2022 Archives

If the fake news wins and neofascist politicians like Trump again gain serious national power, America will be on a fast track down the same road as Russia. Over on Fox “News,” a recent segment with Tucker Carlson suggested that vaccines are more dangerous than getting Covid. Why do conservatives fall for this kind of BS? Multiple recent studies show that Republicans are as much as 8.5 times more likely to both believe and share fake or false “news” with others than are Democrats. The phenomenon is obvious, actually: while as many as half of Republicans believe the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump, there’s no similarly disprovable “big lie” embraced by Democrats. And it’s not limited to things like elections that are overtly political: Republicans are more likely than Democrats to reject basic science about Covid, and thus die of the disease at much higher rates than Democrats.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Have "The Birchers" Won? — There's a debate dividing the Jan 6 committee - Should Trump be referred to the DOJ for prosecution? Or would that backfire? — How the corporate media whittles away at democracy. — Why isn't the media asking if the Saudi sweetheart deal is really just a payout or bribe to Kushner for his services during the Trump presidency? — Why the GOP refuses to do debates with Commission of Presidential Debates. — Why Is It not OK to be a unicorn if you are a child? — Racism Alert! Penn Law professor Amy Wax tells Tucker Carlson that "Blacks" and other "non-western" groups harbor "resentment, shame, and envy" against western people for their "outsized achievements and contributions." But wait...there's more... — Crazy Alert! Are human sacrifices the logical conclusion of deflated tires?

If Trump were to simply ignore AG James’ subpoena and drag things out, it would cost him around $3.6 million a year: that’s chump change for a billionaire oligarch. Last Thursday New York’s Attorney General Leticia James asked a state judge to fine Donald Trump $10,000-a-day until he complies with a subpoena from last December requiring him to turn over documents relating to the development of a fancy estate in upstate New York. The deadline had been March 3rd, but Trump is still procrastinating. Ten thousand dollars a day seems like a lot of money to most of us, but consider Donald Trump’s situation: he has billions, and access to billions more through friends he made when president. The dictator of Saudi Arabia, for example, just apparently paid-off Trump’s son-in-law to the tune of $2 billion, as documented by Judd Legum at Popular.info.

Neoliberalism has failed - The question is whether we’ll return to sane & humane economic policies & ban big money from politics or if we’ll embrace the authoritarian policies of Putin, Trump & Le Pen A bit over 40 years ago the UK and the United States — followed within a few years by most of the rest of western Europe — embarked on a radical experiment in governance and economics. “Neoliberalism” was the word invented by a small group of utopian economists at a 1938 meeting in France, and it was turned into a movement at a 1947 meeting in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland. At that time the world had been shaken by the rise of Communism in the Soviet Union (and China) and the disaster Fascism brought to Germany and then all of Europe. The hope of neoliberalism’s founders was that it would prevent the rise of both communism and fascism in the developed democracies of the world: a sort of magic formula for governance that would keep the world safe and free forever.