Bits: Anti-vaxx crackpottery; COVID crackpottery; Climate change update

In addition to wanting to rewrite and whitewash the history of slavery in America, DeSantis is an anti-vaxx crackpot. The WaPo reports:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and the state’s surgeon general are warning residents under age 65 against the new coronavirus booster, going against the advice of federal health officials who have recommended the shots.

DeSantis and Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo repeated comments made in a live event last week in Jacksonville, Fla., and argued there isn’t enough evidence that the booster’s benefits outweigh any risks. “I will not stand by and let the FDA and CDC use healthy Floridians as guinea pigs for new booster shots that have not been proven to be safe or effective,” DeSantis said in a statement after the call with Ladapo and other doctors, which opened with the title “No way FDA.”

Asked about DeSantis’s vaccine guidance, a spokesperson referred to the governor’s statement on the discussion, which promised to fight “authoritarian policies” around covid.  

Florida leads the country in new covid hospitalizations, with 11.81 per 100,000 in the week ending Sept. 2, a 4.4 percent increase from the previous week.

Great. By opposing vaccination, anti-vaxx crackpots DeSantis and Ladapo use Floridians as guinea pigs to provide researchers with data on how the current COVID strains spread and what the death and illness profiles look like in a population with lots of unvaccinated people. 

And, consider this Germaine special analysis: The crackpots say that because there is not enough evidence of safety and efficacy for the new booster, people under age 65 should not get vaccinated. So, what can one conclude from that? One can and should conclude that (i) DeSantis and Ladapo want old farts to die from vaccine death, otherwise they would have recommended against the vaccine for everyone, and (ii) each illness and death that the two yahoos cause is on them and one should hope that they can be sued for the death and damages that their wrong advice causes. 

See, impeccable logic. You're welcome.

______________________________________________________

______________________________________________________

From the Hey! Did He Grow A Pair? Files: The Hill reports that McCarthy might be getting a bit frustrated with his freak RRA (radical right authoritarian) caucus:

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) vented his frustration about the hard-line conservatives [no, not conservatives, RRAs] holding up appropriations, dropping an expletive as he dared his fiercest critics to attempt a vote to oust him.

“If you want to file a motion to vacate, then file the fvcking motion,” McCarthy said, Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) recounted.

______________________________________________________

______________________________________________________

The ex-pres is in a snit because his COVID policy was not properly accounted for. And he is right, he deserves a lot more blame for his massive failures than he is getting. The Hill reports: 

Trump said in an interview on SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show” airing Thursday. “I never got, I think, the credit that I deserved on COVID.”

With much of his political base skeptical of coronavirus vaccines, Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, has tried to tread carefully when touting the success of his Operation Warp Speed, which developed highly effective and safe vaccines in record time.

Notice the blithering irrationality here? He almost single handedly poisoned the whole idea of vaccines and wearing masks in the minds of tens of millions of Americans but wants more credit for doing a good job? It's freaking insane. He deserves a grade of F. All the needless deaths he caused makes him a mass killer on a scale with killers like Putin and Xi.

______________________________________________________

______________________________________________________

Climate change: Climate change warnings keep coming and the RRA GOP keeps ignoring or denying the data. The AP writes:

Earth is outside its ‘safe operating space for humanity’ 

on most key measurements, study says

Earth is exceeding its “safe operating space for humanity” in six of nine key measurements of its health, and two of the remaining three are headed in the wrong direction, a new study said.

Earth’s climate, biodiversity, land, freshwater, nutrient pollution and “novel” chemicals (human-made compounds like microplastics and nuclear waste) are all out of whack, a group of international scientists said in Wednesday’s journal Science Advances. Only the acidity of the oceans, the health of the air and the ozone layer are within the boundaries considered safe, and both ocean and air pollution are heading in the wrong direction, the study said.

“We are in very bad shape,” said study co-author Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “We show in this analysis that the planet is losing resilience and the patient is sick.”

So, if you want more pollution, global warming, climate change, human climate deaths, species extinctions and so forth, vote for the RRA Republican Party. 

The research article is here.

______________________________________________________

______________________________________________________

Hunter Biden's laptop did it!

First page of Hunter's lawsuit

Here's some fun bits from Hunter Biden's federal lawsuit in California against a Biden-hating zealot, Garrett Ziegler (an Illinois resident) and his happy crew (in Wyoming?):

1. Garrett Ziegler is a zealot who has waged a sustained, unhinged and obsessed campaign against Plaintiff and the entire Biden family for more than two years.

2. Since approximately December 2020, Defendant Ziegler, Defendant ICU and their “team” of volunteers and independent contractors have spent countless hours accessing, tampering with, manipulating, altering, copying and damaging computer data that they do not own and that they claim to have obtained from hacking into Plaintiff’s iPhone data and from scouring a copy of the hard drive of what they claim to be Plaintiff’s “laptop” computer.

3. Defendants’ actions are unlawful under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. § 1030), California’s Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (Cal. Penal Code § 502) and California’s Unfair Competition Law (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 17200 et seq.).

4. Plaintiff has demanded Defendants cease their unlawful activities with respect to Plaintiff’s data and return any data in their possession belonging to Plaintiff, but they have flatly and publicly refused to do so. Rather than comply, Defendants have doubled down on their illegal actions and have vowed to continue violating the law with impunity, thereby necessitating this action.

15. Defendant Ziegler is a former Trump White House aide who worked, from February 2019 until January 2021, as a Policy Analyst and, later, as an Associate Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy under the supervision of Dr. Peter Navarro.

21. Plaintiff is unaware of the precise dates on which Defendants have accessed, altered, tampered with, manipulated, damaged and/or copied Plaintiff’s data. According to Defendant Ziegler himself, Defendants spent at least 13 months – from September 2021 through October 2022 – “analyzing the voluminous material from the Biden Laptop.” On information and belief, Defendants’ unlawful access, tampering with, manipulation, damage and copying of Plaintiff’s data has continued beyond October 2022 and is ongoing to this day.

22. Defendant Ziegler has stated publicly that Defendants used Plaintiff’s data from what he calls Plaintiff’s “laptop” computer to create a voluminous report entitled Report on the Biden Laptop, which Defendants first published on or about October 19, 2022. In addition, in or around May 2022, Defendants used Plaintiff’s data from the claimed Plaintiff’s “laptop” computer to create what Defendant Ziegler has described as “an online searchable database of 128,000 emails found on the Biden Laptop.” Plaintiff has never authorized or consented to any access of his data by any Defendant (or anyone working with any Defendant) at any time or for any purpose.

23. Defendants not only admit to accessing, tampering with, manipulating and copying Plaintiff’s data from their claimed Plaintiff’s “laptop” computer without Plaintiff’s authorization or consent, they regularly brag about their illegal activities in interviews with members of the media, on social media, and on right-wing podcasts.

There sure are a heck of a lot nasty politics-related of lawsuits flying around these days. 

Q: Was it this bad when W or Obama was in office? 

Rewriting history: Slavery was fun on-the-job training!

A major goal of America's radical right authoritarian (RRA) wealth and power movement is to lie about inconvenient things, including inconvenient history.

As we all recall from a couple of months ago, I posted about a plan to whitewash some very inconvenient American history by the RRA DeSantis and his happy crew of RRA thugs. They floated the idea that slavery was good for slaves because they got some learnin' 'n skills 'n good stuff 'n things out of being slaves. It was just on-the-job training with free room & board tossed in for extra goodness! Last July, the WaPo wrote about Desantis' demented faux history plan:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state’s public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved and defending his state’s new African American history standards that civil rights leaders and scholars say misrepresents centuries of U.S. reality.

Former U.S. Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, who announced last month that he was joining the race for the GOP nomination, blasted the idea that enslaved people were able to use slavery as some kind of training program.

“Slavery wasn’t a jobs program that taught beneficial skills,” Hurd, the son of a Black father and a White mother, tweeted. “It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property because they lacked any rights or freedoms.”

My recollection is that the DeSantis rewrite of history cited 16 examples of slaves who done good after slavery. If I recall right, 7 or 8 of the examples were debunked almost instantly by real historians. One of the historians who came up with this crackpot scheme to whitewash slavery is a co-founder of a history think tank (or whatever) in Ohio called YAAHA (Yocum African American History Association -- no, I didn't make that up). Its communications include comments like these: 

The Yocum African American History Association (YAAHA) is a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to sharing educational resources about Black history and providing historical milestones that prove that Black history is American history. .... YAAHA is happy to announce that we are in the top 25 Best Black History Blogs and Websites online. We are honored to be number eight.

Welp, long story short (I know, too late for that), I wrote to YAAHA and informed them that on of their founders was spewing historically incorrect crackpottery and silly anti-historical whitewash. I was shocked that I got a response back.* Even more shocked to find that the yahoos at YAAHA were aware of the whitewash and approved of it because it spoke truth to ignorance about the benefits of slavery to slaves.

* Digression: Over the last 5-6 months, I've tried to contact all kinds of people and organizations (clueless journalists, corporate liars, crackpot scientists and politicians, etc.) when there's something worth saying to them. So far it's mostly (well, completely) been constructive criticism. I get a response back ~2% of the time and a hearty silent non-response ~98% of the time.

Back to YAAHA

After my initial dart, YAAHA sent me a follow-up email asking for contributions to their new book, The Chronicle of Heroes. The group wants to change perspectives about Black history in America. Parts of the email are shown or quoted below.

YAAHA is thrilled to introduce The Chronicle of Heroes, Black Contributions to America, which is based on the wishes of our 24,000 Facebook followers requests to share our posts along with a historical timeline that teaches Black history is American history. We need your support for book publishing costs to make it a reality. Please help us by donating at https://donorbox.org/the-chronicle-of-heroes.

• Book size is 9" x 11," 200+ pages, 600+ photos
• Non-partisan
• Stories of cooperation between the races
• No generalities or stereotypes
• An American story of resilience
• Heroes who struggled against unmanageable circumstances
• Empowering through education

The history of Black and White communities is a tapestry woven with resilience, innovation, courage, and the quest for justice within American history. Yet, countless stories remain obscured, waiting to be unveiled. Some of the most egregious omissions are the stories of cooperation between the races. Throughout every milestone in American history, Blacks and Whites have worked together for a common cause. This is invaluable information for the citizenry as it illustrates that like-minded people transcend race.

Transcending race

_________________________________

Wait! What?

Hm. No agenda, no generalities, no stereotypes, nonpartisan, just the facts? Excuse me!! DeSantis approved this debunked faux slave history story.

What could be going on here might be a huge grift wrapped in a gigantic pile of cherry picked history and outright lies. The point is obvious: Whitewash the horrors of American slavery and get DeSantis elected as president. It's a win-win for the RRA movement and YAAHA!

One can reasonably think that DeSantis might try to make this wonderful new whitewash fiction mandatory in Florida schools, churches, libraries, bathroom stalls, hotel rooms, airplane seats, lunch counters, jails and everywhere else he can force it on people. That ought to smooth over the naughty bits of the history about American slavery. 

If DeSantis can pull it off, taxpayers will pay for the means needed to deceive and disinform themselves. What a slick plan. One has to admire the big cojones on these inventive entrepreneur historians and patriotic political leaders. 

Law school: What a denial of a stay looks like

In the last several weeks, a slew of intermediate court decisions have mostly or all come out against Trump or the indicted goons who helped him try to succeed in his 1/6 coup attempt. For example, yesterday a federal judge rejected Trump's attempt to move a 14th Amendment lawsuit is a Colorado state court to the federal court in Colorado. Things are not going well for the extremely bad guys at the moment, but it is still early days. Their fortunes could still turn around.

In his criminal lawsuit in Georgia, Mark Meadows, like all the other traitors, has been trying to delay and wriggle out of legal jeopardy as best he can. Yesterday a federal judge rejected Meadow's attempt to stop the Georgia state court case while his appeal to a federal court is being heard. What Meadows is trying to do is get his case moved from a Georgia state court to a federal court. Meadows believes that his chances of getting off are better in a Federal court than a state court.

The federal trial court judge, Steve Jones, rejected Meadows' request for a stay or delay in the state court while the federal appeals court ponders the Meadows request to be tried in federal court. 

Page 1 of the decision 

A couple of snippets from the denial of an Emergency Stay are interesting. Jones writes in his 10 page decision:

Meadows seeks a stay of the order remanding—or more specifically, declining to exercise jurisdiction over—his criminal prosecution initiated in Fulton County Superior Court.

An emergency stay may be granted if the movant shows (1) he is “likely to prevail on the merits on appeal,” (2) “absent a stay [he] will suffer irreparable damage,” (3) the State would not suffer “substantial harm from the issuance of the stay,” and (4) “that the public interest will be served by issuing the stay.” .... “The party requesting a stay bears the burden of showing that the circumstances justify an exercise of that discretion.” [in other words, Meadows has to demonstrate those four factors are present]

Factor 1: “Ordinarily the first factor, the likelihood of prevailing on the merits, is the most important.” He first points to the Court’s recognition that the issues presented in his removal action were novel and then asserts three specific contentions of error. These arguments simply preview the issues Meadows is raising on appeal. There is nothing in the summary of arguments he plans to raise in his challenge to the denial of removal to convince this Court that its decision was incorrect. Thus, Meadows has shown no likelihood or prevailing on the merits of his appeal.

Factor 2: Meadows fails to show that anything more than a possibility of irreparable harm in absence of a stay. Some “possibility” of irreparable harm is insufficient, and more than “mere possibility” is required.

Section 1455(b)(3) provides that “[t]he filing of a notice of removal of a criminal prosecution shall not prevent the State court in which such prosecution is pending from proceeding further.” .... Meadows’s alleged previous harm is not a basis for finding irreparable harm to grant his Emergency Motion.

Judge Jones similarly rejected Meadows arguments for factors 3 and 4. He lost on all four arguments. That does not mean that he will lose his plea to get his case transferred to federal courts. It just means that the Georgia state court can continue its prosecution until the federal court decides whether Meadows should be tried in federal or state court. But even if Meadows succeeds to get his case transferred to federal court, he will still be tried under Georgia state laws, not federal law. 

According to one source, Meadows apparently is trying to get a friendlier federal jury pool in a federal court instead of the juror pool in Fulton County state court in Atlanta: 

If a trial went forward in federal court, the jury pool would likely have been broader and slightly friendlier to Trump and his allies than one drawn only from Fulton County. A federal court trial also would be unlikely to be televised, whereas the state court judge has already vowed to livestream all the proceedings.

And the legal battles continue . . . . . 

Bits: Radical right pro-elite econ policy; GOP moderates?

The New York Magazine Intelligencer column writes about policy plans the authoritarian radical right is toying with:

The discourse of the Trump era has been dominated by a conceit that the two major parties have swapped economic identities. The Democrats have supposedly abandoned their historical role as spokespeople for the working class to represent the neoliberal global elite, ....

[However] the two parties remain stubbornly attached to their traditional distributive goals. The Democrats still want to tax the rich and spend on the non-rich. Republicans still want very badly to do the opposite.

The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump’s campaign brain trust is working on a new economic plan to anchor his campaign. The leading idea is to pass another huge tax cut for the wealthy (a cut in corporate tax rates), paired with a tax increase on the middle class (a 10 percent tariff).

Trump’s brain trust believes current economic conditions indicate the U.S. economy is being harmed by excessively progressive taxes. To be sure, they have consistently believed this for more than 30 years through every conceivable combination of economic circumstances: high inflation, low inflation, recession, boom, war and peace,

Supply-side economics is a religion masquerading as an economic theory, and Trump’s brain trust, as it were, is a collection of the high priests of the supply-side cult: Arthur Laffer (who first began promoting supply-side economics nearly 50 years ago), Stephen Moore, Lawrence Kudlow, and Newt Gingrich.

____________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________

America's dismal, for-profit mainstream media continues to (i) fail to understand the extremism and hostile intent of America's aggressive, corrupt radical right authoritarian (RRA) wealth and power movement, (ii) is incompetent and clueless about the RRA, (iii) most likely knows the situation, but cannot speak it because the profit motive has poisoned and killed professional journalism in the US, or (iv) some combination of the foregoing. An article The Hill published exemplifies the shocking uselessness (or worse, complicity) of the MSM:

GOP moderates line up behind McCarthy 

opening Biden impeachment inquiry

House GOP moderates are lining up behind Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) decision to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, downplaying the political risks it poses for them even as they benefit from not having to vote on the matter.

A handful of centrist Republicans said Tuesday that opening an official probe gives GOP-led committees greater latitude in their investigations, and argued that launching a probe does not guarantee articles of impeachment will be brought to the floor.  

Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who’s embroiled in a House Ethics Committee investigation and separately faces federal charges regarding his financial disclosures and for his representation of campaign fund allocations to donors, said on Wednesday that McCarthy’s move was “a step in the right direction.”

There are no moderate or centrist Republicans in the House who support the GOP's witch hunt. It is neither moderate nor centrist to support an impeachment inquiry of Biden when there is no solid evidence he committed any impeachable offense. The Republican cowards do not even have to vote on it. This is a blatant act of moral cowardice. 

Including the lying crook Santos in with moderate and centrist Republicans makes perfect sense. Santos exemplifies what the morally rotted RRA Republican Party has degenerated into. The open question is whether there are any  real moderates left in the GOP in congress? Probably not if one defines RRA to include silent complicity in evil.

The political math: RRA ≠ moderate or centrist