Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive biology, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
Thursday, January 16, 2025
A question about your access to my Perplexity searches
Frames of mind…
So, at any given moment in time, one’s frame of mind not only influences, but is the ultimate controller of one’s current beliefs and subsequent actions based on those beliefs. That sounds right to me. Would you agree with that? If not, start here by making your case against that claim. Give your reasoning.
Now, let’s turn to politics. When it comes to our political views, let’s follow the breadcrumbs that lay the path to how and why people vote as they do.
A few weeks ago, Axios came up with an interesting chart that categorizes the current major political influences on our voting frames of mind:
Task 1: Give a one-sentence or even a one-word description of each of these influential categories, the way you see them. Do you see any one category as being the most influential of all, on the populace-at-large?
Task 2: What category(ies) do you belong to? And if more than one, which one do you believe is in ultimate control of you, when casting your vote? Why?
Task 2a: If none, if you don’t believe your voting is influenced by any of these categories, what does influence you? “Just the facts, ma’am,” you may say? Okay, but where/who provides you with such facts?
(by PrimalSoup)
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
News bits: Dem self-introspecting; Whitewashing very ugly
“I think Senator Sanders has somewhat of a point.”
In defeat, Democrats, like longtime political strategist James Carville, are finally admitting that the independent senator from Vermont just might get it. “There are things Sanders favored that we could have put more front and center," Carville acknowledged in a post-election interview.
The comment itself was not shocking, but the messenger was. After all, Carville had been a leading voice in the news media’s efforts to diminish Sanders’ influence on the Democratic Party during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. In 2020, after referring to the senator as a “communist,” Carville warned it would be the “end of days” if Sanders secured the 2020 Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. After 2024, Carville was not the only person in legacy media to move from critiquing to entertaining Sanders-style politics.
In a widely circulated post-election op-ed for Boston Globe titled “Democrats must choose: The elites or the working class,” Sanders reiterated this point that the Democratic Party had failed to attract or energize the working class, and lost the election as a result.
The FBI did not interview a woman who accused Pete Hegseth of sexual assault in 2017 as part of the agency’s background investigation into him, according to two people with knowledge of the FBI report’s contents who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private discussions. Democratic senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee are now slamming the report as inadequate as they prepare to question the candidate picked to lead the Defense Department at Tuesday’s public confirmation hearing.All nominees are typically subjected to a standard background check by the FBI after they are tapped for roles, and the results are shared with the committees tasked with processing them. The FBI is under no obligation to interview accusers, whistleblowers or naysayers in the course of a background check, unless they are directed to by the transition team that requested it, according to Senate aides with knowledge of the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
Hegseth’s accuser, whose identity has not been made public, filed a complaint with the police alleging she was sexually assaulted days after the Oct. 7, 2017, encounter at a Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California, but the local district attorney did not bring charges. Police confirmed that they investigated the incident. After she threatened litigation in 2020, Hegseth made the payment, and she signed the nondisclosure agreement, his attorney said in November.
When you know politics has taken over your life...............
When there is no new posting today, yet, by Germaine.
When Susan, who is usually very verbose both here and on Snowy's hasn't shown up yet.
When traffic of any kind on Disqus is low right now.
Can you guess?
Everyone is watching the confirmation hearings. Just a guess, but betting my guess is close.
That is when you know people have become obsessed with politics. When they HAVE TO watch the confirmation hearings.
So, here is a summary, all of Trump's choices will be confirmed.
Now you can stop watching them.
On the other hand, if I am way off base and traffic is down or folks who usually post a lot are absent, maybe it's because they finally figured out life is more than just being online.
Nah.
🤪
Cheers from your local SNOWFLAKE.
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
The Jack Smith report
“The throughline of all of Mr. Trump’s criminal efforts was deceit — knowingly false claims of election fraud — and the evidence shows that Mr. Trump used these lies as a weapon to defeat a federal government function foundational to the United States’ democratic process,” the report states.Smith's 174 page report comments on DJT's knowledge or state of mind. The evidence showed that he knew there was no outcome-determinative fraud in the election, but he continued to make false claims of election fraud. He engaged in a series of criminal efforts to retain power, including, (i) pressuring state officials to ignore true vote counts, (ii) manufacturing fraudulent slates of electors in seven states he lost, (iii) attempting to misuse the Justice Department to open sham investigations, (iv) pressuring Pence to obstruct the certification process, and directing supporters to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to obstruct the certification. Smith stated that DJT would have been convicted if he had lost the election.
The report, arriving just days before Trump is to return to office on Jan. 20, focuses fresh attention on the Republican’s frantic but failed effort to cling to power in 2020 after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. With the prosecution foreclosed thanks to Trump’s 2024 election victory, the document is expected to be the final Justice Department chronicle of a dark chapter in American history that threatened to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, a bedrock of democracy for centuries, and complements already released indictments and reports.
Monday, January 13, 2025
News bits: Vaccine buggery; Alito's chat with DJT; About the NGRST
Just one day before his sentencing for his 34 felonies in New York, DJT called Sam Alito for a chat. Dissecting the phone call, it seems reasonable to think that he wanted to see if the USSC could somehow dismiss his criminal sentence. Of course Alito denies that was the reason for the phone call. Instead Alito claims that DJT called to vet a law clerk for a mid-level government position who had worked for Alito 13 years ago. That person, William Levi, has since gone on to work in the 1st DJT administration. Alito said Levi asked him to take a call from DJT. Levi previously worked in DJT's administration as chief of staff to then–Attorney General Bill Barr and GOP Sen. Mike Lee before that. In other words, that guy was already very well vetted. Slate writes:
So why is it that the president-elect vetted a midlevel lawyer with a sitting Supreme Court justice, just as that same president-elect had a case rocketing to the high court?
The most obvious answer is: Because who is going to stop him? Performative flouting of the ethics rules that demand the appearance of neutrality, barely a week after the chief justice himself claimed that the courts had a key role to play in preserving public trust? That stuff is catnip for authoritarians whose images are built upon regularly proving that the rules do not apply to them. It should surprise nobody that Trump wanted a call with Alito. Regrettably, it should also surprise nobody that Alito took it.Beyond that flex, we can think of two other reasons for the call. First, Levi played a major role in marshalling federal law enforcement to subdue the insurrection on Jan. 6, summoning the FBI for backup after rioters overwhelmed the Capitol Police. Perhaps this action landed him on Trump’s blacklist, and the president-elect wanted confirmation that Levi would serve as a loyal foot soldier in his second administration, with all that Jan. 6 business forgiven and forgotten. As a steadfast champion of the president-elect’s agenda, Alito is well positioned to vouch that his former clerk remains a true believer in the cause despite his regrettable lapse four years ago. The justice, after all, shares Trump’s paranoid loathing for the so-called deep state that is, allegedly, forever plotting to sabotage the past and future president. Alito would surely know if his own former clerk was a Never Trumper in MAGA clothing.
It is also possible that Trump sought to flatter Alito by calling upon him as a character reference, part of his long campaign to butter up the justices whom he wants to retire.The charm offensive worked on Justice Anthony Kennedy, convincing the erstwhile swing vote that his seat would be better off in Trump’s hands.
One source writes:
The telescope will be roughly the size of the Hubble Space Telescope, but not quite as long (a “stubby Hubble,” some call it). What the astronomy community and the general public will receive in exchange for the considerable taxpayer investment of nearly $4 billion is an instrument that can do what other telescopes can’t.
It will have a sprawling field of view, about 100 times that of the Hubble or Webb space telescopes. And it will be able to pivot quickly across the night sky to new targets and download tremendous amounts of data that will be instantly available to the researchers.A primary goal of the Roman is to understand “dark energy,” the mysterious driver of the accelerating expansion of space. But it will also attempt to study the atmospheres of exoplanets — worlds orbiting distant stars.
Roman joined the agency when it was just getting started, in 1959, and retired two decades later, having lobbied for the creation of a space telescope. She died at the age of 93 in 2018, and 15 months later NASA honored her by renaming a telescope that had originally been called WFIRST, for Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope. The central feature of the telescope is an exquisitely polished, concave primary mirror, 2.4 meters (7.9 feet) in diameter.
An essential feature of the Roman is that, just like the Webb, it is not designed to be repaired by astronauts if something goes wrong in space. That’s because, unlike the Hubble, it will not be in low Earth orbit. It’ll be where the Webb is, in a stable solar orbit called Lagrange point 2, or L2, roughly a million miles from home and never straying too far away.
So it needs to be put together correctly — perfectly shipshape, immaculately clean — before it gets flung into deep space.