Simply 2023 Question

We experienced a turbulent year in 2022, and so we might feel inclined to say:

To put you all into the spirit for the new year, what exactly was SO awful about 2022? Let's see:

Russia Invades Ukraine

Robb Elementary School Shooting

Buffalo, New York Supermarket Shooting

Death of Pele

Queen of England Elizabeth II

Trucker Convoy Freedom Movement in Ottawa, Canada

6th Wave of Covid

Inflation 

The Republicans winning the House and Senate bigly. 

So, what was for YOU, yes YOU, the most egregious event of 2022? To bring some balance, what was for YOU the most hopeful event of 2022? Maybe how the Republicans swept the House and Senate?

Looking forward to 2023, are you hopeful it will be better, or pessimistic it will be worse, or about the same?

Oh Hell, I might as well say it: I am the optimist, it will be BETTER!! 

News bits: Oops, $240 million is missing from Trumplandia, etc.

The Independent reports: 

Don Jr admits he doesn’t know where $240m Trump fundraised to 

fight election results went in Jan 6 transcripts

Donald Trump Jr said that he did not know where the $240 million raised to fight his father’s 2020 presidential election loss went, according to transcripts released by the House select committee investigating the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.

Aw, c'mon Don Jr, you lil' joker. You and the rest of us know where it went. Don Sr grifted it from the flock and is using the proceeds to have fun with sex workers. . . . . Jeez, $240m will buy a lot of sex worker fun. 😍

Send cash, lots of cash!

The WaPo reports on Trump's released tax returns:

Trump — who broke with a decades-long tradition of presidential candidates and presidents by refusing to make his tax returns public — has for years falsely claimed that he could not release them while under “routine audit” by the IRS.

Last week, the Ways and Means Committee revealed that the IRS did not audit Trump’s returns during his first two years in office, despite a rule mandating such reviews, and never completed any audits while he served.

What a fibber. This is what the Republican Party fights tooth, claw and poison dagger to protect and shield from the public. Of course, if it was a prominent Democrat who did this, Republican howls of self-righteous moral outrage would break your eardrums.

Vox speculates on why massive fraud in COVID relief spending has not had much news impact:

.... pandemic fraud across three major relief programs could reach the $250 billion to $560 billion range (though no one really knows because the exact amount is difficult to estimate). The federal government approved about $5 trillion in total pandemic relief money ....

All of the above makes for a messy picture of political culpability. Republicans can’t frame this as a purely Democratic scandal when Trump signed the bill and was president while much of the theft happened. Democrats, for their part, helped craft the initial relief bill and extended it further under Biden. So that’s an incentive for both parties not to look too closely at what might have gone wrong.

Among Democrats, there’s likely a generalized fear that making too much about any fraud in government benefits will be used to discredit the use of government benefits to help people generally (harking back to the “welfare queen” attack from Ronald Reagan).

One would think, though, that it would be anti-spending Republicans who would typically make a big stink about an issue like this. And yet with the GOP increasingly fixated on the domestic culture war, the specifics of the pandemic relief fraud (money stolen by foreign hackers) don’t seem to fit too well with their current message.

This is evident in an amusing recent exchange on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, wrote an op-ed on pandemic relief fraud, along with five other issues he plans to investigate. But his most specific concern was that some states and localities used pandemic relief funds for “electric buses and controversial ideologies.” In an earlier press release, his office claimed to find evidence that pandemic relief money funded “woke initiatives.”

American Enterprise Institute fellow Matt Weidinger responded to Comer’s op-ed with a letter to the Journal urging him to focus on the bigger fraud picture so it could be stopped from happening again. “Criminal gangs, including some based in Russia and China, used stolen identities to seize U.S. tax dollars on an industrial scale,” Weidinger wrote. This could be read as saying: Focus on the real issue, please, not just the culture war crap. We will see next year whether the GOP House majority listens.

No, the GOP House majority is not going to listen. It is fixated on culture war crap.

American politics at the federal level is a freaking trainwreck. Democrats are plausibly worried about the Welfare Queen myth, while Republicans continue to be trapped in their psychotic break from reality and competence called culture wars. 

However, criminals love the train wreck. They get to live long and prosper, as Spock might say.

News bits: Deep cynicism and mendacity, etc.

Astonishing GOP cynicism & mendacity

The WaPo writes about how congressional Republicans are white washing domestic terrorism and murder by White supremacists, fascists and other radical right thugs and murderers:

Republican attempts to minimize far-right violence hampers government efforts to combat the threat, extremism analysts say

 

Drawing inspiration from a far-right shooter in New Zealand, the gunman who killed 10 Black shoppers at a Buffalo supermarket in the spring used racist, dehumanizing language in his writings, singling out Jews as the real problem to be “dealt with in time.”

Nevertheless, at a congressional hearing this month on the threat of violent white supremacy, two Republican lawmakers cherry-picked a word in the Buffalo killer’s screed — “socialist” — to cast him as a radical leftist. They did not note that the shooter was referring to National Socialism, the ideology of the German Nazi Party, as Democrats and witnesses on the panel pointedly clarified.

“Any sober look” at the Buffalo shooter’s hate-filled manifesto, Oren Segal of the Anti-Defamation League told the lawmakers, “would recognize that attack as clearly a white-supremacist attack.”

But “far right” also is an imperfect term, analysts say, and does not capture the complex ideologies, including some that overlap with the anarchist left, that have fueled recent attacks.

That fuzziness leaves room for bad-faith arguments and misinformation, miring an urgent threat in partisan point-scoring. Terrorism researchers said they had hoped that rising political violence culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol would jolt leaders into action. Instead, they say, efforts to address violent extremism have stalled over semantics and an eagerness to blame “the other side.”  

Also this month, as first reported by Roll Call, lawmakers who wrote the final defense authorization bill “deleted or diluted” all seven House-passed provisions related to extremism in the U.S. military or broader society.

I am sure that if Republicans in congress would act in good faith, without ill will, this problem with semantics would not be a problem. But since the GOP has turned Christofascist, compromise and good will are both off the table. All that’s left is endless bitching, bickering, lying, slandering and point scoring by cynical, mendacious Republicans.

To the extent congressional Democrats are engaging in the same or similar tactics is unclear to me. If they are, I assign most of the blame to Republicans. They are the ones most responsible for fomenting and forcing fascist, no-compromise culture wars on all of us.

Regarding the Supreme Court’s

unprincipled legal reasoning

I’ve repeatedly criticized the current Supreme Court for being unprincipled in its reasoning. Its reasoning looks to me more like a matter of knowing in advance what the decision will be, and then coming up with a legal rationale to support it. That is the opposite of how judges are supposed to decide cases. In theory, judges are supposed to first look at the facts and the law and then decide the case. The court’s recent track record indicates that the decide first, rationalize second mode of decision-making is dominant. Solid evidence of that is the inconsistency in legal reasoning.

The Christofascist Republican court has set itself up as the maker of law, not the decider of legality. That is the essence of anti-democratic authoritarianism. Above the Law writes about this authoritarian aspect of the politically corrupted Republican Supreme Court:

Supreme Court Shadow Docket Is Showing -- Once Again -- 

Its Contempt For Consistency When It Stands In The Way Of Their Political Goals

The emperor has no clothes — or to be more precise the Supreme Court has no consistency. The latest kick to the gut of the Court’s legitimacy came yesterday via the shadow docket — because of course. In Arizona et al. v. Alejandro Mayorkas et al., the Court held in a 5-4 decision that Title 42, a Trump era public health policy that allowed migrants to be expelled quickly from the country during the COVID-19 crisis, could not be lifted during the appeal of a lower court’s decision to end the policy.

The math’s not mathing. That is until you see the through line is current conservative political goals, not any sort of jurisprudential theory.

The Court has become what conservatives long-claimed to hate policymakers in robes. And even the majority’s nod toward separation of powers doesn’t hold much water. 

A growing fascism vs. more radical fascism

split in the Republican Party

A hyper-radicalized Christofascist faction in the Republican Party is trying to gain power over the mainstream radicalized Christofascists. It’s a fight in the GOP between far right authoritarianism against even farther right authoritarianism. The NYT writes:

Ronna McDaniel’s quest for a fourth term atop the Republican National Committee has triggered an ugly intraparty fight between the right and the farther right.

Ms. McDaniel, who was handpicked by Mr. Trump in late 2016 to run the party and whom he enlisted in a scheme to draft fake electors to perpetuate his presidency, could be considered a Trump proxy by Republicans eager to begin to eradicate what many consider to be the party’s pre-eminent problem: the former president’s influence over the G.O.P. 

But Ms. McDaniel is not facing moderation-minded challengers. Her rivals are from the Trumpist right. They include the pillow salesman Mike Lindell, who continues to spin out fanciful election conspiracies, and — more worrying for Ms. McDaniel — a Trump loyalist from California, Harmeet Dhillon, who is backed by some of Mr. Trump’s fiercest defenders, including the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a youthful group of pro-Trump rightists.

“It’s been a very vitriolic campaign,” Ms. McDaniel said in an interview, adding: “I’m all for scorched earth against Democrats. I don’t think it’s the right thing to do against other Republicans.”

The candidacy of Mr. Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who exemplifies the conspiracy-driven fringe, has put still more right-wing pressure on Ms. McDaniel, who refuses to say Joseph R. Biden Jr. was fairly elected in 2020. (Mr. Lindell’s latest conspiracy theory is that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s biggest rival so far for the 2024 presidential nomination, unfairly won re-election in November.)

Hyper-fascist Harmeet Dhillon is trying to take 

over the GOP from fascist Ronna McDaniel 

A couple points points are worth mention:

• The Republican Party is just fine with scorched earth, no-compromise politics and propaganda against Democrats, which constitutes rock solid evidence of the GOP’s Christofascist radical authoritarianism 

• The NYT, and by proxy, the rest of the mainstream still do not understand the nature or seriousness of what has happened to the old Republican Party, i.e., old-fashioned pro-democracy conservatism has morphed into anti-democracy, government- and regulation-hating Christofascism — this is about a bitter intraparty dispute between a radical right faction and a hyper-radical right faction, with regular old-fashioned pro-democracy conservatism is nowhere to be seen

• Mike Lindell does not spin out fanciful election conspiracies — he tells blatant lies and slanders people, which again indicates that mainstream media still do not understand the nature or seriousness of what is going on

A sharp contrast of how Canadians view news

 Hello all, and happy New Year (coming up). Hopefully the new year will bring more joy to all of our lives but I am not holding my breath.

Between the antics of the Republican Party, the ongoing war in Ukraine, sabre rattling by China, more and more climate disasters, it seems there will be more and more reasons to continue to feel anxieties over the future of America and the planet.

I hope the regulars here will excuse a few thoughts then by this American citizen who is now living in Canada.

My observations are strictly mine, just to be clear.

Turning on ANY American news network, or reading up on any American news online, we are usually treated to more angst about the fate of Democracy, the antics of Trump, the failures (or successes) of Biden, election conspiracy theories, and lots and lots of stories about the Border "Crisis", and Inflation.

I have noticed a different tone on Canadian media outlets. More about international news and events. More about climate. More about sporting events. More common interest stories.

Here are just some examples, this morning on CBC online:

https://www.cbc.ca/news

Or CTV online:

https://www.ctvnews.ca/

Mind you, Canadians don't have to deal with Trumpism, election denialism, though even Canadians have their fare share of Rightwing extremists and White Nationalists - but they seldom make the headlines.

Even one of most Rightwing publications in Canada is pretty tame compared to Fox and the like in the U.S.

https://nationalpost.com/

And Canadians have access to some of best analytical and well researched material with outlets like:

https://theconversation.com/ca

Why am I bringing this all up? Am I, now that I am living in Canada, putting my head into the sand? Have I by being less invested in American news, dismissing the real dangers of the world? OR am I finding that being exposed to Canadian news I am getting more balance in my life and seeing more of the world than what I got from American news?

Is the way American news outlets handle news, complete with a lot of hyperbole and a lot of partisan commentary, a better way of presenting the dangers Americans are facing? Or does the way they present the news only cause MORE angst, anxiety, and yup, division?

AND of course many of you will remind me, that the U.S. is in crisis, that the Ukraine war could turn nuclear, and that we have to be fearful of China, and that we need to FOCUS on those dangers. And you may be right, I am NOT saying we should be all singing Kumbaya and ignoring the real dangers.

BUT at the same time it is nice to be able to turn on the news and not be hit in the face 24/7 with the same stories over and over and over again. I have to admit it: it's a nice diversion. 

Should American outlets offer more than 24/7 anxiety ridden news? Whatcha all think?

Sharp criticism of the mainstream media

These comments by PD are a scathing indictment of the failures of our professional mainstream media. This is not about Faux News, QAnon or other radical right and fascist lies and crackpottery propaganda sources. This is about the professional mainstream media. The criticisms are based on facts in the public record. This speaks for itself. PD writes:

I'm afraid politicians and the media across the ideological spectrum lie routinely about really important matters. Right now our major policies come from the Biden Admin and Dem Party. 2 areas of concern for me are the official stories we get from politicians and media outlets like NYT on Covid and Ukraine. These are extremely important, and unlike Q-anon conspiracy theories, the lies we're told are believable because most people aren't going to spend a lot of time searching for evidence that contradicts them.

A NYT article, "Covid Masking: The Last Holdouts" quotes "expert" Trevor Bedford-- a virologist who works at a Cancer Institute in Seattle-- saying

[T]he risk of Covid is similar to that of the flu, with one death in
2,000 infections, about one tenth of what it was originally, with one death in 200 infections.

The actual data (fr Johns Hopkins) shows it is ~1 fatality per 138 infections. No corrections so far.

https://twitter.com/danalud...

The article is clearly written to discourage mask wearing, with sentences like:

While many [experts] recommend masking indoors, they also say individual risk calculations should take into account that the virus is almost certainly here to stay and people need to ask: Do I want to mask, perhaps for decades?

and

On social media, many of the Covid risk-averse have reported entreaties to attend holiday gatherings they fear would expose them to unacceptable health risks. Many declined to speak on the record, for fear of reprisal or ridicule from employers or social groups. Others say the shift in attitudes has sometimes made them question themselves...[One mask wearer said] "Now it's like I'm one of the crazy people."

[And] Sometimes family members and friends can get a little exasperated by the hyper concern. Rafael Oro, 64, a business analyst in Union, N.J., said he has chafed at his wife’s continuing caution. While he is ready to return to prepandemic routines, “we have yet to see a play,” he noted.

The thing is, many epidemiologists are far more inclined to criticize the Biden Admin and CDC for all but giving up on accurate and consistent safety messaging. And though the media doesn't cover it, a new spate of CDC PSAs warn that anyone over 50 or with chronic illnesses should see a doctor immediately if they feel any symptoms as it can be "deadly" in those demographic groups.

UKRAINE:

On Ukraine, there have been so many lies I don't know where to begin. Just this week the head of the private American Mozart Group (which is on the front lines training the Ukrainians got a bit tipsy in an interview and let slip descriptions of Ukrainian atrocities, corruption, false media narratives in the Western papers et al. For example,

It's a very dirty war and Ukrainians are committing plenty of violations including killing Russian prisoners. As soon as we see videos of Ukrainians killing POW's we say 'Dudes, we're going to a different unit. We're very professional. I mean, everybody knows you shouldn't kill dudes that have already surrendered. And there was plenty of that. There's all kinds of atrocities...We need to tell them,'you don't do shit like this, and if you do you're just like the Russians.'

Col. Andrew Milburn on the gov't there:

I happen to have a Ukrainian flag in my bag, but it's not like I'm all 'Ukraine is SO awesome.' Because I understand there are all kinds of fucked up people running Ukraine. It's not about Ukraine. It's about global norms. It's about Putin. It's about dudes in the 21st century running around like Putin doing what they want.'

And this from a guy who is helping Ukraine, though he also says the loss of Ukrainian life is not sustainable, and the "Ukraine is winning" media coverage is "horseshit." It's a war of attrition, he says, and it is the Ukrainians that are bleeding as well as the Russians.

Newsweek ran a sanitized version of some of these comments from Andrew Milburn here: https://www.newsweek.com/us... I watched the entire 2 1/4 hr. interview on youtube here (which is where I got the quotes I used): https://www.youtube.com/wat... Few if any other outlets have reported the story and allegations. Milburn, in a comment to Newsweek said the statements need to be understood in context of a "balanced discussion of the Ukrainian war effort." Whatever his intentions, the statements he made as one of the few Americans on the front lines-- someone working with Zelensky-- are totally incriminating, and yet passed over by the jingoistic reporting about good Ukrainians who practice democracy and value the rule of law. And this is just reaching from this weeks news. I could go on and on, as economist and diplomat Jeffrey Sachs has done on both these issues (as chair of The Lancet Committee on Covid, and as someone who knows-- and worked with-- many of the key players in post-Soviet Ukraine, Poland, Russia and other East European nations). The big policies of our time are being made by Democrats, and they are often very troubling and misrepresented by the media. This is worth pointing out, and not just the outrageous and obvious lies of election deniers, Q-addicts, Christian Nationalists, and sleazy Trump loyalists.

A junk science problem in law enforcement, criminal justice and American society

From The Death of Expertise

by Tom Nichols

A ProPublica article by investigative journalist Brett Murphy discusses some bizarre junk science that the journalist calls “911 call analysis.” This supposedly science based “technology” sometimes subverts justice and the criminal justice system. Sometimes it gets innocent people wrongly convicted of crimes where actual reliable evidence would not be sufficient to establish criminal liability to a jury. The article points to a shocking kind corruption in the American criminal justice system. 

It also exemplifies a much more serious problem in American society. Namely, far too many adult Americans distrust science and experts. Crackpots, grifters, demagogues and other talented liars have become far more trusted than one would think possible in an educated, modern society.

Murphy stumbled across this story by accident, initially not believing it was a real thing. He was wrong. That said, 911 call analysis probably does not apply to rich, powerful or elite people or corporations because they have the attorney firepower to pry this bullshit from the claws of corrupted prosecutors. Poor people probably usually do not have the resources to defend themselves from this horror. Not sure how this impacts the middle class.

ProPublica writes:

Tracy Harpster, a deputy police chief from suburban Dayton, Ohio, was hunting for praise. He had a business to promote: a miracle method to determine when 911 callers are actually guilty of the crimes they are reporting. “I know what a guilty father, mother or boyfriend sounds like,” he once said.

Harpster tells police and prosecutors around the country that they can do the same. Such linguistic detection is possible, he claims, if you know how to analyze callers’ speech patterns — their tone of voice, their pauses, their word choice, even their grammar. Stripped of its context, a misplaced word as innocuous as “hi” or “please” or “somebody” can reveal a murderer on the phone.

So far, researchers who have tried to corroborate Harpster’s claims have failed. The experts most familiar with his work warn that it shouldn’t be used to lock people up.

Prosecutors know it’s junk science too. But that hasn’t stopped some from promoting his methods and even deploying 911 call analysis in court to win convictions.

“Of course this line of research is not ‘recognized’ as a science in our state,” Askey wrote, explaining that she had sidestepped hearings that would have been required to assess the method’s legitimacy. She said she disguised 911 call analysis in court by “getting creative … without calling it ‘science.’”

“I was confident that if a jury could hear this information and this research,” she added, “they would be as convinced as I was of the defendant's guilt.”

What Askey didn’t say in her endorsement was this: She had once tried using Harpster’s methods against Russ Faria, a man wrongfully convicted of killing his wife. At trial, Askey played a recording of Faria’s frantic 911 call for the jury and put a dispatch supervisor on the stand to testify that it sounded staged. Lawyers objected but the judge let the testimony in. Faria was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

After he successfully appealed, Askey prosecuted him again — and again called the supervisor to testify about all the reasons she thought Faria was guilty based on his word choice and demeanor during the 911 call. It was Harpster’s “analytical class,” the supervisor said, that taught her “to evaluate a call to see what the outcome would be.”

This judge wouldn’t allow her to continue and cut the testimony short. Faria was acquitted. He’d spent three and a half years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

None of this bothered Harpster, who needed fresh kudos to repackage as marketing material and for a chapter in an upcoming book. “We don’t have to say it was overturned,” he told Askey when soliciting the endorsement. “Hook me up. … Make it sing!”

Once again, deceit and customer ignorance are 

the best friends of a grifter 

I first stumbled on 911 call analysis while reporting on a police department in northern Louisiana. At the time, it didn’t sound plausible even as a one-off gambit, let alone something pervasive that law enforcement nationwide had embraced as legitimate.

I was wrong. People who call 911 don’t know it, but detectives and prosecutors are listening in, ready to assign guilt based on the words they hear. For the past decade, Harpster has traveled the country quietly sowing his methods into the justice system case by case, city by city, charging up to $3,500 for his eight-hour class, which is typically paid for with tax dollars. Hundreds in law enforcement have bought into the obscure program and I had a rare opportunity to track, in real time, how the chief architect was selling it.  

The program has little online presence. Searches for 911 call analysis in national court dockets come up virtually empty too. A public defender in Virginia said, “I have never heard of any of that claptrap in my jurisdiction.” Dozens of other defense attorneys had similar reactions. One thought the premise sounded as arbitrary as medieval trials by fire, when those suspected of crimes were judged by how well they could walk over burning coals or hold hot irons.

Could it be true that Harpster, a man with no scientific background and next to no previous homicide investigation experience, had successfully sold the modern equivalent [of a medieval trial by fire] to law enforcement across the U.S. almost without notice?  

First, I put together a list of agencies that had recently hosted him. In the months that followed, I sent more than 80 open records requests and interviewed some 120 people. Thousands of emails, police reports and other documents led to a web of thousands more in new states. When agencies refused to turn over public records, ProPublica’s lawyers threatened litigation and in one case sued.  

After he left the FBI Academy that winter, Harpster enrolled at the University of Cincinnati to pursue a graduate degree in criminal justice. For his master’s thesis, he collected 100 recordings of 911 calls — half of the callers had been found guilty of something and the other half hadn’t. Harpster believed he could analyze these calls for clues.

Based on patterns he heard in the tapes, Harpster said he was able to identify certain indicators that correlated with guilt and others with innocence. For instance, “Huh?” in response to a dispatcher’s question is an indicator of guilt in Harpster’s system. So is an isolated “please.” He identified 20 such indicators and then counted how often they appeared in his sample of guilty calls.

Using that same sample of recordings, Harpster, Adams and an FBI behavioral scientist named John Jarvis set out to publish a study in 2008. But even before their work was published in a peer-reviewed journal as an “exploratory analysis” — a common qualifier meant to invite more research — police departments around the country learned about it.

That’s because the FBI sent a version of the study directly to them in a bulletin, which was not labeled exploratory. It included contact information for Harpster and Adams. The publication, which the bureau says typically has a readership of 200,000 but is not supposed to be an endorsement, had immediate impact. “It was required reading by our detective and communications personnel,” a police chief in Illinois told Harpster.

 The article is long and goes into many details about this bizarre stupidity and the shocking gullibility of police and prosecutors. What the FBI was thinking, if anything, is anyone’s guess. This is the kind of crap that happens when people are ignorant and/or distrustful about science and prone to mental corruption. The corruption here is the intense bias that law enforcement and prosecutors have to lock people up. They latch onto anything that gets the conviction.

Apparently, in law enforcement, there are less incentive for getting justice right, than for just locking them up, guilty or not. At least that is how this information makes it look. Both police and prosecutors are guilty of this outrageous travesty. Even TV is biased the same way. Shows like Law & Order puts the cops and prosecutors on a pedestal, while ignoring defense attorneys or making them look sleazy and/or corrupt.

This mental rot in law enforcement mirrors the bigger problem in American society. Specifically, far too many Americans reject and/or attack sound science and the messengers when the science or message (fact and attendant truth) is inconvenient. 

Shucks, one can’t trust law enforcement or the FBI to be honest, competent or rational. What a mess.

From The Death of Expertise

by Tom Nichols

Actually, for politics too many people hold convenient truths to be

true and patriotic, while inconvenient ones are evil

Democratic Party, liberal and/or socialist lies