News bits: Dem self-introspecting; Whitewashing very ugly

Blog note: I was at my dentist this morning, 7 am. I'm starting to feel semi-normal. Ouch, ouch ouch . . . . . 

The Hegseth hearing was what one would expect. Repubs toss soft, cottonball "questions", Dems point out what an unqualified scumbag he is, he deflects and then Repubs will vote to confirm him. It's a gigantic exercise in shameless gaslighting and truth falling to bullshit.

Introspecting:

“I think Senator Sanders has somewhat of a point.”

In defeat, Democrats, like longtime political strategist James Carville, are finally admitting that the independent senator from Vermont just might get it. “There are things Sanders favored that we could have put more front and center," Carville acknowledged in a post-election interview.

The comment itself was not shocking, but the messenger was. After all, Carville had been a leading voice in the news media’s efforts to diminish Sanders’ influence on the Democratic Party during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. In 2020, after referring to the senator as a “communist,” Carville warned it would be the “end of days” if Sanders secured the 2020 Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. After 2024, Carville was not the only person in legacy media to move from critiquing to entertaining Sanders-style politics. 

In a widely circulated post-election op-ed for Boston Globe titled “Democrats must choose: The elites or the working class,” Sanders reiterated this point that the Democratic Party had failed to attract or energize the working class, and lost the election as a result.

One can only wonder what the Dem Party will be like once it decides what it wants to be. One can also wonder how important authoritarian radical right MAGA demagoguery was in causing the failure of Dem messaging to attract or energize the working class. I think it was highly important. Can honest speech stand up to dark free speech? That is the core question. 

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The WaPo reports on the failure of the FBI to vet DJT's morally rotted pick for Sec. of Defense, Pete Hegseth:

The FBI did not interview a woman who accused Pete Hegseth of sexual assault in 2017 as part of the agency’s background investigation into him, according to two people with knowledge of the FBI report’s contents who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private discussions. Democratic senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee are now slamming the report as inadequate as they prepare to question the candidate picked to lead the Defense Department at Tuesday’s public confirmation hearing.

All nominees are typically subjected to a standard background check by the FBI after they are tapped for roles, and the results are shared with the committees tasked with processing them. The FBI is under no obligation to interview accusers, whistleblowers or naysayers in the course of a background check, unless they are directed to by the transition team that requested it, according to Senate aides with knowledge of the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

Hegseth’s accuser, whose identity has not been made public, filed a complaint with the police alleging she was sexually assaulted days after the Oct. 7, 2017, encounter at a Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California, but the local district attorney did not bring charges. Police confirmed that they investigated the incident. After she threatened litigation in 2020, Hegseth made the payment, and she signed the nondisclosure agreement, his attorney said in November.

Once again, we see the American rule of law in full-blown failure mode. The Sec. of Defense is not a minor government position. We are once again betrayed by our broken government. This is just like the whitewashing of the nomination of Brett "The Beer Boofer" Kavanaugh for his supreme court gig. In that case, the FBI just ignored hundreds of allegations against Boofer.

When you know politics has taken over your life...............

 When there is no new posting today, yet, by Germaine.

When Susan, who is usually very verbose both here and on Snowy's hasn't shown up yet.

When traffic of any kind on Disqus is low right now.

Can you guess?

Everyone is watching the confirmation hearings. Just a guess, but betting my guess is close.

That is when you know people have become obsessed with politics. When they HAVE TO watch the confirmation hearings.

So, here is a summary, all of Trump's choices will be confirmed.

Now you can stop watching them.

On the other hand, if I am way off base and traffic is down or folks who usually post a lot are absent, maybe it's because they finally figured out life is more than just being online. 

Nah. 

🤪

Cheers from your local SNOWFLAKE. 

The Jack Smith report

Smith's report says pretty much what one would expect. DJT is a liar and a treasonous criminal. The AP writes:

“The throughline of all of Mr. Trump’s criminal efforts was deceit — knowingly false claims of election fraud — and the evidence shows that Mr. Trump used these lies as a weapon to defeat a federal government function foundational to the United States’ democratic process,” the report states.

The report, arriving just days before Trump is to return to office on Jan. 20, focuses fresh attention on the Republican’s frantic but failed effort to cling to power in 2020 after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. With the prosecution foreclosed thanks to Trump’s 2024 election victory, the document is expected to be the final Justice Department chronicle of a dark chapter in American history that threatened to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, a bedrock of democracy for centuries, and complements already released indictments and reports.

Smith's 174 page report comments on DJT's knowledge or state of mind. The evidence showed that he knew there was no outcome-determinative fraud in the election, but he continued to make false claims of election fraud. He engaged in a series of criminal efforts to retain power, including, (i) pressuring state officials to ignore true vote counts, (ii) manufacturing fraudulent slates of electors in seven states he lost, (iii) attempting to misuse the Justice Department to open sham investigations, (iv) pressuring Pence to obstruct the certification process, and directing supporters to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to obstruct the certification. Smith stated that DJT would have been convicted if he had lost the election.

All of that we were aware of. The report states that prosecution decisions were made based on the Principles of Federal Prosecution, emphasizing the need to uphold the rule of law, protect the integrity of the electoral process, and ensure justice is administered fairly. Sadly, the rule of law has not been upheld. Merrick Garland is a traitor who intentionally and knowingly protected DJT. The failure here is not Jack Smith. Merrick Garland and Joe Biden failed. They are where the buck stops.

From page 32 of Smith's report

Page 33

News bits: Vaccine buggery; Alito's chat with DJT; About the NGRST

The NYT reports that childhood vaccination rates are falling, even without anti-vaxx crackpot RFK Jr spreading his anti-vaccine crackpottery from a position of real power. Falling vaccination rates have created creating new pockets of students no longer protected by herd immunity, the range considered high enough to stop an outbreak.

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Just one day before his sentencing for his 34 felonies in New York, DJT called Sam Alito for a chat. Dissecting the phone call, it seems reasonable to think that he wanted to see if the USSC could somehow dismiss his criminal sentence. Of course Alito denies that was the reason for the phone call. Instead Alito claims that DJT called to vet a law clerk for a mid-level government position who had worked for Alito 13 years ago. That person, William Levi, has since gone on to work in the 1st DJT administration. Alito said Levi asked him to take a call from DJT. Levi previously worked in DJT's administration as chief of staff to then–Attorney General Bill Barr and GOP Sen. Mike Lee before that. In other words, that guy was already very well vetted. Slate writes:

So why is it that the president-elect vetted a midlevel lawyer with a sitting Supreme Court justice, just as that same president-elect had a case rocketing to the high court?

The most obvious answer is: Because who is going to stop him? Performative flouting of the ethics rules that demand the appearance of neutrality, barely a week after the chief justice himself claimed that the courts had a key role to play in preserving public trust? That stuff is catnip for authoritarians whose images are built upon regularly proving that the rules do not apply to them. It should surprise nobody that Trump wanted a call with Alito. Regrettably, it should also surprise nobody that Alito took it.

Beyond that flex, we can think of two other reasons for the call. First, Levi played a major role in marshalling federal law enforcement to subdue the insurrection on Jan. 6, summoning the FBI for backup after rioters overwhelmed the Capitol Police. Perhaps this action landed him on Trump’s blacklist, and the president-elect wanted confirmation that Levi would serve as a loyal foot soldier in his second administration, with all that Jan. 6 business forgiven and forgotten. As a steadfast champion of the president-elect’s agenda, Alito is well positioned to vouch that his former clerk remains a true believer in the cause despite his regrettable lapse four years ago. The justice, after all, shares Trump’s paranoid loathing for the so-called deep state that is, allegedly, forever plotting to sabotage the past and future president. Alito would surely know if his own former clerk was a Never Trumper in MAGA clothing.  

It is also possible that Trump sought to flatter Alito by calling upon him as a character reference, part of his long campaign to butter up the justices whom he wants to retire.The charm offensive worked on Justice Anthony Kennedy, convincing the erstwhile swing vote that his seat would be better off in Trump’s hands.

Ah yes, corrupt Trumplandia machinations have begun anew.

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NASA is busily building the $4 billion NGRST (Nancy Grace Roman Space Telecsope) in Maryland. NASA wants to launch the telescope by May 2027.

Nancy Grace Roman stands next to a scale model of the Hubble Space Telescope outside the Hubble control center at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Roman is known as the “Mother of Hubble.”

One source writes: 

The telescope will be roughly the size of the Hubble Space Telescope, but not quite as long (a “stubby Hubble,” some call it). What the astronomy community and the general public will receive in exchange for the considerable taxpayer investment of nearly $4 billion is an instrument that can do what other telescopes can’t.

It will have a sprawling field of view, about 100 times that of the Hubble or Webb space telescopes. And it will be able to pivot quickly across the night sky to new targets and download tremendous amounts of data that will be instantly available to the researchers.

A primary goal of the Roman is to understand “dark energy,” the mysterious driver of the accelerating expansion of space. But it will also attempt to study the atmospheres of exoplanets — worlds orbiting distant stars.

Roman joined the agency when it was just getting started, in 1959, and retired two decades later, having lobbied for the creation of a space telescope. She died at the age of 93 in 2018, and 15 months later NASA honored her by renaming a telescope that had originally been called WFIRST, for Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope. The central feature of the telescope is an exquisitely polished, concave primary mirror, 2.4 meters (7.9 feet) in diameter.

An essential feature of the Roman is that, just like the Webb, it is not designed to be repaired by astronauts if something goes wrong in space. That’s because, unlike the Hubble, it will not be in low Earth orbit. It’ll be where the Webb is, in a stable solar orbit called Lagrange point 2, or L2, roughly a million miles from home and never straying too far away.

So it needs to be put together correctly — perfectly shipshape, immaculately clean — before it gets flung into deep space.