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Friday, March 15, 2024

The family of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation's plans to give its "Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Award" to conservative billionaires Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch, among others, "an affront to the memory of our mother and grandmother." The honor was first awarded in 2020, before the justice's death, with the intent to recognize "an extraordinary woman who has exercised a positive and notable influence on society and served as an exemplary role model in both principles and practice." read more


Sunday, March 10, 2024

Ken Block's book provides an insider's account of the desperate measures Trump's campaign took to pursue allegations of voter fraud and of how quickly the campaign concluded internally that each one was invalid ... read more


Thursday, February 22, 2024

Four major nonprofits that rose to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic by capitalizing on the spread of medical misinformation collectively gained more than $118 million between 2020 and 2022, enabling the organizations ... read more


Steve Benen: The GOP's star witness in the House Republicans' impeachment crusade against President Joe Biden "admitted that officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story about" Hunter Biden. Dem. Rep. Dan Goldman noted via social media that the "only remaining question" is whether GOP lawmakers "were witting or unwitting agents" of the Russian government. read more


Wednesday, February 21, 2024

David Kurtz (TPM): Everywhere you turn, it's Russia either helping Trump directly or indirectly by damaging Trump's foes. The pattern is clear and persistent but also so sweeping and far-reaching that it really requires taking a step back to grasp the full scope of it all. All those breathless Biden impeachment process stories? They're an outgrowth of this disinformation campaign. read more


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"These groups gave jet fuel to misinformation at a crucial time in the pandemic," Arthur Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, said. "The richer they get, the worse off the public is because, indisputably, they're spouting dangerous nonsense that kills people."

The influx of pandemic cash sent executive compensation soaring, boosted public outreach, and seeded the ability to wage legislative and legal battles to weaken vaccine requirements and defend physicians accused of spreading misinformation.

"These groups gave jet fuel to misinformation at a crucial time in the pandemic," Caplan said. "The richer they get, the worse off the public is because, indisputably, they're spouting dangerous nonsense that kills people."

Some doctors following guidance by Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance or America's Frontline Doctors have been disciplined or face the possibility of discipline from state medical boards alleging substandard medical care. In cases involving two doctors alleged to have followed Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance guidance, three patients died.

Public health experts, including Caplan, worry that the well-funded anti-science movement could lead to devastating long-term public health consequences if childhood diseases once vanquished by vaccines come roaring back.

This is not how national public health policy should work in a scientific evidence-based society. Anti-science's ascendency during the presidency of an anti-intellectual is literally killing Americans for no reason whatsoever but for those who cling to the ignorant canard that their own beliefs are just as viable as scientifically-derived facts and medicines.

The implications of this Russian operation are staggering, especially for the willing Republicans and right-wing media stooges who were the useful idiots propagating the disinformation for years. The James Comers, Chuck Grassleys, Jim Jordans of the world have been trafficking in this stuff as the purported basis for a Biden impeachment, which is itself tightly yoked to Trump's campaign for re-election. Right-wing outlets, most notably Fox News, have been amplifying the claims not dozens or hundreds but thousands of times over the past several months.

It has dominated right-wing media, become an accepted "fact" among MAGA adherents, and allowed elected Republicans to play mainstream media like a cheap fiddle.

We're nearly a decade into Putin's sustained, unrelenting attack on American democracy through misinformation and mischief. Among other things, the Republican Party and its standard bearer have been successfully enmeshed in it and thoroughly compromised. When this all began, Putin in his wildest imagination could not have conceived of this level of success.

This is why we have MAGAts and GOPers still proclaiming that Russian involvement in supporting Trump and destabilizing American politics is actually fake news. Russia started their targeted influence campaign over a decade ago, and it's continuing unabated - now led by Republicans in Congress only happy to use Russian disinformation in their attempt to besmirch Joe Biden for things that he never did.

Calling MAGAts Putin sympathizers doesn't begin to scratch the surface of their willing complicity in placing Russia's interests over those of the American people. It's past time to shine the light of truth on all the Republicans and insurrectionists blindly denying Russia's non-stop role in subverting our democracy and destabilizing the globe by allowing Russia treachery to go insufficiently answered.

In one 2022 case, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson declared during sentencing, "People need to understand that they can't do this, or anything like this, again. They can't try to force their will on the American people once the American people have already spoken at the ballot box. That's the opposite of democracy - it's tyranny. And the threat to democracy, the dark shadow of tyranny, unfortunately, has not gone away.

"There are people who are still disseminating the lie that the election was stolen. They're doing it today," she continued. "And the people who are stoking that anger for their own selfish purposes, they need to think about the havoc they've wreaked, the lives they've ruined, the harm to their supporters' families, even, and the threat to this country's foundation."

Similarly, in November 2021, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta sentenced a Jan. 6 rioter named John Lolos, while reflecting on the fact that the criminal was responding to Donald Trump's call.

Mehta said at the time, "People like Mr. Lolos were told lies, told falsehoods, told our election was stolen when it clearly was not. We're here today deciding whether Mr. Lolos should spend 30 days in jail when those who created the conditions that led to Mr. Lolos' conduct, led to the events of Jan. 6 [haven't been] held to account for their actions and their word."

Speaking directly to the defendant, the judge continued, "In a sense, Mr. Lolos, I think you were a pawn. You were a pawn in a game directed and played by people who should know better."

After a jury convicted another Jan. 6 rioter, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton shared a few thoughts after the verdict was read. "I think our democracy is in trouble, because unfortunately we have charlatans like our former president, who doesn't, in my view, really care about democracy but only about power," the conservative federal jurist said in court.

Unfortunately, none of the jurists above happen to sit on the SCOTUS. He's hoping these judges' simple logic permeates the partisan leanings of the current conservative faction sitting on our highest court.

The average tax rate for the top 1% is 26%. It's 3% for the bottom 50%

What a totally misleading crock of ----. Let's bury this idiocy once and for all. Please feel free to bookmark this post/source and shove it back into Madbomber's piehole the next time he trots out his cherry-picked federal income tax computations blithefully ignoring most of, it not all of, the rest, including the fact that many GOP-controlled states don't even have state income taxes and compile their revenues from far more regressive taxes and fees falling more disproportionately upon those with lessor incomes.

Who Pays Taxes in America

Commentators seeking to create the impression that high-income households are paying an outsized share of the nation's taxes tend to focus their attention narrowly on the most progressive taxes. It is true that some of our revenue sources are quite progressive, including the federal personal income tax, corporate income tax and estate tax.

But Americans pay other federal taxes that are not progressive. For example, everyone who works pays the Social Security payroll tax. Americans also pay state and local taxes that are particularly regressive, meaning they capture a larger share of income from low- or middle-income families than from wealthy families. State and local income taxes are much less progressive than the federal income tax, and some states have no income tax at all.

Property taxes levied at the state and local level affect everyone who owns a home or other real estate and affect renters as well because landlords tend to pass on some of their property taxes as part of the rents they charge to tenants.

State and local sales taxes are paid by virtually everyone. These are particularly regressive because poor families have little choice but to spend all their income buying necessities while wealthy families can save most of their income, shielding it from sales taxes. (This is why those championing VAT only want to INCREASE the shift of taxation onto those who by necessity spend the greatest percentage of their income in order to simply live their lives)

The figures in this report estimate combined federal, state and local taxes paid in the United States in 2019. They show that overall, our tax system is moderately progressive and people at every income level are paying taxes in the aggregate.

For example, this graph shows that the effective total tax rate -- the total federal, state and local taxes paid as a share of income -- is higher for those at the top than for those at the bottom, but the difference is less than commonly believed.

The bottom fifth of Americans pay a lower effective total tax rate, but they nonetheless pay a fifth of their income in taxes. The middle fifth of Americans pay about a fourth of their income in taxes, while the top 1 percent pay about a third of their income in taxes.

But you losers are too afraid to let him run against Dementia Joe this year? If he's a liar and a cheat, why not let the commander-in-depends show him who's boss?

In advising the Court to keep Trump on the ballot, political commentators elevate their own fears about others' resentment above the Constitution. But the very reason we have a Constitution is to handle fear and resentment. To become a public champion of your own own fears and others' resentments is to support an insurrectionary regime.

The purpose of the insurrection clause of the Constitution (the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment) is not to encourage insurrections! If we publicly say that that Supreme Court should disregard it because we fear insurrections, we are making insurrections more likely. We are telling Americans that to undermine constitutional rule they must only intimate that they might be violent.

And much that is very essential would be lost: the rule of law, and the authority of the Supreme Court. How does the rule of law become something else? First comes the acceptance that one person is not subject to the rule of law, for whatever bad reason -- that he was in office; that he has violent supporters; that he is charismatic; that we are cowards. Once that move is made, once that hole is opened, the person so sanctified as a Leader has been empowered to change the regime itself, and will predictably try to do so.

As that person attempts regime change from a position of executive power, he will (again, utterly predictably) try to discredit the other branches of government, the legislative and the judicial. This will involve mocking them. The executive (the president, in our system) will claim extensive powers on the basis of existing laws (Trump has already signaled this), and then argue that he personally cannot be restrained by the courts (as Trump's lawyers have argued in another case). After a while, the makers and the interpreters of laws will seem irrelevant, because they are. Checks and balances cease to function, and a constitutional order becomes something else: a dictatorship based on the threat of violence.

snyder.substack.com

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