News bits: A New Year’s resolution: Respect for the rule of law declines; Etc.

A NYT opinion by Michelle Goldberg argues for resolution to fight DJT in 2024:

Make a New Year’s Resolution to Fight Trump

Before we can fight authoritarianism, we have to fight fatalism. My great hope for 2024 is that anti-Trump Americans can transcend exhaustion, burnout and self-protective pessimism to mobilize once again for the latest most important election of our lifetimes. It’s perfectly understandable that many people galvanized by abhorrence of Trump would step back once his immediate threat to the Republic receded. The obsession with politics that took over the country during his administration was neither sustainable nor healthy. But if you don’t want an even uglier and more despairing replay of those years, the time to act is now.

One place to start is with donations to grass-roots organizations working on voter turnout, which are desperately underfunded. (The Movement Voter Project has a clickable map with links to such groups all over the country.) You can also get involved with the campaigns to put referendums protecting abortion rights on the ballot in states like Arizona and Florida, efforts that could both undo cruel abortion bans and drive voter turnout.

It’s going to be especially important next year to give people reasons to vote beyond the presidential election. .... Faced with an unenthusiastic electorate, Democrats will need down-ballot candidates who can motivate people to go the polls. Few are doing more to bring exciting new candidates into the political process than Run for Something, which recruits and trains young progressives to run for office.

“As we look to our strategy for ’24, we want to make sure especially that we’re prioritizing resources for local candidates whose races can have an impact at the top of the ticket,” said Amanda Litman, Run for Something’s co-founder. Young voters, she said, “are not particularly psyched about Joe Biden right now. But thanks to years of education and each of these special elections, they deeply understand the need to show up locally.”

Goldberg points out that while the DJT's time in office was a disaster, re-electing him will lead to far worse consequences. She referred to the situation in Turkey like this:

While Trump demonized journalists, [Turkey’s dictator] Erdogan imprisoned them. In the absence of serious state repression, Trump’s critics rarely had to hide their sentiments, making it easier to maintain hope that they, and not their freakish madman of a president, represented this country’s future. I fear that in a second Trump administration it will be much harder to keep the faith.

In a second DJT rut at dictatorship, he will try his best to impose serious state repression. His intention to do that has been made publicly and clearly.

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The WaPO reports about new poll data that points to DJT’s and Trumpism’s ability to erode respect for the rule of law:

We can affix a number to how many of them think that Trump breaking the law for political ends is okay.

About 3 in 10.

That’s the finding of a new Fox News poll this weekend. It phrased the question thusly:

“Some people say things in the U.S. are so far off track that we need a president willing to break some rules and laws to set things right, while others say the president should always follow the rules and laws. Which comes closest to your view?”

Voters who supported Trump in 2020 were about twice as likely to endorse the break-rules-and-laws view as 2020 Biden backers. While 65 percent of Trump backers said a president should always follow the rules and the law, 30 percent said breaking rules and laws could be justified. The split among Biden voters was 83-15 against breaking rules and laws.  

The new poll builds on previous polling showing a greater appetite on the right for disregarding the usual guardrails.

One of the most threatening aspects of Trumpism include fomenting open contempt for the rule of law. DJT and some or most of the elites charged with various felonies are completely unrepentant. They brazenly lie about how innocent they are and how political and biased lawsuits against them are. 

In doing this, DJT has inflicted great damage by normalizing acceptance of lies, slanders, vulgarity, racism, corruption and disrespect for democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties and inconvenient facts, true truths and sound reasoning. His toxic, pro-kleptocratic dictatorship influence in this is arguably more poisonous than anyone in the last 100 years has been able to inflict. That poison can and might spread from the political authoritarian radical right to the center and left.

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Rudi gets whacked again: 

Defamed Georgia poll workers who won $148M 

from Giuliani sue him again

Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman asked a federal judge to swiftly enforce last week’s massive defamation damages award before Giuliani’s assets are dissipated

Lawyers for the two Georgia election workers who won $148 million in damages from former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani last week filed a new lawsuit Monday, asking a federal judge to order him to stop repeating his damaging debunked claims about the poll workers and to immediately enforce the jury’s massive award before his assets are dissipated.

This is another example of disrespect for the rule of law that DJT and Trumpism has fomented. The pro-dictator jackass Rudi slandered the two women again with the same lies he got whacked for in his first defamation trial. Just showing up for another trial is going to cost Rudi some money. And if he loses again, as one would fully expect because he publicly asserted the same slander he got whacked for the 1st time, that will cost him more.

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Those anti-abortionists are a persistent and feisty lot:

After Ohio Supreme Court dismisses anti-abortion arguments, 

advocates work to unveil total abortion ban

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Anti-abortion advocates say they are working with Ohio lawmakers to put forward a total abortion ban. This comes after the Ohio Supreme Court dismissed the state's appeal to enforce a near-total abortion ban.

Right now, anti-abortion advocate Austin Beigel is working with lawmakers to introduce a total abortion ban. His group, End Abortion Ohio, is a growing coalition of anti-abortion advocates and lobbyists. [They want to] create a total abortion ban, with an exception for the life of the mother. It would make the abortion procedure or abortion pill a homicide. 

The cells, zygote, embryo, fetus and eventually baby-in-womb would have all the same rights as someone who is already born, meaning all criminal and civil laws would apply.

Ohio voters protected abortion rights in the recent election by putting a right to abortion in the state constitution. However, neither public opinion nor the law matters to radical right authoritarian abortion haters in Ohio. They still try to get rid of abortion in their state.

Q: Should the egg and sperm also have all the same rights as someone who is already born? 

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Poll asks whether DJT will be a dictator: 

More than half of all voters believe former President Trump will act like a dictator if reelected to office, according to a new poll.

 
The Harvard CAPS-Harris poll found that 56 percent of those surveyed at least somewhat agree that Trump, who is the clear front-runner for the GOP nomination, will act like a dictator if given a second term, including almost 40 percent who strongly agree.  

The poll also found that 59 percent of voters believe Democrats are unfairly trying to scare voters over Trump by saying he wants to be a dictator.

That means some rank and file Republican voters will be voting for a person they believe will be a dictator. For the 59% who believe DJT dictator warnings are merely Dem propaganda, they are clueless and/or deceived by authoritarian radical right propaganda.

JWST image of rings of Neptune taken 

with the NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera)

Tree rings

News chunks: Normalized hypocrisy & broken government; Capitalism trickles harm down

Above The Law reports a story about ARR (authoritarian radical right) Elon Musk and the ARR GOP's hypocrisy and broken government:

Republicans Are Mad The FCC Rejected Elon Musk’s Attempt To Get A Billion Dollars In Subsidies To Deliver Pricey Satellite Broadband To Some Traffic Medians

You might recall that Elon Musk claims to hate taxpayer subsidies. They should all be “deleted.” Except for the subsidies given to his companies (often for doing nothing), of course.

Back in 2020, Musk’s satellite broadband venture, Starlink, gamed a Trump-era FCC subsidy program to try and grab $886 million in taxpayer dollars. It was a deal consumer groups noted was a huge waste of money, because the proposal itself — which involved bringing expensive satellite broadband to places like airport parking lots and traffic medians — clearly wasn’t the best use of taxpayer funds.

[The Biden administration] expressed concerns that the service might not be affordable to the heavily rural, lower income users most in need of help. Starlink requires a $600 up front equipment fee and costs $110 a month, and data consistently shows that affordability is a key obstacle to broadband adoption.

So this week, the FCC formally finalized its rejection of Starlink’s attempt to grab a billion dollars to deliver satellite broadband to some parking lots.

Republicans like the FCC’s Brendan Carr are already throwing hissy fits because the Biden FCC refused to waste a billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies on an expensive service that doesn’t scale. Carr, as is his way, took a very valid rejection of a wasteful proposal, and distorted it into a narrative where the government is somehow being particularly unfair to Elon Musk:

Even Elon’s mommy popped up to complain that the mean old government is being mean because it refused to give her son a billion dollars for no coherent reason:

It’s worth pointing out that Musk’s company certainly wasn’t alone in trying to game this particular program (the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, or RDOF) with the Trump FCC and Brendan Carr’s help. The Biden FCC has had to come in and clean up the mess, suing numerous companies that tried to mislead the agency to grab taxpayer money for services they couldn’t actually deliver. All under Carr’s watch.

In fact the Trump FCC and Carr screwed up this particular subsidy program so badly, that when it came time to dole out $42 billion in infrastructure bill broadband funds, the Biden administration leapfrogged the FCC and put the NTIA in charge of managing much of it instead because they no longer trusted the agency’s reputation or competency. So Carr whining about the end result is particularly exhausting.

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Modern brass knuckles capitalism, just like old-fashioned laissez-faire capitalism, hates government, regulations and labor unions. The core guiding moral value is to trickle most of the wealth and power up to a few elites at the top, while trickling most or all of the harm and damage down to society and the environment, including endangered species. The Minnesota Reformer reports an example:

Toxic: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, 

but didn’t tell the public, government

Internal documents show the Minnesota company hid the dangers for decades

3M toxicologist Richard Purdy did a study in 1998 to see whether any of the company’s perfluorochemicals showed up in the blood of eagles and albatrosses.

That seemed unlikely, given the birds’ diet consists mostly of fish. So Purdy was surprised and disturbed when he found levels in their blood similar to those found in human blood. It even showed up in bald eagle nestlings whose only food was fish their parents fed them from remote lakes.

That indicated what Purdy later called “widespread environmental contamination” — the likelihood the manmade, toxic chemicals were moving through the food chain and accumulating in animals.

He told company officials in an email there was a significant risk of ecological harm, which should be reported to the EPA.

In response, 3M managers dispersed the team collecting the data, Purdy alleged.

Purdy resigned in 1999 and sent his resignation letter to the EPA, informing them that while 3M had disclosed to the EPA that a chemical called PFOS “had been found in the blood of animals,” it didn’t mention that it was found in the blood of eaglets.

The per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) had spread — through groundwater and products like Scotchgard stain repellent, Teflon cookware, food wrapping and fire retardant — and were showing up in the blood of people and animals in every corner of the world. They were in nearly every living thing, from house dust to human blood, in wildlife in the Arctic circle and drinking water, rivers, streams and breast milk.

Purdy’s warnings were clear, as revealed by former Attorney General Attorney General Lori Swanson, who sued 3M in 2010, alleging the company failed for decades to report that its chemicals could be toxic to humans, animals and the environment, keeping information from regulators and scientists to protect its lucrative revenue stream.

The morning the case was set to go to trial in 2018, after 22 hours of negotiation, 3M and the state settled. 3M agreed to pay $850 million to help provide Minnesotans clean drinking water.  

But it amounted to just 2.6% of 3M’s nearly $33 billion in revenue in 2018.

The company admitted nothing, and maintains to this day that its chemicals have no adverse health or environmental consequences.

3M spokesman Grant Thompson said in an email that 3M’s position reflects the weight of scientific evidence from decades of research showing exposure to PFOA and PFOS at current and historical levels found in people and the environment has not been shown to cause adverse health effects.

For context, the US government says this:

CDC/ATSDR recognizes that exposure to high levels of PFAS may impact the immune system. A National Toxicology Program review found that exposure to perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) is an immune hazard to humans based on a high level of evidence that PFOA and PFOS suppressed the antibody response from animals and a moderate level of evidence from studies in humans (NTP, 2016).

Reality check: Most big corporations are not your friend or the friend of society generally. 

News bits: Gigantic hypocrisy; Capitalism’s ‘social conscience’; Thoughts on American religious civil war

The AP reports about radicalized Republican Party shenanigans and hypocrisy from the Gigantic Hypocrisy & Double Standards Files:

Florida Republican Party suspends chairman and 

demands his resignation amid rape investigation

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — The Republican Party of Florida suspended Chairman Christian Ziegler and demanded his resignation during an emergency meeting Sunday, adding to calls by Gov. Ron DeSantis and other top officials for him to step down as police investigate a rape accusation against him.

Ziegler is accused of raping a woman with whom he and his wife, Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, had a prior consensual sexual relationship, according to police records.

“Christian Ziegler has engaged in conduct that renders him unfit for the office,” the party's motion to censure Ziegler said, according to a document posted on the social media platform X by Lee County GOP Chairman Michael Thomason. 

Christian Ziegler has not been charged with a crime and says he is innocent, contending the encounter was consensual.

I know, I know. Waddabout the George Santos saga, which went on for months long after it was clear that he was a crook, liar and traitor? It was only after the stench of his lies and crimes was too much to stand any more that some House Republicans voted to boot his sorry ass out of congress. 

And, an ever bigger waddabout is DJT and all of his sexual predation, treason and crimes. Waddabout that? Unlike Ziegler, DJT has been charged with a slew of felonies in four different indictments. 

Where’s the valiant Republican patriot elites in Florida in dealing with DJT? The answer is that there are no valiant Republican patriots among GOP party elites in Florida. The double standards that GOP elites engage in are evidence of deep moral and democratic rot. The party has converted from a generally reasonable party to a mendacious, kleptocratic, authoritarian monster, even worse than The Kraken.

Right: The Kraken

Left: The Stinker Slanderman

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This report is about bid'ness as usual in the Great State of Texas, land of unfettered free markets running patriotic, free, wild, 🍑 (butt naked) and maximally profitable across the vast TX landscape:

Texas power plants have no responsibility to 

provide electricity in emergencies, judges rule

Almost three years since the deadly Texas blackout of 2021, a panel of judges from the First Court of Appeals in Houston has ruled that big power companies cannot be held liable for failure to provide electricity during the crisis. The reason is Texas’ deregulated energy market.

The decision seems likely to protect the companies from lawsuits filed against them after the blackout. It leaves the families of those who died unsure where next to seek justice.  

The state has said almost 250 people died in the winter storm and blackout, but some analysts call that a serious undercount.  

After years of legal process, a three-judge panel convened to decide on the merits of those lawsuits.

This week, Chief Justice Terry Adams issued the unanimous opinion of that panel that “Texas does not currently recognize a legal duty owed by wholesale power generators to retail customers to provide continuous electricity to the electric grid, and ultimately to the retail customers.”

The opinion states that big power generators “are now statutorily precluded by the legislature from having any direct relationship with retail customers of electricity.”

In other words, the TX legislature passed a law that shields electricity providers from any responsibility (“direct relationship” = legal liability) to provide power to customers. Think that was accidental? If so, it would be a false belief. Getting legal liability shields for capitalists is a holy grail because it is worth so damn much money. Those lobbyists put that a legal liability shield in the law for a damn good reason, to protect wealthy capitalists when they fuck up and kill people (or make a species go extinct, or pollute a river or drinking water source, or poison people, or etc.).

Think about it. The estates of at least 250 dead people suing the power company for freezing them to death could bankrupt the company if there was liability for freezing them to death. Now we can't have that kind of chaos, could we? Course not (also: core snot).

For those who still haven’t noticed, free markets running patriotic (well OK, not really patriotic), free, wild, 🍑 and maximally profitable tend to be ones that shield themselves from responsibility and liability for various human, environmental, social and pro-democracy governmental harms and damages. This wonderful lawsuit legal result exemplifies how those free, 🍑 markets work: Trickle wealth and power up to the elites, trickle responsibility for damage, including human deaths, down to individuals, the environment and society.

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Religion Dispatches reports about some interesting poll data in an article entitled AMERICA APPEARS TO BE HEADING FOR A RELIGIOUS CIVIL WAR:

Civil war is coming to America. At least that’s the view sizable numbers of Americans have expressed to pollsters in recent years. A 2022 Economist/YouGov poll found that 43% of respondents think it’s likely a civil war will break out over the next decade. Fewer Americans believed civil war would not occur within 10 years than those who believed it would. The poll affirmed the findings of a 2021 national survey by pollster John Zogby who found a plurality of Americans (46%) believed a future civil war was likely.

Political scientist Barbara Walter has identified two specific factors that predict the likelihood of civil war occurrence. Alarmingly, both variables are present in the United States today and are quickly pushing the country to the brink.

The first is “anocracy,” a political science term for countries that mix democratic and autocratic features. These countries are neither democracies nor autocracies, but instead lie somewhere in the middle. Anocracies are prone to conflict because they lack the strong institutions and political channels of robust democracies for citizens to work through; at the same time, they either don’t possess or choose not to use authoritarian tools of repression to undercut violence a priori. And, according to the Polity Project, the United States is today an anocracy.

The second factor identified by Dr. Walter involves the calcification of identity politics among those who had once been politically dominant but now find themselves in decline.

Citizens organizing themselves into an identity-based faction in this way has historically been a warning sign that large scale political violence may be in the offing. People can compromise if the issue at stake is economic or territorial in nature. Land can be divided; money can be reallocated. But how does one compromise on the core issue of identity?

The MAGA hat on Jesus:

Blasphemy?

Although the identity fault lines in America are myriad, arguably, the most important cleavage involves race and religion, a cleft created largely by (mostly White) conservative Christians who fear that the country is renouncing its Christian foundations.  

Whereas religious violence is commonly believed to be a “weapon of the weak” fueled by minority grievances, it is more often a “weapon of the strong” wielded against marginalized and oppressed minority communities. Dr. Walter finds the same when studying the causes of civil war.

Well now, that sucks.

Q:  Does that suck?

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News bits: Openly authoritarian; Stolen US intelligence; Regarding the speed of justice

While the morally rotted, authoritarian radical right Republican Party bends itself into pretzels to deny or deflect from the undeniable fact that DJT is a full-blown dictator-kleptocrat, DJT just keeps tossing nasties into the GOP’s dark free speech punch bowl. One could probably say that when it comes to radical right messaging, he is a one-man

.

The WaPo reports (not behind paywall) about the latest DJT nasty that is roiling the fluids in the Republican Party punch bowl:

Trump quotes Putin condemning American democracy, 

praises autocrat Orban

Trump also called Jan. 6 defendants “hostages” and again demonized immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country”

Republican polling leader Donald Trump approvingly quoted autocrats Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary, part of an ongoing effort to deflect from his criminal prosecutions and spin alarms about eroding democracy against President Biden.

His speech at a presidential campaign rally here on Saturday also reprised dehumanizing language targeting immigrants that historians have likened to past authoritarians, including a reference that some civil rights advocates and experts in extremism have compared to Adolf Hitler’s fixation on blood purity.

And he used the term “hostages” to describe people charged with violent crimes in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol.  

Trump quoted Putin, the dictatorial Russia president ...., criticizing the criminal charges against Trump ..... In the quotation, Putin agreed with Trump’s own attempts to portray the prosecutions as politically motivated.

“It shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy,” Trump quoted Putin saying in the speech. Trump added: “They’re all laughing at us.”

Regarding the racist dictator-kleptocrat Viktor Orban, the lying thug who killed democracy in Hungary, DJT commented about Orban’s praise of himself: Trump called him “highly respected” and welcomed his praise as “the man who can save the Western world.”

Geez people, it cannot be much clearer. DJT is a full-blown kleptocratic dictator. Corrupt dictators openly support him because they know he is one of them.

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Along with everyone else, CNN is reporting that sensitive US intelligence about the arguably successful Russian effort to put Trump in office in the 2016 election has been “lost.” CNN comments:

A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

Its disappearance, which has not been previously reported, was so concerning that intelligence officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders last year about the missing materials and the government’s efforts to retrieve them, the sources said.

In the two-plus years since Trump left office, the missing intelligence does not appear to have been found.

The binder contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election, sources tell CNN.  

The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe.  

But an unredacted version of the binder containing the classified raw intelligence went missing amid the chaotic final hours of the Trump White House. The circumstances surrounding its disappearance remain shrouded in mystery.

There's no mystery here. There is about a 99.9% chance that DJT gave that stolen information to Putin or an aid or a high level supporter stole it for him. Either way, this is Trump's fault because he was in charge at the time of the theft. So, in addition to being an openly kleptocratic dictator, DJT is a filthy traitor who gives comfort and aid to dictators, in addition to having fomented his violent 1/6 coup attempt.

Shocking as it is, that morally rotted human evil is what most of the Republican Party elites and rank and file support for president in 2024-2025.

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There are very good reasons for wanting criminals to be prosecuted as fast as reasonably possible. Unreasonable delay allows criminal defendants a wonderful opportunity to complain that the delay was intentional, it hurt the defendant somehow or whatever else the accused deem worth complaining about. A great example of the repercussions of slow criminal prosecutions comes from the request by Special Counsel Jack Smith to have the USSC quickly rule whether DJT is immune from prosecution or not. Daily KOS writes:

In a furious tirade delivered during a speech in Iowa (video below), Trump lashed out at Smith's perfectly reasonable and legally astute request.

“Now they’re saying let’s rush it to the Supreme Court. We gotta rush it, rush it, rush it. They could have started three years ago. Everything - nothing changed. They could have started three years ago, but they didn’t. They started just recently with this crap. They started just recently. They could have brought this lawsuit three years ago, right after I left. It's been three years. But they didn’t do that. And now they're saying ‘We have to go immediately before the Supreme Court.’ This thing would have all been over with two years ago. But they waited and waited and waited.”

“And then they saw I was running. And they waited and then they saw I was hot. And they filed lawsuits. These are very dishonest people. That’s called election interference. These are very - and now they’re fighting like hell because they want to try and get a guilty plea from the Supreme Court of the United States, which I can’t imagine cause you have presidential immunity.”

Millions of DJT supporters will believe those lies and use it as more evidence to see a corrupt, politically motivated prosecution of an innocent, patriotic martyr. 

In May of 2021, I wrote a fun little piece and posted it here entitled Federal law enforcement continues to fail: Fire Merrick Garland. It was a complaint that Garland was letting DJT off the hook for clearly documented felonies. By then, I came to believe that Garland was not going to ever prosecute DJT for the multiple felony obstruction of justice crimes he committed to subvert the FBI and the Mueller investigation. That belief still stands as correct. Garland still has not indicted and prosecuted DJT for the obstruction felonies Mueller described in detail.

Worse than that, now DJT can never be prosecuted for some of his felonies. The statute of limitations has run out. Merrick Garland let DJT get away with felonies that struck at the heart of American democracy and the rule law. As far as I'm concerned, Garland should spend the rest of his rotten life in jail for treason. 

The ethics watchdog organization CREW compiled a table with a list of crimes credibly attributed to DJT. CREW commented: 

As of April 2023, Donald Trump has been credibly accused of committing at least 56 criminal offenses since he launched his campaign for president in 2015. Choosing not to pursue accountability for fear of political criticism or consequences is itself a deeply political act. The rule of law is not self-enforcing. The individuals who serve in the Department of Justice and in prosecutors’ offices across the country are charged with upholding it. They must pursue criminal charges against President Trump if the facts, law, and principles of prosecution support doing so.

Here are just a few of the crimes laid out in the CREW table, including felonies, for which DJT can no longer be tried or might still be open to trial for. Indictments for the Mueller obstruction charges might still be possible until sometime in 2024, but indictments seem very unlikely at this point. The felony obstruction charges were investigated and made public in Mueller's report, which was released April 18, 2019.

There’s a darn good reason that DJT obstructed Mueller’s investigation into Russia helping DJT win the 2016 election. Specifically, that is because with Russia’s help, DJT’s election made him an illegitimate president for 4 miserable years.

A law bit: Defamation

But now it’s a Rudi Tooti

Law school for non-lawyers

Defamation: slander or libel

Slander: one or more defamatory oral statements

Libel: one or more defamatory written statements or video(s) posted online

The defamation bit

As we all know, the jackass Rudi G. got whacked for defamation of two poll workers in Georgia. Free speech absolutists are bitching about how bad the lawsuit is. That really ticks me off. 

Criticism: Authoritarian regimes police speech and squelch dissent. That is precisely what the defamation lawsuit against Giuliani seeks to accomplish.

A rejection of the criticism: A reasonable characterization of defamation lawsuits is that they are heavily grounded in the law of defamation, which is heavily grounded in what some might consider to be common sense. 

This defamation suit seeks to protect innocent people, not guilty ones, from all kinds of harm inflicted by lies, slanders and other forms of dark free speech. To incur liability for the defamation defendant, the person defamed (plaintiff) must prove in court: 

(1) the defamer publicly made one or more false statements against the defamed person, 

(2) the defamer (a) knows that the statement(s) is/are false and defamatory, or (b) acted (spoke or wrote) in reckless disregard of these matters, or (c) acted negligently in failing to ascertain the facts, and 

(3) the defamed person suffered damages. 

In the case of the two poll workers, the insulting jackass Giuliani caused damages like this:

On 3 December 2020, Giuliani tweeted a selectively edited video</a> that he claimed showed Freeman and Moss wheeling suitcases full of ballots out from under a table after counting had concluded for the night. The accusation was quickly debunked by Georgia officials, but Giuliani continued to spread the lie. He also accused them of “passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine”, when Freeman was passing Moss a ginger mint.

Almost immediately, Freeman and Moss started to receive death threats through the mail, email, social media and voicemail. Many of those racist messages were displayed and played in court this week.

Giuliani refused to turn over documents as part of the case and conceded earlier this year that he made false statements about the women. Howell found him liable of defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy. The only question for the jury to decide was how much in damages Giuliani should pay.

From the outset, lawyers for Freeman and Moss made it clear that the case was about repairing the reputations of their clients and sending a message to other powerful figures that they could not make similar false claims without consequences. 

“Today’s a good day. A jury stood witness to what Rudy Giuliani did to me and my daughter and held him accountable, and for that I’m thankful,” said Freeman, speaking at the court after the verdict. “Today is not the end of the road, we still have work to do. Rudy Giuliani was not the only one who spread lies about us, and others must be held accountable too. But that is tomorrow’s work. 

“I want people to understand this,” she added. “Money will never solve all my problems. I can never move back into the house that I call home. I will always have to be careful about where I go and who I choose to share my name with. I miss my home, I miss my neighbors, and I miss my name.”  (emphasis added)

Defenses to defamation include the allegedly defamatory statement(s) is/are (1) true, (2) pure opinion, and (3) privileged in some way, e.g., statements made in a court case or in a legislature. 

There is no significant social, political or other kind of benefit or value in defamatory statements. The statements that the unrepentant jackass Giuliani made, caused living hell for the two innocent women he cruelly attacked and defamed without reason, evidence or even any respect for the court or the two women.

Qs: In view of all of that, exactly what are the more than trivial damages to free speech in this defamation lawsuit? Is stopping people from lying about others in ways that causes harm a major burden on free speech?

Rudi needs professional help,

the Kraken would do nicely

Explaining Christian nationalism; A new White MAGA-fomented ethno-nationalist identity

A report in Salon by Senior Writer Amanda Marcotte discusses the transition of many Republicans from mildly sort of Christian to some sort of Christian nationalist as part of a White, MAGA-fomented ethno-nationalist identity:

How Republicans convinced themselves America 

was meant to be a “Christian nation”

Most Republicans now support Christian nationalism. This was not the case during the Obama years

What has genuinely surprised me is the way a bunch of folks who were previously not very religious have become all about Jesus. Maybe not enough to go to church, mind you, but enough to start littering their social media posts and other communications with Bible verses and the sentimental religious imagery. Not too long ago, many of these folks used to mock the showy piety of the fundamentalist neighbors. I fully blame the MAGA movement, of course.

Polling data shows my experience is not unique. Despite the obviously fake Christianity of Trump, this has been an era where most Republicans have abandoned their secular impulses. Instead, being a performative Christian has become an increasingly mandatory part of having a Republican identity. Even for those who never actually go to church.

In 2010, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) polled Republicans about their views on conservative Christianity and the Tea Party movement, which we now can see was a precursor to MAGA. Back then, only 31% of Republican or Republican-leaning voters identified with conservative Christianity. Fast-forward 13 years and the landscape has dramatically shifted. PRRI polling shows that a majority of Republican voters don’t just align themselves with conservative Christianity, but with Christian nationalism. Fifty-four percent of Republicans mostly or completely agree with sentiments such as "Being Christian is an important part of being truly American" and "God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society."

These numbers likely are not the result of millions of Americans suddenly finding Jesus, but about the way that Trump and the MAGA movement have cemented the GOP as an ethno-nationalist party, instead of merely a conservative party. Which is to say, now that they’re a tribe they need ways to define their tribal identity. Religion offers one aspect of that identity. (Whiteness, too, though most will rarely, if ever, so say out loud.) This is why polls show over 40% of self-described "evangelicals" don't even go to church. "Christian" has morphed from a faith tradition to a marker of ethnic/political identity.

How did so many people go from being mildly indifferent to religion to centering Christianity in their self-conception as an American? It certainly wasn’t by accident. This is the result of decades of work by Christian fundamentalists to generate propaganda and disinformation, all to prop up the myth that the U.S. was founded to be a Christian nation. Then Trump came along with his authoritarian "us vs. them" messaging, creating a need for Republicans to define exactly what they mean by "us." Christian nationalists were ready to fill that "us" with their own notions that Christianity is a mandatory part of the American identity.

The central figure in this tale is David Barton, a Christian huckster who has made a name for himself on the right by passing himself off as a "historian." Barton got a bachelor’s in religious education from Oral Roberts University in 1976 and has no academic training in history. His "research" is a joke, to the point where even conservative Christian academics reject his claims.  

Barton’s influence is so vast in the world of Republican thought it’s immeasurable. He’s heavily promoted through right-wing media and consults with major Republican leaders, including the new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. But even people who have never heard his name have likely absorbed his ideas through the right-wing media ecosystem, which is infused with them. When Republicans repeat false talking points, like "separation of church and state is a myth" or "the Founders envisioned a Christian nation," most of that goes straight back to Barton and his fake histories.  

That this all got supercharged under Trump is a little odd, no doubt, because Trump’s “Christianity” is as transparently false as Barton’s historical research. Perversely, however, Trump’s fake faith likely boosted the widespread embrace of an “evangelical” identity by Republican voters who previously weren’t especially religious. By waving around a Bible he doesn’t read and talking up a Jesus he doesn’t believe in, Trump has underscored how much “Christian” is a tribal identity marker more than a faith tradition, at least in the MAGA world.

Marcotte calls it a tribe. I call it a cult. But otherwise her narrative seems generally reasonable.