Hi folks!
We're just $1,507 $917 away from our goal. Let's put an end to this fund drive this week. I know we can do this, because we've done it before. All it takes is you.
If you haven't yet chipped in — if you're one of our regular donors who likes to wait until the last minute — this is your cue.
One dollar, five dollars — no amount is too small, and every donation pushes us that much closer to our goal.
Thanks in advance!
— Jeff T.
— from Robert Reich's Substack
I know the conventional wisdom about midterm elections — the party in power loses big — and I’ve lived through enough midterms to know that the conventional wisdom is mostly correct. Does this make Biden and the Democrats toast when it comes to retaining control of the House and Senate? No — especially because of one huge loose cannon aimed at the Republican Party: Donald Trump.
About 30 percent of Americans love the guy, but a majority detest him. He’s toxic. As Republican Governor Chris Sonunu said of him Saturday night, “He's f***ing crazy!” Almost every time Trump moves center stage, Republicans’ odds decline. This is especially true in the swing suburbs that will determine the outcome of the midterms.
For a few months I thought Trump would stay quiet, but he’s constitutionally unable to keep his big mouth shut. This past week, he trumped his way into the news:
Blood was flowing in the sidewalks and into the gutters in downtown Sacramento last weekend. Six people died, ten or twelve were wounded, though details are still skimpy as of this writing.
This is the capitol city of one of the richest states in the so-called "United" States. California is richer than most countries, in fact, much richer than Ukraine, for instance. We're also battling to surpass them in violent deaths. Even without help from the Russians, our daily body counts of dead and wounded are pretty impressive. We manage to chalk up more than 40,000 deaths per year due to gun violence here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. You're free to go out on a Saturday night, but it'll require no small amount of bravery, along with the willingness to take the odds that you may never come home alive.
While Russian President Vladamir Putin believes he's made the right call by invading Ukraine, one analysis is explaining why that may not be the case. CNN analyst John Blake recently penned a detailed assessment of Hitler's downfall.
Pointing to historical timelines, history professors are highlighting how Putin's decisions are relatively similar to the same ones German dictator Adolph Hitler made during Operation Barbarossa, the mission he led when the German army invaded the Soviet Union.
Peter T. DeSimone, a Utica University, New York associate professor with a focus on Russian and Eastern European history, noted that he'd been attempting to assess the situation since the onset of the Ukrainian invasion. "I have been trying to make sense of this for a month because as terrible as Putin is, you could never say he was illogical," said DeSimone.
Is housing a human right?
Or is it a privilege affordable only to those who have made it under our unfair system of market capitalism?
If you read CNBC’s recent financial advice column, you may come away believing the latter to be true. Economist and CNBC contributor Laurence J. Kotlikoff said Americans “are wasting too much money on housing,” and in order to be more financially savvy about housing he offered such innovative ideas as moving in with one’s parents, renting out part of one’s home to visitors through Airbnb, selling one’s home altogether in favor of a smaller, cheaper one, or—and this is my favorite—moving to a cheaper state.
Here are four self-evident truths, notable because the party allegedly in power remains oblivious to them – indeed, to the less conscious engines of human behavior:
1) Mandated choices, especially by media-plied (and lied to) voters, are driven more by emotions than reason, logic or facts (even to verify minimal job competence, let alone simple truths);
2) Today’s slick 24/7 media profits by maximizing irrational, often negative responses, for the right – fear, outrage, and anxiety; Obama managed to induce positive feelings of hope and optimism;
by Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon
Since Russia's invasion began in late February 2022, universities, schools, theatres, hospitals, and many other civilian sites in Ukraine have been destroyed by Russian shelling and more than four million people have so far fled the country. Faced with the devastating consequences of its actions, Russia has increasingly fallen back on a single legal justification: human shields. Indeed, Moscow repeatedly suggested that Ukraine’s military is deliberately using civilians as a screen to defend legitimate military targets.
On February 25, just hours after the invasion began, Russian President Vladimir Putin appealed directly to the “personnel of the armed forces of Ukraine: "do not allow neo-Nazis and (Ukrainian right-wing radical nationalists) to use your children, wives and elders as human shields.”
[click image to enlarge]
The Build Back Better policy package was supposed to be the centerpiece of the Biden administration’s infrastructure-centered agenda. But now it’s dead because conservative Democrats won’t support it. So the new White House budget doesn’t include it but it ramps up defense spending by billions of dollars.
Let's start here: I absolutely love that we are learning more about black history, however something I loathed from the start about "woke" has been USAGE. "Get woke" is a grammatical abomination. "Woke" is past tense. You can't "get woke." You woke up, you will wake, or you are awake.
Blame the former English major in me. History was my second love in school, when taught right. When taught right I greedily gobbled up history almost as much as I did English. Unfortunately there was a lot of "not taught right." Which is what I have been hearing from lately documentaries and lectures. People really need to organize their lectures better. Right now C-Span has some great history lectures on weekends, but then there have been a few; like one about a blind slave, that reminded me how poorly history was in school sometimes. The lecturer was jumping all over the place timeline-wise. She pretty much started with the blind slave being freed and working together with other abolitionists. It's like revealing who the murderer was in a murder mystery in the first paragraph when that should be the apex of that story. Every lecture should be arranged like a story: don't reveal what should be the conclusion. Follow a bloody timeline when needed, PLEASE! Don't jump around.
The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman is absolutely right: “The controversy over Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, Clarence Thomas, and the Jan. 6 insurrection is demonstrating one profound difference between Democrats and Republicans: how they view the value of making a stink.”
Three years on, the ridiculous and entirely made-up Hunter Biden story is still a thing, more a thing than Donald Trump extorting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to try to get “dirt” on Biden. Because Republicans keep feeding it—because they know it will work.
Meanwhile, the spouse of a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice was involved up to her eyebrows in the effort to overthrow the Congress and keep Donald Trump in office. The Donald Trump who was doing Vladimir Putin’s bidding in trying to withhold arms from Ukraine. Arms that Ukraine has desperately needed in its defense against Russia. That’s a pretty big thing! All definitely worth making a stink about. But thus far, Democratic leadership in Congress is not. The most they’ve done so far is say they think Thomas should recuse himself from any Jan. 6-related cases. Ineffectively.
Donald Trump's presidential diarist has revealed how his records diminished vastly during the time leading up to Jan. 6.
In a collective piece published by CNN, the network's reporters and correspondents, Zachary Cohen, Jamie Gangel, Ryan Nobles, Annie Grayer, and Paula Reid, offered comprehensive details about the mystery behind Trump's scant records in the days leading up to the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.
"The presidential diary that was generated for January 6 contains scant details," they reported. "It lists information from the switchboard call logs and Trump's public schedule but little else besides a phone call the former President had with an "unidentified individual" at 11:17 a.m. And there are no entries in the diary for roughly three hours, from 1:21 p.m. to 4:03 p.m."
— from The New Civil Rights Movement
A reporter at the Dept. of Justice Friday asked Attorney General Merrick Garland the question that’s been on many minds of late: Why hasn’t former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows been formally charged with criminal contempt of Congress?
On December 14 the full House of Representatives sent DOJ a contempt of Congress referral for Meadows. Since that time even more damning information has been reported by the press.
The Attorney General was not just unwilling to give a direct answer, he was unwilling to even confirm there was a referral sent to DOJ, a commonly-known fact that is also in the official Congressional Record.
Though there is no bottom to the depths of my abhorrence for what the Russians are doing in Ukraine, some part of my soul is reserving sympathy for those Russian young men who were conscripted to do the foul deeds they are doing in service to Putin. I think my sympathy for them might be traceable to the kinship I feel for their circumstances, though I have never experienced the horrors they have known or done, nor the toll on the soul such service exacts on young men
I, too, once faced conscription. Most all boys of my generation did. It was called the draft, and the numbers of kids getting drafted when I was about to graduate from high school was going up because my homeland needed protection from a poor little country in southeast Asia most of us couldn't have found on a map. Nonetheless, their civil war was making American policy makers nervous. In order to reduce that sense of peril, we took sides in that country's dispute and, just like that, American boys in ever-increasing numbers began to be conscripted, trained, and sent to that faraway nation where they would begin to die or be damaged in ever escalating numbers. They also began treating the local population they'd been sent there to save from oppression with increasing hostility and disdain, burning their villages, degrading the men, converting many of the women of that country into prostitutes, and denuding the jungles and rice fields with toxic chemicals.
The word "miscalculation" has been thrown around a lot to describe Vladimir Putin's attempt to annex Ukraine, but perhaps his biggest miscalculation lay in thinking he could do it using tanks as his primary weapon. It's clear as the sixth week of the war begins that his apparent plan was to send a column of tanks rumbling into Kyiv, blow up a few things, send Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government scampering away in fear, declare victory, install a puppet president and go home. Evidence that his plan was a strategic, tactical and political failure is showing on your television screens around the clock. If there is one image that will symbolize forever this war, it will be a blown-up Russian tank, its treads sagging and its turret tilted, rusting by the side of the road in Ukraine.
Thirty years ago, this country used two armored cavalry regiments, a mechanized infantry division and a 400 helicopter-strong air assault to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi forces. Huge formations of tanks crossed the border from Saudi Arabia following massive airstrikes on Iraqi positions. During the assault, three epic tank battles were fought in the desert of Kuwait, one of which is thought to have been the largest tank battle in American history. In less than 100 hours of fighting, U.S. forces destroyed 1,350 Iraqi tanks and 1,224 armored personnel carriers (APCs). In all, some 5,000 Iraqi armored combat vehicles were destroyed, damaged or captured. The U.S. military lost a single Bradley fighting vehicle. What is now known as the first Gulf War was the most celebrated and successful use of armored weaponry in modern history. It seemed as Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles rolled to victory in Kuwait City that powerful armored vehicles had proved their worth as weapons of modern war.
If she is confirmed by the Senate next week, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would become arguably the most accomplished Justice on the Supreme Court, and the first to have served as a public defender. It’s no surprise that the first Black woman nominated to the highest court in the country would face intense scrutiny in her confirmation hearings, and indeed, the questioning she endured was not only aggressive but often vicious.
Even prior to the hearings, members of the GOP signaled that they would be focusing in part on her defense of Guantanamo prisoners during her time as a public defender and certain briefs filed while she was in private practice. Leading the charge, Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Tom Cotton (R-AR) sought to discredit Judge Jackson’s work as a defender by conflating her attempts to secure constitutional rights for the men who have been unlawfully detained, and subject to torture, at Guantanamo Bay, with support for violence. The Islamophobia on display in this line of questioning was sometimes shockingly blatant, as when Sen. Cotton asked Judge Jackson if she thought the detainees were terrorists or all “innocent goat farmers” (this was far from the first time Tom Cotton referred to Guantanamo prisoners as goat farmers). The fundamental injustice of these narratives being weaponized to diminish Judge Jackson’s considerable experience and credentials—makes this background of Islamophobia incredibly problematic.
Partisan propaganda about the untrustworthiness of elections was worse in 2021 than during the 2020 presidential election, when Donald Trump claimed that he won and incited a riot at the U.S. Capitol to block ratification of Joe Biden’s victory, according to state election directors who fear that 2022’s elections will see deepening disinformation from losing GOP candidates.
“2021 was far worse than 2020,” said Minnesota Elections Director David Maeda, speaking at an election security webinar at the Hubert Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. “The temperature from 2020 had carried over and gotten worse… [and] just keeps escalating because of all of the mistrust from this misinformation, and questions about the security and fairness of our voting systems.”
Those worries were echoed by current and former top officials from Colorado, Virginia, and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who recounted their responses but cited new developments, including ongoing threats to election officials by Trump backers and an exodus of those officials and poll workers.
Fabrications Normalized
To be sure there is an impressive list of “Big Lie” contagions with few apparent cures to slow them down. It is clear that our economic model is struggling to maintain basic living standards for most working people.
“Big Lies" are particularly dispersed by social media platforms where fiction masquerades as fact and thoughtful analysis is absent.
Working people of all races and creeds are the recipients of “Big Lies” that work against their economic interests and benefit those of the dominant economic group. In the United States there is a faction of oligarchs funding a not-so-hidden political agenda favoring autocracy over democracy. This strategy is their best option to cement their economic power over working people. Despite the cacophony from the clash of cultural issues, it is really not about anything else to the oligarchs.
RUDYARD KIPLING BITCHES TO CHIMP READERS
My name is Rudyard Kipling and the author of a previously lovely but now despoiled poem about the many obstacles as actually opportunities for boys to achieve before becoming men. When I wrote it, women were relatively unimportant but consider that they’re in it now and this poem is for them too. Today with all this woke shit pouring over America it’s as if every toilet and outhouse in our previously pristine nation has been turned upside down and poured over our over-shampooed hair so that no matter how many +’s you earned I have no idea what kind of genetic ruin you have become with the blogger’s stupid changes to my beautiful manly poetry to fit his stupid blog better. Anyway at this time in point, I’m asking for your help, with all the changes made. At the end of this version my poem goes “you’ll be a “blank” my “blank” and you’re gonna’ fill that in for me please and tell me what you really are. Everybody Knows by now, the first “blank” that followed my original "If" as it ended” was “man” and the second “blank” that followed my original “my” was “son.” Daughters didn't count back when England was a real empire.
When Ronald Reagan was president during the 1980s, part of his big-tent view of conservatism was what he called “the 11th Commandment” — which was “never speak ill of any fellow Republican.” But Donald Trump, as president, had a totally different approach: insult, belittle, bully and threaten any Republican who dared to disagree with him about anything. And according to Daily Beast reporters Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley, one of Trump’s worst enablers during his four years in the White House was far-right GOP activist and conspiracy theorist Ginni Thomas — who is married to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
In contrast to Reagan’s view that there was room for a variety of Republicans in his 1980s coalition — from Goldwater Republicans to Rockefeller Republicans, from secular libertarians to theocratic Christian fundamentalists — Trump demanded unquestioning loyalty from fellow Republicans. Ginni Thomas, Suebsaeng and Rawnsley emphasize in an article published by the Beast on April 1, encouraged that type of behavior and offered lists of people she recommended hiring or firing.
— from The New Civil Rights Movement
The House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack is demanding former top Trump advisor Peter Navarro speak with them “about his role in the attempt to overturn the election.”
Friday afternoon the Committee posted a damning “January 3 text to Mark Meadows,” which they say reads: “I have details on the call that Navarro helped convene… to delay certification… including that the president participated…”
The Committee did not reveal who sent the text.
On Monday the Committee had voted to hold Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino in criminal contempt of Congress.
The GOP's choice to make QAnon-style hysterics the centerpiece of their 2022 midterm strategy is most heavily hurting LGBTQ Americans.
From Fox News to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republicans are embracing rhetoric that insinuates — and sometimes outright declares — that there's a widespread conspiracy of Democrats, school teachers, liberal judges and Disney employees to "groom" children for sexual abuse. The primary victims of these lies are LGBTQ people, who are facing a renewed effort to roll back hard-won rights, all under the guise of "saving" children from imaginary "predators." Across the country, Republican state legislatures are passing bills and using executive orders to make life hell for LGBTQ kids by denying them medical care, forcing them to remain closeted at school, excluding them from extracurricular activities, and even taking them away from loving parents. All of this damage is done in the name of "saving" children.
One of the surest signs that this is a Satanic panic-style frenzy is how downright weird the situation is getting, with right-wingers whipping themselves up with urban legends and lurid fantasies.
If Mike Pence is elected and assumes the presidency in 2024, will we have to watch him kiss his own ass at every cabinet meeting?
If Will Smith is arrested and jailed for assault, is it likely he'll share a cell with a big tattooed felon he'll be less likely to slap?
If Clarence Thomas divorces Ginni, might that reduce the pressure for him to resign from the Supreme Court? And should it? Also, is it possible he still has Anita Hill's home phone number? Might he resume hitting on her once he's single again?
Does Melania speak Russian?
The Affordable Insulin Now Act passed in the House Thursday, 232-193. One-hundred-and-ninety-three Republicans are opposed to the more than 30 million Americans with diabetes being able to afford the drug that their lives depend upon. Just 12 House Republicans thought that was a good idea.
It’s not like the bill even hurts anyone, including Big Pharma, because it doesn’t actually reduce the cost that the manufacturers are charging the insurance companies. It caps the amount insurers can pass on to patients to $35 a month, and it doesn’t include glucose monitoring supplies, test strips, syringes, readers, pump supplies, or other diabetes care products. That means that only people with Medicare prescription drug benefits and private health insurance would be protected by the cap. The majority of state Medicaid programs cover insulin, as does the Veterans Administration. But the uninsured won’t get the cost break.
— from Robert Reich's Substack
And how corporate America plans to take back power
Yesterday was a big day for American workers. I want to start with the remarkable worker victory at Amazon’s giant warehouse on Staten Island and then move to yesterday’s great jobs report — and the real danger lying within it.
First, the victory. America’s wealthiest, most powerful, and fiercest anti-union corporation — with the second-largest workforce in the nation (union-busting Walmart being the largest) — lost out to a group of warehouse workers who voted to form a union, by a remarkable 2,654 to 2,131. Even more remarkably, the workers won without any assistance from an established union or professional organizer.
If anyone had any doubts about Amazon’s determination to prevent this from ever happening, the corporation’s scorched-earth anti-union campaign in its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse should have put those doubts to rest. In New York, Amazon used every tool it had used in Bessemer, and then some. Many of its techniques are illegal under the National Labor Relations Act (hence the decision of the National Labor Relations Board to hold another election in Bessemer), but Amazon couldn’t care less. It’s rich enough to pay any fine or bear any public relations hit.
It’s been five weeks since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The conflict threatens to stretch out for months; a resolution is murky. Nonetheless, we have learned several important lessons:
1. Putin is a thug. Out here on the Left Coast we never had high expectations for Vladimir Putin. We knew that he came out of the Soviet KGB and heard rumors that he was a “kleptocrat,” reportedly the richest man in Europe. We didn’t trust Vlad. We believed that he contrived to get Donald Trump elected in 2016.
We thought Putin was immoral but smart. When it looked like he was going to invade Ukraine, we worried, “Poor Ukraine. Russia will roll over them in a few days.”
We forgot that thugs often start out wily but then get overconfident — inflated with hubris. Thugs surround themselves with sycophants. They start believing their own B.S.
Follow us
Become a fan
Subscribe