Friday, November 18, 2022

News bits

The saga of MAGA: 
It’s still raining Republican felons
GOP operative found guilty of funneling Russian money to Donald Trump

A Republican political strategist was convicted of illegally helping a Russian businessman contribute to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

Jesse Benton, 44, was pardoned by Trump in 2020 for a different campaign finance crime, months before he was indicted again on six counts related to facilitating an illegal foreign campaign donation. He was found guilty Thursday on all six counts.
Trump and the fascist GOP both vehemently deny there was any Russian influence in the 2016 election. Well, this is more evidence that the Russians were involved. Bigger Russian influence came from the release of stolen emails by Wikileaks after Trump publicly asked the Russians to help him smear Clinton. Never forget Trump’s open invitation: “Russia, if you're listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” US intelligence found Russian efforts to intervene on Trump’s behalf, which is another inconvenient fact that Trump and the fascist GOP both vehemently deny. 

Grand Jury Indicts 12 Russian Intelligence Officers for Hacking Offenses 
Related to the 2016 Election

The Department of Justice today announced that a grand jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment presented by the Special Counsel’s Office. The indictment charges twelve Russian nationals for committing federal crimes that were intended to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. All twelve defendants are members of the GRU, a Russian Federation intelligence agency within the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian military. These GRU officers, in their official capacities, engaged in a sustained effort to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, and released that information on the internet under the names "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0" and through another entity.

According to the allegations in the indictment, Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, Boris Alekseyevich Antonov, Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov, Aleksey Viktorovich Lukashev, Sergey Aleksandrovich Morgachev, Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek, Pavel Vyacheslavovich Yershov, Artem Andreyevich Malyshev, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk, Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin, and Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev were officials in Unit 26165 and Unit 74455 of the Russian government’s Main Intelligence Directorate.
It’s just raining Republican felons, e.g., the traitors who participated in the Republican 1/6 coup attempt. It’s not projected to stop raining until Republicans take control of state and federal law enforcement. Then the rain will stop.


The rule of law, the Republican way
It is not the case that Republican elites are anarchists who operate without regard for the rule of law. They just do not want the law turned against themselves. They are enthusiastic about using the law to go after Democrats and political opposition. The NYT writes:
Republicans Lay Out Biden Investigations, but Democrat-Aligned 
Groups Promise Counteroffensive

The Biden administration has been bracing for congressional investigations, cognizant of the serious political threat posed by even a narrow Republican majority in the House.
Hours after winning control of the House, Republicans began laying out plans on Thursday for investigations of President Biden, his administration and his family, and were met with promises of a multimillion-dollar counteroffensive from a network of groups allied with Democrats.

On Capitol Hill, the incoming Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, said the panel would focus on trying to link Mr. Biden to the business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden, continuing an effort begun in 2018 that never established the elder Biden’s complicity in any wrongdoing but led to former President Donald J. Trump’s first impeachment.

Mr. Comer told reporters his aim was “to show you this is an investigation of Joe Biden,” and not just his son.
For the fascist Republican Party, the rule of law has degenerated into  partisan weapon to be used against political opposition. It raises the question of when will the GOP sink to the level of fabricating evidence when there isn’t enough to prosecute and convict enemies. 

I had thought that line would be crossed when the Republicans did their witch hunt audits of the 2020 Arizona election. Remember the Cyber Ninjas and their clown car performance pretending to be an audit? But the republicans did not cross the line on that occasion. It is reasonable to think that the temptation to fabricate evidence is just as great today as it was then. 

Sooner or later, that line will probably be crossed. Most likely within the next two years.

Although it goes without saying, if the people the Republicans target with their investigations did commit crimes, they need to be prosecuted if and only if there is enough evidence to get a conviction in a fair and professional court of law. Of course, a different shoe could drop. If the judge is an unfair and unprofessional Republican extremist, e.g., a corrupt Trump judge like pro-Trump federal judge Aileen Cannon, the evidence needed to convict for crimes could be dropped by the judge. That would be the true and final end of the rule of law.  

And, as we all know, a Republican impeachment by the House will not need to be based on sufficient evidence or sound reasoning. Unless there is sufficient evidence, a GOP impeachment will be an obvious partisan witch hunt.

This is America’s new political normal for the foreseeable future, maybe until the end of the Republic. It is best we get used to it because we cannot stop it.



From the rut roh! files:
The Amazon River is drying up
This one is scary. Well, OK, the bit about the rule of law was scary too. There is just so much scary to go around these days. The WaPo writes:
For years, scientists have been warning that the Amazon is speeding toward a tipping point — the moment when deforestation and global warming would trigger an irreversible cascade of climatic forces, killing large swaths of what remained. If somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of the forest were lost, models suggested, much of the Amazon would perish.

About 18 percent of the rainforest is now gone, and the evidence increasingly supports the warnings. Whether or not the tipping point has arrived — and some scientists think it has — the Amazon is beginning to collapse.

More than three-quarters of the rainforest, research indicates, is showing signs of lost resilience. In fire-scorched areas of the Rio Negro floodplains, one research group noted a “drastic ecosystem shift” that has reduced jungle to savanna. In the southeastern Amazon, which has been assaulted by rapacious cattle ranching, trees are dying off and being pushed aside by species better acclimated to drier climes. In the southwestern Amazon, fast-growing bamboo is overtaking lands ravaged by fire and drought. And in the devastated transitional forests of Mato Grosso state, researchers believe a local tipping point is imminent.
No, this isn’t alarmism or politics. It is not lies, socialism, communism, pedophilia, cannibalism, blue space lasers or microchips in the vaccine. It is science based on data. Lest we forget, the Republican anti-science attitude toward climate change is clearly and undeniably stated in these words from radical right Republican Rick Scott’s disastrous plan for America:

The weather is always changing. We take climate change seriously, but not hysterically. We will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs.

That means that the fascist, staunchly pro-pollution Republican Party takes seriously any attempt by government or business to deal with climate change. The GOP is saying that it will oppose all attempts to slow or reverse climate change. 

In other words, Republican elites see all policies to try to deal with climate change as “hysterical, nutty polices.” After all, one cannot change the weather. Right? /s


Unfortunately, most people can’t feel 
it until they feel it hard 

No comments:

Post a Comment