Samuel Alito may not be the most corrupt member of the Supreme Court — that distinction goes to Clarence Thomas — but he is easily its most openly homophobic, misogynistic and histrionic. His latest meltdown came in an unusual “written statement” (the functional equivalent of a dissenting opinion) issued on Feb. 20 in a case on jury selection that the court declined to accept for full review, called Missouri Department of Corrections v. Finney. Alito used the statement not only to set forth his deeply flawed legal reasoning on jury selection, but as an opportunity to reiterate his longstanding critique of the constitutional right to same-sex marriage, a stance that has aligned him closely with the Christian nationalist movement that has taken over the Republican Party.
Jean Finney, the plaintiff in the case, is a longtime employee of the Department of Corrections and a lesbian who, court records state, “presents herself as masculine.” She sued her employer, alleging the agency had created a hostile work environment and retaliated against her after she began dating a male co-worker’s former wife. During jury selection in her 2021 trial, her attorney asked prospective jurors a question that went to their capacity to be fair and impartial: “How many of you went to a religious organization growing up where it was taught that people that are homosexuals shouldn’t have the same rights as everyone else because it was a sin with what they did?”
Home sweet home. For Jeff Bezos, one of our planet’s three richest human beings, the state of Washington neatly fit that description for nearly 30 years. But then this past November Bezos suddenly announced he was moving to Miami.
Why the move? In an Instagram posting, Bezos explained that he wanted to be closer to his dear parents in Florida and the Cape Canaveral operations of his corporate aerospace hobby.
Left unmentioned: His once-beloved state of Washington, a state notorious for going easy on its richest residents at tax time, has put in place a new 7% tax on long-term capital gains in excess of $250,000. By relocating to Florida, a state with no state income tax or levy on capital gains, Bezos stands to save what Timedescribes as “hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes.”
Actually, make that billions of dollars in tax savings.
The Bible and Quran both say that Solomon could hear the speech of the ants. This might be the next best thing: New research shows that when Matabele ants are hurt, “injured workers are carried back to the nest where other workers treat their wounds, by licking and grooming the wound during the first three hours after injury.”
They apparently know which wounds are infected, since “infected wounds are treated more often than sterile wounds.” The practice saves lives with “the targeted use of antimicrobials.”
The lead researcher on that study told The Washington Post that “the solutions these ants came up with should be translatable to some extent to our own system.” Another scientist said the study “speaks very strongly to the power of evolution at both the societal and individual levels,” adding, “Societies succeed when they protect their most vulnerable.”
Joe Biden wants you to believe that spending money on weapons is good for the economy. That tired old myth—regularly repeated by the political leaders of both parties—could help create an even more militarized economy that could threaten our peace and prosperity for decades to come. Any short-term gains from pumping in more arms spending will be more than offset by the long-term damage caused by crowding out new industries and innovations, while vacuuming up funds needed to address other urgent national priorities.
The Biden administration’s sales pitch for the purported benefits of military outlays began in earnest last October, when the president gave a rare Oval Office address to promote a $106-billion emergency allocation that included tens of billions of dollars of weaponry for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. MAGA Republicans in Congress had been blocking the funding from going forward and the White House was searching for a new argument to win them over. The president and his advisers settled on an answer that could just as easily have come out of the mouth of Donald Trump: jobs, jobs, jobs. As Joe Biden put it:
Six years ago in 2018, after returning from a Veterans For Peace trip to Vietnam, I wrote an article called “Why Would Anyone Kill One’s Self In an Attempt to Stop A War?”
Now, six years later, in the past three months, two people in the United States have taken or risked taking their own lives in an attempt to change U.S. policies on Palestine and call for a cease-fire and stop U.S. funding to the State of Israel that would be used to kill in the Israeli genocide of Gaza. An yet unidentified woman, wrapped in a Palestinian flag, set herself on fire in front of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, Georgia, on December 1, 2023. Three months later authorities have yet to release the name of the woman. Her condition was unknown as of mid-December.
This week, on Sunday, February 25, 2024, active duty U.S. Air Force member Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., while he was stating “Free Palestine and stop the genocide.” Bushnell died from his injuries.
All the type of comments I am referring to made by the left, or non-Trump, media, are framings, suppositions. I would like to offer a different framing, other suppositions.
Obviously we don't know for sure if Putin and his THUGS "have something on Donald Trump." Do we really know if Trump is the way he is about Russia and Putin because Putin is holding him hostage with a pee tape or whatever? We don't even know if Donnie believes that Russian Trump tower will EVER happen at this point.
Does Putin even need some pee tape or tower?
My frame...
All the money he and his sons have been given? That's not "hostage" that's payment for being Pro-Putin and for a future they both are attempting to bring about. Payment for the promise of a future ally in a newly shaped superpower power coalition; axis of evil. Against NATO nations. Against democracy. Against Republics that use voting as a basis for who attains power. Against all those who resist authoritarians and an authoritarian wannabe. (Soon to be?)
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
Don’t fall for the media hoopla. In fact, Donald Trump is doing extraordinarily poorly in the Republican primaries and caucuses.
In Saturday’s South Carolina Republican primary, he pulled in just 59.8 percent of the vote. Nikki Haley got 39.5 percent.
If Joe Biden had gotten under 60 percent of the vote in a Democratic primary, the mainstream media would declare his reelection campaign in dire straits.
Trump’s reelection campaign is in dire straits.
In 1992, Patrick Buchanan won 40 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, holding George H.W. Bush to 58 percent — almost exactly what Haley did to Trump on Saturday. The New York Times treated the outcome as a huge problem for Bush, with the headline “BUSH JARRED IN FIRST PRIMARY” followed by a story characterizing the result as “a roar of anger” toward Bush from Republican primary voters.
United States Senator Lindsey Graham has long been known and criticized by fellow lawmakers for often flip-flopping on his support for former President Donald Trump.
The South Carolina lawmaker has switched from slamming the MAGA hopeful to backing his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Graham declared he wouldn't back Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, but endorsed the ex-president's 2024 campaign. Once "a longtime foreign policy hawk," according to The Washington Post, the GOP senator — who just several weeks ago, supported a foreign aid package including aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan — has chosen to vote against the legislation in favor of what Trump wants.
During Sunday's episode of MSNBC's Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough asked former US Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) whether she — as an ex-colleague to US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — is "surprised that he has betrayed Ukraine and Israel, and Taiwan, all because Donald Trump told him to."
McCaskill replied, "I sat across from him on the armed services committee for 12 years, and if somebody told me during those 12 years that there would come a time that Lindsey Graham would vote against essential aid to Ukraine, to stop [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. And, vote against aid to Israel, and vote against aid to Taiwan, I would say, I would bet whatever money you have that that would not happen."
This piece dedicated to Senator Tommy (Dingal) Tuberville of Alabama and all those who always know best what other people should do.
Alabama is said to be considering changing its state motto. Up to now, that motto has been a Latin phrase that translates to mean “We Dare Defend Our Rights.” And boy howdy, do they ever, especially if you’re an egg. The right of an embryo must be defended at all costs, even if actual real live living people have to have their rights denied in order to do that. Life is sacred, damn it, and busy bodies will kill you to protect it. Because that’s their right, and no one is gonna rob them of it, especially not those radical Democrats, Socialists, and Communists in the Deep State or in D.C..
Or, for that matter, if you’re one of these obnoxious busybodies who just want to put your noses in everyone else’s business, you’re probably already hard at work to remake the entire United States on that Alabama model. The plan is to start with rebranding the GOP as the GOB, taking it from the Grand Old Party of Lincoln and the Abolitionists to the Government of Busybodies, those people who have been inspired by Trump and by fascism to Make America Great Again over the objections of the majority of Americans. The GOB won’t be deterred from sticking their noses in everyone’s business, from the use or abuse of ovaries to the places where people are allowed to pee, then on to what people have the right to read, what they might be allowed to say, to do, or to think. It’s the GOB's right to impose their attitudes and beliefs on others, to make them carry fetuses to term, and ultimately to ensure that people who think otherwise are told once and for all that they’re really not welcome here. The GOBs don’t want no Muslims ‘round here, or Mexicans, either, or sluttish women who get themselves knocked up, then think they can just discard their fertilized egg babies willy nilly.
Streaming television channels these days are increasingly inserting advertising into their paid subscriber content. Thus, I recently found myself sitting through several commercials that struck me as emblematic of how out-of-touch corporate marketers are with the economic struggles of ordinary Americans.
A company offering cash advances to low-wage workers makes light of people’s financial difficulties. Take this ad, where a man buying groceries finds himself in the awkward position of having bought more food than he can afford to pay for. A fellow shopper in line points out that a simple app he could download on his phone “gives you up to $250 instantly.” The man pulls out his phone and instantly exclaims, “I got money!” and proceeds to make his purchase. But he sets aside the broccoli he had planned to buy with a wink and a nod to the kid in line next to him, because who likes broccoli anyway, right?
Not only does the ad mislead viewers about how long it takes to actually open an account on the app and have access to cash, but it deceptively portrays the app as “giving” money to a person in need when it’s money that he is borrowing against his own wages. Moreover, he will pay a monthly charge, or extra fees to access the money earlier. And, if he cannot pay it back in time, he will incur hefty interest charges out of his forthcoming wages. The ad also makes light of the plight of those who run out of money to buy groceries, and may have credit scores so low that they cannot get a credit card.
This past Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the bid of three red states—Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri—to intervene in the abortion pill case the court will hear in March. In January, the states asked the court to allow them to join in, at least in part, to bolster a potentially fatally flawed suit. The problem? The conservative physician groups who brought the case have little right to sue in the first place.
That wasn’t an issue for extremist District Court Judge, Donald Trump appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk, or for the equally conservative activist judges on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals who agreed with him. But it’s a very basic problem for the Supreme Court which has to project at least a semblance of knowing what they’re doing with the law.
Legal writers Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern explain at Slate:
Ohio — the swing state that calls itself “the heart of it all” — may well decide the fate of U.S. democracy in 2024. No Republican has ever won the White House without carrying the Buckeye State.
The state’s epic electoral history is rooted in George W. Bush’s bitterly contested official 2004 victory over John Kerry, which helped birth the pivotal grassroots election protection movement in the U.S.
With their sights set on this fall’s election, democracy activists have already gathered more than 400,000 signatures to reform Ohio’s electoral districts. But pushback from the legislature and Republican state officials is predictably fierce.
Leading into 2024, the gerrymandered state legislature’s flood of voter restrictions included strict photo ID requirements, eliminating all but one voting center per country, compressed early voting, ending preaddressed/prepaid return envelopes for absentee voting, and more. According to the League of Women voters, such measures introduce unnecessary confusion and hurdles, with the apparent aim of undermining the public vote (as occurred 20 years ago) while guaranteeing victory for the GOP nominee (very likely Donald Trump, who has already been endorsed by the Buckeye GOP).
Despite the apocalyptic stories you may have heard from Fox News, the New York Post, CNN, and other outlets, San Francisco, California, remains an epically beautiful, achingly poetic, richly diverse, and uniquely important American city. This “cool, grey city of love,” as poet George Sterling coined it back in 1892, has long been a haven for progressive ideas, groundbreaking literature and art, and enlightened social justice.
The City by the Bay has been a national leader on living wages, universal healthcare, criminal justice reform (until recently), and LGBTQ+ rights. But the city has a lesser-known conservative streak that is now mightily resurgent, as deep-pocketed reactionary political forces aim to overhaul San Francisco politics by weaponizing homelessness, drug addiction, and crime to fuel election-year fearmongering about urban crisis.
Progressivism is under siege in this historically forward-looking town that has blazed trails for same-sex marriage, tenants’ rights, immigrant protections, and more. A center-right reactionary movement—financed by Republican billionaires, wealthy corporate Democrats, and big business interests—is pushing hard to take over city politics and roll back progressive policies on everything from homelessness to crime and policing, housing, and elections. It’s a remarkable political volte-face that gained national attention with the 2022 recall of progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin.
Excuse me as I ponder eternity—briefly.
Like it or not, this is the essence of... uh, aging. As I wrote a year ago: “...once you actually hit it—that three letter word, ‘old’—watch out: ‘An aged man (as Wiiliam Butler Yeats pointed out, as he sailed poetically to Byzantium) is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick...’”
Nonetheless, hooray for my good fortune! I’ve been dancing around at age 77 for a while now, and before I start complaining about the aches and pains that come with it, I have to acknowledge—indeed, revere—the mere fact of making it this far. So many people don’t, due to the random will of fate, but also due to the hell of war, which remains humanity’s cancerous addiction. How can I complain when the bombs I help pay for are killing children?
So the following words are not meant to be complainy—just, rather, a contemplation of the great unknown, whose presence becomes increasingly more visible as the aging process obfuscates more and more of my certainties and, indeed, rattles my optimism. The core of this optimism is the mantra that helped me make it through middle age: Be positive and productive! It was my psychological—my spiritual—cane. Now it feels broken.
"Politics is personal."
— '60s slogan
It surely couldn’t have been unique to my generation, and surely not to me, personally, but I spent a lot of anxious moments as an adolescent worrying about whether I would grow to be man enough for the challenges my coeval were likely to face. Young men just a decade older than we were had faced such challenges in Korea, and we had watched them when we were kids getting drafted and being sent off to fight. And then there were our fathers and our uncles, nearly all of whom had fought in Europe or in the Pacific during World War II. Lots of them never came back; many of them who did bore wounds both psychic and physical, though the dues they continued to pay didn’t seem to be something anyone wrote much about, or talked much about.
I worried about being drafted when I got out of high school. Hell, I even worried about boot camp. Would I measure up. As to measures, I was over six ft. tall, but skinny, barely 150 lbs. I took up smoking in hopes of presenting an unconvincing tough guy image to the world. I feared fear itself.
Former President Donald Trump's mounting legal bills are threatening the Republican Party's ability to fundraise ahead of a pivotal presidential election.
The Washington Post reports that the Republican National Committee (RNC) is already starting to fret about its finances given that it's trailing the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in fundraising by an almost three-to-one margin. The DNC has roughly $25 million in cash on hand, compared to the RNC's $8.7 million. And between President Joe Biden's campaign and the Trump campaign, the difference looms even larger: Biden had more than $56 million in cash available by the end of January 2024, whereas Trump had less than $31 million. At the end of 2023, Biden also led in unique donors, with 172,000 to Trump's 143,000 unique donors.
Leading GOP figures are now starting to question whether that gap can be closed at all given that Trump still needs to pay for his legal defense in four looming criminal trials this year.
Former Gov. Nikki Haley, R-S.C., gets a lot of glowing coverage simply because she occasionally criticizes Donald Trump in her fruitless presidential primary run against him. So it was rattling for many when, on Wednesday, Haley reminded everyone she's ensconced in the fringe worldview of the Christian right. When asked about a recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that is expected to destroy in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the state and threatens access across the country, Haley told CNN she agreed with the decision, claiming to believe frozen embryos are "babies."
The Republican-controlled court in Alabama ruled on Friday that lab-created human embryos are "children." Setting aside the odd details of this specific case, the ruling treats the loss of embryos, typically part of the IVF process, as the equivalent of child murder. The University of Alabama at Birmingham's Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility has already canceled all IVF treatment out of fear that "our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages."
Former President Donald Trump is digging himself into a progressively deeper financial hole with each passing day.
According to NBC News, a New York clerk has officially entered into the record that the total sum Trump owes the State of New York is now roughly $464 million, when taking both Judge Arthur Engoron's penalty imposed earlier this month along with pre-judgment interest into account.
The ex-president has 30 days to file his appeal, though that reportedly won't stop the continued accumulation of interest on the judgment itself. MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin told host Katy Tur that the daily compounding interest on the judgment exceeds six figures.
"The judgment that was entered today incorporated actual dollar amounts for all that pre-judgment interest, therefore the total judgment itself has now been raised by almost $100 million for Donald Trump alone," Rubin said. "Now, after today, it will continue to accrue 9% interest annually, and we estimate that thats around $111,000 per day, starting today."
“Useful idiots” doesn’t begin to describe the treason weasel twins, Comer and Jordan, who are enthusiastically promoting zombie lies Russia came up with in 2016 to help Trump win the White House.
They’re mainstreaming political poison directly into the bloodstream of our body politic. Purely for political profit.
Vladimir Putin always knew he couldn’t beat America militarily, so his next best option was to infiltrate our political systems and seize control of the GOP. It increasingly looks like he’s pulled it off, right down to blocking US aid to Ukraine for over a year.
Jim Jordan and James Comey — Jeff Tiedrich calls them “the two Jimmies” — are apparently determined to continue carrying water for Vladimir Putin. Now that they know for certain that their source for phony claims that Joe Biden took a $5 million bribe was an agent of Russian oligarchs tied to Putin, both nonetheless insist they’re going to continue with their witch hunt against Biden.
On Friday morning, the National Republican Senatorial Committee issued talking points as Republicans struggled to respond to the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos are children, a decision that has led some clinics to shut down in vitro fertilization treatments.
The committee is urging candidates and senators up for reelection in 2024 to “clearly and concisely reject efforts by the government to restrict IVF,” and calls the Alabama ruling “fodder for Democrats hoping to manipulate the abortion issue for electoral gain,” according to a copy of the memo obtained by Axios.
The talking points come after an awkward bout of floundering on Thursday from Sen. Tommy Tuberville, Alabama’s contribution to the lowering of the Senate’s IQ, who had three different answers to reporters’ questions about the Alabama ruling.
First, he told reporters that he was “all for” the ruling. “We need to have more kids,” he said. “We need to have an opportunity to do that. I thought this was the right thing to do.”
One of the most frustrating refrains one hears these days is that the Republican Party has "suddenly" gone crazy — as if it was a spontaneous explosion of lunacy that came out of nowhere. The fact is that there has been a strain of crazy on the right for a very long time and the allegedly normal Republicans who are now shocked at what's happened to their party were willfully blind and refused to see how toxic that strain was all along. All they had to do was attend any Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) of the past 20 years and open their eyes to what their party was becoming.
I'm not talking specifically about ideology here, although there was plenty of odious far-right philosophy at this confab going all the way back to its first meeting in 1974. I refer to the smart-ass, frat house attitude that came out of right-wing radio, led by the contemptible Rush Limbaugh and all the spawn that followed him. Sure they pretended to be pious conservative Christians dedicated to bringing morality back to decadent America but down in the basement where people sold their right-wing wares, there was always a plethora of nasty merch. From creepy t-shirts to crude caricatures of Black people (especially the Black First family), they made good money selling racist, sexist insults to their devoted fans.
— from Foreign Policy In Focus
In the late evening of February 16, I was standing on the other side of the iron fence that surrounds the imposing white building of the Russian embassy in The Hague. Abundantly illuminated by the spotlights, the house resembles an expensive film set that has been abandoned for the night.
But the last people who arrived with flowers that night did not look like fans waiting for movie stars. They were silent mourners paying their respects to a person they held in high esteem. The flowers were for Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident who died that morning thousands of kilometers away, in the Arctic Circle.
In the Hague, the spotlights shone brightly on the golden double-headed eagle on the Russian embassy’s facade. Since the Bronze Age, the double-headed eagle has symbolized power. Used by the mighty Byzantine dynasty, the eagle is the oldest royal emblem representing both physical and spiritual power. The eagle has survived up to our times, even in countries without royal families. Russia abandoned its royal eagle following the 1917 revolution but resurrected its glory in 1993. The double-headed eagle on the Russian flag sports a red shield depicting a horseman slaying a black dragon.
God & Country is a new documentary produced by Rob Reiner and his wife Michele. The film examines the rise of Christian nationalism; the way activists use the Bible to justify their political positions, and its growing political influence. Reiner, best known for his acting role in the 1970s sitcom “All in the Family” and for directing a series of beloved comedies, including This is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that “For decades, I was aware of… what we call now Christian nationalism. It’s a political movement, really, certainly not a spiritual or religious movement, and it started gaining more and more strength.”
For decades Religious Right leaders/Christian nationalists have been stigmatizing and attacking opponents, raising large amounts of money, building huge flocks based on faith, fear and anger, launching multi-million-dollar media empires, and becoming the face of conservative evangelical Christianity. While a series of sexual and financial scandals have thinned their ranks, for many among them, the only thing they haven’t gotten away with is murder!
A nation needs tax revenue to pay for the things we all need and that should be held as common goods and services. We have no trouble paying taxes, though we certainly wish the wealthy paid their fair share. What we, and lots of other people, have trouble with sometimes is filing taxes. If it seems unnecessarily complicated and time-consuming, it’s because it is. While the U.S. tax forms might be only a handful of pages long, the instructions for filing taxes runs to over 130.
Every President since Ronald Reagan, Democrats and Republicans alike, have promised a system of free and direct filing. This year, President Biden is taking the first steps to fulfilling that promise with the pilot program launch of Direct File.
Other countries have shown it can be done.
“The reason why Tax Day is a breeze in places like the Netherlands or Japan is because that’s the day when the government just sends you a pre-populated form,” according to video journalist Johnny Harris in a New York Times video that’s well worth watching. “You can either approve it or you can amend it if you think you qualify for some credit or write-off or if you think they did the math wrong. But if you approve it, you’re done in just a few minutes.”
Long ago, I came to believe that being a Jew, even a secular one like me, entailed certain responsibilities. A people who had suffered so much yet survived were obligated, if not honored, to serve as witnesses and supporters of other oppressed people and to live in the public interest, to model ethical lives. Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, and Sandy Koufax all made me proud, while I felt ashamed of Roy Cohn, Alan Dershowitz, and Henry Kissinger.
I never reached such lofty, self-righteous, or even chauvinistic heights or depths, but such figures, positive and negative, offered a comforting structure for my casual, shallow life as a Jew. I rarely observed high holy days. My children were neither bar nor bat mitzvahed. I have lived in a space somewhere between my immigrant grandmother’s anxious response to all current events—“Is it good or bad for the Jews?”—and my father’s snarky yet philosophical “Judaism would be a great religion if you got God out of it.” In my overall indifference to my Jewishness and my unsureness about what it meant to me lay, I thought, a kind of worldliness and emotional integrity. It was enough to attempt to live a decent life, be a sportswriter for TheNew York Times, write books for adults and children, try my best to do some good works.
Then October 7 arrived. And the response to it.
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