Feeding them fear, hate and violence, is how the obscenely wealthy, Fox News and the rest of right-wing media, Trump and the GOP in general, get the little guys to do their dirty work, maintain their power and wealth, and distract from how they have gamed the economy and political system to pillage from the rest of us while keeping us powerless. The suckers, ahem...I mean marks... or is it just their willing victims, lap up each new indignation, enemy and scapegoat, while hating, foaming at the mouth and loading their guns, never questioning who is really destroying their lives, livelihoods, and country. You'd think their puppets/victims/prey would notice, object and revolt from being used so disgustingly...yet they don't even notice how well they are being played and manipulated. That is not freedom!!!

Fox has more blood on their hands. 💔 - by JoJoFromJerz https://jojofromjerz.substack.com/p/fox-has-more-blood-on-their-hands

#FoxPropaganda
#GOPLies
#GOPIsTheRichsBitch
#RightWingPuppets

"Fox has more blood on their hands. 💔
This is the “normal” they’re building.

Last night a man in Lake Arrowhead CA shot and killed a clothing store owner because he didn’t like her Pride flag.

He shot her in the head over a rainbow flag.

“Through further investigation, detectives learned the suspect made several disparaging remarks about a rainbow flag that stood outside the store before shooting Carleton,” the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department said in a press release.

And now, Lauri Carleton, 66, a mother of nine, and wife of 28 years is dead.

The man who is suspected of the murder is also dead. Killed by police after fleeing the scene.

And while this story is utterly horrifying and unbelievably tragic, it’s not really at all surprising, is it? Not if you’ve been paying attention.

After all — this is what Fox and the rest of the hair on fire right-wing bigotry brokers have been building. And selling. For years.

Tucker. Watters. Jones. Bannon. Shapiro. Kirk.

The list is long and the bench of profiteers is deep.

It’s not enough to simply “other” entire communities of already marginalized people. You see, you have to do that, while making sure that your audience also believes “they” endanger them. Believes they are an existential threat to them. To their kids. To their way of life. And once they’ve got them there, that’s when the final piece falls into play.

They have to DO something about it. They have to draw a line. “Stand up for…” some nebulous thing they aren’t actually in any danger of losing… with violence.

With those guns “THEY” are trying to take away from them.

Hate is big business. Master masons of manipulation are bricklaying bias, intolerance, discrimination, prejudice, racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia, fear & a need to arm oneself, all topped off with a willingness to commit acts of violence. Because they think they HAVE to. Because if they don’t, they’re the ones who will lose everything they love.

They believe they need to “protect” themselves, but what they don’t want to admit, is that it’s not really about “protecting” their kid’s gender identity, but is instead about protecting their obstinate devotion to their own opinions and prejudices.

Because if anything is actually under attack — it’s that. It’s the bigotry. And for many the Fox viewer, that’s a non-starter.

But this has become about so much more than them thinking these thoughts. It’s getting them from thinking them, to believing they have a god given right entitling them to saying them out loud, and then eventually, in acting on them.

This is the journey they’re on… one they’re being taken on, one gaslighting, propagandizing Fox “News” segment at a time.

https://x.com/esqueer_/status/1693259613410394147?s=46&t=0jhpxQw9pD9FCcEuf7-TIQ

In a nation armed to the teeth, relentlessly bombarded by the right-wing media machine with fear mongering, othering and violence stoking while being totally strung out on hate, this is the natural progression.

This is inevitable.

It’s the drug Fox and the rest are pushing. Just as addictive as Fentanyl, and potentially, just as deadly. A drug the viewers are addicted to. One they need more and more of every day. They need that next hit of rage. They’re itching for it.

This is the goal for the cult that is the MAGA Republican Party. Fox is pumping these people up with 24/7 outrage. An hourly supply of dopamine hits of HATE HATE HATE and FEAR FEAR FEAR."

This is how you get your way when democracy doesn't give it to you. You do an end-run around democracy so you can have minority rule forever! Who needs democracy, congressmen, senators or presidents when you own the judiciary?

Court decision in clean water case is more legislating from the bench https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/26/supreme-court-clean-water-kavanaugh/?

#PartisanCaptureOfJudiciary
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPIsTheRichsBitch
#TheRichHateDemocracy
#GreedKillsDemocracy

"The Supreme Court’s decision gutting the Clean Water Act isn’t just a disaster for efforts to control pollution, although it is that, too. It is yet another illustration of the conservative supermajority’s aggressive willingness to rewrite statutes to its liking, abandon precedent and lunge to intercede in disputes that could be easily sidestepped.
...
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh (good for him!) joined the court’s three liberal justices in a far more reasoned interpretation of the Clean Water Act that would have respected text and precedent while still finding for the Sacketts.

Once again, the conservative justices reveal themselves to be textualists of convenience. The Clean Water Act requires a permit for dumping pollutants — and this includes the backfilling that the Sacketts were doing to prepare their lot — into the “waters of the United States.” Such waters are explicitly defined to include “wetlands” that are “adjacent” to streams, rivers and other navigable bodies of water covered by the law.

The majority agrees on all this but then waves its magic statutory wand to redefine, and narrow, the meaning of “adjacent.” It transforms the definition to apply solely to wetlands that are actually adjoining — that have a “continuous surface connection” — to the larger body.

This disrespects — actually, it ignores — the law’s text and traditional methods of statutory interpretation. As Kavanaugh noted, dictionary “definitions of ‘adjacent’ are notably explicit that two things need not touch each other in order to be adjacent.”
...
No longer, according to the majority, in an opinion written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., Kavanaugh charitably labeled the majority’s approach “unorthodox” and “atextual.” Another word might be lawless. The majority’s approach blithely dismissed some 45 years of consistent interpretation through eight presidential administrations, Republican as well as Democrat. Even the Trump EPA thought adjacent meant adjacent.
...
Sackett reinforces what we already knew: This is a court that doesn’t like government regulation and it is going to do what it can — text and precedent be damned — to neuter it. Thus the majority, in last year’s West Virginia v. EPA, invented a “major purpose” test to limit the reach of another major environmental law, the Clean Air Act. In this case, it adopts another new test — when Congress exercises such power “over private property” it must use “exceedingly clear language” — to rewrite the Clean Water Act to its liking.

As Justice Elena Kagan explained in a concurrence joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, this is nothing short of another judicial power grab. “The vice in both instances is the same: the Court’s appointment of itself as the national decision-maker on environmental policy,” Kagan wrote.

And why? Not because the law compels it, but because the majority doesn’t like the law. “Congress, the majority scolds, has unleashed the EPA to regulate ‘swimming pools and puddles,’ wreaking untold havoc on ‘a staggering array of land-owners,’” Kagan observed. “Surely something has to be done; and who else to do it but this Court? It must rescue property owners from Congress’s too-ambitious program of pollution control.”

More judicial power-grabbing to follow. The court next term will consider whether to ditch the four-decade old practice, known as Chevron deference, of having courts defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the laws they administer when the statutes are ambiguous. If Chevron falls, as seems all but inevitable, courts will be even more firmly in the driver’s seat to control policymaking.

This isn’t right, and it is also unnecessary. When the court reached out to take Sackett, the Biden administration was in the midst of rewriting the rules on how the Clean Water Act applied to wetlands. But the majority had its votes. Why wait? Why hold back? That could be the motto of this radical and impatient court."

Part 6
Besides lame culture war issues that really don't matter, the GOP has nothing to offer Americans economically except tax breaks for the wealthy.

"Ambitious policy solutions can break through partisan paralysis and change America. It's time to go big"

How to end gridlock and ensure Democratic power — with a bold progressive agenda https://www.salon.com/2022/12/26/how-to-end-political-gridlock-and-ensure-democratic-power-pursue-a-bold-progressive-agenda/

#GOPInBedWithRich
#PartisanCaptureOfJudiciary
#GOPIsTheRichsBitch

"The public health framework
Seeing crime through that kind of public health lens fits with a broader argument I made last year and can apply to liberal or progressive policies more broadly: "[E]nvironmental health, racism, gun violence, injury and violence prevention, healthy housing, and reproductive and sexual health" are all recognized by the American Public Health Association as major areas of concern, and their list "also intersects with human rights in the field of global health, and deals with issues of income inequality, education, housing, incarceration, nutritional equity, literacy, health care coverage and access."

The public health framework can also provide a coherent overarching narrative:

The challenge for Democrats and progressives is to do what Republicans and conservatives have been doing for decades: Craft a coherent ideological narrative that makes sense of what people already feel. But for Democrats, it's not just about vague free-market fantasies, or romantic longings for a past that never was. It's about concrete things people can do to empower themselves through government action, creating a future with more possibilities for all.

In the conclusion to Cantril and Free's "The Political Beliefs of Americans," the authors called for "a restatement of American ideology to bring it in line with what the great majority of people want and approve" which "would focus people's wants, hopes, and beliefs, and provide a guide and platform to enable the American people to implement their political desires in a more intelligent, direct, and consistent manner."

A public health narrative can make sense of the "operational liberalism" identified in that book and can address diverse social movements that energize Democratic base, as well as the multi-pronged project of court reform. It also speaks to the failures that led to such extreme economic inequality in America, as well as the disastrous failures of neoliberal policy that both enabled and sought to justify it. Adopting a public health framework to make sense of our politics and bring us together to solve our most difficult problems might well help Democrats win elections, but that's not the point. Far more important, it could restore a common framework for overcoming the partisan polarization and political gridlock that seems inescapable today, but doesn't have to be."

Part 5
Besides lame culture war issues that really don't matter, the GOP has nothing to offer Americans economically except tax breaks for the wealthy.

"Ambitious policy solutions can break through partisan paralysis and change America. It's time to go big"

How to end gridlock and ensure Democratic power — with a bold progressive agenda https://www.salon.com/2022/12/26/how-to-end-political-gridlock-and-ensure-democratic-power-pursue-a-bold-progressive-agenda/

#GOPInBedWithRich
#PartisanCaptureOfJudiciary
#GOPIsTheRichsBitch

"Criminal justice reform
...As I wrote earlier this month, crime and inflation were "two Dems-in-charge/situation-out-of-control narratives ... custom crafted in the Fox News ecosystem" which the New York Times took a lead role in spreading farther across the political spectrum during the recent midterm campaign, "crowding out other contrasting narratives in the process."

New York was clearly the epicenter of this issue, and bail reform was a key focus. Early in December, civil rights attorney Scott Hechinger, who heads Zealous, a criminal justice reform initiative, co-authored a commentary on the bail reform question, specifically calling out Democrats who blamed it for midterm losses. "Research has established no connection between bail reform and any increase in crime," he wrote, and "New York City has remained secure even though headlines could make one think otherwise." Three of New York's five boroughs "are among the safest 15 counties in the U.S." he noted, while Nassau County, just east of the city on Long Island — where 64 mayors recently called for the repeal of bail reform — has twice since the law's implementation been ranked the safest place to live in the country.

In short, the panic over a supposed crime wave and bail reform in New York was pure political bullshit. "Democrats lost because they ran from the truth about bail reform," Hechinger writes, "amplifying lies instead of championing what should have been their policy win. In short, they made themselves indistinguishable from Republicans on this topic."

..."Other candidates who told the truth about bail reform's success and stood strong against fear-mongering won," Hechinger notes, and that shouldn't be surprising. As I noted above, the actual policy behind the notion of defunding police — meaning the reallocation of funding to social workers, mental health and other social services — is overwhelmingly popular.

The logic behind policies of mass incarceration is at least as bad or worse, as Hechinger noted in an email to Salon:

We invest more than any other society in the history of the world on policing, prosecutions and punishment. So if the current massive investments into these approaches actually worked, you'd expect we'd be the safest and healthiest society in the word. We're obviously far from it, by police and politicians' own admission. We need to follow facts and reasoned solutions, not fear: Why we need to abandon our current approaches that only further drive violence by creating environments of isolation, shame, economic deprivation, and violence — the very characteristics of overpolicing and prisons parallel the very drivers of violence itself.

The alternative already exists, he continued:

People don't have to "imagine" what non-carceral, non-punitive, non-police responses to public health and safety look like. The safest and healthiest communities are those with greater community investments, not more police. One need look no further than wealthy white suburbs to see how substance use, mental health issues, interpersonal violence and conflict between and among young people are dealt with largely without police.

...Perhaps most important is restorative justice, a concept described at length in Lois Forer's 1994 book "A Rage to Punish":

Restorative justice programs recognize that punishment and prison neither heals trauma nor holds actors accountable...In Brooklyn, when survivors of violence are informed that the restorative justice program Common Justice is an option, they choose it over the normal process over 90% of the time. And recidivism rates among those who complete the program are near zero.

The second approach is violence interruption:

The "Interrupters Model" pays and trains trusted insiders of a community to anticipate where violence will occur and intervene before it erupts, work in neighborhoods and hospitals, meet with survivors to help and prevent retaliation, and work with people at highest risk for causing harm...

...Hechinger concluded by saying we need to "understand things police enforce as 'crime' as public health issues — and that includes violence — that we, as a society, have failed to properly address, and can address."

The child tax credit gets shot down but sneaky provisions to shower the rich with more lavish tax breaks always find support.

Article: Progressives Slam Omnibus Retirement Provisions as 'Giveaway to the Rich'

https://flip.it/gBIugF
#Govt4MeButNotThee
#GOPInBedWithRich
#GOPIsTheRichsBitch
#GovtIsTheRichsBitch

" "I'm tired of tax cuts for the rich being sold as help for the poor. The retirement changes in the omnibus package overwhelmingly benefit wealthy people like me while doing almost nothing for the people who truly struggle to save for retirement. This bill does not make it easier for workers to save for retirement, it just makes it easier for high-income earners to shelter more of their earnings from taxes."

GOP conspires to undermine democracy via the judiciary by stacking the courts with GOP partisans!

While advising Trump on judges, Conway sold her business to a firm with ties to judicial activist Leonard Leo https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/20/trump-conway-leonard-leo-00074690

#PartisanCaptureOfJudiciary
#GOPCorrupt
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPIsTheRichsBitch

"Longtime judicial activist Leonard Leo appears to have helped facilitate the sale of former White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway’s polling company in 2017 — as she was playing a key role in advocating for Leo’s handpicked list of Supreme Court candidates
...
The transaction came at a critical moment for Conway — shortly after her ownership of The Polling Company had come under scrutiny from a congressional oversight committee for potential “conflicts of interest,” likely creating pressure to unload it even though its value was unclear because she was its biggest asset and committed to her White House job.
...
It’s the latest example of how Leo has used his network to secure and protect allies at the highest levels of government to successfully advance his decadeslong agenda of shifting the Supreme Court rightward for the next generation.
...
If Leo helped facilitate the transaction, it could violate ethics laws designed to prevent executive branch employees from obtaining benefits from people with whom they interact in their official capacities, said Bruce Freed, president of the nonpartisan Center for Political Accountability, which tracks corporate spending in politics. Federal ethics laws prohibit executive branch employees from using their positions for private personal gain and from accepting gifts.

“It really shows Kellyanne as a vehicle for Leo, the leading role Leo has played and how Trump became his instrument,” said Freed, after reviewing the documents.
...
The financial deal between Conway and CRC adds to an emerging picture of the extent to which groups associated with Leo — who now controls more than $1.6 billion in conservative donor funds — interacted with key players in the conservative movement’s efforts to reshape the judiciary. The New York Times first reported the windfall donation to a Leo-controlled group, among the largest single contributions ever to a political nonprofit.

Leo served on the board of a group led by Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, and he and the Thomases have maintained a longstanding friendship. Leo’s network has been among the most prolific forces behind the new conservative majority, successfully advocating to confirm Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett as well as to block former President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland.
...
Yet she lobbied inside the White House for the specific conservative justices Leo preferred as part of his decadeslong agenda of shifting the balance of the court sharply rightward, according to news reports, her recent memoir and other public records.
...
During the same time frame Conway was a senior adviser to Trump, she was under pressure to sell The Polling Company. In a May 9 statement, then-House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, said the White House had not produced evidence of a certificate of divestiture. The sale to CRC a few months later reduced political pressure on her.

Ethics specialists pointed to the possible involvement of BH Fund as a key question looming over the sale.
...
Brett Kappel, a lobbying and government ethics counsel at the Harmon Curran law firm in Washington who also reviewed the documents at POLITICO’s request, said the transactions appear to be connected.

“Based on the available documentation and the timing of the filings, it certainly appears as though these transactions are related,” said Kappel, who has represented candidates and political committees on both sides of the aisle. Still, Kappel cautioned it may depend on whether Conway was advising the president on court nominations at the same moment she sold to constitute a clear violation of ethics rules.

Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, a non-partisan progressive group that investigates corporate influence in politics and alerted POLITICO to the financial records and timestamps, said it was concerned about whether the Leo-affiliated groups rewarded Conway for her advocacy by purchasing her business at a time when its value was unclear.

It also raises “serious concerns” about how Leo will use his new, “no-strings-attached” $1.6 billion windfall, arranged through a series of transactions that appear to have avoided tax liabilities, to influence the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court, said Herrig."

Part 2
The rich resist regulations/rules that lessen their wealth/power! They leverage and manipulate the reactionary right wing as their shock troops to get what they want. They twisted the supreme court to make money/donations equal to free speech so they could practice legalized bribery and own politicians who should be representing their constituents. These factors all result in entrenched resistance to the actions we must take in order to maintain a livable earth. And, in many ways, the rich are winning, which means life, the majority of humans and the planet will lose.

The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse | George Monbiot | The Guardian
It’s not just indifference. It’s an active, and deadly, cavalier attitude towards the lives of others: an example other nations follow

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/09/us-world-climate-collapse-nations

#GOPInBedWithRich
#GreedKills
#USGovtOwnedByRich
#RightWingRToolsOfRich
#RightWingIsRichsBitch
#GOPIsTheRichsBitch

Take the nitrogen crisis in the Netherlands. Scientists there have been warning since the 1980s that the excessive release of nitrogen compounds – primarily by agriculture – exceed the land and water’s capacity to absorb them, killing rivers, polluting groundwater, damaging soil, wiping out wild plants and causing a severe but seldom-discussed air pollution crisis. But successive governments could not be persuaded to care. Their repeated failure to act on these warnings allowed the problem to mount until it reached catastrophic levels. In 2019, a ruling by the Dutch council of state that the pollution levels breached European law obliged the government to do suddenly what its predecessors had failed to do gradually: shut down some of the major sources of this pollution.

This has triggered a furious reaction from the industries most affected, primarily livestock farming. The farmers’ protests have, like the Ottawa truckers’ strike, now become a cause célèbre for the far right all over the world. Rightwing politicians claim that the nitrogen crisis is being used as a pretext to seize land from farmers, in whom, they claim, true Dutch identity is vested, and hand it to asylum seekers and other immigrants, at the behest of “globalist” forces such as the World Economic Forum.

In other words, the issue has been co-opted by “great reset” and “great replacement” conspiracy theorists, who claim that there are deliberate policies to replace local, white people with “other cultures”. Some Dutch farmers have now adopted these themes, spreading ever more extreme conspiracy fictions, which might have helped to fuel an escalation of violence.

These themes are a reworking of long-established tropes. The notion that farming represents a “rooted” and “authentic” national identity that must be defended from “cosmopolitan” and “alien” forces was a mainstay of European fascist thought in the first half of the 20th century. Never mind that nitrogen fertilisers are now imported from Russia and livestock feed from the US and Brazil, never mind that the model of intensive livestock farming is the same all over the world: Dutch meat, eggs and milk are promoted as “local” and sometimes even “sovereign”, and said to be threatened by the forces of “globalism”.

Thanks to such failures of care over many years, we now approach multiple drastic decision points, at which governments must either implement changes in months that should have happened over decades, or watch crucial components of civic life collapse, including the most important component of all: a habitable planet. In either case, it’s a cliff edge.

As we rush towards these precipices, we are likely to see an ever more violent refusal to care. For example, if we in the rich nations are to meet our twin duties of care and responsibility, we must be prepared to accept many more refugees, who will be driven from their homes by the climate and ecological breakdown caused disproportionately by our economies. But as this displacement crisis (that could be greater than any dispossession the world has ever seen) looms, it could trigger a new wave of reactive, far-right politics, furiously rejecting the obligations accumulated by our previous failures to act. In turn, a resurgence of far-right politics would cut off meaningful environmental action. In other words, we face the threat of a self-perpetuating escalation of collapse.

This is the spiral we must seek to break. With every missed opportunity – and the signs suggest that the Montreal summit might be another grave disappointment – the scope for gentle action diminishes and the rush towards drastic decisions accelerates. Some of us have campaigned for years for soft landings. But that time has now passed. We are in the era of hard landings. We must counter the rise of indifference with an overt and conspicuous politics of care."

Part 1
The rich resist regulations/rules that lessen their wealth/power! They leverage and manipulate the reactionary right wing as their shock troops to get what they want. They twisted the supreme court to make money/donations equal to free speech so they could practice legalized bribery and own politicians who should be representing their constituents. These factors all result in entrenched resistance to the actions we must take in order to maintain a livable earth. And, in many ways, the rich are winning, which means life, the majority of humans and the planet will lose.

The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse | George Monbiot | The Guardian
It’s not just indifference. It’s an active, and deadly, cavalier attitude towards the lives of others: an example other nations follow

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/09/us-world-climate-collapse-nations

#GOPInBedWithRich
#GreedKills
#USGovtOwnedByRich
#RightWingRToolsOfRich
#RightWingIsRichsBitch
#GOPIsTheRichsBitch

"There are two extraordinary facts about the convention on biological diversity, whose members are meeting in Montreal now to discuss the global ecological crisis. The first is that, of the world’s 198 states, 196 are party to it. The second is the identity of those that aren’t. Take a guess. North Korea? Russia? Wrong. Both ratified the convention years ago. One is the Holy See (the Vatican). The other is the United States of America.

This is one of several major international treaties the US has refused to ratify. Among the others are crucial instruments such as the Rome statute on international crimes, the treaties banning cluster bombs and landmines, the convention on discrimination against women, the Basel convention on hazardous waste, the convention on the law of the sea, the nuclear test ban treaty, the employment policy convention and the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities.

In some cases, it is one of only a small number to refuse: the others are generally either impoverished states with little administrative capacity or vicious dictatorships. It is the only independent nation on Earth not to ratify the convention on the rights of the child. Perhaps this is because it is the only nation to sentence children to life imprisonment without parole, among many other brutal policies. While others play by the rules, the most powerful nation refuses. If this country were a person, we’d call it a psychopath. As it is not a person, we should call it what it is: a rogue state.

Through its undemocratic dominance of global governance, the US makes the rules, to a greater extent than any other state. It also does more than any other to prevent both their implementation and their enforcement. Its refusal to ratify treaties such as the convention on biological diversity provides other nations with a permanent excuse to participate in name only. Like all imperial powers, its hegemony is expressed in the assertion of its right not to care.

The question that assails those who strive for a kinder world is always the same but endlessly surprising: how do we persuade others to care? The lack of interest in resolving our existential crises, expressed by the US Senate in particular, is not a passive exceptionalism. It is an active, proud and furious refusal to care about the lives of others. This refusal has become the motive force of the old-new politics now sweeping the world. It appears to be driving a deadly, self-reinforcing political cycle."