March 18, 2022

Where Things Stand: Cheney Warns Another GOPer Has Become One Of The Kremlin's 'Useful Idiots'

One of the continuing ironies of the current political moment is the extent to which it is now the norm for Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), despite her name, to break with her party on a number of issues, especially to critique Trumpian lines of thinking from the far-right faction.

Today she went after Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), criticizing the QAnon congresswoman for giving fresh air to the stale Kremlin talking points about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Putin is targeting and slaughtering civilians in a brutal unprovoked war against Ukraine, a sovereign democratic nation,” Cheney tweeted this morning, pointing to a video that Greene posted on Facebook Wednesday. “Only the Kremlin and their useful idiots would call that ‘a conflict in which peace agreements have been violated by both sides.’”
https://twitter.com/Liz_Cheney/status/1504413263844581377
“Useful idiot” is both amusing on its face and a throwback to the Cold War, a term used to describe people who might not actually be allies of Soviet Russia, but who could be vulnerable to manipulation and indoctrination via its “propaganda.” (It goes without saying that history and ideology has scrambled terminology here: Greene is not a communist, nor is Russia Soviet — but the “useful idiot” line on its face … rings true here.)

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/cheney-warns-another-goper-marjorie-taylor-greene-kremlin-useful-idiots

March 17, 2022

More than two dozen Senate Republicans demand Biden do more for Ukraine after voting against $13.6B

Source: Washington Post

More than two dozen Senate Republicans demand Biden do more for Ukraine after voting against $13.6 billion for Ukraine-complete headline

Thirty-one Senate Republicans voted last week against the $1.5 trillion spending bill to fund the government, increase U.S. defense spending and provide humanitarian and military assistance to Ukraine. In recent days, many of them have clamored for more weapons and aid.

More than two dozen Senate Republicans are demanding that President Biden do more to aid war-torn Ukraine and arm its forces against Russia’s brutal assault, after voting last week against $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine.

Consider Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who heard Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s emotional plea in a virtual address to Congress on Wednesday for more weapons and a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

“President Biden needs to make a decision TODAY: either give Ukraine access to the planes and antiaircraft defense systems it needs to defend itself, or enforce a no-fly zone to close Ukrainian skies to Russian attacks,” Scott said in a statement. “If President Biden does not do this NOW, President Biden will show himself to be absolutely heartless and ignorant of the deaths of innocent Ukrainian children and families.”

Last week, Scott was one of 31 Republicans to vote against a sweeping, $1.5 trillion spending bill to fund government agencies and departments through the remainder of the fiscal year and that would also include $13.6 billion in assistance for Ukraine. Biden signed the bill into law Tuesday, casting the aid as the United States “moving urgently to further augment the support to the brave people of Ukraine as they defend their country.”

After casting a “no” vote, Scott assailed the overall spending bill as wasteful, arguing that it was filled with lawmakers’ pet projects. “It makes my blood boil,” Scott said last week.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/17/republicans-ukraine-aid-vote/

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Of course they did.

March 17, 2022

House Republicans who challenged Biden's win are losing lots of corporate cash

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the days after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, dozens of companies said they would suspend political donations to Republican lawmakers who had backed then-President Donald Trump's baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

More than one year later, Republicans in the House of Representatives who voted to challenge the election results have so far collected about half as much corporate cash as they did at this point in the previous election cycle, a Reuters analysis of campaign finance records shows.

By contrast, corporate donations are up about 10% to House Republicans who voted to certify President Joe Biden's victory over Trump.

The results indicate that the corporate boycott is not just limited to the dozens of companies that announced a halt to donations after the attack. Hundreds more have also scaled back their support, the Reuters analysis shows.

The shift illustrates the growing gulf between business interests and the right wing of the Republican Party, which under Trump's presidency grew more anti-establishment and more open to curbs on global trade and technology that would have been anathema in previous years.

https://news.yahoo.com/house-republicans-challenged-bidens-win-100508402.html

March 17, 2022

As Russia Digs In, What's the Risk of Nuclear War? 'It's Not Zero.'

A series of shifts in Russian statements about using nuclear weapons has led some analysts to believe that the Kremlin sees a nuclear exchange as a viable strategy.

A major war raging on Russia’s and NATO’s borders. Increasingly bold Western military support. Russian threats of direct retaliation. A mood of siege and desperation in the Kremlin. Growing uncertainty around each side’s red lines.

As Russia and NATO escalate their standoff over Ukraine, nuclear strategists and former U.S. officials warn that there is a remote but growing risk of an unintended slide into direct conflict — even, in some scenarios, a nuclear exchange.

“The prospect of nuclear war,” António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, warned this week, “is now back within the realm of possibility.”

Leaders on both sides emphasize that they consider such a war unthinkable, even as they make preparations and issue declarations for how they might carry it out. But the fear, experts stress, is not a deliberate escalation to war, but a misunderstanding or a provocation gone too far that, as each side scrambles to respond, spirals out of control.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/world/europe/ukraine-russia-nuclear-war.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iWka3DODm8ciPsSGYyMvErQf617apwu3C6SRdlMdaUyX-dzx6pZIkdpRgCy54SNgtIFPyAx48qVb18B4qjsD_o-4CO4KS6wMvt-z7my-BzfbGG6DKGMzXcqLV16pcczIEX63SQO2qiRQOAmidl-3_8mAItoBmtVPFn8tPnoCxx9OtuHf0ucvlFwA7cFLGmVyd2M6LsAcxFQC0bFSh595GU87tBdOrAHLfq1bk5gKIel3-JnWiE_J5ypBpYxW4HSi71u1LfLoheJw8C3rO4k_0jEnnjGPjg0A2cBu7kBYg&smid=url-share

These are very dangerous times, but if there is a serious escalation, one can certainly rely on the Republicans to be the "Blame America First" party.

March 16, 2022

James Webb: 'Fully focused' telescope beats expectations

Source: BBC



Engineers say they have now managed to fully focus the $10bn observatory on a test star. The pin-sharp performance is even better than hoped, they add.

To get to this stage, all of Webb's mirrors had to be aligned to tiny fractions of the width of a human hair.

But the agency cautions that a lot of work still lies ahead before the telescope can be declared operational.

Lee Feinberg, the Nasa engineer who has led the development of Webb's optical elements, described the release of the first properly focused image as phenomenal.

Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60771210

March 16, 2022

Judge Wants to Review Investigation Tactics in Bannon Case

A District Court judge ordered the government to turn over certain phone records that investigators captured in their efforts to investigate Steve Bannon and his lawyer.

Federal prosecutors going after Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress revealed on Wednesday that they sought no approval from higher-ranking Justice Department officials before they took the unusual move to spy on his lawyer—in addition to erroneously targeting a number of other Americans with similar names.

That action seemed to disturb U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who repeatedly asked prosecutors why they thought it proper—or even relevant—to secretly gather a log of defense attorney Robert Costello’s private phone calls, text messages, and emails.

“What’s unique here is that the government didn’t just go get regular records,” Nichols said. “Why is that an appropriate first move?”

The judge ruled Wednesday that the government must turn over the phone records requests and the phone records themselves for his private review. That includes information the Justice Department received from Comcast, Google, and Yahoo.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/judge-wants-to-review-investigation-tactics-in-steve-bannon-case

This sounds unsettling.

March 16, 2022

'We Want People That Are Going to Fight the Left,' Says the Man Out-Trumping Trump

Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, is giving Donald Trump a run for his money as the most divisive politician in America.

“We want people that are going to fight the left, and that’s what we need to do in this country,” DeSantis declared in an interview with Fox News on Feb. 8. “That’s what we’re doing in Florida, standing up for people’s freedoms. We’re opposing wokeness. We’re opposing all these things.”

In a Nov. 5, 2021, article on the liberal Daily Beast website, “Desperate, Deranged DeSantis Devolves Into Dumb Troll,” Ruben Navarrette Jr. wrote that DeSantis “is a terrible governor who is failing his leadership course with flying colors. Driven only by politics and naked ambition, he pursues reckless policies that divide Floridians and may even put them in danger.”

The governor routinely succumbs to right-wing pressure groups, Navarrette continued, “because he apparently has no core beliefs other than the unshakable conviction that he should sit in the Oval Office.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/opinion/ron-desantis-is-gambling-on-out-trumping-trump.html

March 16, 2022

A dentist broke his patients' teeth so he could fix them. Prosecutors say he made millions.

Scott Charmoli’s patients’ teeth were just fine, but fine wasn’t making him enough money.

So the dentist in Jackson, Wis., drilled into and broke his patients’ teeth in order to charge them for fixing the damage he’d caused, according to federal prosecutors. By doing so, Charmoli went from pulling in $1.4 million and affixing 434 crowns in 2014 to raking in $2.5 million and performing more than 1,000 crown procedures a year later.

On Thursday, following a four-day trial, Charmoli, 61, was convicted of five counts of health-care fraud and two counts of making false statements about his patients’ treatment. He’s scheduled for sentencing in June, when he’ll face up to 10 years for each of the health-care-fraud counts and a maximum of five years on the other two convictions.

Charmoli’s attorneys didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post on Tuesday night. But when the dentist pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in December 2020, his lawyer at the time said the only thing her client was guilty of was hard work.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/03/16/wisconsin-dentist-scott-charmoli-intentionally-breaks-patients-teeth/

March 16, 2022

Meanwhile, inside the fridge...

March 16, 2022

The Whole Point of the Constitution Was to Weaken the States

As millions of Americans see it, the Constitution was written to protect and extend the powers and prerogatives of the states. It established a “limited” national government and preserved, for state governments, any number of rights and responsibilities.

The whole point of the Constitution, in this view, is to restrain the federal government as much as possible. If there is one reason, beyond partisanship, that anyone is attracted to a plainly deficient idea like the independent state legislature doctrine (which I wrote about last week), it is that it’s in line with the widespread belief that state governments have pride of place within the American constitutional order.

But this is a misunderstanding. Even in the age when state governments were more independent and autonomous than they are today — the nearly 80 years between ratification and Appomattox — it was still understood that states were subordinate to the federal government. In turn, the federal government had considerable power to act on and influence the states. Why else would the statesmen of antebellum South Carolina develop a theory of nullification, if not to challenge the prevailing view that states were bound to submit to the will of the national government?

Go back a little further, to the first years of the American republic, and you will see that one of the key goals of the Constitution was to curb the power of the states and leash them to the broader authority of a new national government led by a powerful legislature and an unusually strong elected executive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/opinion/madison-constitution-states-rights.html

I seem to recall from my high school government classes that the Constitution was written to cure the "defects" of the Articles of Confederation, which gave the states authorities that conflicted with federal powers intended to establish a common framework of legal, judicial, and administrative controls applicable to all states of the union. Republican state politicians in particular seem to want to Balkanize the USA these days by their relentless attacks against the federal government.