Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch called emergency measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis that killed more than 1 million Americans perhaps “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” https://t.co/RxHm7vXvCI
Hyperbole much? Move over Jim Crow, we had to wear a mask and stay home during a pandemic for a few weeks. The humanity. That’s a Supreme Court Justice saying that. My God.
I guess the next time we get hit with a new deadly virus for which humans have no immunity (and we will) we’ll just go about our business and pretend it isn’t happening. No need to try to save lives. Just let ‘er rip.
We have lost 1.1 million people in the US in the last three years to this virus. We would have lost many times that without the mitigation efforts and the vaccines. And I guess that would be just fine — preferable, actually.
Scott Lemieux comments at Lawyers, Guns & Money on our authoritarian party’s redefinition of freedom. Lemieux referenced Jamelle Bouie’s helpful reframing of FDR’s Four Freedoms as an antimatter version for the MAGA party. It is a repudiation of everything conservatives once claimed to hold sacred and didn’t. But you knew that.
“What should we make of all this?” Bouie asks of Republicans’ ongoing efforts to revoke the freedoms of any American who doesn’t drink at their fetid trough:
In his 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt said there was “nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy” and that he, along with the nation, looked forward to “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.” Famously, those freedoms were the “freedom of speech and expression,” the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” the “freedom from want” and the “freedom from fear.” Those freedoms were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II.
There are, I think, four freedoms we can glean from the Republican program.
There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
In the nation Republicans are dismantling in full view, Bouie writes, “you can either dominate or be dominated.”
“It’s all Wilhoit’s Law, and the rest is mere details,” Lemieux observes.* They may act like clowns, but they are committed clowns.
Real Americans™ might want to reevaluate their life choices.
All 3 members of the Republican freshman class of 2020 who lectured us the loudest about family values and marriage didn’t have their marriages survive a second term. pic.twitter.com/Zel6uyB6Ut
People who complain loudest about having political opponents forcing randy random things down their throats have a new obsession, says Kat Abughazaleh of Media Matters. It’s piss. *
This would be embarrassing if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was capable of it (Al Jazeera):
Most recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to announce his bid to be the Republican presidential nominee, signed bills that ban gender-affirming care for minors, restrict chosen pronoun use in schools and force people to use the bathroom corresponding with their sex assigned at birth.
The new bathroom law is particularly cruel and absurd. Politicians claim these measures seek to make bathrooms safer. But I have yet to see any of these legislators produce a shred of credible evidence that transgender people pose a safety threat to cisgender people in bathrooms.
[…]
Bathrooms have long been porcelain crucibles for our deepest fears and anxieties. One hardly needs to crack open the collected works of Sigmund Freud to understand why they have been the sites of repression and humiliation in service of enforcing hierarchies.
And while Josh “The Streak” Hawley boasted about his book of manly virtues…
And when the next campaign finance reports get filed, we will learn who bought them in bulk. pic.twitter.com/GuDbNYQule
We are so excited to feature the two newest members of the Cincinnati Zoo fam…bat-eared fox kits! These 2 little boys were born on April 6th to first-time parents Frankie and Otis. While Otis prefers to live out of the public eye, you may have seen their mom, Frankie, during a program at the zoo! Through ultrasounds, radiographs and even thermal imaging, we were able to stay on top of how the babies and mom were doing during the entirety of her pregnancy and beyond. The kits are strong and full of personality already. These kits are not yet available to be viewed by the public.
The Freedom Caucus belated realizes that negotiations mean they won’t get everything they want:
The House Freedom Caucus is calling for “no further discussion” on legislation to raise the debt ceiling until the Senate passes the bill House Republicans approved last month that would pair an increase in the borrowing limit with steep spending cuts.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has called the bill “dead on arrival.”
The hard-liner conservative caucus said it adopted its official position on Thursday as debt limit negotiations continued behind closed doors between representatives for Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and the White House.
“The U.S. House of Representatives has done its job in passing the Limit, Save, Grow Act to provide a mechanism to raise the debt ceiling. This legislation is the official position of the House Freedom Caucus and, by its passage with 217 votes, the entire House Republican Conference,” the caucus wrote.
“The House Freedom Caucus calls on Speaker McCarthy and Senate Republicans to use every leverage and tool at their disposal to ensure the Limit, Save, Grow Act is signed into law. There should be no further discussion until the Senate passes the legislation,” the caucus added.
And then there’s this:
The Democrats raised the debt ceiling with little drama when Trump was president. They’ve never threatened to default. But whatever.
The Freedom Caucus is not going to agree to any deal. Trump wants a default so he can supposedly ride to the rescue. So the whole thing will depend upon McCarthy’s willingness to lose his seat to save the world economy.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) this week opened a Senate investigation into his allegations that Anheuser-Busch markets Bud Light to underage consumers in its ad featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
In a letter to Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth, Cruz and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) also asked the beer industry trade group Beer Institute, which Whitworth chairs, to conduct its own investigation. Or the company could say it’s sorry for any infraction and publicly disassociate from Mulvaney to avoid further inquiry, the senators wrote, making their actions appear more like a publicity stunt.
“We would urge you, in your capacity at Anheuser-Busch, to avoid a lengthy investigation by the Beer Institute by instead having Anheuser-Busch publicly sever its relationship with Dylan Mulvaney, publicly apologize to the American people for marketing alcoholic beverages to minors, and direct Dylan Mulvaney to remove any Anheuser-Busch content from his social media platforms.” (The letter repeatedly misgenders Mulvaney, who uses she-they pronouns.)
Mulvaney, a 26-year-old actor who chronicled her transition to a wide audience on TikTok, appeared in a one-off Instagram post promoting Bud Light for March Madness. She showed off a can with her likeness that the brand made especially for her.
As you’ve no doubt heard, the company caved and fired the ad execs who came up with the idea but that wasn’t good enough. They need more to keep the hate at fever pitch.
The hostility to transgender people is so extreme it makes my skin crawl at this point, particularly the thrill they all seem to get out of it. This primitive Lord of the Flies mentality is sick. Our culture is being twisted and degraded not by some trans girl on tik-tok, but by this depraved, bully-boy mentality that takes such joy in hurting vulnerable people.
On January 6th the police did their jobs fighting against the rabid mob threatening to kill members of congress and Vice President Pence. But I still wonder what police around the country might do in the face of an organized right wing rebellion. So many of them are MAGA.
Here’s the story of one who was in cahoots with the Proud Boys leading up to January 6th:
It’s good to have friends in high places.
Federal prosecutors on Friday highlighted a nexus between a top intelligence official in D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, a relationship which continued from July 2019 through the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Former Metropolitan Police Department officer Shane Lamond, who supervised the intelligence branch of the department’s homeland security bureau, faces four counts stemming from allegations that he fed information to Tarrio about law enforcement investigations into him and then lied about it to federal agents.
An attorney for Lamond didn’t immediately return our request for comment. But the indictment lays out multiple situations in which Lamond allegedly initiated contact with Tarrio, feeding him sensitive information about investigations into the Proud Boys and Tarrio specifically.
At times, Lamond apparently suggests that he sympathizes with Tarrio politically.
After the November 2020 election was called, Lamond allegedly wrote to Tarrio saying, “Hey brother, sad, sad news today. You all planning anything?”
“Yep,” Tarrio replied.
One hour later, Lamond allegedly wrote to Tarrio that the pair should switch to an encrypted messaging app because social media accounts “belonging to your people are talking about mobilizing and ‘taking back the country.’”
Lamond was put on leave in February 2022 due to suspicions over his ties to the Proud Boys. At the time, Tarrio told reporters that Lamont would tell the group where counterprotestors were staging.
But at Tarrio’s seditious conspiracy trial this year, defense attorneys for the Proud Boys chief revealed several of the texts between the two as part of an effort to show that the group was cooperating with — and not attempting to overthrow — governmental authority.
That’s the nightmare fuel which permeates the texts, however: the prospect of polarized law enforcement officers siding with a violent right-wing street mob.
It’s only one guy but when I was watching that fatuous “weaponization” hearing yesterday with the FBI “whistleblowers” it was clear they are full-blown MAGA extremists. I have little doubt that there are many more just like them all over the country. And it’s a terrifying prospect.
Here’s something to make your blood run cold. From Semafor (sub. req.)
Think tanks often act as an administration-in-waiting for presidents — a place to stash future appointees, generate policy plans, and flag promising young staffers. This year their role on the right is taking on outsized importance, however, as the 2024 Republican field has made overhauling the bureaucracy with more reliable allies one of their top stated goals.
That’s where the Heritage Foundation, alongside 50-plus conservative organizations in partner roles, hopes to come in. In April, the conservative nonprofit unveiled the start of a new $22 million project intended to staff the next Republican presidential administration from day one — a “private LinkedIn for conservatives,” as Paul Dans, the lead of “Project 2025,” described it.
Their work dovetails with the goals expressed in Donald Trump’s calls to “destroy the deep state,” for example, and his plans to fire and replace federal workers en masse. Rivals like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy have already accused Trump of not going far enough as president in rooting out ineffective or disloyal appointees and civil servants.
“What fundamentally unites our coalition is deconstructing the administrative state,” Dans told Semafor.
Besides the database the group is continuing to compile, the conservative think-tank’s ambitious effort is comprised of three additional pillars: A policy book for the next administration, an organized training effort dubbed the “Presidential Administration Academy,” and eventually a “180-day game plan of regulations and executive orders that a president could sign on day one,” Dans explained.
They’ve even recently begun taking the show on the road — some of the project’s top members have already visited Hillsdale College and Florida International University — to try and attract more promising young conservatives to Washington. Eventually, they hope to begin hosting roundtables and debates featuring some of the experts involved in the project’s policy book, and are even considering setting up posts along the campaign trail in key early primary states.
The reporter comments:
“Project 2025” is, at its core, a response to Trump’s win back in 2016. In an interview, Dans said how his upset victory “took Conservative, Inc., by surprise” and thus the movement was unprepared to properly help him as he took office. Trump, who was superstitious about preparing a transition before winning, struggled to fill in the gaps himself.
“They certainly hadn’t done a lot of homework to support them,” Dans said, later adding: “I think we acknowledge, if nothing else, Biden was prepared to go in there.”
Heritage’s efforts also tie into ongoing conservative allegations of “weaponization” of government officials against their priorities (which are fiercely disputed by Democrats.) This is perhaps the most organized effort thus far to respond by trying to pack the executive branch with staff of their choosing.
Prior to this, the most aggressive attempt came from Trump, who issued an executive order dubbed “Schedule F” late in his term, with guidance from former Heritage staffers. The proposal — reversed by President Biden — sought to allow the White House to get rid of huge numbers of civil servants, who are typically protected against the whims of a new president. It’s now a key part of his plans for a second term.
“I think any candidate is going to have to, at a minimum, embrace a Schedule F sort of major reform,” Dans told Semafor. “We’re embarking on the 100 year reform period here in the United States.”
Heritage is also distributing its dense 887-page policy booklet, which covers topics ranging from, as Dans put it, “ending the woke military” to establishing “full spectrum energy dominance,” to 2024 presidential hopefuls plus some notable politicians. They’ve passed it on to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin as well as Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a critic of COVID-19 policies and a prominent spreader of anti-government conspiracy theories, and former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
The Green Zone, Baghdad, Iraq, 2003: in this walled-off compound of swimming pools and luxurious amenities, Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority set out to fashion a new, democratic Iraq. Staffed by idealistic aides chosen [by the Heritage Foundation!] primarily for their views on issues such as abortion and capital punishment, the CPA spent the crucial first year of occupation pursuing goals that had little to do with the immediate needs of a postwar nation: flat taxes instead of electricity and deregulated health care instead of emergency medical supplies.
In this acclaimed firsthand account, the former Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post gives us an intimate portrait of life inside this Oz-like bubble, which continued unaffected by the growing mayhem outside. This is a quietly devastating tale of imperial folly, and the definitive history of those early days when things went irrevocably wrong in Iraq.
I can hardly believe they are planning to do this again, in the US this time, but they are.
One of the homeless men with a sign demanding his $200 from YIT/Sharon Finch. The other individual asked that his identity be concealed.
You may have heard the harrowing story of homeless veterans being thrown out of housing to make room for the foreign invaders. It was very sad. It was also a lie:
Seven homeless men have come forward to say they were part of a group of men recruited at a Poughkeepsie homeless shelter to act as veterans that had been displaced from a Newburgh hotel in order for a non-profit organization to perpetrate a fraud on the public.
The saga of the displaced veterans received national attention when Assemblyman Brian Maher stepped in to denounce the hotel’s actions and grabbed headlines along with an appearance on a conservative tv network to raise money for the YIT Foundation, which claims had housed the homeless veterans at the hotel.
The foundation and its director, Sharon Toney-Finch, appear to have fabricated the entire story, causing Maher to admit yesterday that he had been duped by Finch and her lies.
“When Sharon and sevceral veterans explained to me their situation, I believed them at their word,” Maher said Friday. “I had absolutely no knowledge of any wrongdoing and believed that their stories were real until a phone conversation with Sharon yesterday afternoon when she explained to me that this did not happen the way she purported it to.”
Finch’s story began to unravel last Monday after Mid-Hudson News began looking into the plight of the displaced veterans. An investigation by Mid-Hudson News uncovered a series of lies that led to the belief that the veterans Finch claimed were displaced, did not even exist.
On Thursday night he met with a group of seven men at a homeless shelter. The men said that on Wednesday, two people came into the shelter saying they had work and needed 15 men between the ages of 40 and 60, to take a trip to meet with an elected official for a discussion on homelessness. They were each promised $200 along with food and alcohol. They were familiar with one of the recruiters, Diana, claiming she had previously stayed at the shelter.
Andrew O’Grady, president and CEO of Mental Health America of Dutchess County (MHA Dutchess) also attended the roundtable conversation. O’Grady said “It was brought to my attention that two people came to the homeless shelter in Poughkeepsie and recruited 15 of our homeless guests under the guise of meeting a politician in Connecticut about homeless issues.” He was summoned there to offer assistance to the group and said he attended because the incident “concerned me greatly as vulnerable homeless individuals were bribed to pretend to be Veterans. I was asked to speak to them because they were distraught that they never received payment.”
They didn’t even give them their money and booze! Can they go any lower?
Now that one of the most outrageous state legislative sessions in US history has mercifully concluded, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is finally set to formally announce his candidacy for president. He has quite a record to run on. In a very short time he’s built a multi-dimensional legacy of repression, abuse of power and intolerance rarely seen in modern politics. Now he wants to take that agenda to the whole country.
Some highlights from the last few weeks include a law to ban abortion at six weeks of pregnancy, a law granting permitless concealed carry, a ban on diversity programs in state colleges, a law to prevent teachers from using pronouns they don’t believe are appropriate, easier access to the death penalty and an expansion of the “Don’t Say Gay” law to block teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity through the 12th grade. That’s just for starters. He’s pulled one culture war stunt after another, from transporting migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, to picking a fight with Disney, the state’s largest employer over LGBTQ rights to creating an “election police force” and having them arrest Black ex-felons who were allowed to vote in error and on and on and on. And he just signed into law a bill allowing the state to take transgender children away from their parents. It seems only certain parents have rights in Florida.
DeSantis took a victory lap this week saying: “I remember saying when I became governor, the first day, sat in the office, I kinda just looked around and I thought to myself, ‘You know, I don’t know what SOB is gonna succeed me in this office but they ain’t gonna have much to do because we’re getting all the meat off the bone.’”
That “meat” was taken out of the hides of LGBTQ children, teachers, students, immigrants, Black people and anyone who isn’t thrilled with the idea of living in an Orwellian dystopia.
Right wing politicians have been running on culture war issues forever, of course, particularly on issues of race and abortion. But DeSantis has taken it to an extreme level that’s verging on bizarre, even for the current GOP and doing it while running for president in political environment that has delivered one defeat after another since they embraced MAGA extremism seems inexplicable. If he were to beat Donald Trump in the primary and become the nominee, his chances of winning the general election once the country becomes familiar with his radical record seems even worse than Trump’s.
So, what’s going on here? Why has he lurched so far to the right that he’s on the verge of falling off the edge?
It’s because of the religious right. As long as I can remember, it’s been a truism that America is an extremely pious country and great deference must be paid to traditional Christian values. . In recent years we learned that the conservative evangelical commitment to those same Christian values was more than a little bit overstated when the Republican Party offered up an openly promiscuous, thrice-married, sexual assaulting, libertine for president and they eagerly joined his flock.
It’s now clear that these Americans are not really a religious group at all but rather a political faction. That political faction is Christian Nationalism and it’s a growing threat to American democracy. As I pointed out earlier, Donald Trump is aware of how important they are to his campaign and he proved it last weekend when he called in to ReAwaken America, one of the largest Christian Nationalist groups in the country. Turning Point USA is another Christian Nationalist Organization to which they all feel obliged to pay fealty. And there’s a good reason they do this. According to a recent Public Religion Research Institute-Brookings Institution poll, Christian Nationalist adherents and sympathizers make up 29% of Americans which adds up to tens of millions of our fellow citizens.
If any GOP candidate wants to win the nomination for president he or she must find a way to extricate them from Donald Trump so DeSantis decided that his best chance of doing that was to make their dreams come true in Florida and promise to do the same to America if he wins. We’ll have to see if he can make that appeal but he and all Republicans should probably take another look at the American religious landscape.
As reported in Politico, The Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies released its 2020 census and found that over the last decade, the share of Americans who associate with religion dropped by 11 points. And guess what? Democrats are gaining in the places where religious affiliation is declining and it’s not the godless coastal blue states. It’s mostly in the middle of the country. The correlation is astonishing.
Across the industrial Midwest, in former Rust Belt states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that are absolutely essential to the Democrats’ firewall in 2024, there is good news for the party — each of those states is much less religious today than it was just 10 years ago.
More bad news for Republicans is that ” new data indicates that nearly half of Generation Z has no religious affiliation while a new Catalyst report finds that Gen Z came out in bigger numbers in 2022 than in 2018 — and over 60% voted for Democrats. The speculation is that this young cohort is so turned off by intolerant MAGA culture crusade that they are not only voting in large numbers but will likely define themselves as Democrats their entire lives, just as earlier Democrats did in the era of Franklin Roosevelt and Republicans did when Ronald Reagan came to power. This is a long term problem for the GOP.
The religion census found that the only metro area in the country that gained religious adherents was Miami, Florida. And the border districts in Texas that went from solid Democratic to purple at best can be explained by a rise in religious believers, mostly newer immigrants who are not especially enamored of abortion of LGBTQ rights. Arizona too has a big share of those same voters who are sympathetic to culture war issues.
You have to wonder whether or not the Christian Nationalists will be able to accept the fact that their future political clout will depend upon welcoming new Hispanic immigrants into their coalition. Because let’s face facts, American Christian Nationalism is really white Christian Nationalism.
The reason the GOP is hitting these culture war issues so hard is because this largest single faction in the party demands it. But they represent only 30% of the total electorate and the rest of the country is overwhelmingly appalled by what the Republicans are doing to appease them. In fact, they are not only destroying the Republican Party it appears they are destroying their religion as well. Let’s hope they don’t succeed in destroying American democracy as well.
