Saturday Report 6/11/22 - The Glaciers in Antarctica are Melting at a Rate Not Seen in Over 5,500 Years

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

— “All Roads Lead to Trump” is the headline at The American Prospect, and it accurately depicts what the January 6th Committee laid out Thursday night. As the election numbers came in, Trump’s own data person told him it looked like he was losing. Attorney General Bill Barr’s DOJ conducted an investigation of Guiliani’s and other’s claims of election fraud, found none that would alter the election result, and emphatically told Trump that personally, saying the claims were “bullshit.” Sixty-one different courts — many presided over by rightwing judges Trump himself had put on the court — including the Supreme Court looked at the various claims and found no merit to any of them. But Trump decided to go with the lie, anyway. When, finally, that didn’t work, he conspired with white supremacist militia leadership to storm the Capitol and attempt to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House to stop the Electoral College count. Five people died that day and another three police officers died in subsequent days from their injuries. It’s now obvious this sedition and coup attempt was an act of treachery that will live in history right beside the secession of the South in 1861 that led General Winfield Scott to put cannons and armed men in the Capitol to prevent a mob from interfering with the count of Electoral College ballots that year. General Scott famously said, “I have said that any man who attempted by force or unparliamentary disorder to obstruct or interfere with the lawful count of the electoral vote should be lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder gun and fired out of a window.” He was dead serious, and when the count was completed and went to Abraham Lincoln it started the Civil War. January 6th is truly a day that will, to paraphrase FDR’s announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbor, live in infamy.

— A functioning democracy requires the truth, actual news, and honest reporting by the media: Fox “News” did none of those during the Committee hearing. To the contrary, they deceived their viewers. “The whole thing is insulting,” Tucker Carlson told his Fox viewers. “In fact, it’s deranged, and we’re not playing along. This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live. They are lying, and we’re not going to help them do it.” Twenty million Americans watched the hearing on live television. Fox, however, chose not to carry it and their audience of 3 million instead heard that Nancy Pelosi was in charge of security for the Capitol and could have called in the National Guard (not true: Trump’s Acting Defense Secretary, Chris Miller, explicitly forbade the Guard from going to help: his memo is attached at the bottom of this Report), along with an entire series of bizarre claims and rhetorical questions designed to create doubt in people’s minds. The Australian Murdoch family is not doing democracy any favors.

— Ginni Thomas was far more aggressive at pushing state legislators to overturn the will of their voters and award Trump the presidency than we’d previously known. Reporting that broke yesterday found that the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had contacted 29 Arizona state legislators, rather than the two previously reported, asking them to view a video asserting the election had been stolen from Trump and they should flip the election to him. While the Supreme Court has launched an all-out investigation of who leaked the Alito draft abortion decision, there’s no sign that anybody is investigating Thomas. Here’s her memo:

— If you want to see how far down the rightwing/fascist rabbit hole the GOP has gone, consider this: the leading Republican candidate for Governor of Michigan was just arrested by the FBI, apparently for participating in the seditious attack on the Capitol. He was videotaped at the Capitol shouting, “Come on, let’s go! This is it! This is — this is war, baby!” Several other Republican candidates had to drop out of the Michigan gubernatorial race because hundreds of the signatures they gathered were fraudulent. It appears Republicans across the country, believing Trump’s lies about widespread voter fraud helping Democrats, have decided to try their own hand at it. Of course, Democrats aren’t engaged in voter fraud and we’re now seeing a long line of gullible Republicans getting busted for it.

— Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are trying to both save and expand Social Security. Right now, if a wealthy person makes over $147,000 a year they pay no Social Security tax on all income above that amount, be it hundreds of thousands, millions, or even billions of dollars. Sanders and Warren say that lifting that “cap” so that people earning over $250,000 would pay SS taxes on all their income above that amount. This would generate so much revenue that not only would it extend the lifespan of the Social Security fund for at least 75 years, but would also allow for a $200/month or $2400/year immediate increase in the Social Security benefits to all eligible Americans. Tell your friends and let your members of Congress know you support this effort!

— When you mention January 6th to a rightwinger or hear mention of it on hate-talk-radio, they’ll invariably say, “What about BLM and Antifa burning down cities across America?” Turns out, as more and more research is done, that many — maybe most — of those fires and vandalism were set/done by rightwingers trying to smear the movement against police violence. First it was “umbrella man” smashing out windows and starting a vandalism and looting spree, now it’s a Boogaloo Boi member charged with setting a police station on fire. This guy, 26-year-old Ivan Hunter, drove all the way from Texas to Minneapolis to engage in his sabatoge of the protests. The Bois movement explicitly believes that if they can foment enough violence and disorder it will cause government to collapse or provoke a second civil war so our current government can be replaced with a fascist system that will solidify in place white supremacy and a police state for the generations to come.

— Global warming is picking up pace so quickly that the glaciers in Antarctica are melting at a rate not seen in over 5,500 years, according to scientists. Given that billions of people live close enough to seacoasts to be affected by the 11 feet of sea-level rise predicted just from the collapse of one of the melting glaciers in the Antarctic, this should give an added impetus to efforts to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their 50 years of lies and funding climate disinformation. They truly are destroying the world for money. How do these people sleep at night?

— Geeky Science! A glass of beetroot juice a day may help with coronary artery disease. I remember years ago when a physician who’d developed a product called SuperBeets bought some ads on my radio show: before I’d approve the ad, I asked for his research. He not only shared it with me, but told me that the beet juice interacted with the bacteria in our mouths to produce nitric oxide that made our arteries and veins more flexible and resilient. We advertised it for years and I was so convinced that I took the beet powder every day — and it seemed to lower my blood pressure and eliminated nighttime foot cramps! Now an entire new batch of scientific studies out of the UK show that regularly consuming beet juice does just what that doc said. I’m replacing morning orange juice with beet juice: it’s delicious, too!