Crazy alert! Oklahoma GOP files bill to ban those very scary 'furries' from schools

— Trump is leaning hard on SCOTUS, just like he did on Mike Pence. Will members of the Supreme Court get the Pence “gallows” next? Will they cave to his threats and promises? Trump’s ability to avoid going to jail for his many crimes, and to get revenge on those who’ve tried to hold him to account, is now largely in the hands of the Supreme Court. They’ll soon be hearing cases deciding both his claim of absolute presidential immunity and whether he can be kept off the ballot by state authorities under the 14th Amendment’s provision declaring that any person who’s engaged in or provided aid and comfort to an insurrection can’t hold public office. And now he’s lobbying them hard, from trying to sweet-talk them on Hannity’s show to threatening them with “chaos and bedlam” if he doesn’t get his way.

Mitt Romney’s book tells how multiple Republican senators chose to vote against impeaching him because they were terrified that he’d send his foaming-at-the-mouth hoards against them like he did Romney, two Black election workers in Atlanta, and Nancy Pelosi’s husband. This is how fascists typically seize and hold power: using intimidation and the fear of violence, using well-publicized but controversial people as examples.

Judge Cannon in Florida is acting like she’s been cowed by his threats. He’s apparently loving how E. Jean Carroll is describing the terror she experienced (he amplifies it at every occasion by showing up in the courtroom and discussing it in the media), as he did with Shea Moss and Ruby Freeman: in both cases, Trump’s calculation is that those stories will cause anybody who may cross him to think twice. Like a mob boss, he wields fear more effectively than any other emotion.

So far, it looks like the Court is inclined to help him out; they could have decided either case quickly but are dragging them both out for weeks, presumably to help him get to the election without a conviction and with the stay in place on ballot removal. None of these judges want to be the ultimate villain: the person who prevented Donald Trump from becoming president with the stroke of a pen. Keep an eye on these cases.

— “Largest presidential grift in history”: House Democrats dropped the hammer on Trump and Kushner. Congressman Robert Garcia (D-CA) told the nation, during a floor speech before the House of Representatives, that “Donald Trump and his family, especially the Kushners, participated in the largest presidential grift in history.” And, following up on an investigation and report from the House Oversight Committee, Garcia brought the receipts:

“We have records of 24 governments funneling millions into Trump properties and into Donald Trump’s pockets while he was president, all in violation of the U.S. Constitution,” Garcia claimed, noting Trump was in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause that forbids presidents from taking payments from foreign governments. “And,” Garcia added, noting that most of Trump’s transactions are still secret, “this is just the tip of the iceberg.” He added:
“Despite the attempted cover-ups, we can still prove that Trump and Jared Kushner were making national security decisions while he and his family were getting bribed and paid by the same foreign powers.”

Meanwhile, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are desperately trying to tie President Biden into some of the skeezy deals his son was involved with; so far they have no evidence, but claim that won’t stop them from trying to impeach Biden so Trump can claim he’s not the only impeached candidate running in 2024. Just like their sudden opposition to funding Ukraine, these pathetic members of the house and Senate put their reputations and their careers over their country. That’s as craven as it gets.

— A new report finds half of the inflation America has experienced since the pandemic is caused by corporate price-gouging. A new report from the think tank Groundwork Collaborative documents how obscene corporate profits caused about 53% of the inflation we all suffered under during the second and third quarters of last year. While prices consumers paid last year went up 3.4%, for example, the “input costs” (raw materials, rent, electricity, wages, benefits) to big corporations only went up 1%, drawing from data supplied by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and National Income and Products Accounts.

This is happening because in 1983 Ronald Reagan instructed his DOJ, FTC, and SEC to stop enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust and other anti-monopoly laws, leading to a decade of “Mergers & Acquisitions Mania” as was documented in Michael Douglas’ “greed is good” movie, Wall Street.

The first president since then to begin enforcing century-old anti-trust law is Joe Biden, although his administration has only put their toe in the water: they’re blocking new mergers, but have not yet begun breaking up giant companies like Roosevelt and Taft did at the turn of the 20th century and Gerald Ford did with AT&T in the 1970s. The only solution to this problem will be for Biden to get more aggressive and, by breaking up America’s corporate monoliths, restore some competition to the marketplace.

— Billionaires ask for higher income taxes and even a wealth tax: is anyone listening? A group of over 250 billionaires and multimillionaires presented an open letter to the attendees of the “Billionaire Woodstock” at Davos, Switzerland this week. Calling for higher taxes on the morbidly rich, these wealthy people wrote:

“Our request is simple: we ask you to tax us, the very richest in society. This will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, nor deprive our children, nor harm our nations’ economic growth. But it will turn extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future.”

Valerie Rockefeller and Abigail Disney led the charge, with a letter that was both blunt and concerned:

“We are also the people who benefit most from the status quo. But inequality has reached a tipping point, and its cost to our economic, societal and ecological stability risk is severe — and growing every day. In short, we need action now.”

The group Patriotic Millionaires published a new poll of rich people showing that fully 74% are in favor of higher taxes on their own class. An additional 58% supported a 2% wealth tax like Elizabeth Warren has supported for years, and 54% said straight out that extreme wealth is a threat to democracies around the world. Nonetheless, Republicans will go to the mat to protect or pass tax cuts for the morbidly rich, no matter how badly they damage our economy and the American middle class.

— This is what happens when rabid anti-abortion freaks take over: a woman gets 30 years in prison after her baby dies. Lilian was 19 years old when she went into labor with complications and gave birth in a hospital. Her baby was struggling from the beginning and, despite the neonatal unit and incubator, died after a few days.

The local prosecutor — without any evidence — decided on his own that the baby’s death was “proof on its face” that Lilian must not have been “careful” during her pregnancy and charged her with homicide: she was just released from prison after serving 8 years of her 30-year sentence. Lilian is one of nearly a hundred women who’ve had this happen over the past decade in El Salvador, the country that Ronald Reagan famously and illegally“saved from socialism” by supporting rightwing death squads, leading to the death of more than 75,000 civilians in a bloody civil war.

The rightwingers have run the country ever since, and one of their first accomplishments was to put draconian penalties on abortion that have, for decades, been enforced against women who had simple miscarriages or complex births leading to fetal death. The country is now re-examining some of the cases, most of which have no evidence other than the prosecutors’ assertion, leading to as many as 70 women being released from long prison sentences over the ongoing objections of outspoken rightwing legislators, some will affiliations to the American Republican Party.

This is the vision the GOP has for America, and is already being acted out in some states, like with the case of Brittany Watts, who had a miscarriage at home; one of Ohio’s rightwing county prosecutors nearly sent her to prison last month until nationwide publicity forced him to back down. From the Republicans’ point of view, on the issue of abortion and birth control, they’re just getting started.

— Why the discovery that Greenland is losing ice faster than we knew is concerning. Scientists with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories have found that Greenland’s massive ice sheets are shedding fresh water about 20% faster than earlier believed. The island nation is now dumping around 33 million tons of fresh water into the North Atlantic every hour, threatening to shut down the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt thermohaline ocean circulation patterns that bring warmth to northern Europe and stabilize crop yields all over the world. The movie The Day After Tomorrowis premised on just this scenario, although it collapses decades of weather transition into a few days. This could be one of the most dangerous and dramatic consequences of our ongoing addiction to fossil fuels.

— Crazy Alert! Oklahoma Republican submits legislation to deal with the crisis of kids using litter boxes in school. He’s not the first to be freaked out: ever since a group punked a group of conservatives who’d taken over a school board by claiming that kids were becoming “furries,” the story has acquired an outsized following on rightwing hate media and with GOP politicians. In New Hampshire, for example, US Senate candidate Dan Bolduc told supporters at a campaign event:

“We have furries and fuzzies in classrooms. They lick themselves, they’re cats. When they don’t like something, they hiss… and get this, get this, they’re putting litter boxes [in schools] for them.”

While there’s never been a case of “furries” ever documented in any school anywhere in America, the worry about them continues to provoke Republican legislators seven years after the joke was revealed and debunked. The most recent sucker is Oklahoma Republican State Representative Justin Humphrey, the same guy who earlier introduced legislation require women seeking an abortion to get written permission from “the fetus’ father.” These guys are a living, breathing advertisement for the need to teach civics and critical thinking skills in our public schools.

— Geeky Science - Do multivitamins stave off dementia? A new multi-year, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of seniors taking either a daily multivitamin or a placebo capsule found that those who took the vitamins had brain functions as much as two years “younger” than their placebo-group peers. One of the researchers told The Washington Post: “The results are stunning and strong in their consistency. Each study shows a slightly different result but, taken together, are a powerful indication of the overall benefits of multivitamins on memory and cognitive aging.”