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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.
I don’t know whether Victoria Spartz the Republican representing the 5th District of Indiana is as stupid as she sounds or whether she is just an anti-democracy christofascist follower of criminal Trump. What I do know is that a majority of the voters in the 5th District elected this woman, she reflects their thinking, and it is another example of Red State willful ignorance and the Great Schism Trend.
Christofascist Republican Representative Victoria Spartz of the Fifth District of Indiana Credit: Screencapture
U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) is calling on Congress to “shut down” the U.S. economy over the southern border, while accusing President Joe Biden of Marxist policies and denouncing his border legislation that Donald Trump ordered killed months ago.
Congresswoman Spartz on Tuesday spoke to Fox News Business host Maria Bartiromo in a rambling interview on the Senate bipartisan border bill that Donald Trump ordered killed. Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is one again trying to pass it.
Rep. Spartz said, “we need to get them back, you know, to really put pressure to control the border. So I just don’t see anything else left there because no one wants to shut down the economy, unfortunately. We should really for such a serious issue, but Republicans are not gonna do it. And, and you know, and we’re not just going to let Democrats have messagings bill with lots of loopholes. There are way more loopholes in that bill than people even realized.”
As bad as the Alito majority decision on Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP is, it was not radical enough for Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who is so obviously a flagrantly corrupt self-loathing Black man who feels he is above any law. The Supreme Court is no longer a judicially neutral law-based body. It is a political action group trying to restructure the United States as a christofascist pseudo-democracy. As I said yesterday with this corrupt Supreme Court, and a House controlled by the likes of Mike Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Jim Jordan, can we still say we are a democsracy?
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty
The Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision on Thursday in Alexander v. South Carolina NAACPis a devastating blow to the fight against racial gerrymandering. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the conservative supermajority guts a series of precedents that guarded against racist redistricting, granting state legislatures sweeping new authority to sort their residents between districts on the basis of skin color.
And yet, as bad as Alito’s opinion was, it didn’t go far enough for Justice Clarence Thomas, who penned a solo concurrence demanding a radical move: The Supreme Court, he argued, should overrule every precedent that limits gerrymandering—including the landmark cases establishing “one person, one vote”—because it has no constitutional power to redraw maps in the first place. And he places much of the blame for the court’s allegedly illegitimate intrusion into redistricting on a surprising culprit: Brown v. Board of Education.
Brown was, of course, the 1954 decision holding that racial segregation in public education violates the equal protection clause. Many of us celebrated its 70th anniversary just last week. […]
Aimee Picchi, Associate Managing Editor for CBS MoneyWatch - CBS News
Stephan:
With the christofascist takeover of our democracy dominating the media, this very good news from Biden and his administration is getting very little attention. But it is a big deal. If you have student debt or know someone who does read this follow the guidance it gives.
President Biden speaking at Morehouse College in Atlanta on May 19. Credit: Christian Monterrosa/Bloomberg / Getty
The White House on Wednesday said it has approved $7.7 billion of student debt cancellation for 160,500 borrowers, part of its ongoing effort to provide relief after the Supreme Court last year blocked President Joe Biden’s plan for broad-based college loan forgiveness.
With the latest round of forgiveness, the administration has erased a total of $167 billion in student loans for 4.75 million people, or about 1 in 10 student loan borrowers, the Department of Education said.
The people who qualify for forgiveness in the latest round of debt cancellation include public servants such as teachers and law enforcement officers, as well as tens of thousands of people who have signed up for Biden’s new loan repayment program, called SAVE. That program, created last year, pegs a borrower’s monthly payment to their income, lowering their financial payments, and […]
You have probably already seen one of the many reports on Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito’s open, one might even say blatant, proclamation that he is a christofascist, not a neutral law-based Justice. Everyone is talking about how Alito and Thomas clearly think themselves above the law and lack any ethical standards. The reason I am running this story, however, is to make a different very important point that is not getting properly discussed. I don’t see anything new in Alito’s proclamation. He has made who he is quite clear over several years now. What I think is important is that this Alito story is telling America that one of the legislative branches, the House, and the peak of the judicial branch, the Supreme Court, are now under the control of anti-democracy christofascists. I’m not sure it is correct to say the United States is still a democracy.
Supreme Court christofascist Associate Justice Justice Samuel Alito Jr. and his wife Martha-Ann Alito. Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A second flag of a type carried by rioters during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was displayed outside a house owned by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
An “Appeal to Heaven” flag was flown outside Alito’s beach vacation home last summer. An inverted American flag — another symbol carried by rioters — was seen at Alito’s home outside Washington less than two weeks after the violent attack on the Capitol.
News of the upside-down American flag sparked an uproar last week, including calls from high-ranking Democrats for Alito to recuse himself from cases related to former President Donald Trump.
Alito and the court declined to respond to requests for comment on how the “Appeal to Heaven” flag came to be flying and what it was intended to express. He previously said the inverted American flag was flown by his wife amid a dispute with […]
They don’t like electric vehicles, they are obsessed with guns. They say their faith and Christianity determine their behavior and yet they violate everything Jesus teaches. When I tell you we have become two different countries in a single nation, this article illustrates the difference very clearly. The East side of Oregon as the article describes wants to change the state borders so they can leave a Blue state in order to join christofascist male-dominant racist Red state. I think Oregon ought to let those counties do it. Idaho is a state whose anti-women policies have gotten so bad their already poor healthcare is degrading to a point where doctors feel threatened and are fed up and leaving.
Debates on Oregon’s border have divided local communities. Credit: Images courtesy of Channel 4 News_Michael French’
Under a large tent at the Crook county fairgrounds in Prineville, Oregon, six people stand in a neat line, each clutching the gun in their holster. “Shooters, set,” a man to the side yells. They wait. A light turns on in the centre of the target. They fire. A clock above records how long it took them to draw, shoot and, if they managed to, hit the target. They’re playing in pairs. Best two out of three wins.
Welcome to Oregon’s Cowboy Fast Draw State Championship, a sport organisers say is “dedicated to the romance and legend of the Old West”.
The residents of Prineville are voting on 21 May on a fundamental question: “Should Crook county represent that its citizens support efforts to move the Idaho state border to include Crook county?” If a majority votes yes, the county will become the 13th to vote in favor of leaving the state of Oregon and joining next-door Idaho instead. Polarisation breeds frustration which creates secession. America’s past and […]
The christofascist revolution that is going on in the United States is being financed by corporations and the uber-rich, and they are banking on the Supreme Court to reduce the regulation and oversight of their financial base, as this report describes. The rich always try to do this, so there is nothing particularly surprising in that. The pathetic part of this story is how easily they, through criminal Trump and his minions, are manipulating a large part of the White population to give up their democracy.
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy could hobble a whole range of agencies in unpredictable ways. Credit: Francis Chung/Politico
A decade-long conservative crusade against financial regulators will come to a head soon with a crucial Supreme Court ruling, part of a legal strategy that has spread across multiple Washington agencies into a broad attack on a core power of the federal government.
The court’s ruling on Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, a case challenging the power of in-house federal judges, could hobble a whole range of agencies in unpredictable ways, cutting the powers of antitrust enforcers, labor regulators and consumer finance watchdogs.
Driven by an alliance of tech billionaires, conservative legal activists and the business lobby, the legal campaign that has arisen around Jarkesy is a little-appreciated but significant version of the “war on the administrative state” that Donald Trump promised but largely failed to deliver.
The decision is one of three Supreme Court fights this term […]
By Charles Passy and Victor Reklaitis, - MarketWatch
Stephan:
Look at this story. Nearly half of Americans as this report describes believe the economy is in crisis and going down when, in fact, it is going up and has been for months. Why do they believe this? Because of MAGAt sourced misinformation, and the endless lies proclaiming Biden is creating an economic disaster from the mouth of their monarch criminal Trump. Our country is being destroyed to keep Trump out of prison. The only thing that is going to stop this is an unequivocal election that re-elects Biden and gives the Senate and the House strong Democratic majorities. That may sound politically partisan, but is is actually about the survival of our democracy.
Many Americans incorrectly think the stock market is down, inflation is rising and a U.S. recession is underway. Credit: Patrick Smith / Getty
A new poll is offering fresh evidence that the U.S. economy’s strong performance isn’t resonating with many Americans, even as numerous conventional economic indicators are encouraging.
Some 49% of respondents to the poll, conducted by Harris for the Guardian newspaper, said incorrectly that the S&P 500 SPX was down for the year. The U.S. stock benchmark actually scored a record high Tuesday, stretching its year-to-date rise to about 12% following a 24% gain last year.
MarketWatch noted last week that Americans have appeared indifferent to the stock market’s rally, even as the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s DJIA first-ever close above 40,000 has generated headlines.
Other findings from the new poll include that 72% said they believe the rate of inflation is increasing. The April report for the consumer price index, or CPI, showed prices rising at a […]
This is how deranged the Congressional Republicans have become. There have been 63 court cases testing whether there was something awry in the 2020 election, thousands of hours of research tested the idea., nothing confirmed the claim that there was anything amiss in the election. It is all criminal Trump’s fabrication. And yet the MAGAt mafia believes it without question.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) departs from the Senate Chambers during a series of the votes at the U.S. Capitol Building on February 13, 2023 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Anna Moneymaker / Getty
Four years ago, during the United States’ 2020 presidential race, supporters of then-President Donald Trump accused “Real Time” host Bill Maher of “Trump derangement syndrome” when he predicted that Trump would not accept the election results if he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
But Trump, just as Maher predicted, refused to acknowledge that he lost the election. Now, in 2024, Trump is the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, and Congress — according to the Associated — is full of Republican lawmakers who have either falsely claimed that the 2020 election was stolen or won’t commit to accepting the election results if Trump loses to Biden a second time in November.
In a report Tuesday, States United Action — a group that goes after election deniers — found that almost one-third of Congress […]
