Today In: FAFO

[jhawks99]

Put him in the same cell as DDD.

Couldnt taking bribes from a foreign gummint be considered treason?

[Shirley]

Put him in the same cell as DDD.

Couldnt taking bribes from a foreign gummint be considered treason?

The term is used loosely, so it's hard to be very precise. (Caveat emptor: Everything I know is wrong.)

Although many or most bribes aren't considered so, a bribe is more likely to get you called a "traitor" because you aren't acting in the best interests of the people or country you represent, than an act of "treason".

"Treason", is considered more of a specific act against your country or sovereign. From Wikipedia:

Treason is the crime of attacking a state authority to which one owes allegiance.[1] This typically includes acts such as participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to overthrow its government, spying on its military, its diplomats, or its secret services for a hostile and foreign power, or attempting to kill its head of state. A person who commits treason is known in law as a traitor.[2]

[Shirley]

Lots, lots more of this, please!

All 9 justices of the Texas Supreme Court are, to no one's surprise, Republicans. Three of them, "Jimmy, John, and Jane", are up for reelection this fall. Let's hope they "find out" that making medical decisions without a medical degree, not only denying women health care but also potentially putting their lives and future fertility at risk, has consequences:

Find Out PAC

[Sparko]

Future fertility. Futility is nver at risk.

[Shirley]

Future fertility. Futility is nver at risk.

Thanks, I'll edit it...

[Sparko]

I am overly futile and need some sort of therapy, however!

[Shirley]

I am overly futile and need some sort of therapy, however!

Maybe you and Gutter can get a group rate?

[jhawks99]

Not really political but the dude did FAFO

https://www.wkyt.com/2024/06/12/reds-fa ... PkJIkHpCi7

[Overlander]

Not really political but the dude did FAFO

https://www.wkyt.com/2024/06/12/reds-fa ... PkJIkHpCi7

I respect his effort

[Sparko]

Speaking of FAFO, the white buffalo born in Yellowstone can't portend the end of the cultural hegemony and prosperity of some of the folks who may not have settled North America amicably could it? Asking for some friends on K-Crim. Seems unfair.

[KUTradition]

almost put this in “frightening perspective”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/45-minute-ti ... rImkq2xoUj

'45-minute tidal wave' of contaminated water devastates community — now, residents are fighting back in court

Deadly floods. Shattered lives. A looming day in court.

This is the aftermath of a coal mining disaster in Appalachia — and the culmination of years of unchecked strip mining and increasingly extreme weather in the region...

[jfish26]

Here's some FAFO.

June 24, 2024

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... ne-24-2024

Two years ago today, on June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. The vote was 6–3.

The three justices appointed by former president Trump joined Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts to strip a constitutional right from the American people, a right we had enjoyed for almost 50 years, a right that is considered a fundamental human right in most liberal democracies, and a right they had indicated they would protect because it was settled law. For the first time in our history, rather than conveying rights, the court explicitly took a constitutional right away from the American people.

[...]

[Since] a majority of Americans has always supported the protection of access to abortion, Republican leaders generally promised to end abortion without intending actually to do it.

But the extremist religious judges Leo helped Trump put in place had their own agenda.

As soon as the court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republican-dominated states began restricting abortion access. Now, two years later, 14 states ban abortion entirely. Seven others have restrictions that would have been unconstitutional two years ago.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade upended American politics. The majority of Americans alive today have always lived in a country with abortion access recognized as a constitutional right, and had not thought they could lose it. Exactly what that loss means became clear just days after the Dobbs decision, when news broke that a ten-year-old rape victim had been unable to obtain an abortion in Ohio and had to cross state lines to Indiana, where the state attorney general, Todd Rokita, publicly attacked the doctor who treated the girl. Similar stories, as well as those of women who desperately needed abortions to save their lives or fertility, have driven support for abortion higher than it was before Dobbs.

As state laws prohibiting abortion took effect, voters worked to protect abortion rights. In seven states, including Republican-dominated Kansas, Kentucky, and Ohio, voters have protected abortion rights when they were on the ballot. Pollster Tom Bonier today called abortion rights “the most powerful single issue in politics.”

Bonier recalled looking at the Kansas vote and finding such a surprising statistic he thought he had miscalculated. After Dobbs, almost 70% of the people in that state registering to vote were women. He said he has “never seen a registration surge among any specific group like this before, and [doesn't] expect to again.” He went on to find substantial gender gaps in registration in states where access to abortion was at risk, but not in states where it seemed secure.

In 2022, Bonier said, “[in] states and races where abortion rights were perceived as at stake, Democrats overperformed massively,” including in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona, but in states like New York and California, where abortion rights are protected, “the election was as you would have expected in a ‘normal’ midterm.” Bonier added that abortion rights “is likely more salient now than it was in 2022.”

As the votes indicate, Dobbs has created a huge problem for Republicans, especially as Trump continues to boast that he is responsible for overturning Roe, a boast that the Biden campaign is highlighting. Voters eager to protect abortion rights are moving away from the party toward a more moderate and popular position on abortion.

It has also created a problem for the party on the hard right. Having lost the abortion issue as a way to turn out voters, leaders are whipping up the party’s base with ever-increasing extremism. In the realm of reproductive rights, that extremism has led MAGA Republicans to call for national bans on abortion, contraception, and in vitro fertilization (IVF). More generally, it has increasingly made them call for violence against their opponents. On June 21, for example, Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) posted on social media: “I do want to ‘ethnic cleanse’ by deporting white progressive Democrats—with a special bonus for rich ones with an Ivy League degree. I really do not like ‘those people.’”

Those extremists appear to be threatening Trump from the right, possibly considering a move to back Trump’s conspiracy theorist former national security advisor Michael Flynn at the July Republican National Convention. Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post reported Saturday that there has been a revolt against Trump in the Arizona delegation, some of whom apparently worry that Trump has been captured by the “deep state” and is not extreme enough for them.

The promise to return decision making to the states has always been an attempt to enable a minority to impose its will on the majority, but the Dobbs decision revealed that minority to be so extremist it appears to have engaged, and enraged, people who before it were not paying much attention to politics. In the Dobbs decision, Alito wrote: “Our decision returns the issue of abortion to [state] legislative bodies, and it allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office. Women are not without electoral or political power.”

Amen.

[Shirley]

I haven't paid much attention to the Senator Menendez trail, the one where they found hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash and gold bars at his residence, and his wife was given a Mercedes, etc., but the case is going to the jury today and so I heard a summation of the prosecution's rebuttal of the defense' closing argument.

Menendez' defense is throwing his wife under the bus, (she's being tried separately later, and was recently diagnosed with breast cancer), and that he wasn't involved in any quid pro quo, but perhaps his wife was. According to the prosecution, one problem with that defense is that his and the Egyptian's who is alleged to have bribed him fingerprints are on 16 of the envelopes of cash and the gold bars, but Menendez' wife's aren't. Miner detail, I know, but... What a scum bag.

BTW, did you know that his daughter, Alicia Menendez, is a host/commentator on weekends on MSNBC? Apparently, she is mortified about her father's behavior.

[jhawks99]

Scum. I think I asked this before but... I'm old so I get a pass. If this asshole sold state secrets, isn't that treason and can't we shoot his scumbag ass?

I say this as a hippy pacifist.

[Shirley]

Scum. I think I asked this before but... I'm old so I get a pass. If this asshole sold state secrets, isn't that treason and can't we shoot his scumbag ass?

I say this as a hippy pacifist.

Doesn't appear to be worthy of a firing squad. #sorry

In 2018 his then girlfriend now wife, introduced him to several Egyptians she knew, who had business interests in the US. Most of his crimes were acting on behalf of these guys and their business interests, but he also acted in Egypt's interest as part of the bribes: In terms of "state secrets", here is apparently, what he did:

As part of the scheme, MENENDEZ provided sensitive, non-public U.S. government information to Egyptian officials and otherwise took steps to secretly aid the Government of Egypt. For example, in or about May 2018, MENENDEZ provided Egyptian officials with non-public information regarding the number and nationality of persons serving at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. Although this information was not classified, it was deemed highly sensitive because it could pose significant operational security concerns if disclosed to a foreign government or made public. Without telling his professional staff or the State Department that he was doing so, on or about May 7, 2018, MENENDEZ texted that sensitive, non-public embassy information to his then-girlfriend NADINE MENENDEZ, who forwarded the message to HANA, who forwarded it to an Egyptian government official...

[KUTradition]

guns…

normalization of political violence…

[ousdahl]

Politics is inherently violent

And normalization is relative

[jfish26]

And normalization is relative

...yes, it is. That's why it works.

[ousdahl]

Huh?

[japhy]

Your can't say JD didn't know what he was getting into in his quest for power.

The wife of Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, Usha Chilukuri Vance, and the couple's children have become the targets of backlash for their Indian ancestry.

Chilukuri Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants who grew up in San Diego, as well as RNC speaker Harmeet Dhillon -- who is Sikh and Indian – are facing anti-Asian hate from far-right figures online.

Posts appear to have spiked this week following Vance's nomination criticizing Vance for marrying someone who is non-white, expressing concerns about an influx of Indian immigrants as a result and the so-called Great Replacement conspiracy have garnered hundreds of thousands of views according to individual post engagement figures.

JD Vance previously criticized Trump and his base for the rhetoric on race, a backdrop to the current onslaught of criticism facing Vance’s wife and children.

Vance told POLITICO in 2016 that “the Trump people are certainly more racist than the average white professional.” He also warned that Trump’s rhetoric would cause white people to “become more racist over time.”

In an interview with PBS Newshour in 2016, Vance also stated “there is definitely an element of Donald Trump's support that has its basis in racism or xenophobia.”

In the wake of Trump's vice presidential announcement on Monday, numerous conservative and far-right figures have taken to social media to launch racist attacks against Usha Vance because of her Indian heritage and the assumption that her influence on her husband's political career means the Republican Party will be softer on immigration.

"I'm sure this guy is going to be great on immigration," Jaden McNeil, a far-right activist and the founder of America First Students, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, while sharing a picture of the Vances with their newborn baby.

Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home along with rapper Kanye West in November 2022, suggested that Vance would not be a "defender of white identity" because of his wife's Indian heritage.

"Who is this guy, really?" Fuentes said on his podcast. "Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?"

Vincent James Foxx, who was present at the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, wrote on X: "JD Vance gets tapped as VP and immediately there's a Hindu prayer at the RNC. Next we'll see Sen. Mike Lee and JD Vance team up to convince Trump to let in 10 million Indian immigrants. Green cards on diplomas!"

Conservative commentator Stew Peters wrote, "There is an obvious Indian coup taking place in the US right before our eyes," while sharing a screenshot of an article about the Vances' three children.

Saira Rao, a progressive activist and former Democratic congressional hopeful, also attacked Usha Vance on X.

"Usha Vance, the latest Indian American woman delighted to do the bidding of white supremacy. Who needs white women when brown ones are ready to serve," Rao wrote.