The challenges ahead (Biden's America)

[N.E. Brigand]

What is it with Republicans and pedophilia?

1. Republicans pass a bill through the Ohio House that would allow disgruntled parents to force other people's children to be sexually assaulted.

2. Republican candidate for Massachusetts Sec. of State imagines teachers telling kindergartners to engage in sexual acts.

And that's just in the past 24 hours.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm glad that Kamala Harris is Vice President because of the historical significance, and I'm hopeful that it will lead to bigger and better things for her, but I do believe that if she had ended up as Attorney General instead of the ultra-cautious Merrick Garland, there is a significant likelihood that charges would have been filed against Trump and others as a result of the unlawful (and violent) attempts to overturn a lawful election.

[RoseMorninStar]

Which is perhaps further proof that Merrick Garland was better suited for Supreme court justice?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Absolutely. He was a good prosecutor back in the day, and did a good job prosecuting the Oklahoma City bombing, but that was a very different situation with very different ramifications. His years as a judge also I think did change his attitude and make him all the more cautious. However, all you have do is see the statements made by other judges, primarily the judge who ruled that Eastman's emails were not protected because there is evidence that he and Trump engaged in a criminal acts, and the judge that refused to dismiss the civil cases against Trump, to see just how cautious Garland is acting.

[N.E. Brigand]

Florida's Republican governor, Ron De Santis, has just signed into law a bill that dissolves the company town where Walt Disney World is located. The law is nominally intended to punish Disney for lobbying against Florida's recently-passed so-called "don't say gay" bill. Ironically, the "punishment" will actually reduce Disney's taxes by more than $100 million and will raise other Floridians' taxes by $1 billion. The new law doesn't actually take effect until June 2023, so what's probably going to happen is that a new bill repealing this one will be quietly passed early next year.

Not related to the Disney story, but: Christina Pushaw, the spokesperson for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, was contacted by federal agents, following which she retroactively registered as a foreign agent for her representation in 2018-2020 of the nation of Georgia.

Why does this sort of thing keep happening? Maybe the requirements weren't clear in the past, but by 2017 with the news about Paul Manafort and others, it was plain that if you're working to advance the interests of a foreign government in the U.S., you have to register with the Dept. of Justice.

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Edited to add: And as I was typing that, it was reported that the prestigious Brooking Institution has suspended its president, retired General John Allen -- who once led the U.S. mission in Afghanistan -- because he is under investigation for allegedly having been an unregistered foreign agent for Qatar (and for allegedly lying to the FBI about that).

[N.E. Brigand]

Legally, I understand that this is not what's termed a "true threat," but isn't the implied message here ...



... that if President Biden were to take steps to limit gun availability, then Kyle Rittenhouse will kill him?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I split off the discussion about Gender and threats to "Normality" to a separate thread in Tol Eressëa.

[Eldy]

A non-philosophical sequel to the post that began the split-off discussion:

Not sure what thread this belongs in, but today in Idaho a bunch of white nationalists were arrested after they were found in the back of a U-haul truck:

‘Pack Your Stuff and Get Out of My House,’ Says Patriot Front Member’s Mom - The Daily Beast

Karen Amsden, mom of alleged Patriot Front member and Springville, Utah resident Jared Michael Boyce, said on Monday that her son has struggled to fill “a void” in his life ever since his father left the family years ago and came out as gay. A licensed clinical social worker, Amsden said she’s going public in an attempt to sabotage his standing in the group, because her other attempts at convincing him to walk away from the far right have so far failed.

“I would love to do whatever I can to out him [as a Patriot Front member] so that he can’t be a part of it,” she said. “And that they don’t want him to be a part of their group because his mom has loose lips and a big mouth and he’s never going to get away with anything.”

Amsden said that after her son was released from jail, he told her he’d continue to stand with the group, so she delivered an ultimatum. “I told him, ‘Well, then you can’t live here. You can choose between Patriot Front and your family.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, I can’t quit Patriot Front.’ I’m like, ‘Well, then you've just chosen. So pack your stuff and get out of my house.’”

I feel sorry for the mom, but

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Thank you, Eldy. I almost didn't move that first post since it was political, but I didn't think the thread would make sense without it. Now it is in both places.

[Sunsilver]

Happy to hear his mom took a stand!

[RoseMorninStar]

I give that mother credit.. I can't imagine how hard that must be. My views stand apart from most of my extended family and it's awful. The lies, manipulation, propaganda. Brainwashing, imo. So awful.

[N.E. Brigand]

"South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg was reading Joe Biden conspiracy theories at John Solomon's 'Just The News' website while driving when he slammed into a man, killing him and hitting him so hard the man's face came through the windshield. (Ravnsborg claimed he thought he hit a deer.)"

Here's the source of that quote, which includes video of investigators talking Ravnsborg through a timeline based on his phone's history.

Ravnsborg won't even be impeached for killing a man and covering it up. And that's not my description of his actions. Those are the words of his fellow Republican, Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota.

Surprise, surprise! As I also noted here, while a South Dakota House of Representatives two weeks ago recommended against impeaching Ravnsborg two weeks ago, the full House has just voted 36-31 to impeach him.

South Dakota's Senate this afternoon voted to convict Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg on both counts of impeachment against him resulting from his having struck and killed a man with his car in 2020 and then apparently covering up what happened, actions for which he was not criminally charged. That removes him from office. The Senate also barred him from holding office again in South Dakota.

The vote was 24-9 on the first charge of causing the death of Joseph Boever and 31-2 on the second charge of malfeasance in office. (Two-thirds of the full Senate membership of 35 -- i.e., 24 votes -- were needed to convict; two members apparently were absent.) I'm not sure what the vote was to bar him from future office.

I just learned that Ravnsborg's name is pronounced "rounds-burg."

[Eldy]

Reading some background on this case, and ... wow. Pleasantly surprised to find that blatantly lying about reality is not always enough to convince a majority of legislators of your own party to let you off free of any consequences.

Ravnsborg said he discovered Boever's body the next morning when he returned the sheriff's car and went to the scene of the collision to search for the carcass of the deer he thought he had struck.[129] The South Dakota Department of Public Safety began an investigation of the collision.[130][131][132] Investigators from North Dakota were sent to investigate the crash because of the conflict of interest created by the fact that South Dakota's public safety department reports to the attorney general.[133] The investigators indicated that Boever had been stuck partially inside Ravnsborg's vehicle for an undetermined amount of time.[134] Boever's broken reading glasses were discovered inside Ravnsborg's Ford Taurus, leading detectives to tell Ravnsborg that "his face was in your windshield"; Ravnsborg denied seeing Boever's body or the glasses.[135]

[N.E. Brigand]

I missed this commentary at the time it was shared last fall.



In short, Jacob says that media companies "both sides" the news, prioritizing a veneer of respectability rather than the truth. He says he thought he was being fair by treating Democrats and Republicans equally as he edited the front page of one of the nation's top newspapers, but he came to realize he was really being lazy.

Hillary Clinton mishandled emails. George W. Bush lied to get us into a war. Both were bad.* But one was way worse. The media’s self-assigned job to treat Republicans and Democrats equally has compelled them to pump up coverage of Democratic scandals. It’s fairness-signaling.

The Republicans have overwhelmed the media with corruption. They’ve created scandal fatigue, prompting journalists to do something I call ethics norming. That’s when something that would have been a huge scandal in the recent past is considered normal now.

(*Edited to add: I am reminded that Jacob didn't even have to compare those two different kinds of "scandal," because while Hillary Clinton destroyed 30,000 emails that her attorneys reviewed and found to be personal -- a review which the FBI determined was done in good faith (if not without some minor errors) -- George Bush's administration "lost" 22 million White House emails, which they had been storing on a Republican National Committee server, that Congress requested in 2007.)

Those comments and others on the state of the U.S. media are being shared in light of reports that major news organizations like the New York Times are instructing their workforce, including the 50% of their workforce who just had their rights taken away by the Supreme Court yesterday, not to talk about that publicly.

I agree that's a little fascist.

[Eldy]

To be fair to the media, this is part of a much larger problem of the golden mean fallacy being baked into the political culture of the American center-left, along with a knee-jerk distrust of people who believe in things strongly enough that they're not willing to sacrifice them in the name of compromise and bipartisanship. Unsurprisingly, this way of thinking is insufficient to stand up to a political opposition that does believe in things and have goals other than the maintenance of a milquetoast status quo which benefits the professional upper middle class. Not to say that the GOP's increasingly blatant willingness to undermine democracy isn't also a problem, because it's a really, really serious problem.

(It's also not my intention to say that Democrats should always bow to the wishes of the loudest voices within the coalition, which are disproportionately the voices of highly educated, upper or upper middle class, straight, white, urban professionals, who frequently crowd out the perspectives of the marginalized groups they claim to be championing.)

[N.E. Brigand]

This is Texas's current governor, Greg Abbott, politicizing a tragedy, and rather incompetently at that:



Question: if the border is open, why were these migrants hiding inside a truck?

[Sunsilver]

Duuhhh...

[Cerin]

Question: if the border is open, why were these migrants hiding inside a truck?

If you don't want or aren't able to walk the hundreds of miles on your own, you pay the cartels to traffic you in. If you can get 100 miles into the U.S., you can avoid Title 42 scrutiny.

[Alatar]

I have to say Cerin, its great to hear someone sensibly and clearly arguing the republican stance here.

[Cerin]

I have to say Cerin, its great to hear someone sensibly and clearly arguing the republican stance here.

Was that meant to be snark?

If not, thank you.