Master of Corruption

LAT
4-27-2024
Trump is not just a clown. He’s a master of corruption
He rules from the MAGA trenches to Congress and even the Supreme Court, as we learned this week

Francis Wilkinson is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion

I have badly underestimated Donald Trump. ****
Because Trump is clumsy at his alleged crimes, surrounding himself with flagrant thugs, telling obvious lies, leaving prolific trails of damning evidence, offering ridiculous defenses for indefensible conduct, I had long concluded that he is incompetent at crookery along with his other manifest failings. That’s true as far as it goes. But for all his mad greed and compulsive lawlessness, for all his sleaze and stupidity, crime is ultimately not Trump’s game. Trump is nothing like a master criminal. But he is a master of something far more sinister and complex: corruption.

Crime is a largely private endeavor. Corruption is public. It seeps into the muscle and sinew of democratic society and institutions; it devours from within. The Supreme Court, drunk on arrogated power, cut loose from rudimentary ethics, has been eaten alive by it. But the court is just one plot of a vast terrain that Trump has conquered — not with crime, but corruption.

Crime is when you launch a violent attempt to overthrow the republic. Corruption is when you convince an entire political party to pretend they didn’t watch it live on television, or cower from it inside the Capitol while dozens of police officers were being bludgeoned by the mob.
Crime is when you make off with top-secret documents. Corruption is when a MAGA judge can’t find time to schedule your trial, or process the mountainous evidence of your guilt.
Crime is when a U.S. resident is murdered and dismembered by Saudi hit men. Corruption is when the all but acknowledged killer invests $2 billion in your talentless son-in-law’s fund, which other investors shun.
Crime is when you fake business expenses to cover up a payoff to an adult film actress who wants to cash in on your campaign for president. Corruption is when the head of the nation’s greasiest tabloid, a perpetual fount of lies and nonsense, expresses concern that your deeds are too sleazy for him.
Crime is when your lawyers tell the Senate not to convict you in an impeachment trial because you can be charged in court. Corruption is when your lawyers inform the Supreme Court that you are immune from criminal courts and only the Senate can judge you — but, alas, the senators have missed their window.

Trump has already succeeded at corrupting much of what’s corruptible. Government. Elections. Foreign policy. Democracy. Religion. Above all, people, and mostly men. Truckloads, boatloads, tiki-torch-parade-loads, courtloads of weak men all standing in the shadow that Trump casts.
The Republican Party has been corrupted absolutely. House Republicans have combined McCarthyism with Larry, Moe and Curlyism to twist Congress to comically corrupt ends — all to serve the greater degeneracy of Trump. In the Senate, the young hyenas, Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), study Trump’s demagogy and lick their chops, hoping for a turn at democracy’s carcass.
The establishment has utterly caved. Former Atty. Gen. William Barr’s endorsement of Trump this week, after having called Trump unfit, a psychologically damaged incompetent who cares only about himself, was barely newsworthy. What is Barr but another in the long line of weak men, one more debased Republican offering fealty to the grease king? Trump thanked Barr by humiliating him again.

But it was the Republican Supreme Court — mostly men again — that put the shiv a little deeper in democracy’s back this week. Originalists or textualists, all sounded more or less Trumpist as they seriously entertained Trump’s argument that his assaults on the constitutional order are protected by the Constitution itself. There is no way to make honest sense of such a liar’s mash. But Larry, Moe and Curly aren’t just chairing committees in Congress. They wear robes and furrowed brows now, too. And they seem eager to pretend that crimes are just constitutional exercises of power, and that one ex-president is a king.

Richard Nixon, a self-made, and self-corrupted, man who studied geopolitics and government assiduously, never achieved such a broad subjugation of American values and institutions. Trump, the ignorant, n’er-do-well heir to his father’s crooked fortune, has achieved so much more. Trump hasn’t just captured the trenches of conservative America, he has taken the commanding heights. He owns all of it, from the most racist backwater saloon to the Federalist Society clubhouse. They are his corrupted subjects. He is their corrupt and demented king. If he can somehow get through the next few perilous months, he may yet render corruption sacred, and the republic irredeemable.

https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/latimes/default.aspx?token=42e23962a5d74614be16bae3d62d13e7&sfmc_id=6532a30f25b3640666bed99d&utm_id=35182439&skey_id=f0185674dd52c0ccd4b79cadf4d6840cd74dca950f70382e51f3c73188047081&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ENP-email-Subs-eNewspaper-2024427&utm_term=eNewspaper+Daily+Notify&edid=84dbb145-fe2f-4655-a0b2-c1f3393f4521

"Bunnies boiling on the stove" mentioned several times here regarding Katie Britt. What is that?

At least someone finally gave us the creeeeeeepy clip of a traumatized young black man and a therapist(?) clinking her teacup.

Well, that was the opening bell for the Dem's part of the 2024 presidential campaign...

…and Joe Biden came out swinging.

Go, Joe!

What happened to Boebert last night? I've been looking around for her demise & can't find it.

Thanks in advance.

Resources I wish I'd had years ago for debunking vax & other conspiracy theories: downloadable links...

I hope this is okay to cross-post here. I put it in GD first, but things can get lost over there.

Resources I wish I'd had years ago for debunking vax & other conspiracy theories: downloadable links...

This is from a great article today by Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times. Never mind the link unless you have a subscription, but the meat of it for me is that various organizations have written booklets/manuals on how to rebut, prebut, and educate people who have fallen or may soon fall down the rabbit hole.

Counteracting political lies about science
Johns Hopkins, Yale and others are offering researchers playbooks on how to combat disinformation.
In recent years, disinformation has seemed to be on an inexorable march across the scientific and medical landscape.

Prominent politicians, up to and including the former president, have promoted useless drugs as supposed cures for COVID-19. Partisan attacks on the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines have expanded into attacks on all vaccines. Established scientific and medical authorities have been vilified on social media and on the airwaves and even been subjected to physical assault.
The sheer volume of lies and misrepresentations injected into the political mainstream has some scientists despairing of ever regaining the public’s attention.
“Scientists really recognize this as a problem, from what they see in the community and read in the news,” says Tara Kirk Sell of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security. “They see the problems they have from misinformation and disinformation on the public health side and in the medical field and in other areas. They want to figure out how to deal with it. We’re providing…

Sell’s reference is to the “Practical Playbook for Addressing Health Misinformation” just released by her center. The 65-page publication amounts to a road map for identifying misinformation and disinformation and applying the best strategies for counteracting it before it spreads..
https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/sites/default/files/2024-02/24-02-14-cdc-misinfo-playbook_0.pdf

UNICEF, the Yale Institute for Global Health and other organizations published one of the earliest such guides in late 2020, aimed specifically at anti-vaccine misinformation.
https://vaccinemisinformation.guide/

Others have the broader goal of fighting conspiracy theories in general.
https://skepticalscience.com/docs/ConspiracyTheoryHandbook.pdf

One recommendation that most seem to have in common is to take a strategic approach: Disinformation campaigns can’t be defeated by ad hoc measures; they require an organized, proactive and targeted approach mounted by credible defenders of science.

For what it’s worth, link to LATimes, page A2, 2-25-2024

https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/latimes/default.aspx?token=42e23962a5d74614be16bae3d62d13e7&sfmc_id=6532a30f25b3640666bed99d&utm_id=34465635&skey_id=f0185674dd52c0ccd4b79cadf4d6840cd74dca950f70382e51f3c73188047081&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ENP-email-Subs-eNewspaper-2024225&utm_term=eNewspaper+Daily+Notify&edid=bfe96f70-c429-48c9-87cb-514087918ad7

Resources I wish I'd had years ago for debunking vax & other conspiracy theories: downloadable links...

This is from a great article today by Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times. Never mind the link unless you have a subscription, but the meat of it for me is that various organizations have written booklets/manuals on how to rebut, prebut, and educate people who have fallen or may soon fall down the rabbit hole.

Counteracting political lies about science
Johns Hopkins, Yale and others are offering researchers playbooks on how to combat disinformation.
In recent years, disinformation has seemed to be on an inexorable march across the scientific and medical landscape.

Prominent politicians, up to and including the former president, have promoted useless drugs as supposed cures for COVID-19. Partisan attacks on the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines have expanded into attacks on all vaccines. Established scientific and medical authorities have been vilified on social media and on the airwaves and even been subjected to physical assault.
The sheer volume of lies and misrepresentations injected into the political mainstream has some scientists despairing of ever regaining the public’s attention.
“Scientists really recognize this as a problem, from what they see in the community and read in the news,” says Tara Kirk Sell of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security. “They see the problems they have from misinformation and disinformation on the public health side and in the medical field and in other areas. They want to figure out how to deal with it. We’re providing…

Sell’s reference is to the “Practical Playbook for Addressing Health Misinformation” just released by her center. The 65-page publication amounts to a road map for identifying misinformation and disinformation and applying the best strategies for counteracting it before it spreads..
https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/sites/default/files/2024-02/24-02-14-cdc-misinfo-playbook_0.pdf

UNICEF, the Yale Institute for Global Health and other organizations published one of the earliest such guides in late 2020, aimed specifically at anti-vaccine misinformation.
https://vaccinemisinformation.guide/

Others have the broader goal of fighting conspiracy theories in general.
https://skepticalscience.com/docs/ConspiracyTheoryHandbook.pdf

One recommendation that most seem to have in common is to take a strategic approach: Disinformation campaigns can’t be defeated by ad hoc measures; they require an organized, proactive and targeted approach mounted by credible defenders of science.

For what it’s worth, link to LATimes, page A2, 2-25-2024

I got a shocking email from the Electronic Frontier Foundation the other day about some Calif cops

I’m a Californian — I thought we’d taken care of this, but apparently not.
Since it is a press release, the copyright limitations don't apply afaik.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/dozens-rogue-california-police-agencies-still-sharing-driver-locations-anti-abortion

Dozens of Rogue California Police Agencies Still Sharing Driver Locations with Anti-Abortion States
Civil Liberties Groups Urge Attorney General Bonta to Enforce California's Automated License Plate Reader Laws
PRESS RELEASEJANUARY 31, 2024

SAN FRANCISCO—California Attorney General Rob Bonta should crack down on police agencies that still violate Californians’ privacy by sharing automated license plate reader information with out-of-state government agencies, putting abortion seekers and providers at particular risk, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the state’s American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) affiliates urged in a letter to Bonta today.

In October 2023, Bonta issued a legal interpretation and guidance clarifying that a 2016 state law, SB 34, prohibits California’s local and state police from sharing information collected from automated license plate readers (ALPR) with out-of-state or federal agencies. However, despite the Attorney General’s definitive stance, dozens of law enforcement agencies have signaled their intent to continue defying the law.

The EFF and ACLU letter lists 35 specific police agencies which either have informed the civil liberties organizations that they plan to keep sharing ALPR information with out-of-state law enforcement, or have failed to confirm their compliance with the law in response to inquiries by the organizations.

“We urge your office to explore all potential avenues to ensure that state and local law enforcement agencies immediately comply,” the letter said. “We are deeply concerned that the information could be shared with agencies that do not respect California’s commitment to civil rights and liberties and are not covered by California’s privacy protections.”

ALPR systems collect and store location information about drivers, including dates, times, and locations. This sensitive information can reveal where individuals work, live, associate, worship, or seek reproductive health services and other medical care. Sharing any ALPR information with out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies has been forbidden by the California Civil Code since enactment of SB 34 in 2016.

And sharing this data with law enforcement in states that criminalize abortion also undermines California’s extensive efforts to protect reproductive health privacy, especially a 2022 law (AB 1242) prohibiting state and local agencies from providing abortion-related information to out-of-state agencies. The UCLA Center on Reproductive Health, Law and Policy estimates that between 8,000 and 16,100 people will travel to California each year for reproductive care.

An EFF investigation involving hundreds of public records requests uncovered that many California police departments continued sharing records containing residents’ detailed driving profiles with out-of-state agencies. EFF and the ACLUs of Northern and Southern California in March 2023 wrote to more than 70 such agencies to demand they comply with state law. While many complied, many others have not.

“We appreciate your office’s statement on SB 34 and your efforts to protect the privacy and civil rights of everyone in California,” today’s letter said. “Nevertheless, it is clear that many law enforcement agencies continue to ignore your interpretation of the law by continuing to share ALPR information with out-of-state and federal agencies. This violation of SB 34 will continue to imperil marginalized communities across the country, and abortion seekers, providers, and facilitators will be at greater risk of undue criminalization and prosecution.”

For the letter to Bonta: https://www.eff.org/document/01-31-2024-letter-california-ag-rob-bonta-re-enforcing-sb34-alprs

For the letters sent last year to noncompliant California police agencies: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/civil-liberties-groups-demand-california-police-stop-sharing-drivers-location-data

For information on how ALPRs threaten abortion access: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/09/automated-license-plate-readers-threaten-abortion-access-heres-how-policymakers

For general information about ALPRs: https://sls.eff.org/technologies/automated-license-plate-readers-alprs

I just tuned in this morning. WTF happened with the New York Times that has people in a no-doubt-deserved swivet?

It’s early where I am.

I just tuned in this morning. WTF happened with the New York Times that has people in a no-doubt-deserved swivet? What have they done? Did they give Hur the high-five on the front page?

Who here remembers Bush v. Gore? Who remembers the Brooks Brothers Riot to stop counting the vote?

Who here remembers Bush v. Gore? Who remembers the Brooks Brothers Riot to stop counting the vote?

Well, we’re DUers, so anyone not actually in a coma at the time remembers the events very vividly and personally.

One by one the young lawyers involved with Team Bush and Bush v Gore rose through the ranks of highly respectable and highly right-wing legal careers. Bush v Gore not only gave us the presidency of BushCheney, but ultimately Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Brett Kavanagh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett. I’m sure when they get together in a private setting they all bask in the warm glow of a job well done — but under actual oath at their confirmation hearings they all had a specialized sort of amnesia about those events.

So, to watch them hem and haw today about the sacredness of votes cast, and how they were horrified at the thought of electoral chaos, much less whether one state could be the deciding factor in a presidential election — my mind inescapably returned to the events of Bush v Gore.

These aren’t your grandpa’s Republicans. They’re not even conservative, whatever that means any more. The rot that has taken over the Supreme Court is unspeakable.

I hope Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson are okay — this has got to be hard for them.

This is glorious -- thank you! Off to the side is the happiest dog I've ever seen ❤️