The convicted felon pretends to back away from Project 2025; Commentary on the verdict

Hm, guess the verdict 

did come out so well?

Salon writes that the convicted felon (it feels so nice to write that) and kleptocratic dictator wannabe DJT claims he is backing away from Project 2025:

Trump is now trying to downplay Project 2025

Trump’s campaign issued a statement distancing the former president from a plan drawn up by former staffers

Project 2025 (and its auxiliary Trump’s “Agenda 47”) are a plan by right-wing extremists and other authoritarians to end America’s multiracial democracy and to replace it with a White Christian nationalist plutocracy.

A conspiracy is a plan by two or more people operating in private to advance their interests and goals above those of some other person(s) — or in this context the American people. Project 2025 is not a conspiracy. These plans are exhaustively detailed in a book titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” and are regularly discussed at conferences, in interviews, and in other public forums. Project 2025 and its related plans, like Agenda 47, were not hatched overnight. As author and journalist Anne Nelson and other experts have been extensively documenting, Project 2025 and the other right-wing extremists’ and neofascists' plans to end America’s multiracial democracy have been years and decades in development:

But ignore it at your peril. The massive tome is the latest iteration of a four-decade-long process of crafting right-wing policies to dismantle the federal government, deregulate industry and eliminate consumer protections and public health measures, while installing a regime controlled by fossil fuel interests and the Religious Right. Not coincidentally, the members of its advisory board have been making headlines attacking American institutions at a grassroots level, in preparation for the big takeover—ranging from Moms4Liberty’s assaults on local public schools, to the Koch-founded Institute on Energy Research’s war on climate initiatives.

Project 2025 lays out specifics for hundreds of policy objectives affecting every area of public life. Many of them affect three primary areas: first, the dismantling of environmental regulations, clean energy measures, and climate policy; second, a rollback of civil and political rights for women and LGBTQ populations and the elimination of public health measures; and third, a massive purge of career civil servants and the concentration of power in the Executive branch in the White House, to consolidate an entrenched authoritarian regime.

Public opinion polls and other research have repeatedly shown that a large percentage of the American public remains unaware of the existential danger that Donald Trump and his MAGA movement and the other neofascists and authoritarians represent to the country’s democracy and freedom. It is the responsibility of the Fourth Estate to wake the American people up from their sleepwalking and political zombification. As an institution, the American news media has largely failed in this obligation.  

To awaken from and escape the Age of Trump and this worsening democracy crisis, the American people need more pro-democracy journalism that illuminates, informs, and gives them solutions. Unfortunately, such work is an outlier in American mainstream news media that largely remains ill-equipped to meet the challenges of the Age of Trump, the global democracy crisis, and what comes next with the 2024 election and beyond.

The Salon article is quite long. It points out the few MSM sources that have gone woke, see the threat and call it what it is, i.e., authoritarianism, neofascism, Christofascism, fascism, plutocracy, etc. So far, I am not aware of anyone calling the authoritarian radical right agenda kleptocracy or kleptocratic. However, that is also a key part of what the radical right wealth and power movement is all about. The radical right is not just about setting up a dictatorship-plutocracy-theocracy. It is also very much about accumulating a lot more wealth for the already wealthy people and interests who run our already seriously corrupted government.

Q: Why is the American mainstream news media largely ill-equipped to meet the challenges of the Age of Trump and the global democracy crisis? Media ownership by corrupt corporations and greedy plutocrats? 

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The NYT reports (not paywalled) on the verdict that made DJT a convicted felon:

Live Updates: Trump Lashes Out After Conviction in Misleading Speech

Donald J. Trump, the first U.S. president to become a felon, excoriated prosecutors and the judge in his criminal case and ran through a litany of false statements as he spoke to reporters and a small crowd of vetted supporters at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan.

In a rambling and misleading 33-minute speech, derided the trial as “rigged” and attacked the judge in his first public comments since a Manhattan jury found him guilty of all 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign. He also made numerous misleading statements about the case and what took place at the trial.

Mr. Trump, who said he would appeal the verdict, continued to attack people who testified against him in the seven-week trial, specifically his former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, the star witness for the prosecution. He also admitted that he got “very upset” with his lawyers.

Good, he is upset with his lawyers. I hope he fires all of them and refuses to pay them. That would help in the DJT personal chaos department.

The WaPo reports (not paywalled) on an issue that is personally concerning, namely the overall impact of DJT on the rule of law:

Even as Trump is found guilty, his attacks take toll on judicial system

That the hush money trial happened at all is a sign of democracy working, analysts say, but Trump’s all-out offensive dealt a “body blow” to the judiciary

For months, top advisers to Donald Trump expected that he would be convicted by a New York jury on all 34 felony counts. So Trump and his team waged an all-out war against the judicial system before the verdict came in, hoping to blunt the political damage and position him as a martyr.

They sent hundreds of fundraising appeals attacking the prosecutors and the system, raising millions of dollars on false claims. They lined up allies outside the courthouse almost every day to question the fairness of the proceedings. Trump attacked the judge, the judge’s daughter and, finally, even the jury — ordinary, anonymous New Yorkers called to perform their basic civic duty.

But amid the relentless offensive by Trump and his allies on the legal infrastructure holding him accountable, the trial came with a substantial cost, according to those who study democracy, with the ultimate impact likely to be measured in November.

“The judicial system has taken a body blow from Trump’s assaults,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology at Princeton University who studies the rise and fall of constitutional government. Forcing him to sit through the trial, follow orders and listen to evidence against himself meant that “his rage at being controlled by others is going to be directed at trying to bring the whole judicial system down with him.”

Indeed, Trump went on a long diatribe after his conviction was announced. “This was a disgrace,” he said. “This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt.”

Time will tell how the damage manifests. We can only hope that it will not be crippling, e.g., by getting DJT re-elected, claiming false martyrdom. 

We cannot go back in time and undo to vast damage that Merrick Garland did by delaying any prosecution of DJT for so long. Garland failed miserably. What he did could easily turn out to be too little, too late. This New York state verdict alone may not be sufficient to protect the rule of law.

Wait, what?? . . . . what, what what? . . . . who? . . . . . what what?

Everybody is reporting that DJT is now a convicted felon. 34 felonies. NPR reported that poll data released just before the jury tossed a turd in Trump's party punch bowl indicated that a conviction would hurt the lying, fornicating, deeply insulting, treasonous scumbag Trump only a little bit more than it would help him in battleground states. About 19% said it would hurt him and ~17% said it would help them vote for DJT.

That's how close we are to the brink of fascist Armageddon, or whatever horrors another Trump administration brings down on our democracy, civil liberties and rule of law.

The NPR commentator blowhards say that this verdict reinforces the strength of the rule of law in America. Maybe so. Maybe not. How appeals that DJT files turn out will shed some light. 

Trump's public comments so far are deeply insulting to the jury. He calls them biased and unfair. After those people spent that much time out of their private lives, Trump calls them partisan liars.

That is deeply, deeply insulting to me. What about you?

DJT is corrupt, immoral sub-human filth. If any people on planet Earth are agents of Satan, they include Trump along with mass murdering monsters like Putin and China's Xi.

Qs: Is Germaine over the top for calling DJT corrupt, immoral sub-human filth? And waddabout (1) his elite sub-human GOP defenders like the Christofascist thug House Speaker Mike Johnson, who also deeply insults the jury and our legal system, and (2) DJT's rank and file supporters? What about the rank and file? Are they blameless and innocent?

What about the rank and file?[1]

Footnote: 

1. Various sources report that DJT's website crashed because his loyal supporters were rushing to donate to him. The Hill reported:

Former President Trump’s fundraising page crashed shortly after he was convicted on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, an issue his campaign attributed to an influx of donations.

“The American people see through Crooked Joe Biden’s rigged show trial,” Trump’s campaign posted on the social platform X. “So many Americans were moved to donate to President Trump’s campaign that the WinRed pages went down. We are working on getting the website back online as quickly as possible.”

What about the rank and file? Innocents or complicits?

Legalized political corruption in America

In the years leading up to the 2010 USSC decision in Citizens United v. Fed. Election Commission, Republican federal judges had been nibbling away at laws that tried to tamp down on political corruption. The Citizens United decision blew a huge hole in anti-corruption laws, paving the way for the massive, shameless corruption that now poisons American state and federal governments.

By legalizing corruption, euphemistically called “protected free speech” by pro-corruption, authoritarian Republican judges, America’s radical right authoritarian wealth and power movement was greatly empowered. It aggressively expanded its decades-long effort to (i) take power from federal and state governments, and (ii) take civil liberties and the power that protected them from citizens. As much of that power and attendant wealth flowed to corrupt politician, business, and religious elites as they could possibly get away with grabbing and keeping. The new power to be corrupt was at least as useful as the new cash.

A current example of legalized corruption comes from the prosecution of US Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ). CBS News reports:

Prosecutors trying to prove that New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez wielded his political influence in exchange for bribes cannot show jurors evidence that they argue is “critical” to their case, a federal judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein said prosecutors could not use text messages from 2019 that allegedly show Menendez, who was the top Democrat on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, assuring Egypt and the New Jersey businessmen who are alleged to have bribed him that he was not delaying military aid to the country after Egypt heard he had put a hold on it.

The jury also cannot see another text from 2022 in which the senator's wife, Nadine, allegedly told one of the businessmen that “Bob had to sign off on this.” The text included a link about two pending foreign military sales to Egypt, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors argued last week that Egypt was “frantic about not getting their money's worth,” which is why it contacted Menendez through two of the New Jersey businessmen, who allegedly gave the senator cash, gold bars, and other things of value. The text involving Menendez's wife signaled, “You keep the bribes flowing, and he is going to keep giving you what you want on the military aid,” prosecutor Paul Monteleoni told Stein before the decision.

But Stein determined the Constitution's “speech or debate” clause, which protects lawmakers against prosecution over official legislative acts, applied to the evidence.

“The core legislative act is clearly the hold or releasing the hold. I don't think it matters that there was mistaken information here,” Stein said Tuesday, before making his decision official in an order later in the week.

Such an interpretation would prohibit “some of the core most critical evidence,” Monteleoni countered.

The judge here, Sidney Stein, is a Democrat appointed to the bench by Bill Clinton. That probably makes Stein a neoliberal who is inherently sympathetic to elite white collar criminals. Or maybe the law is such that high-level corruption like this simply cannot be prosecuted any more. Unless I misunderstand this reporting, if a federal politician entangles corruption like bribe-taking with official business, it is legal. 

The American Prospect wrote about the Menendez legal situation last March:

One More Way the Supreme Court Has Legalized Corruption

The Menendez story also illustrates a subtle way the Supreme Court’s de facto legalization of corruption interacts with other aspects of the campaign finance system. You see, he has not officially dropped out of the race—and has even floated that he will run as an independent in the general election—because pretending like he’s still a candidate lets him spend his campaign cash on his legal defense.

The context is important here. The sheer comical excess of the Menendez indictment illustrates how rampant political corruption is in this country. The reason people getting nailed by law enforcement for corruption tend to be people with literal gold bars and stacks of cash sewn into their jackets is because of Supreme Court decisions making it impossible to prosecute instances of corruption that are somewhat more deniable. In McDonnell v. U.S., the Court unanimously overturned the conviction of a former Virginia governor and his wife who had set up meetings with officials for a pharmaceutical company while taking valuable gifts from the company’s owner. In FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate, it ruled that candidates can loan their campaigns money, and then pay themselves back with donor cash after the election is over and the victor is known—effectively opening a window labeled “bribes here.” And in Citizens United v. FEC, of course, they legalized effectively limitless corporate spending in politics.

Partly as a result of these decisions, Washington, D.C., is absolutely awash with people being effectively bribed, morally if not legally. Lobbyists are throwing all kinds of money and gifts around all the time. As a politician, if you behave well in office as a senator or representative, you can expect to be offered all kinds of cushy lobbyist or no-show “consulting” jobs that are actually worth much more than a sack of gold ingots.

So while Menendez was doing the kind of idiotic corruption that actually may have run afoul of the remaining shreds of anti-corruption law, now he is taking advantage of a more subtle variety: spending his campaign money on his legal bills. Should he actually contest the Senate election this year, he is absolutely certain to lose—a recent poll found him with 75 percent disapproval among New Jersey residents—and he’s already given up on seeking re-election as a Democrat. But pretending to be running allows him to spend his remaining campaign funds on his legal defense. Just between October and December last year, he spent $2.3 million out of his campaign coffers on legal fees. And as of the end of December, there’s still another $6.2 million in that account.

This is not just about corruption of federal politicians and the federal government. The corruption problem is in the states too. Last February, The Economist wrote about the flow of power to state Attorney General politicians, like the shamelessly corrupt Ken Paxton of Texas:

State attorneys-general are shaping national policy

Despite not being elected to do so

To foreigners looking in, it is unusual enough that America elects most of its top prosecutors. More shocking is the amount of money going into political campaigns. Now the two have come together in a way that would make even the least wonky American curious. Between 2008 and 2022 the cost of state attorney-general races rose from $17m to $222m. Over that period governors’ contests became only eight—rather than 12—times pricier and those of state senators merely doubled.

The cashflow reflects something much bigger: the role of state attorney-general has been recast. The job used to be about defending state laws and prosecuting cheats, fraudsters and corporate bullies. Today attorneys-general shape nationwide politics and policy by pushing strategic lawsuits through their favorite courts. Their quiet rise to power has made the states’ top lawyers some of America’s most unchecked partisan players.

Two attorneys-general, one a Republican and one a Democrat, exemplify the new breed. First there is Ken Paxton of Texas. Between 2021 and 2023 he refused to represent state agencies in court at least 75 times, according to ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, both news outlets—often seemingly for ideological reasons. He has dropped child-sexual-assault cases after losing track of the plaintiffs, let payments to crime victims lapse and taken decreasing interest in catching Medicaid cheats. Instead he chose to energize his Trumpian base by relentlessly suing the Biden administration. Mr. Paxton has blocked vaccine mandates and banned abortion when it was still protected under the federal constitution. Most recently he brought the country’s attention to a bitter row over whether Texas can enforce its own immigration regime at the southern border.  

[In a 2000 decision,] the Supreme Court ruled that due to the threat of rising sea-levels the Massachusetts attorney-general could lead the charge. Massachusetts v EPA set the precedent for a single state to challenge the federal government in court. That drastically expanded the reach of attorneys-general—Republicans soon raced to sue Barack Obama when he took office. Over time attorneys-general realized that if they banded together with like-minded colleagues across the country, they could handpick the district with the most sympathetic judges in which to bring their case. One federal judge’s injunction in their favor, and against Washington, could shut down a policy for the whole country until a higher court ruled on its appeal. “Not only can they play on their home-turf, they can now choose the referee,” says Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas at Austin. 

The strategy took off when Mr. Trump became president. Democratic attorneys-general sued the federal government more times in four years than they had in the previous 16, says Paul Nolette, a political scientist. Republicans took it a step further under Joe Biden, aiming their litigation not just at Democratic policies but at the administrative state itself. Today these lawsuits are masterfully co-ordinated to maximise partisan wins, says James Tierney, a former attorney-general of Maine who teaches at Harvard University. With that in mind it is less surprising that Mr Trump’s Muslim travel ban was halted by a judge in Honolulu and mifepristone, an abortion pill, was temporarily outlawed by a judge in the Texas Panhandle. 

Follow the money

Dark-money groups caught on to the fact that attorneys-general had sway and that their races were cheaper to influence than congressional ones. The Concord Fund, a conservative one, has pumped at least $9.5m into the contests since 2020. That cash no doubt helped unseat moderates: a five-term Republican attorney-general of Idaho who refused to be a political activist was booted out in 2022. The left is no more tolerant of impartiality. The Democratic Attorneys General Association, which funds candidates, announced in 2019 that it would no longer back Democrats who were not explicitly pro-choice. For aspiring attorneys-general the calculus has become clear: get more political, get elected.

The Economist, which is inherently anti-government and anti-Democratic Party, also singled out New York’s Democratic attorney-general Letitia James for (i) prosecuting Donald Trump for lying to lenders about his finances (finance fraud), and (ii) prosecuting the bosses of the National Rifle Association for corruption. The Economist grudgingly concedes that the James prosecutions “may have more legal merit” than some of what Paxton has done in Texas. That is an understatement. It reflects the pro-business, anti-government bias The Economist usually brings to the table. And, the case for equivalence between Republicans and Democrats The Economist makes is not persuasive to me.  

But as one can see, there are multiple ways to be corrupt in politics and get away with it.

The dark history of Sam Alito and the GOP; Thoughts about right wing American extremism

Now that the raw, bigoted authoritarianism of Sam Alito is well known, some folks are talking a trip down history memory lane. The New Republic writes:

Ted Kennedy Warned Us About Samuel Alito. 

He Was Ignored.

The Supreme Court justice’s flag controversy should come as no surprise to anyone who paid attention to his nomination hearings in 2006

Alito’s troubles began two weeks ago, when The New York Times reported that an upside-down American flag was spotted flying at his Virginia home not long after the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Commentators expressed alarm that a Supreme Court justice would willfully, or through incredible ignorance, associate with an authoritarian movement that has trampled on the Constitution that he took an oath to uphold. Many prominent Democrats, including Representative Hakeem Jeffries, called on Alito to recuse himself from all forthcoming cases involving Trump and the attempted coup in 2021.

But Alito won’t recuse himself—and his brazen display of disloyalty to American democracy should surprise no one who recalls how he landed on the Supreme Court.

Alito’s hard-right ideology [i.e., authoritarianism], and his shameless lack of ethics, were obvious when he was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2005. A few Democratic senators sounded the siren, but the mainstream media, even its so-called “liberal” mainstays, largely ignored the warnings, unwittingly cooperating with an elite, right-wing operation to install a dishonest, partisan extremist on the highest court of the country.

As The New York Times reported on the eve of Alito’s confirmation in 2006, his placement on the court was the “culmination” of an effort that began during the Reagan administration to staff the judiciary with ideologues of the religious right. Conservatives also deployed an adroit media strategy to temper, silence, and even disparage any attempt to criticize Alito during the nomination hearings. Public relations specialists and legal experts, coordinating on behalf of the Federalist Society, Christian organizations like Focus on the Family, and Republican senators, helped to sell Alito to the Senate, the media, and the public—even before his nomination. “We boxed them in,” one lawyer who participated in the meetings told the newspaper, presumably referring to the Senate and the mainstream media.

Early in the Alito nomination fight, Democrats uncovered a memo the judge wrote while he was working for the Reagan administration in 1985 that articulated his opposition to legal abortion. He advised against waging a “frontal assault on Roe” only because such a maneuver would prove politically unpopular, and instead advocated for a steady demolition of access to reproductive health care at the state level. Until the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe, the Alito playbook is exactly what many Southern and heartland states followed to make abortion all but impossible within their borders.  

The memo did not stop Alito from lying to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, whose diary revealed that, while meeting privately in Kennedy’s office, Alito assured him that he would never vote to overturn Roe. Unlike Republican Senator Susan Collins, who believed the same lie from Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, Kennedy was not gullible enough to vote in favor of Alito’s confirmation.  

The P.R. firm [professional liars for hire] handling the Alito nomination insisted that Republicans counter with the claim that, as a lawyer for the Reagan administration, Alito was only reflecting the views of his client. Planned Parenthood warned that Alito would “gut Roe” if he had the opportunity, but the media soon dropped stories on the memo.  

Similarly nauseating events transpired when Democrats learned that Alito belonged to Concerned Alumni of Princeton, an organization that opposed measures to increase admission of women and racial minorities. The group wasn’t merely against affirmative action but also contemptuous of co-education and supportive of quotas that favored men.  

Alito insisted that his participation in the group was ancient history. (He had listed his membership on a job application as a 35-year-old applying to work for the federal government.) The mainstream media reacted not with questions about Alito’s biases on race and gender but with vilification of Democrats. Gloria Borger, a CNN commentator, accused the Democrats of “going over the line,” Newsweek likened Democratic senators to “bullies,” and PBS’s Gwen Ifill accused Alito’s critics of “demonization.” Chris Matthews and Chuck Todd had a conversation on MSNBC suggesting that it was absurd to try to “nail him” for belonging to a “club.”  

Kennedy gave a thunderous address on behalf of the people that the “liberal coalition” aimed to represent, warning on the Senate floor of the dangers of Alito’s extreme ideology: “If you are concerned and you want a justice that’s going to stand for the working men and women in this country—it’s not going to be Judge Alito. If you are concerned about women’s privacy rights, about the opportunity for women to gain fair employment in America—it’s not Judge Alito. If you care about the disabled … the Disability Act that we have passed to bring all of the disabled into our society, if you are looking for someone that is going to be a friend of the disabled—it’s not going to be Judge Alito. And finally, if you are looking for someone that is going to be willing to stand up to the executive branch of government … it’s not going to be Judge Alito.”

 A deeply immoral, chronic liar like Alito is the kind of judge that the radicalized, authoritarian Republican Party likes to put on the bench. That degenerated moral character reminds me a whole lot of the party’s current leader and essentially all of its elected politicians, major donors and hired professional liars known as “PR” firms. 

Yeah, it it was absurd to try to nail Alito for merely belonging to a club, sort of like belonging to a club like the Klu Klux Klan, the Communist Party, the American National Socialist Movement (racist Nazis), the Proud Boys, or these days, even the modern Republican Party. (Oops, was that last one over the top? 🥺)

If I recall right, another trip down history memory lane leads me to think that at one time, the US was antifa fighting against the Nazis and fascists somewhere. Maybe Europe and Japan I think. My goodness, how times have changed.

Qs: What about the rank and file who give power to morally rotted, anti-democracy politicians like this? What are they? Patriots? Complicit, whether they know or believe it or not?

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Off on an American extremism tangent: That stuff about Alito’s brand of lying, bigoted, extremist authoritarian politics got me to wondering, who are the radicals that represent this kind of mental moral rot? One can only hope they are still fringe groups. But with today’s modern radicalized, extremist GOP and elites like Alito and Thomas, maybe they are not so fringy any more. The following comes from something called the Counter Extremism Project. The CEP has a page for worldwide far-right extremist groups and another page for American White Supremacist groups.

The CEP comments on the American White Supremacist page: 

A February 2017 Southern Poverty Law Center report identified 100 active white nationalist and 99 active neo-Nazi groups in the country. In an October 2020 assessment by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf declared that white supremacist violent extremists “have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years.” In March 2021, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas declared domestic violent extremism “poses the most lethal and persistent terrorism-related threat to the homeland today.”  

The Counter Extremism Project (CEP) has identified multiple virulent white supremacist groups, which principally espouse white ethno-nationalism and/or National Socialism (neo-Nazi). Neo-Nazi groups, such as the National Socialist Movement (NSM), generally make no effort to hide their belief that the white race is superior to others. Their ideologies also usually include antisemitic and homophobic components that are in line with Nazi dogma.

I think Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas was wrong about the most lethal and persistent terrorism-related threat to the homeland today. I think that honor really should go to the radicalized modern Republican Party. Or, is that assessment unreasonable or over the top?

This fun-filled American club

is racist and pro-Nazi 

Alito might be at home here

Another fun racist American 

Nazi club

Alitolandia?

This one has some fascism going on in it 😊

The authoritarian racists at The Right Stuff, are self-righteous monsters  

who know they are right, while we are scum that needs to be put down like dogs

(Fortunately the juicy stuff at The Right Stuff is paywalled off

Thank goodness, I am not willing to contribute to that cause) 

In other radicalized Republican moral rot news, Nikki Haley was criticized for writing ‘Finish Them!’ on artillery shell in Israel -- Nikki Haley, the former Republican presidential candidate and U.N. ambassador, wrote “Finish Them!” on an artillery shell during a days-long trip to Israel

Well, now we know where Haley bravely stands on the Palestinian issue. It can be summarized in three words: Kill 'em all! Excellent foreign policy thinking. her experience at the UN shows.

Haley sends her love and respect

to the Israeli people

Something else goes to the Palestinians

Israeli public opinion update: Most Israelis rate military’s campaign in Gaza ‘about right’ or not enough -- A survey by Pew Research found only one in five Israelis said the military campaign in Gaza had gone too far. The survey found 39 percent of Israelis said that the country’s military response against Hamas in Gaza has been about right, and 34 percent said it has not gone far enough. 19 percent said they think it has gone too far.

Well, 73% public support for pulverizing Gaza and the people in it is a pretty good level of support. One does not see that in the US much any more, if ever. Maybe Israel has radicalized too!

Israeli pulverizing machines, 

a/k/a/ tanks

Heck, even the weather is getting on the American extremism wagon: The hail in Texas was so big Tuesday that it required a new description -- Forecasters warned of “DVD-size hail” as stones larger than grapefruits bombarded an area near Lubbock. 

A new record! 5" hail!

Ouch, ouch, OUCH!

Also in Texas: In a Texas G.O.P. at War With Itself, the Hard Right Is Gaining -- The speaker of the State House, Dade Phelan, survived a primary challenge from a Trump-backed activist, but many other Republican incumbents were ousted in bitter primary races.

Well the NYT, like most of the rest of the MSM, still cannot bring itself to call the Republican Party what is it, i.e., obviously anti-democratic and obviously authoritarian.

Supreme Court status update; Jurors get the case; Gaza update

Slate writes about a possible signal that the USSC is going to drop some heavy artillery shells on America by the end of this court term on June 30. In recent decades, the USSC has issued major decisions during the last few days of June so that the justices can get out of town and avoid criticism for the garbage the court often degrades the US with these days. Gutless radical authoritarian Republicans in particular are keen to avoid criticism. The like to think they their keep dignity unruffled by avoiding public protests from unwashed scum. 

How Republican justices see 

us rabble

In a Q&A interview, Slate speculates that we might be in for some very unpleasant decisions in coming days: 

The Supreme Court Is Going Off the Rails. 

It’s About to Get So Much Worse. 

Q: What makes this term different? 

A: It’s different in two ways that are going to sound like they’re inconsistent, although I think they’re coming from the same place. The first way is: The court’s actually doing less. We’re on track for maybe 58 or 59 merits decisions by the time we go home for the summer and go start crying again. Which will be the fifth term in a row that the court doesn’t get to 60 cases. And it hadn’t been below 60, before that, since 1864. And so there’s a whole universe of cases that has completely disappeared from the Supreme Court’s docket.

Yet a remarkably high percentage of what’s left are major cases. You’ve got these major administrative law cases, abortion cases, and social media cases. You’ve got two major gun cases. Oh, by the way, there are those two small Jan. 6 cases, including one about whether former President Trump can be criminally prosecuted. So depending on how you count, that’s about 20 major decisions that the court has to get through between now and the end of June. And they’re doing three or four a week right now.  

Q: What in the world of conceivable interventions could John Roberts, the institutionalist, take? 

A: Roberts the institutionalist is missing in action and has been for some time. The chief’s questions from the bench in some of these high-profile cases have been really trollish and hacky. In the Fisher case about the Jan. 6 prosecutions, he sounded like Thomas and Alito. In the homelessness case, he sounded so horribly cruel and insensitive. 

I worry that the “moderate” John Roberts who appeared intermittently from 2012 through maybe 2023 is gone. I feel like he’s just done trying to police his colleagues and he’s doing this YOLO court thing that we had previously assumed he was embarrassed by.

Strap on your seat belts folks. The ride ahead might get a bit bumpy.

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The jurors in DJT’s criminal fraudulent business records prosecution are getting instructions from the judge. Presumably the jury will start to deliberate today. Two points. One relates to the complexity of the law in this particular case. Trump is charged with falsifying records to cover up a second crime — the violation of a state election law that forbids a conspiracy to aid any election by “unlawful means.” This will probably be the hardest part for judge Merchan to explain to the jury. The outcome of this lawsuit turns on this point.

Second, despite endless pundit and partisan blowhard predictions there is no way to predict how or if the jury will decide. A single MAGA pro-Trumper can hang the jury and cause a mistrial, regardless of how solid the evidence is. In that case, the jury could not decide. Then if there is no MAGA juror, there is the matter of getting all 12 non-MAGA jurors to accept the legal basis for at least one of the alleged 34 felonies in this case for a conviction. I have no idea how this will turn out.

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The NYT is reporting that a senior Israeli official national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, said he expected Israel’s military operations in Gaza to continue through at least the end of the year. That ought to be long enough to pulverize most infrastructure there into dust. The people? That is an ugly question.

An Israeli pulverizer on the Gaza border

The NYT also reports:

The bombs used in the Israeli strike that killed dozens of Palestinians in a camp for displaced people near Rafah on Sunday were made in the United States, according to weapons experts and visual evidence reviewed by The New York Times.

Munition debris filmed at the strike location the next day was remnants from a GBU-39, a bomb designed and manufactured in the United States.

1:32 minute video: This little thing is feisty

American horror stories: The monster from the Ivy League on the Supreme Court

A 2005 article The Nation published was just brought to my attention. This is worth knowing about, if you are OK with horror stories. The Nation wrote:

Alito’s CAP Connection

Samuel Alito once boasted he was a member of Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which opposed and bemoaned the impact of co-education and affirmative action. What does this say about his character and the kind of place he would like America to be?

The Daily Princetonian published a story that merits attention from senators gearing up for the confirmation hearings of Samuel Alito, George W. Bush’s nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court.

In 1985 Princeton graduate and conservative Republican Alito sought to impress his colleagues in the Reagan Administration, where he was applying to become deputy assistant attorney general, by touting his membership in an organization called Concerned Alumni of Princeton.

Launched in 1972, the year Alito graduated, CAP had an innocuous-sounding name that disguised a less benign agenda, which included preventing women and minorities from entering an institution that had long been a bastion of white male privilege. In a 1973 article in Prospect, a magazine CAP published, Shelby Cullom Davis, one of its founders, harked back to the days when a gathering of Princeton alumni consisted of “a body of men, relatively homogeneous in interests and backgrounds.” Lamented Cullom Davis: “I cannot envisage a similar happening in the future with an undergraduate student population of approximately 40% women and minorities, such as the Administration has proposed.” Another article published that same year bemoaned the fact that “the makeup of the Princeton student body has changed drastically for the worse” in recent years–Princeton had begun admitting women in 1969–and wondered aloud what might happen if the university adopted a “sex-blind” policy “removing limits on the number of women.” In an unsuccessful effort to forestall this frightening development, the executive committee of CAP published a statement in December 1973 that affirmed unequivocally, “Concerned Alumni of Princeton opposes adoption of a sex-blind admission policy.”

By the time Alito was readying his 1985 job application with the Reagan Administration, the admission of women and minorities was well established at Nassau Hall, but this did not stop CAP from lamenting the consequences. “People nowadays just don’t seem to know their place,” fretted a 1983 Prospect essay titled “In Defense of Elitism.” “Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they’re black and hispanic, the physically handicapped are trying to gain equal representation in professional sports, and homosexuals are demanding that government vouchsafe them the right to bear children.” By this point the editor of Prospect was Dinesh D’Souza, who brought to its pages a new level of coarseness aimed at those who did not know their place. “Here at Princeton homosexuals are on the rampage,” complained a 1984 news item in Prospect–this after a gay student group had dared to protest being denied permission to hold a dance at a campus club. Another article poked fun at Sally Frank, a Princeton alumna who was suing the university for denying women access to all-male eating clubs. It noted that a Rhode Island woman who’d won a discrimination suit against a mining company had subsequently died in an on-the-job accident. “Sally Frank, take note,” it quipped.  

Some argue that Alito’s membership in the organization hardly proves he shared such views. “It would be outrageously inaccurate to say Sam was deeply involved in the group, and he certainly wasn’t in charge of choosing the articles,” T. Harding Jones, who edited Prospect during the 1970s, told me, adding that CAP’s main goals were strengthening the alumni’s voice and championing a more ideologically balanced curriculum. Diane Weeks begs to differ. Weeks graduated from Princeton three years after Alito did and went on to work with him as an assistant US Attorney in New Jersey. In an interview she took pains to stress that she considers Alito “a man of integrity” with a first-rate legal mind. But, she added, “when I saw CAP on that 1985 job application, I was flabbergasted. I was totally stunned. I couldn’t believe it.” CAP, she said, “made it clear to women like me that we were not wanted on campus. And he is touting his membership in this group in 1985, thirteen years after he graduated. He’s not a young man by this point, and I don’t buy for a second that he was doing it just to get a job. Membership in CAP gives a good sense of what someone’s personal beliefs are. I’m very troubled by this, and if I were on the Senate I would want some answers.”

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee might take the time to leaf through some of Prospect’s back issues and formulate questions for the candidate. Is the Princeton graduate slated to replace the first female Supreme Court Justice proud of his affiliation with an organization that attempted to prevent women and minorities from receiving the same education he did? If not, why did he flaunt his membership in it? What does this say about his character, and about the kind of place he would ultimately like America to be?

One can say that Alito did not share the view of CAP and its Prospect publication because he was just a member of CAP. On the other hand, people can accord no benefit of doubt to Alito, like Diane Weeks. Based on his public record alone, Alito arguably deserves no benefit of any doubt on anything that comes up in his defense. Alito gets distrust because he earned and deserves it.

Waddabout the Bushes (and Trump)?

The Bush family has a worse than terrible track record with their Supreme Court picks. Bush Sr. gave us Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Bush Jr. Gave us John Roberts and Sam Alito. What rotten choices. Being at least as bad as the Bushes, Trump gave us the hyper-radical Neil Gorsuch, the whacko Brett Beer Boofer Kavanaugh, the religious freak Amy Comey Barrett and Aileen Loose Cannon Cannon, whatever she is. All eight are/were radical right authoritarians. Radical right authoritarian is the kind of judge that represents the authoritarian aspirations and politics of the Republican Party.

The thug traitor, bigot and authoritarian Alito

showing his loyalty to Trump 

(oh sorry, his wife did it)

Authoritarian traitor credentials on the left, 

Christian theocrat credentials on the right,

democracy nowhere to be seen

About Perplexity and error correction; About the global warming hoax; GOP corruption & tyranny

A question I had for Perplexity was burning a hole in my brain. So I asked the question. Based on past personal experience, I got the answer I was expecting:

Q: When asked a question and Perplexity gives a wrong answer, but that answer is corrected with a follow up question based on solid evidence, does Perplexity learn from being corrected with correct information, or does Perplexity not remember and use the new information for answering the same question in the future?

A: Perplexity is an AI model, not a learning system. It does not have the capability to learn from corrections or update its knowledge based on new information provided during conversations.

Perplexity is a pre-trained language model designed to generate human-like text based on the data it was trained on. While it can provide coherent and contextual responses, it does not have a mechanism to incorporate new knowledge or learn from feedback dynamically.

When Perplexity generates an incorrect answer and is provided with the right information through follow-up questions or corrections, it does not retain or integrate that new knowledge into its existing model. Each response from Perplexity is generated based solely on its initial training data and the current conversational context.

However, without such retraining, Perplexity will continue to rely on its original training data and may provide the same incorrect answer if asked the same question again in the future. It does not have an inherent ability to remember or apply the corrected information provided during a single conversation.

I think I found a flaw in system. A fly in the ointment. A snake in the wood pile. A hitch in the operation. A hair in the soup. . . . . 

Well, at least Perplexity is honest. 🙃

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The NYT reports:

Climate Change Added a Month’s Worth of Extra-Hot Days in Past Year -- Since last May, the average person experienced 26 more days of abnormal warmth than they would have without global warming, a new analysis found. Hypothetically, had we not heated the globe to its current state, the number of unusually warm days would have been far fewer, the scientists estimated, using mathematical modeling of the global climate. The precise difference varies place to place. In some countries, it is just two or three weeks, the researchers found. In others, including Colombia, Indonesia and Rwanda, the difference is upward of 120 days.

The NYT also reports: Dead Monkeys Are Falling From Trees Amid Brutal Heat in Mexico -- The deaths of dozens of howler monkeys may be the latest sign of the danger extreme temperatures pose to wildlife around the world. Scientists investigating the deaths still don’t know exactly what caused them. But they hypothesize that warmer temperatures may have combined with a confluence of other factors — including fires, deforestation and logging — that have cornered the monkeys in smaller areas of forest with little shade, food or water. The scientists haven’t yet ruled out pathogens, but a recent necropsy on one of the monkeys showed no signs of influenza, including bird flu, or Covid-19, Dr. Pozo said.

And Newsweek reports: Map Shows Florida Cities Break Heat Records Amid Surging Temperatures -- Highs well into the 90s from Texas to South Carolina were reported throughout the weekend. According to the National Weather Service (NWS), record-high temperatures were felt in Central Florida as area residents celebrated Memorial Day. Melbourne experienced its second-warmest May temperature at 98 degrees, while the city of Fort Pierce tied its warmest day of the month at 98.

See, global warming is a hoax, just like the Republican Party and DJT say. /s

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From the Republican Party Corruption Files (not paywalled): Trump makes sweeping promises to donors on audacious fundraising tour -- By tying donation requests to pledges of tax cuts and other policies, Trump is testing the boundaries of federal campaign finance laws. When Donald Trump met some of the country’s top donors at a luxurious New York hotel earlier this month, he told the group that a businessman had recently offered $1 million to his presidential effort and wanted to have lunch. “I’m not having lunch,” Trump said he responded, according to donors who attended. “You’ve got to make it $25 million.” Another businessman, he said, had traditionally given $2 million to $3 million to Republicans. Instead, he said he told the donor that he wanted a $25 million or $50 million contribution or he would not be “very happy.”

Well, there it is ladies & germs. Bribery right out in the open. It is legal and fun. And the USSC would sanction it as just garden variety, constitutionally protected free speech. Yay Republican Citizens United and later Republican USSC decisions that have legalized and sanctioned large scale political corruption. Attaboys! Republicans really know how to do free speech! 

From the Republican Party Tyranny Files: 

Texas GOP Amendment Would Stop Democrats Winning Any State Election

The Republican Party of Texas has voted on a policy proposal that would require any candidate for statewide office to win in a majority of the state's 254 counties to secure election, effectively preventing Democrats from winning statewide positions based on the current distribution of their support.

Democratic voters in Texas are heavily disproportionately concentrated in a handful of major cities which only constitute a small number of counties, while Republicans dominate most of the more sparsely populated rural counties.

American plutocracy corrupting government; Public consequences of plutocracy; Weak Democrats

As we all know, American politics operates as a pay-to-play system. Playing means favorably influencing policy in return for the donor’s free speech in the form of cash contributions. The WaPo reports about the current wave of corruption of congress by the crypto industry:

As crypto cash floods Washington, 

Congress eyes gentler regulations

Major crypto firms are fighting to remake federal law with an expensive lobbying campaign that has left no part of American politics untouched

Cryptocurrency companies and investors have spent at least $149 million over the past four years to thwart tough regulation, elect new allies to Congress and defeat lawmakers seen as potential threats, a campaign that culminated this week with a House vote to soften federal oversight of the embattled industry.

The wide array of financial backers include Coinbase and Ripple, which the U.S. government recently sued for allegedly violating federal rules meant to protect investors from harm. Even as they have come under withering scrutiny, these and other major crypto firms have fought not only to rebuff the charges but to remake the laws entirely, mounting an expensive lobbying effort that has left no part of Washington untouched.

On Capitol Hill, the industry has shelled out more than $60 million to shape federal policy since the start of 2021, according to filings analyzed by The Washington Post and data from OpenSecrets and Public Citizen, two money-in-politics watchdogs. The lobbying campaign helped spur the House on Wednesday to advance the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, the first major piece of legislation on cryptocurrency to clear either chamber of Congress.

As usual for Washington, money always talks and everything else usually walks.

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The Hill reports about social effects arising from the only moral value, profit, that brass knuckles capitalism values and lives by: 

Water systems warn Americans could soon see major rate hikes to 

filter out toxic ‘forever chemicals’

In exchange for cleaner [less toxic] water, Americans around the nation may soon have to pay hefty prices.

Water systems are starting to warn residents of massive rate hikes as they prepare to install technology to filter out toxic chemicals in a family known as PFAS.

Utilities from South Florida to upstate New York have warned customers that they could see significant price increases after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandated that they remove the substances, which have been linked to a number of cancers and other diseases, from their systems.

Last month, the EPA said it will require utilities whose water systems contain high levels of six types of PFAS to remove them from the water.

PFAS, which stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a group of thousands of chemicals that have been used to make a variety of nonstick and waterproof products and firefighting foam.

The substances have also become ubiquitous in the environment, due in part to the fact that they tend to persist for a long time instead of breaking down.

Exposure to these so-called forever chemicals has been linked to increased risks of prostate, kidney and testicular cancers, weakened immune systems, high cholesterol, and developmental issues in children.

Now, for the first time, utilities around the nation will be required to get them out of their drinking water to prevent customers’ exposure. But that will come at a price.

Last month, officials with Broward County, a populous South Florida locale, warned residents that those on county water could see “double or triple water rates for users.”

Obviously, not all businesses are brass knuckles capitalist. But nearly all the big ones are and most of the medium sized ones are. The profit moral value can be described pretty accurately like this:

Make as much profit as possible as fast as possible, privatize it, and trickle it up to elite wealthy investors and owners, while limiting risk, accountability and cost by denying and socializing social, human and environmental damage and harms.

 

In the unregulated capitalist US, PFAS were found to be useful and immediately put on the market to sell for profit. Adverse human and environmental effects were either not researched, or they were found but denied and/or hidden from public knowledge. 

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Politico reports about the abject weakness in Biden and the balance of power in the Democratic Party:

Biden has no plan to touch the Alito controversy, 

even with a 10-foot pole

The president and his team have decided not to engage on a story that progressives say demands their engagement

Top Democrats have no plans to investigate reports that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito flew an upside-down American flag outside his home after the 2020 election. And Joe Biden has no desire to even talk about it.

Amid growing demands from the base of the party to call out the actions of several conservative justices and embrace reforms of the court, both the president and the White House have stayed mum.

Biden has publicly warned that Republicans are undermining democratic norms and threatening its institutions. But he is reluctant to extend that argument to the judicial branch, aides say, fearful it could be cast as politically motivated and undermine his broader effort to portray himself as a champion for strengthening democratic institutions. They believe it’s crucial to maintain a clear contrast with Donald Trump, who has readily attacked an independent judiciary for political gain.

That exemplifies why I see Biden and his brand of Democratic Party politics as center right, politically weak. In my opinion, those people are not seriously committed to defending democracy or civil liberties such as voting rights and abortion rights. If a Democratic Party USSC justice did what Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas have done, the authoritarian radical right Republican Party would be screaming bloody murder in self-righteous moral outrage. But when Republicans are corrupt and hyper-partisan like all six of the Republican rotters on the bench are now, there is not a squeak of protest from high level center-right politicians like Biden. 

In my opinion, if Trump wins in November and we lose our democracy, liberties and rule of law, it will be because corrupt, center right Democrats in power were unwilling to even try to mount an effective defense. In their minds they are valiant defenders of democracy, liberty and the law. In my mind, they are weak, wussified and self-deluded or naive at best, but sympathetic to corruption and authoritarianism at worst.

Some Memorial Day thoughts; A new centrism rising?; DJT & his dark free speech

A sobering NYT opinion (not paywalled) contemplates several aspects of America’s wars: 

How Should We Honor the Dead of Our Failed Wars?

Iraq 2006

About 10 years ago, as the war in Afghanistan was slowly, painfully winding down, I walked through Arlington National Cemetery with a fellow Marine veteran and a relative of mine visiting from Ireland. We passed row after row of pristine white tombs, the dead of all the just wars and unjust wars that made and remade this country, and my relative told us he found it quite moving; he hadn’t been expecting that. Perhaps he thought it’d be more bombastic, or obviously militaristic, and he was taken by the beauty and serenity and quiet dignity of the place.

So we brought him to Section 60 to see some of the newest graves, of kids born in the ’90s, and I told him the sight filled me with rage, these young lives thrown into a mismanaged war, where even their deaths, at that late stage, were mostly ignored. Just the background hum of a global superpower.

A couple of years later, in 2021, the Afghan war finally ended, taking with it a few American children of the 2000s, and, in a moral failure laid on top of the military failure, leaving tens of thousands of Afghans who worked with us at risk in the now completely Taliban-controlled country. The last Marines to fall died in a suicide bombing at a gate to Kabul’s airport, a blast that killed 11 Marines, one Navy medic, one soldier and about 170 Afghan civilians. The Marines were trying to manage the chaos of the poorly planned evacuation of Afghans from Kabul — a humanitarian mission at heart, trying to help those we were abandoning. A week before she died, one of the Marines, Sgt. Nicole Gee, posted a photo of her cradling a baby in Kabul and captioned it, “I love my job.”

America responded to those deaths with a drone strike against a Kabul vehicle the military claimed was transporting ISIS members who were about to carry out another attack, but that, in a twist that felt grotesquely emblematic of so many of our failures, turned out to carry an Afghan aid worker. The blast killed the aid worker and his relatives, seven of whom were children. The sort of people those Marines died trying to help.

How do you memorialize the dead of a failed war? At Arlington, it’s easy to let your heart swell with pride as you pass certain graves. Here are the heroes that ended slavery. Here are the patriots who defeated fascism. We think of them as inextricably bound up with the cause they gave their life to. The same can’t be said for more morally troubling wars, from the Philippines to Vietnam. And for the dead of my generation’s wars, for the dead I knew, the reasons they died sit awkwardly alongside the honor I owe them.

For so many of the kids I saw, their mission mattered to them, and so their mission should matter to all of us when we remember their deaths. And the mission was a catastrophe. Memorial Day should come with sorrow and patriotic pride, yes, but also with a sense of shame. And, though it has faded for me over the years, with anger.

I’ve come to feel that airbrushing out the complexities of their wars is, ultimately, disrespectful to the dead. We owe it to the dead to remember what mattered to them, the ideals they held, as well as how those ideals were betrayed or failed to match reality.

This Memorial Day, as I get ready to take my sons to march in our local Memorial Day parade, our country is in the midst of the most divisive antiwar protests since the early days of the Iraq war, protests my friends characterize as either “objectively pro-Hamas” or as “opposing undeniable genocide.” Questions long dormant, about how we use our might and whom we help kill, feel like live political questions once again (even if we’re not talking much about actual American military deployments, or the troops who have most recently died at the hands of Iranian proxies). The debate is raw and angry.

Good. What a good, uncomfortable, painful national mood for remembering the dead. This year, when I remember them, I will not just remember who they were, the shreds of memory dredged up from past decades. I will remember why they died. All the reasons they died. Because they believed in America. Because America forgot about them. Because they were trying to force-feed a different way of life to people from a different country and culture. Because they wanted to look after their Marines. Because the mission was always hopeless. Because America could be a force for good in the world. Because Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden didn’t have much of a plan. Because it’s a dangerous world, and somebody’s got to do the killing. ....

For Vietnam and most of our later wars, the mission was always hopeless. The wars were mismanaged. The goals were ill-defined, and usually impossible to attain. 

Trying to elect better leaders would be one way to honor the dead.

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The NYT writes about an alleged new, maybe pro-public interest, centrism in Washington politics:

A New Centrism Is Rising in Washington

Call it neopopulism: a bipartisan attitude that mistrusts the free-market ethos instead of embracing it

But in a country that is supposed to have a gridlocked federal government, the past four years are hard to explain. These years have been arguably the most productive period of Washington bipartisanship in decades.

During the Covid pandemic, Democrats and Republicans in Congress came together to pass emergency responses. Under President Biden, bipartisan majorities have passed major laws on infrastructure and semiconductor chips, as well as laws on veterans’ health, gun violence, the Postal Service, the aviation system, same-sex marriage, anti-Asian hate crimes and the electoral process. On trade, the Biden administration has kept some of the Trump administration’s signature policies and even expanded them.

The trend has continued over the past month, first with the passage of a bipartisan bill to aid Ukraine and other allies and to force a sale of TikTok by its Chinese owner. After the bill’s passage, far-right House Republicans tried to oust Speaker Mike Johnson because he did not block it — and House Democrats voted to save Johnson’s job. There is no precedent for House members of one party to rescue a speaker from the other. Last week, the House advanced another bipartisan bill, on disaster relief, using a rare procedural technique to get around party-line votes.

The new centrism is not always so moderate. Forcing the sale of a popular social app is not exactly timid, nor is confronting China and Russia. The bills to rebuild American infrastructure and strengthen the domestic semiconductor industry are ambitious economic policies.

A defining quality of the new centrism is how much it differs from the centrism that guided Washington in the roughly quarter-century after the end of the Cold War, starting in the 1990s. That centrism — alternately called the Washington Consensus or neoliberalism — was based on the idea that market economics had triumphed. By lowering trade barriers and ending the era of big government, the United States would both create prosperity for its own people and shape the world in its image, spreading democracy to China, Russia and elsewhere.

That hasn’t worked out. In the U.S., incomes and wealth have grown slowly, except for the affluent, while life expectancy is lower today than in any other high-income country. Although China, along with other once-poor countries, has become richer, it is less free — and increasingly assertive [more to the point, increasingly aggressively anti-democracy].

Both Democrats and Republicans have grown skeptical of free trade; on Tuesday, Biden announced increased tariffs on several Chinese-made goods, in response to Beijing’s subsidies. Democrats and a slice of Republicans have also come to support industrial policy, in which the government tries to address the market’s shortcomings. The infrastructure and semiconductor laws are examples. These policies feel more consistent with the presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower or Franklin Roosevelt than those of Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.  

“There is a sense on both the left and right, and among many independents, that the economy hasn’t been working in many places,” Ro Khanna, a progressive House Democrat whose district includes Silicon Valley, told me. Daniel DiSalvo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, said that more Republicans “have woken up to the fact that neoliberal policies didn’t work out so well for a large coalition of working people.”

This alleged centrism feels strange, assuming it exists at all. Maybe in a year whether this is for real will become apparent. Right now, there is no room for centrism in Project 2025 or DJT, but there is plenty of room for bigotry, dictatorship and kleptocracy. Time will tell.

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Reuters reports that DJT is falsely claiming, no evidence as usual, that illegal immigrants are building an army to attack Americans:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump claimed without evidence on Thursday that immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere were "building an army" to attack Americans “from within,” once again using inflammatory rhetoric about migrants in the U.S. illegally.

During a rally in the mainly Hispanic and Black neighborhood of New York City's South Bronx, Trump sought to portray migrants from China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other countries as a violent threat, even as studies show immigrants are not more likely to engage in criminality.

“Almost everyone is a male and they look like fighting age. I think they're building an army,” Trump said to a few thousand supporters who gathered to hear him in the South Bronx's Crotona Park. “They want to get us from within.”

By now lies like this are to be expected from DJT. But what, if anything at all, are those few thousand people at the rally thinking? Do they really believe the lies, or are they mostly just virtue signaling to the cult by simply being there and cheering on the lying, kleptocratic dictator bigot? My guess is it is probably mostly a mix of the two, maybe ~20% the former, ~70% the latter and ~10% whatever else.