…ugh…I don’t know…too many places I could start…& I’m not going to get to all of them…so…your guess is probably as good as mine where this is going

It turned out May, 62, had gotten caught up in an increasingly common internet scam — and also a new FBI initiative to protect people from financial ruin.

Enticed by the prospect of romance and riches, coaxed over LinkedIn and WhatsApp, thousands of people have sent their hard-earned money overseas, never to be seen again.

The con is called pig butchering — so named because victims are likened to hogs, fattened up for slaughter.

“It’s a sophisticated con, and you can see that because it’s a long-term con,” said James Barnacle, who runs the FBI’s Financial Crimes Section.

Barnacle said people from all walks of life have fallen victim to the scam, which typically is run by organized criminal groups based in Southeast Asia that often rely on workers who have been trafficked into forced labor. The gangs carefully research their victims and spend months or years gaining their trust. Often they allow victims to withdraw large sums of money, to boost their confidence that the investment scheme is on the level.

…it’s…not deepfaking your work colleagues…but…again with the “sophisticated”…&…it might “just” be catfishing/romance fraud…but…damn

“In 2023, we saw well over $3.5 billion of reported losses, and over around 40,000 victims in the United States,” Barnacle said. “I’ve seen [individual] losses well into the $2-, $3-, $4 million.”
[…]
Other victims interviewed by NBC News included a scientist and a chief financial officer, both of whom thought they had carefully researched the bogus crypto investment opportunities but were fooled by sophisticated fake websites.

Most of the stolen money is never recovered. But recently, FBI investigators have been trying stop the scam in progress, using sophisticated cybertechniques to identify and warn victims before they lose everything. They have even been able to seize and recover some of the stolen funds.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/pig-butchering-scams-rise-fbi-moves-stop-bleeding

…mostly, though…that shit is gone…like you donated it to a MAGA PAC or something

Nevada Republicans are holding caucuses on Thursday, which will be used to allocate delegates to the national convention, and former President Donald Trump is running virtually unopposed.

His top GOP opponent, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, didn’t put her name on the caucus ballot. She’s instead participating in Tuesday’s state-run primary, which is mandated under state law but has no delegates at stake. (President Joe Biden is on the ballot for the Democratic Party’s primary, which is the party’s official contest in the state.)

…& if that sounds like it makes no sense…or…no more sense than a really bad high school debate, say

Amid the national Democratic Party’s attempts to reorganize the presidential nominating calendar after the 2020 election, Nevada enacted a law in 2021 that required the state to hold “a presidential preference primary” if multiple candidates file. The primary must be held the first Tuesday of February and be run by the state.

The law, which was passed by a Democratic-controlled Legislature and signed by the then-Democratic governor, was in part an attempt to secure the state’s spot at the front of the 2024 presidential nominating calendar. And it came as Democrats were looking to move away from caucuses like those both parties had long used in Nevada, de-emphasizing those contests in favor of higher-turnout primaries.

But the state GOP pushed back and is holding caucuses. From the point of view of the national Republican Party, that is the only recognized contest for the purpose of awarding delegates.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/nevada-primary-caucuses-republican-trump-haley

…you’d be right, far as I can make out…the party of “the states should get to determine how elections work” is…refusing to abide by the state’s ruling…so they’re

Why Nevada is having both a Republican primary and caucuses, and how they’ll work [WaPo]

…pulling some shit where presumably both “winners” will claim to have won but they can give the points to the candidate who ought not to be running

Russia poised to bar only antiwar candidate from presidential race [WaPo]

…because of all their hard work to make election results questionable…which…tracks…from a certain precarious point of view

Well, that and a repeated willingness to embrace Trump’s rhetoric, no matter how negative the place where Vance later ends up. As when he said during an interview Sunday that he would have done exactly what Trump wanted on Jan. 6, 2021, and blocked electors from states that voted for Joe Biden — triggering a dangerous challenge to American democracy.

Vance was speaking with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, who seemed to be focused on testing the limits of the senator’s loyalty to Trump. If there’s a limit, Stephanopoulos didn’t find it.

…&…look…he’s a piece of shit…the lowest of the low…which…does track, I guess…if you’re abasing yourself beneath a man who’s lived his whole life in the gutter rooting around in all kinds of rotten shit…you gotta go low…but…how you cut off your ability to hear yourself is fucking beyond me

Asked, for example, how he felt about Trump’s having been found liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, one of many women who have accused Trump of misconduct, Vance waved it away.

“I think it’s actually very unfair to the victims of sexual assault,” Vance said, “to say that somehow their lives are being worse by electing Donald Trump for president, when what he’s trying to do, I think is restore prosperity.”

…&…we’re not supposed to feel all…stabby?

Vance also disparaged the verdict, suggesting that New York is one of several “extremely left-wing jurisdictions” where Trump is facing charges, implying that this was a stacking of the deck against Trump instead of a result of his alleged crimes while he lived in those jurisdictions. The argument that a jury would rule against Trump simply because of politics, of course, is of a piece with the prevalent idea on the right that Democrats are members of a credulous hive mind.

(As an aside, the senator’s effusive disparagement of wealthy donors bankrolling aggressive legal fights may not land well with his primary political patron, Peter Thiel.)

J.D. Vance would have upended democracy over right-wing nonsense [NYT]

…I mean…fucking of course they’re saying they’d have done the illegal shit & said it wasn’t illegal & stolen an election the way they’re promising to make sure nobody steals an election by stealing an election because otherwise their “constituents” might find out what the difference is between being in the minority & getting to disenfranchise one…which makes them cranky…&…we wouldn’t like them when they’re cranky…they might start playing silly buggers “soldier”…& something might get hurt worse than their precious fee-fees

Republican congressmen are now talking about throwing migrants from helicopters [Guardian]

…somebody shouldn’t have been allowed to watch season 2 of reacher unsupervised…I don’t buy that they even would have known about the pinochet thing otherwise…but…I digress

Philippines says it is ready to use force to quell secession attempts as Duterte row deepens [Guardian]

Indonesia election: everything you need to know [Guardian]

…nobody can keep up with all of it

“The whole world is at risk for ‘compassion fatigue,’” Time magazine declared recently. And while occasionally disengaging might seem like a sensible form of self-protection, the prospect of losing any sense of concern for others over the longer term would be a disaster. But is this an inevitable consequence of paying attention to the realities of the world around us? Are there ways to avoid it?

Compassion fatigue is by now a well-documented phenomenon. It was first noted among psychotherapists and medical staff, who often report feeling their compassion dwindling with repeated exposure to patients’ trauma. There can be no doubt that the extraordinary stresses of care work put you at high risk of exhaustion, and compassion fatigue could be a symptom of burnout. As the Time article demonstrates, however, the term is now used to describe people’s apathy in many other contexts, including their response to the news.
[…]
The role of mindset in compassion fatigue should not be surprising. Our beliefs powerfully influence how we behave and what we’re capable of. Consider willpower. Some people believe that their focus and self-control can be easily depleted; you can use it up over the course of the day. This is the “limited mindset”. Others see the practice of willpower as being inherently energising: the more they stick to their goals and avoid temptation, the easier it is to keep going. This is the “non-limited mindset”. Laboratory experiments and observational studies show that people with a non-limited mindset are more likely to stick to a fitness regime after a stressful day at work, while those with a limited mindset might crash out and eat junk food in front of the TV.
[…]
Given these findings, I can’t help but wonder if talking and worrying about compassion fatigue without factoring in the expectation effect could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereas knowing that a lot depends on your mindset could change the way we consume the news for the better. Without turning away from distressing events, we could make a special effort to focus our attention on the stories of the people who are striving to improve the situation: the charity workers who risk their lives to take aid into war zones, or the first responders who maintain their composure in the face of a terrorist attack. Among the daily reminders of suffering, they can help us to remember that the limits to our capacity for compassion and care are often self-imposed.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/05/the-big-idea-is-compassion-fatigue-real

…&…I don’t know if that’s quite how I see that working…but…I can’t argue that the news isn’t fucking exhausting…to the point of trying to conserve momentum so as to get through it without running short of the necessary stamina…let alone the fucking hours in the day

The influential rightwing pressure group the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), which is funded by large US companies, is behind model legislation to greatly restrict lawsuits under state public nuisance laws which are widely used to hold big business to account.

Public nuisance legislation was central to state lawsuits against the tobacco industry over the damage caused to public health by smoking in the 1990s. The laws are also at the heart of some litigation against fossil fuel companies over the climate crisis and emerging lawsuits against companies that failed to adequately protect workers from Covid.

They have also resulted in drug manufacturers and distributors paying out hundreds of millions of dollars to cities and other authorities for their part in the opioid crisis that has claimed about 800,000 lives. On Friday, the advertising company Publicis Health agreed a $350m settlement with US states that sued the company under public nuisance laws for promoting the high-strength painkiller that kicked off the opioid epidemic, OxyContin, to doctors with false claims about its safety.

But in an attempt to limit public authorities and others harmed by the actions of big business from seeking redress, corporations are using groups such as Alec and the US chamber of commerce to push state legislatures to pass laws to curb similar legal actions in the future.

Mary Graffam, the director of state affairs and research for the legal group the American Association of Justice, warned that the legislation would strip away rights for local governments and other entities, such as hospital districts and Native American tribes, to hold corporations to account.

“Because municipalities have successfully held corporations accountable for causing catastrophic harms such as the opioid crisis and environmental pollution, these companies are now turning to front groups like Alec and the US Chamber of Commerce to push laws that would give them complete immunity for their future bad acts,” she said.
[…]
The model legislation significantly limits the basis of public nuisance claims, specifically banning them for cases “based on the manufacturing, distributing, selling, labelling, or marketing of a product, regardless of whether the product is defective”. The law would also bar claims over any product that “endangers the health, safety, or welfare of the public at large or has caused injury to one or more members of the public”.

Secretive US rightwing group Alec designs law to give big business ‘complete immunity for bad acts’ [Guardian]

…secretive the way those scams are sophisticated…&…in effect…sophisticated, too…effectively so, even…but also…fucking delusional

The GOP dog caught the car. Again. [WaPo]

When Donald Trump and his allies set about falsely claiming that an impending Senate immigration deal would greenlight 5,000 undocumented immigrants per day, lead GOP negotiator Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) predicted what would happen when the actual text of the deal was released and they were proved wrong.

“None of those folks are going to look at it and come to the press and apologize,” Lankford said last week. “They’ll find something different.”

The text of the bill was released Sunday night. It doesn’t support Trump allies’ claims. And not only are they not apologizing; they’ve ramped up the rhetoric in stunning ways, with some falsely labeling the bill “amnesty.”

The almost instantaneous pushback from the congressional right Sunday night was a sight to behold. Despite Lankford’s helping to craft a bill that his Senate GOP allies have labeled a remarkably conservative one — one that is certainly more conservative than other recent immigration efforts, in that it includes no new protections for undocumented people already in the country — plenty of Republicans quickly served notice that they will go to great lengths to kill it.

And the counterfactual claims they made certainly bolster the argument, as Lankford and others have posited, that they would rather not pass anything in this election year, when the border crisis is bolstering Donald Trump’s 2024 hopes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/05/gops-false-amnesty-claims-give-away-game/

…but…fuck me…when it comes to stupid games & their stupid fucking prizes…if you want to know why people are getting quotes out of rishi sunak that boil down to “I was ambushed & I panicked like a deer in headlights” & find yourself wondering how a hedge fund guy can somehow think saying “I’m not a betting man” is…credible…you gotta understand he was the little spoon…look…john crace does it better than I could…plus…he actually watched this fucking car crash & I havn’t subjected myself to the full monty

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/05/the-longest-hour-piers-morgans-excruciating-interview-with-rishi-sunak

…but…short version long…they bet each other a grand on whether or not rish would get his wish to “get the people on the planes” before his sorry ass…god willing…gets served off the court…it was this whole weird proto-dominance postural-wrestling match that sunak lost six ways from sunday…but…fuck that noise…obviously…but…that’s the game, right…rishi sucks at it…but the game is can you out-fence your interlocutor because if not what the fuck good are you as a statesman in a room full of people who don’t play with lives at stake…well…”don’t play” in the “she ain’t playin’, dog” sense…obviously in the sense of actual lives being token playthings to some of these assholes is somehow a given…don’t ask me…I just live in the world

Just when you thought House Republicans couldn’t warp the impeachment process any more, here we are, watching them twist and stretch this weighty constitutional provision beyond all recognition — like some grimy wad of Silly Putty pulled from under Marjorie Taylor Greene’s sofa.

Opening a half-baked, highly partisan investigation into President Biden was a cheap stunt. But I’d argue that as House Republicans move forward with a floor vote to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, they are poised to drag the chamber down an even more tortured — and potentially damaging — path.

The Silly Putty Republicans [WaPo]

…besides…empty done moved right along to trying to play off a bad (possibly machine generated) mis-translation of something ilhan omar said as grounds for yet another misapplied censure motion like the bitch hasn’t been begging to get herself muzzled ever time she opens that foaming mouth to froth off some more…I ain’t, even…wouldn’t advise reading up on it…you’ll just feel dumber somehow for knowing people that dumb get to vote on shit…but…I’d wager a grand of rishi’s money…with another from piers’ pocket on top…that it’s exactly what you think it is, sight unseen…actually…what with that being a safe bet…I’d put those assholes down against

Whether you think Mr. Ackman is a billionaire blowhard or a courageous iconoclast, he is part of a paradigm shift in social media in which rich people are increasingly able to convert financial capital into social capital. He’s hardly even the first or most outrageous beneficiary of this unfortunate reality: That distinction probably belongs to his fellow billionaires Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who, like Mr. Ackman, have also discovered that unfiltered, limitless social media platforms are heaven for those with unconventional opinions and God complexes.

But why do wealthy people like Mr. Ackman make such a fuss on X, posting lengthy diatribe after lengthy diatribe? His passion for the platform, especially since Mr. Musk bought it, suggests that he wants to enlist in his battles more than just other wealthy donors to Harvard and to M.I.T. He wants to reach the public, a public that doesn’t enjoy the same freedoms on social media that he does.

Pierre Bourdieu, the great French scholar of social distinction, posited that individuals could convert money into various forms of social standing and vice versa but that the conversion would not be perfect. If you think of this conversion as an exchange rate, what’s happening today is that the rich are cashing in on one of the most favorable opportunities ever offered to turn their wealth into buzz and status on social media and then into outsize societal power and influence.

I believe this is happening for two reasons: First, I’m embracing a theory in the world of social networking known as preferential attachment: The tendency for the rich to get richer applies not only to money but also to the ability of the well connected to garner more attention. Second, I believe that vast wealth uniquely insulates the rich from the consequences of their speech. All gas, no brakes.

The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision — which declared that political spending is a protected form of free speech — started as a legal judgment but is slowly becoming a cultural norm as well, as an increasing number of media outlets, among them X and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, have wealthy owners, some of whom delight in taking a distinctly hands-on approach to making their own politics the politics of the platforms they own.

And the rich are also more insulated from the consequences of their speech. Self-employed billionaires like Mr. Ackman, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump can say whatever it is they want to say on social media without fear of economic or political repercussions because their extreme wealth protects them. They can’t be fired, and even if they could, it wouldn’t matter one iota to their lifestyles.

That’s a privilege extended only to a very few Americans, despite how often our society likes to argue that we all have the same freedom of speech. That’s just not true anymore, if it ever was. A few ill-chosen words, publicly distributed, can get you fired from your job, without a whole lot of recourse, or canceled or both or worse. Just ask Harvard’s Dr. Gay or Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who also recently resigned her post as president after being criticized for her remarks before Congress about campus antisemitism (as Dr. Gay and Dr. Kornbluth were) and for other putative faux pas, or Yao Yue, the Twitter employee whom Mr. Musk fired for publicly criticizing his return to office order.

Mr. Ackman, an activist investor notorious on Wall Street for agitating relentlessly and publicly for his desired outcomes, acknowledges the unique position he’s in. In a Jan. 12 CNBC interview, Mr. Ackman conceded: “If you say something that offends someone, you can lose your job. You can get blackballed. You can get canceled.” He added: “I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of being canceled, not afraid of losing my job, and financial independence gives me the wherewithal to speak.” He considers himself a fixer and sees no difference between his activist campaigns to “fix” a company and an activist campaign to “fix” a university. “It’s all the same,” he said. He sees no irony in the fact that Drs. Gay and Magill and Kornbluth have no similar privilege. He has stirred up another major controversy on X by defending his wife, a former professor at M.I.T., against accusations of plagiarism laid out in a series of articles by Business Insider.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/opinion/ackman-billionaires-musk-trump-social-media-x.html

…&…look…we all know the only guy to be president…fail to get re-elected…& then succeed…was grover cleveland…oh…a while back now

Few former presidents have run for their old jobs – or anything else – after leaving office [Pew Research Center]

…but…we also know this is…a…sophisticated operation

Only five days after Donald J. Trump left office, one of his aides emailed a lawyer to request approval of a formal-looking seal for use on statements from the office of the 45th president.

Margo Martin, one of his closest personal aides, told the lawyer, Scott Gast, that consultants had designed a subtly modified seal for Mr. Trump. “They said they changed a few things to avoid trademark issues,” she wrote, asking Mr. Gast if the design was acceptable.

The eventual image that Mr. Trump’s team used — a recognizable eagle from the Great Seal of the United States, placed in a circle — was evocative of the presidential seal that identified Mr. Trump with the job he had just left. And while he is hardly the first former White House occupant to affix an eagle to his website, the early conversations about presidential imagery revealed what has turned out to be an important obsession of Mr. Trump’s: being seen as much as a future president as a former one.

…sure as shit put the sophist in sophisticated…shame they don’t show much evidence on the soph side of the deal…they…uh…put the more in sophomore?

A majority of Republican voters, polls show, view Mr. Trump not as a “defeated former president,” as President Biden often calls him, but as a wrongly deposed president whose re-election would amend a grave injustice. Elected Republicans who once privately mocked the conspiracy theories about a stolen election now publicly insist that Mr. Trump was the true winner, out of fear of getting crosswise with their constituents or with him.

This widespread accession to Mr. Trump’s denial of reality has reaped him enormous political benefits. His posture as a president in exile robbed his rivals in the Republican primary of one of their most potent available arguments against him. While evoking his presidency has been a net asset for him in the short-term G.O.P. primary contest, it will be used against him — especially on abortion policy — by Democrats and the Biden campaign if he becomes the Republican nominee in the general election.

Donald Trump is capitalizing on his unusual status as both a former president and a candidate to twist the race in his favor in ways big and small. [NYT]

…&…that’s actually not a bad effort that probably deserves more attention than I have time to give it…but…damn it…some of this shit ought to be clear enough to be able to pull the whole explain-it-like-I’m-5 routine & de-program these addle-pated pattern-recognition engines with a vote from the social engineering scam they’ve been falling repeatedly on their heads over

Norma Anderson left the Colorado legislature nearly two decades ago, but she still keeps a copy of the state’s statutes in her home office. She carries a pocket Constitution in her purse. She has another copy, slightly larger with images of the Founding Fathers on the cover, that she leaves on a table in her sitting room so she can consult it when she watches TV.

She’s turned down a page corner in that copy to mark the spot where the 14th Amendment appears. She has reread it several times since joining a lawsuit last year that cites the amendment in seeking to stop Donald Trump from running for president.

Anderson, 91, is the unlikely face of a challenge to Trump’s campaign that will be heard by the Supreme Court on Thursday. She was a force in Colorado politics for decades, serving as the first female majority leader in both chambers of the legislature. She is a Republican but has long been skeptical of Trump and believes he is an insurrectionist who crossed a verboten line on Jan. 6, 2021, that should bar him from holding office again.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/05/trump-supreme-court-ballot-norma-anderson/

…&…sure as eggs is eggs & they’ve made so many omelettes at this point that apparently folks have gone blind to how much of that shit is all over their fucking faces…their court will presumably pretzle-ize itself to proselytize the gospel according to whatever lets them elect the un-electable…but…please…can we at least rub their faces in it…the way you rub your face on the road if you stack a bike when you don’t wear a helmet

When Jill Habig had an office down the hall from Kamala Harris in California, Barack Obama was US president, abortion was a constitutional right and January 6 was just another date on the calendar. A lot has happened since then.

On Thursday Habig, now president of the non-profit Public Rights Project (PRP), hopes her arguments will persuade the supreme court that Donald Trump is an insurrectionist who should be disqualified from the 2024 presidential election.

Habig has filed an amicus brief on behalf of historians contending that section 3 of the 14th amendment to the constitution, which bars people who “engaged in insurrection” from holding public office, applies to Trump’s role in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol.

The brief gives the supreme court’s originalists, who believe the constitution should be interpreted as it would have been in the era it was written, a taste of their own medicine. Conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are self-declared originalists while Samuel Alito has described himself as a “practical originalist”.

…I know these seem like excessively long-winded diatribes a lot of the time…but…you should see what I could do with all the ways alito shoulda kept aquinas’ name out his god damned mouth…except…I like y’all…so…I wouldn’t do that to you…definitely not first thing in the morning, anyway

“Our goal was to bring an originalist historical perspective to the supreme court as it considered the meaning of section 3 of the 14th amendment,” Habig, a former special counsel to then California attorney general Harris, says by phone from Oakland. “The point we make with our historian colleagues is that the history of section 3 is actually very clear. It demonstrates that section 3 was intended to automatically disqualify insurrectionists.”

The amicus brief, led by historians Jill Lepore of Harvard and David Blight of Yale, cites debates from the time in which senators made clear that their view that the provision that would not only apply for former Confederates but to the leaders of rebellions yet to come.
[…]
Habig, who founded the PRP in 2017, says yes. “It’s clear historically that there was no requirement of a conviction or even of charges, that the framers intended section 3 to be self-executing. The brief goes through a number of examples of people who had taken part in the secession and been on the Confederate side actually petitioning Congress for exceptions. There’s a lot of evidence that it was self-executing. There was no need for a particular conviction.”

She adds: “The evidence that we have seen and heard and watched with our own eyes over the last few years has made it quite clear that President Trump lost an election in 2020 and has spent the months and years since then trying to overturn the results of that election in a variety of ways, including people marching to the Capitol and invading the Capitol.”

Indeed, Blight has pointed out that the US Capitol was never breached during the civil war but was on January 6. Habig comments: “It’s difficult to argue with a straight face that these activities don’t qualify for section 3.”

Still, there are plenty of Republicans, Democrats and neutrals who warn that the 14th amendment drive is politically counterproductive, fueling a Trumpian narrative that state institutions are out to stop him and that Joe Biden is the true threat to democracy. Let the people decide at the ballot box in November, they say.

Habig counters: “It’s important to note that the American people did decide in 2020. We had a political process and then we had a president of the United States who attempted to overturn that political process. ”

…I don’t know the lady…but…no lies detected?

Spectacular as it was, the January 6 riot did not occur in a vacuum. Habig and her work at the PRP place it in a wider context of a growing movement to harass and threaten election officials and to interfere with the administration of elections. She perceives a direct line between Trump’s “big lie” and threats to democracy across the country today.

“Regardless of this particular case, the threat isn’t over. It’s actually intensifying. We’re just seeing an array of efforts to rig the rules of the game against our democracy and it’s part of why we’re investing a lot of resources into protecting election officials this cycle, and to litigating and advancing voting rights and free and fair elections this year.”

How did America get here? A turning point was the supreme court’s 5-4 decision in 2013 to strike down a formula at the heart of the Voting Rights Act, so that voters who are discriminated against now bear the burden of proving they are disenfranchised. Since then states have engaged in a barrage of gerrymandering – manipulating district boundaries so as to favor one party – and voter suppression.

Habig reflects: “The gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the supreme court left states to themselves to rewrite the rules of the game in a variety of ways that disenfranchised voters and continued to rig maps against their systems and fair representation.
[…]
“This is an all-out effort to make sure that we don’t have death by a thousand cuts for our democracy this year,” Habig says. “We are potentially less likely to see one central threat like we did on January 6 or even in the 2020 election. We’ve seen some of the larger counties like Maricopa county, Arizona, Philadelphia, Detroit et cetera, who have been targets in the past, have more resources to fight back.

“What we’re most concerned about is the soft underbelly of our democracy, which is the smaller, less-resourced jurisdictions that just don’t have all of the capacity they need to push back against this harassment and intimidation. Because of our decentralised system, election deniers who are intent on disrupting our elections and disrupting the outcome of our election don’t have to mount a huge effort in one place.

“They can pick apart jurisdiction by jurisdiction, invalidate 250 ballots here, and a thousand ballots there and 500 there, challenge absentee ballots, disrupt targeted polling places and that in the aggregate can actually change election results, sow disillusionment and distrust in our system and have the same or even worse aggregate outcome in terms of undermining the integrity of our election. That’s what we’re mobilising to prevent.”

There was no greater measure of America’s ailing democracy than the 2022 decision to overturn Roe v Wade, the ruling that in effect made abortion legal nationwide, by supreme court justices appointed by presidents who lost the national popular vote. But since then, in a series of ballot measures in individual states, abortion rights have prevailed.

Habig reflects: “Every single time that has been put to voters, abortion rights have won. As a result, we’re actually starting to see a lot of overlap between the reproductive rights fight and the democracy fight because this battle over abortion is fuelling additional efforts to break the rules and prevent voters from having a meaningful say in their rights. We’re mobilising on both fronts because the future of both is interconnected.”
[…]
“I appreciate President Biden’s clarity on democracy and the constitution and his leadership on the issue. I do think it’s important for people to understand what democracy means and for their real lives. It can sound abstract sometimes and like an academic debate but bringing it down to the level of, do you have autonomy over your future and your community, do you have autonomy over your own body, is important for people.”

She adds: “That’s why we’ve seen in cases when we’re talking about the fundamental right to vote, people get that. When we’re talking about their autonomy, they get it. When they’re talking about their dignity in the workplace, people get that and feel that on a visceral level. It’s important that we work to build a democracy that actually delivers so that people can feel the value of it in their daily lives.”

Jill Habig has filed an amicus brief saying the 14th amendment applies to Trump – and the brief gives the court’s originalists a taste of their own medicine [Guardian]

…not that some don’t appear to be better inoculated against that sort of clarity than…uh…what…fucking measles…are you fucking shitting me?

How the anti-vaccine movement is downplaying the danger of measles [NBC]

As measles spreads in England, health authorities warn the outbreak could snowball [NBC]

…for fuck’s sake…every fucking day it gets harder not to conclude humanity is too stupid to live…we’re gonna darwin award our asses out of the equation, aren’t we?

…sorry…I dunno…go read about joni mitchell & why it’s a big deal she sang at the grammys or something…because I’m out of time & out of patience & about to say some shit I probably shouldn’t if I’m not careful…illegitimi non carborundum & all that…or…possibly…if it’s them I’m addressing…futue te ipsum et caballum tuum…anyway…lemme see about facing some music