Glenn Kirschner – Trump co-conspirator Walt Nauta finally gets lawyer, pleads not guilty. Is there still time to flip?
The Lincoln Project – Bidenomics is Working
Thom Hartmann – This Sheriff Is Giving YOUR License Plate Info To Extremist Groups & He’s NOT Alone
Robert Reich – We Need Affordable Childcare, Now
Scared Dog Who Approached Rescuers Is The Most Trusting Girl Now
Beau – Let’s talk about SCOTUS not retiring….
Glenn Kirschner – DC Bar committee recommends Rudy be DISBARRED for “destructive” efforts in Trump election challenge
The Lincoln Project – Bidenomics is Working
Thom Hartmann – His Death Squads Killed Thousands Yet He Was Just Nominated For New Commission…WTF?
MSNBC – What to expect from Friday’s first pre-trial conference in Trump classified docs
Hopeful Owl Mom Fosters Two Abandoned Chicks
Beau – Let’s talk about Trump, Obama, Raskin, and McCarthy….
Yesterday, I received an e-mail with a little video of Jamie Raskin announcing that his cancer is in total remission. Now that’s something to break out a little bubbly for! I also received a note (email) from Pat advising me she has out-of-town family visiting, so will probably not be around this weekend (so don’t worry.) I also received a grocery order. Most of it was there, But there was one substitution, and it was a bad one (which common sense should have prevented. So I had to file a refund claim for that. I got it all in and the shulder was still better after doing so than it was the previous day, so that’s a win. It’s still a work in progress, but I;m liking the progress.
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Politico – Biden’s hydrogen bombshell leaves Europe in the dust
Quote – European leaders have devoted tens of billions of dollars toward encouraging production of hydrogen, a clean-burning fuel that advocates say will create jobs and help fight climate change. But now, many of those jobs will be going to the United States instead. The clean energy subsidies that undergird President Joe Biden’s climate agenda have just prompted one Norwegian manufacturer to choose Michigan, not Europe, as the site of a nearly $500 million factory that will produce the equipment needed to extract hydrogen from water. And other European-based companies are being tempted to follow suit, people involved in the continent’s hydrogen efforts say — making the universe’s most abundant substance the latest focus of the transatlantic trade battle on green energy.
Click through for details. I wish no ill to Europe, but I cannot help feeling that this is so cool.
National Public Radio – Researchers found a rare octopus nursery off the coast of Costa Rica
Quote – Scientists working off the coast of Costa Rica say they’ve discovered the world’s third known octopus nursery…. According to a press release, researchers witnessed Muusoctopus eggs hatch. They said it demonstrated that the area, known as the Dorado Outcrop, was hospitable to young octopuses… Scientists said the discovery also indicated that some deep-sea octopus species brood their eggs in low-temperature hydrothermal vents, such as the one where the nursery was discovered, where fluid heated in the Earth’s crust is released on the seafloor — like hot springs.
Click through for story. I cannot bring myself to be surprised that octopuses have discoverd this and made use of it for child care – they are so doggoned smart! But I am charmed by it. The octopuses in this story are neither South Asian nor mimics, but I couldn’t resist the chart below.
Food For Thought
Yesterday (I’m calling it yesterday because it came in after midnight, but she probably wrote it the day before), Joyce Vance took on the subject of “legacy admissions.” Legacy admissions refers to preference given to children of alumni (and alumnae.) But she also points the three other categories which receive preferential consideration: children of big donors, children of faculty and staff, and athletes. Of course one thinks “football,” but, at least in the “ivy league”, most athletic admissions are for sports not played in minority high schools (e.g., fencing.) This essentially comes down to money. Not only athletes, but also faculty and staff are recruited, and those policies are a recruiting tool. And in the case of big donors and legacies (small donors) the connection is even more obvious. I knew that private schools did these things, but I wasn’t aware it had come to the point where state colleges and universites were so starved for cash that they needed to adopt the practices. Another reason the far right wants to abolish the Department of Education.
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Daily Beast – This Melting Planet May Reveal How Venus Became a Hellscape—and Why Earth Was Spared
Quote – Venus, the second planet from the sun, isn’t just Earth’s neighbor. It’s roughly the same size as Earth—and rocky, like Earth is. But while Earth evolved into the wet, breathable planet we know and enjoy, Venus apparently got so hot that its oceans evaporated. Poisonous carbon dioxide vapor then blanketed the planet, trapping the heat and making everything even hotter: a process of runaway global warming that gives climatologists here on Earth nightmares. Why Venus got hot and toxic while Earth stayed relatively cool and liveable (for now) is one of the big mysteries of the solar system—and one with immediate implications for us as we pump more and more carbon into Earth’s atmosphere and risk our own greenhouse-gas calamity.
Click through for details. I think it’s safe to say that no carbon life form is ever going to survive on Venus any time soon. And it certainly wouldn’t hurt to know how it got to that point.
Crooks & Liars – Buttigieg Drops Truth Bomb On The GOP About Biden’s Economy
Quote – Well, look, we’re seeing extraordinarily low unemployment, some of the most job creation under any president ever,” Buttigieg said. “We’re seeing, by the way, with that also unusually high rates of job satisfaction. We’ve seen inflation falling. We’ve seen manufacturing returning to the U.S. Now, obviously, a lot of effort and a lot of money goes into negativity to try to get people focusing on other things, like some of the things that we’re talking about in the culture wars that certain figures are bringing to the fore again and again, I think because they don’t want to talk about the economic work that they’re doing.”
Click through for story (and short video). Secretary Pete is very good at this. But I think this goes beyond just messaging. See Robert Reich’s take.
Robert Reich – Competence isn’t enough. Biden must also confront America’s economic bullies
Quote – Biden has framed that choice as competence or craziness. His new “Bidenomics” blueprint makes clear that America has done well under his quietly competent leadership — featuring significant public investment, taming of inflation, and rebirth of manufacturing. Trump has framed the choice as strength or weakness. I’d rather have someone in the White House who’s competent (even if weak) than someone who’s crazy (even if strong). But I fear voters may choose strength over competence. Strength is one of the central narratives of America. In the mythic telling, America was borne from grit, guts, and gumption.
Click through for his rationale. Messaging, yes – but more than that. I think Bob is on to something. Unless – do you suppose Joe could claim the mantle of the myth by messaging “Good old American know-how”?
Food For Thought
Yesterday, I seriously overslept – by choice – but it did cut into my working time. I’ve been having some issues with pain cutting into both my sleeo time but, even more to the point, into the amount of actual rest/recovery I get when I am asleep. I ran the TENS for extra time today, which has helped – I don’t suppose this will resolve the issue, so I’ll keep on it. On a brighter note, The New Yorker decided to run a group of 9 Name Drop quizzes together, all of them on literary figures (which helped up front), and I actually got all of them. Not spectadularly – five of the nine on the las clue and the rest somewhere between the socond and the fifth – but I’m still quite pleased about it. (I bombed the daily one, though.)
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Axios – Scoop: Hunter Biden’s lawyer roasts IRS whistleblowers in message to GOP chair
Quote – Why it matters: The White House has been struggling to answer questions about the IRS agent transcripts over the past week, but Hunter’s lawyer Abbe Lowell is now taking the lead in fighting back against the Republican-led committee. The letter comes after Chair Jason Smith last week released transcripts of interviews with two IRS agents who claimed that the investigation into Hunter Biden was improperly handled along with a purported WhatsApp message that showed Hunter leveraging his father to close a business deal.
Click through for article (and full 10-page letter). I’m glad they are pushing back – no that anything we say will get through to MAGAt cultists, but there are sane people out there who need to get exposed to facts.
Letters from an American – June 30, 2023
Quote – It turned out that limiting the Fourteenth Amendment to questions of race and letting states choose their voters cemented the power of a minority. The abandonment of federal protection for voting enabled white southerners to abandon democracy and set up a one-party state that kept Black and Brown Americans as well as white women subservient to white men. As in all one-party states, there was little oversight of corruption and no guarantee that laws would be enforced, leaving minorities and women at the mercy of a legal system that often looked the other way when white criminals committed rape and murder. Many Americans tut-tutted about lynching and the cordons around Black life, but industrialists insisted on keeping the federal government small because they wanted to make sure it could not regulate their businesses or tax them. They liked keeping power at the state level; state governments were far easier to dominate. Southerners understood that overlap: when a group of southern lawmakers in 1890 wrote a defense of the South’s refusal to let Black men vote, they “respectfully dedicated” the book to “the business men of the North.”
Click through for full letter (as always, click “Continue reading”). It’s an historian’s view of the SCOTUS’s recent prejudicial decisions in the context of out history.
Food For Thought
Yesterday, I saw Virgil; he is well and returns all greetings. We did play Scrabble, but the letters were so weird that we had to use abbreviations, acronyms, slang, and foreign words to fill the board, in all the games, and we only got three in, as opposed to four on the previous visit. The weather was just about perfect – sun and warmth (but not so much warmth as to delay the car’s air conditioner from coming full on), a little cloud cover, but not too much, and sunset is not ging to get any later than it was yesterday. As I got off the interstate, my car said it was hungry, so I stopped and filled it. So I got home a bit after 4:30 instead of a but before. When I see Virgil, I don’t eat aything from the vending machines, on account of food allergiues (Yes, the stuff is labelled, but it’s not possible to read the ingredients until after getting it out of the machine, and I do hate waste.) So when I get home I’m more than ready for dinner. In the interests of saving a little time, I turn on the living room laptop rather than going all the way back to my desktop. It is slow turning on and slow bringing up theinternet – I use that time for changing into more comfortable clothing, putting stuff away, and then for starting the microwave – so I’m usually home for a half hour or even a little more before I get a comment posted. So please don’t anyone panic if my “home safe” message isn’t up right at 4:30 Mountain.
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Robert Hubbell – Brute Force in the Service of Religious Nationalism
Quote – I will briefly address the constitutional issues below, but before I do, it is appropriate to set aside legal arguments to discuss the human dimensions of the majority’s ruling in 303 Creative. The majority ruled that a business offering creative services to the public can refuse to provide those services to LGBTQ people if the business claims doing so will impair its right to free speech. Forget the procedural background and the judicial arm-waving designed to distract us. At root, the decision authorizes American business owners to discriminate against LGBTQ people. Period. It is a first step, taken in bad faith and wrapped in lies.
Click through for more. He is an attorney in Los Angeles to whom my cousin pointed me. He has opened a comments section to paying, non-paying, and non-subscribers to this post only. Today and tomorrow I am featuring this and another Substack column, the other being from Heather Cox Richardson, who is an historian (and just as angry as Hubbell about this.)
Crooks & Liars – Dark Brandon Won’t Let SCOTUS Stop Student Debt Relief
Quote – “I love the concern for the privileged,” Biden said with a sarcastic chuckle. He didn’t mention how privileged the conservative wing of the court is but he didn’t really have to given all the publicity about how they are raking in the undisclosed gifts, luxury travel and more from their wealthy pals hoping – and getting – favorable rulings.
Click through for the story (and a short video). I’m glad Joe is our President.
Food For Thought
Well, yesterday, they did it. The Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions (but you can bet any important body part you can think of that this applies to any selection process. If not now, it will.) In the interest of avoiding profanity, I’ll stop there. In other news … New York City’s “Free Shakespeare in the Park” is doing “Hamlet” this year. FSitP has never shied away from using the dynamincs of race, and this year is no exception. Hamlet and his relatives are all black – Polonis and his family, white or mixed. They decided not to show the ghost of Hamlet’s father, but instead to represent him by his voice through loudspeakers (which also obscure the direction from which his voice is coming – making it seem to come from anywhere and everywhere. Visual projections add to the effect.) The voice actor is not seen, nor credited. But Daily Beast reveals that the actor is in fact Samuel L. Jackson. Wow. PBS Great Performances featured their “Much Ado” a few years ago. I surely hope they pick this one up.
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HuffPost – In Speech On Bidenomics, Biden Tries To Turn The Page On Reagan (And Every President Since)
Quote – Biden embraced the insult the Wall Street Journal Opinion page gave to his economic plans — Bidenomics. “I did not come up with the name,” Biden noted. But he would now embrace it to tout what the White House sees as significant economic achievements and a new vision of economic policy for the country. He denounce[d] the old supply-side economics that have dominated American policy-making since Ronald Reagan put them in place in 1981. But then Biden explained how his policies actually mark a break with this economic model — and while he didn’t say it, how they break with the policies of both Obama and Bill Clinton.
Click through for story. The speech is attracting a lot of attention, as it should. Enough attention? Not yet really possible to tell.
Daily Beast – Inside the Dem Playbook to Stymie GOP Impeachment Efforts
Quote – Lefty groups like the Congressional Integrity Project and Facts First USA were first formed in 2020 and are doing much of the heavy lifting for the White House, as Biden and his staff attempt to stay out of the political fray—at least publicly. “The impeachment efforts are not legitimate,” said David Brock, a longtime Democratic operative who launched Facts First USA. “They’re basically 100 percent driven by the idea that the Republicans believe that the impeachment of Trump hurt him politically. So the fact that they have the power to do it, they’re gonna do it, whether they have the facts on their side or not.” Brock, who was famously a right-wing reporter in the 1990s before converting to the Democratic side, said he’d seen this as a long time coming—a sort of slow onramp of Republican ire against the Biden administration that he only expects to grow ahead of next year’s elections.
Click through for details. I find this reassuring – and unexpected, though i should have expected it. Joe thinks of everything.
Food For Thought
Glenn Kirschner – Trump lashes out at Jack Smith’s understanding of the law. Here’s why Trump is yelling into the void
PoliticsGirl – What we can Learn from the Titan Sub Tragedy
The Lincoln Project – Same Case
Randy Rainbow for President! (2023-2024 Tour Announcement)
Cat Hides From Her Foster Mom For A Year — Then She Does This
Beau – Let’s talk about Biden, the rails, and sick days….