
Trump clearly revels in these types of threats because they feed an atmosphere of fear and menace he seeks to cultivate among his base of supporters. Yousef Odette, writing for NPR, explains that the reasons Trump’s voters gravitate to such violent invective is that they have been conditioned by Trump and right-wing media to exist in a near-constant state of defensiveness, bordering on paranoia:
“Each incident, each indictment of former President Trump, every negative development that’s related to him, every time even something happens with President Biden or the Democratic Party, where people think that the Bidens have gotten away with it, has contributed to this environment [where his supporters think] that the current government is out to get supporters of Trump,” said Katherine Keneally, who heads threat analysis and prevention at the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue-U.S., which monitors the threat landscape online.
For Trump’s supporters, any attack or criticism of Trump now implicitly equates to an attack on themselves. As Sen. Mitt Romney observed in a recent book describing (in part) what prompted his retirement, the pervasive fear of Trump’s violent supporters is one of the major reasons Republicans refused to vote to impeach him after the attacks of Jan. 6. As MSNBC’s Steve Benen, commenting on this revelation, noted, “In a healthy society with a stable political system, elected officials don’t cast votes out of fear that their families might be killed.”
There is no real dispute that Trump knows what he is doing. His rhetoric since losing the 2020 election has grown exponentially more violent, even as the most visible perpetrators inspired by that rhetoric have recieved (sometimes lengthy) prison sentences. Violence and the threat of violence to achieve his ends are now the most prominent feature to his entire political strategy, as Trump himself has acknowledged. The Republican Party that sustains him has predictably remained silent, with many Republicans (such as Fl. Gov. Ron DeSantis) mimicking Trump’s rhetoric toward groups Trump has demonized. […] the overwhelming majority of ordinary Republican voters have likewise remained silent. […] And the reason for this is that the violence is not directed at them. And as long as that remains the dynamic, they seem to be perfectly fine with it.
So a question that the rest of Americans need to think long and hard about, assuming Trump is afforded an opportunity to once again attain the presidency, is whether they are prepared to accept the normalization of violence that will come with it. Because unlike Trump’s first term, should he be reelected, these tactics will not only be legitimized and validated in his and his associates’ eyes, but, by every indication they will be formally institutionalized throughout the government, most specifically in the federal agencies that make up the executive branch.
[…] As Kayyam [Juliette Kayyem, formerly assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs for the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, and writer for The Atlantic] notes, it is fairly clear that what Trump intends is a sort of police-state-by-intimidation, one in which law enforcement (and perhaps the judiciary), fearful or out of sheer self-interest, looks the other way while Trump’s most thuggish supporters proceed to threaten and intimidate his opponents:
Trump’s bullying of military leaders, journalists, and judges was never merely the ranting of an attention seeker, and that behavior—backed by the credible threat of violence from radicalized supporters—will likely become even more central to his governing style. “The extremism won’t be some side group,” Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard professor who studies political violence, told me. “It won’t be like a terror group against the state. The conditions will be different. It will be embedded into state institutions, and into the orientation of the state against perceived opponents.”
[…] Obviously, the best way to avoid this unpleasant future is to soundly defeat Trump at the polls in November. As Trump’s sycophantic party consolidates around him next year, the stark choice that Americans will be making should become self-evident. Barring any third-party sabotage, the fact that President Biden is polling fairly evenly with Trump at this stage actually (and contrary to much handwringing by the traditional media) bodes well for him, as long as Democrats work to find their communities and turn out their vote in mass. As the election approaches Trump’s supporters—and Trump himself—promise to become even more radicalized and noxious than they are right now. If nothing else, that fact alone should forcefully remind Americans that they don’t want to the rest of their lives determined according to the whims of degenerate Brownshirts.
The Trump years have been a boon for meatheads, and there may be no bigger meathead than podcast host and dude who probably doesn’t re-rack his weights Joe Rogan.
Rogan has a habit of confidently stating that the Left is doing something stupid or insane, which he read about on Twitter or heard some other wingnut jackhole like Tim Pool yammering about on his own podcast or just made up in his own we-guess-you’d-call-it-technically-a-brain. Then he gets fact-checked, discovers he’s wrong, and shrugs because Spotify does not pay him ungodly amounts of money to get it right, it pays him ungodly amounts of money to make all the other meatheads who listen to him feel smugly superior about themselves.
Thus did he take to the airwaves one day recently and spend a few minutes giggling with his guest, MMA fighter Bo Nickal, about how Joe Biden is a senile imbecile who claimed that America lost the Revolutionary War because “they didn’t have enough airports.” Like so: [video at the link]
So after Rogan and Nickal spend a minute giggling over old demented Joe Biden being one Jell-o pudding pop away from a permanent seat in the day room of the nursing home, Rogan’s producer manages to explain to him that Biden was actually making fun of something Donald Trump said in a speech a few years ago:
The two men continued to denigrate Biden and defend Trump for several minutes before one of Rogan’s producers found the video in question, in which Biden says of Trump, “The same ‘stable genius’ said the biggest problem we had during the Revolutionary War is we didn’t have enough airports!”
The producer played the clip of Biden, who was clearly mockingly referring to Trump as the “stable genius” because Trump called himself that once, and Rogan and Nickal snickered, until Rogan’s producer told him that the clip wasn’t fake “but he was referencing Trump saying that.” Then he played the clip of Trump saying that:
“Our army manned the airp … it ranned … the ramparts. It took over the airports. It did everything it had to do.”
Trump was clearly reading off a teleprompter, stumbled over something, and then the miasma of diseased horse liver and insecticide that passes for his mind sent a signal to his mouth to cover it up by confidently proclaiming that seizing airports was a strategic victory for the Continental Army.
If you dig up Fox News clips from that day, you’ll probably find some Trump lickspittle trying to claim that in fact the British had very primitive airports salted throughout the colonies. Only instead of terminals they had barns, and instead of airplanes they had horses, but still, Mr. Trump was obviously correct!
Rogan and Nickal, being intellectually honest, graciously conceded their mistake. Ha ha, just kidding, they continued to be jackasses about it:
ROGAN: So he fucked up.
NICKAL: Yeah he did, but I feel like you can tell that it, like, sounds a little different, he’s like, you could tell he messed up his words but, yeah, I don’t know …That’s the thing about media these days. You gotta look into it.
Imagine if these two shitwits had “looked into it” before they started taping! But sure, blame “the media” because you couldn’t take five seconds to tell an intern to look up a fucking video clip that’s probably all over YouTube.
So to sum up: When Joe Biden says something about airports in the Revolutionary War, he is clearly in the grips of a senility that should disqualify him from office. When Donald Trump says something about airports in the Revolutionary War, he simply misspoke and besides, it’s all the media’s fault somehow.
Rogan has done this stuff before, like the time he had to backtrack on his claim that kids were using litterboxes instead of toilets in classrooms or the time he was shocked, SHOCKED to learn that the same Republicans who call gay people “groomers” would go after his conservative buddy Dave Rubin and Rubin’s husband for having kids.
Joe Rogan is not a smart or responsible person, is what we’re saying. Lucky for him, Spotify pays him to be an idiot.
The Turkish parliament’s foreign affairs committee gave its consent to Sweden’s bid to join NATO on Tuesday, drawing the previously non-aligned Nordic country closer to membership in the Western military alliance.
Sweden’s accession protocol will now need to be approved in the Turkish parliament’s general assembly for the last stage of the legislative process in Turkey. No date has been set…
We end the year 2023 much as we ended 2022, with yet another loss for Kari Lake.
But also, possibly, the first, long-overdue step on the road to accountability for the state’s biggest crybaby, a failed candidate who simply cannot accept the fact that she lost an election.
Last week, a judge ruled that Lake does not have a First Amendment right to call Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer a criminal.
She now has to prove her claims that he intentionally sabotaged the 2022 election. That is, if she wants to avoid being hit with a multimillion-dollar penalty for defamation…
The Las Vegas wedding industry is expecting crowds of couples with wedding plans on New Year’s Eve in what could be the busiest date and holiday in years.
This year’s date of 12/31/23, with its repeating pattern of 1-2-3-1-2-3, is expected to draw in even more ceremonies to the destination…
…
Unlike in Colorado, the Michigan courts rejected the case wholly on procedural grounds. They never reached the questions of whether January 6 was an insurrection and whether Trump engaged in it.
One of the Michigan justices on Wednesday wrote why Michigan is different from Colorado.
The anti-Trump challengers “have identified no analogous provision in the Michigan Election Law that requires someone seeking the office of President of the United States to attest to their legal qualification to hold the office,” Justice Elizabeth Welch wrote, comparing Michigan law to Colorado’s election code.
The lower-court rulings in Michigan kept the door open to future 14th Amendment challenges if Trump wins the Republican nomination. Welch specifically noted this dynamic in the separate opinion she wrote Wednesday…
After leaving the White House in January 2021, Donald Trump spent nearly three years ignoring the Affordable Care Act. It’s not that the former president somehow became a convert to the merits of the ACA, but rather, the Republican took a far greater interest in lying about his election defeat and his successor than the landmark policy breakthrough from 2010.
But it was a month ago when Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, rediscovered his contempt for Obamacare, vowing to replace the nation’s existing health care system with an alternative he hasn’t shared [an alternative that does not exist]. In the days and weeks that followed, the former president kept at it, attacking the reform law in increasingly strident terms online and at public events.
Late last week, the Republican posted a video to his social media platform vowing to “replace” the nation’s health care system with something “better” — he didn’t elaborate — while attacking the late Sen. John McCain for not helping him “terminate” the ACA in 2017. As The Hill reported, Trump kept the offensive going on Christmas day.
Former President Trump vowed Monday to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with his own “much better” alternative program, reviving his push to slash the now-popular health care option used by millions of Americans. … “I will come up with a much better, and less expensive, alternative! People will be happy, not sad!”
By any sensible measure, this entire line of attack is bizarre. Indeed, every time the former president renews his offensive against the ACA, it offers his opponents an opportunity to note that the Affordable Care Act is working very well and it’s about as popular as it’s ever been.
What’s more, it also offers an opportunity to note that Trump has been talking about presenting an alternative to Obamacare for roughly eight years now, and every time he’s tried to follow through on his vows, the Republican has failed in humiliating fashion.
While we’re at it, let’s not forget that Trump’s attacks also set the stage for a debate Democrats are desperate to have: The more 2024 focuses on a fight over health care, the worse it will be for the GOP and its candidates.
So why is Trump doing it anyway? Why draw attention to one of his glaring weaknesses? Why remind the political world of one of his most embarrassing failures? Why pick a fight his own party is eager to avoid?
There are a handful of possibilities. The first is the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential frontrunner hates admitting mistakes, and if he were to back off his anti-ACA crusade, it might be an implicit acknowledgement that it was wrong to have picked this fight in the first place.
The second is that Trump’s fixation on Barack Obama has become increasingly weird in recent months, and it’s possible that the Republican is targeting the ACA over its totemic value: To attack one of Obama’s most important accomplishments is to attack the Democrat who signed the policy breakthrough into law.
But the other possibility is that Trump has simply rediscovered his intention to tear down his own country’s health care system, no matter how many families get hurt in the process. […]
Whatever the motivation, the former president continues to move the Affordable Care Act into the 2024 spotlight, which is exactly where Democrats want it to be.
HuffPost reported that the Republican National Committee is heading into 2024 “with just $7.6 million available, barely a tenth of what it had four years ago, after accounting for inflation.”
In their endless quest to further defang the Voting Rights Act and gerrymander their way into permanent control, Republican officials have launched a double-headed attack on the landmark civil rights law.
The new attacks emerge as Republican politicians attempt to wriggle out of judges’ orders requiring that they draw additional, majority-minority, likely Democratic districts in their states, which could imperil their party’s thin majority in the House of Representatives.
The attacks on the already-weakened VRA take two forms: arguing that the law doesn’t protect districts controlled by coalitions of multiple minority groups, and that only the U.S. attorney general — not individual voters represented by good government groups, as is most common — can bring lawsuits under the section of the law concerning illegal vote dilution. […]
A new report indicates that the world could be on the brink of passing a series of vital climate “tipping points,” any one of which could severely damage the environment and threaten global stability. The report, assembled by scientists in the U.K. and Europe, shows that the world is dangerously close to several potentially disastrous changes.
While climate mediation strategies are generally aimed at addressing issues that feature incremental change, such as the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the average mean temperature, these harmful tipping points are events that don’t transition gradually but could generate abrupt and lasting change. Examples include the collapse of the ice sheet in Greenland or the failure of the North Atlantic current. Addressing these individual threats may require specific actions in addition to the more general effort to reduce greenhouse gases.
The report, which was led by the University of Exeter, identifies more than 25 potential tipping points, some of which are interconnected. Triggering one harmful tipping point could create “a domino effect of accelerating and unmanageable change to our life-support systems,” according to the report’s authors. Right now, five of these points are already at risk of tipping.
The tipping points under study don’t shift smoothly or gradually. This isn’t a matter of a modest increase in heat waves from one summer to the next or a shift in rainfall over years. These are systems that can flip like a switch, generating persistent and disastrous change.
[…] Crossing even one of the five harmful tipping points that are close at hand could unravel societies around the globe and cause immense damage to the natural world.
Several of the tipping points currently under threat involve the “cryosphere”—Earth’s protective layers of ice and snow. This year has seen record-low levels of sea ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic over much of the year, according to the National Ice and Snow Data Center. [Graphs at the link]
However, the tipping points identified as most crucial involve ice on land, particularly the potential collapse of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. […] The collapse of either of these ice sheets could generate extensive sea level rise that greatly exceeds the modest changes already flooding the streets of coastal cities.
Other tipping points that rarely come up in discussions of climate change center on changes to the world’s biosphere being driven by increasing temperatures and shifts in rainfall patterns. These include the collapse of coral reefs, the replacement of open grasslands with forest or desert, and the drying of several of the world’s largest lakes.
When it comes to the oceans, the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream/North Atlantic Current is a well-known possibility connected to severe weather changes in both North America and Europe. But there are other currents where the future is uncertain, including those that drive monsoons in the Southern Hemisphere.
Overall, some of these tipping points may already have been triggered by climate change and environmental destruction. This includes the collapse of some Antarctic ice sheets, the die-off of many coral reefs, the conversion of grasslands into deserts, and the failure of ocean currents in the Labrador and Irminger seas. These things may happen even if global warming is held to the 1.5 degrees Celsius limits under the Paris Agreement.
[…] Damage to the Amazon Basin suggests that the world’s largest rainforest could swiftly collapse and be replaced with a drier, less dense ecology that traps far less carbon.
[…] Not everything in the report is negative. There are some “positive tipping points” that can have great benefits for both the environment and society. Some of the positive tipping points are also close at hand. These include sharp reductions in the cost of renewable energy and increased sales of electric vehicles. The report proposes that negative tipping points should be monitored and addressed with special attention beyond addressing global CO2 levels. It also suggests that positive triggers need to be stimulated through government efforts to shape energy markets and foster innovation.
The result of this report is not to stop worrying about greenhouse gases, stop measuring sea ice, or stop taking steps to mitigate rising temperatures. It’s just that keeping an eye on these things alone isn’t enough. It’s not hotter summers or wetter winters that should be at the top of the list of concerns. It’s how rising temperatures may trigger events that fall like a line of dominoes, taking much of the environment and human society down with them. And the scariest thing may be how often the report confesses that we don’t understand all the factors behind many of these potential disasters.
Sustainable practices do not cost more in real terms. They only appear to cost more in accounting practices designed to obfuscate real costs.
Factor out publicly funded subsidies and factor in externalized costs and the picture is very different. Different to the point of unrecognizable in fact.
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Corporations are artificial immortal persons governed only by the need to maximize profits and (to the degree it matters) comply with laws and regulations.
The latter may or may not apply. It may be easier or more cost-effective to pay a token fine or fight such laws and regulations in court, for decades if necessary — see also “Exxon Valdez” as an example of fighting in court until multiple plaintiffs died of old age.
———————–
Having spent the past nearly 17 years developing energy efficiency (EE) and renewable energy (RE) projects I can confirm a few key aspects of the topic […]
1. For anyone considering buying LEDs to a full solar PV system it comes down to whether they can afford it and, as we’re in a capitalistic world, how it pays for itself. While EE and RE beat fossil fuels hands-down the general public lacks this knowledge. They just see the cost not the gain.
2. Commercial building owners require a payback of under five years if they’re going to spend capital. Under four years gets compelling. If financed the incentives and savings must be larger than the amortized payments will be. Cash flow positive or no, they won’t buy.
3. Landlords do not care, with very rare exceptions.
4. Utilities view RE on homes and businesses as taking their customers. They will fight to protect their multibillions of investment in fossil fuel production as long as they can. They constantly adjust rules and rates to minimize the economic case for renewables and stall the switch to carbon free power.
Cases in point:
– It used to take 8 weeks to get a solar PV system approved by Xcel Energy in Colorado. Last year it took 8 months. The industry association lobbies the PUC and eventually the PUC forced Xcel to pare it down. Now it’s 2-3 months.
– The industry spent years in California to reduce the value they’d have to credit for power sent to the Grid. Last Fall they succeeded. PG&E’s average residential rate is 38¢/kWh. They only credit average 2¢ for power net metered. TWO CENTS. CA lost 17,000 solar jobs this year. Because about one third of power a solar system produces must be sent to the Grid or stored in batteries, which are expensive. The economic case got wrecked.
5. THEY WILL NOT CHANGE UNTIL FORCED TO CHANGE.
So it’s up to us to change our own usage. And to lobby our government & justice system to force them.
[quoting from The New York Times] Tom Smothers, the older half of the comic folk duo the Smothers Brothers, whose skits and songs on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in the late 1960s brought political satire and a spirit of youthful irreverence to network television, paving the way for shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Rosa, Calif., a city in Sonoma County. He was 86.
He died “following a recent battle with cancer,” a spokesman for the National Comedy Center announced on behalf of the family.
The Smothers Brothers made their way to network television as a folk act with a difference. With Tom playing guitar and Dick playing stand-up bass, they spent as much time bickering as singing.
With an innocent expression and a stammering delivery, Tom would try to introduce their songs with a story, only to be picked at by his skeptical brother. As frustration mounted, he would turn, seething, and often deliver a trademark non sequitur: “Mom always liked you best.”
As his ethics controversies mounted over the course of the year, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his allies struggled to justify his apparent lapses. Over the summer, for example, my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones reported that more than a 100 of the far-right justice’s former clerks released an open letter vouching for the jurist’s integrity.
The odd thing about the defense, however, was that it didn’t include an actual defense. The public should discount the allegations, the former clerks effectively argued, not because they’re false, but because people who’ve worked with Thomas believed he deserved the benefit of the doubt, the evidence notwithstanding.
What was not obvious at the time, however, was the ease with which the former clerks’ statement came together. The New York Times reported over the holiday weekend:
In the 32 years since Justice Thomas came through the fire of his confirmation hearings and onto the Supreme Court, he has assembled an army of influential acolytes unlike any other — a network of like-minded former clerks who have not only rallied to his defense but carried his idiosyncratic brand of conservative legal thinking out into the nation’s law schools, top law firms, the judiciary and the highest reaches of government.
[…] In the nation’s capital, it’s not too unusual for alumni of prominent officials to keep in touch long after they’ve moved on to other positions. Aides to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, for example, famously created an alumni group of sorts, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with such efforts. These organizing efforts can be great for networking, learning about job opportunities, maintaining relationships, etc.
But Thomas’ “army of influential acolytes,” based on the Times’ reporting, is qualitatively different. From the article:
Supreme Court clerks are, by definition, the sort of ambitious lawyers likely to wield significant influence in their post-clerk lives. What makes Justice Thomas’s clerks so remarkable, in large part, is their success as loyal standard-bearers of his singular ideology. Indeed, an examination of what the justice and his wife call Thomas Clerk World, based on interviews with people in and around it and a review of private emails and the Thomases’ public statements, shows how meticulously the couple have cultivated the clerk network over the decades.
The reference to the justice’s wife, Ginni Thomas, was of particular interest. The idea that there’s some kind of firewall between the jurist’s office and his family does not appear to apply here: She’s contributed to the Thomas Clerk World private email listserv and has been credited with helping create the network.
Also notable are the kind of events Thomas Clerk World members have participated in, including group screenings of — wait for it — a film based on Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.”
But perhaps most striking of all was the apparent fact that after the State Bar of California announced an ethics investigation into John Eastman — himself a former Thomas clerk — Wendy Stone Long, another member of the network, reportedly reached out to rest of the team.
“Dear Clerk Family, John Eastman is being put through a sham disbarment proceeding by the bar of the state of California,” she wrote. Members of the “family” weren’t just encouraged to support Eastman publicly: The email, the Times added, included a link to donate to his defense fund. [Fundraising for John Eastman?!]
In case anyone needs a refresher, Eastman helped concoct a legally dubious scheme to keep Donald Trump in power, despite the election results, and the then-president embraced the plot as a way to keep power he hadn’t legitimately earned.
Eastman was not, however, merely a behind-the-scenes author of a ridiculous memo. The Republican lawyer also effectively played the role of a lobbyist, advocating on behalf of a scheme, pleading with officials to go along with the plot, and even appearing at a pre-riot Jan. 6 rally to espouse his outlandish ideas to Trump’s radicalized followers.
The State Bar of California has accused the Republican lawyer of, among other things, pushing false statements about election fraud and “contributing” to provoking radicalized Trump supporters ahead of their Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
At least some members of Thomas Clerk World apparently rallied behind Eastman anyway — not because he was right, but because has was considered a member of the “Clerk Family” in good standing. [Sounds like a mini-cult.]
What with all the bourbon we’ve been pouring into our egg nog, we had completely forgotten about Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) and his quixotic attempt to challenge Joe Biden in the Democratic primary.
Now that we remember that Phillips exists, we would like to offer hearty congratulations to whatever social media consultant is grifting what we hope is a yuuuuge chunk of his $124-million fortune to produce such gems as this tweet (yes, fuck you, Elon, it’s still a tweet):
Imagine waking-up January 21, 2025 with a President who grew up listening to U2 and watching MTV on a color television.
Oh yeah, break out the War Tour t-shirts!
Boy, this could work for so much early-’80s Gen X nostalgia if Phillips feels like tapping into it. Imagine waking up with a president who remembers that Van Halen had another lead singer before Sammy Hagar! […]
Who the hell is running the Phillips campaign, anyway? Oh, it was Steve Schmidt? And now it’s Jeff Weaver and Andrew Yang’s former campaign manager because Schmidt left to lead a super PAC focused on raising money to advertise for Phillips in some of the early primary states?
[…] Personally, yr Wonkette doesn’t give two shits if the next president listened to early U2 or lived through the generational trauma of ridding the world of black-and-white TVs. […]
And we certainly didn’t care about all the goddamn times everyone got to get together and sing Fleetwood Mac’s worst songs, though if it helps Dean Phillips, we promise we’ll get together with our friends and sing “Tainted Love” to celebrate if he wins the nomination.
Maybe someone told Phillips he needed the youth vote and he forgot that the minimum voting age is younger than 40.
We are reminded of the famous Kurt Vonnegut quote that “true terror is to wake up one morning and realize that your high school class is running the country.” […] Then we remembered that Marjorie Taylor Greene graduated high school the same year we did so maybe our class is already running the country […]
Seriously, we’ve been staring at the above tweet for like an hour asking, “Who does the Dean Phillips campaign imagine this is for?” People who vaguely remember when their family got its first VCR? The all-important Fans of Molly Ringwald demographic?
Phillips’ major reason for running, as he has said more than once, is that Joe Biden is old. So how is reminding Gen X that it too is aging to the point where watching early MTV on a color television feels like the height of rose-colored nostalgia going to help? […]
Dean Phillips must be a huge dork, but if you’re Steve Schmidt, the checks aren’t likely to bounce, so go for it, we guess […]
he missed a bunch of filing deadlines to be on the ballot, so congrats Steve Schmidt
————————
I don’t get his point. Color TVs were ubiquitous when MTV premiered. He should have gone with American Bandstand.
———————–
The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads – they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude. /s
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This guy is a really shallow thinker and a bigoted agist. With age, comes experience and knowledge unless you’re donald trump. The “issues” he raises are absolutely irrelevant to good governing, which Biden is currently doing. This guy has delusions of adequacy based on the fact that he’s rich. I prefer Presidents who were not born rich and have experienced much of what the rest of us have.
I wonder if this jerk realizes that there are people younger than himself out there
The New York Times also published an article in 2016 saying as much, with the title, “Donald Trump’s Draft Deferments: Four for College, One for Bad Feet.” …
They put a lot of effort into something that is incredibly obvious: The image has Trump’s recent face, not a younger Trump.
tomhsays
@ #492
I’m old enough to remember the Smothers brothers show and their constant battle with the CBS censors, for bits like this one which got through somehow.
Smothers joked that Easter “is when Jesus comes out of his tomb and if he sees his shadow, he goes back in and we get six more weeks of winter.”
It was constantly anti-Vietnam war, and at Christmas, when other show hosts were sending best wishes to soldiers fighting overseas, Smothers offered his to draft dodgers who had moved to Canada.
It was truly the only one of its kind, and I doubt they could get away with it today. In those days it was mainly language and sex that upset the censors. After 3 years CBS couldn’t take it any more and canceled the show.
The University of New Brunswick’s Carly Smith is no ordinary student athlete.
Smith, who is from Moncton, was born missing part of her left arm, from right above the elbow, but that didn’t stop her from taking up curling at the age of seven…
When she was 14, she had a sweeping arm made that would help her hold the broom while she manoeuvred down the ice.
But that wasn’t her only challenge. When throwing a rock, she needed expert-level balance to maintain her form while sliding forward out of the hack…
Sunday Four-Play: The fake Biden impeachment rolls along, and J.D. Vance forgets Mike Johnson exists
For the convenience of readers, here are a few links back to the previous group of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread:
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2023/10/09/infinite-thread-xxix/comment-page-4/#comment-2204412
Biden invites Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to the White House on Tuesday
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2023/10/09/infinite-thread-xxix/comment-page-4/#comment-2204411
Hunger, thirst and chaos in southern Gaza as hostilities drive humanitarian aid to the brink of collapse
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2023/10/09/infinite-thread-xxix/comment-page-4/#comment-2204377
Pliosaur discovery: Huge sea monster emerges from Dorset cliffs
Ukraine Update: The Ukrainian Army is expanding—they need American surplus armor
Followup to comment 3.
Posted by readers of the article:
JFK on Trump, The Week in Editorial Cartoons
This Pennsylvania farm’s farmhands are Newfoundland dogs that pull your Christmas tree to your car
Riahi Sunak’s grip on power is increasingly shaky. It is unlikely that he will.be forced out if he loses Tuesday’s vote in parliament, but the risk is certainly non-zero.
Buy popcorn.
NB
Generous social welfare policies are linked to decreased child neglect.
https://phys.org/news/2023-generous-social-welfare-policies-linked.html
I forgot a “12”
Here we go
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-generous-social-welfare-policies-linked.html
Royal Navy donates vital mine-hunting ships to Ukraine navy
Good for the rabbis, but Austin’s claim is nonsense: the settlers they are helping the Palestinian farmers against are not “rulers”: they are either politicial/religious zealots determined to drive Palestinians out of “Judea and Samaria”, or opportunists looking to steal land for personal advantage.
Has anyone heard from SC? I haven’t seen anything from her for a while.
SMBC
“Inbox”
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/pop
“Loosening up the universe”
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/loosen
The wrong stuff.
https://xkcd.com/2865/
Oceanography gift
https://xkcd.com/2859/
This state is counting the human casualties from a drug meant for animals
Panama Canal drought to delay grain ships well into 2024
Tucker Carlson to Launch Own Streaming Network
Poland’s Donald Tusk set to become PM, ending eight years of nationalist rule
NPR:
High Court, in declining to weigh conversion therapy ban, allows law to stand
Nina Totenberg / December 11, 2023
Spineless cult follower demonstrates his spinelessness:
Summarized by Steve Benen from an Associated Press report.
The Republican Party aligns itself with the January 6 rioters:
Link
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary:
Followup to comment 24.
Commentary from Steve Benen:
Link
NBC News demands Trump campaign take down fake clip of reporter
Trump’s campaign posted a video of NBC News Senior Capitol Hill correspondent Garrett Haake supposedly making disparaging comments about Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. That’s not good. Trump’s campaign is posting fake news.
Link
https://www.wonkette.com/p/and-the-men-had-tears-in-their-eyes
Oops! The Supreme Court Heard Another Case Built on Shameless Lies.
Alex Jones Says He Was Just Playing Devil’s Advocate on That “Whole Sandy Hook Thing”
Does it occur to him that if he wanted to put forward alternative versions of reality, he should have done that within the framework of the trial, which is long over?
How a true believer’s flawed research helped legitimize home schooling.
Washington Post link
Brian Ray says home-schooled students do better. His daughter tells a different story.
NYT:
Special Counsel Asks Supreme Court to Decide Whether Trump Is Immune From Prosecution
By Adam Liptak and Alan Feuer / Dec. 11, 2023
George Santos Begins Revenge Tour With Scorching Attack on Fellow Republican
This article doesn’t mention, so I had to look up that Malliotakis is a Republican.
Could this be the one decent thing Santos ever did?
Texas woman seeks emergency abortion out of state after Supreme Court block
I hope she sues Paxton for travel costs.
@34
Could someone remind me where Ken Paxton got his medical degree?
After embarrassing interview, James Comer runs to Newsmax to call CNN a ‘low-IQ audience’
@ 35
Right-winger: “He got it from Jesus Christ, dean of the University of SHUT YO’ MOUTH, LIBERAL CUCK!!!”
Re: Abortion in Texas.
Texas is one of eighteen states which do not permit initiatives, referendums, or recalls. They do allow voter-approved constitutional amendments, but only after a 2/3 majority of the legislature places them on the ballot. In other words, there is no chance of a Kansas-type vote on abortion.
Elon Musk’s new AI bot, Grok, causes stir by citing OpenAI usage policy
* sniff sniff * – Is that a lawsuit I smell?
UCKG: Church pastor tells boy ‘evil spirit’ hides in him
Unfortunately for Donald Trump, I’m Not His Alibi
Reginald @40, sounds like that church is actively doing harm.
Reginald @41, I was glad to see John Nichols characterize that bit of nonsense from Trump and his lawyers as indicating that they had a less than airtight case. LOL
NBC News:
Associated Press:
Another good result from the CHIPS Act.
New York Times:
New York Times:
I would like to see Fox News correct their previous hair-on-fire broadcasts about “organized retail crime” in cities (blaming Democrats of course).
US healthcare giant Norton says hackers stole millions of patients’ data during ransomware attack
Ukraine Update: New Polish government under Donald Tusk is a win for Ukraine, the EU, and Poland, by Mark Sumner
DeJoy’s US Postal Service leadership is deadly
It continues to amaze me that DeJoy still has that leadership position. He is a trumpian doofus.
NYT:
Texas Supreme Court Rules Against Woman Who Sought Court-Approved Abortion
By J. David Goodman Reporting from Houston / Dec. 11, 2023
GAME ON. SCOTUS grants Smith’s motion
U.S.-Chinese military hotline hasn’t been restored a month after Biden-Xi summit
Last month, Biden declared the resumption of contacts a signature achievement. U.S. military officials say their Chinese colleagues haven’t been taking their calls.
Re: Lynna, OM @ #51….
Lest we forget… Trump’s defense during the Senate trial over his second impeachment argued exactly the opposite. To wit, that if the Senate acquitted him, he would then be subject to possible criminal charges and it would be up to normal court proceedings to deal with the matter. Someone needs to remind SCOTUS about that.
Plus see here : https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/stellar-surfs-monster-waves-tall-three-suns-are-crashing-upon-colossal-star
Among other places.
^Typos mine of course. Typng from paper magazine article.
An Iowa fight over a Satanic display reminds us: Republicans believe “free speech” is only for them
Commercial Ship In Flames After Red Sea Missile Attack
Republicans in Congress are getting advice from Viktor Orbán’s office about Ukraine: report
Ranked choice voting bill moves to hearing in front of Wisconsin Senate elections committee
It may well not happen as expected / hoped and it’ll probly be cloudy becoz o’course but still worth looking up for :
Source : https://www.space.com/comet-new-meteor-shower-dec-2023
See also : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/46P/Wirtanen & perhaps more usefully here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sculptor_(constellation)
^ As well as via Kaler’s Stars : http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/scl-p.html
Military intelligence hacks Russian tax authoritie
Finland to reopen 2 out of 8 border crossings with Russia after a 2-week closure over migrant influx
@54-55 Anton Petrov has a good ten minute Youtbe clip on this Star With Huge Tidal Waves (4.3 Million km High) That Happen Monthly here which I obvs reccommend.
Kentucky woman seeking court approval for abortion learned her embryo no longer has cardiac activity
Dean Phillips: Biden impeachment probe ‘perhaps makes him unelectable’
Idiot
Ukraine mobile network Kyivstar hit by ‘cyber-attack’
Judge: Giuliani may have defamed Georgia election workers again outside DC courthouse
Via Phys dot org :
Source : https://phys.org/news/2023-12-environmental-stress-genetics-height-differences.html
Plus :
Source : https://phys.org/news/2023-12-ukraine-lost-scientists-due-war.html
In addition to :
Source : https://phys.org/news/2023-12-extremely-rare-female-male-bird.html
Yeah, if only we humans actually would. That last sentence. Spot on.
Exceptional = too often treated as rong becoz differnt than right or just different but eqally cool – as long as NOT hurting anyone else.
@Reginald Selkirk :
Emphasis added.
Do you mean Biden is the idiot or Dean Phillips is the idiot or both?
^ Are eitehr as remotely close to being as idiotic as Trump and the Repug fascist alternatives?
PS Can’t you guys find and plausibly get running for power with chance of getting it better alternatives over in the States?
Don’t recall ever hearing about Dean Phillips before FWIW.
@70 Dean Phillips.
whheydt @53, oh! Very good point. I had forgotten about that.
Re: Lynna, OM @ #73…
I’m reasonably sure that Trump’s lawyers are hoping that everyone has forgotten it.
Texas Supreme Court makes it clear: The cruelty is intentional
Toxic Libertarian Billionaires Put Their Faith In SCOTUS: ‘Endorse Trump’s Immunity Or Else…’
I understand the premise behind the headline, but I still think the headline is misleading. Where are the instances of “Libertarian Billionaires” saying “Endorse Trump’s Immunity or Else”?
Cartoon: Climate newspeak at COP28
Washington Post link
More at the link.
NYT:
Top Court Clears Path for Democrats to Redraw House Map in New York
By Nicholas Fandos / Dec. 12, 2023
Election Law Blog
Recent news of pending Section 3 challenges
Derek Muller / December 12, 2023
Links to each of the cases at the title link.
Tesla says California’s Autopilot action violates its free speech rights
Uh what? The basis of the action was that their claims were not truthful.
Far-right lawmaker extinguishes Hanukkah candles in Polish parliament
Every homeopathic eye drop should be pulled off the market, FDA says
“Never too late to stop punching ourselves in the face” and “there’s a world to win.” It isn’t all bad news but we do have to act. Some of the key points from this 12 minute long good discussion by real Climate Scientists Dr Ella Gilbz & Dr James Kirkum (spelling?) : here.
Rudy G Is His Own Worst Disaster
I have lost count of the number of times Rudy Giuliani shot himself in the foot.
Totally Normal … In A Mob Movie
Exclusive: Former Mar-a-Lago employee-turned-witness repeatedly contacted by Trump and associates before documents charges
Hamas tunnels flooded with seawater, a war tactic that may make Gaza uninhabitable.
UN Climate Summit Agrees To Transition Away From Fossil Fuels. That’s A First! Yes, There’s Also A ‘However’.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/un-climate-summit-agrees-to-transition
It’s historic and should have started 30 years ago. But it’s still big.
Zelenskyy Is In DC Begging Republicans For Help. Can They Hear Him From Inside Putin’s Pants?
https://www.wonkette.com/p/zelenskyy-is-in-dc-begging-republicans
Yell louder.
Supreme Court will hear abortion pill fight
Kelsey Reichmann / December 13, 2023
Supreme Court will hear abortion pill fight
Kelsey Reichmann / December 13, 2023
Courthouse News Service
Oops, sorry for the doubling post.
Link
NB
BIG news for half the world’s population- the cause for nausea and vomiting during pregnancy has been identified, opening the path to curing or preventing this condition.
It is a hormone (GDF15) produced by
the fetus.
This is no small thing – some expecting mothers vomit 10-25 times a day during the worst phase.
.
BTW today morning Sweden had the yearly Lucia festivities (a pre-modern practice that expanded from a local tradition to being a national one).
I have been drinking lots of (non-alcoholic) mulled wine and eaten lots of saffron buns.
BTW
I have found one of the few cases when it is justified to invoke Zod.
A poster with a grumpy cat (a relative of the one intimidating PZ?) reading a book, subtitled ” I am going to let god fix it, because if I do it, I am going to jail”
(the cross worn around the neck of this black cat is no more reassuring than the white collar worn by Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider – this angry puss is a killer). 🤬
https://share/temu.com/J06jxed CUNA
https://share/temu.com/J06jxedCUNA
Never mind. I neglected to sacrifice to Ctulhu so this link is borked.
.
British PM Rishi Sunak temporarily hangs on after getting enough votes for the Rwanda bill. But it will be amended down the road and he may only have postponed a confrontation with the lunatic fringe of the tory members of parliament.
This does not make Sunak the nicer politician – the bill he got through parliament is by-passing the European rules about human rights.
Sunak has written a law defining Rwanda as a safe place to send refugees, reality be damned.
The refugees in Britain are just pawns in a performative game of cruelty, intended to please the worst segment of tory voters.
Link
To appear reasonable and compassionate, Republicans point to exemptions in their abortion bans. There’s new evidence that these exemptions are meaningless.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/the-maga-movements-links-with-the-global-far-right-were-on-full-display-at-trumps-latest-party
Link
X experiences widespread broken link issues
Britain again.
This bloke writing for The Guardian explains the current situation much more eloquently than I could ever do.
“Tories are too busy locked in a narcissistic death spiral to spare a thought for us”.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/13/tories-are-too-busy-locked-in-a-narcissistic-death-spiral-to-spare-a-thought-for-us
ABC News
Donald Trump loses appeal in E. Jean Carroll case, clearing way for defamation trial
ByAaron Katersky / December 13, 2023
Michael Cohen’s lawyer cited three fake cases in possible AI-fueled screwup
Stephen Colbert:
“Jack Smith has Trump’s DMs and draft tweets”
https://youtu.be/rNEu1YtIa6w
or possibly
https://youtu.be/rNEu1Ytla6w
More from The Daily Show:
Trump asks SCOTUS for immunity and Texas strikes down abortion exemption
https://youtu.be/F6oHayc5pjo
What’s The Deal With That Cough Everyone Seems To Have Right Now?
Elon Musk wants to open STEM-focused schools, university in Austin
Who wants their children educated by nazis?
Florida abortion rights activists win over Republicans in ballot measure push
…
Carter is one of more than 150,000 registered Republican voters who have signed a petition in support of a ballot amendment that would bar the state from restricting abortion “before viability” — which is usually at 24 weeks — or “when necessary to protect the patient’s health.” …
Media Matters sues Texas attorney general over response to Elon Musk dispute
Only Donald Trump can save the free world now
This is from The Telegraph. It is astonishing that it does not appear to be satire.
Supreme Court to decide whether to restrict abortion drug nationwide
Wondering which way they will lean? Consider that mifepristone was not available in the 17th century…
Minnesota down to 3 final concepts for new state flag
Pope Francis takes on unprecedented attacks from American opponents
They can’t be very good Catholics if they can’t remember one of its central tenets: the pope is in charge.
NASA’s Voyager 1 Spacecraft Is Speaking Gibberish
It Just Got Harder For Car Dealers To Scam You
Ukraine Update: Russia can’t win its invasion without Republican help
Followup to comment 117.
Posted by readers of the article:
NBC News:
CNBC:
Trump Way More Fun When He’s Just Grifting MAGA Rubes To Buy His NFT Trading Cards
https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-way-more-fun-when-hes-just
Link
Danger of Donald Trump is disruption, not dictatorship
This is bone stupid.
Because there can be only one danger?
Because dictatorship would not of itself be a disruption to a democracy?
Manchin taking 2-month tour to test appetite for national ‘movement’
I had a movement this morning. It smelled just like Joe Manchin.
Kari Lake’s lawyers could face discipline over election cases
Arizona GOP leaders sued to stop ‘dark money’ transparency. A judge will rule by year’s end
Zulu king’s official crowning by President Rampahosa invalid, court rules
Not related to politics, you just need a cute video of an adopted jackal puppy going crazy.
https://youtu.be/UEfb8KWDvGY
Moving in with Jesus: A grilled cheese parable
The faithful have to write this drek to distract themselves from the stupidity if their beliefs.
Reginal Selkirk@128,
Yeah… but why do you seek it out?
Neanderthals may have been morning people, study says.
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-neanderthals-morning-people.html
@129: I didn’t, really. Was working late at a task that left me a lot of side time for distractions. That article showed up in a search of Google News for ‘cheese’.
@ 130
No wonder they went extinct. Now excuse me, I need to eat a whole bag of coffee beans just to face the day.
NOT Live coverage: Rudy Giuliani chickens out in defamation trial
This the penalty-determination phase. The defamation case already has been decided. Yes, Rudy defamed those two women. And yet, he was still out there claiming that everything he said was true. I assume Rudy wanted to convince the jury to pile on more penalties. Now it looks like his lawyers finally talked him into shutting the fuck up. He won’t testify today.
Cartoon: And the horse you rode in on.
Some Dipshits Gonna Impeach Joe Biden For ‘Multitude Of Numerous Items,’ NO MORE QUESTIONS PLEASE!
https://www.wonkette.com/p/some-dipshits-gonna-impeach-joe-biden
Fuuuuuck, these people are not impressive.
Some limited good news:
Washington Post link
Putin gloating (and probably lying as well):
New York Times link
NYT:
Judge Pauses Trump Election Case Amid Appeal of Immunity Issue
The decision by the judge to freeze the case came as an appeals court agreed to move quickly in considering the former president’s claims that he is immune from prosecution.
By Alan Feuer / Dec. 14, 2023
Comer has obsessively talked about Biden family shell companies, at one point saying, “Nobody creates shell companies.” But what about his own?
Followup, of sorts to comment 139.
Link
Good news: Congress approves bill barring any president from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO
NPR:
Supreme Court leaves Illinois semiautomatic gun ban in place
Nina Totenberg / December 14, 2023
https://www.wonkette.com/p/happy-xmas-president-kid-rock-announces
Washington Post link: E.U. agrees to open membership talks with Ukraine
Lynna, OM@145,
Orbán was given a €10bn bribe (the European Commission unfroze funds that had been held up because Orbán has subordinated the judicial system to his party), but the Ukrainians could certainly do with some good news, and Putin could certainly do with a slap in the face.
Ex-FBI intel chief Charles McGonigal gets over 4 years in prison
Chester: The city which still celebrates Saturnalia
Keep Saturn in Saturnalia!
When someone asks “What have the Romans ever done for us?“, keep Saturnalia in mind.
Republicans Nominate Mazi Melesa Pilip To Succeed George Santos
Russian drone attack on Ukraine violates NATO airspace over Romania, prompting German fighter jet response
a16z will give literally any politician money if they help deregulate tech
Yeah, regulations are such a downer when you are flying passenger aircraft or operating nuclear powerplants.
A link to warm you during winter:
‘The most loyal friends are Istanbul stray cats’.
https://youtu.be/ZdwzExyUY9k
Orbán has now blocked €50bn in EU funding for Ukraine. I suppose he wants a bigger bribe for this.
Probly too late really now but still :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-12-13/geminid-meteor-shower-2023-australia/103199230
Timings in Aussie zone and day. Not sure how well this works out for thsoe inthe USA & elsewhere. Still..
^ PS. You can still often see more meteors the nights before and after the peak too FWIW.
Ex-Wirecard COO Suspected as Decade-Long Russian Agent
New reporting alleges that a binder containing highly classified information on Russia was brought to the Trump White House — where it went missing.
In new display of incompetence, Trump promises a Biden depression on the Dow’s best day ever
Link
Followup to comment 157.
Link
Followup to comments 157 and 160.
Posted by readers of the article:
Tren Maya: Mexico’s Yucatán mega train – world beating or environmental disaster?
Schumer delays Senate recess in pursuit of Ukraine/border deal
Posted by readers of the article:
Link
Cartoon: Blurry faces
Link
Michigan court rejects challenges to Trump’s spot on 2024 primary ballot
Where’s an originalist when you need one? The text of the 14th amendment is clear.
MEDICARE ADVANTAGE SCAM EXPOSED
Houthi attacks lead shipping giant Maersk to halt Red Sea transit
Jill Biden Posts Jazzy White House ‘Nutcracker’ Video, Wingnuts Driven To New Heights Of Sputtering Racism We Mean Rage
Update on the Russian hybrid migrant operation on Finnish border: Yup, still there.
At the end of November, Finland closed its entire Russian border for two weeks. Early this week, the closure was extended for most border crossing points until mid January, while two crossing points were opened just to see what happens (see Yahoo News link at 63 upthread). Traffic resumed on Thursday just after midnight.
Quite predictably, many (a few hundred) of the migrants who’d been stuck in northwestern Russia immediately rushed to cross the border. They apparently didn’t know for certain if Russian border guards would still let them through (since they lacked visa to Finland/Schengen area), but almost all of them were indeed let through. Meanwhile, there have been reports in recent days that Russian officials have at least occasionally arrested migrants whose visa to Russia has expired. Some of those were deported to their countries of origin, while some were falsely promised lavish pay and benefits if they’d enlist as foreign contract soldiers to fight in Ukraine. I shit you not.
During the two weeks’ closure, it didn’t seem like there were many new migrants massing behind the border. Still, that would likely change if the border remained open for a while. Therefore, Finnish government immediately decided to shut everything up again, effective Friday evening (a couple hours ago now). At least we demonstrated that we don’t really want to keep the border closed just to spite Russia. This mostly affects a bunch of ethnic Russians who live in Finland and have lots of contacts across the border. The situation will likely last months, if not years, with occasional brief openings.
Thank you lumipuna @171 for that update. I continue to feel badly about people waiting to cross the border while winter weather makes the situation more dire.
I have heard that Russia “falsely promised lavish pay and benefits if they’d enlist as foreign contract soldiers to fight in Ukraine” to a lot of immigrants. That’s a nasty business indeed.
Link
Republicans do NOT want to take responsibility for their actions. Do they think the fallout from their anti-abortion laws will just go away if they ignore it?
NB
“Climate change to force people indoors earlier than expected.”
This time, Sabine Hossenfelder seems to have made a decent job interpreting science news.
The realistic wet bulb temperature is lower than the quoted value. People are going to start dying in droves from heat stroke in India, Saudi Arabia and Africa (actually, the Saudis only have themselves to blame).
https://youtu.be/3eErk9PapoQ
Liars and criminals get caught … and fined:
Link
Followup to comments 157, 160, and 161.
A few more details:
https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-staff-handed-out-binder-full
What a total clown show.
Rudy Giuliani hit with $148M verdict for defaming two Georgia election workers
Ukraine grenade incident: Councillor tosses explosives into meeting
The Return of the Lord
Baby found alive in tree after Tennessee tornado
House GOP reeling after a top recruit blasts Trump on tape
If Ridley Scott had done it.
https://youtu.be/iD8OM_Rhcx0
In this context, Sabine Hossenfelder shines; She makes a good argument for why solving a particular question is hugely important.
“The biggest gap in science: Complexity”
https://youtu.be/KPUZiWMNe-g
This “smoking gun” killed the McDonald’s ice cream hackers’ startup
What happens to credit card debt when you die?
Followup to comments 89, 145 and 146.
NBC News:
Link
Cartoon: Antisemitic safe space
NOT REAL NEWS
Texas Supreme Court declines to revive billionaire’s defamation lawsuit against Beto O’Rourke
Posted by readers of the article:
Israeli military says soldier opened fire on hostages holding white flag. (Washington Post link.)
New York Times:
Order blocking enforcement of Ohio abortion ban stands after high court dismisses appeal
Posted by readers of the article:
US issues dire warning to North Korea on nuclear threat
Say what now?
Tim Ballard’s Psychic Friend Says Dead Mormon Prophet Did Not Help Her Find Missing Children
https://www.wonkette.com/p/tim-ballards-psychic-friend-says
Confederate Memorial at Arlington will be removed despite GOP opposition
Though dozens of congressional Republicans protested the move, the Army says it will begin work in coming days.
New York Times:
Cardinal Becciu: Vatican court convicts former Pope adviser of financial crimes
He was sentenced to pray the rosary 3 times. /s
Tasty! Asano eats a chocolate coin thrown in German fan protests and scores
McCarthy-endorsed Vince Fong can’t legally run for Congress, California secretary of state says
Land of the lost: Hidden lagoon network found with living fossils similar to those from more than 3 billion years ago
Russia Ramps Ups Attacks On LGBT Groups For An International, Far-Right Audience
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson once did legal work for Ark Encounter, for Ken Ham. Sheesh.
Link
Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on Ukraine
Trump spoke at another rally this weekend. He was in New Hampshire:
Link
Nature – CAR-T therapy forces autoimmune diseases into remission
How Harvey Weinstein nearly ruined the LOTR films.
(Let’s see if the link works)
https://youtube.com/shorts/kpu9C4asjE0
Followup to comment 203.
Graham blows off Trump migrant ‘poisoning’ remark: ‘I could care less what language people use’
Did he?
First of all, the number of people trying to cross into the U.S. is not entirely under the control of the U.S. president. It is a difficult problem without an easy solution.
Second of all, I seem to remember children being locked into cages and separated from their parents. It is not at all clear to me that Trump “delivered on the border.”
500,000 Kids, 30 Million Hours: Trump’s Vast Expansion of Child Detention
New Paper Argues That the Universe Began with Two Big Bangs
Reginald @207, I agree with you. Trump did NOT deliver on the border. He made things worse. And then he told a thousand lies about how he has supposedly made things better. Too many people believed the lies.
More news, some of which is about the border issues:
Link
Reclaiming Idaho: Ranked-choice voting on the ballot
News about a certain former politician.
T***p implodes as stunning military lies about made-up general collapse on stage.
https://youtu.be/OICb-Z4wBtQ
or possibly
https://youtu.be/OlCb-Z4wBtQ
Doctors with histories of big malpractice settlements found a new home in the insurance industry
Roseanne Has Weird Breakdown About Imaginary Muslim Caliphate Taking Over The World
https://www.wonkette.com/p/roseanne-has-weird-breakdown-about
Major storm battering Florida expected to slam East Coast, bringing hazardous winds and potential flooding rain
Severe weather battered Florida and South Carolina this weekend, with impacts expected to last through Monday.
YES!
Political news. With space aliens.
https://youtu.be/-GsIpujFOsw
or possibly
https://youtu.be/-GslpujFOsw
re Lynna @213:
You can stop right there because she has NEVER been funny. From the first time I saw her doing “comedy”, I disliked her annoying voice and obnoxious delivery. I never once watched the sitcom starring her. Whatever she has to say now doesn’t matter to me because I won’t be listening.
Car plows into parked vehicle in Biden’s motorcade outside Delaware campaign headquarters
Chilean voters reject conservative constitution, after defeating leftist charter last year
Watchdog groups push for disbarment of ex-Trump attorney Jenna Ellis over Georgia charges
Bob Good prepares for fight as new hard-right leader after controversial moves inside House GOP
Inflation forces Turkey’s central bank chief to move in with parents
New Census proposal would reduce the number of disabled women and girls counted by nearly 10 million
Disability Rights Network – Tell the Census Bureau: Nothing About Us Without Us!
SMBC: “This public figure I support…”
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/that-thing
SMBC:
Defining your perfect soulmate
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/soulmate-3
A suspected cyberattack paralyzes the majority of gas stations across Iran
A “Delicate Matter”: Clarence Thomas’ Private Complaints About Money Sparked Fears He Would Resign
Well, I wouldn’t use the word ‘Fears’
Followup to Reginald @226
Over the course of 2023, congressional Republicans have repeatedly scrambled to defend Justice Clarence Thomas. Their job just became even more difficult.
BTW over at Mano Singham at Freethoughtblogs there is mention of Temu, a potential rival of Amazon that is reaching out from China to USA and Europe.
Job numbers have been so good under Joe Biden that Donald Trump wants voters to see the data as “fake.” The closer one looks, the worse the pitch gets.
Followup to Reginald A220.
The incoming chairman of the House Freedom Caucus has been described as a “legislative terrorist.” It’s tough to be optimistic about the faction’s future.
Mother Jones:
How Leonard Leo’s Dark Money Network Orchestrated a New Attack on the Voting Rights Act
ARI BERMAN / 12/18/2023
Much more detail at the title link.
New Russian sea drone poses threat to Ukrainian ports
Where did they get that idea?
After report of antisemitism, Missouri’s AG is defending X, formerly Twitter. Here’s why.
Melodramatic much? Disregarding that X is a right wing platform, not a “free speech” platform, is Bailey forgetting about Parler, Gab and Truth?
This horrible article is very pro-Bailey, letting him and his allies state their views with no counter-voice pointing out how ridiculous they are.
In his latest pitch, Trump wants to ‘indemnify all police officers’
Except for the Capitol Police who fight off his insurrectionists, I assume.
Josh Marshall:
Link
I also think it unlikely that you can arm a lot of people and, training or no training, expect that only “good guys” will shoot “bad guys.” The situation is likely to go tragically awry quite often.
Inside The Russian Propaganda Mill Beaming Out Of A Florida Strip Mall
Link
Pope’s shift on same-sex couples exposes Christian division
Mark Sumner:
I snipped details of a 1990 interview, including:
Link
John Oliver spends 30 minutes taking down Elon Musk
https://www.wonkette.com/p/senate-republicans-wont-stop-pissing
Everyone expected a recession. The Fed and White House found a way out.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/18/recession-economy-inflation/
The economy’s strength and stability — defying even the most optimistic predictions — represent a remarkable development after seemingly endless crises.
Former student of Sarasota school system says Bridget Zeigler should be fired for being bad at her job and not for having a threesome.
I’d argue that Zeigler’s threesome is important as it shows what an utter hypocrite she is, but I can’t argue with any of the other points he makes.
gijoel @242, that former student made some excellent points!
In other news:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/keith-richards-at-80
Abbott to Sign Law Allowing Texas Police to Arrest Migrants. (That’s a New York Times link.)
The new law, which would take effect in March, could bring in mass arrests and a court fight between Texas and the federal government over immigration powers.
Here’s how the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea threaten the global supply chain
Major shipping lines and oil transporters suspended their services through the Red Sea as vessels came under attack at the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
Link
Federal Reserve On Cusp Of What Some Thought Impossible: Defeating Inflation Without Steep Recession
https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2023/12/18/volcanic_eruption_has_started/
Re: whheydt @ #248…
The article cited above now includes a link to a video stream of the–extremely beautiful–fire fountains of the eruption.
Icelandic authorities are reacting to the new eruption…
https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2023/12/18/police_evacuate_grindavik_immediately/
Trump’s million dollar expert ‘lost all credibility,’ judge in NY civil fraud trial says
LIVE: TYT News & Politics live on youtube currently with discussion of Trump’s tax cuts for the super-rich and the media’s silence on it which seems to be going well-under the radar and earlier Trump’s lastest literally nazi cribbed off literal Hitler remarks.
(Youtube comments turned off there unusually for them & these.I missed the start here so dunno if they explained why at beginning..)
Good news story :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-19/black-mambas-in-greater-kruger-south-africa-poaching-national/103102528
Without bullets.
Repeat for emphasis : Without bullets
Volcanologist in Iceland says that the lava fountains of the new eruption are up to 150m high, and this indicates a high flow rate out of the fissure. (For comparison, the highest record lava fountains ever were at Mt. Etna and reached 1500m to 2000m. Think about the pressure it takes to toss rocks over a mile upwards.)
This article: https://grapevine.is/news/2023/12/18/eruption-has-begun-at-sundhnukagigar/ has a link to a video of the actual start of the current eruption in Iceland.
Some spaaace neeeews stories via Space dot com summed up :
Source : https://www.space.com/barringer-crater-formation-cosmic-curveball-asteroid
Seems we have a new category of possible life-inhabited world – the Super-Europa :
Source : https://www.space.com/nasa-17-exoplanets-liquid-oceans-beneath-surface
Source : https://www.space.com/ai-models-dark-force-dark-matter-universe-theory
This new SIDM answers the issues of DM distribution in galactic haloes and provides a new “more complex and vibrant” understanding of something we don’t understand much for sure about yet at all which is, um, cool. I reckon anyhow.
So much for nuclear non-proliferation right?
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/video/us-congress-passes-legislation-to-sell-nuclear-powered-submarines-to-australia/ttbtpvtv9
A story withsome pretty significantimplications in my view that seems to have gone under the media radar as well at least here in Oz.
Which also makes me wonder how the huge cost of our AUKUS deal is going to help deal with real problems like refugees (Hey, hint, treat them like they are good people forced out of their former homes through no fault of their own and have alot to actually offer us if we treat them well thus welcome them, help them contribute to our society becaues they are and do?) :
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/australia-pledges-265m-to-support-refugees-overseas-as-number-of-displaced-people-hits-record-level/1fovgk4ur
Plus Climate currently this :
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/floods-have-wreaked-havoc-in-north-queensland-its-a-frightening-glimpse-of-whats-to-come/7gfupmuc9
But also Bushfires, heatwaves, droughts, storms all getting ever worse and ever more frequent becuase well, we all know why but refuse to take serious action about it but wasting money on dangerous (in many ways) submarines we don’t need that are going to be obssolete as soon as they are launched if not before and outnumbered massively anyhow to fight a war we can’t win and can easily avoid is .. words fail me.
Text quoted by Reginald @251:
That is such good news! I was worried about that so-called expert’s testimony taking hold. That expert is actually a highly paid liar.
Cartoon: Putin
Ukraine Update: Russia has highest single-day losses since invasion began, by Mark Sumner
https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1736742423173247102
With a Deadline Looming, the United Methodist Church Breaks Up
Followup to comment 261.
Posted by readers of the article:
WaPo:
Meadows’s bid to move Georgia election case to federal court rejected
By Holly Bailey / December 18, 2023
The lava flow in Iceland is 100-200 cubic m per second, which is like the flow of a substantial river .
This will be very useful for dating artefacts.
“Mesopotamian bricks unveil the strength of Earth’s ancient magnetic field ”
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-mesopotamian-bricks-unveil-strength-earth.html
Since the actions he was performing served Trump’s campaign rather than the office of the president, isn’t that a Hatch Act violation?
Qakbot’s backbot: FBI-led takedown keeps crims at bay for just 3 months
Authorities claim seizure of notorious ALPHV ransomware gang’s dark web leak site
BTW the latest entry of God Awful Movies is now available on Youtube.
Reginald @270, so good to see countries cooperating to take down the bad guys, even if, as noted in 269, sometimes the bad guys reorganize and get up to more mischief.
https://twitter.com/MaddowBlog/status/1737111583388549122
Excellent video segment at the link.
Commentary from Steve Benen:
Link. Video also available at that link.
NBC News:
Commentary:
Link
The Daily Beast:
Commentary:
Link
IRONY ALERT
Marjorie Taylor Greene says she’s ‘sick and tired’ of being around ‘stupid people’ in Congress
Reginald @276, LOL.
In other news:
Link
@ 273
Funny, that’s exactly what I think about the Biden and the Democrat’s handling of Trump and the far right.
Megyn Kelly Calls On Her Billions Of Fans To Boycott Taylor Swift
Megyn Kelly … still infamous for saying that she likes her Santa and her Jesus white, white, white. Megyn Kelly … still infamous from complaining that Jill Biden is referred to as Dr. Jill Biden. Megyn Kelly … still infamous for promoting anti-trans hate freak Posie Parker, and for dissing Dylan Mulvaney, and for praising Tucker Carlson constantly. That Megyn Kelly … who still does NOT have billions of fans like Taylor Swift.
Suddenly the Republican Party is concerned with the wealth gap. I imagine this is their latest talking point after running surveys, and an attempt to belittle the success of the economy under Biden. But seriously, we know which party consistently sides with the super-rich and corporations against the masses.
Trump bemoans record stock market as just making ‘rich people richer’
<a href=”https://news.yahoo.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-says-shes-034920321.html>Marjorie Taylor Greene says she’s ‘sick and tired’ of being around ‘stupid people’ in Congress
The nation’s capital, built on water, struggles to keep from drowning.
Washington Post link
Much more at the link, including a description of the battle to save scores of twisted cherry trees starved of oxygen from standing in polluted high-tide waters twice a day. In the Tidal Basin, completed in 1897, water has risen four feet over the past century — one foot from rising seas and three feet from its sinking foundation built on fill, according to the National Park Service.
Recent history:
Paul Krugman:
New York Times link
Get the popcorn!
Senior tory implicates himself for signing a false witness statement.
https://youtu.be/F6B_mwbYwFI
Cartoon: Mustache 2024
Link
Good news:Trump kicked off Colorado ballot in 14th Amendment case
Link
@286: Yay. Hoping more states follow suit.
New bill would require Chick-fil-A to be open on Sundays
Watch This Gay Trump Supporter Get The Shock Of His Life When He Realizes Republicans Are Homophobic
Minnesota panel chooses new state flag featuring North Star
Vance slams ‘poisoning our blood’ comparisons between Trump comments, Nazis
Srsly
Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence says discovery of bugging devices in Commander-in-Chief’s office has caused public outcry
Prominent Republican judge leaves party, cites Donald Trump as ‘a big part of it’
YES! After Jan 6th why has it taken this long and allowed Trump to go this far already? Bout time and hopefully other courts will now follow & this will be upheld.
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-20/colorado-supreme-court-bans-trump-from-the-state-ballot/103249742
See also BBC Wolrd news here : https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67768873
^ As well as SBS news here :
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/donald-trump-disqualified-from-colorado-presidential-primary-ballot-over-capitol-riot/cc5sajcdj
So could thsi finally be the end of Trump’s political career? (Yeah, I know how many times have we heard that before? Still)
@291. Reginald Selkirk: Minnesota panel chooses new state flag featuring North Star.
A bit hard to tell that’s meant to be Polaris a.k.a. “the North / Pole Star” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris ) rather than a generic star symbol! Nothing to indicate its position, magnitude, sepctral type (F7 Ib – Procyonese yellow-white supergiant star) distance, or slight Cepheid variablity. ;-)
But definitely a huge improvement.
Sen. Tillis to introduce legislation barring federal funds from states ‘misusing’ 14th Amendment
And by “misusing” he means using it in a way he doesn’t like.
Well that would be just another law. It wouldn’t have the effect of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified as part of the constitution.
Trump or Hitler: Who Said It Better?
A question: is Megan Kelly that former TV presenter who claimed she won when she didn’t, or was that some other MAGA Republican woman?
There are so many weirdos (even more when you count the Brit ones) I have trouble keeping track.
A random thought. When tory crazies like Suella Braverman or Priti Patel burn out their careers in the Conservative Party they could launch a profitable career in USA.
When Megan Kelly, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter etc burn out, they cannot as easily move to Britain – the conservatives are incredibly jingoistic and parochial, and probably not tolerant of people without a “public school” accent. Unless they are billionaries, at which point they magically become acceptable.
In case you wonder, Braverman is the one who describes being homeless as a “lifestyle choice”.
Because poor people are just lazy.
Judge orders Rep. Scott Perry to disclose 1,600 messages to federal prosecutors
So overthrowing the elected government is not part of an elected legislator’s official duties? Shocking!
Letters to the Editor: Trump’s legal defense could make Biden America’s first king
Egypt faces painful choices after Sisi’s re-election
Two more commercial ships in Red Sea attacked
Link
Summarized from The Political Wire (and sort of funny):
The Guardian says British doctors expect a rise in penile fractures during the Christmas season.
My comment (adressing British men) “just leave the reindeer alone”.
Finland bolsters military ties with the United States.
Followup to comment 310.
Posted by readers of the article:
Cartoon: Dumb dumb
Netanyahu Cites Amalek as Justification for Gaza
Followup to comment 313.
Hayes went on to play a clip of Israeli journalist Shimon Riklin saying, “I am for the war crimes. I don’t care if I am criticized, and I honestly don’t care. I am unable to sleep if I do not see houses being destroyed in Gaza.”
The MSNBC host continued:
Link
Former federal judge: Colorado’s Trump disqualification not ‘anti-democratic’
Creepy:
https://www.wonkette.com/p/sexual-penis-guy-ted-cruz-pretty
UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday
GAM435 Mr Scrooge To See You!
https://youtu.be/uq_IS5mNSmA
God Awful Movies GAM435
https://youtu.be/uq_lS5mNSmA
Elon Musk Is Dangerously Close to Losing The Tesla Hoe
Researchers Test 2,400-Year-Old Leather and Realize It’s Made of Human Skin
@ 321
KLATU… VERADA… Necktie… Nickel… It was definitely an “n” word.
Hooray! About time to put an end to it: Tuberville’s tantrum ends as Senate confirms military promotions
Link
Trump’s lawyers ask Supreme Court to stay out of dispute on whether he is immune from prosecution
If they lose in a lower court, they will have the option of appealing it up the ladder. It’s almost as if they know it is just a delaying tactic.
AlphV ransomware site is “seized” by the FBI. Then it’s “unseized.” And so on.
London chess prodigy, 8, wins title at European championships
Republicans plot revenge after court kicks Trump off Colorado ballot
Kellyanne Conway’s Mockery Of Liberals Gets Mocked By ― Surprise! ― Liberals
She’s been spying on me! I wonder where the secret camera is hidden.
Trump Misidentifies Reporter As Judge’s Son In Latest Courtroom Conspiracy
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #330…
These bearded white guys all look the same?
Re 310 and 311, Lynna quoting Daily Kos on the new Defense Cooperation Agreement between US and Finland
IDK about “unfettered” either, either, but most of the fifteen bases are located in western Finland rather than along the Russian border.
According to Finnish media, the general understanding is that there is no practical reason or interest whatsoever to store US nuclear weapons in Finland. It’d also be against the current Finnish law (and very much against public opinion, which is why the prospect has been brought up in the media discussion). However, since the DCA does not separately rule out nukes, the issue can be easily mispresented as being under negotiation.
(What might be under negotiation is perhaps the rules for some wartime scenario of transporting or using US nukes in Finnish airspace, transport involving Finnish Air Force equipment etc.)
Similarly, “concrete measures” were threatened after Sweden and Finland applied for Nato Membership in May 2022. This was also when Russia quit selling electricity to Finland, in an attempt to cause some quick inconvenience. The whining about Nato aggression, ruined relationship etc. is pretty much word for word repetition of rhetoric introduced in 2022. This year, while the DCA negotiations were underway, there was some sabotage of Baltic undersea infrastructure, and the funneling of refugees to Finnish border.
Russian land forces stationed near Finnish border were already quite minimal prior to 2022, compared to the major concentrations of naval and air/missile capability near St. Petersburg and Murmansk. In this modern day, Russia could use many kinds of approaches and weapons to attack Finland, but a traditional land-based invasion would definitely require a separate buildup of troops (of which Russia doesn’t currently have to spare).
As for the promised “concrete measures”, in January 2023 Russia announced a reorganization and modest beefing up of the land forces in the northwest. This will take at least a few years to actually happen, assuming Russian military can recover from its losses in Ukraine. We’ll see what, if anything other than small dirty tricks, the newly threatened “necessary measures” will turn out to be.
The prospect of another Trump term in US is certainly making many Finns increasingly nervous, in a way that wasn’t present during the 2016 US election cycle. I’m personally aware that it’d a disaster in many other ways too, mainly for US folks and to some extent others, outside of the matter of European defense against Russia.
Turkish central bank raises interest rate to 42.5% to combat high inflation
Users Flock to Threads as X Suffers Largest Outage Since Musk Takeover
Behold the Mega Lake: Earth’s Largest Lake in History Lands in Guinness Book of Records
lumipuna @332, thanks for clarifying several aspects of that discussion, and for adding information. Excellent.
Jim Jordan slammed officials who do things that benefit their family’s finances. It was intended as criticism of Joe Biden, but it applied to Donald Trump.
Federal judge orders Giuliani to pay defamed election workers now, not later
Elon Musk is terrified of unions. And he should be
birger @300, you are thinking of Kari Lake.
Here’s an update on that particular batshit crazy MAGA woman: In defamation case, judge tells Kari Lake what she didn’t want to hear
Megyn Kelly and Kari Lake were both hosts of supposed news broadcasts. That’s why people know them. Megyn did not try to become governor of Arizona, Kari Lake did. Both are steeped in MAGA conspiracy theories and other senseless mind sludge.
Rudy Giuliani Files For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
Cartoon: Poisoning the blood
At least 15 dead in shootings at university in Prague
Washington Post link
Khashoggi’s widow wins political asylum in the United States
Washington Post link
[…] policymakers are weighing the consequences of using $300 billion in Russian assets to help Kyiv’s war effort.
New York Times link
Trump team fires back at claims that ex-president ‘smells’
Thank you Lynna for providing this informative interactive resource.
From our Enchiridion: Each December 21st we celebrate the symbolism of enduring life of evergreens with a period of thoughtful silence, reciting together our Official Invocation and wishing all people of honesty and decency a peaceful Winter Solstice. And may those always green, living and sheltering outstretched boughs of the Tannenbäume instill an abiding tranquility in us, so we, too, will prevail against the dark and cold to carry through the end of the year and on into a healthy, prosperous new year.
GOP congresswoman touts $650,000 in federal funding — even though she voted against the bill that provided it
Trump lawyer threatens prosecutions of Colorado judges — as they’re bombarded with violent threats
Curiously, Trump is at present claiming complete immunity from the law while performing (supposed) official acts. I would think deciding court cases would fall under the official duties of a judge. And also, as Stephen Colbert has pointed out,
“Removing the guy who tried to overthrow a democratic election is actually pro-democratic. “
ibid.
In other news, Alina Habba is stupid and incompetent. Of course its a constitutional decision.
Rare ‘rainbow cloud’ dazzles skies across North West
shermanj @347, thank you.
More reasons and ways to honor trees, (and new scientific studies): WRITTEN IN THE WOOD
Washington Post link
Much more at the link
NBC News confirming a good diplomatic step:
NBC News:
Well that’s awful.
New York Times:
Yep. More authoritarians refusing to accept election results. sheesh.
NBC News:
Wisconsin GOP Assembly leader backs off threat to impeach Supreme Court judge
Never before seen tiny Briwn Dwarf objects (below the deuterium-burning treshold) with mysterious carbon molecules.
https://youtu.be/p45j-eB0fvo
Jack Smith:
Commentary and more details: Jack Smith blows up Trump’s embarrassingly flawed plea to SCOTUS for a delay.
I meant “Brown Dwarf”.
Also, yet more political turmoil in Britain as a tory biggie seems to have implicated himself in perjury.
Recording surfaces of Trump pressuring Michigan officials not to certify 2020 election
Hardly surprising, given what happened in Georgia.
More than half of Americans approve of Colorado ruling to bar Trump from state’s ballot: Poll
This New Dinosaur May Be The Biggest Ever Found | 7 Days of Science by Ben G Thomas here which i thought was gong to be about (among other things)</i) this fossil find :
https://www.sci.news/paleontology/ruixinia-zhangi-11495.html
Specifically Ruixinia zhangi but actually turned out to be this one :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bustingorrytitan
So not one but two new contenders for Argentinosaurus‘;es crown..
Oh FFS..
FFS
Gen Z and millennial women are waking up to the lies feminists fed them. Now they are upset and alone
Although, being alone is probably better than being with a MAGA douchebro
The War on Christmas rages on.
Woman killed by falling Christmas tree on Belgian market square
@362. Reginald Selkirk : What;s wrong with the other half of them.. Like Dafuck!?
Sorry, tired and cheesed off tonight and just .. after Jan 6th.. really?! How can Trump still have that many cultists willfully blindty following him? Da fuck is wrong with too many people?
@ 365
Consider the source. Of course Fox News is going to claim that feminism makes women sad and they’d be much happier as subservient, brainless Stepford Wives for JEEZ-us.
Biden pardons marijuana use nationwide. Here’s what that means
Uzbekistan summons Russian envoy over politician’s annexation remark
Ukraine-Russia war: Ukraine shoots down three Russian fighter jets
Videos show ‘elite’ Louisville police unit tossing drinks on unsuspecting pedestrians
Second North Korean nuclear reactor appears to be operational, IAEA says
Could California drop Trump from ballot? Lieutenant governor wants to find out
Pancho Claus, Santa’s primo from the South Pole, brings Christmas cheer to San Antonio
U.S. Steel bald eagles popping up at Stonehenge, South Pole and anywhere their fans travel
U.S. Govt and researchers seemingly discover new type of superconductivity in an exotic, crystal-like material — controllable variation breaks temperature records
Followup to Reginald @369.
Link
Republicans have taken a keen interest in a text from Hunter Biden that the right sees as incriminating. A closer look discredits the faux “evidence.”
Trump caught on tape begging officials to subvert Michigan vote
Arctic rivers are turning orange with iron and sulfuric acid, showing remote ecosystems collapsing.
https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1737832281547350307
Posted by Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦
https://twitter.com/JayinKyiv/status/1737769787088834787
Video at the link. Weird. Spooky. And WTF?
https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1737541097922998465
A GOP House member thinks his colleagues have been taped sleeping with Russian spies: ‘Next thing you know, you’re in the motel room with ’em naked’
“Like Muslim suicide bomb culture, Putin’s regime wants Russians to focus on the afterlife rather than the impoverished and depraved fealty under which they live in this world.”
GASP! Who are you to attack their Deeply Held Spiritual Beliefs™.
Young voters right now overwhelmingly prefer Biden: The Economist/YouGov poll
Trump supporters just can’t stop threatening court officials
We have to stay the course.
Cartoon: GOP and Santa
Link
Sick people:
Link
Doofuses in Texas being doofuses:
https://www.wonkette.com/p/all-male-texas-city-council-debates
More at the link, including a discussion of Wisconsin chipping away at abortion rights; social media posts from anti-abortion doofuses who misrepresent Kate Cox’s situation [Example: A popular Instagram post made a number of misleading claims. For instance, the post stated that “90% of kids with Trisomy 18 live when given proper medical care,” while giving examples of children who defied the odds. According to studies, the median survival time for the condition among babies born alive was four to 14.5 days, and just 5.6% to 8.4% of those born alive lived to their 1st birthday.]; and Vice President Kamala Harris’s upcoming tour to promote abbortion rights.
Doofus Republican Explains Why ‘Good Conservatives’ Support ‘Crazy’ Bills: Hot Naked Blackmail Motel Sex!
https://www.wonkette.com/p/doofus-republican-explains-why-good
Chris Rufo posted that.
Commentary:
Supreme Court won’t fast-track ruling on Trump’s claim of immunity.
Washington Post link
U.N. Security Council passes resolution supporting a fighting pause in Gaza to allow aid entry, after a rare U.S. vote abstention
Washington Post link
Octopus DNA seems to confirm scientists’ theory about a long-standing geological mystery
Wisconsin Supreme Court orders new legislative maps in redistricting case brought by Democrats
Ukraine update: 3 Russian Su-34 jets taken out as new Patriot system is deployed, by Mark Sumner
From 1990:
Link
Followup to comment 400.
Posted by readers of the article:
And I’m not trying to be cute. I am speaking 100% literally. You can be certain that one of those two (or both) told Trump to start using the “poisoning the blood” phrase. And there will be a lot more where that came from.
Lynna @401
I’m sure Miller has been putting the Hitler language into Trump speeches knowing full well where that comes from even if Trump didn’t know or remember it (since he has/had the speeches book). And Trump loves it because that’s what he believes and that works for his followers (worshippers).
Miller is a disgusting and dangerous individual and I’m sure he is enjoying planning for a follow up to the family separation and putting children in cages. He should be in prison for crimes against humanity but he’ll never face accountability and he’ll likely have even more power if there is a second Trump presidency (either elected or otherwise).
“Last Christmas” by Wham reaches number one on the UK chart 39 years after it was released.
Andrew Ridgeley says “mission accomplished”.
Ridgeley looks wrinkled, reminding me of how time flies. It feels like it is ten years since Wham! split, tops.
Speaking of time, and split, it is now 10 years since ‘The Epic Split’ ad video, featuring Jean Claude Van Damme standing astride two moving Volvo trucks… simultaneously!
https://youtu.be/M7FIvfx5J10
Trump says he would peacefully transfer power at end of his term if reelected
Why on earth would anyone believe him?
A British sea monitoring agency says another vessel has been hijacked near Somalia
California town proposes ban on Pride, Black and women’s history celebrations
Cancel Culture!
A miracle in Cincinnati? Some Catholics say they saw ‘manifestation’ during communion
Psychologists Pinpoint Average Age Children Become Santa Sceptics
Some good news in a study that will be published in The Lancet.
A study of the latest COVID vaccine shows it provides a surprisingly strong immune response against recent mutated omricon variants such as XBB and BA.2.86.
The study was done by Karolinska Institute and Danderyd hospital, Sweden.
Police camera operators jailed for deleting speeding offences for friends
Jean @402: “[…] he’ll likely have even more power if there is a second Trump presidency […]”
All too true. Stephen Miller is typical of the wannabe-Nazis surrounding Trump. Miller has positioned himself to wreak more havoc if Trump wins. It’s scary.
MRFF is delighted to report that Rep. Turner’s NDAA amendment to shut us down has backfired BIGLY!!!
https://www.wonkette.com/p/white-house-will-renominate-julie
Poop and Politics:
https://www.wonkette.com/p/with-fart-and-poop-comments-trump
Re: Lynna, OM @ #413…
There’s another Gotcha! to AB5. If you run a for profit convention–no matter how little that profit is–you can’t use volunteers to help run it. They have to be paid at least the local minimum wage. In practice that means that the former volunteers at the convention will be getting more per hour than I average over the course of the year for running convention registration from my share of the profits.
So far as we can tell, a lot of conventions in our field are ignoring the law. It may come back to bite them.
whheydt @415, interesting. Thanks for the additional info.
In other news, Trump is offering gift wrap that features his awful visage, and he is selling “Never Surrender” Xmas stockings … all part of his holiday fundraising efforts. Well, he does have a lot of lawyers to pay. I wouldn’t display any of that stuff in my house. What a way to ruin the holiday.
Link
Twitter violated contract by failing to pay millions in bonuses, judge rules
The lawsuits make a range of claims, including that X discriminated against older employees, women and workers with disabilities, and failed to give advance notice of mass layoffs.
The Sahara Desert Used To Be a Green Savannah and New Research Explains Why
Vale Laura Lynch -lead singer of the Chicks ex-Dixie Chicks :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-24/founding-member-of-the-dixie-chicks-dies-65/103262468
U.S. water utilities were hacked after leaving their default passwords set to ‘1111,’ cybersecurity officials say
Federal court orders some Michigan political districts to be redrawn
The mystery of Roman concrete is fnally solved.
or maybe
https://youtube.com/shorts/VePA5JqdC1A
“Trump in panic mode after people confirm he smells bad ”
So this allegation is what makes Trump’s PR people freak out ??
https://youtu.be/68_v2I9oU4U
or possibly
https://youtu.be/68_v2l9oU4U
Guatemala’s Democracy Descends Into Crisis, With Implications For The US
Black Music Sunday: Wishing you a jazzy Christmas Eve!
Much more at the link. Lot’s of music.
This has no relevance to.previous comments whatsoever. I just wanted to share the weirdest anime segment possible, this being Xmas and all.
https://youtu.be/cutG_O5pRdo
Fentanyl super labs in Canada pose new threat for U.S. opioid epidemic
Washington Post link
Manchester United announces deal to sell up to 25% of EPL club to U.K. billionaire Jim Ratcliffe
Ratcliffe, who owns petrochemicals giant INEOS, is one of Britain’s richest people.
GOP senators who voted to acquit Trump insist they don’t regret it
People who sucked still suck; that’s not really news.
Bild: Russia may attempt to attack Europe next winter, European intelligence source says
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #430…
That begs the question: What would the Russians attack Europe with? WW2 equipment? That’s most of what they’ve got left.
Venomous snakebites kill thousands every year. A California doctor may have a solution
Trump claimed the Lincoln Project used AI to make him ‘look bad.’ But the clips are real
Waste of effort:
Moses’ parting of the Red Sea may not have been a miracle after all
Next they will launch an in-depth study of how Jack could really have climbed that beanstalk.
Another waste of effort:
Archaeologists Think They Might Have Found the Real Noah’s Ark
Press Release: TACF Discontinues Development of Darling 58
Some good news, or at least good hopium:
Link
Followup to comment 437.
Same link as in comment 437.
Orange tabby cat named Taters steals the show in first video sent by laser from deep space
Reginald Selkirk @ 434
A non-miraculous explanation of a memorable event would be a neat explanation for something that was – much later – joined to the corpus of Jewish myrhology.
A decade ago Science (or Nature?) had an article about a phenomenon outside the Nile delta near the branch that was called Tanis in antiquity.
Due to persistent wind conditions a big bay at the Tanis delta got nearly drained of water for hours.
If the section of the Old Testament was referring to “the sea of reeds” this location would be a fit for an observed event attributed to supernatural agency that later got inserted in the invented narrative of Moses.
So we have a plausible natural event living on in oral tradition + priests in the myth-making business operating in the early iron age.
At least this myth has a fragment of real background, unlike the narrative of the star of Betlehem *.
The way I see it, anything that de-mystifies the background of myths is a victory for a secular worldview.
*See Aaron Adair’s book about possible sources for the nativity myth.
birgerjohansson@440,
No: there’s actually no evidence the Israelites were ever in Egypt, despite the best efforts of generations of believing archeologists. The Israelites appear to have differentiated from other inhabitants of Canaan in situ, around 1200 BCE, which is around the time the Exodus is usually set by those who take the myth for history. See Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. The oldest parts of the Tanakh (the Jewish scriptures) date from no earlier than the 700s BCE. Finkelstein is one of Israel’s most eminant archeologists and as it happens, an observant Jew.
As for the Nativity myths (there are two completely incompatible ones in the gospels of Matthew and Luke), they are obvious retcons, to place Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem (where according to Jewish beliefs of the time, the Messiah was to be born) despite the fact that he was a native of Galilee. The fact that Christian writers went to the trouble of inventing these stories is actually good evidence for a historical Jesus – if he’d been wholly invented, there would be no reason at all to place his early life in Galilee.
KG @ 441
We are not in disagreement.
I am merely pointing out a small fragment of the spurious “Egyptian captivity” narrative that may have been inspired by natural phenomena, just as earhquakes mentioned in the NT are inspired by real earthquakes.
It is now increasingly accepted that the Jews are descended from a population in the highlands that expanded after the bronze age civilizational collapse brought down the city states among the coast.
The material culture in this highland population was very poor and was initially dominated by a bedouin-style life rather than agriculture-dominated.
There was of course a constant flow of people West and East, to and from Egypt. But apart of the temporary polity in the Nile delta at the end of the Middle Kingdom there is no sign of massive migration before the Sea People arrived.
A heart-warming Youtube video.
Fur farm rescue foxes walking on the ground for the first time.
The release starts at the 9-minute mark.
https://youtu.be/zXZIeAh1rqE
or maybe
https://youtu.be/zXZleAh1rqE
Re; KG @ #441…
Two items about the standard nativity story tend to cause me to go, “WTF?” The first one is the bit about shepherds staying out in the fields at night keeping an eye on the sheep. That was only done in lambing season, which is in the spring, so the mid-winter dating is an obvious cover to celebrate when everyone else is celebrating some sort of Solstice event. The other is the great pains made to give Joseph’s genealogy. Since the myth is that Jesus isn’t his son, what does his genealogy matter? What should matter would be Mary’s genealogy, if one is needed.
‘Fake’ Seal Impression of Biblical King Jeroboam Is Authentic, New Study Says
Archaeologists Bewildered by Monumental Moat That Split Biblical Jerusalem in Two
@440,441,444 Nativity narrative
The detail that always makes me laugh is that the magi spotted the star in the East, and so traveled West. (Matt 2)
Setting up a new Windows laptop or desktop? Change these dumb defaults right away!
Israeli airstrike in Syria kills senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards member
Well that should calm things down /s
Many prehistoric handprints show a finger missing. What if this was not accidental?
Maybe the penalty for graffiti was having a finger cut off?
More Russian stuff blowing up: Russia’s largest nuclear-powered icebreaker catches fire
FRANKFURT, Germany —Shipping firm Maersk says it’s preparing for resumption of Red Sea voyages after attacks from Yemen
Let The Golden Dukes 2023 Voting Begin: Santos Was Just The Tip Of The Iceberg
Announcing the nominees for the 2023 Golden Dukes awards.
Reginald @447, perhaps re-read the passage. They followed the star in the direction it moved.
(Matthew 2:7–9 RSV)
birgerjohansson@442,
OK, thanks. Quasi-naturalistic “explanations” of non-events irritate me, but I see I misunderstood you. Oddly, this solstice I haven’t spotted any of the usual pseudo-astronomical “What was the Star of Bethlehem?” pieces.
KG @ 455 If you want a truly comprehensive debunking of the various explanations to the star of Betlehem, Aaron Adair has written a book that is likely to be the final word on the topic.
Also, that century the Romams circulated a book by Virgil that had Aeneas follow a star (Venus) to the site of future Rome. The guy who wrote down the gospel got his inspiration from a book Virgil himself was not very fond of.
US airstrikes hit Kataib Hezbollah sites in Iraq after attack on US troops
Tucker Carlson Drops Bizarre Interview With Kevin Spacey Floating 2024 Run and Suggesting Netflix Tried to Kill Him
Ukraine claims it destroyed Russian tank landing ship
birgerjohansson@456,
Nah – I don’t need a debunking of a fictional episode. And I rather doubt the “following a star” trope was original with Virgil any more than with “Matthew”: similarity does not necessarily imply transmission.
KG 460.
Yes, as we have seen with the flood narrative, stories get recycled again and again.
“Alexei Sayle’s alternative alternative Christmas message ”
Recommended
https://youtu.be/jnbDn3ghqbk
Project Veritas faces new legal setback in case about Biden’s daughter
Posted by readers of the article:
Link
https://twitter.com/NewVoiceUkraine/status/1739330664368082957
@ 464
Please! The height of American “art” are paintings of Elvis Presley on black velvet and the “Dog’s Playing Poker” picture.
America is a nation of fucking slobs. Trump, his millions of trash supporters, and the vile, uneducated, scut this quote comes from are proof of that.
15 most famous sculptors and their most iconic works
Two are American, Calder and Koons. Most are from continental Europe.
Lynna… @ # 464, quoting a Kossack: Is the White House a superior building to Versailles?
Even if one agrees, that still leaves US architecture subordinate to European: The White House design copies that of Dublin’s Leinster House.
StackExchange Hermeneutics – Magi Travelogue
Religion Clause / Objective coverage of church-state and religious liberty developments, with extensive links to primary sources.
Top 10 Church-State and Religious Liberty Developments of 2023
By Howard Friedman / December 26, 2023
In Letter Heavy With Irony, Navalny Describes Transfer to Arctic Prison
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/26/world/europe/navalny-russia-prison-letter.html
The comments from the Russian opposition leader were written with a heavy dose of humor, and seemed intended to assuage concerns among allies after his three-week disappearance.
Blizzard conditions roll through northern and central Plains, snarling post-Christmas travel
A blizzard warning is in effect through 5 a.m. Mountain time for 600,000 people across five states, hitting South Dakota and Nebraska the hardest.
Photos show jackknifed semitrucks and tractor-trailers that veered off roads.
Airline travel:
Police investigate incidents involving Colorado justices after Trump removed from ballot
Followup to comment 473.
Link
Joe Rogan Tries To Pin Trump Quote On Biden, Gets Corrected On Air, Is Meathead
https://www.wonkette.com/p/joe-rogan-tries-to-pin-trump-quote
Intel secures $3.25B Israeli gov’t grant to build $25B chip fab in Israel amid ongoing tensions
Sweden’s bid to join NATO approved by Turkish foreign affairs committee
Kari Lake is in deep, deep trouble with judge’s refusal to dismiss defamation lawsuit
Getting to the bottom of how red flour beetles absorb water through their butts
1-2-3-1-2-3: Vegas chapels prepare for influx of couples on NYE
Michigan Supreme Court rejects ‘insurrectionist ban’ case and keeps Trump on 2024 primary ballot
Sexing Dinos: Paleontologists Seek Fossilized Hormones
Huge Shakira statue unveiled in her hometown of Barranquilla
Donald Trump has little to gain from his incessant attacks on the ACA. It’s worth considering why the Republican is keeping the offensive going anyway.
HuffPost reported that the Republican National Committee is heading into 2024 “with just $7.6 million available, barely a tenth of what it had four years ago, after accounting for inflation.”
Good News.
Link
Details at the link.
Study shows Small Magellanic Cloud is actually two smaller galaxies
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-small-magellanic-cloud-smaller-galaxies.html
Opening up a whole new wavelength region.
High-sensitivity terahertz detection by 2D plasmons in transistors
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-high-sensitivity-terahertz-2d-plasmons-transistors.html
NB
Private enterprise fucks up health care- what a surprise! (“Private equity” takeovers BTW increase the risk of bankrupcy for companies taken over)
Quality of care declines after private equity takes over hospitals, finds nationwide analysis
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-12-quality-declines-private-equity-hospitals.html
New report suggests that there’s more to be concerned about than just rising temperatures
Followup to comment 490.
Posted by readers of the article:
Tom Smothers, Comic Half of the Smothers Brothers, Dies at 86
Link
https://www.wonkette.com/p/rep-dean-phillips-to-win-democratic
Followup to comment 494.
Posted by readers of the article:
Fact Check: Viral Pic Shows Donald Trump While Serving in the Military?
They put a lot of effort into something that is incredibly obvious: The image has Trump’s recent face, not a younger Trump.
@ #492
I’m old enough to remember the Smothers brothers show and their constant battle with the CBS censors, for bits like this one which got through somehow.
Smothers joked that Easter “is when Jesus comes out of his tomb and if he sees his shadow, he goes back in and we get six more weeks of winter.”
It was constantly anti-Vietnam war, and at Christmas, when other show hosts were sending best wishes to soldiers fighting overseas, Smothers offered his to draft dodgers who had moved to Canada.
It was truly the only one of its kind, and I doubt they could get away with it today. In those days it was mainly language and sex that upset the censors. After 3 years CBS couldn’t take it any more and canceled the show.
Steam Punk Lara Croft / Hullabaloo
https://youtu.be/OQPfrb_6fgI
or
https://youtu.be/OQPfrb_6fgl
UNB curler brings down the hammer with one-of-a-kind prosthetic
The First Secret Asteroid Mission Won’t Be the Last