The whole world is in a post-pandemic funk. I guess it’s good that Biden isn’t quite as unpopular as everyone else but it’s really bad news, and not a coincidence, that we also have a rising fascist right at the same time. Ours is unique in that our fascist movement is also led by an unhinged, corrupt, imbecilic cult leader which actually makes it more difficult.
The usual suspects are having a good old-fashioned cry over a comment by Biden at a fundraiser. As he was reminding the attendees of the chaos of the Trump years and the probability of it being even worse next time he said:
“Remember him saying the best thing to do is just inject a little bleach in your arm? That’s what he said. And he meant it. I wish he had done a little bit himself.”
They’re melting down because what he said is “a lie!” And technically they’re right. Trump never said to inject “bleach into your arm.” He mused that maybe we could inject “disinfectant” or maybe “hit the body” with a strong light. Totally different Except not.
These were big, breakthrough ideas of the stable genius himself, telling assembled scientists to pursue them:
A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposedly we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it.
And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting, right?
And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful. Steve, please.
No doubt they got right on that. His uncle went to MIT you see:
“You know, my uncle was a great person. He was at MIT. He taught at MIT for, I think, like a record number of years. He was a great super genius. Dr. John Trump… I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for President.”
It’s very rude of Joe Biden to make fun of him. After all, he’s actually very stupid.
In a conversation in Austin with Chief Judge Priscilla Richman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, Kavanaugh acknowledged the polarization in the country over political and legal issues, especially since the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the legal right to an abortion established decades earlier by Roe v. Wade.
He said judges and Supreme Court justices must clearly explain their interpretation of the law and apply those legal principles in a uniform fashion. “Individual decisions don’t have to be popular. … The losing party has to respect the decision,” Kavanaugh said at the 5th Circuit Judicial Conference.
“Consistency builds respect,” he continued. “It’s showing up every day in the courtroom and trying to be respectful to the parties, to write your opinion in a way that’s clear and understandable, to get out when you’re speaking and try to explain, to the bar, the judicial process, to try to be transparent and to be impartial as a judge.”
How about consistency with precedent, which they promised to do in their confirmation hearings? In fact, how about consistency with their promises in general in their confirmation hearings? (Although, I guess Kavanaugh has done that — he did promise that we’d reap the whirlwind and a whole lot of women are doing just that today.)
Consistently extreme rulings aren’t going to gain respect from the majority of Americans, sorry. It’s making that majority hold the Supreme Court in roughly the same esteem as a street gang.
He went on to say:
“Real lives are being affected. Real people are being hurt or helped. You can’t lose sight of that. It’s polarized. I get it. I’m part of the system. I understand. I see it.”
If anyone knows, it Kav. He’s been a political operative his whole career and still is.
But Kav wasn’t the only one spouting BS at that conference:
After facing harsh questions about his judicial decisions and acceptance of lavish gifts from a billionaire, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas forcefully pushed back at his critics Friday — saying he and his wife,Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, have endured “nastiness” and “lies.”
Thomas targeted the maelstrom he has facedin Washington, offering some of his most extensive comments since news broke last year of travel and real estate deals paid for by Republican donor Harlan Crow,and since he has faced calls to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election because of his wife’s involvement with efforts to block Joe Biden’s victory.
“What you are going to find, especially in Washington, is that people are going to pride themselves on being awful,” Thomas said during the hour-long conversation with U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, a former clerk of his, at a judicial conference on the Gulf Coast, hundreds of miles from the nation’s capital. “It’s a hideous place.”
The justice went on to say that he maintains his positivity in work and life despite the tribulations. Still, he told his audience that he wished he had remained a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and that he “had no interest in public life” but felt called to it by God. He did not address any recent decisions by the court.
Another whining wingnut. Do they ever stop?
These wingnuts are all convinced that they were chosen by God. Actually, Thomas was chosen by George Bush Sr and he was definitely not God. But he is right about Washington being full of people who pride themselves on being awful. He is their leader.
Alito spoke at a Catholic university commencement and told the graduates not to abandon their beliefs, perhaps assuming they all agreed with him. Polling suggests they do not, at lest when it comes to his odious abortion decision.
What do I keep saying about royalists?
Connor Clegg, a producer at Fox News according to his LinkedIn, posted a racist attack on a law enforcement officer to Twitter. Clegg has since locked his twitter account.
Clegg complained about being stopped by a traffic officer with an accent because he was blocking an alley and his tags were expired on his vehicle. The Fox News producer’s description was laced with racist language and superiority.
Here is what Fox News Producer Connor Clegg’s ranted on Twitter late Thursday night:
Just had a “parking enforcement” office who barely spoke a lick of English attempt to load my car onto a tow truck because I was (allegedly) blocking some type of *very important* alleyway where I was parked.
He said “we have to move your car”
Told him, “no need, sir, l’ll move it myself, thanks, sorry for the trouble!” – very polite!
He then says, in his broken tongue, “yes but your plates are also expired…you have to follow law, sir, we have to tow, it’s too late, you can’t move car” in an accent and diction so thick and faulty it was nearing aboriginal levels.
I proceeded to get in my car and leave because, as someone descended from those who formed the very concept of law he meekly was attempting to enforce, that is my birthright, and there’s not a damn thing a foreigner with a tin badge and poorly tailored pants can do to stop me.
How we got to the point where foreigners are given the privilege to enforce this nation’s “laws” unto citizens is beyond me but l’ve had damn near enough of it.
You can respectfully reason your way out of trouble – at least out of parking violations – with a fellow countryman; I’ve done it dozens of times in my life… But a tyrannical foreigner with no concept of western rites and tradition wielding the Longsword of the Leviathan is completely out of bounds and why we tolerate it as a nation is well beyond me.
“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy,” journalist Alfred Henry Lewis told Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1906.
Don’t kid yourselves. Feudalism is even closer.
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After Donald Trump won election in 2016, some friends and colleagues in the progressosphere began moving off social media platforms and to more secure communications channels. The fear was that Trump and his lieutenants would crack down on dissenters using state surveillance. In the end, while damaging, the early Trump administration was too bungling and incompetent, too unfamiliar with where the levers of power were and how to work them. That may not be true in a second Trump administration. Project 2025, and all that.
When he’s not seething inside a cold courtroom, Trump is signalling his second term will be more corrupt that his first, and more blatant about it. His promise to supporters, Greg Sargent satirizes, is a simple promise: I have seen elite corruption and self-dealing from the inside, and I will put that know-how to work for you.
Sargent writes:
A new Washington Post report that Trump made explicit policy promises to a roomful of Big Oil executives—while urging them to raise $1 billion for his campaign—is a powerful story in part because it wrecks what’s left of that mystique. In case you didn’t already know this, it shows yet again that if Trump has employed that aforementioned knowledge of elite corruption and self-dealing to any ends in his public career, it’s chiefly to benefit himself.
More worrisome is how newer, bluer meanies in his employ might direct executive power against political enemies. Trump views power more as a means to wealth and criminal immunity. His allies see power itself as their primary goal and money as a perk. Disarming the left not simply through electoral shenannigans but in every way imaginable could be how they do it. Not unlike how the right has attacked education in red states during the Biden administration, only more so and nationwide.
Michelle Goldberg considers:
In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland this week, the Republican senator Josh Hawley demanded a federal investigation into dark money groups subsidizing “pro-terrorist student organizations” holding anti-Israel protests on college campuses. He cited Politico reporting linking big liberal philanthropies to some pro-Palestinian organizers. Open Society Foundations, for example, founded by the oft-demonized George Soros, has given grants to the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, which has an active university presence. Hawley noted that an I.R.S. ruling denies tax-exempt status to organizations that encourage their members to commit civil disobedience, calling nonprofit funding for the groups behind the anti-Israel demonstrations “almost certainly illegal.”
Even if Garland doesn’t act on Hawley’s request, the attorney general in a second Donald Trump administration probably would. That’s one reason I fear that the backlash to the pro-Palestinian campus movement — which includes lawsuits, hearings and legislation — could help Republicans wage war on progressive nonprofits more broadly.
If they do, the right would be following a well-worn authoritarian playbook. In addition to repressing critical voices in academia and the media, the autocratic leaders Trump admires have regularly tried to crush the congeries of advocacy groups, think tanks, humanitarian organizations and philanthropies often referred to as “civil society.” Hungary, for example, passed what it called the “Stop Soros” law, which criminalized helping refugees and migrants apply for asylum. More recently, Hungary enacted a “sovereignty law,” which, as a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace put it, “offers the ruling party and the Secret Service vast powers to accuse and investigate any groups or individuals that influence public debate and may have had foreign training or contact for any part of their work.”
That Carnegie report, written by Rachel Kleinfeld and published in March, offers a stark warning that something similar could happen here. In fact, Kleinfeld argues, it’s already started.
Titled “Closing Civic Space in the United States,” the report describes a wide array of efforts to curb organizing and assembly. Kleinfeld criticizes the left as well as the right, citing, for example, the pandemic-era rules that kept churches closed even after bars had reopened. But as she writes, “the vast majority of efforts to close space currently come from the illiberal right,” which is integrated into the Republican Party, and thus into government, in a way that has no analogue on the left.
In “Minority Rule,” Ari Berman leads readers through a mind-bending array of tactics Republicans have employed to secure their power in a time when their political base is shrinking steadily. Most are familiar to Hullabaloo readers. But the walk down memory lane is still unnerving. My God, the number and deviousness of them. Inventiveness that might be put to work solving social problems and improving people’s lives is instead dedicated to f#cking with democracy in ways I would never have conceived.
“That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind,” as an old restaurant customer smiled.
What concerns Goldberg is how pro-Palestinian protests are spurring those criminal minds to more inventiveness and, as one nonprofit consultant put it, giving Republicans “a Hamas-sized terrorist wedge to go after our entire infrastructure.” Legislation is in the works.
Goldberg concludes:
None of us, presumably, want to finance evil. The question is whether you want the government, particularly one controlled by Trump’s Republican Party, deciding what evil is. Mike Johnson, the House speaker, recently suggested that the F.B.I. investigate Soros’s role in the protests. A Trump F.B.I. wouldn’t need to be asked twice.
Ponder that.
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Baby elephants are the best
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.
I’m sure many in the media will say this must mean that Joe Biden is in trouble. Isn’t everything? But it just ain’t so. This is not good news for Trump I don’t care what anyone says:
Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign called itself a “juggernaut” in May of that year, on par with a planet-destroying Death Star that was “firing on all cylinders.”
Trump’s 2024 campaign has traded Star Wars metaphors for talk of a “leaner” and “more efficient” operation, with less real estate, fewer employees and greater dependence on outside groups.
“We’re focused on quality over quantity. I mean, how novel a concept,” top strategist Chris LaCivita told the crowd of top donors May 4 at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., according to attendees.
The shift comes as President Biden’s campaign and its allies, buoyed by incumbency, have been moving in the opposite direction, building a more expansive operation sooner than in 2020. Strategists for both major parties expect Democrats to raise and spend more than Republicans over the coming months, a dynamic that has been magnified by the significant legal costs Trump’s fundraising apparatus has absorbed to defend him in state and federal courts.
Trump trying to bribe the oil industry for a billion dollars is more evidence of this “quality over quantity” strategy, amirite?
Trump won spending less money than Clinton in 2016 so the conventional wisdom is that he has some magical abilities that make him beyond any of the usual campaign necessities and requirements. But that was then and this is now. Trump is a known quantity today, the media is treating him critically, he’s been sued for half a billion dollars for fraud, is indicted on very serious charges and is not running against a woman that many voters loathed with a singular passion usually reserved for serial killers. It is a different day and I’m not sure that Trump failing to put together a real campaign is the put-away shot too many people think it is.
You may recall that the House Republicans held up aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel (and blew off a very expansive border bill on Trump’s orders) for months. These Republicans attempting to impeach Biden over this issue is mind-boggling.
I’ve heard several wingnut commentators compare Biden’s actions to Trump’s when he told Zelensky that he would withhold weapons unless he came up with dirt on Joe Biden. I don’t think I need to point out how ridiculous that comparison is. If they disagree with Biden’s decision that’s completely legitimate. They can try to write some legislation to stop him or someone on their team could file a lawsuit. But there are decades of precedents that say presidents have the authority to make a decision like this on the basis of the national interest (often at the behest of Republican hawks who argue for unlimited presidential power.) Trump, on the other hand, used his authority to advance his personal political interest. You’ll recall that Alan Dershowitz fatuously tried to argue that a president’s personal political interest is by definition in the national interest — another example of l’etat c’est moi.
Presidents have often made dubious decisions in this area and there are good reasons to dial back their unrestrained authority. But impeaching Biden over this is absurd and they know it.
“For those of you that want to vote because you think he’s an anti-vaxxer, he’s not really an anti-vaxxer. That’s only his political moment. So, RFK, his views on vaccines are fake, as is everything else about his candidacy.”
In a striking video on Truth Social, Donald Trump criticizes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dismissing him as a ‘radical left Democrat’ amid polls indicating Kennedy is siphoning votes from Trump’s campaign. Emphasizing the urgency, Trump states he would prefer Joe Biden over ‘Junior,’ arguing that the country would fare better under Biden’s administration than the ‘immediate collapse’ he predicts with Kennedy.
Trump could theoretically put him away quickly if he wanted to:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has challenged Donald Trump to a head-to-head debate for when both address a Libertarian convention later this month, a move that comes as the presumptive GOP nominee has ramped up both criticism of Kennedy’s independent bid and demands that President Joe Biden meet him on a debate stage.
Arguing that he is “drawing a lot of voters from your former supporters,” Kennedy said to Trump in an open letter posted Tuesday to X that the Libertarian convention provides “perfect neutral territory for you and me to have a debate where you can defend your record for your wavering supporters.”
Trump is taunting Joe Biden every day now to debate (knowing that he won’t agree to do it until the fall because he’s the president not some gadfly.) But he refused to debate any of his primary rivals and he’s not going to do this either.
But it is telling that he’s going after Kennedy so hard and that he’s decided to go after him by pretending that he’s not the foremost anti-vax activist in the country and has been for years. (He’s really all-in on the idea that he has the power to change reality simply by saying something.) They must have some very disturbing poll numbers for him to do this. This is one of his only weaknesses with the cult and the last thing he wants is to have Kennedy out there reminding everyone that he’s the guy who touted the COVID vaccine as one of his great achievements (until he was booed at one of his rallies.) It’s a weak spot and he’s obviously very worried about it.
This is how half the country becomes inured to blatant corruption:
That is Fox News blithely normalizing Trump’s flagrant corruption. No biggie. Just Trump trying to bribe the oil industry into giving him a billion dollars. What’s the problem?
It’s not that this sort of quid pro quo wasn’t implicit in the past. But they used to couch it in the idea that they were ideologically aligned and never made such a blatant pitch for specific “deliverables” in exchange for cash. You have to love the fact that the “oil man” told this reporter that a billion dollars in exchange for destroying regulations isn’t really a good deal. I guess they’re negotiating.
But hey, why not? There’s no further need to pretend that the Republican party has any integrity. It’s all for sale and they’re fine with it.