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Publishing 18 stories on Hunter Biden while categorically ignoring positive FBI stats on plummeting crime rates says it all.

The corporate media goal is to hurt Biden/Democrats in the election through predetermined narratives.

Robert Taft at The Guardian:

Republicans responded to Hunter Biden’s conviction on Tuesday of lying about his drug use to buy a gun by doubling down on conspiracy theories that many senior party figures have been using to try and damage his president father. Despite the fact that Joe Biden’s son could now face a hefty jail sentence, Donald Trump’s election campaign and its surrogates repeated unfounded attack lines that the conviction was part of a conspiracy to deflect attention from more serious crimes and represented the use of the Department of Justice (DoJ) as a political weapon.

Republicans have long sought to use Hunter Biden’s woes and business dealings as a political weapon against Biden, ignoring the fact that Trump himself is also now a convicted felon whose own business empire has been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for fraudulent practises.

That tactic continued in the wake of Hunter’s guilty verdict. “This trial has been nothing more than a distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family, which has raked in tens of millions of dollars from China, Russia and Ukraine,” the Trump campaign said in a statement. Matt Gaetz, the far-right congressman from Florida, was distinctly dismissive, posting on X: “The Hunter Biden gun conviction is kinda dumb tbh.” That was echoed by Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and founder of Turning Point USA, who derided the conviction as a distraction from worse crimes he claimed have been committed by the president’s family. “Hunter Biden guilty. Yawn,” Kirk wrote. “The true crimes of the Biden Crime Family remain untouched. This is a fake trial trying to make the Justice system appear ‘balanced.’ Don’t fall for it.” Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman for South Carolina, implied that the verdict was a sham. “Timing is everything. The veil of fairness in the justice system under Potus,” she wrote.

Stephen Miller, one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers during his first presidency, went further still, posting: “[The] DoJ is running election interference for Joe Biden – that’s why DOJ did NOT charge Hunter with being an unregistered foreign agent (FARA) or any crime connected with foreign corruption. Why? Because all the evidence would lead back to JOE.” The negative drumbeat underscored how the prosecution – and now conviction – of Hunter Biden has undermined a Republican narrative that the justice department has been “weaponised” by Biden’s administration to pursue a vendetta against Trump, who was last month convicted of 34 counts of document falsification to conceal hush-money payments to an adult actor. Trump’s case was led by a New York state prosecutor, who does not work under the department’s jurisdiction, while Hunter Biden was prosecuted by the DoJ, which is part of his father’s administration.

Wah wah wah!!! Republicans whine about the 3 Hunter Biden guilty convictions (even after hoping and praying for him to be guilty) and play poutrage games in order to hurt his father Joe’s election chances.

See Also:

HuffPost: Republicans Complain About Hunter Biden Guilty Verdict

Daily Kos: Hunter Biden is convicted, but the GOP is still big mad

Public Notice: Hunter Biden's conviction destroys key MAGA conspiracy theory

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.

Jim Morrison

Coincidentally, today is Valentine's Day in Brazil. ❤️🇧🇷

Monica Johnson, Portland nurse, returns from a traumatic experience in Rafah

Republican vows to block Democrats’ supreme court ethics bill

Excerpt:

US representatives have also criticized what they call a “crisis of legitimacy” affecting the court.

While speaking at a round table on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on Tuesday, the New York progressive representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the court has been captured and corrupted “by money and extremism”.

The Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who was also at Tuesday’s round table, said: “The highest court in the land today has the lowest ethical standards.”

“A group of anti-democratic billionaires with their own ideological and economic agenda has been working one of the three co-equal branches of government,” she said.

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

Global pollution from electricity generation was set to fall last year, thanks to the growth of renewable energy. Then came the droughts.

Hydropower, the biggest source of renewable energy in the world, was crippled by lack of rain in several countries last year, driving up emissions as countries turned to fossil fuels to fill the gap. To cope with the electricity shortfall, China and India turned to coal plants, and Colombia to natural gas.

A recent report by the International Energy Agency showed that hydropower’s decline last year pushed countries to use dirtier sources of energy that produced an extra 170 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s like turning on an extra 42 coal-fired power plants for a year. In China, the worst-hit country, hydroelectricity generation saw the steepest fall in the past two decades, according to the I.E.A.

This year, the dip in hydropower has continued in some countries, including Ecuador and Turkey, as temperatures continue to shatter records. Because its giant hydroelectric dams didn’t have enough water, Canada imported more electricity from the United States than it had done in over a decade, as my colleague Ivan Penn wrote this week.

In the United States, hydropower generation fell 6 percent last year. The decline was mostly attributed to high temperatures having melted snow too quickly in the Northwest, leading to huge water loss that curbed energy production in hydropower plants.

In China, hydropower generation fell around 4.9 percent last year, according to the I.E.A., because of a severe drought in the southwest provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan, which can generate almost half of the country’s hydroelectricity. Still, renewables have grown so much in China that there is reason to believe that the country’s emissions may have peaked last year, as Carbon Brief reported.

Climate change doesn’t lead to drier conditions everywhere. In some parts of the world, it increases rain. In Brazil, lack of rain has dried up large dams that fuel power plants in the north, while frightening floods have come to the south, where there are even larger dams.

While climate change is still expected to present enormous challenges for hydropower in Brazil, rain in one part of the country can help offset drought in another. But that can happen only because Brazil’s grid is fully interconnected, meaning that the energy that each plant produces can be directed to almost any part of the country that needs it.

Experts say a better connected electric system in the United States and Canada would help the region cope with hydropower declines. Instead of one fully interconnected grid, the United States has three grids that connect only in a few points and share little power between them, as my colleagues Nadja Popovich and Brad Plumer explained.

“Most models suggest that a more interconnected grid is a better grid,” Shelley Welton, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who helped write a recent report on the United States’ grid, told Penn. “I do think there is power in being interconnected across North America. We need scenario planning. We need long-term planning.”

Some interesting points to think about in the aftermath of the Hunter Biden guilty verdict:

- Hunter Biden was convicted in the state of Delaware, where the Bidens decidedly have a "home court" advantage -- for the people who say trump couldn't get a fair trial in NYC because they hate him, just look at Delaware.

- There was no ridiculous daily parade of same-suit-wearing Senators and members of Congress in the court; just Hunter's mom and family members.

- David Weiss, the prosecutor who went after Hunter in this case, was a trump-appointee. President Biden could have had him replaced, but decided to let the justice system play itself out. Because he BELIEVES in the process.

- Unlike his disgraced, unhinged, convicted felon predecessor, President Biden did not lash out against prosecutors, or the judge, members of the judge's family, or witnesses. Neither did Hunter Biden.

- Unlike trump, there were no delays or stupid stunts in this trial.

- President Biden said he will NOT pardon his son.

- If President Biden were interfering in the justice system as has been alleged by his detractors, there are so many different ways this could have played out.

- You will NOT be hearing Democrats tearing down the justice system in the aftermath of this verdict, baselessly declaring it to be rigged, despite the fact that he may have been prosecuted BECAUSE his name is Biden.

Most important: NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.

Florida residents are bracing for heavy rain ahead of flash flooding. The state is expected to get a month's worth of rain in just a few days, and the weather is also impacting air travel. Manuel Bojorquez reports.