I have posted that before with the caveat that at least America isn’t seeking external expansion. Well…
Reading
Can I get an ‘Amen’? Mega money doesn’t necessarily go with megalomania. But one can find plenty of evidence for a correlation. Josh Marshall unearths a fine example in “Donald Trump’s Greenland jones” originating perhaps with tech-bro Dryden Brown. When money goes to your head, what does it do there? In Brown’s case, convince you you can fly into a poor country unannounced and try to buy it. In Peter Thiel’s case, prompt you to send an essay packed with “just asking questions” conspiracy theories and get the august Financial Times to print it. Kieran Healy, a Duke University Professor of Sociology, read Thiel’s offering and commented: This Thiel Op-Ed is really nuts. I mean, truly. His focus of attention is like a pinball careening around in a machine where every bumper and paddle is a noisy, flashing conspiracy topic. I get more measured and carefully-reasoned emails on these topics every other week from mentally-ill cranks. It’s never clear just what Thiel’s point is.
Biden drills down on offshore drilling, credit scores get healthier, social security gets a hand, and sketchy mortgage lenders are locked out.
Laboratories of election thievery In the District of Columbia this week, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Donald Trump’s demand to delay his Friday sentencing in the New York hush money case. But in Raleigh, North Carolina, SCOTUS’s Mini-Me court accepted the demand by Judge Jefferson Griffin to delay certification of the race he lost in November. Griffin’s team hopes to have the state Supreme Court election overturned by the state Supreme’s Republican majority. Basic fact: After multiple recounts, incumbent Associate Justice Allison Riggs (D) defeated NC Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin (R) by 734 votes. I’ve already briefed you on this saga here, here, here, here, here, and here. The New York Times contacted several citizens among the 60,000 whose votes the NC GOP proposes voiding in an “extraordinary effort“: “Anyone who is trying to invalidate my personal vote as fraudulent — that’s a direct attack on the voters,” said Mr. Clay, who voted for Judge Griffin, who now sits on the North Carolina Court of Appeals. “It’s inexcusable to contest these legal ballots. He’s a sore loser.
Doctor Who has two eras and two sets of fans who now complain that the current era isn't as fresh or new. So what can a 60-year-old show do?
Alfred Bourgeois’s daughter is convinced of his innocence. In the four years since his execution, she has waged a sometimes-lonely battle to prove it.
The post She Lost Her Dad to Trump’s Killing Spree. Now She Wants Biden to Clear His Name. appeared first on The Intercept.
Sixth form college teachers are striking for a fair pay deal, after the government announced a 5.5 percent pay rise for teachers that excludes sixth form colleges. Members of the National Education Union (NEU), who are on strike in over 30 colleges across the country, are demanding that the pay offer be extended to their […]
Public defenders and legal professionals said they never see the leniency offered to Trump given to other defendants.
The post A Tale of Two Justice Systems: Only Trump Gets Convicted of 34 Felonies and Receives No Punishment appeared first on The Intercept.
Developers and real estate interests crushed efforts to limit development in high-wildfire-risk areas — including in L.A. neighborhoods now in ashes.
I would post something about the animals and the fires but I just don’t have the heart. I put up some links last night if you want to check out some of the various organizations that are working in that area. The devastation is going to be immense for them just as it is for the humans. It’s all bad. Here are some zoo animals frolicking in the snow. It made me feel better, anyway.
On Tuesday, January 7, 2025—just its second day of the session—the Idaho legislature sent a...
They aren’t even waiting until their Dear Leader is inaugurated: Acres of orange fields sat unpicked in Kern County this week as word of Border Patrol raids circulated through Messenger chats and images of federal agents detaining laborers spread on local Facebook groups. The Border Patrol conducted unannounced raids throughout Bakersfield on Tuesday, descending on businesses where day laborers and field workers gather. Agents in unmarked SUVs rounded up people in vans outside a Home Depot and gas station that serves a breakfast popular with field workers. This appears to be the first large-scale Border Patrol raid in California since the election of Donald Trump, coming just a day after Congress certified the election on January 6, in the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency. The panic and confusion, for both immigrants and local businesses that rely on their labor, foreshadow what awaits communities across California if Trump follows through on his promise to conduct mass deportations. “It was profiling, it was purely field workers,” said Sara Fuentes, store manager of the local gas station.
The prison occupies a powerful place in the American imagination. In film and television it...
An area larger Manhattan has burned down. In the middle of fucking winter.
I’ve been watching the reaction, and there’s a lot of screeching about DEI and bad fire management and so on and it’s true that California’s fire management isn’t good.
Whatever.
California’s had shit water management forever, and decades of shitty fire management. What’s changing is the climate.
California was paradise because it had a mediterranean climate. That climate is shifting north. California is moving towards a new climate. Like most such changes it’s a fits and starts thing: some years its the old normal, others it’s the new normal. The old vegetation, suited for the old climate, will go, often in fire, sometimes replaced more gently.
Michael Tomasky wrote an excellent piece today about the unaccountable president, laying out the process by which he gets away with everything. No one expects anything of him and no matter what he says, the right wing media, the Congress and his allies in the judiciary will back him up. As an example he suggests that even if Trump were to be found to have given nuclear secrets to North Korea he would either claim it was fake news and the entire wingnuts apparatus would launch into gear calling it another hoax or he would admit it, saying it was a perfect move of a very stable genius and they’d all back his decision as necessary for national security despite its madness. That is not an exaggeration. I believe there is nothing that can make them abandon their support at this point. He writes: Trump will be a completely unaccountable president, then, for this very simple reason: The only three power systems capable of holding him to account—the right-wing media, Republicans in Congress, and the Supreme Court—have no interest in doing so.
The urban inferno is a warning about America’s future — if we do not combat the climate crisis and adapt to its threats.
The author on losing his home to wildfire, finding strength in solitude, and his new book Aflame
The post Pico Iyer’s Wide-Awake Silence appeared first on Nautilus.
Apparently: Putin is very eager to meet Trump face to face, the Kremlin is making no prerequisite demands for the meeting to take place. There has presumably been a lot of back channel diplomacy before this official meeting. The Russian side aims to exclude Ukraine from the process completely and present itself to Trump as the side willing to compromise, while blaming Kyiv (and Biden’s administration) for the continuation of the war. Sounds totally believable. I wonder if Trump will let anyone take notes. Two buds hands in glove.