Saturday Report 10/12/24 - Machine confesses "human" desires...
The Best of the Rest of the News
— Head’s up: I’ll be a guest on Ali Velshi’s brilliant show this Sunday morning around 11:25 am Eastern time, internet gods willing.
— Chief Justice John Roberts is shocked, shocked, I tell you! that the public is horrified that he wrote a decision saying that Trump, if he returns to the White House, can commit all the crimes he wants with impunity. Apparently, according to New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, Roberts thought he could pull one over on us by quoting Alexander Hamilton, referencing “enduring principles,” and avoiding mentioning Trump, referring instead to “transient results” like letting Trump skate. Nobody, it seems, is buying his BS, least of all Justice Sonya Sotomayor, who argued that the case was about Trump and Trump only: “The indictment paints a stark portrait of a President desperate to stay in power. … That is the backdrop against which this case comes to the Court.” From there, she went on to indict the six bought-off rightwing extremist justices: “Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for ‘bold and unhesitating action’ by the President … The Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more. Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.” Amen. Apparently Roberts was so startled by the American public agreeing with Sotomayor that he failed, for the first time, to give a single public speech this summer. Of course, as my old friend and colleague David Sirota points out with his brilliant Master Plan podcast, Roberts has been a corporate lawyer (including for the US Chamber of Commerce) and hardcore rightwing extremist hack for most of his career, helping (along with Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett) craft the Supreme Court arguments in Bush v Gore that handed George W. Bush the White House even though he lost the election. Will Roberts moderate his positions? Not a chance…
— The GOP’s evil purge strategy to win in 2024. Ever since five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized the practice for Ohio, multiple Republican-controlled states, from Virginia to Florida to Alabama to Georgia to Texas (and more) have been aggressively purging voters from their rolls. People living in Blue cities in Red states are being hit particularly hard, with tens of millions of voters purged just in the past few years in anticipation of the 2024 election. Reporter Greg Palast, with help from Martin Sheen and George DiCaprio, put together a shocking documentary about the scheme in Georgia; you can watch it for free here. And Matt Laslow wrote an alarming summary of the national breadth of the practice for Raw Story here. If Trump wins this November, and if Republicans hold the House or take the Senate, this strategy will have played a huge role in those victories. It’s why we need a law explicitly saying that voting is a right, rather than a privilege. If a state government wants to take away your gun, they have to go to court to get a court order (because five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that owning guns is a right), but if that same government wants to take away your vote they don’t even need to notify you. And Republicans are doing just that, right now, removing voters by the millions.
— The GOP’s main messaging strategy is to tell lies — the more outrageous the better, per Hitler’s “Big Lie” technique — and it’s working. As Hitler said, the bigger the lie the more likely it is to be believed, because people assume that nobody could or would lie about something “that outrageous.” From the 2020 election to migrants eating cats to weather “weapons,” Republican voters are buying this crap and rightwing hate media, particularly Murdoch’s Fox “News,” are helping them promote it. Over at The Atlantic, Charlie Werzel writes that he’s “running out of ways to explain how bad this is.” And he’s right: this is an assault on reality itself, and no democracy can survive when half its people believe things that simply aren’t true. Russia’s Putin and Australia’s Murdoch family seem hell-bent on destroying Americans’ faith in our own government — or even in the idea of a democratic republic itself — and it’s become a cancer that’s eating our country inside-out. The Murdochs do it to earn billions; Putin does it to try to end our country: the effect is the same. It’s gotten so bad that meteorologists are facing death threats for simply pointing out the role of global warming on hurricanes. Will we ever return to a time when politicians of both parties disagree on policy but tell the truth about their positions? Given how the GOP’s lies today stretch all the way back to Reagan’s lies about how cutting taxes on billionaires will “trickle down” to the rest of us, through George W. Bush’s lies about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction just so he could have a war that he believed would insure his 2004 reelection, to today’s “firehose of lies” Trump strategy, I’m skeptical we’ll see the Republican Party return to honest truth any day soon. But one can hope.
— Vice President Kamala Harris made a major proposal this week that the media has almost entirely ignored. She’s proposing that paying for long-term in-home elder care be incorporated into standard Medicare. This will save lives, prevent family bankruptcies, and take a huge burden off millions of families who are caring for disabled and dementia-affected elders because they can’t afford nursing homes. It’s huge. As Alex Lawson, Executive Director of Social Security Works, noted (and repeated on my program yesterday): “This is a universal benefit, in the grand tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Frances Perkins. Everyone on Medicare would qualify. This is a win for everyone in America — except the billionaires.”
— Is Putin Running Out of Cemeteries? Over 600,000 Russians are believed to have died in Putin’s brutal invasion of democratic Ukraine, and apparently Russia is now running out of both cemetery and crematorium space. As a spokesman for the US Department of Defense noted, “Russian losses, again, both killed and wounded in action in just the first year of the war exceeded the total of all Russian losses, or Soviet losses in any conflict since World War II combined. It's kind of the Russian way of war where they continue to throw mass into the into the problem, and I think we'll continue to see high losses.” Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
— Musk’s new robot confesses ‘human’ desires. The Trump-loving billionaire’s new Tesla robot caused a bit of a stir when it told an interviewer that it’s main goal was to become “as human as you guys are.” Brrrrrrrrrr….
— Wisdom School: how do societies evolve?
— ADHD Hunter in a Farmer’s World: Distraction by design.
The addition of home health aides to Medicare is … in principle … a universal benefit. Except to the families that will have to find workers in the fragmented, no job ladder, no benefits crap work labor market that is home health.
The sector needs to be formalized & professionalized to benefit the workers, the families & the care system.
To use Medicare $$ the sides must work for an agency. Agency bills Medicaid $50/hr, pays aide $19/hr. Estimates are that >50% of HHA work off the books.
Yes by all means include this care for our seniors. Yes yes yes!
But also direct attention to improving the working conditions of the mostly female workers.
If this were not my country, I would laugh my ass off about Lying Don. It's also really hard to be amused about the MAGA crowd and their constant threats to people just trying to do their jobs.
I guess I never thought I'd turn on PBS and hear them say the former President is lying, and this is the outrageous thing he said today. It's pitiful, but we must report---if PBS can do it, so can we. Learn. Educate. Vote.
Lying about how elections are held while actively stealing millions of people's right to vote isn't funny either, but it is effective. So I hope everyone checks their registration, and then has a meaningful and happy experience actually voting. Make it a good day.
Thank you Thom and thank you Greg.
And by the way, John Roberts has turned his Court into the laughing stock of this nation. The King has no clothes and his Court's Righteous Six have no robes.