Politics

Archived version

Former GOP official Michael Steele unfurled an epic rant bashing voters who would consider sending "incompetent" Donald Trump back to the White House.

[...]

"He is a fool, an incompetent individual who does not read even the briefings that he still gets as a former president on some of these things, so he'd at least have some workable knowledge of events there," Steele said. "He has to wait to be told what [Russian president Vladimir] Putin tells him to think about this affair because that's where his alliances, his allegiance is. The most galling and assaulting part of this is to minimize the traumatic injuries to our servicemen and women who took the incoming barrage from Iranian missiles and who, as has been reported, have been – were denied their Purple Hearts as a consequence of that because the Pentagon was dancing around how not to offend the president because he didn't think it was that important – these were just headaches, these were minor injuries."

Archived version

[...]

The Comstock Act is an 1873 law that, if enforced, would outlaw all abortions in America by banning the shipping via mail, UPS, FedEx, etc., of any device, drug, or instrument that can be used to produce an abortion. It would even shut down hospital abortions.

It could also be used to empower new state or even federal police agencies specifically overseeing women violating its provisions. Like the menstrual police, which a Trump senior advisor just said was a very real possibility.

[...]

It’s the opinion of the Biden Administration that the Comstock Act — which is still on the books — is no longer enforceable, and the Biden DOJ (along with those of every president since Richard Nixon) refuses to enforce it.

Senator JD Vance disagrees.

He (and a few other Republican senators) sent a letter to Merrick Garland demanding that the Comstock Act be enforced by the FBI and DOJ now. He wrote:

“It is disappointing, yet not surprising, that the Biden administration’s DOJ has not only abdicated its Constitutional responsibility to enforce the law, but also has once again twisted the plain meaning of the law in an effort to promote the taking of unborn life.”

[...]

The authors of Project 2025 agree as well, saying that the next Republican president should immediately restore enforcement of the law to end all abortion in America. They propose the next Republican president should launch:

“[A] campaign to enforce the criminal prohibitions” of the Comstock Act, including “against providers and distributors of abortion pills.”

[...]

Former NY Postmaster and anti-pornography crusader Anthony Comstock lobbied for and shepherded through Congress his law; it passed on March 3, 1873 and was titled “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, obscene Literature and Articles of immoral Use.” Today we refer to it as the Comstock Act.

Its language with regard to abortion is not at all ambiguous:

“Every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matter, thing, device, or substance … designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use; and “Every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and “Every written or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, or how, or from whom, or by what means any of such mentioned matters, articles, or things may be obtained or made, or where or by whom any act or operation of any kind for the procuring or producing of abortion will be done or performed, or how or by what means abortion may be produced, whether sealed or unsealed; and “Every paper, writing, advertisement, or representation that any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing may, or can, be used or applied for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and “Every description calculated to induce or incite a person to so use or apply any such article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing— “Is declared to be nonmailable matter and shall not be conveyed in the mails or delivered from any post office or by any letter carrier."

The penalty is also not ambiguous. Persons mailing information about abortion, or drugs or devices to produce an abortion:

“[S]hall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both, for the first such offense, and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both, for each such offense thereafter.”

Archived version

Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was sentenced to nine years for allowing a man to use a security card to access her county’s election system, and deceiving investigators about who the person was. He was later determined to be working with MAGA gadfly and pillow magnate Mike Lindell, a prominent election denialist and supporter of Donald Trump.

"I am convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You’re as defiant as any defendant this court has ever seen,” District Judge Matthew Barrett told Peters in announcing the sentence. “You are no hero. You abused your position and you’re a charlatan.”

Barrett said that Peters, a Republican, didn’t take her job seriously, espousing claims about rigged voting machines even after they were disproven. During the trial, prosecutors said that Peters was seeking attention after associating with election denialists, and Peters remained unrepentant about her crimes.

With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child. While working in Gaza we saw widespread malnutrition in our patients and our Palestinian healthcare colleagues. Every one of us lost weight rapidly in Gaza despite having privileged access to food and having taken our own supplementary nutrient-dense food with us. We have photographic evidence of life-threatening malnutrition in our patients, especially children, that we are eager to share with you.

Virtually every child under the age of five whom we encountered, both inside and outside of the hospital, had both a cough and watery diarrhea. We found cases of jaundice (indicating hepatitis A infection under such conditions) in nearly every room of the hospitals in which we served, and in many of our healthcare colleagues in Gaza. An astonishingly high percentage of our surgical incisions became infected from the combination of malnutrition, impossible operating conditions, lack of basic sanitation supplies such as soap, and lack of surgical supplies and medications, including antibiotics.

Malnutrition led to widespread spontaneous abortions, underweight newborns, and an inability of new mothers to breastfeed. This left their newborns at high risk of death given the lack of access to potable water anywhere in Gaza. Many of those infants died. In Gaza we watched malnourished mothers feed their underweight newborns infant formula made with poisonous water. We can never forget that the world abandoned these innocent women and babies.

We urge you to realize that epidemics are raging in Gaza. Israel’s continued, repeated displacement of the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, half of whom are children, to areas without running water or even toilets available is absolutely shocking. It was and remains guaranteed to result in widespread death from viral and bacterial diarrheal diseases and pneumonias, particularly in children under the age of five. Indeed, even the dreaded polio virus has reemerged in Gaza due to a combination of systematic destruction of the sanitation infrastructure, widespread malnutrition weakening immune systems, and young children having missed routine vaccinations for nearly an entire year. We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and that tens of thousands more will die in the coming months, especially with the onset of the winter rains in Gaza. Most of them will be young children.

Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict. However, every single signatory to this letter saw children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.

archive link: https://archive.is/H0FZY

from Talia Lavin, who's high on my list of "anything she writes is worth reading" journalists. an excerpt from her upcoming book Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America.

hopefully the title made it obvious, but a big ol' content warning for explicit and heartbreaking details about child abuse and endangerment.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21022250

Ahmad Wuhidi October 4 2024, 6:00 a.m.

Julian Assange in a parliamentary hearing on his detention and conviction - and their chilling effect on human rights - on 1 October 2024 ahead of a full plenary debate on this topic by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).

In his first public remarks since his release from detention at Belmarsh Prison in the UK, Mr Assange told parliamentarians: "I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today because after years of incarceration I pleaded guilty to journalism. I pleaded guilty to seeking information from a source, and I pleaded guilty to informing the public what that information was."

Archived version

Special counsel Jack Smith has built an airtight case against former President Donald Trump in his superseding indictment and in the new, massive filing released Wednesday, a retired Harvard Law professor argued.

Laurence Tribe told CNN's Erin Burnett on Wednesday that the case surmounts every obstacle the Supreme Court put in its way with the recent ruling that grants presidents a presumption of immunity for official acts.

"What stands out most clearly is that the Supreme Court, despite its effort to protect the former president and to erect a hurdle that was almost sky-high, made clear that it is possible to overcome that hurdle by specific proof that the former president, in his capacity as office-seeker, private capacity ... sought to overturn an election that he knew he had lost," said Tribe.

[...]

"The evidence is overwhelming and to the extent that there is any overlap between public and private, it occurs in the very limited context of communications between the president and the vice president," said Tribe. Even in that narrow slice of evidence, most of the communications were with Pence in his capacity as president of the Senate, making presidential immunity irrelevant, he argued.

[...]

"I said, 'Wow' about 25 times in a quick reading of this document. I bet there are another 25 that I will encounter," said Tribe "There are lots of jaw-dropping things. You've named some of them. You know, 'So what' if the vice president is hung, it doesn't matter whether we won or lost. That's just a sampling. It's the tip of a horribly large and scary iceberg."

Archived version

Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks are billionaires who have made their fortunes in the oil industry. Over the past decade, the pair have built the most powerful political machine in Texas — a network of think tanks, media organizations, political action committees and nonprofits that work in lock step to purge the Legislature of Republicans whose votes they can’t rely on.

Cycle after cycle, their relentless maneuvering has pushed the statehouse so far to the right that consultants like to joke that [Republican lobbyist] Karl Rove couldn’t win a local race these days. Brandon Darby, the editor of Breitbart Texas, is one of several conservatives who has compared Dunn and Wilks to Russian oligarchs. “They go into other communities and unseat people unwilling to do their bidding,” he says. “You kiss the ring or you’re out.”

[...]

The duo’s ambitions extend beyond Texas. They’ve poured millions into “dark money” groups, which do not have to disclose contributors; conservative-media juggernauts (Wilks provided $4.7 million in seed capital to The Daily Wire, which hosts “The Ben Shapiro Show”); and federal races. Dunn’s $5 million gift to the Make America Great Again super PAC in December made him one of Donald Trump’s top supporters this election season, and he has quietly begun to invest in efforts to influence a possible second Trump administration, including several linked to Project 2025.

[...]

Dunn and Wilks are often described as Christian nationalists, supporters of a political movement that seeks to erode, if not eliminate, the distinction between church and state. Dunn and Wilks, however, do not describe themselves as such. (Dunn, for his part, has rejected the term as a “made-up label that conflicts with biblical teaching.”) Instead, like most Christian nationalists, the two men speak about protecting Judeo-Christian values and promoting a biblical worldview. These vague expressions often serve as a shorthand for the movement’s central mythology: that America, founded as a Christian nation, has lost touch with its religious heritage, which must now be reclaimed.

A cache of internal emails obtained by 404 Media using a public records request show the chaos caused by the unfounded racist conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants are “eating the pets” of residents in Springfield, Ohio. The emails show city officials scrambling to deal with bomb threats, hateful and threatening emails and phone calls, a media bonanza, and confused residents in the immediate aftermath of the presidential debate, in which Donald Trump said “in Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

[...]

[Springfield] Mayor Rob Rue received the majority (but not all) of these types of emails. Here is a sample of them:

• One email titled “Haitian invaders” suggested that residents should buy large dogs that would attack Haitian people: “Since it’s obvious that you and the rest of the cowards on the city council are too afraid to handle this invasion citizens will apparently need to do so themselves. Purchase of Belgian Malinois and Cane Corsos should skyrocket along with protection training. If the dog goes in its yard and invaders are there, well, I guess lunch time it is.”
• Another said that Haitians “will NOT like the bitter cold” of winter and that Springfield should “have them quietly transferred to blue states.” Another email called Rue an “inauthentic gaslighting moron” and said that city officials “aid the DNC (Treason Party) Propaganda Media in attempting to rig any further Presidential Debates. Americand [sic] in Springfield have my sympathies because it is obviously cursed with some bureaucratic fucktards.”
• One email repeatedly called Haitians the n-word Another email titled “Invasion of Illegal Haitian Immigrants” reads “why you are not doing anything to protect your citizens and remove these haitians immigrants? How much money did you receive from Biden /Harris?”
• “Your lack of action on what is happening in Springfield and Ohio's leaders in other cities is outrageous and disgusting. You have immigrants harassing your citizens, going into parks and taking and killing animals, taking people's pets, skinning and eating them in public places, flipping over cars, taking over citizens yards, etc. Why in the world have you not called in the National Guard?”
• “I’m a lifelong resident of Ohio And I just want to email you in regards to the illegals walking the parks and destroying property of residence who pay taxes, slaughtering livestock creating chaos!! Ultimately, this is your responsibility top down or not! You will be held accountable for what you allow to happen in your city!”

[...]

Archived version

Three investigators for the Heritage Foundation have deluged federal agencies with thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests over the past year, requesting a wide range of information on government employees, including communications that could be seen as a political liability by conservatives. Among the documents they’ve sought are lists of agency personnel and messages sent by individual government workers that mention, among other things, “climate equity,” “voting” or “SOGIE,” an acronym for sexual orientation, gender identity and expression.

The Heritage team filed these requests even as the think tank’s Project 2025 was promoting a controversial plan to remove job protections for tens of thousands of career civil servants so they could be identified and fired if Donald Trump wins the presidential election.

All three men who filed the requests — Mike Howell, Colin Aamot and Roman Jankowski — did so on behalf of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, an arm of the conservative group that uses FOIA, lawsuits and undercover videos to investigate government activities. In recent months, the group has used information gleaned from the requests to call attention to efforts by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency to teach staff about gender diversity, which Fox News characterized as the “Biden administration’s ‘woke’ policies within the Department of Defense.” Heritage also used material gathered from a FOIA search to claim that a listening session the Justice Department held with voting rights activists constituted an attempt to “rig” the presidential election because no Republicans were present.

Last week on MSNBC, the “Morning Joe” pundits were talking about Donald Trump’s latest scheme to con the rubes, his sale of Trump Watches.

Elisabeth Bumiller, the New York Times’ Washington bureau chief, told her fellow panelists: “He’s entertaining. Let’s not forget.”

But he’s not entertaining, Elisabeth. He’s frightening.

[...]

Time after time, the New York Times sands off the sharp edges of Trumpism:

• The Times described JD Vance’s denunciation of “childless cat ladies” and his lie about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats as “combative conservatism” when it’s really sexism and racism.

• When Trump posted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” the Times toned that down with a headline saying he “expressed disdain” for her.

• When top Republicans lied about Haitian immigrants, the Times’ headline said “Republicans Seize on False Theories” as if those theories came out of the ether instead of originating and being spread by the pro-Trump right wing.

• Early in the pet-eating hoax, the Times wrote this headline: “JD Vance Appears to Backtrack on False Claim About Haitian Migrants in Ohio.” But that was an embarrassing misreading of what Vance did. The correct headline would have been: “Vance Says Claim About Haitian Migrants May Be Hoax, but Urges People to Spread It Anyway.” That’s what he did. Three weeks later, Vance still hasn’t disavowed the lie and apologized.

• This past weekend, the Times wrote a ridiculously warm-and-fuzzy mentor-protege story about Trump and Vance, making them seem like Dumbledore and Harry Potter when they’re more like Dr. Evil and Mini-me. (Or not fictional characters at all, but real-life fascists.)

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Archived version

In what we can only assume is an effort to prove he’s not weird by standing next to people who may be even weirder than he is, JD Vance will be doing a town hall today with Christian extremist Lance Wallnau during a Monroeville stop on Wallnau’s “Courage Tour.”

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Wallnau is a leader in the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement and one of the authors of Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate — a deeply disturbing Christian movement centered on them taking over the “seven spheres” of society — family, religion, education, media/entertainment, business, government, and science/technology (the science and technology mountain was added after COVID; media and entertainment used to be separate mountains). Once they do that, not only will they be in control of all of us … Jesus will come back!

[...]

Wallnau sees himself not just as a guy trying to practice his own religion in peace, but as engaging in “spiritual warfare” against the rest of us. Why? Because of how we are all demonic.

“The Left is loaded with demons,” Wallnau has said. “I don’t think it’s people anymore. I think you’re dealing with demons talking through people.”

[...]

Project 2025 intends to use U.S. foreign assistance programs to push conservative culture wars worldwide, conditioning aid on restricting abortion and pulling all funding for climate change.

Jeremy Konyndyk, who worked in the U.S. Agency for International Development under President Biden & Obama, says the culture war obsessions in this chapter would ally the U.S. with authoritarian countries around the world.

Multi-level marketing at its prime.

Legislators are not allocated enough funds to properly pay their staffers, a well-documented problem that leads to constant turnover at the mid and senior levels as the private sector lures some of the best policy minds away. It’s a vicious cycle: Elected officials, aware of their association with a deeply unpopular legislative body, don’t want to be seen “wasting” taxpayer dollars increasing staff salaries, and while congressional capacity isn’t the only reason why people are dissatisfied with Congress, the lack of capacity certainly contributes to public disappointment.

[...]If you're a Legislative Correspondent making $70,000 a year, it's hard to pass up a private sector job that could pay double that. Legislative Directors make significantly more, but by that point, we’re talking about mid-career professionals with even more lucrative opportunities outside of Congress. And it’s just not reasonable to ask these staffers to stick around for the love of the game.

Archived version

As Florida braced for Hurricane Helene, some weather and politics observers were mad about Project 2025.

“Reminder that Project 2025 would dismantle the National Weather Service and NOAA,” wrote the League of Conservation Voters on X.

NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, founded in 1970.

[...]

“Project 2025 wants to get rid of NOAA, wants to get rid of the National Weather Service — the people that tell you the weather and help you prepare for hurricanes,” said Moskowitz, a past Florida emergency management director under Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla.

Moskowitz quipped about how hurricane forecasting would function under Project 2025 and a Trump administration.

“Maybe we will just do it with a Magic 8 ball or maybe with a Ouija board. Or maybe we will do hurricane cones like President Trump did, right where he just circled in another state that wasn’t in the cones,” Moskowitz said.

[...]

Archived version

Election misinformation about the U.S. presidential election is going viral on Facebook while Zuckerberg makes amends with the GOP - a false claim recently went viral “and there wasn’t anything happening to stop it," one official said.

Derek Bowens has never had such an important job. He’s the director of elections in Durham County, North Carolina, one of the most-populous areas of a state that’s increasingly viewed as crucial to the 2024 presidential contest.

So when a former precinct official emailed Bowens in July to warn him of a post containing voting misinformation that was spreading virally on Facebook, Bowens quickly recognized that he may be facing a crisis.

The post, written as if from an authority on the subject, said voters should request new ballots if a poll worker, or anyone else, writes anything on their form, because it would be invalidated. The same incorrect message was spread on Facebook during the 2020 election, but the platform flagged the content at the time as “false information” and linked to a story that debunked the rumor by Facebook’s fact-checking partner, USA Today.

Bowens said no such tag appeared on the post, which was widespread enough that the North Carolina State Board of Elections had to issue a press release on Aug. 2, informing voters that false “posts have been circulating for years and have resurfaced recently in many N.C. counties.”

“It was spreading and there wasn’t anything happening to stop it until our state put out a press release and we started engaging with our constituency on it,” Bowens told CNBC in an interview.

The elections board wrote a post on Facebook, telling voters to “steer clear of false and misleading information about elections,” with a link to its website. As of Wednesday, the post had eight comments and 50 shares. Meanwhile, multiple Facebook users in states like North Carolina, Mississippi and New Jersey continue to share the ballot misinformation without any notification that it’s false.

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