With authoritarians and tyrants on the march across the world, Poland is an emerging test case of whether a corrupted democracy can be revived. The discouraging early signs are that it might be harder than building one from scratch.
Contempt for the niceties of representative and pluralistic democracy, along with florid rhetorical excess, were the trademarks of the man who controlled Poland’s ruling party for the past eight years, before a shock electoral defeat last fall cast him into political exile.
Ghost Cat, by Chikanobu Toyohara 1838-1912
Now Jaroslaw Kaczynski, having meted out death by a thousand cuts to Polish democracy in a failed effort to cement his grip on power, leads an irreconcilable opposition.
His escalating standoff with the new government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk is a stress test that is likely to subject Eastern Europe’s biggest and most influential country to a bitter contest of wills for the foreseeable future. And it is far from clear that Poland can regain the vibrant democracy, independent judiciary and robust institutions it worked so hard to establish from the ruins of communism more than 30 years ago.
“It was easier then because there was broad consensus in society and the political class about the general direction,” Piotr Buras, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Warsaw office, told me. “Now this is the core of the conflict.”
Tusk, who was prime minister from 2007 to 2014, took office again last month. It doesn’t mean that he took power.
Over the course of its two terms in government, Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party jury-rigged systems, rules and institutions to its own partisan advantage, seeding its allies in the courts, prosecutors’ offices, state-owned media and central bank. Kaczynski’s administration erected an intricate legal obstacle course designed to leave the party with a stranglehold on key levers of power even if it were ousted in elections.
On top of that, President Andrzej Duda, a Kaczynski ally, is set to remain in office until his term expires in August next year. He retains broad powers, including to veto legislation, and has already thwarted Tusk’s agenda where possible.
Wednesday Reads: Today’s Awful News (Is there any other kind?)
Posted: September 10, 2025 Filed under: just because | Tags: Donald Trump, Epstein birthday book, ICE, israel, Jeffrey Epstein, NATO, Poland, Qatar, Russia 9 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
I’m even more overwhelmed than usual with the news today. It’s absolutely insane.
Yesterday we got to see Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday book, and it is simply disgusting, as JJ wrote yesterday. Trump can deny he wrote the note with his signature all he wants. No one is buying it. He was closse friends with this man for 10-15 years and had to know what Epstein was up to. Not only that, Trump makes other sickening appearances in the book, including one about buying a “fully depreciated” woman from Epstein.
That would be enough horrible news to deal with today, but there’s much more. Poland shot down Russian drones that entered their air space. Israel bombed a building in Qatar. The Supreme Court decision to legalize racial profiling continues to be a top story (Dakinikat covered that extensively on Monday.). ICE is continuing to terrify residents of numerous cities. Trump ventured out of the White House last night with some cabinet members and was called Hitler by citizens of Washington DC.
The Birthday Book
Charley Warzel at The Atlantic (gift link): You Really Need to See Epstein’s Birthday Book for Yourself. This time, the conspiracy theorists were right.
Looking back, I don’t know what exactly I was expecting when I opened “Request No. 1,” the PDF file containing the contents of Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th-birthday book. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend and co-conspirator, created the book in 2003 by soliciting tributes from the financier’s friends and associates. Given the crimes Epstein was convicted of, I steeled myself before scrolling. Somehow, my internet-addled imagination failed me. This book is a nightmare.
The book was released yesterday by Congress after Epstein’s estate, which was subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee, provided a copy. It is the same book that contains the now-infamous letter and “bawdy” sketch from Donald Trump that ends: “May every day be another wonderful secret.” When The Wall Street Journal reported on the letter’s existence in July, the newspaper described it but did not republish the letter itself, so Trump vehemently denied that it was real and sued for defamation. But the now-public letter certainly looks real, and so does Trump’s signature. Many of the people who encountered it for the first time yesterday made a similar observation: Its creepy prose is framed by a markered sketch of what looks like the caricature not of a woman’s body, but of a girl’s. (The White House can no longer plausibly deny that the letter exists, but it now insists that Trump did not write or sign it.)
The Trump letter makes the birthday book inherently newsworthy. But it is far from the most disturbing or lecherous of the book’s contents. A section titled “Brooklyn” includes recollections of Epstein’s horrible sexual escapades, apparently including making a maid watch people have sex and holding a knife up while telling women to take off their swimsuits on a boat—a story told in the book under the heading “Girls on My Boat.” Given what we know about Epstein’s sex crimes, including his sex crimes against minors, the birthday book is a sickening document. Over its 238 pages, Epstein’s friends, “girlfriends,” and business acquaintances offer lurid tributes to the pedophilic multimillionaire in the form of acrostic poems, drawings, and letters extolling him as “a liver, a lover,” and, affectionately, the “Degenerate One.” Individual contributions vary but it is the sheer volume of sexual references and jokes that ends up being most shocking. So much so that I suggest you read the document yourself.
The book’s contributors apparently include former President Bill Clinton, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, the billionaire retailer Leslie Wexner, and, of course, Maxwell herself, as well as a prominent fashion designer, financiers, and a media magnate. Clinton, Mitchell, and Wexner did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for Clinton referred The Wall Street Journal to a previous statement that said, “The former president had cut off ties more than a decade before Epstein’s 2019 arrest and didn’t know about Epstein’s alleged crimes.” Wexner declined to comment to the Journal but previously told reporters he cut ties with Epstein in 2007.
Not all of the entries in the book allude to sexual activity, and it’s plausible that not all of the contributors knew about Epstein’s crimes. Still, the document is conspiracy jet fuel—visual and textual confirmation of the long-held suspicions that Epstein’s sex pestery was an open secret, enabled by powerful people who may have participated in it themselves or laughed it all off as a friend’s roguish quirk….
Sanitizing this document would be wrong, so I’ll be blunt: The Epstein birthday book is full of contributions from wealthy and powerful people who appear fully aware of Epstein’s attraction to “girls.” In fact, they seem to celebrate it and, in some cases, allude winkingly to Epstein’s predatory lifestyle.
Use the gift link to read the rest. I haven’t looked through the entire book yet. I suppose I should do it, but I’m not looking forward to it after what I’ve already seen and heard.
One more on the birthday book from Matthew Goldstein, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Steve Eder at The New York Times: A Phony Trump Check and a ‘Depreciated’ Woman in Epstein’s Birthday Book.
The splashy focus of Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday book released by lawmakers on Monday was a lewd drawing apparently signed by Donald J. Trump. But Mr. Trump’s cameo in another part of the book also provided fodder for Democrats and other critics of the president.
An entry in Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday book, contributed by the Florida real estate developer Joel Pashcow.
The entry, included in a bound volume in 2003, was made by Joel Pashcow, the former chairman of a real estate company in New York and a member of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Fla. It shows a photograph of Mr. Pashcow at the resort with Mr. Epstein, another man and a woman whose face is redacted. Mr. Pashcow is holding an oversize check that appears to have been doctored, with a seemingly phony “DJ TRUMP” signature.
A handwritten note under the photo, which was taken in the 1990s, joked that Mr. Epstein showed “early talents with money + women,” and had sold a “fully depreciated” woman to Mr. Trump for $22,500.
The woman, whose name is also redacted in the files released by the House Oversight Committee, was a European socialite then in her 20s, according to two people familiar with the original photo. She had briefly dated both Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump around that time, according to court transcripts and a person close to Mr. Epstein. The birthday book entry appears to be a reference to the competition between the two men for the woman’s affections.
The nature of the woman’s relationship with Mr. Epstein is murky. The New York Times is not naming her because she may have been one of his victims.
A lawyer for the woman said she knew Mr. Epstein in “a professional capacity” when she was a student but severed ties with him in 1997. She did not know anything about the letter or its “derogatory content,” the lawyer added.
A bit more information:
Mr. Pashcow appears to have contributed several consecutive pages to the book. On the page before the mock check is a vulgar cartoon depicting Mr. Epstein’s grooming of young girls: On one side, marked 1983, Mr. Epstein is handing out balloons to a group of girls; on the other, labeled 2003, he is receiving a naked massage from four topless young women. “What a great country!” it reads at the bottom.
The photograph with the giant check offers fresh insight on the social circles shared by Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein. It is no secret that the two were friendly in the 1990s and early 2000s, before Mr. Epstein was convicted of sex crimes in 2008.
A visual analysis by The Times found that the photo was taken at Mar-a-Lago after the resort opened as a club in 1996 and was landscaped with palm trees and other features.
Use the gift link to read more details if you so desire.
NATO Shoots Down Russian Drones in Poland
CNN: NATO shoots down Russian drones in Polish airspace, accusing Moscow of being ‘absolutely reckless.’
NATO fighter jets shot down multiple Russian drones that violated Polish airspace during an attack on neighboring Ukraine early on Wednesday, as the military alliance denounced Moscow for “absolutely dangerous” behavior that ratcheted up tensions to a new level.
The operation marked the first time that shots were fired by NATO since the start of the war in Ukraine. Polish and Dutch jets intercepted the drones, with assistance from Italian, German and NATO’s multinational forces, officials said.
People watch as a house is damaged after a drone or similar object struck a residential building according to local authorities, following violations of Polish airspace during a Russian attack on Ukraine.
Addressing the Polish parliament, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that while there was no reason to say that Poland was in a state of war, it was closer to a conflict than any time since World War II. He said the country was facing an “enemy that does not hide its hostile intentions.”
Tusk also announced that Poland has invoked Article 4 of NATO, meaning the alliance’s main political decision-making body will now meet to discuss the situation and its next steps.
Russia’s defense ministry said in a statement that it had carried out a strike against Ukraine overnight. It said that “no targets on the territory of Poland were planned for destruction,” and that the drones it used in Ukraine have a flight range that of no more than 700 kilometers (435 miles).
The Russian foreign ministry then said that these “specific facts completely debunk the myths repeatedly spread by Poland in order to escalate the Ukrainian crisis further.”
NATO chief Mark Rutte said, however, that the violation of Poland’s airspace was not an “isolated incident.”
Jenny Gross at The New York Times: Poland Has Invoked NATO’s Article 4. What Comes Next?
Poland invoked Article 4 of NATO’s treaty on Wednesday after the alliance’s fighter jets shot down Russian drones that entered its airspace in the early hours of the morning. Russian drones have crossed into Poland before, including twice last week, but this was the first time that Russian drones had been shot down over the territory of a NATO country.
“What is clear is that the violation last night is not an isolated incident,” said Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general. “We will closely monitor the situation along our eastern flank, our air defenses continually at the ready.”
Here’s what to know about NATO’s Article 4….
Article 4 allows a member state to start a formal discussion among the alliance about threats to its security. While invoking Article 4 does not commit NATO to any military action, it is a required step toward a NATO decision to invoke Article 5. (An invocation of Article 5 is often assumed to have military implications, but the NATO treaty says only that its members will “assist” the party that has been attacked. This can also mean economic or political action.)
Article 4 states that the alliance’s members “will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened.”
Since NATO’s founding in 1949, Article 4 has been invoked eight times. Before Wednesday, the last was on Feb. 24, 2022, the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Now what?
The joint NATO response early Wednesday showed how quickly the war in Ukraine could escalate into a military confrontation between Russia and NATO.
Mr. Rutte said that the alliance’s air defenses were activated to ensure Poland’s protection. The response included fighter jets and air-defense systems from the Netherlands, Germany and Italy, he said.
“The security situation of our airspace has been stabilized, and ground-based air defense and radar reconnaissance systems have returned to standard operational activities,” the Polish military said on social media.
So, we’ll see what happens.
Israeli Strike Inside Qatar
CNN: Israel targets Hamas leadership in Qatar strike.
• Israel carried out an unprecedented attack against Hamas leadership in the capital of Qatar, which has been a key mediator in Gaza ceasefire talks — putting hostage negotiations at risk.
• Hamas said the strike killed five members but failed to assassinate the negotiating delegation. A Qatari security official also died in the strike.
• US President Donald Trump expressed displeasure about the attack. “I’m not thrilled about the whole situation. It’s not a good situation,” he said, adding he would issue a full statement on Wednesday. Qatar’s prime minister was visibly angry as he described the strike as “state terrorism.”
This is a developing story.
The Independent: Qatar says it has a right to respond to Israeli attack that killed six in Doha: Latest.
Qatar said it has the right to respond to Israel’s strike in Doha that targeted Hamas political leaders, which it decried as a “blatant attack”.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, the Qatari prime minister, described Tuesday’s attack as “state terrorism” that targeted the security and stability of the region.
Aftermath of Israeli strike inside Qatar.
“Qatar… reserves the right to respond to this blatant attack,” he told a late night press conference.
“We believe that today we have reached a pivotal moment. There must be a response from the entire region to such barbaric actions.”
US president Donald Trump said he was “very unhappy” about Israel’s airstrike that killed six people, saying it advances neither Israel nor America’s goals.
Trump called the strike on Hamas’s political wing “unfortunate” and said he had directed US envoy Steve Witkoff to warn Qatar but it was too late to stop the strike.
Hamas said five of its lower-ranking members and a Qatari security official were killed in the airstrike, but that all its leaders survived the attack.
ICE Commentary
Garrett Graff at Doomsday Scenario: ICE is Eating the Soul of America.
A big change happened yesterday, when the Supreme Court said it was okay for ICE and the Border Patrol to racially profile individuals walking freely on America’s streets. If you’re brown, speak Spanish, and work in a blue-collar job, you officially belong to a different class of citizen and according to Chief Justice John Roberts, it’s okay to racially profile you.
We have never in US history seen a federal law enforcement agency operate the way ICE has operated this summer — it marks the arrival of a new style of domestic policing, more in line with the infamous “brown shirts” of authoritarian regimes the world over than any regular policing tradition in the nation’s interior. Yes, we’ve seen similar abuses of civil liberties and due process stem from corrupt and racist state police and country sheriffs in the Jim Crow south, and plenty of local police departments even today suffer from localized corruption scandals, but never we seen what is happening with ICE right now take place the whole country over.
All of the nation’s law enforcement are blending together into an “ICE auxiliary.” — Garrett Graff
The day-to-day behavior and aggression of ICE is corrupting the soul of America. I encourage you to watch this video of federal agents policing the start of an elementary school in DC — there not to secure the school and children, but specifically to intimidate and punish schoolgoers. Tell me that isn’t the picture of authoritarianism? You know how you’re going to be the bad guy in the eyes of history? If school children and mothers have to push their way through your armed, masked gang while you’re carrying assault weapons in order to attend school. I can’t help but think how the Trump administration has turned the proud tradition of the US Marshals at the University of Mississippi or the 82nd Airborne at Little Rock Central High on its head. Similarly, this video of a masked officer detaining a father outside immigration court in New York City — the masked officers are indistinguishable from Wild West bank robbers.
There are four things that have really struck me about ICE’s operations over the last month, all of them worrisome about the trajectory of that agency and the presence and role of federal law enforcement in American life. (Separately, I’m going to write about the warning signs already visible in ICE’s dramatic hiring surge.) Taken together, they paint a picture of an already rogue agency that feels it operates outside of the Constitution and owes nothing to the Americans it’s supposed to serve.
(NOTE from BB: You’ll need to go to the link to read the entire explication under the four headings)
1) Everything is now ICE.
The most worrisome aspect of the quick militarization and turbo-charging of ICE is how American law enforcement across the board — and much of the government beyond — is being subsumed by ICE’s mission and lowering themselves, from hiring to behavior to tactics, down to ICE’s standards.
We have different federal law enforcement agencies for a reason — and moreover, as citizens, we as a country need and want federal law enforcement. The FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service, and the US Marshals all have their own lanes, authorities, and responsibilities, but right now we’ve watching the Trump administration turn all of federal law enforcement across both the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security into an faceless quasi-ICE auxiliary, blending all these agencies and agent into some amorphous anonymous blob of masked, brown tactical-vest-wearing federal law enforcement. I wrote recently about how this precisely is what authoritarian regime looks like — armed, masked, anonymous agents of the state jumping from unmarked vehicles and whisking people away….
2) Collapse of Moral Legitimacy.
I wrote earlier in the summer about how in a democracy policing requires moral legitimacy and the permission of the policed. That’s been one of the hallmarks of policing ever since Sir Robert Peel built the first modern police force in London’s Metropolitan Police. One of his core principles of policing was: “To recognize always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behavior, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.”
The DC police department was literally created originally in Peel’s image, which is why it too is known awkwardly as the “Metropolitan Police.” Now, in a historical irony, it is ground zero for the erosion of the moral legitimacy of federal law enforcement writ large….
3) Operating without due regard for civil liberties and due process.
In my essay at the end of August about how America has tipped in fascism, I wrote, “America has become a country where armed officers of the state shout ‘papers please’ on the street at men and women heading home from work, where masked men wrestle to the ground and abduct people without due process into unmarked vehicles, disappearing them into an opaque system where their family members beg for information.”
Few of the videos that have surfaced since have indicated otherwise; normal ICE procedures barrel right past normal due process and civil liberties; here, after wrestling someone to the ground, officers lose interest the moment he makes clear he’s a US citizen. Here masked officers start pushing a man before he can even provide proof of citizenship. Is this what America has come to?
4) Avoiding transparency and accountability.
Add up all of the above and you have a portrait of a rogue agency, which is what leads me to my final dangerous warning sign: This agency clearly knows that it can do no wrong in the eyes of the White House and administration — there is no level of violence, brutality, or abuse of civil liberties that would get any of these agents or officers in trouble with their bosses. Earlier this summer, I wrote about how ICE is acting as if it will never face accountability again. We’ve seen ICE flaunt federal law that requires congressional oversight — and, instead, it has tried to arrest and charge federal lawmakers, a bright line if there ever was one.
At every turn, though, the agency is going out of its way to make it harder to hold officers accountable. ICE officers don’t routinely wear name tags or easily visible badge numbers (in this video, check out how you have to zoom in on his badge on his belt to even begin to identify his badge number.) Moreover, though, despite the fact that we’re weeks and months into this national ICE takeover, the agency has made no effort to make its masked officers on the streets identifiable to either the public — or even to itself.
Tom Nichols at The Atlantic (gift link): The Government Wants to See Your Papers.
You there. Stop what you’re doing. Take off that tool belt and hard hat—let’s see some ID. Why? Because we don’t think you’re a citizen. Now show us your papers.
This kind of behavior by government officials is now legal in the United States.
Masked ICE agents in Los Angeles
Yesterday, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court allowed ICE officials to conduct roving patrols and use racial profiling to stop and detain people for no other reason than their skin color, the language they’re speaking, suspicions about their national origin—or, really, if immigration officials just feel like it.
But wait, you might object. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. Did the Court explain why that protection apparently no longer applies to you if you’re a day laborer or running a fruit stand? Good luck with that: This Court’s majority doesn’t explain itself to anyone. It merely lets stand or overturns the decisions of lower courts—lately, almost always in favor of expanding the power of, and corroding any checks on, President Donald Trump.
Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo is a case from Los Angeles about whether ICE can stop people because of a suspicion of their being in the United States illegally, based solely, as SCOTUSblog summarized it, on any combination of four factors: a person’s “‘apparent race or ethnicity,’ speaking in Spanish or accented English, being present at a location where undocumented immigrants ‘are known to gather’ (such as pickup spots for day laborers), and working at specific jobs, such as landscaping or construction.”
A California district-court judge had earlier enjoined ICE from making such stops, perhaps appalled by this example:
Plaintiff Jason Brian Gavidia is a U.S. citizen who was born and raised in East Los Angeles and identifies as Latino. On the afternoon of June 12, he stepped onto the sidewalk outside of a tow yard in Montebello, California, where he saw agents carrying handguns and military-style rifles. One agent ordered him to “Stop right there” while another “ran towards [him].” The agents repeatedly asked Gavidia whether he is American—and they repeatedly ignored his answer: “I am an American.” The agents asked Gavidia what hospital he was born in—and he explained that he did not know which hospital. “The agents forcefully pushed [Gavidia] up against the metal gated fence, put [his] hands behind [his] back, and twisted [his] arm.” An agent asked again, “What hospital were you born in?” Gavidia again explained that he did not know which hospital and said “East L.A.” He then told the agents he could show them his Real ID. The agents took Gavidia’s ID and his phone and kept his phone for 20 minutes. They never returned his ID.
In overturning the lower court’s decision, five of the Court’s six right-wing justices—there is no other reasonable way to describe them at this point—took advantage of their right to remain silent, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh gamely tried to speak up in a concurrence. If his goal was to be reassuring, he did not help matters: Such stops are usually “brief,” he explained. Again, I am not a scholar of the Constitution, but I had no idea that I could be deprived of my rights under the Fourth (or any other) Amendment as long as my getting roughed up takes only a few moments out of my busy day.
Use the gift link to read the rest.
Trump Dines in DC
The Independent: Trump labeled ‘Hitler of our time’ as hecklers crash his DC dinner plans.
President Donald Trump stepped out for dinner in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday only to find himself immediately confronted by protesters calling him “the Hitler of our time,” forcing him and his entourage of cabinet officials to stand awkwardly listening to their taunts before they could sit down to eat.
Activists took advantage of Trump’s rare public outing to to Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab, a short walk from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to heckle and berate the president with cries of “Free D.C.! Free Palestine! Trump is the Hitler of our time!”
“You are not welcome here!” one woman can be seen telling him in a video shared on social media. “Yes he is,” another diner countered.
Trump initially looked unfazed by the provocation but then gestured to his security team and said impatiently: “Come on. Let’s go. Get them out of here.”
The activist in question was escorted out of the dining area but continued to yell, despite some boos: “He’s terrorizing communities all over the world! From Puerto Rico… to Palestine to Venezuela! He’s not welcome to D.C.! He’s not welcome to Palestine! Palestine is not for sale!”
Only after she had been removed could Trump and his guests take their places at their table.
Joining the president for dinner were Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other senior White House officials.
Those are my offerings for today. What’s on your mind?
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: January 20, 2024 Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump | Tags: "the face of evil", Biden's Israel policies, continuing resolution, Hezbollah, Houthis, iran, israel, Japanese cat art, Niki Haley, Poland, Racism, saving democracy, Trump's cognitive decline, Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky 8 CommentsHappy Caturday!!
I’m really late getting started today, so I’m just going to get right to today’s news. Things are getting out of hand in the the Middle East, and Republicans in the House are determined to make the worse. They are also working hard to shut down the government unless they get all the goodies they are demanding. Johnson did manage to get a continuing resolution passed, but he depended on Democratic votes. Meanwhile the Republicans are holding back funding for Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
This is from Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American: January 18, 2024.
This afternoon, Congress passed a new continuing resolution necessary to fund the government past the upcoming deadlines in the previous continuing resolution. Those deadlines were tomorrow (January 19) and February 2. The deadlines in the new measure are March 1 and March 8. This is the third continuing resolution passed in four months as extremist Republicans have refused to fund the government unless they get a wish list of concessions to their ideology.
Today’s vote was no exception. Eighteen Republican senators voted against the measure, while five Republicans did not vote (at least one, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, is ill). All the Democrats voted in favor. The final tally was 77 to 18, with five not voting.
In the House the vote was 314 to 108, with 11 not voting. Republicans were evenly split between supporting government funding and voting against it, threatening to shut down the government. They split 107 to 106. All but two Democrats voted in favor of government funding. (In the past, Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts and MIke Quigley of Illinois have voted no on a continuing resolution to fund the government in protest that the measure did not include funding for Ukraine.)
This means that, like his predecessor Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to turn to Democrats to keep the government operating. The chair of the extremist House Freedom Caucus, Bob Good (R-VA), told reporters that before the House vote, Freedom Caucus members had tried to get Johnson to add to the measure the terms of their extremist border security bill. Such an addition would have tanked the bill, forcing a government shutdown, and Johnson refused.
Republican extremists in Congress are also doing the bidding of former president Donald Trump, blocking further aid to Ukraine in its struggle to fight off Russian aggression and standing in the way of a bipartisan immigration reform measure. Aid to Ukraine is widely popular both among the American people and among lawmakers. Immigration reform, which Republicans have demanded but are now opposing, would take away one of Trump’s only talking points before the 2024 election.
Richardson discusses a column in yesterday’s Washington Post about what happens when a country backslides on democracy: Poland is a test case for reviving a corrupted democracy, by Lee Hochstader. This could apply to Ukraine and potentially to the U.S.
Read more at the WaPo. This is the danger we face if we let Trump gain power again.
This is funny. From The Kiyv Independent: Zelensky invites Trump to Ukraine.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has extended an invitation to Donald Trump to visit Kyiv, with a specific condition attached.
Speaking with U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 News, Zelensky said that Trump would be warmly received in the capital under one stipulation: the former U.S. president must demonstrate his ability to bring an end to the war with Russia within 24 hours, as he once promised.
Trump has repeatedly said that the war would not have happened if he was still in power in Washington, and that he would bring it to an immediate end if voted back in because he has what he described as “a good relationship” with both Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Beyond that, former U.S. president has provided no details of what his peace deal would involve.
Zelensky, who has previously extended the invitation without receiving a response, emphasized that if Trump indeed has a “formula” for resolving the war, he is eager to learn the specifics.
“So, I invite President Trump. If he can come here, I will need 24 minutes — yes, 24 minutes. Not more. Yes. Not more — 24 minutes to explain [to] President Trump that he can’t manage this war. He can’t bring peace because of Putin.”Zelensky said on air: “He is very welcome to come here, but I think he can not end the war in 24 hours, without giving our land to Putin.”
On the Israel situation, from The Washington Post: Growing number of Senate Democrats question Biden’s Israel strategy.
Five Senate Democrats on Friday signed onto a measure that would condition aid to Israel on its compliance with international law, bringing the total number of co-sponsors to 18. And a prominent Democrat, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, is rounding up support for his amendment to stop President Biden from circumventing Congress when he orders weapons transfers to Israel, a maneuver the president has pursued twice in recent months.
Kobayashi Kiyochika, Cat and Lantern
Earlier this week, 11 senators voted for a bill by Sen. Bernie Sanders aimed at forcing the Biden administration to examine potential human rights abuses by Israel.
After weeks of unquestioning support, the Senate is emerging as a center of resistance to Biden’s unwavering embrace of Israel — at least in modest ways — as even centrist Democrats are signaling their discomfort with the president’s “bear hug” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A number of prominent Democrats have proposed or backed measures that aim to hold Israel accountable or to shift American strategy, even if they are unlikely to garner enough support to pass.
The growing willingness of establishment Democrats to criticize or push back on Israel — a move that would have come with serious political ramifications just a few months ago — signals a shift in the politics of the party since the war in Gaza began more than 100 days ago. Senators from swing states, including Georgia, Wisconsin and Minnesota, have signed on to some of these measures as polls show a notable drop in support for Biden among young, Muslim and Arab American voters over his handling of the issue.
While few senators are voicing full-throated criticism of Biden’s Israel policy, the new, more skeptical tone reflects an increasing unease as the civilian toll in Gaza rises and Israel repeatedly flouts U.S. requests to modify its military onslaught.
“Every week the Netanyahu coalition promises the Biden administration that we will see meaningful changes, and every week it never materializes,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who, along with Kaine, organized the effort to impose conditions in exchange for aid. Van Hollen noted that some members of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition are even “bragging” about ignoring American requests.
Read more at the WaPo.
Iran’s involvement in the conflicts is getting scary. From Reuters: Iranian and Hezbollah commanders help direct Houthi attacks in Yemen.
Commanders from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Lebanon’s Hezbollah group are on the ground in Yemen helping to direct and oversee Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, four regional and two Iranian sources told Reuters.
Iran – which has armed, trained and funded the Houthis – stepped up its weapons supplies to the militia in the wake of the war in Gaza, which erupted after Iranian-backed militants Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, the four regional sources said.
Tehran has provided advanced drones, anti-ship cruise missiles, precision-strike ballistic missiles and medium-range missiles to the Houthis, who started targeting commercial vessels in November in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, the sources said.
IRGC commanders and advisers are also providing know-how, data and intelligence support to determine which of the dozens of vessels travelling through the Red Sea each day are destined for Israel and constitute Houthi targets, all the sources said.
Washington said last month that Iran was deeply involved in planning operations against shipping in the Red Sea and that its intelligence was critical to enable the Houthis to target ships.
The Guardian: Iran accuses Israel of killing Revolutionary Guards spy chief in Damascus.
A suspected Israeli strike killed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ espionage chief for Syria and three other guard members on Saturday, Iran has said, in an attack that destroyed much of a multistorey residential building in Damascus.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said six people were killed in the Israeli strike on the upmarket Mazzeh neighbourhood in the Syrian capital.
Four Cats Sleeping, by Inagaki Tomoo
In recent weeks, Israel has been accused of intensifying strikes on senior Iranian and allied figures in Syria and Lebanon, raising fears the war in Gaza could expand into a regional conflict.
“The Revolutionary Guards’ Syria [intelligence] chief, his deputy and two other guard members were martyred in the attack on Syria by Israel,” Iran’s Mehr news agency said.
In a statement, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) confirmed it had lost four of its members and blamed Israel.
When asked about the strike, the Israeli army said: “We do not comment on reports from the foreign media.”
Tensions between Iran and Israel have risen to a new high after the bloody surprise attack launched by Hamas into Israel on 7 October.
Trump has been directing racist attacks against Niki Haley, now that the Republican primary campaign has moved to New Hampshire.
The Washington Post: Trump lobs racially charged attacks against Haley ahead of N.H. primary. [For the WaPo headline writer: the attacks are racist, not “racially charged.”
Former president Donald Trump is lobbing racially charged attacks at Republican rival Nikki Haley, a daughter of Indian immigrants who served as his U.N. ambassador, days before a hotly contested New Hampshire primary that could determine the trajectory of the party’s nominating contest.
Meanwhile, Trump is demonstrating his cognitive decline in his campaign speeches. Yesterday, he confused Nicki Haley with Nancy Pelosi–claiming Haley was responsible for Congressional security on January 6, 2021.
Donald Trump on Friday was skewered online for apparently confusing Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, resulting in the ex-president blaming the former for the events of Jan. 6.
Leisure Day by Togyu Okumura
Trump was delivering remarks in Concord, New Hampshire, on Friday, when he said that Haley was “offered 10,000 people” on Jan. 6, and implied that she was involved in the deleting of video evidence. These are common allegations that the former president has previously lobbed at Pelosi and the Jan. 6 subcommittee.
The video quickly went viral, causing people to make fun of Trump and even suggest he has mental health concerns.
“Do we need to do the dementia test again?” asked national security attorney Bradley P. Moss. MSNBC personality Mehdi Hasan had a similar take, asking, “Does he need to take the ‘person woman man camera TV’ test again?”
Hasan had been responding to a Biden-Harris HQ post in which the campaign says a “deeply confused Trump confuses Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley multiple times.”
Trump has also begun bragging again about how he “aced” a cognitive test as president. Actually the test he took is designed to detect dementia and has nothing to do with IQ or intelligence generally.
The Washington Post: A ‘whale’ of a tale: Trump continues to distort cognitive test he took.
Donald Trump this week bragged about purportedly acing a widely used cognitive test that was administered to him when he was president, suggesting that the test included identifying drawings of three animals.
CBS News: Deposition video shows Trump claiming he prevented “nuclear holocaust” as president.
Combative, angry and prone to grandiose claims — newly unveiled footage of an April 2023 deposition gives a glimpse into how former President Donald Trump behaves when testifying under oath.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Looking Tiresome
The video, released to CBS News on Friday in response to a freedom of information request, shows Trump claiming to have averted a “nuclear holocaust” and “saving millions of lives” as president. A transcript of the deposition was previously made public as an exhibit in Trump’s New York civil fraud case.
Trump testified at trial on Nov. 6, and his testimony that day often mirrored the April deposition.
During the trial, Trump said he was too “busy in the White House” to worry about his businesses. “My threshold was China, Russia and keeping our country safe,” he said.
It echoed a response he gave in his April 2023 testimony in a small conference room with New York Attorney General Letitia James. He went further that day, explaining just what he believes he kept Americans safe from:
“I was very busy. I considered this the most important job in the world, saving millions of lives. I think you would’ve had nuclear holocaust if I didn’t deal with North Korea. I think you would’ve had a nuclear war if I weren’t elected. And I think you might have a nuclear war now, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said.
Read more from the deposition at the link.
One more on Trump’s issues from Raw Story:
Appearing on MSNBC on Saturday morning, conservative attorney George Conway was asked how the jury in the E.Jean Carroll defamation trial is likely viewing Donald Trump in the flesh as opposed to just seeing clips of him on TV.
Getting right into it with the hosts of MSNBC’s “The Weekend,’ Conway explained, “When you see little clips of him, you kind of think you know, it’s reality TV. He’s silly, he’s harmless, it’s just nonsense and he just does his thing, he does his schtick. But when you see him up close and in person you start to realize there’s something seriously wrong with him.”
“And that’s what happens with his own people,” he continued before recalling, “Remember how his chief of staff, General Kelly, brought in a book, like the psychiatrists had written about Donald Trump, saying he was completely out of his mind, and he [Kelly] is like, ‘This is the key. We could figure this out!'”
“People learn, there is something seriously wrong with this guy, and I think what this jury is going to learn, which is like you are in this solemn proceeding you are taking this seriously, and jurors generally don’t look at scams and people behaving badly in the courtroom, and here, they have this psychopath sitting right there,” he elaborated. “It’s got to be off-putting and scary, and just appalling to them, because they were actually seeing him in the flesh, this real person, not this caricature on TV, this self-caricature on TV. They’re seeing the face, the face literally, of evil right there.”
Yes, the face of evil is accurate–I agree.
What do you think about all this? What other stories are you interested in?
Lazy Caturday Reads: Mostly SCOTUS Stuff
Posted: March 26, 2022 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: caturday, Clarence Thomas, Ginni Thomas, Harvard, Joe Biden, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Mark Meadows, Poland, SCOTUS, U.S. troops, Ukraine 33 Comments
Willow, the Biden family’s new pet cat at the White House on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2022. The Washington Monument can be seen in the distance. (Erin Scott/The White House, AP)
Good Afternoon!!
Joe Biden wasn’t my first choice for the Democratic nomination in 2020; in fact, I didn’t want him to run at all. But I was wrong. He has been a good president so far, and his deep foreign policy knowledge and experience have been showcased during the Ukraine crisis. This morning Biden was in Poland meeting with U.S. troops at the Ukraine border. It appears he’s a hit as commander-in-chief.
Yesterday the majority of the Supreme Court acknowledged that Biden is in fact commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces, but Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas disagreed. Ian Millhiser at Vox: The Supreme Court rules that Joe Biden is commander-in-chief. Three justices dissent.
The Supreme Court on Friday evening decided, no, it was not going to needlessly insert itself in the military chain of command above President Joe Biden.
The Court’s decision in Austin v. U.S. Navy SEALs 1-26 largely halted a lower court order that permitted certain sailors to defy a direct order. A group of Navy special operations personnel sought an exemption from the Pentagon’s requirement that all active duty service members get vaccinated against Covid-19, claiming that they should receive a religious exemption.
A majority of the Court effectively ruled that, yes, in fact, troops do have to follow orders, including an order to take a vaccine.
The decision is undeniably a win for the balance of power between the executive branch and the judiciary that has prevailed for many decades. But the fact that the Court had to weigh in on this at all — not to mention that three justices, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch, dissented from the majority — is a worrisome sign about America’s judiciary.
Brett Kavanagh explained why he sided with the majority:
…laying out why the lower court erred, this court “in effect inserted itself into the Navy’s chain of command, overriding military commanders’ professional military judgments.” Had the Court ruled the other way in SEALs, it would have effectively placed itself at the apex of the military’s chain of command, displacing Biden as commander-in-chief.
Henry (dog) and traveling companion Baloo, by Cynthia Bennett
But as Kavanaugh correctly notes in his concurring opinion, there is a long line of Supreme Court precedents establishing that courts should be exceedingly reluctant to interfere with military affairs.
In Gilligan v. Morgan (1973), for example, the Court held that “the complex, subtle, and professional decisions as to the composition, training, equipping, and control of a military force are essentially professional military judgments,” and that “it is difficult to conceive of an area of governmental activity in which the courts have less competence.”
Nevertheless, Judge Reed O’Connor, a notoriously partisan judge in Texas who is best known for a failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, ruled in favor of the service members who refused to follow a direct order. And the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit refused the Navy’s request to stay key parts of O’Connor’s order.
That left the responsibility of restoring the military’s proper chain of command to the Supreme Court. Though the Court’s order does not wipe out O’Connor’s decision in its entirety, it temporarily blocks that decision “insofar as it precludes the Navy from considering respondents’ vaccination status in making deployment, assignment, and other operational decisions.”
In other SCOTUS news, the Ginni Thomas story is still snowballing. Daknikat wrote quite a bit about Thomas yesterday; https://skydancingblog.com/2022/03/25/friday-reads-you-shouldnt-go-back-home/if you haven’t read her post, please check it out.
Scott Wong at NBC News: Ginni Thomas pressed for GOP lawmakers to protest 2020 election results.
Shortly after the 2020 election, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sent an email to an aide to a prominent House conservative saying she would have nothing to do with his group until his members go “out in the streets,” a congressional source familiar with the exchange told NBC News.
Thomas told an aide to incoming Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Banks, R-Ind., that she was more aligned with the far-right House Freedom Caucus, whose leaders just two months later would lead the fight in Congress to overturn the results of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory.
Cat who thinks he’s a dog by Jack Shepherd. He was raised with and by the dogs.
The RSC was long representative of the most conservative House members, but in the past several years, it has been replaced by the tea party-driven Freedom Caucus.
Thomas wrote to the aide that Freedom Caucus members were tougher than RSC members, were in the fight and had then-President Donald Trump’s back, according to the source familiar with the email contents. Until she saw RSC members “out in the streets” and in the fight, she said, she would not help the RSC, the largest caucus of conservatives on Capitol Hill.
Her November 2020 email came in response to a request from the RSC to offer policy recommendations as Banks was set to take the helm of the group in early 2021. But when Thomas portrayed the RSC as soft in its support for Trump and told its members to take to the streets, the aide thanked her for her suggestions and moved on….
The email exchange suggests Thomas was pressuring Republicans in Congress to get more aggressive in fighting for Trump at a key moment when the lame-duck president and his inner circle were devising a strategy to overturn the results of the 2020 election and keep him in power.
Obviously Thomas has access to powerful politicians only because she is married to Clarence Thomas.
Conservative columnist Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast: If Ginni Thomas’ Big Lie Texts Don’t Shock You, Nothing Will.
“Biden and the Left [are] attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
“[The] Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators…are being arrested and…will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”
Oh yeah, and “Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states.”
Another photo of the cat who thinks he’s a dog and his friends, by Jack Shepherd.
These aren’t the rantings of some obscure, tinfoil hat-wearing lunatic. These are just a few of the 29 text messages sent by Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. These messages were sent in the wake of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory, as Mrs. Thomas sought to push Meadows to try to overturn the 2020 election results—sometimes quoting far-right websites to make her case.
In a world where more tenuous relationships than a spouse have sparked huge controversies (think Barack Obama’s relationships with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the former Weather Underground activist Bill Ayers), the level of this conflict of interest should be condemned by intellectually honest conservatives.
As one smart observer put it, “If you had a problem with Bill Clinton meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac, you should probably have a problem with Ginni Thomas’s barrage of texts to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the days preceding a legitimate self-coup attempt.”
Click the link to read the rest.
Another conservative take from David French at The Atlantic: The Worst Ginni Thomas Text Wasn’t From Ginni Thomas. Mark Meadows and the dangerous religious zeal of “Stop the Steal.”
After giving examples of Thomas’s text messages, French writes:
This is the kind of communication that would make you worry about a family member’s connection to reality. When it comes from the wife of a Supreme Court justice who enjoys direct access to the White House chief of staff, it’s not just disturbing; it’s damaging to the Supreme Court….
It is…understandable if ordinary Americans wonder whether she’s made an impact on her husband, and it’s important for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from any future cases that could potentially involve additional disclosures of his wife’s communications with the White House or her involvement in the effort to overturn the election.
Mako the Cat-Dog: raised by cats, he thinks he is one.
But the Ginni Thomas texts were not the most alarming aspect of Woodward and Costa’s story. There was a text in the chain that disturbed me more than anything Ginni Thomas wrote. It came from Meadows, and here’s what it said: This is a fight of good versus evil . . . Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.
One of the most dangerous aspects of the effort to overturn the election was the extent to which it was an explicitly religious cause. January 6 insurrectionists stampeded into the Senate chamber with prayers on their lips. Prominent religious leaders and leading Christian lawyers threw themselves into the effort to delay election certification or throw out the election results entirely. In the House and Senate, the congressional leaders of the effort to overturn the election included many of Congress’s most public evangelicals.
They didn’t just approach the election fight with religious zeal; they approached it with an absolute conviction that they enjoyed divine sanction. The merger of faith and partisanship was damaging enough, but the merger of faith with lawlessness and even outright delusion represented a profound perversion of the role of the Christian in the public square.
Read the rest at The Atlantic.
More Ginni Thomas stories:
The Washington Post: Ethics experts see Ginni Thomas’s texts as a problem for Supreme Court.
The New York Times: Justice Thomas Ruled on Election Cases. Should His Wife’s Texts Have Stopped Him?
The Washington Post Editorial Board: Justice Thomas’s wife is a political extremist. This is now a problem for the court.
There are quite a few stories today that deal with the disrespectful treatment that Supreme Court Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson received from Republicans in her Senate confirmation hearings.
I really liked this one from Kevin Cullen at The Boston Globe, because he trotted out an old saying that my Dad often used: You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.
One of life’s inexplicable wonders is how Harvard can produce someone as grounded and poised and principledas Ketanji Brown Jackson and also someoneas unmoored and annoying and unscrupulous as Ted Cruz.
Providing clear evidence of how pathetic my existence is, I watched Jackson’s confirmation hearing start to finish, a marathon of high drama and low farce.
Am I a loser? Yes, but nothing likethe preening senators who treated Jackson with appalling disrespect, with constant interruptions and cynical questions meant to gin up their base, not ascertain whether Jackson is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court.
If you had to boil down the objections of Republicans to Jackson it is this: She’s a soft-on-crime, pedophile-coddling, racist-baby-kissing, terrorist-hugging Critical Race Theory nut job.
Other than that, they acknowledged, she seems nice enough.
It was hard to decide which senator combined rudeness and pandering to produce the greatest mix of condescension. Besides Cruz, Senators Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton – another Harvard man! – all covered themselves in something less than glory.
But when it comes unctuousness, Cruz takes the cake.
That he and Jackson served together on the Harvard Law Review didn’t spare Jackson from his unremitting bile.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin repeatedly told Cruz he was going over his allotted time and violating rules. Proving the old adage that you can always tell a Harvard man but you can’t tell him much, Cruz ignored Durbin.
Cruz was too busy yammering about racist babies and fake women and child pornographers to pay attention to something as inconsequential as rules.
When Cruz said, “Under the modern leftist sensibilities, if I decide right now that I’m a woman, then apparently I’m a woman,” I thought, “This guy went to Harvard Law School?”
Read the rest if you can use a laugh.
More follow up stories on the Jackson hearings:
Dana Millbank at The Washington Post: Ivy League Republicans’ phony rebellion against the ‘elites.’
Ruth Marcus at The Washington Post: Forget advise and consent. This is smear and degrade.
The Independent: Hawley attacked Ketanji Brown Jackson’s ‘alarming’ record on sex offenders. He agreed to an abuser getting only probation.
Two articles on Wesley Hawkins, who was sentenced by Jackson as an 18-year-old and was the subject of much of the GOP screaming and yelling about child porn cases:
The New York Times: Who is Wesley Hawkins? Republicans zero in on Jackson’s sentencing of a teen in a child sex abuse case.
The Washington Post: Wesley Hawkins, talk of the Jackson hearings, describes life after pornography sentence.
Sorry this is so late. WordPress deleted my post in progress twice and I had to reconstruct it. Have a great weekend!
Thursday Reads
Posted: March 24, 2022 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: Brett Kavanaugh, Brussels, Joe Biden, Josh Hawley, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Lindsey Graham, Madeline Albright, NATO, Poland, Roe v. Wade, SCOTUS, Ted Cruz, Ukraine, Ukraine war, Vladimir Putin 24 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
It’s another big news day. We lost Madeline Albright, the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State, paving the way for other women to meet with NATO allies and announce new sanctions on Russia. Afterwards, he will visit Poland and perhaps even go to the border of Ukraine. Today is the final day of the hearings on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Today will be dedicated to testimony from people who support or oppose her nomination. The Ukraine war continues, with reports of Ukrainian victories and numerous analyses of the failure of Putin’s efforts to subdue it’s neighbor. I’ll get to as much of this news as I can.
Madeline Albright
The Washington Post: Madeleine Albright, first female secretary of state, dies at 84.
Mr. Graham also attacked Judge Jackson for her work defending Guantánamo Bay detainees, acknowledging that no one should judge her for representing unpopular defendants or advocating zealously for her clients — and then proceeding to do just that.
Monday Reads
Posted: July 22, 2013 Filed under: misogyny, morning reads, religious extremists, Reproductive Rights, SCOTUS, U.S. Politics, War on Women | Tags: abortion, Anthony Scalia, anti-choice legislation, CIA black sites, economics, evangelicals, Poland, secret prisons, The Prisoner's Dilemma 45 CommentsGood Morning!
So, I’m still a little bit out of the loop at the moment. I’m not really reading much in the way of news or even watching TV so I had to do some searching for something interesting to read this morning. This will be a bit of a link dump. I promise I will do better by midweek.
Will we ever be rid of Fat Tony and his blatant hypocrisy?
With his own claims to originalism fading fast, Scalia suggests liberal judicial activism, practiced by some of colleagues on the Court, is part of what brought about the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. The speech was an address to the Utah State Bar Association.
From the Aspen Times …
Scalia opened his talk with a reference to the Holocaust, which happened to occur in a society that was, at the time, “the most advanced country in the world.” One of the many mistakes that Germany made in the 1930s was that judges began to interpret the law in ways that reflected “the spirit of the age.” When judges accept this sort of moral authority, as Scalia claims they’re doing now in the U.S., they get themselves and society into trouble.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is something we teach a lot in economics. You may remember the movie “A Beautiful Mind” and the invention of game theory. Well, there’s been an interesting test of the theory.
The “prisoner’s dilemma” is a familiar concept to just about anybody that took Econ 101.
The basic version goes like this. Two criminals are arrested, but police can’t convict either on the primary charge, so they plan to sentence them to a year in jail on a lesser charge. Each of the prisoners, who can’t communicate with each other, are given the option of testifying against their partner. If they testify, and their partner remains silent, the partner gets 3 years and they go free. If they both testify, both get two. If both remain silent, they each get one.
In game theory, betraying your partner, or “defecting” is always the dominant strategy as it always has a slightly higher payoff in a simultaneous game. It’s what’s known as a “Nash Equilibrium,” after Nobel Prize winning mathematician and A Beautiful Mind subject John Nash.
In sequential games, where players know each other’s previous behaviour and have the opportunity to punish each other, defection is the dominant strategy as well.
However, on a Pareto basis, the best outcome for both players is mutual cooperation.
Yet no one’s ever actually run the experiment on real prisoners before, until two University of Hamburg economists tried it out in a recent study comparing the behaviour of inmates and students.
Surprisingly, for the classic version of the game, prisoners were far more cooperative than expected.
Menusch Khadjavi and Andreas Lange put the famous game to the test for the first time ever, putting a group of prisoners in Lower Saxony’s primary women’s prison, as well as students through both simultaneous and sequential versions of the game.The payoffs obviously weren’t years off sentences, but euros for students, and the equivalent value in coffee or cigarettes for prisoners.They expected, building off of game theory and behavioural economic research that show humans are more cooperative than the purely rational model that economists traditionally use, that there would be a fair amount of first-mover cooperation, even in the simultaneous simulation where there’s no way to react to the other player’s decisions.
And even in the sequential game, where you get a higher payoff for betraying a cooperative first mover, a fair amount will still reciprocate.
As for the difference between student and prisoner behaviour, you’d expect that a prison population might be more jaded and distrustful, and therefore more likely to defect.
The results went exactly the other way for the simultaneous game, only 37% of students cooperate. Inmates cooperated 56% of the time.
On a pair basis, only 13% of student pairs managed to get the best mutual outcome and cooperate, whereas 30% of prisoners do.
While America languishes in an economic depression, Republican officeholders are bending all their efforts… to ban abortion. In the last few weeks and months, we’ve seen a blizzard of anti-choice legislation in Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and many other places. These laws stall women seeking abortions with mandatory waiting periods, brutalize them with invasive and unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds, force doctors to read shaming scripts rife with falsehoods, and impose onerous regulatory requirements that are designed to be impossible to comply with so that family-planning clinics will be forced to close. At the federal level, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted for a bill banning all abortion after 20 weeks, without even putting up a pretense that this was constitutional.
One would think the drubbing taken by anti-choice zealots like Todd Akin in the last election would have given Republicans an incentive to step back and consider whether this is a winning strategy. Instead, it seems as if their losses have only inspired them to fight harder. For the right-wing Christian fundamentalists who dominate the Republican Party, banning abortion, or at least piling up pointless regulations to make it as burdensome and difficult to obtain as possible, has become an all-consuming obsession, akin to a religious crusade.
Given the amount of effort and political capital the religious right puts into trying to restrict abortion, you’d guess that opposition to women’s choice must take up a huge portion of the Bible. But the reality is that nothing could be further from the truth.
The Bible says nothing whatsoever about abortion. It never mentions the subject, not once, neither in the Old Testament nor the New. This isn’t because abortion was unknown in the ancient world. Much to the contrary, the ancient Greeks and Romans were well-acquainted with the idea. Surviving writings from these cultures recommend the use of herbs like pennyroyal, silphium and hellebore to induce abortion; others advise vigorous physical activity to cause a miscarriage, and some even discuss surgical methods.
Here’s an intriguing investigation of secret US prisons being carried out by Poland. What exactly do we and other countries know about these black ops sites run by the CIA?
The only sign of life at Szymany’s “international airport” are mosquitoes eager to suck blood out of a rare visitor. The gate is locked with a rusted chain and a padlock.
Evidence suggest that some of the last passengers at this site were CIA officers and their prisoners. That was in 2003. Soon after, the airport about 180 km north of Warsaw inside the picturesque Mazury forests went out of service.
Bounded by the Freedom of Information Act, Polish Airspace authorities have revealed that at least 11 CIA aircrafts landed at Szymany, and some of their passengers stayed on in Poland. The European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation (Eurocontrol) was not informed about those flights.
From Szymany the prisoners were driven to a nearby intelligence academy in Stare Kiejkuty, where the CIA had a separated facility. In 2006, a few months after Poland was first identified as having hosted a secret CIA prison, Polish ombudsman Janusz Kochanowski visited the CIA villa – only to see that its chambers have been freshly renovated.
Two other European countries with known but unconfirmed black sites are Romania and Lithuania; the rest were in Asia and North Africa.
Human rights groups believe about eight terror suspects were held in Poland, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Two other men currently detained at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility have been granted “injured person” status in the ongoing investigation.
The first is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national alleged to have organised the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. He has claimed that he was often stripped naked, hooded, or shackled during seven months at Stare Kiejkuty, and subjected to mock execution with a gun and threats of sexual assault against his family members.
The second, a stateless Palestinian known as Abu Zubaydah, said he was subjected to extreme physical pain, psychological pressure and waterboarding – mock drowning.
Any Polish leaders who would have agreed to the U.S. programme would have been violating the constitution by giving a foreign power control over part of Polish territory, and allowing crimes to take place there.
Former prime minister Leszek Miller, now chairman of the opposition Democratic Left Alliance has been the prime target of criticism. There are demands he should face a special tribunal charged with trying state figures.
In March 2008, the Polish authorities opened a criminal investigation. “This indicates that Poland is a country with a rule of law,” Senator Jozef Pinior told IPS. “But the protraction is a reason for concern. The investigation has been moved to the third consecutive prosecutor’s office, in what looks like playing for time.”
Pinior, one of the leaders of the Solidarity opposition movement during the 1980s, and more recently a member of the European Parliament, has for long been lobbying for a full investigation into what the CIA was doing in Poland. Twice he was called in as witness in the investigation. He claims to have seen a document on a CIA prison with PM Miller’s signature.
“Poland is no banana republic, our security services do not do such things behind the back of the government.” — Polish Senator Jozef Pinior“The Polish government, especially Leszek Miller, must have had knowledge that such sites existed on Polish territory without any legal basis,” Pinior said. “They must have known about the torture too. Poland is no banana republic, our security services do not do such things behind the back of the government.”
It is still not clear how much knowledge the Polish leaders had about the black site in Stare Kiejkuty. Some have vehemently denied the prison’s existence, but some admit it between the lines, though denying responsibility.
“Of course, everything took place with my knowledge,” said former president Aleksander Kwasniewski in an interview with leading daily Gazeta Wyborcza.
So, that’s a few odds and ends to get us started today. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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