News bits: Mentally trapped Christian nationalist outburst; Protecting the judge against thugs; Etc.

I found an informative report about a foaming at the mouth Christian nationalist who is self-aware enough to acknowledge that his religion has trapped his mind and forces him to act:

Satanic idol at Iowa State Capitol BEHEADED by Christian veteran

“I saw this blasphemous statue and was outraged,” Cassidy said. “My conscience is held captive to the word of God, not to bureaucratic decree. And so I acted.”

According to The Sentinel, Michael Cassidy pushed over and decapitated the statue of Baphomet, which was placed in the building by members of the Satanic Temple of Iowa after receiving permission, and discarded the head of the statue into the trash.

Very few reports are this explicit about the power of Christian nationalist ideology and dogma to trap minds and cause behavior consonant with beliefs. Some of the behavior is bad, or if people are harmed or could foreseeably be harmed, evil.

Note: I financially support the Satanic Temple (TST). It is a formal religion consisting of a secular group dedicated to forcing religion out of government as much as possible by forcing Satan in wherever Christianity is found in government, mainly govt. buildings and public schools. I’m not sure if TST is active in federal prisons.

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Business Insider reports that judge Engoron needed an armed security force to escort him out of the courthouse after a day in DJT’s civil fraud trial:

Trump fraud-trial judge evacuated from Manhattan 

courthouse soon after testimony ends

• More than 10 weeks of testimony wrapped on Wednesday with a verdict expected in a month.

• Four hours after testimony ended, someone set a small fire outside the judge's robing room.

The person creating the mischief was caught and arrested. The police do not think that this incident had anything to do with the fact that Engoron was the judge on DJT’s fraud trial. I find that not believable. One way or another, that crackpot was motivated by the DJT trial in my opinion.

If DJT is found liable for fraud in this case, the penalties could bankrupt him.

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Salon reports from the Well, Duh! Files:

Paul Ryan goes off on podcast: 

“Trump’s not a conservative — he’s an authoritarian narcissist”

Trump's tendencies are guided by narcissism and "whatever makes him popular," ex-House speaker says

“He doesn’t think in classical liberal-conservative terms. He thinks in an authoritarian way. And he’s been able to get a big chunk of the Republican base to follow him because he’s the culture warrior,” said Ryan, who has faced criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for not strongly opposing Trump in 2016 or through his presidency.

At least some folks are now woke enough to see that DJT isn't a pro-democracy conservative. Once that miraculous revelation is experienced, the next question one would expect to traverse the woke mind is, if he’s not a conservative, then what is he? Some see God’s chosen defender of the faith. Others see a demagogic liar-grifter dictator. Others see other stuff.

Too bad Paul didn’t see the reality of what DJT was while he still had power. Now that Ryan has nothing to lose he gripes about what DJT is. One could say that by practicing the KYMS tactic about DJT while he had power, Ryan was complicit with lies, corruption and tyranny when it counted the most for DJT.

Paul, an earnest young man,

but too little and too late

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As we all know, DJT wants to delay all of his trials as much as possible. That is his best weapon to deny or at least reduce accountability. One avenue of delay has been for DJT to claim he is immune from whatever he did while in office. To cut that delay tactic off, DoJ Special Counsel jack Smith made an emergency appeal to the USSC to determine whether DJT could be tried for his crimes while in office. Surprisingly, the USSC (i) agreed to hear the appeal, and (ii) granted Smith’s request to decide real soon, like in the next 10-14 days or thereabouts. 

That amounts to the court acting faster than light. It is ludicrous speed for a federal court.

As usual, DJT’s court filing in opposition to deciding the immunity issue is full of desperation, nonsense and blatant lies. The facts are all against him. Lies and desperation is all he has in his defense. Here is an example:

The prosecution has one goal in this case: To unlawfully attempt to try, convict, and sentence President Trump before an election in which he is likely to defeat President Biden. This represents a blatant attempt to interfere with the 2024 presidential election and to disenfranchise the tens of millions of voters who support President Trump’s candidacy.

While pursuing this partisan goal, the prosecution waited over two years to bring this lawless case, and then sought an extraordinarily expedited trial calendar, demanding that jury selection begin in December 2023—notwithstanding nearly 13 million pages of discovery and a litany of important and unresolved legal issues. D.Ct. Doc. 23, at 2. In support, the prosecution made the same argument it makes now—that violating President Trump’s due process rights would somehow “vindicate” the public’s interest in a speedy trial.

The prosecution was wrong then, and it is wrong now. This appeal presents novel, complex, and sensitive questions of profound importance. Whether a President of the United States may be criminally prosecuted for his official acts as President goes to the core of our system of separated powers and will stand among the most consequential questions ever decided by this Court. The manifest public interest lies in the Court’s careful and deliberate consideration of these momentous issues with the utmost care and diligence. 

A peanut gallery commenter said what all of us are thinking: The argument to delay is absurd but this is the most insane SCOTUS ever assembled, so what do you think the chances are that they’ll buy his argument and delay? Their true motive - to delay past the election - is abundantly clear. There’s no legitimate reason for a defendant to want to delay a decision that could exonerate them of multiple federal charges.

A response to that was this: This SCOTUS is insane, but they are predominately Federalist Society Republicans. Trump came to power in a hostile takeover of the Republican party. The country club set might want their party back. Also, the court wants to maximize the power of the court within government. Granting immunity to Trump doesn’t accomplish that. He’s done what they wanted in the past, but that might not outweigh other considerations here.

Good ’ole peanut gallery!

What ludicrous speed looks like

News chunks: Elite DJT supporter calls for execution of non-Christians; The authoritarian lie about abortion

Raw Story reports about a cruel figure in the brutal kleptocratic dictatorship called Trumplandia: 

White supremacist who dined with Trump 

calls for ‘death penalty’ for non-Christians

.... [Nick] Fuentes is a white supremacist, Christian nationalist, anti-LGBTQ, authoritarian extremist who supports Trump’s “America First” doctrine.

In his livestream show on Sunday titled, “The Great Replacement is about White GENOCIDE,” Fuentes called for the “death penalty” for non-Christians, according to Right Wing Watch (video below). “Antisemitic white nationalist Christian fascist Nick Fuentes says that when his America First movement takes power, all non-Christians will be executed,” RWW reported.

Nick F, a hyper-arrogant 

pro-mass murdering Christofascist

and loyal DJT supporter

“There is an occult element at the high levels of society [yes, it's called Christian nationalism], and specifically among the Jews, and you know, whenever I see that stuff that just makes me want to proclaim louder and more firmly and more rigidly that it is nothing other than Jesus Christ. No, no pagan stuff, no false gods, no deities, no demons. It is Jesus Christ and we need to start saying that name,” Fuentes said.

“It’s the name Jesus, talk about it, say it. Pray to Him, talk about the sacrifice on the cross, that’s the answer. Because so many of the people that are perpetrating the lies and the destruction on the country, they are evil doers. They are people that worship false gods, they are people that practice magic or rituals or whatever, and more than anything those people need to be, when we take power, they need to be given the death penalty. Straight up. And, I’m far more concerned about that than I am about even non-white people or mass migration.”

“These people that are that are communing with demons and engaging in this sort of witchcraft and stuff, and these people that are suppressing the name Christ and suppressing Christianity, they must be absolutely annihilated when we take power, I’m not calling for political violence, but that cannot have any quarter in our society.” 

“We need to put up a crucifix in every home, in every room in every school and every government office to signal Christ’s reign over our country,” Fuentes declared. “Not that God needs it, but it must be outwardly expressed from the interior, that this is God's country. This is Jesus’s country. This is not the domain of atheists or devil worshipers or perfidious Jews. This is Christ's country,” he said, adding those who are “agnostic” cannot be part of his “America First” movement. “No, you must be a Christian. And you must submit to Christianity.” 

An outspoken admirer of fascists such as Mussolini, Fuentes emerged as an influential figure on the national stage during the now-infamous ‘Stop the Steal’ movement, which relied on misinformation [lots of lies and slanders] to falsely claim that Donald Trump had won the 2020 election and sought to overturn the results of it.

Stinking agnostics. Worse atheists. Jews? -- just kill ’em. Go get ’em Nick! MAGA!!

Qs: 

1. How is it possible to not call for violence while simultaneously calling for absolute annihilation and the death penalty for non-Christians? (Hint: It’s not possible, except in the enraged, self-righteous minds of traitors, liars and crackpots) 

2. Notice the bigotry and intolerance inherent in Christian nationalism? (I see it, even if some Christian nationalists are more less bigoted and more tolerant than Nick)

3. Can one reasonably argue that the concept of Satan lives in the minds of some humans and controls their perceptions, thinking and behavior? (I can) 

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Slate writes about the sad, terrifying saga of Kate Cox, the unfortunate woman the cruel, blatantly dictatorial radical right Republican Party in Texas wanted to force her to do against her will and at threat to her life. Kate had to flee Texas to get an abortion before her pregnancy might have killed her. This is what life under a Republican Party dictatorship looks like. The Texas dictatorship will get worse as the rigid dogma of dictatorship poison flows and continues to exert increasing control over everyday life in Texas.

Who Determines Kate Cox’s Health Care

In a post-Roe world, it is judges [in red states] who get to decide what a pregnant person must do with even a nonviable pregnancy

Kate Cox: Seriously oppressed by the 

dictatorial Texas GOP

Here is a partial list of the not-medically-trained people who made the medical determination that terminating Kate Cox’s 20-plus-week-old pregnancy would not fall under an approved exception to Texas’ three overlapping abortion bans. Not one of these people, mind you, knows anything about pregnancy, medicine, or Kate Cox’s life, they each just decided that because she did not suffer from “a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced,” she could not access an abortion, despite the fact that her fetus did receive, from a physician, a diagnosis incompatible with life. The list of people with the moral certainty and medical acumen to restrict this woman’s access to the health care that would in fact preserve her fertility are:

• Ken Paxton, Texas’ nearly impeached attorney general, who appealed a lower court order granting Cox permission to terminate her pregnancy, which she had received following a diagnosis of trisomy 18, a genetic anomaly that virtually always results in miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant death, and frequently causes severe physical pain for the mother and may impair her efforts to bear future children. Add to the list Paxton’s crack team of lawyers who argue—as ace physicians—that Cox should just have had her abortion in Florida if she wants one so badly, then threatened to prosecute her physician and any hospital which aided Cox in Texas despite the existence of a court order specifically shielding them from prosecution.

• All nine justices of the Texas Supreme Court, who unanimously determined on Monday in a nine-page opinion that while “no one disputes that Ms. Cox’s pregnancy has been extremely complicated,” the problem was that when Ms. Cox’s physician expressed a “good faith belief” that her condition met the legal standard for an exception, this was not a sufficient quantum of legal certainty upon which to predicate a medical judgment. While noting in their opinion that “a pregnant woman does not need a court order to have a life-saving abortion in Texas,” the great minds of the court determined that Ms. Cox could not receive a life-saving abortion in Texas without a court order.

• Among those nine eminent medical experts, one must single out Justice John Devine, a radical Christian fundamentalist who has bragged of being arrested 37 times for protesting at abortion clinics. His election campaign included a video depicting his wife’s decision to continue a high-risk pregnancy (her seventh), which was said to likely end in the deaths of both mother and child. The mother lived. The child lived for an hour.

• Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the majority opinion in Dobbs in such a way as to arrogate vast medical authority to himself, his colleagues, eminent historical medical experts such as Sir Matthew Hale (M.D. ostensibly received from Witch Burner College sometime in the 17th century), and amicus brief spider monkey Robert George. While it’s true that Alito neither knew nor cared about women’s medical needs in his Dobbs opinion, it’s also true that without the Dobbs opinion, the Texas Supreme Court and Ken Paxton wouldn’t be telling Katie Cox that she is, in effect, an ambulatory coffin for the duration of her pregnancy, because government was getting itself out of the abortion-regulation business.

So here we are. It’s 2023 and Texas has elected an all-Republican Supreme Court that is now asserting in a written opinion that the judiciary shouldn’t be deciding reproductive rights questions because such questions should be left to medical experts, at the exact same time that it is second-guessing a real, live medical expert and granting to itself the sole power to decide which acute medical conditions are life-threatening and which are just jolly good fun. It’s 2023, and Ken Paxton is accusing the pregnant mother of two children, who desperately wants more children, of being untruthful with the courts, while he terrorizes her physician and the hospitals at which she has admitting privileges. What is “substantial impairment of a major bodily function” if not the impairment of future childbirth? The only way Kate Cox can persuade a bunch of elected judges and lawyers (who have never met her and don’t care about her health or her reproductive future) that she should be allowed to end an excruciating, doomed pregnancy is by either: 1) dying; or 2) having a physician certify that she will die without treatment. And this macabre pretzel is what we are advised is definitionally “pro-life.”

One can only wonder why majorities of rank and file Texas voters want to live under a brutal, radical right Republican Party dictatorship. Maybe they like to think for themselves by being told what to do by radical dictators and their radical supporters in power.

Republican Party “reasoning”

News bits: Doing business in Alabama; Biden impeachment vote; Biden responds; Democracy status update

Law and Crime reports about how Alabama treats some or most of its prisoners:

Alabama made $450 million annually from ‘convict leasing,’ forcing 

Black prisoners to work at fast-food chains: Lawsuit

A group of current and former Alabama prisoners filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday saying that they were forced into “a modern-day form of slavery” by working at fast-food chains for next to nothing.

The complaint, which seeks class-action certification, alleged that the prisoners “have been entrapped in a system of ‘convict leasing’ in which incarcerated people are forced to work, often for little or no money,” all while Alabama and its corporate partners reap millions in profits.

Inmates, according to the complaint, “live in a constant danger of being murdered, stabbed, or raped that is so profound that the federal government has sued Alabama for inflicting cruel and unusual punishment, and if they refuse to work, the State punishes them even more.”  

The 129-page complaint alleges it is “no accident” that the people “caught in a labor-trafficking scheme” are Black, comparing it to “like individuals who were enslaved and forced to work Alabama’s cotton fields, and those forced to participate in the sharecropping and convict leasing schemes that followed the end of the Civil War.”

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Reuters reports:

The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to formally authorize its ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, as Republicans unite behind the effort even though they have yet to find evidence of wrongdoing by the Democrat.

The Republican-controlled chamber voted 221-212 along party lines to approve the probe, which is examining whether Biden improperly benefited from his 53-year-old son Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, hours after the younger Biden refused a call to testify behind closed doors. 

“The House has now spoken, and I think pretty loudly, pretty clearly with every single Republican voting in favor of moving into this official impeachment inquiry phase of our constitutional duty to do oversight,” said Republican Representative Jim Jordan.

One can expect that this could be the new normal. If one party controls the House, a president of the other party will at least be investigated for impeachable offenses and maybe impeached, even without evidence. DJT probably has successfully rendered impeachments by the House mere exercises in partisan political theater. That helps DJT sanitize his rotten legacy by claiming that neither a House impeachment investigation or an actual impeachment vote signifies anything significant.

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The Huffpo reports:

Joe Biden Calls Republicans Time-Wasting 

Liars After Impeachment Vote

“I wake up every day focused on the issues facing the American people — real issues that impact their lives, and the strength and security of our country and the world,” the president said in a statement. “Unfortunately, House Republicans are not joining me. Instead of doing anything to help make Americans’ lives better, they are focused on attacking me with lies.”

That’s a refreshing little blast from Joe. I didn’t know he had it in him to speak blunt truth to the mendacious, corrupt, radicalized, dictatorship-loving GOP. IMHO, he needs to do that a heck of a lot more often. That morally rotted party is so target rich that a person can throw darts at it blindfolded and hit something meaningful.

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A NYT opinion by Charles Blow comments on worldwide democracy:

America’s Thirst for Authoritarianism

Around the world, authoritarianism is ascendant and democracy is in decline.

A 2022 report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found that “over the past six years, the number of countries moving toward authoritarianism is more than double the number moving toward democracy” and that nearly half of the 173 countries assessed were “experiencing declines” in at least one metric of democracy.

The United States wasn’t impervious to this trend. The report found that America was “moderately backsliding” on its democracy.

But I fear that we’re now on the precipice of fully turning away from democracy and toward a full embrace of authoritarianism. The country seems thirsty for it; many Americans appear to be inviting it.

Confidence in many of our major institutions — including schools, big business, the news media — is at or near its lowest point in the past half-century, in part because of the Donald Trump-led right-wing project to depress it [In large part IMO]. Indeed, according to a July Gallup report, Republicans’ confidence in 10 of the 16 institutions measured was lower than Democrats’. Three institutions in which Republicans’ confidence exceeded Democrats’ were the Supreme Court, organized religion and the police.

And as people lose faith in these institutions — many being central to maintaining the social contract that democracies offer — they can lose faith in democracy itself. People then lose their fear of a candidate like Trump — who tried to overturn the previous presidential election and recently said that if he’s elected next time, he won’t be a dictator, “except for Day 1” — when they believe democracy is already broken.

News bits: The one-way ratchet to dictatorship moves a notch; COP28 final global warming communique

The NYT reports about what looks to me to be another notch toward some form of an American radical right, kleptocratic autocracy-plutocracy-Christotheocracy dictatorship:

House Set to Approve Biden Impeachment Inquiry 

as It Hunts for an Offense

Republicans are pushing forward with a formal investigation even though their yearlong scrutiny of the president and his family has turned up no proof of high crimes or misdemeanors

G.O.P. leaders refrained for months from calling a vote to open an impeachment inquiry, given the reservations of mainstream Republicans, many of them from politically competitive districts, about moving forward without proof that Mr. Biden did anything wrong. But the political ground has shifted considerably, and most of them are now willing to do so, emphasizing that they are not yet ready to charge the president.

“Voting in favor of an impeachment inquiry does not equal impeachment,” Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the No. 3 House Republican, said at a news conference on Tuesday. “We will continue to follow the facts wherever they lead, and if they uncover evidence of treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors, then and only then will the next steps towards impeachment proceedings be considered.”  

Using their subpoena power, Republicans have obtained more than 36,000 pages of bank records; 2,000 pages of suspicious activity reports from the Treasury Department; and dozens of hours of testimony from two of Hunter Biden’s business partners, a senior official from the National Archives and Records Administration, seven federal agents and three U.S. attorneys.

“Republicans’ yearlong fishing expedition has uncovered no evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden,” said Representative Dan Goldman, Democrat of New York.

At present, the House seems to be set to vote on impeachment tonight. Note the incoherence of Emmer who claims voting to start a formal inquiry is just following the evidence. So far, the evidence says there is no reason for an impeachment. This is how people rationalize the irrational. To me, this exemplifies what I see as a one-way inching of American politics toward some form of deeply corrupt dictatorship.

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Good news! The COP28 meeting wound up with an actual modern day miracle. The final Communique included a modest call to phase out fossil fuels. The pro-pollution oil, coal and gas sectors had fought tooth, claw and poison dagger for decades to keep the phrase “fossil fuel(s)” out of the messaging. Apparently the urgency of the situation finally overwhelmed the polluter’s sophisticated, ruthless propaganda, lies, slanders, money, dirty tricks and threats. The WaPo reports:

Nearly 200 countries struck a breakthrough climate agreement Wednesday, calling for a transition away from fossil fuels in an unprecedented deal that targets the greatest contributors to the planet’s warming. The deal came swiftly — with no discussion or objection — in a packed room in Dubai following two weeks of negotiations and rising contention. It is the first time a global climate deal has specifically called to curb the use of fossil fuels.

Countries agreed to transition from fossil fuels “in a just, orderly and equitable manner” while “accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.”

Sultan Al Jaber, the filthy rich rabidly pro-pollution chief executive of 

Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., is the president of COP28

He tried, but couldn’t keep fossil fuels out of it

News bits: Life in red states; Pharmacies betray customers; Democracy good news bit

A NYT opinion by Jamelle Bouie:

Where Republicans have gained .... full control over state legislatures and statehouses, they have used that authority in pursuit of policies meant to curtail the ability of people in their states to live as they please.

You know what this looks like. It’s the “anti-woke” policymaking of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida, from laws that stigmatize L.G.B.T.Q. students and teachers in public school classrooms to an assault on higher education that has driven professors out of state. “What we are witnessing in Florida is an intellectual reign of terror,” LeRoy Pernell, a law professor at Florida A&M University, said in an interview with a special committee of the American Association of University Professors.

Republican trifectas in states across the country have introduced and passed dozens of bills aimed at the public existence of trans and other gender-nonconforming people. Republicans in Oklahoma banned the use of nonbinary gender identifiers on birth certificates; Republicans in Tennessee, similarly, banned trans people from changing their gender on their birth certificates.  

Abortion . . . .  

The state-level Republican agenda also includes efforts to restrict voting or gerrymander political opponents out of representation. Taken all together, you could say that Republicans are engaged in a comprehensive effort to limit the freedom of entire categories of people. 

.... what we can see in the divergent agendas of Republican-led states and Democrat-led states, is how the differences have far more to do with the actual purpose of government. For Democrats, that purpose is usually the public good. For Republicans, that purpose is harsh social regulation, with little apparent regard for the lives of those who have to endure these policies.

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In the police state’s never-ending war on privacy, all means to nab the bad guys are pursued, sometimes even if they are illegal. The WaPo reports about cooperating pharmacies:

Pharmacies share medical data with police without a warrant, inquiry finds

The revelation could shape the debate over Americans’ health privacy as states move to criminalize abortion and drugs related to reproductive health

The nation’s largest pharmacy chains have handed over Americans’ prescription records to police and government investigators without a warrant, a congressional investigation found, raising concerns about threats to medical privacy.

Though some of the chains require their lawyers to review law enforcement requests, three of the largest — CVS Health, Kroger and Rite Aid, with a combined 60,000 locations nationwide — said they allow pharmacy staff members to hand over customers’ medical records in the store.

It’s good to know that ‘concerns were raised’ but what difference does that make when giant companies don’t care about customer privacy and neither do foaming at the mouth, authoritarian radical right Republican politicians? Raising ‘concerns’ about privacy is like sending thoughts and prayers after another mass slaughter of innocents. These days, concerns by politicians about consumers or the public interest are almost always nothingburgers. The real concern for authoritarian radical right Republicans is obliterating civil liberties to exert more control.

Betraying customers

Betraying customers

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Here’s a bit of good news for democracy. Poland voted out of power its equivalent of the American authoritarian radical right Republican Party. MAGA!! to that. The WaPo writes:

In a cathartic moment for many in Poland, centrist political veteran Donald Tusk got the nod on Monday to be the country’s next prime minister, marking the end of eight years of right-wing nationalist rule and a dramatic shift in the European political landscape.

Tusk’s alliance secured a majority in October elections with a promise to restore Polish democracy and the country’s relationship with European allies.

Tusk faces the daunting task of repairing relations with the European Union, depoliticizing the judiciary, restoring the independence of the media, and bolstering the rights of women and minorities — all without alienating the many who sympathize with the old guard. [does that sound familiar?]

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