Good to know According to the DC Circuit, congressional reps can foment coups and there’s nothing anyone can do about it: A top House conservative’s conversations with allies in Congress and the Trump White House about overturning the 2020 election are off-limits to special counsel Jack Smith, an appeals court ruled in a newly unsealed court opinion. A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that prosecutors’ effort to access the cellphone communications of Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) with colleagues and executive branch officials violated his immunity under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate clause, which shields members of Congress from legal proceedings connected to their official duties. “While elections are political events, a Member’s deliberation about whether to certify a presidential election or how to assess information relevant to legislation about federal election procedures are textbook legislative acts,” Judge Neomi Rao wrote in the opinion issued last week. The decision breaks new ground in a decadeslong tug-of-war between Congress and the executive branch.
Reading
A chilling laboratory of authoritarianism I thought this piece by Don Moynihan was one of the best analyses I’ve seen of the attack on democracy we’re seeing in Wisconsin. It’s long but if you have time, read the whole thing. You’ll understand what’s happening in Wisconsin but also where the Republicans are headed nationally. This is who they are now: “DEMOCRACY IS A SYSTEM IN WHICH parties lose elections,” according to the political scientist Adam Przeworski. By that measure Wisconsin is not really a democracy. Sure, the Republican Party of Wisconsin routinely is defeated in statewide elections. Indeed, since 2018, they have lost fourteen of seventeen such races. But can they be said to really lose when they refuse to accept their defeat and instead use power accrued by undemocratic means to minimize or even reverse those losses? In this, Wisconsin was the pre-Trump canary in the coal mine, alerting us to the undemocratic depths to which the GOP would descend. The state’s Republicans then became bolder following Trump’s Big Lie example.
In May 1971, I published a full-page letter in The Australian addressed ‘To Those Who Shape Australia’s Destiny’. It was signed by 730 Australian scientists including Sir Mark Oliphant and Sir Macfarlane Burnett. The letter concluded with these words: “For biological and ecological reasons civilisation based on the present western technology cannot survive much longer. Continue reading »
An innocent invitation to a conference could turn into a nightmare. Next month I shall be on my way to an Australian Studies conference in Beijing, but already I am nervous about my travel plans because of recent stories about the attitude of Australian spy agencies to information exchanges with China. Friends, if I fail Continue reading »
Prior to his most recent overseas trip to Jakarta, Manila, and New Delhi, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been abroad a dozen times. Not bad for a government that’s been in office for just on eighteen months. The next few months will see him flying off again for half a dozen more summits, head to head meetings Continue reading »
It is time for government to get the suits back under control and manage the economy for the benefit of us all. When my brain was switching to idle on my recent break, I thought of two central questions. First, for whose benefit is the economy being run – a handful of company executives at Continue reading »
Without reform, Australia’s schooling system threatens to create a lost generation of young people. Teddy is a Kamilaroi university student who dreams of making a difference to educational outcomes of First Nation peoples. Growing up in regional New South Wales was fraught with challenges related to disadvantage for Teddy, but the amazing teachers who supported Continue reading »
By chance, US president Biden’s goodwill visit to Vietnam’s communist government in Hanoi came just 50 years after the notorious 1972 Christmas bombings. These bombings saw more than 200 American B-52s flying 730 sorties and dropping over 20,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam over a period of 12 days in December 1972. The aim: Continue reading »
The American diplomatic starship, USS Exceptionalism, fell to earth at the G20 Leaders’ Summit in New Delhi. Thankfully for the world, India, that is Bharat, successfully landed its earthbound diplomacy. Only a few weeks ago, during the BRICS Leaders Summit, the Global South and its Eurasian partners had stood to applaud Prime Minister Modi because Continue reading »
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Vladimir Putin could barely contain his excitement Tuesday while discussing Donald Trump, telling a forum in Vladivostok that the criminal cases against the former president are “good” for Russia and that the Kremlin took delight in Trump’s claim he’d swiftly force an end to Moscow’s war against Ukraine. “As for the persecution of Trump… for us, what is happening in these conditions, in my opinion, is good, because it shows the whole rottenness of the American political system, which cannot claim to teach others about democracy,” Putin said, echoing the former American president’s own oft-repeated claim that “what’s happening with Trump is a persecution of a political rival for political motives.” The man who is responsible for trying to kill his rival with poison and then locking him up in a prison camp for life says what? Trump’s response: Hmmm. I’d guess he didn’t really think that through. (But when does he ever think anything through?) But I’m sure Putin doesn’t care.
“U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert was escorted out of a Sunday night performance of the ‘Beetlejuice’ musical in downtown Denver, accused by venue officials of vaping, singing, recording and ‘causing a disturbance’ during the performance.” — The Denver Post
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(The curtain rises on the Buell Theatre, Denver. We see the AUDIENCE on stage, settling in for a performance of the musical “Beetlejuice.”)
AUDIENCE
It’s a splendid night for a musical
An escape that’s non-pharmaceutical
You won’t see a frown
When the theater lights go down
We’re waiting in our seats politely
Looking forward to the show excitedly
Hey, look, there’s our rep in DC
And she’s shouting, “Hey, y’all, look at me!”
Eh, let her have her fun
The show hasn’t yet begun
Once the actors start their work
She’ll probably stop acting like a jerk
New evidence suggests electric stoves are better for people and the planet.
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McCarthy snaps to On August 28th, Donald Trump had had enough of his House Republicans dilly-dallying around. He took to his social media platform Truth Social and issued an order: The Republicans in Congress, though well meaning, keep talking about an Impeachment ‘Inquiry’ on Crooked Joe Biden.Look, the guy got bribed, he paid people off, and he wouldn’t give One Billion Dollars to Ukraine unless they ‘got rid of the Prosecutor.’ Biden is a Stone Cold Crook-You don’t need a long INQUIRY to prove it, it’s already proven. These lowlifes Impeached me TWICE (I WON!), and Indicted me FOUR TIMES – For NOTHING!Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US! Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy heard him loud and clear. On Tuesday he announced that he was unilaterally ordering an impeachment inquiry into the president during his term as Vice President nearly a decade ago. No one was surprised that he went back on his stated principle that an impeachment inquiry can only be launched with a full vote of the House or the still binding determination by Trump’s Department of Justice which came to the same conclusion.
As political attacks on trans life have increased across the English-speaking world, sport has been a highly effective route through which the anti-trans right…
“While I was at the funeral for my brother…there were only four people, because of social distancing. I will never forget that," song-writer and actor Will Young tells Byline Times.
China has emerged as a greater threat than Russia, despite Ukraine. In the New Cold War, China is richer, more populous, and the dominant power pitted against the West
Evidence-free since … pretty much forever We’ve seen this show before. Rudy Giuliani had his law license suspended for bringing meritless lawsuits, unsupported by evidence, alleging massive voter fraud in the 2020 election. He had it, oh yes, massive amounts of evidence he hyped endlessly before cameras but never produced to be independently scrutinized. House Republicans are playing that game again with their budding Biden impeachment inquiry. “What actual evidence do you have as opposed to allegations to show to the American public that would merit an actual impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden?” the off-camera reporter asked Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) Perry did not take it well. Mediaite: Notably, during a CPAC event in March Perry made clear his penchant for political revenge. Perry, whose cell phone was seized by the FBI during its investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, fantasized aloud at CPAC about “leftists” and “Marxists” “quaking in fear” and “losing weight because they’re not eating” because they are so afraid the government may jail them.
Set to hit next week, here's a preview of Big Finish Production's Sooz Kempner-starring audio drama Doctor Who: Doom's Day - Dying Hours.
There’s a raw and sinewy energy to Elisa Gonzalez’s line. Her debut collection, Grand Tour, clarified and found its final form in the years after her brother was shot to death. So it is a first book and also a shattered elegy, an announcement and an aftermath, by turns impassioned and dispassionate as it registers grief in many forms. It begins with “Notes Toward an Elegy,”
The Cypriot sun is impatient, a woman undressed
who can’t spare the time to dress, so light
like a vitrine holds even a storm.
One day in the Old City, a pineapple rain.
And I’m on my way home from the pharmacy, carrying my little bag of cures.
Refuge at the café in the nameless square.
Nihal brings espresso poured over ice, turns off the music.
We listen to rain fall through the light until the end.
That’s the end of the stanza and the rain but the beginning of the poem and the book. It’s as if the poet’s point of departure is the place where two Yeatsian gyres meet just as they go their separate ways: