News bits: Trump is back on Twitter, Mullahs shooting people's eyes out, etc.

It’s baaaaack!

The NYT writes:

Elon Musk Reinstates Trump’s Twitter Account

Mr. Musk, who had asked Twitter users about whether to bring back the former president to the service, said, “The people have spoken.”

“The people have spoken,” Mr. Musk said on Twitter. “Trump will be reinstated.” He added the Latin phrase “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” which roughly means that the voice of the people is the voice of God.

Musk claimed that 52% of 15 million Twitter votes were in favor of reinstating Trump.

From now on, I'll refrain from posting or linking to Tweets here. I don’t want to feed the beast that builds and makes money from Hellscape v. 2. The ‘Musk era’ of poison, lies, slander and open sympathy for treason has begun.

UPDATE: Trump has said that he will not return to Twitter and instead will continue to spout lies, slanders and poison on is social media site. This is good news.

What theocracy can look like

The NYT writes:

Hundreds of Protesters in Iran Blinded by 

Metal Pellets and Rubber Bullets

Security forces have been firing ammunition that has ruptured the eyes of antigovernment demonstrators in the past two months. “Everything went dark,” one said.

The protester was speeding toward a demonstration in Tehran on his motorbike when an Iranian security officer standing 10 feet away raised his gun and fired a rubber bullet.

The protester said the bullet hit his left eye. “We locked eyes and then everything went dark,” said the protester, who goes by the nickname Saman. He cupped his hand to his mutilated eye, afraid that it would drop from its socket, as he drove himself to a hospital where doctors refused to treat him, he said.

He was finally admitted to the government-run Farabi Eye Hospital, where he was operated on nearly 24 hours after he had been shot.

One has to wonder whether things could get that bad in the US after a takeover by an American Christian Taliban operating under Christian Sharia law. The is what the wrath of sacred, loving Gods can look like:

Saman

From the capitalism fails files: 

COVID hell may be upon us

The NYT writes:

The End of Vaccines at ‘Warp Speed’

Financial and bureaucratic barriers in the United States mean that the next generation of Covid vaccines may well be designed here, but used elsewhere.

Operation Warp Speed, the Trump-era program that poured billions of dollars into developing Covid shots, seemed to signal a new dawn of American vaccine making, demonstrating how decades of scientific grunt work could be turned into lifesaving medicine in a matter of months.

But as a third pandemic winter begins in the United States, its vaccine-making effort has lost steam. Efforts to test and produce next-generation Covid vaccines are bogged down by bureaucratic problems and funding shortfalls. Foreign rivals have raced ahead in approving long-awaited nasal-spray vaccines, including one invented in St. Louis, creating a scenario in which Americans would have to travel abroad for the latest in American vaccine technology.

Anyone who argues that capitalism always does everything better than government needs to ignore, deny, downplay and/or distort facts like these. This is what capitalists privately call bad news. By that they mean, bad news for their profits. Many or most capitalists do not care much or at all about whether people get sick or die or not. They care about profit and hating on government.

An odd story of alleged sleaze by radical right Supreme Court theocrat justice Sam Alito

Over the last few days, multiple reliable sources have been reporting a strange story about a years-ago pre-public leak of a major US Supreme Court (SC) anti-abortion decision by Sam Alito. Alito is probably the most or second most radical of the Christian nationalist theocrat and brass knuckles capitalist judges on the SC. As far as I can tell, Alito and Clarence Thomas are in the running for the most extreme of the Republicans on the court. Until now, I've resisted posting about this because it’s so odd and possibly not true. 

But, maybe there is mostly truth in this bizarre story. It comes from some years ago, 2014. The key proponent of the story today is the former rabid anti-abortionist evangelical Christian preacher Robert Schenck. In July of 2020, I posted about what Schenck said in a published interview after his mind changed about what he saw going on. He pointed to moral rot in the American evangelical church. By then, had become disillusioned with the church. He flipped against Christian nationalism (CN). Now he is considered to be a whistleblower about American Christian church sleaze.

The Guardian writes:

Rights group calls for Samuel Alito to be investigated 

after claims of leaked 2014 ruling

Anti-abortion activist said supreme court justice revealed the landmark ruling on contraception and religious rights weeks earlier

A civil rights group issued a call Saturday for US supreme court justice Samuel Alito to be investigated over allegations that the judge leaked a 2014 landmark ruling involving contraception and religious rights at a private dinner with wealthy political donors.

The claim was contained in a New York Times article in which minister Rob Schenck, an anti-abortion activist, said he was told of the decision weeks before it was announced and had used the information to prepare a public relations push.

Schenck also claimed he tipped off Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain owned by Christian evangelicals that brought and won the case allowing privately-held, for-profit businesses to be exempt from regulations to which its owners religiously object, in this case requiring employers to cover certain contraceptives for their female employees.

“The Senate judiciary committee should immediately move to investigate the apparent leak by Justice Alito,” said Brian Fallon, the executive director of Demand Justice.

“This bombshell report is the latest proof that the Republican justices on the court are little more than politicians in robes. It’s no wonder trust in the court has hit a record low. Structural reform of the court, including strict new ethics rules, is needed now more than ever.”  

In a letter to supreme court chief justice John G Roberts Jr dated 7 June, Schenck wrote that he was reaching out to the judge “to inform you of a series of events that may impinge on the investigation you and your delegates are undertaking in connection with the leak of a draft opinion”.

He described a dinner at which an unnamed political donor invited to dine at the home of Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann, had offered to try to glean information about the pending decision in the Hobby Lobby case.

The next day, the Times reported, the dining guest called Schenck and told him Alito had written the majority opinion in the case and that Hobby Lobby would win. That exact decision was publicly announced less than a month later.  

Schenck concluded the letter to Roberts by saying he “thought this previous incident might bear some consideration by you and others involved in the process”.

How that directly reflects on the current investigation into the leak of the Dobbs decision is not clear, but it arrives at a time of concern for the court’s legitimacy as it works under the sway of a conservative supermajority. Polls show that a majority of Americans are losing confidence in the supreme court.  

After the leak in May of the Dobbs decision draft, Alito called the unauthorized disclosure “a grave betrayal” and ordered an investigation by the supreme court’s marshal.

The Times noted that Schenck’s account has “gaps”. But the newspaper’s examination of the claim uncovered emails and conversations that “strongly suggested” that Schenck knew of the decision before it was made public.

If Schenck’s story is true, what makes it interesting is the howling outrage that Alito, some other radical right Republican theocrat judges on the Supreme Court and CN Republican elites have expressed about the horrible leak of the June 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned the Roe v. Wade decision. Alito wrote both the Hobby Lobby and Dobbs decisions. The 2014 Hobby Lobby decisions a key case that seriously eroded the separation of church and state.

Initially, I rejected this story as too speculative. But as time passes, it seems more and more plausible. Now, for reasons I cannot articulate, this allegation of sleaze by Alito seems more likely mostly true than not. After all, radical right Republican Party elites, including all six on the Supreme Court, are chronic deceivers and liars. why accord them one shred of credibility?

What do you think? Is this bullshit or mostly real? Seems mostly real to me, certainly plausible.

An update: Those frisky Catholic priests -- at it again!

The NYT writes:

Maryland Finds That for Hundreds of 

Clergy Abuse Victims, ‘No Parish Was Safe’

The attorney general of Maryland has identified more than 600 young victims of clergy sexual abuse over the course of 80 years in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, according to a court document filed Thursday.

The new report marks a symbolic milestone in the long-running international abuse scandal that has shaken faith in the Catholic Church and led to some reforms and billions of dollars in settlements. The Baltimore report is one of the first major investigations completed by a state attorney general on sexual abuse in the Church since a scathing report on six dioceses in Pennsylvania shocked Catholics across the nation in 2018. Colorado investigators issued their own report in 2019 on church abuse.

The scale of the abuse outlined is on par with other large abuse cases uncovered in lawsuits and other investigations in dioceses in Boston, Los Angeles, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

The Maryland report found that “no parish was safe,” according to the filing from the office of Attorney General Brian Frosh. Both boys and girls were abused, ranging in age from preschool to “young adulthood,” which a spokeswoman for the attorney general said reached to age 18.

The filing says the Archdiocese failed to report many allegations of “sexual abuse and physical torture” and neglected to remove accused priests from active ministry or even restrict their access to children. Some congregations and schools had more than one abusive priest there at the same time. “The sexual abuse was so pervasive that victims were sometimes reporting sexual abuse to priests who were perpetrators themselves,” the filing states. One congregation was assigned 11 abusers over 40 years.

“Reading the report in its entirety made me physically ill,” Mr. Frosh said. “We may be looking at the tip of the iceberg, but it’s a very big tip.”

In a letter to church members on Thursday, Archbishop Lori said, “We feel renewed shame, deep remorse and heartfelt sympathy, most especially to those who suffered from the actions of representatives of the very Church entrusted with their spiritual and physical well-being.” Archbishop Lori has served in the role since 2012.

The priests were frisky and the morally rotted Catholic church protected them. The only remorse and shame the Church has is that it got caught. If it were not for investigations by law enforcement, none of this moral rot and criminality would have come to light. That is how organized crime syndicates work.

Q: Why doesn’t the IRS revoke tax breaks for this criminal organization?

A: Because the IRS itself is captured, complicit and morally rotted.

One can only wonder how big the iceberg is. One thing is for sure, the Catholic Church crime family will never volunteer that information. Child sex abuse has been uncovered in other Christian denominations in the US, so this is not confined to the American Catholic Church.

Q: Is American Christianity seriously morally rotted? 

News today: Abortion and other bits

The next wave of attacks of abortion rights

Politico writes:

A group of anti-abortion organizations sued HHS and the FDA on Friday in a bid to reverse the FDA’s approval of the abortion medication mifepristone.

Lawyers from the conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom filed the suit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Amarillo on behalf of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American College of Pediatricians, the Christian Medical & Dental Associations and four doctors.  

Last year, the FDA permitted doctors to prescribe mifepristone via telemedicine and to send the pills by mail.

Abortion rights advocates want the agency to assert that its decisions to approve drugs preempt state abortion bans and restrictions.

Notice how radical right political groups that work to take away people’s rights give themselves names like Alliance Defending Freedom. That happens a lot. It will be interesting to see how the Supreme Court eventually decides this case. I suspect that the court will reverse the approval of mifepristone via telemedicine and sending the medicine by mail. Time will tell. We'll know in a few years.

Garland appoints a special counsel to investigate Trump

The National Review writes:

Former vice president Mike Pence said Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint a special counsel to oversee two criminal investigations into former president Donald Trump is “very troubling.”

The special counsel, Jack Smith, will take over investigations surrounding the extent of Trump’s involvement in the events leading to the January 6 Capitol riot and his alleged mishandling of sensitive government documents, Garland said at a press conference on Friday.

“The appointment of a special counsel is very troubling,” Pence told Fox News at the Republican Jewish Coalition annual leadership conference. “No one is above the law, but I am not sure it’s against the law to take bad advice from your lawyers.”

He added: “The timing of this decision — just a few short days after the president announced his intention to seek re-election, I think that the history of it, the facts that I am aware of behind it, I think it is very troubling.”

Once again, staggering Republican Party hypocrisy is on display. Neither Pence nor GOP elites complained when the FBI announced opening an investigation into Hillary Clinton a week before the 2016 presidential election. That hurt her. Now, about two years out from the 2024 election, the GOP is howling about an investigation. What a bunch of hypocrite fascists. 

And one can see the GOP angling to shift blame from Trump, in this case to his lawyers who Pence claims gave him bad advice. If it was Hillary Clinton in the same position, Pence and the rest of the GOP elites would be howling something like this: “No one is above the law, and if you take bad advice from your lawyers you are still liable for your crimes. LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!!” 

Also note that in the blame shifting tactic, the Republicans are directly raising the issue of intent. Conviction for most crimes requires intent to commit the crime. If intent cannot be proven, the accused person cannot be found guilty. This is how white collar criminals get off with most of their crimes. They all claim they did not know that what they did was illegal. That is why, in my opinion, about 99.99% of all white collar crimes are never prosecuted. In nearly all cases, there is no way to get all 12 jurors to agree on intent.

Garland appointed the special counsel to avoid the appearance or actuality any political motivation or conflict of interest. Nearly all Republican elites who have opined, say the investigation is a politically motivated Democratic Party witch hunt. The Democrats could appoint Jesus to investigate and they would still claim it is a corrupt, partisan witch hunt.

The Ukraine war

The NYT writes:

The 96-missile barrage fired across Ukraine on Tuesday was Russia’s biggest aerial attack of the war so far. But it followed months of assertions by Western and Ukrainian officials that Moscow’s stockpile of missiles and other weapons was rapidly dwindling.

Whether the assault on infrastructure targets was long planned, as Ukrainian commanders say they believe, or served as a deadly response to Kyiv’s recapture of the city of Kherson last week, the widespread attack raises questions about how much Russia’s arsenal may be depleted and whether Moscow will endure by finding alternative sources of weapons.

The NYT article goes on to discuss four different ways that Russia might have more sources of weapons than Western military analysts believed, e.g., ramping up Russian domestic missile production. Probably all four are involved. At least all four seem to be plausible.

It looks like in time, the Ukraine will be pulverized and pushed into the Stone Age.  That's why it seemed reasonable to urgently push for negotiations to at least see if some form of acceptable peace agreement is possible. As time goes on, the negotiation position of the Ukraine and anti-Russian forces decline. If the infrastructure of the Ukraine is pulverized to sand and dust, what’s left to negotiate?  

The Republican Commitment to America

The Republicans are planning to exercise power in the House starting next January. Kevin McCarthy is likely going to be the next House Speaker. In advance of his new power and extremism, he released a short thing called The Republican Commitment to America. Four areas of focus are the economy, national security, freedom, and government accountability. There’s almost no detail in the commitment. That leaves McCarthy and House Republicans almost unlimited freedom to do whatever they want without the public knowing what is on their minds. 

Most of the commitment, deceptive propaganda actually (it feels mostly like empty promises), is contained in this one-page summary:

The commitment does not mention climate change. The generic fluff in the section on the economy mentions energy. The closest thing there is to hinting at how radical right House Republicans will deal climate change is this bit of deceptive fluff:

Make America Energy Independent and 

Reduce Gas Prices

Not long ago, America was the largest energy producer in the world and gas was affordable. The Biden Administration then halted energy projects, shut down pipeline construction, and took every step to discourage the production of American energy resources. Americans shouldn’t have to choose between driving to work and putting food on the table.

At this point, one should understand that the Biden administration supported boosting clean energy, mainly solar and wind. So it is a flat out Republican Party lie to say that Biden took every step to discourage the production of American energy resources. Once again, we see the contempt that radical right Republicans have for fact, truth and sound reasoning whenever any of it is inconvenient. 

In addition, the Republicans pose a false dilemma here. Americans do not have to choose between driving to work and putting food on the table. They have to decide whether to take climate change seriously or ignore it as the Republicans are clearly arguing. Taking it seriously does not mean not being able to drive to work. That lie is pure propaganda.

As pointed out here before, Republicans in power, profit motive-driven businesses and external factors are at least as responsible for inflation as the Democrats. So blaming just Biden and the Democrats is another lie embedded in this piece of deceptive propaganda. 

The main point of this post is to make clear that the Republican Party and its main donors have no intention of trying to deal honestly or seriously with climate change. They are loathe to even acknowledge it exists at all. America and the world will have to save themselves despite ferocious, divisive Republican Party opposition, lies, slanders and crackpottery.

News bits

The saga of MAGA: 

It’s still raining Republican felons

The WaPo writes:

GOP operative found guilty of funneling Russian money to Donald Trump

A Republican political strategist was convicted of illegally helping a Russian businessman contribute to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

Jesse Benton, 44, was pardoned by Trump in 2020 for a different campaign finance crime, months before he was indicted again on six counts related to facilitating an illegal foreign campaign donation. He was found guilty Thursday on all six counts.

Trump and the fascist GOP both vehemently deny there was any Russian influence in the 2016 election. Well, this is more evidence that the Russians were involved. Bigger Russian influence came from the release of stolen emails by Wikileaks after Trump publicly asked the Russians to help him smear Clinton. Never forget Trump’s open invitation: “Russia, if you're listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” US intelligence found Russian efforts to intervene on Trump’s behalf, which is another inconvenient fact that Trump and the fascist GOP both vehemently deny. 

In 2018, a Department of Justice press release commented:

Grand Jury Indicts 12 Russian Intelligence Officers for Hacking Offenses 

Related to the 2016 Election

The Department of Justice today announced that a grand jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment presented by the Special Counsel’s Office. The indictment charges twelve Russian nationals for committing federal crimes that were intended to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. All twelve defendants are members of the GRU, a Russian Federation intelligence agency within the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian military. These GRU officers, in their official capacities, engaged in a sustained effort to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, and released that information on the internet under the names "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0" and through another entity.

According to the allegations in the indictment, Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, Boris Alekseyevich Antonov, Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov, Aleksey Viktorovich Lukashev, Sergey Aleksandrovich Morgachev, Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek, Pavel Vyacheslavovich Yershov, Artem Andreyevich Malyshev, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk, Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin, and Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev were officials in Unit 26165 and Unit 74455 of the Russian government’s Main Intelligence Directorate.

It’s just raining Republican felons, e.g., the traitors who participated in the Republican 1/6 coup attempt. It’s not projected to stop raining until Republicans take control of state and federal law enforcement. Then the rain will stop.

The rule of law, the Republican way

It is not the case that Republican elites are anarchists who operate without regard for the rule of law. They just do not want the law turned against themselves. They are enthusiastic about using the law to go after Democrats and political opposition. The NYT writes:

Republicans Lay Out Biden Investigations, but Democrat-Aligned 

Groups Promise Counteroffensive

The Biden administration has been bracing for congressional investigations, cognizant of the serious political threat posed by even a narrow Republican majority in the House.

Hours after winning control of the House, Republicans began laying out plans on Thursday for investigations of President Biden, his administration and his family, and were met with promises of a multimillion-dollar counteroffensive from a network of groups allied with Democrats.

On Capitol Hill, the incoming Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, said the panel would focus on trying to link Mr. Biden to the business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden, continuing an effort begun in 2018 that never established the elder Biden’s complicity in any wrongdoing but led to former President Donald J. Trump’s first impeachment.

Mr. Comer told reporters his aim was “to show you this is an investigation of Joe Biden,” and not just his son.

For the fascist Republican Party, the rule of law has degenerated into  partisan weapon to be used against political opposition. It raises the question of when will the GOP sink to the level of fabricating evidence when there isn’t enough to prosecute and convict enemies. 

I had thought that line would be crossed when the Republicans did their witch hunt audits of the 2020 Arizona election. Remember the Cyber Ninjas and their clown car performance pretending to be an audit? But the republicans did not cross the line on that occasion. It is reasonable to think that the temptation to fabricate evidence is just as great today as it was then. 

Sooner or later, that line will probably be crossed. Most likely within the next two years.

Although it goes without saying, if the people the Republicans target with their investigations did commit crimes, they need to be prosecuted if and only if there is enough evidence to get a conviction in a fair and professional court of law. Of course, a different shoe could drop. If the judge is an unfair and unprofessional Republican extremist, e.g., a corrupt Trump judge like pro-Trump federal judge Aileen Cannon, the evidence needed to convict for crimes could be dropped by the judge. That would be the true and final end of the rule of law.  

And, as we all know, a Republican impeachment by the House will not need to be based on sufficient evidence or sound reasoning. Unless there is sufficient evidence, a GOP impeachment will be an obvious partisan witch hunt.

This is America’s new political normal for the foreseeable future, maybe until the end of the Republic. It is best we get used to it because we cannot stop it.

From the rut roh! files:

The Amazon River is drying up

This one is scary. Well, OK, the bit about the rule of law was scary too. There is just so much scary to go around these days. The WaPo writes:

For years, scientists have been warning that the Amazon is speeding toward a tipping point — the moment when deforestation and global warming would trigger an irreversible cascade of climatic forces, killing large swaths of what remained. If somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of the forest were lost, models suggested, much of the Amazon would perish.

About 18 percent of the rainforest is now gone, and the evidence increasingly supports the warnings. Whether or not the tipping point has arrived — and some scientists think it has — the Amazon is beginning to collapse.

More than three-quarters of the rainforest, research indicates, is showing signs of lost resilience. In fire-scorched areas of the Rio Negro floodplains, one research group noted a “drastic ecosystem shift” that has reduced jungle to savanna. In the southeastern Amazon, which has been assaulted by rapacious cattle ranching, trees are dying off and being pushed aside by species better acclimated to drier climes. In the southwestern Amazon, fast-growing bamboo is overtaking lands ravaged by fire and drought. And in the devastated transitional forests of Mato Grosso state, researchers believe a local tipping point is imminent.

No, this isn’t alarmism or politics. It is not lies, socialism, communism, pedophilia, cannibalism, blue space lasers or microchips in the vaccine. It is science based on data. Lest we forget, the Republican anti-science attitude toward climate change is clearly and undeniably stated in these words from radical right Republican Rick Scott’s disastrous plan for America:

The weather is always changing. We take climate change seriously, but not hysterically. We will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs.

That means that the fascist, staunchly pro-pollution Republican Party takes seriously any attempt by government or business to deal with climate change. The GOP is saying that it will oppose all attempts to slow or reverse climate change. 

In other words, Republican elites see all policies to try to deal with climate change as “hysterical, nutty polices.” After all, one cannot change the weather. Right? /s

June 2022 poll data

Unfortunately, most people can’t feel 

it until they feel it hard