Saturday Report 6/15/24 — Thankfully, I’m getting over Covid…

The Best of the Rest of the News

— Thankfully, I’m getting over Covid. Last Thursday afternoon I flew to New York to debate a rightwing talk show host at the annual Talkers convention and managed to pick up Covid. This is my first experience with the disease, as it was the first time I’ve been willing to share space with a few hundred other people without a mask on since the pandemic started. Lesson learned. And, when I got back, I managed to give it to Louise and Shawn. The good news is that it seems these recent strains are a lot less destructive to body and mind than the early ones, and being fully vaccinated seems to have contributed to a rapid recovery. I only had two days where I was really sick with a 102 fever, and even that wasn’t as bad as some bouts of the flu I’ve had. I was still able to write this newsletter every day! This note is just FYI, if you’re wondering why my voice sounded so rough on our podcasts and I wasn’t doing a live show Wednesday through Friday of this week. Hopefully I’ll be back on the air on Monday, and many thanks to Jefferson Smith for filling in for me on the radio and Free Speech TV.

— Horrified critics blast Fox’s Ingraham for suggesting a 50-year MAGA reich is possible. If Trump wins, this will be referred to as the age of Trump,” Laura Ingraham told her Fox viewers, dreaming of a repeat of the kind of consequential presidency that stamps political eras. “He dominates the policy debate in ways that no one has done since Reagan. And if he picks a strong VP… this coalition could be in power for 50 years.” Ingraham — who I also once debated, at a Heritage Foundation event — could be right. If Trump becomes president this fall, he and his Project 2025 allies will transform America in ways that go far beyond FDR’s New Deal or Reagan’s war on working people. The Christian Taliban that has surrounded him will take over public school instruction and birth control policy, racist militias and skinheads will be running elections and immigration policy, the media will be finally and fully seized by rightwing oligarchs like in Russia and Hungary, unions and equality movements will be functionally outlawed, and Trump’s “enemies” (including reporters and commentators like yours truly) will end up in prison. Each of those things are already promised explicitly by Trump himself or part of the Project 2025 program for the next Republican presidency.

— Clarence Thomas, who only barely disguises his hatred of our nation, just guaranteed more mass slaughters. Along with the other five Republicans on the Supreme Court, Thomas wrote the opinion that was released yesterday and re-introduced bump-stocks to our country (they were banned by the Trump administration’s ATF). We normally think of Republican politicians who are given huge contributions for their campaigns by the NRA as being beholden to the lobby for the weapons manufacturers, but that corrupt gun group has apparently managed to hold captive rightwing Supreme Court justices as well, starting in a big way with Antonin Scalia’s authoring the extraordinarily dishonest Heller decision. Justice Sonia Sotomayor minced no works calling out her colleagues’ BS: “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.’ Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent.” In his majority opinion, Clarence Thomas wrote, “the shooter must release and reset the trigger between every shot” when using a bump stock, a naked lie. The Las Vegas shooter was able to fire more than 1000 rounds in just a few minutes, killing 58 people and injuring almost 500, many in ways that will alter their lives forever. Expect more spree shooters like that, now that this extraordinarily corrupt group of justices have re-legalized these devices that transform a semiautomatic weapon into a fully-automatic weapon-of-war machine gun that can fire as many as 800 rounds a minute. Why would six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court go along with flooding America with these horrible weapons of mass destruction? The only two possible reasons I can come up with are that they genuinely hate this country and want “their side” to win in a Civil War, or that they are so committed to the Republican notion that government should put rich people and corporations (like gun manufacturers) above average citizens that they’re willing to countenance mass slaughter in our streets and schools. What say you? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.

— American healthcare spending is almost double of every other country in the world…and as much as half of that money is going into the pockets of hospital, healthcare, and insurance industry executives and shareholders. America has the only for-profit healthcare system in the developed world, and — because it’s a matter of life-or-death in many cases — citizens have no choice but to pony up the cash. A new report from the official Centers for Medicare Services finds that US healthcare spending is pushing 20 percent of GDP: almost one-in-five dollars spent in America will go to insurance or healthcare corporations. For comparison, every other developed country in the world pays between 6 and 12 percent. Public Citizen broke it down with the graphic below, noting “The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services projected U.S. health care spending would climb to $7,000,000,000,000 by 2032, or 19.7% of our economy.” It’s far past time to create a single-payer system and get these blood-sucking leeches from the insurance industry off our backs, again require hospitals to run as nonprofits, and break up the big chains of doctors’ offices that are being created by private equity mergers.

— Few dispute that Trump and his enablers are sociopaths (who else would delight in ripping nursing babies from their mothers and then trafficking them into Texas, the nation’s #2 producer of child pornography?). But Seth D. Norrholm, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at Wayne State University School of Medicine, argues that sociopathic behavior is actually contagious and Trump is a super-spreader (my term, not his). In an article for Raw Story, Dr. Norrholm lays out the mechanism of this action, summarizing: “I have written and said it before and I will do so again: The contagious spread of sociopathy has provided us with potential and actual leaders who embody the worst that humanity has to offer according to moral, legal, religious/spiritual, and societal norms…and they continue to run on this platform.”

— Heat: the Great Killer. Heat stress — when the body can’t cool itself to a safe temperature and becomes overwhelmed by heat — kills more people worldwide than any other natural weather phenomenon. And as global warming — resulting from 50 years of lies by the fossil fuel industry preventing necessary action — gets worse every year, its deadly impact is increasing exponentially. Just six hours of exposure to 95 degree F heat at 100 percent humidity is fatal for most people. The dystopian future that scientists at Shell and Exxon warned their companies about 50 years ago is now here. But, because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery, we continue to shovel hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and its morbidly rich executives.

— Crazy Alert! Trump supporters are all-in on the idea that the Earth is “flat as a pancake.” Liberal guerrilla theater group The Good Liars asked people at a recent Trump rally a number of questions, including one about their opinion of the flat-earth theory that’s making a resurgence among Qanon followers. One after another asserted that the planet is flat and there’s a massive conspiracy to convince us it’s round. Seriously. You can see the video here.

— Hypocrisy Alert! Republican candidate for Colorado’s 4th Congressional district Richard Holtorf paid for his girlfriend’s abortion and bragged about it on the floor of the Colorado legislature. Last week a brave local TV news host asked him, “Why is abortion good for your girlfriend? But bad for other women?” After much hemming and hawing, Holtorf really didn’t have much of an answer. You can watch the cringeworthy interview here.

— Wisdom School Alert!

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— Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert!

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