Month: October 2022

Defending satire after the death of irony

Satirical news site The Onion filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in the case of an Ohio man arrested in 2016 for creating a Facebook page parodying Parma, Ohio’s police department’s page. It’s slogan?  “We no crime.” 

Police charged Anthony Novak with a felony. A public interest law firm explains:

The Parma Police Department did not appreciate Anthony’s criticism. Citing 11 calls that Parma residents made to a nonemergency line to either ask about or tattle on Anthony’s parody page, police obtained a warrant for his arrest, searched his apartment, seized his electronics, and charged him with a felony under an Ohio law that criminalizes using a computer to “disrupt” “police operations.” Anthony had to spend four days in jail before making bail. He was prosecuted, but after a full criminal trial, a jury found him not guilty.

But when Anthony tried to vindicate his rights by filing a civil-rights lawsuit, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to hold the police officers accountable for their actions. Despite the clear violation of Anthony’s First and Fourth Amendment rights, the Sixth Circuit granted the officers qualified immunity—a doctrine that the Supreme Court invented in the 1980s to protect government officials from being sued for unconstitutional conduct. As a result, Anthony’s case was thrown out.

“There’s no recognized right to be free from a retaliatory arrest that is supported by probable cause,” the appellate court ruled. Novak has petitioned SCOTUS to take up his case and to .

The Onion, “the world’s leading news publication” boasting a “daily readership of 4.3 trillion,”  took up his cause. The Sixth Circuit’s ruling threatens the business model of an operation supporting “more than 350,000 full- and parttime journalism jobs,” they again boast, but with serious intent:

The Onion regularly pokes its finger in the eyes of repressive and authoritarian regimes, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, and domestic presidential administrations. So The Onion’s professional parodists were less than enthralled to be confronted with a legal ruling that fails to hold government actors accountable for jailing and prosecuting a would-be humorist simply for making fun of them.

“Novak’s petition calls on the Supreme Court to decide whether officials can claim qualified immunity when they arrest someone based purely on speech,” reports the Washington Post. “It also asks the justices to do away with the doctrine altogether.”

The Onion drove home its point as The Onion would:

I. Parody Functions By Tricking People Into Thinking That It Is Real.

Tu stultus es. You are dumb. These three Latin words have been The Onion’s motto and guiding light since it was founded in 1988 as America’s Finest News Source, leading its writers toward the paper’s singular purpose of pointing out that its readers are deeply gullible people. The Onion’s motto is central to this brief for two important reasons. First, it’s Latin. And The Onion knows that the federal judiciary is staffed entirely by total Latin dorks: They quote Catullus in the original Latin in chambers. They sweetly whisper “stare decisis” into their spouses’ ears. They mutter “cui bono” under their breath while picking up after their neighbors’ dogs. So The Onion knew that, unless it pointed to a suitably Latin rallying cry, its brief would be operating far outside the Court’s vernacular.

Attorneys procede to give SCOTUS a parody lesson complete with examples and supporting case citations of how parody has functioned in history.

Time and again, that’s what has occurred with The Onion’s news stories. In 2012, for example, The Onion proclaimed that Kim Jong-un was the sexiest man alive.⁷ China’s state-run news agency republished The Onion’s story as true alongside a slideshow of the dictator himself in all his glory.⁸ The Fars Iranian News Agency uncritically picked up and ran with The Onions headline “Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama.”⁹ Domestically, the number of elected leaders who are still incapable of parsing The Onion’s coverage as satire is daunting, but one particular example stands out: Republican Congressman John Fleming, who believed that he needed to warn his constituents of a dangerous escalation of the pro-choice movement after reading The Onion’s headline “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex.”¹⁰

The point of all this is not that it is funny when deluded figures of authority mistake satire for the actual news—even though that can be extremely funny. Rather, it’s that the parody allows these figures to puncture their own sense of self-importance by falling for what any reasonable person would recognize as an absurd escalation of their own views. In the political context, the effect can be particularly pronounced. See Hustler Mag., Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46, 53–55 (1988); see also Falwell v. Flynt, 805 F.2d 484, 487 (4th Cir. 1986) (Wilkinson, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing) (“Nothing is more thoroughly democratic than to have the high-and-mighty lampooned and spoofed.”).

There are serious First Amendment issues at stake. Not that The Onion would treat them “with a straight face.”

IV. It Should Be Obvious That Parodists Cannot Be Prosecuted For Telling A Joke With A Straight Face.

This is the fifteenth page of a convoluted legal filing intended to deconstruct the societal implications of parody, so the reader’s attention is almost certainly wandering. That’s understandable. So here is a paragraph of gripping legal analysis to ensure that every jurist who reads this brief is appropriately impressed by the logic of its argument and the lucidity of its prose: Bona vacantia. De bonis asportatis. Writ of certiorari. De minimis. Jus accrescendi. Forum non conveniens. Corpus juris. Ad hominem tu quoque. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Quod est demonstrandum. Actus reus. Scandalum magnatum. Pactum reservati dominii.

See what happened? This brief itself went from a discussion of parody’s function—and the quite serious historical and legal arguments in favor of strong protections for parodic speech—to a curveball mocking the way legalese can be both impenetrably boring and belie the hollowness of a legal position. That’s the setup and punchline idea again. It would not have worked quite as well if this brief had said the following: “Hello there, reader, we are about to write an amicus brief about the value of parody. Buckle up, because we’re going to be doing some fairly outré things, including commenting on this text’s form itself!”

In over 30 years, have none of these judges watched The Simpsons?

The New Age movement was in full flower when I arrived in “Paris of the South,” the “New Age Mecca” before it became the “Cesspool of Sin.” Every other person I met was an “internationally recognized” seeker — seeking ways to monetize their spiritual journey and ready to believe anything. Flyers for weekend workshops in neuro-nuclear transmigration or whatnot were in every health food store. I began posting parodies and found, as The Onion has, it was hard to keep ahead of reality (or unreality). I imagined a men’s support group called “Men Without Foreskins,” only to have a relation in Montana, a psychologist, say he knew of a similar group there.

No matter how crazy the fake product or therapy, believers did me one better. Now, Trumpublicans in Pennsylvania want to elect one of these guys to the U.S. Senate.

https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1577266077981347840?s=20&t=NTZ6lxSn0GnxktQUV3T7Ag

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us

Dr Oz is the real deal

You knew this, of course. But the details are still startling.How anyone like this can be a contender for the US Senate is just shocking:

Mehmet Oz looked directly into the camera and introduced his daytime television viewers to a “controversial” weight loss approach: taking a hormone that women produce during pregnancy combined with a diet of 500 calories a day.

“Does it really work? Is it safe? Is it a miracle? Or is it hype?” he asked in a 2011 episode of “The Dr. Oz Show” before introducing his audience to “human chorionic gonadotropin,” or HCG, and to a weight loss doctor who promoted it.

In fact, there was little uncertain about the HCG Diet. Numerous studies conducted years before Oz’s show had shown that the fertility drug does not cause weight loss, redistribute fat or suppress hunger. Ten months later, the Food and Drug Administration warned seven companies marketing HCG products they were violating the law by making such claims, and the agency issued additional warnings to consumers in subsequent years. Nevertheless, Oz revisited the topic in 2012, providing a platform for the same weight loss doctor, who claimed that HCG worked.

Now as a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, a key battleground in the fight for control of the upper chamber of Congress, Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon, is putting his medical background and his popular TV show at the center of his campaign pitch. At a recent town hall in a Philadelphia suburb, he said his approach to medicine and politics is similar: “If you teach people on television or whatever forum you use, they actually begin to use the information and they begin to change what they do in their lives. I want to do the same thing as your senator. Empower you.”

Yeah. Empower you to throw your money away on bullshit. He knows his GOP audience.

But during the show’s run from 2009 to 2021, Oz provided a platform for potentially dangerous products and fringe viewpoints, aimed at millions of viewers, according to medical experts, public health organizations and federal health guidance. The treatments that Oz promoted included HCG, garcinia cambogia — an herbal weight-loss product the FDA has said can cause liver damage — and selenium — a trace mineral needed for normal body functioning — for cancer prevention, among others.

“He spouts unproven treatments for things and supposed ways to maintain and regain health,” said Henry I. Miller, one of 10 physicians who in 2015 tried to have Oz removed from the faculty at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Miller described Oz, in his view, as someone who has been an advocate of “quack cures.”

Did you say quack? He pushed Hydroxychloraquine hard. Very hard. He got into the White House with that clap trap. Of course they believed him. They love quacks.

Apparently, he’s been gaining in the polls. There really is a sucker born every minute.

Hundreds of thousands of Republicans died unnecessarily

Yep, they did it:

New study of almost 600,000 deaths in Ohio and Florida shows that registered Republicans had far higher excess-death rates than registered Democrats during the pandemic, with almost all of the gap coming after vaccines were available.

The study shows there was no difference in excess deaths between Dem and GOP voters in 2018 and early 2020 (control). And there was no real gap pre-vaccine. But beginning spring 2021, and accelerating w/Delta Republicans began dying at a significantly higher rate.

This paper is based on individual-level data (that is, the authors matched mortality data to individual voter registrations), which makes it more accurate. And the clear implication is that if Republicans had gotten vaxxed at higher rates, many more of them would have lived.

A note on methodology: looking at excess deaths, rather than total deaths, mitigates the “GOP voters are older” issue. And the fact that there’s no meaningful difference in excess rates during 2018 or even the first 7 months of the pandemic suggests that vaxxes made a difference.

One other thing to note: this study looked at excess deaths, not Covid deaths. So if the vaccines were killing people, you’d see it in this data. You don’t see it, because they’re not.

Originally tweeted by James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) on October 3, 2022.

There is one primary reason for this. And they are still doing it.

FYI Fox primetime is still doing regular segments about how the COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous and ineffective. pic.twitter.com/wuw5fILL0m

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) September 28, 2022

They do not care. They just want to own the libs by any means necessary.

I’m so old I remember the Johnny Chung scandal back in the 90s. (You would have tnhought it was the greatest threat to American national security since the Rosenbergs.) In fact, I even remember the “Hunter Biden laptop” scandal from this morning, in which it’s alleged that he arranged bribes from China on behalf of his father at some point — or something. It’s very hard to know exactly what it’s about.

But I’d totally forgotten about this:

Elections finance law complaints against an Asian day-spa operator from South Florida who allegedly funneled contributions from Chinese elites, likely including foreign nationals, to a campaign committee backing then-President Donald Trump have quietly been dismissed.

The dismissal by the Federal Elections Commission came despite a staff finding that laws likely were broken and that the matter merited the FEC’s full attention. The six-member panel split 3-3, as is its usual practice, on whether to proceed, with Democrats voting yes and Republicans saying no. Four votes are needed for a full investigation to occur. The dismissals were first reported by the Florida Bulldog.

Complaints against Li “Cindy” Yang, who raised campaign cash and parlayed persistence to gain access to Republican circles in Florida and get pictures taken with the then-president, were filed by Common Cause, a Washington-based watchdog group, and the Campaign Legal Center. The dismissal of those complaints came three years after the Miami Herald first revealed Yang’s activities in a series of articles titled Trump Tourism. WHO HAS GAINED ACCESS TO PRESIDENT TRUMP AND MAR-A-LAGO THROUGH CINDY YANG?

“Attempting enforcement in these matters would not be a prudent use of agency resources,” Republican Chairman Allen Dickerson and commissioners Sean Cooksey and James “Trey” Trainor III wrote in a statement dated Sept 6. Get unlimited digital access Subscribe now for just $2 for 2 months. The Herald investigation found that over an 18-month period Yang published online ads targeting overseas clients — mostly from China — promoting Trump fundraisers as opportunities to mingle with the then-president, his family and other top Republicans.

Her clients ranged from Chinese tech executives who took $50,000 photos with the president at a New York fundraiser for his re-election campaign to a Chinese-born American citizen and avid Trump supporter with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The Herald also documented how Yang made contributions to Trump Victory, the president’s PAC, in the name of friends and relatives, an apparent violation of campaign laws as are contributions from foreign nationals. Li ‘Cindy’ Yang attended Sen. Rick Scott’s Sunshine Ball in Washington, D.C..

Events attended by Yang included a “Safari Night” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Palm Beach resort, now his permanent residence and currently tangled up in a federal criminal investigation because government documents, some marked “top secret,” were stored there in an insecure manner. In declining to pursue the allegations, the Republican members cited an approaching statute of limitations that “provided no time for us to sufficiently investigate.”

None of the dozens of complaints about Trump-related fundraising have been deemed worthy of investigation by the full commission. The general counsel for the FEC issued a 33-page report in June presenting preliminary findings that Yang violated campaign contribution laws. That report details Yang’s appearance at two high-profile fundraising events for Trump with groups of Chinese business people and the donations that preceded their attendance.

The report encouraged the FEC to continue investigating whether Yang had made “excessive contributions,” “contributions in the name of another” and provided “substantial assistance in the making of foreign national contributions.” “The alleged violations of our campaign finance laws are egregious,” Democratic commissioner Ellen Weintraub wrote in a statement. “Our commitment to pursuing foreign national matters seems now to be an empty promise — or a commitment that varies based on who benefited from the prohibited funds.”

The report references reporting by the Herald in 2019, which revealed Yang’s access to top Republican politicians, particularly Trump, and national security concerns prompted by her ties to groups associated with the Chinese government. Yang served on the leadership teams of the Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China (CPPRC) and the Miami branch of the United States Association for Science and Technology, both of which have “direct links” to the Communist Party in China, according to a report by Mother Jones.

Here’s the kicker:

Yang came into the spotlight amid the filing of charges against Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, for visiting Asian spas that had been linked in social media posts to alleged prostitution. Yang was the founder and former owner of one of the spas, and still owned other Florida day spas unconnected to the case.

You can’t make this stuff up.

And by the way, Yang isn’t the only Chinese national with suspicious ties to infiltrate Mar-a-lago. But hey, no biggie. Hunter has a laptop with dirty pics. That’s what we really care about.

Depressing …

How does the public govern itself if it doesn’t know the rules?

After two years of considerable improvement, Americans’ knowledge of some basic facts about their government has fallen to earlier levels, with less than half of those surveyed able to name the three branches of government for the 2022 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s annual, nationally representative survey showed notable increases in 2020 and 2021 after tumultuous years that put the role of government and the three branches under a media spotlight. In those two years, the survey was run amid a pandemic and government health restrictions, two impeachment inquiries, a presidential election, an attempt to disrupt congressional certification of the electoral vote, criminal trials of the individuals charged in the assault on the U.S. Capitol, and waves of social justice protests, among other events.

The current survey, released for Constitution Day (Sept. 17), found the first drop in six years among those who could identify all three branches of government, and declines among those who could name the First Amendment rights, though knowledge remained high on some other questions. Additional findings on the Supreme Court will be released next month.

“When it comes to civics, knowledge is power,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s troubling that so few know what rights we’re guaranteed by the First Amendment. We are unlikely to cherish, protect, and exercise rights if we don’t know that we have them.”

Highlights:

Less than half of U.S. adults (47%) could name all three branches of government, down from 56% in 2021 and the first decline on this question since 2016.

The number of respondents who could, unprompted, name each of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment also declined, sharply in some cases. For example, less than 1 in 4 people (24%) could name freedom of religion, down from 56% in 2021.

Over half of Americans (51%) continue to assert incorrectly that Facebook is required to let all Americans express themselves freely on its platform under the First Amendment.

But large numbers recognize other rights in the Bill of Rights and the veto process.

Our democracy is in peril not because of this, of course. I doubt people have ever been particularly knowledgeable about the workings of government. But I don’t think we’ve generally had cretinous ignoramuses at the elite levels of right wing politics. This combination seems lethal.

How some people win even when they lose

The Brazilian election yesterday has resulted in a run-off between the two top rivals, Lula and Bolsonaro. But much of the coverage last night seemed as though Bolsonaro had actually won because he outperformed the polls. Headlines like “Bolsonaro surprisingly strong, forces Brazil runoff.”

But Bolsonaro is the incumbent and he lost which is a major failure. In America that would be the end of it because we don’t have a run-off system. The fact that he got more votes than the polls predicted doesn’t mean he won anything.

Morning update: replace “nearly” with “more than”

— Alex Burns (@alexanderburns) October 3, 2022

It’s possible that Bolsonaro could win in the runoff, of course. But most observers think that’s unlikely because those who voted for others than him in the first round are unlikely to do so in the second round. The real question is why this incumbent president with a huge profile did so poorly.

And he gets testy over it:

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) defends the timing of Lee County officials' delayed evacuation:

"Where was your industry stationed when the storm hit? Were you guys in Lee County? No you were in Tampa. They were following the weather track … 72 hours, they weren't even in the cone." pic.twitter.com/DYDzmPjswp

— The Recount (@therecount) October 2, 2022

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Saturday defended the state’s early preparations for Hurricane Ian as questions remain over whether hard-hit areas received enough advance warning to evacuate.

DeSantis said local officials in Lee County — where Ian made landfall Wednesday as a Category 4 hurricane — acted appropriately when they issued evacuation orders on Tuesday, after the storm’s forecasted path had shifted from the eastern Panhandle to Tampa Bay and eventually further south to the Fort Myers area.

Several other counties in southwest Florida and west-central Florida — including Charlotte County, immediately to the north of Lee — had issued mandatory evacuation orders for their barrier islands on Monday, offering crucial extra time for people to depart a low-lying region with few major escape routes. The National Hurricane Center warned Monday that the region from Fort Myers to Tampa Bay faced the highest risk of storm surge, regardless of Ian’s exact path.

Even so, DeSantis pointed to the ample public warnings early this week that Ian posed a catastrophic danger to the flood-prone Tampa Bay region, which had not taken a direct hit from a major hurricane in more than a century.

“When we went to bed Monday night, people were saying this is a direct hit on Tampa Bay — worst case scenario for the state,” DeSantis said during a news briefing in Fort Myers on Saturday.

The Republican governor’s defense is part of what could become a long debate about the region’s warnings and preparations for Ian, one of the most destructive hurricanes ever to hit the United States.

The cone????

By the way, that’s official, not a “sharpie” cone.

The actual storm is a fraction of what public officials are judged on in handling natural disasters; the aftermath is also a big piece. https://t.co/YfnJ7uJlf1

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 2, 2022

I don’t know that DeSantis will be on the hot seat over any of this. The media generally is pretty easy on him. But you never know.

On the other hand, thisindicates they aren’t giving up on the odious migrant abduction story:

The political mystique of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis rests partly on the illusion that he wields absolute “own the libs” mastery over the various assorted enemies the right has decided to hate these days. It’s why he’s seen as a 2024 GOP contender who has the capacity to channel the ugliest of MAGA pathologies even more effectively than Donald Trump did.

But new revelations about DeSantis’s flying of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard — including the unmasking of “Perla,” who allegedly scammed them into getting onto planes — show why this illusion will be increasingly difficult to pull off.

The New York Times has now identified that person as Perla Huerta, describing her as a “former combat medic and counterintelligence agent.” This opens the door to a host of new inquiries that could implicate DeSantis more deeply in the scheme’s sordid aspects.

Will it? I dunno. He’s running around in his windbreaker and I don’t see a lot of appetite for nailing the guy.

Just as bad as the last term?

For the past week, headline news has focused almost exclusively on the scenes of desperation and destruction left in the wake of Hurricane Ian. So most of us missed taking note of last Friday’s investiture of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. She was sworn in last June so this was a formality, but it still carried the weight of history and the court was filled with political and judicial luminaries, including President Biden and Vice President Harris. It was by all accounts a moving ceremony. But considering all the turbulence on the Supreme Court right now, I have to wonder if Jackson might be having second thoughts.

Today is the first Monday in October, the first day of the new Supreme Court term — and the court is in crisis. According to the Gallup poll, its public approval ratings have never been lower, with 58% of Americans disapproving of how this court is handling its job. A good part of that can be attributed to the Dobbs decision overturning the right to abortion, which had been effectively enshrined in the Constitution for 50 years. That it came fast on the heels of two underhanded end-runs by the Republican-controlled Senate — blocking the nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016, and then jamming through Amy Coney Barrett in 2020 — made it all the more rank. The court’s right-wing majority couldn’t even wait another year or two, just for appearance’s sake.

Dobbs wasn’t the only case last term that exposed what partisan hacks the court majority have become. They also ruled that despite centuries of jurisprudence allowing the regulations of firearms, a New York state law requiring concealed carry licenses, on the books for more than 120 years, was somehow a violation of the Second and 14th amendments. In his majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas made it very clear that he didn’t hold with his former colleague Antonin Scalia’s view that the Second
Amendment is not absolute when it comes to private ownership of guns.

And in case anyone thought the court might think twice about gutting the EPA in light of the planetary climate upheaval we now see unfolding every day, they did not. In another 6-3 opinion, justices denied the EPA the right to demand emissions caps as part of the Clean Power Plan, siding once again with red-state climate-change deniers and Big Energy interests.

All those opinions came virtually on top of each other at the end of the court’s spring term, and its approval rating sank precipitously right after that. But the more recent nosedive in public opinion is likely also connected to the fact that one prominent justice is married to someone who was heavily involved in the post-election Big Lie campaign, and perhaps with illegal attempts to overturn the election. Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, was interviewed last week by the House Jan. 6 committee, and reportedly said that she still believes the 2020 election was stolen. That all might be considered a case of very poor judgment by the spouse of a Supreme Court justice, if it weren’t for the fact that Thomas has refused to recuse himself from any cases pertaining to Donald Trump — and has consistently supported Trump in pretty much every instance. Furthermore, the public has gradually become aware that Thomas and the other justices aren’t required to adhere to any clear ethics rules or standards — because there aren’t any. 

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan — the latter is among the three remaining “liberals” — have been obliquely arguing with each other about the court’s loss of prestige and legitimacy in various speeches they’ve given over the last few weeks. Roberts, a smart guy deliberately playing dumb, has wondered aloud why people might thing the court has become purely political just because they disagree with the outcome of certain cases. Kagan, meanwhile, has patiently pointed out that when the court starts overturning precedents one after the other after a dramatic shift in personnel, it might make people just a little suspicious that politics is at work. Here’s how Slate justice reporter and analyst Dahlia Lithwick put it:

[I]t is not that the public didn’t like the final score at the end of the term when the lights went out in June. The problem wasn’t just the losses; the problem was that [Roberts’] team moved the game to another field, then stole the ball and replaced it with a time bomb, then changed the rules, then lied about it, and then set the entire field ablaze. Now he wants everyone to shake hands and go home. 

Unfortunately, they aren’t finished. Indeed, the right-wing justices and their allies are just getting started. If this term goes like the last one, get ready for the court to lose another 20 points in approval. It will hear cases on religion, free speech, LGBTQ rights, affirmative action and voting. It’s not hard to imagine where the right-wing majority that signed on to the Dobbs decision will go now that they’ve decided to let it all hang out.

The legal precedents on affirmative action were thought to be so firmly established, according to New York Times, that the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg assumed the issue had been permanently settled. Apparently not. The court plans to hear two cases that could once again upend precedents in place for half a century. Then there’s Merrill v. Milligan, which is poised to destroy what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, and Sackett v. EPA, which is likely to further degrade the federal government’s ability to enforce clean water standards, meaning that what happened to the water systems of Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi, could happen in your town as well. In the latest bogus “religious freedom” case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, the court may enshrine the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people on religious grounds.

Then we get to perhaps the most chilling case of all, Moore v. Harper, which aims to establish the “independent state legislature” theory as the law of the land, essentially giving any Republican legislative majority in a swing state the power to do whatever it chooses when it comes to elections — with no checks on its power, including from state courts, the governor or any other election officials. Let’s put it this way: If this had been in effect in states like Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2020, it’s entirely possible that right-wing state legislators could have done exactly what folks like Ginni Thomas wanted them to do — refuse to count certain votes, or even appoint their own slates of presidential electors in defiance of the voters. And you don’t even want to think about what how creative they could get with gerrymandering districts so Republicans never lose.

So get ready. The Supremes are on a roll and it doesn’t look like they have any plans to “moderate” in light of the fact that the public now perceives them as nothing more than an enforcement arm of the Republican Party. Public opinion, in this case, isn’t wrong. Old-time conservative movement ideology may be widely unpopular these days, is firmly entrenched in the high court and they are making all their dreams come true.

Who’s going to stop them?

Salon

Republicans are singing the golden oldies

A tweet from Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars caught my attention just now:

This tsunami of Dr. Oz "soft on crime" ads are working, and I'm not seeing a strong pushback from Fetterman. What are they waiting for?

— Suburban Guerrilla 💙 (@SusieMadrak) October 3, 2022

The GOP once again is deploying familiar racist tropes involving crime, immigrants, and scary black people in its campaigns this fall. They’re singing the golden oldies. They have no new material and nothing positive to offer.

Sure, that's interesting, but did Abbott say *what* changes he wants to Biden's "border policies" with any meaningful specificity or detail? https://t.co/x10GunZgbt

— Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) October 3, 2022

“The GOP is partying like it’s 1988 — the year that scary pictures of a felon they called Willie Horton and grainy images of Black crime saved a party equally devoid of actual policies,” Will Bunch writes in his Philadelphia Inquirer column:

Turn on your TV set — especially here in my home state of Pennsylvania, where a once seemingly dead-in-the-water Mehmet Oz has revitalized his Republican Senate campaign against Democrat John Fetterman — and suddenly the 2022 midterms are all crime, all the time.

But it hasn’t been enough for Oz and his deep-pocketed backers to summarize Fetterman’s work on much-needed criminal justice reform in two words — “pro-criminal.” Oz and his supporters like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have even gone after Fetterman’s trademark tattoos — ironically, since most mark his commitment as mayor of Braddock, Pa., to end murders there — and falsely implied that Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor was once in bed with a gang, the Crips.

The GOP's 'new' midterm strategy turns out to be just ripping out the 'Willie Horton' page from 1988 and amping up the dog whistles on crime and race, even darkening WI's Barnes' skin in one flyer

It's racist. It's immoral. And it's working. My new column https://t.co/KdCULtBdLK

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) October 2, 2022

“People do it because they think it works,” Bill Clinton told Jon Stewart in 2004 about Republican appeals to racist animus. “And as soon as it doesn’t work, they’ll stop doing it.”

They’re still doing it.

Bunch continues:

Two things are happening here. One, of course, is that crime is legitimately seen as a problem by millions of voters. The pandemic — which both seriously eroded the wider social fabric but also saw a surge in gun ownership — triggered a nationwide short-term spike in homicides and some other categories of violent crime, especially in cities like Philadelphia and Milwaukee. Although there are already signs that crime is subsiding in many locales, the public perception — aided by the reality of high-profile incidents like last week’s fatal shooting after a football scrimmage at Roxborough High School — for many is that law and order has broken down. My contacts who’ve canvassed voters in white working-class areas like older rowhouse streets in South Philly tell me crime is the only thing on some voters’ minds.

Yet hypocrisy abounds. There is the hypocrisy that — much like inflation — the Republicans (or most Democrats, for that matter) aren’t offering solutions beyond the continued insanity of hiring more cops, despite a lack of evidence that this actually reduces crime as opposed to the harder work of neighborhood intervention. There is the hypocrisy that a surge in gun ownership — with more than 20 million new firearms sold during the pandemic, many to first-time buyers — aided by GOP opposition to gun control was arguably a bigger factor in the murder spike than any Democratic policies. And there is the hypocrisy that candidates like Oz’s Pennsylvania running mate — gubernatorial hopeful Doug Mastriano, who aided Donald Trump’s fake-elector scheme — or Wisconsin’s Johnson, also tied to the Jan. 6 plotting now under federal investigation — are the actual “pro-criminal” candidates.

McCain made a huge mistake, Clinton said, by not calling out the George W. Bush campaign over racist attacks in South Carolina in 2000 that he had fathered a black child (he and his wife had adopted a girl from Bangladesh).

The country has changed, becoming more diverse and more open since 2000, Bunch notes.

And yet the GOP still refuses to do anything for YOU — the middle-class American who struggles with things like stagnant wages, or incomprehensible college costs, or medical bankruptcies. They can only win elections in the 21st century by pitting you against THEM, by protecting you from “The Other.” That means the crudest dehumanization of people.

The GOP attacks on Fetterman are racist and immoral, Bunch writes, yet “tragically but inevitably … working all too well with an election little more than one month away.”

Fetterman had best not repeat McCain’s mistake.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us

The fate of Ukraine’s democracy and ours is linked

Remember “freedom fighters”? Americans considered Afghani guerillas battling Soviet invaders freedom fighters. President Ronald Reagan meets with mujahedeen leaders in the White House in 1983, calling them freedom fighters. That same year he called Nicaraguan rebels fighting the Sandinist regime freedom fighters opposed to “Government out of the barrel of a gun.” America’s “mission,” Reagan declared in his 1985 State of the Union address, was to “nourish and defend freedom and democracy.” It was dubbed the Reagan Doctrine.

That was a different Republican Party. Four decades later, the Party of Donald Trump has gone squishy on freedom fighters opposing Vladimir Putin’s Russian invaders in Ukraine. Republicans have gone rather squishy on democracy here at home.

Timothy Snyder believes Ukraine’s freedom fighters represent an “affirmation of faith in democracy’s principles and its future” and “a challenge to those in the West who have forgotten the ethical basis of democracy and thereby, wittingly or unwittingly, ceded the field to oligarchy and empire at home and abroad.” He invites us to view Ukraine’s fate as a harbinger of our own.

Snyder draws familiar lessons from the spread of fascism in the mid-twentieth century and argues its survival is not inevitable. Its defense must be more than rhetorical (Foreign Affairs, paywalled):

The current Russian regime is one consequence of the mistaken belief that democracy happens naturally and that all opinions are equally valid. If this were true, then Russia would indeed be a democracy, as Putin claims. The war in Ukraine is a test of whether a tyranny that claims to be a democracy can triumph and thereby spread its logical and ethical vacuum. Those who took democracy for granted were sleepwalking toward tyranny. The Ukrainian resistance is the wake-up call.

Putin’s organizing principle, already too familiar here, is “the shameless production of fiction” and remains in power via the rejection of truth and all values. “Putin stays in power by way of such strategic relativism: not by making his own country better but by making other countries look worse.” This strategy, too, is already familiar in the U.S.

For such a regime to survive, the notion that democracy rests on the courage to tell the truth must be eliminated with violence if it cannot be laughed out of existence. Night after night, Kremlin propagandists explain on television that there cannot be a person such as Zelensky, a nation such as Ukraine, or a system such as democracy. Self-rule must be a joke; Ukraine must be a joke; Zelensky must be a joke. If not, the Kremlin’s whole story that Russia is superior because it accepts that nothing is true falls to pieces. If Ukrainians really can constitute a society and really can choose their leaders, then why shouldn’t Russians do the same?

Marjorie Taylor Greene: "I am not going to mince words with you all. Democrats want Republicans dead and they have already started the killings."

This rhetoric is dangerous and unacceptable. pic.twitter.com/2UiKXsrlsJ

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) October 1, 2022

Do not discount the effectiveness of Russian up-is-downism, Snyder cautions. The events of Jan. 6th, the spread of white Christian nationalism and right-wing domestic terrorism in the U.S. validate his concern. We have seen what Republican/Russian/QAnon propaganda and embrace of “alternative facts” can do on this continent:

Russia embodies fascism while claiming to fight it; Russians commit genocide while claiming to prevent it. This propaganda is not entirely ineffective: the fact that Moscow claims to be fighting Nazis does distract many observers from the fascism of Putin’s regime. And before North Americans and Europeans praise themselves for winning the battle of narratives, they should look to the global South. There, Putin’s story of the war prevails, even as Asians and Africans pay a horrible price for the war that he has chosen.

By this, Snyder means the choking off of Ukrainian grain exports. As Stalin did before him, Putin is using famine as a weapon, not just against Ukraine, but the world.

For his part, Putin’s actions are all about grievance. In a speech declaring his annexation of several of Ukraine’s eastern reaches, Putin asserted his invasion is a reaction the western efforts to weaken Russia, as if capitalism did not have more pressing interests than Putin’s political legacy (Yahoo News):

All of this, according to Putin, is the fault of the United States and its European allies, whom he accuses of trying to fulfill a long-standing project to weaken Russia — a project in which Ukraine is, in this cynical vision of the global order, nothing more than a pawn.

“Putin seems desperate to blame the West for everything, which isn’t unexpected, but the intensity of the sentiment makes you wonder what lengths they will go as a result,” Ben Friedman, a policy expert at the security think tank Defense Priorities, told Yahoo News. “Annexing territory Russia seems likely to have trouble holding, and hinting about nukes to defend it smacks of desperation and should make all reasonable people nervous.”

Domestic desperation among adherents of what was once conservatism should concern us as well. For the longest time, it was easy to view Trump as an insecure would-be autocrat emulating a real one, Putin. Now, it’s not clear who is imitating whom. Just as Hitler took lessons from America’s Jim Crow regime, Putin (I’m stretching here) seems to be emulating the Party of Trump’s nihilism. It’s not clear who is influencing whom.

“Russia’s support of fascism, white nationalism, and chaos brings it a certain kind of supporter,” Snyder writes and “its bottomless nihilism is what attracts citizens of democracies who are not sure where to find ethical landmarks.” As it does here.

The party that once embraced freedom fighters may cut off Ukraine’s should they regain control of all three branches of government in 2022 or 2024.

Snyder concludes:

Most urgently, a Ukrainian victory is needed to prevent further death and atrocity in Ukraine. But the outcome of the war matters throughout the world, not just in the physical realm of pain and hunger but also in the realm of values, where possible futures are enabled. Ukrainian resistance reminds us that democracy is about human risk and human principles, and a Ukrainian victory would give democracy a fresh wind.

Read between the lines: Our fates are linked.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us