News bits: Supreme Court justice goes full blown radical partisan

From the Crossing New Lines Files: The Hill writes about comments that hyper-radical right justice Sam Alito made in the abortion pill decision the Supreme Court just handed down. Alito was in a minority dissent that would have supported continuance of blocking access to mifepristone. Alito was pissed:

In a dissent from the Supreme Court’s order pausing mifepristone restrictions from taking effect, Justice Samuel Alito said there were “legitimate doubts” that the Biden administration would have followed a court decision that went the other way.

“Here, the Government has not dispelled legitimate doubts that it would even obey an unfavorable order in these cases, much less that it would choose to take enforcement actions to which it has strong objections,” Alito, one of the court’s conservatives, wrote.

For context, Alito appears to me to be just as hyper-radical as Clarence Thomas. Those two are probably the most fascist of the six Republican Christian nationalist partisans on the court.

Alito's comments directly undermines the credibility of the court's independence. His comments reinforce a belief that the Supreme Court is a supporting part of the fascist Republican Party.

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Christofascism watch - Radical right Republican legislators keep pushing Florida toward fascism: The Independent writes: 

Republican lawmakers in Florida have sparked outrage after passing a bill that LGBTQ advocates say will strip trans children from their parents' custody.

SB254 — which one former lawmaker has called "fascist" legislation — would allow the state to rip children from their parents when they are "at risk" or "subjected" to gender-affirming health care. The bill is written so that even a child of Floridian parents living out of state could trigger the law.

“I can’t believe I’m writing this,” Carlos Guillermo Smith, a former House lawmaker, and the state’s first Latino LGTBQ representative, wrote on Twitter last month. “This is fascist.”

That speaks for itself. 

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Tennessee legislature punts on gun safety regulations: The TN legislature kicked two Dems out of the legislature because they disrupted the legislatures in a peaceful demonstration over gun safety laws not being passed. One GOP leader claimed the Dems were kicked out because they disrupted the legislature's ability to deal with gun safety regulations. My response to that was that the radical right TN legislature had no intention of passing any guy safety laws, ever. The NYT writes:

On Friday, just under a month after the attack at the school, Republicans instead cut short the year’s legislative session and punted on any measure dealing explicitly with guns, capping a whirlwind three months of lawmaking that underscored the power of the far-right flank of the Republican Party in Tennessee and saw the brief expulsion of two Black Democratic lawmakers.  

Within two hours of the legislature’s hasty departure, the state’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, announced that he would summon lawmakers back for a special session to revisit the debate, with details expected in the coming weeks. Mr. Lee, whose wife lost a friend in the attack, had pushed the legislature to pass an order of protection law, which, in an effort to win conservative support, had become so limited in scope that some experts said it would not even qualify as the type of “red flag law” scorned by gun rights supporters.  

But it was clear as the legislature departed on Friday that any measure that would limit access to guns, even one as narrow as the proposal championed by Mr. Lee, would face steep odds with the Republican supermajority.

The only apparent reason for Lee to call the legislature back is because his wife is in a funk about a friend being gunned down and murdered. If that had not happened, Lee would not be calling the legislature back for a watered down, meaningless safety law. This is how the radical right does politics.

News bits: A GOP Senator got fooled?; Judicial rot watch update; Purging government of pro-democracy sentiment

From the Totally, Totally Wrong Files: MSNBC reports:

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk [the fascist anti-abortion pill Trump judge] has some explaining to do after The Washington Post reported over the weekend that, when he was being considered for the judgeship, he asked a Texas law journal to remove him as the author from a controversial article he had previously submitted criticizing Obama-era protections for abortion and transgender people.

The article was published under the name of his colleagues from the religious conservative legal group he worked for at the time, which offered a strange explanation in response to the Post's questions about the name swap. The group said Kacsmaryk was just a "placeholder" when he submitted the article until the final authors were named.

Lisa Murkowski (R-AL) was one of the 52 senators to confirm the judge who, in an unprecedented ruling earlier this month, attempted to suspend the Food and Drug Administration's 2000 approval of the commonly used abortion pill mifepristone. The Supreme Court has temporarily blocked the ruling (which had been narrowed somewhat by an appeals court) from taking effect at least through Friday.

In light of the Post story on the undisclosed article, Politico reported that Murkowski said in an interview Wednesday:

You want to talk about the ultimate bait and switch? I feel like I got duped. I feel like voted for somebody based on what had been presented to me. And you do this? That is totally, totally wrong.

What is really totally, totally wrong is (i) US Senators being incredibly cynical, stupid and/or naïve, and (ii) Kacsmaryk and other people lying about people lying about Kacsmaryk's authorship of a controversial paper to keep clueless Senators deceived. Despite the deceit, there was plenty of evidence that Kacsmaryk was a fascist. Murkowski is a cynical liar, stupid and/or inexcusably naïve.

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From the Rotting Judiciary Files: HuffPo writes: 

Judge Who Ruled Against Abortion Pill Didn’t Disclose 

Christian Radio Appearances: CNN

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk was required to submit a lengthy report on all of his writings and appearances during his confirmation

The federal judge who suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of an abortion pill failed to disclose two interviews on a Christian radio show where he discussed his extremist views on contraception and gay rights, CNN reported Thursday. Neither were included in paperwork he submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Again, fascist Republican bad faith, ill will and contempt for both ethics and the rule of law are on public display. Like Clarence Thomas, fascist Republican elites hide inconvenient truths, the law and ethics be damned.

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The WaPo writes about a sentiment that now appears to be dominant among fascist Republican politicians. That sentiment is purging from government employees who are competent, experienced employees and loyal to the rule of law, the constitution and civil liberties. Those bureaucrats are to be replaced with incompetent goons loyal to the party and the reigning dictator candidate, Trump at present. That is the same tactic that Viktor Orban used to kill democracy in Hungary in 2010-2012. The WaPo writes:

WEST OLIVE, Mich. — The eight new members of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners had run for office promising to “thwart tyranny” in their lakeside Michigan community of 300,000 people.

In this case the oppressive force they aimed to thwart was the county government they now ran.

The new commissioners, all Republicans, swore their oaths of office on family Bibles. And then the firings began. Gone was the lawyer who had represented Ottawa County for 40 years. Gone was the county administrator who oversaw a staff of 1,800. To run the health department, they voted to install a service manager from a local HVAC company who had gained prominence as a critic of mask mandates.

As the session entered its fourth hour, Sylvia Rhodea, the board’s new vice chair, put forward a motion to change the motto that sat atop the county’s website and graced its official stationery. “Whereas the vision statement of ‘Where You Belong’ has been used to promote the divisive Marxist ideology of the race, equity movement,” Rhodea said.

Her proposed alternative, she said, sought to unite county residents around America’s “true history” as a “land of systemic opportunity built on the Constitution, Christianity and capitalism.’”

She flipped to her resolution’s final page and leaned closer to the mic. “Now, therefore, let it be resolved that the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners establishes a new county vision statement and motto of ‘Where Freedom Rings.’”

The commission’s lone Democrat gazed out in disbelief.  

In the fall of 2020, the Ottawa County health department learned of a coronavirus outbreak at his daughter’s Christian school and ordered the school’s leaders to comply with the governor’s mask mandate. When they refused, state and county officials chained shut the school’s doors for more than a week and warned parents that continued resistance could bring fines and imprisonment.

Suddenly, Moss realized that those dangerous people that his pastor had been talking about on Sundays were not just in Washington and Lansing, the state capital. They were in West Olive, where the county government was headquartered. “In 2020, I became a threatened parent,” Moss said on the campaign trail. “I was threatened specifically … by Ottawa County.”

Purging government of bureaucrats loyal to democracy and the rule of law is a big part of how Orban killed democracy in Hungary in 2010-2012. The fascist Republican Party is trying to do the same thing wherever it has the power to do so.

Besides fascism, what does the GOP want? Two things. 

One is the fascist GOP wants corrupt brass knuckles capitalism with its intent to take more power and wealth from average people and move it to wealthy and powerful politicians and business elites. 

The other is bigoted, racist Christian nationalist theocracy, where the Constitution and secular are subordinate to God's infallible Christian Sharia law and its intolerant, wealthy White, heterosexual male Christian Taliban culture.

Ottawa County: 

Radicalized by COVID

Q: Is this characterization of the GOP grossly hyperbolic, more wrong than right, or more right than wrong?

The "real you”…

Here’s a cold slap-upside-the-head from website BigThink.  If you’re not science-minded, it may surprise you to find out this fundamental fact.  Read on.

You are energy

Incredibly, what this all means is that 98% of the mass that makes up you and indeed all matter isn’t “stuff.” Instead, it’s a combination of kinetic (moving) and potential (binding) energy inside the nucleons. Remember, Einstein’s equation tells us that mass and energy are equivalent, so that enormous amount of energy inside the nucleons is what makes up the vast majority of our mass.

This is a staggering, mind-twisting conclusion. Rather than the intuitive idea that you are solid and made of massive atoms, much like how grains of sand make up a sandbag, you are instead mostly empty space. If you were somehow able to take a snapshot of all the atoms in your body, identifying the location of every atom, you would find empty space filled with a smattering of electrons and atomic nuclei, held together by electromagnetic energy.

Each of us proves Einstein’s equation simply because we exist.

Full article with audio link here. 

That’s right.  You are basically “nothing.”  You don’t see that or believe that because you see yourself as a sold mass (some of us more than others 😜).  But it’s so not true.  You just cannot get to that microscopic perspective from where you are.

So, if this realization "moves you," great.  Tell us about it.  

If not, carry on with your “oblivious to fundamental reality” macroscopic perspective.  No problem.  All is forgiven. 😁

An essay about political opposition to true fascism

I post this as a companion piece to what Snowflake posted earlier today, The Obsession With Trump is Pathological. 

The April 15 issue of The Economist published an obituary for Traute Lafrenz. Here is some of it:

Traute Lafrenz

 

To look misery in the eye

The last member of the White Rose group died on March 6th, aged 103

The leaflets are called Flugblätter in German: “flying sheets of paper”. And on that February morning in 1943, they did just that. The students had been carrying so many in their suitcase—perhaps 1,800—far too many to deliver safely. And so in high spirits, or maybe foolishness, they had just thrown the rest over the balustrade into the grand atrium of Munich University below. Down fell the leaflets begging their “Fellow Students!” to stand up to the Nazis. Down, like snow, fluttered the leaflets raging against the “godless, shameless” Nazis. Down, down fell the leaflets bearing the cry: “Freedom and honor!”

The Gestapo, when they finally arrested Traute Lafrenz, would ask her about those leaflets. Did she know about them? Yes, she said, now they mentioned it, she did. Her friend Hans had shown her one. And did she understand, the Gestapo asked, that such a leaflet was subversive material? Of course Traute understood. How could she not? Her friend Hans had already been executed for them, as had his sister Sophie and her friend Christoph. Her friends were being picked off one by one. Clearly she might be next. So did she understand, the Gestapo asked? Did she understand that they were subversive? Yes, she did, she said demurely; but it had seemed harmless, really, such nonsense!

And in a way, it had been harmless at first. Later, decades later, when streets had been renamed after the White Rose group, and films made of them, and statues sculpted of them, people would start to call it an “organization” and her a “hero”. No, she said. There was no “organization”. There was just her friend Hans, and his sister Sophie and some other friends. And they had done the leaflets, that was true: six in all, as well as some graffiti (Hans had painted “Down With Hitler!” and “Freedom!” all over Munich). But they hadn’t just done that: there had also been walking and biking and bathing and reading Tolstoy and falling in love. And she didn’t like that word “hero”: she was no hero. Just a witness.

Later, when she was living out her long life in America, Traute would always wonder: why Hans? Why had he started all this? He had been a much better Nazi than she at first. She’d never liked the Nazis: all that “Heil Hitler-ing” and shouting at school had grated on her; when one teacher had cursed her she’d just got on her bike and gone home. But Hans had willingly joined the Hitler Youth; he’d even been a banner-carrier at a Nuremberg rally—the photos show the sort of profile Leni Riefenstahl would have lingered over. But then his unease grew; then he began the leaflets. Then he was sent to the Eastern Front. On the way, the soldiers’ train had gone through Warsaw and they had seen the ghetto. “Misery looks us in the eye,” his friend wrote. “We turn away.” Then they turned back.

For the first run of leaflets, in the summer of 1942, the students had only managed 100 copies. Then they got better, typing them out on an old Remington typewriter then hand-cranking a duplicating machine: in later runs they did 10,000. The tone of the leaflets was uncompromising. They raged at the Germans for being “a shallow, spineless herd of mindless followers”; they raged at the slaughter of Stalingrad and at the “bestial” murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. And above all they raged at German apathy. No German, the leaflets said, could claim to be free of these “inhumane crimes”. Every German, they said, “is GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY”. And they would not let them forget it: “We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will never leave you in peace!”  

She hadn’t done much, Traute was always clear on that: she’d just helped get paper and envelopes. Though they had to be careful: just buying paper was dangerous. Later, the Nazis would call their leaflets the “worst incident of highly treasonous propaganda” of the whole war. But Traute would always remember how calm Sophie had been: that January the two of them had just strolled through Ludwigstrasse, delighting in the sun and the warmth, to the stationer’s shop. There had been a horse outside and Sophie had stroked his neck. “Hey, Buddy!” she had said; then she’d walked into the shop with that same happy face. They’d cut her head off with a guillotine, too. 

It had all happened so fast. On the Thursday, just before Sophie threw those leaflets into the atrium, she had spotted Traute and called out to her. “Hey!” she’d said. Those ski boots Traute wanted to borrow? She should just take them, Sophie said, “in case I’m not home this afternoon.”

Sophie did not come home. The university’s caretaker had seen her throw the leaflets in the atrium; he rushed up the stairs and caught her and Hans. Their trial began on Monday morning and ended at 1pm. At 5pm, Sophie was led to the guillotine; then Hans. Just before the blade hit his neck, he had shouted out: “Long live freedom!” The whole thing was over in under ten minutes.

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No, we're not there yet. But that's approximately or maybe almost exactly where we could wind up if we don't stand up and oppose the evil that is undeniably trying to swallow us right now.

For people who do not believe such a monstrosity is possible in modern America, you are wrong. Completely wrong. The monster is possible. It did not die at the end of WWII. Fascism never died. Most or all of its intolerant, brutally authoritarian sentiment it probably never will die in view of the human condition.

Look at what Viktor Orban did to democracy in Hungary in 2010-2012. Look at who the modern radical right Republican Party elites are in deep love with, Viktor Orban. Look at what the modern radical right Republican Party elites want to do to American government, i.e., use Schedule F[1] to force professional bureaucrats out of government, and replace them with loyal fascist thugs, exactly like what Orban did to Hungary's now-dead democracy.

Just some food for thought.

Footnote: 

1. Wikipedia: 

A Schedule F appointment was a job classification in the excepted service of the United States federal civil service that existed briefly at the end of the Trump administration during 2020–2021. It would have contained policy-related positions, removing their civil service protections and making them easy to fire. It was never fully implemented, and no one was appointed to it before it was repealed at the beginning of the Biden administration.

The purpose of the provision was to increase the President's control over the federal career civil service. While proponents stated this would increase flexibility and accountability, it was widely criticized as providing means to retaliate against federal officials for political reasons. It was estimated that tens or hundreds of thousands of career employees could have lost their civil service protections, increasing the number of political appointments by a factor of ten.

Purging government of professionals and replacing them with fascist loyalists is how Orban subverted the Hungarian government as part of his successful effort to establish his dictatorship for life in Hungary.