Christopher Flavelle and Julie Tate, Reporters - The New York Times Magazine
Stephan: I don't know about you but I am both saddened and angry at the corruption of our Congress and Supreme Court. The Congressional corruption is certainly bipartisan although the Republicans are notably worse on this score, Mitch McConnell being a horrific example. However, there are some Democrats who also stand out, and none is worse than Joe Manchin. It isn't just that he has been rented, rather that he is on long-term lease to the coal industry, and like McConnell has gone from very modest affluence when he came into the Congress to multi-millionaire status. Think about it, you get a decent salary as a member of Congress, $174,000, three times the average American salary, and the Majority and Minority leaders get a bit more, $193,400. Plus lots of perks and high status. How then do these congress members become multi-millionaires? Why long-term leasing by corporations and the ultra-rich, of course, because bribery of politicians is legal in the United States thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.
Being sworn into the U.S. Senate by Joe Biden in 2010. Credit: Drew Angerer/The New York Times
GRANT TOWN, WEST VIRGINIA — On a hilltop overlooking Paw Paw Creek, 15 miles south of the Pennsylvania border, looms a fortresslike structure with a single smokestack, the only viable business in a dying Appalachian town.
The Grant Town power plant is also the link between the coal industry and the personal finances of Joe Manchin III, the Democrat who rose through state politics to reach the United States Senate, where, through the vagaries of electoral politics, he is now the single most important figure shaping the nation’s energy and climate policy.
Mr. Manchin’s ties to the Grant Town plant date to 1987, when he had just been elected to the West Virginia Senate, a part-time job with base pay of $6,500. His family’s carpet business was struggling.
Opportunity arrived in the form of two developers who wanted to build a power plant in Grant Town, just outside Mr. Manchin’s district. Mr. Manchin, whose grandfather went to work in the mines at age 9 […]
Stephan: Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, a Democrat of course, and I think that is notable, is one of those who give me hope for Congress. His history of integrity is obvious, as is his commitment for fostering wellbeing. And what he is saying here, in my opinion, is exactly what needs to be done. It is absurd that Supreme Court Justices, unlike all other federal judges, should not have ethical standards.
Democratic Senator Cory Booker Credit: The Washington Post
Reactions to a series of text messages from GOP activist and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife Ginni Thomas to former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows about overturning the 2020 election are still pouring from both sides of the aisle. Today, Sen. Cory Booker (D.-N.J.) weighed in and called for a change to the highest court’s ethics rules.
Appearing on Meet the Press Sunday Booker said that he has had “a lot of frustrations” with the US Supreme Court as a whole because “they haven’t taken measures to police themselves.”
“They need to use this Thomas affair as an opportunity to change their ethics rules,” Booker said.
To recap the reasons for the scrutiny on Ginni Thomas, I’ll refer to my colleague Noah Kim’s story about how she had repeatedly urged Trump’s top aide to overturn the election by any means necessary. This in itself would not be a problem, except for the fact that as a Supreme Court justice, her husband ruled on cases directly related to that effort.
Charles Pierce, Columnist - Reader Supported News / Esquire
Stephan: Every day, as I scan through the journals, papers, websites, and news media that I look at in preparation for SR, I find what is happening with the Republican Party ever more alarming. Our governmental design for the last two centuries has been basically a two-party system and now that fundamental is breaking down, by any reasonable measurement. As I watched the way the Republicans behaved in the Brown Jackson hearings I was left with the realization that the Republican Party isn't even interested in democracy anymore. They want power for their cult nothing more. How democracy survives under those circumstances depends entirely on us, our friends and families. For all its flaws, and they are many, I think we have to vote Democrat, because they are the only political organization that believes in democracy, and has some semblance of understanding why fostering wellbeing is the path to take. Charles Pierce thinks similarly, given the facts.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Credit: Alex Wong/Getty
Over the past six or seven years, I’ve had one line of Elvis Costello’s that keeps banging around in my head. It was there as I sat through the amazing confirmation hearings of the collection of unemployables that the previous president* installed in his Cabinet. It was there during the hearing on Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court. It sounded like the genuine trumpet of doom during Brett Kavanaugh’s extended manic episode before the Senate Judiciary Committee. And it was back this week as I watched the rancid flotsam of the Republican senatorial caucus treat Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as though she’d been caught stealing silverware from the Harvard Club. And this is what I’ve kept hearing through most of this wretched decade.
I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused.
I try, but I can’t do it. I can’t look at what’s going on and find any of it clever or funny. I can’t use, “but it works” as an excuse for dangerous political […]
Robyn Dixon, Mary Ilyushina, - Microsoft News / The Washington Post
Stephan: For about 15 years, beginning in 1981, I spent a lot of time in Russia, particularly Moscow and St. Petersburg working both philanthropically, and with businesses. It was fascinating watching Communism die as a failed system, and that time in Russia taught me viscerally and intellectually that the best system of governance is a democracy committed to fostering wellbeing as its first priority.
Russian police arrest someone for having a bouquet of blue and yellow flowers Credit: The Washington Post
RIGA, LATVIA — There was a message to all Russians in the first cases under Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hunt for what he calls “scum and traitors.”
That message is that no one is too small to escape notice.
Authorities arrested an Interior Ministry technician for talking privately on the phone. They also nabbed people holding blank placards implying opposition to the war; a woman wearing a hat in Ukraine’s yellow and blue colors, and a Siberian carpenter in Tomsk named Stanislav Karmakskikh who was holding a poster of an 1871 Vasily Vereshchagin artwork called “The Apotheosis of War.”
A popular food blogger, Nika Belotserkovskaya, was among the first three to face charges under Russia’s law against “fake” war news after her Instagram feed went from truffles and rosé to posts about Ukrainian refugee children. (She is outside Russia.)
The speed of Russia’s transformation to Soviet-style “self-purification” has been astonishing. When Russia invaded Ukraine last month, state TV went to wall-to-wall propaganda blaming […]
Stephan: I urge each reader to write Tom Vilsack, the Secretary of Agriculture and ask him to stop this obscenity. https://www.usda.gov/contact-us
The 2021 toll shows the killings span a Noah’s Ark of species. About 64,000 coyotes were killed. Credit: Rory Merry/Shutterstock
An obscure division of the US government had a busy – and ruthless – year in 2021, killing more than 1.75 million animals across the country, at a rate of about 200 creatures every hour.
The latest annual toll of Wildlife Services, a department within the US Department of Agriculture, has further stoked the fury of conservation groups that have decried the killings as cruel and pointless. Wildlife Services maintains the slaughter is necessary to protect agricultural output, threatened species and human health.
The 2021 toll shows the killings span a Noah’s Ark of species, including alligators, armadillos, doves, owls, otters, porcupines, snakes and turtles. European starlings alone accounted for more than 1m of the animals killed. A single moose was shot, along with a solitary antelope and, accidentally, a bald eagle.
Wildlife Services targets certain invasive species that it considers a threat to ecosystems, such as feral hogs and a type of giant […]
