Devin Nunes Still Needs A Hug-- And Not The Kind Of Anaconda Hug That Devin Nunes' Mom Wants To Give Him

For some reason I could never understand, no one on Twitter ever pointed out that Devin Nunes is a hermaphrodite. OK let that go by. But we really do need to ask ourselves if Nunes is a shameless partisan hack-- someone who abuses power and the legal process to injure his political opponents, who plays fast and loose with the truth to advance partisan goals, and who’s prone to conspiratorial thinking on the flimsiest of grounds. That either is or isn't the case. Please-- a yes or no answer!

I couldn't resist a quickie post about Nunes on Tuesday after his attorney lamented about how "he endured an orchestrated defamation campaign... that no human being should ever have to bear and suffer in their whole life." God, it sounds almost like someone made him work for wages that couldn't sustain a family or like someone took away his family's healthcare. Poor Devin! The terrible mocking must end-- or else! His ridiculous lawsuit is, as Matt Ford put it in the New Republic, a masterpiece of Republican Grievance. Nunes has done the impossible and surpassed even the short-fingered vulgarian in hypersensitivity, even claiming that the defendants in his absurd lawsuit are "part of a grand conspiracy to cripple his political career." The GOP has no issues with broad appeal... so now they're depending on this kind of crap to entice the aggrieved among us to vote for them.

Who’s leading this dastardly plot? Nunes doesn’t quite say. Maybe it’s the Democratic Party, he suggests. Or unnamed liberal donors. Or even hostile foreign adversaries. Whoever these hostile actors are, they’re not only causing him grievous harm; they’re contributing to “the corruption of American democracy and society.”

What the lawsuit really demonstrates, though, is the stunning vindictiveness of a powerful elected official who would use the legal system to punish his critics. If the lawsuit was intended to vindicate Nunes and his reputation, it has achieved precisely the opposite.

Nunes rose to national fame over the last two years as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, a perch he used to undermine the Russia investigation and defend Trump. In the complaint, he depicts himself as an honorable public servant who’s been wrongly maligned by his powerful opponents-- only one of whom, longtime Republican political operative Liz Mair, is explicitly named. The others are unknown to him: the Twitter users responsible for anonymous parody accounts such as “Devin Nunes’ Mom,” “Devin Nunes’ Cow,” “Fire Devin Nunes,” and “Devin Nunes’ Grapes.”

Nunes obliquely implies that Mair is in cahoots with these accounts’ owners, but offers no proof to support the theory. Either way, like a high school teacher hit from behind with a spitball, he’s determined to find out who’s responsible. “The identity of those behind the Twitter accounts is a matter of great public concern,” Nunes told the court. “Whether the accounts are controlled by wealthy Democrats, the Democratic National Committee, an opposition research firm, such as Fusion GPS, the ‘Russians,’ the ‘Chinese,’ or some other foreign government or non-governmental organization, the corruption of American democracy and society by intentional falsehoods, fraud and defamation must stop.”

What horrible things did these accounts say about Nunes to warrant the judiciary’s intervention? The account named “Devin Nunes’ Mom” receives the most attention in the complaint. Its owner frequently posted caustic remarks about him and his actions toward the Russia investigation. One tweet said that Nunes was unfit to run the House Intelligence Committee, while another joked that he was “voted ‘Most Likely to Commit Treason’ in high school.” Some tweets are indistinguishable from legitimate political criticism. Others are more puerile, implying that Nunes wanted to commit sexual acts with Trump and other top Republicans.

“In her endless barrage of tweets, Devin Nunes’ Mom maliciously attacked every aspect of Nunes’ character, honesty, integrity, ethics and fitness to perform his duties as a United States Congressman,” Nunes wrote in the complaint. Twitter apparently suspended the account this month for impersonating a real person, but not before he “suffered substantial insult, humiliation, embarrassment, pain, mental suffering and damage to his reputation as a result of the unprecedented personal and professional attacks on his character.”

Why did these tweets wound Nunes so deeply? The accounts’ jibes resemble much of the political commentary on Twitter—including the president’s. Nunes’s real grievance appears to be with Twitter itself. “Twitter represents that it enforces its Terms and Rules equally and that it does not discriminate against conservatives who wish to use its ‘public square,’” he told the court. “This is not true. This is a lie. Twitter actively censors and shadow-bans conservatives, such as Plaintiff, thereby eliminating his voice while amplifying the voices of his Democratic detractors.”

Twitter has denied that it uses shadow banning-- making a user’s posts visible to themselves but invisible to others-- but that hasn’t stopped Republican lawmakers, including Trump, from making the claim as part of a broader narrative that Silicon Valley is censoring conservative voices.

Nunes’s claim for damages also doesn’t hold up. He says that Twitter bears legal responsibility for any defamatory posts made on its platform. In reality, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act generally shields websites from civil liability related to third-party content on their platforms. Nunes himself should be pretty familiar with this: As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown pointed out, he and his colleagues have been working to change Section 230 for this exact reason.

Nunes adopts a patriotic mien when it comes to the broader free speech issues at stake. “Access to Twitter is essential for meaningful participation in modern-day American Democracy,” he told the court. “A candidate without Twitter is a losing candidate. The ability to use Twitter is a vital part of modern citizenship. A presence on Twitter is essential for an individual to run for office or engage in any level of political organizing in modern America. This is because Twitter is not merely a website: it is the modern town square.”

This paean to civic speech might be more convincing if Nunes didn’t ask the court to force Twitter to “reveal the names and contact information” behind four of the pseudonymous accounts. What’s more, he also wants the court to “permanently enjoin and order Twitter” to suspend Mair and the other accounts. Twitter is a vital part of modern American citizenship, Nunes says, and he wants the government to strip people of access to it for being mean to him.

But Americans have every right to mock and insult their elected officials. During the election of 1796, the first contested presidential race in the nation’s history, Alexander Hamilton wrote a pseudonymous pamphlet that accused Thomas Jefferson of having an affair with an enslaved woman he owned. (The allegation later turned out to be true.) Jefferson’s supporters jeered at John Adams as “His Rotundity” and called him a hermaphrodite, while Adams’s camp accused Jefferson of supporting prostitution and incest. Adams later arrested one of Jefferson’s pamphleteers during the election of 1800 and tried to prosecute him under the Alien and Sedition Acts. The American tradition of salacious and spurious political attacks is alive and well in the Trump era.



The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, a Supreme Court case from 1964, set a formidable threshold for defamation claims by public figures like Nunes. The justices cited a “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,” even if it includes “vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” The tweets against Nunes appear to fall well within those bounds. But Nunes ignores that landmark ruling (perhaps because, like Justice Clarence Thomas, he would like to see Sullivan overturned). Instead, he cites a smattering of other cases to defend his “fundamental constitutional interest and entitlement to the uninterrupted enjoyment of his reputation.” One of his longest citations isn’t from law, but a passage from Shakespeare’s Othello in which Iago bemoans that “he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed.”

So why embark on what appears to be a doomed legal endeavor? Perhaps Nunes genuinely believes he’s the victim of a conspiracy theory by Democrats and America’s foreign adversaries. If there’s evidence to support this, Nunes doesn’t offer it. “The full scope of the conspiracy, including the names of all participants and the level of involvement of donors and members of the Democratic Party, is unknown at this time and will be the subject of discovery in this action,” he noted in the complaint. In other words, Nunes wants to go on a fishing expedition to satiate his political grievances, and he wants the courts to light the way.

Or maybe Nunes is trying to use the legal system to get revenge on his political opponents. Defending oneself against litigation is onerous even for those with the financial means to fight back. (Mair urged her Twitter followers on Monday night to donate to her legal defense fund.) The rich have always wielded the American legal system as a cudgel against critics, as Peter Thiel did in financing the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that ultimately killed Gawker. That a member of Congress would attempt to do so is deeply disturbing.

Nunes’s largely anonymous Twitter critics cast him as a shameless partisan hack-- someone who abuses power and the legal process to injure his political opponents, who plays fast and loose with the truth to advance partisan goals, and who’s prone to conspiratorial thinking on the flimsiest of grounds. They say he lacks the temperament and honor to serve on the House Intelligence Committee and safeguard the nation’s secrets. His lawsuit only proves them right.

The headline in the most widely read newspaper in Nunes' district, the Fresno Bee, was By suing Twitter and parody account @DevinCow, Nunes makes himself a laughingstock. Reporter Marek Warszawski wrote that "unless the Tulare Republican plans to undo the Constitution, his lawsuit will never get out of the barn" and reminded readers that Nunes had been a co-sponsor of a piece of legislation by Tom Rice (R-SC) in 2017 called the "Discouraging Frivolous Lawsuits Act."

Nunes’ antics would be tolerable, at least somewhat, if he were good at his job. Which is to serve the people of his district, not act as President Trump’s mole. Unfortunately, after eight terms on Capitol Hill, his list of legislative accomplishments looks up to an earthworm.

Little wonder Nunes hasn’t held a public forum around these parts since 2010. (And, no, those chummy radio appearances and speeches at Republican fundraisers don’t count.) He doesn’t care to engage anyone, besides those in lockstep with him, on air quality, water, immigration, nothing.

Despite the doltishness of the conspiracy theories he propagates, Nunes is no dummy. He knows what he’s doing is legally bogus. The only reason to file it is for attention it gets him.

Since Democrats took control of the House, Nunes’ national status has shrunk. This lawsuit, and those he threatens to file, is nothing but a politician grasping at paper straws to stay relevant.

Nunes will use the headlines and Fox News appearances to raise even more money among like-minded Republicans. Thanks to his staunch defense of Trump, our congressman raised $12.6 million (and spent $11.5) on his re-election campaign.

Now the coffers need replenishing, so why not pull a stunt that will only ingratiate him with right-wing hearts and minds? Especially those with deep pockets to go with their persecution complexes.

And, by the way, the very small and numerically insignificant Nunes' Cow twitter account (about 1,200 followers before Nunes filed his frivolous suit), is about to overtake has now overtaken Nunes' own Twitter account in terms of followers. Nunes has 397,000 followers as of this writing, and Devin Nunes' Cow now has a rapidly expanding 574,000 followers. As you can see, on Tuesday after the brouhaha had already begun, the Cow account had barely 70,000 followers. Thanks to Nunes' whining, the Cow account can reach almost 500 hundred times as many people as it used to-- sharing everything Nunes' wishes no one was thinking about or talking about. Still no declared candidates against him... yet.

Are Crazy, Corrupt Religionists Preventing Action To Stop A Climate Change Chain Reaction That Mankind Will Be Powerless To Stop?

It frightens me that the media in the U.S. gives more space and more air to a discussion of whether storms like Hurricane Sandy are retribution from an angry god then looking at the scientific data about what the real problem actually is. Ken covered the science part of the equation pretty thoroughly Friday evening. People in other countries are concerned as well-- and they should be. Psychotic and corrupt Bronze Age religionists in the U.S. are powerful enough to prevent ameliorative action on Climate Change to prevent the onset of a new Ice Age. Scottish economist, Graeme Maxton, author of Driving Over a Cliff and The End of Progress, How Modern Economics Has Failed Us, explained in the South China Morning Post why Climate Change is a "clear and present danger" that must be dealt with seriously.

It almost seems fitting. The country that uses the most oil, has produced the greatest amount of carbon dioxide emissions for decades and has consistently denied the evidence of climate change has been given the slap it required. With tens of deaths, a crushed infrastructure and billions of dollars worth of damage, Hurricane Sandy is the wake-up call America needed. More than that, it is an event to which we should all pay heed. It is time to stop wasting money on fake wars and start spending it to protect us from a much graver threat.

A few weeks ago, I attended the general assembly of the Club of Rome, in Bucharest. There, we were presented with the latest evidence on the effects of climate change, and they were scary. Predictions made just five years ago have already proved wildly wrong.

In 2007, scientists said they thought the Arctic would be ice-free by the end of this century. At the current rate of melting, however, it will now be ice-free in the summer by 2015. It will be ice-free all year by 2030. This is not the main worry, however, as this is floating ice. When it melts, it does not raise sea levels. The real worry is the Greenland ice shelf, which is also melting at an unprecedented rate. If this disappears too, the effects will be catastrophic.

Sea levels around the world will rise between six and seven metres, wiping out cities like New York, London and Shanghai. The addition of so much cold fresh water into the seas would also change ocean currents and weather patterns in ways we can barely imagine.

At the same time, rising temperatures in the northern hemisphere now risk melting much of the Siberian permafrost, which will release vast clouds of trapped methane, accelerating the speed of climate change even more. This risks starting a chain reaction, which we could do nothing to stop.

The effects of what we are doing to the planet are all around us, from the storms and floods this year to the record droughts. Since 1980, the number of natural catastrophes has risen from an average of 400 a year to about 800 now, according to reinsurance company Munich Re. Ironically, North America has already been more affected by "weather-related extreme events" than anywhere else.

We need to make urgent changes to the way we live if we want to avoid a crisis. The changes now anticipated will not just affect our children and grandchildren. They will affect us all.

When predictions were made a few years ago, scientists said it would all be more or less OK if we limited the rise in average global temperatures to two degrees Celsius.

Yet we have missed that target already. Because we have not actually done anything to halt the damage we are doing, the amount of greenhouse gas being released into the atmosphere has continued to grow.

Without change, we are now heading for a four-degree rise, which will take the earth's average temperature back to levels last seen 40 million years ago. This will cause the Antarctic to melt too, with sea levels rising 60-70 metres. The droughts and floods we would experience along the way would make the planet virtually uninhabitable.

While these changes have been happening, while they have been denied and ignored, we have been fighting two senseless wars instead. The first has been against debt. Governments around the world have spent trillions trying to prop up their economies, to keep them growing and keep people spending. In the process, they have kept us digging up ever more of the world's raw materials and consuming even more stuff we don't need, making the changes to the climate even worse.

The second senseless war has been the "war on terror." According to a study by Brown University last year, the cost to America in the first 10 years after the attacks of September 11 was a staggering $4trillion. Trillions more have been spent in Europe and elsewhere.

During all this time, there have been just 251 terrorism-related deaths in the developed world and none in the US. Over the same time, tens of thousands have been killed by climate change. According to Munich Re, 30,000 people have been killed in North America alone, between 1980 and 2011 because of weather-related incidents.

For more than a decade, we have been chasing the wrong demon. The biggest threat to our existence is not the lack of economic growth, or al-Qaeda. It is the earth itself. Unless we learn to treat it with respect and start responding to the signals it is sending us, it will consume us all.

When Thomas Jefferson was interviewing academics for faculty positions at the University of Virginia, John Adams warned him to not consider any Europeans since they were likely to have already had their minds hopelessly warped by Christianity, which many of the Founding Fathers recognized as a dangerous superstition. Jefferson founded the University of Virginia as the country's first explicitly secular school, if not anti-Christian school. Dr. Daryl Cornett of Mid-America Theological Seminary wrote that Jefferson's "vision for the University of Virginia was for education finally free from traditional Christian dogma. He had a disdain for the influence that institutional Christianity had on education. At the University of Virginia there was no Christian curriculum and the school had no chaplain." This is the quote from John Adams' letter to Jefferson (January 22, 1825):

Your university is a noble employment in your old age and your ardor for its success does you honor but I do not approve of your sending to Europe for tutors and professors. I do believe there are sufficient scholars in America to fill your professorships and tutorships with more active ingenuity and independent minds than you can bring from Europe. The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices both ecclesiastical and temporal which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with episcopal and presbyterian creeds and confessions of faith.

JOHN ADAMS, GEORGE BUSH AND DONNA EDWARDS

Not quite as bad as Bush, but...

Earlier today I looked over new a Rasmussen poll about which presidents Americans most admire. Most of it is quite intuitive.

Six American Presidents are viewed favorably by at least 80% of all Americans. Those esteemed six are led by the first President George Washington. The Father of our Country is viewed favorably by 94% of Americans. The sixteenth President, Abraham Lincoln, is the second most popular. The man who gave us the Gettysburg Address is viewed favorably by 92% (see Presidential favorable ratings). The next four are Thomas Jefferson (89%), Teddy Roosevelt (84%), Franklin D. Roosevelt (81%), and John F. Kennedy (80%).

So far, so good. The next batch, however is where the trouble begins. Before I get to that... yes, of course Nixon and Bush II are the two presidents who are the least admired. 60% assign Nixon a negative rating and 59% register the same contempt for Bush. In fact, the "very unfavorable" category is not used much to describe anyone at all. Even Nixon only gets a 25% very unfavorable. Bush, on the other hand, gets the most-- aside from William McKinley (who was also governed by an unscrupulous, much-hated Rove-like figure, Mark Hanna)-- the only president to get more very unfavorables than Nixon. And it was way more. Nixon's 25% is positively dwarfed by Bush's 40%.

None of that surprises me. What does is the overwhelmingly favorable ratings (74%) for another Bush-like figure: John Adams. Aside from John Adams, Bush is most compared to James Polk, who has a meager 27% approval, Warren Harding (29% approval), Nixon (32% approval) and the aforementioned McKinley (42% approval). Adams' presidency was what Thomas Jefferson-- for good reason-- called the "reign of witches." Today Scott Horton explained why-- and why Adam's heavy-handed rule resembles that of Bush more than 200 years later-- in Harper's. "Jefferson believed that the Federalists had overplayed their hand-- that they had manipulated threats from abroad to seize for themselves vastly greater powers than the Constitution permitted them. He also believed that their demonization and mistreatment of the political opposition was an abuse of the powers of office and an assault upon the body politick. Adams had used the power of criminal prosecution to destroy the reputations of dozens of opposition political leaders, and to throw many of them behind bars. Even Jefferson expressed concern that he might be prosecuted... He termed Adams’s tactics as 'divide and conquer.' 'This is not new,' he wrote to John Taylor, 'it is the old practice of despots; to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order. And those who have once got an ascendancy and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantage.'"

Does this all sound disturbingly familiar? It should. Bush has been using many of the same divisive tactics, the same fear-mongering, the same narrow politicization of the national business. And it's almost over-- until Democrats, convinced it is their turn at the public trough, turn people against them and back to the Republicans. Is there a way out? Absolutely: primaries. There are too many corrupt, incompetent Democrats in Congress. We write about them all the time-- the Al Wynns, Max Baucuses, Mary Landrieux, John Barrows. Defeat slime like these and watch how fast your Rahm Emanuels and Steney Hoyers will shape up. Right now there are five progressive Blue America candidates who are seriously contending with unworthy Democratic primary opponents. For now that's where the real battle for the soul of our country lies. We'll have more coming soon. But if you want to donate-- and even small amounts help tremendously-- let me recommend the 5 with the primary battles: Victoria Wulsin (OH-02), Steve Cohen (TN-09), Angie Paccione (CO-04), John Laesch (IL-14), and, most important of all, Donna Edwards (MD-04). A victory for Donna over Al Wynn is a shot right across the bow of every faithless, corrupt Democrat on Capitol Hill. There's is nothing the American people could do between now and the February primary-- short of demanding Bush and Cheney be impeached-- to invigorate our democracy that would be more effective than replacing Al Wynn with Donna Edwards. Do the right thing... for America.