Deplorables

As we learn more about the plot to overthrow the 2020 election, Chauncey DeVega notes that Hillary Clinton's warning from 2016 was understated.

Today's Republican Party is in fact a right-wing extremist organization, and fascist in all but name. Its followers and voters embrace and act upon those values and beliefs. To claim that there is some other Republican Party, somehow separate and distinct from right-wing extremism — as too many commentators and political observers do — is to assert a difference that does not substantively exist. Ultimately, Hillary Clinton's [recent] Guardian interview makes clear that she too fails to consistently and accurately describe the party that she warned us about five years ago.

DeVega is not optimistic that the press and political class will respond adequately.

American political insiders are deeply invested in the familiar, nostalgia-colored mores of American politics. To acknowledge the existential threat of the Jim Crow Republicans and the [fascist] movement is too traumatic and terrifying for the political class to properly contemplate. Indifference, fantasy and soothing lies about how everything will inevitably be OK in America appear to offer a much easier path than doing the difficult and dangerous work required to save American democracy.

Matters are now so dire that it is now not a question of whether American democracy will succumb to a nightmare reign of full-on fascism but rather when that will happen. If America's neofascist movement continues to gain momentum, Joe Biden will be relegated to the role of a speed bump or an asterisk in American history.

Global Public Heatlth and Climate

An editorial published in over 200 medical journals calls for worldwide efforts to halt climate change.

We are united in recognising that only fundamental and equitable changes to societies will reverse our current trajectory.

The risks to health of increases above 1.5°C are now well established. Indeed, no temperature rise is "safe".

Thriving ecosystems are essential to human health, and the widespread destruction of nature, including habitats and species, is eroding water and food security and increasing the chance of pandemics.

The consequences of the environmental crisis fall disproportionately on those countries and communities that have contributed least to the problem and are least able to mitigate the harms.

[G]overnments must make fundamental changes to how our societies and economies are organised and how we live.

Update (October 21):  A report published by The Lancet warns about a health crisis.

There is no safe global temperature rise from a health perspective, and additional warming will affect every U.S. region. Today’s adverse health impacts of climate change are varied and widespread. All of us have been or likely will be affected by climate change, with some hazards more easily recognizable than others. Climate change is worsening heat waves, amplifying droughts, intensifying wildfires, supercharging hurricanes, and fueling flood risk through increased heavy rainfall events and rising sea levels.

Misogynist Triumph

Despite nearly 50 years of precedent, the Supreme Court allowed a Texas law to stand that essentially overturns the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

The new law, Senate Bill 8, effectively bans abortions at six weeks, when many women don't yet realize they're pregnant. It also deputizes private citizens who can receive bounties of up to $10,000 for suing anyone accused of "aiding and abetting" patients who seek an abortion in Texas.

Amanda Marcotte summarizes the stakes.

[T]his support for the Texas law is an open invitation to every state legislature run by woman-hating Bible thumpers to pass versions of their own. Accompanying the law will be more dehumanizing rhetoric, treating women as livestock who can't be trusted to make decisions, or even acknowledged as capable of making decisions. Because debasing women has always been what the anti-choice movement is about. Now Americans will start to see the real life damage such hatred can wreak in women's lives.

Hopefully, David Frum is correct when he warns the GOP may face a major backlash from voters.

Texas Republicans have just bet their political future in a rapidly diversifying and urbanizing state on a gambit: cultural reaction plus voter suppression. The eyes of Texas will be upon them indeed. The eyes of the nation will be upon them too.

Update (September 8):  Amanda Marcotte warns us not to let Republicans off the hook for seemingly saying dumb things.

The Texas abortion ban isn't something that idiot anti-choicers stumbled into by accident. It was carefully crafted by highly educated, intelligent people who spent years researching ways to overturn Roe v. Wade while pretending that's not what they did. They are manipulative and diabolical, and have had incredible success, despite holding views that are wildly unpopular. It may feel good to write such people off as "ignorant," but that is the last thing they are. They're smart as hell, and that is why they're so dangerous.

Update (September 21):  The legal challenges have begun. 

Colossal Failure

As U.S. troops continue to withdraw from Afghanistan, the Taliban are on the verge of reclaiming control of the country. This comes about in a matter of days after nearly 20 years of U.S. involvement. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost and $2 trillion wasted that could have been spent much more productively. Lindsey German:

The whole war on terror has proved a terrible failure and this should be admitted. We should also consider how the lives of Afghanis would have been improved if only a fraction of the money committed to this war ... had gone into improving their lives through investment in infrastructure, housing, education, agriculture. That was an opportunity that could have been taken but was ignored in favor of military solutions. And those have brought us to where we are today.

Update (August 17):  Derek Davidson (via Luke O'Neil) notes that the Washington Post exposed 18 years of government lies about the progress of the war--but there's little attention paid to that.

Whatever form the war apologia takes you can be sure that it will be heavily cloaked in claims of deep concern for the Afghan people.

But you shouldn’t for a second suppose that the people who cheerled endless war and occupation in Afghanistan ever did so out of concern for the Afghan people. If the United States were really concerned for the Afghan people it wouldn’t have spent well over a decade ignoring the evidence that its nation building efforts were failing.

And Thom Hartmann offers these reminders for just how much American presidents cared about the Afghan people.

After 9/11 the Taliban offered to arrest Bin Laden, but Bush turned them down because he wanted to be a "wartime president" to have a "successful presidency." ... With that decision not to arrest and try Bin Laden for his crime but instead to go to war, George W. Bush set the US and Afghanistan on a direct path to today.

More recently, [Dear Leader] and [Mike] Pompeo gave the Taliban everything they wanted — power, legitimacy and the release of 5,000 of their worst war criminals — over the strong objections of the Afghan government in 2019 so [the Orange Turd] could falsely claim, heading into the 2020 election, that he'd "negotiated peace" in Afghanistan when in fact he'd set up this week's debacle.

Update (August 18):  Heather Digby Parton places the greatest blame for the failure on George W. Bush.

[P]erhaps the most cynical of all the rationales they offered in those early days before they pivoted to Iraq and pretty much put Afghanistan on cruise control was the unctuous, insincere, marketing campaign they launched to convince the American people that they were fighting the war on behalf of Afghan women. On November 17, 2001, just a few weeks after the attacks, they sent out First Lady Laura Bush to make a speech about the repressive Taliban regime's treatment of women, all of which was true but was clearly designed to make the war into something nobler than the crude act of vengeance it really was. ... There was zero interest in the issue on the right until the Bush administration decided to make it a central rationale for the war in Afghanistan.

Update (August 30):  The U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan is complete. 

Code Red for Humanity

The first part of the Sixth Assessment Report from the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change finds that

It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.

Human activities are responsible for about 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming since the late 19th century and warming will likely exceed 1.5 degrees within 20 years.

But it is not just about temperature. Climate change is bringing multiple different changes in different regions – which will all increase with further warming. These include changes to wetness and dryness, to winds, snow and ice, coastal areas and oceans. For example:

Climate change is intensifying the water cycle. This brings more intense rainfall and associated flooding, as well as more intense drought in many regions.

Climate change is affecting rainfall patterns. In high latitudes, precipitation is likely to increase, while it is projected to decrease over large parts of the subtropics. Changes to monsoon precipitation are expected, which will vary by region.

Coastal areas will see continued sea level rise throughout the 21st century, contributing to more frequent and severe coastal flooding in low-lying areas and coastal erosion. Extreme sea level events that previously occurred once in 100 years could happen every year by the end of this century.

Further warming will amplify permafrost thawing, and the loss of seasonal snow cover, melting of glaciers and ice sheets, and loss of summer Arctic sea ice.

Changes to the ocean, including warming, more frequent marine heatwaves, ocean acidification, and reduced oxygen levels have been clearly linked to human influence. These changes affect both ocean ecosystems and the people that rely on them, and they will continue throughout at least the rest of this century.

For cities, some aspects of climate change may be amplified, including heat (since urban areas are usually warmer than their surroundings), flooding from heavy precipitation events and sea level rise in coastal cities.

Update (August 20):  Brian Tokar summarizes key points from the IPCC report. 

The report affirms much of what we already knew about the state of the global climate, but does so with considerably more clarity and precision than earlier reports. It removes several elements of uncertainty from the climate picture, including some that have wrongly served to reassure powerful interests and the wider public that things may not be as bad as we thought. The IPCC’s latest conclusions reinforce and significantly strengthen all the most urgent warnings that have emerged from the past 30 to 40 years of climate science.

Further Warning

An article published in BioScience updates previous warnings to humanity about the climate emergency.

Out of the 31 variables that we track, we found that 18 are at new all-time record lows or highs.

 

Disillusion

As the world literally burns, the Guardian reports on Russian efforts to subvert American politics.

Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” [Fuckface von Clownstick] in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.

And five years after that Kremlin meeting, reporting from Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig shows how close we are to the brink of authoritarianism.

General Mark Milley, was so concerned the outgoing president would try to stage a military coup he warned the heads of the U.S. Military branches, did daily "check-in" calls with the White House Chief of Staff, and likened the Commander in Chief's efforts to retain power to Adolf Hitler.

"They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed," Milley told his deputies.

In turn, Manbaby denies comtemplating a coup.

[I]f I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley.

So who did he have in mind to help with the coup? 

Update (July 16):  Chaucey DeVega notes that military leaders preparing to defy civilian rule sets a dangerous precedent.

Any "democracy" where such decisions become normalized — and are welcomed by the public — is in practice an autocracy, or eventually a military dictatorship.

America's political institutions did not "hold" in the face of the [Fuckface] regime's many assaults. If anything, [Dear Leader's] attempt to overthrow American democracy was sabotaged by his own incompetence and stopped by a few courageous individuals.

[O]ne thing is certain: if there are no severe consequences for the [Orangeman] regime's ongoing assault on American democracy, or for its other crimes, that will offer both permission and a blueprint for future fascists and other types of demagogues. They will learn from the [von Clownstick] regime's tactical and strategic errors, and will not repeat them.

Heather Digby Parton agrees that

it's very unnerving to see a general in this position, working with others to thwart the will of the civilian leadership. That is NOT how it's supposed to work.

Parton adds a further detail from Rucker and Leonnig that Vice President Pence refused to get into a car with Secret Service on January 6. She quotes Nicolle Wallace:

[S]omeone familiar with this reporting tells me that Pence feared a conspiracy. He feared that the Secret Service would aid [Dear Leader] in his ultimate aims that day.

Update (July 20):  Chauncey DeVega discusses the Guardian report.

Whatever one concludes about the authenticity of these Kremlin papers, one conclusion is obvious: Their observations about [Fuckface von Clownstick], and about the vulnerability of American society to disinformation and subversion, are correct.

Both Robert Mueller's report and the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the 2016 election (the latter completed under Republican leadership) have conclusively shown that Russia interfered to help [Dear Leader] win as a way of advancing its strategic goals. Moreover, it is a matter of public record that [Manbaby's] inner circle included at least one Russian agent.

Russia's strategy would prove to be brilliant: [Fuckface] left the White House with the U.S. a weakened world power, gripped by a plague that has killed at least 600,000 people, along with a neofascist insurgency that shows no signs of dying out. Right-wing terrorism and other violence is escalating, and the nation has become irreparably polarized by the increasing radicalism of Republicans and the right.