Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis, who has been conducting a criminal investigation of former President Donald Trump's post-2020 election activities in her state, has yet to formally announce any type of indictment. It's still possible that Willis will decide against a prosecution.
But according to May 19 reporting in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) and The Hill, Willis' recent actions indicate that the Georgia prosecutor is getting ready to move forward with an indictment this summer.
The Hill's Zach Schonfeld reports that Willis has "asked judges in the Georgia county not to schedule trials and in-person hearings in roughly the first half of August — a signal she may bring charges against former President Trump during that time."
According to Schonfeld, "Willis also indicated about 70 percent of her staff will work remotely on various days in August, according to a letter sent Thursday, (May 18) to local judges, law enforcement officials and elected officials…. She also noted that few in-person proceedings will be held the week of July 31, because most judges will be attending the state's annual judicial conference."
When E. Jean Carroll won her defamation and sexual abuse lawsuit against Donald Trump earlier this month, Republicans knew exactly who they wanted to blame. No, not Trump's defense attorney, who called no witnesses and offered no evidence in his client's defense. No, not Trump, who keeps undermining his weak denials of the crime by bragging about how guys like him "historically" and "fortunately" get away with sexual assault. No, they blamed the jury.
"That jury's a joke," huffed Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., or as Trump called him during the 2016 primary, "Little Marco". Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., echoed the same claim, grousing about "a New York jury," as if it's preposterous to try a case in the same jurisdiction where the crime actually happened. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., also took a swipe about the "New York jury."
— from The New Civil Rights Movement
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, traveling in New Hampshire on Friday, just days ahead of his expected presidential run announcement, made the traditional visit to a diner where he said hello to locals, sat down with reporters, and then claimed second-grade children are being “forced” to choose their “pronouns.”
The far-right Florida governor who has been “waging a culture war on his own constituents for the purpose of elevating himself,” as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said Thursday, made certain he shared that platform with New Hampshire voters.
On Wednesday, the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT), as ABC News reported, DeSantis signed several bills into law attacking the LGBTQ community.
Among them, legislation that not only bans all gender-affirming care for anyone under 18, it allows the State of Florida to take custody of the minor from their own parents if they have received treatment.
You’ve probably never heard of Anthony Comstock, a Civil War Union soldier and New York Postmaster, who died in 1915. You need to learn about him and his legacy, however, as his long fingers are about to reach up out of the grave and wrap themselves around the necks of every American woman of childbearing years.
Anthony Comstock was a mama’s boy who hated sex. His mother died when he was 10 years old and the shock apparently never left him; women who didn’t live up to her ideal were his open and declared enemies, as were pornography, masturbation, and abortion. He was so ignorant of sex and reproduction that he believed a visible human-like fetus developed “within seconds” of sexual intercourse.
Comstock spent decades scouring the country collecting pornography, which he enthusiastically shared with men in Congress, and harassing “loose women.” For example, when he visited a belly-dancing show (then a new craze) in Chicago at the Cairo Theatre during the World’s Fair of 1893, he demanded the show be shut down.
Counting on John Roberts to fix what’s wrong with the Supreme Court is a fool’s errand. This was true before the latest round of scandals involving Clarence Thomas, and it remains true in their aftermath. Roberts may be an “institutionalist,” as he is often labeled by mainstream legal commentators, but he appears to be just fine with the direction and management of the institution he leads. Far from being a potential savior of the court, Roberts is at the center of its many burgeoning problems.
On April 10, the eleven Democratic Senators who hold a slim majority on the upper chamber’s judiciary committee cosigned a respectful letter to Roberts, imploring him to open an investigation into Thomas’s failure to disclose a stunning array of gifts that he and his wife Ginni Thomas, the crackpot uber-right election denier, had received from Texas billionaire and Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow over the past twenty years. On April 20, they sent a second letter, inviting Roberts to testify on May 2 about the need for ethics reform on the court.
President Biden has officially announced that he’s running for a second term in 2024.
Among the first-term achievements he touted were his actions to address climate change. There’s a good reason for that — Biden’s reelection may well hinge on turnout among young voters who care passionately about the climate.
But worryingly for Biden, a Fossil Free Media and Data for Progress poll this spring showed a dramatic drop in approval for the president’s climate and energy policies, particularly among independent voters and youth. The dip followed Biden’s decision to approve the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska, breaking a campaign promise to end oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters.
President Joe Biden is attending this year’s G7 summit, with Russia’s war in Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons there at the top of the agenda. The G7 comprises Japan, Italy, Canada, France, the US, the UK, and Germany. Russia was briefly a member of what was then called the G8, but was expelled in 2014 after its military annexation of Crimea.
This year’s G7 meeting is being held in Japan. Of particular note is where in Japan: Hiroshima. There, on August 6th, 1945, the United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb, leveling the city and killing an estimated 140,000 people and injuring 100,000 more. As the threat of nuclear war looms as a real possibility, the world leaders gathered in Hiroshima have a responsibility, to reflect on the obliteration of that city almost 80 years ago, and to say no to nuclear war.
“I want them, the G7 leaders, to seriously acknowledge the inhumanity of nuclear weapons,” 85-year-old Teruko Yahata, a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, said this week. “These are weapons that can destroy humankind. I want them to strongly feel that these are terrible things and that they have to be abolished.” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s family is from Hiroshima, and a number of his relatives perished in the atomic blast.
It seems that the anticipated humanitarian crisis of thousands of migrants streaming across the border, which many predicted with the end of the Title 42 program, has been avoided.
Still, something like 12 million undocumented people currently live in the United States, and we are probably just one migrant caravan away from having scores of families forced to live in squalor in border cities and perhaps being subject to violence at the hands of border agents.
Making matters worse, no recently proposed legislation concerning immigration has much chance of becoming law.
For instance, the 2021 US Citizenship Act, which Biden championed early in his term and that would have created a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people, ran aground quickly last term due to GOP opposition. Now, Republicans have their own version of revamping our immigration system with the Secure the Border Act. This bill, which calls for hiring more border agents, as well as championing some Trump-era initiatives like building a physical border wall, has no path out of the Democrat-controlled Senate.
When so much Republican behavior these days is too gross to be funny, there's something downright refreshing about old-fashioned Christian right hypocrisy. This time, it comes from Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a biological human being who nonetheless sounds exactly like ChatGPT channeling a Breitbart comment section. Boebert built her career on sanctimonious, though often incoherent, lectures on the supposed threats to the family of leftist sexual "depravities" like same-sex marriage or contraception use. She also filed for divorce last month, a fact that only got into the press this week. This follows other comical examples of Boebert's "family values," such as celebrating teen pregnancy or standing by her now-to-be ex-husband after he exposed himself to teen girls in a bowling alley.
Her choice to leave Jayson Boebert might be the first sign that there's functioning brain activity in Lauren Boebert's skull. As the bowling alley story suggests, the guy is a creep. He started dating then-Lauren Roberts when she was 16 and he was 22 years old. She dropped out of high school to give birth to their first child at 18. They got married two years later. During this time, he was arrested on domestic violence charges after a fight with her. In August, he was still at it, getting the cops called on him for reportedly threatening neighbors.
United States Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) returned to work last week in Washington, D.C., appearing "shockingly diminished" and "frail," The New York Times reports.
The 89-year-old senator is still visibly struggling through her recovery from shingles, which according toThe Times "spread to her face and neck, causing vision and balance impairments and facial paralysis known as Ramsay Hunt syndrome."
The longtime lawmaker, however, still "sees the job as her calling" and has been resistant to calls for her resignation from the physically and mentally demanding job.
The Times reports:
Rep. Jim Jordan wants special counsel John Durham to testify in his “weaponization” hearings. Created as part of a dark deal that Rep. Kevin McCarthy made with far-right Republican extremists to secure his speakership, Jordan’s new subcommittee claims to be investigating “the politicization of the FBI and the Department of Justice” against Republicans.
So far, Jordan’s (R-Ohio) subcommittee has found nothing. Durham didn’t find anything either, but he spun his report with useful GOP soundbites that are sufficient to achieve Republican objectives:
Muddy the scene. Arouse the mob. And accuse adversaries of your own nefarious deeds. Then exploit the resulting confusion and chaos.
In fact, John Durham is now a case study in the GOP’s weaponization of the Justice Department.
We have, today, the most extreme Supreme Court since the early 1930s, and it didn’t just get that way through Republican appointments. Breaking two centuries of tradition, wealthy GOP donors are now using money, gifts, and other enticements to keep the Court in line.
In this, they’re exploiting the lifetime tenure given federal judges by the Constitution. If a billionaire or industry can suck up to and build a relationship with a Supreme Court justice early enough in their career, they can be confident of decades of decisions that favor them and their interests, as we’ve seen most shockingly in the case of Harlan Crow and Clarence Thomas.
This is the exact opposite of the intention of the Framers of the Constitution.
A changing world order, a shrinking U.S. empire, migrations and related demographic shifts, and major economic crashes have all enhanced religious fundamentalisms around the world. Beyond religions, other ideological fundamentalisms likewise provide widely welcomed reassurances. One of the latter—market fundamentalism—invites and deserves criticism as a major obstacle to navigating this time of rapid social change. Market fundamentalism attributes to that particular social institution a level of perfection and “optimality” quite parallel to what fundamentalist religions attribute to prophets and divinities.
Yet markets are just one among many social means of rationing. Anything scarce relative to demand for it raises the same question: Who will get it and who must do without it? The market is one institutional way to ration the scarce item. In a market, those who want it bid up its price leading others to drop out because they cannot or will not pay the higher price. When higher prices have eliminated the excess of demand over supply, scarcity is gone, and no more bidding up is required. Those able and willing to pay the higher prices are satisfied by receiving distributions of the available supply.
Blasting out either/or dilemmas should favor Dems: Do elections (or mobs) count? Are we a secular democracy or a theocracy? Is politics warfare or accommodation? Forced births or abortion rights?
Could the news get worse for the GOP? Count on it. Banning abortion? Attacking elected DAs? Defending homicidal vigilantes? Praising Putin? Shielding George Santos? Tolerating Rudy Giuliani? Letting McCarthy's nutcase cabinet run free? Rampaging Ron DeSantis? Pathetic Mike Pence? Nikki Haley blaming Obama for today's racism? And Trump posing as the “moderate” – excluding his convictions? What a crew! Thus Never Trumpers anticipate national routs if Donald the Deficient is nominated. What a uniform display of going off the rails.
More important than weekly melodramas, the next election again confronts what will be the operative rules that define governance? For the core thresholds are what Trumpism belligerently challenges: whether one unpopular, minority party gets away with unilaterally vetoing legal and Constitutional norms. Everything else is noise. Thus Dems triumph when making elections about values, destiny and what defines citizenship, not media/propaganda squabbles.
Oftentimes, when you suspect you’re being gouged by corporate price fixers, you’re right.
Take the rat-a-tat-tat of today’s price jumps at supermarkets and chain restaurants. They make you want to race to the cash register before they raise prices again.
No, no cry the CEOs of food giants, it’s not us, it’s “supply chain disruptions.” Then corporate politicians and economists chime in with old platitudes about the invisible hand of “supply and demand” while media know-nothings pile on, blathering about “ne’er-do-wells” causing a labor shortage.
But that’s hogwash — your suspicions are right: It’s plain old price fixing by avaricious food monopolies.
As the planet’s biggest investor, with $9 trillion in assets under management and an army of tech-savvy analysts trained on the scent of easy money, numbers are BlackRock’s bread and butter. A giant with such an enormous appetite should find room for all kinds of facts and figures – but this one’s a bit of a picky eater.
The BlackRock Annual General Meeting is on May 24th, and resolutions submitted by shareholders will be going to a vote. The board advocates for or against those resolutions in a statement released last month. One resolution they unanimously recommend shareholders vote against is Item 7 – the 'Impact Report for Climate-Related Human Risks of iShares U.S. Aerospace and Defense Exchange-Traded Fund' resolution, submitted by CODEPINK.
The resolution simply calls on BlackRock to research and publish the climate impacts of this industry-wide investment offering (ticker code ITA). Among the dozens of companies represented in ITA are Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing – companies that profit directly from mass killings. Lockheed Martin developed the bombs Saudi Arabia used on a Yemeni school bus full of children in 2018, and Raytheon is the chief weapons contractor behind the expansion of the nation's nuclear arsenal.
Not so long ago, political analysts were speaking of the “G-2”—that is, of a potential working alliance between the United States and China aimed at managing global problems for their mutual benefit. Such a collaborative twosome was seen as potentially even more powerful than the G7 group of leading Western economies. As former Undersecretary of the Treasury C. Fred Bergsten, who originally imagined such a partnership, wrote in 2008, “The basic idea would be to develop a G-2 between the United States and China to steer the global governance process.”
That notion would become the basis for the Obama administration’s initial outreach to China, though it would lose its appeal in Washington as tensions with Beijing continued to rise over Taiwan and other issues. Still, if the war in Ukraine teaches us anything, it should be that, whatever the desires of America’s leaders, they will have little choice (other than war) but to share global governance responsibilities with China and, in a new twist on geopolitics, with India, too. After all, that rising nuclear-armed nation is now the most populous on the planet and will soon possess the third-largest economy as well. In other words, if global disaster is to be averted, whether Americans like it or not, this country will have little choice but to begin planning for an emerging G-3.
President Joe Biden has the power to tell Republicans to pound sand on their demands over the debt ceiling, and Democrats are getting louder in saying he should do just that. Congressional Democrats are getting more and more worried that Biden is caving the debt ceiling negotiations he promised would not happen, and that he’s inevitably setting Democrats up to make unacceptable concessions. That will have reverberations down the line, when the next fight comes along.
Biden continued the semantical game the White House has been playing during a Wednesday press conference. “To be clear,” he said, “this negotiation is about the outlines of what the budget will look like, not whether or not we'll in fact pay our debts.” If that’s the case and defaulting on our debts is not on the table, then Biden can prove it by ending the farce of negotiations on the budget and take the debt ceiling off the table unilaterally.
A former employee of Rudy Giuliani, who was hired to help him drum up business for his law firm, has sworn under oath and penalty of perjury that he told her one of the “business opportunities” she could exploit was to sell pardons to felons for $2 million each. Giuliani, she alleges in a lawsuit filed Monday, told her he’d be splitting the money with Trump 50/50.
It’s an echo of a mostly-forgotten story in The New York Times from over two years ago: The $2 million figure matches what John Kiriakou told reporters and the FBI (which appears not to have followed up) that Giuliani quoted him as the cost to buy a pardon from Trump. (Kiriakou turned the offer down, noting that he didn’t have $2 million even if he were inclined, which he wasn’t.)
As far as I can tell, not a single elected Republican has commented on the news: Corruption is now officially the GOP’s brand. The ideals of America are, to them, nothing more than a joke.
The rock n' roll immortal and political savant, Kid Rock, will be appearing in concert at Thunder Valley Casino in a couple of weeks. Should you want to go, you can be sure you'll find yourself among a throng of swell folks who want to re-live their younger days. I looked at the comments following that announcement turning up on my Facebook feed and wasn't entirely surprised to see that lots of the "young" people who are moving through their progressions toward becoming no longer young love the guy, have seen him before and want to see him again. Memories. Of the way they were.
So he'll probably draw a sizeable throng of people mixing their meth with brewskis that won't include Bud Light. That brand is for shooting, not for drinking.
The long-awaited Durham Report about the "investigation of the investigation" of the origins of the Russia probe was finally released on Monday after four long years. And just like everything that touches Donald Trump these days, the right insists that it says something completely at odds with reality.
But what else is new?
Every nonsensical charge made by Donald Trump is deemed by his supporters to automatically be true and every charge against him is a hoax or a witch hunt. In this case, Trump and his media enablers have been touting this investigation for years as "The Big One" that finally proves that "Russia, Russia, Russia" was a witch hunt, set up by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. The report fails on every count to prove that case.
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
While MAGA Republicans in the House attack and investigate what they dub Biden’s “weaponized” federal government and blast Democratic mayors for being “soft on crime,” they are blatantly ignoring the crimes of their allies in plain sight.
After Rep. George Santos was arrested and charged with 13 federal crimes — seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making false statements to Congress — what did Speaker Kevin McCarthy do?
Nothing. In fact, he said he would not act to remove Santos.
Timothy Parlatore, an attorney for Donald Trump, made a major announcement on Wednesday, May 17: He is leaving the former president's legal team.
The attorney has been representing Trump during one of his many legal battles: the U.S. Department of Justice's investigation of government documents he was storing at his Mar-a-Lago compound in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump's critics allege that he violated federal law by storing classified documents at Mar-a-Lago; Trump, however, has maintained that the documents were declassified when he left the White House.
Parlatore didn't get into specifics when he made his announcement, telling CNN, "It's been an incredible honor to serve and work through interesting legal issues. My departure was a personal choice and does not reflect upon the case, as I believe strongly the (U.S. Department of Justice) team is engaging in misconduct to pursue an investigation of conduct that is not criminal."
Within a mere few pages of his debut novel, Altar to an Erupting Sun, Chuck Collins of Guilford, Vermont, sets the stage for his heroine, Rae Kelliher, to carry out a well-planned murder/suicide. Kelliher sacrifices herself to a cause, taking out an oil baron for his role in delaying responses to climate change. Complicating the aftermath, two of the CEO’s children are killed in the process.
In Altar, a work of near-future eco-fiction, Collins welcomes us into a world where visionaries and activists wrestle with climate disruption in the recent past to our present and several years beyond. Rae Kelliher is a life-long activist focused most on the environment, though her reach spans other causes. Throughout the novel, we see what makes Kelliher tick. From wrestling with her Ohio past and a myopic brother to her meticulous research into, and near-obsessive behavior around, a cause, we see that she is a force to be remembered. And she is.
Seven years after her dramatic demise, Kelliher’s Vermont farm community — which she and her husband, Reggie, nurtured — gather to honor her, to try to understand her violent exit, to grapple with the work yet to be done. In the end, it’s clear that Rae Kelliher did not die in vain.
— from Foreign Policy In Focus
The burning of fossil fuels—oil, coal, natural gas—is responsible for nearly 90 percent of global carbon emissions. Despite almost-universal recognition of the need to reduce the use of those fossil fuels, the industrialized world is having the hardest time breaking its addiction. The economic rebound from the COVID-19 shutdowns generated the largest ever increase in global emissions from fossil fuels in 2021—around 2 billion tons. The increase in 2022 was considerably more modest—thanks to a surge in renewable energy investments—but it was an increase nonetheless. Meanwhile, subsidies for fossil fuel consumption rose to a record $1 trillion last year.
The prevailing approach to reducing dependency on fossil fuels has been price-based—either by way of a carbon tax or some form of emissions trading scheme. Around two dozen countries levy carbon taxes: establishing a price for carbon and making emitters pay that price per unit of carbon consumed. Meanwhile, under the various “cap-and-trade” systems in place in the European Union and other places, a “cap” on emissions is established through the issuance of permits. But industries can exceed their “cap” by simply paying a penalty, while those that don’t use the full value of their permit can effectively sell their allowance to others.
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