Stephan: I find this story both alarming and almost impossible to believe. How is it possible that a sitting Associate Justice of the Supreme Court can have a partner who is a MAGAt activist openly explicit and public in her advocacy for insurrectionists whose actions her husband may have to rule on? Suppose she were an open Nazis supporter, or anti-Semite, or openly advocated anti-Black racism? Would that be acceptable? What is the difference? Clarence Thomas, in my opinion, should never have been confirmed by the Senate for the Supreme Court in the first place, and his wife's open political activism should preclude his holding office.
Clarence and Ginni Thomas Credit: Facebook
It has been less than a week since 11 Oath Keepers were arrested with seditious conspiracy, but the spouse of Justice Clarence Thomas believes that they “have done nothing wrong.”
Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes pointed to a letter signed by Ginni Thomas along with many other fringe conservatives like the Family Research Council, the chair of the Tea Party Patriots Fund and the president of the Club for Growth. The letter speaks out against Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who serve on the Jan. 6 committee which bothers Republicans who believe the GOP should be unified in protecting those who participated in a “coup,” as three retired U.S. Army generals characterized it.
“The actions of Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger on behalf of House Democrats have given supposedly bipartisan justification to an overtly partisan political persecution that brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law, legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong, and which demeans the standing of the House,” […]
Linda Greenhouse, Contibuting Opinion Writer - The New York Times
Stephan: Here is some interesting background on the bizarre anti-science recent court decision by the conservatives on the Supreme Court concerning Biden's vaccine policy.
The Supreme Court in Washington. Credit: Mandel Ngan / Agence France-Presse / Getty
Halfway through their pained dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision blocking the Biden administration’s workplace Covid vaccine rule, the court’s three liberal justices made a glancing reference to a now-obscure case from 1981, American Textile Manufacturers Institute v. Donovan. It was one of the court’s first efforts to interpret the 1970 law that created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
There surely was nothing casual about their citation to this case, once the stuff of headlines. Among the dissenters was Justice Stephen Breyer, the court’s authority on administrative law, a subject that he taught for many years at Harvard Law School and that has never been more important, or contested, than it is today, as we see now in the court’s decision on the OSHA vaccine directive. At issue in the 1981 case was the validity of OSHA’s imposition of a new limit on textile workers’ exposure to cotton dust, a workplace hazard that causes serious lung disease. Upholding […]
Stephan: This survey by The Gallup Organization should be of grave concern to every person in America who supports democracy, and wants to see the United States continue as a democratic republic. Personally, I am appalled.
Story Highlights
Preferences shifted from nine-point Democratic advantage to five-point GOP edge
Average party preferences for all of 2021 similar to past years
Largest percentage of U.S. adults identify as political independents
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On average, Americans’ political party preferences in 2021 looked similar to prior years, with slightly more U.S. adults identifying as Democrats or leaning Democratic (46%) than identified as Republicans or leaned Republican (43%).
However, the general stability for the full-year average obscures a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter.
These results are based on aggregated data from all U.S. Gallup telephone surveys in 2021, which included interviews with more than 12,000 randomly sampled U.S. adults.
Gallup asks all Americans it interviews whether they identify politically as a Republican, a Democrat or an independent. Independents are then asked whether they lean more toward the Republican or Democratic Party. The combined percentage of party identifiers and leaners gives a measure of the relative strength of the two parties […]
Stephan: Every day brings more criminal activity to light by Trump and his orcs seeking to destroy democracy to keep him in power. How is it possible that a man so obviously criminal and corrupt is actually increasing in popularity, as the Gallup survey in the previous article reports?
I think the answer is the fear of lower I.Q. White people, fueled by corporate and uber-rich dark money interests who see them as exploitable and expendable peasants. The MAGAts are frightened that their world is changing in ways they neither understand nor like. (See yesterday's SR for a lengthy article on this). That said, unless we can, as a nation, understand that we are becoming a multi-racial, multi-ethnic country, we are headed into White supremacy, male dominant, christofascism, and will remain poorly prepared for the challenges of climate change.
Former president Donald Trump made no secret of his interest in meddling with the 2020 Census. But newly released documents show the extraordinary measures his political appointees took to alter the outcome—and the strong pushback they encountered from Census Bureau career staff.
An accurate and total count of all people living in the country every 10 years is one of the few government functions explicitly described in the Constitution, and the outcomes of the Census determine everything from congressional representation to how federal aid is distributed. With the 2020 election fast approaching and a pandemic making it even more difficult to complete, the Trump administration began pressuring Census officials to wrap up their counting early—a decision that could have potentially benefited the GOP and Trump if the final count failed to capture certain harder-to-measure demographics like immigrants.
In the summer of 2020, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University began trying to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain details of just how these decisions were being made, and after their requests were denied, filed a lawsuit. […]
Stephan: America's wealth inequality is so great, I think, it is actually incomprehensible to most Americans, going both ways. If you are worried about whether you can pay your mortgage or your rent this month, or buy the new shoes you son needs, who is growing like a weed at 14, or the braces your pretty daughter needs to straighten her teeth, how can you possibly imagine deciding to spend 100 million dollars for a new yacht you fancy? If you are that rich, how can you possibly comprehend the financial stress that afflicts both many in the lower middle class, let along the yawning money terror that confronts the poor.
The rich, the middle class, and the poor live in three different worlds that have little or nothing to do with one another, and it is a major factor in the Great Schism Trend that has torn the country apart.
Elon Musk attends TIME Person of the Year on December 13, 2021 in New York City. Credit:Theo Wargo/Getty
The world’s 10 richest men doubled their wealth during the COVID-19 pandemic, from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion, according to a report published by Oxfam. In the meantime, 99 percent of the global population saw their incomes decrease during the pandemic while 160 million were pushed into poverty. “If these ten men were to lose 99.999 percent of their wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than 99 percent of all the people on this planet,” said Oxfam International’s Executive Director Gabriela Bucher. “They now have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people.”
Billionaires as a whole have added $5 trillion to their fortunes during the pandemic. The total wealth of billionaires rose from $8.6 trillion in March 2020 to $13.8 trillion in November 2021, the biggest increase in the last 14 years. Meanwhile, inequality contributes to the death of at least 21,000 people per day, according to Oxfam, which describes the number […]
