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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
JUSTIN MILLER, Political Reporter - Texas Observer
Stephan:
The Texas far-right Republican organization, a modern Nazis party that controls Texas government, is openly trying to turn the state into a christofascist anocracy. Here is some of the proof.
Nick Fuentes (middle) a White Supremacist photographed exiting offices of Pale Horse Strategies with Chris Russo (right), founder and president of Texans for Strong Borders, in Forth Worth on Oct. 6, 2023. Pale Horse is a consulting firm owned by the far-right GOP activist Jonathan Strickland. Credit: Texas Tribune.
The Texas GOP’s full-on embrace of extremism continues unabated.
Over the weekend, a majority of the Texas State Republican Executive Committee (SREC) voted to remove language from a resolution affirming support for Israel that would have prohibited party associations with people and groups “known to espouse or tolerate antisemitism, pro-Nazi sympathies or Holocaust denial.”Members of the state party committee—who are elected by party delegates—voted 31-29 to remove that language. About half the committee also tried to block a public record of the vote.
The proposed ban on associating with such extremists came during the first quarterly meeting since Hitler admirer and antisemitic far-right activist Nick Fuentes was caught on camera in October while visiting the Fort Worth offices of former state representative and prominent right-wing operative Jonathan Stickland, […]
The Republican christofascists are already trying to do everything they can to screw up the election process in their county. Here’s the story and how the underpaid overworked election workers are dealing with this. I think we can anticipate that the Republicans are going to do everything they can to confound what used to be a simple straightforward process. Those of us who support democracy, and a fair and just election process need to be prepared for this. If you can volunteer to be an election worker so the system in your voting district operates as it should.
A voter casts his ballot for midterm elections at a polling station in Marietta, Georgia, on 8 November 2022. Credit: Bob Strong / Reuters
ATLANTA, GEORGIA — Deb Cox has been elections director of Lowndes county in southern Georgia for more than a decade – and has never before received so many time-consuming demands for public information.
Like many elections officials across the country, Cox has been inundated with Freedom of Information Act and open records requests from rightwing activists who believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. That’s forced her and other local officials to spend an unusual amount of time and money providing polling documents to partisan groups – an additional burden as they scramble to prepare for the fraught 2024 presidential election.
Cox, a military veteran with prior law enforcement experience and an unflappable approach to her work, is in charge of preparing and managing all processes regarding voting and elections in the mid-sized county that hugs Georgia’s border with Florida and includes the small city of Valdosta.
David Badash, Staff Writer - The New Civil Rights Movement
Stephan:
Christofascist Republican American Congress members are meeting secretly with Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, also a christofascist, and a pipeline to Putin. These are the same Congress members who are trying to stop further funding for Ukraine. Here is the story. I wonder if the people that voted for these scum realize they are voting for Russian supporters against American interests.
Christofascist Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán
Congressional Republicans are meeting in secret this week behind closed doors with allies of the far-right Christian nationalist authoritarian Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán. Those allies, including from a Hungarian government agency that reportedly organized a far-right U.S. group’s conference in Budapest, are working to support Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal war against Ukraine. GOP lawmakers, especially in the House but increasingly in the Senate, have been voicing strong opposition to the U.S. sending any additional funding to Ukraine.
“Members of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and staff from the Hungarian embassy in Washington will on Monday begin a two-day event hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank,” The Guardian reports. The Heritage Foundation, once considered the premier conservative think tank, by 2016 was a pro-Trump group. Now, Heritage is behind the massive Project 2025, which aims to install tens of thousands of pro-Trump loyalists into the federal government if the ex-president re-takes the White […]
A recently released report from Northwestern University “found the decline in the number of local newspapers nationwide has accelerated. A key takeaway from Medill’s annual ‘State of Local News Project’ is that since 2005, there have been 2,900 newspapers that have stopped. There are now approximately 6,000 newspapers remaining with most of them (4,790), weeklies. In 2005 there were 8,891 newspapers. In the early 20th century. there had been about 24,000 newspapers in the U.S.” Six companies control 90% of the media in the United States. They operate with only one consideration, maximum profit. The traditional function of media in democracy from Benjamin Franklin until the 1980s, to be the Fourth Estate, the investigator for and chronicler of the people is of interest only if it increases profits. If you were designing a media to support democracy would it be devoting most of its coverage to Donald Trump?
Employees of the Washington Post picket near an oversized inflatable rat outside the company’s offices in downtown Washington, Thursday, Dec. 7, 2023. Dozens of employees joined the protest on Thursday as hundreds of Washington Post workers were expected to walk off the job amid a one-day strike over labor issues. Credit: Mark Schiefelbein / AP
About 750 members of the Washington Post Guild staged a one-day strike against the paper on Thursday to publicize their position that management is not bargaining with them in good faith. Staffers who picketed were joined by Scabby the Rat, and many Post reporters withheld their bylines from the paper’s Thursday and Friday editions in protest.
The mini-strikers may not have imagined that their direct action would force the Jeff Bezos-owned paper to submit to their demands. Few, if any, subscribers will notice or care that bylines were withheld, nor will many be moved by the fact that the Friday edition seemed fattened with what appeared to be staff stories that had been banked. The true purpose […]
The American wealth inequality, which is the direct result of the Republicans rigging the tax system, after a Republican majority of the Supreme Court legalized the bribery of Congress members with the Citizens United decision, is the worst amongst all the developed nations. There is no other country in which the wealth of just 4 people is as great as the collective wealth of 48% of the rest of the country. If you vote for Republicans you are literally stealing money out of your own pockets. It is a tragedy that most Republican voters can’t seem to grasp.
U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse attends a hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington D.C. on December 5, 2023. Credit: Celal Gunes / Anadolu / Getty
The Democratic chair of the Senate Budget Committee rebuked his Republican colleagues on Thursday for demanding action to reduce the U.S. debt after adding roughly $10 trillion to it with tax cuts for the rich and large corporations.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) was responding to a letter he received earlier this week from Republican members of the budget committee, who criticized the chair for dedicating “significant time and attention to climate issues” while purportedly neglecting “the impending budgetary and fiscal crisis facing our nation.”
In a written reply, Whitehouse noted that “if not for the Bush tax cuts, their extensions, and then the Trump tax cuts, the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio would be declining indefinitely.”
The Bush administration’s decision to launch the so-called “war on terror”—which received bipartisan support in Congress—also cost the U.S. upwards of $8 trillion, […]
If you have ever travelled in another country, like Japan or Italy, you know that you can always tell who are Americans because of their obesity. It is just a strong characteristic of the American population. It is part of the reason Americans live five years less than the people of other nations. It is the result of inadequate exercise, and terrible diet. Almost all the food you see advertised on cable television is bad for you.
Plus-sized model Tess Holliday (pictured during Beautycon in LA) has been outspoken about body image
Sitting picturesquely in the foothills of the hiking and skiing mecca of the Rocky Mountains, Boulder isn’t known as America’s fittest city for nothing.
Intimidatingly hale and hearty, it’s a place where bars and restaurants are dead by 9pm so locals can fit in an early morning ski or mountain-bike climb before work.
It sits at 5,430ft above sea level so endurance athletes from all over the world come to train here. Boulder’s social calendar is packed with a daunting series of strenuous events including an annual 10km road race that attracts 50,000 runners, a plunge into an iced-over lake and a ‘Tube To Work Day’ in which commuters hurtle down the rapids of a river clinging to car tyre inner tubes.
And then there’s the annual Halloween Dash, when residents run naked down the city’s main street in front of cheering crowds wearing nothing but a hollowed-out pumpkin on their head. Anywhere else the locals might be just a little self-conscious but not Boulder, where many people are only too happy to […]
This report, I think is just an early account of an emerging trend that is going to notably transform American media. Newspapers are dying, misinformation has taken over social media, and television channels are owned by a handful of corporations. AI is going to be an irresistible temptation because of the money it will save publications. Getting the actual facts about something is going to become terribly difficult, and the influence of AI-created misinformation is going to come to dominate people’s thinking. America is a very sick country if your calibration is egalitarian democracy.
One of the most highly-trafficked financial news websites in the world is creating AI-generated stories that bear an uncanny resemblance to stories published just hours early by other competitors.
Investing.com, a Tel Aviv-based site owned by Joffre Capital, is a financial news and information hub that provides a mix of markets data and investing tips and trends. But increasingly, the site has been relying on AI to create its stories, which often appear to be thinly-veiled copies of human-written stories written elsewhere.
In early November, the blog CryptoNewsLand wrote a short item noting that the token XRP had “witnessed a resurgence in both its price and investor activity” in recent days. Just a few hours later, Investing published a similar article citing nine of the same statistics as those in the CryptoNewsLand story, as well as the same dataset from Santiment. Both articles were four paragraphs.
On the same day, longrunning financial news site The Motley Fool published a story comparing Microsoft’s stock performance to Google’s. In its piece, Motley Fool noted that Microsoft seemed poised for […]
COP28, headed by an oil executive from a country that has no other income source but oil and gas to keep the rich, rich, 2,400 petroleum lobbyists hovering over every day’s meeting. What could possibly go wrong. George Monbiot spells it out.
Protesters at Cop28 call for an end to fossil fuels, 8 December 2023. Credit: Dominika Zarzycka/ NurPhoto / Shutterstock
Let’s face it: climate summits are broken. The delegates talk and talk, while Earth systems slide towards deadly tipping points. Since the climate negotiations began in 1992 more carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels has been released worldwide than in all preceding human history. This year is likely to set a new emissions record. They are talking us to oblivion.
Throughout these Conference of the Parties (Cop) summits, fossil fuel lobbyists have swarmed the corridors and meeting rooms. It’s like allowing weapons manufacturers to dominate a peace conference. This year, the lobbyists outnumber all but one of the national delegations. And they’re not the only ones: Cop28 is also heaving with meat and livestock lobbyists and reps from other planet-trashing industries. What should be the most important summit on Earth is treated like a trade fair.
It’s not surprising that the two decisive measures these negotiations should have delivered at the outset – agreements to leave […]
