Biden dropped 9 points to 17 percent after his dismal performance in Iowa, followed close behind by former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who rose 7 points to 15 percent, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who dropped 1 point to 14 percent.
Lazy Caturday Reads: The Specter of Dictatorship in America
Posted: February 15, 2020 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Foreign Affairs, U.S. Politics | Tags: authoritarian rule, Department of Justice, Donald Trump, Sally Yates, specter of dictatorship, Trump 35 Comments
By Rudi Hurzlmeier, German cartoonist
Good Afternoon!!
Trump has gone to Florida for the long weekend, while the rest of us catch our breaths and try to process the horrifying events that followed the impeachment acquittal. More journalists are now writing about the specter of dictatorship in America.
Andrew Feinberg at The Independent: I spoke to experts on authoritarian rule about Trump’s behavior this week. They say 2020 could be our last free election.
Over the course of President Trump’s impeachment trial, Democrats warned the Republican-controlled Senate that acquitting Trump would mean he had successfully stymied most attempts to subject him or his administration to even a modicum of Congressional oversight. They warned that an acquittal would embolden him to finally exert full control over the entirety of the executive branch; norms, customs or guardrails be damned.
That’s exactly what Americans have seen in the days since Senate Republicans (minus Utah’s Mitt Romney) voted to absolve him of responsibility for his attempt to blackmail a foreign government.
According to several people closest to the President, he has internalized the exact lesson that Democrats feared he would, and for some time now has been intent on using the flexibility provided him by his acquittal and a compliant cohort of aides to begin settling scores.
Thursday’s Child – by Arthur Rackham (1907)
You’re familiar with the list of recent outrage, including the firings of Sondland and the Vindman brothers and trying to get the military to investigate Alexander Vindland, punishing New York by cutting off residents’ access to the Trusted Traveler program, and using Bill Barr to intervene in the Stone and Flynn cases.
…for scholars who study the authoritarian regimes for which the 45th President has repeatedly expressed admiration, Trump’s intervention in the Stone case represents a troubling milestone.
“The United States looks to be moving in the direction of Hungary or Poland, with the justice system starting to become a tool under the power of the executive branch that is being used for partisan ends,” said Jason Stanley, a Yale University philosophy professor who studies authoritarian politics.
“Republicans have shown no interest in sharing power or having a multi-party democracy, they’ve shown no interest in the rule of law,” he added, because a guiding concept of the Republican style of politics perfected by Trump is a wholesale rejection of the Democratic Party as a legitimate expression of voters’ political will….
Another scholar of authoritarianism, New York University’s Ruth Ben-Ghiat, said Trump’s co-opting of the Justice Department is typical of a democracy falling under the control of a dictator.
“You see this in authoritarian states… those in important positions like the attorney general or equivalent end up spending a lot of their time on the personal vendettas of their leader,” she said, offering the example of Barr’s recent trip to Italy to pressure Italian security services into providing information that would help discredit the Mueller investigation. “Inevitably, the people who last in the cabinet of an authoritarian leader are people who end up doing his personal-slash-official business, because you can no longer separate the two.”
Charles Frederick Tunnicliffe,Siamese cat on branch with apple blossom
Ben-Ghiat said the way Trump’s cabinet and congressional Republicans have adapted to him is a textbook example of “personalist rule.”
“This is a perfect example of when these men come to office and there is no longer a separation between their private profit and public office,” she explained, with various “lackeys” like Barr doing things that make it difficult to tell where the Justice Department’s business ends and Trump’s personal business begins.
And even though there is a presidential election in nine months, Ben-Ghiat said Republicans will continue to enable Trump’s whims and act as if there will never again be a Democratic president, because the endgame involves Trump and his allies protecting themselves by staying in power.
I recommend reading the whole article at The Independent.
At The Atlantic, Franklin Foer writes that Trump wants the U.S. to be like Ukraine: Now We Know What Kind of Authoritarian Trump Aspires to Be.
Donald Trump’s obsession with Ukrainian corruption turned out to be genuine: He wanted it thoroughly investigated—for the sake of its emulation. The diplomats who testified in front in Adam Schiff’s committee explained and exposed the Ukrainian justice system. Their descriptions may have been intended as an indictment of kleptocracy, but the president apparently regarded them as an instructional video on selective prosecution, the subversion of a neutral judiciary, and the punishment of whistle-blowers who expose corruption.
Over the course of Trump’s presidency, his critics have speculated about the model of illiberal democracy that he would adopt as his own. After the past week—which saw the firing of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the revocation of the Justice Department’s sentencing memo for Roger Stone, and Attorney General Bill Barr’s increasingly heavy-handed control of the investigations into his boss—there’s less doubt about the contours of the state Trump hopes to build. He’s creating Kyiv-on-the-Potomac.
Feridun Oral (1961-present, Turkish)
The House Intelligence Committee narrative featured a villainous bureau in Kyiv called the Office of the Prosecutor General. On paper, this department is akin to America’s own Department of Justice, but in practice, it acted more like an auction house where top government lawyers would entertain bids from oligarchs. These prosecutors have been integral to the maintenance and perversion of the system. Oligarchs would abuse the office to bring cases against old enemies; they also used the office to punish critics of their corrupt practices. And, in the most extreme example, one Ukrainian president weaponized the office against his primary political opponent: He actually locked her up. (It was Paul Manafort’s job, as a consultant to that president, to justify the arrest to the rest of the world.)
Again, I recommend reading the entire piece.
Sasha Abramsky at The Nation: Republicans Have Made It Clear They Will Let Trump Become a Dictator. Will We?
Trump’s attacks on the federal judiciary are the domestic Signal this week. Freed from all accountability by the Senate, the realtor’s inner autocrat is on full display, with a pressure campaign on the Justice Department to back off on its sentencing recommendations for his convicted friend Roger Stone, and with an extraordinary flurry of tweets personally attacking the judge in Stone’s case.
Trump’s actions got so extreme that, amazingly, even Attorney General Barr finally had enough. On Thursday evening, in an extraordinary exchange, Barr, who has done more than anyone else to protect and enable this lawless presidency, said that Trump’s tweets were making it impossible for him to do his job. Trump wasn’t humbled. By Friday, he was on the attack once again, claiming that he had the legal right to interfere in federal criminal cases.
By Rudi Hurzlmeier
For Senator Susan Collins, who absurdly claimed that Trump had learned his lesson after being impeached by the House, and for the other “moderate” Republicans who voted to acquit, this week has been a nightmare. Sure, they can dismiss it as simply more Trumpian Noise, but when the attorney general of the United States personally undermines his own career prosecutors to do a solid for the president, that’s far more serious than mere chatter.
And there’s no indication things will get better anytime soon. To the contrary, between now and November we are likely to see Trump fully unleashed.
We are heading into election season led by a president consumed with personal vendettas and convinced that he is surrounded by conspirators. Paranoid and narcissistic, he is firing anyone who stands in his way, demanding ever more craven demonstrations of loyalty from his courtiers. In Tennessee, legislators are debating a resolution to declare CNN and The Washington Post fake news because of their critical coverage of Trump.
Sally Yates at The Washington Post: Trump thinks the Justice Department is his personal grudge squad.
The imperative of Justice Department independence from political influence has deep roots. After the Watergate scandal, Attorney General Griffin Bell sought to reestablish Justice’s independence and ensure that the department would be “recognized by all citizens as a neutral zone, in which neither favor nor pressure nor politics is permitted to influence the administration of the law.” The nation had lost faith in the Justice Department and the rule of law, so during the Carter administration Bell instituted strict limits on communications between the White House and Justice to prevent any “outside interference in reaching professional judgment on legal matters.”
By Robert McClintock
Since Bell’s tenure, attorneys general in Democratic and Republican administrations alike have issued largely similar policies to adhere to the course Bell mapped for the department to live up to its promise of impartial justice. All have observed a “wall” between the White House and the Justice Department on criminal cases and investigations. While it is appropriate to communicate about administration policies and priorities, discussion with the White House about specific criminal cases has traditionally been off-limits. Presidents and department leaders from both parties have recognized that for case decisions to have legitimacy, they must be made without political influence — whether real or perceived. Implementation of these restrictions has not always been perfect, but the department’s independence has remained honored and unquestioned.
Until now.
While the policy is ostensibly still in effect, it is a hollow ode to bygone days. From virtually the moment he took office, President Trump has attempted to use the Justice Department as a cudgel against his enemies and as a shield for himself and his allies.
But now Trump is trying to turn back time. Read the rest at the WaPo.
And what about Trump’s attacks on the Intelligence Community? Are they working? Jefferson Morley at The New Republic: Is the CIA’s Director Going Full MAGA?
When President Trump called in his State of the Union address for legislation that would allow crime victims to sue sanctuary cities for offenses committed by undocumented immigrants, CIA Director Gina Haspel rose to her feet, clapping. It was an unusual display of partisan spirit for the nation’s top intelligence officer, especially as it concerned a domestic law enforcement issue, an area where the agency is forbidden by law from acting.
By Valentina Andrukhova
It was “not right” for Haspel to attend the speech, much less applaud it, said Gen. Michael Hayden, who served as director of central intelligence under President George W. Bush. Bruce Riedel, the CIA’s former Saudi Arabia station chief, was similarly categorical. “It is odd that a DCI who avoids public appearances of any kind would make a public appearance at the most fractious SOTU in our time,” he told me in an email. “The job is being more politicized than it should be.”
Haspel was not required to attend the State of the Union. The CIA director is not even a Cabinet officer, noted ex-CIA officer John Kiriakou. “Why was she even there, much less in a seat of honor, up front?” he said in an interview. “The joint chiefs don’t applaud. The Supreme Court justices don’t applaud. The CIA director shouldn’t, either.”
Haspel’s appearance raises the unsettling possibility that Trump, for all his denunciations of the “deep state,” might have an ally at the top of the CIA. With Attorney General Bill Barr fulfilling Trump’s whims at the Justice Department, a compliant intelligence director in Langley would enhance Trump’s ability to pursue worse whims—including, potentially, foreign aid to his political and personal fortunes.
A few more stories to check out:
Lucian K. Truscott IV at Salon: Can we stop tiptoeing around the fact that Trump is behaving like a dictator?
Shan Wu at The Daily Beast: Bill Barr Is Wrecking the Justice Department, And It May Never Recover.
Eric Boelert at Press Run: Trump unleashed — does the press know how to handle his authoritarian ways?
Cat by Lionel Lindsay (1874-1961) Australian painter
I’ll end with this sobering piece by Fred Kaplan at Slate: “The President Has the Power to Basically Destroy the World”
On Oct. 30, 2017, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on whether the president needed new congressional authorization to use military force against terrorists around the world. When his turn came to ask questions, Democratic Sen. Edward Markey asked the witnesses whether Trump could launch a nuclear first strike without consulting anyone from Congress.
At first, the witnesses, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, hesitated, calling the question “hypothetical,” but Markey wouldn’t relent, and finally, Mattis allowed that the president could order a first strike if an adversary was seen “preparing” to launch an attack.
Markey, a longtime advocate of nuclear arms treaties, knew the answer before asking the question, but some of the senators were surprised. Among them was the Republican chairman, Bob Corker. A businessman from Tennessee, Corker was deeply conservative, but he was also agitated by stories he’d been hearing about Trump’s mental state. Recently Corker had made a stir by likening the White House to an “adult day center” and warning that Trump’s reckless threats toward other countries could pave a “path to World War III.”
Read the rest at Slate if you dare.
Enjoy this long weekend Sky Dancers! With any luck Trump will spend his time on the golf course and watching TV so we can have a short break from his insanity. This is an open thread, as always.
Such a Friday Reads: Losing the Rule of Law
Posted: February 14, 2020 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Banana Republicans, Bill Barr's Department of INjustice, Is Justice JUST ICE?, Rule of Law, With Liberty and Justice For All 18 Comments
FULL LIBERTY WITH FLAG, Peter Max
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Watching a country either recover from the grips of despotism or fall into it has always been a bit of a mental history assignment for me. It probably developed in the 1960s some time from watching way too much news with my parents during dinner. However, I even admit to enjoying that old movie The Year of Living Dangerously which overly romanticized the overthrow of President Sukarno in Indonesia. Well, it had an exotic setting and Sigourney Weaver. What can I say. It seems like almost all of that kinda thing had an exotic setting and a woman say, like Evita Peron.
I never could figure out what the appeal could possibly be of a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Mussolini. I understood revolutions and military coups–like those plaguing South America and parts of Asia–because they were such obvious power grabs. I also sat through The Killing Fields. It’s always been easier to write off a foreign banana republic that never really established rule of law than to think such a thing would ever be seen again after all the lessons of 20th century fascism.
Our country appears more infected by a disease than something like an obvious coup. But, whatever it is, Mitch McConnell and his republican cronies have taken down our rule of law rather slowly and deliberately.
Here we are. We have messianic theocratic aspirants like Iran did in the 1970s. Only these are in charge of the State Department and the Department of Education. They’re not mullahs. They’re Rev. Franklin Grahams. They’re even masking as Catholics and Methodists under names like Alito, DeVose, and Pompeo. We have the greed of oligarchy in the form of barely legal corporate kleptocracy. It’s no wonder they’ve teamed up to overthrow the judiciary by stacking it with hapless 30 something judges that couldn’t even find a job arguing before a court before they get a life time appointment to determine what is the rule of law. We have a representative democracy with a Constitution.–providing checks and balances on paper–but it seems in theory only today.
We now have that typical gross, disgusting tin pot fattie who’ll sell anything to anybody as long as he gets his way, gets attention, and can pocket gobs of tax payer dollars while he’s blowing up vital institutions. Trump’s got a worse case of the uglies than Idi Amin or Kim Jong Un or Vladimir Putin or Benito Mussolini or any of them. And btw, why are the worst autocrats basically the most unattractive men you’ve ever put eyes on?
So, now, here’s our justice department being ruled over by another unattractive blob of a man who thinks an Iron Age book of Roman mythology gives him the right to do whatever. That, and I swear there’s some paperwork somewhere on Jeffrey Epstein that has his family name on it that he’s still searching for. I just can’t figure out if it’s his father’s or his because, well, that’s what all those ugly little toadie men professing way too much religion do. They abuse women and children and say nasty things about gay men and pass laws to make it all acceptable.
LIBERTY HEAD, Peter Max
And, I’m tired of it.
The Republican Party has become a grab bag of men with the worst tendencies held in low regard by history. Mitch McConnell may be the worst of them because he’s got the job that’s supposed to stop all this from happening because it’s in his oath of office to uphold the US Constitution. He just keeps letting Trumpist corruption roll on and on and over everything that was every sacred in this country.
I’m trying not to turn this into a lecture but as an economist, I can only tell you that the single most important thing to an economy’s well being is rule of law. It’s that thing that stops corruption and thugs from taking stuff that doesn’t belong to them which was has been an understanding of good governance since the Magna Carta.
It is the necessary insurance for risk-taking in a real market economy. In history and in recent empirical studies, we see all the time that the rule of law countries have economic growth, stability, and the protection to property owners that makes small businesses thrive. Once lost, it’s like a bad reputation, you don’t get it back quickly or completely, ever. What we’ve lost the last three year we will never earn back in earnest because trust remembers.
So, with that, I continue what BB started yesterday and that’s the sad mess state of affairs at the Department of Justice and the ongoing shitshow being exposed by folks willing to leave their jobs to expose it. If you read anything, go back to her post and read the top item. It’s Michael Gerhardt at The Atlantic: Madison’s Nightmare Has Come to America.
And let me start off with what Rachel said last night in her A block because this and the historian she interviewed are so incredibly spot on that crying for the death of one’s country is in order.
So, you have to actually see or read the ABC interview with Anything but Justice AG William “Shifty” Barr trying to explaining why so many US attorneys just walked out on him. Could it be that Trump keeps tweety tweet tweeting his many moves to disrupt justice and cover up crimes? ‘Barr blasts Trump’s tweets on Stone case: ‘Impossible for me to do my job’: ABC News Exclusive. The AG spoke with ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas.’.
Such a way to ensure justice for the People and to uphold the Constitution and RULE OF LAW!
Barr ignited a firestorm this week after top Justice Department officials intervened in the sentencing of Roger Stone, a longtime friend and former campaign adviser to the president who was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction of justice.
In a stunning reversal, the Justice Department overruled a recommendation by its own prosecution team that Stone spend seven to nine years in jail and told a judge that such a punishment – which was in line with sentencing guidelines – “would not be appropriate.”
The about-face raised serious questions about whether Barr had intervened on behalf of the president’s friend. It also raised questions about whether Trump personally pressured the Justice Department, either directly or indirectly.
In the interview with ABC News, Barr fiercely defended his actions and said it had nothing to do with the president. He said he was supportive of Stone’s convictions but thought the sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years was excessive. When news outlets reported the seven to nine year sentencing recommendation last Monday, Barr said he thought it was spin.
“Statue of Liberty” 1963, Andy Warhol
So, this is Barr’s really, really dim excuse. The Orange Snot Blob ate his homework!
“I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases,” Barr told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas.
When asked if he was prepared for the consequences of criticizing the president – his boss – Barr said “of course” because his job is to run the Justice Department and make decisions on “what I think is the right thing to do.”
Yes, Shifty Bar says it was in the works the entire time and ignore the man twittering away from the shitter in the Oval Office.
Can we get some congressional oversight again please? At least in the House?
Can we get a witness?
Numerous House Democrats are now advocating for the House to solicit testimony from the four prosecutors involved in the initial recommendation for Stone, aides tell me. Four have withdrawn from the case, and one quit his job.
Two senior Democratic aides told me many House members want to see these hearings well in advance of Barr’s planned testimony to the Judiciary Committee on March 31.
“Time is of the essence, since this scandal gets worse by the hour,” one senior aide to a member of Judiciary told me, adding that hearing from the four prosecutors could help create “a record of what happened before Barr gets to set the narrative.”
Another senior House aide told me there’s a “pretty widespread sentiment” among members that the four prosecutors must be heard from, “to get the full story of what’s happening under Barr’s tenure.”
Yeah, and what happened here?
So, I watched TV yesterday afternoon while getting my lecture notes in order and over and over again I saw this parade of lawyers discussing how unprecedented this massive walk out was. All I could think was Nixon but yet, again, the catalyst is more brazen than Nixon’s messing with the special investigator resulting in the so-called Saturday Night Massacre in 1973.
The former U.S. attorney whose office oversaw the Roger Stone prosecution resigned from the Trump administration Wednesday, two days after President Donald Trump abruptly withdrew her nomination for a top job at the Treasury Department.
Jessie Liu had headed the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., which oversaw several cases that originated with former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, including prosecutions of longtime Trump associate Stone and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Liu was moved from the U.S. attorney’s office after Trump nominated her to serve as the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial crimes, a top position overseeing economic sanctions.
A source told NBC News earlier this week that after Liu was nominated, she told the lawyers in her office that she would stay put until she was confirmed. However, Attorney General William Barr asked her to leave around Feb. 1 to ensure continuity in the office, and she agreed.
Such a Republic! If we can keep it!
But n/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-tronc.s3.amazonaws.com/public/3ZOIOT44WBEY7IOV5ZXTNU5OLU.tif)
Should we just keep impeaching him over and over and over? Julia Ioffe asked Representative and Impeachment Manager Hakeem Jeffries just that question..
Now, the president clearly feels vindicated, he is more popular than ever, and Rudy Giuliani is out there saying he’s going to keep investigating Joe Biden. If Giuliani continues using the powers of the executive branch to do that, what options do you have?
Rudy Giuliani is totally out of control. He is a failed mayor, a failed lawyer, and a failed presidential candidate. Someone needs to undertake a clinical intervention as it relates to Rudolph Giuliani running around the world, trying to do the president’s political bidding—
Clinical intervention? Are you saying he should be institutionalized?
—in a manner that resulted, in part, in Donald Trump’s impeachment. But ultimately, Donald Trump is the one who is responsible for executing a corrupt scheme and a geopolitical shakedown to solicit foreign interference in the American election. House managers made clear that we don’t believe that Donald Trump will learn a lesson from his political near-death experience. It is clear that Donald Trump is further emboldened to cheat in the election—and that’s on the United States Senate.
Does the House have any recourse? Is a second impeachment in the cards?
In my view, no. It’s in the hands of the American people at this point to decide the fate of Donald Trump.
What if he’s re-elected, would you undertake a second impeachment?
It’s my expectation that he will not be re-elected. In fact, I disagree with the premise that some have articulated, which is that President Trump has emerged from the impeachment more popular than ever before. A Quinnipiac poll that came out this week showed President Trump decisively losing to every single Democratic candidate.
To be fair, polls had him losing to Hillary Clinton, but we know how that worked out. He says he feels totally vindicated, and he fired two of the witnesses who testified in the impeachment trial. Should we just stay off Fifth Avenue if he’s in the area?
Well, Donald Trump clearly feels that he can shoot holes in the Constitution on Pennsylvania Avenue and get away with it. But ultimately I believe the American people will have the final decision and that his out-of-control, erratic, corrupt behavior will not be tolerated and he will be decisively defeated in November.
This is from a Susan Glasser piece in the New Yorker discussing our unhinged president and the entire situation. Again, the parallels to countries with no apparent rule of law are highlighted. This time it’s Putin’s Russia. The difference is that Putin is not the same kind of insane that Donald Trump daily displays.
I found myself thinking a lot this week about my experience of covering the former Soviet Union and watching aspiring authoritarians in action. Before Vladimir Putin refused to give up power, despite the Russian Constitution’s two-term limit, two senior Bush Administration officials told me that he would not do so, simply because Putin had personally assured them that he wouldn’t. These same officials believed that Putin would never arrest Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, until he did. They also believed that Putin would never renationalize Khodorkovsky’s oil company. But he did that, too.
In Azerbaijan, in 2003, I watched thousands of protesters in the streets on the night of a rigged election, in which Ilham Aliyev, the widely derided playboy son of the country’s gravely ailing dictator, received an implausible seventy-seven per cent of the votes. Western observers condemned the balloting as neither free nor fair, but the real insight for me came the next day, while I was flying back to Moscow. On the plane with the Russian election-observation team, which had seen nothing to object to, I wondered why Aliyev and his ruling party had seemed to go for such overkill, such an obviously fake result, rather than stealing the election with a more credible fifty-five per cent. One of the Russians laughed at me, saying, in effect, that the overkill was the point. That’s how power works around here. Strength lies in forcing people to accept the unacceptable. Aliyev, incidentally, remains in charge to this day.
Neither Putin’s bald decision to rewrite the rules so that he could stay in office nor Aliyev’s election fraud were in the least bit surprising to their subjects. But they were important moments, nonetheless. Blowing through previously established rules and norms matters. Having suffered no consequences for such acts, leaders move on to bigger and more audacious targets. The appetite grows while eating, as the Russian saying goes.
Still, this isn’t Russia, and, for Trump-watchers, there was a notable familiarity to the week of mayhem that followed the President’s acquittal. Although it is often difficult to look back when so much is happening each day, Trump has been nutty and angry before, ranting and vindictive, blasting norms and lying with abandon. Trump has been insulting his enemies and wreaking vengeance and claiming the “absolute right” to do things that he does not have the absolute right to do—for years. The Washington Post counted more than sixteen thousand lies, misstatements, and untruths from the President—before a single senator voted to acquit him. Months before he hijacked U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine, in service of his personal political interests, he ordered the U.S. military to the Southern border to combat a nonexistent “invasion,” only days in advance of the 2018 midterm elections. Is this time really different?
The answer, I’m afraid, is yes. In his post-impeachment rage, Trump wanted vengeance, and he wanted us to know it. There was no one inside his Administration to stop him. A month ago, Congress had at least the theoretical power to do something about his overreaching. Today, thanks to the Senate’s very clear vote, it does not. So, although the President himself is unchanged, the context around him is very much altered. In the history of the Trump Presidency, there will be a before impeachment and an after. It’s too late for lessons learned, and it’s most definitely too late for Bill Barr to complain about the President’s tweets. The constraints are gone. The leverage is lost. One ABC News interview with a single Cabinet official is not going to restore it. Trump, unhinged and unleashed, may actually turn out to be everything we feared.
United We Stand, Four Statues of Blue Liberty. Peter Max, 2001
So, if you want to get philosophical about the whole thing I would suggest a podcast from The Guardian. ( Written about 380BC, Plato’s Republic is still our blueprint for thinking about the relationship between justice and the state. But who exactly is the “philosopher king” that Plato envisages? Did he really advocate infanticide? And who will “guard the guardians”? In the latest episode of The Big Ideas, Benjamen Walker talks Plato with philosophers Mark Kingwell, Mark Vernon, Julian Baggini and Guardian writer Charlotte Higgins. )I read Republic way back in High School. It was in 1973 about the same time as the Saturday Night massacre. I offer it humbly up to you along with this quote.
Laws are partly formed for the sake of good men, in order to instruct them how they may live on friendly terms with one another, and partly for the sake of those who refuse to be instructed, whose spirit cannot be subdued, or softened, or hindered from plunging into evil.
So, we are on this path together and the only thing I know for certain is that this year will be quite long. I’m disheartened by the many good people losing jobs that were basically in service to us yet made optimistic by the fact that they while they lost their jobs and we lost their divine service, we still have heroes among us. They quit on principle. It is just sad that they are the ones that may not get the big bucks for speaking or writing books. But perhaps it is better they don’t because that circumstance has shut the mouths and conscience of a lot of higher ups thrown over by the Trumpist Regime who enabled him when they had their chance at doing something principled.
And I give you Joni Mitchell asking the rhetorical question is Justice “Just Ice”? I add my own question to you now.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads: Can American Democracy Survive Trump’s and Barr’s Assaults?
Posted: February 13, 2020 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bill Barr, Donald Trump, James Madison, Jonathan Kravis, Roger Stone 32 Comments
Good Afternoon!!
Are we in a Constitutional crisis yet? I think we are. Trump is acting as if he has dictatorial powers and it appears that some of our institutions are crumbling under his attacks.
The State Department and the Justice Department are going along with Trump’s undemocratic demands. Bill Barr has turned the DOJ into Trump’s private law firm. Trump is now attacking the judicial system, demanding that judges treat his cronies leniently and punish his enemies harshly.
The Defense Department has acquiesced to his taking funds appropriated for other purposes to build his idiotic border wall. The GOP-controlled Senate has refused to rein him in through his impeachment trial, and in the process they have damaged their own legislative and oversight powers.
Can we survive Trump’s attack on our democracy? It looks like our only hope is to defeat him in November, but Republicans in the Senate are doing their damnedest to prevent any attempts to protect election security. In acquitting him in the impeachment “trial,” GOP Senators endorsed Trump’s efforts to get foreign governments to help in his reelection. Finally, Trump could very well win enough electoral votes to win even if he loses the popular vote again.
We definitely need massive protests in the streets. Will it happen? We also need the media to wake up and take this crisis seriously. Yes Trump is a moron and does all kinds of moronic things, but this is no laughing matter. Investigative reporters need to continue revealing Trump’s corruption and his power grabs and political reporters need to focus more on vetting the Democratic candidates and writing about their policy proposals and less on the horse race.
Stories to check out today
Michael Gerhardt at The Atlantic: Madison’s Nightmare Has Come to America.
The Senate’s impeachment trial of President Donald Trump is over, ending with all but one Republican voting to acquit. But the effort to make sense of its constitutional ramifications is only beginning.
Almost a half century ago, President Richard Nixon’s resignation was thought to have proved that the constitutional system worked, with the House, the Senate, and a special prosecutor each having conducted long, painstaking investigations into his misconduct; the Supreme Court having directed President Nixon to comply with a judicial subpoena to turn over taped conversations; and the House Judiciary Committee having approved three articles of impeachment shortly before Nixon resigned.
In sharp contrast, few think that the acquittal of President Trump is a triumph for the Constitution. Instead, it reveals a different, disturbing lesson, about how the American political system—and the Constitution itself—might be fundamentally flawed.
Since the writing of the Constitution, three developments have substantially altered the effectiveness of impeachment as a check on presidential misconduct. The first is the rise of extreme partisanship, under which each party’s goal is frequently to vanquish the other and control as much of the federal government as possible. This aim is fundamentally incompatible with the system that James Madison designed, premised as it was on negotiation, compromise, and a variety of checking mechanisms to ensure that no branch or faction was beyond the reach of the Constitution or the law.
Read the rest at the link. It’s not very long.
Stephen Collinson at CNN: The President’s decision to expand his power post-trial has stunned Washington.
It’s time to stop asking whether President Donald Trump will learn lessons from the controversies he constantly stokes — of course he does. But far from stepping back or opting for contrition as his critics and appeasers hope, Trump draws darker political conclusions.
The result is that he expands his own power by confounding institutional restraints and opening a zone of presidential impunity — while at the same time delighting his political base.
Trump’s interference in the sentencing of his long-time associate Roger Stone and a post-impeachment retribution splurge reflect a lifetime’s lessons of a real estate baron turned public servant.
On Wednesday, Trump publicly praised the Justice Department for reversing its call for a stiff jail term for Stone after his own critical late night tweet that laid bare fears of blatant interference in bedrock US justice.
“I want to thank the Justice Department for seeing this horrible thing. And I didn’t speak to them by the way, just so you understand. They saw the horribleness of a nine-year sentence for doing nothing,” the President told reporters.
He noted that the four prosecutors who quit the Stone case “hit the road,” raising the prospect that their protests failed to introduce accountability to the administration and only served to further hollow out the government and make it more pliable to the President.
Trump denied that he crossed a line. But his tweet left no doubt about what he wanted to happen. And his strategy, in this case and others, actually worked.
Just as he used US government power to smear Joe Biden in the Ukraine scandal, he succeeded in getting favorable treatment for a friend in the Stone case — though the final sentence will be up to a judge.
Chuck Rosenberg at The Washington Post: This is a revolting assault on the fragile rule of law.
Something extraordinary and deeply troubling happened at — and to — the Justice Department this week. Four federal prosecutors properly, and as a matter of conscience, withdrew from the Roger Stone case. They had shepherded that case through the criminal-justice system but in an alarming development were ordered to disavow a sentencing recommendation they filed with the federal judge overseeing the matter….
We all understand that the leadership at the top of the department is politically appointed, and we make peace with that (in addition to my work as a career federal prosecutor, I served in political positions under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama in the Justice Department and worked for thoughtful appointed leaders of both parties), but being asked by that leadership to allow politics to corrode our work is not remotely normal or permissible. And it is treacherous.
The rule of law is a construct. It was made by people — and is nurtured and preserved by people. It can also be destroyed by people. And unlike the law of gravity, which works everywhere and all the time (at least on this planet), the rule of law is precious and fragile. As citizens and prosecutors, we either safeguard it or we surrender it. That’s the choice. What political leadership did here — mandating a favor for a friend of the president in line with the president’s publicly expressed desire in the case — significantly damages the rule of law and the perception of Justice Department fairness.
Principled resignations by career federal prosecutors highlighted this dangerous stunt. I am proud of them for that.
But I find it revolting that they were pushed into that corner (one resigned his job; three others resigned from the case) and saddened by their sacrifice. This is not normal and it is not right,and it is dangerous territory for the rule of law.
Safeguard or surrender. You choose.
Bob Bauer at The New York Times: Trump and Barr Are Out of Control.
Jonathan Kravis
The resignation of a Justice Department prosecutor over the sentencing of Roger Stone is a major event. The prosecutor, Jonathan Kravis, apparently concluded that he could not, in good conscience, remain in his post if the department leadership appeared to buckle under White House pressure to abandon a sentencing recommendation in the case of Mr. Stone, the associate of President Trump who was convicted of obstructing a congressional inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Three of his colleagues quit the Stone case but remain with the department: Mr. Kravis left altogether. Even though the president for years has derided federal law enforcement officials, accusing them variously of conflicts of interest and criminality and weakness in not pursuing prosecution of his political opposition, Mr. Kravis’s is the first resignation in the face of these assaults.
Dramatically forceful responses to Mr. Trump’s assaults on rule-of-law norms have been all too rare. A resignation can set off an alarm bell for an institution whose failings an official might be unable to bring to light in no other way, or as effectively. It upholds rule of law norms in the very act of signaling that they are failing. It makes its point with power and transparency, and stands a chance of rallying support from those who remain in place and compelling other institutions like the press and Congress to take close notice.
The government official who resigns for these reasons is, paradoxically, doing his or her job by leaving it.
Read more at The NYT.
Natasha Bertrand and Daniel Lippman at Politico: ‘Really shocking’: Trump’s meddling in Stone case stuns Washington.
President Donald Trump’s post-impeachment acquittal behavior is casting a chill in Washington, with Attorney General William Barr emerging as a key ally in the president’s quest for vengeance against the law enforcement and national security establishment that initiated the Russia and Ukraine investigations.
In perhaps the most tumultuous day yet for the Justice Department under Trump, four top prosecutors withdrew on Tuesday from a case involving the president’s longtime friend Roger Stone after senior department officials overrode their sentencing recommendation—a backpedaling that DOJ veterans and legal experts suspect was influenced by Trump’s own displeasure with the prosecutors’ judgment.
“With Bill Barr, on an amazing number of occasions … you can be almost 100 percent certain that there’s something improper going on,” said Donald Ayer, the former deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration.
The president has only inflamed such suspicions, congratulating Barr on Wednesday for intervening in Stone’s case and teeing off hours later on the prosecutors, calling them “Mueller people” who treated Stone “very badly.”
The president said he had not spoken with Barr about the matter, but Ayer called the attorney general’s apparent intervention “really shocking,” because Barr “has now entered into the area of criminal sanction, which is the one area probably more than any other where it’s most important that the Justice Department’s conduct be above reproach and beyond suspicion.”
What will today bring? I haven’t turned on the TV yet, but I’m very fearful of what Trump will do next. Courage, Sky Dancers! This is an open thread.
Tuesday Reads: New Hampshire Primary and Barr’s Injustice Department
Posted: February 11, 2020 Filed under: just because, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bill Barr, Injustice Department, New Hampshire primary 32 Comments
Je Suis Un Gourmand, by William Logsdail
Good Morning!!
Last night MSNBC reported on primary results in three small towns in New Hampshire where voting starts at midnight. Not that it means anything yet, but Amy Klobuchar came out on top.
WMUR: First results of 2020 New Hampshire Primary are in. Amy Klobuchar, Donald Trump lead.
Dixville Notch kicked off the primary festivities Tuesday as they have done for decades, and the result was described as “interesting.”
Michael Bloomberg got three write-in votes, one of which was a write-in vote in the Republican primary. It’s a rarity in Dixville Notch for write-in votes. Pete Buttigieg and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders each got one vote….
Sen. Amy Klobuchar was the popular choice in Hart’s Location, receiving six votes in the Democratic race. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren came in second with four votes. Andrew Yang and Sanders followed with three votes and two votes, respectively. Former vice president Joe Biden, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Tom Steyer each received one vote….
Thomas Benjamin Kennington, Girl with doll
In Millsfield, Klobuchar took home the win in the Democratic race with two votes. Biden, Buttigieg and Sanders each got one vote. Trump received 16 votes from Millsfield. Former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld got one vote.
It’s not looking good for Joe Biden. Axios summarized the results of the latest Quinnipac poll:
“Biden no longer dominates on the key question of electability,” with 27% of national Democratic or Dem-leaning voters giving Biden the best chance of beating President Trump — a steep drop from 44% just two weeks ago.
- Sanders was second with 24%. Bloomberg was third with 17% — up from 9% in late January, and ahead of Buttigieg, Warren and Klobuchar.
- Among black primary voters, the poll found Biden’s lead has dropped to 27% from 51% in December, with Bloomberg jumping to the second spot, at 22%, slightly ahead of Sanders.
Meanwhile, the oddsmakers see Bloomberg in second among Democrats right now, behind Sanders.
Here are results of a Morning Consult poll of black voters:
Amy Klobuchar also got 1%.
Politico on the Quinnipac poll: Biden plummets in new national poll, ceding top spot to Bernie.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has plummeted in a new national poll out Monday that also shows Bernie Sanders with a clear lead among Democratic voters heading into Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.
Andrei Petrovich Ryabushkin – Girl with doll, 1890s
The new Quinnipiac University poll, conducted after Sanders’ strong showing in the Iowa caucuses a week ago, has the Vermont senator boasting the support of 25 percent of Democratic voters, making an 8-point lead over Biden and a 4-point increase over the last national survey taken before the caucuses.
While former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg got a 4-point bump after appearing to narrowly edge Sanders out for first place in the Iowa state delegate count — results which Buttigieg and Sanders are both challenging — Buttigieg came in at fifth place nationally in the Quinnipiac poll, with 10 percent of the vote. Sen. Amy Klobuchar rounds out the top six with 4 percent, a drop of 3 points, while no other candidate broke 2 percent in the poll.
So it’s beginning to look like another primary crash and burn for Biden. A few more opinion pieces to check out:
Ryan Lizza at Politico: This Democratic field is so flawed that even Biden still has a chance.
Karen Tumulty at The Washington Post: There are two Joe Bidens. The wrong one is running for president.
Ben Terris at The Washington Post: On the trail with Joe Biden: What happens when the ‘electability candidate’ starts to lose?
It’s not looking good for Elizabeth Warren either. She’s from Massachusetts and she should be doing well in New Hampshire. I always assumed she would come in second to Bernie Sanders; but that’s not happening–at least according to the polls. She isn’t picking up enough of the black voter either.
Matt Flegenheimer at The New York Times: Elizabeth Warren Is Running Her Race. The Real One May Be Passing Her By.
Two days before a once-mission-critical primary in a state she neighbors, Senator Elizabeth Warren — typically exceptional at holding a room — had not finished speaking when something unusual happened: Dozens of voters began filtering out of the middle school gym she had reserved.
John White Alexander. Portrait of a Young Girl with Her Doll
Campaign staff strained to enlist prospective volunteers on their way to their cars. “Someone, anyone,” one organizer called out as departing guests stepped around him.
And when Ms. Warren wound toward her big finish, the go-out-and-get-’em kicker in these urgent final hours, her mind wandered accidentally to home.
“It’s up to you, Massachusetts, to decide what to do,” Ms. Warren instructed.
Supporters looked back at her, murmuring. She realized why. “And to the people of New Hampshire!” she amended.
On the eve of a contest she had hoped to win (and probably will not, according to polls) — one week removed from a caucus she had hoped to win (and certainly did not, according to Iowans) — Ms. Warren has arrived, almost imperceptibly, at a precarious stage.
In a primary adjoining her own state, it is Senator Bernie Sanders, another New Englander, and Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., who are leading sin polls.
Warren’s campaign also appears to be struggling financially.
What about Amy Klobuchar? Is she really surging in New Hampshire? Stranger things have happened. New Hampshire voters have a tendency to pull off surprises.
Buzzfeed News: Amy Klobuchar’s New Hampshire Surge Might Really Be Happening.
Pundits have been predicting the moderate Minnesota senator’s rise in the Democratic primary since October, as she racked up supposed debate wins and endorsements and built a campaign on her own “electability” in the states Democrats desperately need in 2020. For months, though, there was little sign among voters of that surge. Polls remained stagnant, and small, quiet crowds often tailed her in Iowa.
But this time, after the latest Democratic debate and just before New Hampshire votes in the nation’s first primary, there’s serious evidence that the Klobuchar is becoming a threat to the other moderates in the race: record-sized crowds, impressive fundraising hauls, and polls that suddenly show her in third place, ahead of Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden.
Louis Adolphe Tessier (1858-1915) — Girl with Doll, 1901
Her delight at this fact, at a succession of diners and packed rallies across New Hampshire, is palpable.
“And by the way, I’ve got a plan for the Midwest — and we can include New Hampshire as well,” Klobuchar told Sunday’s middle school gym crowd. “We’re going to build a beautiful blue wall around these states, and we’re going to make Donald Trump pay for it.”
Click the Buzzfeed link to read the rest.
Vox: Klobmentum could be happening in New Hampshire.
A string of strong polls over the weekend have shown the Minnesota senator overtaking Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden to reach third place in New Hampshire, which votes Tuesday. Over the weekend, her campaign reported $2.5 million in post-debate fundraising — an impressive two-day number in the context of the $11.4 million she raised in the last three months of 2019.
It’s a change for Klobuchar, whose national polling has been mired in the low single digits since she entered the race in February 2019. Nationally, she’s in sixth at 4.3 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average, 4 percentage points behind former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. But Biden’s weak performance in Iowa seems to have given Klobuchar, who came in just behind him in fifth place, an opening. And a strong performance in New Hampshire could bolster her candidacy going into Super Tuesday.
Like Buttigieg and Biden, Klobuchar has positioned herself as a moderate. On the debate stage, she has emphasized practicality, party unity, and a uniquely Midwestern case for electability: She’s mentioned repeatedly that she’s one of the only candidates who’s never lost a race — and that she outperformed Hillary Clinton in multiple Minnesota counties in 2016.
By framing her candidacy in this way, Klobuchar is targeting voters who may still be making up their minds — including some who are searching for a moderate alternative to the white male frontrunners. And recent polls indicate her message might be resonating in New Hampshire.
Read more at Vox.
The problem for both Warren and Klobuchar is that so far they are not winning the black vote. But I suppose that could change if one of them starts looking like she could beat Trump.
The Washington Post: Barr acknowledges Justice Dept. has created ‘intake process’ to vet Giuliani’s information on Bidens.
Jan Sluijters – Portrait of a girl, 1935
Attorney General William P. Barr acknowledged Monday that the Justice Department would evaluate material that Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, had gathered from Ukrainian sources claiming to have damaging information about former vice president Joe Biden and his family — though Barr and other officials suggested Giuliani was being treated no differently than any tipster.
At a news conference on an unrelated case, Barr confirmed an assertion made Sunday by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) that the Justice Department had “created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it’s verified.”
Barr said he had established an “intake process in the field” so that the Justice Department and intelligence agencies could scrutinize information they were given.
“That is true for all information that comes to the department relating to the Ukraine, including anything Mr. Giuliani might provide,” Barr said. He did not provide any other specifics.
A Justice Department official said Giuliani had “recently” shared information with federal law enforcement officials through the process described by Barr. Two people familiar with the matter said the information is being routed to the U.S. attorney’s office in Pittsburgh.
This could all be a waste of time for Trump and Barr if Biden’s campaign continues to go downhill. I wonder what foreign countries they will ask to help if the nominee is someone else? I guess they could get a lot from Russia on Bernie Sanders.
Raw Story: Barr declares war against sanctuary cities – expert says he’s targeting democratic jurisdictions.
Attorney General Bill Barr has launched an all-out attack against sanctuary cities, claiming they are endangering national security. The AG says he will allow the Dept. of Homeland Security to issue “federal subpoenas to access information about criminal aliens in the custody of uncooperative jurisdictions,” Fox News reports.
Barr says the DOJ is targeting the State of New Jersey and King County, Washington, and will be “reviewing the practices, policies, and laws of other jurisdictions across the country. This includes assessing whether jurisdictions are complying with our criminal laws, in particular the criminal statute that prohibits the harboring or shielding of aliens in the United States.”
Miss Winifred Hudson as a Young Girl, 1888 — by Nicholas Chevalier (Australian, 1828-1902)
In addition to targeting certain state and local governments, Barr appears to be making the targeting personal, declaring, “we are meticulously reviewing the actions of certain district attorneys who have adopted policies of charging foreign nationals with lesser offenses for the express purpose of avoiding the federal immigration consequences of those nationals’ criminal conduct. In pursuing their personal ambitions and misguided notions of equal justice, these district attorneys are systematically violating the rule of law and may even be unlawfully discriminating against American citizens.”
Read more at the link.
One more from The Daily Beast: The FBI Makes a Bizarre Claim About Pro-Choice Terrorism.
The FBI is expanding its focus on domestic terrorism, and that includes pro-choice violence—even though such violence is so vanishingly rare, it’s all but nonexistent.
In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray disclosed that the bureau has recently “changed our terminology as part of a broader reorganization of the way in which we categorize our domestic terrorism efforts.” It’s part of a much-heralded reinvigoration of the bureau’s domestic terrorism focus after a rising tide of mostly white-supremacist terrorism.
Among four broad categories of domestic terrorism that the FBI confronts, Wray said, is “abortion violent extremism.”
But Wray wasn’t only talking about the pro-life extremism that murders abortion providers in their churches, he hastened to add, but “people on either side of that issue who commit violence on behalf of different views on that topic.”
His questioner, Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), was puzzled at Wray’s seeming equivalence: “People on either side of that issue don’t commit violence.” In fact, the FBI pointed The Daily Beast to just one episode of pro-choice-inspired terrorism—one that did not involve an actual act of violence, but rather a threat in an online comments section.
I just don’t know what to say about all this. We are in big trouble as a country. Hang in there Sky Dancers! As always, this is an open thread.
Monday Mayhem: But be sure to look behind the curtain!
Posted: February 10, 2020 Filed under: just because, morning reads, US National Parks | Tags: #BLM, Department of Interior, destruction of sacred and historic sites, fracking, ICE, the Very Destructive WALL, US National Parks 35 Comments
Thomas Moran’s The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872
Good Day Sky Dancers!
The Trumpist regime is sneaking a lot of bad policy in while all of us are focusing on the things the media wants to put on TV, Trump is definitely feeding our Treasury, our people, and our Country’s gifts of nature to his cronies. Here’s some links on what the Bureau of Land Management is doing to roll back land and animal protection and to ensure every bit of nature in the country is turned into oil, gas, and a dust bowl.
Pendley, a 74-year-old former Marine who ran the MSLF from 1981 until his appointment last year at the BLM, pursued Watt’s vision with admirable tenacity and has continued to pursue it in his new office. This month, he greenlighted rampant expansion of oil and gas drilling on previously off-limits areas, including on one million acres in central California. On January 17, he announced the loosening of regulations for the public lands cattle industry, making it easier for livestock operators to violate federal environmental laws and not face consequences. He has sowed chaos at BLM by uprooting long-standing Washington D.C. staff with a forced move of the agency’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, where energy companies rule the roost. The goal, his critics say, is to bring BLM regulators into closer quarters with the oil and gas industry to be more easily captured. In response, staffers in the D.C. quarters have attempted to unionize: The National Treasury Employees Union filed a petition to represent BLM employees with the Federal Labor Relations Authority in December.
Pendley’s actions are accompanied by extremist and inflammatory rhetoric supporting lawlessness on the public lands. Pendley has praised the criminal Cliven Bundy clan, whose infamous armed standoffs against federal land regulators amounted to acts of domestic terrorism. When Bundyite militiamen pointed sniper rifles at BLM law officers in Nevada, in 2014, and took over at gunpoint the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016—in both instances announcing their willingness to kill federal law officers if need be—Pendley cheered in the pages of National Review, reiterating the Bundy family’s crackpot theory that the Constitution forbids federal ownership of land.
In an op-ed published last November in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Pendley stated it is now policy that BLM law officers will defer to self-proclaimed “constitutionalist” county sheriffs who have vowed not to enforce federal environmental laws on public lands. Pendley’s Review-Journal piece was “a dog whistle to the extremists of the anti-public-lands movement,” wrote Erik Molvar, executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, an environmental nonprofit in Idaho. That’s in part because of the belief system of the “constitutionalist” sheriffs, not mentioned in Pendley’s piece. The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which Pendley has long claimed as an ally, declares on its website that “federal agencies now claiming control of land within a state should be drastically downsized and/or dismantled. County sheriffs in these states should take their rightful position and use their authority to assist in the transfer of control of the land.”
Dennis McLane, who was deputy chief of law enforcement at BLM from 1996 to 2003, explained to me how this would shape out on the ground. County sheriffs allied in the CSPOA, he said, would serve as the local vanguard for the evisceration of federal public lands regulations. “In many western counties,” McLane told me, “the sheriffs would use their newfound authority to just ignore the enforcement of federal resource laws.” In other words, it would be a free-for-all of extractive interests engaging in lawless behavior for maximum profits—the vision of James Watt and the MSLF.
O’Neill Butte, Grand Canyon, Thomas Moran 1884
The New York Times Reports that” “U.S. Moves Ahead on Development Plans for Utah Monuments Trump Shrank” via Reuters.
The U.S. Interior Department on Thursday finalized land use plans for two Utah national monuments that President Donald Trump shrank soon after taking office, a move environmental groups said would leave cultural sites vulnerable to destruction and boost development in pristine wilderness.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) proceeded with the plans despite pending litigation challenging the 2017 proclamation by Trump that slashed the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.
BLM officials told reporters in a call that the land use plans for the Grand Staircase-Esclalante monument, as well as 860,000 acres (348,030 hectares) that were excluded from the monument by Trump, were necessary because the existing plan had not been updated in 20 years and that the number of visitors to the area had exploded in that time.
“Implementing these plans means that the BLM can improve visitor services and support local businesses and permitees and help them thrive, help the economy here, all while protecting this great American landscape,” Harry Barber, manager of BLM Utah’s Paria River District, said on the call.
Scenery in the Grand Tetons by Albert Bierstadt (MABI 2843) circa 1865 -1870
Nothing is literally sacred. Not only are lands being pillaged for greedy extraction profiteers but the wall threatens native burials as well as the land. I’ve seen this park and the ones in Utah as a kid.
The grandeur of the land in the American West is simply unimaginable until you stand on it and look around! Seeing these natural wonders and parts of our history is the single most humbling experience you can imagine. You just stand there breathless. And then, you see your first herd of buffalo, or your first family of mountain goats, or a mother bear and her young! Ever scaled a cliff dwelling or crawled through a Kentucky cave with just an oil lamp? Seen a geyser erupt, ventured to peer over the deepest part of a canyon cut from water? Seen water weep over a huge cliff? I have and I want that experience to be available to every one!
It is so worth keeping for generations ahead and I am so glad that the generations behind me felt the same. This goal to monetize everything is just surreal to me. From CBS:
A national monument in Arizona, home to rare species and sacred Native American burial sites, is being blown up this week as part of construction for President Trump’s border wall, Customs and Border Protection confirmed to CBS News. “Controlled blasting” inside Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument began this week without consultation from the Native American nation whose ancestral land it affects, according to the congressman whose district includes the reservation.
“There has been no consultation with the nation,” said Congressman Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who is the chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources and whose district contains the reservation and shares 400 miles of border with Mexico. “This administration is basically trampling on the tribe’s history — and to put it poignantly, it’s ancestry.”
Customs and Border Protection told CBS News that the blasts are in preparation for “new border wall system construction, within the Roosevelt Reservation at Monument Mountain in the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector.”
Georgia O’Keeffe, My Front Yard, Summer, 1941
But there is more. Here’s more form the desert areas and again, it’s big energy related. This is from the LA TImes.
In step with President Trump’s push for more energy development in California’s deserts, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced Thursday it wants to transform 22,000 acres of public land in the southern Owens Valley into one of the largest geothermal leasing sites in the state.
The agency has determined that the aquifer deep beneath the surface of the vintage Old West landscape of Rose Valley, about 120 miles north of Los Angeles, is a storehouse of enough volcanically heated water to spur $1 billion in investments and provide 117,000 homes with electricity.
Yet the decision is sure to set off a new water war in an arid part of the eastern Sierra Nevada that is sprinkled with dormant volcanoes, spiky lava beds and rare species, such as desert tortoises.
MABI 6194, “Half Dome” by Carleton Watkins, 1861
Conservation groups are suing the Trumpist Regime. This is especially true for California. This is from the NRDC:
Conservation groups sued the Trump administration today challenging the last step in the administration’s plan to allow oil drilling and fracking on more than 1 million acres of public lands and minerals in Central California.
Today’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, says the Bureau of Land Management violated federal law by failing to consider fracking’s potential harm to public health and recreation in the region, as well as harm to the climate and possible groundwater and air pollution. The suit also notes the potential for oil-industry-induced earthquakes.
The BLM plan would allow drilling and fracking on public lands across eight counties in California’s Central Valley and Central Coast: Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Tulare and Ventura.
“Trump’s illegal, deeply unjust fracking plan would be a disaster for Central Valley communities, as well as our climate, wildlife and water,” said Clare Lakewood, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We need to phase out fracking and oil drilling, not throw open our public lands to polluters. The future of our beautiful state and our children depends on it.”
The Trump administration also plans to allow fracking on an additional 725,500 acres across 11 counties in California’s Central Coast and Bay Area. In October conservation groups filed suit to challenge that decision.
“BLM’s ill-considered plan to fling wide the door to fracking on public lands is yet another assault on California’s efforts to protect its environment and move away from dirty fossil fuels,” said Ann Alexander, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Gov. Newsom just announced curbs on oil drilling, but BLM is charging full speed ahead with it. California is trying to find a way to rationally address its limited water supply, and now BLM is greenlighting activities that can contaminate it with toxic chemicals. This federal war on California really needs to stop.” In an expert blog, Alexander further explains the implications of this rash move by the administration.
Animals, historical sites, and our lands are not the only things subject to decimation. Politico reports: “Trump hits Medicaid, food stamps in push to slash domestic spending. He will also ask Congress for a slight spending increase for the Pentagon as he releases his $4.8 trillion budget blueprint for the upcoming fiscal year.” Again, the border wall is set to destroy a lot.
Under Trump’s plan, theadministration predicts the federal deficit would shrink to $966 billion next fiscal year and to $261 billion by 2030.That gap between government spending and revenue is forecast to exceed $1 trillion this year.
As with his previous budget proposals, Trump is once again seeking deep and unrealistic cuts to most federal agency budgets, according to the budget summary tables. The cuts are unlikely to be embraced by Congress.
For example, the administration is seeking an 8 percent cut to USDA’s budget over current funding levels. Trump’s plan would cut the Commerce Department by 37 percent, the Education Department by 8 percent, the Energy Department by 8 percent, the Department of Housing and Urban Development by 15 percent, and the Department of Health and Human Services by 9 percent.
The administration is also seeking a 13 percent cut to the Interior Department, a 2 percent cut to the Justice Department, an 11 percent cut to the Labor Department, a nearly 21 percent cut to the State Department and a 13 percent cut to the Department of Transportation. The EPA’s budget would see a nearly 27 percent chop, the Army Corps of Engineers would see a 22 percent reduction and the Small Business Administration would see an 11 percent decrease.
On immigration, health care, infrastructure and the deficit, the final budget pitch of Trump’s first term will look much different from the campaign platform he offered four years ago.
The border wall that he promised would be paid for by Mexico is instead being financed by billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars, and the administration’s budget request to Congress is expected to seek even more.
The president’s 2015 promise to protect Medicaid from cuts has been repeatedly ignored, as he has sought to slash some $800 billion over a decade from the health program for low-income Americans. The latest evidence of this came on Saturday, when he wrote on Twitter that the budget proposal “will not be touching your Social Security or Medicare.” He made no mention of protecting Medicaid, even though he had vowed to guard it during his first presidential campaign.
He is also seeking to gut the Affordable Care Act through the courts despite pledging to safeguard one of its key tenets: insurance coverage for people with preexisting conditions.
While it is important to focus on things that remove this abomination from the White House. We cannot ignore what is being pushed through by the white nationalist, radical rightist republican party. Please watch for these actions and write and call your congress critters as required!
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