Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Like I said, the left always opposes measures to prevent cheating in elections.

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Like I said, the left always opposes measures to prevent cheating in elections.

To clarify - it has never been seen as necessary by either progressive or conservative parties here in Australia. Of course voting is compulsory here, so the turnout means we don't face the issues you face in the US.

As for tit for tat, some time back, our Liberal Party decided it was a good idea to be obstructionist to everything the Labor government tried to pass through Parliament. They then accused them of doing nothing during their term in parliament, won the election, and then cried foul when the favour was returned.

I've always found pettiness to be a childish, somewhat ugly trait, but in the scenario above, it was also utterly idiotic and self centred (done for their own benefit rather than any belief it would benefit the country, with an idiotic expectation that it wouldn't happen during their next term in government)

US politics in some ways remind me of this - but also appear much more extreme, as do the supporters (most here are cynical of both sides of government, and many vote for the one they least despise)

We awoke this morning to news that President Joe Biden was in Kyiv, Ukraine, where he pledged “our unwavering and unflagging commitment to Ukraine’s democracy, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.” Air raid sirens blared as Biden and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky walked through the streets during the U.S. president’s five-hour stay.

As National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters, Biden’s visit was the first time a U.S. president has visited “the capital of a country at war where the United States military does not control the critical infrastructure”…in other words, an active war zone. Biden traveled in a special mission plane from Germany to Poland, then took a train from Poland to Kyiv. To make sure there would be no attacks, the U.S. notified the Russians that Biden would be in Kyiv, but a Russian MiG 30 flew from Belarus during Biden’s visit, triggering air raid sirens.

According to Sullivan, Biden felt it was important to visit Kyiv at the anniversary of the 2022 Russian invasion. The image of Biden and Zelensky standing together sent a message to Russian president Vladimir Putin, as David Rothkopf put it in the Daily Beast: “I am here in Kyiv and you are not. You not only did not take Kyiv in days as some predicted, but your attack was rebuffed. Your army suffered a humiliating defeat from which it has not recovered.”

Just under a year ago, the global equation looked very different. On February 4, 2022, Chinese president Xi Jinping hosted Russian president Vladimir Putin on the opening day of the Winter Olympics. The two men pledged to work together in a partnership with “no limits” in a transparent attempt to counter U.S. global leadership and assert a new international order based on their own authoritarian systems.

At the time, Russia was massing troops on its border with Ukraine but fervently denied it was planning to invade. On February 24, 2022, Russian tanks rolled across the border and Russian planes covered them in the air. Biden remembered that Zelensky called him and said he could hear the explosions as they spoke. “I’ll never forget that,” Biden said. “The world was about to change.” When Biden asked what he could do to help, Zelensky said: “Gather the leaders of the world. Ask them to support Ukraine.”

And over 50 nations stepped up to make sure the rules-based international order in place since World War II, which prevents one country from attacking another, held. Those backing Ukraine against Russian aggression have squeezed Russia with economic sanctions and supported Ukraine with military and humanitarian aid. As Biden said today, standing next to Zelensky: “Kyiv stands and Ukraine stands. Democracy stands. The Americans stand with you, and the world stands with you.”

Biden pledged another $460 million in aid to Ukraine, emphasizing that U.S. support for the country is bipartisan.

Biden mourned the cost Ukraine has had to bear, but championed its successes. “Russia’s aim was to wipe Ukraine off the map,” Biden said, but “Putin’s war of conquest is failing. Russia’s military has lost half its territory it once occupied. Young, talented Russians are fleeing by the tens of thousands, not wanting to come back to Russia. Not…just fleeing from the military, fleeing from Russia itself, because they see no future in their country. Russia’s economy is now a backwater, isolated and struggling.”

“Putin thought Ukraine was weak and the West was divided,” Biden said. He remembered telling Zelensky that Putin was “counting on us not sticking together. He was counting on the inability to keep NATO united. He was counting on us not to be able to bring in others on the side of Ukraine.” While Biden didn’t say it, Putin had reason to think those things: the four years of the Trump administration had seen the U.S. offending allies and threatening to pull out of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that stands against Russian aggression.

“He thought he could outlast us,” Biden said. “I don’t think he’s thinking that right now…. [H]e’s just been plain wrong. Plain wrong.” A year later, Biden said, “We stand here together.”

“You and all Ukrainians…remind the world every single day what the meaning of the word ‘courage’ is—from all sectors of your economy, all walks of life. It’s astounding. Astounding.

You remind us that freedom is priceless; it’s worth fighting for for as long as it takes. And that’s how long we’re going to be with you, Mr. President: for as long as it takes.”

Zelensky answered, “We’ll do it.”

The world could stand behind Ukraine as it has because Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have held a coalition together and presented a united front with Zelensky and allies and partners in defense of democracy.

In contrast today, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) explicitly called for dividing the nation. She tweeted: “We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this.” For once I will spare you my usual lecture on how elite southern enslavers in the 1850s made this same argument because they resented the majority rule that threatened their ability to impose their will on their Black neighbors.

(I will note, though, that former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) helpfully reviewed “some of the governing principles of America” for Greene, tweeting: “Our country is governed by the Constitution. You swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Secession is unconstitutional. No member of Congress should advocate secession, Marjorie.”)

What Greene had to say next is of more interest in this moment. The Munich Security Conference, the world’s largest gathering for international security discussions, has just reported that the Russian war on Ukraine is a war of authoritarianism on a rules-based international order. At that conference, Vice President Kamala Harris said the U.S. had determined that Russia has committed crimes against humanity and noted that the bipartisan U.S. delegation to the conference was the largest we have ever sent. The U.S. president has just entered a war zone to declare U.S. support for democracy and is now in Poland, where he will speak with the leaders of the nine countries that make up NATO’s eastern flank and will deliver a speech that Blinken has described as “very significant.”

In contrast, Greene echoed authoritarian leaders Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Putin himself when she called for splitting the nation over “the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats” and “the Democrat’s [sic] traitorous America Last policies.” Authoritarian leaders insist that the equality that underpins liberal democracy threatens traditional society because it means that LGBTQ people, women, and minorities should have the same rights as white men. Greene appears to be taking the same position.

Meanwhile, Fox News Channel personalities, including Tucker Carlson, are trying to spin Biden’s visit to Ukraine as proof that he doesn’t care about the train derailment in Ohio. Scholar of disinformation behavior Caroline Orr Bueno noted: “There’s a narrative being planted here; watch how support for Ukraine is framed as incompatible with US national interests.” She notes that a similar narrative in Canada argues that support for Ukraine hurts Canadian veterans.

A filing in Dominion Voter Systems’ lawsuit against FNC for defamation revealed last week that FNC personalities knowingly lied to their viewers about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, acting as a propaganda outlet for Trump. This information is a handy backdrop for the news reported today by Mike Allen of Axios, who says that House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has given to FNC host Carlson—who figured prominently in the election fraud lies—exclusive access to 41,000 hours of footage from the U.S. Capitol of the January 6, 2021, attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. According to Allen, Carlson’s producers have already begun going through it to see what they can use on his show.

Putin is scheduled to address the Russian Federal Assembly tomorrow. Billboards in Russia proclaim: “Russia’s border ends nowhere,” but observers believe that he was hoping for a major victory on a battlefield in Ukraine before the speech. Instead, Russian forces have taken severe losses in their recent stalled offensive in eastern Ukraine near Bakhmut.

Biden’s speech in Poland will follow later in the day.

Kevin McCarthy offers his first sacrifice to the MAGA cult
His gift to Tucker Carlson is one of many capitulations to the far-right extremists in the party for Kevin McCarthy

Last week, America received proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Fox News is a dishonest institution that spread Donald Trump's Big Lie knowing full well that he did not win the election. In a court filing from the defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Machines against the company, it was revealed that all of the top brass and their stars were fully aware that the election had not been stolen yet remained terrified of losing their deluded audience (which they had been instrumental in brainwashing) so they parrotted Trump's bogus claims. In this specific case, they spread the falsehood that the Dominion machines were rigged for the Republicans. As Dominion argued in the filing:

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"Not a single Fox witness testified that they believe any of the allegations about Dominion are true. Indeed, Fox witness after Fox witness declined to assert the allegations' truth or actually stated they do not believe them, and Fox witnesses repeatedly testified that they have not seen credible evidence to support them."

And they had the receipts. The emails from the likes of owner Rupert Murdoch, and stars such as Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson are unequivocal proof that these people are all liars. For their part, Fox News dismissed Dominion's findings as "a lot of noise and confusion."

In the wake of the network's call on election night giving the Arizona electoral votes to Joe Biden, which was true, their audience, under instructions from Donald Trump, left the network in droves for the competition, Newsmax and OAN. The executives and the stars were terrified that the stock price was being negatively impacted by their decision to tell the truth. As Salon's Igor Derysh reported, Carlson was so distraught when a reporter on the network reported that election security officials stated there was no evidence that the voting machines had been compromised that he texted Hannity:

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Please get her fired. Seriously… What the ****? I'm actually shocked… It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke."

This filing was a shocking set of documents that, in a normal, healthy democracy, would finish Fox News as a credible media company to the remainder of society that didn't already know it wasn't. But America is not a normal, healthy democracy and it could not be clearer that it isn't by the fact that just days after that stunning revelation, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he saw fit to give unfettered access to 41,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from the Jan. 6 insurrection to none other than Tucker Carlson.

It's almost as if McCarthy was playing some kind of elaborate practical joke. After what we learned about the Fox News host, how in the world can McCarthy justify handing over such sensitive information to Tucker Carlson?

These tapes have been closely guarded by the Capitol Police ever since the event and have been turned over to the January 6 Committee and Justice Department prosecutors, as well as defense lawyers, but no one in the media has been given access — until now:

The committee asked for permission from U.S. Capitol police before they used any of the footage in public hearings, these people said, as they did not want to publicly disclose the location of security cameras in the building. The committee cut and minimized use of the footage accordingly, these people added.

According to Politico's Kyle Cheney, "Tucker Carlson doesn't "have" any Jan. 6 footage. He hasn't "obtained" it. His people are viewing it on a terminal in the Capitol and it's unclear when he'll get permission to air any of it, let alone lots of it." If Cheney is right, worries about the footage getting into terrorist or extremist hands for nefarious purposes (if you don't count Carlson) may just be overblown. On the other hand, Carlson did say he would have "unfettered" access so who knows?

The real problem is that this release could compromise some of the ongoing criminal trials. Carlson will almost certainly try to create a counternarrative of January 6, which won't be hard to do since most of his audience probably never even saw the hearings or read anything about what actually happened. Instead, they've been fed a steady stream of lies, particularly from Carlson, since that fateful day.

Calson's most well-known bit of slickly produced propaganda on the subject is his "documentary" called "Patriot Purge." In it, Carlson suggests that January 6 attack was actually a plot by Antifa, the FBI and other members of the "deep state" working in concert as a false flag operation to make Trump look bad. Fox News commentators Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg resigned in protest over it but it did Carlson no harm. He's never been more popular.

He declared the January 6 Committee investigation a lie and, with characteristic unctuous sanctimony, told Axios that "if there was ever a question that's in the public's interest to know, it's what actually happened on January 6. By definition, this video will reveal it." He went on to say: "It's impossible for me to understand why any honest person would be bothered by that." I'm not sure that honest people are bothered so much by the video being released to the public as they are bothered that it's being released to a proven liar and propagandist, like Tucker Carlson, who will likely dole out the tidbits he thinks will twist what happened into a believable alternative theory of what we all saw with our own eyes that day. If anyone's up for the challenge, it's him.

The truth is that the calls to release the footage have been out there almost since the day it happened, led by none other than Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. In June of 2021, the Republican sent a wild letter to top government officials demanding the release of the footage (among other things) in order to assist what she calls "political prisoners" who were arrested for sedition conspiracy. This has been one of her hobby horses ever since and she's been joined by such luminaries as Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Az., and Matt Gaetz, R-Fl., who made it clear that this was a condition of voting for McCarthy for Speaker of the House.

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Matt Gaetz
@mattgaetz
Thank you to the 20 patriots who helped EARN this commitment from the Speaker.

Thank you
@SpeakerMcCarthy
for affirming this commitment you made.

Keeping promises is how trust is built.

I’m growing more optimistic by the day!

So this was another total capitulation to the far-right extremists in the party for Kevin McCarthy. He just took it to a whole other level by releasing it exclusively to Fox News and specifically to Tucker Carlson.

No other speaker in history would have done something so blatantly partisan as that with something so sensitive. Without a second thought for the security of the institution or the safety of his fellow officials, McCarthy's decided that MAGA love is all that matters. But he must know that they will never really love him. He's just their submissive servant and they will make him demonstrate that every day he holds the office. It would be uncomfortable to watch his ritual humiliation if he weren't so very eager to let them do it.

Last week’s court filing in the Dominion Voting Systems case proved that Fox News Channel personalities knew full well that Joe Biden had won the 2020 presidential election. They pushed Trump’s Big Lie of voter fraud anyway, afraid they would lose viewers to right-wing networks that were willing to parrot that lie.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have relied on a false narrative to win voters. To get rid of the active government put in place after 1933 to put guardrails around the unfettered capitalism that had led to the Depression, they argued that government regulation, the social safety net, civil rights, and investment in infrastructure were socialism and were undermining traditional America.

Their argument was that business regulation gave the government control over the way a man ran his business, and that taxes to support government bureaucracy, social services, and public investments redistributed wealth from white men to minorities and women. Real Americans, they suggested, must be willing to defend themselves and the country against the “socialist” national government.

Lately, this determination to get rid of the New Deal government has taken the shape of cutting Social Security and Medicare, which led to the brouhaha over President Biden’s charge during the State of the Union address that Republicans would cut those programs. After Republicans booed him and called him a liar, he backed them into agreeing they would take cuts off the table.

But former vice president Mike Pence brought it up once more this morning on CNBC, saying, “While I respect the speaker’s commitment to take Social Security and Medicare off the table for the debt ceiling negotiations, we’ve got to put them on the table in the long term,” because they were facing “insolvency.”

Reversing 40 years of Republican tax cuts would also address financial shortfalls, but that approach does not fit the Republican narrative that cutting taxes promotes growth and raises revenue.

As their policies became increasingly unpopular, Republicans ramped up that narrative until we have the extraordinary scenario we saw last night: former president Trump telling a campaign audience that the United States has blown right past socialism and is now a communist, Marxist country. That, of course, would mean that the people’s government owns the means of production: the factories, services, and so on.

Instead, as President Biden pointed out today in response to right-wing attempts to blame his administration for the Ohio derailment, deregulation has moved money upward and compromised Americans’ safety. He noted that he has committed the federal government to make sure Ohio has all it needs to address the crisis. Then he added: “Rail companies have spent millions of dollars to oppose common-sense safety regulations. And it’s worked. This is more than a train derailment or a toxic waste spill—it’s years of opposition to safety measures coming home to roost.”

That narrative has also enshrined the idea that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, originally intended to limit the federal government’s power over state militias but now interpreted to mean that individuals have a right to own whatever weaponry they want, defines the nation. After a number of right-wing congressional lawmakers have taken to wearing assault rifle lapel pins, Representative Barry Moore (R-AL) this week introduced a bill to make the AR-15 the “National Gun of America.” Moore claims that “The anti–Second Amendment group won’t stop until they take away all your firearms.”

From February 17 through February 19, there were ten mass shootings in the United States. According to Grace Hauck of USA Today, there were “two mass shootings in Georgia and Missouri and one each in Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi.” Thirteen people were killed and 46 injured. At least 15 of the victims were under 20. Mass shootings are up in 2023 compared to 2022: 82 this year, compared with 59 at the same time last year.

The idea of strangling government programs and saving tax dollars has gotten to the point that we had the extraordinary scene in Alaska earlier this week of Republican state representative David Eastman, who attended the January 6, 2021, rally in Washington, D.C., suggesting that children dying of child abuse would save the state money in the social services those children would otherwise need.

The Republican narrative to attract voters, as warped as it has become, has now begun to drive the government itself. Today, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Isaac Stanley-Becker of the Washington Post reported that after the 2020 election, Arizona’s then–attorney general, Mark Brnovich, concealed a report produced after 10,000 hours of investigation by his own staff, that said virtually all the claims of fraud leveled against the 2020 Arizona election were unfounded.

Brnovich was running to win the Republican nomination for a seat in the U.S. Senate. He kept the report hidden and instead released an “Interim Report” saying that his office had found “serious vulnerabilities.” He continued to circulate hints that the vote was off, somehow, despite fact checks disproving those allegations. His office put together a document refuting the idea the election was stolen and saying that none of the people making that accusation produced any evidence. Brnovich did not release that summary.

In a later memo summarizing their work, investigators noted that none of those making outlandish claims about the election were willing to repeat those claims to agents, when they would be subject to a state law prohibiting them from lying to law enforcement officers.

Brnovich was involved in the Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee case, decided in July 2021 by the Supreme Court, that made it much harder to challenge voting restrictions that make it harder for minorities to vote. Voters replaced Brnovich this year with Kris Mayes, a Democrat, who shifted Brnovich’s “Election Integrity Unit,” which focused on fraud, to address voter suppression.

The attempt to maintain the Republican narrative is now deeply embedded in the government itself. House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has apparently given to Tucker Carlson of the Fox News Channel exclusive access to more than 44,000 hours of video taken within the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. This amounts to “one of the worst security risks since 9/11,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said in protest today, “a treasure trove of closely held information about how the Capitol complex is protected.”

Carlson has repeatedly challenged the official accounts of the riot, blaming the federal government for launching the attack and claiming that FBI agents were behind it. Carlson is also one of the key conspirators in the Fox News Channel promotion of the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election, even though they dismissed that notion privately. The expectation is that Carlson will hack whatever videos he can into a version of the Republican narrative.

But there is more: McCarthy is fundraising off his release of the videos to Carlson, claiming he is delivering “truth and transparency over partisan games” and asking “patriots” to “chip…in” to help House Republicans.

A Fox host sparked outrage on Wednesday by claiming that Lego is “going woke” because they have introduced characters with a range of identities and personality traits.

In a segment on Fox News, host Harris Faulkner introduced a segment on Lego by announcing that “Lego is going woke.”

As evidence, Faulkner offered news that the Danish toy company is unveiling a range of new characters that include characters with anxiety, characters who are disabled, and characters with Down Syndrome.

“These are really important issues,” Faulkner told Fox Radio host Jimmy Failla. “Do you want Lego in there?”

“Definitely not,” Failla said. “But what’s so fascinating about this story is the divide in the country. Republicans think it is insane that they are forcing identity politics into Legos. Democrats are upset they didn’t make a drag queen stripper.”

...the left's war on white republican states.