A THREAD ABOUT A WEAK WEST

 I have long been amused and disheartened by the west's response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Here I am, a liberal Snowflake, typically against military interventions, wondering how in the world we could have lost our hawkishism. One reason, maybe the only reason, we may have needed a Nikki Haley.

What is typical in leftist circles, is something left over from failed wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. We shouldn't be interfering in the affairs of other nations.

All of the above and below are my own personal observations. I will not be posting any links to any publications to give me the ideas I have circulating around in my head. So here goes..........

The west has gone soft. Dangerously soft. In my opinion. Iran may well achieve it's goal of building a nuke. Israel may well take care of that problem on it's own. Because we in the west don't have the balls any longer to stop Iran from doing so. If Israel does so the west will turn even MORE against Israel than it already has. That is how we roll now. 

When Russia invaded two territories belonging at the time to Georgia, the west barely blinked. Ditto when Russia invaded Crimea. The west kept believing, as did the leftist snowflakes, that surely that would be the end of Putin's adventurism. Guess what? And yet we keep hearing from the same leftist snowflakes that Russia will stop after they have taken Ukraine. 

Here is how Russia should have been dealt with and can still be dealt with. Be prepared. You are going to hear things from this liberal snowflake you would never have expected to hear from him.

After the invasion of Crimea, massive amounts of weapons, including offensive weapons, should have been shipped to Ukraine. NATO forces should have been stationed in Ukraine. Massive financial aide should have been given to Ukraine. Pre-emptive. 

Next: why do we still have pro-Russian regimes like Cuba still on our doorsteps? It would only take a minimum effort to remove the commies once and for all from Cuba. Ditto with Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Go in full force, take the governing regimes out. Would help enormously with illegal immigration as well. Those invasions would actually be humanitarian since people suffer in those countries.

But too late now. So what can the west do now? 

They could still take out the commie regime in Cuba at the bare minimum. Get it done!

And get this - Russia has now shipped nukes to Belarus and barely a blink from the west. Again acting like chickens. If Russia can ship nukes to Belarus then the west can ship some nukes to Poland, the Baltics, Finland. 

The west can also send combat troops to Ukraine. Never mind that congress is tying up aide to Ukraine. NATO can send troops. They do not need to be employed offensively but employed to defend the Capital of Ukraine and it's larger cities. Even offensively, what is Russia going to do, threaten us with nukes? THAT threat alone has already caused the lilly livered west to quake in their boots. Seriously?

Clearly we need another John F. Kennedy who had no problem facing the Ruskies down. Putin is bluffing. If the west had nukes placed in NATO countries bordering Russia, I think that would send a clear message. The counter-argument would be "but that would only provoke Putin." Imagine how Putin must be laughing at us. Mind you, the US had to be dragged into WWII because peaceniks didn't want us involved. Only an invasion on Pearl Harbor woke us up from our slumbers. 

What will it take this time? NK hitting us with a nuke? Russia invading a NATO country? When will the west grow a spine?

BTW, none of this rant is about making a suggestion about who should be Prez. Biden, in this department has been weak. Congress is just as or more weak. Trump would be worse. Bring on Nikki Haley or someone on the D side (if there is anyone) with the determination to take on Putin. 

BEFORE IT'S TOO DAMN LATE!

News chunk 'n bits: Trickle down economics trickles up; The Biden impeachment

A WaPo opinion by Jennifer Rubin discusses the evidence that trickle down economics cause wealth to flow up to the top, increasing inequality:

‘Trickle-down economics’ is a scam that ignores decades of evidence

Like climate change denial, the claimed economic benefits of tax cuts for the rich don’t hold up under scrutiny. .... Republicans often reply: “But look at the growth and jobs!” Actually, we have seen a steady stream of evidence debunking this rationale.

Last July, NEC Director Lael Brainard laid out the overwhelming evidence that “trickle-down” economics — defined as “cutting taxes for big businesses and those at the top” — has been a bust.

“Economic inequality increased, many communities suffered from sustained disinvestment, and earnings growth for many Americans failed to keep pace with the cost of necessities like health care, housing, and education,” she said. “Investments in infrastructure and vital industries stagnated.”

This isn’t new evidence, either. A 2020 paper by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London examined “18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015,” CBS News reported. “The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn’t, and then examined their economic outcomes.” It turns out that “per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn’t, the study found.”

But there was one significant difference: “The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality, the research indicates.” Oops.

Well, what about the huge tax cuts passed by MAGA Republicans in 2017? Were those any different? “Mr. Trump’s tax cuts have lifted the fortunes of the ultra-rich,” the report found. “For the first time in a century, the 400 richest American families paid lower taxes in 2018 than people in the middle class, the economists found.”  

But economic growth made up for this handout, right?! Not so fast. Wages for average Americans did not keep up with the cost of living. Worse, “Even before the pandemic, income inequality had reached its highest point in 50 years, according to Census data,” as CBS News reported. And, before Biden came into office, income inequality worsened as the pandemic hurt the less-well-off more severely than it did the rich.

We all knew it, but a reminder is useful.

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The NYT reports that House TTKP (Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party) elites are getting worried that they will never be able to impeach president Biden. Instead, they want to send a slew of criminal referrals to the DoJ against Joe and his family in a desperate move to save face and make it look like they are not being “political.” 

Mr. Armstrong said he believed criminal referrals were the much more likely outcome. Mr. Armstrong suggested House Republicans could make referrals regarding alleged violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act in connection with international business deals by Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and suggested that the Justice Department investigate accusations of obstruction.

“I’m still interested in why we haven’t gotten better answers on the whole-of-government approach to obstructing all of these investigations,” Mr. Armstrong said.

Given how jaw-droppingly incompetent and politically stupid Merrick Garland is, he will probably comply and start investigations so as not to look political. The disaster called the TTKP is un-effing believable. So is Garland. 

I still remember those 4 or 5 slam dunk obstruction of justice felonies that DJT committed to subvert the Mueller investigation. Garland still has not lifted a finger to prosecute America’s loud and proud Felon-in-Chief. Fire Garland. Lest we forget, here is a four felony obstruction analysis that Law Fare published in 2019:

And here is a five felony analysis by a different attorney:

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Crackpottery from Lindellandia: This is sort of about the 2020 stolen election lie, more or less. Raw Story reports that Mike Lindell backed away from showing the public explosive evidence that would shatter modern civilization and destroy everything, leaving Earth a lifeless ball of rock, microplastics and Teslas (Teslae?) with discharged battery packs:

“The Supreme Court case, the lawyers will be turning it in later on on Thursday,” Lindell said of his purported evidence. “We were going to do it right on-site at the Supreme Court, but they said, no, Mike, it's too risky.”

“It’s going to be too dangerous,” he added. “The evidence we’re going to put in this case has never been seen before. And the only reason we’re able to do it is because they kicked this case out on standing. Had they not done that, we wouldn’t be able to add this new evidence.”

“And it is so explosive.”

One might have realized from this blither that the nutter Lindell is well past bat guano crazy. Maybe people have to go to Lindell’s personal website, where they may or may not be asked to buy pillows, before they can see the explosive evidence. Maybe the evidence will cause people’s computers to explode. Who knows? One peanut in the gallery commented astutely: This guy is so full of shit his breath stinks!

Also note, that the USSC does not determine the actuality or legal relevance of evidence. That is the job of trial courts and discovery demands. American politics has officially hit ludicrous speed!

What ludicrous speed looks like

Direct threats from Christianlandia: 

“The government doesn’t make the law. The people rise up, power rises up from the people and the people make the law. And that law should be in accordance with God’s word and the conscience. And these federal laws are restricting both of those things. So when this authority – namely the federal government – commands what God has forbidden or has not required, second – whenever it forbids what God commands or has not forbidden, third – whenever it oversteps its constitutional jurisdiction, or fourth – binds the conscience that God alone has jurisdiction, we – those who are their authority – we are the authority for the federal government in this situation, we are not to obey them whenever they take tyrannical action.” – Christian nationalist Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers.

Notice the nonsense in Deevers’ deranged blither? The people make the law but God makes the law and those [mostly White males] who claim God’s authority are God’s authority, whatever that might be. Or something like that.

And that is all the politics fit to print. Hi yo Silver, ludicrous speed away!

An essay on the origins of TTKP lethality

TTKP: Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party

An essay that Thom Hartmann wrote for Daily KOS asks this interesting question: “How Come Everything the Republican Party Stands for Involves Other People Dying?”

Republican-controlled “Red” states, almost across the board, have higher rates of: Spousal abuse, Obesity, Smoking, Teen pregnancy, Sexually transmitted diseases, Abortion, Bankruptcies and poverty, Homicide and suicide, Infant mortality, Maternal mortality,  Forcible rape, Robbery and aggravated assault, Dropouts from high school, Divorce,  Contaminated air and water, Opiate addiction and deaths, Unskilled workers, Parasitic infections, Income and wealth inequality, Covid deaths and unvaccinated people, Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”), People on welfare, Child poverty, Homelessness, Spousal murder, Unemployment, Deaths from auto accidents, and People living on disability.

But are all these things, along with widespread GOP support for dictators like Putin, Orbán, and Xi, happening because Republicans hate their citizens and worship poverty, death and disease?

Or is there something in the GOP’s core beliefs and strategies that just inevitably leads to these outcomes?

It turns out that’s very much the case: these terrible outcomes are the direct result of policies promoting greed and racism that the GOP has been using for forty+ years to get access to billions of dollars and win elections.

Using racism as a political strategy while promoting and defending the greed of oligarchs always leads to widespread poverty, pollution, ignorance, and death regardless of the nation it’s done in. 

The GOP first openly embraced racism in 1964 when the party’s presidential candidate that year, Barry Goldwater, proudly refused to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It was a huge shift for the party of Lincoln, and when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964, the South did a collective “what the hell?!?”

But racism alone can’t explain the entire list above. There had to be something else.

The second element embraced by the GOP that filled out the rest of the list above happened in 1980 when they hooked up with religious grifters and greedy, morbidly rich people.

Prior to that election year, George HW Bush and his wife Barbara were big advocates for Planned Parenthood and a woman’s right to choose an abortion. Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, had signed the nation’s most liberal abortion law and was also an outspoken supporter of Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood.

The 1980 election saw the first major merger in American history between a political party and a religious movement largely run by grifters. Something that would have both shocked and horrified the Founders of our country and the Framers of the Constitution.

Republicans started talking about God (the word appeared in their platform for only the second time since the Party’s formation in 1856), and preachers and televangelists began to openly push GOP candidates from the pulpit in defiance of nonprofit law and the IRS.

As the GOP went deeper down their religion-induced rabbit hole, their hostility to science was logically accompanied by a hostility to education and educated people. George HW Bush and Rush Limbaugh began talking about “pointy-headed liberals in ivory towers,” openly trashing higher education to bring blue-collar voters into the party.

That was followed by a sustained Republican attack on public education itself by pushing for-profit privatized “charter schools” and vouchers, an ironic position in that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower had probably done more to advance public education than any president in the 20th century.

Thus was set up the GOP’s 2020 hostility to masks and Covid quarantines, sex education and birth control, and their 2021 attacks on vaccination. And their continuous denial of global warming.

The other big turning point for the GOP in 1980 was Reagan’s open embrace of America’s oligarchs.

Just four years earlier, in their Buckley v Valeo decision, conservatives on the Supreme Court ruled that when a rich person showered so much money on a politician that that politician pretty much only voted the way the rich person wanted, that was no longer bribery but, instead, First Amendment-protected “free speech.”

In 1978, in a Republican-appointee-only decision written by Lewis Powell (of Powell Memo fame), the Court extended that right to buy politicians to American corporations (it was extended to international billionaires and corporations in 2010 by Citizens United.)

The result of this whole sad history is that Red states have been turned into sacrifice zones for Reagan’s racial and religious bigotry and the neoliberal raise-up-the-rich and crap-on-unions economic policies he inflicted on America.

In the years since the Reagan Revolution, TV preachers have become multimillionaires with private jets, their parishioners have slid deeper and deeper into poverty and addiction, and the unholy alliance of church and state that Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton warned us about is now arguably — behind great wealth — the second most powerful political force in America.

That is sobering. The evolution of the morally rotted TTKP is loaded with toxic radical authoritarians and shameless grifters. Hm, that sounds a lot like the evolution of the morally rotted DJT.

Banning same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, a Japanese high court rules

 Tokyo — A Japanese high court ruled Thursday that denying same-sex marriage is unconstitutional and called for urgent government action to address the lack of any law allowing such unions.

The court doesn't have the power to overturn the current marriage law, which has been interpreted to restrict marriage as between a man and a woman. Government offices may continue to deny marriage status to same-sex couples unless the existing law is revised to include LGBTQ+ couples, or a new law is enacted that allows for other types of unions.

The Sapporo High Court ruling said not allowing same-sex couples to marry and enjoy the same benefits as straight couples violates their fundamental right to have a family.

Ireland is one of the most pro-Palestinian nations in the world

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/14/1233395830/ireland-pro-palestinian

The most notorious chapter of Ireland's WWII history came upon Hitler's death: Ireland's wartime leaders — President Douglas Hyde and Prime Minister Éamon de Valera — both offered official condolences to Germany's envoy in Dublin.

This was in 1945 — after the horrors of the Holocaust were known.

After the war, Ireland also allowed some Nazis to resettle there. Among them was Otto Skorzeny, whom the BBC has referred to as Hitler's "scar-faced henchman," who famously rescued Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from captivity.

Historians say Irish neutrality was more about opposing Britain than out of any love for the Nazis. Ireland gained independence from Britain in 1921, barely 20 years before the onset of WWII.

News bits: Election propaganda; The reality disconnect; Rewriting history!

Now that Honest Joe and Crooked Don have secured their party nominations, our eyes and ears want to seek out the onslaught of divisive, de-rationalizing TTKP lies, slanders, crackpottery and irrational emotional manipulation that is most certainly coming our way.

TTKP: Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party

NPR reports about a key bit of Great white Replacement Theory propaganda that TTKP elites are test driving to see how good the lies’ traction (rage, terror, etc.) is likely to be with the public. The elite liars are lying about a tidal wave of illegal voting by illegal immigrants in the 2024 elections.  

It’s illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and numerous studies over the years have found that it almost never happens, but voting experts still worry the claims could take hold at a time when huge numbers of Republicans simultaneously don't trust elections and see immigration as the top problem facing the country.

“I think that’s what it’s meant to do — to freak people out over an issue. It’s a continuation of this myth of voter fraud,” said Gilda Daniels, an election law professor at the University of Baltimore. “It not only creates hysteria, but it [furthers] this idea that only certain people should be allowed to participate in the process.”

Given its apparent power to foment irrational fear, anger and outrage among the increasingly deceived TTKP base, this racist lie is likely to be prominent in the coming months. 

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Vox maybe inadvertently reports about the vast gulf in how Crooked Don’s supporters see him and his actual track record: 

Trump just opened the door to Social Security cuts. Take him seriously.

During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump called for a ban on all Muslim immigration to the United States, the targeted assassination of terrorists’ family members, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and enormous corporate tax cuts.

And voters considered him the most “moderate” Republican candidate in more than four decades. [Huh? What?]

To the extent this perception had any basis in reality, it reflected Trump’s genuine moderation on one highly salient issue: Unlike many of his GOP predecessors, the mogul emphatically opposed any cuts to Medicare and Social Security. This likely made it a bit easier for ideologically conflicted older Rust Belt voters to pull the lever for a Republican.

Also in his track record of moderation are moderate accomplishments like (i) chronic lying including lying about the vast, still-ongoing stolen 2020 election lie, (ii) DJT’s violent coup attempt on 1/6/21, (iii) two impeachments, (iv) the indictments and criminal cases that are moving at the speed of cold molasses due to his stonewalling the courts, and (v) working with a cadre of convicted felons, many of whom he pardoned. 

Yeah, he definitely is a moderate! (sarcasm)

Q: If DJT is a moderate, what does an extremist look like? Putin? This guy?:

Is he a moderate too?

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The AP writes about another example of the massive TTKP propaganda campaign that is now getting underway in earnest. 

No, not that Earnest

This time the propaganda tactic is rewriting history:

House GOP launches new probe of Jan. 6 and tries 

shifting blame for Capitol attack away from Trump

House Republicans are launching a vast reinvestigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, seeking to push the blame away from Donald Trump, who has been indicted over his actions or his supporters in the mob siege trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Chairman Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., called Jan. 6 a “dark day” in U.S. history as he opened Tuesday’s hearing to delve into the investigation of pipe bombs that were left outside Republican and Democratic party headquarters that day. But, he said, “we still have many unanswered questions.”

The panel’s work comes as Trump and President Joe Biden are galloping toward a 2020 rematch this fall, and Republicans, some once skeptical of Trump’s return to the White House, have quickly been falling in line to support the former president. The House GOP’s high-profile impeachment inquiry into Biden has stalled without a clear path forward.

Speaker Mike Johnson said House Republicans intend to release a final report on Jan. 6 “to correct the incomplete narrative” advanced by the previous work of the Select Committee on the Jan. 6 attack.

Germaine muses about the final report: The TTKP final, final report will find and expose Hillary’s deleted emails, with evidence of collusion with terrorists in the Benghazi fiasco and socialist deep state operatives in the federal government. From that, a connection with be made to the hidden deep state documents on Hunter Biden’s laptop and pictures of Anthony Weiner’s wiener. Those previously hidden documents will show that not only was Hunter a naughty newt, he and Joe together planned and executed the 1/6 coup attempt as a false flag operation by the pedophilic, socialist deep state operatives, rogue atheists and peeping Toms in trench coats pretending to be DJT supporters. 

There, I have set the record straight. Fact checkers agree:

☹️ Well OK, maybe the fact checkers are not quite in full agreement.

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For the last ~12 years, I have strenuously argued many times that dark free speech is tearing America apart. An article by Barbara McQuade that Time published a couple of weeks ago seems relevant:

Disinformation Is Tearing America Apart

“The information war is about territory—just not the geographic kind. In a warm information war, the human mind is the territory.” — Renée DiResta, The Digital Maginot Line

ON JANUARY 5, 2021, Rosanne Boyland left her home in Kennesaw, Georgia, for the ten-hour drive to Washington, DC. Boyland had fallen under the spell of the election-denier movement, bound by a belief that the incumbent president, Donald J. Trump, had won the presidential election but had been robbed of his victory through fraud.1 In fact, sixty-one courts and Trump’s own Justice Department had already rejected every claim of fraud, and federal cybersecurity and election officials had declared the 2020 election “the most secure in U.S. history.”

The next day, Boyland joined a mob egged on by Trump and stormed the U.S. Capitol to “Stop the Steal,” as the movement slogan went.

Like the rest of America, Boyland had been bombarded with false claims that Biden had used fraud to steal the election—a fabrication that would become known as “the Big Lie.” Eight others would also lose their lives as a result of the Capitol attack that was sparked by the deluge of disinformation.

In 2022, former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, a prominent conservative, warned that 2020 was merely a dry run to steal future elections. He called Trump and his allies a “clear and present danger” to U.S. democracy. Indeed, after Trump was charged with crimes for efforts to upend the 2020 election, he began telling a second Big Lie—that the indictments were themselves election interference, filed solely to prevent his election to the presidency in 2024.

Is American democracy undergoing a slow erosion, invisible in real time but as devastating as a metastasizing cancer? Even if our form of government is not destroyed altogether, it risks becoming unrecognizable, controlled not by the people at large but by a small faction of the far right, willing to say or do anything to seize power. And while the current purveyors of disinformation do not represent every member of the GOP, the party’s silence is a form of complicity. When Republican leaders like former congresswoman Liz Cheney denounce their party’s disinformation, they are ignored or purged. Now that the potency of disinformation has been revealed, this weapon can be used by any demagogue or self-interested opportunist, regardless of political affiliation.

A key insight that McQuade mentions is the cancer-like malignancy of the disinformation threat. The cancer has been growing for decades. It arguably predates even Rush Limbaugh when he started spewing his poison on air in 1984. 

Q: Was Germaine premature to start whining about the dangers of disinformation or dark free speech all those years ago? Why could Germaine, often maligned as alarmist, hyperbolic, crackpot, liar, etc., clearly see a grave threat that most others could not, and some still cannot?