Republicans have had a tricky time trying to undercut President Biden’s nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. On Monday, the first day of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings considering her nomination, several Republican senators offered lines of attack on her background and sentencing history. It seemed a bit scattershot. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), for example, tried to suggest that Jackson goes easy on pedophiles, a claim that even the conservative National Review shrugged at.
[…]
But then the Republican Party itself decided to weigh in, elevating a point first introduced by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) on Monday. Maybe, it suggested in a tweet, the Jackson nomination was a Trojan horse for that most nefarious of concepts … critical race theory.
We can dispatch with the allegation itself fairly quickly, and will. But it’s very important to recognize what the party is doing here. “Critical race theory” (CRT) was elevated — and expanded — as a way of talking about conservative concerns about the perception that Whites held a diminished position in American society without being explicit about that perception. Here, the subterfuge is stripped away: Republicans are being warned that a Black nominee for the Supreme Court is hoping to inculcate this anti-White agenda.
When considering the specific criticisms that the party is offering, it’s important to remember that the definition of CRT often used in political discussions is subjective. It’s been (intentionally) used to describe a wide range of race-related programs and ideas. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’ ” pundit Chris Rufo, the primary architect of the right’s deployment of the term, wrote last year. “We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” So “CRT” should generally just be understood to mean “a race-related concept or idea that the right dislikes” and not anything specific or at any significant scale.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/22/gop-drops-any-subtlety-centering-jackson-nomination-fight-race/
[…]
We know why, of course. For decades, Republican officials and candidates slowly moved away from explicit racial appeals to quiet or subtle ones, a pattern reflected in the “Southern strategy.” But emboldened by the increased discussion about race that accompanied the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the party has started moving back to more explicit racial appeals such as that focus on “critical race theory.” Ask a Republican voter what CRT means, and they are likely to offer up some pastiche of concerns about children being taught that White people are inherently guilty or bad and that the United States is foundationally racist. CRT has been recodified to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans, as Rufo promised — where “Americans” means “heavily conservative White Americans.”
[…]
Every part of this is about race, and every part of it is already structured to let the GOP pretend that it isn’t.
…that the CRT stuff isn’t even the worst example of the tack some of the questioning took is…lamentable…but honestly the depths to which some of the GOP is going wouldn’t leave space for much else this morning…so if you’d care to plumb those I’d recommend maybe doing via someone else
…direct exposure to this level of self-serving misrepresentation is further into this kind of territory than seems healthy, after all
…although…I don’t know about the mercy part?
The White House dismissed it with a joke. A National Review columnist called it a “smear.” And the paid media campaigns against Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court have ignored it completely.
And yet, on Tuesday morning, the first accusation Jackson was asked to respond to was the one first made by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) — that she had given sexual predators and people caught with child pornography the most “lenient” sentences she possibly could.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/22/trailer-how-campaign-rhetoric-about-child-porn-made-it-supreme-court-hearing/
…because it seems pretty clear that the last thing those assholes were looking for were responses that might make anything clearer
Jackson confirmed under questioning from Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., that she’d uphold abortion rights in any cases that come before her on the court. Specifically, Jackson said that she believes that Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey are the “settled law of the Supreme Court concerning the right to terminate a woman’s pregnancy.”
https://www.msnbc.com/supreme-court/confirmation-hearings/live-blog/ketanji-brown-jackson-senate-hearings-live-coverage
…& basically nobody has enough time to get to the bottom of the whole lindsay graham performative meltdown thing
…but then…sigh…making their audience dumber is literally a feature not a bug to these mendacious fuckwits…that part’s hardly new…but…not rushing headlong into global &/or nuclear conflict being indistinguishable from weakness…I feel like that part kinda is?
Consider the moment on Monday when Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) was asked by Fox News host Sean Hannity why Biden did not approve a proposal by Poland to deliver MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine.
“Putin owns Biden,” Graham said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Biden is afraid of escalation. He’s afraid of making Putin mad.”
[…]
In a world where Republicans were held to account for their positions, we could have a real debate over this question. Republicans could tell us why they think this intelligence assessment is wrong — that is, why they think approving the MiGs wouldn’t prompt such an escalation. Or maybe they’d say it’s a risk worth taking.
[…]
Instead, they are permitted to dumb the debate down to the point at which Putin’s invasion is continuing only because of Biden’s “weakness,” without having to explain why the downside risks of showing more “strength” are acceptable ones to take.Why Fox News hosts don’t want to make Republicans explain this is fairly obvious. But if they aren’t going to, then perhaps Democrats should.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/22/lindsey-graham-biden-ukraine-putin-gop/
…because…sometimes there are distinctions without a difference
It’s hard to tell when Fox News host Sean Hannity is actually mad or when he’s performing madness; over the years, the affectation and the reality have fused into one consistent cranky vibe. On Tuesday night, that vibe was directed, as always, at Hannity’s opponents out there in the world, some of whom had once again done something hopelessly bad.
“Rolling Stone magazine — the great, let’s see, journalistic integrity that they have — and other liars in the media mob are actually accusing me, they’re saying Hannity is parroting Russian propaganda and supporting Vladimir Putin,” Hannity explained.[…]
It’s a fair point — and a revealing one. It’s a reminder that Russia’s efforts to sow dissent in the United States have consistently followed and amplified existing rhetoric instead of injecting new assertions into the massive pool of political rhetoric.
The investigation into Russia’s effort to influence the 2016 election emphasized precisely that goal. In his report about the effort, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote that the desired outcome of Russia’s social media push in the United States was to “provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States.” If you review where the Internet Research Agency (the Russian group that was trying to shape online discourse) invested its time and money, you can see how that worked. Some of its heaviest investments in advertising, for example, came in 2014 in Missouri and Maryland — places where protests over the deaths of Black men at the hands of police were raging. The goal was to find fissures (like those created by Donald Trump) and widen them, not to create new cracks.
[…]
Which brings us back to Hannity. It is, in fact, the case that the Fox News host deserves a disproportionately large share of the credit for elevating doubt about Biden’s cognitive abilities. His show has mentioned “cognition” in the context of Joe Biden four times as often as any other show since the beginning of 2019, according to GDELT analysis of closed-captioning information collected by the Internet Archive. (The second-place show is the one that follows Hannity’s on Fox News.) His indignation at being accused of elevating Russian propaganda is sincerely predicated: If anyone deserves credit for accusing Biden of mental failings, it’s Hannity, not Peskov!And that’s the point. Hannity isn’t elevating Russian propaganda. Russia is elevating Hannity’s.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/22/sean-hannity-has-point-hes-not-elevating-russian-propaganda-russia-is-amplifying-his/
…chicken/egg…horse/cart…whatever your metaphor it may not alter much in terms of the consequences…but it can still pay to examine the source
Dugin’s intellectual influence over the Russian leader is well known to close students of the post-Soviet period, among whom Dugin, 60, is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s brain.” His work is also familiar to Europe’s “new right,” of which Dugin has been a leading figure for nearly three decades, and to America’s “alt-right.” Indeed, the Russian-born former wife of the white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, Nina Kouprianova, has translated some of Dugin’s work into English.
[…]
A product of late-period Soviet decline, Dugin belongs to the long, dismal line of political theorists who invent a strong and glorious past — infused with mysticism and obedient to authority — to explain a failed present. The future lies in reclaiming this past from the liberal, commercial, cosmopolitan present (often represented by the Jewish people). Such thinkers had a heyday a century ago, in the European wreckage of World War I: Julius Evola, the mad monk of Italian fascism; Charles Maurras, the reactionary French nationalist; Charles Coughlin, the American radio ranter; and even the author of a German book called “Mein Kampf.”
[…]
In his magnum opus, “The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia,” published in 1997, Dugin mapped out the game plan in detail. Russian agents should foment racial, religious and sectional divisions within the United States while promoting the United States’ isolationist factions. (Sound familiar?) In Great Britain, the psy-ops effort should focus on exacerbating historic rifts with Continental Europe and separatist movements in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Western Europe, meanwhile, should be drawn in Russia’s direction by the lure of natural resources: oil, gas and food. NATO would collapse from within.
[…]
In a sense, Dugin’s 600-page doorstop can be boiled down to one idea: The wrong alliance won World War II. If only Hitler had not invaded Russia, Britain could have been broken. The United States would have remained at home, isolationist and divided, and Japan would have ruled the former China as Russia’s junior partner.Fascism from Ireland to the Pacific. Delusional? I sure hope so. But delusions become important when embraced by tyrants.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/22/alexander-dugin-author-putin-deady-playbook/
…even for amateurs
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine has unfolded at a blistering pace over social media, it has swollen the ranks of hobbyist spies[…]. Armed with day jobs or coursework, the self-proclaimed open source intelligence — or “OSINT” — community tracks every movement of the Russian and Ukrainian militaries online. Five weeks into the war, their findings are impacting strategy on the ground.
[…]
Much of the work could be more impactful in the long term. Activists, scholars and media professionals are using their data to create a verified timeline of conflict that could impact how countries are held accountable for war crimes.
[…]
By most accounts, hobbyist tracking started gaining traction in 2011, during the Arab Spring in the Middle East. Smartphone and social media use was on a sharp rise, unleashing unfiltered images of conflict to the general public for the first time in history. This reached a turning point in 2014, when open source intelligence was used to track Russia’s invasion of Crimea, and provide evidence of the country’s involvement in shooting down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, research scholars noted. Last year, during the Jan 6. insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, hobbyists disseminated intelligence online that federal agencies relied on to find rioters.
[…]
In recent weeks, established hobbyists have seen their social media followings grow by the thousands. Media outlets such as The Washington Post and the New York Times have used the community’s work in their visual investigations. Project Owl, a private community for open source intelligence gatherers, has seen its membership base grow from 15,000 members five weeks ago to nearly 30,000 presently, the group’s moderators said.
[…]
Eliot Higgins, the founder of investigative journalism media outlet Bellingcat, said he relies on the community’s work to document atrocities in Ukraine.Last week, his organization released a platform to document potential war crimes in real time. Through the work of open source hobbyists and others, Bellingcat has gathered over 400 verified, geolocated, and tagged incidents of potential war crimes in Ukraine, ranging from hospital bombings, neighborhood strikes and other attacks that have killed or injured civilians.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/23/twitter-open-source-intelligence-ukraine/
[…]
But for some, the growth in the number of hobbyists disseminating information in real time about the war in Ukraine comes with concerns. As more people get drawn to the hobby — one without professionally mandated standards — there’s concern their actions could put lives in danger, or unwittingly spread misinformation.
…&…well…I know I seem to bang this drum with depressing regularity…but…well
Energy policy is foreign policy. It always has been. But it particularly is right now. It’s widely believed that Vladimir Putin timed both his 2014 invasion of Crimea and his 2022 invasion of Ukraine around tight energy markets. It’s thought that he thought, maybe rightly, that he’d have the most leverage to act when Europe was most dependent on Russian oil and gas and when leaders everywhere feared the domestic turmoil that higher energy prices could bring.
The reverse theory was an operation, too. In a decision that now looks naive, Germany’s Angela Merkel thought that integrating Russia into Europe through the energy trade might smooth the road to peace, giving Russia too much to lose if it considered doing something like, well, what it’s doing right now. All that is to say, to understand this war, to understand this moment, to understand this world, you need to understand global energy production and global energy markets.
You need to understand why a war in Ukraine raises gasoline prices in California. You need to know why the fact that America produces more energy than it needs, the fact that we got to that much vaunted, much desired energy independence, doesn’t actually make us energy independent. It doesn’t actually protect us from disruptions half a world away. And in the bigger, broader sense, we need to think hard about what all of this domestic sensitivity and turmoil around the price of the pump means for the always looming threat of climate change. How do you decarbonize in a world where people care more about the price of fossil fuels today than about the devastating consequences their use will bring tomorrow?
So I wanted to bring someone on the show who really does understand global energy markets. Daniel Yergin is an economic historian and writer who The New York Times once called America’s most influential energy pundit. Time magazine said, quote, “if there’s one man whose opinion matters more than any other on global energy markets, it is Daniel Yergin. He’s the author of a bunch of books on the intersection of energy and geopolitics, including the Pulitzer winner “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power” and most recently, “The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations.”
And “The New Map,” for a book written a few years ago, ooh, it’s scarily prescient, that the lengthy sections on Ukraine and Russia now read like they were written by someone telling the future. But Yergin doesn’t tell the future. He just watches the energy markets.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-daniel-yergin.html
…unsurprisingly I’d say that was worth a read (or listen)…but…I’d also tend to the view that it isn’t the market we need to be taking our cue from on this…like a lot of politicians got fond of saying as the pandemic took its toll on all of us…& of course those precious markets…sometimes you have to follow the science
Rich nations must end oil and gas production within 12 years to give the world a shot at meeting the goal of the Paris agreement — and to give poor countries a “fair chance” to replace their lost income from fossil fuels, according to a report by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester released late Monday.
The report looked at the global carbon budget — the amount of carbon that the world can afford to emit without blowing past 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of global temperature rise, the more ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris accord.
It found that to have a 50 percent chance of meeting this target, developed countries must phase out oil and gas production by 2034. Developing countries would have until 2050 to end their production.
“This is what the science is clearly telling us. It’s a bit of basic arithmetic. That’s all it is,” Kevin Anderson, a co-author of the report and a professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester, told The Climate 202.
Anderson co-authored the report with Daniel Calverley, an independent climate researcher. Their work was commissioned by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a think tank focused on sustainability.
[…]
“This new study is a timely reminder that all countries must phase out oil and gas production rapidly with wealthy countries going fastest, while also ensuring a just transition for workers and communities that rely on it,” Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in a statement.
[…]
Scientifically speaking, the report is clear about the dangers of burning more fossil fuels. But politically speaking, the report’s recommendations could be a tough sell for world leaders, as demonstrated by the U.N. climate summit in Scotland last year.At the high-profile summit, Denmark and Costa Rica led the formation of the Beyond Oil & Gas Alliance, a first-of-its-kind initiative that seeks to set an end date for new oil and gas production.
[…]
In the United States, the American Petroleum Institute, the nation’s largest oil and gas lobbying group, has urged the Biden administration to unleash fossil fuel production on federal lands and waters after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine roiled global energy markets.
[…]
Anderson, the co-author of the study, ultimately lamented the lack of political willpower to tackle climate change at the speed and scale that the science demands.“Physics doesn’t care about ephemeral politics,” he said. “It just cares about [carbon dioxide] molecules.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/22/rich-countries-must-end-oil-gas-production-by-2034-report-says/
…or to put it another way…however emotionally manipulative some narratives might be…the underlying facts can be pretty stark when it comes to how the grandstanding shakes out where the rubber meets the proverbial road
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox made an emotional plea for compassion toward transgender youth Tuesday in explaining his decision to veto a bill banning transgender students from playing girls’ sports.
In a letter to the state’s Senate president and House speaker, Cox told his fellow Republicans that he was moved by data showing that among 75,000 kids playing high school sports in Utah, only four were transgender, with just one involved in girls sports.
“Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what all of this is about. Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day,” he wrote. “Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/utah-governor-becomes-latest-republican-veto-transgender-sports-ban
[…]
“I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live. And all the research shows that even a little acceptance and connection can reduce suicidality significantly,” Cox wrote.
[…]
Eleven states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia — have implemented bans targeting transgender athletes.
…as they used to say back in the hazy mists of time when I had exams to sit…compare & contrast
In today’s heightened culture war, the coffers of the anti-gay movement are overflowing. According to publicly available annual returns, 11 nonprofit groups identified as anti-LGBTQ hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center took in over $110 million in contributions during the financial year ending in 2020.
The dollar amount represents a recent high-water mark for the organizations, whose take of donations, grants and other noncash contributions has increased steadily since 2016, when the same 11 groups reported more than $87 million in such contributions.
In just four years, their total revenue swelled by over 25 percent, with some indication that the positive trend continued into 2021. The multimillion-dollar war chest has bolstered a movement that just a few years ago appeared to be losing ground in America’s decadeslong culture war around lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer rights. Far from retreating, the groups have won significant battles at all levels of American government and society — from local school boards to the federal courts.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, based in Montgomery, Alabama, has tracked the anti-LGBTQ movement for more than a decade. In 2011, the SPLC published its first list of 13 “hate groups” that propagate known falsehoods and pseudoscience to disparage gender and sexual minorities. Since 2020, the organization has been tracking more than 40 entities, of which many engage in a host of issues beyond LGBTQ rights, like abortion and Covid-related mandates. Several groups are also churches, which are exempt from filing annual returns and therefore do not disclose their finances.
[…]
When the SPLC began tracking anti-LGBTQ hate in the early 2010s, the organization noted that “a small coterie of groups now comprise the hard core of the anti-gay movement.” The same groups — many now flush with financial resources — continue to shape the anti-LGBTQ agenda.“As of today, there probably are five or six key players,” McCoy said, highlighting the Family Research Council, the Alliance Defending Freedom, Liberty Counsel and the American College of Pediatricians as parts of the core.
From 2011 to 2021, the total revenue of the Family Research Council — an advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., that, according to its website, believes “homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it” and “is also harmful to society at large” — jumped from over $12 million to more than $23 million.
During the same period, contributions to the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is based in Scottsdale, Arizona, more than doubled, from over $34.5 million in 2011 to more than $76 million in 2021. According to its website, the group aims to secure “generational wins” to ensure “the law respects God’s creative order for marriage, the family, and human sexuality.”
In a statement, Jeremy Tedesco, the senior counsel and senior vice president of corporate engagement at the Alliance Defending Freedom, touted its judicial track record and alleged that the SPLC has “destroyed its own credibility because of its blatant partisan agenda.”
…I can feel your eyes rolling…but yes, you read that right…these people’s thinking is that twisted that they think the SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTRE are the fucking bad guys
The significant flows of contributions to the groups, however, do not reflect a growing antagonism toward the LGBTQ community in broader American society.
[…]
One group in the American Values Atlas continues to lag behind the rest of the country when it comes to affirming LGBTQ equality: white evangelical Protestants, whose fringe, far-right elements comprise the core of the anti-LGBTQ movement in the U.S. today.
[…]
“As someone who writes social science, I can’t tell you how many sentences I have begun with the words ‘with the lone exception of white evangelical Protestants,’” said Robert P. Jones, the CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, the organization behind the American Values Atlas. “Whether it is on immigration, LGBTQ issues, abortion — white evangelical Christians are increasingly outliers to the middle of the country, not just to the left.”
[…]
“I think the biggest marker of change among white evangelicals over the last decade has just been the internal shifts that they have undergone,” Jones said. “They have shrunk by nearly a third just over the last decade. Today, they are 14.5 percent of the population. And as they have shrunk, they have been hemorrhaging young people. I think that is one of the reasons why they have become increasingly out of step with the middle of the country.”Despite the bleed of parishioners, white evangelicals have managed to maintain their power in electoral politics by solidifying their stake in the Republican Party. Between 2016 and 2020, Pew Research Center found that white evangelical voters’ support of President Trump rose from 77 percent to 84 percent. Although this voting bloc only accounted for 19 percent of the total electorate in 2020, it made up 34 percent of all Trump voters.
“When you’re a third of one party’s base, you wield a pretty big hammer,” Jones said.
Without the broad support of white evangelicals, Pew Research Center observed, Trump would have lost to Joe Biden by more than 20 points in the last presidential election.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/groups-opposed-gay-rights-rake-millions-states-debate-anti-lgbtq-bills
[…]
It was not just Trump who welcomed evangelical leaders into the highest levels of politics and policy. In 2018, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., appointed Family Research Council President Tony Perkins to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent, bipartisan commission created by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 that is “dedicated to defending the universal right to freedom of religion or belief abroad.” At the time, Heidi Beirich, then the director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, called Perkins’ appointment “deeply disturbing.” His current term on the commission expires in May.
[…]
The most recent addition to the court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, even has a past with members of the anti-LGBTQ movement. From 2011 to 2016, Barrett gave lectures on five different occasions to the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, the Alliance Defending Freedom’s flagship summer program for Christian law students. During her confirmation hearing in 2020, Barrett described her experience with the Blackstone Legal Fellowship as a “wonderful one” but also said that “nothing about any of my interactions … were ever indicative of any kind of discrimination on the basis of anything.”
[…]
“It’s that dynamic that is driving the fundraising,” [Jones] said. “There’s a kind of last-stand desperation, an apocalyptic feeling that if we don’t do something now, we will lose the country. And if we don’t do something to win it back, there will never be another opportunity.”
…& while we’re on the subject of fundraising
Stacey Abrams has filed a lawsuit seeking to immediately begin fundraising for her campaign for governor under a state law that prevents her gubernatorial leadership committee from doing so.
Abrams is requesting to take advantage of a new kind of fundraising committee created by Georgia lawmakers last year, which her opponent, the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, has already been able to make use of. Called a leadership committee, it allows certain people and groups to accept unlimited contributions. Giving to direct candidate committees, on the other hand, is limited to $7,600 apiece for the primary and general elections and $4,500 for any runoff election.
Under the law, the committees can be formed by the governor and lieutenant governor, opposing major party nominees, and both party caucuses in the state house and senate. The committees can coordinate with candidate campaigns, unlike most other political action committees.
[…]
“Ms Abrams – the sole qualified and declared Democratic candidate for Governor of Georgia – and her campaign committee will be unable to operate, control, chair, or otherwise use One Georgia, a leadership committee … to support her campaign without credible and justified threat and fear of legal proceedings being instituted against Plaintiffs,” the lawsuit said.
[…]
Georgia has not yet approved Abrams’s leadership due to disputes over whether she qualified as a nominee before the primary, even though the state’s Democratic party chair, representative Nikema Williams, has recognized her candidacy and recognized Abrams as the sole nominee.In an affidavit, Williams wrote, “The only candidate who qualified with DPG [Democratic Party of Georgia] to run for the office of Governor of the State of Georgia prior to the end of the 2022 candidate qualifying period on March 11, 2022 is Stacey Y Abrams.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/22/stacey-abrams-lawsuit-fundraising-campaign-georgia-governor
…& I know I’m fond of a bit of escapism…but even if life imitates art
…I don’t see this shit getting fixed by walking purposefully while talking fast
…anyway…I’ll try to get some tunes together before my day gathers sufficient momentum to drag me in other directions…but just in case I don’t…maybe folks could throw a few of those my way?
Speaking of Paul Manafort:
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-middle-east-miami-europe-paul-manafort-de557d1773a150fa975769d7216fa54f
Imagine who your seatmate might be on an Emirates flight from Miami to Dubai, two sunny spots for shady characters. Well, it won’t be Paul Manafort for a while, until he comes up with a valid passport. And even then, who knows what country will be issuing it and what name he’ll travel under.
This is pursuant to our conversation two days ago about Londonograd. I asserted, in a very tangential-to-the-overall-topic belief, that when it comes to London shielding all sorts of shady (there’s that word again) assets controlled by various unsavory characters from around the globe, New York was no different.
I happened to be reading the Guardian’s book reviews this morning and apparently I was wrong.
The funny thing is, from my rooftop Garden of Wonders I can see Billionaire’s Row. That is where West 57th Street is, a line of supertall towers consisting of eye-wateringly expensive condos bought invariably by LLCs where the lights are never on. It is widely assumed that the whole stretch is a wildly exuberant display of money laundering not exactly hiding in plain sight. Every so often some wild-eyed radical brings up the idea of the names of the controlling parties behind these LLCs become part of some public record but that conversation usually takes less time than you can say, “The unit occupies the entire 68th floor and comes with its own luxuriously appointed safe room.” But I guess London is even worse?
…it remains to be seen how much of a dent that “actually, we’re gonna need a name to go with that” law they folded into the defense spending bill makes in the utility of US shell corporations for those long on cash & short on acceptable explanations for why it’s supposedly theirs to spend…but…well…maybe it’s just that london’s had longer to practice?
…I mean it’s more likely that it’s more by way of another example of the tories being demoralizingly adept at enabling this kind of hypocrisy…but…if I start in on that I’ll be at it all day…& believe it or not I actually do have other stuff I’m meant to get to?
…to which I guess I’m now adding that review…& possibly the book it’s about…so cheers for that part, too
RIP.
Madeleine Albright, first female US secretary of state, dies aged 84
The difference between her and Trump’s Secretaries of State was a chasm, and it’s true for Blinken too.
One of the things that’s so frustrating about coverage of Ukraine is how deliberately the press has downplayed the difference between competence and incompetence.
I’ve noticed that real life organizational Ron Swansons (libertarian/gun lover boss from Parks and Rec) are not as personable or helpful as he was on TV and more punch in the face-ble. They’re usually the office dick (and it seems in my experience the head of the IT group.)
I don’t want to be the kind of person who actively wishes death on a person. But it’s Clarence Thomas we’re talking about.
I’ll allow it.
Instead of death, how about fully conscious but unable to communicate or move on their own? 😈
What happens to the Jackson hearings if Clarence Thomas is really sick (with CoVID*)?
*which would be rather karmic considering they struck down Biden’s vax mandates.
Suddenly a comfortable majority gets really really really tenuous.
We all know what happens when that comfortable majority suddenly sees the neighborhood change.
…that…somewhat like the passing of madeline albright…albeit for very different reasons…was something I totally meant to find space for…which might say something about the way my day appears to have very much started the way it seems determined to go on?
…either way…thanks for picking up that particular bit of slack…(& @memeweaver too)
Moscow Mitch gonna shit.
https://futurism.com/neoscope/men-overestimate-intelligence?ref=thefuturist
/raises hand/
Yeah, I’ve been there.
I actually haven’t. My mom was a teacher with a master’s in counseling so she’d bring all of the standardized tests home and make me do them. And since she wasn’t very good at hiding things, I’ve known exactly what my IQ was since I was about eight or so. (It used to be a thing that you couldn’t share that information with children because it would fuck them up somehow — wait, I knew mine and that means … Okay, didn’t think that through).
Stone age superstitions aside, I also told my daughter what hers was. I’m just out here dropping IQ bombs all over the place.
12 years to step away from fossil fuels?
welp we’re fucked
they might have finished debating the hows and why’s of stepping away from fossil fuels and be ready to start debating how to fund it by then
assuming they dont get distracted by shiney new issues and election year popular options to get re elected….
…somehow it’s always worse than the awful I start out thinking it was…pretty sure I heard some guy on the radio the other night that claimed shell already had vastly more oil pulled out of the ground than we can afford anyone burning…no idea how he came by his numbers but if (optimistically) we assume he meant it in terms of their proportional market share…rather than “shell alone” before we even worry about other sources…it was still upwards of 80% of what they had which he said would basically need to never be sold/burnt
…I mean…I want to be an optimist…but that’s a lot of money “left on the table”…& oil companies aren’t exactly known for their willingness to do that however much the alternative screws the rest of us?