February 22, 2024

Lara Trump says she thinks GOP voters would like to see RNC pay Donald Trump's legal fees

https://apnews.com/article/lara-trump-rnc-donald-trump-9c25a74e096439cd7b0ac37c96530675



Updated 2:07 AM CET, February 22, 2024

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law and handpicked choice to help lead the Republican National Committee said she thinks Republican voters would support having the political organization pay the former president’s ballooning legal fees. Lara Trump said Wednesday while campaigning for her father-in-law ahead of the South Carolina primary that she was not familiar with the RNC’s rules about paying Donald Trump’s legal fees in a multitude of criminal and civil cases.

But she said she thought the idea would get broad support among GOP voters who see his legal cases as political persecution. “That’s why people are furious right now. And they see the attacks against him. They feel like it’s an attack not just on Donald Trump but on this country,” she said. “So yeah I think that is a big interest to people, absolutely.” In addition to the millions he is spending on lawyers, Trump’s legal debts now top half a billion dollars.

Trump, though the front-runner in the GOP presidential primary, has not yet become the Republican nominee. That did not stop him last week from publicly calling to remove the RNC’s current leaders and suggest Lara Trump should serve as co-chair. He proposed Michael Whatley, the current chair of the North Carolina GOP, to serve as chair.

She told reporters on Wednesday that GOP voters will feel more trust in the RNC by having a Trump family member installed in leadership. “Having someone like me in there I think will go a long way for people. I can assure you that my loyalty is to my father-in-law and I will make sure that every penny is used properly,” she said. “It should be going to fight for Nov. 5 for the causes that we care about.” Those causes were electing Trump president in November, growing the Republican majority in the House with “patriots, America first candidates” and winning back control of the Senate, she said.

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February 22, 2024

Sir Keir Starmer has called for an "immediate humanitarian ceasefire" in Gaza to try to quell a Labour party revolt

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/labour-immediate-ceasefire-gaza-israel-war-keir-starmer-wlzsfrw6w

https://archive.is/xcCpc

Sir Keir Starmer will seek to stave off a Labour revolt over his stance on Gaza by calling for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire”. In an escalation of language that diverges from the UK government’s position, Labour urged both Israel and Hamas to put down their weapons and end a four-month battle immediately. The intervention before a crunch vote on Wednesday in parliament appeared to win over wavering shadow ministers who were considering quitting if Labour did not call for an immediate ceasefire.

However, wrangling over parliamentary procedure could still blight Labour’s chance to force a vote on its new position and threaten the carefully-crafted attempt at party unity. Starmer personally lobbied MPs to back his amendment, with David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, and Lisa Nandy, the shadow international development minister, also holding talks with colleagues on Tuesday. “It’s a good, credible motion and frontbenchers will be happy to vote for it,” said one shadow minister who had been pushing strongly behind the scenes for Starmer to toughen up his stance on Israel.



At a meeting on Tuesday, the shadow cabinet signed off Labour’s new position — articulated in an amendment to a motion by the Scottish National Party at Westminster that will be debated on Wednesday. Labour insiders were bullish that there would be a small rebellion at most, confined only to a handful of traditionally-unruly backbench MPs who are prepared to back the SNP motion. Senior Labour sources predicted the party would avoid a repeat of the embarrassment suffered last November, when a fifth of the parliamentary party rebelled and ten frontbenchers quit to back a similar SNP motion.

However, the Labour left mobilised to accuse Starmer of acting too slowly. A spokesman for the left-wing pressure group Momentum said that Starmer’s statement was “so conditional and caveated, the Labour Leadership is giving cover for Israel’s brutal war to continue”. A member of Labour’s ruling national executive committee, Jessica Barnard, also said it was a “total moral failure that it has taken the loss of 30,000 Palestinians lives to arrive here”.

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February 21, 2024

Teen Subcultures Are Fading. Pity the Poor Kids.

Gorgeous, abundant visuals are just pale imitations of what young people used to have: an actual scene.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/magazine/aesthetics-tiktok-teens.html

https://archive.is/ufTxA



A few weeks ago, my 12-year-old daughter showed me a video created by a Dallas clothing store called Dear Hannah Prep, depicting a girl’s first time visiting “the preppiest boutique in Texas.” “How excited are you?” an off-camera voice asks. “I’m so excited!” the girl says. Then she opens the door, gasps and declares, “It’s so preppy in here!” That this moment had become a meme, spawning an array of other videos riffing on the original (we see the girl enter a derelict classroom or padded cell and swoon, each time, that it’s “so preppy in here”) was far less confusing to me than the fact that people were calling this store — an all-white box exploding with smiley-face sweatshirts, tie-dyed fuzzy bathrobes and a generally berserk neon beachiness — preppy. “That,” I told my daughter, “is not preppy.” I did not have much hope of persuading her that millions of teenagers on TikTok were wrong and her 50-year-old mother — who does, in fact, own a copy of Lisa Birnbach’s 1980 “The Official Preppy Handbook” — was right, but it seemed worth trying. I looked around her room, and for lack of any stray loafers or rumpled chinos to use as examples, I touched the top of an antique oak dresser that was once her grandmother’s. “This is preppy,” I said. She rolled her eyes: “Mom, that dresser is super cottagecore, and that is not my aesthetic at all.”

My daughter’s “preppy” is not my idea of preppy — the prep of actual New England prep schools, of frayed Oxford cloth and WASPy noblesse oblige. Nor is it the aspirational varsity style of Tommy Hilfiger and 1990s rappers in rugby shirts, or even J. Crew’s self-conscious 2010s update on old-money style. Those meanings haven’t vanished; a great deal has been written about them lately, much of it connected to Avery Trufelman’s erudite series “American Ivy,” released on her podcast in 2022. But those iterations are now known, in the TikTok world, as “old preppy.” The new sort fills its Pinterest pages with something else: colorful Stanley mugs, tiered pink micro-minis, bulbed makeup mirrors and Brazilian Bum Bum Creams. Part of what makes it hard to describe is that it is not rooted in any specific culture; it seems to be largely about being fun and a girl and buying things packaged with a bright color on a white background. There is no deep ethos to it, no shared experience other than posting videos of shopping hauls or makeup routines — pastimes usually engaged in alone, in your bedroom. This is not just true of “preppy.” If you are a teenager or have exposure to teenagers, what I am about to write is something you probably know already. Subcultures in general — once the poles of style and art and politics and music around which wound so many ribbons of teenage meaning — have largely collapsed.

What teenagers today are offered instead is a hyperactive landscape of so-called aesthetics — thousands of them, including everything from the infamous cottagecore to, these days, prep. These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum. They come and go and blend and break apart like clouds in the wind, many within weeks of appearing. They have much content but little context — a lot to look at but a very thin relationship to any “real life” anything, like behaviors or gathering places. On one end, even a distinctly in-the-world subculture (like, say, grunge) can be reduced to a vibe packet of anodyne references (cigarettes, grimy things); on the other, a mere mood tone can be elevated to something offered as lifestyle (there are girls who enjoy the color red and a certain Euro effortlessness, and they are called Tomato Girls, while others who prefer white are called Vanilla Girls). If two dozen things on a Pinterest page feel as if they go together, chances are someone, even just as a lark or experiment, is calling it an aesthetic.

For proof, you need only log on to Aesthetics Wiki, a wonderfully encyclopedic website for online style tribes. Here you will find not only large categories like emo, Y2K, VSCO, academia or the perennial goth but also categories so specific that their nicheness begins feeling like an Escher staircase of references. The roughly 200 aesthetics found under the randomly chosen letter M contain some that will be legible to many (Memphis rap, Mod), some that involve a kind of style-sensitive hairsplitting (Mallgoth, Messy French It Girl, McBling) and others that are just full-on W.T.F.: Meatcore is for people who appreciate raw meat as a nondietary object, and Monumentality is the appreciation of anything big, like Godzilla, Gothic cathedrals, giant redwoods or asteroids (“many asteroids are fairly large”). It’s hard to imagine a Monumentality meetup because, like so many aesthetics, Monumentality is only referential, its conversation ending right where it begins: Do you like this big thing? Yes, because it is big.

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February 21, 2024

Trump and allies plotting militarized mass deportations, detention camps

As president, Trump sought to use military planes and bases for deportation. Now, he and his allies are talking about a new effort that current and former officials warn could be impractical and dangerous.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/20/trump-mass-deportations-immigration/

https://archive.is/LDP8V



Faced with a surge of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018 and 2019, Donald Trump’s White House discussed ways to more aggressively deploy the resources and the might of the U.S. military. Aides and officials spoke privately about detaining migrants on military bases and flying them out of the country on military planes — ideas that the Pentagon headed off. Throughout his presidency, Trump himself would frequently demand to send troops to the border and catch people crossing.

“He was obsessed with having the military involved,” said a former senior administration official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. That approach and unfinished business have taken on renewed significance and urgency as the country confronts another migrant crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, and as Trump closes in on the Republican presidential nomination. The former president is making immigration a core campaign theme, promoting a proposal for an unprecedented deportation effort if he is returned to power.



Trump pledges that as president he would immediately launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As a model, he points to an Eisenhower-era program known as “Operation Wetback,” using a derogatory slur for Mexican migrants. The operation used military tactics to round up and remove migrant workers, sometimes transporting them in dangerous conditions that led to some deaths. Former administration officials and policy experts said staging an even larger operation today would face a bottleneck in detention space — a problem that Trump adviser Stephen Miller and other allies have proposed addressing by building mass deportation camps.

“Americans can expect that immediately upon President Trump’s return to the Oval Office, he will restore all of his prior policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shock waves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation in American history,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt in a statement. She added that undocumented immigrants “should not get comfortable because very soon they will be going home.”



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February 21, 2024

Donald Trump - I'm your Puppet

February 21, 2024

The Neglected History of the State of Israel

https://prospect.org/world/2024-02-21-neglected-history-state-of-israel/



I begin with fulsome praise: Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker is the greatest interviewer alive. He asks the most terrible people alive, or sometimes just conspicuously dodgy people, the bluntest questions imaginable. They evade; he follows up—ruthlessly. They’re reduced to puddles of incoherence. We get to peer inside the mystery of moral failure—an accomplishment few other writers can manage. Just as valuable are his straightforward informational interviews, especially these past months in which Chotiner has been methodically flushing out all-too-shrouded facts of the inhumanity on the ground in Israel and Palestine, from all sides. One of Chotiner’s best interviews ran this past November. A leader of the militant West Bank settlement movement told him that Jews have a sacred duty to occupy all the land between “the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest,” that nothing west of the Jordan River was ever “Arab place or property,” and that no Arabs, even citizens, should have civil rights in Israel. Stunning stuff, and extremely valuable to have on the record, especially given the settler movement’s close ties to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

I praise Chotiner, however, as a bridge to a separate point: Even the most learned and thoughtful observers of Israel and Palestine miss a basic historic foundation of the crisis. Return to that November interview. Chotiner asked, “So rights are not some sort of universal thing that every person has. They’re something that you can win or lose.” The settler answered, “That’s right.” He followed up: “When you see Palestinian children dying, what’s your emotional reaction as a human being?” She replied: “I go by a very basic human law of nature. My children are prior to the children of the enemy, period. They are first. My children are first.” Chotiner responded with incredulity: “We are talking about children. I don’t know if the law of nature is what we need to be looking at here.” The settler, nonplussed, repeated herself: “I say my children are first.”

It’s a remarkable thing to hear such horrifying sentiments, unadorned. But it is also remarkable how surprised we are by them. I’ve been reading an outstanding 2005 study, The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy, by historian Eran Kaplan. You should too. One of the things you’ll learn: That settler is repeating almost word for word the doctrines of one of Zionism’s original political traditions—the faction that ended up winning, and whose foundations were literally fascist. I use the word “fascist” in the literal sense. Do not flinch from it. The founders of Revisionist Zionism certainly didn’t. Respect them enough to take them at their word.



In 1928, a prominent Revisionist named Abba Ahimeir published a series of articles entitled “From the Diary of a Fascist.” They refer to the founder of their movement, Ze’ev Jabotinsky (his adopted first name is Hebrew for “wolf”), as “il duce.” In 1935, his comrade Hen Merhavia wrote that Revisionists were doing what Mussolini did: “establish a nucleus of an exemplary life of morality and purity. Like us, the Italian fascists look back to their historical heritage. We seek to return to the kingdom of the House of David; they want to return to the glory of the Roman Empire.” They even opened a maritime academy in Italy, under Mussolini’s sponsorship, for the navy they hoped to build in their new Israeli state. “[T]he views and the political and social inclinations of the Revisionists,” an Italian magazine reported, “are absolutely in accordance with the fascist doctrine … as our students they will bring the Italian and fascist culture to Palestine.”

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February 21, 2024

Conservative Think Tank Plots a Christian Nationalist Trump Presidency

https://www.thedailybeast.com/conservative-think-tank-plots-a-christian-nationalist-trump-presidency



A conservative think tank is preparing to infuse Christian nationalist politics into a potential second Donald Trump presidency, according to documents obtained by Politico.

Staff members at the Center for Renewing America placed Christian nationalism at the top of a list of priorities should Trump snag a second term as head of state. The Center for Renewing America is headed by Russell Vought, a former Trump cabinet member and ally, and “proud” Christian nationalist.

https://twitter.com/russvought/status/1618352693449494528
According to a statement on the think tank’s website, its purpose is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.” While the documents obtained by Politico did not include any specific policy points, conservatives like Vought have long used interpretations of Christian doctrine as the basis for hard-line stances against abortion, immigration, and same-sex marriage.

Christian nationalists are reliably Trump voters, and Vought’s name has been floated for the position of chief of staff. Trump has slowly increased his use of spiritual language on the campaign trail, in a bid to capture the votes of evangelical Christians, and has displayed a desire to earn messianic status among them.

Read it at Politico

February 21, 2024

Right-Wing Org Uses Bonkers Alabama Ruling to Fight Abortion in Florida

Florida is considering an abortion rights law. But now that Alabama’s supreme court says that embryos are “children,” conservative groups are moving to derail the Florida measure.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/right-wing-org-uses-bonkers-alabama-ruling-to-fight-abortion-in-florida



Now that Alabama’s supreme court on Friday took the remarkable step of declaring that frozen embryos are “children,” a conservative group is trying to derail an expected 2024 ballot initiative in Florida that would enshrine abortion rights in that Sunshine State’s constitution. On Monday, a religious civil rights law firm alerted the Florida Supreme Court to the neighboring state’s recent ruling in an attempt to have the high court block the amendment from reaching voters as it currently stands. Earlier this month, the conservative-leaning Florida court heard arguments on the proposed constitutional amendment. It will decide by April 1 whether to approve the language in the measure, which states, “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”

Anti-abortion groups and the state’s own attorney general have asked the Florida high court to stop the proposal, with AG Ashley Moody submitting a court filing that decries the ballot question as a devious ploy to trick voters into creating the “near-equivalent of abortion on demand in the State of Florida.” Among the groups opposing the abortion rights measure is the attorney Mathew D. Staver and his law firm, Liberty Counsel, who take credit for drafting the notorious Florida Amendment 2 that voters approved in 2008 strictly defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman—one that was struck down by a federal court and ultimately led to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision guaranteeing the right to gay marriage in 2015.

Although Liberty Counsel already presented arguments to the Florida Supreme Court in the current abortion rights ballot initiative, it’s now trying to bolster its cause by pointing to the Alabama ruling to make the case that personhood status should actually be more expansive than it already is. The Alabama Supreme Court considered whether three couples could sue for wrongful death after their frozen embryos were destroyed, and it decided the matter by asserting that the state’s “Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location,” including those in a “cryogenic nursery.” The 7-2 decision is among the first to tackle the personhood status of what it called “extrauterine children—that is, unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed.”

The decision is the latest move in conservatives’ ongoing legal battle across the country to severely restrict abortion rights ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. A 2022 legal paper by Penn State law professor Dara E. Purvis noted that “general personhood statutes are typically more concerned with embryos and fetuses in utero, and only implicitly potentially apply to stored embryos.” Arizona and Louisiana are the rare exceptions, she noted. The Florida ballot initiative’s attempt to secure abortion rights “before viability,” however, is setting up a battle on what viability means—and that’s where Alabama’s court decision comes in. In court papers, the Florida AG is arguing that “‘viable’ has a broader understanding—’capable of living,’ whether or not dependent on another person.” If Florida’s supreme court is receptive to the argument that personhood status should also extend to embryos, this could give conservative groups more ammunition to restrict abortion rights elsewhere.

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February 21, 2024

GOP Rep Deletes Post Falsely Accusing 'Illegal Alien' of Parade Shooting

Sharing a photo of a Kansas City Chiefs fan briefly detained for intoxication, Burchett wrongly claimed the man was one of the shooters and in the U.S. illegally.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-rep-tim-burchett-deletes-tweet-falsely-accusing-illegal-alien-of-kansas-city-shooting



Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) backtracked on Monday afternoon and deleted a tweet that wrongly identified a local resident as being an “illegal alien” and one of the gunmen in the Kansas City Super Bowl parade shooting. According to the Knoxville News Sentinel, Burchett only deleted the post after the outlet contacted him on Monday and asked about the tweet, which falsely claimed Kansas native Denton Loudermill was one of the suspected shooters. In the wake of the tragic shooting that left one dead and 22 others injured, social media was flooded with right-wing disinformation tying the shooting to illegal immigration, particularly around press photos of Loudermill being detained in cuffs by police near the scene.

Before long, viral posts surfaced alleging that a 44-year-old illegal immigrant named Sahil Omar was identified as one of the shooters and had been arrested by Kansas City police, citing images of a detained Loudermill. The Associated Press noted that the name “Sahil Omar” has been used to make similar erroneous claims about other recent tragedies, likely preying on fears about immigration and crime. “At least one of the Kansas City Chiefs parade shooters identified as Sahil Omar, a 44 year old illegal immigrant,” one widely read X post blared about the KC shooting. “Biden has failed to protect America from invasion and terrorism.” Feeding into the panic, Burchett tossed the following caption alongside an image of Loudermill: “One of the Kansas City Chiefs victory parade shooters has been identified as an illegal Alien.”

https://twitter.com/timburchett/status/1759645965445636470
It was soon clear, however, that Burchett’s claim was untrue. Within a day of the shooting, local law enforcement said they had multiple juvenile suspects in custody. While the teenagers haven’t been publicly named yet, Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves said there was “no nexus to terrorism or homegrown violent extremism” and that the incident appeared to stem from a “personal dispute” between the assailants. Additionally, Loudermill was never a suspect in the shooting and had only been briefly detained by police because he was intoxicated and did not immediately move from the crime scene. “There were many people detained at one time or another on Wednesday,” the Kansas City police department said in a statement. “Some of the detainments could result in future charges unrelated to the shooting. No one who is believed to be involved in the shooting has been released.”

Meanwhile, Loudermill has spent the past few days attempting to clear his name after he was falsely tied to the shooting. “Mr. Denton has received death threats over a lie, over misinformation,” Loudermill’s attorney LaRonna Lassiter Saunders said in a press conference on Saturday. “He didn’t do anything wrong. He did not commit a crime. So please, run, tell that. Get the truth out there. Help us clear his name. Help us save his life.” She added: “Mr. Denton had several drinks, but so did a half million other people, including some of the Chiefs players. It’s not a crime. It doesn’t make you a mass shooter.”

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February 21, 2024

Supreme Court tells Marjorie Taylor Greene's anti-mask lawsuit to kiss off

She said not wearing a mask during the COVID-19 epidemic was a form of protest. The Justices apparently didn't agree with her.

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2024/02/supreme-court-tells-marjorie-taylor-greenes-anti-mask-lawsuit-to-kiss-off/



The Supreme Court has refused to hear a lawsuit brought by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) against fines she received for ignoring a mandatory masking rule at the Capitol during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Greene — a notorious anti-vaxxer and COVID “truther” (that is, one who peddles conspiracy theories against COVID-19 vaccinations) — was one of three Republican representatives who were charged fines for refusing to wear masks on the House floor.

House Democrats approved the rule. The rule fined legislators $500 for their first infraction and $2,500 for each one after. Greene accumulated over $100,000 in fines for refusing to wear masks, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Two other Republicans — Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ralph Norman (R-SC) — also broke the rule. The legislators later said in their lawsuit that the Democrats sought to “force Republicans to be instruments in fostering public adherence to an ideological viewpoint,” the Courthouse News Service reported. As such, the Republicans considered their rule-breaking as a form of protest.

“Nancy Pelosi did this by edict. There’s no law. She changed this rule on her own,” Massie said at a press conference announcing the lawsuit. “She did it unconstitutionally.” Greene and her fellow rule-breakers filed a lawsuit to dismiss the fines. All three claimed that the 27th Amendment, which prevents Congress from changing lawmaker’s salaries in between elections, made the fines unconstitutional. A federal judge in D.C. tossed their lawsuit in 2022, stating that the legislators couldn’t sue then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) because she had passed the rule while working as a member of the federal government.

In June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed the ruling. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court declined to hear Greene’s appeal, offering no reason for their rejection. As such, the fines against her and the other legislators will stand. All three legislators have supported anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the past, including a federal “Don’t Say Gay” bill. They also voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, a bipartisan law that requires federal, state, and local governments to recognize legal same-sex marriages.

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