https://twitter.com/IAmPoliticsGirl/status/1464745657617420292

McDonald's USA v. McDonald's Denmark

 McDonald’s USA — Employee: $9.00/hr, no benefits — Big Mac: $5.65 

 McDonald’s Denmark — Employee: $22/hr, 6 weeks vacation, 1 year paid maternity leave, life insurance, pension — Big Mac: $4.74

(tweet from Andrea Junker, @Strandjunker)

There are some good replies to Andrea's tweet:

starting wage in Canada at McDonald's is $13.50/hr

In Canada, the average McDonald's wage is $14.62 and the cost of a Big Mac is $5.69 

Bear in mind that those figures are Canadian dollars -- so the wages are not quite as high, and the Big Mac is a bit cheaper, than Americans might think.

 

Some HIghlights From HCR, November 22

 That's historian Heather Cox Richardson. A couple of notes from her post:

Today, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, based in Stockholm, Sweden, released its 2021 report on “The Global State of Democracy.”

“Democracy is at risk,” the report’s introduction begins. “Its survival is endangered by a perfect storm of threats, both from within and from a rising tide of authoritarianism.” “The world is becoming more authoritarian as nondemocratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression and many democratic governments suffer from backsliding by adopting their tactics of restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law.”

The report identifies the United States as one of the democracies that is “backsliding,” meaning that it has “experienced gradual but significant weakening of Checks on Government and Civil Liberties, such as Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Association and Assembly, over time.”​​

“The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale,” the report says.

Surprise, surprise. The U.S., which has always been a global leader in the advocacy of democracy and human rights, completely withdrew from that role for the four years of the Trump administration. He attacked fellow democracies while cozying up to dictators and autocrats all around the planet. 

I was pleased to see provocateurs Roger Stone and Alex Jones have been subpoenaed by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Now if they can be forced to show up . . .

She says "conservative columnist Max Boot called out Republican lawmakers for “fomenting violent extremism” and noted that “they have also become hostage to the extremists in their ranks” because they fear for their safety should they stand up to the Trump loyalists. Right-wing extremists have threatened the lives of the 13 Republicans who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill."

It's kind of sad when elected representatives receive death threats for doing their job, and are cowed into going along for fear of violence to themselves or their families.  

Two long-standing Fox News Channel contributors, Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, quit the enterprise today over Tucker Carlson’s three-part series Patriot Purge. That series, they wrote, “is presented in the style of an exposé, a hard-hitting piece of investigative journalism. In reality, it is a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions.”

They say they could no longer work at the Fox News Channel because “we sincerely believe that all people of good will and good judgment—regardless of their ideological or partisan commitments—can agree that a cavalier and even contemptuous attitude toward facts, truth-seeking, and truth-telling, lies at the heart of so much that plagues our country.”

Well, I can't stand either Goldberg or Hayes, but it's a good thing that Fox News is too much for even them, and I'm glad they have called Tucker Carlson's "Patriot Purge" the hot mess that it is.

 

Audio Book L'Étranger, Albert Camus

Amazon says: 

The classic literary masterpiece The Stranger (Vintage International) is a story about an Algerian, Meursault, the titular character who commits a murder after attending his mother’s funeral. His understanding of the world, his emotional spectrum, and the general absurdities of the time all combine to form a compelling read. 

The story is aptly divided into two riveting sections, both told from the perspective of Meursault, who gives us his views before the murder in the first section and later walks us through his state of mind after the murder in the second section. The two parts in this thrilling novel encompass the protagonist’s mindset through the ordeal of grieving for his mother’s death while also coming face to face with his own moral compass for committing a murder. 

 The Stranger (Vintage International) is often cited as one of the finest examples of the philosophy of the absurd. The sense of culture and various human values interwoven during the turbulent pre-modern era is also best captured in the contents of this novel. 

L'Étranger, by Albert Camus, audio:

Here's the "dueling banjos" scene from Deliverance.

 The "banjo boy" was a young actor named Billy Redden -- but he's not playing the banjo; that's done by Ronnie Cox, the actor who's playing the guitar. Redden was neither autistic nor slow-witted. He was paid $500 for his appearance in Deliverance, and he's recently been working in a WalMart in Georgia.

 

Tax The Rich!

A tweet from Andrea Junker:

Wealth of Elon Musk

    2011: $2,000,000,000

    2021: $271,500,000,000

Wealth of Mark Zuckerberg

               2011: $17,500,000,000 

                2021: $121,900,000,000 

Wealth of Jeff Bezos 

                2011: $18,100,000,000 

                2021: $203,100,000,000 

U.S. Minimum Wage 

                2011: $7.25 

                2021: $7.25 

Three words: tax the rich.

Click here for the entry on Twitter; it's worth reading comments. There are pros and cons.

Trump's Machinations

Click here for the November 8, 2021, edition of historian Heather Cox Richardson's blog.

Here's an excerpt I found particularly interesting:

Excerpts from a new book by ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl say that Trump was so mad that the party did not fight harder to keep him in office that on January 20, just after he boarded Air Force One to leave Washington, he took a phone call from Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, and told her that he was quitting the Republicans to start his own political party.

McDaniel told him that if he did that, the Republicans “would lose forever.” Trump responded: “Exactly.” A witness said he wanted to punish the officials for their refusal to fight harder to overturn the election.

Four days later, Trump relented after the RNC made it clear it would stop paying his legal bills and would stop letting him rent out the email list of his 40 million supporters, a list officials believed was worth about $100 million.

Instead of leaving the party, he is rebuilding it in his own image. 

In Florida, Trump loyalist Roger Stone is threatening to run against Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 to siphon votes from his reelection bid unless DeSantis promises he won’t challenge Trump for the Republican nomination in 2024. 

Voting Fraud In Virginia Election!

The Virginia gubernatorial election was won, with a thin margin, by Republican Glenn Youngkin.  The age limit for the election is 18, but Youngkin's 17-year-old son tried to vote -- twice.

Senior reporter Ari Berman for Mother Jones tweets:

Crystal Mason, Black woman in Texas, gets 5 years in prison for casting ballot on supervised release when didn’t realize ineligible & vote wasn’t even counted. Glenn Youngkin’s 17 year old son tries to illegally vote twice & no charges filed.

Important Article From The Washington Post

 Click here for an article in WaPo entitled The Attack, subtitled "The Jan 6. siege of the U.S. Capitol was neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event." 

Poynter says the following about the article: 

On Sunday, The Washington Post published an exceptional three-part investigation about Jan. 6. It involved more than 75 journalists and included interviews with more than 230 people, thousands of pages of court documents and law enforcement reports, as well as hundreds of videos, photographs and audio recordings.

Here's the introduction:

President Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy began in the spring of 2020, when he issued a flurry of preemptive attacks on the integrity of the country’s voting systems. The doubts he cultivated ultimately led to a rampage inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, when a pro-Trump mob came within seconds of encountering Vice President Mike Pence, trapped lawmakers and vandalized the home of Congress in the worst desecration of the complex since British forces burned it in 1814. Five people died in the Jan. 6 attack or in the immediate aftermath, and 140 police officers were assaulted.

The consequences of that day are still coming into focus, but what is already clear is that the insurrection was not a spontaneous act nor an isolated event. It was a battle in a broader war over the truth and over the future of American democracy.

Since then, the forces behind the attack remain potent and growing. Trump emerged emboldened, fortifying his hold on the Republican Party, sustaining his election-fraud lie and driving demands for more restrictive voting laws and investigations of the 2020 results, even though they have been repeatedly affirmed by ballot reviews and the courts. A deep distrust in the voting process has spread across the country, shaking the foundation on which the American experiment was built — the shared belief that the nation’s leaders are freely and fairly elected.

The article is divided into three sections, but click here to read the full article. 

This is a good summary of what happened:

1. Before - Red Flags - Law enforcement agencies fail to heed mounting warnings before Jan. 6 as Trump propels his supporters to Washington, many with the intent to commit violent attacks.

• Law enforcement officials did not respond with urgency to a cascade of warnings about violence on Jan. 6
  

•  Alerts were raised by local officials, FBI informants, social media companies, former national security officials, researchers, lawmakers and tipsters.

• The FBI received numerous warnings about Jan. 6 but felt many of the threatening statements were “aspirational” and could not be pursued. In one tip on Dec. 20, a caller told the bureau that Trump supporters were making plans online for violence against lawmakers in Washington, including a threat against Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah). The agency concluded the information did not merit further investigation and closed the case within 48 hours.
• One of the biggest efforts to come out of Sept. 11, 2001 — a national network of multi-agency intelligence centers — spotted a flood of Jan. 6 warnings, but federal agencies did not show much interest in its information.
• The FBI limited its own understanding of how extremists were mobilizing when it switched over its social media monitoring service on the last weekend of 2020.

• Pentagon leaders had acute fears about widespread violence, and some feared Trump could misuse the National Guard to remain in power

• Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy was left rattled by Trump’s firing of senior Pentagon officials just after the election and sought to put guardrails on deployment of the National Guard.
• Then-acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller did not believe Trump would misuse the military but worried that far-right extremists could bait soldiers into “a Boston Massacre-type situation.” Their fears contributed to a fateful decision to keep soldiers away from the Capitol on Jan. 6.

• The Capitol Police was disorganized and unprepared

• The U.S. Capitol Police had been tracking threatening social media posts for weeks but was hampered by poor communication and planning.
• The department’s new head of intelligence concluded on Jan. 3 that Trump supporters had grown desperate to overturn the election and “Congress itself” would be the target. But then-Chief Steven Sund did not have that information when he initiated a last-minute request to bring in National Guard soldiers, one that was swiftly rejected.

• Trump’s election lies radicalized his supporters in real time

• As the president exerted pressure on state officials, the Justice Department and his vice president to overturn the results, his public attacks on the vote mobilized his supporters to immediately plot violent acts — discussions that researchers watched unfold online.

2. During - Bloodshed - For 187 harrowing minutes, the president watches his supporters attack the Capitol -- and resists pleas to stop them. 

• Escalating danger signs were in full view hours before the Capitol attack but did not trigger a stepped-up security response

• Hundreds of Trump supporters clashed with police at the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial on the morning of Jan. 6, some with shields and gas masks, presaging the violence to come.
• D.C. homeland security employees spotted piles of backpacks left by rallygoers outside the area where the president would speak — a phenomenon the agency had warned a week earlier could be a sign of concealed weapons.

• Trump had direct warnings of the risks but stood by for 187 minutes before telling his supporters to go home

• For more than three hours, the president resisted entreaties from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, other Republican lawmakers and numerous White House advisers to urge the mob to disperse, a delay that contributed to harrowing acts of violence.

• His allies pressured Pence to reject the election results even after the Capitol siege

• John C. Eastman, an attorney advising Trump, emailed Pence’s lawyer as a shaken Congress was reconvening to argue that the vice president should still reject electors from Arizona and other states.
• Earlier in the day, while the vice president, his family and aides were hiding from the rioters, Eastman emailed Pence’s lawyer to blame the violence on Pence’s refusal to block certification of Biden’s victory.

• The FBI was forced to improvise a plan to help take back control of the Capitol

• After the breach, the bureau deployed three tactical teams that were positioned nearby, but they were small, specialized teams and did not bring overwhelming manpower.
• As the riot escalated, acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen scrambled to keep up with the deluge of calls from senior government officials and desperate lawmakers.
• Senior Justice Department officials were so uncertain of what was occurring based on chaotic television images that Rosen’s top deputy, Richard Donoghue, went to the Capitol in person to coordinate with lawmakers and law enforcement agencies.
  

3. After - Contagion - Menacing threats and disinformation spread across the country in the wake of the Capitol siege, shaking the underpinnings of American democracy.

• Republican efforts to undermine the 2020 election restarted immediately after the Capitol attack

• Eight days after the violence, state Republicans privately discussed their intention to force a review of ballots cast in Maricopa County, Ariz., setting in motion a chaotic process that further sowed doubt in the results and a wave of similar partisan investigations in other states.

• False election claims by Trump that spurred the Capitol attack have become a driving force in the Republican Party

• Nearly a third of the 390 Republicans around the country who have expressed interest in running for statewide office this cycle have publicly supported a partisan audit of the 2020 vote, downplayed the Jan. 6 attack or directly questioned Biden’s victory.
• They include 10 candidates running for secretary of state, a position with sway over elections in many states.

• Trump’s attacks have led to escalating threats of violence

• Election officials in at least 17 states have collectively received hundreds of threats to their personal safety or their lives since Jan. 6, with a concentration in the six states where Trump has focused his attacks on the election results.
• Ominous emails and calls have spiked immediately after the former president and his allies raised new claims.

• First responders are struggling with deep trauma

• Those who tried to protect the Capitol are contending with serious physical injuries, nightmares and intense anxiety. “Normal is gone,” said one Capitol Police commander.

Heather Cox Richardson Hits It Out Of The Park

Click here for a particularly good HCR column, October 26, 2021. Her introduction:

For all the news stories that seem to tug us in one direction or another, there is just one overarching story in the news for Americans today.

We are in an existential fight to defend our democracy from those who would destroy it.

People seem to hark back to films from the 1930s and 1940s and think that so long as we don’t have tanks in our streets, our government is secure. But in this era, democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.

She emphasizes the usurpation of power that has taken place in Hungary over the last decade or so under Viktor Orbán. Orbán was elected in 2010, and has consolidated his power since then to the point where:

On paper, Hungary is a democracy in that it still holds elections, but it is, in fact, a one-party state overseen by one man.

Ten short years, from democracy to absolute power. This is the path the United States is beginning to take. If gerrymandering, voter suppression, and control of the election count/certification process can win power for the Republicans in at least the House -- and possibly the Senate as well -- in 2022, that will be the end of bodies such as the January 6 committee. Republicans will be able to pass federal laws cementing their control of the election process at a federal level, mimicking the partisan manipulation they are in the process of carrying out in Republican states.

In their embrace of the illiberal democracy of Hungary, those on the right argue that they are defending traditional American values. 

Like Orbán, they focus relentlessly on immigration; “caravans” of immigrants have once again made the right-wing news, as they always do before an election. They worry that traditional families are under attack, hence Texas’s S.B. 8, which outlaws the constitutional right of abortion by empowering vigilantes. They insist that “real” America is being destroyed by multiculturalism; hence the hysteria over Critical Race Theory, an obscure legal theory from the 1970s that is not taught in K–12 schools, and the calls for “patriotic education.”  

And, crucially, those on the right are openly embracing voter restrictions and the replacement of nonpartisan election officials with partisans.

There have been 33 new election laws passed in 19 Republican states which are designed to replace the idea of democracy with a hierarchy in which a Republican minority will determine the outcome of elections.

Republicans today are not trying to win the next elections, in 2022, by contrasting their ideas for the future of the country with Democratic ideas; they're actively trying to rig the outcome.  

When the Founders declared it “self-evident, that all men are created equal,” they were making a bold declaration about the nature of governments that flew in the face of western tradition and thought. They denied that some individuals were better than others and had an inherent right to rule the rest. Governments, the Founders said, derived legitimacy not from religion, or heritage, but instead were legitimate only to the degree that those who lived under them consented to them. “[T]o secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” the Founders said.

This was a truly revolutionary idea in the age of the absolute monarchy. But HCR points out that this viewpoint can be shaken by determined forces, and possibly even overturned. On the brink of civil war, Southern demagogues were declaring:

"... that Jefferson’s belief that all men are created equal was ​​“an error” and that anyone who still adhered to that idea was an insane 'fanatic.' Stephens [Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who would soon be the vice president of the Confederate States of America] told listeners: 'Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.'"

HCR says:

And there it was: the replacement of the idea that all people are created equal with the idea that some people are better than others, and that those people, who truly understand God’s laws, should rule.

 

Colin Powell, R.I.P.

Click here for an article at The Intercept by Peter Maass, entitled "Colin Powell Was a Nice Man Who Helped Destroy Iraq." It's a clear-eyed assessment of Colin Powell's place in history, including the blot on his record which was his performance at the U.N., urging prosecution of the Iraq war.

January 6: The New Lost Cause

Click here for an article in The Atlantic by David A. Graham entitled "The New Lost Cause," subtitled "Republicans are holding up the January 6 insurrection—an effort to overthrow the American government—as the high-water mark of patriotism."

He begins by telling of a rally in Virginia for Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, a hardcore Trump guy (Trump didn't attend the rally, but he phoned in). At one point, an emcee introduced a speaker by saying, “She’s carrying an American flag that was carried at the peaceful rally with Donald J. Trump on January 6.”

So now the Republicans are venerating objects associated with January 6, a day they are celebrating, rather than condemning it as a violent, treasonous attempt to overthrow a legitimately elected government.

"The Lost Cause" is the name Republicans give to the Southern attempt to overthrow a legitimately elected government in 1861; they glorify Southern actions in the Civil War.

Elevating this banner to a revered relic captures the troubling transformation of the events of January 6 into a myth—a New Lost Cause. This mythology has many of the trappings of its neo-Confederate predecessor, which Trump also employed for political gain: a martyr cult, claims of anti-liberty political persecution, and veneration of artifacts.

To Trump and his followers, "January 6 was a righteous attempt by brave patriots to take back an election stolen from them. The day’s events produced a martyr—Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to enter the Speaker’s Lobby of the House. The rioters who remain imprisoned, meanwhile, are “political prisoners.” Now objects carried that day have become sacred too."

Ashli Babbitt's death saddens me. It should never have happened. She was duped by Trump and his minions into believing she was doing a good and patriotic thing, when she was led to her death by unscrupulous, traitorous cowards.

Graham concludes:

The problem with these myths, the Lost Cause and the New Lost Cause, is that they emphasize the valor of the people involved while whitewashing what they were doing. The men who died in Pickett’s Charge might well have been brave, and they might well have been good fathers, brothers, and sons, but they died in service of a treasonous war to preserve the institution of slavery, and that is why their actions do not deserve celebration.

The January 6 insurrection was an attempt to subvert the Constitution and steal an election. Members of the crowd professed a desire to lynch the vice president and the speaker of the House, and they violently assaulted the seat of American government. They do not deserve celebration either.

Bill Maher: The Slow-Moving Coup

Click here for Bill Maher's monologue from October 8, 2021, entitled "The Slow-Moving Coup."

Trump and his minions are laying the groundwork to steal the congressional elections in 2022 and the presidential election in 2024. If Trump's efforts to rig the election fail and the Democrats win, Trump will declare the election fraudulent, and this time his followers will use violence to try to overthrow the legitimately elected government. Maher lays out a frightening scenario of what might happen.

Chris Cuomo Nails The Degradation Of The Republican Party

Click here for Chris Cuomo's opening monologue from October 11, 2021, asking how history will judge this era in American politics, when the Republican Party is going all in on a lie, purely for the sake of gaining power.

"I often wonder if people who are living during times that will be historic know it. Because we sure are. Do you realize that? Do you realize that people will be talking about this period in American history for decades and decades to come?"

Yes, they'll be talking about it, and it won't be in a good way . . .

Is Bannon Fomenting Revolution? And More, From Heather Cox Richardson

Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's "Letters from an American" post for October 8, 2021.

The first thing that caught my eye was a quote from Steve Bannon:

Bannon told his podcast audience that he will have 20,000 “shock troops” ready to take over the country. “We control this country,” he said. “We have to start acting like it.”

Bannon has been subpoenaed by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, and is scheduled to appear on October 14. Outcome to be determined ... 

In further news, apparently a treasure trove of Trump documents has been released by the National Archives, as Trump's opposition has been defeated:

Today, the pressure on the former president got higher when the White House declined to assert executive privilege over some of the documents requested by the January 6 committee. Former president Trump’s attorneys had requested that the Biden administration withhold documents about Trump’s actions on January 6. NBC News reported this afternoon that White House Counsel Dana Remus has sent a letter to the National Archives saying that “President Biden has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore is not justified as to any of the documents.”

“These are unique and extraordinary circumstances,” Remus added. “Congress is examining an assault on our Constitution and democratic institutions provoked and fanned by those sworn to protect them, and the conduct under investigation extends far beyond typical deliberations concerning the proper discharge of the President’s constitutional responsibilities. The constitutional protections of executive privilege should not be used to shield, from Congress or the public, information that reflects a clear and apparent effort to subvert the Constitution itself.”

According to MSNBC, those documents include Twitter messages, phone and visitor logs, videos and photos of Trump’s events, all documents and communications related to Vice President Mike Pence’s movements and security, the planning around the counting of the certified votes, and any other documents concerning either the rally at the Ellipse or the Capitol riot.

 

Is The U.S. Secretly Being Led By Trump And The Military?

Click here for an article at vice.com by David Gilbert, entitled "How a Truly Unhinged QAnon Conspiracy Went From Telegram to Fox News." (Telegram is a messaging app where anyone can post.)

In the days after Biden was inaugurated, as all hope that former President Donald Trump would somehow overturn the election results had evaporated, QAnon supporters came up with a theory to allow them to perpetuate the myth that Trump was still somehow in charge.

The claim was as follows: Biden was simply acting as the president, filming his addresses to the nation in a Hollywood studio set dressed to look like the Oval Office. This, the conspiracy theory claimed, was all being controlled by Trump and the military, who had in fact arrested Biden but were maintaining the lie that he was president in order to lure the rest of the traitors into their trap.

The basis for these claims were pictures of some of Biden’s early speeches from the Oval Office. QAnon followers cited new wallpaper, strange views from the windows, and claims that Trump himself could be seen in the background of some of the pictures. All of these claims have been thoroughly debunked, but they’ve persisted anyway.

 Even by QAnon standards, this conspiracy was so unmoored from reality that some adherents to the movements pushed back, saying there was no evidence to back it up.

Staunch believers have continued to push this nonsense, in hopes that evidence would emerge supporting their theory.

And that’s what happened this week, when pictures emerged of Biden speaking from a virtual set in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, located just west of the White House. 

The South Court Auditorium set, which features a digital window pane mocked up to look like the Rose garden, is frequently used for news events and photo ops, but for some QAnon followers, this was the proof they had been waiting for. 

“In case you needed any more proof you are definitely watching a movie with a fake president,” John Sabal, known online as QAnon John, told his 70,000 followers on messaging app Telegram. Sabal is the person behind the large Patriots Roundup QAnon conference that is set to take place in Las Vegas later this month, featuring not only a who’s who of QAnon stars, but also at least five sitting GOP lawmakers.

“Look no further,” Sabal continued. “I challenge you to find me one picture like this while Trump was at the White House...I'll wait.”

Of course Sabal could have simply searched online and he would have found an array of pictures of Trump using the very same set.

This nutso theory was picked up and given support by Tucker Carlson on Fox News on Thursday, October 8:

But the fact that Trump used the set during his tenure did stop Carlson from alluding to the QAnon conspiracy about Biden during his highly-rated show on Thursday night, and asking: “If he’s not running the government, then who is?”

Here's another interesting passage:

The claim that Biden is a fake or illegitimate president began life as a QAnon conspiracy theory, but it has seeped into mainstream Republican orthodoxy in recent months, with lawmakers across the country openly claiming, without any concrete evidence, that the election was rigged and that Trump should be reinstated. 

And in some cases, even the full, unvarnished QAnon conspiracy has been repeated by Republicans. 

Like Patricia Silva, a Republican candidate for the local assembly in Fairbanks, Alaska, who recently said: “Of course, we’ve heard about Castle Rock, the studio where Hollywood stars do a lot of their productions. If you’re not aware they have a scene, a set that is the White House, And inside there are rooms that are set up like the Oval Office and such. It’s my opinion that’s where he filmed his inauguration.”

It's beyond disgusting that Carlson should be lending legitimacy to these fantasies, which are so easily debunked -- and have been, repeatedly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

161 Carve-Outs In The Filibuster Rule

Click here for an article available at The Brennan Center by Tim Lau entitled "The Filibuster, Explained." It's a short, clear explanation. I was shocked to hear that far from being sacrosanct and inviolable, there have been 161 exceptions to the filibuster's supermajority requirement ... between 1969 and 2014.

So how about one more for voting rights? Here's an excerpt, a short piece headed "What's the history of the filibuster and its supermajority requirement?"

Under original Senate rules, cutting off debate required a motion that passed with a simple majority. But in 1806, after Vice President Aaron Burr argued that the rule was redundant, the Senate stopped using the motion.

This change inadvertently gave senators the right to unlimited debate, meaning that they could indefinitely delay a bill without supermajority support from ever getting to a vote. This tactic is what we now know as a filibuster.

In 1917, the Senate passed Rule XXII, or the cloture rule, which made it possible to break a filibuster with a two-thirds majority. In 1975, the Senate reduced the requirement to 60 votes, which has effectively become the minimum needed to pass a law.

There are, however, exceptions to the filibuster rule. Perhaps the most notable recent example pertains to presidential appointments. In 2013, Democrats changed the Senate rules to enable the confirmation of executive branch positions — including the cabinet — and of non–Supreme Court judicial nominees with a simple majority. Four years later, Senate Republicans expanded the change to include Supreme Court appointments. Both changes invoked what is known as the nuclear option, or an override of a rule to overcome obstruction by the minority.

At times, the Senate has also exempted certain types of legislation from the cloture rule. For example, Congress’s annual budget reconciliation process requires only a simple majority vote and cannot be filibustered. Likewise, trade agreements that are negotiated using fast-track rules cannot be filibustered. Other exemptions apply to measures that involve, for example, military base closures or arms sales. In total, 161 exceptions to the filibuster’s supermajority requirement have been created between 1969 and 2014, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution’s Molly Reynolds.

 

Hold Accountable Those Who Incited The January 6 Insurrection

 Click here to play a video clip describing Paul Gosar's (R-AZ) involvement in the January 6 insurrection (including scathing statements from his siblings, who banded together to oppose his election, and remain hostile to his antics in Congress).

Click here to play a video clip describing Andy Biggs' (R-AZ) involvement in the January 6 insurrection.

Click here to play a video clip describing Mo Brooks' (R-AL) involvement in the January 6 insurrection.

Click here to play a video clip describing Andrew Clyde's (R-GA) involvement in the January 6 insurrection.

 Click here to play a video clip describing House Minority Leader Kevin McCArthy's (R-CA) involvement in the January 6 insurrection.

Click here for more of these videos available at a site called Respectful Dialogue.

Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry for September 30. Some excerpts:

Tonight, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that extends funding for the government until December 3, 2021. The government won’t shut down tomorrow.

In the Senate, Republican Tom Cotton (R-AR) tried to amend the measure to stop aid for Afghan refugees who were evacuated to the United States. That amendment reflected the demands of former president Donald Trump, who insisted that Republicans should oppose the bill, calling it “a major immigration rewrite that allows Biden to bring anyone he wants from Afghanistan for the next year—no vetting, no screening, no security—and fly them to your community with free welfare and government-issued IDs.” Trump suggested they would bring “horrible assaults and sex crimes” that would be “just be the tip of the iceberg of what’s coming if this isn’t shut down.”

For all their talk of concern about taking care of our Afghan allies during the evacuation of Afghanistan, all 50 Republican senators voted for Cotton’s measure. Democrats killed it on a strict party line vote.

Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) also tried to amend the bill. He wanted to prohibit the use of federal funds to implement vaccine requirements for the coronavirus. This failed, too, but only after all Republicans voted for it.

So the Republicans are opposed to helping the Afghans who worked with U.S. troops and whose lives are in danger at home. Trump turns on his firehose of lies, as usual, with his groundless horror stories demonizing immigrants. He's so predictable.

Here's a piece on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The Republicans have always been totally opposed to the CFPB, which stands up for the little guy against corporate malfeasance. When it was established, private citizen Elizabeth Warren was proposed as its head, but Republicans blocked her; she responded by running for and winning a Senate seat in Massachusetts.

The Senate went on today to confirm Rohit Chopra to direct the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) for a five-year term. Chopra worked with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to establish the CFPB after the financial crisis of 2008, and in its first five years it recovered about $11.7 billion for some 27 million consumers. Former president Trump appointed former South Carolina representative Mick Mulvaney to head the bureau while he was also the director of the Office of Management and Budget; when he was in Congress, Mulvaney had introduced legislation to abolish the bureau. At its head, Mulvaney zeroed out the bureau’s budget and set about dismantling it.

When he took office, Biden began to rebuild the bureau and, in mid-February, appointed Chopra to head it, but Republicans objected to him. Now, more than seven months later, with Republicans insisting he would be anti-business, Vice President Kamala Harris cast the deciding vote to confirm his appointment.

Trump appointed Mulvaney CFPB head after he had introduced legislation to abolish it! Mulvaney proceeded to damage the CFPB as much as he could, but it's back in business.

Congress is wrangling over the $3.5 trillion (over 10 years) Democrat plan, which amount is roughly half what the U.S. spends on the military, and which will not add to the deficit because it's covered by "clawing back some of [Trump's] cuts to corporate taxes and [increased] income taxes on the nation's highest earners." Surprise, surprise: The nation's highest earners are opposed -- and so are their Republican lapdogs.

In contrast, though, Congress spends very little time discussing the defense budget, which, at its current rate, would cost $7.78 trillion over the next ten years. That amount is significantly higher than the defense spending of any other nation in the world. In 2020, the U.S. spent $778 billion on defense, making up 39% of our overall spending. China, the country with the next highest defense budget, spent 13% of its overall spending on defense at $252 billion, India spent 3.7% at $72.9 billion, Russia spent 3.1% at $61.7 billion, and the United Kingdom spent 3% at $59.2 billion.

At the heart of the question of how we spend our tax dollars, of course, is who pays those tax dollars. The Biden administration wants to fund the Build Back Better plan not by borrowing, but by closing tax loopholes and clawing back some of the 2017 cuts to corporate taxes and income taxes on the nation’s highest earners. At Rolling Stone today, reporters Andy Kroll and Geoff Dembicki wrote that political groups funded by the network of right-wing libertarian billionaire Charles Koch, who is deeply invested in fossil fuels, are pouring money and effort into killing the Build Back Better plan.

Not content to try to win seats by gerrymandering, Republicans are not only trying to suppress votes -- they're removing nonpartisan election officers and replacing them with Trump toadies who will surely seek to nullify any Democratic wins:

Meanwhile, the Senate still has not taken up either of the two voting rights acts passed by the House or the Freedom to Vote Act hammered out this month by Democratic senators led by Manchin.

Yesterday, the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab released a report that noted the new voter suppression laws in place in 18 Republican-dominated states but focused instead on 17 new election subversion laws in 11 of those same states. Those new laws put into place the policies former president Trump’s campaign demanded in 2020. They threaten election officials with prosecution if they send out mail-in ballots to anyone who has not requested one, require legislatures to agree to changes in election rules, transfer control of elections or reporting results from nonpartisan officials to political operatives, and allow candidates to demand recounts at will.

A new law in Arizona, for example, “shifts control of election litigation from the secretary of state (currently a Democrat) to the attorney general (currently a Republican). The provision is designed to sunset on January 2, 2023, when a new attorney general potentially takes office.”

“When Voting Rights Lab launched a few years ago, we knew we’d be busy tracking many disturbing, and oftentimes veiled efforts to suppress the vote of historically excluded Americans,” the report concludes. “What we couldn’t have anticipated at that time was that current officeholders would warp the election process itself….”

Sometimes I despair.

 

 

 

 

Methinks Alito Doth Protest Too Much

Click here for an article at cnn.com by Ariane de Vogue entitled "Justice Samuel Alito says Supreme Court is not a 'dangerous cabal.'"

Alito defends the court against recent attacks, especially over the way it handed the preposterous bounty-hunting abortion law in Texas with the "shadow docket."

He said the recent criticism was geared to suggest "that a dangerous cabal is deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way, in the middle of the night, hidden from public view."

Justice Elena Kagan had a few things to say about the Texas decision:

She noted that the law was written to block Texas officials from enforcing it, and instead allows anyone to bring civil suit against an individual that may have helped someone obtain the procedure.

"Without full briefing or argument, and after less than 72 hours' thought, this Court greenlights the operation of Texas's patently unconstitutional law banning most abortions," Kagan said.

She said the court's ruling illustrated how far the Court's 'shadow docket ' decisions may depart form "the usual principles of appellate process."

She noted the ruling was of "great consequence" but that it had only been "hastily" considered by the court. She said the majority barely bothered to explain its conclusion "that a challenge to an obviously unconstitutional enforcement scheme is unlikely to prevail."

"In all these ways, the majority's decision is emblematic of too much of this Court's shadow docket decision-making -- which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend, " she said.

UNREASONED, INCONSISTENT, AND IMPOSSIBLE TO DEFEND -- thank you, Justice Kagan!

On Twitter, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said:

Nope, just random that we churned out 80 partisan 5-4 decisions for Republican donors, opened dark money floodgates, crippled the Voting Rights Act, unleashed partisan bulk gerrymandering, and protected corporations from court. Pure coincidence. 

Click here for more commentary on Alito's whining. In an article entitled "Alito's political broadside against Supreme Court critics -- and how it misfires," Aaron Blake at The Washington Post says: 

“Democrats are fond of concocting ominous terms like ‘dark money’ and ‘shadow docket,’ ” Cruz maintains. Alito calls it a “catchy and sinister term” used to paint a picture of a “dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways.”

The Trump administration kick-started the frequent use of the shadow docket:

According to data kept by University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck, the Trump administration dramatically increased its emergency requests relative to its predecessors — from just eight in the previous 16 years — one every two years — to 41 in four years.

Blake goes on:

And those requests were largely successful. As Vladeck testified earlier this year, “Not counting one application that was held in abeyance and four that were withdrawn, the Justices granted 24 of the 36 applications in full and four in part.”

That success rate is pretty extraordinary. Numbers crunched by Reuters show that in 2020, the court granted 10 of 11 emergency requests from the Trump administration and 10 of 15 from religious groups, but only about one-third of requests from state and other government groups, and precisely zero out of 97 from other private parties.

Is this a reflection of the politicization of SCOTUS? Heaven forfend.

 

 

 

Summary of Robert Kagen's Article, "Our Constitutional Crisis is Already Here"

Click here for an article in The Washington Post by archconservative (neocon) Robert Kagen, entitled "Our Constitutional Crisis is Already Here." The article is attracting a lot of attention, and I have summarized it by cutting and pasting a number of passages from the article:

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.
Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.

Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.

The amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a simple majority vote.

The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.

Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation. The political and intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating Trump since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way — if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if Trump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states.

Party loyalty has superseded branch loyalty, and never more so than in the Trump era. As the two Trump impeachments showed, if members of Congress are willing to defend or ignore the president’s actions simply because he is their party leader, then conviction and removal become all but impossible.

Trump supporters believe the U.S. government and society have been captured by socialists, minority groups and sexual deviants. They see the Republican Party establishment as corrupt and weak — “losers,” to use Trump’s word, unable to challenge the reigning liberal hegemony. They view Trump as strong and defiant, willing to take on the establishment, Democrats, RINOs, liberal media, antifa, the Squad, Big Tech and the “Mitch McConnell Republicans.” His charismatic leadership has given millions of Americans a feeling of purpose and empowerment, a new sense of identity. While Trump’s critics see him as too narcissistic to be any kind of leader, his supporters admire his unapologetic, militant selfishness. Unlike establishment Republicans, Trump speaks without embarrassment on behalf of an aggrieved segment of Americans, not exclusively White, who feel they have been taking it on the chin for too long. And that is all he needs to do.

Because the Trump movement is less about policies than about Trump himself, it has undermined the normal role of American political parties, which is to absorb new political and ideological movements into the mainstream.

For a movement built around a cult of personality, these adjustments are not possible. For Trump supporters, the “error” is that Trump was cheated out of reelection by what he has told them is an oppressive, communist, Democrat regime.

The Trump movement might not have begun as an insurrection, but it became one after its leader claimed he had been cheated out of reelection. For Trump supporters, the events of Jan. 6 were not an embarrassing debacle but a patriotic effort to save the nation, by violent action if necessary. As one 56-year-old Michigan woman explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”

The events of Jan. 6 proved that Trump and his most die-hard supporters are prepared to defy constitutional and democratic norms, just as revolutionary movements have in the past. While it might be shocking to learn that normal, decent Americans can support a violent assault on the Capitol, it shows that Americans as a people are not as exceptional as their founding principles and institutions. Europeans who joined fascist movements in the 1920s and 1930s were also from the middle classes. No doubt many of them were good parents and neighbors, too. People do things as part of a mass movement that they would not do as individuals, especially if they are convinced that others are out to destroy their way of life.

It would be foolish to imagine that the violence of Jan. 6 was an aberration that will not be repeated. Because Trump supporters see those events as a patriotic defense of the nation, there is every reason to expect more such episodes. Trump has returned to the explosive rhetoric of that day, insisting that he won in a “landslide,” that the “radical left Democrat communist party” stole the presidency in the “most corrupt, dishonest, and unfair election in the history of our country” and that they have to give it back. He has targeted for defeat those Republicans who voted for his impeachment — or criticized him for his role in the riot. Already, there have been threats to bomb polling sites, kidnap officials and attack state capitols. “You and your family will be killed very slowly,” the wife of Georgia’s top election official was texted earlier this year. Nor can one assume that the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers would again play a subordinate role when the next riot unfolds. Veterans who assaulted the Capitol told police officers that they had fought for their country before and were fighting for it again. Looking ahead to 2022 and 2024, Trump insists “there is no way they win elections without cheating. There’s no way.” So, if the results come in showing another Democratic victory, Trump’s supporters will know what to do. Just as “generations of patriots” gave “their sweat, their blood and even their very lives” to build America, Trump tells them, so today “we have no choice. We have to fight” to restore “our American birthright.”

It was no surprise that elected officials feared taking on the Trump movement and that Republican job seekers either kept silent about their views or made show-trial-like apologies for past criticism. Ambition is a powerful antidote to moral qualms. More revealing was the behavior of Republican elder statesmen, former secretaries of state in their 80s or 90s who had no further ambitions for high office and seemingly nothing to lose by speaking out. Despite their known abhorrence of everything Trump stood for, these old lions refused to criticize him. They were unwilling to come out against a Republican Party to which they had devoted their professional lives, even when the party was led by someone they detested. Whatever they thought about Trump, moreover, Republican elders disliked Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democrats more. Again, this is not so unusual. German conservatives accommodated Adolf Hitler in large part because they opposed the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis, who, after all, shared many of their basic prejudices.

All this has left few dissenting voices within the Republican ecosystem. The Republican Party today is a zombie party. Its leaders go through the motions of governing in pursuit of traditional Republican goals, wrestling over infrastructure spending and foreign policy, even as real power in the party has leached away to Trump. From the uneasy and sometimes contentious partnership during Trump’s four years in office, the party’s main if not sole purpose today is as the willing enabler of Trump’s efforts to game the electoral system to ensure his return to power.

Even Trump opponents play along. Republicans such as Sens. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse have condemned the events of Jan. 6, criticized Trump and even voted for his impeachment, but in other respects they continue to act as good Republicans and conservatives. On issues such as the filibuster, Romney and others insist on preserving “regular order” and conducting political and legislative business as usual, even though they know that Trump’s lieutenants in their party are working to subvert the next presidential election.

The result is that even these anti-Trump Republicans are enabling the insurrection. Revolutionary movements usually operate outside a society’s power structures. But the Trump movement also enjoys unprecedented influence within those structures. It dominates the coverage on several cable news networks, numerous conservative magazines, hundreds of talk radio stations and all kinds of online platforms. It has access to financing from rich individuals and the Republican National Committee’s donor pool. And, not least, it controls one of the country’s two national parties.

oday, we are in a time of hope and illusion. The same people who said that Trump wouldn’t try to overturn the last election now say we have nothing to worry about with the next one. Republicans have been playing this game for five years, first pooh-poohing concerns about Trump’s intentions, or about the likelihood of their being realized, and then going silent, or worse, when what they insisted was improbable came to pass. These days, even the anti-Trump media constantly looks for signs that Trump’s influence might be fading and that drastic measures might not be necessary.

The world will look very different in 14 months if, as seems likely, the Republican zombie party wins control of the House. At that point, with the political winds clearly blowing in his favor, Trump is all but certain to announce his candidacy, and social media constraints on his speech are likely to be lifted, since Facebook and Twitter would have a hard time justifying censoring his campaign. With his megaphone back, Trump would once again dominate news coverage, as outlets prove unable to resist covering him around the clock if only for financial reasons.

But this time, Trump would have advantages that he lacked in 2016 and 2020, including more loyal officials in state and local governments; the Republicans in Congress; and the backing of GOP donors, think tanks and journals of opinion. And he will have the Trump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again.

Plan To Have Mike Pence Overturn The Election Results And Declare Trump President

 This is the six-point plan from Trump lawyer John Eastman given to Mike Pence before the January 6 insurrection, in an attempt to have Pence overturn the election results and have Trump declared the winner.

Debt Ceiling Blues

 Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry for September 21, 2021, where she provides a good explanation of the debt ceiling. 

Only one other country in the world has a debt ceiling: Iceland, which has set the ceiling so astronomically high it will never be reached. Anyway, once again, the debt ceiling is being used by the Republicans as a political tool to whip up political chaos and disagreement:

Tonight, the House of Representatives passed a funding bill that would both keep the government from shutting down and prevent a default on the U.S. debt. The vote was 220 to 211, with all Democrats voting in favor and all Republicans voting against.

If the debt ceiling is not raised, the time will soon come when the U.S. government is forced to default on its debt. No one knows what the result of default would be, because it's never happened -- but economic belief is unanimous that the negative consequences would range from serious to catastrophic.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says it “could trigger a spike in interest rates, a steep drop in stock prices and other financial turmoil. Our current economic recovery would reverse into recession, with billions of dollars of growth and millions of jobs lost.” Financial services firm Moody's Analytics warned that a default would cost up to 6 million jobs, create an unemployment rate of nearly 9% and wipe out $15 trillion in household wealth.

In 2011, Republican refusal to raise the debt ceiling until the last minute resulted in a downgrade of the U.S. federal government creditworthiness from AAA to AA+ -- the first time the U.S. had been given a rating below AAA. Moody's and Standard & Poor explained that although the U.S. had not defaulted, the downgrade was because the Republicans had acted so irresponsibly by leaving the situation to the very last minute that it was clear the government was not to be trusted. 

The debt ceiling charade has always been simply political theater -- a game of chicken where everyone knows the collision will not happen, because the result would be too painful. My fear is that with today's gang of anarchists and Trumpists, particularly in the House, the Republicans might actually be willing to risk economic disaster this time -- maybe a global economic meltdown would give them an opportunity to claim that the Biden administration had caused such a huge amount of damage that the 2020 election would have to be rescinded and Trump could step in to save the world (ha!).

We haven't yet seen how far the Republicans are willing to go to inflict damage on the country for what they perceive to be their political advantage. It doesn't look good.

Trump STILL Doesn't Know How The Supreme Court Works

 Click here for an article at Business Insider, by Sonam Sheth, entitled "Trump's lawyers had a 'law school 101 discussion' about explaining to him how the Supreme Court works, book says."

 Trump, angered by his loss to Biden, screamed at his advisors, "Why can't we go directly to the Supreme Court?" They had to explain to him that first a case must be filed in a district court, then get a federal appeals court to hear the case, and appeal that case to SCOTUS -- and even then, the Court might decline to take it up.

Trump said frequently and publicly on the campaign trail that he was banking on the Supreme Court to hand him the election if he lost the Electoral College to Biden.

After Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September last year, leaving a vacancy on the high court, Time reported that Trump allies were weighing which prospective Supreme Court picks would help him win the election.

On September 23, Trump made the groundless claim that Democrats were trying to rig the election against him and said he wanted a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that would agree with him.

"I think this will end up in the Supreme Court," he said. "And I think it's very important that we have nine justices."

 He seemed to believe that because he had appointed Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Comey-Barrett, they were in his pocket and would vote to support him. That's not the way it works -- at least, not yet.

SEAL Of Disapproval

Click here for an article in Washington Monthly by Thomas E. Ricks entitled "Seal of Disapproval -- How the Navy failed to stop -- and Donald Trump championed -- a murderous special operations leader. It's the story of disgraced SEAL Eddie Gallagher, told in a new book, entitled "Alpha," by New York Times reporter David Philipps.

In recent years we’ve had a raft load of fanboy books by and about Navy SEALs and other special operators at war. But in Alpha, David Philipps, a reporter for The New York Times, has produced a serious study of a SEAL unit in crisis as it fought ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, in 2017. By Philipps’s credible account, the unit’s leader, Eddie Gallagher, was a one-man wrecking crew for ethical behavior.

It's a lot more than ethical behavior -- it's criminal behavior. It tells how Gallagher got away with inexcusable actions because those around him -- including his superiors -- were afraid that if they disciplined Gallagher or tried to rein him in, they would be murdered -- something easily accomplished in a war zone.

But Philipps’s book isn’t just about Gallagher. It’s about a system that enables evil because it doesn’t want to look bad.

Gallagher found support on Fox News, and then with Donald Trump and his sons:

When they finally decided to prosecute him for his other crimes, including killing the teenage prisoner, Gallagher found fast outside backing. The Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth conducted a campaign on the soldier’s behalf. He featured Andrea Gallagher, Eddie’s wife, in television interviews. She alleged that her husband was an innocent and noble victim of an ungrateful government. “These are atrocities being committed against our military service members, my family, my husband,” she claimed. She asserted that people who had never been in the fight were judging her husband, when in fact his accusers were members of her husband’s own team, who believed he had recklessly endangered them while undercutting the war effort by alienating Iraqis. Benefiting from Fox’s backing, Andrea Gallagher was able to raise roughly $500,000 for her husband’s legal defense fund. 

More importantly, Hegseth’s efforts attracted the attention of Donald Trump and his sons. The president called Richard Spencer, the Navy secretary, to chew him out over the service’s handling of Gallagher—and then told Spencer to call Hegseth, the Fox News contributor.

An interesting article -- and I'm sure "Alpha" is an interesting book.

 

How To Wipe A Drive On Windows 10 Or Windows 11

 Click here for an article at How-To Geek by Chris Hoffman entitled "How to Wipe a Drive on Windows 10 or Windows 11."

It contains:

Table of Contents
What You Need to Know
Option 1: Wipe Any Entire Drive
Option 2: Wipe Only Free Space
Option 3: Wipe Your Windows System Drive

Trump's Deadline: Leave Afghanistan By May 1, 2021

 Statement by Donald J. Trump, April 18, 2021:

This statement was on the Republican Party website until August 16, 2021, when it was taken down.

Cool Numbers Trick!

1 Look up the 9th word on page 108 in your dictionary. Write this word on a slip of paper and slip it into an envelope. Put the envelope in your pocket.
    
2 Ask for two volunteers. Give one the dictionary, and the other a calculator.
 

3 Ask the volunteer with the calculator to pick any three digit-number. The only stipulation is that no two digits can repeat. For example, he or she might choose the number 365. The digits must be different - you cannot have a number like 222.
    ​
4 Ask them to reverse the number (e.g.563). Then, ask them to take away the bigger number from the smaller number (e.g. 563- 365= 198) Finally, ask them to reverse that number (e.g. 891).

​5 Ask them to add the last two number together. In our example, 198+891= 1,089. The result will always be 1,089 no matter what number you choose in the first place.
    ​
6 Now ask them what the first three digits of the number are. These will always be 108. Ask the volunteer with the dictionary to turn to page 108.

7 Now ask the other volunteer what the last digit of the number was. This will always be 9.
  ​
8 Ask the volunteer with dictionary to stare at the ninth word down. Pull out the envelope and reveal the strip of paper. The audience will be astonished as you show the same word as the volunteer called out!

Heather Cox Richardson: Carlson/Orban, Immigration, And The Republican March Toward Authoritarianism

 Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry for August 8, 2021. Tucker Carlson broadcast his show from Budapest all last week:

The reason that Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson’s broadcasts last week from Hungary were so shocking was that his praise of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s policies, which have dramatically eroded Hungarian democracy, threw into the open the Republican Party’s embrace of authoritarianism.

When Biden took office, his overriding concern was COVID, and he hoped he could heal the Republican/Democrat divide by uniting Americans against the spread of the disease. 

In response, Republican pundits, especially those on the Fox News Channel, undermined support for the vaccine. Right-wing accounts on social media warned people the vaccine was dangerous and said that Covid-19 was a hoax, or almost certainly survivable. Trump supporters became one of the populations that were reluctant to get vaccinated. We are now facing a new, very contagious variant—the Delta variant—which appears to be more dangerous even than the original virus and which is infecting children more effectively than the original did. National infection numbers are around 100,000 a day, about the same rate we were suffering in February, before the vaccine was widely available.

Republican-led states have been hit the hardest. Last week, Florida and Texas alone made up one out of every three new cases, and now Florida is the center of the pandemic. On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 23,903 new cases in Florida that day alone. Hospitals are filling up as unvaccinated Americans need medical care; Austin, Texas, activated an emergency alert this weekend as its hospitals were overwhelmed.

Here's a recent comment from Senator Rand Paul:

Today, in just the latest example, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said, “It’s time for us to resist. They can’t arrest all of us.... No one should follow the CDC.” He claimed that masking and remote learning was physically and emotionally damaging for children, and there was no reason they should not return to school full time, without masks. He said he would work to defund any school or government agency or school that did not simply resume its pre-pandemic operations.

Republicans are now blaming the continuing COVID problem on immigration:

When Biden asked Republican governors on August 3 to help or get out of the way, Florida governor Ron DeSantis responded: “Joe Biden has the nerve to tell me to get out of the way on COVID while he lets COVID-infected migrants pour over our southern border by the hundreds of thousands. No elected official is doing more to enable the transmission of COVID in America than Joe Biden with his open borders policies,” and claimed: “He’s imported more virus from around the world by having a wide-open southern border.” 

"He lets COVID-infected migrants pour over our southern border by the hundreds of thousands"? Hardly. HCR goes on to explain the procedure followed to deal with the possibility of COVID-infected migrants.

She concludes:

While infection rates are climbing, because of both the Delta variant and the crowding at Border Patrol, immigrants test positive at a lower rate than the rate of non-immigrants around them. 

And yet, Republicans are using the deadly new coronavirus variant to stoke anti-immigrant fires. 

It is cynical, it is deadly… and it takes us one more step toward authoritarianism.