In today’s news - Part 4

5-23-2022

Now I’m confused.  1.  Kansas was never a state that shared a border with Mexico..  2. But Kansas does have 4 borders.

So what’s his point?



See… 😀

Well a big fat duh!  Anyone who think fossil fuel companies are going to quietly go away as the country very very slowly transitions to renewable clean energy are kidding themselves.   Silly people.

The words “trump”  & “library” should never be used in same sentence.  

So in twitter one “retweet” a tweet they want to share.

According to the post above on trump’s site one “ReTruthed”.

That’s the best they can do is “ReTruthed”

5-24-2022

I’m not sure how much if any corruption had seeped into the Executive Office before trump took office.  But going forward, because of the lack of interest the American People seem to have in holding these people responsible for their actions, the flood gates are open.  Why not, not enough people seem to care to stop it.  Kind of like with guns.

From Paul Waldman…

“Opinion Jared Kushner’s follies show that ‘corruption’ has lost all meaning”

By Paul Waldman
Columnist
May 23, 2022 at 2:48 p.m. EDT

“Donald Trump’s presidency produced a long list of should-have-been scandals, incidents and revelations of sleaze so frequent that few garnered more than a day or two of notice. A year and half after Trump’s band of grifters left office, stories of potential or actual corruption continue to emerge, the latest involving son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin.

Like so many before it, this tale will likely fade from notice in short order. Which reveals something profoundly disturbing about American politics today: We are losing our ability to deal with corruption, to confront it and punish it, and perhaps most importantly, to deter it.

The New York Times reports that in the waning days of the Trump administration, Kushner and Mnuchin traversed the Middle East supposedly seeking investments in places such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for a government-established entity called the Abraham Fund, which was supposed to promote economic development in the region.

Yet the Times concludes: “With no accounts, employees, income or projects, the fund vanished when Mr. Trump left office.”

Kushner and Mnuchin did, however, win great benefits for themselves: Immediately upon leaving office, they both started their own investment funds, and money poured in from those same nations.

Were Kushner and Mnuchin using their positions to set up their future businesses? Were contacts cultivated — or promises made — while representing the United States, and if so, what were they? We’ll probably never know. There won’t be congressional investigations or much journalistic follow-up; it will likely just fall into the hole where we toss everything sketchy that happened during the Trump years, when self-dealing was the order of the day.

What this suggests is that the sheer volume of graft during Trump presidency gutted our capacity for treating potential or actual corruption as something that matters and must be addressed.

Some of this flows from the bargain that Republicans made with Trump. These days, Republicans use the word “corrupt" all the time. But they are rarely talking about someone who took a bribe, who made decisions benefiting patrons instead of the national interest, or who exploited their office to get rich.

Instead, to many Republicans these days, a “corrupt” official is someone who follows the law even when it doesn’t help Republicans. It’s an election administrator who resists insane right-wing conspiracy theories about voter fraud. It’s a Justice Department that refuses to help a president overthrow an election.


Trump himself throws the word “corrupt” around more than anyone. Yet he was without doubt the most corrupt president in U.S. history, using his office for financial gain, twisting U.S. foreign policy to target a political opponent, and issuing a wave of pardons for his cronies on his way out of office. To Trump, being “corrupt” just means you aren’t loyal to him.

And yet, as with so many aspects of his behavior, Republicans resolved whatever cognitive dissonance they might have had in supporting Trump by deciding not that he was innocent but that the things he did just weren’t problematic. They concluded that sexual misconduct, incessant lying, vulgar bullying, running scams to rob people of their life savings, and everything else he was guilty of just weren’t misdeeds at all. The word “corruption” lost all meaning.
But it wasn’t Trump who gave conservatives the idea that corruption isn’t something to be concerned about.

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has been on a long crusade to narrow the legal definition of corruption to render it almost meaningless. We used to have a system of campaign finance laws that treated even the appearance of corruption as something serious, on the principle that maintaining public faith in the system was a vital goal.

No more. In cases dating back to Citizens United in 2010, the court has allowed money from corporations, wealthy individuals, nonprofits that conceal their donors, and many other sources to flow toward campaigns and public officials. Again and again, they have expressed the belief that such payoffs to elected officials are essentially nothing the law should worry about.

Just last week, the court ruled that a candidate can loan his campaign money, then get paid back in the full amount after the election by donors, who will be putting money right in his personal bank account as they seek his favor.

Under this regime, a senator would at this point practically have to take out an ad in the newspaper saying. “I have just taken a bribe from this corporation, in exchange for which I have given my vote on this upcoming bill” to be found guilty of corruption.

The self-dealing free-for-all of the Trump presidency assured that ethically challenged underlings that their misdeeds wouldn’t face legal consequences. Today, two of Trump’s sleaziest appointees — former interior secretary Ryan Zinke and former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt — are running for the House and Senate, respectively. They might win, because in the GOP, you can’t be corrupt as long as you hate the libs.

Republicans have pulled off a neat trick: They have convinced themselves both that everyone they disagree with is corrupt, and that the corrupt acts and practices their own side commits are perfectly fine. They have degraded our entire system, and there is no reason to believe it won’t get worse.”

Elections have consequences…

From the Washington Post.

“What the end of Roe signals about the rise of Christian power”

“Conservative Christians have waged a war against the U.S. being a secular, civic republic”

Perspective by David Sehat
David Sehat is professor of history at Georgia State University in Atlanta and author, most recently, of "This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism" (Yale, 2022).
May 23, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

“The leaked draft Supreme Court opinion suggests that Roe v. Wade is about to fall. If the court overturns Roe, the impact will go far beyond abortion rights. It will also signal the dramatic expansion of religious authority into far-flung corners of American life, as conservative Christians impose their moral ideas on the general public.

Conservatives have long been explicit in their view that the right to abortion had to be countered to maintain the Christian underpinnings of American society. After the court handed down its decision in 1973, for example, Christianity Today lamented that “the American state no longer supports, in any meaningful sense, the laws of God.” American Catholic bishops similarly spoke of the natural law that abortion violated and immediately mobilized to limit the damage.

Part of their objection to the legalization of abortion was the way the court simply assumed that the United States was a secular, civic republic. Roe marked the culmination of a 10-year interrogation of the role of religious groups within American society by the court. The justices rejected the power of religious leaders to define social and moral norms — to the utter dismay of those who saw Christian values as the bedrock of American society.

The justices first addressed religion in schools in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and School District of Abington Township v. Schempp (1963) by disallowing school prayer and overt religious exercises. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the court weighed in on contraception by allowing birth control to be sold and advertised, disregarding the long-standing religious opposition that had led to laws forbidding it. It then tackled popular entertainment in Stanley v. Georgia (1969), permitting obscene films, books and other materials to be made and sold.
Through these cases, the court rejected the stance of Christian religious groups that said bans on obscenity were an expression of public morality. By the time the court took up the question of abortion, religious conservatives had grown outraged that their moral positions received no consideration.

In deciding Roe, the court made its commitment to secularism explicit. It had to. The question of when human life began and the exact status of a fetus were essentially religious questions. Different religious groups took divergent positions on abortion. Taking a stance within the dispute would involve the court in a religious debate, which it was loath to do because such a decision would violate the separation of church and state that it had earlier proclaimed.

So as the legal scholar Laurence H. Tribe later explained in the Harvard Law Review, the court took a step back from the issue. Rather than deciding the precise status of an unviable fetus, it asked itself the question, in Tribe’s words, “Who should make judgments of that sort?” The answer was clear, given the court’s prior rulings. The court should not decide, nor should political players at the state or federal level, nor should religious teachers. An individual woman in consultation with her doctor was the only person charged with making those judgments.

Here was a clear articulation of liberalism, which involved seeing women as capable of moral self-determination independent of religious leaders and even their families. It expressed what the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray had earlier called “the secularist tradition of the autonomous man.”

Almost immediately after Roe, conservative religious groups, members of Congress and jurists began to back away from that idea. In 1973, Congress, in response to lobbying from conservative religious groups, permitted private religious hospitals to forbid their doctors from performing abortions. Rep. Bella Abzug (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Jacob Javits (R-N.Y.) pointed out in the floor debate that the amendment actually reinforced the authority of conservative religious leaders, while denying the rights of doctors, patients and the public. Four years later, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, which ensured that public money would not be used for abortive procedures. It was a win for conservative religious authorities seeking to influence policy.

Conservative religious groups also pushed to restore the church-state connection in other ways. Activists began to demand public funding for religious institutions and a variety of religious exemptions to otherwise neutral statutes in an attempt to reinvigorate religious influence within American life. As conservatives on the court began to sign off on the effort, liberals began to remind their conservative counterparts that, as Justice Harry Blackmun put it in 1986, “The legitimacy of secular legislation depends … on whether the State can advance some justification for its law beyond its conformity to religious doctrine.”

But conservatives instead became aggressively hostile to the ideal of secular legislation and to the notion that the state has any role in protecting the individual from religious groups. In recent years, the conservatives on the court have used the notion of religious freedom to carve out larger and larger institutions in American life — including for-profit corporations — that are able to make religious determinations limiting the choices of others. In doing so, they have helped unleash the religious authority that the court tried to contain in the 1960s and early 1970s.

With this history before us, the next steps may be easier to see. The invalidation of Roe, and of women’s right to an abortion, is not really an end but a beginning. Just as the court’s original decision in Roe v. Wade represented the apotheosis of a secular order through the privatization of religious sentiment, the court’s coming decision to overturn Roe represents a straightforward attack on the American secular ideal. It will probably be the first of many developments, as the wall of separation crumbles and as conservative religious authority floods American life.”

She is right.  Unfortunately not all religious types see it that way.

This is a “well duh” ruling IMO.  One of the responses said next stop will be the Supreme Court and isn’t holding out much hope it will stand.  This person may be right.