Poll data on Gaza ceasefire

Some poll data indicates that most Americans want a push for a ceasefire in Gaza. Zeto recently reported:

New Poll Suggests Gaza Ceasefire and 

Arms Embargo Would Help Dems with Swing State Voters

The YouGov/IMEU Policy Project poll found over a third of voters in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia are more likely to vote for a Democratic nominee who pledges to withhold weapons to Israel

A significant share of Democrats and independent voters in pivotal swing states Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona are more likely to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee (presumptively Kamala Harris) if said nominee pledges support for an arms embargo to Israel, and if President Joe Biden secures a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. The findings come in new polling commissioned by the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding Policy Project and conducted by polling firm YouGov.

In Pennsylvania, 34% of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withhold weapons to Israel, compared to 7% who said they would be less likely. The rest said it would make no difference. In Arizona, 35% said they’d be more likely, while 5% would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39% said they’d be more likely, also compared to 5% who would be less likely. 

Similar results were found when respondents were asked separately if they were more or less likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if Biden called for an end to US.-funded weapons to Israel or if the US president secured a ceasefire.

The results were particularly stark when looking at responses by those who voted for Biden in 2020 and are currently undecided. In Pennsylvania, 57% of such voters said they’d be more likely to support the Democratic nominee if they pledged to withhold additional weapons to Israel for committing human rights abuses; in Arizona, 44% said the same; in Georgia, 34% said so.

YouGov has been ranked 3rd out of several hundred polling organizations.

Responsible Statecraft reported this last December: 

Roughly three in four Democrats support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, according to a new poll from Data for Progress [poll ranking 24th] that highlights the sharp divide between the Democratic Party and its supporters as Israel resumes its ground campaign in the war-torn strip. A total of 61% of Americans polled said they were in favor of a ceasefire.

While the Biden administration has signaled that it is concerned about the level of civilian casualties in Gaza, the White House maintains that any sustained pause in fighting would embolden Hamas and enable future attacks against Israel.

The administration’s hard-line position stands in contrast to the growing support for a ceasefire in the House, where roughly half of the Democratic caucus has called for an end to the war. Biden’s policy has, however, earned a better reception in the Senate, with only two Democrats saying they back a ceasefire.

The poll, which surveyed roughly 1,200 likely voters between Nov. 22 and 25, also found that a plurality (49%) of Republican voters support a ceasefire, though that number dropped by more than 10 points when respondents were told that such a move would “keep Hamas in power and allow them to prepare another attack against Israel.”  

Voters also overwhelmingly support the idea that weapons sales to Israel should be conditioned on human rights, according to the survey. That trend is particularly strong among Democrats, 76% of whom say Tel Aviv should only receive weapons if it uses them in accordance with “our standards for human rights.”

Truthout commented on the YouGov poll mentioned above: Support for an end to the arms transfers to Israel is strongest among those who are undecided in the presidential race.

A Gallup poll from last March (poll ranking 35th) reported this data:

Apparently, being informed changes opinions

If the collective poll data is correct, a call by Harris for at least a ceasefire probably would help her more than it hurt. However, doing that would probably anger many pro-Israel people and groups in the US. AIPAC might throw its considerable cash and influence in support of DJT, who favors obliteration of the Palestinian people. If the election is close, that factor alone might be sufficient to tip the race in favor of DJT. 

It would be beyond ironic if the US lost its democracy to authoritarianism due in a small but necessary part to continuing US support for Israel's war in Gaza. We live in times that are very dangerous for democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. Unreasonably and irrationally dangerous.

New Israeli human rights group report on systematic torture in Israel

 B'Tselem, the well known Israeli human rights organization, issued a disturbing report called "Welcome to Hell," last week. On its website (where the full report can be seen or downloaded) the human rights group describes its report thus:

Welcome to Hell is a report on the abuse and inhuman treatment of  Palestinians held in custody since 7, October 2023. B'Tselem collected  testimonies from 55 Palestinians held during that time and released, almost all with no charges. Their testimonies reveal the outcomes of the rushed transformation of more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities, military and civilian, into a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates as a matter of policy. Facilities in which every inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering operate as de-facto torture camps.

Democracy Now and CNN have both covered the report. Below is a 25 min. clip from Democracy Now that discusses the horrifying report, along with recent UN condemnations of Israeli torture of Palestinians, and reporting on Israel's TV channel 12 which aired shocking footage of soldiers sexually assaulting a prisoner at Sde Teiman base, where 1000s of detainees from Gaza are held, and tortured (as revealed in previous reporting covered on this blog).

Earlier this month, video emerged  of a gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner by guards at the Sde Teiman detention facility in the Negev desert, southern Israel.

The video, which was widely reported,  shows the prisoner being selected from a larger group lying bound on the floor. The victim is then escorted to a wall, where guards, using their shields to hide their identity from the camera, proceed to rape him. When 9 guards were held for questioning by the IDF (a rare event indeed), some far right ultra-nationalist politicians, like Security Minister Ben-Gvir (who perversely oversees the Israeli prison system) and many Israeli youths who share his views, condemned the decision to arrest the suspects, arguing that "anything is permissible, even rape, for the security of the state." He went on to say, "It is shameful to arrest our best heroes." 

Another far right minister, Finance Minister Smotrich, demanded “an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them.” The rape and torture is legitimate against anyone deemed "Hamas" a label used even for 100s of randomly seized detainees from Gaza who have been rounded up, tortured and later released without charges. 

Disturbingly, when asked by an Arab MP in Israel's Knesset whether "it is legitimate to insert a stick into a person's rectum," Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, responded: “If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!” (source: CBS News Reports). 

Responding to warnings of overcrowding within the prison system from the security agency Shin Bet in early July, Ben-Gvir repeated his call for Palestinian prisoners to be executed, tweeting that one of his principal goals since attaining office had been to “worsen the conditions of the terrorists in the prisons, and to reduce their rights to the minimum required by law”.

He said: “Everything published about the abominable conditions” of the Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons “was true”.

So here we are, once again sending weapons to what has clearly become a fascist state, replete with eliminationist ideology, concentration camps, systematic torture, the now completed destruction of Gaza. This is our "closest ally!? " 

The Times of Israel reported that  Blinken (note: not Biden) has just approved $20 billion sale of weapons to Israel, including F-15s-- right on the heels of the revelations discussed here, which place Israel well outside of the category of ethical and  law-abiding Liberal Democracies of the world.  Biden doesn't make a sound about it. Blinken seems to be making decisions, while Biden is disturbingly AWOL. State Dept. mouthpieces only say, "Israel will investigate these allegations of violations of international law" as if they are reliable and transparent. Kamala Harris has studiously avoided the topic, as she tries to appease concerned progressives without actually saying anything about US policy in the face of these tragic developments. Of course, the problem will not go away as protestors prepare to make their voices known to the Biden Administration, including Harris at the upcoming convention.  Campus protests are sure to restart in a few weeks, and it will be important to see how Harris responds. She has promised to listen with respect. I hope so. Of course, Trump too avoids discussing his plans should he win. But at the moment Trump has no power to stop sending weapons even if he wanted to (and he does not). This is happening in real-time. This administration has responsibility for its own policies in the ongoing present. The buck stops there. It is not only a potential pitfall for the Dems, but a moral stain on this nation. We have enabled all of this for the better part of a year, and do not even know who is in charge anymore. 

It is in the context of all the above, that the following report on the Human Rights report and related revelations of torture, which is being defended by wide swathes of Israeli society and ignored by others, is of particular relevance.

Recommended related readings:  

>>"As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel: This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far-right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history – and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree "  by Omer Bartov at The Guardian here.

>> Haaretz' Gideon Levy: "Welcome to Hell: B'Tselem's Ignored Abuse Report Shows Israel's True Face" The short article can be read at Haaretz here.

Because the article may be behind a paywall, I will past just a few paragraphs from it below: 

 The B'Tselem report published this week, "Welcome to Hell," isn't only a report about what's happening in Israel's prison facilities; it's a report about Israel. Anyone who wants to know what Israel is should read this report before any other document about Israeli democracy.

Anyone who wants to become familiar with the spirit of the times in Israel should note how most of the media outlets ignored the report, which should have caused outrage and shock in Israel. Even the documentation of the gang rape reported this week by Guy Peleg on Channel 12 News didn't show only the Sde Teiman detention facility. It showed the face of the country.

If a report like that of B'Tselem was almost totally ignored here, and if even after the evidence shown by Peleg the debate as to whether it's permitted to detain the despicable soldiers presented in it continues – on the Channel 12 morning program there was a discussion of who's in favor of rape [of alleged terrorists] and who's opposed – then Peleg's documentation is documentation of the face of Israel 2024, its spirit and its likeness.

Unfortunately, even Peleg continued to call the victim of the barbaric rape a "terrorist" (after all, he does work for Channel 12 News), although a moment earlier he revealed that the rape victim wasn't a member of Hamas or a company commander – he was an ordinary policeman in the anti-drug unit in Jabalya. He was also pulled out from among dozens of detainees who were lying handcuffed on the floor, perhaps at random because he was the last one in the row. No violence and no riots, as the suspects' disingenuous lawyers tried to claim....

When you read the 94 pages of the B'Tselem report, which causes you to lose sleep, you understand that it wasn't an exceptional incident, it's the routine of torture, which has become a policy. As opposed to the torture by the Shin Bet, which presumably had a security-minded purpose – to extract information – here it's solely to satisfy the darkest and sickest sadistic urges. Look how calmly the soldiers approach to carry out their malevolent intention. There are dozens of other soldiers too, who saw and knew and remained silent. Apparently they also participated in similar orgies, based on the dozens of testimonies cited in the B'Tselem report. That's the routine.

The indifference to all these things defines Israel. The public legitimization defines Israel. In the Guantanamo Bay detention camp that was opened by the United States after the 9/11 attacks, nine prisoners were killed in 20 years; here it's 60 detainees in 10 months. Need anything more be said?

 

As it is OUR tax money that is paying for these obscenities, what, if anything do you-- readers-- think we, as ordinary citizens should do? Nothing? Sign petitions? Protest? Shrug our shoulders in saddened resignation? Nothing? Who bears responsibility if not the country paying for all of this insanity? Who does the government here represent in theory if not the citizens? Is this country actually  a democracy if such representation does not exist even in a case like this where the vast majority of condemn Israel's behavior and want to see immediate and permanent ceasefire and humanitarian aid? Most Democrats believe Israel has committed genocide, and yet the Dems in charge in Washington ignore their voters and send more weapons (yet again) on the heels of reporting the likes of which we haven't seen in Western nation-states since WW2. The Israelis are not even denying it any more, as documented in this blogpost and the video and articles it features. How can we sit passively by in the face of this scandalous abuse of power by our top politicians? Do they act in your name?

Psychological incivility research update: Incivility is bad for rationality

A 55 minute segment of the Hidden Brain program that NPR broadcasts weekly focuses on social science related to incivility. Rudeness is toxic to the human mind. The effects are subtle but surprisingly powerful and often lingering. The interviewer is Shankar Vedantam and he speaks with researcher Christine Porath.

One part of the transcript, starting at 16:04:

Shankar Vedantam: I want to examine both the immediate effects of incivility on the mind, as well as some of these long-term effects that you're talking about. You say that instability can hijack the amygdala. What do you mean by this, Christine?

Christine Porath: Well, I think it means that we're flooded with emotions and that's when kind of this idea of fight or flight gear kicks in. And it leads to us, for many people, being paralyzed almost in terms of not being able to respond to things, or not being able to react or make changes that would help us in that moment. It's almost as if we can't cope with the situation because we're struggling to process things. And so one way that I think about this is like the storm inside your brain.

Shankar Vedantam: Christina has conducted many studies into the effects of incivility, one of them builds on a famous psychological experiment. Volunteers are asked to watch a video of people rapidly passing a basketball. Right in the middle of the game, a person wearing a gorilla suit walks through the middle of the frame. Many volunteers fail to notice the gorilla because they're so focused on the ball being passed.

Shankar Vedantam: In Christine's experiment, she exposed a subset of volunteers to incivility before they watched the video.

Christine Porath: They were five times less likely to see the gorilla on the screen and that really surprised us but also with other studies, what we found is that it took people a lot longer to answer questions, to solve anagrams, word jumbles, to create words. They had much more difficulty doing that kind of thing, so cognitive performance went down significantly, roughly about 30% across different studies. And even their physical moves to answer questions, that was slower. It seemed to be affecting people in all sorts of ways and what's interesting also is that people weren't aware of this.

Shankar Vedantam: There's been some work that you and others have done looking at the effects of incivility on memory. What do you find?

Christine Porath: We find that when people witness rudeness, they are far less likely to be able to remember things. They make a lot more errors. We measured this with math errors. We measured this with performance errors on cognitive tests and the differences were really stunning with just seeing this or being around it.

Shankar Vedantam: Hmm. You've even found that incivility has effects on our creativity, which I found really surprising. What do you find, Christine?

Christine Porath: Yeah. We find again, whether you experience incivility, whether you witness it, it decreases your ability to come up with creative ideas. In some of the tests, we give them this study where they come up with as many ideas for what to do with a brick as possible, and we code it for dysfunctional ideas as well as how creative the ideas are. What we find is the people that were exposed to rudeness, they come up with really dysfunctional responses for what you do with a brick. They'll say things like, "break someone's nose," "smash someone's fingers," "beat or crush a person to death," "sink a body in a river," "throw it through a window," "place it on the floor to stub people's toe," or something like that.

Shankar Vedantam: It almost seems as if people are coming up with creative uses for the brick that are somewhat aggressive.

Christine Porath: Yeah, scary aggressive. It was just stunning to see the ideas that people came up with because really all that they were exposed to was just one quick incident. It was like a fleeting moment that they were exposed to and somehow this is what they came up with.

Shankar Vedantam: Why do you think rudeness has these effects on creativity, both in some ways limiting how creative we can be, but also perhaps exacerbating this kind of aggressive creativity?

Christine Porath: I think it ties to the hijacking people's focus and attention and the lack of awareness around that. People become much more self-focused, much less other-focused and I think our mind is wrapped up on replaying the incident, where they're not focusing on the task nearly as much. They're overwhelmed by other thoughts and so it's very hard to think about anything else.

Let’s do some self-reflecting…

Well, our Christian visitors are finally gone.  It was a good visit, no problems.  But I have to say, I’ve never heard the word “church” mentioned so many times in the short 3-week timeframe before.  But religion is their obsession, so…  I think I can understand.  I try to.  It's something real and important to them; as real as our (mostly atheists here) reality is to us. 🤷‍♀️

Which got me to wondering, do we here have the same kind of obsession with our politics as they have with their particular obsession, religion?

I ask in earnest because, if I’m honest, I do see some similarity.  So, what is the real difference between obsessions?

Could it be:

• A case of something we see as their fantasy versus our reality?  Meaning, we are more obsessed with thoughts of the real world, versus their being obsessed with thoughts of the other world?  

• Does our being tethered to a more “provable reality” makes that obsession more, I’ll call it, “legitimate/worthy”?  How is legitimacy and worth really judged/gauged anyway?  Strictly in the eye of the beholder?

• For example, while we worry about the real-world consequence of, say a Trump victory in November, they worry about the other worldly consequences of not accepting religion (i.e., eternity in Hell).

Discuss the difference between obsession with politics versus obsession with religion.  Break down the relevant factors to be considered.  Justify them, in your opinion.

(by PrimalSoup)

Drug prices finally negotiated down; Global warming & our broken DoJ

After decades of drug companies screaming and howling that they will be destroyed, the US government under Biden has finally been able to negotiate lower prices for a few commonly used drugs. The new prices kick in in 2026. Price reductions range from 38% to 79%.

 Medicare would have saved $6 billion, if the lower prices had been in effect in 2023. As usual, the whole endeavor is shrouded in opacity as drug companies desperately try to keep prices jacked up as high as possible as long as possible. The NYT comments:

It is impossible to tell how much the new prices will save Medicare for each individual drug subject to negotiations. The federal government does not disclose the net prices it pays for medications, which take into account the billions of dollars in discounts the program receives.

Medicare’s Part D program covers most of the costs of prescription drugs that seniors take at home. Approximately nine million Part D beneficiaries took at least one of the first 10 medications subject to negotiations in 2022, according to federal estimates. Some will see direct savings at the pharmacy counter as a result of the negotiation program.

The prices the Biden administration announced were made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act, a climate, health and tax bill signed by Mr. Biden in 2022 that granted the health and human services secretary the authority to negotiate on behalf of Medicare.

A person can rest assured that if DJT were elected in 2020, the drug price negotiations would have never taken place because as we all know, unregulated markets always do everything better than government intervention. Heck, DJT would never have allowed drug price negotiating in any law he could veto. And, one can credit the Democrats for fighting to get drug price negotiations in any law that passed congress. And, lest there by any shred of confusion, all House and Senate Republicans opposed the Inflation Reduction Act:

Congressional Republicans strongly opposed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) when it was passed in 2022. Every Republican in both the House and Senate voted against the IRA. Republicans argued it was a "reckless spending spree" that would harm the economy and waste taxpayer money. They claimed it would not effectively reduce inflation, despite its name. Many objected to the climate and clean energy provisions, viewing them as an expensive and ineffective "Green New Deal".

But since the bill was passed and spending started, some Republicans have taken credit for the law when spending in their state or voting districts started. One source commented:

Hall of Republican Clean Energy Hypocrisy

Not a single Republican in Congress voted to support the Inflation Reduction Act, a key pillar of the Biden administration's affordable clean energy plan. And yet, many are happy to cheer the IRA-funded projects that are benefitting the communities they represent. Read more below and select a Representative to read about their newfound support for clean energy, in their own words.

The shameless hypocrites:

Their comments in opposition of the IRA and then

later in support of local spending are cited for each hypocrite

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

The costs of global warming are significant and increasing. One estimate is that economic cost in the US is running at about $150 billion/year. Other costs include a worse climate that people have to live in (that gets no economic value) and species that go extinct (they get no economic value). As usual, energy sector companies that have advocated for decades for continuing pollution and global warming deny, distract and impede efforts to do something serious, e.g., a carbon tax. The Hill writes about people wanting the DoJ to file lawsuits against pro-pollution companies for the damage they help cause:

Survivors of “climate disasters” are calling on federal prosecutors to bring fossil fuel companies to court.

The over 1,000 signatories of Thursday’s letter to the Department of Justice lived through wildfires, floods and heat waves caused or exacerbated by the burning of fossil fuels.

Major oil companies have “known since the 1950s about the dangers posed by burning fossil fuels,” they wrote.

“Instead of acting responsibly on their own scientists’ warnings, they waged a decades-long disinformation campaign to muddy the science and confuse and mislead the public.”

Though scientists at fossil fuel companies like Exxon projected current levels of planetary heating with startling accuracy, the industry spent decades fighting climate science, and currently contests federal regulation and financial tools that seek to slow it.

The letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland comes amid a wave of nationwide pressure against the industry. 

On the civil front, there is the a wave of “climate superfund” legislation or lawsuits — from seven states, 35 cities and Washington, D.C. — that seek to hold the industry responsible for the costs of climate change.

In May, House and Senate Democrats referred their own investigation of the industry to the Department of Justice, with Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) calling on Garland to “investigate big oil for its decades long disinformation campaign to mislead the American public.”

Given Garland's stunning fear of doing anything that might make MAGA angry, it seems unlikely that he will do anything. The polluters will continue to make as much money from pollution as possible. If DJT gets re-elected, we all know how that will play out.

A study commissioned by Consumer reports commented on the burden to individuals:

So a new report commissioned by Consumer Reports and conducted by ICF, a global consulting firm that conducts climate studies for businesses and governments, might snap some of us to attention. Its finding: If humanity does not act swiftly to limit it, climate change will cost a typical child born in 2024 at least around $500,000 over the course of their lifetime—and possibly as much as $1 million—through a combination of cost-of-living increases and reduced earnings.

That’s in 2024 dollars, meaning each newborn will lose the current purchasing power of those amounts. Add in inflation and the actual amount they’ll lose over their lifetimes will be much larger.

The study also says those costs will be significantly lower if we act quickly to reduce global carbon emissions.

That speaks for itself. The Republican Party still considers global warming to be a hoax or something not important or urgent. So, both DJT and the GOP will continue to fight tooth and claw for more pollution and more costs that global warming will impose on average people, while wealthy elites just turn on their air conditioners. 

It still smells

The MSM's double standard?; DJT's outrageous behaviors

Sometimes, the mainstream media looks to be biased in favor of authoritarianism. The AP reports about a recent example:

At least three news outlets were leaked confidential material from inside the Donald Trump campaign, including its report vetting JD Vance as a vice presidential candidate. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what they received.

Instead, Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post have written about a potential hack of the campaign and described what they had in broad terms.

Their decisions stand in marked contrast to the 2016 presidential campaign, when a Russian hack exposed emails to and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The website Wikileaks published a trove of these embarrassing missives, and mainstream news organizations covered them avidly.

Politico wrote over the weekend about receiving emails starting July 22 from a person identified as “Robert” that included a 271-page campaign document about Vance and a partial vetting report on Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also considered as a potential vice president. Both Politico and the Post said that two people had independently confirmed that the documents were authentic.

“Like many such vetting documents,” The Times wrote of the Vance report, “they contained past statements with the potential to be embarrassing or damaging, such as Mr. Vance’s remarks casting aspersions on Mr. Trump.”  

The Times said it would not discuss why it had decided not to print details of the internal communications. A spokesperson for the Post said: “As with any information we receive, we take into account the authenticity of the materials, any motives of the source and assess the public interest in making decisions about what, if anything, to publish.”  

Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, said over the weekend that “any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies.” 

It’s also easy to recall how, in 2016, candidate Trump and his team encouraged coverage of documents on the Clinton campaign that Wikileaks had acquired from hackers. It was widespread: A BBC story promised “18 revelations from Wikileaks’ hacked Clinton emails” and Vox even wrote about Podesta’s advice for making superb risotto.

Brian Fallon, then a Clinton campaign spokesperson, noted at the time how striking it was that concern about Russian hacking quickly gave way to fascination over what was revealed. “Just like Russia wanted,” he said.

So in 2024 it is OK for the NYT, WaPo and Politico to withhold the juicy bits from the leaked documents because of potentially embarrassing or damaging content for Vance and/or DJT. But in 2016, the MSM freely blasted out everything that was damaging to Hillary, helping to put DJT in power. What happened here?

Does anyone notice DJT's shameless hypocrisy in his 2016 vs 2024 mindset, or it is just me? 

Q: Is this 2016 vs 2024 story a nothingburger, or is it evidence that the MSM is pro-authoritarian biased, stupidly incompetent or both?

____________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________

Random news bit:

Donald Trump said on his Elon Musk interview that he might leave the country if he loses the upcoming US presidential election. He said he would go to Venezuela to hide out. Does this make him a bigger flight risk? Is it possible this could have cause his bail to be revoked?

____________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________

Regarding DJT's outrageous behaviors: For some reason, two bits of what is standard news about DJT sparked deep anger in me. Why today? Who knows. Anyway, my anger is directed at DJT, the entire Republican Party and DJT's emotional support billionaires, Elon Musk in this case. 

In the first bit, The Hill reports that a Democratic political group filed a lawsuit claiming that DJT violated campaign finance law by virtue of his 2 hour "interview" with Elon Musk on X: 

The Democratic organization End Citizens United filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Tuesday over former President Trump’s interview with tech billionaire Elon Musk.

Trump spoke with Musk on social media platform X, which Musk owns, on Monday night for roughly two hours after their conversation was delayed by technical difficulties. In its complaint on Tuesday, End Citizens United alleged that the interview was a corporate contribution that violated campaign finance laws.

“The Donald Trump-Elon Musk campaign rally hosted on X wasn’t just an incoherent diatribe of lies marred by technical difficulties, it was a blatantly illegal corporate contribution to Donald Trump’s campaign,” End Citizens United President Tiffany Muller said in a statement.

“This brazen corporate contribution undermines campaign finance laws and would set a dangerous precedent for unfettered, direct corporate engagement in campaigns. The FEC must investigate this corporate-funded campaign event and hold Trump, his campaign, and X Corp. accountable,” she added.

The complaint notes that federal campaign finance law prohibits corporations from making contributions to federal candidates, who cannot accept the contributions. It said that the “conversation” between the former president and Musk “amounted to a virtual campaign event for Donald J. Trump financed by X.”

That is infuriating. If Harris had done the same, DJT and the GOP would be howling in self-righteous outrage about the horrible breaking of sacred laws.

Also infuriating, the courts are not going to hold DJT or Musk accountable any time soon, if ever. The radical Republican USSC hates campaign finance laws as undue burdens on "free speech."More importantly, the UUSSC secretly hates campaign finance laws as undue burdens on corruption because they impose some transparency on bribery. If this winds up at the USSC, one can see the applicable law likely falling as an unconstitutional burden on "free speech."

The 2nd bit, is an item from Reuters about DJT holding the courts in utter contempt and never, ever, accepting an adverse ruling against him:

NEW YORK, Aug 14 (Reuters) - A New York judge declined for a third time to step aside from the case in which Donald Trump was convicted of charges involving hush money paid to a porn star, dismissing the former U.S. president's claim of conflict of interest related to political consultancy work by the judge's daughter.

As he did in April and in August 2023, Justice Juan Merchan in a decision released on Wednesday denied a request by Trump's lawyers that he recuse himself from the first case involving criminal charges against a former U.S. president. Merchan is scheduled to sentence Trump on Sept. 18.

"Defendant has provided nothing new for this Court to consider. Counsel has merely repeated arguments that have already been denied by this and higher courts" and were "rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims," Merchan wrote in the ruling, dated Aug. 13.[DJT's utter contempt for the court and the rule of law cannot get much clearer than this]

A spokesperson for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office declined to comment. 

"The Highly Conflicted Judge should have long ago recused himself from this case," Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement.

Trump was found guilty by a jury on May 30 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for having covered up former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen's $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to avert a sex scandal before the 2016 U.S. election.

Two months later, his lawyers made their third request that Merchan step aside, arguing that his daughter's work for a political consultancy that has counted Democratic campaigns among its clients - including the unsuccessful bid by Kamala Harris for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination - posed a conflict of interest.

That 2nd bit about DJT asking for the 3rd time for the judge to step aside due to an alleged conflict of interest is well beyond an insulting outrage. DJT himself operates with no ethical concerns, including actual, blatant conflicts of interest. But here he howls in sanctimonious moral outrage when there is even a faint whiff of an appearance of a conflict he has no basis to howl about. His shameless hypocrisy is off the charts.

Q: Is Germaine being irrational or too wuss for having been triggered by DJT and the toxic combination of his authoritarianism, constant mendacity, ghastly corruption, contempt for the rule of law, and hypocrisy?