Crooked Media - Judged on the Herits

- Sean Hannity perhaps meeting his terrible annoying guy match in an interview with Vivek Ramaswamy 

The Republican Party’s 2024 presidential frontrunner (by some 40-plus points) is a four-times indicted criminal, and the rest of the party cannot even bring itself to condemn neo-Nazis. So where does the GOP go from here?
 

• Well, nowhere good! Whether or not disgraced former president Donald Trump is the GOP nominee the Republican Party and its allied organizations are preparing for his possible second White House term and folks, it’s pretty scary. Former Trump administration officials have joined forces with the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation to create a government-in-waiting for any GOP candidate who might beat President Biden in 2024. 
   

• These ghouls went so far as to draw up a 1,000-page handbook called “Project 2025” (I’m gonna be sick) which outlines a Day One plan to dismantle the federal government as we know it in order to do away with what they call “deep state” bureaucracy. According to that plan, the first order of business would be firing as many as 50,000 federal workers. It’s a GOP tale as old as time: slash agency resources (or in this case the whole government’s), and then a few months later smugly point to the ensuing chaos and say, “Wow, can you believe how dysfunctional this is? See? Government doesn’t work!!!”
   

• MAGA conservatives are on a mission to take “a wrecking ball to the administrative state” by firing all of the federal employees they claim would stand in the way of a Republican president’s agenda, and replacing them with other MAGA loyalists. In other words, no one thought Trump was going to win in 2016, so in his first administration, his team was not prepared to govern. Throughout his term, many lawmakers, federal employees, and even some of Trump’s own appointees refused to bend or break the law to achieve his goals, and that is not a mistake the GOP wants to make twice.

This isn’t the first time that the Heritage Foundation and anti-government conservatives have formulated a master plan of destruction. 
 

• Project 2025 is a Joker-esque blend of longstanding right-wing policy goals and batshit proposals that picked up speed during the Trump era. Much of a new GOP president’s agenda would be accomplished by reinstating the Trump-era executive order Schedule F, which would reclassify tens of thousands of federal employees as at-will, making them easier to fire. Unsurprisingly, they imagine a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice particularly focused on curbing its political independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of foreign election subversion  (huh, wonder why!). Then there’s a proposal to abolish the Pentagon’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, or anything the project classifies as part of the “woke” agenda, and recommends reinstating service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine. 

• One chapter written by Trump’s former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security calls for bolstering the number of political appointees and redeploying DHS office personnel with law-enforcement credentials to the field to “maximize law enforcement capacity.” The book suggests a “reexamin[ation]” of providing work space for the White House press corps, and specific language about ensuring that White House counsel is “deeply committed” to the president’s agenda. Congress would see its role minimized through proposals like eliminating congressional notification on certain foreign arms sales. Fucking yikes. 

The thread running through Project 2025 is the bogus right-wing “unitary executive” theory, which holds that the president has broad authority to act alone (so long as the president is a Republican). This is the mainstream agenda of today’s GOP. Congressional Republicans now openly endorse defunding the FBI and eliminating the salary of Special Counsel Jack Smith. House Republicans introduced amendments on Monday to defund all active prosecutions of Trump. If Trump for some reason is not the 2024 nominee, the reigning GOP doctrine will all but ensure that someone just like him springs up in his place.

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Michael Farris may not be a household name, but the conservative Christian lawyer is the most influential leader of the modern home-schooling movement. For decades, his arguments about the evils of public education and “divinely-endowed” parental rights didn’t make much of a cultural dent. But post-Trump and post-COVID conservatives  have taken to his ideology in huge numbers. The pitch is the same: Public schools are “indoctrinating” children with a secular worldview that amounts to a godless religion, but the solution is new. Farris and his movement are seeking to file lawsuits alleging that public school teachings are unconstitutional, and kicking the issue over to the hundreds of allied, right-wing federal judges and the far-right majority on the Supreme Court. Their ultimate goal is a federal decision that would mandate parents’ right to claim billions of tax dollars for private education or homeschooling, effectively defunding public schools. 

The war on public education is not new, but it’s reached a fever pitch in the GOP. Farris was the president of the powerhouse Christian legal group the Alliance Defending Freedom from 2017-2022, where the group and its allies have filed dozens of federal lawsuits alleging that public schools are “violating parental and religious rights. At last Wednesday’s Republican presidential primary debate, almost every candidate bragged about “taking on the teachers unions” and getting “indoctrination” “out of our schools.” (To be clear: they absolutely want conservative Christian indoctrination in schools.) The movement also found a highly effective, unhinged vessel in Donald Trump, who in a presidential campaign video earlier this year called for a “federal parental bill of rights,” saying that secular public school instruction has become a “new religion,” using Farris’s words from 40 years ago almost exactly. According to a Washington Post analysis, “parental rights” measures have been proposed or enacted in more than half of all states this year alone.

Wagner mercenary group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was quietly buried outside of his hometown of St. Petersburg on Tuesday, six days after he was killed in an “unexplained” (Putin did it) plane crash.

Floridians are preparing for Hurricane Idalia to make landfall on the state’s Gulf Coast early on Wednesday as a Category 3 storm. 

A wildfire that has been burning in Greece for over 11 days has destroyed an area larger than New York City. 

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez announced on Tuesday that he is suspending his presidential campaign after failing to qualify for the first Republican primary debate last week. 

Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) (never forget: the guy who killed the Public Option in the Affordable Care Act) said on Sunday that his group No Labels intends to select a presidential ticket in Dallas this coming April. The guy just loves ruining things!

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) announced on Tuesday that he has been diagnosed with a form of blood cancer known as multiple myeloma and is undergoing treatment.

Ex-FTC Commissioner Joshua Wright resigned from George Mason Law School amid allegations from eight women that he sexually harassed or coerced them, abusing his position and influence. From 2015 until last year, he directed faculty hiring at the conservative institution’s law school. Wright countered with a $108 million defamation lawsuit, calling two of his accusers “scorned former lovers.” Seems like a great guy!

A new study shows that air pollution in South Asia is projected to cut life expectancy by more than five years there, underscoring the important impact air pollution has on human health.

New modern horror just dropped! Self-driving taxis are here. For years now, our creepy tech overlords have been promising that autonomous vehicles will boost safety on the roads and improve transportation access, but even driver-monitored autonomous vehicles have caused hundreds of accidents. A legal framework for driverless cars still doesn’t really exist, and many cities do not want to offer themselves up as testing grounds for unpredictable autonomous vehicles, especially with no clear incentive for doing so. Nevertheless, robotaxi (kill me) companies Cruise and Waymo are implementing plans to scale quickly and deploy fleets of driverless taxis across multiple cities in rapid succession. Austin, Phoenix, and San Francisco are the only cities where the public can currently hail a driverless taxi, but the list could grow by more than a dozen in the next year. Autonomous vehicles “struggle” in the snow, so the targeted cities for rollout are mostly in the sun belt. Should the effort succeed, it will have major labor implications for already-beleaguered taxi and rideshare drivers. Congress has considered A.V. legislation every session since 2017, but has so far failed to pass a bill.

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The Biden Administration just announced the first 10 medications that will be eligible for direct price negotiations with manufacturers under Medicare as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. Among the list are commonly prescribed blood thinners and diabetes medications, as well as cancer treatment. 

A Colorado baby born with a rare birth defect that caused her intestines to grow outside of her body in the womb earlier this year is now three months old and recovering well from a life-saving surgery.