FFRF wins Texas lawsuit; Infowars update

The FFRF (Freedom From Religion Foundation), was finally paid for a lawsuit it filed in 2016 against the state of Texas for taking down a state approved secular nativity scene in the state capitol. The FFRF won the case in 2017 and a final appeal by Texas in 2023:

Gov. Abbott and Texas pay $358,000 in 

attorneys fees in FFRF’s Bill of Rights case

The 8-year legal saga over censorship by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott of a Bill of Rights display has finally ended with receipt of attorneys’ fees by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Although FFRF won the lawsuit with a judgment by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals last year, disputes and delaying tactics by the governor held up the required attorney fees and costs totaling $358,073.67, which were received this week. Of that, $184,727.11 reimburses FFRF for staff attorney time.

The exhibit, designed by artist Jake Fortin, commemorates the “birth” of the Bill of Rights (adopted on Dec. 15, 1791), depicting Founding Fathers and the Statue of Liberty gazing adoringly at a manger containing the historic document. A sign by the display also celebrated the Winter Solstice. FFRF placed the display to counter a Christian nativity scene placed in the Capitol in 2014 and 2015.

Indecent, mocking and 

“contributing to public immorality”

The lawsuit began in February 2016, after Abbott ordered removal of FFRF’s duly-approved and permitted Bill of Rights “nativity” display from the Texas state Capitol. Abbott ordered the display removed only three days after it was put up on Dec. 18, 2015, lambasting it as indecent, mocking and “contributing to public immorality.”

Largely due to Abbott’s refusal to accept the ruling of the court in FFRF’s favor, the case pingponged before the federal courts and the appeals court, which ruled on it twice. The state later closed the public forum altogether.

On January 27, 2023 the 5th Circuit unanimously ruled in FFRF’s favor. FFRF is pleased that the court warned the state that closing its forum in the Texas Capitol does not mean the state has free rein to discriminate when displaying exhibits in the future.

This is the Republican Party's idea of free speech and equal protection. In their minds, Christianity is fine and most everything else is indecent, mocking and contributes to public immorality.

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FAIR reports about how America's radical right authoritarian wealth and power movement has quietly infiltrated and subverted local news coverage:

How Sinclair Sneaks Right-Wing Spin 

Into Millions of Households

With the presidential contest in full swing, the Sinclair Broadcast Group appears to be ramping up its right-wing propaganda again.

While millions of Americans are subjected to the TV network’s electioneering, few know it. That’s because, like a chameleon, Sinclair blends into the woodwork.

 

Turn on your local news and you may well be watching a Sinclair station, even though it appears on your screen under the imprimatur of a major network like CBS, NBC or Fox.

While trust in the media has cratered in recent years, there’s a notable exception. “Seventy-six percent of Americans say that they still trust their local news stations—more than the percentage professing to trust their family or friends,” the New Yorker (10/15/18) reported.

Smartly, Sinclair leaves its affiliates alone long enough for them to develop a rapport with their audience. “In a way, the fact that it looks normal most of the time is part of the problem,” said Margaret Sullivan (CJR, 4/11/18), former public editor of the New York Times. “What Sinclair is cynically doing is trading on the trust that develops among local news people and their local audience.”

By hijacking this trusting relationship, Sinclair is able to sneak its propaganda into millions of American homes, including in presidential swing states where Sinclair owns more stations than any other network.

Sinclair does this by requiring its affiliates to air the right-wing stories it sends them. Because these segments are introduced or delivered by trusted local hosts, they gain credibility.

Mostly Sinclair’s sleight of hand goes undetected. But in 2018, the network pushed its luck by requiring anchors at stations across the country to read from the same Trump-like anti-media script. A video compilation of dozens if not hundreds of Sinclair anchors voicing the same “Orwellian” commentary went viral.

Of the 294 TV stations that Sinclair owns or operates, at least 70 of them air Sinclair’s in-house national evening news broadcast. For a year and a half, this broadcast was anchored by Eugene Ramirez, but he resigned in January, and it’s not hard to see why.

Each night Ramirez was given a list of four stories produced out of Sinclair’s Maryland’s headquarters. From these, Ramirez had to select at least three to air. Often these stories were little more than writeups of press releases from right-wing politicians and groups, as Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby report at Popular Information (7/23/24). One recent headline read, “Trump PAC Launches New Ad Hitting Democrats on Border: ‘Joe Biden Does Nothing.’”

Sinclair frequently booked far-right guests to appear on Ramirez’s broadcast, and he was “instructed not to interrupt them,” according to Popular Information. “Many of Sinclair‘s affiliates were not in big cities,” Ramirez was told, “and the content of the broadcast had to reflect the sensitivities of those viewers.” Progressive guests rarely if ever appeared.

Q: Which came mostly first, (i) viewer's sensitivities, (ii) radical right sensitivity-fomenting right wing propaganda, including radicalizing Sinclair propaganda, or (iii) is it about a tie?[1]

Footnote:

1. From the Journal of Social and Political Psychology (2013):

The Role of the Media in the Construction 

of Public Belief and Social Change

Abstract: The media play a central role in informing the public about what happens in the world, particularly in those areas in which audiences do not possess direct knowledge or experience. This article examines the impact the media has in the construction of public belief and attitudes and its relationship to social change. .... Findings across these areas show the way in which the media shape public debate in terms of setting agendas and focusing public interest on particular subjects. For example, in our work on disability we showed the relationship between negative media coverage of people on disability benefit and a hardening of attitudes towards them. Further, we found that the media also severely limit the information with which audiences understand these issues and that alternative solutions to political problems are effectively removed from public debate. .... In our study of news reporting of climate change, we traced the way that the media have constructed uncertainty around the issue and how this has led to disengagement in relation to possible changes in personal behaviors. ....

2016 all over again...

I think this excerpt speaks for itself:

Well done, Lawrence.  I especially relate to the 12:53-12:55 mark, where he slams down the papers.   My feelings exactly.

(by PrimalSoup)

Lewis Powell and the great American illusion machine

In a long, detailed article, Slate reports about racist letters and memos that former supreme court justice Lewis Powell (1907-1998) wrote:

There’s a New Lewis Powell Memo, and It’s Wildly Racist

Now never-before-seen letters and memos show that behind the scenes at the court, Justice Lewis Powell, an influential jurist with an undeserved reputation for decency and moderation, used wildly racist code words on the court’s letterhead as he strenuously—and successfully—drove a decision in City of Mobile v. Bolden four years later that would overturn the lower court and reinstate a system that reliably produced all-white rule.

Should his side not prevail, and should districts replace at-large systems nationwide, Powell warned Justice Potter Stewart in a barely coded racist letter from Feb. 28, 1980, “our cities could become jungles.”

It is startling, even horrifying, to turn the pages of an archival folder in a beautiful Yale research library and come across such incendiary and racist language on official Supreme Court letterhead and dated during one’s own lifetime. What’s perhaps more horrifying is that Powell’s thinking in the Mobile case shaped a young John Roberts, who would years later become the chief justice of the United States and defined the early chapters of Roberts’ lifelong efforts to unravel voting rights from the bench.

When Powell died in 1998, the New York Times memorialized the distinguished jurist as a “balancer and compromiser,” a “political moderate” who disdained “heated rhetoric and doctrinal rigidity.” Time magazine mourned the loss of someone it had praised as the “marble palace’s Southern gentleman,” and the Los Angeles Times praised the “middle-road course” of this “uncommonly sweet, gentle and courteous man,” who, it suggested, served the nation only from a sense of civic patriotism. They all got Powell dangerously wrong.

None of these obituaries mentioned the Powell memo, his manifesto for the Chamber of Commerce that exhorted big business into the culture wars and the battle to capture the judiciary, long viewed on the left as the right’s road map for spreading free-market fundamentalism into the courts. “Political power is necessary,” Powell insisted, in a memo that inspired the Koch brothers and the right-wing foundations that helped build the Heritage Foundation and new intellectual infrastructure on the right. “It must be used aggressively and with determination.” They also skipped over his many speeches during the 1960s denouncing and mocking Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (“a prophet of civil disobedience”) and his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (“heresy,” an invitation to “totalitarian rule.”)

The appreciations also airbrushed a lifetime of more genteel racism. Powell had been a pillar of Richmond society, educated in all-white schools, a member of its all-white social clubs and churches, and the founding partner of a law firm that would not hire Black attorneys. His biographer, John C. Jeffries Jr., notes that he “never met a Black as an equal.” Racial segregation remained so commonplace in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, into the 1960s that Powell later conceded, “It never occurred to me to question it.” When the U.S. Supreme Court desegregated the nation’s schools in Brown v. Board of Education and called for integration “with all deliberate speed,” Powell, then the chairman of the Richmond school board, described his reaction as “shock.” In letters to colleagues and friends, he maintained that “the school decisions were wrongly decided,” misguided not only as a matter of law but as social policy as well.  

Alabama established its at-large elections in 1911, not long after the state adopted its new 1901 constitution with the stated goal to “establish white supremacy in this State … by law—not by force or fraud.” The new setup worked beautifully—so much so that some residents, let alone jurists like Lewis Powell, forgot the original intent of at-large elections altogether; it faded into the past, another taken-for-granted feature of a bitterly unjust social order, rooted in the nation’s original sin. Yet if time clouded anyone’s memory of how white supremacy took deep structural root in the city’s modern life, a visit to the public library would clarify things. There you’d find a written confession from Frederick Bromberg, a state senator who in a 1909 letter to the editor made it clear that the purpose of at-large elections had always been to eradicate the possibility of Black voting power. “We have always, as you know, falsely pretended that our main purpose was to exclude the ignorant vote when, in fact, we were trying to exclude not the ignorant vote, but the Negro vote,” he wrote.[1]

In the 1950s, Powell would slow-walk the Thurgood Marshall–won Brown decision. A quarter century later, he’d battle Marshall on the bench. Powell quite strategically shifted the question in the Mobile case. Instead of a totality of evidence, Powell and Stewart would ask whether historic racism and systemic inequality played a part in creating Mobile’s all-white power structure. Did Mobile mean to keep Black residents out of power? Or did it simply work out that way, even once Black people had the same opportunity to vote as whites? The answer appeared undeniable, unless one closed their eyes, blinded by the rhetoric of color blindness.

Once again, the mainstream media is America's great illusion machine. In this case, it grossly mischaracterized a powerful person with toxic politics. 

Footnotes:

1. A 1907 letter from Alabama state senator Frederick Bromberg to Alabama governor Braxton B. Comer:

Highlighted text: We have always, as you know, falsely pretended that our main purpose was to exclude the ignorant vote when, in fact, we were trying to exclude, not the ignorant vote; but the negro vote.

One has to wonder how much racist sentiment there still is in American society and the authoritarian Republican Party in particular. Powell influenced chief justice John Roberts into opposing elections. There are increasing warnings that the corrupt dictator DJT and his authoritarian Republican Party are currently engaged in lawsuits to discredit the 2024 primary and general elections. Roberts has been openly hostile to voting rights in his decisions.[2] When that is coupled with the sources of racism and anti-democratic sentiment from Powell to Roberts, there is a deadly serious attack on democracy and 2024 elections underway already.

2. Some evidence of Roberts' hostility to voting rights:

 Shelby County v. Holder (2013): This decision was authored by Roberts. It invalidated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which required certain jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing voting laws. This ruling effectively weakened federal oversight and has been criticized for enabling voter suppression tactics. Since them racial gerrymandering has expanded in red states, especially in the South.

Long-standing Skepticism: Roberts's skepticism towards expansive federal voting rights protections dates back to his early career. In the 1980s, he opposed strengthening the Voting Rights Act, viewing it as constitutionally suspect. So Roberts sees voting rights as suspect. 

Recent Decision: Roberts occasionally took an unexpected position on voting rights. But given his track record, that can be seen as a cynical misdirection from his long-term goal of weakening voter power in elections. In a recent 2023 decision involving Alabama's congressional districting (Allen v. Milligan), Roberts sided with liberal justices to uphold a key part of the Voting Rights Act, ensuring that district maps do not dilute the voting power of Black citizens. This decision was unexpected given his previous rulings. One source commented, the Chief justice’s opinion shocked observers of his 40-year assault on the Voting Rights Act, but it may not mean a change of heart. (as far as I know, Alabama is still resisting compliance with this court ruling, indicating significant racism sentiment there) 

Bizarre billionaire behavior; Impending election wars -- another warning;

We all recall Elon merrily telling Disney CEO Bob Iger to not advertise on X and go f**k yourself for pulling Disney ads from the toxic X media platform:

The video without the bleeps for the bad word

In a court filing dated yesterday, Elon is suing advertisers for not advertising on X. The lawsuit is framed as an antitrust case. Some advertisers do not want to advertise on X because the reputation of their products can get smeared by appearing on posts by actual Nazis, raging racists, crackpot conspiracy theorists and other assorted creeps, freaks, sleazebags, etc.

Musk states his grievance like this at pages 1-2 of his court filing: 

2. Acting with and through a World Federation of Advertisers (“WFA”) initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (“GARM”), the Defendants conspired, along with dozens of non-defendant co-conspirators, to collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue from Twitter, Inc. (“Twitter,” now X Corp.). Concerned that Twitter might deviate from certain brand safety standards for advertising on social media platforms set through GARM, the conspirators collectively acted to enforce Twitter’s adherence to those standards through the boycott.

3. As a condition of GARM membership, GARM’s members agree to adopt, implement, and enforce GARM’s brand safety standards, including by withholding advertising from social media platforms deemed by GARM to be non-compliant with the brand safety standards. When Elon Musk and other investors acquired Twitter in November 2022, GARM members reached out to GARM to learn “[GARM’s] perspectives about the Twitter situation and a possible boycott from many companies[,]” and GARM conveyed to its members its concerns about Twitter’s compliance with GARM’s standards, triggering the massive advertiser boycott that followed.

So on the one hand, Musk tells advertisers who want to protect their name brands to not advertise on X and go eff themselves, but on the other, he now sues them for not advertising on X. Musk filed his lawsuit in the radical, pro-Trump 5th Circuit to get a crackpot Trump judge on the case. 

5th Circuit = TX, LA, MS

Maybe all that Musk has to do is donate enough to DJT and he will get his judge to decide against the absent advertisers. Otherwise, this lawsuit makes no sense to me. However, I no longer understand anything about the law in Trumplandia.

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Rachael Maddow did another segment on the radical right authoritarian Republican Party intention to contest election results nationwide in Nov. 2024:

The plan has two goals. First, subvert election results where a Republican and if DJT loses. Second, normalize election subversion to undermine trust in democracy and elections. Salon also commented about the authoritarian Republican Party election subversion plan:

GOP plans to win this election — in court, if not at the ballot box

Republicans learned from their 2020 mistakes — and have good reason to believe the Supreme Court is on their side

The fact that Republicans greeted Harris’ entry into the race with the threat of litigation provides a sobering reminder that the GOP has little intention of conceding an electoral loss on Nov. 5. That’s simply when a second contest will begin — one aimed not at swing-state voters but a battalion of right-wing Federalist Society-approved judges installed on federal courts and the deeply conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Look closely and that second battle is already underway. While the usual rituals of an election play out nationwide — rallies, TV ads, conventions, sofa memes — a shadow fight is already unfolding in battleground-state courts. They include lawsuits in Michigan, Arizona and Nevada that seek to knock voters off the rolls in the weeks before the election, as well as litigation in Nevada and elsewhere hoping to void absentee ballots received after Election Day.

These lawsuits rely heavily on unsubstantiated Republican fantasies about dead people and non-citizens casting ballots. Even if these cases go nowhere, they could redound to the GOP’s benefit simply because they seed the groundwork for claims that the election has been stolen and cast doubt among the party’s base about the process and the legitimacy of the results.

About the growing alliance of autocracies

A WaPo opinion essay discusses an alliance that is taking shape among the various flavors of global tyranny: 

An alliance of autocracies is deepening. 

One city plays a central role.

It is making a mockery of Western sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea

In recent years, dictators in China, Iran, Russia and North Korea have strengthened trade and security ties, formalized cooperation and alliances, and worked together to expand their power from Ukraine to Taiwan.

One city plays a central role in this deepening alliance of autocracies: Hong Kong.
Once a trusted global financial center aligned with Western democracies and governed by the rule of law, our new report with the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation details how Hong Kong has become the world’s leader in such practices as importing and re-exporting banned Western technology to Russia, forming untraceable front companies for the purchase and sale of barred Iranian oil, and managing “ghost ships” that illegally trade natural resources with North Korea.

Hong Kong’s business-friendly policies, which make it easy to conceal corporate ownership and quickly create and dissolve companies, allow illicit actors to make a mockery of U.S. and Western sanctions. At the same time, slow and inconsistent enforcement by Western governments has allowed those actors to continue their operations with relative impunity. The United States can and should address this situation without delay.

Customs data collected by the global security nonprofit C4ADS shows that eight months after Russia invaded Ukraine, shipments of technology categorized by the United States and European Union as the highest priority to Russia for its war effort, such as advanced semiconductors and communications equipment, had nearly doubled from prewar levels. They included products from U.S. companies such as Intel, Analog Devices, Apple and Texas Instruments — despite efforts by the U.S. government to stop sales of sensitive goods by U.S. companies to Russia. By the end of 2023, nearly 40 percent of the cargo shipped from Hong Kong to Russia was made up of these “Common High Priority Items.”

Hong Kong’s destabilizing behavior is not limited to Russia. Leaked emails we analyzed from the Iranian petrochemical company Sahara Thunder revealed relationships with Hong Kong companies that sought to facilitate ship-to-ship transfers of Iranian oil, which would then be taken to foreign ports where its Iranian origin could be masked. Other Hong Kong companies have supplied the Western parts that Iran needs to produce drones — which have increasingly appeared on battlegrounds in Ukraine, Yemen and elsewhere.

The United States should also designate Hong Kong a “primary money laundering concern,” a tool that would, for example, permit the Treasury Department to require U.S. financial institutions to disclose the beneficiaries of accounts opened by Hong Kong individuals. Finally, the process of investigating and sanctioning evaders must be completed much faster; the Treasury, Commerce, and State departments must receive all the resources they need to do the job.

Hong Kong is undermining the world’s security, stability and liberty. The United States and its allies need to curb the city’s behavior before sanctions become ingrained as little more than symbolic gestures.

The world's tyrants seem to be getting their anti-democracy act together. Are the democracies getting their anti-tyranny act together? Definitely not if DJT gets re-elected -- he's on the American pro-tyranny side with its Project 2025 plan to install tyranny here.

Ranking of polls

If anyone is interested, r/538 published a ranking of polls at this link.