Monday, July 10, 2023

Ron DeSantis and other sociopaths

Wasn't planning on blogging tonight.  Got too hot for me today and when I came home from work, I face planted on the bed.  My wife got home about an hour later and said she tried to wake me up.  She couldn't.  I was that out of it.  So she froze for another hour -- froze because I must have turned the ac down as low as it would go -- I don't remember doing that.  She figured if I was that out of it and that hot that she'd leave the ac alone until I woke up.


I did and it was three hours after I got off from work.  I took a shower and then, when I got out, I was so cold.  I went to find her and asked her if she was burning up and she said she walked into our house with it being that cold.  I've been sluggish since I woke up and I had three glasses of decaf iced tea at dinner and am two sips away from finishing a bottle of water -- 33 ounces -- I think it's 33.8 ounces but my eyes are blurry.  

So with all that, I wasn't planning on blogging especially since I couldn't find anything I wanted to share.  But just as I was giving up, I found this:

 

A second form includes the scores of Republicans and right-wingers who have decided to play the role or act sociopathic for their own personal gain. This includes hard-line MAGA members such as Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Lauren Boebert, Kari Lake, Matt Gaetz who decided to infect themselves with contagious sociopathy. Look at the case of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis whose impressive on-paper resume includes graduation from Yale University (where he served as captain of the baseball team) and Harvard law school (with Honors), distinguished service in the United States Navy including a legal role with Seal Team One and a deployment to Iraq. On paper, he is highly accomplished and embodied what we as Americans tend to hold in high regard…until he acquired contagious sociopathy.Coincident with his departure from active military service and rise to Congress and the Florida governorship, he apparently chose to include antisocial tendencies in his political and public persona. He believes in unregulated gun ownership (despite brutal killings in his state’s own schools), he attacks the rights of women with his restrictive abortion laws, he suppresses legislation that would support the LBGTQ+ community, and he seeks to diminish the plight of historically maltreated groups (like African Americans) with his attempts to bury the past.

In another high-profile example, the United States Supreme Court was constitutionally designed as a third arm of our democratic republic that was supposed to serve independently from the other Branches in an apolitical manner…now its majority is infested with contagious sociopathy. In just the last year (and weeks), they sociopathically overturned Roe v. Wade and severely undercut women’s healthcare rights, ruled in favor of discrimination, and ruled against students struggling under the mountain of student debt…all while facing accusations of improper gifts, hypocrisy, and politicization…in other words, with contagious sociopathy.

The third group with contagious sociopathy are the passive enablers of widespread acts of manipulation and cruelty ranging from long-serving, establishment leaders like Senator Mitch McConnell all the way to the throngs of people clad in Confederate flags and MAGA idolatry whose inaction and permissiveness serves as a large-scale perti dish by which contagious sociopathy can flourish. It cannot go without mentioning that the processes of cultism are at play here as well.

 Exactly.  And let me cosign on Trina's "Matteo Lane serves up a pasta recipe " which calls out the WSWS for it's poor coverage of the Court decision noted above.  And for its general silence on LGBTQ+ issues.  Her call out opens with:

 I am against book banning.  But here's some reality for WSWS and David Walsh:  You have been silent in the attacks on the LGBTQ+ community.  Silent.  Disgustingly so.  Point?  Shut the f**k up.  Books don't mean a damn thing if we don't support the rights of others.  And this banning?  It would have had a harder chance at succeeding if you'd call out the hate merchants.

 

 Trina manages another f-you later in her call out.  Trina has eight children, one of which is gay.  Ruth has a gay grandson.  You don't mess with either of them on the LGBTQ+ issues.  They won't be silent.  Good for them.  I love them so much and I love everyone who speaks out.  Be sure to read Ruth on crazy Tara Reade, Rebecca on 'pyschic' Nikki Haley and Mike, Ann, Betty, Cedric and Wally on Ron DeSantis:



 And read Kat's "AMAZON beef (and some Laura Nyro talk) " and ask yourself, why, in 2023, does AMAZON not know how to ship a package properly?

 

Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

 

Monday, July 10, 2023.  The persecutions against Julian Assange continues, TotalEnergy signs a deal with Iraq that's good for TotalEnergy, tourism is up in Iraq but down in Florida -- just like Ron DeSantis' polling numbers, Junior continues his bizarre campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential campaign with more people noticing serious problems, and much more.






 Ben Cohen, co-founder of popular American ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s, was arrested Thursday outside the Department of Justice while protesting in support of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange.

Cohen had shared in a tweet on Wednesday that he planned to “protest the criminalization of the free press and the prosecution” of Assange, acknowledging that the move would "risk arrest." 


Julian is being persecuted for the 'crime' of journalism.  Julian Assange remains imprisoned and remains persecuted by US President Joe Biden who, as vice president, once called him "a high tech terrorist."  Julian's 'crime' was revealing the realities of Iraq -- Chelsea Manning was a whistle-blower who leaked the information to Julian.  WIKILEAKS then published the Iraq War Logs.  And many outlets used the publication to publish reports of their own.  For example, THE GUARDIAN published many articles based on The Iraq War Logs.  Jonathan Steele, David Leigh and Nick Davies offered, on October 22, 2012:



A grim picture of the US and Britain's legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.
Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters and civilian killings in the Afghan war.
The new logs detail how:
• US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.

• A US helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after they tried to surrender.
• More than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.

The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent deat



The Biden administration has been saying all the right things lately about respecting a free and vigorous press, after four years of relentless media-bashing and legal assaults under Donald Trump.

The attorney general, Merrick Garland, has even put in place expanded protections for journalists this fall, saying that “a free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy”.

But the biggest test of Biden’s commitment remains imprisoned in a jail cell in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been held since 2019 while facing prosecution in the United States under the Espionage Act, a century-old statute that has never been used before for publishing classified information.

Whether the US justice department continues to pursue the Trump-era charges against the notorious leaker, whose group put out secret information on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, American diplomacy and internal Democratic politics before the 2016 election, will go a long way toward determining whether the current administration intends to make good on its pledges to protect the press.

Now Biden is facing a re-energized push, both inside the United States and overseas, to drop Assange’s protracted prosecution.


 


On the 30 June, Stella Assange and her two children were granted a private audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican. Mrs Assange has reported that the Pope is well aware of the urgency of the situation her husband Julian is in, as he awaits his appeal against extradition from England to the United States to face charges of violations of the US’s 1917 Espionage Act. 

[. . .]

In light of her audience with Pope Francis last week, I caught up with Stella Assange in London earlier today to ask her about her own faith and the role that faith has played throughout the ordeal. 


Anthony McCarthy (AM)

Can you tell us what the audience with the Pope meant to you and your children? 

Stella Assange (SA)

The audience with the Pope was a moment of humanity and compassion at a human level and contrasted with much of the day-to-day fight where we are confronted with the opposite. The prison, which is a place that we spend a lot of time, and which Julian is in all the time, is where humanity and compassion and dignity is denied in a systematic way. We felt the exact opposite in meeting with Pope Francis, where we were greeted with great warmth. I have huge respect for Pope Francis and I am very grateful that he allowed for this meeting to be publicised.  
AM

Can you tell us more about what the Pope’s letter to Julian meant to him at the time it was received? 

SA

The Pope sent a message in March 2021 to Julian via the Catholic chaplain of the prison. It came at an especially low point, as the lower court in UK had ruled that Julian’s treatment in the US would not be humane, but the court, despite this finding, did not grant him bail. The letter was a significant event and it was very important to Julian that he received this message, which also coincided with some very difficult days – he had lost one of his close friends to suicide in the prison just a couple of months previously and it was during the cCvid lockdown period, so there was much isolation. While these communications are private there is much significance in these gestures and Julian has found much comfort from the pastoral care of the Catholic chaplain at Belmarsh, who also blessed our wedding. It was this same chaplain who verbally read to Julian the Pope’s message through the prison door. 

[. . .]

AM

Is there any final message you would like to give to Catholics in the British Isles ?

SA

I would like to thank everyone who has been praying for Julian and supporting his freedom. I think that many people whom I have met along the way are both deeply concerned and disgusted about the dehumanisation and mistreatment of Julian, but also share my understanding that what is being done to Julian is a bigger attack on the truth and on people’s right to know the truth. And without the truth we can never have justice. The most important thing is not to allow Julian to become a taboo issue. This case is so flagrant, it concerns the exposure of the killing of thousands and thousands of men, women and children and what the punishment is for exposing that. Justice here should not be seen as a taboo subject.

We all have a responsibility to ensure that injustice isn’t allowed to carry on in silence. It’s crucial that people don’t remain silent in the face of this. That is why I am so grateful to the Pope for having decided to highlight this in this way. 

Turning to Iraq where the big news, according to the media, is a business deal.  THE CRADLE reports:

Iraq sealed a $27 billion energy deal with French oil major TotalEnergies on 10 June to develop the nation's oil, gas, and renewable energies sectors over 25 years in a step toward achieving energy self-sufficiency.

"This is the starting day, and we'll deliver the project in the next four years for the benefit of everyone in Iraq," TotalEnergies Chairman and CEO Patrick Pouyanne said during the signing ceremony in Baghdad, stressing that this was a “historic day.”


OIL & GAS notes, "The deal between both parties was initially signed in 2021 with an investment of $10 billion in southern Iraq over 25 years, but it was delayed amid disputes between Iraqi politicians." At its website, TOTAL notes, "We have been operating in Iraq since the late 1920s in oil and gas exploration and production. Today, we are also active in the retail sector. "  Not noted in most of the coverage is that fact that this has been an on-again-off-again deal for some time.  For example, last year on Valentine's Day, Aref Mohammed, Rowena Edwards and Dmitry Zhdannikov (REUTERS) reported, "A $27 billion deal between France's TotalEnergies (TTEF.PA) and Iraq that Baghdad hoped would reverse the exit of oil majors from the country has stalled amid disputes over terms and risks being scrapped by the country's new government."  It would be over a year later, April 3, 2023, before the deal again had any real movement.  Ahmed Rasheed and Maha El Dahan (REUTERS) reported, "Baghdad has reached an agreement to hold a 30% stake in TotalEnergies TTEF.PA long-delayed $27 billion Iraq project, two sources told Reuters on Tuesday. The deal was signed in 2021 for TotalEnergies to build four oil, gas and renewables projects with an initial investment of $10 billion in southern Iraq over 25 years." The 'new' deal?  Julian Bechocha (RUDAW) explains, "The finalized deal saw TotalEnergies holding the lion’s share with a 45 percent stake in the Gas Growth Integrated Project (GGIP), followed by Iraqi state-owned Basra Oil Company with 30 percent, and QatarEnergy with 25 percent."  Sinan Mahmoud (THE NATIONAL) adds, "Baghdad had wanted a 40 per cent stake but the French company insisted on a majority holding." Of the deal struck, ZAWYA notes:

The four contracts include:

  • Building a seawater treatment plant to provide water injection for pressure maintenance to increase regional oil production
  • Development of nearly 600 million cubic metres of associated gas and several oilfields in South Basra governorate
  • Boosting output from the Artawi oilfield
  • Developing a 1 GW solar power plant to supply electricity to the Basrah regional grid.

In other Iraq news, TRAVEL AND TOUR reports:

In the five years from the time the Islamic State terrorist group was compelled to get out of the country, Iraq has had a comparatively peaceful time.

In spite of some persistent economic and political disputes, the northwestern Kurdish highlands of the country have witnessed a huge rise in tourism as stability in the country has been reinstated.



Convention organizers are pulling out of Florida, which is devastating knock-on tourism and causing panic over the future of the industry, experts warned in a report Friday.

When asked for a reason why they were scrapping plans, one organizer wrote simply: “Governor DeSantis.”

More than half a dozen planned conventions in Broward County, which encompasses the Fort Lauderdale area, have been scrapped in recent months, according to a list drawn up by the county’s tourism promotion group Visit Lauderdale and reported by the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

“We lost this program due to political climate,” Visit Lauderdale notes on a decision by the Supreme Council of America Inc., Ancient & Accepted Scottish Rite Masons to cancel its meeting, planned for August next year. It also canceled 855 hotel rooms


Imagine that, people happy to visit The Sunshine State are less inclined to visit in its latest incarnation as The Hate State.  Who could have guessed?  Anyone with a brain.  Which leaves out the state's governor Ron DeSantis and Ronnie's chief cheerleader Jonathan Turley.  Poor dumb Ron, Mike handed him "Idiot of the week" for the way Ron's campaign is imploding.  On the imploding campaign:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign is sinking into oblivion – and that's filling Floridians with dread, columnist Fred Grimm writes for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

“Somehow, DeSantis has failed — so far — to captivate Republican voters despite his relentless exploitation of crafted-for-MAGA issues like race, abortion, immigration, guns, gender dysphoria, gay rights, drag queens, the Disney Company," Grimm wrote.

Grimm notes that despite DeSantis’ efforts to project a “tough guy” image of Trump without the baggage, MAGA voters are sticking with what they know.


William Spivey (LEVEL) observes, "The good news is that the American public has seen Ron DeSantis for who he is and rejected him. In addition to him having almost no social skills, his likability levels are near zero. His entire campaign was based on appealing to hate, and he’s now been exposed."



Turning to another imploding campaign, this time in the Democratic Party, Robert F. Kennedy Jr's bid for the party's presidential nomination becomes more of a longshot with each passing day.  John Gallagher (LGBTQ NATION) notes:

For example, last month Kennedy said that chemicals in the water are turning kids trans. His proof? It’s happening to frogs.

“There’s atrazine throughout our water supply,” Kennedy claimed. “If you, in a lab, put atrazine in a tank full of frogs, it will chemically castrate and forcibly feminize every frog in there. And 10 percent of the frogs, the male frogs, will turn into fully viable females able to produce viable eggs. If it’s doing that to frogs, there’s a lot of other evidence that it’s doing it to human beings as well.”

If this particular rant sounds familiar, it’s because Alex Jones has used it as well. No one has ever suggested that Jones, who claimed the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, was a credible presidential candidate.

Kennedy has also said he opposes trans athletes participating in sports. “I am against people participating in women’s sports who are biologically male,” Kennedy said on CNN last April.

Kennedy’s disdain for the health of LGBTQ+ people extends to HIV as well. In his worldview, AIDS is actually caused by poppers. In a nice blame-the-victim touch that would have made the Reagan administration proud, he also sounds as if he believes gay men were at fault for their own deaths.

“A hundred percent of the people who died in the first thousand [with] AIDS were people who were addicted to poppers, which are known to cause Kaposi sarcoma in rats,” Kennedy said. “And they were people who were part of a gay lifestyle where they were burning the candle at both ends.”

Kennedy believes that AZT, one of the earliest treatments for AIDS, killed more people than the disease itself would have if left untreated. (It didn’t.) He has blamed Anthony Fauci for deliberately sabotaging treatments that were cheaper and more effective and even accused Fauci of essentially murdering 80 Black children in a clinical trial and burying them in a mass grave. Kennedy recently endorsed a book that argues that HIV does not cause AIDS.

Kennedy’s fringe (to be polite) beliefs will no doubt come out as the campaign wears on. But it’s in the interest of the far right to promote him as a legitimate alternative to Biden during the primary. The more votes Kennedy might siphon from Biden, the weaker Biden will appear, softening him up for the general election.

That’s the apparent reason why such Trump-world figures as Steve Bannon and Roger Stone are singing the praises of Kennedy. Bannon actually encouraged Kennedy to run for president as, in the words of CBS reporter Bob Costa “a useful chaos agent.” Stone has said that a Trump-Kennedy ticket would be a “dream.” Michael Flynn and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk have also expressed their admiration.

The right is certainly doing its best to create a race between Biden and Kennedy. “With RFK Jr. … surging in the Democratic primary, is Biden in trouble?” Sean Hannity asked on one recent show. As it turns out, Kennedy is rising in the polls – among Republicans. Democrats have had an increasingly unfavorable opinion of him as they learn more about him.

That’s a problem for someone who is running as a Democrat. The other problem Kennedy has is that his family isn’t lining up to support him either. Three years ago, two of his siblings and a niece wrote an op-ed in which they said they loved him but called his anti-vax stance “tragically wrong” and “an outlier in the Kennedy family.”

Meanwhile, the foundation named after his father, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, is carrying on exactly the kind of mission that Junior is not. It has decried last week’s Supreme Court ruling allowing selective discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, criticized the attack on books, and, most telling of all, advocated for the rights of trans people.

The president of the group is Kerry Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Jr.’s sister. 


Junior is not carrying his father's legacy, he's just a little boy -- an elderly little boy -- who wants to play in the right-wing sandbox.  As we noted last week:


Junior stands for nothing and that's why he's not increasing his support.  He's far too busy reaching out to the most pathetic of panhandlers -- Glenneth, Matt Taibbi, Tulsi Gabbard, Bari Weiss, serial plagiarist Chris Hedges, Col Douglas Macgregor, Joe Rogan. Jordan Peterson, et al.  He should have known that he'd be judged by the company he keeps.   And that we would notice how he apparently doesn't know a single person of color.  It's a monochromatic world for Junior.

[. . .]

Junior is not bridging a gap between middle class and poor nor between Whites and African-Americans.  

Junior's in bed with racists.  Maybe he expects non-racists to just trust him but why should they?  


His father, as a candidate in 1968, did not bridge the gap by glorifying racists.  Nor did he just pose with and visit White people.  

The Kennedy image is supposed to be about uplift.  It's Eunice starting The Special Olympics, for example.  It's Caroline leaving private life to become a US ambassador.  It's not Teddy drunk in his 80s feeling up an actress (true story, by the way) during a public dinner.  It's not acting like a frat boy (William Kennedy Smith, Junior and so many more examples).  

The Kennedy luster has been squandered by Junior.  People wanted to be inspired.  They wanted to right a wrong (the assassinations of JFK and RFK).  They want to believe -- as so many films and novels tell them -- that the child emerges as an adult to right the wrongs done to the family.  Instead, he became a boring frat boy, hanging out with every extremist White person he could, refusing to speak to people of color -- as a general rule, if you're trying to reach out to people of color you don't make White bread Dennis Kucinich your campaign manager. 


He failed to inspire.  He instead came off like so many others born with every opportunity who only identifies with those just like him.  

That image could be turned around but the campaign doesn't appear to have a clue and has instead focused on the low hanging and rotten fruit like Moms For Liberty.  You can believe that no other Kennedy, past or present, would have been stupid enough to get entangled with them or any other identified hate group.


He shows no leadership at all.  Claire Thornton (USA TODAY) reports:

Days after the Supreme Court's ruling that businesses can deny same-sex wedding services if it clashes with their religious views, new data says most American voters disagree with that position.

Last week, the nation's high court sided with a Colorado business owner who argued a state nondiscrimination law could not compel her to make same-sex websites.

The survey, conducted by Data for Progress, found 65% of voters believe businesses should not be allowed to turn away customers who are of a particular sexual orientation because of the business owner's personal beliefs. Data for Progress describes itself on its website as "a multidisciplinary group of experts using state-of-the-art techniques in data science to support progressive activists and causes."


The following sites updated:





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