The Republican Central Planning Committee

Having met with some "success" at legislating profits over the last 20 or 30 years, Republicans aren't trying to hide their shit anymore - on practically anything.

We're "anti-woman"?

Fuckin' ay right we are - here's 200 new laws that have been either proposed or passed making it illegal to seek an abortion, illegal to travel out of state for an abortion, illegal to buy an abortion pill, illegal to help a woman with any of the above.

We're racist assholes?

Damn straight. We're busing brown immigrants - no matter their status - out of state - cuz we don't like them and we don't want them here.

We "back the blue" whenever they're stomping on brown people.

We're anti-democracy?

What was your first clue?

Closing precincts where lots of Democrats vote?

Making it OK for the Texas AG to throw out the polling results in the single largest Democrat-heavy county?

Moving to kill early and mail-in voting?

Eliminating college campus voting?

And on it goes ad infinitum, ad nauseam, but particularly on economic issues the last few months.

So is it any wonder they're making moves to permanently ensure profitability in a few of their favorite kinds of businesses, while trying to put up a facade of "getting to the bottom of this", and actually making it illegal to consider anything but good little fascist criteria when deciding what investments are best for a given client?

Opinion

The day free-market Republicans became Soviet economic planners

Can you remember when Republicans still believed in the free market?

It was sometime before Donald Trump started routine attacks on the “globalists” of Goldman Sachs and the leaders of large U.S. corporations; before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used tax policy to attack the Walt Disney Co. because it dared to disagree with his “don’t say gay” legislation; before congressional Republicans harassed social media companies and book publishers over alleged “censorship” of their views; before they threatened Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Major League Baseball over their support for voting rights; before they vowed to use federal resources to retaliate against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for backing a few Democrats; before Republican governors enacted laws overriding private employers’ coronavirus vaccination policies; and before GOP-led states moved to disrupt interstate commerce to block abortion access and morning-after pills.

This week brought the latest evidence that the former party of laissez-faire capitalism has reimagined itself in the image of a Soviet State Planning Committee. Republican lawmakers are now telling investors which businesses they can and can’t invest in — and which investment criteria they will be permitted to consider.

The House Oversight Committee staged a hearing to denounce asset managers for using “environmental, social and governance” criteria, or ESG, when making their investments — and to plot ways to stop investors from doing this terrible thing.

“An unelected cabal of global elites are using ESG, a woke economic strategy, to hijack our capitalist system,” declared an overwrought Steve Marshall, Alabama attorney general and one of two GOP expert witnesses at the anti-investor hearing. For those who didn’t understand him the first time, Marshall used the word “elites” 13 times and “woke” 20 times in his opening testimony.

The other GOP witness, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, declared that there exists a “conspiracy” of ESG-minded investors. He was particularly worried that “asset managers who collectively own significant percentages of utilities’ stock are improperly influencing the operations of those utilities.”

Imagine that! The shareholders who own a company are trying to influence its operations! Will nobody rid us of this capitalist menace?

Legislatures in several red states have passed laws, championed by oil, gas and coal companies, that essentially pull state pension funds from investment managers unless they invest in — you guessed it — oil, gas and coal companies. Similar laws bar pension plans from working with investment firms that use ESG standards when deciding whether to invest in companies that trash the planet, abuse their workers or kill their customers. Led by Marshall and Reyes, 25 state attorneys general sued the Biden administration to block a regulation that allows retirement-plan investors to consider ESG standards. The rule doesn’t mandate that investors do so. It merely gives them the option.

The Democrats’ witness, Illinois treasurer Michael Frerichs, called the Republicans’ schemes “anti-free market and anti-investor.” The GOP officials would block asset managers from even considering whether a car company “is aligned with market expectations and preparing for the shift to electric vehicles,” whether a pharmaceutical company “has exposure to massive lawsuits because of its role in the opioid epidemic” or whether “health-care companies understaff their operations and jeopardize the safety of patients.” Said Frerichs: “ESG is simply additional information that investment professionals use to assess risk and return prospects.”

Apparently, a lot of investors agree with him, because the accountancy PwC expects ESG-related assets under management to grow to $33.9 trillion by 2026, or about one-fifth of the worldwide asset-management total. ESG, lamented Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), “is gaining ground on Wall Street.”

And Republicans are determined to stop the free market — no matter how much it costs.

A study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and a Fed economist, for example, calculated that an anti-ESG law in Texas will cost the state $303 million to $532 million in additional interest annually. The Kansas Public Employees Retirement System said anti-ESG legislation there could cause more than $1 billion in losses from early sale of assets and reduce returns by $3.6 billion over a decade. Public pension systems in Arkansas said an anti-ESG bill there would cause them to lose at least $37 million per year.

In the end, the GOP’s anti-capitalist binge is about culture, not economics. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) expressed his concern that ESG considerations would work against “certain disfavored groups in our society. People don’t like men. People don’t like people of European background.” ESG investors, he argued, “are the type of people who judge people by where their great-great-grandparents came from.” Other Republicans on the panel used their time to denounce the perceived “woke” wrongs of JPMorgan Chase, Nike, Anheuser-Busch and others.

Frerichs, a Democrat, pointed out the absurdity “of me defending the free market against a Republican legislature trying to have a planned economy mandating what businesses have to invest in.”

But the irony was lost on Comer, who tried to draw a link between his anti-capitalist crusade and his simultaneous attempt to prove wrongdoing by President Biden and his family. “We just had a press conference and showed bank records that showed the Biden family getting millions of dollars from places like China,” he said. “I wonder what types of ESG policies China” has.

China doesn’t have ESG standards, Mr. Chairman. It’s an authoritarian country with a state-run economy. Our free-market economy, which lets investors make choices free of the heavy hand of government, is vastly superior. I remember when Republicans used to think so, too.

When he isn’t laying waste to the capitalist system as a whole, Comer has been trying his all to take down a particular subset of capitalists: those with the surname “Biden.”

The chief Hunter hunter in the House, Comer had for weeks been hyping his investigation into business dealings by Hunter Biden and numerous other Bidens, suggesting that he finally had the goods on the “big guy” himself, President Biden.

“Joe Biden’s going to have a lot of explaining to do,” Comer teased on Fox News on April 11, promising a blockbuster news conference within two weeks. He claimed his subpoenas of bank records had uncovered “influence peddling” at high levels.

A week later, he claimed to have evidence that “10 or 12 Biden family members” were involved in “taking money from our adversaries around the world” and that “these adversaries were getting something in return” from Joe Biden.

On April 23, he told Fox News that he would “very soon” have a news conference at which he would detail the “influence peddling scheme” that he now claimed involved “at least 12” Bidens. Tossing out the words “launder,” “deceive the IRS” and “foreign agent,” he said multiple Bidens should be indicted, and he teased that the president himself might be “compromised.”

Then, on Tuesday, Comer told Fox News that “tomorrow is going to be judgment day for the Biden administration, the Biden White House.”

And so, after a month of hype, Comer and other Oversight Committee Republicans walked into the House television studio Wednesday and revealed … a whole lot of nothing.

He had not presented any evidence of wrongdoing by the president. He hadn’t presented evidence that the elder Biden — “the big guy” — had any involvement in his son Hunter’s businesses. Comer’s months of digging through bank records had found more than $10 million in payments from companies run by foreign nationals that went to Biden family members and business associates and their companies. But Comer produced no evidence that these payments were illegal or that any official government actions were taken in exchange.

The only thing he had to offer was more innuendo. “It would be hard for me to believe” that there was no official quid pro quo, he said, and “we believe that the president has been involved.” Said Comer: “We’re going to continue to look.”

After unwrapping his nothingburger, Comer gave the first question to a friendly reporter from the Murdoch New York Post. But even he sounded skeptical. Comer gave the second question to the Epoch Times, a far-right publication that traffics in conspiracy theories.

The reviews, even from the right, were savage. “I’m not impressed with James Comer’s Biden bombshell,” tweeted former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka.

Geraldo Rivera said Comer and colleagues were “struggling to find direct evidence of criminal conduct or corruption.” He said the investigators need to “put up … or shut up.”

On “Fox & Friends,” Comer got a dressing-down from host Steve Doocy. The charge of influence peddling is “just your suggestion,” he told Comer on Thursday morning. “You don’t actually have any facts to that point. You’ve got some circumstantial evidence. And the other thing is … there’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally.”

Comer had nothing. “Make no mistake, Joe Biden was involved,” he promised.

Just take his word for it.

On the other side of the Capitol, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), another avid Hunter hunter, offered this explanation for the latest failure to produce evidence of wrongdoing: “People that commit criminal acts try not to leave a paper trail.” So the lack of anything incriminating merely proves that the Bidens were very good criminals! “You have to infer these things,” Johnson told Fox Business. “You’re not necessarily going to get necessarily hard proof.”

Of course, if Comer is going to “infer” guilt based on the $10 million in foreign funds received by Biden family members and business associates over 15 years, he would also have to infer that Trump family members, who have received hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign payments since his election, are more guilty by orders of magnitude.

Alternatively, we can all infer that Comer is not very good at this, that Biden hasn’t done anything wrong — or, most likely, both.

Grand juries aren’t generally known for their comic timing, but you’ve got to give credit to the one that just indicted Rep. George Santos.

The jurors, sitting in Central Islip, N.Y., returned their indictment of the Long Island Republican on Tuesday, charging Santos with, among other things, “fraudulent application for and receipt of unemployment benefits.”

The very next day, House Republicans began debate on the House floor of H.R. 1163, the Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act.

One of the 35 co-sponsors of the bill? George Anthony Devolder Santos.

“The Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act takes much needed overdue action to recover fraudulently paid covid benefits … and prosecute the criminals responsible,” proclaimed the irony-challenged Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

If House Republicans really wanted to take a stand against unemployment fraud, they could expel Santos, who is accused of defrauding taxpayers of almost $25,000 in unemployment benefits during the pandemic while he earned a salary of approximately $120,000. But they need his vote.

Outside the courthouse after his arraignment Wednesday, Santos thanked House Republican leadership for standing by him. “I appreciate leadership for being patient,” he said, telling reporters, “I have to go back and vote tomorrow.”

And that he did. The House passed the unemployment fraud bill Thursday afternoon on a mostly party-line vote. Among the “ayes” was Santos.

There are three weeks to go until the United States defaults on its debt. Let’s check in on where Republican leaders stand.

“The solution to this problem lies with two people, the president of the United States … and the speaker of the House.” — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the White House driveway on May 9.

“That would come down really to Chuck Schumer and the president.” — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the White House driveway, two minutes later.

“Well, you might as well do it [default] now.” — Former president Donald Trump, May 10.

Odd how the GOP is suddenly all in for the government picking winners and losers.

More Ukraine

One of the things humans fear most is being forgotten - thinking we don't count for much when we're alive, and that our passing will mean little to anyone. All we have is a few close friends and family to carry on when we're dead and gone.

There's more than just a possibility that lots of Russians are being forgotten - deprived even of the tiny solace that someone will know of their passing and will mourn them - as they're casually tossed into the meat grinder in eastern Ukraine by a regime in the Kremlin that obviously doesn't give one empty fuck about them.

In Russia, the third wave of recruitment of prisoners to participate in the war against Ukraine has already begun.

Of the first thousand prisoners recruited by the Wagner Group to participate in the war against Ukraine, only 20 returned home. This was stated by the head of the public organization "Seated Russia" Olga Romanova in an interview with the publication "Current Time" .

According to her, the third wave of recruitment of prisoners into the "Wagner group" is now underway in Russia. The first wave came out of the prisons of central Russia from June 26 to September 21, the second - in the Urals and the Far East from September 21 to the end of December. Now the third one has begun, which already covers the whole country, including Chechnya.

“Naturally, for Prigozhin there is also a great convenience in the fact that there is actually no extradition from Chechnya. There he can do some things that he cannot do in the Ryazan region, in the Smolensk region or somewhere else. This is actually extraterritorial education. Therefore, recruitment began in Chechen prisons,” Romanova said.

"I think that they do not count the number of dead - nothing. I think there is no one there. But let's look at the results of the first recruitment. In the very first days of July, about a thousand people were recruited from the Leningrad and Novgorod regions in the zones, but returned 20. Look at the statistics,” she said.

Participation of Russian prisoners in the war against Ukraine

Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin personally traveled to Russian prisons and recruited prisoners into his private army, known as the "Wagner Group" or "PMC Wagner". According to experts , the Wagnerites, among whom the majority are former prisoners, may make up about a quarter of all Russian forces in Ukraine.

At the front, the "Wagner Group" became famous primarily for the fact that it does not spare its soldiers at all and sends them into suicidal attacks for the sake of minimal progress.

The dead Wagnerites are transported around Russia by ordinary truckers, after which they are buried "without too much noise . "

We hear very little about the casualty numbers on either side because governments don't want to give out any information about its wars that it doesn't absolutely have to give out, but the Russians seem to be taking the opportunity to ignore their own losses in order to feel a bit less embarrassed by this latest colossal fuckup in a lengthening series of colossal fuckups.

Everybody's Got One

Not that I feel a need to go out of my way to shit on somebody's hopefulness, but c'mon, guys - SCOTUS has been scuttling laws aimed at regulating guns for 30 years - and I don't think we have long to wait before there's a lawsuit challenging this new assault on "shall not be infringed" and SCOTUS strikes it down.

There could be, however, a weird Good News / Bad News angle to consider.

If the law is upheld, that could give the liberals a warm and fuzzy feeling, and signal some small chance for even better gun safety laws to follow, but it could also mean that the plutocracy has decided it's time to curtail the rabble's ability to fight back.

Authoritarians love for you to go around waving your big bad substitute penis in the air when it intimidates "the left", but they can't afford to have you well-enough armed to mount an effective resistance once they have a choke hold on power, and you recognize that you've been slickered - again.

WaPo - Opinion: (pay wall)

GOP support for a gun bill offers hope for bigger reforms

Fifteen Republicans in the Senate and 14 in the House joined with congressional Democrats this week to break more than 25 years of inaction on gun safety. That these Republicans, many of whom had ratings of A or A-plus from the National Rifle Association, defied the gun lobby with their support of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act suggests they saw the political peril in doing nothing about the gun violence gripping the country. Indeed, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who voted for the bill, admitted as much when he said he hoped GOP support for the measure “will be viewed favorably by voters” as the party seeks to regain the majority next year.

The public sentiment for gun safety that has steadily built with each mass shooting, finally forcing Republicans to drop their ironclad opposition, offers hope that the legislation, signed into law by President Biden on Saturday, will be the first and not last step in bringing some rationality to the nation’s gun laws.

The 80-page bill, produced by a small group of Republican and Democratic senators in the aftermath of back-to-back mass shootings at a Buffalo grocery store and a Texas school, falls far short of the tough but common-sense measures long sought by gun-control advocates. There are no universal background checks, no ban of large-capacity magazines, no requirements for safe storage of weapons and no action — not even raising the minimum age of purchase — on assault weapons. That, though, does not detract from the significance of what was achieved.

Among the worthwhile reforms: enhanced background checks for younger gun buyers to include juvenile and mental health records; incentives for states to adopt red-flag laws that allow guns to be temporarily confiscated from people deemed dangerous by a judge; tougher penalties on illegal gun purchases; and revision of a federal law intended to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers to close the “boyfriend loophole.” Those measures — along with billions of new federal dollars to expand mental health programs and improve school safety — will save lives.

Credit for the hard work of fashioning a compromise that both sides could agree to goes to Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and John Cornyn (R- Tex.), aided by Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). Mr. Murphy had just been elected to the Senate in 2012 when a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in his home state and has been tireless in his pursuit of common-sense gun control despite many setbacks. Mr. Cornyn’s willingness to negotiate — and his refusal to back down even when faced with withering criticism from former president Donald Trump, Fox News and his state GOP party — is equally praiseworthy. So is his forthrightness in standing up to the NRA. “We worked with the NRA, listened to their concerns, but in the end I think they simply — they have a membership and a business model that will not allow them to support any legislation,” Mr. Cornyn said.

Passage of the bill came a day after the Supreme Court expanded gun rights by striking down a New York law limiting the carrying of guns in public. That ill-advised and dangerous ruling may have tempered any celebration over the gun bill, but it can’t squelch the public sentiment that has risen up in support of rational gun-safety laws.

Remember that last bit, and keep it in mind as we have to contemplate the probability that this is all part of the typically cynical machinations of a Republican party that knows the Supreme Court is chock full of "conservatives" who will knock down anything "Progressive" that manages to get through.

In the case of gun regulation, Cornyn can sit back and say, "Well gee whiz, I was willing to humor the dumbass Dems and give their cockamamy scheme a try, but the Supreme Court says it's unconstitutional (just like I knew they would - wink wink) - whaddaya gonna do?"

Ya heard it here first.

A Random Thought

There's been a whole long string of PolToons like this one - a happy reunion for Poppy and Babs in the afterlife and blah blah blah.

I think I get it, but I have to let Cynical Asshole Mike come out and play for just a minute:

1. Doesn't the background in this cartoon look a bit like flames?
2. "Welcome home"? Like "Glad you're dead, George - wanna dance"?

Today's Podcast

No, not The Professional Left. We'll get to that one a little later.

This one is You Are Not So Smart - Episode 108: Pandora's Lab:



20,000 dead Americans every year - because of Opioids.

And the idiocy of smart people.

So also too - be cautious about being cautious.

This Modern GOP

(I was desperately hoping this was some kind of April Fools gag - but alas, Beshear put his name to this crap and sent it to SCOTUS ... and so the search for intelligent life among Republicans continues)

Via HuffPo:

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear's administration is arguing the state's ban on same-sex marriage isn't discriminatory because it applies to straight people, too.

"Kentucky’s marriage laws treat homosexuals and heterosexuals the same and are facially neutral. Men and women, whether heterosexual or homosexual, are free to marry persons of the opposite sex under Kentucky law, and men and women, whether heterosexual or homosexual, cannot marry persons of the same sex under Kentucky law," the Democratic governor said in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on March 27.

That's what passes for "logical thinking" in the GOP now.

So the argument in favor of (eg) the anti-miscegenation laws in the Jim Crow era would be: "the laws against Inter-Racial Marriage are not at all discriminatory because they make it illegal for both whites and blacks to marry outside their race".

It seems so easy to identify this Beshear guy as just another dipwad politico pandering to a slice of the voter demographic.  My standard complaint is that he needs the rubes to send him their butter-n-egg money on a regular basis, and he needs to count on 'em showing up on election day, so he needs to rile 'em up with some bullshit issue-du-jour that keeps them feeling justified in thinking they have somebody they can spit on (which keeps them too busy to notice what Beshear's bosses are doing to them and everybody else); and that what he can't afford to let happen is for any one slice of the voter demographic to make common cause with certain other slices of the voter demographic, because if we ever really get hip to these divide-and-conquer strategies, these guys are toast.  

But my main problem now is that it seems like Beshear (eg) isn't simply making cynical calculations on how to stay in power.  It's possible he's just not good at the Rhetorical Spin Game, but I'm thinking some of these guys actually believe the shit they say.  How does Beshear try to make that point if he's not a true believer?

Seriously - we gotta stop electing these assholes.  We have to show up and vote every time we get the chance.

Lying Liars

...and their doofus constituents - this is practically the very definition of Co-Enabling.

From The National Memo, via Little Green Footballs:

The deficit is down 37.6 percent for the first 10 months of the 2013 budget year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But a new survey conducted by Google at Paul Krugman’s request finds that more than 50 percent of Americans think it’s still growing.

Just another solid example of Deliberate Ignorance, fueled by the cynical manipulations of certain Coin-Operated Politicians who say they only want the very best for us - and have managed to convince significant numbers of people that volunteering to wear the shackles is what sets them free.

When almost 60% of us believe exactly the opposite of what is true; when the facts can be discovered by spending a lousy 90 seconds with Google; don't we have to think maybe there's something wrong?

Modern Methods (updated)

I caught this episode on The Science Channel the other night - this is what explains to me some of the methods political hucksters use to get us leaning and keep us in line.

It's what prompted a previous post - Modern Methods.

And for all the Centrists out there, please look around and tell me what examples you can find to show that the Dems are trying to pull the False Memory trick.  I realize they're using a lot of the same advertising gimmicks, but I've not seen the outright attempt to change the facts of historical events to fit their ideology.  That seems to be the near-exclusive province of the Wingnuts.



Full episode on YouTube

At about 14:30, they start talking about the causes and effects of Memory Errors.  Once this is understood, it's a short step to manipulation.  ie: Play up the fear, which revs up the amygdala; plant the new memory, and you've got yourself a new convert.  Sounds like a pretty handy little tool to me.