News bits: DJT policy update; GOP violence watch update; Election subversion update

The New Republic reports on DJT's publicly stated plans if he is re-elected:

Trump Goes Full Deranged, Suggests Charging 

People He Doesn’t Like With Treason

Donald Trump went over the edge over the weekend and began calling for his detractors to be prosecuted or even put to death.

“They are almost all dishonest and corrupt, but Comcast, with its one-side and vicious coverage by NBC NEWS, and in particular MSNBC, often and correctly referred to as MSDNC (Democrat National Committee!), should be investigated for its ‘Country Threatening Treason,’” he wrote on Truth Social Sunday night.

“I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States … the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events,” he said. “They are a true threat to Democracy and are, in fact, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country!”

MSN commented:

Professor of global politics and political scientist Brian Klass at The Atlantic wrote on Monday that General Milley’s phone call to China “was, in fact, explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials.”

“And yet,” Klass noted, “none of the nation’s front pages blared ‘Trump Suggests That Top General Deserves Execution’ or ‘Former President Accuses General of Treason.’ Instead, the post barely made the news. Most Americans who don’t follow Trump on social media probably don’t even know it happened.”

“Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous, not just because it is the exact sort that incites violence against public officials but also because it shows just how numb the country has grown toward threats more typical of broken, authoritarian regimes. The United States is not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election. It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed.”

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LGBQT Nation reports:

GOP congressman calls for execution of “sodomy-promoting” US Army general

Rep. Paul Gosar said that the "homosexual-promoting" general "would be hung" in a better society

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) called for the execution of General Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a homophobic tirade this weekend.

In his newsletter this weekend – published to his Congressional website – Gosar accused Milley of being a “homosexual-promoting-BLM-activist” who delayed the military’s response to the January 6 riot. An election denier, Gosar has in the past claimed that he “started the revolution,” referring to the insurrection.  

“In a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung,” Gosar wrote. “He had one boss: President Trump, and instead he was secretly meeting with Pelosi and coordinating with her to hurt Trump. That is, when he wasn’t also secretly coordinating and sharing intelligence with the Chinese military.”

Since the GOP is silent on Gosar's threat, the Republican Party supports Gosar's call for executing Milley.

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Ohio Capitol Journal reports:

In Wisconsin, Republican lawmakers are threatening to impeach both the state’s election administrator, who is highly regarded nationally, and a state Supreme Court justice despite a ruling by the state’s judicial commission that the justice had done nothing wrong — effectively nullifying a recent statewide election she won, Democrats say.

In North Carolina, a bill that would give the legislature control of state and local election boards — potentially allowing lawmakers to overturn results — could soon become law.

Alabama continues to defy the U.S. Supreme Court by refusing to draw a new congressional district with a Black majority.

And after forcing voters to cast ballots in unconstitutionally gerrymandered districts in 2022, Ohio Republicans have recently proposed new maps that retain their gerrymandered supermajority control over the legislature, after enacting one of the most restrictive voter laws in the country earlier this year, and spending the summer campaigning to roll back the constitutional power of Ohio voters.

Other states are seeing efforts by politicians to gain a political advantage by curtailing the power of voters.  

Wisconsin’s legislative maps are among the most heavily gerrymandered in the country — a 2020 Harvard study ranked them as the worst, on par with Jordan, Bahrain, and the Congo. They’ve consistently given the GOP large majorities — currently 22-11 in the Senate and 64-35 in the House — despite the state tilting slightly Democratic in most recent statewide races.  

In Ohio, the Supreme Court has ruled five times that the state’s current legislative maps are unconstitutional gerrymanders favoring Republicans. But the bipartisan commission that’s supposed to draw fair maps waited 16 months before reconvening last week.

It has made almost no progress, because GOP legislative leaders spent the first week infighting over who would co-chair the committee. When they finally did name one this week, the commission met and Republicans used their 5-2 advantage on the commission to establish a proposed working map that could lead to more Republican seats and fewer competitive districts.

Authoritarian radical right Republican efforts to subvert the 2024 elections continue to be a wild card. Biden could win the election but for the effects of those laws. Republicans have tried to suppress non-Republican voters and rig or openly reject election results that the radical right authoritarians dislike. 

I am not aware of any analysis that predicts the likely effects of radical Republican anti-election, pro-tyranny laws in any state. Maybe it's time to start doing some searching to see if I can find anything. 🤨

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?