Legalized political corruption in America

In the years leading up to the 2010 USSC decision in Citizens United v. Fed. Election Commission, Republican federal judges had been nibbling away at laws that tried to tamp down on political corruption. The Citizens United decision blew a huge hole in anti-corruption laws, paving the way for the massive, shameless corruption that now poisons American state and federal governments.

By legalizing corruption, euphemistically called “protected free speech” by pro-corruption, authoritarian Republican judges, America’s radical right authoritarian wealth and power movement was greatly empowered. It aggressively expanded its decades-long effort to (i) take power from federal and state governments, and (ii) take civil liberties and the power that protected them from citizens. As much of that power and attendant wealth flowed to corrupt politician, business, and religious elites as they could possibly get away with grabbing and keeping. The new power to be corrupt was at least as useful as the new cash.

A current example of legalized corruption comes from the prosecution of US Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ). CBS News reports:

Prosecutors trying to prove that New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez wielded his political influence in exchange for bribes cannot show jurors evidence that they argue is “critical” to their case, a federal judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein said prosecutors could not use text messages from 2019 that allegedly show Menendez, who was the top Democrat on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, assuring Egypt and the New Jersey businessmen who are alleged to have bribed him that he was not delaying military aid to the country after Egypt heard he had put a hold on it.

The jury also cannot see another text from 2022 in which the senator's wife, Nadine, allegedly told one of the businessmen that “Bob had to sign off on this.” The text included a link about two pending foreign military sales to Egypt, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors argued last week that Egypt was “frantic about not getting their money's worth,” which is why it contacted Menendez through two of the New Jersey businessmen, who allegedly gave the senator cash, gold bars, and other things of value. The text involving Menendez's wife signaled, “You keep the bribes flowing, and he is going to keep giving you what you want on the military aid,” prosecutor Paul Monteleoni told Stein before the decision.

But Stein determined the Constitution's “speech or debate” clause, which protects lawmakers against prosecution over official legislative acts, applied to the evidence.

“The core legislative act is clearly the hold or releasing the hold. I don't think it matters that there was mistaken information here,” Stein said Tuesday, before making his decision official in an order later in the week.

Such an interpretation would prohibit “some of the core most critical evidence,” Monteleoni countered.

The judge here, Sidney Stein, is a Democrat appointed to the bench by Bill Clinton. That probably makes Stein a neoliberal who is inherently sympathetic to elite white collar criminals. Or maybe the law is such that high-level corruption like this simply cannot be prosecuted any more. Unless I misunderstand this reporting, if a federal politician entangles corruption like bribe-taking with official business, it is legal. 

The American Prospect wrote about the Menendez legal situation last March:

One More Way the Supreme Court Has Legalized Corruption

The Menendez story also illustrates a subtle way the Supreme Court’s de facto legalization of corruption interacts with other aspects of the campaign finance system. You see, he has not officially dropped out of the race—and has even floated that he will run as an independent in the general election—because pretending like he’s still a candidate lets him spend his campaign cash on his legal defense.

The context is important here. The sheer comical excess of the Menendez indictment illustrates how rampant political corruption is in this country. The reason people getting nailed by law enforcement for corruption tend to be people with literal gold bars and stacks of cash sewn into their jackets is because of Supreme Court decisions making it impossible to prosecute instances of corruption that are somewhat more deniable. In McDonnell v. U.S., the Court unanimously overturned the conviction of a former Virginia governor and his wife who had set up meetings with officials for a pharmaceutical company while taking valuable gifts from the company’s owner. In FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate, it ruled that candidates can loan their campaigns money, and then pay themselves back with donor cash after the election is over and the victor is known—effectively opening a window labeled “bribes here.” And in Citizens United v. FEC, of course, they legalized effectively limitless corporate spending in politics.

Partly as a result of these decisions, Washington, D.C., is absolutely awash with people being effectively bribed, morally if not legally. Lobbyists are throwing all kinds of money and gifts around all the time. As a politician, if you behave well in office as a senator or representative, you can expect to be offered all kinds of cushy lobbyist or no-show “consulting” jobs that are actually worth much more than a sack of gold ingots.

So while Menendez was doing the kind of idiotic corruption that actually may have run afoul of the remaining shreds of anti-corruption law, now he is taking advantage of a more subtle variety: spending his campaign money on his legal bills. Should he actually contest the Senate election this year, he is absolutely certain to lose—a recent poll found him with 75 percent disapproval among New Jersey residents—and he’s already given up on seeking re-election as a Democrat. But pretending to be running allows him to spend his remaining campaign funds on his legal defense. Just between October and December last year, he spent $2.3 million out of his campaign coffers on legal fees. And as of the end of December, there’s still another $6.2 million in that account.

This is not just about corruption of federal politicians and the federal government. The corruption problem is in the states too. Last February, The Economist wrote about the flow of power to state Attorney General politicians, like the shamelessly corrupt Ken Paxton of Texas:

State attorneys-general are shaping national policy

Despite not being elected to do so

To foreigners looking in, it is unusual enough that America elects most of its top prosecutors. More shocking is the amount of money going into political campaigns. Now the two have come together in a way that would make even the least wonky American curious. Between 2008 and 2022 the cost of state attorney-general races rose from $17m to $222m. Over that period governors’ contests became only eight—rather than 12—times pricier and those of state senators merely doubled.

The cashflow reflects something much bigger: the role of state attorney-general has been recast. The job used to be about defending state laws and prosecuting cheats, fraudsters and corporate bullies. Today attorneys-general shape nationwide politics and policy by pushing strategic lawsuits through their favorite courts. Their quiet rise to power has made the states’ top lawyers some of America’s most unchecked partisan players.

Two attorneys-general, one a Republican and one a Democrat, exemplify the new breed. First there is Ken Paxton of Texas. Between 2021 and 2023 he refused to represent state agencies in court at least 75 times, according to ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, both news outlets—often seemingly for ideological reasons. He has dropped child-sexual-assault cases after losing track of the plaintiffs, let payments to crime victims lapse and taken decreasing interest in catching Medicaid cheats. Instead he chose to energize his Trumpian base by relentlessly suing the Biden administration. Mr. Paxton has blocked vaccine mandates and banned abortion when it was still protected under the federal constitution. Most recently he brought the country’s attention to a bitter row over whether Texas can enforce its own immigration regime at the southern border.  

[In a 2000 decision,] the Supreme Court ruled that due to the threat of rising sea-levels the Massachusetts attorney-general could lead the charge. Massachusetts v EPA set the precedent for a single state to challenge the federal government in court. That drastically expanded the reach of attorneys-general—Republicans soon raced to sue Barack Obama when he took office. Over time attorneys-general realized that if they banded together with like-minded colleagues across the country, they could handpick the district with the most sympathetic judges in which to bring their case. One federal judge’s injunction in their favor, and against Washington, could shut down a policy for the whole country until a higher court ruled on its appeal. “Not only can they play on their home-turf, they can now choose the referee,” says Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas at Austin. 

The strategy took off when Mr. Trump became president. Democratic attorneys-general sued the federal government more times in four years than they had in the previous 16, says Paul Nolette, a political scientist. Republicans took it a step further under Joe Biden, aiming their litigation not just at Democratic policies but at the administrative state itself. Today these lawsuits are masterfully co-ordinated to maximise partisan wins, says James Tierney, a former attorney-general of Maine who teaches at Harvard University. With that in mind it is less surprising that Mr Trump’s Muslim travel ban was halted by a judge in Honolulu and mifepristone, an abortion pill, was temporarily outlawed by a judge in the Texas Panhandle. 

Follow the money

Dark-money groups caught on to the fact that attorneys-general had sway and that their races were cheaper to influence than congressional ones. The Concord Fund, a conservative one, has pumped at least $9.5m into the contests since 2020. That cash no doubt helped unseat moderates: a five-term Republican attorney-general of Idaho who refused to be a political activist was booted out in 2022. The left is no more tolerant of impartiality. The Democratic Attorneys General Association, which funds candidates, announced in 2019 that it would no longer back Democrats who were not explicitly pro-choice. For aspiring attorneys-general the calculus has become clear: get more political, get elected.

The Economist, which is inherently anti-government and anti-Democratic Party, also singled out New York’s Democratic attorney-general Letitia James for (i) prosecuting Donald Trump for lying to lenders about his finances (finance fraud), and (ii) prosecuting the bosses of the National Rifle Association for corruption. The Economist grudgingly concedes that the James prosecutions “may have more legal merit” than some of what Paxton has done in Texas. That is an understatement. It reflects the pro-business, anti-government bias The Economist usually brings to the table. And, the case for equivalence between Republicans and Democrats The Economist makes is not persuasive to me.  

But as one can see, there are multiple ways to be corrupt in politics and get away with it.

The dark history of Sam Alito and the GOP; Thoughts about right wing American extremism

Now that the raw, bigoted authoritarianism of Sam Alito is well known, some folks are talking a trip down history memory lane. The New Republic writes:

Ted Kennedy Warned Us About Samuel Alito. 

He Was Ignored.

The Supreme Court justice’s flag controversy should come as no surprise to anyone who paid attention to his nomination hearings in 2006

Alito’s troubles began two weeks ago, when The New York Times reported that an upside-down American flag was spotted flying at his Virginia home not long after the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Commentators expressed alarm that a Supreme Court justice would willfully, or through incredible ignorance, associate with an authoritarian movement that has trampled on the Constitution that he took an oath to uphold. Many prominent Democrats, including Representative Hakeem Jeffries, called on Alito to recuse himself from all forthcoming cases involving Trump and the attempted coup in 2021.

But Alito won’t recuse himself—and his brazen display of disloyalty to American democracy should surprise no one who recalls how he landed on the Supreme Court.

Alito’s hard-right ideology [i.e., authoritarianism], and his shameless lack of ethics, were obvious when he was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2005. A few Democratic senators sounded the siren, but the mainstream media, even its so-called “liberal” mainstays, largely ignored the warnings, unwittingly cooperating with an elite, right-wing operation to install a dishonest, partisan extremist on the highest court of the country.

As The New York Times reported on the eve of Alito’s confirmation in 2006, his placement on the court was the “culmination” of an effort that began during the Reagan administration to staff the judiciary with ideologues of the religious right. Conservatives also deployed an adroit media strategy to temper, silence, and even disparage any attempt to criticize Alito during the nomination hearings. Public relations specialists and legal experts, coordinating on behalf of the Federalist Society, Christian organizations like Focus on the Family, and Republican senators, helped to sell Alito to the Senate, the media, and the public—even before his nomination. “We boxed them in,” one lawyer who participated in the meetings told the newspaper, presumably referring to the Senate and the mainstream media.

Early in the Alito nomination fight, Democrats uncovered a memo the judge wrote while he was working for the Reagan administration in 1985 that articulated his opposition to legal abortion. He advised against waging a “frontal assault on Roe” only because such a maneuver would prove politically unpopular, and instead advocated for a steady demolition of access to reproductive health care at the state level. Until the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe, the Alito playbook is exactly what many Southern and heartland states followed to make abortion all but impossible within their borders.  

The memo did not stop Alito from lying to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, whose diary revealed that, while meeting privately in Kennedy’s office, Alito assured him that he would never vote to overturn Roe. Unlike Republican Senator Susan Collins, who believed the same lie from Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, Kennedy was not gullible enough to vote in favor of Alito’s confirmation.  

The P.R. firm [professional liars for hire] handling the Alito nomination insisted that Republicans counter with the claim that, as a lawyer for the Reagan administration, Alito was only reflecting the views of his client. Planned Parenthood warned that Alito would “gut Roe” if he had the opportunity, but the media soon dropped stories on the memo.  

Similarly nauseating events transpired when Democrats learned that Alito belonged to Concerned Alumni of Princeton, an organization that opposed measures to increase admission of women and racial minorities. The group wasn’t merely against affirmative action but also contemptuous of co-education and supportive of quotas that favored men.  

Alito insisted that his participation in the group was ancient history. (He had listed his membership on a job application as a 35-year-old applying to work for the federal government.) The mainstream media reacted not with questions about Alito’s biases on race and gender but with vilification of Democrats. Gloria Borger, a CNN commentator, accused the Democrats of “going over the line,” Newsweek likened Democratic senators to “bullies,” and PBS’s Gwen Ifill accused Alito’s critics of “demonization.” Chris Matthews and Chuck Todd had a conversation on MSNBC suggesting that it was absurd to try to “nail him” for belonging to a “club.”  

Kennedy gave a thunderous address on behalf of the people that the “liberal coalition” aimed to represent, warning on the Senate floor of the dangers of Alito’s extreme ideology: “If you are concerned and you want a justice that’s going to stand for the working men and women in this country—it’s not going to be Judge Alito. If you are concerned about women’s privacy rights, about the opportunity for women to gain fair employment in America—it’s not Judge Alito. If you care about the disabled … the Disability Act that we have passed to bring all of the disabled into our society, if you are looking for someone that is going to be a friend of the disabled—it’s not going to be Judge Alito. And finally, if you are looking for someone that is going to be willing to stand up to the executive branch of government … it’s not going to be Judge Alito.”

 A deeply immoral, chronic liar like Alito is the kind of judge that the radicalized, authoritarian Republican Party likes to put on the bench. That degenerated moral character reminds me a whole lot of the party’s current leader and essentially all of its elected politicians, major donors and hired professional liars known as “PR” firms. 

Yeah, it it was absurd to try to nail Alito for merely belonging to a club, sort of like belonging to a club like the Klu Klux Klan, the Communist Party, the American National Socialist Movement (racist Nazis), the Proud Boys, or these days, even the modern Republican Party. (Oops, was that last one over the top? 🥺)

If I recall right, another trip down history memory lane leads me to think that at one time, the US was antifa fighting against the Nazis and fascists somewhere. Maybe Europe and Japan I think. My goodness, how times have changed.

Qs: What about the rank and file who give power to morally rotted, anti-democracy politicians like this? What are they? Patriots? Complicit, whether they know or believe it or not?

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Off on an American extremism tangent: That stuff about Alito’s brand of lying, bigoted, extremist authoritarian politics got me to wondering, who are the radicals that represent this kind of mental moral rot? One can only hope they are still fringe groups. But with today’s modern radicalized, extremist GOP and elites like Alito and Thomas, maybe they are not so fringy any more. The following comes from something called the Counter Extremism Project. The CEP has a page for worldwide far-right extremist groups and another page for American White Supremacist groups.

The CEP comments on the American White Supremacist page: 

A February 2017 Southern Poverty Law Center report identified 100 active white nationalist and 99 active neo-Nazi groups in the country. In an October 2020 assessment by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf declared that white supremacist violent extremists “have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years.” In March 2021, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas declared domestic violent extremism “poses the most lethal and persistent terrorism-related threat to the homeland today.”  

The Counter Extremism Project (CEP) has identified multiple virulent white supremacist groups, which principally espouse white ethno-nationalism and/or National Socialism (neo-Nazi). Neo-Nazi groups, such as the National Socialist Movement (NSM), generally make no effort to hide their belief that the white race is superior to others. Their ideologies also usually include antisemitic and homophobic components that are in line with Nazi dogma.

I think Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas was wrong about the most lethal and persistent terrorism-related threat to the homeland today. I think that honor really should go to the radicalized modern Republican Party. Or, is that assessment unreasonable or over the top?

This fun-filled American club

is racist and pro-Nazi 

Alito might be at home here

Another fun racist American 

Nazi club

Alitolandia?

This one has some fascism going on in it 😊

The authoritarian racists at The Right Stuff, are self-righteous monsters  

who know they are right, while we are scum that needs to be put down like dogs

(Fortunately the juicy stuff at The Right Stuff is paywalled off

Thank goodness, I am not willing to contribute to that cause) 

In other radicalized Republican moral rot news, Nikki Haley was criticized for writing ‘Finish Them!’ on artillery shell in Israel -- Nikki Haley, the former Republican presidential candidate and U.N. ambassador, wrote “Finish Them!” on an artillery shell during a days-long trip to Israel

Well, now we know where Haley bravely stands on the Palestinian issue. It can be summarized in three words: Kill 'em all! Excellent foreign policy thinking. her experience at the UN shows.

Haley sends her love and respect

to the Israeli people

Something else goes to the Palestinians

Israeli public opinion update: Most Israelis rate military’s campaign in Gaza ‘about right’ or not enough -- A survey by Pew Research found only one in five Israelis said the military campaign in Gaza had gone too far. The survey found 39 percent of Israelis said that the country’s military response against Hamas in Gaza has been about right, and 34 percent said it has not gone far enough. 19 percent said they think it has gone too far.

Well, 73% public support for pulverizing Gaza and the people in it is a pretty good level of support. One does not see that in the US much any more, if ever. Maybe Israel has radicalized too!

Israeli pulverizing machines, 

a/k/a/ tanks

Heck, even the weather is getting on the American extremism wagon: The hail in Texas was so big Tuesday that it required a new description -- Forecasters warned of “DVD-size hail” as stones larger than grapefruits bombarded an area near Lubbock. 

A new record! 5" hail!

Ouch, ouch, OUCH!

Also in Texas: In a Texas G.O.P. at War With Itself, the Hard Right Is Gaining -- The speaker of the State House, Dade Phelan, survived a primary challenge from a Trump-backed activist, but many other Republican incumbents were ousted in bitter primary races.

Well the NYT, like most of the rest of the MSM, still cannot bring itself to call the Republican Party what is it, i.e., obviously anti-democratic and obviously authoritarian.

Supreme Court status update; Jurors get the case; Gaza update

Slate writes about a possible signal that the USSC is going to drop some heavy artillery shells on America by the end of this court term on June 30. In recent decades, the USSC has issued major decisions during the last few days of June so that the justices can get out of town and avoid criticism for the garbage the court often degrades the US with these days. Gutless radical authoritarian Republicans in particular are keen to avoid criticism. The like to think they their keep dignity unruffled by avoiding public protests from unwashed scum. 

How Republican justices see 

us rabble

In a Q&A interview, Slate speculates that we might be in for some very unpleasant decisions in coming days: 

The Supreme Court Is Going Off the Rails. 

It’s About to Get So Much Worse. 

Q: What makes this term different? 

A: It’s different in two ways that are going to sound like they’re inconsistent, although I think they’re coming from the same place. The first way is: The court’s actually doing less. We’re on track for maybe 58 or 59 merits decisions by the time we go home for the summer and go start crying again. Which will be the fifth term in a row that the court doesn’t get to 60 cases. And it hadn’t been below 60, before that, since 1864. And so there’s a whole universe of cases that has completely disappeared from the Supreme Court’s docket.

Yet a remarkably high percentage of what’s left are major cases. You’ve got these major administrative law cases, abortion cases, and social media cases. You’ve got two major gun cases. Oh, by the way, there are those two small Jan. 6 cases, including one about whether former President Trump can be criminally prosecuted. So depending on how you count, that’s about 20 major decisions that the court has to get through between now and the end of June. And they’re doing three or four a week right now.  

Q: What in the world of conceivable interventions could John Roberts, the institutionalist, take? 

A: Roberts the institutionalist is missing in action and has been for some time. The chief’s questions from the bench in some of these high-profile cases have been really trollish and hacky. In the Fisher case about the Jan. 6 prosecutions, he sounded like Thomas and Alito. In the homelessness case, he sounded so horribly cruel and insensitive. 

I worry that the “moderate” John Roberts who appeared intermittently from 2012 through maybe 2023 is gone. I feel like he’s just done trying to police his colleagues and he’s doing this YOLO court thing that we had previously assumed he was embarrassed by.

Strap on your seat belts folks. The ride ahead might get a bit bumpy.

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The jurors in DJT’s criminal fraudulent business records prosecution are getting instructions from the judge. Presumably the jury will start to deliberate today. Two points. One relates to the complexity of the law in this particular case. Trump is charged with falsifying records to cover up a second crime — the violation of a state election law that forbids a conspiracy to aid any election by “unlawful means.” This will probably be the hardest part for judge Merchan to explain to the jury. The outcome of this lawsuit turns on this point.

Second, despite endless pundit and partisan blowhard predictions there is no way to predict how or if the jury will decide. A single MAGA pro-Trumper can hang the jury and cause a mistrial, regardless of how solid the evidence is. In that case, the jury could not decide. Then if there is no MAGA juror, there is the matter of getting all 12 non-MAGA jurors to accept the legal basis for at least one of the alleged 34 felonies in this case for a conviction. I have no idea how this will turn out.

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The NYT is reporting that a senior Israeli official national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, said he expected Israel’s military operations in Gaza to continue through at least the end of the year. That ought to be long enough to pulverize most infrastructure there into dust. The people? That is an ugly question.

An Israeli pulverizer on the Gaza border

The NYT also reports:

The bombs used in the Israeli strike that killed dozens of Palestinians in a camp for displaced people near Rafah on Sunday were made in the United States, according to weapons experts and visual evidence reviewed by The New York Times.

Munition debris filmed at the strike location the next day was remnants from a GBU-39, a bomb designed and manufactured in the United States.

1:32 minute video: This little thing is feisty

American horror stories: The monster from the Ivy League on the Supreme Court

A 2005 article The Nation published was just brought to my attention. This is worth knowing about, if you are OK with horror stories. The Nation wrote:

Alito’s CAP Connection

Samuel Alito once boasted he was a member of Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which opposed and bemoaned the impact of co-education and affirmative action. What does this say about his character and the kind of place he would like America to be?

The Daily Princetonian published a story that merits attention from senators gearing up for the confirmation hearings of Samuel Alito, George W. Bush’s nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court.

In 1985 Princeton graduate and conservative Republican Alito sought to impress his colleagues in the Reagan Administration, where he was applying to become deputy assistant attorney general, by touting his membership in an organization called Concerned Alumni of Princeton.

Launched in 1972, the year Alito graduated, CAP had an innocuous-sounding name that disguised a less benign agenda, which included preventing women and minorities from entering an institution that had long been a bastion of white male privilege. In a 1973 article in Prospect, a magazine CAP published, Shelby Cullom Davis, one of its founders, harked back to the days when a gathering of Princeton alumni consisted of “a body of men, relatively homogeneous in interests and backgrounds.” Lamented Cullom Davis: “I cannot envisage a similar happening in the future with an undergraduate student population of approximately 40% women and minorities, such as the Administration has proposed.” Another article published that same year bemoaned the fact that “the makeup of the Princeton student body has changed drastically for the worse” in recent years–Princeton had begun admitting women in 1969–and wondered aloud what might happen if the university adopted a “sex-blind” policy “removing limits on the number of women.” In an unsuccessful effort to forestall this frightening development, the executive committee of CAP published a statement in December 1973 that affirmed unequivocally, “Concerned Alumni of Princeton opposes adoption of a sex-blind admission policy.”

By the time Alito was readying his 1985 job application with the Reagan Administration, the admission of women and minorities was well established at Nassau Hall, but this did not stop CAP from lamenting the consequences. “People nowadays just don’t seem to know their place,” fretted a 1983 Prospect essay titled “In Defense of Elitism.” “Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they’re black and hispanic, the physically handicapped are trying to gain equal representation in professional sports, and homosexuals are demanding that government vouchsafe them the right to bear children.” By this point the editor of Prospect was Dinesh D’Souza, who brought to its pages a new level of coarseness aimed at those who did not know their place. “Here at Princeton homosexuals are on the rampage,” complained a 1984 news item in Prospect–this after a gay student group had dared to protest being denied permission to hold a dance at a campus club. Another article poked fun at Sally Frank, a Princeton alumna who was suing the university for denying women access to all-male eating clubs. It noted that a Rhode Island woman who’d won a discrimination suit against a mining company had subsequently died in an on-the-job accident. “Sally Frank, take note,” it quipped.  

Some argue that Alito’s membership in the organization hardly proves he shared such views. “It would be outrageously inaccurate to say Sam was deeply involved in the group, and he certainly wasn’t in charge of choosing the articles,” T. Harding Jones, who edited Prospect during the 1970s, told me, adding that CAP’s main goals were strengthening the alumni’s voice and championing a more ideologically balanced curriculum. Diane Weeks begs to differ. Weeks graduated from Princeton three years after Alito did and went on to work with him as an assistant US Attorney in New Jersey. In an interview she took pains to stress that she considers Alito “a man of integrity” with a first-rate legal mind. But, she added, “when I saw CAP on that 1985 job application, I was flabbergasted. I was totally stunned. I couldn’t believe it.” CAP, she said, “made it clear to women like me that we were not wanted on campus. And he is touting his membership in this group in 1985, thirteen years after he graduated. He’s not a young man by this point, and I don’t buy for a second that he was doing it just to get a job. Membership in CAP gives a good sense of what someone’s personal beliefs are. I’m very troubled by this, and if I were on the Senate I would want some answers.”

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee might take the time to leaf through some of Prospect’s back issues and formulate questions for the candidate. Is the Princeton graduate slated to replace the first female Supreme Court Justice proud of his affiliation with an organization that attempted to prevent women and minorities from receiving the same education he did? If not, why did he flaunt his membership in it? What does this say about his character, and about the kind of place he would ultimately like America to be?

One can say that Alito did not share the view of CAP and its Prospect publication because he was just a member of CAP. On the other hand, people can accord no benefit of doubt to Alito, like Diane Weeks. Based on his public record alone, Alito arguably deserves no benefit of any doubt on anything that comes up in his defense. Alito gets distrust because he earned and deserves it.

Waddabout the Bushes (and Trump)?

The Bush family has a worse than terrible track record with their Supreme Court picks. Bush Sr. gave us Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Bush Jr. Gave us John Roberts and Sam Alito. What rotten choices. Being at least as bad as the Bushes, Trump gave us the hyper-radical Neil Gorsuch, the whacko Brett Beer Boofer Kavanaugh, the religious freak Amy Comey Barrett and Aileen Loose Cannon Cannon, whatever she is. All eight are/were radical right authoritarians. Radical right authoritarian is the kind of judge that represents the authoritarian aspirations and politics of the Republican Party.

The thug traitor, bigot and authoritarian Alito

showing his loyalty to Trump 

(oh sorry, his wife did it)

Authoritarian traitor credentials on the left, 

Christian theocrat credentials on the right,

democracy nowhere to be seen

About Perplexity and error correction; About the global warming hoax; GOP corruption & tyranny

A question I had for Perplexity was burning a hole in my brain. So I asked the question. Based on past personal experience, I got the answer I was expecting:

Q: When asked a question and Perplexity gives a wrong answer, but that answer is corrected with a follow up question based on solid evidence, does Perplexity learn from being corrected with correct information, or does Perplexity not remember and use the new information for answering the same question in the future?

A: Perplexity is an AI model, not a learning system. It does not have the capability to learn from corrections or update its knowledge based on new information provided during conversations.

Perplexity is a pre-trained language model designed to generate human-like text based on the data it was trained on. While it can provide coherent and contextual responses, it does not have a mechanism to incorporate new knowledge or learn from feedback dynamically.

When Perplexity generates an incorrect answer and is provided with the right information through follow-up questions or corrections, it does not retain or integrate that new knowledge into its existing model. Each response from Perplexity is generated based solely on its initial training data and the current conversational context.

However, without such retraining, Perplexity will continue to rely on its original training data and may provide the same incorrect answer if asked the same question again in the future. It does not have an inherent ability to remember or apply the corrected information provided during a single conversation.

I think I found a flaw in system. A fly in the ointment. A snake in the wood pile. A hitch in the operation. A hair in the soup. . . . . 

Well, at least Perplexity is honest. 🙃

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The NYT reports:

Climate Change Added a Month’s Worth of Extra-Hot Days in Past Year -- Since last May, the average person experienced 26 more days of abnormal warmth than they would have without global warming, a new analysis found. Hypothetically, had we not heated the globe to its current state, the number of unusually warm days would have been far fewer, the scientists estimated, using mathematical modeling of the global climate. The precise difference varies place to place. In some countries, it is just two or three weeks, the researchers found. In others, including Colombia, Indonesia and Rwanda, the difference is upward of 120 days.

The NYT also reports: Dead Monkeys Are Falling From Trees Amid Brutal Heat in Mexico -- The deaths of dozens of howler monkeys may be the latest sign of the danger extreme temperatures pose to wildlife around the world. Scientists investigating the deaths still don’t know exactly what caused them. But they hypothesize that warmer temperatures may have combined with a confluence of other factors — including fires, deforestation and logging — that have cornered the monkeys in smaller areas of forest with little shade, food or water. The scientists haven’t yet ruled out pathogens, but a recent necropsy on one of the monkeys showed no signs of influenza, including bird flu, or Covid-19, Dr. Pozo said.

And Newsweek reports: Map Shows Florida Cities Break Heat Records Amid Surging Temperatures -- Highs well into the 90s from Texas to South Carolina were reported throughout the weekend. According to the National Weather Service (NWS), record-high temperatures were felt in Central Florida as area residents celebrated Memorial Day. Melbourne experienced its second-warmest May temperature at 98 degrees, while the city of Fort Pierce tied its warmest day of the month at 98.

See, global warming is a hoax, just like the Republican Party and DJT say. /s

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From the Republican Party Corruption Files (not paywalled): Trump makes sweeping promises to donors on audacious fundraising tour -- By tying donation requests to pledges of tax cuts and other policies, Trump is testing the boundaries of federal campaign finance laws. When Donald Trump met some of the country’s top donors at a luxurious New York hotel earlier this month, he told the group that a businessman had recently offered $1 million to his presidential effort and wanted to have lunch. “I’m not having lunch,” Trump said he responded, according to donors who attended. “You’ve got to make it $25 million.” Another businessman, he said, had traditionally given $2 million to $3 million to Republicans. Instead, he said he told the donor that he wanted a $25 million or $50 million contribution or he would not be “very happy.”

Well, there it is ladies & germs. Bribery right out in the open. It is legal and fun. And the USSC would sanction it as just garden variety, constitutionally protected free speech. Yay Republican Citizens United and later Republican USSC decisions that have legalized and sanctioned large scale political corruption. Attaboys! Republicans really know how to do free speech! 

From the Republican Party Tyranny Files: 

Texas GOP Amendment Would Stop Democrats Winning Any State Election

The Republican Party of Texas has voted on a policy proposal that would require any candidate for statewide office to win in a majority of the state's 254 counties to secure election, effectively preventing Democrats from winning statewide positions based on the current distribution of their support.

Democratic voters in Texas are heavily disproportionately concentrated in a handful of major cities which only constitute a small number of counties, while Republicans dominate most of the more sparsely populated rural counties.

American plutocracy corrupting government; Public consequences of plutocracy; Weak Democrats

As we all know, American politics operates as a pay-to-play system. Playing means favorably influencing policy in return for the donor’s free speech in the form of cash contributions. The WaPo reports about the current wave of corruption of congress by the crypto industry:

As crypto cash floods Washington, 

Congress eyes gentler regulations

Major crypto firms are fighting to remake federal law with an expensive lobbying campaign that has left no part of American politics untouched

Cryptocurrency companies and investors have spent at least $149 million over the past four years to thwart tough regulation, elect new allies to Congress and defeat lawmakers seen as potential threats, a campaign that culminated this week with a House vote to soften federal oversight of the embattled industry.

The wide array of financial backers include Coinbase and Ripple, which the U.S. government recently sued for allegedly violating federal rules meant to protect investors from harm. Even as they have come under withering scrutiny, these and other major crypto firms have fought not only to rebuff the charges but to remake the laws entirely, mounting an expensive lobbying effort that has left no part of Washington untouched.

On Capitol Hill, the industry has shelled out more than $60 million to shape federal policy since the start of 2021, according to filings analyzed by The Washington Post and data from OpenSecrets and Public Citizen, two money-in-politics watchdogs. The lobbying campaign helped spur the House on Wednesday to advance the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, the first major piece of legislation on cryptocurrency to clear either chamber of Congress.

As usual for Washington, money always talks and everything else usually walks.

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The Hill reports about social effects arising from the only moral value, profit, that brass knuckles capitalism values and lives by: 

Water systems warn Americans could soon see major rate hikes to 

filter out toxic ‘forever chemicals’

In exchange for cleaner [less toxic] water, Americans around the nation may soon have to pay hefty prices.

Water systems are starting to warn residents of massive rate hikes as they prepare to install technology to filter out toxic chemicals in a family known as PFAS.

Utilities from South Florida to upstate New York have warned customers that they could see significant price increases after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandated that they remove the substances, which have been linked to a number of cancers and other diseases, from their systems.

Last month, the EPA said it will require utilities whose water systems contain high levels of six types of PFAS to remove them from the water.

PFAS, which stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a group of thousands of chemicals that have been used to make a variety of nonstick and waterproof products and firefighting foam.

The substances have also become ubiquitous in the environment, due in part to the fact that they tend to persist for a long time instead of breaking down.

Exposure to these so-called forever chemicals has been linked to increased risks of prostate, kidney and testicular cancers, weakened immune systems, high cholesterol, and developmental issues in children.

Now, for the first time, utilities around the nation will be required to get them out of their drinking water to prevent customers’ exposure. But that will come at a price.

Last month, officials with Broward County, a populous South Florida locale, warned residents that those on county water could see “double or triple water rates for users.”

Obviously, not all businesses are brass knuckles capitalist. But nearly all the big ones are and most of the medium sized ones are. The profit moral value can be described pretty accurately like this:

Make as much profit as possible as fast as possible, privatize it, and trickle it up to elite wealthy investors and owners, while limiting risk, accountability and cost by denying and socializing social, human and environmental damage and harms.

 

In the unregulated capitalist US, PFAS were found to be useful and immediately put on the market to sell for profit. Adverse human and environmental effects were either not researched, or they were found but denied and/or hidden from public knowledge. 

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Politico reports about the abject weakness in Biden and the balance of power in the Democratic Party:

Biden has no plan to touch the Alito controversy, 

even with a 10-foot pole

The president and his team have decided not to engage on a story that progressives say demands their engagement

Top Democrats have no plans to investigate reports that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito flew an upside-down American flag outside his home after the 2020 election. And Joe Biden has no desire to even talk about it.

Amid growing demands from the base of the party to call out the actions of several conservative justices and embrace reforms of the court, both the president and the White House have stayed mum.

Biden has publicly warned that Republicans are undermining democratic norms and threatening its institutions. But he is reluctant to extend that argument to the judicial branch, aides say, fearful it could be cast as politically motivated and undermine his broader effort to portray himself as a champion for strengthening democratic institutions. They believe it’s crucial to maintain a clear contrast with Donald Trump, who has readily attacked an independent judiciary for political gain.

That exemplifies why I see Biden and his brand of Democratic Party politics as center right, politically weak. In my opinion, those people are not seriously committed to defending democracy or civil liberties such as voting rights and abortion rights. If a Democratic Party USSC justice did what Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas have done, the authoritarian radical right Republican Party would be screaming bloody murder in self-righteous moral outrage. But when Republicans are corrupt and hyper-partisan like all six of the Republican rotters on the bench are now, there is not a squeak of protest from high level center-right politicians like Biden. 

In my opinion, if Trump wins in November and we lose our democracy, liberties and rule of law, it will be because corrupt, center right Democrats in power were unwilling to even try to mount an effective defense. In their minds they are valiant defenders of democracy, liberty and the law. In my mind, they are weak, wussified and self-deluded or naive at best, but sympathetic to corruption and authoritarianism at worst.