Deja vu all over again?

In a move that did not get too much attention in the news, 13 Republicans members of the hard right caucus voted with 203 Democrats to defeat by 216-203 an effort to ‘pass the rule’ for three Republican bills to be brought to the floor, thus stymying their speaker Mike Johnson. Without the rule being passed, Johnson will need a ⅔ majority. (In a post back in November, I explained what this procedural stuff is all about.)

Why did they do this? Apparently they are unhappy with the deal that Johnson made with the White House and the Democratic leadership over the spending bills for the budget, because it did not contain all the measures they sought. I can understand the frustration of the hard right caucus. As Kevin Drum writes, the framework of the deal that Johnson agreed to is pretty much the same that former speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to with the White House eight months ago.
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Trump spoke at his trial after all

The lawyer for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) asked the judge for permission for SSAT to speak for two or three minutes during closing arguments and the judge asked “Do you promise to just comment on the facts and the law?”. But then SSAT immediately started speaking without answering and did his usual rigamarole about this being a persecution by the prosecution and the judge. SSAT spoke for five minutes before the judge cut him off.

I am not sure what the point of this was other than for SSAT to let off steam. After all, there was no jury to convince. All it does is further tick off the judge who is going to make the final determination of the size of the penalty.

Trump’s planned courtroom antics foiled by judge

Yesterday we saw another attempt by serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) to turn the legal system into a circus. All witness testimony in the fraud trial involving his business enterprises that was brought by the attorney general of the state of New York Letitia James, and which is being conducted in a Manhattan courthouse presided over by judge Arthur Engoron, is over and all that remains is the summing up by the two sides. Note that Engoron had already ruled that the documentary evidence had established fraud and this trial was to determine the size of the penalty. James had initially asked for $250 million and then raised it to $370 million.

SSAT said that he wanted to give his side’s closing argument, in addition to his attorneys. I do not think that this was because he thought his attorneys were incompetent, although they apparently forgot to check the box at the beginning that asked for a jury trial and thus this was a bench trial to be judged exclusively by the judge. That did not prevent SSAT from repeatedly whining how he was being deprived of his constitutional right to be tried by a jury even though that right has to be requested and he did not do so. I think that he may have not wanted to have a jury at all, anticipating that he would lose and thinking that it would be easier to argue that the judge was biased against him rather than a jury.
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Covid-19 cases are on the rise again

Covid cases are on the rise again in the US, fueled by a new variant known as JN.1. Since many people now test at home, health officials are using wastewater to get measures of its prevalence.

The variant is linked to about 60% of new cases, according to CDC data. A member of the omicron family, JN.1 is descended from the BA.2.86 variant. Its most notable new mutation changes the spike protein that latches onto cells, enhancing its ability to evade our immunity. But even if JN.1 is more skilled at dodging antibodies from previous infections and vaccinations, it is not entirely resistant to them.

A recent study of disease spread found that length of exposure was the biggest factor in transmission. A team led by University of Oxford researchers found that 82% of cases were acquired from exposures that lasted longer than one hour.

Despite COVID’s omnipresence, the chance of hospitalization and death is unmistakably lower than in previous years. The number of people in California hospitals with COVID grew to about 2,000 by the end of December, half of last winter’s peak, and just a tenth of the record high.

But the nebulous threat of developing what is known as long COVID remains, and millions across the United States have already experienced it.

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The decline of Boeing

Problems keep mounting for the Boeing aircraft company. In 2019, there were two crashes in quick succession of the new Boeing 737 Max aircraft that killed 346 people and resulted in the entire fleet of that model being grounded from March 2019 to November 2020 for investigations and to fix the problem.

Investigations faulted a Boeing cover-up of a defect and lapses in the FAA’s certification of the aircraft for flight. The accidents and grounding cost Boeing an estimated $20 billion in fines, compensation and legal fees as of 2020, with indirect losses of more than $60 billion from 1,200 cancelled orders. In 2021, Boeing also paid US$2.5 billion in penalties and compensation to settle the DOJ’s fraud conspiracy case against the company. Further investigations also revealed that the FAA and Boeing had colluded on recertification test flights, attempted to cover up important information and that the FAA had retaliated against whistleblowers.

Then last week, a panel of the fuselage ripped out of a brand new 737 Max plane operated by Alaskan Airways just after it took off and was ascending to cruising altitude. Fortunately there were no casualties and the plane landed safely but the fleet was grounded again to see what might be the problem.
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The further adventures of Kristina Karamo

You may recall my post of about two weeks ago about the Michigan GOP where a bonkers QAnon-supporting election denier Kristina Karamo and her followers took over the leadership of the state party just a year ago and promptly made a mess of things so that the party is on the verge of bankruptcy. This resulted in efforts by even those who once supported her bid for the leadership to try and oust her and yesterday, they managed to do just that.

But if you think that ended that saga, then you still haven’t understood today’s MAGA GOP. They never accept an election result unless they win. Karamo herself has still not conceded that she got trounced in the race for Michigan secretary of state back in 2022 claiming (you guessed it) that the election was rigged.
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Trump reveals new discovery about magnets

In their 2010 song Miracles, the Insane Clown Posse had the lyric “Fucking magnets, how do they work?”. That line has since become an internet meme. They also sang that they did not want to talk to any scientist because scientists lie.

In a speech in Iowa on Friday, serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) reveals his knowledge of magnets, that pouring water over them destroys them.


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John Pilger (1939-2023)

The Australian journalist and documentarian died last week at the age of 83. He was tireless in his efforts to expose the crimes of the powerful against the powerless.

I first became aware of him in 1979 when I was in graduate school in the US. The film The Deer Hunter that dealt with the story of three friends form rural Pennsylvania who get sent to Vietnam during that brutal invasion of that country by the US that saw millions of Vietnamese killed and their country ruined by massive bombardment and the deliberate destruction of villages and the countryside. The film came out to great acclaim and went on to win five Academy Awards including best picture, best director (Michael Cimino) and best supporting actor (Christopher Walken) with further nominations for best actor (Robert De Niro) and best actress (Meryl Streep).

I went to see it and was appalled at the utterly racist way that the Vietnamese were portrayed, like bloodthirsty savages who delighted in torturing and killing. It was clear to me that the film was trying to make Americans feel good about the war that they had humiliatingly lost just four years earlier despite throwing their sophisticated weaponry (short of nuclear weapons) at a much poorer country.
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What the hell is going on in the Michigan GOP?

Michigan is a so-called swing state that neither Democrats nor Republicans have a lock on. Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) won the state in 2016 and then lost it to Joe Biden in 2020. But then SSAT went on his delusional bender about how the election was stolen, pointing to this state as one that he actually won. Many of his supporters picked up on that and the state GOP went all in on the lie. Following SSAT’s defeat, the party leadership swept out all the old guard at all levels and put in place the most extreme election deniers.

But while the voters of Michigan may not be firmly in the Democratic camp, it appears that they were not that enthused about the Big Lie and, in the 2022 elections, Democrats won big and the proponents of the Big Lie lost. Currently the Democrats control the State House, the Senate, the Governor’s Office, and most of the Congressional seats, leaving the GOP in the most marginalized situation in 40 years.
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A welcome dent in the qualified immunity defense

For the longest time, many police officers who abuse ordinary people during their interactions with the public have been shielded from repercussions under what is known as ‘qualified immunity‘ for their actions.

Qualified immunity is a type of legal immunity that protects a government official from lawsuits alleging that the official violated a plaintiff’s rights, only allowing suits where officials violated a “clearly established” statutory or constitutional right.
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When determining whether a right was “clearly established,” courts consider whether a hypothetical reasonable official would have known that the defendant’s conduct violated the plaintiff’s rights. Courts conducting this analysis apply the law that was in force at the time of the alleged violation, not the law in effect when the court considers the case.
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Although qualified immunity frequently appears in cases involving police officers, it also applies to most other executive branch officials. While judges, prosecutors, legislators, and some other government officials do not receive qualified immunity, most are protected by other immunity doctrines.

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