Democracy gone Astray: Saturday, October 07, 2023

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Saturday, October 07, 2023

‘They did it to me': Trump says Biden impeachment inquiry might be motivated by revenge

Former President Donald Trump has “no idea” whether Republicans will vote to impeach President Joe Biden.

But he does have a theory on what motivated House Republicans to launch a Biden impeachment inquiry: revenge.

“They did it to me,” Trump told former Fox and NBC host Megyn Kelly during an hourlong interview on SiriusXM radio that aired Thursday. “And had they not done it to me, I think, and nobody officially said this, but I think had they not done it to me … perhaps you wouldn’t have it being done to them.”

Deep in the Wyoming wilderness last month, Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, stood before a large audience of elite central bankers and casually predicted the collapse of the international financial order. Resplendent in red and black, she resembled a humanoid Lindor chocolate truffle — and though her warning was diluted by the usual impenetrable jargon, the subtext was sufficiently clear and dramatic.

“There are plausible scenarios where we could see a fundamental change in the nature of global economic interactions,” Lagarde announced drily to the crowd, which was gathered for the annual central banker confab in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The assumptions that have long informed the technocratic management of the global order were breaking down. The world, she said, could soon enter a “new age” in which “past regularities may no longer be a good guide for how the economy works.”

Kim Jong-un has visited a factory that builds advanced fighter jets, as his tour of Russia moves into its third day and the Kremlin revealed he and Vladimir Putin had exchanged gifts of rifles during their summit this week.

Two days after meeting Putin at a space base in Russia’s far east, where they discussed satellite technology and – possibly – a deal to provide North Korean arms for the war in Ukraine, Kim’s armoured train arrived in the city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, where he visited a factory that makes Russia’s most modern fighter jets, Russian news agencies reported.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Republican-controlled Wisconsin Senate voted Thursday to fire the battleground state’s nonpartisan top elections official, prompting a legal challenge from Democrats who say the vote was illegitimate.

Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul said in a lawsuit that Senate Republicans don’t have the authority to oust Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe and accused them of attacking the state’s elections.

She loves it, she loves it not.

Premier Danielle Smith’s support for carbon capture projects is fickle and complicated, much like her understanding of the realities of climate change.

It all depends on the situation she finds herself in at the moment.

This week she waxed poetic about the potential for carbon capture, utilization and storage projects, to reduce emissions and save us from climate change while allowing us to keep using fossil fuels.

A federal judge in Texas on Wednesday again ruled that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is illegal, but kept it intact for now for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children.

After the Biden administration moved last year to finalize a rule to codify the Obama-era DACA policy into a federal regulation, a group of Republican-led states challenged the effort and asked Texas-based U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen to shut down the program in its entirety over two years.

KYIV — Ukraine on Thursday confirmed it wrecked a Russian submarine with British weapons, during a missile attack on the Black Sea port of Sevastopol in Russian-occupied Crimea.

The Russian cruise missile carrier — the Rostov-on-Don — was significantly damaged in the massive Ukrainian strike, as was Kremlin warship the Minsk.

A senior Ukrainian military official confirmed to POLITICO that Ukrainian pilots used the British cruise missile Storm Shadow for the attack.

Wisconsin Republicans voted Thursday to fire the state’s elections chief just months before the battleground state’s presidential primary.

State senators voted 22-11 along party lines to fire Meagan Wolfe, the administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, a bipartisan board that oversees election administration in the state. Wolfe’s position is a nonpartisan, non-voting one tasked with implementing the decisions made by the three Democratic and three Republican commissioners.

House Republicans on Thursday advanced legislation to overturn President Joe Biden’s new student loan repayment program that lowers monthly payments and caps interest.

The House education committee voted 23-19, along party lines, to approve a resolution, H.J. Res. 88, that would block the new income-driven repayment plan — dubbed the SAVE plan — that was finalized by the Education Department earlier this year.

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Alex Jones’ personal spending is frustrating families who are trying to collect on the $1.5 billion in judgments against him for calling the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting a hoax.

The conspiracy theorist and Infowars host has been paying his own wife, Erika Wulff Jones, $15,000 a month, according to the most recent spending report he filed in his bankruptcy case — payouts called “fraudulent transfers” by lawyers for some of the shooting victims’ families. Jones says they’re required under a prenuptial agreement.

Donald Trump seemed to want it both ways while bragging about his response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic this week.

Dubiously boasting about having bipartisan support, Trump told Megyn Kelly his “very smart” Democratic friends loved his coronavirus policies but that he wasn’t “proud” of his work on the vaccine, which remains a tense talking point among conservatives.

Breathless coverage of the presidential horserace has begun, and it seems all but inevitable: we’re heading towards a Trump-Biden rematch. Democrats need to maintain their razor-thin Senate majority if they hope to enact President Biden’s second-term agenda – or, God forbid, fend off Trump’s.

That prospect hinges on a few incumbents facing tough re-election fights. The most critical, must-win seat belongs to Sherrod Brown, a senator from Ohio.

Khirbet al-Ras al-Ahmar, occupied West Bank – Thaer Bsharat is one of 130 Palestinians living in this remote village in the northern Jordan Valley. They have little means, but a lot of determination.

Bsharat was born and raised in the occupied West Bank village, which is surrounded by two illegal Israeli settlements and two Israeli military bases. It was declared a closed military zone more than two decades ago.

The very presence of the Palestinians, let alone any structure they erect, is deemed “illegal” under Israeli law.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) let her fingers do the talking on Wednesday as she described what’s happening to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

Pelosi put McCarthy on blast for opening an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden, which she said was part of a deal he made with his party’s extremists that forces him to cave to their demands or risk losing the gavel.

A woman who sat behind Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) at a theater in Denver on Sunday has described the lawmaker’s “outrageous” behavior before she was kicked out of the venue.

The extremist lawmaker was forced to leave the touring production of “Beetlejuice” following complaints from multiple other attendees about disruptive behavior, according to local news outlets.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) slammed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Wednesday, saying his colleague was “never” going to impeach President Joe Biden and accusing the Republican leader of gaslighting members of his party.

“He’s throwing impeachment out like an ill-cast lure with no real intention to follow through,” Gaetz said of the speaker in an interview with MSNBC’s Ari Melber. “If you were really serious, you would subpoena Hunter Biden, get answers. They’re not serious. And that’s why you see this failure theater in the absence of real accountability.”

When the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, announced an impeachment inquiry into President Biden on Tuesday, he subverted the normal procedures for doing so. Typically, the House would have to vote on whether to open an informal impeachment investigation: McCarthy just announced it, unilaterally, calling a press conference to say he was “instructing” the House to open such an inquiry.

During his visit to the Chinese province of Xinjiang on August 26, Chinese President Xi Jinping asserted that the predominantly Muslim Uighur region is enjoying some “hard-won social stability”, and that it is moving toward “unity, harmony and prosperity”. This image of “beautiful Xinjiang”, which Xi talked about, stands in sharp contrast with the reporting of the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

A report OHCHR released last year concluded that since 2017, the Chinese government had committed grave rights violations against millions of Uighurs and other Turkic people in Xinjiang, abuses so systematic and widespread that they “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity”.

Taiwan has clapped back at Elon Musk after the billionaire businessman waded into the delicate issue of the island’s relations with China.

Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said that Taiwan was “not for sale” after Musk referred to Beijing’s official position that the self-ruled island is part of its territory.

“Listen up, Taiwan is not part of the PRC & certainly not for sale!” Wu said on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.

Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the US House, announced on Tuesday he is launching a formal impeachment inquiry into president Joe Biden – despite resistance from Republicans in the House and Senate, where an impeachment vote would almost certainly fail.

The order comes as McCarthy faces mounting pressure from some far-right members of his chamber, who have threatened to tank his deal to avert a government shutdown by the end of the month if he does not meet their list of demands.

Concerned Women for America (CWA), a rightwing group that describes itself as the largest public policy women’s organisation in the US, was criticised for hosting “a misogynist indicted criminal”, after it announced a keynote speech by Donald Trump.

“Of course a misogynistic indicted criminal would speak to a conference of women determined to block access to reproductive healthcare and move backward instead of looking toward the future,” Christian F Nunes, national president of the National Organization for Women and chair of the NOW political action committee, said in a statement.

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a former presidential nominee and a rare relative moderate in the Republican party of Donald Trump, has said he will not run for a second term next year, depriving the party of one of its fiercest critics in Congress of the former US president and his political movement.

“It’s pretty clear that the party is inclined to a populist demagogue message,” he said in an interview with the Washington Post in which he announced his retirement.

The situation is dire when you’re boasting of closer ties with North Korea, but Vladimir Putin in 2023 finds himself in just that situation with nothing left to lose.

The Russian fanfare before the summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un has rivalled the anticipation for his meetings with western leaders, where he would attempt to woo or spar with opponents such as Barack Obama or Angela Merkel.

Ukraine has struck Russian naval targets and port infrastructure in the Crimean city of Sevastopol, in what appeared to be the biggest attack of the war on the home of the Russian navy’s Black Sea fleet.

A Ukrainian intelligence official said a large vessel and a submarine struck in the attack were so badly damaged as to be likely beyond repair.

The pre-dawn strike highlighted Kyiv’s growing missile capabilities as Russia continues to bombard Ukraine from afar with long-range missiles and assault drones.

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s sudden decision to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden has won over even the most reluctant Republicans, with some GOP lawmakers pushing for it to move quickly rather than drag into the 2024 election year.

McCarthy opened and closed a private meeting Wednesday of House Republicans justifying his reasoning for the inquiry sought by former President Donald Trump, the party’s frontrunner to challenge Biden next year.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) move to launch an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden could backfire badly.

“I can’t tell you the number of Democrats who’ve come up to me today to say, ‘Let them do the impeachment, it will be the end of the Republican Party,’” Raskin said on MSNBC on Tuesday night.

Raskin said those lawmakers predicted that the impeachment proceedings “will end up in complete defeat and humiliation” for the Republicans.

Fox News’ parent company is facing more legal troubles for amplifying former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies.

Pension funds for New York City and the state of Oregon sued Fox Corp. in Delaware on Tuesday. They allege that as shareholders they were negatively impacted by Fox News’ decisions to air falsehoods, which resulted in a $787.5 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems and other legal claims.

CNN host Abby Phillip sharply reminded Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) that Republicans still do not have evidence of any illegal activity by President Joe Biden ― and then she did it again. (Watch the video below.)

The far-right lawmaker appeared on the news network Tuesday after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) ordered an impeachment inquiry into the president for alleged influence peddling.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman suggested Donald Trump was a driving force behind House Republicans’ newly launched impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.

“He is certainly somebody who supports it, is behind it, has been talking about it,” Haberman told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday, noting that Trump has been discussing the subject both publicly and behind the scenes.

Donald Trump addressed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comments on the former president’s criminal charges in a confusingly worded post on his Truth Social platform early Wednesday.

“President Vladimir Putin of Russia is using Crooked Joe Biden’s illegal Banana Republic style treatment of his Political Opponent, who is beating him badly in the Polls, to condemn America and all of the good things it once stood for,” Trump wrote. “The whole World is watching as the USA is being torn apart by dreams of Election Interference!”

Elon Musk is not the most reckless, destructive or dangerous corporate leader in world history. But he just might be the most reckless, destructive and dangerous corporate leader at this moment.

For the past year, as Musk destroyed Twitter from the inside and expanded the influence of his rocket-and-satellite company, SpaceX, we have read accounts of how dependent Ukraine is for military and civilian internet service on a SpaceX subsidiary called StarLink. Meanwhile, Musk’s financial debts to the sovereign investment fund of the Saudi royal family have generated significant scrutiny among policy makers and human rights advocates around the world.

China’s government has unveiled a “new path towards integrated development” with Taiwan, including proposals to make it easier for Taiwanese people to live, study and work in China.

At the same time, it sent the largest number of warships to gather in years to the waters on Taiwan’s east, in what analysts said signalled a choice between peaceful “reunification” and military violence, just months out from Taiwan’s presidential election.

House conservatives are glad they finally got their impeachment inquiry. But they were quick to say it won’t shield Speaker Kevin McCarthy from potential efforts to boot him.

Their issues with McCarthy when it comes to government spending, they argue, are separate from any impeachment considerations. Plus, they criticized him Tuesday for moving too late to launch a formal inquiry into President Joe Biden.

When asked if McCarthy's impeachment announcement placates conservatives who are still considering forcing a vote to boot the speaker, Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) replied that the two topics are “independent of one another. So I don't think it has any such effect, from my perspective.”

Donald Trump has been weighing in behind the scenes in support of the House GOP push to impeach President Joe Biden, including talking with a member of leadership in the lead up to Tuesday’s announcement authorizing a formal impeachment inquiry.

The former president has been speaking weekly with House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, who was the first member of Republican leadership to come out in support of impeachment. The two spoke Tuesday, after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced Republicans would be pursuing the inquiry, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

Mark Dybul knows the ins and outs of PEPFAR, America’s long-running effort to fight AIDS in Africa, intimately. As a staffer at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he was one of only two non-White House experts to help draw up the original outline of the program early in the George W. Bush administration. From 2006 to 2009, he served as the program’s chief as U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator.

Now two decades old, the program is credited with saving more than 25 million lives. Dybul, however, is worried it may not continue much longer, as misinformation peddled by opponents of abortion rights threatens congressional authorization of the program.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said House Republicans’ new impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden is “not inappropriate,” despite a lack of evidence to link Biden to his son Hunter’s business dealings abroad.

“The fact that the White House has been singularly silent and coddled Hunter Biden suggests an inquiry is not inappropriate,” Romney told reporters Tuesday.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) may have instructed committees to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, but at least one Democratic senator doesn’t seem too concerned.

Well, too concerned about anything but getting laughs.

On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman reacted to the news by putting his hands to his head like Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone.”

As the national security workforce ages, dementia impacting U.S. officials poses a threat to national security, according to a first-of-its-kind study by a Pentagon-funded think tank. The report, released this spring, came as several prominent U.S. officials trusted with some of the nation’s most highly classified intelligence experienced public lapses, stoking calls for resignations and debate about Washington’s aging leadership.

Joe Biden has Air Force One; Rishi Sunak a fleet of RAF jets and helicopters. But when Kim Jong-un makes one of his rare journeys outside North Korea, he has an armoured train in which to while away the hours.

The North Korean leader’s dark green train crossed the Russian border on Tuesday in advance of talks between Kim and Vladimir Putin on supplying the Kremlin with munitions for the war in Ukraine.

Kim Jong-un has arrived in Russia on his armoured train for a rare summit with Vladimir Putin to discuss a possible deal to supply North Korean arms for the war in Ukraine.

The train arrived at Khasan station, the main rail gateway to Russia’s far east from North Korea, where Kim was filmed alighting and meeting the Russian environment minister, before continuing to travel north.

Maryland’s top utility regulator was watching the news one February morning when a headline blindsided him: Two suspects with neo-Nazi ties had been charged with plotting to take down Baltimore’s power grid.

Jason Stanek, the then-chair of the state’s Public Service Commission, said Maryland regulators were “caught flat-footed,” not hearing a word from law enforcement before the news broke — or in the months afterward. Federal prosecutors have alleged the defendants were driven by “racially motivated hatred” to try to cut power to hundreds of thousands of people in the state’s largest city, which has a predominantly Black population.

The fundamentals of the 2024 campaign are still taking shape, but one thing is already clear: A flurry of court actions might cost Republicans the House majority.

In the past nine days, state and federal judges threw out two congressional maps — and helped Democrats avoid a worst-case scenario in Ohio — kicking off an unusually busy redistricting calendar heading into the election year.

All told, a dozen or more seats across at least six states could be redrawn, increasing the likelihood Democrats could chip away the five-seat GOP House majority through redistricting alone.

In October 2013, the Republican-led House of Representatives failed to pass a last-ditch spending bill for the first time in 17 years, forcing the federal government into a costly and controversial 16-day shutdown. Now, as Congress once again careens toward a potential shutdown on Oct. 1, one of the Republican leaders at the center of the fight 10 years ago — former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor — has some advice for his colleagues in the GOP.

Don’t do it again.

Attacks on the U.S. power grid are on the rise, threatening to upend lives all across the country.

Yet a lack of communication between law enforcement and officials charged with keeping the lights on has left state and federal regulators largely unaware of the full extent of those threats, according to an analysis by POLITICO reporter Catherine Morehouse.

Regulators say that’s making it harder to safeguard the nation’s vast electricity system.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that the four separate criminal cases against former U.S. President Donald Trump are politically motivated.

“Everything that is happening with Trump, this is persecution for political reasons of one’s political rival,” Putin said at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, state-owned news agency Ria Novosti reported.

WASHINGTON ― House Republicans want to rewrite the history of then-President Donald Trump’s impeachment in 2019.

House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) on Tuesday asked the State Department for documents related to Joe Biden’s role in U.S. policy toward Ukraine during the latter years of his vice presidency.

The request signals that Republicans are serious about reviving Trump’s accusation that Biden pushed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor in order to benefit a Ukrainian company that employed his son Hunter Biden. It’s a dubious claim that could become the centerpiece of a Republican effort to impeach the president. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced Tuesday that he had directed his colleagues to open an impeachment inquiry.

WASHINGTON ― House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Tuesday that he is directing House committees to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.

“House Republicans have uncovered serious and credible allegations into President Biden’s conduct,” the California Republican said. “Taken together, these allegations paint a picture of a culture of corruption.”

Republicans have delved into bank records reflecting millions of dollars that foreign nationals paid the president’s son, Hunter Biden, including during the years when Joe Biden was heavily involved in foreign policy as vice president. The records haven’t shown any payments to the president himself, however.

A bevy of recent polling data suggests that voters are split on which candidate they would prefer in the 2024 presidential election when faced with a potential race between Democratic incumbent President Joe Biden and former president and likely Republican nominee Donald Trump.

As of Monday morning, an aggregate of polling data from RealClearPolitics shows that Biden is leading Trump by just 0.4 percent. That’s well within the margin of error — indeed, in nine of the last 10 polls shared to the site, the two are statistically tied.

Although the election is still more than a year away, the data is worrying some Democrats, who fear that a close race will benefit Trump when it comes to the Electoral College.

Watch out! The AI “clones” of politicians are coming. And they’re not half bad.

In June, the AI avatars of Joe Biden and Donald Trump engaged in a marathon session of profane trash-talking broadcast on Twitch, offering a surreal glimpse at one potential future of political debate. Then a super PAC supporting the (since-scuttled) presidential bid of Miami’s mayor launched an AI Francis Suarez bot to answer voters’ questions, which offered a more polished vision of a politician’s avatar.

Former President Donald Trump is asking the judge assigned to his federal prosecution for seeking to overturn the 2020 election results to step aside because of her past comments about his responsibility for the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

In a motion filed Monday afternoon, Trump’s attorneys said U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s comments about Trump during sentencing hearings for two Capitol riot defendants indicated she had already concluded that Trump is responsible for crimes related to the violence that took place that day.