Assange Is Free
Truth still not
June 25: Assange plea deal … Guns a public-health crisis … Duggar appeal … Bowman primary …
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To mark yesterday’s anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, I expected today’s TFN to be terminated in the third trimester. That’s because last night I attended a special screening of No One Asked You, the documentary about abortion-rights activist Lizz Winstead and her organization, Abortion Access Front. So I didn’t think I’d have time to get you a fully developed edition of TFN. But I did!
Lizz, if you didn’t know, is a comedian perhaps best known as the co-creator of The Daily Show. After the screening, she came out and did a Q&A with the audience. And then she went out for drinks with the creator of The Fucking News and his wife.1
For a documentary about abortion, No One Asked You is surprisingly uplifting and charming. Amazingly, it chronicles years of Lizz’s fight, which is not so much about laws and judicial rulings but supporting abortion workers on the ground, where they are, especially in places where they are rare and heartbreakingly alone.
You will marvel at and fall in love with the people who do this work. (And you will laugh. AAF uses comedy to build community and you will recognize some of Lizz’s allies in this movie.)
As someone who has to be dragged to documentaries, and resents using my entertainment time to give a shit about things, I highly recommend No One Asked You. If you want to support Lizz and Abortion Access Front, you can front them money here.
And giving isn’t all you can do; even if you’re not sure how you can help, get in touch with AAF and they’ll figure out which of your myriad talents can change lives where you live and on the front lines of abortion services. Use the special code NEWSFUCKERS.2
Assange Is Free
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is a free man today. And for the rest of his life. At least until the CIA gets him.
The international saga, and his individual ordeal, both appear to be over this morning.
Assange is en route to a U.S. courtroom in the Northern Mariana islands, where he is expected to plead guilty tomorrow to a single charge of violating the Espionage Act by conspiring to obtain and distribute classified national defense information. It’s part of a plea deal Assange and prosecutors agreed to.
In return for his plea, the U.S. agreed to a sentence of five years, which Assange has already effectively served in a British prison after avoiding capture for years by seeking diplomatic shelter in Ecuador’s London embassy.
Once the court signs off on the plea deal, Assange will resume his trip and return to his native Australia. Those close to him say his physical and mental health have suffered in the decade-plus in which U.S. officials sought to punish him for revealing just a fraction of the shitty, shitty stuff done by the U.S. military and intelligence, including material provided by Chelsea Manning.
The leaks included horrific 2007 video of a U.S. helicopter attack that killed 11 people, two of them journalists, in Baghdad. Unlike Assange and Manning, the killers have spent zero time in prison.
Assange became an international symbol of the fight for transparency and opposition to the militarism — and secrecy in the bullshit name of national security — of America and its most powerful allies.
Under then-Pres. Barack Obama, the Justice Department spent years not deciding, Garland-style, whether to prosecute Assange for doing journalism stuff. Under then-inconceivably-Pres. Donald Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made Assange’s arrest a priority.
Pres. Joe Biden never acted on calls to pardon Assange. But now the Justice Department apparently has decided justice has been done.
Schrödinger’s Guns Are/Aren’t a Public Health Crisis
Republicans, especially former Pres. Donald Trump, have issued dramatic warnings about gun violence in the U.S. ever since Jan. 21, 2021, when crime was invented. Acknowledging Republican concerns about this criminal epidemic, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy today declared gun violence a public health crisis.
The rare designation has been used in the past to shift both public policy and public perception of things that kill Americans, most notably cigarettes in the 1960s. And public perception is crucial for fighting a public health-crisis that occupies two positions simultaneously in our political system, depending on how it’s viewed.
According to Republicans, gun violence is so prevalent in some urban areas that it kills one out of every, uh, two people. Referring to Philadelphia, where he was speaking, Trump said Saturday that, “If you walk down certain streets here, you have a 50/50 chance of not ever seeing your home again."
Trump is perhaps more qualified than any other president to discuss the crisis of urban gun crime as he both grew up in New York and is himself a criminal.
Statistically speaking, if half the people walking down a city street were gunned down — every single time anyone walked down that street — this would be extremely bad. There’s literally no city where this is true. There’s not even literarily a city where this is true.
Nevertheless, gun crime is so bad in Republican perception, that this morning Murthy issued his public-health warning. The threat guns pose goes beyond injecting people with bullets at high speeds, Murthy said. Guns are also causing mental trauma for almost as many people as get shot walking down some Philadelphia streets.
Half of 14-to-17-year-olds worry about school shootings, according to survey findings Murthy cites. More than a third of adults report skipping some events or public activities in order not to get shot.
However, whether guns really are a crisis appears to depend on how guns are observed. Observing guns as a political problem for Democrats appears to result in guns becoming a serious crisis threatening entire U.S. cities. But researchers have found that when guns are seen as subjects for legislation, they are somehow simultaneously no longer a crisis.
Medically speaking, the gun crisis/not crisis has its origins in the early 1970s, when a bio-engineered mutation of the Second Amendment was leaked from National Rifle Association labs. Some say intentionally.
Since then, millions of otherwise healthy Americans have succumbed to this virus, suffering delusions that the founding fathers put the word “regulated” in the same amendment as “arms” because they didn’t want arms regulated. Those stricken with this virus also suffer from the delusion that guns make them safer. (In fact, the only health benefit researchers associate with guns is that purchasing one can, in fact, make the owner’s penis larger in their mind.)
Murthy, an actual doctor, issued a prescription this morning for curing America’s gun crisis. The prescription includes universal background checks for anyone who wants to buy a gun and regulating guns just like consumer products which are not designed and marketed as human killers. Practitioners of alternative medicine have offered another potential cure: Banning most guns for most people.
Dobbs Anniversary Marked by Bravery, Cowardice
In addition to attending screenings of No One Asked You last night, Americans marked the anniversary of the Dobbs ruling striking down Roe v. Wade in various ways yesterday.
Democrats announced a multi-million-dollar campaign to reach female voters in swing states specifically on abortion and reproductive rights.
Vice President Kamala Harris and First Lady Jill Biden are taking the campaign on the road with public appearances in Senate campaign stops.
On the flip side, former Vice President and abject presidential-campaign failure Mike Pence is promoting his campaign for a national ban on abortion with an op-ed piece yesterday and, uh, that’s pretty much it.
Pence is so committed to his crusade to save the precious unborn that he specifically called out by name vaguely alluded to former Pres. Donald Trump for saying he will let states decide on abortion. Which is a weird stance to take if you think abortion is murder.
“There is no reason for conservatives to abandon the fight for life at the federal level and focus exclusively on the states,” Pence wrote, even though “But Trump said so” is the driving reason for conservatives doing most of what they’re currently doing.
Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox No Longer Exempt from Draft
Israel’s Supreme Court ruled this morning that Israel must begin subjecting ultra-Orthodox Jews to the draft.
Unlike the U.S. — where ultra-something Christians are getting more and more exemptions from the law because they believe in magic — the Israeli court wrote that selective government enforcement of the law based on “group affiliation … seriously harmed the rule of law and the principle according to which all individuals are equal before the law.”
The ultra-Orthodox exemption has been a notorious and controversial de facto aspect of Israel’s famous compulsory military service. If ultra-Orthodox students fail to comply, the court said, the government must stop funding their schools.
The ruling threatens to be a real pain in the tuchis for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That’s because the building blocks of his fragile and fractious ruling coalition include two ultra-Orthodox political parties, which will be ultra-unhappy about this ruling.
Netanyahu has been trying to get the Knesset to pass a law codifying the ultra-Orthodox exemption into law. But so far hasn’t succeeded. Almost as if there’s some reason he’s not popular these days.
Crime Watch
NO APPEALS LEFT AND COUNTING Former and future reality star Josh Duggar got a harsh dose of reality yesterday. The Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal.
Duggar is a former lobbyist for the Family Research Council, the right-wing organization that researches how to make it harder to have families. Duggar’s idea of family research allegedly includes fondling four of his sisters. And a babysitter. And presumably every single plushie, pet, and flirtatious sofa cushion in the house.
But it was the TLC show “19 and Counting” that made Duggar famous as the dad of too many children. (The title also bordered on deceptive marketing, as having that many kids strongly implies he wasn’t counting.)
Duggar’s career and life went rapidly downhill when it became known that he did not understand what actual TLC is. In addition to abusing people, Duggar was convicted of downloading pictures of children being sexually abused. Now, as loyal Newsfuckers know, TFN doesn’t do kink-shaming. Except when your kink is shameful. And Duggar’s kink deserves shame. But also a lengthy prison sentence!
Duggar isn’t due for release until 2032 (when it’ll be too late for him to help fight climate change). Which means he’s still got eight years of his sentence to go. And counting!
Campaign Watch
BOWMAN For Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), today’s the big day. Or possibly the not-big-enough day.
New York is one of today’s primaries. And Bowman is up against Westchester County Executive George Latimer, who has the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) backing. And by “backing” I mean millions of dollars.
Latimer has the endorsements of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), who yesterday became the first sitting member of Congress to oppose his colleague’s re-election. Gottheimer, it’s worth noting forever and ever, earlier this year called human critics of Israel “a cancer.”
Bowman’s endorsements include The Squad and other congressional progressives, as well as tons of community organizations. Including Jewish groups! Seriously behind in the polls, Bowman has won before after lagging in the polls, on the backs of turnout efforts by those groups, but never in the face of an onslaught like this year’s AIPAC spending.
And if any election-night “pundits” are reading this, here’s your handy cheat sheet for tonight:
If Bowman loses, it’s because The Squad is out of touch with real Americans.
If Bowman wins, well, he’s an incumbent in a low-turnout race with no big fight at the top of the ticket, what do you expect?
DEBATE Former Pres. Donald Trump is struggling to manage his expectation-setting for Thursday’s debate.
Trump has begun suggesting that Pres. Joe Biden is a master debater who wrestles bears and once beat Mr. Spock at space chess.
This is clearly a strategic feint by Trump to game the refs, make any Biden gaffes or stumbles look worse, and make it easier for Trump to declare victory in the eyes of pundits who declare victories relative to their expectations rather than to reality.
But Trump’s ego is apparently having trouble even fake-acknowledging the real possibility that Biden might give him some trouble. So Trump keeps relapsing into painting Biden as a doddering boob who will need a helping hand from (a) CNN’s moderators and (b) fictional drugs that, like Flowers for Algernon, turn doddering boobs into sooooper geniuses.
TCB
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Go get ‘em, kids. You got this.
#Humblebrag
There is no special code NEWSFUCKERS
"But it was the TLC show “19 and Counting” that made Duggar famous as the dad of too many children." I hate myself for feeling like I'm defending this family, however this makes it sound as if Josh Duggar was the patriarch of the family rather than Jim Bob. Is it too early and I'm misreading, because that's a real possibility if the coffee and Adderall haven't fully kicked in.
Assange has learned his lesson and the message has been sent: **Do not expose US government blunders**, and good luck with that whole democracy dark death thingy.