When "conservatives" bitch about Biden's sketchy dealings with China, remember this:
Trump showed a secret document to people who directly represent Chinese companies - some of which are companies partly owned by the Chinese government.
In keeping with Trump's constant blurring of the line between WWE-style Reality TV and actual real world reality, we have him shit-talking the Chinese at every opportunity, doing it with a wink and a nod - it makes for good TV and that's all that matters because the rubes practically live for the chance to line up and empty their pockets for him.
Remember the name Susie Wiles.
"... she's got Trump by the balls - she can name her price for her loyalty, and Trump can't say no." (that's from the NY Post, so yeah - large grains of salt).
No matter how bad we think it is, with Trump it's always worse. Always.
Vomited in my mouth a little when I scrolled past this picture. Then I read the text and may have actually had a seizure. The amount of willful ignorance and hatred on this site is going to eventually kill me. Dr King must be rolling in his grave this week. #DemVoice1pic.twitter.com/PwEBJz5ygT
— ChaosPigeon - This machine irks fascists -✊🏼🌊♿️ (@ChaosPigeon1) June 30, 2023
Reality is that of course the Kremlin fully funds the Wagner Group.
Wagner is not independent and self-sustaining, the way Putin has needed us to believe.
So we've got Pregozhin running around in Africa and Syria, et al, committing atrocities we'll find hard to believe could ever be carried out by honest-to-god humans. And those will be the atrocities that the investigators and their bosses will allow us to be aware of because some of them are bound to be so horrendous, nobody wants to know about them. Ever.
The point that needs to be hammered on is that this shit is not simply being done by rogue actors who are unaffiliated with Moscow.
Putin sponsors Wagner, Wagner is acting on behalf of Putin, Putin is largely responsible for Wagner's behavior. The Russian government is committing war crimes everywhere it goes.
Clarence Thomas finally gets a little relief for his bruised ego self-loathing.
The guy got some of his schooling under Affirmative Action. I get the feeling he's always been eager to pull the ladder up behind him because he's spent 35 or 40 years listening to "conservatives" as they told him, almost straight up, that he didn't deserve anything he got because he stole the place that rightfully belonged to some white kid and blah blah blah.
Thomas has been gunning for Affirmative Action since before his appointment so this one may not look like some kind of outlier - unless...
Let's take Paranoid Mike's little tour and see how we might get to these odd-seeming decisions.
First:
All of these "conservative" justices were chosen for nomination specifically to address particular pieces of the Project Plutocracy agenda. They've all been groomed and placed on the court in order to have a desired effect on whatever items their handlers deem appropriate at any given time.
Second:
Nobody is outright buying decisions from this court. That's totally illegal, and even though these dark-money yacht-buying assholes don't really care about following the law, they don't have to do it that way.
They pick a justice they're pretty sure is sympathetic to their side of the issue-du-jour, and they treat that justice to a really spiffy time at an exotic vacation spot, or they arrange a nice little junket to speak to a group of 'concerned citizens', having arranged for the justice to receive a right handsome honorarium from a grateful bunch of just regular hard-working Americans.
And they do all of that well before they start any legal action.
The point of the exercise is to make all the legal steps fit with an overall strategy - combining political campaign funding, Voter Education SuperPACs, advertising and other media manipulation - together with some client head-hunting in order to get the right people with the right standing, in front of the right judges in the right lower courts, making the right arguments based on whatever loophole, gray area, or cockamamie "theory" they can come up with.
As the case works its way through the system, they keep refining the terms and testing the arguments on focus groups and OpEd pages and white papers and speeches and and and.
I'm betting it's way more gnarly and complicated than the picture I have in my cluttered little brain, but no matter how twisty-turny it gets, or how carefully it's set up, there can be surprises - it doesn't always work.
But this is Political Capitalism, and the players are going to do everything possible to be sure they know the outcome before the voting even starts.
We're told all our lives that we really don't want to see how they make the sausage - and we've been able to convince ourselves the ugliness of it was pretty well concentrated in the Legislative Branch. And maybe they've been mostly right. But this is definitely not the case now - not anymore.
Affirmative Action
Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and U.N.C.
The 6-3 ruling could drastically alter college admissions policies across the country. Criticizing the decision, President Biden said this was “not a normal court” and directed the Education Department “to analyze what practices can build a more inclusive and diverse” student body.
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Activists celebrate the affirmative action opinion at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
