Stephan: I am running this story, not for itself, but because it represents a trend. Almost every week for several years now I have seen stories about MAGAt Republicans being indicted, and often convicted, for felonies of one sort or another. It happens so frequently, and is so specific to Republicans -- yes, yes, of course, there is an occasional Democrat, but the pattern and frequency is not the same -- that it constitutes a trend. It is clear that MAGAts, while whining about how they are victims, in fact, see themselves as above the law, just as does the head MAGAt, criminal Trump.
Florida Republican MAGAt State Rep. Joe Harding Credit: Gage Skidmore
Click Orlando reports that Florida State Rep. Joe Harding is been hit with charges of wire fraud, money laundering and making false statements over an alleged attempt to defraud the Small Business Administration out of COVID-19 emergency relief money.
“The U.S. Department of Justice said Harding, 35, created bank accounts for dormant business entities and used them to apply for SBA Economic Injury Disaster Loans,” Click Orlando writes. “The indictment accuses Harding of obtaining and attempting to obtain more than $150,000 from the SBA, which was deposited into two bank accounts.”
If he is found guilty, Harding potentially faces decades in prison, as Click Orlando notes that the wire fraud charge alone carries a sentence of up to 20 years, while the money laundering charge could potentially tack on an extra decade to his sentence.
Stephan: CPAC invited fascist dictator Viktor Orban to speak at the largest Republican convention, Republican House members voted against aid to Ukraine, and now this. If you have any political sense, sadly a large number of Americans have little or none, it is obvious that the Republican Party is trying to turn the United States into a christofascist anti-semitic White supremacy authoritarian anocarcy. That may sound partisan, but it is not, it is simply a statement of objectively verifiable facts.
Christofascists Representatives Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene voted with other Republican members against a $40bn aid package for Ukraine. Credit: Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
Ever since Russia launched its brutal war in Ukraine the Kremlin has banked on American conservative political and media allies to weaken US support for Ukraine and deployed disinformation operations to falsify the horrors of the war for both US and Russian audiences, say disinformation experts.
Some of the Kremlin’s most blatant falsehoods about the war aimed at undercutting US aid for Ukraine have been promoted by major figures on the American right, from Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes to ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Fox News star Tucker Carlson, whose audience of millions is deemed especially helpful to Russian objectives.
On a more political track, House Republican Freedom Caucus members such as Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Scott Perry – who in May voted with 54 other Republican members against a $40bn aid package for Ukraine, and have raised other concerns about the war – have proved useful, though perhaps unwitting, Kremlin […]
Stephan: When the House comes back in January under Republican control expect to see the party's christofascists go into an obsessive frenzy over Hunter Biden. Frankly, I could not understand what this was about, and the other day I spent a couple of hours reading MAGAt media, and actual fact-based media trying to figure out why christofascists like Jim Jordan just quiver with anticipation of holding hearings on Hunter Biden. Why? My takeaway from reading everything I could find on Hunter Biden is that he is a rather sad character who got lost in drugs for a while and did a number of rather stupid things financially, but nothing I could find that seemed valid showed he was involved with politics or even particularly interested in politics. The laptop business may actually be some kind of Russian disinformation operation. So why the obsession by the MAGAts? This article, I think, gives the best explanation, as pathetic and sad as it is. They need the Bidens to be as dishonest and criminal as the Trumps.
They are all leaping in with both feet—all the usual suspects. Elon Musk gave Matt Taibbi access to internal Twitter documents, promising a big reveal about how the company handled the Trump campaign’s planned October surprise. Though it actually unearthed nothing of interest—then-candidate Biden (he was not in government at the time) requested that Twitter not circulate nude photos of his disturbed son, and the company complied—it unleashed a festival of I-told-you-sos from the right.
This comes on the heels of House Republicans calling a press conference to declare that after running on inflation, the border, and crime, their very top priority will be investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop. Rep. James Comer, who will chair the House Oversight Committee, said, “Hunter Biden’s fair game because I believe Hunter Biden is a national security risk.” That was actually mild compared with Rep. Elise Stefanik’s promise in July that if given the majority, Republicans would get “accountability” from the “Biden crime family.”
The-liberal-media-covered-up-the-truth-about-the-Biden-family storyline has been suspended for some time, apparently just waiting for the […]
Stephan: I am seeing more and more stories describing how an increasing number of Americans either can't afford the drugs they need to maintain their health, even their lives, or have to wait because when they go to their drugstore they don't have the drug available. Why is this? The answer isn't that complicated. This is happening because the pharmaceutical industry is structured to produce profit not wellbeing. Here is the USDA assessment of what is going on.
Credit: Health News
In June 2018, a bipartisan group of 31 U.S. Senators and 104 members of the House of Representatives wrote to Scott Gottlieb, MD, then Commissioner of Food and Drugs, to ask for assistance in addressing the Nation’s drug shortage crisis. Their letters urged the Food and Drug Administration (FDA or “the Agency”) to convene a task force to study the problem, prepare a report on the root causes of drug shortages, and make recommendations for enduring solutions. In response to this request from Congress, the FDA convened an inter-agency Drug Shortages Task Force (“Task Force”) of senior officials drawn from its own ranks and several partner Federal agencies.1 The Agency invited public participation through a public meeting on November 27, 2018 with a docket to receive comments, and invited stakeholders to a series of listening sessions. The Task Force commissioned a team of FDA economists and other scientists to analyze drugs that went into shortage between calendar years 2013-2017 with a view to understanding the underlying forces that were driving them. The analysts relied on the statutory definition of drug shortage, as a period of […]
Gloria Dickie and Simon Scarr, - Reuters / Raw Story
Stephan: As a species, we just don't get it. We do not understand, will not accept, and cannot overcome the besetting sin of humanity, Greed. And, as a result, we are wrecking the ecosystems of the earth upon which our own wellbeing depends. The evidence is irrefutable, and ignoring it will not save us.
As a boy in the 1960s, David Wagner would run around his family’s Missouri farm with a glass jar clutched in his hand, scooping flickering fireflies out of the sky.
“We could fill it up and put it by our bedside at night,” says Wagner, now an entomologist.
That’s all gone, the family farm now paved over with new homes and manicured lawns. And Wagner’s beloved fireflies – like so many insects worldwide – have largely vanished in what scientists are calling the global Insect Apocalypse.
(For related graphic, please click on )
As human activities rapidly transform the planet, the global insect population is declining at an unprecedented rate of up to 2% per year. Amid deforestation, pesticide use, artificial light pollution and climate change, these critters are struggling — along with the crops, flowers and other animals that rely on them to survive.
“Insects are the food that make all the birds and make all the fish,” said Wagner, who works at the University of Connecticut. “They’re the fabric tethering together every freshwater and terrestrial ecosystem across the […]
