Reading

What else is new? Axios reports that there’s some dissonance in the House Freedom caucus. They’re voting for new leadership and there seems to be a bit of a problem: An influential member of the House Freedom Caucus won’t run for a leadership spot, citing a recommendation by the group’s board that Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) serve as its next chairman. “I am concerned that our group often relies too much on power (available primarily due to the narrow majority) and too little on influence with and among our colleagues,” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) told his fellow members in a letter sent Sunday. “I ask that we consider how to best increase our influence while preserving our power to move policy in the right direction.

The committee is pushing a bill that civil liberties experts say would amount to the largest expansion of domestic surveillance in decades.

The post Trump Allies Are Giddy About House Intelligence Committee’s Surveillance Bill appeared first on The Intercept.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

They’re making an effort. Will it be enough? Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop takes a look at how the media is handling Trump’s threats to democracy. He notes the flurry of articles in recent days exposing the authoritarian Trump agenda for his second term and examining his increasingly fascistic language and makes the same observation that I did earlier about the Trump campaign obviously getting nervous about it. However: Back in January, as part of an article laying out the media dynamics CJR’s staff would be watching this year, I wrote that I would be interested to see how media outlets continued to center—or didn’t—threats to democracy; I’d observed some progress on this front in 2022, but also feared that last year’s midterms—which brought defeat for the most ardent Trumpian election deniers running to assume oversight of the country’s election infrastructure—could push the question down the media agenda even though the threat hadn’t dissipated.

Projects to map the universe are getting weird.

The post The Cosmic Web and the Fate of the Universe appeared first on Nautilus.

Hold the vacuum cleaner! There’s evidence in those motes.

The post How Dust Could Help Solve Crimes appeared first on Nautilus.

Kate Cox, the Texas woman who is carrying a fetus with a fatal anomaly, has been forced to leave the state to get her needed abortion: The announcement came as Kate Cox, 31, was awaiting a ruling from the Texas Supreme Court over whether she could legally obtain an abortion under narrow exceptions to the state’s ban. A judge gave Cox, a mother of two from the Dallas area, permission last week but that decision was put on hold by the state’s all-Republican high court. “Her health is on the line. She’s been in and out of the emergency room and she couldn’t wait any longer,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which was representing Cox. This is horrifying. Cox has the ability to pay for this and pay for an attorney. Other women in her position aren’t. The horror of these creepy men like the criminal Ken Paxton and that grotesque anti-abortion zealot Supreme Court just John Devine deciding such issues is overwhelming. I think this will be a problem for the Republicans politically but many, many people will have to suffer in the meantime.

Here's Disney+'s teaser for Russell T. Davies's Ncuti Gatwa & Millie Gibson- starring Doctor Who Christmas Special "The Church on Ruby Road."

The notion that the war would end if Hamas was overthrown or surrenders is as ahistorical as it is false.

The post This Is Not a War Against Hamas appeared first on The Intercept.

I was recently invited to contribute a paper to a special issue on the legacy of Che Guevara, published by Globalizations. As a feminist working at the intersection of international security and global political economy, I wanted to use the opportunity to seriously engage with Che’s normative contribution to theories of resistance. The call prompted me to think about the ethics of feminist anti-militarism and whether my feminism left room for support for the type of revolutionary violence we associate with Che.

The post Foco Feminism?: Rethinking the Ethics of Feminist Anti-Militarism appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

The case is “at the apex of public importance” Josh Kovensky at TPM reports: Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court on Monday to take up Donald Trump’s claim of presidential immunity, seeking to speed up a question which could delay the former president’s trial on charges he conspired to subvert the 2020 election. The trial is currently scheduled for March 4, 2024 in D.C. Trump lost his claim of absolute immunity at the district court and has appealed that ruling to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. But rather than wait for the appeals court to hear the case, Smith is now asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on whether presidential immunity protects Trump from prosecution for crimes related to his efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election. “It is of imperative public importance that respondent’s claims of immunity be resolved by this Court and that respondent’s trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected,” Smith wrote in the petition for writ of certiorari. Smith asked the high court to consider two issues.

And welcome to our annual celebration of the Great War on Christmas Yes, it’s that time of year again when we all eat too many goodies, wear ugly sweaters and pose with Santa Claus alongside our semi-automatic weapons. It’s Christmas time in America. And here at Hullabaloo it’s the time of year I ask you, my loyal readers, to put a little something into the old stocking to keep us going for yet another year. I think you all know how vital political information is right now. In fact, it’s never been more vital. Back when I was a young person, the biggest problem for most Americans was trying to wade through the conventional wisdom of the establishment media to find out the truth of what our government was really doing. That’s still an issue today but in the last few years we’ve had to confront the overwhelming problem of cacophonous propaganda bombarding us from every direction via our now ubiquitous social media. It is very hard to sort through it all, even for me and I have no life! Take this, for instance, from just this past weekend: You can say this is just fringe, and it should be.

.