Saturday Report - The "Manson Girls" held vigil outside Charles' 1971 trial, just like Mike "Squeaky" Johnson & his GOP friends are doing now for their cult leader...

The Best of the Rest of the News

— It’s time for corrupt, billionaire-funded Justice Sam Alito to step down or be investigated and impeached. The New York Times broke a story this week that just a few days after January 6th, with multiple Trump-related cases before or coming before the Supreme Court, Justice Alito repeatedly flew the US flag upside-down in his yard. The upside-down flag is a universal distress signal that dates back centuries to mariners signaling they’re under attack from pirates; it was adopted by the January 6th terrorists as part of their “stop the steal” branding. Justice in America is supposed to be “blind” (thus the Lady Justice figure in front of the Justice Department wears a blindfold), which is why judges should be scrupulously non-partisan in their public lives. In America, however, since rightwing billionaires and the Federalist Society made an unholy alliance with bought-off Republicans, judges from Texas’ anti-mifepristone Matthew Kazmaric (who also wants to do away with no-fault divorce) to members of the Supreme Court have been openly in-the-bag for big money and the GOP. Both the House and the Senate should subpoena Alito and Thomas to investigate the extent of their corruption and acceptance of bribes, in preparation for impeachment hearings. And get to the bottom of who paid off Kavanaugh’s gambling debts. Back during the Nixon administration, Republicans took down Justice Abe Fortas with a specious claim that his wife had broken tax law (no such thing had happened) and argued he couldn’t be impartial because he’d taken $15,000 for writing a book. Under pressure from Nixon and the newspapers of the day, Fortas — then the most progressive member of the Court — resigned, giving Richard Nixon a chance to replace him with a good Republican. Democrats should take a lesson from the Nixon/Fortas example and push both Thomas and Alito hard to resign now, in time for Biden to nominate and the Senate to confirm their replacements. Amy Coney Barrett, after all, was confirmed a mere 38 days after Ruth Bader Ginsberg died.

— Tomorrow at 10 AM PT/1 PM ET, I’ll be speaking at the “Embracing Our Emergency” conference, a 10-session live online course hosted by Josh Fox and Daniel Pinchbeck. Speakers include Jane Fonda, Marianne Williamson, Bill McKibbin, Michael Mann, Margaret Klein Salamon…and me (among others). You can sign up here: https://www.liminal.news/embracing-our-emergency. Hope to see you there, then!

— A Trump-linked dark-money group spent $90m on racist and transphobic ads in 2022 and are fixing to repeat the performance this fall. The Guardian has exposed the group, Citizens for Sanity, that ran “anti-crime” ads filled with Black people and, The Guardian reported: “Some ads targeted LGBTQ+ rights and attacked ‘Biden and his radical allies’ for supporting ‘the woke left’s war on girls’ sports’ and the ‘woke war on our children’. Others pictured Latino immigrants and characterized them as criminals ‘draining your paychecks, wrecking your schools, ruining your hospitals [and] threatening your family’, declaring that ‘Joe Biden and the Democrats have erased our southern border.’” Given how Trump’s main appeal to white voters is his naked racism and misogyny, expect this fall to get exceptionally ugly.

— Why is cable news refusing to report on Trump’s solicitation of a $1 billion bribe? At a recent Mar-a-Lardo fundraiser, Trump offered to undo all of President Biden’s climate regulations if the wealthy fossil fuel executives in the audience would cross his palm with a billion dollars. As Media Matters reported this week: “CNN, Fox News Channel; ABC’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week; CBS’ Mornings, Evening News, and Face the Nation; and NBC’s Today, Nightly News, and Meet the Press” all completely ignored the story. The only news network that reported on it was MSNBC, which covered it extensively on six different programs. Why did everybody else ignore the story? None are saying, but my bet is that they’re so used to Republicans soliciting and taking bribes (see: Clarence Thomas) that they no longer consider it news. Or they want Trump to be elected this fall so he can roll back Biden’s corporate and billionaire tax increases. Which is it? I report, you decide.

— Is the GOP planning to outlaw no-fault divorce? Putting women “back in their proper place — the bedroom and kitchen” is central to the GOP’s plan for their next administration; the Dobbs decision outlawing abortion was just step one. So, it makes perfect sense that Trump VP wannabee Ben Carson is now echoing multiple other conservative luminaries in calling for an end to no-fault divorce “for the sake of the families.” California Governor Reagan was the first in the nation to sign no-fault legislation into law (he was divorced, himself), but that doesn’t matter to these men who are so offended by women showing up in boardrooms, running colleges, and being Vice President of the United States. Ironically, when Reagan was elected president and no-fault was starting to spread across the country from state to state, the divorce rate was 5.4 per thousand people per year; last year it was 2.4 per thousand per year. But, sure, says the GOP: “Let’s dump on the women.” Now even Project 2025 is calling for a federal law overruling state no-fault divorce laws as soon as the next Republican president takes office, be it next year or four years from then. These people are dead serious.

— Ron DeSantis makes “Climate Change Isn’t Real” the official law and policy in Florida. Hafiz Rashid is reporting for The New Republic that Ron DeSantis signed a new law this week that strips climate change rhetoric and solutions from Florida law and policy. DeSantis is still eyeing the White House, now for 2028, and apparently thinks this step will get him entrée to the billions handed out to politicians every year by the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it’s created. DeSantis says that further endangering his state and all life on Earth by promoting more fossil fuel use is necessary to reject “the agenda of the radical green zealots.” Sick.

— Why are we allowing ultraprocessed food corporations to cram junk down our children’s throats? Both teen and adult obesity rates have exploded over the past thirty years, at the same time new research shows that as many as half of our nation’s cancers are caused by excessive body fat. The main culprit in our obesity and diabetes epidemic is what’s known as Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs): basically anything that will last on a shelf for months or is packaged in cans or jars, ranging from condiments to high-fructose-corn-syrup-laced sodas to snack foods and processed meats. UPFs, which pretty much didn’t exist fifty years ago, now constitute as much as two-thirds of all the calories consumed by American children, and the number is going up, not down. One big factor is that the giant processed food corporations are now increasingly getting their foods placed in schools, paid for with federal dollars. This poisoning of an entire generation should be illegal, but as long as corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court continue to hold political bribery as “free speech,” it’s going to be a hell of a slog to get anything done in defiance of this multi-billion-dollar industry and its army of lobbyists.

—  If you thought China was our friend, think again. Just weeks after Secretary of State Anthony Blinkin visited China to demand that government not supply Russia with arms to use against the Ukrainian democracy, President Putin this week showed up in Beijing. He and President Xi declared their mutual support against western democracies. Their joint statement was blunt, saying both countries “intend to increase interaction and tighten co-ordination in order to counter Washington’s destructive and hostile course towards the so-called ‘dual containment’ of our countries.” Expect Chinese weaponry to show up in Ukraine as this battle becomes a proxy war between western democracy and a new Chinese/Russian axis of dictatorial authoritarianism. Meanwhile, the ratio of pro-Trump versus pro-Biden content on Chinese-owned TikTok is now in excess of 2:1, probably reflecting the Chinese bias for Trump becoming president and making the world safe for autocracy. Again, this fall is going to be wild.

— Hunter in a Farmers World Alert!

ADHD: The “Mirror Technique” from Claude Bristol

— Wisdom School Alert!

Four Mistakes Have Brought Humankind to a Crisis

— Mike “Squeaky” Johnson Alert! The “Manson Girls” held vigil every day outside Charles’ 1971 trial, just like Mike “Squeaky” Johnson and his GOP friends are doing today for their cult leader. Pathetic.