Saturday Report 6/8/24 - It's All One Thing: the Story of the Worms
The Best of the Rest of the News
— Trump’s vow to prosecute Democrats puts the rule of law on the ballot. Donald Trump and his allies have both implicitly and explicitly said that they intend to use the American legal system and the US Department of Justice to prosecute and imprison those who have tried to hold Trump to account legally, as well as those who oppose him, including people like me in the media. This is exactly how autocrats operate; they typically tell their followers in advance what they intend to do…and then follow through. One of the great tragedies of the way America’s corporate media is covering Trump is that they don’t take seriously his threats against them. I fully believe that he will go after the independent press and the legal system and will destroy both. It’s what Putin did in Russia, it’s what Orbán did in Hungary, it’s what Pinochet did in Chile, it’s what Bolsonaro nearly completely did in Brazil, it’s what Duterte did in the Philippines. There’s nothing new or surprising about this, yet so many in America are trying to pretend it’s not happening, essentially whistling past the graveyard.
— The Justice Department is apparently looking into the company started by Clarence Thomas’s sugar daddy, Harlan Crow. Back in the late 90s, Crow’s company came up with a software program for use by his real estate empire to calculate rents for his rental properties. Now, some in the media and, apparently, the Department of Justice are arguing that the software, which is used to set rents for almost 20,000,000 properties across the country, violates antitrust laws and is significantly responsible for the fact that in just the past four years rents nationwide have gone up by as much as a third. If it turns out the allegations are true, combined with this week’s revelations that Clarence Thomas took millions more in gifts and bribes from billionaires than we knew about before, this could be a huge story that Democrats should pounce on and publicize far and wide. Thomas needs to be impeached or resigned from the Court, as does Alito, and if Democrats can’t pull that off, the very least they can do if they seize both Congress and hold the White House this fall is to expand the number of justices on the court. Traditionally the number of justices tracked the number of circuit courts: today there are 13 circuit courts, so there should be at least 13 justices.
— Handmaid Alert! Radical GOP senators vote against birth control. Democrats in the Senate put a bill on the floor that would simply affirm the right of Americans to purchase, possess, and use birth control. It had absolutely nothing to do with abortion; it was motivated in part by Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in the Dobbs decision that ended Roe v. Wade. Thomas argued that because the Court had rejected the privacy argument that decision was based on, they should also reject the privacy basis that led to the 1965 decision legalizing birth control, as well as later decisions decriminalizing homosexuality and legalizing gay marriage. The only two conservative senators who voted for the legislation were Maine Republican Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski (who is now an independent). Nobody thought Republicans on the Supreme Court or in Congress would ever try to overthrow Roe v. Wade, and then they did it. Birth control is up for next year, and many Republicans are absolutely giddy about it.
— The Republican war on women amps up in Texas, where two male professors want to fail female students who get abortions. The two men have filed a court case — hundreds of miles away from where they teach college — before judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the Amarillo District Court judge who tried to outlaw mifepristone. (That case is before the Supreme Court and we expect a ruling any day.) They explicitly argued that women who get abortions are criminals who have committed homicide and therefore these professors should have the right to flunk them from their classes or even deny them entrance to those classes. If they win this case, watch out: this will probably go national.
— An all-Republican court gives Trump a delay past the election in the Georgia case. The five Republicans on the Georgia Court of Appeals have ruled that Fani Willis’ case against Donald Trump won’t be heard until March of next year, at the earliest. The charges are based on Trump’s phone call after he lost the 2020 election when he demanded — threatening prison — that the Secretary of State give him over 11,000 votes. This is as bad as it gets: Republicans are openly saying here that they don’t give a damn about the rule of law…
— Jared Kushner‘s new development deal includes a memorial to the victims of NATO. Say what? He’s proposing to spend a half-billion dollars on a pro-Russian project. Here’s the amazing story:
-- The pay gap between CEOs & workers is growing. Most American CEOs make more than in a day than their employees do in an entire year. What possibly justifies this kind of obscene compensation?
— Wisdom School Alert!
— Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert!
— Crazy Alert! Donald Trump tells Sean Hannity on Fox “News” that
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