Supreme Court Republicans rule in favor of political corruption

Using the excuse of free speech, the court decided to allow corrupt use of campaign finance finds for political purposes. Ted Cruz had challenged the campaign finance law and won. The Republicans argued the law “burdens core political speech without proper justification,” which the said violated the First Amendment. The Democrats’ dissent explained why the law was passed in the first place. The New York Times writes:

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the law was squarely aimed at preventing corruption.

“Repaying a candidate’s loan after he has won election,” she wrote, “cannot serve the usual purposes of a contribution: The money comes too late to aid in any of his campaign activities. All the money does is enrich the candidate personally at a time when he can return the favor — by a vote, a contract, an appointment. It takes no political genius to see the heightened risk of corruption.”

The basic dispute was whether contributions to winning candidates to repay personal loans to their campaigns were a form of political speech or a kind of gift with the potential to corrupt.

The challenged law placed a $250,000 cap on the repayment of personal loans from candidates to campaigns using money from postelection donations. Seeking to test the constitutionality of the law, Mr. Cruz lent $260,000 to his 2018 re-election campaign.

A related regulation allows repayment of loans of more than $250,000 so long as campaigns use pre-election donations and repay the money within 20 days of the election. But the campaign did not repay Mr. Cruz by that deadline, so he stood to lose $10,000.

Chief Justice Roberts, noting that the 2018 Senate race in Texas was at the time the most expensive in history, wrote that it was undisputed under the court’s precedents that candidates can spend their own money without limitation on their own campaigns.

The challenged law, he wrote, “inhibits candidates from loaning money to their campaigns in the first place, burdening core speech.”

Once again, the Republican Party stands on the side of wealth and power for elites. They stand for corrupt government. That law prevented no speech by average voters. The only affected people are rich people. Ted Cruz is not going to give access to wealth to a voter who donates $200 or $800 to his campaign. 

The burden on speech for everyone was completely non-existent if one does not consider spending money in politics to be protected free speech, which I do not. I consider it to be legalized corruption. That money is usually dark. There is no accountability for that corruption.

Once again, we clearly see how Republican Party dogma supports flows of power to elite and powerful people, with no benefits for average people. The Democrats on the court dissented here, not the Republicans. In fact, average people and the public interest are usually harmed, as is the case here. Exerting political power in setting policy is a rich person's game, not an average voter's game. The only game the average voters get to play are voting, with all of smoke, mirrors, lies, deceit, slanders and crackpottery that game is shrouded in and corrupted by.

Simply put, political corruption by rich real people and people called corporations is legal in America. Republican Party elites are fully on board with corruption as their preferred means of exercising and keeping power for the benefit of the powerful, corrupt special interest called the Republican Party. This is how neo-fascism plays politics and power. It is not how democracy is supposed to play it.

The Faux News Chronicles: Its conspiracy theory inspires a mass murder

We all know that Faux News is a constant source of propaganda, lies, slanders and fun entertainment in the form of crackpot conspiracies and pushed emotional buttons. The fun entertainment provokes a gamut of fun feelings from self-righteous moral outrage and disgust to irrational terror and hate. One source, Mother Jones, reports on evidence that the recent mass shooting in Buffalo NY arises from terror the faux White Replacement theory inspires in millions of conservatives. They feel terror and horrendous threat from an impending White person apocalypse caused by minority people demanding equality. Apparently, the terrorized White folks see equality as oppression and tyranny, or something like that. 

And don't forget it!

As discussed here a few weeks ago, research data indicates that fear of White Replacement by minorities was and is the most important factor in public support for the ex-president and his racism and hate. 

MJ writes:

The Buffalo Shooter’s Manifesto Relied on the Same White Supremacist Conspiracy Pushed by Tucker Carlson

The mass shooting inside a crowded, Buffalo, New York, supermarket on Saturday, which killed 10 people and injured three more, is renewing fierce condemnation of the racist conspiracy known as the “great replacement theory,” after a racist manifesto believed to have been written by the gunman was uncovered online.

The theory is popular among white supremacists and is predicated on the racist falsehood that white people are purposely being replaced by people of color. It’s reportedly all over the 180-page manifesto written by the alleged gunman, a white 18-year-old who drove hours from his home to perpetrate the attack, in which he outlined detailed plans to carry out Saturday’s massacre. Those plans revealed that the alleged gunman specifically targeted the supermarket because its neighborhood had a high percentage of Black residents. “Zip code 14208 in Buffalo has the highest black percentage that is close enough to where I live,” a line from the manifesto reads.

Also reportedly referenced in the manifesto is the gunman who killed 49 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. At the time, a similarly racist document was found online, in which the gunman cited “invaders” and millions of people coming across the border “invited by the state and corporate entities to replace the White people who have failed to reproduce.”  

Beyond the massacre in Christchurch, fears of a “great replacement” have fueled numerous mass shootings and other acts of violence against immigrant communities in the US in recent years, including the 2019 El Paso mass shooting inside a Walmart store. .... The theory became especially popular during the Trump administration when right-wing media, the president, and some Republican members of Congress openly promoted the same viciously racist views and warned of a violent “invasion” of immigrants.  

But the most prominent espouser of the theory has arguably been Tucker Carlson. In a damning three-part series examining Carlson’s outsized role in stoking white supremacist fears, the New York Times recently found that Carlson has long pushed the false conspiracy theory that Democrats were carrying out an elaborate mission to bring “more obedient voters from the third world” in order to replace the current electorate and win elections. Carlson has even defended the theory’s role in motivating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol building.

There’s the threat White people. Unless Whites start shelling out boatloads of White babies, they will be replaced by hoards of rapist, drug dealing, pedophilic, illegal immigrant socialist tyrants. Those horrible illegal minority people breed like rabbits compared to God-fearing, moral White folks. 

Tucker: Us innocent, moral White folk will be replaced by 

force by those guilty, immoral not White folk

Stay tuned to Faux for more entertaining 

crackpottery, terror and moral outrage by Tucker, 

coming up right after these messages about pillows

stuffed with shredded polyurethane foam

Hello fellow Faux crackpots and deranged conspiracy theory freaks

My pillows aren’t very toxic and I will prove soon 

that the 2020 election was stolen

And as a bonus, the plastic foam in my pillows is guaranteed to 

never biodegrade so our legacy will be landfills loaded with my 

patent pending Forever Foam!

The pillows’ filling is made from 100% polyurethane foam which makes them shapeable, fluffable, and easy to fold. The polyfoam is shredded which is intended to enhance the breathability of the pillow, and make it easier to manipulate under the cover fabric. Polyfoam has a fluffy, cushy feel often found in mattress toppers or couch cushions.

What more could anyone ask for fun entertainment and 

sources of fill for landfill?

Go Faux News!

 Now, back to more moral outrage and deranged crackpottery from Tucker, the 

non-literal commentator who the judge says bloviates and is not to be taken seriously!

The Republican radical right is fighting for full control of the GOP

Context

Wikipedia: In United States politics, the radical right is a political preference that leans towards extreme conservatism, white supremacism, and other right-wing to far-right ideologies in a hierarchical structure paired with conspiratorial rhetoric alongside traditionalist and reactionary aspirations. The term was first used by social scientists in the 1950s regarding small groups such as the John Birch Society in the United States, and since then it has been applied to similar groups worldwide. The term “radical” was applied to the groups because they sought to make fundamental (hence “radical”) changes within institutions and remove persons and institutions that threatened their values or economic interests from political life.

Wikipedia: Far-right politics, also referred to as the extreme right or right-wing extremism, are politics further on the right of the left–right political spectrum than the standard political right, particularly in terms of being authoritarian, ultranationalist, and having nativist ideologies and tendencies. Historically used to describe the experiences of fascism and Nazism, far-right politics now include neo-fascism, neo-Nazism, the Third Position, the alt-right, racial supremacism, and other ideologies or organizations that feature aspects of ultranationalist, chauvinist, xenophobic, theocratic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, or reactionary views. Far-right politics have led to oppression, political violence, forced assimilation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide against groups of people based on their supposed inferiority or their perceived threat to the native ethnic group, nation, state, national religion, dominant culture, or conservative social institutions.

Wikipedia: The John Birch Society (JBS) is an American right-wing political advocacy group. Founded in 1958, it is anti-communist, supports social conservatism, and is associated with ultraconservative, radical right, or far-right politics. .... The society rose quickly in membership and influence, and was controversial for its promotion of conspiracy theories. In the 1960s the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review pushed for the JBS to be exiled to the fringes of the American right. More recently Jeet Heer has argued in The New Republic that while the organization's influence peaked in the 1970s, “Bircherism” and its legacy of conspiracy theories have become the dominant strain in the conservative movement.

The radical right rising

The new York Times writes:

A Fracture in Idaho’s G.O.P. as the Far Right Seeks Control

Ahead of a primary vote, traditional Republicans are raising alarm about the future of the party, warning about the growing strength of militia members, racists and the John Birch Society.

At a school gymnasium in northern Idaho, Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin regaled a crowd with stories of her feuds with the current governor, a fellow Republican, including the time when he briefly left the state and she issued a mutinous but short-lived ban on coronavirus mask mandates.

Gov. Brad Little had worked in recent years to slash taxes and ban abortion, but for Ms. McGeachin and the hundreds gathered at a candidates’ forum sponsored by the John Birch Society in late March, the governor was at cross purposes with their view of just how conservative Idaho could and should be.

They clapped as one candidate advocated “machine guns for everyone” and another called for the state to take control of federal lands. A militia activist, who was once prosecuted for his role in an infamous 2014 standoff with federal agents in Nevada, promised to be a true representative of the people. A local pastor began the meeting with an invocation, asking for God to bless the American Redoubt — a movement to create a refuge anchored in northern Idaho for conservative Christians who are ready to abandon the rest of the country.

“We’re losing our state,” said Ms. McGeachin, who is now seeking to take over the governor’s job permanently. “We’re losing our freedoms.”

The bitter intraparty contest between Ms. McGeachin and Mr. Little, set to be settled in the state’s primary election on Tuesday, reflects the intensifying split that is pitting Idaho’s conventional pro-gun, anti-abortion, tax-cut conservatives against a growing group of far-right radicals who are agitating to seize control of what is already one of the most conservative corners of the Republican Party in the country.

Fearing the growth of the party’s extremist wing, some Republicans are waging a “Take Back Idaho” campaign. In northern Idaho’s Kootenai County, the disputes have led to a formal rift, with two Republican Party factions separately battling to convince voters that they represent the true nature of the party.

Similar debates are playing out across the country, as more moderate Republicans confront challenges from an increasingly powerful segment energized by the continuing influence of former President Donald J. Trump. In Idaho, where Mr. Trump won 64 percent of the vote in 2020, carrying 41 of the state’s 44 counties, many longtime Republicans fear the party’s name, identity and deep conservative values are being commandeered by the state’s fringe elements. 

One of the growing powers in the region is the John Birch Society, which dominated the far right in the 1960s and 1970s by opposing the civil rights movement and equal rights for women while embracing conspiratorial notions about communist infiltration of the federal government. The group was purged from the conservative movement decades ago but has found a renewed foothold in places like the Idaho panhandle.

How should a person takes this? Some people will dismiss this as an unimportant intraparty dispute where rationality will prevail, the JBS will be pushed back, and whatever it is we are witnessing in the Republican Party will subside. Some will be confused and not know what to think. Others won't care very much because they are busy, not interested, etc. 

How can one do a neutral and rational analysis? Look at what appear to be most of the major factors. 

• T**** and the continuing radicalizing influence he exerts on the GOP is important. Most of the rank and file still believe the 2020 election was stolen and that Democrats are lying, corrupt socialist tyrants. Rank and file loyalty to T**** is blind and at the level of a personality cult, not just a political party or even tribe.
• GOP elites do not have the courage to openly oppose T**** or push back on his lies and neo-fascist politics and policies. Either openly or by their silence, GOP politicians constitute a major source of support for T**** and his power.
• The radical right’s propaganda Leviathan, e.g., Faux News, is increasingly neo-fascist, aggressive and detached from reality and sound reasoning. That is a powerful source of influence on the rank and file and apparently many independents. The power of dark free speech is greater than that of honest speech. This is an important factor.
• The Democrats are divided and incapable of effective messaging via already weak honest speech. Poor messaging is not generating enthusiasm or winning converts among voters.
• The business community has quietly returned to supporting the GOP after a brief moment of social conscience the 1/6 coup attempt shocked it into. Despite public relations propaganda to the contrary, laissez-faire capitalism is not on the side of democracy or the public interest or common good. It is on it’s own side. 
• Christian nationalism has risen in influence along with radical right political and social ideology and laissez-faire capitalism in the GOP. Those forces are control the party, not the traditional conservatives that are starting to see the threat in their own party. It too is anti-democratic and neo-fascist with tendency toward bigotry at best and racism at worst. 
• And, exactly what do those awakening traditional conservative Republicans actually stand for? Nearly all are some combination of maybe softer laissez-faire capitalist, maybe softer Christian nationalist and maybe softer hard core radical right. Maybe most of those people are something short of radical right or far right. Something fairly close, not something far away. Decades of RINO hunts have ideologically cleansed the GOP quite a lot. For most traditional conservatives, the pull of radical right ideology and politics is probably almost as appealing as the appeal of whatever traditional conservatism is. In other words, those troubled conservatives arguably do not look all that comforting with regard to defense of democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties, the public interest, or the truth. 

At this point, the best indicator of how the close to radical traditionalists against the hard core radical right power fight will play out is unclear. The results of the 2022 general elections ought to shed significant light on which path the GOP will take.

Question: The NYT article calls the traditional conservatives “moderate Republicans” but does that ring true in view of how far to the right that decades of radical right propaganda, RINO hunts and T****’s anti-democratic influences have had the GOP? 

The laissez-faire capitalism chronicles: The Texas grid breaks down again

A person has just got to acknowledge the unfailing persistence of laissez-faire capitalists and how they govern. Those buggers never lose sight one the one and only relevant moral value, profit. It doesn't matter how many people die or how how many millions of tons of pollution their profit pursuit spews into the environment. Profit is king, and everything else is a bunch of expendable pawns. NBC News writes:

Texas power grid operator asks customers to conserve 

electricity after six plants go offline

The operator of Texas' power grid asked residents to conserve electricity Friday after six power plants went offline amid soaring temperatures.

Brad Jones, CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said in a statement that the company had lost roughly 2,900 megawatts of electricity — or enough to power nearly 600,000 homes, the Texas Tribune reported.

[In keeping with the always popular KYMS propaganda tactic] Jones did not say why the plants went offline, and a spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Friday evening.

[KYMS: Keep your mouth shut]

The non-profit energy organization, which manages power for 90 percent of Texas' electrical grid, faced blistering criticism last year after blackouts left millions without power for days during subfreezing temperatures.

The company blamed frozen equipment in an event that left more than 200 people dead, many from carbon monoxide poisoning as they tried to stay warm. Others froze to death.

The company's CEO was fired and six board members — including the chairwoman and chairman — resigned. [Nobody went to jail and the executives probably got huge bonuses on their way out the door]

State lawmakers responded with a [hopelessly leaky] raft of legislation aimed at making the grid more resilient to a brutal winter storm.

Nearly a year later, an investigation by NBC News and the Texas Tribune found that the grid remained vulnerable, with new regulations allowing companies to avoid the improvements. [In making a mistake by abandoning from the KYMS tactic and making a mistake,] Jones referenced the unseasonably hot weather, saying it was driving the demand for power across the state. Temperatures approaching 100 degrees were forecast from Austin to Dallas over the weekend and into next week.

By referring to “unseasonably hot weather,” Jones ignores the fact that Texas has hot weather much of the year and there are weather forecasts that predict when it will get hot. One of two possibilities are plausible. Either unseasonably hot weather had nothing to do with the current grid failure, or forecasts of unseasonably hot weather were ignored. Either way, a combination of corruption and incompetence explains the situation.

Also note that the “raft of legislation” was passed by Texas legislators. Most of them are laissez-faire capitalist ideologues. Those ideologues believe that only markets running free, wild, butt naked and drunk as a skunk can solve problems. They live by one and only one moral value, profit. Everything else is secondary, including human life and the environment. 

Without a social conscience[1], the problems that laissez-faire capitalism is seriously concerned about are ones that impair unfettered accumulation, privatization and trickling up of profits while socializing risk and harm, including mass human deaths, vast environmental damage, and subversion and corruption of democracy, government and society. 

Footnote: 

1. Prominent economist Milton Friedman published an essay in 1970, The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. He argued that the best type of CEO was not one with a social conscience. CEOs with a social conscience were considered to be “highly subversive to the capitalist system.” Newsweek wrote this in 2017:

In 1970, Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman published an essay in The New York Times Magazine titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Flouting the midcentury view (and that of the most influential faculty at the Harvard Business School) that the best type of CEO was one with an enlightened social conscience, Friedman claimed that such executives were “highly subversive to the capitalist system.” His tone was snide. "[Businessmen] believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned ‘merely’ with profit but also with promoting desirable 'social' ends, that business has a ‘social conscience’ and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are—or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously—preaching pure and unadulterated socialism."

Notice the lie in the highlighted last sentence. Capitalism can be regulated into having a social conscience without conversion of government and society to socialism with appropriation by government of the means of production. Friedman’s assertion is a bald faced lie. It is insulting, ruthless capitalist propaganda from an arrogant, ruthless liar.

An awakening of concern for church-state separation?

The Daily Beast writes in an article, There's No Separation of Church and State on the Supreme Court:

In a democracy founded on the separation of church and state, we’ve got a Supreme Court on the cusp of a decision that cements a theological view of abortion that even most Catholics don’t abide by.

All five of the justices who signed onto the draft opinion that would dump Roe (and any ruling associated with it)—plus Chief Justice John Roberts—are progeny of the Federalist Society. Over the past three decades, the legal group’s blessing has become a de facto requirement for Republican presidents who owed their election to white evangelical voters and ran on a promise to deliver an anti-Roe Supreme Court.

“Religion is the elephant in the room,” says Amanda Tyler, executive director of Baptist Joint Committee (BJC), a legal advocacy group for religious freedom that doesn't take a position on abortion. “We are all free to be religious or not, but we expect our government to be secular and to rule for all Americans and not for their religious views. And that principle is being threatened by at least the appearance of what’s going on in this case,” Tyler adds.

She points out that the words “religion” or “religious” do not once appear in Alito’s leaked draft opinion, yet he calls abortion “a profound moral issue”—phrasing that goes beyond the rule of law. “Many people read into the word ‘moral’ a religious objection, even though he’s going out of his way not to use religion,” says Tyler, which is why she calls it the elephant in the room.

She calls the looming decision by five Federalist Society alums “a flagrant violation of the separation of church and state…an assault on the core pillar of our democracy and the DNA of America.”

The ascendancy of conservative, anti-Roe Catholic jurists has been forty years in the making, dating back to the founding of the Federalist Society in 1982.

“The intersection of the religious right with conservative politics occurred with the anti-abortion agenda, and because evangelicals were lacking a bench of legal scholars, they had to turn to Catholics,” says Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth College. “Political conservatism is baked into Catholic legal scholarship.”

“All picked by the Federalist Society,” Trump boasted. “All gold standard,” Trump declared as he rallied conservative voters with the promise of delivering the Court they wanted.

When Amy Coney Barrett, a law professor at Notre Dame at the time, testified in 2017 before the Senate for a lower court position, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein voiced concern about her religious affiliation with an evangelical offshoot of the Catholic Church. “I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma,” Feinstein said. “In your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.”

Feinstein was castigated—and not just by Republicans—for straying into territory that felt uncomfortably close to a religious test. Three years later, Democrats questioning Barrett for the Supreme Court didn’t quiz her on her religious activism and what connection, if any, it might have to her views on Roe.

So, as late as 2017, Senators could not even ask about the role of religion in a nominee’s life. That reflects two things. First how utterly clueless Democrats were and still are about what the Republican Party has become. Second, it shows how effective Republican Party propaganda and messaging tactics really are. They are so effective that the targets of their deceit and lies are unaware of the true nature of who the opposition is and what their intent is. 

Even worse than 2017, by 2020 Senate Democrats had been cowed into not even raising the issue of the role of radical conservative Christian fundamentalism in a judge’s reasoning. Sadly, it is not the case that asking the question would have made any difference. The Republican Party would put any religious freak on the federal bench, no matter how anti-democratic and radical theocratic. The GOP elites, and most of its rank and and file are just fine with White male Christian-dominated neo-fascist theocracy. And, their judicial nominees do not hesitate to use the KYMS[1] tactic on the Senate or to lie by both affirmative lies and lies of omission, all of which they are expert at. 

Clueless does not do justice to what the Democratic Party has degenerated into. At least they voted against radical Christian theocrats and their jihad to replace secular law with Christian Sharia law. An end-game vestige of political opposition. Whoo-hoo, there's a little spunk left in ’em!

The church is swallowing the state before our eyes and most Americans cannot see the threat due either to sheer ignorance and deceit, or they cannot accept the reality because the truth hurts too much. As one observer put it about such situations generally, their fee-fees would be hurt so they do not see what is in plain sight and remain psychologically comfortable and self-assured. But maybe a few more people are starting to wake up to the seriousness of the Christian theocratic threat. Just maybe.

Footnote: 

1. The KYMS or keep your mouth shut propaganda tactic. It is manifested in various popular deceptive, faux responses to questions among professional political propagandists and liars. Popular KYMS examples for judges include ‘I don't recall’, ‘I can’t remember’, ‘no comment’, ‘I can't answer that’, ‘I can't prejudge that until the issue is before me’, ‘that is just a hypothetical and I do not comment on hypotheticals’, ‘it is settled law’, ‘Senator, that is a settled precedent the court has relied on for decades’, etc., etc., etc.

The hypocrisy chronicles: Republicans are against free speech against themselves, but for it against others

The Washington Post writes:

The Republican governors of Virginia and Maryland, where the homes of Supreme Court justices have become the targets of protests, are demanding that Attorney General Merrick Garland enforce a federal law that forbids demonstrations intended to sway judges on pending cases.

Demonstrators have gathered over the past week at the homes of several conservative justices, spurred by the leak of a draft opinion suggesting that the high court is preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision guaranteeing access to abortion nationwide.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan wrote to Garland (D) on Wednesday, just days after some conservatives faulted Youngkin for not having protesters outside the Alexandria, Va., home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. arrested under a state statute prohibiting demonstrations at private residences.

“There’s no changing their minds. We’re expressing our fury, our rage,” said Donna Damico, a 70-year-old grandmother who protested outside Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Montgomery County, Md., home last week. “We’re impotent and this is really all we got other than praying that people vote in November.”

A hanger symbolizing unsafe illegal abortions was drawn in chalk outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh over the weekend as abortion rights activists protested in Chevy Chase, Md.

Lots of snotty rich people live in Chevy Chase

Brett and his colleagues are not one of us, they are one of them

Good old Republican politicians. They love and support free speech and slanders used against their enemies. They hate and shut it down it when it is directed at them (e.g., this). Republican elites are fucking shameless, spineless free speech* hypocrites.

 

* And most everything else. Some of 'em are wife beaters too.

Questions: Are Republican elites free speech hypocrites? Whaddabout the rank and file?