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Tag: Opinion

  • Opinion | From Pizzagate to Drag Bills: The ‘Groomer’ Myth That Will Not Die

    Opinion | From Pizzagate to Drag Bills: The ‘Groomer’ Myth That Will Not Die

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    If this all seems unhinged, it’s not unprecedented. In the 1960s and ’70s, conservative opponents of school integration, women’s rights and LGBTQ rights coalesced around a similar narrative. They wrapped concerns about social and cultural change in a grim warning that America’s children were the target of gay people who aimed to “recruit” and abuse them. In many cases, it worked. It set back LGBTQ rights in many states and localities and effectively stalled efforts to pass an Equal Rights Amendment.

    It’s a cautionary tale. Some conservative politicians and pundits surely know that they’re spinning fantasies in the service of scoring wins. But as the Comet Pizza shooting demonstrates, too many people believe those fantasies and are willing to act on them.

    When conservatives targeted LGBTQ Americans in the 1970s, their intended target, ironically, was not always or necessarily gay people. The debate over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s is a case in point. Originally proposed by the National Women’s Party in the 1920s, the ERA cleared through Congress in March 1972, whereupon it was sent to the states for ratification. In its final version the amendment read simply that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Within hours, Hawaii became the first state to ratify the amendment, followed by Delaware, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Idaho and Iowa over the next two days. It seemed likely if not inevitable that the ERA would quickly win approval by the requisite 38 states and become a permanent fixture of American jurisprudence — until Phyllis Schlafly intervened.

    Born and raised in St. Louis, Schlafly was a devout Catholic and prominent conservative activist with degrees from Washington University and Radcliffe College. In 1972 she founded STOP ERA (Stop Taking Our Privileges), a national organization that opposed ratification on a state-by-state level. A powerful speaker and talented political organizer, Schlafly found a sympathetic reception among millions of women who agreed that the traditional family was “the basic unit of society, which is ingrained in the laws and customs of Judeo-Christian civilization [and] is the greatest single achievement of women’s rights,” and that the ERA was “anti-family, anti-children, and pro-abortion.”

    ERA opponents warned that the amendment would have far-reaching consequences, denying divorced women the right to alimony or subjecting women to the draft. But in language that seems eerily familiar today, they also claimed the law would compel schoolgirls and schoolboys to use the same restrooms — a charge that many feminists suspected of appealing to fears that white schoolgirls would be forced to use the same toilets as Black schoolboys. They claimed that women prisoners would be “put in the cells with Black men,” a situation that would inevitably lead to “the negro accost[ing] the white woman in the cell.”

    Critically, children — and alleged dangers to children — lay at the heart of the anti-ERA movement. By making the amendment synonymous with LGBTQ rights, STOP ERA struck at fears of mixed bathrooms and “homosexual teachers.” The amendment would “legalize homosexual marriages and open the door to the adoption of children by legally married homosexual couples,” according to literature distributed by a state-level affiliate in Florida.

    To the modern reader, the connection between equal gender rights and sexual predation in schools and prisons might seem an improbable leap. But opponents of the ERA knew what they were doing. They were creating a problem that did not exist to resist social changes that many white conservatives deeply resented.

    Take, for instance, racial integration. In Florida, where the movement gained early traction, many activists associated with Women For Responsible Legislation (WFRL), the state’s leading anti-ERA organization, were veteran organizers against school desegregation and, in the 1970s, active participants in the anti-busing movement. In one breath, they warned that the ERA would create gender mixing in “gym classes,” “college dormitories” and “rest rooms.” In another breath, they portended grave consequences if Black and white children were bused between neighborhood schools in an effort to achieve desegregation. As Reubin Askew, Florida’s moderate Democratic governor, and a proponent of both busing and the ERA, observed, “Many critics of the Equal Rights Amendment have used the idea of ‘integrated’ restrooms to illustrate their fear of the proposed Amendment. The idea comes from the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954.”

    The anti-ERA forces continued to build on this well-established nexus between LGBTQ rights and school desegregation. In 1956, two years after Brown v. Board, the Florida legislature created the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee to stymie efforts to desegregate public schools. By the early 1960s the committee broadened its scope to probe the purported dangers that school children faced from gay men and, to a lesser degree, gay women. In 1964 the panel issued a lurid report, “Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida,” complete with a glossary of gay slang and terminology, and photos of half-naked men kissing or bound up in ropes.

    The report focused largely on schools, where closeted gay teachers supposedly harbored a “desire to recruit” young boys, as “homosexuals are made by training rather than born.” It described an unnamed “athletically-built little league coach in West Florida” who “lived at home with his mother” and “systematically seduced the members of the baseball team into the performance of homosexual acts.” Taking care not to “lump together the homosexual who seeks out youth and … child molesters,” the committee explained that “the child molester attacks, but seldom kills or physically cripples his victim. … The homosexual, on the other hand, prefers to reach out for the child at the time of normal sexual awakening and to conduct a psychological preliminary to the physical contact. The homosexual’s goal is to ‘bring over’ the young person, to hook him for homosexuality.”

    In much the same way that conservatives today see a far-reaching conspiracy to groom and traffic schoolchildren, a special investigator who cooperated with the committee lamented that “the homosexuals are organized. The persons whose responsibility it is to protect the public, and especially our kids, are not organized in the direction of combatting homosexual recruitment of youth.”

    Ten years later, as they organized against the ERA, conservative activists in Florida and elsewhere well understood how to crystalize opposition against school integration and LGBTQ rights into grassroots opposition to women’s equality. They understood it because so many of them were pioneer organizers in all three efforts.

    Florida was hardly the only state to give rise to anti-integration, anti-ERA or anti-LGBTQ activism. Boston, the cradle of liberty, was arguably the poster child for the anti-busing movement, and in 1978 California nearly passed a ballot initiative that would have barred gay teachers from employment in public schools. On a visit to raise support for the referendum, the conservative evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell informed his followers that “homosexuals often prey on the young. Since they cannot reproduce, they proselyte [sic].” It was only when former Governor Ronald Reagan — a conservative Republican, but also a former Hollywood actor who had more than a few gay friends and business associates — spoke out against the initiative that support for it began to collapse.

    But Florida seemed always at the center of the fight. In 1977, country and western singer Anita Bryant, a resident of Miami, Florida, spearheaded a successful effort to pass a referendum overturning a city ordinance extending standard civil rights protections to gays and lesbians. In just one month, Bryant, a devout Southern Baptist and mother of four, managed to gain 60,000 signatures to place her referendum question on the ballot. Thus began several months of ugly provocation. “If homosexuality were the normal way,” she told supporters, “God would have made Adam and Bruce.” Enjoying support from prominent Christian televangelists like Jim and Tammy Bakker of the PTL Club, Pat Robertson of the 700 Club and Jerry Falwell of the Old-Time Gospel Hour, Bryant denounced a “life style that is both perverse and dangerous” and won plaudits from other conservative Christian leaders for her efforts to “stop the homosexuals in their campaign for equal rights.”

    Critically, children — and made-up threats to their safety — were at the heart of Bryant’s campaign. Her organization, after all, was named Save Our Children (SOC). Claiming a fundamental threat to her right to dictate “the moral atmosphere in which my children grow up,” she presaged today’s activists in portraying schools as the front line of the era’s culture wars. “God gave mothers the divine right … and a divine commission to protect our children, in our homes, business and especially our schools.” Unsurprisingly, many of SOC’s leaders were veterans of the state’s anti-busing and anti-school desegregation movement.

    SOC played heavily into nationwide fears of a child pornography epidemic. The hype was purely fanciful, but it proved resonant. “SCAN THESE HEADLINES FROM THE NATION’S NEWSPAPERS,” a typical leaflet urged. “—THEN DECIDE: ARE HOMOSEXUALS TRYING TO RECRUIT OUR CHILDREN?” The organization denied any intention to discriminate against gay people, as long as they lived their lives quietly, and out of public view. “Homosexuals do not suffer discrimination when they keep their perversions in the privacy of their own homes,” it insisted. As for Bryant, she held that gay people “can hold any job, transact any business, join any organization — As long as they do not flaunt their homosexuality.”

    In the end, Bryant’s referendum passed with overwhelming support. And the Florida legislature declined on several occasions in the 1970s to pass the ERA.

    Americans in the 1970s experienced profound social and cultural change, as women and people of color came to enjoy greater freedoms and opportunities, the LGBTQ community more actively asserted its fundamental right to live equally and to be left alone by the state, and traditional hierarchies began to give way to a less certain societal order. It’s little wonder that conservative activists, most of whom were probably sincere in their beliefs, were successful at creating a bogeyman that focused the fears of many middle-of-the-road voters. That bogeyman was the child predator — gay, prurient and dangerous. He turned schools and libraries into recruitment (aka, “grooming”) forums. And he had to be stopped.

    That’s roughly where we are today, as local and state governments from Tennessee and Idaho, to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, to Ohio and New York, seek to ban or restrict public drag shows, remove books addressing LGBTQ-related topics from schools or restrict what teachers can say about sexuality or race in the classroom. As in the 1960s and 1970s, the voices warning of predatory grooming are often the same ones opposing other bogeymen, like “Critical Race Theory.” Then as now, the opposition nexus unifies broader concerns about the pace and nature of social change.

    History does not inevitably repeat itself. This moment could prove fleeting. But conservative success in the 1970s in fabricating threats to children, then rallying people to organize around them, offers cold comfort to those who view this form of retrenchment with a worried eye. And as Comet Pizza should have taught us, when you play with fire, people can get hurt.

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    #Opinion #Pizzagate #Drag #Bills #Groomer #Myth #Die
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Putin’s Russia summons Stalin from the grave as a wartime ally

    Putin’s Russia summons Stalin from the grave as a wartime ally

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    MOSCOW — As Russia enters the second year of its war against Ukraine, fans of Joseph Stalin are enjoying a renewed alignment with the Kremlin.

    On Sunday, the hundreds of Stalinists who came to Red Square to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet dictator’s death were full of bravado and admiration for a man responsible for mass executions, a network of labor camps and forced starvation.

    But that was not a side of the dictator that was at the forefront of the minds of those who showed up to commemorate him.

    “Stalin stood up to Nazism,” Maxim, a 19-year-old medical student in a blue wooly hat, who like others interviewed for this article declined to give his last name, told POLITICO. “And now our current president has led the charge to take it on again.”

    Irina, a 35-year-old marketer, brought a bouquet of red carnations to lay at Stalin’s grave at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. On February 24 last year when President Vladimir Putin declared war on Ukraine, a triumphant Irina posted a picture of a hammer and sickle on Instagram. “That symbol for me said it all.”

    Standing in front of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square, longtime Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov told journalists Putin could learn “lessons” from Stalin: “It’s time to take action and start fighting in a real way.”

    But as Stalin’s reputation undergoes this rehabilitation, those dedicated to documenting Soviet-era mass repression have felt the full force of the state apparatus used against them.

    Across town from Red Square, in Moscow’s north-eastern Basmanny district, about two dozen people gathered outside a faded yellow four-storey building on Sunday. They came to install a plaque commemorating the site as the last home of Vladimir Maslov, an economist accused of spying for Poland in a fabricated case and shot at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge. One of the attendees wore an olive-green jacket adorned with a Dove of Peace — a risky political statement in Putin’s Russia.

    The “Last Address” campaign, which attaches the plaques to the former homes of the victims of Soviet repression, is one of very few such projects remaining after a merciless purge of Russia’s most established human rights groups — Memorial, the Sakharov Center and the Moscow Helsinki Group have all been forced to close.

    For now, their loosely organized volunteers, armed with drills and step stools to attach the plaques on façades, have been spared. But they face increasing hurdles: The required unanimous consent of a particular building’s residents has become harder to come by; plaques have even been taken down. 

    “People have become more careful, they are scared that acknowledging the dark episodes of the past will be taken as a nod to what’s going on today,” said volunteer Mikhail Sheinker. “In times like these, past and present converge until they almost blend together.”

    The day Stalin’s death was announced — March 6, 1953 — is seared into Sheinker’s memory: “I was four at the time and was making the usual ruckus, but my mother told me to be quiet out of respect.” 

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    Russian Communist party supporters march to lay flowers to the tomb of late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin | Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images

    Today, in wartime Russia, the specter of Stalin could once again be used to further silence dissent. 

    On Sunday, state-run news agency RIA Novosti published an opinion piece headlined: “Stalin is a weapon in the battle between Russia and the West” arguing criticizing Stalin is “not just anti-Soviet but is also Russophobic, aimed at dividing and defeating Russia.”

    But while World War II — which Russians refer to as “the Great Patriotic War” — continues to be a central trope of Putin’s rhetoric when it comes to his invasion of Ukraine, the president casts himself more as a successor to the czars than Soviet leaders. Accordingly, state media paid relatively little attention to the 70th anniversary of Stalin’s death.

    Former Kremlin adviser Sergei Markov said that’s because Stalin is still too divisive and Russia’s ruling elite is loathe to commit to any specific ideology. But “if Russia is going to suffer further setbacks [in Ukraine], Stalin will become a main theme,” Markov wrote on Telegram.  

    Strange bedfellows

    The alliance between Putin’s Kremlin and revanchist Communists is an uneasy one. 

    In Russia’s lower house, or the State Duma, the Communist Party closely toes the Kremlin line — but at a regional level, its members are at times less disciplined.

    Last month, Mikhail Abdalkin, a Communist lawmaker in the region of Samara, posted a video of himself listening to Putin’s annual address to the entire ruling elite with noodles hanging from his ears. It was a nod to a Russian idiom “hang noodles on one’s ears” that refers to being taken for a ride or being fed nonsense.

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    A Russian Communist party supporter holds a portrait of late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images

    Last week, Abdalkin said he had been charged with discrediting Russia’s armed forces, with the case to be heard on March 7. If he’s convicted, Abdalkin could be fined.

    On Red Square on Sunday, some Communist supporters volunteered criticism of Putin, too — but not of his war on Ukraine. 

    “Stalin gets criticized for having blood on his hands. But what about Putin’s policies? Outside big cities, people need to travel hundreds of kilometers on muddy roads to get health care,” said Alexander, a pensioner in his 60s.



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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

  • Opinion | Republicans Can’t Wait for Trump to Implode

    Opinion | Republicans Can’t Wait for Trump to Implode

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    All sorts of caveats are necessary.

    It’s still very early in a late-developing race. There are only two current or former officeholders in the race, Trump and Nikki Haley.

    There’s no doubt that Trump has taken on water, and is at his weakest since sometime in the first part of 2016.

    Ron DeSantis has tended to do better against Trump in head-to-head polling (although he trails in a new Yahoo poll), and Trump has looked vulnerable in all-important Iowa and New Hampshire.

    Finally, we’ll have to see where DeSantis settles in the polling, if and when he actually gets in the race.

    All that said, unless Trump’s support in surveys is a complete mirage, he continues to have a formidable grip on the GOP. There’s been a lot of buzz about DeSantis, understandably, who’s done all the right things to establish a national brand, win credibility with populists, and cultivate big donors. But there should be no mistake regarding Trump’s leadership of the party, he can set up like the Texans defending their canon at the Battle of Gonzales and defy his adversaries to “come and take it.”

    That is a daunting prospect. It’s one thing to imagine supplanting Trump as he slip-slides away, defeating himself with his own obsessions and animosities; it’s another to figure out a way to topple him, to come up with lines of attack that diminish him and convince his voters to go elsewhere.

    Since he first entered the race in 2015, Trump has benefited from a natural sense of command. What he’s lacked in policy depth or in dignity, he’s made up with his considerable personal force and authority. In the 2016 primary debates, he was the tall, orange-hued man standing in the middle of the stage, hushing the other candidates as necessary.

    In the current developing field, he’s obviously the only former president and the only one with a track record of winning (and losing) at the national level. He’s the creator of the movement that nearly everyone else wants to take over or, at the very least, accommodate. He’s the dominant force — the one whose standing in the race affects everything, and, importantly, the one everyone fears.

    The latter quality is a key part of the Trump phenomenon. Other national figures might out-charm their competition (Barack Obama in 2008) or overwhelm them with resources (George W. Bush in 2000, Hillary Clinton in 2016). Trump’s MO is to bludgeon them with highly personal, belittling attacks, in a way that has proven highly effective in the past and quite unpleasant to the targets.

    Nikki Haley had a pretty good launch a couple of weeks ago but among her weakest moments were when she was clearly frightened to say anything at all about Trump, including mentioning a policy difference or two.

    Mike Pence has been more forthright, although even he has leveled criticisms in oblique terms.

    Ron DeSantis, the target of a flurry of initial jabs from Trump, has shrugged them off or parried with very subtle counterpunches.

    None of this is irrational. Why would Haley want to become the subject of Trump’s ire at a time when she’s the only other major politician in the race? Pence can wait to prosecute his case more directly if he launches a campaign. DeSantis is trying to push his own message, most recently on his book tour, and put more points on the board in the coming Florida legislative session — a mud fight with Trump now isn’t in his interest.

    Yet, the disinclination to engage with Trump at all brings back memories of 2016. If it’s a temporary dynamic, that’s one thing; if it’s another prisoner’s dilemma among the non-Trump candidates, waiting for someone else to take him on and hoping to emerge unscathed in the aftermath, it’s repeating the same mistake and expecting a different result.

    If the current situation holds, there’s no way around Trump — only through — and that will require making a case against him.

    To be the man (or the lady), as the immortal Ric Flair said, you’ve got to beat the man. Trump may indeed be beatable, but the latest polling shows him squarely in the way of anyone who wants to take over the party he’s dominated for seven years and counting.

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    #Opinion #Republicans #Wait #Trump #Implode
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | Time to Unleash an Extraordinary Weapon Against Fentanyl

    Opinion | Time to Unleash an Extraordinary Weapon Against Fentanyl

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    But one tool to combat fentanyl has been overlooked. If members of Congress or the Biden administration really want to take on this deadly drug, there is an opportunity to seriously debilitate the organized criminal syndicates that make, import and distribute it to the American people: Secretary of State Antony Blinken should designate these narco-syndicates as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

    Using his existing authority, Blinken could make the determination that these organized criminal cartels are, according to the law, “foreign organizations engaged in terrorist activity that threatens the security of U.S. nationals or the national security (national defense, foreign relations, or the economic interests) of the United States.”

    Here’s why it would work.

    Since the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency in 1973, the U.S. has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to wage a “supply side” fight overseas, primarily in Latin America, to stop drugs before they are smuggled across our border. Entire bureaucracies in the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, Homeland Security and the CIA have evolved into a massive costly enterprise to keep the poison from reaching U.S. streets.

    The effort has been marginally successful at times, but overall American demand for cocaine, heroin and marijuana from South and Central America has remained steady. This has had the effect of “normalizing” the drug trade, rendering it the stuff of Netflix’s “Narcos” series.

    What is often misunderstood in the Hollywood treatment the drug trade receives is that it isn’t just run by foreigners. The internal U.S. distribution networks for fentanyl are the most essential component of the foreign cartels’ operations because, without them, there are no sales and no profits. And organized crime since time immemorial exists only for those illicit profits.

    By designating producers of fentanyl as FTOs, the U.S. federal and state law enforcement bureaucracies would have expanded powers to freeze the assets of U.S. citizen collaborators of the cartels. They could be prosecuted under terrorism statutes which carry stiffer sentences. The deterrent factor would be palpable.

    It’s important to understand who these people are. They are the Main Street small business owners of trucking firms, warehouses and stash houses. They are the accountants, lawyers and bankers, as well as the street level dealers. Imagine if they were all now viewed by the American people and the justice system as being just as deadly as a jihadist with an explosive vest. The cartels need American citizens and U.S. residents to make their fentanyl enterprises run.

    But the U.S. does not pursue them with the same intensity as the foreign bad guys, perhaps because they don’t pull the triggers, explode the bombs or kidnap their enemies. Instead, these U.S. individuals press click on small money transfers to offshore shell companies. They open their warehouse doors at a certain time and ask no questions as to what is stored within.

    The argument against designation is strictly definitional: What is terrorism? Must a terrorist organization have a political agenda or an ideological belief system? Experts disagree on a uniform definition of what constitutes terrorism. But what is clear is that a reign of terror is upon us, and the American fentanyl crisis compels us to act now.

    For years, Mexicans and Colombians have said something very true: In the counternarcotics fight, you Americans put up the money and we put up the dead bodies, as the cartels savagely kill hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans in internecine turf wars. Now the U.S. is putting up dead bodies, too — and many more than it loses to international terrorism.

    (Indeed, while the main intent of this proposal is to save U.S. lives and improve the U.S. domestic situation, it would also likely improve security in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Central America and the Caribbean; that would have the added benefit of minimizing one of the greatest “push” factors of illegal migration from those countries, as people would have less need to escape the bloodshed of the drug war.)

    Designating narco-syndicates as FTOs might have little practical effect on the drug capos themselves, who are already visa-less and can’t access the U.S. financial system in their own names. But it will have the symbolic effect of linking them to ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other sworn American enemies.

    More substantively, it will subject more individuals in the U.S. to investigation for providing “material support” to an FTO. It will put more foreign support personnel on No-Fly lists and keep them from getting visas. And it will highlight for Americans, who have never truly accepted that illegal drugs represent a clear and present danger to the national security of the U.S., that the foreign danger is — paradoxically — domestic in much of its operational logistics.

    By weakening these distribution networks in the United States, U.S. law enforcement will not only hurt market incentives, but reduce the amount of money the cartels launder and repatriate to Latin America that allows them to bribe officials, arm themselves and control vast territories of friendly democratic nations.

    As young men in very different worlds, we both learned the same lesson: The greatest danger is the one cloaked in bland normalcy. U.S.-based, foreign cartel support networks live in stunning normalcy among us. An FTO designation of the transnational drug cartels would not be a normal move — but it’s the one we need to take if we’re really serious about ending the scourge of fentanyl.

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    #Opinion #Time #Unleash #Extraordinary #Weapon #Fentanyl
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | Rupert Murdoch: More Puppet than Puppeteer

    Opinion | Rupert Murdoch: More Puppet than Puppeteer

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    But as I’ve written before, Murdoch has failed again and again to elect a president of his choice. In the 2016 campaign, he opposed Trump, tweeting in July 2015, a month after Trump announced, “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” Trump was so furious at Fox coverage at one point, and with then-host Megyn Kelly, that he retaliated by skipping the Fox primary debate. Moreover, Murdoch opposed Trump’s signature positions on immigrants, the Muslim ban and trade. Only after Trump paved a sure path to the nomination did Murdoch start sucking up to Trump, and he sucked hard.

    The Trump-Fox feedback loop benefited both parties as Fox ran interference for Trump throughout his presidency and Trump filled Fox’s schedule with the strong meat of his persona. By July 2019, Trump had given 61 interviews to Fox channels compared to 17 for ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC/CNBC combined. The downside of grabbing a tiger by the tail, as we all know, is how to ungrab the tail as the ride slows or the tiger gets hungry. Murdoch probably thought dismounting would be an easy process once Trump lost the 2020 election and shuffled off to political oblivion.

    But it wasn’t that easy. When other news networks called the election for Joe Biden before Fox, Murdoch expressed relief in an email to his son and fellow Fox executive, Lachlan. “We should and could have gone first but at least being second saves us a Trump explosion!” Fox was spared the immediate Trump explosion, but it came eventually as the network did not toe the Trump line on his election lies. He savaged the network on Twitter, writing, “@FoxNews daytime is virtually unwatchable, especially during the weekends. Watch @OANN, @newsmax, or almost anything else.” Viewers defected as instructed to the upstart news channels, which were flooding their schedules with sympathetic coverage to the stolen-election line. Now, in addition to Trump’s fury, Fox was fretting about viewer anger, and inside Fox, all was pandemonium. In testimony, Lachlan Murdoch said the drop of ratings would “keep me awake” at night.

    The day before the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot, Murdoch and Fox News Media Chief Executive Suzanne Scott plotted to have prime-time Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham explain Biden’s election to viewers who hadn’t gotten the message. “Privately they are all there,” Scott told Murdoch, according to the court filing, but “we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers.” As the New York Times reports, “No statement of that kind was made on the air.”

    Murdoch’s fear of a Trump temper tantrum became palpable after the Capitol Hill riot, as an email exchange between Murdoch and former Republican House Speaker and Fox Corporation board member Paul D. Ryan attests. In it, Murdoch claims that Hannity, a Trump stalwart, had been “privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.” It’s obvious here that Murdoch was mapping his fear of losing viewers onto Hannity, as a single instruction to the host to tell the truth about Trump’s claims would have put things straight.

    When a former Fox executive told Murdoch in a Jan. 8, 2021, email that “Fox News needs a course correction” on Trump, Murdoch replied, “Fox News very busy pivoting. … We want to make Trump a non person.” A few days later, Murdoch expanded in another email to his son. The network was “pivoting as fast as possible” away from Trump, but after four years of conditioning its audience to worship the president, Murdoch was aware that the decondition process would be hairy. “We have to lead our viewer which is not as easy as it might seem,” Murdoch wrote.

    “Nobody wants Trump as an enemy,” Murdoch said in a deposition, still bruised from his tiger ride. “We all know that Trump has a big following. If he says, ‘Don’t watch Fox News, maybe some don’t.’”

    The Fox “pivot” away from Trump did come eventually, all but banning him from the network, even if some of its hosts still put in a good word for him. Trump continues to hector Fox from his social media perch, recently calling it the “RINO network,” but he has yet to go full bore against his former ally. Who among us would preclude a reunion in 2024, with Trump pulling Murdoch’s strings once more if Trump wins the presidential nomination?

    Murdoch’s pursuit of power and money, and his deft combination of the two, has always been a naked secret for those who care to inquire. These latest court filings only strip the top layer of epidermis from his hide and expose his venal essence. As late as Jan. 26, 2021, Murdoch was still so fearful of Trump that he had not executed the pivot and was still allowing stolen-election crackpot (and loyal Fox advertiser) Mike “MyPillow” Lindell a platform on the network’s Tucker Carlson Tonight show. Why allow it? Murdoch was asked. Presumably cashing Lindell’s fat checks in his mind’s eye, Murdoch replied, “It is not red or blue, it is green.”

    ******

    Send your drawings of Trump pulling Murdoch’s strings to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed is my robot. Nobody follows my Mastodon or Post accounts and who can blame them? My RSS feed has plans to fix the next Fox primary.



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    #Opinion #Rupert #Murdoch #Puppet #Puppeteer
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | Before Slashing Social Security, Cut 401(k)s

    Opinion | Before Slashing Social Security, Cut 401(k)s

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    financial markets wall street 29029

    Given these tremendous expenses, it is initially hard to understand why people who seem so worried about the costs of old-age benefits choose to focus solely on Social Security. But it becomes easier to understand once you realize who benefits the most from the various parts of the old-age system.

    DBs, DCs and IRAs are overwhelmingly skewed toward the rich, while Social Security is more heavily relied upon by low-wage workers. Low-wage workers are less likely to work for an employer that offers a pension and have far less surplus income to put toward a 401(k) plan or an IRA. Even when low-wage workers do participate in these programs, they receive less tax benefits for doing so because low-wage workers have lower tax rates than high-wage workers.

    Whether it’s based on self-interest or political expediency, those calling to cut Social Security are asking more from the most vulnerable Americans, while letting the well-off off the hook.

    According to the Congressional Budget Office, the richest fifth of Americans receive 58.1 percent of all the government subsidies provided to DBs, DCs and IRAs while the poorest fifth receive just 1.3 percent. Even the middle fifth receives only 10.5 percent of the subsidies, about half of what they would receive if the money were distributed evenly. This year, the poorest fifth of the population will receive around $5 billion of the $371 billion of federal tax breaks allocated to these programs. The middle fifth will receive around $39 billion, while the richest fifth will receive a whopping $215 billion.

    Social Security provides benefits to all retired workers, but the benefits are far more significant to low-wage workers. These workers get relatively little out of the other old-age programs and therefore rely much more heavily on the floor provided by the Social Security program. Additionally, the Social Security benefit formula replaces up to 90 percent of the monthly wages received by low-paid workers. The income-replacement rate for higher-paid workers is much lower than 90 percent and is subject to a maximum cap currently set at $3,627 per month.

    DBs, DCs and IRAs also provide significant amounts of fee revenue to Wall Street banks and other financial intermediaries who administer the tens of millions of individual accounts and pension funds. This aspect of the system periodically generates outrage when research is released showing that many financial institutions are basically scamming their account holders with shockingly high management fees. But when it comes to the debate about old-age programs, this gusher of cash for the financial sector no doubt helps to explain why these programs are never targeted, while Social Security, which provides no money to the financial industry, is always in the crosshairs.

    Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. The rules governing DCs, DBs and IRAs, as well as the massive public subsidies flowing to them, can be changed just as the rules governing Social Security can be changed. If we are seriously worried about the generosity of old-age benefits or the government’s debt, then surely everything should be on the table and the part of the system that most favors the rich should be front and center.

    For example, the most talked-about proposal for cutting Social Security right now is focused on gradually raising the full retirement age to 70 years old. The CBO says that this would save $121 billion between 2024 and 2032. However, a similar amount of savings could be achieved by applying an annual 0.03 percent tax on the $34.5 trillion of assets held by DBs, DCs and IRAs. Such a tax could be directly collected and remitted by the financial institutions that manage these accounts without changing anything at all about the tax-filing obligations of individuals. For a person with a $100,000 IRA, the tax would amount to just $30 per year.

    This is just one of many policies that could be used to trim this other half of the American retirement system. Although I personally don’t believe spending on old-age benefits is a pressing issue at the moment, people who do think that should give up their singular fixation on Social Security. If they do not, they can be safely disregarded as unserious and as motivated by things other than a sincere concern for retirement finances.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | Vladimir Putin’s Big Backfire

    Opinion | Vladimir Putin’s Big Backfire

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    Russia’s relations with the West are broken and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Few Western leaders advocate engaging Russia anymore. And the collective West is united in its opposition to the war as it increases sanctions on Russia and severs economic ties. Russian officials are sanctioned, no longer welcome in many international fora. And Russian oligarchs have lost access to their homes and yachts in Europe.

    Putin may have believed a year ago that Europeans were so dependent on Russian hydrocarbons that they would not jeopardize their access to them by opposing the war. But Europe has managed to wean itself from Russian oil and gas in a remarkably short time, jettisoning 50 years of energy interdependence. Russia will no longer have the geopolitical influence that had qualified it as an energy superpower even as it sets its sights on the Asian market.

    Putin has closed the window on the West which his much-invoked favorite Tsar Peter the Great opened three centuries ago. But Russia’s ties with China remain strong. China repeats the Russian narrative about the West being responsible for the war, while indirectly criticizing Putin’s threats that Russia might use nuclear weapons. China does not want Russia to lose this war because of concerns that a leader who might succeed Putin might re-evaluate Russia’s ties to China. China needs Russia for ballast in this new era of great power competition. So China remains the anchor of Putin’s world, even as the relationship increasingly makes clear that Russia is the junior partner.

    In one part of the world Russia is still a player. Since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Putin has assiduously courted the developing world, the global South, and this part of his world has expanded in the past year. No country in Africa, the Middle East or Latin America has sanctioned Russia and some have abstained on United Nations resolutions condemning the invasion and subsequent annexation of four territories in Ukraine. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was recently in South Africa, where he and his South African counterpart agreed to conduct joint naval exercises with China this week. Russia’s influence on the African continent has grown this year with the mercenary group Wagner becoming increasingly active in supporting autocratic leaders and profiting from their ample natural resources. Many countries in the global south view the Russia-Ukraine war as a regional European conflict of little relevance to them and refuse to take sides. Ironically, given their own experience of colonialism, they do not view Russia as a colonial power seeking to restore its lost empire.

    Putin’s world may have shrunk, but he has used this past year to consolidate his power at home. The poor performance of the Russian military and the significant casualties — over 200,000 killed or severely wounded — have not damaged his political position. As many as 1 million Russians have left the country in the past year, many of them coming from the most dynamic parts of the economy, but those that remain by and large support the war or are indifferent to it. Greater repression and jail time for those who dare to question the “special military operation,” plus an endless barrage of propaganda about Russia fighting “Nazis” and NATO in Ukraine, have acted as a disincentive to oppose the war. Unlike during the Soviet-Afghan war, there is no independent Soldiers’ Mothers committee to protest. When Putin met recently with the mothers of dead soldiers, the cold-blooded words he offered them was that it was better that their sons die as war heroes than drink themselves to death.

    Putin has also made the Russian political elite accept the war by making clear that there is no alternative. Very few of them have left, perhaps out of fear about what might happen to them if they do. The rest, including those once known as pragmatic technocrats who favored ties to the West, have adapted to the war and its constraints. There is no obvious challenger to Putin. The Russian people have been told that Putin is the leader of great power fighting the West just as the USSR fought Nazi Germany in World War II and that Russia will prevail because, according to Putin, there’s no alternative. The degree of state control and repression which has grown in the last year, where anyone who dissents is branded a traitor, makes it unlikely that Russia’s fading international stature will backfire on him domestically.

    Putin launched this war hoping to reincorporate Ukraine into the Russian state and gather in other lands which, he believes, Russia has a right to rule. Russia would emerge from the conflict a larger, stronger power with a sphere of influence in its neighborhood, regaining aspects of great power status which were lost when the USSR collapsed.

    But Putin will emerge from this war no longer the leader of a great power. His status as a competent leader has been diminished by his army’s poor performance and by the West’s isolation of him. Russia may still have the largest number of nuclear warheads and a veto on the U.N. Security Council, but it will have lost its seat at the table of global leadership.

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    #Opinion #Vladimir #Putins #Big #Backfire
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Hyderabad: Police seeks legal opinion in stray dogs attack on infant incident

    Hyderabad: Police seeks legal opinion in stray dogs attack on infant incident

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    Hyderabad: Days after a horrific incident wherein an infant was mauled to death by stray dogs in Hyderabad, police booked a case without naming any person.

    On Friday, after booking the case under section 174 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), police started a formal investigation and started seeking legal opinion in the incident.

    Telangana HC pulls up municipal body

    Earlier, after taking cognisance of the media report on the incident, Telangana High Court initiated suo moto Public Interest Litigation (PIL).

    The court pulled up Hyderabad’s municipal body over the gruesome death of the infant. A division bench headed by Chief Justice Ujjal Bhuyan blamed negligence by the Greater Hyderabad of Municipal Corporation (GHMC) for the infant’s death and asked it what steps are being taken to curtail incidents of stray dog attacks.

    The court included the Chief Secretary, Principal Secretary of the Municipal Administration and Urban Development Department, GHMC Commissioner, GHMC Deputy Commissioner (Amberpet), GHMC Veterinary Officer, Hyderabad District Collector and Member Secretary of Telangana State Legal Services Authority as respondents in the case and asked them to file the counter.

    Video of stray dogs attacking infant in Hyderabad goes viral

    Even days after the incident, the video of stray dogs mauling the infant is making round on social media.

    The incident took place on the infant was strolling outside. The CCTV footage shows that a pack of stray dogs attacked him.

    Following the incident, Telangana Minister KT Rama Rao condoled to the family members of the kid and said, ‘we’ve been trying to tackle street dog menace in our municipalities. We’ve created animal care centres, animal birth control centres’.

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    #Hyderabad #Police #seeks #legal #opinion #stray #dogs #attack #infant #incident

    ( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

  • Opinion | The Bigger Question Behind the Fox News Debacle

    Opinion | The Bigger Question Behind the Fox News Debacle

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    Why does this matter? Because — barring a powerful rebuttal from Fox — it means that Dominion has met a very high bar in defamation law. Because it’s in the public arena, Dominion has to prove that Fox knew they were airing lies, or “recklessly disregarded” the truth or falsehood of their reports.

    It’s tempting to celebrate a verdict against Fox; “reckless disregard” might as well be its slogan. But a blow to the loudest media voice on the right would come at a time, ironically, when other conservatives have launched a fundamental attack on the free press that hits directly on the issue of defamation. At risk is a 58-year-old Supreme Court case that is a powerful protection of First Amendment rights: New York Times v. Sullivan.

    In 1960, the NAACP took out a full-page fundraising ad in the New York Times, which criticized the Montgomery, Ala. police department’s treatment of protesters. The ad made a few minor factual errors — how many times Martin Luther King Jr. had been arrested, what songs the protestors sung. Montgomery County police commissioner L.B. Sullivan, who was not mentioned in the ad, sued the newspaper and won a judgment of $500,000 — the equivalent of nearly $5 million today. It was part of a wave of defamation suits brought across the South by public officials who were clearly intending to silence or bankrupt critics in and out of the press.

    It was against this background that a unanimous Supreme Court overturned the verdict in 1964. But it went much further. The case, Justice William Brennan wrote, had to be framed in the context of “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

    To protect that principle, the court set down a new standard: When it comes to public officials, they had to prove not just that a statement was false and injurious, but that it was made with “actual malice” — an inartful term that meant not “ill will,” but that it was published with willful knowledge that it was false or with “reckless disregard.” (An example: We got an anonymous tip that the governor was beating his children, so we broadcast it.) That standard was not enough for Justices Hugo Black, Arthur Goldberg, and William Douglas, who argued that the First Amendment protection was absolute and unconditional — even lies were protected. The court later expanded the media’s protection from defamation suits so that “public figures” meant pretty much anyone in the public eye, from celebrities to business executives.

    In recent years, New York Times v. Sullivan has gotten new scrutiny by powerful conservatives. In 2019, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued for a reassessment, amid consideration of a libel lawsuit from a woman who accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault. In 2021, Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed to the radical change in the media landscape as a reason to reconsider the law: “What started in 1964 with a decision to tolerate the occasional falsehood to ensure robust reporting by a comparative handful of print and broadcast outlets, has evolved into an ironclad subsidy for the publication of falsehoods by means and on a scale previously unimaginable.”

    While these justices did not make an explicitly ideological or partisan point, Federal Appeals Judge Lawrence Silberman did. In a remarkably blunt dissent in 2021 where he called for overturning New York Times v. Sullivan, Silberman wrote:

    “Although the bias against the Republican Party — not just controversial individuals — is rather shocking today, this is not new; it is a long-term, secular trend going back at least to the ’70s. (I do not mean to defend or criticize the behavior of any particular politician). Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), the New York Times and the Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets. And the news section of the Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction. The orientation of these three papers is followed by the Associated Press and most large papers across the country (such as the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Globe). Nearly all television — network and cable — is a Democratic Party trumpet. Even the government-supported National Public Radio follows along.”

    The call for weakening New York Times v. Sullivan is also emanating from conservatives in the more explicitly political arena. Trump, no stranger to litigation on both sides of the defamation issue, has argued for its overturn. It’s also now part of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ nascent presidential campaign. In a roundtable discussion earlier this month, DeSantis said the ruling served as a shield to protect publications that “smear” officials and candidates. Indeed, the governor has gone further. A bill he proposed that has now been refiled in the Florida legislature would leave the press wide open to lawsuits, including by stating that comments made by anonymous sources would be presumed false in defamation suits.

    In other words, if Woodward and Bernstein did not identify “Deep Throat,” or their countless other anonymous sources in Watergate reporting, their stories would have been presumed false under this bill. It would make the effective end of whistleblowers as a tool of investigative reporting. The bill’s sponsor told POLITICO it was also explicitly intended to spur a legal challenge to New York Times v. Sullivan¸ with the goal of overturning it.

    None of this is to say that Fox News should escape judgment if its defense team cannot rebut the damaging evidence that is now on the record. But it doesn’t eliminate the need for great caution about the protection the Supreme Court gave the press nearly 60 years ago. In New York Times v. Sullivan, the court took away from public figures the power to bankrupt or intimidate their critics with a storm of litigation. We cannot put that power back in the hands of the powerful again.

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    #Opinion #Bigger #Question #Fox #News #Debacle
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | The George Santos Caucus Is Growing

    Opinion | The George Santos Caucus Is Growing

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    Liars are supposed to appall us, but in practice, they don’t. America loves its scoundrels. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which is about a prolific liar, ranks near the top polls of America’s best-loved novels. Its enduring lesson teaches that if you can’t make it, fake it, and nobody will be any the wiser by the time you succeed. Spoiler alert if you slept through high school English: Gatsby climbs to the top by lying about his name (it’s James Gatz), the origin of his wealth (bootlegging; moving counterfeit stocks; bribing public officials; working with gangsters), and his past (he was born poor in North Dakota, not rich in San Francisco). He ultimately gets knocked off, not in comeuppance for his lies, but in an act of revenge. (His killer mistakenly thinks Gatsby hit and killed his wife in traffic when actually Gatsby’s mistress Daisy was the wheelwoman.) The moral of The Great Gatsby is if you want to get ahead in American life, lie profusely — but make sure your sweetheart drives safely.

    The Gatsby Directive has long been observed in corporate America, with executives routinely getting busted for resume padding. Academia, too, is shot through with professors who doctor their curriculum vitae. And you could fill a roadside Little Library with bestselling memoirs that turn out to be fake. In spinning their exaggerations and embroideries to political success, Santos, Luna and Ogles resemble President Joe Biden, who has dispensed one large dip of double-fudge after another throughout his entire political career. In a recent unrelenting column, the Washington Post’s Marc A. Thiessen truth-squaded Biden. The president’s many lies include those about his family history; about his college achievements; about getting arrested while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison; about getting arrested for protesting civil rights; about getting arrested for sneaking into the U.S. Capitol; about getting shot at inside Baghdad’s Green Zone; about pinning a Silver Star on a Navy Captain in Afghanistan; about cutting the federal deficit in half. And that’s just a partial list.

    Of course, the volume and scale of Biden’s lies don’t compare to those of Donald Trump, who completely untethered himself from the truth during his administration. According to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column, Trump made at least 30,573 false or misleading comments during his four years in the White House. Trump maintained such a unique relationship with the truth that it might have been simpler for the Post to tabulate his truthful statements than his lies. When the fact-checker first got going at Trump during the 2016 campaign, it looked like their accountings would fracture his credibility with voters, but it didn’t — or at least not enough to turn the election. Trump supporters discounted the fact that he was full of it because they liked many of the things he said about immigrants, foreign entanglements, Hillary Clinton, trade, economic growth and race. The same — although on a radically different scale — appears to be true with Biden supporters. When Joe blunders or overstates, they cover for him by saying, “Oh, that’s just Joe,” and change the subject.

    If Santos, Luna and Ogles studied the political career of Donald Trump before composing their personal histories, nobody should be surprised. Trump established that while journalists care about the truth, voters can be more forgiving. If voters cared that much about campaign lies, the Democrats would have made the 2020 election an exercise in public shaming about Trump’s lies. But they didn’t. The only lies politicians must avoid are the ones that might trigger legal proceedings against them, like the iffy campaign finance statements Santos filed that have spurred investigations and might result in prosecution. Garden variety lies that aren’t prosecutable are regularly forgotten by voters by the time their speakers run for reelection.

    Politicians lie, lie and lie some more because they’ve learned voters seem not to care much about it when the lies are uncovered. (In a perfect world, the press would fully vet every politician’s every statement, but even before the industry’s decline it didn’t have the resources to perform mass lie detection.) In the long run, voters seem not to care whether a candidate’s credentials are legitimate or if they really climbed Mt. Everest in their stocking feet as they attest on the husting. So why bother fluffing your resume in the first place if voters will only shrug when they discover you stretched the truth? Could it be that, like committing minor acts of vandalism or petty shoplifting, telling lies about ourselves feels too good to resist, especially when engaged in the contest that is politics, where every day brings another public exercise in resume comparison?

    When it comes to politics, a candidate’s lived experience should be less important than where they stand on the issue. For that reason alone, we’d be better off if politicians competed by deflating their resumes instead of ballooning them.

    ******

    I do, however, want my neurosurgeon’s resume to be accurate. Send neurosurgeon references to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed pitched in the World Series. My Mastodon account has invented a cure for cancer. My Post account saved a baby from being run over in traffic. My RSS feed has accomplished nothing and has no ambitions.



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    #Opinion #George #Santos #Caucus #Growing
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )