Notices by Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im), page 13

The oligarchs behind the GQP are asking

"Why can't WE ditch the OLD GUY and run our REAL Facist VP?"

( they can't because they've invested too much in #Cheesus )

Past assassination attempts led to US gun reform.

But not this time

Political violence has long shaped the gun control movement, but it appears little will change from this week

In the aftermath of the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, the calls for stricter gun regulation came quickly.

Senator Thomas Dodd proposed new legislation five days after the president’s death.

Almost two decades later, the 1981 shooting of Ronald Reagan prompted swift demands for action, including restrictions on handguns.

And though in both instances it would take years for lawmakers to move forward, both tragedies led to meaningful reform:
bans on mail-order gun sales,
restrictions on who can purchase weapons
and federal background checks for all gun purchases.

Political violence has long shaped the US gun control movement, but it appears little will change from this week.

After the attempt on Donald Trump’s life over the weekend,
outcry over the easy access to guns in US has been relatively muted.
There are no Republicans calling for tougher laws.
There’s no national conversation about the toll of gun violence on American life.

The biggest movements for gun control in US history can be traced to specific assassinations, said Andrew McKevitt, a history professor at Louisiana Tech University and the author of
"Gun Country", which looks at America’s relationship with firearms.

“The calls for those things came in the immediate aftermath,” McKevitt said.
“These are both kind of foundational moments for gun control in the United States and yet we haven’t seen anything in that regard in the last week.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/20/trump-assassination-attempt-gun-reform?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The wife of Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, #Usha #Chilukuri #Vance, and the couple's #children have become the targets of backlash for their Indian ancestry.
Chilukuri Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants who grew up in San Diego, as well as RNC speaker Harmeet #Dhillon -- who is Sikh and Indian
– are facing anti-Asian hate from far-right figures online.
Posts appear to have spiked this week following Vance's nomination
criticizing Vance for marrying someone who is non-white,
expressing concerns about an influx of Indian immigrants as a result and the so-called #Great #Replacement #conspiracy
have garnered hundreds of thousands of views according to individual post engagement figures.
"Stop AAPI Hate", an advocacy group that tracks anti-Asian hate incidents,
condemned the attacks, arguing that the onslaught of hate has reinforced
“heightened levels of fear and anxiety Asian Americans and immigrants are currently experiencing across the country leading up to this year’s presidential election.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jd-vances-wife-faces-racist-online-backlash-social/story?id=112096897

Tell Congress: Don't Let Anyone Own The Law

A large portion of the regulations we all live by (such as fire safety codes, or the national electrical code)
are initially written
—by industry experts, government officials, and other volunteers
—under the auspices of standards development organizations (SDOs).

Federal, state, or municipal policymakers then review the codes and decide whether the standard is good broad rule.
❌The Pro Codes Act effectively endorses the claim that SDOs can “retain” copyright in codes,
even after they are made law,
as long as they make the codes available through a “publicly accessible” website
– which means read-only, and subject to licensing limits.

💥That's bad for all of us.
Anyone wishing to make the law accessible in a better format would find themselves litigating whether or not they are sheltered by the fair use doctrine
– a risk that many won’t want to take.
♦️We have a constitutional right to read, share and discuss the law.
SDOs have already lost this battle in court after court, which have recognized that no one can own the law.
✅Tell Congress you agree the law should be open to us all and urge them to reject this bill.
https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-don-t-let-anyone-own-the-law

Ocasio-Cortez attacked her fellow Democrats who have spoken anonymously to the press about Biden -- particularly those resigned to defeat in November.

“My community does not have the option to lose,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“If they’re going to come out and say all their little things on background, off the record,
but they’re not going to be fully honest, I’m going to be honest for them.
I’m in these rooms. I see what they say in conversations.”

“A lot of them are not just interested in removing the president. They are interested in removing the whole ticket,” Ocasio-Cortez added.

As far as a plan for replacing Biden, Ocasio-Cortez said that whenever she has asked, she hasn’t gotten an answer.
“I have stood up in rooms with all of these people and I have said, ‘Game out your actual plan for me.’ What are the risks of this going to the Supreme Court?
And no one had an answer for me.… I’m talking about the lawyers. I’m talking about the legislators,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

She noted that the convention is in less than a month, and that Michigan has to finalize their ballot two days after the convention, which could result in a legal crisis.
Ocasio-Cortez said she was concerned that these factors aren’t being considered by Democrats in the replacement camp.

(Recent reports say Biden dropping out of the race is increasingly likely, and could happen in a matter of days.
The president appears to be strongly considering the idea after meeting with Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, and reportedly even former president Barack Obama thinks Biden needs to reconsider running.
A major West Coast donor has already drafted a withdrawal speech.)

https://newrepublic.com/post/184042/aoc-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-warning-biden-drop-out-instagram-live

Process That Felt ‘Hostile’
Platform day arrived last Monday.
Party regulars arrived in Milwaukee with a sense of excitement.
Many of these activists look forward every four years to shaping the Republican Party’s official vision, and they pay their own way to participate in the process.

Members of the platform committee arrived expecting two days of work ahead, prepared to break into subcommittees to draft sections of a document that typically spans thousands of words.

Instead, they handed over their phones to party officials, who sealed them in the magnetic pouches.

Mr. Trump and party operatives were allowed to keep their devices.

Only delegates and guests were denied the ability to communicate with the outside world.

Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies in the Senate, presided over the meeting.

It became clear very quickly to those who wanted to amend the platform that Mr. Trump’s team controlled the room.

One delegate, a state lawmaker from Arizona, Alex Kolodin, had brought a laptop and printer to be prepared.
But there was a quick vote to confiscate those
— and any other electronics.

“The will of the body is the will of the body,” Mr. Kolodin said of having his devices taken.

Mr. Kolodin said he had submitted ideas to the Trump team before the platform committee meeting but did not realize those gathered would have no actual say in the final document.

“This is all for show,” Mr. Kolodin said,
adding that he wished the party had shared that fact in advance.
“We all would have felt more respected by that upfront approach,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/18/us/politics/trump-gop-platform-convention.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Ted Cruz is a man who,
more than just about anyone in his party,
should understand that Hispanic immigrants are in no way guaranteed votes for the Democratic Party.
(His father was born in Cuba.)

But he not only elevated the false idea that there was an intentional plan to transition immigrants into Democratic voters

but that the party did so despite the putative danger posed to children.

Cruz claimed not only that Democrats were encouraging immigration to gain power,
but that they were callously sacrificing children to do so.

https://c.im/@cdarwin/112800295119901507

Now that Ohio Senator J.D. Vance is Donald Trump’s running mate,
everyone is combing through his old quotes,
and a striking one has surfaced:

in 2016, Vance warned that Trump threatened to take the white working class to a “very dark place.”

In short, Vance once understood that MAGA ideology, at its core, is really, really toxic.

And that’s a big political vulnerability.

We talked to Sarah Longwell, the pollster and prominent Never Trumper, about how the Vance pick will showcase the worst aspects of MAGA throughout this race and how Democrats can try to use that to win swing voters.

https://newrepublic.com/article/183904/jd-vances-stunning-admission-trump-spells-trouble-maga

The MAGA Plan to End Free Weather Reports

Project 2025 would all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Charging for popular services that were previously free isn’t generally a winning political strategy.

But hard-right policy makers appear poised to try to do just that should Republicans gain power in the next term
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/07/noaa-project-2025-weather/678987/

Hi there. My name is
Trisha Calvarese,
and I am OFFICIALLY the Democratic nominee running
against Lauren Boebert
here in Colorado's 4th congressional district.

Lauren Boebert is a national embarrassment.

After Beetlejuice-gate, she packed her bags and moved across the state to my district.

Her political career was about to end, and she knew it.

Now, she's brought her bonkers to eastern Colorado,
but that doesn't mean she's going to cruise to victory here:

Brand-new polling shows I can defeat Lauren Boebert and flip this seat blue!

But only if I can raise the money needed to win...

My team has set a goal of raising another $50,000 so we can give Boebert the boot,
but right now, we're still short.

I'm not taking money from corporate PACs,
so if I am going to win and defeat Lauren Boebert, I need grassroots donors like you to chip in to my campaign right now.

This is our last chance to put an end to Lauren Boebert's political career forever:

Please, will you make a weekly donation to my campaign now
-- to help me defeat Lauren Boebert,
flip this seat blue,
and take back the House for Democrats?

https://go.trisha4co.com/7161

Together, we are going to finish the job and finally kick Lauren Boebert out of Congress.

Your support means the world to me.
Thank you.

Trisha

‘Not welcome in our city’: protesters march on Republican convention

“Today is about telling the Republicans that they’re not welcome in our city,
they’re not welcome anywhere and anywhere they show up, we’re going to show the opposition to their ideas,” Flores told the Guardian.

“Basically the entire platform of the Republicans this year is they want to increase border restrictions,
they want to deport immigrants,
they are attacking LGBTQ rights,
and they stand with Israel, and we don’t stand for any of that.
So that’s why we’re marching today,” said Emily Chu, a 22-year-old student who had traveled by bus from Minneapolis.

Sasmit Rahman, who traveled to Milwaukee with Chu, said:
“The Republicans know that their policies aren’t popular with people. You can visibly see that:
they’ve been walking back their public anti-abortion sentiments because they know that it’s not popular.
It doesn’t change the fact that they’re still going to put it in place, but like,
they’re scared of how the people are going to react when they put unpopular policies in place.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/15/republican-national-convention-protest?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

When lobbyists and corporate interests want to influence policy going forward,
they’ll be putting 👉more resources toward the judiciary than the president.👈
When the Supreme Court overturned #Chevron deference last month,
it also 💥upped the ante for corporate interests to land their cases in a favorable court.💥
Before the landmark ruling, presidential administrations could change government rules and expect courts to side with them.
♦️Now, a judge’s decision on a government rule becomes “locked in” as a judicial precedent for future challenges♦️
— 🔸even if the executive branch tries to change it in the future.🔸
“Chevron was supposed to, deference was supposed to, take some of the edge off of those selections
because whatever judge you got, they were supposed to be deferential.
But that’s gone now,” administrative law expert Craig Green told NOTUS.

The incentives for corporate interests to invest financially in presidential elections don’t disappear,
but they do shift, in part, from the president’s power over agencies to the president’s power over judicial appointments.
https://www.notus.org/courts/scotus-chevron-judge-shopping-brand-x

JD Vance is a rightwing troll disguised as a populist, and
could be our next vice-president

J.D. got the nod from Don, not just for sycophancy, but for clear and present authoritarian tendencies

The junior senator from Ohio had a massive advantage that made him more similar to Trump than any other contender:
a presence in popular culture, created by "Hillbilly Elegy,"
the memoir to which both conservatives and liberals dumbfounded by Trump’s triumph turned eagerly to understand why the “left behind” were opting for rightwing populism.

People think they know Vance, because they know his narrative:
growing up in poverty in Appalachia and making it to Yale Law School and Silicon Valley,
only to then turn into "political champion of blue-collar folks."

Vance perfected what, on the right, tends to substitute for policy ideas these days:
trolling the liberals.

Mobilizing voters is less about programs, or a real legislative record (Vance has none).

Rather, it’s generating political energy by deepening people’s sense of shared #victimhood.

No one but J.D. would try to schmooze voters with an invocation of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt -- who, in the 1930s, claimed that liberals were either weaklings or prone to betray their own ideals.
(Schmitt is an obscure reference to most outside the hallowed halls of Yale Law School, but a signal to cognoscenti that Vance is all in on antiliberalism.)

As with so many self-declared rightwing champions of the working class, economics isn’t ultimately where the action is;
“elite campuses” feature much more in an increasingly feverish Maga imagination.

Vance has declared universities the enemy
and asserted that “the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with leftwing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary”.

The reality is that Orbán has simply shut down entire academic subjects which conservatives don’t like – no more gender studies – and handed over Hungarian universities to cronies;
he also managed to chase out the country’s best school, Central European University.

When pressed, Vance re-describes his Orbánism as giving taxpayers a say in how their dollars are spent in education
– a startling admission that politicians should be in control,

and of course a blatant contradiction with the free speech pieties Vance’s allies in Congress have become so good at weaponizing.

How the hillbillies of Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy will benefit from removing Judith Butler from reading lists at Harvard is anyone’s guess.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/09/jd-vance-is-a-rightwing-troll-disguised-as-a-populist-he-could-be-our-next-vice-president?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Fox's Brit Hume on H. D.Vance:

"then you think, well, is this person, how did he get the job?

Did he get it because he was really the best qualified to be president?

Or did he get it because he sucked up effectively to the nominee?

People will have questions about that."

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/foxs-brit-hume-says-voters-will-wonder-if-trump-picked-vance-as-running-mate-because-the-senator-sucked-up-effectively-to-the-nominee/

Four Colorado poultry workers diagnosed with bird flu

Four poultry workers in Colorado have been diagnosed with bird flu, health officials have confirmed.

The new cases bring the US total to nine since the first human case of the current outbreak was detected in 2022,
also in a Colorado poultry worker.
Eight of the nine were reported this year.

Their illnesses were relatively mild
– reddened and irritated eyes and common respiratory infection symptoms such as fever, chills, coughing, sore throat and runny nose.
None were hospitalized, officials said.

The other US cases have also been mild.

A fifth person with symptoms is undergoing testing, but those results are not back yet, officials said.
The workers were culling poultry at a farm in north-east Colorado, according to state health officials. All had direct contact with infected birds.

A bird flu virus has been spreading since 2020 among mammals
– including dogs, cats, skunks, bears and even seals and porpoises
– in scores of countries.
Earlier this year the virus, known as #H5N1, was detected in US livestock,
and is now circulating in cattle in several states.

Health officials continue to characterize the threat to the general public as low,
and the virus has not spread between people.
But officials are keeping careful watch because earlier versions of the same virus have been deadly to people.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sent a nine-person team to Colorado to help in the investigation, at the state’s request, CDC officials said.
This cases earlier this year were among dairy farm workers in Michigan, Texas and Colorado.

The virus detected in the four latest cases is least partly identical to the type found in the earlier US cases,
but further genetic analysis is underway to make sure it is exactly the same, officials said.

As of last Friday, the H5N1 virus has been confirmed in 152 dairy herds in 12 states, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
Hundreds of commercial poultry flocks in more than 30 states have reported H5N1 or other types of bird flu.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/15/colorado-bird-flu?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Project 2025 … and 1921, and 1973, and 1981

Terrifying blueprints for the next Republican presidency are a quadrennial tradition.

This year’s Mandate for Leadership is the ninth edition in the series.

I’ve never seen the “Mandate V” and “Mandate VI” volumes from 2000 and 2005, so I can’t say how much they contributed to George W. Bush’s own unique contributions to the deconstruction of the administrative state, and the debacles of deregulation

But I can report, thanks to Wikipedia, that the one in 2005 was a mere 156 pages,
because “according to Heritage, the shorter length reflected that
policies and ideas from the early Mandate editions had, by the time of this publication, largely become part of the mainstream debate.”

So what of this edition in the series?

What is same old same old, what’s uniquely MAGA? What’s an accumulation of decades of momentum, what’s a veering from the Reaganite course?

Where is the “Special Assignment Technique” buried within, only this time for some constitutionally fastidious attorney general or Geneva Convention–besotted four-star general?

Bottom line:
How much of it renders reasonable the fears we’ve been hearing, that this time, they finally have the federal government figured out?

👉There’s plenty. 👈

Tune in next week. Same wing-nutty time, same wing-nutty channel.

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/

US lawmakers and analysts have been voicing concern since the 2021 US Capitol riot that increasingly bellicose campaign language was becoming a worrying contusion on the US body politic ahead of November's presidential election

Trump himself has been a major architect of the coarsening in US political discourse in recent years.
Many of Trump's targets in Congress and the government
-- from Republican Senator Mitt Romney to retired top government scientist Anthony Fauci
-- have disclosed having to take on private security after threats from Trump's supporters.
The former US president sparked fury last year when he implied that the country's top military officer should be executed, and joked about the Pelosi hammer attack.
Trump's exhortations to violence are nothing new -- he suggested that protesters should be "roughed up" at a rally in 2016, and that looters should be shot during the 2020 racial protests over the police murder of George Floyd.
He has also repeatedly described the attorneys leading the multiple civil and criminal cases he faces as "monster," "deranged" and "psycho."
And, of course, many argue he incited the deadly Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, when he exhorted his followers to "fight like hell" shortly before they stormed the seat of US government, leaving five people dead.
Republicans have in the past accused Democrats of overreacting to figurative language and ignoring leftist aggression, such as harassment of conservative Supreme Court justices and the 2017 shooting that wounded Scalise.
Still, law enforcement agencies say that while threats have proliferated from every corner, right-wing violence is the bigger threat.

Discourse that was once taboo is now commonplace on the far right, with Republican flamethrowers in Congress incorporating violent language and imagery into their stump speeches.
Threats against members of Congress of all stripes reached a record high of 9,625 in 2021, according to data provided by the Capitol Police, compared with just 3,939 in 2017.
Robert Pape of the University of Chicago has conducted several polls on political violence since the Capitol assault. In his latest last month, 10 percent of respondents said the use of force was "justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president."
"The shooting of former President Trump is a consequence of such significant support for political violence in our country," he told AFP.
"We also need to worry about threat in retribution to President Biden. Our survey shows seven percent of American adults -- 18 million -- support force to restore Trump to the presidency, half of whom own guns."
Political analyst Charlie Kolean called for Americans to stand together "in condemning such violence and work towards ensuring the safety and security of all public officials."
"Today's events are a stark reminder of the threats our leaders face," Kolean, the chief strategy officer at conservative-leaning political consultancy RED PAC, told AFP.
"An attack on the presidential candidate is an attack on our democracy."
https://www.rawstory.com/bullet-and-the-ballot-box-violent-us-rhetoric-comes-home-to-roost/

Supreme Court corruption is untouchable,

But last week Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced a formal request to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland for the opening of an investigation into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Separately, this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York filed articles of impeachmentagainst not only Thomas, but fellow justice Samuel Alito.

Thanks to crack reporting from ProPublica, the world was made aware last year that the SCOTUS justice has been accepting millions of dollars worth of lavish vacations, yacht trips, and international jet-setting on the dime of Republican billionaire megadonor Harlan Crow, breaking with public servant laws and disclosure norms.

https://www.theroot.com/finally-justice-clarence-thomas-might-be-in-trouble-fo-1851587547

A death knell for NATO: Project 2025 calls for Trump to "restructure" US foreign policy

The plan is for Donald Trump to "reset the nation’s role in the world"

https://www.salon.com/2024/07/10/a-knell-for-nato-project-2025-calls-for-to-restructure-us-foreign-policy/

A pair of well-connected Democrats is offering an optimistic plan
that would involve the president stepping down as the nominee and the party announcing a “blitz primary” process ahead of the August convention.

The proposal is the work of Rosa Brooks,
a Georgetown University law professor who served in the Obama and Clinton administrations and as a volunteer policy adviser to the Biden campaign in 2020,

and Ted Dintersmith, a venture capitalist and education philanthropist who has donated to various Democratic campaigns.

They want Biden to flip the script on the current Washington narrative of a Democratic Party in chaos
and for the party to see the current period as an opportunity for a reset.

“In the midst of malaise and crisis, we can forge an uplifting path,” Dintersmith told Semafor.

Their idea goes something like this, according to a memo shared with Semafor that has been circulated to Democratic donors and bundlers as well as officials within the Biden campaign and administration:

• Biden would step down as the Democratic nominee in mid-July, and announce the new system, with backing from Vice President Kamala Harris.

• Potential candidates would have a few days to throw their respective hats in the ring. The Democratic Party then would begin a primary sprint in which the six candidates who receive the most votes from delegates pledge to run positive-only campaigns in the month leading up to the convention.

• The “blitz primary” would involve weekly forums with each candidate moderated by cultural icons

(Michelle Obama, Oprah, and Taylor Swift are among the names floated in the memo) in order to engage voters.

• The nominee would ultimately be chosen by the delegates using ranked choice voting before the start of the Chicago convention on Aug. 19.

• It would be announced with plenty of fanfare on the third day of the gathering. The memo imagines the nominee unveiled on stage with Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

According to its authors, the country would be captivated. Donations would pour in. And Biden would be celebrated as a “modern-day George Washington,” the proponents argue

https://www.semafor.com/article/07/07/2024/blitz-primary-could-open-up-democratic-race-if-biden-drops-out