More news bits

The hellscape will get worse

Elon Musk has to close the deal to buy Twitter by Friday, i.e., tomorrow. That's pretty soon. He publicly stated he would lay lots of Twitter employees off, get rid of content moderation, re-open Trump's account and more or less, let free speech run free, wild and butt naked. Axios writes:

Elon Musk: Twitter won't become a "free-for-all hellscape"

Elon Musk said in a note Thursday that Twitter must be "warm and welcoming to all" and not a "free-for-all hellscape" in order for it to reach its full potential.

Why it matters: In an overture to advertisers, Musk seemed to walk back the idea of total free speech on Twitter and promoted it as a digital town square with some limitations.

What he's saying: Musk wrote in a tweeted note to advertisers that Twitter should be "a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence."

"Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!"

Here comes the a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences. Public discourse and civility are going to get even uglier than they are now. The chart below shows how to prepare for the barbaric hell that Musk is going to unleash on all of us. If you don't already have a scimitar, Wall Mart has them on sale in anticipation of the worsening hellscape to come soon.

The Republican plan for the economy

Various sources are reporting that once the GOP takes control of congress after the upcoming elections, they will push hard for (i) geting rid of as much of the federal government as they can, e.g., the IRS, EPA and Dept. of Education, (ii) tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses, gutting domestic spending for social security, Medicare and etc., and (iii) total attacks on all future elections, especially ones that republicans do not win. Republicans have already filed dozens of lawsuits attacking all aspects of the upcoming election in various states. This is just the beginning of an endless radical right Republican Christofascist and capitalist war against elections.  

In essence, the autocrat-theocrat GOP is once again pushing hard for horse and sparrow economics, with wealth gushing up to the elites (the horses) and the masses (the sparrows) desperately looking for scraps ejected from the elites.

Election update

The Guardian writes:

‘A madness has taken hold’ ahead of US midterms: 

local election officials fear for safety

In two rural California counties, voters are showing increasing hostility and aggression toward election workers

In California, officials in small, rural and underresourced counties such as Shasta say they are encountering hostility and aggressive bullying from residents who believe there is widespread voter fraud – many are inundating local elections offices with public records requests as part of a relentless quest to try to prove their claims.  

Residents in Shasta county have tried to intimidate election workers while acting as observers, crowding around Allen during a tense election night confrontation in June, and visiting voters’ homes while claiming to be a part of an “official taskforce”. In north-eastern California’s Nevada county, the registrar-elect had to take out a restraining order against residents who harassed her and pushed their way into her office, assaulting a staffer, she said.

Our democracy is slipping quietly under relentless waves of autocratic Republican Party demagoguery, dark free speech, rage, hate and lies. The American experiment is probably going to end in a corrupt autocratic-Christian theocratic failure.

Fetterman's debate performance has Democrats on edge in crucial Pennsylvania Senate race

HARRISBURG, Pa. — After getting their first long look at John Fetterman in Tuesday night’s Pennsylvania Senate debate, fellow Democrats are second-guessing his decision to appear on stage five months after a stroke — and some question whether he should have remained on the ballot at all.

(Snowy's opinion: I wish Democrats would shut the f..k up. This is their candidate, back him! Questioning and 2nd guessing only feeds the other side)

But by Wednesday morning, many Democrats were in a panic over his performance. And there were fresh questions about how transparent Fetterman has been through a months-long recovery that continues to present communication challenges less than two weeks before Election Day.

(Snowy's opinion: Just what the Dems need in the home stretch, panic 😕)

He has little room for error: The FiveThirtyEight's review of recent polls suggests he holds a 2.3 percentage point lead over Republican Mehmet Oz, a margin that has narrowed appreciably since Labor Day.

(YES it has narrowed, but even despite a poor performance, Fetterman is still leading, time to put a MORE positive spin on this instead of hand wringing)

Fetterman 47.2%Oz 44.9%

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/senate/2022/pennsylvania/

Similarly, some Democrats maintained optimism. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/fetterman-debate-performance-democrats-edge-pa-senate-race-rcna54158

Snowy was listening to a call in show yesterday, day after the debate, and it featured a lot of Pennsylvania voters, and the vast majority who called in - and this was NOT on a partisan leftwing show either - had the same message:

"Fetterman is one of us, no way we are going to fall for a fake from out of state."

Whatchallthink? Time for the Democrat panic button pushers to stop eating their own??

After all, the Repubs are backing Hershel Walker ALL THE WAY. 

An opinion from across the pond about the UK and conservative politics

An opinion piece from the Guardian opines:

Oh, Britain: the chasm between myth and reality keeps on growing

So it’s tempting to see the fall of the hapless Liz Truss and the rise of the guileless Rishi Sunak as a contrasting tale of character and plot.

One was plainly incompetent and spontaneously combusted in an inferno of their own lies and trickledown economics. So is the other.

But British politics are not quite so simple – not since the country ripped off its reputation for common sense and streaked on to the global stage claiming it was too sexy for its own continent.

There has long been a yawning chasm between what British people admire in the mirror and what the rest of the world observes.

But over the last six years, that gap between myth and reality has become unbridgeable.

Sunak, for all his earnest schoolboy affect, is heading for the same fate as all four of his predecessors, because you can only fool all of the people some of the time.

Of course, some of the people can be fooled all of the time. We call those people Conservative party members who are – like their American Republican counterparts – no longer conservative at all.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the monster raving loony right has glugged down a radical cocktail of conspiracy theories, free-market fever dreams, and a corrosive taste for cultural victimhood.

Six years into Brexit, it’s obvious that the world is not in fact hankering after glorious new trade deals that will make Britain ludicrous amounts of loot. It’s also obvious that erecting trade barriers to the largest economy on your doorstep did not in fact punish the foreigners on the other side.

As the former governor of the Bank of England points out, before Brexit the British economy was 90% the size of Germany’s. Today it is less than 70%. Well done, chaps.

The new prime minister is faced with the same dire choices as his predecessor – and proudly proposes the same dire policies.

He cannot increase trade with Europe, without admitting that Brexit was batshit. He cannot raise taxes to spend more on public services, without admitting that his version of Thatcherism was reckless nonsense.

So all he can do is to cut public spending at a time when interest rates are rising sharply. The next two years, before the next general election, will be miserable for everyone.

To be fair, other countries will also need to hack back after years of cheap money as the world’s central banks crack down on inflation.

But Britain has indulged in something worse, and there are clear lessons for other countries that are tempted to go down the same mirage-filled road.

Today’s rightwingnuts idolize the notion of a long-lost greatness that somehow proves their own exceptionalism.

In Britain’s case, that is clearly rooted in memories of empire that have never been revisited with any seriousness. British children can pass through an entire schooling without an honest discussion about the white supremacist enterprise that built their own country.

In a country that likes to look down on racial politics in the United States, there is little to feel smug about. Around one third of Brits think the empire is something to be proud of. That’s not much different from the number of Americans who think the US government has no responsibility to address the historic effects of slavery today.

If we can’t be honest about our past, it’s easy to lie about our future.  

British prime ministers used to come and go like vintage wines. Every few years there might be a classic. Now they come and go like utility bills: painful and entirely forgettable.

Gosh, that sounds a lot like British right wing politics is about like radical right deceive and divide politics in the US. There's lots of illusions of grandeur, false beliefs, lies and crackpottery, with plenty of slanders to go all around. 

At least the toxic reality of Brexit is dawning on some of the Brits. One question is whether a significant awakening will make any difference. Probably not.

News bits

Russia demands desatanization of Ukraine

Russian propagandists are learning fast from American Christian nationalist propaganda techniques and creative QAnon style crackpottery. Ukrainska Pravda writes:

Russia's Security Council claims there are "hundreds of sects" in Ukraine

and demands "desatanisation"

Aleksey Pavlov, assistant secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, has said that Ukraine should be "desatanised".

Details: Pavlov claims that Ukraine has turned into a "totalitarian hypersect" where citizens have abandoned Orthodox values, and therefore "desatanisation" is becoming an urgent issue. Pavlov admits that the exact number of sects in Ukraine is unknown, but "the number is in the hundreds."

Quote: "Using internet-based manipulations and psychotechnology, the new government [formed after 2014 - ed.] has turned Ukraine from a state into a totalitarian hypersect. Moreover, the authorities in Kyiv were the first to turn into militant fanatics whose views are directly opposite to those of normal people.

Not disclosed, is what "internet-based manipulations" and "psychotechnology" are. One European observer of this Russian intelligence mused out loud in the comments section of a reposted version of this article, I wonder what desatanized means from a metrics viewpoint? One commenter hypothesized, from what I have seen from the Russians, it means you invade a country with a Jewish president and bomb the holocaust memorial. . . . . They appear to be going full Ghandi on this.

Dissident Politics will be keeping a close eye on how Russia's desatanization pogrom is going and make discreet inquiries into what internet-based manipulations, psychotechnology and a totalitarian hypersect might be.

Disclaimer: I think the quoted reporting is not sarcasm or humor. The site it comes from is credible and has a good fact accuracy rating.

From the well duh files: Pledged climate change efforts are failing

The NYT writes:

Countries around the world are failing to live up to their commitments to fight climate change, pointing Earth toward a future marked by more intense flooding, wildfires, drought, heat waves and species extinction, according to a report issued Wednesday by the United Nations.

Just 26 of 193 countries that agreed last year to step up their climate actions have followed through with more ambitious plans. The world’s top two polluters, China and the United States, have taken some action but have not pledged more this year, and climate negotiations between the two have been frozen for months.

Without drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the report said, the planet is on track to warm by an average of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels, by 2100.

All indicators remain the same: Party hardy (formerly party hearty) while the lights are still on.

From the advances in dirty tricks files

The NYT writes:

Two right-wing political operatives have pleaded guilty in Ohio to a telecommunications fraud charge for arranging thousands of robocalls that falsely claimed that the information voters included with mail ballots could be used by law enforcement and debt collectors, prosecutors said.

The operatives, Jacob Wohl, 24, of Los Angeles, and Jack Burkman, 56, of Arlington, Va., entered their pleas on Monday in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in Cleveland, prosecutors said.

The men were indicted in 2020 after they were accused of using the robocalls to intimidate residents in minority neighborhoods to refrain from voting by mail at a time when many voters were reluctant to cast ballots in person because of the coronavirus pandemic. The calls also claimed that the government could use mail-in voting information to track people for mandatory vaccination programs, prosecutors said.  

They face up to a year in prison and a fine of $2,500 when they are sentenced on Nov. 29, he said.

Up to a year and up to a $2,500 fine? Pffft! They will probably get probation for a couple of months and a $50 fine for being just playful, but naughty boys. 

Accumulating evidence continues to point to voter fraud efforts being committed by Republicans, not Democrats. Republican claims of serious vote fraud are just projections of what they desperately want to do themselves, i.e., cheat and steal elections. Just more shameless hypocrisy.

Racketeering Catholic church style 

The NYT writes:

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo has agreed to submit to sweeping government oversight of its operations in a legal settlement reached on Tuesday with the New York attorney general, Letitia James, resolving a lawsuit that accused the church and its officials of a yearslong cover-up of sexual abuse.

Those monitors will be overseen by Kathleen McChesney, a former high-ranking F.B.I. official who also led the child protection office at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. As part of the settlement, two former Buffalo bishops, Richard Malone and Edward Grosz, will also be banned for life from holding any fiduciary role in a charity registered in New York.

According to the suit, the two former bishops shielded more than two dozen accused priests from investigation by the Vatican, and allowed them to either retire or go on medical leave.  

Instead of following church policy and referring the accused priests to a Vatican investigation that might result in their expulsion from the priesthood, the bishops classified the men as “unassignable,” a category that allowed them to retire with benefits or go on medical leave.

That kept the priests on the diocesan balance sheet, which prosecutors said constituted a misuse of charitable funds and an abrogation of fiduciary duty.

Us dumb taxpayers. We are forced by law to support the criminal Catholic church organization with massive tax breaks. And this is how the arrogant, criminal Catholic church shows its gratitude for what it is generously given. As the ex-president might say, while praising Catholic racketeering operations and for its stand against, and abuse of, the rule of law, taxpayers are suckers and losers. He would be right about that.