Bits: Dissolution of the Union; Impeachment Kool-Aid update; Analysis of democracy rot

America's authoritarian radical right (ARR) continues to call for the dissolution of the Union if the ARR doesn't get everything it wants. What it wants is full legalization of all corruption, death of democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law, dictatorship, Christian Sharia theocracy and plutocracy. Rolling Stone writes: 

IN FEBRUARY, GEORGIA Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene called for a “national divorce” between red and blue states. Now, she’s taking her call for a schism even further by encouraging states to outright “consider seceding from the union.”

On Monday, Greene (R-Ga.) wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that “if the Biden admin refuses to stop the invasion of cartel led human and drug trafficking into our country, states should consider seceding from the union.”  

The ARR continues to foment a bloody civil war.  

____________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________

One of the far right House Freedom Caucus members, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) said there's currently no evidence that Biden committed any impeachable offense.

Appearing on MSNBC's "Inside with Jen Psaki," Republican Rep. Ken Buck was asked about the constant push from political bomb-thrower Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to impeach the president. Buck noted the "time for impeachment is the time when there's evidence linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor." "That doesn't exist right now," he said.

That's strange. The Freedom Caucus isn't known for being tied to actual facts. Besides not having committed any impeachable offense is grounds for impeachment in the demented minds of the ARR.

___________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________

A NYT opinion piece discusses the thinking of two experts about the recent rot of American democracy caused by America's ARR:

One of the most influential books of the Trump years was “How Democracies Die” by the Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Published in 2018, it served as a guide to our unfolding ordeal.

Because that volume was prescient about how Donald Trump would try to rule, I was surprised to learn, in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s new book, “Tyranny of the Minority,” that they were shocked by Jan. 6. Though they’ve studied violent insurrections all over the world, they write in this new book, “we never imagined we’d see them here. Nor did we ever imagine that one of America’s two major parties would turn away from democracy in the 21st century.”

What astonished them the most, Levitsky told me in an interview last week, “was the speed and the degree to which the Republican Party Trumpized.” In “How Democracies Die,” he and Ziblatt had reproved Republicans for failing to stop Trump’s rise to power. But at the time, he said, “we didn’t consider or call the Republican Party an authoritarian party. We did not expect it to transform so quickly and so thoroughly.”  

.... in recent years, only in America has a defeated leader attempted a coup. And only in America is the coup leader likely to once again be the nominee of a major party. “Why did America, alone among rich established democracies, come to the brink?” they ask.

So in 2018, two high 'n mighty academic poobahs did not consider the GOP to be authoritarian. I must be some sort of genius, maybe even a God! By 2018 it was obvious the GOP elites and leadership had become staunchly authoritarian. By then, ARR elites were busy getting the rank and file to drink the poisoned Kool-Aid with them.

Anyway, my alleged genius aside, Levitsky and Ziblatt point out the obvious for an explanation. They see part of the answer is in our Constitution. They figured out that the US Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely dcefeate majorities, and sometimes govern. Well duh! They see an America that is locked into a minority rule crisis. Well duh!, again. Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t have any proposals to emerge from minority rule. Wonderful!

The Economist, a nest of feisty Brits on the other side of the pond, published this in July 2018, and I have cited it here probably a dozen times since then:

American democracy’s built-in bias towards rural Republicans 

Its elections no longer convert the popular will into control of government

“EVERY system for converting votes into power has its flaws. Britain suffers from an over-mighty executive; Italy from chronically weak government; Israel from small, domineering factions. America, however, is plagued by the only democratic vice more troubling than the tyranny of the majority: tyranny of the minority.

This has come about because of a growing division between rural and urban voters. The electoral system the Founders devised, and which their successors elaborated, gives rural voters more clout than urban ones. When the parties stood for both city and country that bias affected them both. But the Republican Party has become disproportionately rural and the Democratic Party disproportionately urban. That means a red vote is worth more than a blue one.

If Brett Kavanaugh, whom President Donald Trump nominated this week, joins the Supreme Court, a conservative court established by a president and Senate who were elected with less than half the two-party vote may end up litigating the fairness of the voting system. [Authoritarianism warning!]

This bias is a dangerous new twist in the tribalism and political dysfunction that is poisoning politics in Washington. Americans often say such partisanship is bad for their country (and that the other lot should mend their ways). The Founding Fathers would have agreed. George Washington warned that ‘the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge…is itself a frightful despotism’.”

Guess Germaine wasn't so genius after all. 🤪 He just read a short thing some Brits wrote for The Economist and internalized it. Internalized it because the Brits' analysis made a hell of a lot of sense in July of 2018. It still makes a hell of a lot of sense in September 2023. Apparently, Levitsky and Ziblatt just figured that out. Guess they're not the grand poobahs the NYT makes 'em out to be. Sheesh!

2024 Presidential Election Odds & Predictions

 PLACE YOUR BETS!

Although New York sports betting laws do not allow betting on 2024 presidential elections, as soon as Joe Biden had been declared the winner over 45th President Donald Trump, sports betting sites across Europe – where political betting is legal – began pricing up who would win the 2024 election.

According to the 2024 election odds listed at Ladbrokes, President Joe Biden (40.0%) and former President Donald Trump (30.8%) remained most likely to be the next US President.

Joe Biden Wins in 2024

Biden is the bookies’ current favorite.

Lots and lots of other details, for your amusement:

https://www.empirestakes.com/ny-sports-betting/presidential-election-odds

Don't forget the radical right Convention of States threat

I've posted about this one or twice before, but re-posting about it helps keep it in mind. In the hands of the radical right this is a powerful weapon in the hands of democracy haters, pro-tyranny and pro-kleptocracy authoritarians, racists and bigots. America's radical right really does want to completely destroy what we have and install some form of a kleptocratic dictatorship. Common Cause writes:

STOPPING A DANGEROUS ARTICLE V CONVENTION

Wealthy special interests are pushing for a constitutional convention that could put everyone in America’s rights up for grabs. It's on us to stop them

Wealthy donors, corporations, and radical far-right actors are pushing calls for an Article V Convention in states across the country to reshape our Constitution for their own benefit.

Frighteningly, they are just a few states away from succeeding

What is an Article V Convention?

Under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, Congress is required to hold a constitutional convention if two-thirds of state legislatures (34 states) call for one.

But here’s the catch: there are absolutely no rules for an Article V Convention outlined in the Constitution.

That means the group of people convening to rewrite our Constitution could be totally unelected and unaccountable. There is nothing that could limit the convention to a single issue, so the delegates could write amendments that revoke any of our most cherished rights – like our right to peaceful protest, our freedom of religion, or our right to privacy. There are also no rules preventing corporations from pouring money into the convention to ensure they get their way.

In short, an Article V Convention would be a disaster. It would lead to long and costly legal battles, uncertainty about how our democracy functions, and likely economic instability.

But extremists and wealthy special interests see it as their best chance to write their far-right agenda into the Constitution. That is why they are working around the clock to convince their allies in state legislatures to make it happen.

How far are we from an Article V Convention?

Right now, there are four major campaigns for an Article V Convention: the Balanced Budget Amendment campaign, the Convention of States campaign, the Wolf-PAC campaign, and the term limits campaign.

Each has different goals, but together, they have convinced 28 states to call for a convention. That means they have just six states to go.

__________________________________________________________

What saves us, if the Convention of States beast ever gets unleashed, is the current Constitution. It requires ratification of the new constitution by 75% of states, i.e., 38 states. 

At present it is hard to see 38 states agreeing with an authoritarian, radical autocratic-plutocratic-Christian theocratic constitution. 

Radical right intentions and tactics: Rewrite the constitution but learn how to shoot, just in case

Radicalization of the extreme right constitutes a broad and deepening authoritarian phenomenon that is well underway. Military arts schools teach people to overcome their natural hesitancy to shoot and kill other humans, but they hope it doesn't come to that. Instead, these radical extremists plan to rewrite the US Constitution and convert secular law into Christian Sharia law. Freelance journalist Laura Jedeed writes for The New Republic:

My Week Inside a Right-Wing “Constitutional Defense” Training Camp

An on-the-ground report on the movement trying to rewrite the Constitution—and arm supporters along the way

I am approximately halfway through Patriot Academy’s Constitutional Defense course, a five-day program run by a right-wing organization that promises to give participants both “the physical training you need to be able to defend your family” and “intellectual ammunition to defend the Constitution.” It’s late September, and my classmates and I—a group of about 60 in total—have sent approximately 200 rounds through various forms of Bob [human silhouette targets] over the past day and a half. There are 600 more rounds in the trunk of my rented Chevy Malibu, currently dwarfed by rows of pickup trucks in the parking lot behind our line of fire.

The idea of combining political instruction and 35 hours of intense, combat-focused pistol training in 2023 America seems insurrectionary on its face. And it is, but not in the immediately obvious way. The guns are a red herring. The insurrection, if Patriot Academy has its way, will be bloodless: a heart transplant for the body politic. Patriot Academy, along with many fellow-traveler evangelical organizations across the country, is engaged in a life-and-death struggle to rewrite America’s Constitution—and teaching its supporters how to defend themselves with a handgun, just in case.

This is how Patriot Academy began: not as a handgun training course or any of the other things the outfit would eventually become, but as a summer camp for politically minded students between the ages of 16 and 25. Once a year, approximately 30 ambitious youngsters spent a week in the Texas Capitol building, where they participated in mock legislative sessions, received leadership and activist training from notable local Republicans, and learned about how America’s roots trace back to a deeply Christian founding and to religious men such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

At a constitutional defense course hosted by Patriot Academy in New Braunfels, Texas, in early December 2022, participants practiced a drill training them to shoot from the hip in close combat stance, imagining they’re within a few feet of their possible target.

Note: The marked target areas of Bob to shoot at are body parts you shoot to kill

That dubious tale of America’s origins appears to come courtesy of David Barton, the man who put up the cash for Patriot Academy’s founding. Barton, whose academic qualifications consist of a large collection of revolutionary documents and a bachelor’s degree in religious education, has written over a dozen books on America’s biblical roots, including one pulled from shelves for factual inaccuracy after outcry from fellow Christian historians. In Barton’s defense, it is very difficult to prove that Thomas Jefferson, infamous Deist and slave owner, was both deeply Christian and a civil rights pioneer.

Rick Green would not approve of my sarcasm. “You [said] David Barton teaches that America was founded on Christian principles,” he told me when I pulled him aside for an interview four days into the Constitutional Defense course. “I argue there’s no question. America was founded on Christian principles. You read the Founding Fathers, 95 percent of them were Christians. Even the ones that weren’t Christians were still believers in God.”

One thing no one can dispute is Barton’s decades-long influence on evangelical conservative thought. He served as vice chair of the Texas Republican Party from 1997 to 2006 and has advised a variety of prominent conservatives over the years, including Newt Gingrich and Ted Cruz.

_______________________________________________________

And then the Tea Party arrived.

Demand for all things constitutional skyrocketed; the organization’s donations quintupled in 2009 and continued to rise. As evangelical Christianity now surges back into mainstream political discourse, Patriot Academy finances are enjoying a second Great Awakening. Between 2017 and 2020, the group’s revenue nearly tripled. In 2008, Patriot Academy’s revenue was less than $29,000. In 2020, the group collected $1.2 million.

These funds have not sat idle. Patriot Academy’s Leadership Congress camp for young people continues not just in Texas but in state Capitol buildings across the country. A separate series of leadership congresses for veterans kicked off in 2017. Slickly produced video courses, with names like Constitution Alive! and Biblical Citizenship, allow students of any age to learn Barton’s worldview in living rooms and churches throughout America. Through it all, an undercurrent of concern carries students toward a worrying conclusion: America currently teeters on the brink of godless authoritarian communism, and only something as radical as the well-funded and rapidly growing conservative effort to rewrite the Constitution can save it.

Patriot Academy’s description of the Constitutional Defense course makes it clear that the handgun training and constitutional education are complementary, but separate. I was skeptical. In an era where right-wing talk of civil war is never more than a mouse-click away, who would we be preparing to shoot?

The course, designed for people of varying skill levels, starts with the fundamentals and works its way up. We do not fire a shot until halfway through the first day: It is all about safety, stance, loading, and unloading. Only after the instructors are satisfied that we are not going to do anything stupid do we begin to put holes through Bobs.

Hollywood has lied to you. Accurate shooting requires finesse and skill and an almost pathological attention to detail. It is easy to get lost in the mechanics of it: Weaver stance, bladed feet, bend your knees, sight picture, trigger pull, move, assess, reset, reload. Add in shooting from the holster and a focus on speed, and the act becomes so ritualized that you can easily forget that, ultimately, you are learning the most efficient way to kill another human.

Constitutional Defense never lets its students forget the point of handguns for long. Except in two accuracy drills, our targets are exclusively human-shaped. This makes me uncomfortable. I think it is supposed to. 

Twice, instructors replace Bob with photo-realistic targets of men pointing guns back at us. The first group stares menacingly at us from across the firing line when we arrive on the fourth day: a sequence of four scumbags repeating down the line. All of them are white. I choose the man in a cream-colored turtleneck and a bad haircut, wanted for crimes of fashion. 

The next day—our final day of training, when our aim is best and our confidence high—a second group of bad guys with guns assembles to oppose us. All of them appear to be people of color. 

I am spectacularly uncomfortable as I step up to the line. With one possible exception, every single student here is white. My opponent is an Asian man in a white T-shirt. Next to me, a classmate takes aim at a Black man in overalls. He names the targets while we wait to begin the drill. Hong. José. Jamal. The drill starts. I take aim at Hong and pull the trigger.

Jamal

_______________________________________________________

This may sound like a theocracy to the untrained ear. Green wants you to know that it is not. “I don’t know a single person in our movement that wants a theocracy or wants a nation where everybody’s got to be a Christian,” he tells me. “Whether you’re atheist, Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish … everybody benefits from the freedom principles that came from a Christian society.”

I am beginning to get the picture. You will not be forced to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior in Biblical America. You will not be forced to attend church. But there will be prayer in school, and our history will be highly sanitized. Trans people will not have access to gender-affirming care, and marriage will be between a man and a woman. No one will force you to be a Christian in Rick Green’s America. But you will largely need to live like one.

_______________________________________________________

An Article V convention, like a gun on your hip, offers a simple solution to a complicated problem. During our interview, Rick Green refers to eighteenth-century federalism as “utopia.” If we can just get back to a time when things made sense, the logic goes, the world would be a lot less awful. 

“[People] know the country’s falling apart,” Green says at the fundraising dinner at the end of the course. “They know we’ve got real challenges in our nation right now, and they don’t know what to do.… You feel it in your gut. You know you need to do something, you don’t know what to do. We know what to do.

Political Influence…

When it comes to how you think about politics, who has or has had the most political influence on you?

• Spouse
• Significant other
• Family figureheads
• Other family members (if so, who)
• Friends
• Neighbors
• No one (I fly solo)
• I’m the influencER, not the influencEE
• Other 

 Describe that influence.  How did it come about?  What was its evolution?

• I was convinced or convinced others via argument  
• I did/do it to keep peace in the family and/or with friends.
• Other

US Gov't shuts down $125 Mil Potential Pandemic Virus Hunting Program Amid Safety Fears

9/7/23

The British Medical Journal made the following announcement which has been confirmed by the US Gov't.

"I'm Kamran Abbasi, Editor-in-Chief of The BMJ. Today, The BMJ can report that the US quietly terminated a flagship, one-hundred and twenty-five million dollar wildlife virus hunting project. This is major news reported for us by the Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran journalist David Willman, because for over a decade, hundreds of millions of dollars in unabated government funding have symbolized a commitment to such efforts. The shuttering of this massive program known as "DEEP VZN"[which stands for Discovery & Exploration of Emerging Pathogens - Viral Zoonoses, and is pronounced "deep vision"] marks the first acknowledgment by the US government that such projects carry risks. Risks that critics have characterized, as potentially catastrophic, wherein virus hunting could actually inadvertently ignite a pandemic.

The world can't afford another pandemic, and questions remain about the origins of SARS-COV-2. But it's become fairly clear that collecting, transporting and performing research on exotic wildlife viruses carries unacceptable risks to all of humanity."

This is extremely important news. It is these "exotic wildlife viruses" that are used in Gain of Function Research of Concern (GOFROC), or research that involves the enhancement of potential pandemic pathogens (ePPP).  Though such research has created many viruses that are pathogenic to humans (one of which *could* be SC2), it has not led to production of any vaccines or cures to date, as biologists, Richard Ebright and Justin Kinney point out in their article posted here yesterday. According to David Willman's reporting for  BMJ,   the gov't  kept the news quietly buried in a congressional budget document hundreds of pages long.  Willman conducted  interviews with federal lawmakers and researchers and found that the closing of DEEP VZN is the result of a review of costs and benefits which included bi-partisan input as well as that of science and technology advisors close to Joe Biden. Willman, in his BMJ report, writes:

"In December 2021 two senior White House officials specialising in biosecurity and biosafety—Jason Matheny, deputy assistant to Biden for technology and national security, and Daniel Gastfriend, the National Security Council’s director for biodefence and pandemic preparedness—first privately shared their views with USAID’s administrator, Samantha Power, and advised her to shut down DEEP VZN. Those familiar with the matter said that another White House official, T Gregory McKelvey Jr, a physician and the assistant director for biosecurity with the Office of Science and Technology Policy, also privately raised concerns with USAID staff."

The USAID and NIH  funded much of the virus hunting conducted by Shi Zenghli, who carried who played a key role in the US-China research of concern that may have caused Sars-CoV-2 (SC2). According to Wikipedia, she reported receiving $1.2 Mil. for the research which was ongoing from 2014-2019.*  That research is precisely the kind that came under review in assessing and closing Deep VZN. Officials told Willman that the new policy recommendations only support such research a) if there is no safer method to produce the same benefit/s and b) only after "all unnecessary risks have eliminated." Although such phrasing is not entirely unambiguous, the fact is that a major program behind much of the Gain of Function Research of Concern is being closed by the Biden Administration. 

That is great news for those of us who are worried about this research. It is also-- for me at least-- one of Biden's most important contribution to the well being of Americans and people all over the world today. Below are some sources for those interested.

 

 >>BMJ article by  https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj.p2002

>>Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/2023/09/the-us-government-cancels-deep-vzn-a-controversial-virus-hunting-program/

>> Daily Mail: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12491751/USAID-125million-project-pandemic.html

 >> Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/09/07/deep-vzn-virus-wild-usaid-program/

 >> New York Times???? (Waiting for you to find space for "all the news that's fit to print")

 

FN *Wikipedia's source is award-winning investigative medical journalist Katherine Eban from this 2021 deep dive published by Vanity Fair. This June she also reported on the communication between the Chinese CDC and US scientists on the origins of Covid. She was able to interview China's former CDC director Geroge Gao who said he had told American scientists-- including one of the Proximal Origins authors, Eddie Holmes and Wuhan Meat Market theoy proponent Michael Worobey-- that the origins could well have been lab-related OR zoonotic. Worobey, who was lead author in the most widely cited article on Wuhan Market theory of SC2 origins,  said that Gao is misrepresenting the phone calls in question.)