Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Powell: ‘The US is on an unsustainable fiscal path’

Now, they have a freer press than we do.

The US public has been treated to the most pervasive, relentless anti-Russia, anti-Trump, anti-conservative propaganda imaginable--and it's been incredibly successful.

1. Target your scapegoat.

2. Immerse your population in preemptive propaganda to dehumanize & vilify the scapegoat, using media & pop influencers.

3. Label & vilify those who question the state narrative. Associate them with the scapegoat.

4. Fearing labeling themselves, cowardly types join the noise against dissenters. Influencers (celebrities, politicians) are paid to join the state narrative.

When you are 34 trillion in the red, you don't give other countries hundreds of billions of dollars.

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Now, they have a freer press than we do.

They really don't.

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Yes, they really do. Israel edits our news releases. More than one media outlet has staff that've complained about it.

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The US public has been treated to the most pervasive, relentless anti-Russia, anti-Trump, anti-conservative propaganda imaginable--and it's been incredibly successful.

So successful that Fox News is the most listened-to source of network news and Trump actually stands a chance of winning.

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And what does that tell you?

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1. Target your scapegoat.

Biden, the Democrats, and the mainstream media

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No dice. Republicans and Democrats actually DO things to make them hated. There's a pretty even social civil war between those two factions by the people that don't realize they're two corrupt wings on one bird that rules the country. The media is the mouthpiece of the power in the country and Russia Russia Russia dominated the news for YEARS. There's no equivalent to the Russia scapegoat--but I think China will be trading places with Russia soon--or thrown on the heap.

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2. Immerse your population in preemptive propaganda to dehumanize & vilify the scapegoat, using media & pop influencers.

Direct negative attention to the LBGT community, ban books, and fulminate against "wokeness"

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Again, the media doesn't drive this narrative. These are actions by conservatives. They're shitty and to be complained about and fought--but nowhere near the scale of the Russia Russia Russia narrative that has lasted years. Americans aren't associated with gayness or books and then ostracized from society--actually, most Americans shun that behavior. Conversely, journalists are called Putin bots or Russian sympathizers if they depart from the mainstream narrative. Tucker Carlson interviewing Putin, Julian Assange, whistleblowers who used to be protected now incarcerated, genocide now acceptable--what if Trump had facilitated a genocide?
It's the rallying cry of conservatives.

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3. Label & vilify those who question the state narrative. Associate them with the scapegoat.

Accuse them of being pedophiles or on the payroll of George Soros

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4. Fearing labeling themselves, cowardly types join the noise against dissenters. Influencers (celebrities, politicians) are paid to join the state narrative.

Roseanne Barr, Kelsey Grammer, Kid Rock

I had a popular commentator that told me flat out, if you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you. Because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.

Garry Kasparov@Kasparov63
Feb 6
When you are too pro-Kremlin and anti-American to keep a job in US propaganda mills, go to the source! Nothing surprising, but, as with Trump's treasonous embrace of Russia, watch who normalizes it.

Russia Is Boosting Calls for ‘Civil War’ Over Texas Border Crisis

An all-encompassing Russian disinformation campaign is using everything from bots to lifestyle influencers to powerful state-run media to sow division in the United States.

And what does that tell you?

More than one media outlet has staff that've complained about it.

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When you are 34 trillion in the red, you don't give other countries hundreds of billions of dollars.

But if the countries are strategic allies or have existing defense agreements you can provide them with arms.

Amidst the Republican meltdown in Washington, a disturbing pattern is emerging.

Under pressure from former president Donald Trump, Republican senators today killed the $118 billion Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act that provided funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan and humanitarian assistance for Gaza and also included protections for the border that Republicans themselves had demanded.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), one of the team of senators who had negotiated the bill, called out the Republicans who had staged photo ops at the border and insisted that Congress must address the rise in migration across the border… until Trump told them the opposite: “After all those trips to the desert, after all those press conferences, it turns out this crisis isn’t much of a crisis after all. Sunday morning, it’s a real crisis,” she said. “Monday morning it magically disappeared.”

After four months of Senate negotiations over the bill produced a strong bipartisan agreement, Trump pulled the rug out from under a measure that gave the Republicans much of what they wanted, partly because he wanted the issue of immigration and the border to run on in 2024, it seems, but also to demonstrate that he could command Congress to do his bidding.

It appears that Trump is trying to turn the Republican Party into an instrument he can use as he wishes.

Senator James Lankford (R-OK), whom Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tapped to negotiate the bill, today told the Senate that four weeks ago a right-wing media personality had told him “flat out—before they knew any of the contents of the bill, any of the content, nothing was out at that point—that told me flat out, ‘If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you, because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.’”

Lankford added, “[They] have been faithful to their promise and have done everything they can to destroy me in the past several weeks.” (MAGA radio host Jesse Kelly later claimed he was the person to whom Lankford referred, and called the Oklahoma senator a “eunuch.”)

It is not a normal part of our political system to have members of Congress deciding what laws to support on the basis of threats.

In Politico today, Burgess Everett reported that Trump-aligned MAGA Republican senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) are calling for McConnell to step down because he backed the national security measure with the border fixes MAGA demanded, suggesting that negotiating with Democrats is off-limits. Trump has consistently called for McConnell to be replaced with someone friendlier to him.

Senators aligned with Trump—Ron Johnson (R-WI), Rick Scott (R-FL), and J.D. Vance (R-OH), as well as Cruz and Lee—took a stand against the national security measure, creating such pressure that McConnell’s supporters quietly turned against it. Everett noted that the rapid about-face Senate Republicans made over the national security measure “is evidence of a major drift away from McConnell’s style of Republicanism and toward Trump’s.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said, “I have a difficult time understanding again how anyone else in the future is going to want to be on that negotiating team—on anything—if we are going to be against it.” She said: “I’ve gone through the multiple stages of grief. Today I’m just pissed off.”

Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is showing as well in his attempt to take over the Republican National Committee, in particular a plan to replace as its chair his hand-picked loyalist Ronna McDaniel, who has ties to the old party, with someone even closer to him. Since 2016, “[t]hey’ve merged the DNA of the president’s campaign and the RNC,” a Republican operative told Matt Dixon, Olympia Sonnier, and Katherine Doyle of NBC News.

Josh Dawsey and Michael Scherer reported yesterday in the Washington Post that Republicans are afraid to stand up to Trump out of fear that he will retaliate against them. In Politico today, Peder Schaefer described how in Republican-dominated Wyoming, Democrats are afraid to admit their political affiliation out of concern for their safety.

Yesterday, Politico’s Adam Wren pointed out that Trump has spent much of the last week attacking elections officials in Indiana for helping former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who is running against him for the Republican presidential nomination. He is apparently working with loyalist Representative Jim Banks (R-IN) to push the lie that Haley had forgotten to fill out the paperwork to get onto the Republican primary ballot and that election officials were cheating to get her onto it.

Officials say that these baseless accusations are an attempt to sow distrust of the 2024 election.

“Trump is reinforcing a narrative where the only acceptable outcome is his victory, thus preemptively delegitimizing any electoral defeat,” Evansville attorney and former Indiana Republican delegate Joshua Claybourn told Wren. “It sets the stage for yet another crisis of legitimacy in the November general election.”

Mike Murphy, a former Republican member of the Indiana House of Representatives, offered Wren a different theory about Trump’s actions: “The bottom line is he’s completely unhinged. He is literally off his rocker.”

But there is a method behind the madness. Trump’s actions are not those designed to win an election by getting a majority of the votes. They are the tools someone who cannot win a majority uses to seize power.

Trump’s base is shrinking as his actions become more extreme, but he has a big megaphone, and it is getting bigger. As Robyn Dixon and Natalia Abbakumova pointed out in the Washington Post today, Putin’s awarding of an interview to right-wing former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson in Moscow this week “demonstrated Putin’s interest in building bridges to the disruptive MAGA element of the Republican Party, and it seemed to reflect the Kremlin’s hope that Donald Trump would return to the presidency and that Republicans would continue to block U.S. military aid to Ukraine.”

Yesterday, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) introduced, and more than 60 House Republicans co-sponsored, a resolution denying that Trump had engaged in insurrection in his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Former District of Columbia police officer Michael Fanone, who was badly hurt on January 6, said the resolution was “a slap in the face to those of us who almost lost everything defending the Capitol on January 6th, including protecting some of the very Members of Congress who are now attempting to rewrite history to exonerate former President Trump.

“But no piece of paper signed by a group of spineless extremists will ever change the facts about that dark day:” he wrote, “the insurrection was violent, it was deadly and it will happen again if we do not expunge the MAGA ideology that stoked the flames of insurrection in the first place. Rep. Matt Gaetz and every supporter of this resolution must be held accountable for their lies and un-American efforts to undermine our democracy.”

Ten days ago Joe Biden did something remarkable, and almost without precedent – he actually said no to big oil.

His administration halted the granting of new permits for building liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, something Washington had been handing out like M&Ms on Halloween for nearly a decade. It’s a provisional “no” – Department of Energy experts will spend the coming months figuring out a new formula for granting the licenses that takes the latest science and economics into account – but you can tell what a big deal it is because of the howls of rage coming from the petroleum industry and its gaggle of politicians.

And you can tell something else too: just how threadbare their arguments have become over time. Biden has called their bluff, and it’s beautiful to watch.

To give you an idea, politicians beholden to the industry are using this week and next to hold hearings about natural gas in Congress. Joe Manchin – who has received more lobbying money from big oil than anyone else in Congress, and is the founder of a coal brokerage business – is convening a session in the Senate on Thursday, but on Tuesday the House began the action with a hearing before a subcommittee of the House committee on energy and commerce.

One “expert” summoned by the panel, Toby Rice, owns the company that produces more natural gas than any other in the country. And he immediately deployed the sleight of hand that his ilk have used over and over again. I’ll try and slow it down enough that you can see the hand dealing from the bottom of the deck.

The fracking revolution, Rice said, “has powered our economy and prevented us from being reliant on foreign sources of natural gas – all the while driving over 60% of the emissions reduction the United States experienced since the turn of the century by displacing coal-fired power generation”.

The key word here is “emissions”, by which Rice means carbon dioxide. And indeed fracked gas, when burned in a power plant, produces fewer emissions than coal. But there’s another major greenhouse gas – methane – and that’s basically what “natural gas” consists of. When it leaks from a well or a pipeline, it’s 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, molecule per molecule, at trapping heat.

And so much is leaking that – when you combine those emissions with the carbon that still comes from burning gas – America’s total contribution to global warming has probably not gone down at all over the last two decades. Far from being a boon, natural gas has been a trap, one that the industry now wants to catch the rest of the globe in.

What’s more – as new research this fall showed – when you put fracked gas on a boat and send it on a long ocean cruise, so much leaks out that it’s far worse than coal. If the White House had kept granting all the permits that industry wanted, within a decade US natural gas would be producing more greenhouse gas emissions than everything that happens on the continent of Europe. It’s the biggest fossil fuel expansion project on Earth.

That’s half the problem with Rice’s argument. The other half is, it’s not coal that Rice’s gas mostly undercuts. We now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun; there’s no reason not to go straight from coal to renewable energy, with no intermediate stop at gas. The idea that it’s a “bridge fuel” is a decade out of date, but it’s an argument that big oil wants to extend four or five decades into the future, because that’s how long this new infrastructure is supposed to last.

If Rice’s arguments were deceptive, the other industry witness was simply sad. Eric Cormier represented the Chamber Southwest Louisiana, where most of this infrastructure is located. It’s his neighbors – environmental justice crusaders like Roishetta Ozane and James Hiatt – who have led this fight, pointing out the damage that these installations are doing to the air and water. Cormier, though, said LNG development was necessary because the region had taken such an economic hit from Hurricanes Laura and Delta, which had caused $17bn in damages, damaged 44,000 homes, and dropped the population by about 7%.

He’s not wrong about the damage – Lake Charles, the big city in the region, is arguably the blue tarp capital of the planet. But think about his argument for even a second: the climate crisis is causing such grievous loss along the coast of Louisiana that … we need to make the climate crisis worse to pay for all the damage.

What? If any place on Earth should viscerally feel the urgent need to get off fossil fuels, the disappearing Louisiana coast would be it. But if you’re the Chamber SWLA, short-term profit is the only metric you understand.

This brand of greenwashing has been going on for years, of course. But big oil is having an ever-harder time making their argument, especially after a new economic survey published last week showed that continuing to build out the LNG export infrastructure would raise energy costs for Americans by 9 to 14%. And polling shows pretty conclusively that Americans don’t want to frack their country to send cheap gas to China.

That won’t stop the industry from shouting. At this point, bypassed by new renewable technology, their only real hope is political gamesmanship. But it’s getting far easier for enlightened leaders to stand up to them. In December, in Dubai, the world signed a pledge to “transition away” from fossil fuels. Last month, in Washington, Joe Biden started to show that he meant it.

I think the justices that are directly beholden to Trump for their seats on the court may decide purely out of fear of reprisal.