James.galbraith

Sure, the Republican Party is overwhelmingly backing a convicted felon, confirmed sexual assailant, business fraud, insurrectionist, and (alleged!) documents thief whose most endearing personality trait is his rascally inability to stop quoting Hitler, but have you seen what’s going on in Texas lately?

The Lone Star State, which has continually returned a criminally indicted attorney general to statewide office, is now looking to be a laboratory of new, exciting ideas, like “what if we shove all these unlabeled lab chemicals in a Hefty bag, light it on fire, and then stand around and see what happens?”

To read the Texas GOP’s recently passed, deeply un-American platform is to hate it—particularly if you’re a progressive ... or a moderate … or a moderate conservative who either has, knows someone with, or knows of someone with a womb.

As Karen Tumulty wrote in The Washington Post:

Just a few of the platform’s planks: that the Bible should be taught in public schools, with chaplains on hand “to counsel and give guidance from a traditional biblical perspective based on Judeo-Christian principles.” That noncitizens who are legal residents of this country should be deported if they are arrested for participating in a protest that turns violent. That name changes to military bases should be reversed to “publicly honor the southern heroes.” That doctors who perform abortions should be charged with homicide. That the United States should withdraw from the United Nations and that the international organization should be removed from U.S. soil.

Holy Mike Johnson! It’s enough to make you swallow your own tongue, assuming it wasn’t cut out years ago by your local Christofascists for uttering the sacred name of Barron Trump. What’s next, thought crimes? It won’t be long before Republicans seek to jail ordinary Americans for looking at pornographic images of consenting adults—or for not looking at pornographic images of Hunter Biden. (If Covenant Eyes hasn’t yet tweaked its filter to accommodate lurid photos of Hunter Biden, it really doesn’t understand its audience and should probably just shut down now.) 

And that’s not all! If you’re gobsmackingly horrified by the above, well, you should see what they want to do to democracy in Texas.

As reported in the Texas Tribune:

Perhaps the most consequential plank calls for a constitutional amendment to require that candidates for statewide office carry a majority of Texas’ 254 counties to win an election, a model similar to the U.S. electoral college.

Under current voting patterns, in which Republicans routinely win in the state’s rural counties, such a requirement would effectively end Democrats’ chances of winning statewide office. In 2022, Gov. Greg Abbott carried 235 counties, while Democrat Beto O’Rourke carried most of the urban, more populous counties and South Texas counties. Statewide, Abbott won 55% of the popular vote while O’Rourke carried 44%

So to review, Texas Republicans wants to jail abortion doctors while ensuring Greg Abbott can’t possibly lose the governorship, no matter how many killer mutant Sea-Monkeys he pours into the Rio Grande.

All of that is suitably horrifying, of course—and Texas Republicans are admittedly pushing the envelope further than other state parties—but Republican extremism and anti-democratic thinking have been running rampant of late, in case you somehow hadn’t noticed. And that’s a big opportunity for big-D Democrats.

First and foremost, the GOP is a party that embraces a literal felon who faces three more felony cases, all of which are arguably stronger than his first one.

It’s a party that, in newly red redoubts like Ohio, is brazenly attempting to thwart the will of voters on reproductive rights, vowing to do “everything in [its] power” to uphold restrictive abortion laws. 

It’s a party that’s rushed to pass new restrictive voting laws in response to Trump’s insistence that the racist, eternally demagoguing, pro-Putin candidate deserves to win every time.

It’s a party that, to a startling degree, has embraced and protected Putin, as well as openly autocratic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. 

It’s a party that, post-Dobbs, has eagerly passed new, restrictive abortion laws, even as it tries to pretend it’s moderate on the issue. 

It’s a party that keeps hinting it will take an axe to Social Security and Medicare, which remain vital to the well-being of millions of Americans.

It’s a party that elevates ambulant absurdities like South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s dog killing.

And it’s a party that’s apparently eager to ratify every fascist scheme that Trump wants to inflict on the American people. 

In other words, as Hopium Chronicles’ Simon Rosenberg tweeted, the current iteration of the Republican Party is “the ugliest thing any of us have ever seen.”

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg we’re about to crash into at full speed if we’re not careful.

In 2020, the GOP neglected to release a platform in advance of its national convention, perhaps reasoning that Trump’s surpassing charm and wit were all that they needed—or perhaps worried that Trump wouldn’t read it and would wildly contradict its key planks. Or, more likely, they were worried that the GOP’s awful policies—psst, if you want to live a long, healthy life, don’t live in a red state—would actually shake people loose from their tribal fealties long enough to notice that they prefer progressive policies. (Which, to be clear, most of them do. Turns out millions of non-billionaires actually support raising taxes on billionaires. Go figure.)

Of course, despite ample evidence that the electorate as a whole has no use for GOP policy prescriptions—on abortion and a range of other topics—Republicans across the country (not just in Texas) somehow can’t resist saying the quiet parts out loud. 

I say we hand them a megaphone and encourage them to Trump front and center as often as possible. Because every time he talks, an angel vomits into a pail, and there’s only so much mess God is willing to put up with, even from his chosen one.

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The GOP attempted to distract the public from Donald Trump’s conviction by bringing Attorney General Merrick Garland in front of the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday. While Republicans like Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida pushed conspiracy theories, Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California shut them down in an embarrassing defeat.

“I'm starting to think you're in a cult,” Swalwell said.

He proceeded to point to the cognitive dissonance among the GOP’s Trump apologists, and then he listed off the 37 countries that ban convicted felons from entering. 

While Swalwell rattled this off, Republicans objected and Committee chair, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, pounded his gavel. 

My colleagues, none of this today that you are bringing makes sense—your inconsistencies, your hypocrisy, your sycophancy. Unless you are in a cult. And guys, I'm starting to think you're in a cult.

That is your right. But it's not your responsibility. I promise you, that's not what your constituents would want. So if you believe in states’ rights, except when a jury in that state convicts your nominee for president, you might be in a cult. 

If you claim you back the blue but want to defund the police, when the police go to your nominee's house to retrieve national security secrets, you might be in a cult. 

If you're supporting a guy whose felony convictions prevent him from getting a security clearance, you might be in a cult. 

And if the guy you're supporting for president has felony convictions that prevent him from going to Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia. Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Macau, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, New Zealand, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and the UK, you might be in a cult.

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Dr. Anthony Fauci testified Monday before the Republican-led House panel investigating COVID-19 and the government’s response. Desperate to fan the embers of COVID-19 conspiracy theories, the committee Republicans tried to rehash the long-ago debunked claims that Fauci is responsible for the Trump administration’s abominable handling of the pandemic.

But it was a failure. 

Fauci responded to each attempt at a “gotcha moment” with the same calm he composed himself in 2020. 

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene drove the proceedings off the rails, holding up a widely circulated image of dogs being experimented on, purportedly using grant money approved by Fauci and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. As with most of the claims made by the GOP during the hearing, this was debunked years ago.  

Greene: As a dog lover, I want to tell you this is disgusting and evil. What you signed off on. And these experiments that happened to beagles–”

Fauci: What does dogs have to do with anything that we're talking about today?

Greene then refused to call Fauci a doctor, and said he should be “prosecuted for crimes against humanity.” Greene was suspended from talking while Democratic representatives tried successfully to force Greene to acknowledge Fauci’s professional title. But they were unsuccessful in having her words stricken from the record. Then Greene left.

When craven Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York implied that Fauci received big money for COVID-19 vaccines and medicines, Fauci made it very clear that headlines about pharmaceutical profits do not translate into royalties for him. 

“On the record, I want to make sure that this is clear,” Fauci explained. “I've developed a monoclonal antibody about 25 years ago that's used as a diagnostic. That has nothing to do with Covid, and I receive an average of about $120 a year from that.” 

Since Malliotakis has no evidence that Fauci has received money, his response left her at a loss.

Ranking Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin helped in humiliating the Republicans by publicly apologizing to Fauci for the damage the GOP has done to his reputation. 

“They're treating you, Dr. Fauci, like a convicted felon,” Raskin lamented. “Actually, you probably wish they were treating you like a convicted felon. They treat convicted felons with love and admiration. Some of them blindly worship convicted felons.”

Finally, Republican Rep. Debbie Lesko of Arizona failed spectacularly in her attempt to misinform the public, lying that she has a boatload of damning evidence against Fauci.

Fauci: So you said about four or five things, Congressman, that were just not true.

Lesko: Well, we have emails to prove it.

Fauci: You don't.

Allowing Fauci to remain in his position was arguably the only smart thing that Donald Trump did as president. In fact, it might be the single intelligent thing the convicted felon has ever done in his entire life.

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Since Donald Trump was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records, the “law and order” Republican Party has been twisting itself into a hypocritical pretzel. The party line these days is that Trump isn’t a convicted felon—even though he is.

Republican former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who is running for Senate, found that out the day before the hush money Trump verdict was reached. Hogan tweeted our that, “[r]egardless of the result, I urge all Americans to respect the verdict and the legal process.” 

The words “respect” and “legal process” are anathema to Trumpland, and Trump’s campaign head Chris LaCivita responded by writing, “You just ended your campaign.”

Trump’s daughter-in-law/RNC-co-chair Lara Trump, told CNN’s Kasie Hunt, that Hogan “doesn't deserve the respect of anyone in the Republican Party at this point, and quite frankly, anybody in America, if that's the way you feel.” 

But demanding conformity over the rule of law is not just relegated to shooting oneself in the foot over a possible Senate seat. Young conservatives are also on the purity firing line. Similar to Hogan, College Republicans tweeted that while they decried the “politically motivated prosecution” of Trump, “[the] verdict was handed down by jurors whose decisions were made in accordance with our criminal justice system. As such, the outcome of this trial should be respected.”

LaCivita replied with vintage MAGA class, replying “Opinions are like assholes … everyone has one.” The children are our future, unless of course they don’t conform to the fragile egos of a convicted felon and his minions.

Everybody on the planet knows that Trump is a convicted felon. But the MAGA world demands purity tests that blindly exonerate Trump in order to sanitize one of the most impure and corrupt public figures we have seen in the modern era.

RELATED STORY: Rep. Matt Gaetz wants to force House GOP to take a Trump loyalty test

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A cartoon by Clay Jones.

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How Republicans must miss those days before Donald Trump’s freshly seeded right-wing Supreme Court majority spit out its Dobbs decision, overturning Roe v. Wade and permanently injected the issue of reproductive rights directly into the heart of this nation’s political discourse.

Back then, Republicans could proudly display their “pro-life” bona fides on the front page of their websites, knowing it really wouldn’t make any difference since, well, abortion was still legal. No exceptions for people raped or maybe impregnated by an abusive relative? Not a problem! Support a 15-week, 10-week, heck, even a six-week ban. It’ll never happen, but sure, Mr. Christian extremist, we’ll take your vote—and your money! 

Then the world changed in an instant. Republicans glanced down at their news feeds on June 24, 2022, and politics as they’d known it simply ended.

Many of them didn’t realize it at the time. It took two years of humiliating losses at the ballot box, one after another, as citizens voted to preserve abortion rights in Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, California and Ohio. Then there were the governor’s races in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, as pro-choice candidates kept coming out on top. Pro-choice voters flipped the Wisconsin Supreme Court too, and yanked away Republican legislative majorities in Virginia. Finally it began to sink in for Republicans that they had a big, big problem, and it wasn’t going away.

So, they began to panic, twisting themselves into knots to “reframe” or “modify” their positions. They began furiously scrubbing their websites, mouthing different words, and most of all, hoping no one would notice. But they were wrong. 

As reported by Jess Bidgood and Lisa Lerer, writing for the New York Times:

Republican candidates in all eight of the country’s most competitive Senate races have changed their approach on the issue of abortion, softening their rhetoric, shifting their positions and, in at least one case, embracing policies championed by Democrats.[…]

While the pivot is endemic across races in swing states, the most striking shifts have come from candidates who unsuccessfully ran for the Senate just two years ago in their home states, with abortion views that sounded very different.

Before pointing out some examples of this new Republican hypocrisy, it’s helpful to understand that the vehement pushback to Republicans’ draconian abortion policies we now see in state after state is not simply political. Rather, it cuts across party lines. 

That’s why these sad efforts by Republicans to “soften” their radical and reactionary positions won’t work. Because when voters who care about their reproductive destinies realize someone is trying to deceive them—particularly now, in this post-Roe environment—it just makes them more angry. So highlighting this deceitful behavior early—as Planned Parenthood did with a series of ads in the 2023 race for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, for example—seals the deal for such voters almost immediately. For these voters, Republicans’ advocacy for these radical, harmful, and sometimes deadly policies is bad enough. But being lied to about their real positions is absolutely infuriating.

Dave McCormick is one such liar. He’s running for Senate against Democrat Bob Casey in Pennsylvania. Here is a frame from his old website, before he scrubbed it:

McCormick knows that his “life begins at conception” position, his eager participation in anti-abortion rallies, and his advocacy for the so-called “unborn” has now become pure political poison in the voter-rich suburbs of Philadelphia, which he absolutely must win. So the Connecticut-based former hedge fund manager is now backtracking, and as reported by Sean Kitchen for The Keystone, repeatedly contradicting himself seemingly with every new interview he gives.

As Kitchen reports:

“I’m not in favor of any bans, federal bans, federal legislation. I’m in favor of the three exceptions. I’m for widely available contraception. I’m for supporting adoption in young families that are struggling. And I’m for restrictions on late term abortions,” McCormick said on the Dawn Stensland Show earlier this month.

As Kitchen points out, that makes no sense. McCormick says he’s not in favor of any “bans,” but then volunteers that he favors “exceptions.” Of course there are no “exceptions” unless a ban is already in place. And “banning abortions late in pregnancy”—whatever that means—is still, in fact, a ban. And none of this new blather is reconcilable with his now-scrubbed website, which declared “life begins at conception.”

As Kitchen notes, prior to that interview McCormick offered the same weasel language recently employed by Trump, saying he believes abortion should “be decided by the states.” States such as Florida, for example, which now bans abortion at six weeks, before many people realize they’re pregnant. Or Texas, which (thanks to the Dobbs decision) doesn’t allow any abortions at all, unless a doctor certifies that a pregnant person will die unless the procedure is performed.

This meaningless, “leave it to the states” mantra seems to be the consensus position for multiple swing-state Republican Senate hopefuls desperate to hide their actual positions from voters. As Bidgood and Lerer report in their Times article, Bernie Moreno, currently running in Ohio against Democrat Sherrod Brown, was very clear on his position in 2022.

From Moreno’s X feed (formerly Twitter):

Moreno opposed the Ohio’s “Issue 1” citizen-led effort to amend the state’s constitution and preserve abortion rights. At that time he complained (falsely) that the ballot initiative would allow a rapist to “force” his victim to have an abortion.

Except now, as Bidgood and Lerer explain, Moreno has apparently altered his no exceptions position and now says he favors a 15-week ban with “reasonable” exceptions. His communications director also says Moreno believes the matter should really be “decided at the state level,” which seems to be Republican code for “please don’t ask me about my prior positions.”

Another prevaricator is Sam Brown, currently the leading Republican candidate challenging Democrat Jacky Rosen in Nevada. As reported by Axios, Brown was not only a member of but the leader of the Nevada branch of the “Faith and Freedom Coalition.” This is not simply just another anti-abortion organization, but one of the most hardline of them all, lending its support to a Texas six-week abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. As helpfully preserved by the Nevada state Democratic party, Brown once provided his position on abortion in response to a voter questionnaire: 

​That means Brown would only allow someone to obtain an abortion if they risked dying, the same law that now exists in Texas. No other abortions allowed—ever—under any circumstances. 

But as Bidgood and Lerer report, Brown, whose own wife chose to have an abortion for career reasons, now says the decision “is now correctly left at the state level.” In other words, he endorses the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs which allowed states to restrict or wholly outlaw abortion. Just don’t ask him about his prior statements or his leadership of an anti-abortion group of fanatics, please.

Then there’s Kari Lake, hoping to defeat Democrat Ruben Gallego in Arizona. Lake once bragged about being vetted for a job with the Alliance Defending Freedom, the same organization that supported the state’s archaic 1864 abortion law and represented the plaintiffs in the Dobbs case, successfully overturning Roe v. Wade. Lake has shape-shifted so many times now it’s impossible to know what she believes. As Bidgood and Lerer note, Lake once called the 1864 statute a “great law,” and said she supported a six-week abortion ban. Now, however, Lake says, women should have “more choices,” and she (now) opposes a federal ban.

Which is it, then? Nobody knows, apparently. But please stop asking. 

Finally, there is former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who evidently claims to have made a 180-degree turnaround from his prior record as governor championing abortion restrictions. Hogan is running for Senate against progressive Democrat Angela Alsobrooks, and evidently thinks he can fool voters into believing he’s now pro-choice. In mostly Democratic Maryland, of course, he has no other choice. But he offers no good reason why any voters should accept his remarkable “turnaround,” except perhaps to conclude that he has no principles whatsoever. 

As Bidgood and Lerer report, in other swing states Republican Senate hopefuls like Tim Sheehy in Montana, Mike Rogers in Michigan, and Eric Hovde in Wisconsin are busily backpedaling their prior extreme positions, hoping that their constituents don’t pay attention to their earlier campaigns to further restrict and control abortion. Ted Cruz of Texas is also getting in on this act, sponsoring toothless legislation that purports to preserve access to IVF treatment in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision to “personify” frozen embryos, rendering facilities and physicians who store and implant them subject to the state’s criminal code. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that this deceitful behavior is anything but more evidence of their unfitness for office in the first place.

The renowned author and poet Maya Angelou famously said “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” Many people, however, are unfamiliar with the entire quote which is “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do. That’s why it’s important to stop expecting them to be something other than who they are.”

These Republicans have all warmly embraced anti-abortion extremism in the past. Whether it was out of genuine belief or political convenience, that’s what they are. What they want now is power, and they’re clearly prepared to say or do anything to attain it, no matter whose rights they’ve trampled on or simply disregarded. The only reason they’ve changed their position is because they feel they have to. They deserve absolutely no credit or consideration for that, and they certainly don’t deserve any votes for it.

RELATED STORIES: 

Texas Supreme Court rejects challenge to abortion laws

Illinois takes a big step to protect abortion rights

Democrats are spending big on abortion to retake the House

Ohio GOP will only let Biden on the ballot if they can restrict abortion

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Witnesses in the various criminal cases against the former president have gotten pay raises, new jobs and more. If any benefits were intended to influence testimony, that could be a crime.

by Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski, ProPublica

Nine witnesses in the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump have received significant financial benefits, including large raises from his campaign, severance packages, new jobs, and a grant of shares and cash from Trump’s media company.

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The Painted Ladies houses, which includes the house from the 1990s sitcom Full House, is a set of seven houses in San Francisco. Six of them are basically the same, but the annual property taxes are not. For the San Francisco Chronicle, Nami Sumida shows why through a set of charts and illustrations, using the differences as a way to explain California property taxes.

This is also why I will never move.

Tags: Painted Ladies, San Francisco Chronicle, taxes

As of this writing, Israel’s war in Gaza has claimed the lives of more than 34,000 Palestinians, including 14,680 women, children, and elderly people, according to the United Nations. But that is just the tally of the identifiable dead. It does not include those rendered invisible or unrecognizable by rubble and fire. 

And that death toll could surge in the coming days and weeks. Roughly 80 percent of Gazans have been displaced from their homes, there are acute shortages of food and medical supplies, and thousands of small children are suffering from malnutrition.

Meanwhile, 121 Israeli hostages remain unaccounted for following their kidnapping by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups on October 7. We do not know how many are already dead or what cruelties beset those still alive. We do know that Hamas fighters have subjected some of their captives to rape, according to the United Nations. 

On Friday, Joe Biden unveiled a plan to end these nightmares: The president has presented a roadmap to a permanent ceasefire. Broken down into three phases, the plan ostensibly aims to secure an immediate and durable end to hostilities, which would secure the release of all Israeli hostages; a surge of humanitarian relief into Gaza; the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from that territory; and international funding for Gaza’s reconstruction. 

Plenty of ceasefire proposals have been floated before, but two things distinguished Friday’s: According to Biden, it was the Israeli government’s own plan, and it did not explicitly call for the total destruction of Hamas as a military and governing power.

Israel’s commitment to complete victory over Hamas has been one major obstacle to peace. To this point, Hamas has proven resilient enough to withstand Israel’s onslaught and tolerant enough of Gazans’ suffering to insist on retaining power, no matter the human cost. Hamas has evinced some interest in trading hostages for Palestinian prisoners, but it has shown none in total surrender. If Israel no longer demanded the latter, then peace might be at hand.

In the days since Biden’s announcement, the Israeli government has distanced itself from the ceasefire proposal and reaffirmed its commitment to Hamas’s destruction. “Israel’s conditions for ending the war have not changed: the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement Saturday.

This response is unsurprising. Many Israeli voters find the idea of Hamas’s ongoing military presence in Gaza to be an intolerable security risk, and this is especially true on the nation’s right. Were Netanyahu to accept the agreement, his governing coalition would likely dissolve. 

Achieving peace in Gaza will therefore require a counterforce to Israel’s domestic political pressures. In recent weeks, the Biden administration threatened to freeze arms transfers to Israel if it conducted an assault on Rafah without a plan for protecting civilians in that city, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians had taken refuge. Israel proceeded to launch an airstrike that killed 45 Palestinian civilians in the city’s safe zone. If the White House wishes to turn its blueprint for peace into a reality, it may need to enforce its own red line.

Such a measure would attract considerable opposition. Israel hawks in the United States insist that the Jewish state’s struggle against Hamas is existential and cannot end without that organization’s destruction. From this perspective, the death toll in Gaza is a tragic but unavoidable cost of a necessary war. 

World War II analogies figure prominently in this line of argument. Last week, in a column titled, “Do we still understand how wars are won?” the New York Times’s Bret Stephens accused Israel’s critics of historical amnesia.

After all, he notes, the last time the United States fought a war in which its very existence was conceivably at stake, Allied bombers “killed an estimated 10,000 civilians in the Netherlands, 60,000 in France, 60,000 in Italy and hundreds of thousands of Germans,” while the firebombings of Japanese cities and atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed nearly 1 million Japanese civilians. 

Stephens notes that we do not remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a genocidal leader. Rather, we fondly remember leaders “who, faced with the awful choice of evils that every war presents, nonetheless chose morally compromised victories over morally pure defeats.”

Today, Stephens writes, Israel finds itself waging such an existential war: Hamas has called for wiping the country off the map, and the Jewish state cannot know security until it destroys its enemy’s “capability and will to wage war,” a task that entails tragedies like the one that claimed 45 civilian lives in Rafah in late May. Rather than threatening to withhold arms transfers to force Israel into appeasing Hamas, Stephens argues, the United States must “understand that [Israel has] no choice to fight except in the way we once did — back when we knew what it takes to win.”

But this line of reasoning is morally and intellectually bankrupt. That we are more horrified by the mass killing of civilians today than we were in 1945 is a mark of progress, not amnesia. And in any case, Israel’s war with Hamas is not remotely analogous to the Allied cause. 

By the time the United States and Great Britain began bombing Dresden and Tokyo, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were already in the process of mass murdering tens of millions of people. Hamas may have genocidal intentions, but it does not have genocidal capacities. Waging total war on Gaza is not necessary for averting the imminent slaughter of Israeli civilians; to the contrary, doing so risks the lives of the few Israelis whom Hamas is currently in a position to destroy. 

Further, the Axis powers genuinely threatened the existence of neighboring states. Hamas is incapable of defending its airspace, let alone conquering Israel. The Israeli government is right to insist that Hamas must not be allowed to launch another October 7, but that attack was only possible due to easily avoidable failures of intelligence and border defense. 

More fundamentally, Israel’s ends cannot justify its means in Gaza when those ends are themselves unjust. The Netanyahu government is not fighting to liberate Gazans from despotism and establish the foundations for a two-state solution. To the contrary, it is committed to Palestinian statelessness and dispossession.

The people of Gaza deserve better than Hamas, but the Israeli government has neither the capacity nor the will to give Gazans what they deserve. The best it can do for the moment is stop killing them. 

The weak case for seeing Israel’s war with Hamas as analogous to America’s struggle against the Axis 

Stephens is far from alone in analogizing Israel’s war in Gaza to the Allied cause. In conversations with US officials last fall, Israeli leaders “referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries,” according to the New York Times.

 At around the same time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended his nation’s bombardment of Gaza by referencing Britain’s bombing of Copenhagen in 1944. In an interview with Piers Morgan last October, Israel’s ambassador to the UK noted that “over 600,000 civilian Germans” were killed by allied bombing campaigns in World War II, and then asked, “Was it worth it in order to defeat Nazi Germany? And the answer was yes.”

This argument’s popularity owes little to its substantive merits. 

The sole virtue of Stephens’s analogy is that Israel does in fact seem to be emulating the Allies’ method of “strategic bombing” (also known under the less euphemistic term of “terror bombing”). Strategic bombing campaigns aim not only to degrade the enemy’s capacity to wage war, but also their will to do so by imposing intolerable losses and suffering upon the civilian population. Anonymous Israeli officials told +972 Magazine last fall that the IDF was doing precisely this in Gaza, deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure in the hopes that this would turn Gazans against Hamas’s war effort. As one official observed, the logic of this strategy — deliberately harming civilians to put political pressure on an adversarial government — is the logic of terrorism. 

The +972 report is consistent with some Israeli officials’ characterization of their past counterterrorism operations against Hezbollah. In October 2008, then-commander of the IDF’s northern front Gadi Eizenkot said that his army would devastate “every village from which shots were fired in the direction of Israel,” deploying “disproportionate power” that would “cause immense damage and destruction,” as “Harming the population is the only means of restraining” the enemy. 

So, there are some grounds for likening Israel’s conduct in Gaza to the Allied powers’ strategic bombing campaigns, even as the latter took civilian life on a much greater scale. But this is where the merits of Stephens’s argument end. 

Hamas does not pose a threat remotely analogous to that presented by Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan

The flaws in his reasoning are several. First, it is worth noting that the Allies’ “strategic bombing” campaigns predated the modern laws of war. Today, they would be understood as unambiguous war crimes. Anyone who believes in progress or the “rules-based international order” should celebrate the fact that mass murdering civilians is less morally permissible in 2024 than it was in 1945. 

What’s more, there is far from consensus among historians about the efficacy of strategic bombing. Some scholars maintain that the bombardment of cities typically leads civilian populations to rally behind their nations’ war efforts.

For the sake of argument, however, let’s stipulate that the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo were indispensable to Allied victory, and therefore morally justified, given the radical evil of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The fundamental problem with Stephens’s argument is that Israel’s war with Hamas is not remotely analogous to World War II. 

By the time the Allies began bombing German and Japanese cities, those two nations had already conquered neighboring lands and begun murdering innocents on a world-historic scale. Nazi Germany killed an estimated 17 million civilians and prisoners of war. Imperial Japan killed as many as 30 million civilians in East Asia, while subjecting many thousands to torturous medical experiments and germ warfare. 

In other words, the existential threat posed by these powers was not merely hypothetical. And their desire to perpetrate genocide was not merely aspirational. Whether it is morally permissible for a military to kill civilians in large numbers in order to end an apocalyptic atrocity on the scale of the Holocaust or the Japanese occupation of China is a vexing question. 

But this is not the question that Israel faces today. Hamas may have genocidal aspirations. But as of now, it has scant capacity to kill Israelis outside of Gaza. And bombarding that territory’s cities has made the safe return of Israeli hostages less likely, not more so, a point that has not been lost on many of the captives’ families.

In reality, Israel does not need to level Gaza in order to ensure its own existence. To prevent October 7, all the Netanyahu government needed to do was take its intelligence seriously and fortify its borders. Israeli intelligence obtained Hamas’s battle plan for October 7 more than a year in advance. Last July, an Israeli intelligence analyst warned her supervisors that Hamas had conducted a training exercise that appeared to match the intercepted battle plan. But a colonel dismissed these concerns, according to emails obtained by the New York Times. As Israeli officials conceded to the Times,“Had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them.”

Instead, Israel persisted in leaving the border fence with Gaza thinly defended, so as to devote more IDF troops to the protection of illegal settlements in the West Bank.

The fact that Hamas’s rockets rarely succeed in killing Israelis tells us nothing about the organization’s moral character. But it does tell us something about the scale of the threat that it poses to Israel. Hamas is not a burgeoning imperial power. And it has no serious prospect of becoming one. Israel’s capacity to restrict the flow of arms and goods into Gaza places tight constraints on Hamas’s capacity to amass economic and military power. 

The obliteration of Gaza will not ensure lasting peace

It is quite understandable that Israelis do not like the idea of Hamas persisting in Gaza after October 7. No one should. But it does not follow that the very existence of Israel depends on Hamas’s elimination, let alone that these existential stakes give Netanyahu’s government the right to “fight in the way we once did,” even if that involves incinerating Palestinian refugees in their tents.

This is all the more true when one considers that Israel does not actually have a remotely feasible plan for eliminating Hamas, facilitating the formation of a stable successor government in Gaza, or pursuing a lasting peace with the Palestinians. 

When the United States bombed Japan and Germany, it was not simultaneously engaged in the settlement of Japanese and German land. The Israeli government, by contrast, has been forcing Palestinian communities in the West Bank off their land, while subjecting the broader territory to a form of apartheid rule. 

Establishing a postwar governing authority in Gaza that simultaneously boasts legitimacy in the eyes of its people and cooperates with Israel on security issues would be difficult today under any circumstances. In a context where the Netanyahu government remains committed to expanding settlements — and, in so doing, humiliating Fatah in the West Bank, Palestine’s only alternative power center to Hamas — it is wholly impossible. Until that changes, an uneasy truce with a Hamas-governed Gaza may be the best of Israel’s bad options. 

But Netanyahu’s problem isn’t merely that he cannot install a replacement for Hamas without abandoning his coalition partners’ commitment to the West Bank’s annexation. It is also that his military has proven incapable of eliminating Hamas to begin with. As soon as Israeli troops began leaving northern Gaza, the militant group started reestablishing itself, forcing the IDF to return and reengage in fighting. By all appearances, Israel has no viable alternative to Hamas to offer Gaza’s 2 million people beyond unending war and occupation.

Stephens is not wrong that we remember the justice of the Allies’ cause more than the horrors of their war crimes. But the suffering of Dresden and Hiroshima would be harder to rationalize or overlook in a world where neither gave way to peace and prosperity, but rather, to an endless cycle of counterinsurgency wars and the illegal settlement of German and Japanese lands by American religious fanatics.

In Gaza, Israel is not choosing a “morally compromised victory” over a “morally pure defeat.” It’s choosing a morally abominable quagmire. The bereaved parents of Rafah will take no comfort in the thought that hundreds of thousands German and Japanese civilians knew a similar pain in the 1940s. We shouldn’t either.

It took less than a day for the world to start rallying for George Floyd in late May 2020. The events that led to Floyd’s murder unfolded over hours, but a viral 10-minute video recording of the deadly encounter with Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was enough to send floods of people nationwide into the streets for months. 

In the weeks after Floyd’s killing, the number of Americans who said they believe racial discrimination is a big problem and that they support the Black Lives Matter movement spiked. As books about racial injustice flew off of bookstore shelves, corporate leaders, politicians, and celebrities pledged to fight racism. The events of 2020 disturbed America’s collective conscience, and the movement for justice captivated millions. Until it didn’t.  

In retrospect, there were signs of brewing right-wing resistance all along. While many peacefully protested, others called for their defeat. Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton demanded that the US military be brought in to fight “insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.” As police officers used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse crowds across the country, President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard to “dominate the streets” and defend “life and property,” sending thousands of troops and federal law enforcement officers to control protesters in Washington, DC; Portland, Oregon; and other cities. 

Some Americans who wanted to stamp out the unrest took it upon themselves to practice vigilantism. One of them, Kyle Rittenhouse, fatally shot two unarmed men and wounded another when he brought an AR-15-style rifle to protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (Rittenhouse was later acquitted of all homicide charges.)

Though the mass mobilization of 2020 brought hope, it’s clear today that it also marked a turning point for backlash as the mirage of progress morphed into seemingly impenetrable resistance. Historically, backlash has embodied a white rejection of racial progress. Over the past few years, the GOP has built on that precedent and expanded its reach. 

The right watched progressives rally for change and immediately fought back with the “Big Lie” of a stolen election. In many of the states that Biden flipped in 2020, Republicans rushed to ban ballot drop boxes, absentee ballots, and mobile voting units, the methods that allowed more people to vote. Since then, we’ve seen the passage of dozens of regressive laws, including anti-protest laws, anti-LGBTQ laws, and anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion laws. In state after state, these bans were coupled with incursions against reproductive rights, as some conservatives announced plans to take over every American institution from the courts to the schools to root out liberalism and progress.

“[The backlash] came like a multi-front war on democracy, a multi-front war on liberalism, a multi-front war on a multicultural democracy,” said historian Carol Anderson, who has examined backlash in books such as White Rage and We Are Not Yet Equal. “It knocked some folks back on their heels.” 

A brief history of backlash in America

Backlash politics have long defined the country. The term “backlash” gained popularity in politics after John F. Kennedy proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1963. “Transferred to the world of politics, the white backlash aptly describes the resentment of many white Americans to the speed of the great Negro revolution, which has been gathering momentum since the first rash of sit-ins in early 1960,” said a 1964 article in Look magazine.

The phenomenon, however, goes back to Reconstruction beginning in the 1860s, when white lawmakers claimed that equality for freed Black Americans threatened them, according to Larry B. Glickman, a historian at Cornell University who is writing a book about backlash since Reconstruction. Lawmakers instituted literacy tests and taxes at the polls while white agitators used violence and intimidation, all to prevent Black Americans from participating as full citizens.  

“There’s a backlash impulse in American politics,” Glickman said. “I think 2020 is important because it gets at another part of backlash, which is the fear that social movements for equality and justice might set off a stronger counter-reaction.”

The protests of 2020 did. And though race is still at the core of the post-George Floyd backlash, many Republicans have gone to new lengths to conceal this element. 

“One of the things that the civil rights movement accomplished was to make being overtly racist untenable,” said Anderson. “Today they say, ‘I can do racist stuff, but don’t call me racist.’” For Anderson, backlash is about instituting state-level policies that undermine African Americans’ advancement toward their citizenship rights.

By early 2021, alongside the effort to “stop the steal,” legislation that would limit or block voting access, give police protection, and control the teaching of concepts such as racial injustice began spreading across Republican-controlled state legislatures — all in the name of protecting America. 

“They cover [voter suppression] with the fig leaf of election integrity, with the fig leaf of trying to protect democracy, and with the fig leaf of stopping massive rampant voter fraud,” Anderson said. And, she said, laws banning the teaching of history get covered “with the fig leaf of stopping indoctrination.”

That coordinated legislation was a direct response to potential racial gains for Black Americans and other marginalized groups. “After the death of George Floyd in 2020, it seemed like all of our institutions suddenly shifted overnight,” conservative activist Christopher Rufo said in a 2022 interview. Rufo’s answer was to release a series of reports about diversity training programs in the federal government and critical race theory, which, he argued, “set off a massive response, or really, revolt amongst parents nationwide.” 

“Race is key,” said Glickman. “When the term backlash was popularized, it was often called the ‘white backlash.’ It was very clear that it was understood as resentment. The campaign for Black equality was moving too fast and going too far. I still think that’s at the root of many backlash movements.” 

The new era of backlash is grievance-driven 

That racial resentment has since taken on a particularly acrid temperament since Floyd’s death. At the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump, facing a litany of criminal and civil charges, stood on stage and told the audience, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” 

Trump’s words summarized the political discourse that has spread since the killing of George Floyd and highlighted the absence of a formal Republican policy agenda. “[What he said was] not policy,” said historian John Huntington, author of the book Far Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism. “It was just vengeance for some sort of perceived wrongs.” He added, “policy has taken a backseat to cultural grievances.” 

What Huntington calls out as “endless harangues against very nebulous topics like critical race theory or wokeness or whatever the current catchphrase is right now” are an important marker of this new era. “A key element of the current backlash we’re seeing is a politics of grievance,” he says. “‘I have been wronged somehow by the liberals or whoever, and Trump is going to help me get even with these people that I don’t like.’”

“It’s a reversal that happens in backlash language where privileged white people take the historical position of oppressed people”

Glickman calls this backlash tactic an “inversion” or “elite victimization”: “It’s a reversal that happens in backlash language where privileged white people take the historical position of oppressed people — often African Americans but sometimes other oppressed groups — and they speak from that vantage point.”

To be sure, Republicans have passed dozens of laws through state legislatures to do everything from restricting voting to banning trans athletes from participating in sports. But for Huntington, these reactionary laws don’t amount to legitimate policy. “It’s very difficult to convince people to build a society rather than trying to tear down something that’s already existing,” he said. “Critiquing is easy. Building is hard.” Nationally, Republicans only passed 27 laws despite holding 724 votes in 2023. 

Though other backlash movements in history, such as the response to desegregation or the Confederacy, have involved violence, today’s backlash also features a greater embrace of it from the Republican Party as a whole, according to Huntington. 

“But nowadays, the GOP, having moored themselves to Trump, have very much kind of implicitly embraced this politics of violence,” Huntington said. 

The January 6 insurrection, and how Trump and other Republicans have expressed a desire to pardon insurrectionists, is emblematic of how the party has aligned itself with a much more radical idea of how to gain and keep power. 

“If you’re embracing the politics of violence in order to gain power,” said Huntington, “that illustrates a dark turn in American politics.” 

Still, no backlash is forever. The events of 2020 triggered a particularly virulent right-wing response, but many such movements have failed, including various stages of this one. 

“Backlashes have been very effective at mobilizing opposition to movements for equality, but I don’t think that they’re necessarily successful,” said Glickman. “I would say the jury’s still out.”

They “are often seen as automatic and inevitable and sort of mechanistic and unstoppable. But I don’t think that,” he added. “Backlashes are political movements made up of human beings who were asserting their agency, and sometimes they’re successful and sometimes they’re not successful. I think we’ve blown up the backlash sometimes as this all-powerful phenomenon.”

This current backlash certainly isn’t achieving all of its goals. Trump lost in 2020, and the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has prompted a backlash to the backlash, with voters in several states choosing to protect abortion rights through constitutional amendments. 

With all their force and fire, backlashes can fail to anticipate pushback from people committed to democratic values. “The mobilization is really quiet,” Anderson said. “We are so focused on the flames that we miss the kindling … we miss the folks who are quietly, doggedly going about the work of democracy.” 

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Slashdot reader storagedude shares a provocative post from the cybersecurity news blog of Cyble Inc. (a Ycombinator-backed company promising "AI-powered actionable threat intelligence"). The post delves into concerns that the new "Recall" feature planned for Windows (on upcoming Copilot+ PCs) is "a security and privacy nightmare." Copilot Recall will be enabled by default and will capture frequent screenshots, or "snapshots," of a user's activity and store them in a local database tied to the user account. The potential for exposure of personal and sensitive data through the new feature has alarmed security and privacy advocates and even sparked a UK inquiry into the issue. In a long Mastodon thread on the new feature, Windows security researcher Kevin Beaumont wrote, "I'm not being hyperbolic when I say this is the dumbest cybersecurity move in a decade. Good luck to my parents safely using their PC." In a blog post on Recall security and privacy, Microsoft said that processing and storage are done only on the local device and encrypted, but even Microsoft's own explanations raise concerns: "Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. That data may be in snapshots that are stored on your device, especially when sites do not follow standard internet protocols like cloaking password entry." Security and privacy advocates take issue with assertions that the data is stored securely on the local device. If someone has a user's password or if a court orders that data be turned over for legal or law enforcement purposes, the amount of data exposed could be much greater with Recall than would otherwise be exposed... And hackers, malware and infostealers will have access to vastly more data than they would without Recall. Beaumont said the screenshots are stored in a SQLite database, "and you can access it as the user including programmatically. It 100% does not need physical access and can be stolen.... Recall enables threat actors to automate scraping everything you've ever looked at within seconds." Beaumont's LinkedIn profile and blog say that starting in 2020 he worked at Microsoft for nearly a year as a senior threat intelligence analyst. And now Beaumont's Mastodon post is also raising other concerns (according to Cyble's blog post): "Sensitive data deleted by users will still be saved in Recall screenshots... 'If you or a friend use disappearing messages in WhatsApp, Signal etc, it is recorded regardless.'" "Beaumont also questioned Microsoft's assertion that all this is done locally." The blog post also notes that Leslie Carhart, Director of Incident Response at Dragos, had this reaction to Beaumont's post. "The outrage and disbelief are warranted."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week the Washington Post reported that Americans "are more hesitant to buy EVs now than they were a year ago, according to a March Gallup poll, which found that just 44 percent of American adults say they'd consider buying an EV in the future, down from 55 percent last year. High prices and charging worries consistently rank as the biggest roadblocks for electric vehicles," they write, noting the concerns coincide with a slowdown in electric car and truck sales, while hybrids are increasing their market share. But something else happened this week. The chair of California's Air Resource Board and the chair of the state's Energy Commission teamed up for an op-ed piece arguing that "despite negative hype," electric cars are their state's future: When California's electric vehicle sales dipped at the end of last year, critics predicted the start of a new downward trend that would doom the industry and the state's broader effort to clean up the transportation sector, the single largest source of greenhouse gases and air pollution. But the latest numbers show that's not the case. Californians purchased 108,372 new zero-emission vehicles in the first three months of 2024 — nearly 7,000 more than the same time last year and the highest-ever first-quarter sales. Today, one in four new cars sold in the Golden State is electric, up from just 8% in 2020... California is now home to 56 manufacturers of zero-emission vehicles and related products, making our state a hub for cutting-edge automotive technology. Soon even raw materials will be sourced in-state, paving the way for domestic battery production... Challenges persist, and chief among them is the need for more widely available charging options. Many more charging stations need to be built as fast as possible to keep up with EV adoption. To address this, California is investing $4 billion over six years to rapidly build out the EV refueling network, on top of billions in investment by utilities. Equally essential is improved reliability of the EV charging network. Too many drivers today encounter faulty charging stations, which is why the California Energy Commission is developing the strongest charging reliability standards in the country and will require companies to be transparent with the public about their performance. They also point out that California "now boasts more EV chargers in the state than gasoline nozzles." And that it's become the first U.S. state whose best-selling car is electric.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Donald Trump, former president and newly convicted felon, went on a vocal rampage this morning at a press conference inside his namesake Manhattan skyscraper. Trump is livid after having been found guilty yesterday on all 34 counts related to hush-money payments and connected cover-ups dating back to his 2016 campaign. His wild, unrestrained remarks today offered a rhetorical hint at the extremism to come in the remaining five months of this year’s presidential election, for which he is once again the presumptive Republican nominee.

“You saw what happened to some of the witnesses that were on our side,” Trump said. “They were literally crucified by this man who looks like an angel, but he is really a devil.” Trump deemed the judge in the case, Juan Merchan, a “tyrant,” called his trial “ridiculous,” and lamented that Merchan could lock him away for 187 years. The former president will be sentenced on July 11; it is uncertain whether he will serve any jail time at all.

President Joe Biden, Trump seethed, is the “most incompetent,” “dumbest,” and “most dishonest” president America has ever had. “He is a Manchurian candidate,” Trump said of his rival—an explosive, unfounded accusation that, had anyone else said it, would elicit bafflement and condemnation. Michael Tyler, the Biden campaign’s communications director, said in a statement this afternoon that Trump is “confused, desperate, and defeated” and “consumed by his own thirst for revenge and retribution.”

[Read: Trump, defeated]

Trump’s speech resembled the remarks he’s made during his rallies over the past several months, as his tone has become ever more dark and apocalyptic. “I am your retribution” has been his 2024 campaign’s central theme. But this morning, it was clearer than ever that anyone who does not fall in line behind Trump is considered an enemy.

Though the speech was ostensibly a reaction to his trial verdict, he used the time to attack one of his favorite targets: immigrants. He repeated his line that foreign countries are emptying out their jails and “insane asylums” and sending people to America. “We have a president and a group of fascists that don’t want to do anything about it,” Trump said. “They’re destroying our country. Our country is in very bad shape.” He complained that people “are allowed to pour in from countries unknown, from places unknown, from languages that we haven’t even heard of.” He claimed that American children can’t play Little League games anymore because of too many migrant tents on the field.

Nine years ago, on June 16, 2015, Trump took his infamous golden-escalator ride in this same Manhattan tower and announced that he was running for president. That day, many people treated the event like a carnival—a former reality-TV star and tabloid fixture called a press conference in the building with his name on it because he wanted attention. But even that day, Trump’s mask was off. He attacked immigrants then too, calling Mexicans “rapists” and “people that have lots of problems.” A year and a half later, he was elected president of the United States.

Today, despite his conviction and ever-ratcheting bombast, Trump is leading Biden in the polls and could well return to the White House. Yesterday’s verdict and this morning’s remarks may not derail his career so much as galvanize his supporters. His campaign claims to have raised $34.8 million since the verdict. Trump concluded his statement this morning by saying that November 5 is “the most important day in the history of our country.” He’s right.

Rose Horowitch contributed to this report.

Louisiana Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley announced Tuesday that public schools will be allowed to use the unaccredited, right-wing nonprofit PragerU "edu-tainment" children's videos.

PragerU’s billionaire-backed, Islamophobic, homophobic, climate denialist, racist, and ultimately revisionist content was born out of the repugnant minds of right-wing radio show host Dennis Prager and screenwriter Allen Estrin. PragerU is a propaganda project designed to target children with far-right ideas and alternate facts.

The videos range from animations for very young children to hosted informationals for young adults, with titles like "Born to hate Jews," about how Muslims are raised to be antisemitic. There’s also "Would you rather be colonized by Aztecs or Christians?," which is hosted by Christian conservative extremist Michael Knowles.

During his announcement on Tuesday, Brumley claimed that PragerU’s content aligns with the state’s new social studies standards, which he calls the “freedom framework.” 

Want to teach your kids about Christopher Columbus crossing the ocean blue? PragerU has a video where children travel back in time to learn from an animated Columbus that “being taken as a slave is better than being killed!” There’s also a video where abolitionist Frederick Douglass says the Founding Fathers of our country were also abolitionists (they weren’t) and takes a swipe at the Black Lives Matter movement.

But PragerU isn’t just about Islamophobia and revisionist U.S. history. There are several climate denialism videos, too. There’s even an eight-minute video titled “How To Embrace Your Masculinity” that explains that there is no such thing as “toxic masculinity” and that it was “masculinity that defeated the Nazis in World War II.” 

Louisiana now joins Oklahoma, Florida, Montana, New Hampshire, and Arizona in adding PragerU materials to their public education curriculum. These materials include books for young adult readers like “Sofia Survives The Border,” which is about a young girl who “learns why strong borders are essential for keeping communities safe and prosperous.” 

Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne described the addition of PragerU resources to the state’s curriculum as a way to “present an alternative” to “the extreme left side” of education. 

In other words: Republicans want to present an alternative reality to the facts being taught in schools.

Every day brings a new prognostication that is making President Joe Biden's campaign operatives worry or freak out. Is Donald Trump running away with the election? No. Not even close.

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Donald John Trump has now been convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying documents to cover up a scheme to defraud voters in the 2016 election. It may have seemed as if Trump would never face any consequences for his actions. That changed Thursday.

Trump’s conviction may be a singular event, but he’s certainly not alone among his friends and co-workers. From his business, to his campaign, and on into his administration, Trump has been connected with a string of crimes and a list of felons. Not all of them got their own orange jumpsuits, but some did. Maybe they can provide Trump with a few tips on how to handle the guys in the yard.

Here’s a dirty baker’s dozen of Trump pals, all of whom have been convicted or pleaded guilty to a felony charge. Any of them should be happy to commensurate with Trump over his conviction. That is, if they’re out of jail. And if they’re allowed to associate with felons.

1. Paul Manafort, campaign chairman: Tax fraud and bank fraud
2. Rick Gates, Trump’s deputy campaign manager: Conspiracy against the United States
3. Roger Stone, campaign adviser: Obstruction, lying to the FBI, witness interference 
4. Steve Bannon, chief strategist: Defying a subpoena 
5. George Nader, foreign policy adviser: Child sex abuse
6. Peter Navarro, trade adviser: Contempt of Congress
7. Michael Cohen, Trump attorney: Campaign finance fraud and tax evasion
8. Jenna Ellis, Trump attorney: Aiding and abetting false statements
9. Micahel Flynn, national security adviser: Lying to the FBI
10. George Papadopoulos, campaign adviser: Lying to the FBI
11. Kenneth Chesebro, Trump attorney: Conspiracy to file false documents 
12. Alan Wiesselberg, Trump Organization CFO: Perjury
13. Elliot Broidy, top fundraiser and campaign adviser: Conspiracy to violate FISA 

Trump used his extraordinary pardon authority in a very un-ordinary way the last time he had the opportunity, pardoning pals Manafort, Flynn, Broidy, and Stone so that none of them had to serve more than a fraction of their sentences. He also pardoned Bannon, who was charged with ripping off donors who thought they were helping to build Trump’s wall, before his case even went to trial. That didn’t stop Bannon from getting himself indicted a second time—and convicted—after Trump left office. 

Right now, the Good Felons club doesn’t include his former attorneys Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, who have both been indicted. And Sidney Powell is only a junior member, thanks to her multiple misdemeanors. 

Chief of staff Mark Meadows and deputy chief of staff Daniel Scavino didn’t face charges, though the House voted to hold them in contempt and recommended their prosecution to the Department of Justice. They got lucky.

But give it time. More Trump associates are sure to join the list.

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Private-equity investors have poured billions into healthcare but often game the system, hurting both doctors and patients. From a report: Consolidation is as American as apple pie. When a business gets bigger, it forces mom-and-pop players out of the market, but it can boost profits and bring down costs, too. Think about the pros and cons of Walmart and "Every Day Low Prices." In a complex, multitrillion-dollar system like America's healthcare market, though, that principle has turned into a harmful arms race that has helped drive prices increasingly higher without improving care. Years of dealmaking has led to sprawling hospital systems, vertically integrated health insurance companies, and highly concentrated private equity-owned practices resulting in diminished competition and even the closure of vital health facilities. As this three-part Heard on the Street series will show, the rich rewards and lax oversight ultimately create pain for both patients and the doctors who treat them. Belatedly, state and federal regulators and lawmakers are zeroing in on consolidation, creating uncertainty for the investors who have long profited from the healthcare merger boom. Consider the impact of massive private-equity investment in medical practices. When a patient with employer-based insurance goes under for surgery, the anesthesiologist's fee is supposed to be determined by market forces. But what happens if one firm quietly buys out several anesthesiologists in the same city and then hikes the price of the procedure? Such a scheme was allegedly implemented by the private-equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe and the company it created in 2012, U.S. Anesthesia Partners, according to a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit filed last year. It started by buying the largest practice in Houston and then making three further acquisitions, eventually expanding into other cities throughout the state of Texas. In each location, the lawsuit alleges, USAP pursued an aggressive strategy of eliminating competitors by either acquiring them or conspiring with them to weaken competition. As one insurance executive put it in the FTC lawsuit, USAP and Welsh Carson used acquisitions to "take the highest rate of all ... and then peanut butter spread that across the entire state of Texas." In May, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt dismissed the FTC's unusual step of charging the private-equity investor, Welsh Carson, but allowed the case against USAP to proceed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Increasingly redundant copper wires may be worth over $7 billion to telecommunications firms, should they take the trouble to recycle them. From a report: The estimate comes from British engineering company TXO, which claims there's up to 800,000 metric tons of copper wiring that could be harvested in the next ten years. TXO claims over a dozen telcos are investigating extracting copper wires from old networks to sell on the open market. The need for copper wiring is declining as carriers adopt fiber optics, which have superior carrying capacity -- one upcoming fiber technology is expected to increase the data capacity of undersea cables by 12 times. While repurposing old stuff isn't unusual, recycling copper can be particularly valuable as the conductive metal is a crucial material for things like solar panels and batteries, which rely on old-school electrical wiring. A 2022 report from S&P Global estimated demand for copper would double by 2035 -- from 25 million metric tons in 2022 to 50 million -- and since the copper mining industry reportedly won't be able to keep up with demand, that means higher prices. Copper is already 50 percent more expensive since the COVID-19 pandemic, and prices will likely continue to increase.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An explosive new essay published in Slate on Thursday raises new allegations about former President Donald Trump’s behavior on the set of The Apprentice, renewing focus on his history of racist comments and misconduct toward women. 

The piece, by Bill Pruitt, a former producer on the reality show, claims Trump used the n-word to describe a Black contestant named Kwame Jackson, and describes how he openly commented on women’s appearances. 

The allegations are at once shocking … and not. They echo much of what’s known about Trump based both on his public behavior and reports about his private conduct. The piece also revives a past allegation about the former president using the racial slur, this time offering testimony from a direct source who purportedly witnessed it. 

A Trump campaign spokesperson, in a response to Pruitt, has denied the essay’s claims. 

Black voters and women are both groups that Trump has sought to make inroads with this year as the 2024 election is expected to be extremely close. Whether the essay alters any voters’ perceptions of Trump remains to be seen, particularly as the version of Trump portrayed in the piece doesn’t differ greatly from his public persona. But even if Pruitt’s piece doesn’t affect how voters see the former president, it’s putting his troubling track record into the spotlight once more. 

Pruitt claims there are recordings of Trump saying unsavory things 

Pruitt’s essay focuses on how Apprentice producers were able to make Trump appear like a successful and commanding businessperson despite his bumbling persona and well-established history of scamming those he worked with. 

In the piece, Pruitt describes the ways in which editing, offscreen coaching, and sets were used to establish Trump’s business acumen and to obscure sexist and racist comments that he made. 

“We scammed. We swindled. Nobody heard the racist and misogynistic comments or saw the alleged cheating, the bluffing, or his hair taking off in the wind,” Pruitt writes. 

Below are some of the specific examples Pruitt cites: 

• Racist comments: Pruitt says that there is a tape of Trump using the n-word to describe Jackson, a Black Goldman Sachs banker, as the judges are discussing who should win the first season of The Apprentice. 

According to Pruitt, Carolyn Kepcher, one of Trump’s employees who advised him on the show, argued that Jackson did a strong job with the season’s final challenge, and he deserved to win. 

“Yeah,” Trump allegedly said, “but, I mean, would America buy a n— winning?”

Pruitt says that Kepcher’s face reddened, but producers and those in the room simply glossed over the comment and continued with the taping. He adds that such statements were cut from the show and that he does not believe those tapes will ever come to light. 

• Treatment of women: Trump’s comments about women, including staff on the show as well as contestants, are also called out in the essay. 

Pruitt claims that Trump prevented one camera operator from getting on the elevator with him, stating that she’s too “heavy” and openly commented on another’s looks, saying “that’s all I want to look at.” He also says that Trump described a contestant, as “the one with the …” while gesturing toward his chest. 

• Scamming workers: In recent years, there have been a number of reports about Trump shortchanging contractors. Pruitt says he learned of this firsthand while filming the show after meeting an architect at Trump National Golf Club, who described being stiffed for half the cost of the work he did.  

The essay may not change anyone’s mind about Trump, but it still matters

Many of the issues the piece raises are familiar ones. 

In office, and on the campaign trail, Trump has been well-known for racist remarks, including describing Haiti and El Salvador as “shithole” countries, and threatening violence toward Black Lives Matter protesters. His policies, too, have taken aim at immigrant families and promoting diversity training in the workplace. Trump’s misogyny has been long established as well, with more than 20 women accusing him of sexual misconduct and a bombshell Access Hollywood video featuring him bragging about sexually assaulting women. 

The piece treads similar ground. And for many of his core supporters, in particular, these revelations are unlikely to change their support of him. 

The essay does, however, reignite discussion of Trump’s attitudes toward women and minorities as he tries to win over pivotal swing voters in 2024. In 2020, suburban women were a major group that boosted President Joe Biden in key swing states while Trump made marginal gains with Black male voters. 

Pruitt’s piece points to key vulnerabilities Trump still has with these groups, and is a reminder of how his history could make improving his standing with them an uphill battle. 

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Ever since the story broke of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s upside-down insurrection flag, Democrats have been calling on him to police himself. On Wednesday, he said nope, not gonna, you can’t make him.

And on Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts told Democrats that’s good enough for him.

In regard to questions concerning any Justice's participation in pending cases, the Members of the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed the practice we have followed for 235 years pursuant to which individual Justices decide recusal issues. … It is my understanding that Justice Alito has sent you a letter addressing this subject.

Yes, Alito sent a letter addressing whether he should recuse himself from cases concerning the Donald Trump-inspired insurrection on the grounds that the pro-insurrection flag at his house sure made him look pro-insurrection himself. He addressed it by saying it’s all his wife’s fault because she really loves flying all kinds of flags, and even though he told her to take it down, she’s quite insubordinate and refused.

But also, Alito has consulted himself on whether he can be impartial—and he had decided that he can, so that’s the end of that.

So, therefore, the most powerful judge in the United States sees no reason to intervene and certainly sees no reason to answer any questions about it, despite the highest-ranking Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee asking him to do that.

I must respectfully decline your request for a meeting. As noted in my letter to Chairman Durbin last April, apart from ceremonial events, only on rare occasions in our Nation's history has a sitting Chief Justice met with legislators, even in a public setting (such as a Committee hearing) with members of both major political parties present. Separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence counsel against such appearances.

In Roberts’ version of the Constitution, it clearly states that the legislative branch of government—which confirms the appointment of members of the judicial branch of government, like Roberts himself—actually has nothing to do with the judicial branch of government. Roberts has yet to make his special version of the Constitution available to anyone, including Democratic senators.

But here’s the real kicker, where Roberts makes clear he’s as much a partisan hack as his buddy Alito.

Moreover, the format proposed—a meeting with leaders of only one party who have expressed an interest in matters currently pending before the Court — simply underscores that participating in such a meeting would be inadvisable.

In other words, since Senate Republicans have no interest in investigating the corruption of Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court, Roberts doesn’t consider the request of the chair of the Judiciary Committee, Dick Durbin, and his fellow Democrat-therefore-not-really-reason-enough colleague Richard Blumenthal sufficient.

So, where does that leave us? Despite all the polite requests from Democrats that the Supreme Court police itself, two justices have now said quite explicitly they will not.

Perhaps—just spitballing here—Democrats, who, contrary to Roberts’ secret Constitution, absolutely do have the right and authority to ask questions of the judicial branch and even impeach and remove its corrupt members, should stop asking nicely and take it upon themselves to do something.

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Every violent crime is a tragedy. Behind the statistics are real people experiencing injury, trauma, and loss. 

However, the great news is that far fewer Americans are personally involved in these tragedies than they were not so long ago, as the rate of violent crime continues to plummet. Despite false claims by Donald Trump that crime has increased under President Joe Biden, PolitiFact confirms that in 2022, the violent crime rate neared a 50-year low. 

That’s not all. Preliminary statistics for 2023 indicate the lowest levels of violent crime ever recorded, dropping below previous records in 2014 and 2019. And that’s still not all, because right now it appears that 2024 is still trending down.

Americans are safer now than they have been in decades, and the numbers have only gotten better under Biden. 

But you won’t hear that from Republicans, or Fox News, or much of the media. Because pushing fear is all they know.

There are fewer violent crimes now than there were in 1971 under Richard Nixon, despite a population that has increased by over 100 million people. Today we are experiencing not simply fewer crimes per person, but fewer crimes overall. According to FBI statistics, there were over 5 million fewer violent crimes in the United States last year than in the final full year of Ronald Reagan's “tough on crime” administration.

After peaking in 1991 under George H. W. Bush, violent crime has been slowly declining year over year. There have been a few exceptions: Some categories of violent crime, including murder, were up in 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic. Even then, those numbers didn’t come close to the levels seen in the 1980s or 1990s.

All of this simply blows apart one of the right’s major talking points: racist claims that immigrants are generating a "crime wave." 

Trump has been drawing a connection between immigrants and crime ever since he rode down the golden escalator in 2015 to talk about Mexicans being rapists and drug dealers. He’s told bizarre—and false—stories of “taped-up women” being trafficked across the border. 

"Women are tied up, they're bound, duct tape put around their faces, around their mouths," Trump said in a 2019 press conference. "In many cases, they can't even breathe. They're put in the backs of cars or vans or trucks."

All of this seemed to be generated by some fetish of Trump’s, because as ABC News confirmed, there was no connection with reality.

Trump has also spread false claims that people on the terror watch list were rushing to the border after Biden became president. He’s made up endless stories about the gang MS-13, which has roots in Los Angeles’ Salvadoran community, to bolster his claims of a criminal “invasion.” And he’s exploited the unfortunate victims of crime, even lying about speaking to a murder victim's family during a rally speech about “Biden’s border bloodbath.”

Trump isn’t alone in this conspiracy of fear. Other Republicans have joined in the howling over this nonexistent immigrant crime wave.

"Since Joe Biden took office, crime has skyrocketed across our country," Rep. Nancy Mace wrote in a social media post on March 30. Except it hasn’t. 

Since the statistics show that crime is actually going down, Trump has also jumped in with a false attack on FBI crime statistics, adding “fake numbers” to the list of things he can dismiss when they don’t fit his narrative. Fox News has also been leading the charge to undercut the truth by pushing an evidence-free claim from a recently formed right-wing group insisting that America has suddenly developed an issue with counting crimes.

Finally, with gun sales declining for three years in a row, firearms manufacturers are also feeding the idea that crime is underreported—because otherwise, how are they going to keep up levels of fear that drive their customers to buy a deadly weapon for “self-defense?”

New York City Police Commissioner Edward Caban also hyped a "wave of migrant crime" that simply does not exist. But he helpfully provided Republicans with a remark that they have cited often and bolstered the idea that “blue cities” are hotbeds of crime. The truth is that crime is particularly down in large cities, including New York City.

Of course, there are some crimes that Republicans fully support. Only 18% of Republicans admit that Jan. 6 insurrectionists were violent and 45% believe punishment of those who fought with police, smashed their way into the Capitol, and tried to capture members of Congress has been too harsh. An eyebrow-raising 86% of Republicans don’t hold Trump to blame for any of it. But then 85% of Republicans don’t believe Trump should be prosecuted for any of the crimes he’s been charged with so far. It turns out Republicans are soft on crime—so long as it’s Republican crime.

Attempted insurrections aside, why isn't America reveling in an unprecedented period of personal safety? Because Trump, Republicans, Fox News, gun manufacturers, and a media that has operated for decades on “if it bleeds, it leads” all operate on fear.

And their biggest fear is that Americans will wake up and realize they shouldn't be scared.

Every day brings a new prognostication that is making President Joe Biden's campaign operatives worry or freak out. Is Donald Trump running away with the election? No. Not even close.

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A cartoon by Pedro Molina.

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett.

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