AlterNet

In a surprising turn of events, Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff for ex-President Donald Trump, is facing criminal charges in Fulton County, Georgia, for his alleged involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. While he managed to avoid indictment by special counsel Jack Smith, Meadows was not so fortunate in Georgia, where he finds himself at the center of legal scrutiny.

CNN's senior legal affairs correspondent, Paula Reid, weighed in on the developments, stating that the decision to charge Meadows was not unexpected, given the multitude of reports placing him squarely within the heart of Trump's campaign to block the certification of President Joe Biden's victory.

"The investigation into the events of January 6th highlighted a compelling pattern - one that consistently pointed to Mark Meadows as a key figure in this alleged conspiracy," Reid explained. "Their findings positioned him as a pivotal enabler for former President Trump and his orchestrated attempts to overturn the election."...

We already knew that the deal struck between the president and the House Republicans, to lift the debt ceiling, was going to place new work requirements on childless adults between the ages of 50 and 54 in return for food stamps.

What we didn’t know is that the legislation changes “work requirements under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which provides cash assistance to households with children. Under the provisions in the bill, states will likely have to require more parents on TANF to work or be in job training,” according to Kery Murakami, a senior reporter for Route Fifty, a news site.

Murakami has the details. They are granular and patchwork. Some states would be free to do more to help needy families. Other states would be free to do less. Either way, one official said, the new requirements don’t “leave a lot of time to be parents. We want them to be able to be parents. We want them to be able to solve the crisis that has brought them in our doors in the first place.”...

Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian: When Lunatics Run the Asylum

I’m proud to have lived through the last 20-odd years at TomDispatch with Noam Chomsky, now a remarkable 94. In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, I stumbled into creating this site and, in October 2003, first posted a piece of his about how the U.S. had for so long terrorized Cuba. It was taken from a book of his that had just been published. By 2007, he was writing directly for TomDispatch on the way the U.S. had brought a campaign of terror to Iran. (“What If Iran Had Invaded Mexico?“) In February 2008, for another article of his, “The Most Wanted List,” in which he put the very idea of terrorism into perspective, I began my introduction this way: “One of Noam Chomsky’s latest books — a conversation with David Barsamian — is entitled What We Say Goes. It catches a powerful theme of Chomsky’s: that we have long been living on a one-way planet and that the language we regularly wield to describe the realities of our world is tailored to Washington’s interests.”

And here I am, 15 years later, posting his latest piece for TomDispatch, an interview that — yes! — David Barsamian of Alternative Radio has just conducted with him on the true terrors of this planet in 2023, starting (but hardly ending) with climate change. And, by the way, the two of them continue to produce books together, the latest being Notes on Resistance. As far as I’m concerned, he’s never been more on target and, believe me, that’s truly saying something! So, let me turn you over to Noam and David and a world that’s deeply in need of something better. Tom...

William Hazlitt: "The only vice which cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy" That's why hypocrisy cavorts with notorious cousins: fraud and knavery. Rank stupidity (like Trump's) doesn't quite compete because world-class hypocrites thrive only when inventing plausible scenarios – and Trump's fraudulence quickly exposes itself: he is manifestly the same scurrilous person inside and out. No wonder Trump and Mitch McConnell can't stand each other: they honor different devils.

Thus emerges the reigning Hypocrite-in-chief: Senator Mitch McConnell. In April the most visible GOP leader -- and icon of special big business interests -- provided this farce: he was shocked, shocked to discover that wary corporations could not abide wholesale, Republican voter suppression in Georgia. Without missing a beat a week later he coughed up that Biden's modest, 36 member (!) Supreme Court Commission "fits squarely within liberals' years-long campaign to politicize the Court." Squarely? Liberals'? Years-long campaign? Politicize? Is this a new form of self-satire?

Judicial Snub for the Ages...

If you're like most people, you haven't followed the twists and turns of conservative intellectual efforts to gin up a new account of American conservatism distinguishing it from Trumpism. But if the past is any guide, don't worry. You're not

Conservatism since Reagan has been about interests, not ideas. The Reagan coalition united economic conservatives focused on "smaller government"—i.e., lower taxes and regulations—and religious conservatives intent on preserving traditional morality, which boiled down mostly to sex they don't like. The economic conservatives were the dominant partner. When the Reagan-era conservative movement deployed ideas, it was usually as a fig leaf to cover the nakedness of the dominant partner's interest.

The conservative movement that lasted from the late-1970s until 2016 looks positively egg-headed compared to today's Trumpist party. Trump's intuitive genius was to understand the standard account of the Republican coalition was incomplete. A big slice of the "smaller government" crowd, Trump understood, wasn't motivated by economic interest at all. Rather, for a lot of exurban and rural Republicans, small government was not about reducing taxes but a way of starving the government of resources that benefit people they didn't like—namely, people who aren't white....