News bits: The AGW propaganda war update; Radical Christianity and oil; Psychological projecting

AGW (anthropogenic global warming) has been a heavily propagandized science topic for decades. The reality of it, and the fact that it is serious, is not in dispute among climate science experts. It remains heavily disputed among enraged government-hating ideologues (most Republicans (~90% ?) and Libertarians (~97% ?), corrupt cynical politicians paid off by pro-pollution business interests and religious ideologies (chemicals, transportation, oil, coal, gas, Christianity, etc.) and various crackpots spouting various mostly idiotic false theories. So far, the deniers have done a damn good job of (1) deceiving, distracting and confusing the public, and (2) blocking or slowing national and international efforts to deal with it. All of this is documented and not seriously disputed by nearly all normal, reality-attached people.

At the COP28 UN climate summit, the main or only international AGW game in existence, meeting in the staunchly pro-pollution, oil-dominated United Arab Republic, the polluter’s propaganda, lies and slanders are on display. Not surprisingly, the dark free speech onslaught is shameless and ruthless. The NYT comments:

As the world’s leaders gather this week at a major summit to discuss ways to address the effects of global warming, one of the greatest obstacles they face is disinformation.

Among the biggest sources of false or misleading information about the world’s weather, according to a report released this week: influential nations, including Russia and China, whose diplomats will be attending. Others include the companies that extract fossil fuels and the online provocateurs who make money by sharing claims that global warming is a hoax.

They spread diverse and frequently debunked falsehoods: Humans are not responsible for climate change; recent wildfires were enabled by arson rather than hotter and drier conditions; the world is cooling; oil and gas giants are leading the charge toward carbon neutrality; and warnings about the environment are an excuse for authoritarian elites to destabilize the developing world and force everyone into lockdown and onto a diet of insects and lab-grown food. (Ahhh! Insect diet! 😮)

Their efforts have already significantly eroded the public pressure and political will needed to prevent a dire future for the planet, experts said.

“What has dramatically shifted is how central to public life mis- and disinformation about climate has become,” said Jennie King, an author of a new report by Climate Action Against Disinformation, an international coalition of more than 50 environmental advocacy groups.  

The campaign against meaningful action to curb emissions is powered by an ecosystem with “weird informal allegiances and overlaps” among countries, corporations and people — all with disparate agendas and motivations but united in their desire to discredit the climate change threat, Ms. King said.

“It’s actually about the normalization of disinformation, rather than just the sheer volume,” said Ms. King, who is running the coalition’s intelligence unit at the summit. “That’s what concerns me the most — how high-traction and how emotionally resonant this kind of content seems to be.”

Notice how the dark free speech campaign against AGW truth is about the same as that routinely used by America’s radical right pro-kleptocratic tyranny political movement against democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. 

At the current climate meeting in the UAE, a popular crackpot conspiracy on social media claims that governments use AGW as a pretext to steal land from farmers and cause deliberate food shortages. And, there are adult human beings who actually believe that obviously false bullshit. That’s no different from tens of millions of adult Americans believing the glaringly false 2020 stolen election and illegitimate Biden presidency bullshit. There’s no difference. Dark free speech works everywhere, especially if it has been normalized and accepted by a lot of people.

In my opinion, this trait of socially weak public defenses against the dark arts constitutes an existential threat to modern civilization, a huge global human population, democracies everywhere, civil liberties and the rule of law. That’s why Steve Bannon’s battle cry against democracy and truth is flood the zone with shit! (disinformation, lies, slanders, crackpot conspiracies, etc.). Unfortunately, Bannon’s shit-flooding tactic is quite effective. It could get most of us alive today literally killed if it causes civilization collapse, which it just might.

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An interview with Darren Dochuk, author of the 2019 book Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America, was published by TGC (The Gospel Coalition) in 2019 in an article entitled, Anointed with Oil: Evangelicals and the Petroleum Industry. Here are a few bits.

DD: While writing my first book—From Bible Belt to Sunbelt—I kept coming across influential oil executives who supported the religious and political institutions I was examining. Whether it concerned California governor Ronald Reagan’s “Kitchen Cabinet” of advisers, or Christian colleges such as Pepperdine and Biola, oilmen seemed almost omnipresent in the rise of California’s (and the Sunbelt’s) conservative movement. So I thought I might “follow the money” further and see how petroleum powerbrokers shaped the course of American religion and politics.This was part professional and part personal. While writing my first book—From Bible Belt to Sunbelt—I kept coming across influential oil executives who supported the religious and political institutions I was examining. Whether it concerned California governor Ronald Reagan’s “Kitchen Cabinet” of advisers, or Christian colleges such as Pepperdine and Biola, oilmen seemed almost omnipresent in the rise of California’s (and the Sunbelt’s) conservative movement. So I thought I might “follow the money” further and see how petroleum powerbrokers shaped the course of American religion and politics.

TGC: There were sharply divergent religious attitudes in the oil industry, especially the clash between the “civil religion of crude” and “wildcat Christianity.” What divided those camps?

DD: I identify the civil religion of crude with the major (fully integrated, multinational) oil companies of the east—Standard Oil and its offshoots—and with their controlling clan, the Rockefellers. .... The Rockefellers sought to impose order on their chaotic corporate realm (and early oil was chaotic) and to reform society .... a gospel that saw oil money as a means to uplift humanity and essentially baptize people in their liberal, internationalist worldview.

The ethic of wildcat Christianity with the independent oilmen who on account of the Rockefellers’ monopoly in Pennsylvania were forced to relocate west. Enraged by the Rockefellers’ control of their industry and that family’s liberal Protestantism, the wildcatters determined to protect their individual rights to drill exploratory wells (a process called “wildcatting”) and enjoy oil’s profits on their own terms. They shored up their core principles, which were intensely evangelical: They defended the autonomy of believers and the church, as well as orthodox theological convictions espoused in the 1915 publication The Fundamentals (a project independent oilman Lyman Stewart funded to offset Rockefeller-sponsored liberalism). They emphasized the primacy of soul-winning evangelism over social restructuring, in anticipation of Christ’s impending return. .... [pumping oil in California and Texas] these independents—many of whom, like Stewart, were extremely devout—were able to build their own empires, and fight the Rockefellers for control of their industry, and ultimately of the American church.  

Throughout oil’s history there’s been a get-rich-quick tendency, as well as a concern only for short-term economic gain, not long-term human, communal, and environmental consequences. On occasion those tendencies have stemmed from the urgencies of Christian oilmen, churches, and church folk to obtain black gold quickly in order to fund ministries and missionaries, and to spread the gospel.  

I think the oil industry has been particularly receptive to Christians and Christian values. Oil has always been seen as a business in which the combination of entrepreneurialism and certainty of belief can produce quick and spectacular outcomes.

This interview, which is long and has a lot more history in it, discusses the deep entanglement of American evangelical Christianity with brass knuckles oil capitalism. It also points why so many old-time evangelicals, now morphed into radical Christian nationalists (whether they know it or not, or deny it or not), don't seem to be all that concerned about AGW and pollution from burning oil.

In the modern radicalized Republican Party brass knuckles capitalism and Christian nationalism are compatible. One can say it’s a marriage made in Hell at least for democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. 

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In psychology projecting attributes personal feelings, desires or traits to other people, groups or things.

Projection is a standard dark free speech tactic the authoritarian radical right uses to attack political opposition and hated target groups, e.g., groups like the LQBQT community and racial minorities that God commands be vilified and oppressed. A NYT article reports about a current example:  

Trump’s Defense to Charge That He’s Anti-Democratic? 

Accuse Biden of It

Indicted over a plot to overturn an election and campaigning on promises to shatter democratic norms in a second term, Donald Trump wants voters to see Joe Biden as the bigger threat

While Mr. Trump shattered democratic norms throughout his presidency and has faced voter concerns that he would do so again in a second term, the former president in his speech repeatedly accused Mr. Biden of corrupting politics and waging a repressive “all-out war” on America.

”Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy,” he said. “Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy.”

Mr. Trump has made similar attacks on Mr. Biden a staple of his speeches in Iowa and elsewhere. He frequently accuses the president broadly of corruption and of weaponizing the Justice Department to influence the 2024 election. 

But in his second of two Iowa speeches on Saturday, held at a community college gym in Cedar Rapids, Mr. Trump sharpened that line of attack, suggesting a more concerted effort by his campaign to defend against accusations that Mr. Trump has an anti-democratic bent — by going on offense.

In this case, the actual dictator DJT accuses the mildly pro-democracy Biden of being a dictator in fact. Compared to the liar and traitor DJT, Biden is a freaking patriot and paragon of secular democracy. 

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Some Sunday Fun

 Ok ok, the following might not sound funny but I had a good chuckle.

I can't say where I got the quote from or who posted it, but suffice it to say, it perfectly illustrates what Trumpers think. And it ain't pretty.

It involves a wild rant that was in response to an article:

Trump’s Second-Term Plans: Anti-‘Woke’ University, ‘Freedom Cities’ Trump’s Second-Term Plan

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trumps-second-term-plans-anti-woke-university-freedom-cities-28f8123d?mod=trending_now_news_2

Now the article itself is scary enough, but this is how one Trumper responded to the article:

To those of you who are "woke" this stuff sounds crazy. To those of us who despise woke policies it sounds like common sense to spot the spread of stupidity shoved on our nation by the radical progressives who want, open borders, no penalties for crimes in America, a society of victims, Teach sex ed to k-3, hide a students health care from their parents, anyone can come to America and vote, get medical care or social safety net aid, take a crap on our streets, smoke dope and shoot up on our streets, lie about Trump Russian collusion, spy on Americans, lie to the federal FISA court and not be punished, tell us we don't need fossil fuels and must buy a EV, lock us down for over two years, ruin our kids education, pay people not to work, tell kids if they are troubled or have questions about life it's because they need to change sex even if they don't even know what's involved. Woke is pure BS. Go ahead and support Hamas murder, killing babies whenever you like and tell us we have a problem because we don't like it.

An opinion about AI: Bad recipe or mankind's salvation?

Twilight Zone, 1962

A NYT opinion by Maureen Dowd opines her view of the transformation of AI (artificial intelligence):

Sam Altman, former altruist, current 

brass knuckles capitalist

Sam Altman, Sugarcoating the Apocalypse

My favorite “Twilight Zone” episode is the one where aliens land and, in a sign of their peaceful intentions, give world leaders a book. Government cryptographers work to translate the alien language. They decipher the title — “To Serve Man” — and that’s reassuring, so interplanetary shuttles are set up.

But as the cryptographers proceed, they realize — too late — that it’s a cookbook.

That, dear reader, is the story of OpenAI.

It was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit to serve man, to keep an eye on galloping A.I. technology and ensure there were guardrails and kill switches — because when A.I. hits puberty, it will be like aliens landing.

When I interviewed them at their makeshift San Francisco headquarters back in 2016, the OpenAI founders — Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman — presented themselves as our Praetorian guard against the future threat of runaway, evil A.I., against bad actors and bad bots and all the lords of the cloud who had Mary Shelley dreams of creating a new species, humanity be damned.

“We are explicitly not trying to enrich ourselves,” Sutskever told me.

Brockman was equally high-minded: “It’s not enough just to produce this technology and toss it over the fence and say, ‘OK, our job is done. Just let the world figure it out.’”

But OpenAI is tossing a lot of alarming stuff over the fence. Musk is gone, and Altman is no longer casting himself as humanity’s watchdog. He’s running a for-profit outfit, creating an A.I. cookbook. He’s less interested in peril than investors, less concerned about existential danger than finding A.I.’s capabilities. “When you see something that is technically sweet,” Robert Oppenheimer said, “you go ahead and do it.”

The government has nibbled the edges of regulation, but the quicksilver A.I. has already leaped ahead of the snaillike lawmakers and bureaucrats. Nobody, even in Silicon Valley, has any clue how to control it.

Whatever you want to say about Musk’s recent unraveling — his manic edge, his offensive tweets, his strange, angular cybertruck — he has been passionate in working against rogue A.I. The perhaps quixotic quest of aligning A.I. progress to protect human values has caused Musk many a sleepless night and many a fractured friendship.

He lured Sutskever, a dazzling Russian engineer, from Google to OpenAI. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google and an A.I. accelerationist, was furious at his good friend Musk for poaching Sutskever and broke with him. Page dismissively told Musk he was “a specist” for siding with the human species in the A.I. argument.

Musk also scrapped with Altman. As Walter Isaacson wrote in “Elon Musk,” the mercurial mogul summoned Altman in February, asking him to bring OpenAI’s founding documents. Not too long after, Musk tweeted: “I’m still confused as to how a nonprofit to which I donated $100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?”

Speaking to Kara Swisher, Altman called Musk a “jerk.”

As with Shakespeare, personality clashes are shaping life-or-death decisions in the battle over A.I. One thing that may have touched off the rebellion against Altman was that he diminished Sutskever’s role at the company.

Certainly, the A.I. is getting better at reasoning, making fewer mistakes, hallucinating less — the term for making up stuff — and doing complicated math puzzles.

Musk recently praised Sutskever for having “a good moral compass.” Was the young engineer, who joined the doomers on the board and delivered the bad news to Altman before recanting, influenced by his mentor at Google, Geoffrey Hinton?

Unlike Musk, who can be awkward and go into “demon mode,” according to Isaacson, Altman is smooth in his dealings with investors, techies and lawmakers, comfy in T-shirt and jeans. One top Silicon Valley scientist described the 38-year-old Altman as “weirdly adorable.” Friendly with many reporters, he has assumed the role of the upbeat face of A.I.’s future.

But do we want someone with a sunny disposition about A.I.? No. Not when, as Musk warned last Thursday, “The apocalypse could come along at any moment.”

Oh, great. If Dowd is right, we are at the mercy of squabbling, spoiled brat billionaires, sometimes in demon mode, an inept, clueless, corrupted, bickering federal government and rich brass knuckles capitalists who think Altman is “weirdly adorable” in his comfy tennies and T-shirts. 

If AI is capable of screwing us into catastrophe, the clowns, goons and capitalists running the show are probably not gonna stop it. Heck, some of ’em like Altman don't even want to stop it. There’s just so damn much money to be made and so few politicians to bamboozle and/or corrupt. MAGA?

Mm, something smells delicious

Human vindaloo!

News bits: A ruling against DJT; Another warning; Christian nationalist “history”

The lawsuits against DJT are producing a lot of filings by the parties and court responses. Some of the documents merit a mention. DJT keeps denying the charges and files motions to have the cases against him dismissed. The prosecution has to keep rebutting those filings, and then the court has to decide. In this 48 page document, the federal DC trial court rejects DJT’s most recent motion to dismiss the entire federal insurrection case based on Presidential immunity, (“Immunity Motion”) and on constitutional grounds. At this point, one can now expect DJT to appeal to the DC federal appeals court. DJT faces four 1/6 insurrection-related felony counts in this lawsuit. Some of the decision and my comments follow.

The judge: At the motion to dismiss stage, the court assumes the truth of the Indictment’s allegations. 

This points out the fact that it is still early in the case. Here, the court says that the facts and allegations in Jack Smith’s indictments are taken as true. That shifts the burden to DJT to show that the contested facts and allegations are false. Key matters at issue include:

1. DJT organized electors as part of his attempt to convince legislators not to certify the 2020 election. Dang, it’s gonna be real hard to disprove that.

2. Despite having lost the 2020 election, DJT “was determined to remain in power,” (quoting Smith’s indictment) so “for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.” Whew, that’s gonna be real hard to disprove.

3. DJT “knew that [those claims] were false,” but “repeatedly and widely disseminated them anyway—to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.” Yikes! That's gonna be a stinker to disprove because there’s a buttload of evidence that DJT was told over and over that he lost and also evidence he knew it by saying so.

Anyway, the court drones on and on and on like this. There’s no way in hell that DJT can disprove squat about the allegations that Smith levels at him.

The judge: Because a court’s use of its supervisory power to dismiss an indictment directly encroaches upon the fundamental role of the grand jury, dismissal is granted only in unusual circumstances.

Whatever immunities a sitting President may enjoy, the United States has only one Chief Executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong “get-out-of-jail-free” pass.  Former Presidents enjoy no special conditions on their federal criminal liability.  Defendant may be subject to federal investigation, indictment, prosecution, conviction, and punishment for any criminal acts undertaken while in office.

I point this out because collectively it says that what DJT is trying to do isn’t easily done in normal circumstances. This is important because the trial court is where facts are found. Appeals courts do not look at facts the trial court has found. So when DJT appeals, there will have to be legal errors, not fact errors the appeal will be based on. Given the record here, DJT is really screwed on the facts, which are rock solid and mostly in the public domain. That is unusual. He can only pray the trial court judge made a significant legal error. The judge, Tanya Chutkan, doesn’t strike me as sloppy.

For giggles, the tail end of the judge’s legal analysis shows the desperate situation DJT is in:

The judge: Finally, Defendant argues that, for the Indictment to comply with due process, the prosecution bears the burden to “provide examples where similar conduct was found criminal.” Under that theory, novel criminal acts would never be prosecuted. 

In other words, DJT actually argues that he cannot be prosecuted for breaking those laws at least sort of like he did because no one before him has broken those laws about the same way he broke them. In other words, if a criminal finds a new way to break a law, they get off Scott-free for being creative! MAGA!! DJT’s attorneys deserve credit for their artistic creativity! 👏. . . . ☹️ . . . . ☠️ . . . .👎

At the moment, it’s pretty clear that DJT is guilty. The open question is whether he will be able to (i) delay the federal trial long enough to get elected and then shut down the DoJ lawsuit against himself if he or some other MAGA Republican is re-elected or elected, or (ii) pardon himself if he or some other MAGA Republican is re-elected or elected. 

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A NYT opinion by Frank Bruni, It’s Not the Economy. It’s the Fascism., opines (not paywalled off):

To spend more than a little time toggling between news sites of different bents is to notice a fierce debate over the American economy right now. Which matters more — the easing of inflation or the persistence of prices that many people can’t afford or accept? Low unemployment or high interest rates? Is the intensity of Americans’ bad feelings about the economy a sane response or a senseless funk estranged from their actual financial circumstances?

On such questions may the 2024 election turn, so the litigation of them is no surprise. It’s not just the economy, stupid. It’s the public relations war over it.

But never in my adult lifetime has that battle seemed so agonizingly beside the point, such a distraction from the most important questions before us. In 2024, it’s not the economy. It’s the democracy. It’s the decency. It’s the truth.

I’m not talking about what will influence voters most. I’m talking about what should. And I write that knowing that I’ll be branded an elitist whose good fortune puts him out of touch with the concerns of people living paycheck to paycheck or priced out of housing and medical care. I am lucky — privileged, to use and own the word of the moment — and I’m an imperfect messenger, as blinded by the peculiarities of his experience in the world as others are by theirs.

But I don’t see any clear evidence that a change of presidents would equal an uptick in Americans’ living standards. And 2024, in any case, isn’t shaping up to be a normal election with normal stakes or anything close to that, at least not if Donald Trump winds up with the Republican presidential nomination — the likeliest outcome, to judge by current conditions. Not if he’s beaten by a Republican who had to buy into his fictions or emulate his ugliness to claim the prize. Not if the Republican Party remains hostage to the extremism on display in the House over these past few months.

That assessment isn’t Trump derangement syndrome. It’s straightforward observation, consistent with Liz Cheney’s new memoir, “Oath and Honor,” at which my Times colleague Peter Baker got an advance peek. Cheney describes House Republicans’ enduring surrender to Trump as cowardly and cynical, and she’s cleareyed on what his nomination in 2024 would mean. “We will be voting on whether to preserve our republic,” she writes. “As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution.”

I post different warnings from different people because they often see things I do not and they articulate their worries in ways differently and usually better than I can. I don’t mean to be mindlessly repetitive. But giving voice to different ways of seeing and speaking about the grave danger of bigoted, kleptocratic tyranny strikes me as the best I can do to fight off the gathering darkness. Could I do better? If so, how?

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A really long piece by Politico does a deep dive into some influential Christian crackpots who shamelessly lie about history to deceive, manipulate and grift people. They use dark free speech to shamelessly attack and betray secular democracy, and civil liberties, the rule of law and actual history. Even if they have been outed as liars and ignorant fantasists, tens of thousands of adult Americans revere and trust these deeply immoral, grifter-liars: 

The Bogus Historians Who Teach Evangelicals 

They Live in a Theocracy

A new book on the Christian right reveals how a series of unscrupulous leaders turned politics into a powerful and lucrative gospel

.... they had come out by the hundreds, decked out in patriotic attire this October evening in 2021, to hear from a man who was introduced to them as “America’s greatest living historian.” They had come for David Barton. And so had I.

It would be of little use to tell the folks around me — the people of my conservative hometown — that Barton wasn’t a real historian. They wouldn’t care that his lone academic credential was a bachelor’s degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University. It wouldn’t matter that Barton’s 2012 book on Thomas Jefferson was recalled by Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest Christian publisher, for its countless inaccuracies, or that a panel of 10 conservative Christian academics who reviewed Barton’s body of work in the aftermath ripped the entirety of his scholarship to shreds. It would not bother the congregants of FloodGate Church to learn that they were listening to a man whose work was found by one of America’s foremost conservative theologians to include “embarrassing factual errors, suspiciously selective quotes, and highly misleading claims.”

All this would be irrelevant to the people around me because David Barton was one of them. He believed the separation of church and state was a myth. He believed the time had come for evangelicals to reclaim their rightful place atop the nation’s governmental and cultural institutions. Hence the hero’s welcome Barton received when he rolled into FloodGate with his “American Restoration Tour.”  

Throughout his decades of public life — working for the Republican Party, becoming a darling of Fox News, advising politicians such as new House Speaker Mike Johnson, launching a small propaganda empire, carving out a niche as the American right’s chosen peddler of nostalgic alternative facts — Barton had never been shy about his ultimate aims. He is an avowed Christian nationalist who favors theocratic rule; moreover, he is a so-called Dominionist, someone who believes Christians should control not only the government but also the media, the education system, and other cultural institutions. Barton and his ilk are invested less in advancing individual policies than they are in reconceiving our system of self-government in its totality, claiming a historical mandate to rule society with biblical dogma just as the founders supposedly intended.  

This is what the “American Restoration Tour” was all about: restoring a version of America that never existed.

David Barton, facing camera

Barton

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DJT speaks truth for a change

Two bits: The one-way ratchet to tyranny; The ratchet's political moral lubricant

 Ratcheting our way to kleptocratic dictatorship, one step at a time: The HuffPo reports that Senate Democrats used a rule-breaking tactic to advance two judicial nominees because Republicans themselves had done the exact same thing twice. Sen. Judiciary Committee chairman Durban called the rule breaking just a matter of following the Republican “precedent.” 

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had full-blown meltdowns on Thursday after Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) held votes on two of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees without allowing debate on them, saying he was simply following the “new precedent” established by Republicans when they did the same thing to Democrats, twice.

Durbin appeared to completely blindside Republicans by moving straight to votes on two U.S. District Court nominees, Mustafa Kasubhai and Eumi Lee, without opening up the floor for discussions on them. Both nominees had two previous hearings and had been debated. But typically the panel would still allow for more discussion in what was their confirmation hearing.

“The two preceding chairs of this committee violated the letter and spirit of Committee Rule IV,” Durbin said, referring to a committee rule that requires at least one member of the minority to vote with the majority to end debate on a matter before moving to vote on it.

Durbin said one former chair, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), violated this rule with a vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was chair when he broke the rule to advance a partisan immigration bill without Democratic input. 

“In doing so, Republicans established a new precedent that I followed on one occasion last Congress and will follow again today,” said the Illinois Democrat. “I’ve said time and again there cannot be one set of rules for Republicans and a different set for Democrats.”

If I recall right, Senate Republicans when Obama was in office were blocking all judicial nominees, even though they did not control the Senate. The Dems could not get even one judge confirmed. So, Dems changed the rule to confirm a trial and appeals court nominees. The Dems left intact the existing rule for confirmation of Supreme Court justices. 

After they got back in control of the Senate, radical Republicans got their revenge. They (1) refused to allow Obama's nominee Merrick Garland to even get a hearing, and (2) removed the rule for Supreme Court judges. That allowed authoritarian radical Senate Republicans to bulldoze onto the court three corrupt, radical right authoritarian Christian nationalist plutocrats. Those three extremists are the radical Gorsuch, the sex predator Kavanaugh, and the Christian nationalist freak Barrett. 

One can see where this is going. The toxic act-react ratchet keeps moving the Senate and American politics generally away from bipartisanship and pro-democracy compromise. It pushes us toward single party rule and some form of kleptocratic authoritarianism or tyranny.

In my firm opinion, this one-way trek to kleptocratic dictatorship hell is inevitable because the Republican Party has radicalized and become authoritarian. Unless absolutely necessary, the GOP no longer cooperates, compromises or even respects inconvenient fact or truth. For the modern radicalized GOP, winning power and wealth is everything. Democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law just get in the way.

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The House voted 311-114 today to expel George Santos, with 105 Repubs voting to expel him. 

The main reasons were criminal indictments against him, and House ethics rules prohibiting misuse of campaign funds and various alleged crimes. The Hill comments:

Once seen as a GOP trailblazer, Santos is facing federal indictment on 23 counts of wire fraud, identity theft and other campaign finance charges, and many Republicans came to view him as a drag on the party’s image and a liability heading into a tough election cycle where control of the House is up for grabs.  

Santos has consistently pointed out that he has only been charged and not convicted.

“It starts and puts us in a new direction, a dangerous one, that sets a very dangerous precedent for the future,” Santos said on the House floor Tuesday. “Are we to now assume that one is no longer innocent until proven guilty, and they are in fact guilty until proven innocent? Or are we now to simply assume that because somebody doesn’t like you, they get to throw you out of your job.”

People voting against expelling Santos argued this would set a bad or dangerous precedent for the reasons Santos himself raised in his defense. Sadly, that is spot on true. The concern is about political self-preservation. Lots of Repubs probably have skeletons in the closet and want more protection for their jobs in case they get caught and whacked. If this serves as precedent, then the ratchet can be fired up any time some politician in the House gets incited for committing one or more crimes. The overwhelming moral concern appears to be political self-preservation, not defense of voters or democracy.

Only one news report about Santos today that I've seen even mentioned the fact that Santos got elected to office on the basis of his slew of jaw-dropping lies and fantasy stories. Voters were deceived and screwed out of a knowing choice. Among the news reports I saw, only one person who was reported to raise the concern that Santos lied to me. That complaint was raised by an irate Santos constituent, not any news media I'm aware of and not any politician. That fact of screwed voters was not very important, at least for the politicians who voted not to expel. For those people, lying to voters is not grounds for expulsion.

Santos should have been expelled as soon as the scope and depth of his lies and deceit of voters became clear and undeniable. In other words, deceiving voters and screwing them out of an informed choice is not major a moral concern for the politicians here. Even the people who voted to expel were focused on Santos’ bad criminal actions, not playing immoral dirty tricks on voters. Or, if some politicians who voted to expel were concerned about screwed voters, it wasn't reported much or at all. 

NYT book review: It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here is the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel that predicted the rise of fascism in America. From a Jan. 2017 NYT book review, Reading the Classic Novel That Predicted Trump:

“It Can’t Happen Here” is a work of dystopian fantasy, one man’s effort in the 1930s to imagine what it might look like if fascism came to America. At the time, the obvious specter was Adolf Hitler, whose rise to power in Germany provoked fears that men like the Louisiana senator Huey Long or the radio priest Charles Coughlin might accomplish a similar feat in the United States. Today, Lewis’s novel is making a comeback as an analogy for the Age of Trump. Within a week of the 2016 election, the book was reportedly sold out on Amazon.com.

At a moment when instability seems to be the only constant in American politics, “It Can’t Happen Here” offers an alluring (if terrifying) certainty: It can happen here, and what comes next will be even ghastlier than you expect. Yet the graphic horrors of Lewis’s vision also limit the book’s usefulness as a guide to our own political moment. In 1935, Lewis was trying to prevent the unthinkable: the election of a pseudo-fascist candidate to the presidency of the United States. Today’s readers, by contrast, are playing catch-up, scrambling to think through the implications of an electoral fait accompli. If Lewis’s postelection vision is what awaits us, there will be little cause for hope, or even civic engagement, in the months ahead. The only viable options will be to get out of the country — or to join an armed underground resistance.

Lewis’s book sold 320,000 copies, becoming his most popular work to date. Reviewers agreed that the book’s success had little to do with its literary merits; though “a vigorous anti-fascist tract,” one critic noted, it was “not much of a novel.” What propelled its popularity was a sense of urgency, the worry that the United States — like the nations of Western Europe — might contain dark forces yet to be unleashed.

milo mentioned this book in a comment today. I was unaware of it. This seems appropriate for the interesting times we are going through. Some other reviews say that the book did not predict Trump, but most all the reviews out there talk about disturbing parallels, similarities and the like between Trump and the fictitious bad guy, US Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip. The bad guy rises to power to become America’s first outright dictator.