News bits

The Lever points out why Bob Menendez and other politicians who engage in blatant corruption have a good chance of getting away with it:

But if the alleged facts in the indictment prove true, the big question is: Why would any politician think he could get away with something so brazen? Perhaps because Menendez knows that to secure a conviction, prosecutors will have to prove that it was illegal for him to accept the gifts in exchange for a “performance of an official act,” as the indictment says. And like every American politician, Menendez almost certainly knows that while that may seem straightforward, the corruption-plagued Supreme Court has deliberately made it anything but.  

“Our concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts at the time. “It is instead with the broader legal implications of the government’s boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute… Setting up a meeting, calling another public official, or hosting an event does not, standing alone, qualify as an ‘official act.’”  

The problem is that Supreme Court justices have for years been legalizing — and personally engaging in — similar kinds of corruption. At the same time, top Democrats are constantly assuring justices that no matter how repugnant their behavior, there will be no serious challenge to their power.

A bribe has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be in exchange for “performance of an official act.” In essence, that cannot be proven unless the briber or bribee is an idiot and leaves tangible evidence for prosecutors to argue criminal intent. Menendez describes his situation where he as a victim of a “smear campaign” by those who “simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a U.S. Senator and serve with honor and distinction.”  

With the ‘official act’ shield, the odds of convicting Menendez seem to be low.

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The Guardian reports some commentary on the MSM: 

US news organizations have turned Biden’s age into a scandal and continue to cover Trump as an entertaining side show

Christiane Amanpour has reported all over the world, so she recognizes a democracy on the brink when she sees one.

Last week, as she celebrated her 40 years at CNN, she issued a challenge to her fellow journalists in the US by describing how she would cover US politics as a foreign correspondent.

“We have to be truthful, not neutral,” she urged. “I would make sure that you don’t just give a platform … to those who want to crash down the constitution and democracy.”

It’s an important call to action. But so far, the American press is failing to meet its responsibility to adequately emphasize the stakes of the coming election.

That speaks for itself.

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The radical right teaching children traditional family values

Look closely, you'll see the traditional 

family value being expressed

Freaks

OK, I gotta admit I stole this idea from another site but there were some hilarious rebuttals and some very heated ones as well. So let's try this out here and see how it goes.

NOT including Biden or Trump, who do YOU think is the biggest freak in American politics?

No Biden or Trump votes, thanks, that would be WAY TOO EASY.

Surely each one of us has someone else in mind that they think is a freak. So - what's your vote?

AND YES, I am asking for you to explain your choice.

This ought to be fun.

Bits: GOP attacks on the rule of law; GOP attacks on inconvenient truth

As commented on here before, authoritarian radical right Republican (ARR) politicians in Georgia want to get rid of the prosecutor in Trump's election subversion case in that state. That amounts to a direct attack on the rule of law. Another major avenue of attack is coming from ARR Republicans in congress. The Messenger reports:

Trump’s Government Shutdown Push to Starve His 

Criminal Cases Has a Fundamental Flaw

Trump is openly goading his congressional loyalists to shut down the federal government at the end of next week for the explicit purpose of sabotaging his criminal cases.

“Republicans in Congress can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government that refuses to close the Border, and treats half the Country as Enemies of the State,” the former president and 2024 Republican frontrunner wrote on his website Truth Social on Thursday morning. “This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”

In the event of a shutdown, the U.S. court system will remain fully funded for up to three weeks. And even after that, the judicial branch of the federal government can tap into “carryover” funds from previous years and fees like the ones charged by Pacer, the online court documents database that costs the public 10 cents a page for downloads.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, whose team works for the Justice Department, has an additional cushion provided by a “permanent, indefinite appropriation,” which will continue to finance the already-charged cases against Trump. The scheduled start dates for the trials in the two federal Trump cases also aren’t scheduled until March and May of 2024 respectively, well beyond the time window that any shutdown is expected to last.  

Republican Rep. Andrew Clyde, a Trump supporter from Georgia, proposed an amendment that would target funding of state and federal prosecutions of the former president, but the special counsel’s office is already funded. There is no evidence that Trump’s criminal prosecutions in New York and Georgia have received any substantial federal financing.

Despite the alleged “fundamental flaw”, one can expect ARR Republicans in congress to do their best to try to protect the traitor Trump from as much prosecution as they can. This is open war on the rule of law by the radicalized, authoritarian Republican Party.

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Remember the successful ARR attack on federal funding for gun violence research that was imposed in 1996 (my 2021 post is here)? That funding ban was triggered by this 1993 research paper that showed that gun ownership was a risk factor for domestic homicide. 27 years later that ban still hampers gun violence research in the US.  As I discussed here in 2015, the ARR has fought against all research that could generate truth that is inconvenient to ARR dogma, wealth and/or power. The ARR tactic of killing inconvenient research is not new.

The ARR Republican Party in congress is now doing the same thing to federally funded research on the effects of online misinformation and lies. The WaPo writes:

Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks

An escalating campaign, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans, has cast a pall over programs that study political disinformation and the quality of medical information online

Academics, universities and government agencies are overhauling or ending research programs designed to counter the spread of online misinformation amid a legal campaign from conservative politicians and activists who accuse them of colluding with tech companies to censor right-wing views.

Facing litigation, Stanford University officials are discussing how they can continue tracking election-related misinformation through the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a prominent consortium that flagged social media conspiracies about voting in 2020 and 2022, several participants told The Washington Post. The coalition of disinformation researchers may shrink and also may stop communicating with X and Facebook about their findings.

The National Institutes of Health froze a $150 million program intended to advance the communication of medical information, citing regulatory and legal threats.  

“If the question relates in any way to misinformation or disinformation, please do not respond,” read the guidance email, sent in July after a Louisiana judge blocked many federal agencies from communicating with social media companies.  

“In the name of protecting free speech, the scientific community is not allowed to speak,” said Dean Schillinger, a health communication scientist who planned to apply to the NIH program to collaborate with a Tagalog-language newspaper to share accurate health information with Filipinos. “Science is being halted in its tracks.”  

Academics and government scientists say the campaign also is successfully throttling the years-long effort to study online falsehoods, which grew after Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 election caught both social media sites and politicians unawares.

Once again, we clearly see blatant, direct attacks by elite radical Republican Party authoritarians on inconvenient truth and science, and on the public interest. To establish their corrupt dictatorship, Republican politicians attack and subvert the same thing that all or nearly all other dictators, theocrats, plutocrats and kleptocrats target, prominently political opposition, pluralism-tolerance (to have scapegoat groups to attack and fearmonger about), democracy, civil liberties, especially voting rights and elections, and sources of inconvenient truth. None of these tactics are new. Same dictator lies, deceit, slanders, crackpottery. It's just a different day in a different country, now the US.

Note that some government scientists say the Republican dictators' campaign is throttling research on online falsehoods. If Trump or another Republican dictator wannabe is elected president in 2024, those scientists would be searched out and fired as communist deep state enemies. They would replaced by thugs who will deny that online lies are of any consequence, assuming any even exist in view of the reality of post-truth and alt-facts.

Global warming propaganda tactics update

A Vox article discusses the propaganda tactics, some of which were discussed several times here before, that pro-pollution companies like ExxonMobil are using to fight against doing anything about global warming. Since it's too hard to deny global warming and climate change any more, industry propaganda tactics now mostly focus on dividing, delaying, downplaying, deflecting and what I call demotivating. Vox writes:

What do you call it if it’s not climate denialism anymore? What are we facing now?

So there are other D-words. There’s delay. There’s division. Get climate advocates fighting with each other about, like, whether they’re vegans or not or whether they drive a car or not. Get climate advocates fighting with each other so you divide and conquer the movement. That’s division. Delay: “Oh, look, we can fix the problem with geoengineering, with carbon capture down the road. Trust us, we’ll be able to fix it.” So “let us continue to burn fossil fuels now. We will fix it later.” Delay. And that’s what they want. They want people disengaged on the sidelines rather than on the front lines. We see these tactics literally playing out today.

There’s an article that just recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal detailing how Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, who had been lauded as the next generation of Exxon leadership — he was not a climate denier. He accepted that climate change is real — there was a real effort by Tillerson and ExxonMobil at that time to present this public face of climate acceptance — because it had already become difficult to deny it was happening. People understood it was happening. It wasn’t credible to deny it. And so it was, “Yes, we accept the science,” but the D-word here is downplaying. And in the article, the Wall Street Journal makes it very clear, based on internal documents that show a different side of ExxonMobil and Rex Tillerson, that they were actively campaigning to downplay the detrimental impacts of the climate crisis while playing up techno fixes like geoengineering. 

And a lot of that would have to be on the individual because obviously, if individuals want to burn fossil fuels, this is a country where they’re going to find someone willing to help them do so. How much of the climate delayism is being pushed on the individual at this moment?

It’s a great point. And actually I would even classify that with a different D-word, what I call deflection, which is to say there’s been an effort by the same bad actors to deflect the conversation away from regulation and the needed policies which will hurt their bottom line — carbon pricing, cap and trade, what have you — to redirect the conversation against those systemic changes and policies that will hurt them financially and turn attention instead to individuals.

In the early 2000s, the very first widely used and publicized individual carbon footprint calculator, where you could calculate your carbon footprint and figure out how to change your lifestyle to make it smaller, was created and publicized by British Petroleum. British Petroleum wanted you so focused on your individual carbon footprint that you failed to note theirs.

That’s why we need policies, because individuals can’t put a price on carbon themselves. They can’t block the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure. These are all things that only our politicians can do. And so that’s where we are today. Deflection remains one of the key tactics.

I want to ask you about another D-word that I think is related to the lack of policies that are going to make enough of a difference to save this planet. And that, of course, is doom. Climate doomerism. [One can call it demotivating]

Yeah. And doomism has actually been weaponized by bad actors to convince even environmentalists that, “Hey, it’s too late to do anything anyway, so you might as well just give up trying to solve the climate crisis.” People who are ostensible climate advocates and environmentalists insist that it’s too late, and we just have to accept our fate. There are events, like mass extinction events in the past, that some of these doomists will point to and say, “Look what happened to the dinosaurs, what happened during the so-called Great Dying 250 million years ago when 90 percent of all species died out because of a massive release of carbon into the atmosphere through an episode of massive volcanism, that’s happening today.” There are prominent actors in the climate space who are literally making this claim. And they’re doing so by misrepresenting what the record of Earth history actually tells us about those events. We are at a fragile moment. We’re not yet past the point of no return. But if we don’t take substantial action and do so immediately, then we are due for some of those potential worst-case scenarios. So it is still up to us.

20 Best Countries for Americans Who Want to Live Abroad

 Considering a life abroad?

You know, because of Trumpism, Christofascism, political and social turmoil, all kinds of reasons, are you........

Considering a life abroad?

Here are 20 of the best countries for expats to help you get started and practical steps to make your dreams a reality.

https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/best-countries-for-american-expats

Not sure about THAT list, Canada comes in ONLY at #4 ?

AND Ghana is listed as a preferred destination????

This West African nation's diverse expat community continues to grow each year thanks to the friendly locals and the laid-back culture.

Well, ok then! 

BUT, regardless of what lists say which countries are preferred destinations for Americans who want to get out of Dodge, your list might be different.

Easy for me, I already live in my preferred destination. New Zealand would by #2.

BUT just for fun, if you were to leave the U.S. - which countries would YOU chose?

Bits: 2024 election spoilers; Christian nationalist law & order; Menendez

Things that could throw the 2024 election to Trump seem likely to crop up. Maybe prosecution of Trump or a court finding that he is disqualified to run under the 14th Amendment could derail him. At this point, it seems that the election will be close, so it might not take much to tip the outcome one way or the other. 

Wild cards include how effective authoritarian Republican laws to suppress non-Republican votes and to rig state elections will be. A related wild card is the effectiveness of vicious radical right lies and slander propaganda to poison Biden and Democrats generally. 

Another tactic the radical right is using is funding groups that pretend to be something other than Republican, but designed to siphon votes from Biden or dampen enthusiasm for Democratic voters. The AP writes about one such group, No Labels:

A third party signed up 15,000 voters in Arizona 

Democrats worry that’s enough for a Biden spoiler

More than 15,000 people in Arizona have registered to join a new political party floating a possible bipartisan “unity ticket” against Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

While that’s less than the population of each of the state’s 40 largest cities, it’s still a number big enough to tip the presidential election in a critical swing state. And that is alarming people trying to stop Trump from winning the White House again.

The very existence of the No Labels group is fanning Democratic anxiety about Trump’s chances against an incumbent president facing questions about his age and record. While it hasn’t committed to running candidates for president and vice president, No Labels has already secured ballot access in Arizona and 10 other states. Its organizers say they are on track to reach 20 states by the end of this year and all 50 states by Election Day.  

“If they have someone on the ballot who is designed to bring the country together, that clearly draws votes away from Joe Biden and does not draw votes away from Donald Trump,” said Rodd McLeod, a Democratic strategist in Arizona.  

No Labels leaders say they’ll decide after the Super Tuesday primaries in March whether to run a candidate, who would be nominated at a convention in Dallas in April.  

No Labels leaders vehemently deny that they’ll be a spoiler for Trump and say they’ll only proceed if their candidate has a path to victory. But it’s unclear how certain that path will have to be.

Despite the No Labels vehement denial that it would be a spoiler, they have no way to know that and are just making that up. It is ludicrous to think that their candidate would have any path to victory. Money flowing into No Labels comes mostly from Republican donors.

Also a possible spoiler is the Green Party, which siphons more votes from Democrats than the radical right Libertarian Party takes from Republicans. Cornel West is running for the People's Party and he would drain votes from Biden.

Like it or not, there definitely be Republican election subversion laws in effect and probably at least one or two other spoilers in the mix. It's not yet clear how all of that will affect the election.

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The Guardian writes:

Jessica Burgess, a Nebraska mother accused of helping her teenage daughter use pills to end her pregnancy, was sentenced on Friday to two years in prison.

Burgess and her daughter, Celeste Burgess, stand accused of working together to end Celeste Burgess’s pregnancy in April 2022.  

Court documents in the case revealed that Facebook’s parent company Meta supplied police with the private Facebook messages that Celeste and Jessica Burgess had sent one another. 

LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!! 

Go Republican Party & Christian nationalism!

Thank you Mark Zuckerberg for maintaining law & order!

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Everybody is reporting about Bob Menendez and his stashes of cash and gold bars. The WaPo wrote in one article:

Menendez on Friday cited having beat a previous indictment, in 2018, and accused prosecutors of having “misrepresented the normal work of a congressional office.”

“On top of that, not content with making false claims against me, they have attacked my wife for the long-standing friendships she had before she and I even met,” Menendez added.  

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) is already calling for Menendez’s resignation, as is the state Democratic Party chairman.

In the near term, Democratic Party rules mean he’ll have to at least temporarily relinquish his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations committee. 

Given how slowly corruption cases move through the courts — Menendez’s last one started more than two years after his indictment — it would seem unlikely this one would be resolved before the state’s June 4 primary and possibly even the November 2024 general election.  

“The excesses of these prosecutors is apparent,” he said, adding: “They wrote these charges as they wanted; the facts are not as presented. Prosecutors did that the last time and look what a trial demonstrates. People should remember that before accepting the prosecutor’s version.”

Once again, as usual, the accused accuses the accusers. The usual list of accusations is in play, e.g., bad motives, no evidence, witch hunt, legal business as usual, lying about the facts and/or whatever else fees right at the moment. That's the norm for modern politicians. Unfortunately the norm also includes the crooks getting off. 

Q: Is it fair to consider an accused politician to be a criminal even if he is acquitted in court or in an impeachment if there is sufficient evidence to reasonably believe that? 

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The AP reports about how radical right Republican politicians in Georgia plan to keep Trump out of court and out of jail:

A judge expressed skepticism Friday at demands to freeze a new Georgia law creating a commission to discipline and remove state prosecutors.

Some Republicans want the new commission to discipline or remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for winning indictments of former President Donald Trump and 18 others.

That’s in part a way to evade demands from some Republicans that lawmakers call themselves into special session to attack Willis. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has rejected both a special session and the notion that Willis has done anything that merits sanctions from the new commission, although he supported the law, saying when he signed it that it would curb “far-left prosecutors” who are “making our communities less safe.” 

A lawyer for the state argued Georgia lawmakers noted the state constitution expressly says lawmakers can pass laws to discipline or remove district attorneys, and said lawmakers can also define a prosecutor’s duties.

Georgia’s law is one in a series of attempts nationwide by Republicans to impose controls on prosecutors they don’t like. Republicans have inveighed against progressive prosecutors after some have brought fewer drug possession cases and sought shorter prison sentences, arguing Democrats are coddling criminals.

Q: Who coddles criminals more, Dems, Repubs, or are both about the same but in different ways (Dems coddle low level criminals and Repubs coddle Republican elites)? In view of their track record of constant, blatant mendacidty, how credible are radical right Repubs to criticize the Dems of anything without a lot of rock solid evidence to back it up?