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 The GOP hyperventilating over the Trump indictment often includes the claim that Bragg and/or the Manhattan DA's office was funded by George Soros. What does Soros say when asked about this" “As for Alvin Bragg, as a matter of fact I did not contribute to his campaign and I don’t know him.” Soros is Jewish. The attacks on Soros are nothing more than an antisemitic dog whistle. Shame.

"On Monday, a 28-year-old shooter reportedly used assault-style weapons to kill three 9-year-olds and three staff members at The Covenant School, a private Christian school in Nashville. "Burchett told reporters after the tragic event that his solution is to simply keep his child at home. "Speaking to reporters on Monday, hours after the shooting, Burchett was asked, "What else should be done to protect people like your little girl?" ""Well, we homeschool her," Burchett said in response. While answering a separate question about how to quell school shootings, he also said "we're not gonna fix it."" Barbarian. https://www.businessinsider.com/tennessee-gop-rep-says-he-homeschools-kid-protect-from-shootings-2023-3

 Just finished reading “Black Earth: The Holocaust as history and warning” by Timothy Snyder. It is a detailed account of the Holocaust, as well as an effort to abstract lessons from this history for our time. Like his book “Bloodlands,” Snyder’s “Black Earth” makes for painful reading. As the grandson of a Ukrainian Jew and the son of a Jew, I would have been targeted in the Holocaust had I been in the wrong place. I had read several histories of Europe in World War II that included the Holocaust. I knew the basic story of the Holocaust and Hitler’s anti-Semitic vision. I learned a great deal by reading this book. I won’t belabor the ghoulish atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. To summarize them here would be to trivialize the enormity of the crimes and invite pointless debate about who did what and who suffered more. You’ll have to read the book to understand Snyder’s historical insights. However, I learned many things that I did not know by reading thi...

"Senate Chaplain Rear Admiral Barry Black (Ret.) was unusually pointed in his plea for action after yet another school shooting Monday that left both children and adults dead. "“Lord, when babies die at a church school, it is time for us to move beyond thoughts and prayers,” Black said Tuesday morning to open the Senate session. “Remind our lawmakers of the words of the British statesman Edmund Burke: ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.'” "“Lord deliver our senators from the paralysis of analysis that waits for the miraculous,” he added. “Use them to battle the demonic forces that seek to engulf us.”" Which will happen co-terminus with the first verified report of porcine aviation. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/senate-chaplain-gun-control-shooting

"It was all a bridge too far for some of his sometimes-serious allies in the Senate. Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), John Cornyn (R-TX) and Mike Rounds (R-SD) all made a point of speaking out against the move this week. "• “I think the best thing for President Trump to do is to focus on the problems people are facing today. There is no way you’re going to convince the American people that Jan. 6 was anything less than a horrible day,” Graham told HuffPost, arguing that Trump’s suggestion that the attack was “a walk through the park is offensive to me. It’s not reality. It was one of the worst days in American history, and it needs to be viewed that way.” "• “I never have seen somebody successfully get elected to office running on something that happened in the past…. I think people want a positive vision for the future,” Cornyn told HuffPost. He made similar remarks to NBC News: “I just frankly don’t understand this, you know, retrospective look,” he said. “When it comes to...

Anyone sincerely concerned about the future of Medicare would support abolishing Medicare Advantage, to eliminate overbilling of Medicare by private insurance. The right is fond of saying that government is inefficient and that private enterprise is better. That's clearly not the case with health insurance. More here: https://angrybearblog.com/2023/03/plans-to-cut-billions-in-medicare-fraud-ignites-lobbying-frenz#more-104788

What do the Nazis, the Italian fascists, the Bolsheviks, the Maoists and the Khmer rouge have in common? They were all single-party states. What does the modern GOP want? A single party state? How do single party states deal with opposition? They are purged. "That brings us up to February 2023, when Ron DeSantis appeared on pundit Mark Levin’s Fox News show, where the two had fun ranting about the government bureaucrats behind pandemic public health measures. “But it’s hard to remove them with the civil service rules and the union rules and all the rest,” Levin griped. “Well, there was a proposal that I think a lot of us wanted to see under the prior administration to do a Schedule F,” DeSantis offered. “So anyone who has any policy role is classified as a Schedule F, and they can be removed by the president. The left would litigate that, but I honestly think we would win on that in the Supreme Court.”" Republicans hate democracy. Republicans hate government. Republicans are ...

The Republicans want you to believe that the growth in federal deficits is due to Social Security and Medicare. Certainly, they are lying about Social Security, which contributes precisely zero to the federal deficit. In fact, federal spending as a percent of GDP, corrected for inflation, has been essentially flat since 1980, when St. Ronnie began the tradition of Republican deficit-busting tax cuts for the wealthy. "In 2019—the last year before the pandemic—the federal government spent almost exactly as much as it did in 1980. Spending was up a bit during the 1991 and 2000 recessions, and up a lot during the 2008 recession, but it always settled down to around 20% or so. "So yes, if spending is the same as it was 40 years ago then consistent deficits are obviously due to tax cuts." And whose tax cuts, exactly? "Everybody has gotten tax cuts, but the big winners were the super-rich. Not only have their incomes quadrupled since Reagan was president,² but their tax ra...

"Kansas City Police leaders allegedly ordered officers to target minority neighborhoods to meet ticket quotas — telling them to be “ready to kill everybody in the car” — and to only respond to calls for help in white neighborhoods. "Edward Williams, a 44-year-old white KCPD officer and 21-year veteran of the force, filed a discrimination lawsuit in Jackson County Court this week including those and other allegations. Williams said he’s faced retaliation because he’s been a whistleblower, is disabled and is over 40." Feh. https://www.kcur.org/news/2023-03-23/kansas-city-police-targeted-minority-neighborhoods-to-meet-illegal-ticket-quotas-lawsuit-says

"They’re talking about taking a ‘pause’, pumping the ‘brakes’. It’s embarrassing and frankly humiliating for DeSantis who has experienced several such dignity draining moments of late. But this is all a product of the last two weeks. It’s a rapid shift in conventional wisdom that is driven in large part by groupthink. It’s like a run on the National Bank of DeSantis. The difference is that in this case it’s a rapid shift in the direction of the more realistic take on DeSantis’s prospects. "Which raises the question: if the GOP megadonors lose faith in DeSantis, where do they go next? What other untested Republican do they pump up to stratopheric proportions as the new Trump Slayer?" https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/all-reporters-agree-desantis-is-toast

Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Nutjob): “Americans have the right to assemble, the right to protest. And that’s an important constitutional right. And he doesn’t have to say peaceful for it to mean peaceful. Of course, he means peaceful. Of course, President Trump means peaceful protests.” Donald J. Trump (R-Loser):“What kind of person can charge another person, in this case a former president of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting president in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination, with a crime, when it is known by all that NO crime has been committed & also that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country? Why & who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truely hates the USA!” In what sense does "death and destruction" = "peaceful"? Maybe she means "peaceful" as in the January 6th violent riots of treason? https://talkingpoint...

If you've been hanging out by the tee-vee, waiting to see Trump take that perp walk, you may want to find something else to do for the next few days: "There will be no grand jury testimony, deliberations, or vote in the Trump "hush money" case in Manhattan for the remainder of this week, a source told Insider. "Grand jurors will return to court Thursday, according to the law enforcement source. But the panel will meet in connection with a different case — not the Trump hush-money matter, the source said early Thursday." https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-hush-money-grand-jury-pause-in-case-this-week-2023-3

20 years ago yesterday, the US invasion and military occupation began. Thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis died as a direct result of this US war of aggression. The results included ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, which resulted in the deaths of thousands more. I was opposed to the US invasion and military occupation from the start, because there was no evidence that Saddam had WMDs, no evidence for a connection with al Qaeda and no evidence that Iraq posed an existential threat to the US. It was all a lie, and people died for this lie. Shame! John Ganz says it better than I ever could: "No one today can supply a simple reason for the invasion of Iraq that stands up to the slightest moral or factual scrutiny. Every attempt to provide a rationale for the war is patent sophistry or self-justification. This groundlessness, this inability to situate the war in anything tangible or concrete, is simply because it was based on a lie. More than a single lie, it was based on thoroughgo...

Hitler denied the existence of Poland and the Soviet Union as he invaded each of them with devastating effect. Putin denies the existence of Ukraine as he continues to invade and occupy Ukraine. And with those barbaric antecedents, now we have this: "A firebrand Israeli minister claimed there’s “no such thing” as a Palestinian people as Israel’s new coalition government, its most hard-line ever, plowed ahead on Monday with a part of its plan to overhaul the judiciary." As historian Timothy Snyder shows in "Bloodlands" and "Black Earth," the preconditions for most of the deaths during the holocaust, both Jewish and non-Jewish, was statelessness. I understand the serious problem of national security that Israel has faced since its founding, but I have to believe that emulating dictatorships is not a good look for any state, let alone a state with Israel's history. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/israel-minister-palestine-apartheid-west-bank_n_6418726de4b0...

 I used to get several FB ads a day with the word "patriot" or some variant in them. Apparently, "patriot" has something to do with guns, the military, camo gear or flag decals. Now, it seems that "patriot" also refers to enormous flags hoisted to unprecedented heights, and to theme parks that exploit veterans' names without their consent. Why aren't ecology and nature patriotic? When did the fantasies of a some absurdly rich people come to define patriotism? https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/03/19/metro/proposal-build-worlds-tallest-flagpole-looms-over-small-community-maine/?s_campaign=bostonglobe:push:web

It's on our currency: from many, one. In the pledge, it says " . . . one nation, indivisible . . . " I have no problem with peaceful protest. I've participated in peaceful protest myself. But we know what happened the last time Donald Trump summoned his cult--a violent attempted coup at our nation's capitol. Using similar language, Trump is summoning his cult again. Peaceful or violent? Indivisible or divided? I'm glad that local, state and federal law enforcement will be better prepared to deal with violence this time. I don't like it when a former president and declared presidential candidate summons people with a known track record of violence. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-says-he-believes-he-will-be-arrested-on-tuesday

I believe the null hypothesis on the COVID-19 origin was natural infection, not a lab leak. That's because that's how all other pandemics that I know of started. That being the case, the burden of proof is on the lab leak hypothesis to provide data falsifying the null hypothesis. In fact, the data for a natural origin just got stronger: "Through a swirl of data obfuscation by Chinese authorities and politicalization within the United States, and rampant speculation from all corners of the world, many scientists have stood by the notion that this outbreak—like most others—had purely natural roots. But that hypothesis has been missing a key piece of proof: genetic evidence from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, showing that the virus had infected creatures for sale there. "This week, an international team of virologists, genomicists, and evolutionary biologists may have finally found crucial data to help fill that knowledge gap. A new analysis of gene...

Kevin Drum nails it: "Everyone knows mifepristone is safe. Everyone knows the FDA approval process in 2000 was fine. Everyone knows there's more than 20 years of real-world data to demonstrate mifepristone's safety. Everyone knows it's been approved for use throughout the entire world. Everyone knows why an obscure judge in a tiny jurisdiction in Texas is hearing this case. And everyone knows the case has nothing to do with safety anyway. It's just a way to make it harder to get an abortion. "But we're all forced to play make believe and pretend there's a real case here. And conservatives are all fine with this because, despite their incessant whining about "judicial wokeness" or whatever their latest complaint is, they don't care one whit about judicial process. They just want the result they want. "None of that matters, though. This Kacsmaryk dude is probably going to (a) ban mifepristone, (b) refuse to stay his ban while the case ...

In other news, dog bites man, water is wet, the sun rose in the east and the pope is Catholic. "According to stories bursting across the right-wing mediasphere today, a key reason for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was its focus on spreading “woke culture” rather than efficiently managing risk and profits. Ground zero for this is the allegation that SVB had donated over $73 million to the “BLM Movement & Related Causes.” That struck me as quite a lot of money for a single company, even a large and profitable one, to give to any cause or even all causes. So I tried to find out where this factoid came from and rapidly found my way to a Trumpist think tank. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s a complete lie. I want to show you the receipts, but first some key details. The claims come from a database posted earlier this week by the Center for the American Way of Life, a project of the Claremont Institute. As Claremont put it in a Newsweek article introducing the database, “A...

"“I apologize for any embarrassment my postings have caused my family, friends and colleagues,” McNally said in a statement. “For this reason, I will be pausing my social media activity in order to reflect and receive more guidance on the use of social media.” "Progressive local news outlet Tennessee Holler broke the news of McNally’s internet history last week, sharing screenshots of flirty Instagram comments that the politician left on gay social media influencer Franklyn McClure’s (a.k.a. Franklyn Superstar) Instagram posts. McNally has left comments featuring crying emojis, heart emojis, and flame emojis on McClure’s nearly-nude photos." (snip) "The Lieutenant Governor’s behavior towards a then-teenage McClure is disturbingly hypocritical given that the 79-year-old has a history of using children as an excuse to progress dangerous anti-LGBTQ+ laws within Tennessee. He helped pass the nation’s first-of-its-kind drag ban and voted in favor of the state’s anti-tran...

 The wall still isn't built. It will never be built. The point was never to build a wall. The point was to use the idea of a wall as a totem to rally the base. As Timothy Snyder notes, the difference between GOP fascism and German fascism is that the German fascists actually built things. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/abbott-has-spent-nearly-1-billion-to-complete-trumps-wall-hes-just-getting-started

The weird thing about the "abortion is murder" trope is that nobody seemed to believe it. Look, if abortion is murder, then the woman seeking the abortion is taking out a hit on her zygote/embryo/fetus. If you have an abortion in a state that allows the death penalty for premeditated murder, and abortion is murder, then by this "logic," a woman who has an abortion deserves the chair. Now the GOP in South Carolina has decided to say the quiet part out loud: "MEMBERS OF THE South Carolina State House are considering a bill that would make a woman who has an abortion in the state eligible for the death penalty. The “South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act of 2023” would amend the state’s code of laws, redefining “person” to include a fertilized egg at the point of conception, affording that zygote “equal protection under the homicide laws of the state” — up to and including the ultimate punishment: death." Ladies and gentlemen, this is the "Freedom ...

 I see where Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Bubblehead) has a teenage son who is about to be a father. If this were a Black kid, Republican tongues would be clucking. In this case, it's just 'family tradition.' "Boebert’s son, when she talked with him about becoming a grandmother, pointed out that Boebert made her own mother a grandmother at 36 and he suggested it was “hereditary,” Boebert told those at the breakfast." At least that means it's not contagious. 

Just finished reading “Bloodlands,” a book by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. It was published in 2010, but now has a lengthy afterward that discusses the book’s reception and ties the theme to current events. I was inspired to read this book because of events in Ukraine and I believe that I have a much better understanding of the current conflict from having read it. The bloodlands refers to the territory lying between central Poland and, roughly, the Russian border, covering eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic republics. It was here that ca. 14 million people were killed by purposeful policies of mass murder implemented by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union between 1932 and 1945: the Ukrainian Holodomor in 1932-33, the Stalinist purges in Ukraine, Lithuania and Belorussia of 1937-39, the murder of the Polish intelligentsia and deportations to the Soviet eastern lands in 1941, the starvation of Soviet POWs by the Wehrmacht, the shootings and gassings of Polish, Ukranian, Bel...

I'm not a fan of arguments from authority. A real expert will tell you *why* your argument is wrong, not just *that* your argument is wrong. And a real expert will listen to new evidence. Sadly, the market for short, glib answers is much larger than the one for long, thoughtful answers. Ask questions, but don't forget to listen for answers.

Michigan is a civilized state: ". . . by a 20-18 party line vote, the Michigan Senate approved a state House-passed bill to repeal the 1930s-era law that banned abortion in all cases except when the woman’s life was in danger. The measure also repealed the law’s sentencing guidelines. "Michigan Democrats celebrated the long-fought victory after sending the bill to Whitmer’s desk for her signature." https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/where-things-stand-bill-to-repeal-1930s-era-abortion-ban-heads-to-whitmers-desk

If the GOP really wanted a balanced budget, it would raise taxes. By taking military spending off the table, the remaining programs would have to be cut by 70% or more to balance the budget in 10 years, thanks to the Reagan, Bush and Trump deficit spending. And by the way, cutting Social Security would have no effect on the budget, since it is funded separately. "“The Republican party is in disarray because they have no basic intellectual integrity,” Sen. Richard Bluementhal (D-CT) told TPM. “They can’t simply make up numbers. They really have no factual basis for the fantasy they’re trying to construct.”" Do we need to have a balanced budget? Of course not. No other industrialized nation has a regular debt ceiling vote. And the debt ceiling never mattered to the GOP when they were in power. It's not economics, it's politics. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/senate-democrats-republicans-budget

"Democratic members on the House Oversight Committee asked their Republican colleagues to sign a two-sentence statement that plainly rejects white supremacy, white nationalism, and a far-right conspiracy theory that suggests politicians are intentionally seeking to displace white Americans by loosening immigration. "All 26 Republicans on the GOP-led committee have signalled that they will not sign the statement, which a committee spokesperson characterised in a statement to The Independent as a distraction." Shame. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/oversight-republicans-great-replacement-theory-b2295295.html?amp&fbclid=IwAR1UEfRQeps6xcq5nXf5apN1lbDrBz73guXcq2aLbQcApt6qKQOkZHJ2rrc

  The state needs to get out of the marriage business entirely. Leave marriages to the churches/synagogues/temples/etc. The state should recognize civil unions for legal purposes. https://newrepublic.com/post/171025/tennessee-house-bill-gutting-marriage-equality

 This is a new and unfamiliar use of the word "transparency": "“No,” McCarthy responded. “I said at the very beginning: transparency. And so what I wanted to produce for everybody is exactly what I said. That people can actually look at it and see what’s gone on that day.” " What is transparent is McCarthy's pandering to a right-wing propagandist. Real transparency would be releasing the same information to everyone. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/mccarthy-has-no-regrets-about-tuckers-access-to-jan-6-security-footage-amid-gop-backlash?fbclid=IwAR2RE8496d89xe4vbutlIci0fchaopqg3h3mJ-VJtU8a9Go45MFj5r9oqU8

"House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) said Tuesday morning that it was a “mistake” that the administration didn’t go through with bombing drug labs in Mexico after then-President Donald Trump suggested it in 2020. “One of the things we learned post-Trump presidency is that he had ordered a bombing of a couple of fentanyl labs, crystal meth labs, in Mexico, just across the border and for whatever reason the military didn’t do it,” he said on Fox News. “I think that was a mistake.”" The "whatever reason" is that bombing another country is an act of war. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/comer-house-oversight-mexico-bomb

 I have to admit to some trepidation as the House GOP started doing the party's business. But I needn't have worried. The bubblehead party of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert was as unlikely to know what to do with Congress as the dog who catches that car. Putting Gym Jordan in charge of the "Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization [sic] of the Federal Government" was a stroke of (whatever the opposite of) genius. I'd say "stroke of irony," but irony is dead in the GOP--Newt Gingrich slew it. As with everything Republican, this committee was about doing whatever they accuse others of. "You probably didn’t figure that Jordan was going to unearth a lot of legitimate scandals or secret antifa cells at the FBI or other arms of federal law enforcement. But even if your bar was low the levels of incompetence and pro-insurrectionist content is still pretty wild." As teh kidz say, read the rest: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-staffe...

For most of my adult life, I’ve learned history almost exclusively by reading books. I took American and World history in high school and two quarters of American history in college, but after that, I became a history autodidact. I’ve written several book reviews (and published three of them), but this is the first course review I’ve written. In a footnote to an article on Ukraine in New York Review of books by British historian Timothy Garton Ash, he mentioned a series of 23 online lectures from Fall 2022 about the history of Ukraine by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. I’m not a big consumer of video content, but I decided to check them out, and in the space of the first afternoon, I’d already watched five 50-minute lectures. I binge-watched all 23 lectures in five consecutive days. I was primed for these lectures by having read “The Gates of Europe,” a history of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy, which turns out to be an assigned text for Snyder’s course. In his first lecture, Snyder discus...

Here's Donald J. Trump at CPAC: "And he promised that if he won reelection, he would take revenge on those who didn’t respect his followers. “I am your retribution,” he said." Conservatives are fond of insisting on public recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, with the words "one nation, indivisible." And yet the GOP, which styles itself as the conservative party, applauds GOP frontrunner Trump for divisive language. There's nothing patriotic about supporting Trump. He's openly promising to avenge himself on Americans who don't support him. That's not how democracy works, folks. In a democracy, if you lose, you admit it. In a democracy, if you win, you are responsible for all constituents, even those who voted against you. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-cpac-return_n_640262fce4b0e45e2f8e7346

Increasingly, when I read articles in the MSM, I ask myself "cui bono?" Does the article report data, or just interviews with a couple of people? Does the headline match the article? Does the evidence support the tone? Media outlets in America have to make money to survive, so in the eyeball marketplace, they benefit by pumping out stories that excite readers at the expense of respecting their intelligence by showing them facts and evidence (which anyway are more time-consuming and expensive to gather and interpret). So has the world that was promised to 30-44 year-olds betrayed them? Are they in decline? As always, Kevin Drum shows his work and concludes: "The overall picture is pretty plain: on average, 35-44 year-olds are doing as well or better than their parents at that age. It took too long, and I'd prefer it if they were doing better still, but the stereotype of the gig-job millennial is long out of date. Right now, they're doing just fine." Read the ...