The battle lines are rather sharply drawn. We’ve got two political parties, and one of them is falling into a dark pit of insanity, a distinction that is being constantly highlighted. The latest episode: the Republicans killed a bill that would protect our right to contraception. Are they planning something for the future?

The Senate on Wednesday afternoon voted not to advance a bill that would create a federal right to access contraception. The procedural measure, which required 60 votes, failed as all but two Republicans present voted against it.

The legislation would have prevented states from passing laws that limit access to contraception, including hormonal birth control, intrauterine devices and other methods that prevent pregnancy. Democrats introduced the bill, in part, to put Republicans on the record on reproductive rights ahead of November’s elections.

Obviously, it was set up as part of a political ploy by the Democrats…but it worked. The Republicans willingly hitched their wagon to the star of weird pronatalists and freaky tradwives and fundamentalist Catholics and evangelicals. That’s who you’re voting for when you vote for Republicans.

They’ve elected women to run their countries. This is not a guarantee of an improvement (just remember Margaret Thatcher), but it does improve the odds.

Iceland has elected Halla Tomasdottir to the presidency. She’s billed as an “entrepreneur” and “businessperson,” which are not reassuring criteria, but she did say this:

A climate and nature emergency demands urgent, inclusive action, conformity simply won’t unlock the leadership we need. It’s time to transform how we lead, and in a world of low trust we need to get better at co-creating solutions with those impacted. A livable world can best be secured if women, in solidarity with male allies, unite to redefine leadership norms; dismantle barriers; and move toward sustainable, people-first approaches. This demands courageous collaboration. The most important question we must now ask is, how will we choose to lead at a time like no other for humanity?

Promising.

Mexico has elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum. She has a Ph.D. in energy engineering, and previously served as an environmental secretary. She promoted education (Yay!) and policing (boo.) Leftist activist and climate scientist, what’s not to like?

I’m feeling even more discouraged by our choices in the US presidential election. Why can’t we have any educated, progressive women on the ballot?

This is one of those comic illustrations that are burned into the brain of every person above a certain age. “Guilty, guilty, guilty” is the phrase that immediately came to my mind yesterday.

We felt a kind of glee at this rare occasion when a rich and powerful person gets the same justice we peons routinely experience, as they should. But take a moment and exercise your empathy: how would another rich and powerful person react to the demonstration that they could be held to account for their crimes? I know, I know! Let’s ask Elon Musk!

After Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in relation to a scheme to silence a porn star and unlawfully influence the 2016 election, Musk moaned that the history-making outcome of the trial is bad news for all Americans. “Indeed, great damage was done today to the public’s faith in the American legal system,” he wrote in a post on X.

Personally, my faith in the American legal system is far more shaken by Alito and Thomas and Roberts and the decisions of the Supreme Court that have privileged corporations, and the stock trading of our senators, and the thuggery of police officers. There have been many things in the past several decades that have eroded my confidence, and seeing a con man getting convicted in a jury trial of something he actually did isn’t one of them.

Musk’s comment came in response to another user who bemoaned that the first conviction of a former president had occurred not because of the “Iraq or Afghanistan wars, illegal CIA coups, drone striking weddings, or spying on Americans” but rather because “Trump misclassified a $130,000 payment for a porn star’s NDA.”

Musk apparently also saw Trump’s crimes as insignificant and questioned the legitimacy of the prosecution. “If a former President can be criminally convicted over such a trivial matter—motivated by politics, rather than justice—then anyone is at risk of a similar fate,” he wrote.

I agree in part that I would like to have seen more high officials convicted of their great crimes, and it’s terrible that they have such impunity. It’s pathetic that I have to accept justice for the little stuff — it’s like Al Capone getting convicted for tax evasion rather than racketeering and murder.

But wait — “little stuff”? What am I thinking? Paying $130,000 for the silence of a porn star is not a little thing to most people. That’s about two years salary, before taxes, for me! This is not a small crime to the majority of people in this country. That’s robbing your local bank money — not a gas station or 7-11 holdup, but hitting a up small business on payday. And the rich people think the sum is “trivial” or “insignificant.” Musk probably breaks into a cold sweat at the thought that he could be punished for a crime that represents the price of one cybertruck, rather than the millions and billions he has in his coffers.

My dream is to see every billionaire get their butts kick and their profits taxed heavily. A guilty verdict for Trump is just the first small step.

“Justices” Thomas and Alito have refused to recuse themselves from January 6th cases, despite being blatantly partisan. The bias and corruption in the Supreme Court have become rather blatant, because right now the courts think they are not bound by ethics or law. Jamie Raskin has an idea.

Everyone assumes that nothing can be done about the recusal situation because the highest court in the land has the lowest ethical standards — no binding ethics code or process outside of personal reflection. Each justice decides for him- or herself whether he or she can be impartial.

Of course, Justices Alito and Thomas could choose to recuse themselves — wouldn’t that be nice? But begging them to do the right thing misses a far more effective course of action.

Correct. It would be hopelessly naive to think the Supreme Court would do anything in the name of principle. So what is his recommended course of action?

The U.S. Department of Justice — including the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointed U.S. special counsel and the solicitor general, all of whom were involved in different ways in the criminal prosecutions underlying these cases and are opposing Mr. Trump’s constitutional and statutory claims — can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law.

The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can…

Stop right there. The solution hinges on ineffectual, waffly Merrick Garland, the dilatory attorney general, taking decisive action? Wouldn’t that be nice? Unfortunately, it’s only slightly less naive than expecting Thomas or Alito to do the responsible thing. Furthermore, “petitioning” doesn’t sound very effective — do we think the justices won’t find an excuse to weasel out of any “petition”? This is John Roberts’ court, after all.

“I think John Roberts is gonna go down in history as one of the worst chief justices of the United States,” Graves said. “He’s done everything he can to try to manipulate the process to avoid and block efforts by the Senate to hold the court accountable, to insist that it abide by just commonsense ethical rules that every other court in the country has to follow.”

Nothing will be done. These crooks aren’t worried.

All right, all right, we know. The American election process sucks, and somehow a floofy-haired orange con artist got elected to the presidency, and despite being hit with trial after trial for his criminal corruption, is trying to get elected again to the highest office in the land. And a significant number of people enthusiastically favor him!

I don’t get it. Minnesota had a kook claiming to be a vampire, Jonathon “The Impaler” Sharkey, running for governor, and when his crimes were exposed, we had him arrested and extradited to Indiana. That’s the sane response to running a crook and a fraud out of town.

Then the UK fucked up thoroughly by passing Brexit — again, with a significant fraction of the population cheering it on — and as the relevance of the nation collapses in response, elects a series of Tory bastards to various high positions. Nigel Farage? How was he taken seriously? Boris Johnson? Rishi Sunak, who is simply an exploiter and parasite? It’s absurd. How can the US and UK keep digging deeper holes for themselves?

And now the Netherlands. The Netherlands always seemed like an eminently sensible, practical nation with high educational standards, but now they’ve gone and put Geert Wilders in charge of the country.

The far right’s stunning victory in the Netherlands’s parliamentary elections last fall will upset far more than the country’s immigration policies. An agreement by the four parties aiming to form a new government, presented on 16 May and debated in the House of Representatives on 22 May, also calls for cuts in science and innovation funding, rollbacks of environment and climate policies, and restrictions on the influx of foreign students.

HOW? How does an electorate decide to immolate their economy, their reputation, and their future? Wilders is a catastrophic choice, just as bad as electing Trump here. He’s also simply dead wrong on every decision that impacts science.

Wilders, who ardently denies climate science, called in his election platform for putting all climate policies and agreements “through the shredder,” but he conceded in Parliament that won’t happen. The governing agreement leaves most climate “nonsense” in place, he said. A proposed carbon dioxide tax for industry and a plan to speed up the introduction of heat pumps in homes have both been abandoned, however.

He also looks like a clown. I guess it’s good that politicians shouldn’t be elected on the basis of appearance, but you’re supposed to avoid superficialities to examine their policies critically. Wilders fails on all counts.

Does this remind anyone else of a certain University of Chicago professor who was both outraged that anyone would refuse to pay racists and gender criticals to speak on campus, while also freaking out that students had strong opinions he disagreed with? It’s uncanny.

Although…the worst ones tend not to call themselves “conservative.” They’re “liberal” or “centrist” or “open-minded” while magically and unthinkingly aligning themselves with conservatives all the way down the line.

Massachusetts leads the way! They placed a wealth tax on rich people and gleaned over a billion dollars, which sounds like a good deal to me.

Massachusetts’ so-called “millionaires tax” appears primed to actually deliver billions.

State officials said Monday that the voter-approved surtax on high earners has generated more than $1.8 billion in revenue this fiscal year — with still three months left to go — meaning state officials could have hundreds of millions of surplus dollars to spend on transportation and education initiatives.

Education? That’s a great priority. Also transportation is a good idea, if it’s being invested in mass transit.

They had some reservations, though, that it might scare the rich people away.

The Department of Revenue won’t certify the official amount raised until later this year. But the estimates immediately buoyed supporters’ claims that the surtax would deliver much-needed revenue for the state despite fears it could drive out some of the state’s wealthiest residents.

I would like to help Massachusetts. If every state imposed a wealth tax, the looters would have nowhere to run to!

Here’s an observation that you might find counter-intuitive, unless you recognize that the police carry a cost in inherent destructiveness: more police doesn’t work.

In 2016, a group of criminologists conducted a systematic review, opens new tab of 62 earlier studies of police force size and crime between 1971 and 2013. They concluded that 40 years of studies consistently show that “the overall effect size for police force size on crime is negative, small, and not statistically significant.”
“This line of research has exhausted its utility,” the authors wrote. “Changing policing strategy is likely to have a greater impact on crime than adding more police.”
Decades of data similarly shows that police don’t solve much serious and violent crime – the safety issues that most concern everyday people.
Over the past decade, “consistently less than half of all violent crime and less than twenty-five percent of all property crime were cleared,” William Laufer and Robert Hughes wrote in a 2021 law review article, opens new tab. Laufer and Hughes are professors in the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania’s Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department.
Police “have never successfully solved crimes with any regularity, as arrest and clearance rates are consistently low throughout history,” and police have never solved even a bare majority of serious crimes, University of Utah college of law professor Shima Baradaran Baughman wrote in another 2021 law review article, opens new tab, including murder, rape, burglary and robbery.
Existing research also affirms the findings in the recent report on police work in California.

I once had a nice encounter with the local sheriff’s department when a visitor accidentally locked their keys in their car — they came right over and used their collection of simple tools to break into the car, and the officer was quite nice. He didn’t need to use his gun. I’m all for a disarmed police force, also one that doesn’t use an armored personnel carrier or tank.

This week, Donald Trump took advantage of the recess in his trial for paying hush money to a porn star by gracing the state of Minnesota with his presence. He’s also in the state for the Republican fundraiser. It was an opportunity for him to belch out lots of lies.

Former President Donald Trump is again falsely claiming he won Minnesota in the 2020 election while describing the state as “out of control,” attacking Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar and suggesting Minneapolis would have “burned down to the ground” that same year if not for him.
…
In the Alpha News interview, Trump railed against Biden as the “worst president in the history of our country” and called his withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan “the most embarrassing day in the history of our country.”

Trump claimed without evidence that many immigrants who cross the border illegally come from “prisons, mental institutions and terrorists.” Additionally, he said, “You’re going to have to have mass deportations. The country can’t stand it, the country can’t handle it.”

Asked about anti-police sentiments, Trump said “you have to give them back their respect and dignity.” Then he shifted his comments toward Minnesota and Minneapolis, specifically.

“If I didn’t let things happen a certain way, you would have had Minneapolis — this would have burned down to the ground. It was terrible what they were doing. You look at what happened during that time, and we were very — I got awards for saving certain areas and saving certain towns because your politicians didn’t want to act. They were unwilling to act,” Trump said.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney (remember that loser?) is opining on what should be done with Trump: he should have been pardoned for everything, so that he got less attention, and so Biden would look like a gracious big dog.

During an interview on Wednesday with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, Romney said that President Joe Biden should have “immediately pardoned” Trump from federal charges, and that Biden also “made an enormous error” by not pushing New York prosecutors to drop their charges against Trump in the hush money case.

“He should have fought like crazy to keep this prosecution from going forward,” Romney said. “It was a win-win for Donald Trump.”

That’s the kind of strategy a rich guy who thinks the law doesn’t apply to the wealthy would advocate.

No.

The law should apply equally to everyone, and you shouldn’t get a pass on criminal acts because they’re rich and powerful and it gives other rich and powerful people the opportunity to practice noblesse oblige. Romney looks at this situation and has decided it’s an excuse for class solidarity among the aristocracy. No wonder he’s a loser.