Commentaries on the oral arguments in Moore v. Harper

The ones in red circles are fixin’ to fix 

American democracy by damaging it, 

or destroying it completely

Multiple sources are commenting in yesterday’s Supreme Court oral arguments in the Moore v. Harper case that will decide about the independent state legislature doctrine (ISLD). The ISLD holds that state courts cannot interfere much or at all with rules state legislatures make to control elections. Deciding in favor of a robust vision of the ISLD would leave legislatures free to subvert elections and suppress voters. 

A robust vision of ISLD would give red states the power they want to destroy democracy in America. This would roughly parallel how Viktor Orban destroyed democracy in Hungary after being elected into power in 2010. After 2010, national elections in Hungary were rigged and Orban could not lose.

Observers of the oral arguments in Moore suggest there is significant disagreement among the six radical right Republicans. The three Democrats are hostile to ISLD. Three of the radical Republicans are sympathetic to it (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch), but three are apparently conflicted about it (Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett). The conflicted ones apparently do not want to appear to be what they actually are, i.e., partisan Republican Party politicians wearing black robes. 

This is a real surprise to me. I did not imagine that Kavanaugh or Barrett would have any qualms about an appearance of being radical right Republican politicians. Those two are Republican Party fire breathers. I figured they just didn't care about the appearance or actuality of partisanship. 

Politico writes:

The spotlight for Wednesday’s oral arguments was focused on three of the high court’s six conservative justices: Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh.

Those three justices will likely serve as the deciding factor in any decision. The court’s three liberals were extremely hostile to the theory during oral arguments, while the three other conservatives have signaled sympathy for a muscular version of the theory, both in previous writings and during arguments in front of the court on Wednesday.

Questioning from Roberts to David Thompson, who was representing the Republican legislators, showed hostility to the independent state legislature theory.

“Vesting the power to veto the actions of the legislature significantly undermines the argument that it can do whatever it wants,” Roberts said, citing a 1930s Supreme Court case that found that the U.S. Constitution didn’t prohibit governors from vetoing a congressional map passed by legislatures.

But later, Roberts’ questioning to Neal Katyal, who represented the groups that challenged the initial legislatively drawn maps, showed how some of the court’s swing conservative justices could still potentially rule in favor of the GOP lawmakers without embracing the most robust interpretation of the independent state legislature theory. Roberts seemed to be potentially probing for a way to constrain state courts in some way, particularly on what could be decisions based on broad constitutional provisions.

“Do you think the phrase ‘fair and free elections’ is providing standards and guidelines?” he asked Katyal, who responded affirmatively.

That suggests that the three conflicted ones will look for some version of ISLD that looks and maybe is less extreme than what they actually want but are hesitant to impose for the sake of political optics. A brilliant analysis by Above the Law points to the conflict between optics and the underlying Republican radicalism that are pushing in opposite directions, for and against the ISLD: 

If one were so inclined, the smart money said the Supreme Court would functionally cancel democratic elections, or to be more technical, “cancel any check on gerrymandered state legislatures from erasing elections if they wanted to.”

As the argument unfolded, three distinct camps emerged, with Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor opposed to the whole goofy theory; Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas thrilling at the prospect of authoritarian rule; and the Chief, Barrett, and Kavanaugh wishing there was some way to let Republicans gerrymander at will without turning North Carolina elections into North Korean elections.

Neal Katyal went right at the conservatives with receipts — straight up calling his shot, announcing that he’d been “waiting for this case” so he could unload his can of originalism on Justice Thomas — quoting back their own opinions from every time the shoe was on the other foot, prompting a series of blubbering exchanges from the frustrated justices. His exchange with Gorsuch set the tone. The justice asked Katyal for “one example” of the Court employing Katyal’s theory. He cited a 19th century example. “*grumble* Put that aside!” He cited another. Gorsuch rants and raves trying to figure out why he hadn’t researched this point.** 

** He didn’t research the point because of (i) his rigid authoritarian ideologue radicalism, (ii) his blinding loyalty to the Republican Party, and (iii) normal human confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. All of that allows him to be comfortably and arrogantly self-deluded. All of this is obvious human cognitive biology and social behavior stuff.

Alito concocted a hypothetical about a rogue state supreme court that needed to be brought to heel. Yes… Samuel Alito raised the fear that a court might ignore law and precedent for political gain. You really can’t make this stuff up! Alito is having himself an all-timer week for unintentional comedy. 

Don Verrilli and Elizabeth Prelogar also took turns at battering the GOP theory, with the conservative justices growing quieter if no less strident as the event wore on.

But amid all the twists and turns from Justice Kagan’s incisive questioning (not-too-far-off translation by Professor Leah Litman: “So this theory could end our democracy. Response?”) to Justice Gorsuch arguing that the independent legislature theory is how pre-Civil War Virginia was a bulwark against the 3/5ths clause (or some nonsense), Justice Jackson delivered the most devastating body blow (no transcript… so this may be inexact):

I guess I don’t understand how you can cut the state constitution out of the equation when it is giving the state legislature authority to exercise the legislative power.

Yes. She actually asked this question in different phrasings a few times, but it’s really the only question anyone needs to answer. If state constitutions create state legislatures then how can state legislatures violate state constitutions. It ceases to be a constitutionally ordained legislature at that point!

It’s a chicken and egg problem — except it’s more like which came first the chicken or my dinner tonight — with a single obvious answer. If the state constitution sets guardrails of voting rights and the proper deference required to courts and the executive, then the legislature can only work within that.

At the top of Katyal’s argument he cited the two centuries of election law and declared that it would be “a whole lot of wrong” if “Legislature” meant what the GOP asked for as opposed to how Justice Jackson posed her question.

Occam’s Razor remains undefeated.

Make no mistake, Chief Justice Roberts is on record buying into a watered down version of this theory and will, after today’s battering, probably cobble something together that shields Republican legislatures without straining the outer bounds of basic notions of constitutional governance. But whatever compromise the conservatives try to mold will remain haunted by Jackson’s straightforward question.

Which came first, the state constitution or the state legislature? It’s the constitution. It’s always going to be the constitution.

So, it looks like we will probably get a less than absolute version of the ISLD and American democracy will take a serious but not quite lethal body blow. Less likely, but still possible, is the full blown version of ISLD that Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito want for the final fix to what ails democracy as they see it. 

As I’ve argued here before, we do not know how the court decides cases because the court shields its decision-making process from public scrutiny “for obvious reasons.” The obvious reasons have never been publicly stated and they probably never will be. 

That unjustifiable secrecy provides the time and opacity needed for the three hyper-radicals, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito, to convince at least two of the three conflicted ones to join them in finally killing off American democracy by imposing full-blown ISLD on all of us. A 1973 paper, Secrecy and the Supreme Court: On the Need for Piercing the Red Velour Curtain, criticized the Supreme Court’s opaque decision-making like this:

Our thesis may be simply stated: basic democratic theory requires that there be knowledge not only of who governs but of how policy decisions are made. .... We maintain that the secrecy which pervades Congress, the executive branch and courts is itself the enemy. .... For all we know, the justices engage in some sort of latter-day intellectual haruspication, followed by the assignment of someone to write an opinion to explain, justify or rationalize the decision so reached. .... That the opinion(s) cannot be fully persuasive, or at times even partially so, is a matter of common knowledge among those who make their living following Court proclamations.

It feels like there will probably be some nasty haruspication** in American democracy’s future.

** Haruspication: divining truth from a pile of fresh animal guts

Can we discriminate against Christians who discriminate against some others?

A core dogma in American radical right White Christian nationalism is the right for wealthy heterosexual White Christian males to discriminate against whoever they choose to hate or oppress, mostly the LGBQT community, non-white immigrants (legal or not), non-white citizens, women, and filthy atheists and other forms of non-Christian heathens. That is rock solid core sacred belief. It's not negotiable or open to debate. An article at Lawyers, Guns & Money poses an interesting hypothesis: 

BY ALITO’S LOGIC, CAN WE DENY CHRISTIANS SERVICE?

A restaurant in Richmond last week canceled a reservation for a private event being held by a conservative Christian organization, citing the group’s opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion rights.

“We have always refused service to anyone for making our staff uncomfortable or unsafe and this was the driving force behind our decision,” read an Instagram post from Metzger Bar and Butchery, a German-influenced restaurant in the Union Hill neighborhood whose kitchen is helmed by co-owner Brittanny Anderson, a veteran of TV cooking shows including “Top Chef” and “Chopped.” “Many of our staff are women and/or members of the LGBTQ+ community. All of our staff are people with rights who deserve dignity and a safe work environment. We respect our staff’s established rights as humans and strive to create a work environment where they can do their jobs with dignity, comfort and safety.”

The group, the Family Foundation, was set to host a dessert reception for supporters on Nov. 30, the group’s president, Victoria Cobb, wrote in a blog post describing the incident. About an hour and a half before it was slated to start, one of the restaurant’s owners called to cancel it, she wrote. “As our VP of Operations explained that guests were arriving at their restaurant shortly, she asked for an explanation,” Cobb wrote. “Sure enough, an employee looked up our organization, and their wait staff refused to serve us.”

I mean, if it’s all about personal values and freedom and such, why can’t we just refuse to serve Christians if we find them outrageous to our value system? I do however await the legal “logic” by which the Supreme Court finds this illegal but refusing to serve gays totally legal.

Interesting, right? Sure, we should be able to deny them whatever they deny us. 

Sadly, that's is what America is degenerating to under radical right Republican Party Christian nationalism and Republican Party brass knuckles, government-hating capitalism. The radical right is forcing people how are attacked and persecuted to defend moral values that radical right Christian nationalists hate and vehemently reject, e.g., tolerance, pluralism, civility, non-heterosexuality, etc.

The theocratic, radical right Republican Party started this war decades ago. It and its supporters are the attackers, oppressors and liars. We have to either defend ourselves or let them screw, abuse and oppress us. 

Q: Is that assessment unreasonably hyperbolic, lies or otherwise not credible?

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Freeze Preach for bringing this fun article to my attention.

News bits: Warnock wins! 😀, etc.

Warnock wins!

The NYT writes:

To Republicans who have said the strong turnout in the general election and the runoff showed the absence of any voter suppression, Mr. Warnock disagreed. “Just because people endured long lines that wrapped around buildings, some blocks long, just because they endured the rain and the cold and all kinds of tricks in order to vote,” Mr. Warnock said, “doesn’t mean that voter suppression does not exist. It simply means that you, the people, have decided that your voices will not be silenced.”

One can be glad that Warnock pushed back on Republican lies about voter suppression. I want to see the data that shows no voter suppression. The Republican Party worked long and hard to earn distrust. So, now it gets the distrust it worked hard to foment. 

Lawsuit goes against Trump Co.

The NYT writes:

The Trump Organization, the family real estate business that made Donald J. Trump a billionaire and propelled him from reality television to the White House, was convicted on Tuesday of tax fraud and other crimes, forever tarring the former president and the company that bears his name.

The conviction on all 17 counts, after more than a day of jury deliberations in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, stemmed from the company’s practice of doling out off-the-books perks to executives: They received luxury apartments, leased Mercedes-Benzes, extra cash at Christmas, even free cable television. They paid taxes on none of it.  

The felonies — tax fraud, scheming to defraud, conspiracy and falsifying business records — are hardly a death sentence for the Trump Organization. A company cannot be imprisoned, and the Trump Organization is not publicly traded, meaning there are no financial regulators to punish it or public shareholders to flee from it. The maximum penalty it faces is $1.62 million, a pittance for Mr. Trump, who typically notched hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue during his presidency.

Although most of the MSM is saying this is a big deal and a major blow to Trump, it does not look that way to me for at least two reasons. First, the company faces a paltry fine of up to $1.6 million. Just $1.6 million?? That is nothing. Second, prosecutors did not charge Trump with any crime. Once again, he gets off free and clear with no personal accountability to anyone for any of his crimes.

This is more evidence that the rule of law in America is at least two-tiered. One tier is is fuzzy and friendly for service to the rich and powerful. The 2nd tier is nastier and designed to whack the rest of us, some harder than others (a 3rd tier?). Maybe one day, some prosecution somewhere will finally nail the SOB and put him behind bars where he belongs. In the meantime, I’m not holding by breath.

Contempt for the rule of law and defiant arrogance is how Trump and his corrupt company sees this. The NYT writes:

In a relatively muted statement, Mr. Trump said he was “disappointed with the verdict” but planned to appeal. He blamed Mr. Weisselberg, saying the case was about his “committing tax fraud on his personal tax returns.”

The Trump Organization lamented in its own statement that it was being made accountable for Mr. Weisselberg’s crimes. “The notion that a company could be held responsible for an employee’s actions, to benefit themselves, on their own personal tax returns is simply preposterous,” the statement said.

This is how privileged and wealthy people see the law. It is a sad, sick joke at our expense.

Bringing some jobs back to the US

Finally after years of politicians and companies just talking about it, there appears to be some tangible progress in returning at least some manufacturing jobs back home. CNBC writes:

CEO Tim Cook confirmed that Apple will buy U.S.-made microchips at an event in Arizona on Tuesday, where President Joe Biden also spoke. 

The plants will be capable of manufacturing the 4-nanometer and 3-nanometer chips that are used for advanced processors such as Apple’s A-series and M-series and Nvidia’s graphics processors. 

The factories in Arizona will be partially subsidized by the U.S. government. Earlier this year, Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law, which includes billions of dollars in incentives for companies that build chip manufacturing capabilities on U.S. soil. 

TSMC said on Tuesday that it would spend $40 billion on the two Arizona plants. The first plant in Phoenix is expected to produce chips by 2024. The second plant will open in 2026, according to the Biden administration. 

The TSMC plants will produce 600,000 wafers per year when fully operational, which is enough to meet U.S. annual demand, according to the National Economic Council.

Note that the spending that bill Biden and the Dems passed against Republican Party opposition was needed to get this deal put together. One can reasonably believe that Republican politicians will take credit for bringing jobs back, despite opposing spending to actually do it. That’s just standard Republican SH (shameless hypocrisy) tactics.

Loyalty, Trump-style

A WaPo opinion piece comments on a key, highly loyal group of his supporters:

Republican support for former president Donald Trump is declining. Even his popularity among evangelicals has faded — not because they have discovered his abysmal character or lack of reverence for the Constitution, but because they fear he might not be a winning candidate.

Aw, isn’t that sweet? Evangelicals are just as loyal to Trump as he to them. 

Philosophy & science for wonks: Is WIMP better than DSD?

CONTEXT

Trigger alert, this post is long and wonky. This is not for the weak of heart or the potato of couch. Get children out of the room. Separate the dog from the cat. Put on the tea kettle. Gird up your loins. 

In physics, WIMP is the acronym for weakly interacting massive particle. Wikipedia describes physics WIMPs like this:

WIMPs are hypothetical particles that are one of the proposed candidates for dark matter. There exists no formal definition of a WIMP, but broadly, a WIMP is a new elementary particle which interacts via gravity and any other force (or forces), potentially not part of the Standard Model itself, which is as weak as or weaker than the weak nuclear force, but also non-vanishing in its strength.

This post is not about that kind of WIMP. 

This is about something called DSD by some advocates, but maybe the acronym WIMP meaning weakly interacting mental phenomena is a better term. Why? Because DSD is an acronym for Descartian Spiritual Dualism that some people believe in today. Scientists tend to be mostly materialists. They are put off by trying to fit the concepts of dualism and a kind of spiritualism into mainstream modern science. 

Why? Because materialism is a theory that the world is entirely physical, but dualism is a theory or set of theories that there are two fundamentally different kinds of things in the universe: mind and bodies. Dualists say that minds are not made out of physical stuff, and they are not subject to the laws of nature. Now you can see why most scientists would be hostile to the idea of turning dualism or spiritualism into mainstream science. Although not a real scientist, I had that hostility until I came to understand that DSD could be considered a legitimate topic of scientific inquiry. 

Why might DSD could be considered a legitimate topic of scientific inquiry? Because: 

(1) we still do not understand the mind, consciousness, free will, how sensory inputs trigger emotions, biases or beliefs, etc.; and

(2) humans are hard wired by evolution for spirituality, usually manifested as a formal religion such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and the like and all their variants, Catholicism, Protestantism, Mormonism and the like; therefore

(3) some people are going to keep trying to fit things like WIMP (or DSD) into modern science until we come to understand whether the dualism is real or not.

So, in the spirit of being open-minded, hopefully not feeble-minded, it is time for Dissident Politics (i) to wade into the muck to consider whether WIMP or DSD is the better acronym, and (ii) regardless of the label one uses, what the heck is WIMP or DSD?

 -- End of context (thankfully) --

The blog post

dcleve is a believer in DSD. I suggested changing it’s name to WIMP to make the idea sound more like science than DSD. He described what WIMP is in this rather long comment:

I will try to follow your suggestion and try using the term WIMP, instead of spirit or soul .... We can see how it goes.

The basic WIMP model is that our world is not monotonic, and there are two different and weakly interacting categories of things, mental and physical phenomenon. AND, that the “mystery” of consciousness can be solved by postulating that we humans (and all living things, at least in my version) are DUAL entities, in which aspects of the physical, and aspects of the mental , are interacting.

Most people think in WIMP terms, but rarely try to think thru what the WIMP assumptions imply. You want to know, so I will try to flesh it out.

1) WIMP holds that there are likely to be non-physical mental objects. These would most likely be entities, but maybe there can be non-entity mental objects too.

1a) The possibility of non-entity mental objects is something that should be very high on the “to investigate and figure out” list for WIMP advocates. I have not made this a priority for myself, and perhaps should.

1b) The investigation of non-physical entities has been a major focus of WIMP research. I have had significant first person experiences supporting the existence of discarnate entities. How to do first person empiricism is should also be a significant priority for WIMP advocates.

2) Living things operate under evolutionary processes. If living things are dualist, then the development of that dualism had to have some benefit to the beings that acquired it.

2a) I have found several mind theorists who have come up with plausible evolutionary explanations for why life developed consciousness. Karl Popper postulated that it was so living things could develop models of our reality (access hypotheses from world 3), so they could run simulations of actions before doing something that might prove fatal. Nicholas Humphreys postulated that life already did models, and needed to distinguish models from reality, and a STRONG IMMEDIATE experience could be distinguished from the weak sauce of modeled reality. Mark Solmes postulates that we need some way to maintain homeostasis in novel environments, and qualia about how we feel was the way life did this. Note, all of these extend consciousness to the most basic of living things, which need to model reality to learn, and which need to maintain homeostasis in novel environments.

My WIMP proposal is for the same bacterial origin that these other thinkers use, and it is to postulate that agency, self- identity/priority, and willing were useful for bacteria, and those that had the ability to become dual WIMP entities had a strong advantage over their peers.

3) And our consciousness has become highly tuned, indicating it is supremely beneficial evolutionarily. We should expect that the WIMP interface to ALSO have been tuned evolutionarily.

3a) There are several implications to this:

3a1) WIMP interactions are weak, so they would need to be leveraged massively. The brain is where this interaction would take place, and the brain IS massively leveraged, such that very small energy inputs into a few synapses, could cause brain states, which can cause macro body movements, This is MANY orders of magnitude of leveraging.

3a2) WIMP interactions are possible outside of brains and life. But they are weak, so will be rare, and hard to detect.

3a3) Brains are tuned to do WIMP interactions (see 3a1) so brains are plausibly good instruments to do experiments on WIMP interaction. Channeling and mysticism is doing this.

3a4) Developing mechanical instruments to do WIMP interaction is, however, plausible as well. One of the things that some psychic researchers tend to use are instruments with very low triggering energy. A radio tuned to a while noise station is the sort of device that is sometimes used.

4) The LACK of direct knowledge of the Mental realm for most of us is a challenging observation for WIMP. WIMP needs to be patched to address this observation.

Hmm -- I am running out of steam here, it is late. ALSO, people tend to be less good at identifying challenges to their worldview, than at identifying supporting evidences. We are all geared to do confirmation bias.

I will offer the critiques I assembled for an IDEALIST worldview, as a possible example for how to put challenges together for a non-physicalist model. Idealism is not widely held, but interestingly, most psi researchers are idealists, and the book review I will be referencing is for a team that includes psi researchers. A few of the questions I asked are evidence FOR WIMP as opposed to the Strongly Interacting Mental Phenomenon this team postulates (they hold by SIMP, in your terms). Here is the review, with critique questions: Scientifically flawed 

-- 7th inning stretch --

 

-- Germaine’s comments --

I remain significantly confused.

1, 1a, 1b) What experiment(s) could be devised to determine if there are non-physical mental objects and whether they are entities or non-entities? I presume that entity means something with some form of consciousness. 

2) Whether beneficial or not, if we’re dualist critters, the immaterial thing(s) or WIMP(s) can’t be so detrimental that it causes dualist species to go extinct. Could it be weakly detrimental or neutral, or does it have to be more than trivially beneficial? If so, why? Sentience? Bias toward life? Are there any non-dualist life forms on Earth? How can we know?

2a) I’m baffled about what physical structure(s) is needed to enable or allow dualist life forms, especially ones without brains. Bacteria have sensors and can react to things and changes in the environment, but there is no brain. What kind of consciousness is there in life forms without brains? How can we know it is consciousness and not signaling the environment through means that are sometimes reasonably well known and understood? Humans maintain homeostasis in novel environments by mechanisms that I think are reasonably explained by physical biological phenomena. Is that not true?

3) How do we know that our consciousness is highly tuned, and if so, tuned by what, evolution, WIMPs or both? Why would we expect the WIMP interface to have been tuned evolutionarily. That seems to imply some form of two-way communication or interaction. Does that mean that life in Earth shapes and/or influences WIMP sources?

3a1, 3a2) I can see the leveraging argument is necessary to go from a weak influence to beliefs and behaviors. But is there evidence that WIMP interactions (i) are possible outside of brains and life, or (ii) why they are necessarily rare. By definition weak interactions are hard to detect, so that makes sense.

3a3) Assuming that brains are tuned to detectably respond to WIMP interactions then brains-minds can be studied. From the little I think I know, channeling and mysticism are not well understood. Some researchers consider channeling might be a form of mental disorder or unusual mental process. But there is uncertainty. My searches turned up very few peer reviewed papers in mainstream science journals. Apparently, the human brain-mind can create perceptions of things that do not correspond to physical reality, e.g., hallucinations. Or are those things manifestations of WIMP interactions? There seems to be a heck of a lot of uncertainty and conclusions are usually posited tentatively, with calls for more research, e.g., this:

Voice parameters were different between channeling and no-channeling states using rigorous controlled methods, but other physiology measure collected were not. Considering the subjective and phenomenological differences observed, future studies should include other measures such as EEG connectivity analyses, fMRI and biomarkers.

3a4) I’m unsure what instruments could be developed to detect and characterize WIMP interactions. How can alleged signals that human technology can detect determine if what is detected arose from the physical world or a non-physical source? It makes sense that detection instruments would need to respond to very low triggering energy because WIMPs are weakly interacting, but nonetheless the machine detects a signal from the physical world. Right? So, how can a radio tuned to a white noise frequency distinguish a WIMP signal from a physical signal? Aren’t radio waves physical universe things, not immaterial universe things? Do WIMPs elicit static radio waves from brains? I’m missing something here.

4) The lack of direct knowledge of the mental realm (WIMP? a soul or spirit?) is what my 3a4 comments are about. There is a fundamental disconnect between physical-material universe detection instruments that humans can build and the non-physical-immaterial signals they are trying to detect. Unless I misunderstand, humans and their technology are trapped in our physical universe. How can WIMP theory and research be patched to address this problem? I’m stuck at the point of the boundary of the two worlds. I don't know how or if anyone can cross it.

That’s all I’ve got. Mainstream science seems to still not accept the concept of WIMPs (souls, spirits or whatever), but at least the label feels to me to be both (i) easy and comfortable to use, and (ii) helpful in understanding the nature of the problem. But that’s just me. Maybe for most people, WIMP is little or no better or worse than DSD. 

This reminds me of an argument about the power of clarifying disputed matters.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to dcleve for taking the time to explain the situation with DSD or WIMPs.

News bits: Trump, more Trump, Republican treason, etc. It's a busy day!

From the he didn’t say what he said files

Trump now says he didn’t say what he said. The title of an article in The Independent says, what one needs to know: Trump falsely claims he never called to ‘terminate’ US constitution despite having said exactly that. Now we’re back to this dirty trickery:

From the corrupt Trump files

An article in The Guardian, Trump did not disclose $19.8m loan while president, documents show, discusses standard Trump style corruption. The loan was from a company with links to North Korea. Merrick Garland isn’t going to do anything about this little oversight. But never mind any of that, let’s see what is on Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

From the Republican elites are lying fascist traitors

and they hate democracy files

The Guardian writes:

Top US conservatives pushing Russia’s spin on 

Ukraine war, experts say

Some of the Kremlin’s most blatant falsehoods aimed at undercutting US aid are promoted by major figures on the right

Ever since Russia launched its brutal war in Ukraine the Kremlin has banked on American conservative political and media allies to weaken US support for Ukraine and deployed disinformation operations to falsify the horrors of the war for both US and Russian audiences, say disinformation experts.

Some of the Kremlin’s most blatant falsehoods about the war aimed at undercutting US aid for Ukraine have been promoted by major figures on the American right, from Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes to ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Fox News star Tucker Carlson, whose audience of millions is deemed especially helpful to Russian objectives.

On a more political track, House Republican Freedom Caucus members such as Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Scott Perry – who in May voted with 54 other Republican members against a $40bn aid package for Ukraine, and have raised other concerns about the war – have proved useful, though perhaps unwitting, Kremlin allies at times.

Ooh, interesting. Are Gosar, Greene and Perry stupid enough to be unwitting Kremlin allies? Or, are they fascists who knowingly want to help Putin destroy Ukraine and slaughter its people? I think we can rest assured that Fuentes, Bannon and Carlson definitely are fascists who knowingly want to help Putin destroy Ukraine and slaughter its people.

From the On a Lighter Note Files:

More about those massively

important Dick Pics! 

Above the law writes:

Donald Trump Demands To Be Restored To Power After Americans Deprived Of Constitutional Right To See Hunter Biden Dick Pics

Get a load of these wankers!

“What really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter will be published on Twitter at 5pm ET!” Trump tweeted, adding “This will be awesome” and a popcorn emoji 🍿 in case there was any doubt how wild things would get. No mention was made of the day’s earlier debacle: after antisemitic rapper Ye’s account was suspended on the same day Twitter welcomed Andrew Anglin, the founder of the virulently antisemitic Daily Stormer website, back to the platform.[1] Don’t look over here, look over there!

At 5:21pm, the Muskboys [Elon Musk’s minions] were still “double-checking some facts,” but eventually Substacker Matt Taibbi delivered a 41-tweet thread showing the company’s Trust and Safety team grappling in good faith with what looked at the time very much like a foreign government hack and/or misinformation operation timed to interfere with the American election. Indeed, this was a grappling which had taken place at multiple conservative media outlets, including Fox and the Wall Street Journal, both of which passed on the story before the New York Post picked it up. This was in part because Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon could not demonstrate the provenance of the laptop supposedly belonging to candidate Biden’s son, and they still can’t.

What might said emails contain? Matt Taibbi, a journalist with 30-plus years of experience, does not say. But he and the Muskies [Elon Musk’s minions] are sure this censorship is a sign of nefarious pro-Biden electoral interference.

In point of fact, the tweets featured both family photos of Hunter Biden’s minor children and pictures of his penis, both inside and outside of women, something Taibbi could easily have discovered since he and Bari Weiss are apparently being allowed to paw through company records at will. Hope no one wants to assert privilege over those docs later!

Publishing nude photos without consent is unambiguously a violation of Twitter’s terms of service, and indeed a private platform is free to censor anything it likes. Nonetheless, these brain geniuses are sure that this is a gross violation of the Constitution which will bring down the Republic. Because if websites aren’t obligated to publish pictures of Hunter Biden’s junk, then what even is the First Amendment for?

At the end of the thread, Taibbi declared himself spent, and thanked all who’d helped him reach this journalistic climax, spreading his seeds of truth far and wide. Then the circle of Musk fanboys and MAGA loons buttoned up their raincoats and took to Twitter to, ummm …. praise his wondrous emanation.

“We are witnessing the biggest story in modern presidential election history,” tweeted Pizzagate weirdo Jack Posobiec, adding “We can never go back to the country we were before this moment.”

Meanwhile, Florida’s preeminent law-understander has logged on to say that we should simply cancel the Constitution and put him back in power.

So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!

“UNPRECEDENTED FRAUD REQUIRES UNPRECEDENTED CURE!” the former president screams into the Truth Social ether. But not on Twitter, the platform which is supposedly revealing all this corruption.

The amazing revelation that Twitter failed to show pictures of Hunter Biden’s bits has thus fair failed to restore Trump to power. Even over at Fox, there seems to be a dawning realization that Musk and Taibbi’s package has failed to impress.

But hope springs eternal.

“I feel that Elon Musk has held back some material,” New York Post reporter Miranda Devine, an early proponent of the “laptop from hell” story said wistfully at Fox.

Or maybe not. Maybe Taibbi is just spilling his seed on the ground and all we’ll get out of this thing is some dick pics.

As is our sacred right under the Constitution!

Yes indeed, our sacred Constitutional right to see those dick pics has everyone up in arms. I'm all riled up!

Note the patriot on the far right goosing the 

butt of the patriot next to him

😊

Footnote: 

1. For those not among us elite cognoscenti, this is how Wikipedia describes the delightful Daily Stormer:

The Daily Stormer is an American far-right, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, misogynist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and Holocaust denial commentary and message board [and bar and grill] website that advocates for a second genocide of Jews. It is part of the alt-right movement [including the entire Republican Party leadership]. Its editor, Andrew Anglin, founded the outlet on July 4, 2013, as a faster-paced replacement for his previous website Total Fascism! 😍, which had focused on his own long-form essays on fascism, race, and antisemitic conspiracy theories. In contrast, The Daily Stormer relies heavily on quoted material with exaggerated headlines. (emphasis and emoji added)

The daily poop stormer

Terminate the Constitution? The GOP seems to be OK with the idea!

This one is a double MAGA!! story. Several sources are reporting that Trump has issued a call to terminate the constitution. Newsweek writes:

Donald Trump has sparked a furious backlash after he called for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The former president, who announced in November that he would run again for president, reiterated his baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election in posts on his Truth Social platform on Saturday.

But he went further by suggesting that the U.S. abandon one of its founding documents.

“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote in response to Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files.”

Musk had claimed the files would reveal how the social media platform had suppressed a New York Post story about Hunter Biden prior to the 2020 election. However, some people described them as a “snoozefest” that did not bring to light anything that was not already known about the platform’s handling of the story.

So, as one commentator quipped, not only is Trump trying to protect the Constitution by nullifying it, he is a repeat offender after his 1/6 coup attempt to nullify it.

What is the GOP response? According to another source, mostly crickets:

As party leaders remained silent, a few Republicans on Sunday rejected Donald Trump's extraordinary suggestion for "termination" of the U.S. Constitution and his installation as president. 

Mike Lawler, an incoming House Republican from New York, told CNN's State of the Union that “obviously, I don’t support” Trump’s demands, and that the Constitution exists “to protect the rights of every American.” Lawler and others suggested that Trump needs to get past his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden: “I think the former president would be well-advised to focus on the future, if he is going to run for president again.”  

Higher-ranking Republicans remained silent, while Democrats and others condemned what some described as a call for dictatorship.

Note that Lawler did not say he does not support Trump as a candidate for president. Instead, he gives Trump advice on how to win the 2024 presidential election. 

ABC News reports this: 

Trump's call to suspend Constitution not a 2024 deal-breaker, leading House Republican says 

Republican Ohio Rep. Dave Joyce said Sunday that he didn't want to be drawn into commenting on Donald Trump's recent call to suspend the Constitution over baseless claims of 2020 election fraud.

Joyce, the chair of the Republican Governance Group, a centrist group in the House, was asked by ABC "This Week" anchor George Stephanopoulos to respond to Trump's post on Saturday on his Truth Social platform. The former president wrongly asserted that the "massive fraud" -- which did not occur -- "allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution."

Note that Joyce is being called a centrist. A centrist? Really? What the hell is a good, solid rightist in the GOP, Hitler? What does all of this tell us, or at least suggest? At least four things come to mind:

• It tells us, yet again, that Trump is a dictator wannabe who naturally opposes democracy, the rule of law, and civil liberties right down to his rotten, corrupt, bigoted, mendacious dictator core

• It tells us, yet again, the Republican Party leadership is no different than Trump, other than being more practiced at deceit, and therefore are far more subtle and deceptive about their bigoted anti-democracy, pro-theocratic tyranny, kleptocratic agenda

• It tells us that less sophisticated anti-democracy, pro-tyranny Republican liars like Mr. Lawler are blatantly incoherent and mendacious in their pretense to be pro-democracy (given the obvious stupidity of his comments, one has to wonder if he really is that stupid)

• In view of the practiced, intractable mendacity of Trump and the GOP elites, it strongly suggests that they believe that overt calls for dictatorship won’t alienate most rank and file Republican voters (if the elites thought otherwise this would not have played out as it has so far, i.e., the GOP leadership would have jumped on Trump instantly and unanimously condemned him - instead, they see him as an OK candidate for president and are just weighing the public reaction to see what, if any, public response they need to make to help them stay in power - they will opt for the popular and effective KYMS* tactic if they can get away with it) 

* KYMS - keep your mouth shut

The grave, imminent threat to American democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties, truth, secularism and tolerant pluralism has not gone away. It is not going to go away for the foreseeable future. Both Trump and the Republican Party leadership and elites really are cynically and deeply mendacious anti-democratic, pro-theocratic tyranny and pro-kleptocracy.

Q: Is my threat assessment to democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties too hyperbolic or otherwise false, unreasonable or nutty because things like tyranny, theocratic Christian Sharia law, Christian Taliban theocracy, capitalist and Christian kleptocracy and/or bigoted fascism just can’t happen here?