Month: February 2024

Here’s a NYT gift link to a thorough deconstruction of the “confidential informant” (dare I say) hoax with which the GOP planned to impeach Biden. Read it all if you have the time. An excerpt:

In May 2023, Senator Charles E. Grassley, a chief antagonist of President Biden, strode to the Senate floor with some shocking news: He had learned, he said, of a document in the F.B.I.’s possession that could reveal “a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden.”

Mr. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, suggested to any Americans listening that there was a single document that could confirm the most sensational corruption allegations against Mr. Biden — and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was engaging in a coverup.

“Did they sweep it under the rug to protect the candidate Biden?” he asked conspiratorially.

Over the next few months, Mr. Grassley’s quest to make public the allegation — laid out in an obscure document known as an F.B.I. Form 1023 — became a fixation, and a foundation of the growing Republican push to impeach Mr. Biden as payback for Democrats’ treatment of former President Donald J. Trump.

At the center of it all was the unsubstantiated accusation that Mr. Biden had taken a $5 million bribe from the executive of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.

But what neither Mr. Grassley nor any of the other Republicans who amplified the claims said in their breathless statements was that F.B.I. officials had warned them repeatedly to be cautious about the accusation, because it was uncorroborated and its credibility unknown.

All that the form proved, federal law enforcement officials explained, was that a confidential source had said something, and they had written it down. And now federal prosecutors say the claim was made up.

But the cautions Republicans received from the start about the materials did not stop them from repeating the unverified allegation hundreds of times over many months, in official settings and interviews on right-wing media outlets.

Read the whole thing. They knew it was bogus. They did not care.

People have been warning about Russian influence on the GOP since 2015. Trump’s weird affinity for Vladimir Putin exacerbated all the suspicions. This has now become so obvious that you’s have be brain damaged not to admit it and see that it is detrimental to the United States. This is just the latest revelation that points toward the Republican Party being so Trump-addled that they are literally selling out the country for their Dear Leader.

A psychologist formerly of Johns Hopkins University has some thoughts on Donald Trump’s mental status. Chauncy DeVega at Salon interviewed him about a number of things but this caught my eye due to that very weird moment above:

Not enough people are sounding the alarm, that based on his behavior, and in my opinion, Donald Trump is dangerously demented. In fact, we are seeing the opposite among too many in the news media, the political leaders and among the public. There is also this focus on Biden’s gaffes or other things that are well within the normal limits of aging. By comparison, Trump appears to be showing gross signs of dementia. This is a tale of two brains. Biden’s brain is aging. Trump’s brain is dementing.

What evidence do you have for that conclusion?

“Phonemic paraphasias” —the substitution of non-words for words that sound similar—are not normally seen until a patient enters the moderate to severe stages of Alzheimer’s.

“What I don’t understand is why those clips aren’t replayed over and over in the mainstream media. Isn’t Trump babbling incoherently the most newsworthy part of his rally? You can be sure it would be if it were Biden.”

Some examples of Trump’s non-words: Beneficiaries becomes “benefishes.” Renovations become “renoversh.” Pivotal became “pivobal.” Obama became “obamna.” Missiles became “mishiz.” Christmas became “Crissus.” Bipartisan became “bipars.”

This is a fundamental breakdown in the ability to use language. If you were talking to your father on the phone and he did this you would think he is having a stroke. There is no healthy older person who speaks that way.

Trump also engages in what we call “tangential speech.” He just becomes incomprehensible when he engages in free association word salad speech that is all over the place. Again, that’s a sign of real brain damage, not being old, not being slow, not losing a step not being, but of severe cognitive deterioration. What I don’t understand is why those clips aren’t replayed over and over in the mainstream media. Isn’t Trump babbling incoherently the most newsworthy part of his rally? You can be sure it would be if it were Biden.

He’s getting worse. The Nikki Haley Nancy Pelosi mix-up is the most extreme example:

He does this all the time as you will recognize when you watch his rallies. It’s not a schtick.

Yesterday:

It’s one thing for the press to dismiss the fact that he’s an ignorant psycho, I guess. Like this:

But to dismiss his obvious aphasic word salad while relentlessly hammering Joe Biden is ridiculous. Trump is not normal.

In the past they tried to exclude them but they’ve thrown up their hands now and are welcoming them into the MAGA fold. Where they certainly belong:

Nazis appeared to find a friendly reception at the conservative political action conference this year.

Throughout the conference, racist extremists, some of whom had secured official CPAC badges, openly mingled with conference attendees and espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The presence of the individuals has been a persistent issue at CPAC, and in previous years, conference organizers have ejected well known nazis and white supremacists, such as Nick Fuentes.

But this year, racist conspiracy theorists didn’t meet any perceptible resistance at the conference where Donald Trump has been the keynote speaker since 2017.

At the Young Republican mixer Saturday evening a group of Nazis, who openly identified as national socialists, mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed race science and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

One member of the group, Greg Conte, who attended the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, said that his group showed up to talk to the media. He said that the group was prepared to be ejected if CPAC organizers were tipped off, but that never happened.

Another, Ryan Sanchez, who was previously part of the Nazi Rise Above Movement, took photos and videos of himself at the conference with an official badge and touted associations with Fuentes.

Other attendees with Sanchez openly used the N-word.

They might as well offer them full participation along with panels and speaking roles. Who are they trying to kid?

They can’t

Republicans are in a pickle on this one. Look at the record:

Most House Republicans have cosponsored a bill declaring that life begins from the moment of conception, a position under increased scrutiny after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are “unborn children.”

This Congress, 125 House Republicans — including Speaker Mike Johnson — have cosponsored the “Life at Conception Act,” which states that the term “human being” includes “all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.”

The bill does not include any exception for in vitro fertilization (IVF), a reproductive treatment that allows mothers to fertilize several eggs outside the womb in order to increase the chances of a viable pregnancy.

Several healthcare providers in Alabama have already halted IVF programs in the wake of the ruling, given that IVF treatments may include the discarding of fertilized eggs, which may now violate the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

The lack of an IVF exception is notable, given the carveout contained within a previous version of the Life at Conception Act introduced by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky in 2017.

“Nothing in this Act shall be construed to require the prosecution of any woman for the death of her unborn child, a prohibition on in vitro fertilization, or a prohibition on use of birth control or another means of preventing fertilization,” reads the 2017 bill.

Look at that. They actually took out an IVF exception. That’s a conscious act. Remember, these are people who believe that frozen embryos are babies that need to be adopted. They call them “snowflake babies.” (Maybe we can get a full Handmaid’s Tale program going to force prisoners to incubate them for all the people who are supposedly waiting in line to do that.)

They knew there was no way this monstrosity could ever become law while Roe was still in place. They were performing for their Christian fascist base. Now, all bets are off and they have to face what they have done.

Republican Rep. Alexander Mooney, the main House sponsor of the bill, did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on why that exception was not included.

Neither did spokespeople for Speaker Johnson, who largely controls the House floor and whose evangelical Christian views have entailed staunch opposition to abortion in the past.nt

“When a woman is pregnant, science tells us the new life she carries is a completely separate and fully new human being from the moment of fertilization,” Johnson said during a 2021 hearing on Texas’s 6-week abortion ban.

They knew what they were doing. Now there’s a mad scramble to distance themselves from the consequences of their actions, starting with Donald Trump who put out a statement in which he declared himself the savior of IVF but he’s the guy who loves to take credit for overturning Roe Vs Wade. And that decision was the basis for the Alabama Supreme Court ruling.

Trump appeared before the Black Conservative Federation (although the crowd seemed mighty white) and this is what he had to say:

(He’s really reaching out to Black youth with that one. I guess he figures his fugly sneakers are doing that for him.)

Reminder:

Trump’s Central Park Five op-ed. When they were exonerated he said they were guilty anyway and the city should never have paid them a dime.

Anyone who believes this man is not a racist throwback is deluded.

Vote for candidates who will hear you out

Ask me why I do what I do and my answer is not that altruistic. I hate feeling like political road kill. When I’m doing I don’t feel like a victim. This morning (FWIW) I’ll be electing members to the Democratic National Committee for the next four years from North Carolina. I want change agents. Not people intent on adding another bullet item to their long political resumes but not do anything with the position (and there will be plenty of those in the running).

Yeah, the system is flawed. But as my friend Anat Shenker-Osorio says, “Forget about the lesser of two evils, and focus on choosing a president open to hearing you out on a whole bunch of evils.”

Anat tells The Ink why you should not panic:

What do you say to people who are burned out on the idea that we have to fight fascism again this November? How can you keep them focused despite an unending sense of crisis, through another election cycle that looks a whole lot like the last one?

Keep your eye on what really matters — making room for progressive change

Here’s what I say. When you look at the actual progressive gains that we have had in our society, when you look at the landmark civil rights legislation — the de jure, not de facto, end of segregation — when you look at women finally having their inherent right to vote be recognized — by the way, I refuse to say that women were given the right to vote or Black folks were given the right to vote. We had the right all along. Some people had some trouble understanding that, because that’s what it means to be endowed by a creator — whether you believe in one or not — with inalienable rights. Like no one’s giving those out. That’s just by virtue of being human…

But I digress. The Americans with Disabilities Act, marriage equality, the eight-hour workday, child labor laws — all of the gains that I think any real progressive person would point to as What are the things that have actually moved society along? — none of those, none, have happened because we elected the right person. None of those have happened by ballot. Even if some of marriage equality happened by ballot initiative, all of those things have happened because there has been pressure — sustained, smart, strategic pressure from outside of the electoral system. 

Elections aren’t everything — they’re just part of the struggle

I don’t think that any person within the civil rights movement would ever have thought, “Oh, well, it’s really just a question of who we elect president. We’re just going to work on who’s going to be president.” And thought that that was actually going to create legislation. 

F.D.R. himself said prior to passing the New Deal (and, obviously, it was a big deal that he was the person in charge at that point), “If you want these things to happen, make me. Make me.” 

And so what I say to people who are burned out — after empathizing with them, because, again, I do try to follow my own advice, and I don’t start with, “How dare you?” or, “Do you not understand that fascism is on the rise?” That kind of discourse is not empathetic, not active listening, not starting with a shared value. 

Accept the limitations of the system — and look towards real goals

The place that I’ve come to is this: that it is a correct assessment. It’s my assessment, too, that the electoral system is a piece of garbage. I mean, it really just truly is a piece of garbage. And another bit of language that I refuse to use, I never talk about saving our democracy or restoring our democracy. We don’t have a democracy. We have never had a democracy. 

A democracy isn’t an electoral college. It isn’t a Senate and a system that grossly overrepresents rural people, that lets acres of land vote, and means human beings in California and New York don’t count equally and doesn’t let people in D.C. vote period, full stop, or be represented.

I think that it’s not accidental that we have measurably historic distrust of institutions, that we have what we call double-no voters. Double-no is like, “Don’t like him, don’t like him.” That is all just a product, and proof, of the fact that the electoral system is — and this is the most generous thing I can say — garbage. 

Forget about the lesser of two evils, and focus on choosing a president open to hearing you out on a whole bunch of evils

So what you do is acknowledge that issue. You say that an election — choosing who is going to be at the helm of this system — is choosing who is going to be responding to us when we’re agitating through other lanes. It’s choosing who is in power when we say, “No, this policy is unjust and unfair.”

Is it someone who is going to allow that speech to occur? Is it someone who is going to permit protest in front of the White House? Is it someone who is going to allow us to march? Is it someone who — on the more positive side — is going to march alongside the UAW when strikes are happening? Or is it someone who has told us that he will be sending you to the gulag for daring to speak out against him?

Sometimes I feel really perplexed by people who say, “The system is broken. Voting for the lesser of evils is still evil. We’re going to vote third party,” or, “We’re not going to vote top-of-ticket, or not vote at all.” What’s mystifying is not that these people have identified — rightly, because I agree — that the electoral system is garbage, but that they think that they can use the electoral system to fix the electoral system? 

That doesn’t make any sense to me. The message is vote for our freedoms, strike for our families, march for our futures. We vote for Biden-Harris and for Democrats on November 5th. And on November 6th, we have a general strike (in my fantasy world where there’s a general strike because I honestly believe that nothing in America is ever going to change unless we withhold our labor). We’re saying, “We elected you. Here’s the deal. Here is what that vote means.” 

So here’s the question you want people to keep in mind: What is the world that we want and how do we get it? In pursuit of that, voting is just one of the tools in our toolbox — it may be insufficient on its own, but making the choice is absolutely necessary.

And bring a towel. I did.

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Give an inch, take a mile

Via Dispatches from the Religious Left, an analysis of the Alabama Supreme Court’s IVF ruling explaining how the judges scooped up this ball and rasn it in for a fringe-right touchdown.

Chris Geidner writes:

I’d like to focus instead on the majority opinion from Justice Jay Mitchell, which is extreme in its own ways — and highlights the dangerous faux-jurisprudence that the U.S. Supreme Court has encouraged.

In order to reach its ruling, the court needed to ignore its own past precedents that congruence between the state’s criminal-homicide statute and wrongful-death statute was needed. This is important because the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act was passed in 1872. The court had justified expanding that civil law to fetuses in utero based on an expansion of the criminal law to include fetuses in utero and the claimed need for congruence between the two laws. Now that the court wanted to go further than the criminal law, it just ignored those rulings — overruling them without saying so, as Justice Greg Cook stated in his dissenting opinion.

Or, as Justice Will Sellers wrote more bluntly, “To equate an embryo stored in a specialized freezer with a fetus inside of a mother is engaging in an exercise of result-oriented, intellectual sophistry, which I am unwilling to entertain.”

The court also went far afield of what was necessary for its ruling. After claiming that “[t]here is simply no … ambiguity” about the word “child” in the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, the court then got into what ordinarily would then not have been a part of the opinion at all: An extended discussion of the “Sanctity of Unborn Life’ provision of the Alabama Constitution: Article I, Section 36.06.

Of that, Mitchell wrote for the court, “Even if the word ‘child’ were ambiguous, however, the Alabama Constitution would require courts to resolve the ambiguity in favor of protecting unborn life,” claiming that Section 36.06 “operates in this context as a constitutionally imposed canon of construction, directing courts to construe ambiguous statutes in a way that ‘protect[s] … the rights of the unborn child’ equally with the rights of born children, whenever such construction is ‘lawful and appropriate.’“

This is dicta — a statement that is unnecessary to the ruling — and yet, as a statement in a majority opinion from the state’s Supreme Court, it was a chance for this court to establish this new rule, which undoubtedly will now be applied by lower courts in Alabama.

As Sellers wrote in dissent, “Respectfully, § 36.06 neither operates in such a fashion nor commands this Court to override legislative acts it believes ‘contraven[e] the sanctity of unborn life’“ — a quote from Parker’s even further-reaching concurring theocratic opinion.

Finally, and perhaps most telling, the court — in the closing paragraphs of Mitchell’s opinion — makes clear that it did not need to reach either the statutory or constitutional issues here.

“[T]he defendants pointed out that all the plaintiffs signed contracts with the Center in which their embryonic children were, in many respects, treated as nonhuman property,” Mitchell wrote. “If the defendants are correct on that point, then they may be able to invoke waiver, estoppel, or similar affirmative defenses.”

In other words, if this is true, the court could have issued a ruling that avoided all of the IVF issues — instead ruling that, even if the plaintiffs could bring such lawsuits, they would be barred from doing so here. This is an ordinary practice of courts to avoid reaching more complicated or extensive rulings than necessary for the case in front of it.

But, this court wanted to reach its broader ruling in this case. So, it refused to rule on that pivotal question, with Mitchell instead writing for the court, “[T]hose defenses have not been briefed and were not considered by the trial court, so we will not attempt to resolve them here. We are ‘a court of review, not a court of first instance.’”

Ignoring precedent, going further in its rulings than necessary, and reaching issues that it did not even necessarily need to reach — all in service of a ruling that restricts bodily, family, and reproductive autonomy to advance what Parker’s concurrence makes clear is a Christian nationalism goal.

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A patriarchal theocracy

AOC has opinions, of course:

“If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention,” Charles Blow wrote this week. This is a subculture that’s been simmering just outside of the national public’s view for decades.

Janine Melnitz : Yes, of course they’re serious…

From weapons training for Jesus to pledging allegiance to the Christian flag, to worship services featuring AR-15s to purity pledges, and now to book bans, this is a subculture the rest of us could comfortably view with a smirk as an unserious fringe.

Don’t say you weren’t warned. “It’s hard to know what will happen if these people begin to exert even stronger influence over the Republican party in a time of great stress and transition in this country,” Digby wrote in 2010.

A friend this week said she’s less likely these days to admit being a Christian because of these people. That’s okay because they are unlikely to consider her one in their budding theocracy. Given a chance, the American Taliban will not tolerate ordinary Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, etc. Freedom of religion will be guaranteed so long as it’s theirs.

Check between your shoulder blades for a target.

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Baby elephants!

Hilvarenbeek, February 20, 2024 – African elephant Punda has become the mother of a healthy elephant calf after a 22-month pregnancy. This is the third calf born in the Safari Park @Beekse-Bergen in four months. Never before have three African elephants been born in a European zoo in such a short time.

The young elephant is a girl and has been named Tendai. Head zookeeper Yvonne Vogels says: “Everything is falling into place! Mosi means firstborn: the first of the three calves. Ajabu stands for ‘radiant’. It’s wonderful to see how the premature baby, because she was born two months prematurely, is now strengthened and how we see this reflected in her character. And now there is Tendai, which means grateful. Thankful for all the healthy happiness in the herd. We are completely over the moon!”

The zookeepers of the African elephants were alert for the arrival of the calf for several days. Vogels: “On Wednesday we saw a change in the blood values and in principle the calf would be born within 48 hours.” The zookeepers monitored the webcam for five nights, taking turns and every hour. “We regularly thought that the moment had arrived. On Sunday evening, Punda was very restless. The keepers and I decided to spend the night in a room next to the elephant enclosure. The little one was born on Monday morning, February 19 at 9.10 am,” says Vogels.

To allow mother and daughter to recover in peace, the elephant stable will be open to a limited extent in the coming days. Matriarch At 32 years old, Punda is the matriarch of the elephant herd in Safari Park Beekse Bergen. It means that as the eldest of the herd, she plays an important role within the elephant family. When the two previous calves were born, her essential role was visible: she taught her daughters how to care for their young calves.

Punda arrived at the Safari Park with her offspring in 2015 as part of the management program. The management program ensures a healthy reserve population of this species. Elephant bull Yambo came to Beekse Bergen from Spain in 2021 to make his contribution. And with success, because not much later the zookeepers saw the first mating. More space Through the Wildlife Foundation, Beekse Bergen supports the Save the Elephants organization with the Northern Corridors Project. The project will ensure that nature parks in Kenya are connected with each other with corridors. A corridor is a safe passage for wild animals, such as elephants.

The passages are necessary because the population of Africa is growing and the elephant habitat is becoming fragmented, resulting in human-animal conflicts. The aim is to finance one corridor: 60,000 euros are needed for this. More than half of this amount will be collected through an adoption plan for the young elephants. The rest of the amount will be supplemented with other initiatives.

An Extra treat for you:

I doubt it

After the exposure of the big confidential informant who claimed Biden had taken 5 million dollars in bribes from the Ukrainian government this wee, there is some hope that the Biden impeachment probe may collapse. It’s possible. It’s also quite likely that it won’t for all the reasons Susan Glasser lays out in the New Yorker:

“Smirnov’s allegations were the foundation of the entire impeachment drive,” Raskin told me. Without them, “the impeachment investigation has ended in substance if not actually in form . . . the whole project lies in ruins.”

But I am not fully convinced. In today’s Congress, the fight, somehow, must always go on. For years, Trump and his backers have fed elaborate conspiracy theories about the President and his son to their base. This particular trope about Biden and Ukraine and the bribe that wasn’t is unlikely to die off swiftly. Raskin readily admitted that some Republicans in Congress were likely to keep pressing the matter even after its source had been discredited—“like Confederate soldiers lost in the woods somewhere,” still fighting on long after the war was over. In the way of conspiracy theories, he fears that Smirnov’s takedown may soon end up being portrayed as just another deep-state plot to cover up Biden’s crimes. I suspect it will not be long before this prediction comes to pass.

“We were warned that the credibility of this statement was not known and yet my colleagues went out and talked to the public about how this was credible and how it was damning,” Representative Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican who has started occasionally challenging his party in public, said this week. Of course, they were warned. We all were. The point was not the veracity of the accusation but the fact that Republicans had an accusation to make.

Political memory in America is shockingly attenuated. In 2019, Trump was impeached by a Democratic-controlled House for demanding that Ukraine help him politically by digging up dirt on Biden. In the “perfect” phone call that Trump himself publicly released, he pushed Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to open an inquiry into Biden, referring to allegations that Biden had “stopped the prosecution” of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that had paid Biden’s son to serve on its board, at a time when the then Vice-President was helping oversee U.S. policy toward Ukraine. This is the same conspiracy theory that Republicans have been pursuing in the current impeachment inquiry into Biden, all these years later. It did not matter to them when the charge was dismissed as unproved Russian disinformation back in 2019, and, I fear, it will not matter to them now that this latest iteration of the tale, with its own Moscow angle, has been discredited too. The circus tent is not coming down; it has taken up permanent residence.

I’m afraid she’s right. I don’t know if they’ll have the votes when it comes down to it. There are a bunch of House seats up for reelection in districts that Biden won in 2020 and they may not be as keen. But I’ll be shocked if they fold up the tent completely. After all, Dear Leader wants his pound of flesh and I really doubt they have the brass to defy him.

Also, who knows what new “evidence” their friends in Russia will provide?