This is interesting…
Dance, Ron, dance.
Megyn isn’t quick enough to throw back in his face the long-standing GOP view of small government and the private sector being completely independent from the state. His diversion from that ideology is very Trumpian: the only rule that corporations need to follow is that they must show total fealty to … him. There’s a word for that and it starts with F and ends with ism.
He’s at a loss on this one. His excuse is lamer than usual:
“These were my tapes that we gave to them,” Trump told conservative radio host John Fredericks. “These were security tapes. We handed them over to them. … I’m not even sure what they’re saying.”
That’s a non-sequitur. Yes, they were his tapes. It’s what he ordered his henchman to do with them that was criminal.
The Department of Justice alleged that Trump and Nauta had asked De Oliveira to delete the footage from Mar-a-Lago, so the video would not get into the hands of a grand jury.
The new court documents claimed De Oliveira and Nauta were captured on surveillance video moving boxes that may have contained documents with classified markings before DOJ and FBI officials visited the property to collect subpoenaed items.
It also alleged that in June 2022, on the same day that the DOJ emailed Trump’s attorney another subpoena for surveillance video, De Oliveira had a private conversation with an employee in an audio closet during which he asked how long a server containing the video kept its footage.
The employee said the footage would stay on the server for 45 days, to which De Oliveira responded that “the boss” wanted the server deleted, according to the indictment. Trump also allegedly offered to provide an attorney for De Oliveira last August.
He knows very well what they are saying in the indictment. He just doesn’t know how to explain this except to bellow “mine” which can’t make sense even to the cult. (Or can it?)
Not content with chasing phantom “Biden Crime Family” investigations, the Republicans decided to take a spin in a spaceship:
David Grusch, the former US intelligence officer who claims that the US government is harboring “intact and partially intact” and “non-human” pilots, appeared in Washington, under oath, to repeat the same.
The US government conducted a “multi-decade” program which collected, and attempted to reverse-engineer, crashed UFOs, Grusch told the oversight committee. He added that unnamed federal agencies had even recovered “biologics” from these craft, which he described as “non-human”.
Moreover, Grusch, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency until 2023, said he had encountered “people who have been harmed or injured” in the course of the government’s efforts to keep this alien program secret. Grusch told the committee that after going public with his allegations he had feared for his life.
Happily for Grusch, and for the scores of UFO enthusiasts who flooded to the hearing, some of the politicians listening appeared to be completely sold.
“I believe they [aliens] exist. I knew that before I came in here,” Tim Burchett, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, told the Guardian.“I don’t want to oversimplify it, but how are you going to fly one [a spaceship]? You got to have somebody in it. That seems to be pretty simple,” Burchett said.
If Burchett’s statement seemed to ignore longstanding earth-bound technology which already commonly enables unmanned flight via drones, his enthusiasm will at least have buoyed onlookers. Given the Republican is co-leading the investigation into Grusch’s claims, he seems a good person to have convinced.
Also onboard is Matt Gaetz, a rightwing Republican from Florida. Gaetz, Burchett and Anna Paulina Luna, also from Florida, had caused a kerfuffle at a Florida air force base a week earlier when they turned up demanding to see evidence of a recently reported UFO incident.Gaetz said that having initially being denied access to the base, the trio were eventually shown an “image” of unidentified anomalous phenomena – a term preferred by some to UFO. “The image was of something that I am not able to attach to any human capability either from the United States, or from any of our adversaries,” Gaetz said.
Luna, who is co-leading the oversight committee investigation with Burchett, also seemed keen. “It is unacceptable to continue to gaslight Americans into thinking this is not happening,” she said during Wednesday’s hearing. A day later Luna told Axios that her interest in UFOs came from encountering one in 2018.
Claims of UFOs, and of the government covering up aliens, have a long history in the US.In the 1940s and 50s, reports of UFOs, usually in the shape of a “flying saucer”, were commonplace, while Grusch himself has suggested – although not in Wednesday’s hearing – that Pope Pius XII negotiated the transfer of a UFO from Mussolini’s Italy to the US in 1944.
It wasn’t until the past couple of years, however, that Congress really began to take notice. Grusch’s accusations might have ultimately prompted this investigation, but the discussion of UFOs has been lent something approaching legitimacy by leaked military videos which appear to show odd-shaped objects zipping about in American aerospace, and claims from US navy pilots of strange encounters.
Two of those pilots – David Fravor and Ryan Graves – gave testimony on Wednesday. Graves, who has previously reported seeing unidentified aerial phenomena off the Atlantic coast “every day for at least a couple years”, said that other, unnamed pilots had come across “dark grey or black cubes inside of clear spheres” where “the apex or tips of the cube were touching the inside of the sphere”.
Not everyone, however, was impressed with the new disclosures. Grusch has not personally seen any of the things he described, and his claims are based on interviews with people “with direct knowledge” of governmental goings on, which has raised eyebrows among skeptics.“Fravor and Graves for years have been telling this story pretty much as best as they can. And Grusch: I suspect he believes his story,” said Mick West, author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole. How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect.
“So it didn’t really change that aspect of it for me. I already believe that they thought they were telling the truth, what I don’t think is that what they’re describing is an accurate representation of the facts.” West, a longtime investigator of alleged UFO encounters and claims, said sightings like the ones Fravor and Graves described could be attributed to radar issues or clutter, including balloons in the air.
In terms of proving, unequivocally, that the US government has alien craft, and indeed aliens, West said it “will come down to the physical evidence”. “They say they know the exact locations of where these alien craft are. So if you want to tell the American public about the whole program, if Congress wants to do that, then they can just go and look at these craft,” he said
One issue which commonly raises doubts is that the US government has allegedly been able to keep its stash of UFOs secret – for decades. Given the leaks, scoops and whistleblowing on various governmental secrets and wrongdoing, this apparent ability to remain tight-lipped on what would be the biggest secret in human history would be remarkable.
“And it’s not just the US government. It’s the whole world,” West said. Indeed, UFO sightings are not a uniquely American phenomenon. The UK, for one, has not been immune. In 2011 the British Ministry of Defence released 8,500 pages of reports on UFO sightings, dating back to the 1950s. The files included a report from one man who said he was “abducted” in October 1998, by aliens in a “large cigar-shaped vehicle with big projectiles on each side like wings”.
“And what about all the other countries? There’s a lot of other landmass, lots of places for UFOs to crash. It doesn’t make any sense,” West said. Maybe it doesn’t, but there is evidence that international cooperation may be coming. In May the Pentagon held a UFO-focused briefing of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance – which includes the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia – with the promise of more meetings to come.
And despite the lack of an extraterrestrial smoking gun, for longtime followers of UFO sightings, claims and developments Wednesday made for an extraordinary experience.“It was one of the most amazing and bizarre and surreal congressional hearings ever held,” said Nick Pope, who spent the early 1990s investigating UFOs for the British Ministry of Defence.
“You had to almost pinch yourself and do a double-take when you heard phrases like ‘non-human intelligences’ and ‘biologics’ unpacked in the testimony.”
Grusch didn’t produce new revelations, repeatedly stating that he could not elaborate further in a public setting, something which Pope said made sense.
But some of the politicians spoke afterwards, however, about the importance of getting Grusch’s claims into the record. Pope said that was an important step in the road to finding out what the government might have. “It was clear listening to what the various people on the committee said that they weren’t going to let this lie,” Pope said. “You got a sense of the anger that they had, at the implication that things were being hidden from them improperly.”
One thing is certain: the UFO craze is not going away. The next things to look out for include a Nasa report due to be published this month, while the Department of Defense is due to issue a report of its own this summer. There will probably be more congressional hearings when representatives, who are about to leave Washington on a month-long recess, return in September.
“We’re not bringing little green men or flying saucers into the hearing. Sorry to disappoint about half y’all,” Burchett said at the start of proceedings on Wednesday.
“We’re just going to get to the facts.”
What those facts are, and when exactly they might be uncovered, remains to be seen.
Ya think?
By the way, there weren’t any hearings on climate change last week despite the unprecedented heat waves all over the globe. The only thing Republicans had to say about it was, “it’s summer.”
He reluctantly endorses mail-in votes but says “you’re never going to get an honest vote… it’s disgraceful.”
As usual, he will accept the results if it goes his way.
Ala-by God-bama!
“In an echo of mid-century southern defiance of school desegregation, the Yellowhammer State’s Republican-controlled legislature defied the conservative-dominated Court’s directive to redraw its congressional map with an additional Black-majority district,” Adam Serwer explains in The Atlantic:
Openly defying a Supreme Court order is rare—almost as rare as conservative justices recognizing that the Fifteenth Amendment outlaws racial discrimination in voting. Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, states are sometimes required to draw districts with majority-minority populations. This requirement exists because after Reconstruction, one of the methods southern states used to disenfranchise their Black populations was racially gerrymandering congressional districts so that Black voters could not affect the outcome of congressional elections. Earlier this year, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to further weaken the Voting Rights Act so as to preserve its racial gerrymander.
More than a quarter of Alabama’s population is Black, but the state’s Republican majority has racially gerrymandered that population into a single district out of seven because it fears those voters might elect Democrats. The partisan motive is no excuse for racial discrimination—1870s Democrats also had a partisan interest in disenfranchising Black voters, who were then reliably Republican. After failing to get the Supreme Court to overturn Section 2, Alabama decided that following the law was optional.
Hell, yeah!
Even as the right criticizes Democrats’ calls for ethics rules for the court in light of conservative justices’ non-transparency about gifts from ultra-rich supporters, Alabama reserves the right to ignore court rulings it dislikes. Democrats’ complaints only further deligitimize the Roberts court, dontcha know? Conservative states reserve the right to treat unfavorable court rulings as mere recommendations.
At one point, the right-wing legal martyr and originalist Robert Bork was so frustrated by the Court being insufficiently conservative that he declared, “As our institutional arrangements now stand, the Court can never be made a legitimate element of a basically democratic polity.” In the right’s view, the judiciary was an “imperial judiciary,” an “out of control branch of government.”
That’s the highfalutin way conservatives say that the only legitimate court is one in which heads, they win and tails, libs lose. SCOTUS is illegitimate when rulings go against states like Alabama. See, “voiding constitutional prohibitions on racial discrimination” is a southern tradition. Heritage. Like slavery and the Confederate battle flag.
Serwer is even more blunt:
It is clear the right that views the Court as a political instrument for imposing conservative policy, and when the Court fails to heed its obligation to do so, they can simply ignore it. This is consistent with the movement’s Trumpist turn toward the belief that the legitimacy of any practice or institution—elections, fundamental freedoms, the state itself—is conferred not by the consent of the governed but by the consent of the right. You have an inalienable access to the franchise as long as you vote Republican. You have free speech as long as you say conservative things. The free market is free only when it leads to conservative outcomes. The Supreme Court’s rulings are the law of the land, except if those rulings are not what conservatives want.
Not to single out the South exclusively, that’s also how Ohio Republicans treat their state Supreme Court’s rulings.
The Democracy Optional Party. Ain’t that grand?
Another of the downsides to the steady withering of “X” is the former bird platform’s function as a town square where professional and amateur media critics could find an audience, complains Dan Froomkin of Press Watch.
“Political reporters at our leading news organizations routinely put a thumb on the scale in favor of the far right – both by failing to call out its racist and increasingly homophobic nature, and by adopting right-wing frames in reporting current events,” Froomkin writes. He offers a short list of recent stories in which major media outlets tiptoe around the increasingly overt racist and homophobic impulses behind conservative actions and rhetoric.
“The right-wing’s anti-woke war against trans people has now — as was entirely predictable — morphed into a war on any expression of gender or sexuality that isn’t Biblically-approved procreative sex between a man and a woman,” Froomkin posted to the X site on Friday.
Slippery, meet Slope:
The Washington Post story about the homophobic attack on libraries that I mentioned above is just one example. The article by Gregory Schneider, was headlined “Public libraries are the latest front in culture war battle over books“.
But this is not a story about concerned “community members” legitimately worried about “terrible violations of the social order, of sexualizing and brainwashing children,” as Schneider described it.
There has been no violation of the social order — unless that social order is mandatory cis heterosexuality, which, at least for the moment, it is not. There has been no sexualizing and brainwashing at these libraries.
The story is actually about a little library defending itself against steamrolling by homophobic zealots who call anything that isn’t heterosexual pornography.
Twenty-seven paragraphs from the start, Schneider finally offers readers a hint that virtually all the people behind the complaints “said they had not read the books, only summaries.”
It’s as if reporting on Ohio Republicans’ effort to raise the bar for amending the state constitution in the August special election treated it as a legislative debate rather than it being “100%” about blocking the abortion rights amendment on the ballot in November.
Yes, there’s more:
A New York Times story headlined “Bungled Hiring of Journalism Director Exposes a Rift at Texas A&M” dramatically underplayed the role of racism in both the “bungled” hiring and the alleged “rift”.
Kathleen McElroy’s job offer to be the tenured director of the journalism program at A&M was rescinded because she was Black.
This was euphemized by reporters Colbi Edmonds, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Marina Trahan Martinez, who wrote that the “shifting offers” were due to “a backlash over the Black professor’s views on race and diversity.”
Worse, they turned a story about a powerful racist subculture into one about a “rift” over “opposition to diversity initiatives”.
There is no evidence of such a rift. Indeed, faculty members, for instance, are appropriately aghast at the administration’s moral collapse in succumbing to racist criticisms.
To support their hypothesis that “some Aggies are questioning the direction of the university,” the reporters quote who? A conservative news website and the chairman of the university’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter. That’s it.
The appearance of non-stories is something, like Froomkin, I’ve noticed lately, stories where at the end you ask yourself what the point was. Froomkin mentions one by the New York Times that suggests the Department of Justice is wasting resources investigating Donald Trump. It concludes, “These efforts, taken as a whole, do not appear to be siphoning resources that would otherwise be used to combat crime or undertake other investigations.”
Saguaro cacti are collapsing in the prolonged, record-high Arizona heat. Stories on the impacts are likely to chalk it up to a heat wave, to temperatures heating up “over time” and to failure of summer monsoon rains to arrive. If mentioned at all as a factor, climate change might appear in the last paragraph.
Mustn’t ruffle delicate feathers on the climate change-denying right.
The youngest offspring at Zoo Vienna is hard to miss. On July 17, a female fur seal was born. When it’s hungry, it loudly draws attention to itself to get its mother’s care. “In the first few days, the mother and the young seal were in the backstage area, but now they can be seen by the visitors in a specially designed shallow water area. The little one is already making its first attempts at swimming. The mother is very experienced and takes good care of her offspring,” says Simone Haderthauer, the zoological curator. Fur seals can swim and dive from birth, but practice makes perfect! Once the young seal is confident both on land and in water, she will join the rest of the group.
The commented feeding of the fur seals is a highlight of every zoo visit for many visitors. However, it will take some time before the young seal exclusively eats fish and participates in the feeding. During the first six to eight months, seal pups are nursed by their mothers. Haderthauer says, “Currently, even the adult seals don’t have a big appetite for mackerel, sprats, and other fish. In the summer, after the pups are born, it’s also the mating season, and the male, who keeps a harem, has little time to eat.” The animal care team has also noticed that the recent heatwave has further reduced the seals’ appetite. It’s a good thing that cooling down is now the order of the day.”
Trump addressed the new superseding indictment:
Donald Trump on Friday defended the handling of surveillance footage at his Florida home that is at the center of major new criminal charges in the federal case over the former president’s retention of classified documents.
“These are my tapes that we gave to them,” Trump told a conservative radio host in his first public interview since being accused of the new crimes.
“And they basically then say, ‘That’s not enough,’” Trump said on “The John Fredericks Show.”
Trump, the leading candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, also vowed to continue his campaign even if he is convicted and sentenced.
“Not at all, there’s nothing in the Constitution to say that it could,” Trump said when asked if being sentenced would end his presidential bid.
Later in the day, Trump fired off several social media posts raging against the Department of Justice.
He accused special counsel Jack Smith, the prosecutor leading the classified documents probe, of “attempting to destroy the lives of two fine people who have worked for me (and have done a great job!) for a long time.”
“This is textbook Third World intimidation by rabid, lawless prosecutors,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. In a follow-up post, he called for Smith, his prosecutors and Attorney General Merrick Garland to be jailed.
Waaaaah!!!!
In light of the news that Trump ordered his minions to “erase the server” that held the surveillance footage outside the storage room at Mar-a-lago, I’m just going to leave that here for you to enjoy.
Trump projection 101.
How’s it going down in Florida these days?
The inflation rate hit a two-year low in June but the financial relief may not be felt in Florida.
The Federal Reserve raised the interest rate again on Wednesday in an effort to lower inflation. It comes as the Tampa Bay area still has among the highest inflation rates reported, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater has a Consumer Price Index, which is measured for inflation, of 7.3% for the year ended in May.
Meanwhile, the Consumer Price Index grew at an annual rate of 3% in June — the smallest increase since March 2021, the Labor Department said on Wednesday.
South Florida is also reporting similar numbers.
The CPI for Miami-Ft. Lauderdale-West Palm Beach is at 6.9% in June from the year before.
[…]
Those like Nhick Ramiro Pacis of Tampa keep an eye on his budget from the rising costs at the grocery to his insurance.
“It’s really affecting a lot of people. Not only me,” Pacis said.
Like other Floridians, Pacis has had to make adjustments. On top of working two jobs, he’s cut down on TV subscriptions and dining out in an effort to save.
Claar said it’ll be difficult to understand just how soon Florida’s higher inflation rates will cool down. As desirable of a market as it was before for factors like real estate, it’s undergone high interest since the start of the pandemic.
“I don’t think a responsible economist at this point can tell you the day or the month or maybe even the year that things will begin to look more normal… because we don’t quite know yet what the new normal is going to be,” Claar said.
DeSantis seems to think killing “woke-ism” is what’s important. The Florida economy, not so much.
And they are doubling down:
Media Matters took a look at the curriculum:
A cartoon Booker T. Washington distorting the history of the Civil War. A narrator explaining that embracing climate denialism is akin to participating in the Warsaw Uprising. An instructional video telling girls that conforming to gender stereotypes is a great way to embrace their femininity. A dramatization of the supposedly civilizing, benevolent era of British colonial rule in India.
These are just some of the episodes of PragerU Kids — an offshoot of right-wing propaganda organization PragerU — that Florida has just approved for use in its public school classrooms, reflecting and potentially accelerating the state’s hard conservative turn.
“The state of Florida just announced that we are now becoming an official vendor,” said PragerU CEO Marissa Streit in a video heralding the news. She claimed that schools have “been hijacked by the left” and “used by union bosses” to pursue an agenda “not for our children.”“We are just getting started — additional states are signing up,” Streit added.
Here’s one very special example tailor made for DeSantis’ FLorida:
Leo & Layla: Lessons in collective forgetting
Another series sees animated characters Leo and Layla traveling back in time to learn from historical figures. In one episode, the pair discuss slavery with a fictionalized Booker T. Washington.
“I hate that our country had slavery,” Layla says. “Mr. Washington, sometimes do you ever wish you could have lived somewhere else? Like a different country?”
“That’s a great question, and I hate slavery too, but it’s been a reality everywhere in the world,” Washington responds.
The fictional Washington then elides the reality of the U.S. Civil War by adopting the passive voice. This flattens the process through which enslaved people freed themselves — alongside the Union Army — into an undifferentiated joint venture of the entire country.
“America was one of the first places on earth to outlaw slavery,” Washington says, getting the timeline completely reversed. “And hundreds of thousands of men gave their lives in a war that resulted in my freedom.”
“When you put it that way, it totally makes sense,” Leo responds.
Washington’s comforting account of history adds up to a conclusion squarely in line with DeSantis’ anti-critical race theory agenda. “Future generations are never responsible for sins of the past,” Washington reassures the children.
“OK I’ll keep doing my best to treat everyone well and won’t feel guilty about historical stuff,” Layla responds, now absolved and innocent.
PragerU Kids’ anti-anti-racism project includes a predictable deradicalization of Martin Luther King Jr., whom Leo and Layla travel to meet.
“My parents … taught me that racism, thinking people are better than or lesser than because of skin color, is wrong and to hate the wrong but never the wrongdoer,” the fictional King tells the kids.
“Wow. That’s so noble,” Layla responds, in an inadvertent but tellingly condescending way.
“My Christian faith directs me to love my neighbors, even when they act in ways I don’t like, and that’s always helped me remain peaceful,” King replies.
Like in the “Around the World” segments, Leo and Layla also have ample opportunities to promote Western chauvinism.
“What’s up with the face?” Layla asks her brother at the beginning of their Christopher Columbus episode. “You look stressed.”
“I’m just doing some research,” Leo responds. “Was today weird for you?”
“Yeah. How’d you guess?” Layla says.
“Columbus Day,” Leo says.
“Or Native American Day, or Indigenous People’s Day — it’s weird, right?” Layla replies.
The kids then discuss how their teachers and peers got into arguments about whether Columbus should have his own holiday.
“The side against Columbus says he was a really mean guy who spread slavery, disease, and violence to people who would’ve been better off if he’d never gone to the new world,” Leo says. “The side for him says he was a really courageous guy who loved exploring, inspired generations, and spread Christianity and Western civilization to people who really benefited from new ways of thinking and doing things.”
When the two kids meet Columbus, he assures them that he was justified in his violence against indigenous people.
“The place I discovered was beautiful, but it wasn’t exactly a paradise of civilization, and the native people were far from peaceful,” he tells them.
Like the fictional Booker T. Washington, Columbus naturalizes slavery and the slave trade as something that happened everywhere.
“Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world,” Columbus says.
“Well, in our time we view slavery as being evil and terrible,” Layla corrects him.
“Ah. Magnifico! That’s wonderful,” Columbus responds. “I am glad humanity has reached such a time. But you said you’re from 500 years in the future? How can you come here to the 15th century and judge me by your standards from the 21st century?”
As this episode shows, the overriding theme of Leo and Layla’s adventures — and PragerU Kids in general — is that schools have made white children feel uncomfortable by teaching them about racism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression, and that that anxiety must be alleviated through a rigorous disavowal that the past plays any role in ordering the present. If historical wrongs committed by white people in the United States or Europeans must be acknowledged, we must teach that those injustices were undertaken with good intentions. Even more importantly, the past must remain firmly in the past, lest Leo and Layla lose their innocence and be forced to confront continuities of domination.
And this:
Closer to home, “Los Angeles: Mateo Backs the Blue” is anti-Black Lives Matter, pro-cop propaganda. The video describes a Mexican immigrant family that moved to Los Angeles and had their lives upended by the death of George Floyd, whom the narrator characterizes as “a Black man who resisted arrest.”
“Activists claimed that police were targeting the Black community and purposefully killing unarmed Black men,” the narrator says. “As the false claims of racial targeting spread, so did the anger and violence.”
Mateo develops fondness for his school’s “resource officer” — a euphemism, though one not unique to PragerU Kids — and comes to view the cop as “as a guide, a mentor, and a protector, not how he has seen police characterized in the news, as mean-spirited bullies.”
I particularly like this one:
In “How to Be a Victor and Not a Victim,” students learn that “people all around the world who have encountered great setbacks have gone on to overcome them, whether it’s poverty, disease, discrimination, or all of it combined.”
That, PragerU Kids says, is the mentality of winners. “Victims on the other hand, don’t believe that personal growth is possible,” the presenter — who, it should be noted here, is Black — instructs the kids.
“Or, even worse, don’t believe it’s needed,” he continues. “Victims are often so busy blaming everything and everyone else for their problems that they don’t stop to think about how their own growth can make things better.”
I think this is actually an excellent lesson for the right wing. There is no group on earth that whines more about being victims than they do.
This stuff is going to be taught in schools in Florida. I expect there will be parents who will object. Will they have the same “rights” as the fascist friendly Moms for Liberty?