Nashville (Special to Informed Comment) – Suspicions grow that not only did new Congressman George Santos (R-NY) fabricate his educational and employment record but that he fabricated a marriage in order to get a permanent residency permit (‘green card’).
Let us, as the intel people say, ‘walk the cat backwards’ — ask a series of questions, each reaching further back in time and leading to some logical conclusions.
Santos is openly gay. He says he has a husband and wears a wedding band. Fine. But why then did he marry an American women in 2012 and stay married to her
A new study of Russia-based Twitter posts by New York University researchers buries the liberal canard that Russian bots played any significant role in swinging the 2016 election for Donald Trump.
Corporate Crime, Corporate Punishment. If only Al Capone was incorporated like Trump. Bet Madhoff wished he was a corporation he wouldn’t have got 150 years.
Weisselberg faced the prospect of up to 15 years in prison – the maximum punishment for the top grand larceny charge – if he were to have reneged on the deal or if he didn’t testify truthfully at the Trump Organisation’s trial. He is the only person charged in the Manhattan district attorney’s three-year investigation of Trump and his business practices.
Republicans didn’t get their predicted “red wave” in the November midterms, but the results were hardly a repudiation of the Right: most of Donald Trump’s endorsed candidates won their races, and the GOP continues to make inroads with voters of color.
Murdoch seems to have a greater grip on American than he does Australia with 36% subscriptions to cable TV. Foxtel and Sky News seem more of a joke here than in America. Only 8% watch the ABC so why is he so ineffective an influencer here?
a golden age of conspiracy theory — Republicans have endorsed all kinds of dubious, far-fetched or provably false theories, most based either in denying the validity of election results or embracing the all-encompassing online cult movement QAnon, which is now pretty much the conservative mainstream.
In response, defending the interests of working people, communities of color, LGBTQ individuals and families, and other vulnerable sectors of this society will mean alliances between progressives, liberals, and, in some instances, disaffected and distraught anti-Trump, pro-democracy Republicans. There are too many historical examples of authoritarian and fascist takeovers while the opposition remained split and in conflict not to form such political alliances. Nothing is more urgent at this moment than the complete political defeat of an anti-democratic movement that is, all too sadly, still on the march.
“Twelve years after the publication of ‘Cablegate,’ it is time for the U.S. government to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets,” reads the letter signed by the editors and publishers of The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País. “Publishing is not a crime.”
American Democracy proves itself not to be “the ideal Democracy” but rather a failed experiment. Having said that, it doesn’t mean throwing Democracy out as possibly the most equitable form of government. After all Australia’s system managed to stall the over-exaggerated swing to the right this past decade.
Just as Marx predicted the coming of an ideal state of Communism, the execution of which failed, doesn’t mean Marxism is not a more equitable ideal to Capitalism which has also proved to be an increasing failure with every decade for the past 50 years. Corporations, Governments and Inheritance are institutions that have guaranteed any notion of a “free market”, “merit” or “equitable principles” could never be reached.
America is almost perfectly divided between Democrats and Republicans and neither party can cobble together an effective majority. The 2022 midterms are, on the surface, a win for Democrats, but from a deeper perspective they have simply ratified the status quo of the US as a divided and divisive country.
If Republicans cannot win against a near-octogenarian and historically unpopular president who has presided over the worst inflation in four decades, when exactly can they win? That is the question that any conservative trying to explain away the GOP’s absolutely abysmal midterm election performance must ask themselves.
It’s unclear whether the “Red Wave” the Republicans have been talking about since early 2022 will eventually materialize, but one thing is certain: Something is happening in early voting and it’s helping the Democrats.
Unless polls, pundits and precedents are wildly wrong, Democrats will crash and burn in this week’s US midterm elections. Given the problems he inherited, Joe Biden’s presidency was always likely to end in tears. Expected Republican gains on Tuesday herald a descent into bareknuckle political fisticuffs and legislative gridlock before the 2024 White House race.
We know how easily a government can be toppled and how close we came on January 6, 2021: if just five Republicans had not refused to go along with Trump we’d be in this fascist dystopia today.
We can’t pretend we don’t know what’s happening and where it will lead if it’s not stopped.
This election may well seal or determine the fate and future of democracy in the United States and, by extension, most of the rest of the world.
Vote as if it’s your last chance to have your voice heard. Because it may well be
There are lots of problems with cults, but one is that they’re not terribly self-aware. The Make American Great Again (MAGA) “movement”, to frame it generously, lacks even the most rudimentary self-awareness. Many of its staunchest adherents – zealots, perhaps; those who disseminate their religion with furious keyboard strokes and oddly-placed capital letters (you’ll know them from the Kool-Aid running down their chins) – are not even cognisant of the ideology they’re embracing.
We all know there are Nazis at Trump rallies. There were Nazis at Charlottesville. There were Nazis storming the barricades during the attempted coup on 6 January. We all know the KKK endorses Trump. But the people who don’t know it, the people who deny it with every misspelled slur, every comedic self-own, are Trump supporters.
It’s weird. They don’t even know what they stand for.
This has rapidly become the standard business model for American newspapering. Today, more than half of all daily papers in America are in the grip of just 10 of these money syndicates. That’s why our “local” papers are dying. It’s not a failure of journalism.
It’s a plunder of journalism by absentee corporate owners.
In the case in question, we know the Oath Keepers followed through.
One of the turncoats, Joshua James, swore in his plea deal that he accompanied Rhodes on the run after J6 and saw him buy and distribute thousands of dollars worth of weapons that he intended to use to stop the transfer of power. James also claims that on Jan 20, Rhodes gave him an AR15-style rifle and said he would “not be taken by law enforcement without a fight.”
This is a test of whether the 19th century statute still has teeth and, moreover, whether a jury is willing to apply it to white insurrectionists.
A supermajority of six, unelected ultraconservatives justice – five of which were put on the bench by presidents who did not win the popular vote – have aggressively grabbed yet another batch of cases that will allow them to move American law to the extreme right and threaten US democracy in the process. The leading example of this disturbing shift is a little-known case called Moore v Harper, which could lock in rightwing control of the United States for generations.
The Hill has fired Katie Halper from its morning show, Rising, for describing Israel’s policies as tantamount to apartheid. It’s a blatant act of censorship to silence a pro-Palestinian journalist.
The dramatic decline of the once-great U.S. economy has important lessons for Australia and the world, as Alan Austin reports. AMERICANS SEEKING WISDOM about the state of their economy will gain little insight from mainstream economics writers. They are like detectives called to investigate an assault. They note boot prints in the garden, the broken living room window and the smell of gunpowder. But they fail to observe the three dead bodies. These are the cadavers:
Welcome to America’s Taliban. Fundamentalism has arrived. A Bill to ban Abortion in all States has been introduced. Education is totally privatised and is whatever you want it to be. None is fine and has been legislated in Florida and Arizona. Flat earth theory is an accepted reality and the states has no responsibility for children. The Republican Dark Ages have been directed and authorised from the top down with guns the ultimate authority just as in Afghanistan.
The introduction of such a bill is a sign of just how potent the abortion issue has become ahead of the midterms.
Women in every US state would be prohibited from having an abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy under a proposed national ban designed to galvanise Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.
Three months after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in America, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, an ally of Donald Trump, has introduced legislation for a federal ban, claiming that such a move would get the nation into a position that was “fairly consistent with the rest of the world”.
We’d be a much healthier nation if we paid more attention to our life expectancy and less to the Gross National Product. A big part of our lousy performance as a country is we measure the wrong things to plot our success. Sadly, whether it be education, healthcare or housing, our system is all about preserving and amassing great wealth — and if you happen to deliver on those three, well, that’s just a happy coincidence.
Even gun manufactures are now blaming Trump and other politicians for the gun violence. They like Trump will scapegoat anybody rather than blame themselves and their industry.
Donald Trump’s legacy of COVID apathy, gun violence and hatred has set in motion the decay of American democracy, writes Sue Arnold.
If it seems like nothing works anymore in the US, you’re not imagining things. Record-low public investment and declining private investment have given us a failing, decrepit infrastructure.
Plenty of us dirty fucking hippy bloggers railed for years about how not holding Bush and Cheney accountable for the laws they broke was going to come back to bite us all the next time a Republican became president. Yeah, we told you so.
But back in 2009, no one imagined this. How much worse could it be in 2024? We can’t even imagine. Which is why holding Trump accountable now is absolutely essential.
As former federal prosecutor and current defense attorney Ken White noted in a lengthy Twitter thread following the raid, the “feds do not seek search warrants lightly.” As White explained, such warrants generally require “probable cause to believe that the specified location has the specified evidence of a specified federal crime.” This one, in particular, would have been combed over by multiple high-ranking authorities, including Attorney General Merrick Garland himself. Crucially, while we the public do not know the details of what is almost certainly one of the most careful and detailed warrants imaginable, Trump himself does, because the subject of the search is given the warrant.
Covid and the Flu are nothing compared to the Right-Wing Media fury backing Trump and their effort to take control of America.
The baseless claim that the FBI may have planted evidence while carrying out a court-approved search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on Monday has surged through right-wing media, as the former president’s allies continue their effort to turn their audiences against the probe and shield Trump from accountability.
Meanwhile Putin is doing to the Ukraine what Trump wished he could have done to America.
Former federal prosecutor Michael Stern suggested that TrumpWorld is trotting out the claim because the FBI may have found damaging evidence at his home.”I have written hundreds of search warrants. Lawyers and people whose homes are being searched are routinely not present during the search,” he wrote. “That Trump is now talking about ‘planted’ evidence means he knows there is something damning they found.”
Mark Leibovich: “Trump said and did obviously awful and dangerous things—racist and cruel and achingly dumb and downright evil things. But on top of that, he is a uniquely tiresome individual, easily the sorest loser, the most prodigious liar, and the most interminable victim ever to occupy the White House. He is, quite possibly, the biggest crybaby ever to toddle across history’s stage, from his inaugural-crowd hemorrhage on day one right down to his bitter, ketchup-flinging end. Seriously, what public figure in the history of the world comes close? I’m genuinely asking.”
Regardless of anyone’s views on abortion, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson took away a reproductive right that a half-century of hard-fought judicial precedent had determined was constitutionally protected.
In doing so, the court set a dangerous precedent — that a person’s rights can be taken away.
Overturning Roe v. Wade was a triumph of politics and ideology over constitutional principles. It diminished the power and equality of women, along with transgender men and non-binary people, to make informed decisions about their own bodies without fear of government intrusion.
The opinion itself fails as an application of long-standing constitutional law. The justices arbitrarily discarded precedents they opposed, like Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, threatening the role of precedent in ensuring legal stability.
They selectively reasoned in Dobbs that abortion law should be left to the states, but conveniently did not grant that same level of deference when they declared a New York law unconstitutional for limiting concealed weapons.
This is hardly the first time that the ideologies of Supreme Court justices have shaped their decisions.
But we are not actually going back to the eighteenth century, since “originalism” is a scam. We are being delivered into the hands of high-tech, 21st century authoritarians who have invented the personhood of the blastocyte and are using it for the purposes of neo-patriarchy. In that regard, this Evangelical dictatorship has some firm resemblances to the Taliban in Afghanistan, who are not “medieval” either, but very much a movement of contemporary counter-modernity. Ironically, Muslims in general have, and all along had, much more liberal views on abortion than the American Religious Right.
Muslim-majority countries out of 47 surveyed permit abortion on demand. These are Albania, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tunisia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Another two, Burkina Faso and Guinea, allow abortion in cases of incest and rape, which the new Texas law does not, and Sudan allows it in case of rape.
Several other Muslim-majority states allow abortion where the mother’s physical or mental health would be impaired, not just if her life was endangered . . . Even Saudi Arabia permits abortion where the mother’s health is in danger, as do all but 18 of the 47 nations Shapiro surveyed . . .
Since 43 U.S. states have some restrictions on abortion, in fact, there are more Muslim-majority countries with abortion on demand than there are U.S. states [who allow that] . . .
With the striking down of Roe, the Federalist Society’s bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court has allowed states to dictate as they will to women over the disposition of their own bodies. Judge Samuel Alito alleged that it was ‘rational’ to protect a blastocyte, a just-fertilized human egg. No one in history ever found that rational. They might have found it doctrinally sound if they were believers (and that only recently). Let’s take a poll of scientists as to whether that is rational. It is actually the imposition of Catholic and Evangelical theology on rational people who reject
Washington: In a major expansion of gun rights, the Supreme Court said Americans have a right to carry firearms in public for self-defence, a ruling likely to lead to more people legally armed in cities and beyond. The ruling on Thursday (US time) came with recent mass shootings fresh in the nation’s mind and gun control being debated in Congress and states.
About a quarter of the US population lives in states expected to be affected by the ruling, which struck down a New York gun law. The high court’s first major gun decision in more than a decade came on a 6-3 split with the court’s conservatives in the majority and liberals in dissent.
John Howard encouraged Evangelist minorities and cults to become donors and to actively participate in the LNP and politics. He saw that ultra-conservatism influence was developing in America. The consequence of which we are seeing and feeling in Australia now. Morrison represents the erosion of our majority Democracy along with it’s central pillar the Separation of Powers. We haven’t just witnessed but felt Australia’s slide towards an ultra-right Christian theocracy leading to minority rule over the majority. The ALP is currently the only Party representative of the Australian ideal of majority representation and a government that respects all Australians equally. One we last witnessed during Rudd/ Gillard era.
Morrison’s first bill on his agenda should he win is the RDB with no protection for LGBTQI’s why? Who is he really working for?
The American Religious Right as a political force is in some ways a creation of the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that made abortion a woman’s right grounded in Americans’ constitutional right to privacy. Opposition to abortion and to a right to privacy united previously divided factions within US Christianity, Evangelicals and Roman Catholics, and galvanized the previously quietist Evangelicals to go into politics.
The memo, sent on Thursday to state and local law enforcement, said that DHS had no indication of a specific and credible plot, but that the agency and the FBI had “identified new content online that could inspire violence, particularly by lone offenders, and could be directed against political and other government officials, including members of Congress, state and local officials, and high-profile members of political parties, including in locations outside of [Washington DC]”.
When the media declares situations like this are “normal” and declares it’s “news”. When Jan 6th is described as “resistence” and a progressive movement you know American Democracy is being redefined and all its weaknesses laid to bare.
The fortunate thing is that we don’t need to know precisely what the future holds. History, and the presence of 20 million assault rifles in America, provides us with enough data to know the outlines of what’s ahead if we continue to pretend that nightmares are for other countries, not ours.
“Initially enacted in the wake of the Civil War, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies from public office any individual who has taken an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution and then engages in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or gives aid or comfort to those who have,” Free Speech for People explains. “By inciting a violent attack on Congress in an effort to prevent the certification of his own electoral defeat, Donald Trump engaged in insurrection and violated his oath of office.”
The polling shows that a substantial number of Republicans have turned against democracy and have fallen victim to Great Leader Syndrome as surely as North Koreans. Nothing could be more deadly to our Republic than to have one of the two major parties descend into reality-denying insanity and a “my leader right or wrong” mentality.
As much as we may critique the democratic system in the United States for not living up to its name, or the Democratic Party for not getting enough done, what we now face is dire. Trump himself may not precisely fit the “classic” definition of a fascist leader — we can quibble about that around the edges — but he’s close enough for many experts. More to the point, he is a nonstop liar, a conman and a sociopath. He doesn’t care about his own followers, only about himself. No such person should be in a leadership position at any level.
Republicans: Taking One-Party Control of the Election Process and Referee.
This is an entirely new threat. This is not voting suppression or gerrymandering (though those remain huge democratic obstacles which we continue to report on). What is now taking shape across America is the machinery necessary to steal an election.
America in 2021 is not Serbia in 1995. Our machinery of impunity is not susceptible to pressure from larger nations. But the journalists, whistleblowers, and researchers who have done the hard work of exposing its lies — they are still at work. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that the more these people uncover, the harder they toil. I wouldn’t bet against them.
At this time of year we traditionally reflect upon our blessings and forgive those who have trespassed against us. But we’ve been trying that for millennia, and the results have been unsatisfactory. So let’s discard the accumulated wisdom of all humanity’s spiritual traditions and focus our mental energy instead on how much we dislike various awful people around us. Merry Christmas.
From 2011 on, nearly a thousand combat outposts and a modest number of major bases have been closed in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in Somalia. Just a little over five years ago, David Vine estimated that there were around 800 major U.S. bases in more than 70 countries, colonies, or territories outside the continental United States. In 2021, our count suggests that the figure has fallen to approximately 750. Yet, lest you think that all is finally heading in the right direction, the number of places with such bases has actually increased in those same years.
As the congressional investigation into the January 6 insurrection gets underway, we’re learning disturbing new details about Trump supporters’ violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election. As I watch, I see a chilling parallel to the rise of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Steve Stern’s book Remembering Pinochet’s Chile opens with a couple greeting the 1973 military coup that launched Pinochet’s dictatorship by toasting the fighter jets with champagne. Decades later, they still remember Pinochet fondly. Their version of their country’s history differs starkly with its reality — and they aren’t alone. They politically opposed the leftist Allende government that Pinochet overthrew, but that alone doesn’t explain why they would cheer a regime known for torturing and murdering its political enemies. So, why did they support Pinochet? Because he provided an entirely false and easily disproved story to justify his illegal coup and the brutality that followed — and they believed it.
And now that we’re 245, it seems as though we should be old enough to take an honest look at various dumb and awful things about our birth, and stop believing in preposterous myths.
With Senate Republicans expected to use the filibuster on Thursday to block a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol instigated by former President Donald Trump, fears are mounting that his “Big Lie” about the 2020 election was just a “test run” for future GOP assaults on American democracy. “If Democrats don’t make some changes to our election laws and if they lose some races that they really need to win in 2022 and 2024, then we’re in real trouble.” —David Faris, Roosevelt University As Ryan Cooper lamented Wednesday in a column at The Week, “The truth is that the insurrection never actually stopped.”
It is notable that since 2018, the “more with Israel” respondents have fallen from 64 percent to 58 percent, and so are six percent down. Likewise, the percentage that want the US government to put more pressure on Israel has risen from 27 percent in 2018 to 34 percent today. There is thus a significant shift in attitudes going on, but not significant enough to sink support for Israel under 50 percent in the general population.
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