Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: July 17, 2021 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: cat art, caturday, Covid-19 fourth wave, DACA, Delta variant, Missouri, Trump books | 29 Comments

Cat on a flowery Meadow, Bruno Liljefors

Cat on a Flowery Meadow, by Bruno Liljefors

Good Afternoon!!

Yesterday I wrote about the latest revelations from some of the many Trump books that have been hitting the shelves, as well as an upcoming one by Susan Glasser and her husband NYT reporter Peter Baker. Yesterday Glasser spoke to CNN’s Jack Tapper. From Raw Story: ‘Most terrified I’ve ever been’: Reporter describes learning ‘extremely alarming’ details of Trump’s final days.

Reporter Susan Glasser on Friday told CNN’s Jake Tapper that she felt personally unnerved while reporting out details of former President Donald Trump’s final days.

While discussing her most recent article in the New Yorker about Trump’s fights with General Mark Milley in the waning weeks of his administration, Glasser explained to Tapper that it was unprecedented for American military leaders to view the sitting commander-in-chief as a potential national security threat.

“You know, when I first learned about the level of alarm that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had through the election and all the way into January, I have to say it was probably the most terrified I’ve ever been as a reporter in several decades,” said Glasser, who has also reported from American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

She said she was relieved to see that Milley and other top military commanders had done their best to hold Trump in check, but still found it frightening just how far the twice-impeached former president was willing to go.

The question arises: why are we just now learning about these horrific events and those reported in other books? From The Washington Post: The media scramble at the heart of Trump Book Summer.

The peak of Trump Book Summer, the moment of maximum media intensity, may have come last Wednesday, when reporters scrambled to match a story about a story contained in one of those books.

Around 3 p.m. that day, New York magazine published an article based on a revelation its writer had discovered in the pages of “I Alone Can Fix It,” one of the entries in the current spate of Trump Studies, a copy of which the magazine said it had “obtained” before its official release.

The gist of the magazine’s report — that the book would reveal that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, feared Trump would precipitate a coup to maintain power — was so hot that it in turn triggered a nearly immediate follow-up report on CNN.com, written by no less than five reporters. Which in turn prompted The Washington Post to chase down the same nugget — which was kind of ironic considering the book that produced the scoop was written by two Post reporters and had already generated a prominent excerpt in the paper, with a second to come days later.

Wyndham Lewis, A Woman with a Cat

The media-on-media scramble, a kind of Russian nesting doll of reportage, attested to both the profound import of the Milley anecdote and the cultural heat of the new syllabus of Trump books. On the same day, “I Alone,” written by The Post’s Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, was the best-selling book on Amazon, which includes preorders for not-yet-released books. The third and fourth bestsellers were also dishy Trump titles, “Landslide,” by the independent journalist Michael Wolff, and “Frankly, We Did Win This Election,” by the Wall Street Journal’s Michael C. Bender, respectively. A fourth book, “Nightmare Scenario,” about Trump’s handling of the pandemic by two other Post reporters, Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb, had climbed up the lists the week before….

This spurt doesn’t include another dozen or so Trump books that will be released over the next few months, including one co-authored by Washington Post veteran Bob Woodward, who has already written two Trump tomes, including last September’s predictably best-selling “Rage.”

So why is it OK for these reporters to keep shocking news to themselves so they can use it to sell their books later on? The answer is that newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times allow their reporters to go on leave while writing their books and their research is “walled off from from their daily beat responsibilities,” according to editor Sally Buzbee.

“Basically, when staffers go on unpaid book leaves, which is the case here, there is an understanding that the reporting they are doing is for the book,” she said. “The Post typically publishes the book’s first excerpt, which gives our readers the first cut at the news. This is our long-standing practice and has served readers of The Post and the reporters well.”

Painting by Lilla Cabot Perry (1848-1933)

New York Times editor Dean Baquet said he encourages his reporters to “keep in touch” with editors at the paper when they’re working on books, and to alert them when they come up with something worthy of daily publication.

“Sometimes we make the judgment that it is okay to hold [a big scoop], or at least to hold until we publish an excerpt,” he said. Book-writing and daily news reporting aren’t “church and state,” said Baquet, whose star White House reporter Maggie Haberman is at work on a Trump book, “and I do hope reporters break their big news in the Times.”

Rucker noted another constraint on real-time reporting of the news he and Leonnig uncovered: “Many of the officials we interviewed for ‘I Alone Can Fix It’ agreed to speak with us about these events only after Trump had left office and only for the purposes of this deeper history,” he said.

OK then. I have to admit I can’t resist reading these books, even though I’m troubled by reporters keeping these secrets.

In other news, a Texas judge ruled that DACA is illegal. The Washington Post: U.S. judge blocks new applicants to program that protects undocumented ‘dreamers’ who arrived as children.

A federal judge in Texas has largely halted an Obama administration initiative that grants work permits and reprieves from deportation to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children — calling the program “unlawful” even as he allowed the more than 600,000 young people already in it to keep their protected status.

U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen sided with Texas and other states in his ruling that President Barack Obama overstepped his executive authority when he created the program.

Hanen’s ruling called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, an “illegally implemented program” and said “the public interest of the nation is always served by the cessation of a program that was created in violation of law.”

He prohibited the Department of Homeland Security from approving new applications, issued a permanent injunction vacating the memo that created DACA in 2012 — when President Biden was vice president — and remanded the issue to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for reconsideration.

Painting by Oskar Kokoschka

President Biden said the DOJ will appeal the decision. The White House: Statement by President Joe Biden on DACA and Legislation for Dreamers.

In 2012, the Obama-Biden Administration created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of young immigrants to remain in the United States, to live, study, and work in our communities. Nine years later, Congress has not acted to provide a path to citizenship for Dreamers.

Yesterday’s Federal court ruling is deeply disappointing. While the court’s order does not now affect current DACA recipients, this decision nonetheless relegates hundreds of thousands of young immigrants to an uncertain future. The Department of Justice intends to appeal this decision in order to preserve and fortify DACA. And, as the court recognized, the Department of Homeland Security plans to issue a proposed rule concerning DACA in the near future.

But only Congress can ensure a permanent solution by granting a path to citizenship for Dreamers that will provide the certainty and stability that these young people need and deserve. I have repeatedly called on Congress to pass the American Dream and Promise Act, and I now renew that call with the greatest urgency. It is my fervent hope that through reconciliation or other means, Congress will finally provide security to all Dreamers, who have lived too long in fear.

Thanks to all the misinformation Trump and his fans have spread about the Covid-19 and vaccines that prevent infections, we now appear to be entering a fourth wave of the deadly virus. USA Today: The fourth wave of COVID-19 cases is here. Will we escape the UK’s fate? It’s too soon to know, by Karen Weintraub.

A doubling of COVID-19 cases in the last two weeks suggests the United States has entered a fourth wave of the pandemic.

Beaver Meadow, by Paul Sample

No one knows what the next month or two will bring, but the example of the United Kingdom suggests the infection rate could get quite high, while hospitalizations and deaths stay relatively low.

Instead of the virus raging through entire communities, it is expected to target the unvaccinated, including children, and if rates are high enough, also the most vulnerable of the vaccinated – the elderly and the immunocompromised.

“Since the majority of our population is now immune, it’s unlikely that we’re going to return to the massive nationwide waves we saw back in January,” Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist with the Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said in a Wednesday webinar with media.

But major outbreaks can still occur, particularly in areas with low vaccination rates.

“We’re going to be living in two pandemic worlds, the world that’s vaccinated and the world that’s unvaccinated,” said Dr. Luis Ostrosky, chief of infectious diseases at UTHealth and an infectious disease specialist at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston.

The three vaccines authorized for use in the United States, from Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson, have all been shown to be highly effective against variants of the virus, including Delta, which now accounts for most of the cases in the U.S.

It’s a long article, so click the link to learn more.

Ed Yong at The Atlantic: Delta Is Driving a Wedge Through Missouri. For America as a whole, the pandemic might be fading. For some communities, this year will be worse than last.

The summer wasn’t meant to be like this. By April, Greene County, in southwestern Missouri, seemed to be past the worst of the pandemic. Intensive-care units that once overflowed had emptied. Vaccinations were rising. Health-care workers who had been fighting the coronavirus for months felt relieved—perhaps even hopeful. Then, in late May, cases started ticking up again. By July, the surge was so pronounced that “it took the wind out of everyone,” Erik Frederick, the chief administrative officer of Mercy Hospital Springfield, told me. “How did we end up back here again?”

Painting by Alice Neel

The hospital is now busier than at any previous point during the pandemic. In just five weeks, it took in as many COVID-19 patients as it did over five months last year. Ten minutes away, another big hospital, Cox Medical Center South, has been inundated just as quickly. “We only get beds available when someone dies, which happens several times a day,” Terrence Coulter, the critical-care medical director at CoxHealth, told me.

Last week, Katie Towns, the acting director of the Springfield–Greene County Health Department, was concerned that the county’s daily cases were topping 250. On Wednesday, the daily count hit 405. This dramatic surge is the work of the super-contagious Delta variant, which now accounts for 95 percent of Greene County’s new cases, according to Towns. It is spreading easily because people have ditched their masks, crowded into indoor spaces, resumed travel, and resisted vaccinations. Just 40 percent of people in Greene County are fully vaccinated. In some nearby counties, less than 20 percent of people are.

Many experts have argued that, even with Delta, the United States is unlikely to revisit the horrors of last winter. Even now, the country’s hospitalizations are one-seventh as high as they were in mid-January. But national optimism glosses over local reality. For many communities, this year will be worse than last. Springfield’s health-care workers and public-health specialists are experiencing the same ordeals they thought they had left behind. “But it feels worse this time because we’ve seen it before,” Amelia Montgomery, a nurse at CoxHealth, told me. “Walking back into the COVID ICU was demoralizing.”

Those ICUs are also filling with younger patients, in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, including many with no underlying health problems. In part, that’s because elderly people have been more likely to get vaccinated, leaving Delta with a younger pool of vulnerable hosts. While experts are still uncertain if Delta is deadlier than the original coronavirus, every physician and nurse in Missouri whom I spoke with told me that the 30- and 40-something COVID-19 patients they’re now seeing are much sicker than those they saw last year.

Read the rest at The Atlantic.

I’ll add a few more links in the comment thread. What stories are you following today?

Friday Reads: The Final Days

Posted: July 16, 2021 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because, morning reads | Tags: Coup attempt, Donald Trump, iran, January 6 Capitol insurrection, Joint Chiefs, Keith Kellogg, Mark Milley, Mike Pence, Secret Service, Trump books | 11 Comments

Soiree, by Andrea Kowch

Good Morning!!

The revelations about Trump’s final days just keep on coming. The Washington Post released another excerpt from the book by their reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig yesterday, and today The New Yorker a piece by Susan Glasser, who apparently has a book coming out next year.

Among the stunning details in the Rucker/Leonnig excerpt is that Mike Pence didn’t trust all of the the members of his Secret Service detail, seemingly suspecting that they were aiding Trump’s attempted coup.

At 2:13, Pence’s Secret Service detail removed the vice president from the Senate floor and took him through a side door to his ceremonial office nearby, along with his wife, Karen, their daughter Charlotte, and his brother, Greg, a congressman from Indiana. The Pences were hurried across one of the Capitol’s many ornate marble hallways to get there, but the path proved eerily close to danger. One or two minutes later, marauders chanting Pence’s name charged up the stairs to that precise landing in front of the hallway, and a quick-thinking Goodman led the rioters in a different direction, away from the Senate chamber. Had Pence walked past any later, the intruders who called him a traitor would have spotted him….

As rioters marauded through the Capitol, it was clear whom they were looking for. Some of them shouted, “Hang Mike Pence!” Trump didn’t exactly throw them off the hunt. At 2:24, the president tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

At that moment, Pence was still in his ceremonial office — protected by Secret Service agents, but vulnerable because the second-floor office had windows that could be breached and the intruding thugs had gained control of the building. Tim Giebels, the lead special agent in charge of the vice president’s protective detail, twice asked Pence to evacuate the Capitol, but Pence refused. “I’m not leaving the Capitol,” he told Giebels. The last thing the vice president wanted was the people attacking the Capitol to see his 20-car motorcade fleeing. That would only vindicate their insurrection.

The third time Giebels asked Pence to evacuate, it was more of an order than a request. “They’re in the building,” Giebels said. “The room you’re in is not secure. There are glass windows. I need to move you. We’re going.”

At 2:26, after a team of agents scouted a safe path to ensure the Pences would not encounter trouble, Giebels and the rest of Pence’s detail guided them down a staircase to a secure subterranean area that rioters couldn’t reach, where the vice president’s armored limousine awaited. Giebels asked Pence to get in one of the vehicles. “We can hold here,” he said.

“I’m not getting in the car, Tim,” Pence replied. “I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.”

The Pences then made their way to a secure underground area to wait out the riot.

Much as I can’t stand Pence, he did the right thing on that terrible day.

Let's say Pence had resigned, unable to defend Trump any longer. What if he'd done before 2019, when the GOP controlled both chambers?

You might have had VP Mark Meadows. What do you think HE would have done on Jan. 6?
— S.V. Dáte (@svdate) July 16, 2021

As we’ve learned, General Milly also came through, and even the much hated Bill Barr refused to support Trump’s authoritarian obsession.

Even Barr, who defended Trump on pretty much everything, who lied about the Mueller report to weaken its impact, came through for American democracy when it counted.

Do you think Acting Attorney General Matt Gaetz would have done that?
— S.V. Dáte (@svdate) July 16, 2021

Meanwhile, Trump was excitedly watching the MAGA attack on TV. He couldn’t have cared less that the Vice President and hundreds of Congresspeople were in danger.

Back at the White House, [Pence’s national security adviser, Retired Lt. General Keith] Kellogg was worried about Pence’s safety and went to find Trump.

“Is Mike okay?” the president asked him.

“The Secret Service has him under control,” Kellogg told Trump. “Karen is there with the daughter.”

“Oh?” Trump asked.

“They’re going to stay there until this thing gets sorted out,” Kellogg said.

A Siesta, by John Singer Sargent

Trump said nothing more. He didn’t express any hope that Pence was okay. He didn’t try to call the vice president to check on him. He just stayed in the dining room watching television.

Around this time, Kellogg ran into Tony Ornato in the West Wing. Ornato, who oversaw Secret Service movements, told him that Pence’s detail was planning to move the vice president to Joint Base Andrews.

“You can’t do that, Tony,” Kellogg said. “Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.”

Pence had made clear to Giebels the level of his determination and Kellogg said there was no changing it.

“He’s going to stay there,” Kellogg told Ornato. “If he has to wait there all night, he’s going to do it.”

At this point, can anyone seriously doubt that Trump would have been OK with his thugs hanging Pence? Pence and Kellogg need to testify under oath before the January 6 committee.

If you haven’t read the Washington Post article yet, please do.

General Mark Milley was a significant source for the Rucker/Leonnig book, and he apparently talked extensively to Susan Glasser as well. Glasser writes at The New Yorker: “You’re Gonna Have a Fucking War”: Mark Milley’s Fight to Stop Trump from Striking Iran.

The last time that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke with President Donald Trump was on January 3, 2021. The subject of the Sunday-afternoon meeting, at the White House, was Iran’s nuclear program. For the past several months, Milley had been engaged in an alarmed effort to insure that Trump did not embark on a military conflict with Iran as part of his quixotic campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election and remain in power. The chairman secretly feared that Trump would insist on launching a strike on Iranian interests that could set off a full-blown war.

There were two “nightmare scenarios,” Milley told associates, for the period after the November 3rd election, which resulted in Trump’s defeat but not his concession: one was that Trump would try “to use the military on the streets of America to prevent the legitimate, peaceful transfer of power.” The other was an external crisis involving Iran. It was not public at the time, but Milley believed that the nation had come close—“very close”—to conflict with the Islamic Republic. This dangerous post-election period, Milley said, was all because of Trump’s “Hitler”-like embrace of the “Big Lie” that the election had been stolen from him; Milley feared it was Trump’s “Reichstag moment,” in which, like Adolf Hitler in 1933, he would manufacture a crisis in order to swoop in and rescue the nation from it.

Study for the Pigeons, by Henry Koerner

To prevent such an outcome, Milley had, since late in 2020, been having morning phone meetings, at 8 a.m. on most days, with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in the hopes of getting the country safely through to Joe Biden’s Inauguration. The chairman, a burly four-star Army general who had been appointed to the post by Trump in 2019, referred to these meetings with his staff as the “land the plane” calls—as in, “both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck, we’re in an emergency situation. Our job is to land this plane safely and to do a peaceful transfer of power the 20th of January.”

This extraordinary confrontation between the nation’s top military official and the Commander-in-Chief had been building throughout 2020. Before the election, Milley had drafted a plan for how to handle the perilous period leading up to the Inauguration. He outlined four goals: first, to make sure that the U.S. didn’t unnecessarily go to war overseas; second, to make sure that U.S. troops were not used on the streets of America against the American people, for the purpose of keeping Trump in power; third, to maintain the military’s integrity; and, lastly, to maintain his own integrity. He referred back to them often in conversations with others.

As the crisis with Trump unfolded, and the chairman’s worst-case fears about the President not accepting defeat seemed to come true, Milley repeatedly met in private with the Joint Chiefs. He told them to make sure there were no unlawful orders from Trump and not to carry out any such orders without calling him first—almost a conscious echo of the final days of Richard Nixon, when Nixon’s Defense Secretary, James Schlesinger, reportedly warned the military not to act on any orders from the White House to launch a nuclear strike without first checking with him or with the national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger. At one meeting with the Joint Chiefs, in Milley’s Pentagon office, the chairman invoked Benjamin Franklin’s famous line, saying they should all hang together. To concerned members of Congress—including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—and also emissaries from the incoming Biden Administration, Milley also put out the word: Trump might attempt a coup, but he would fail because he would never succeed in co-opting the American military. “Our loyalty is to the U.S. Constitution,” Milley told them, and “we are not going to be involved in politics.”

Read the rest at The New Yorker.

Raw Story has an investigative article on the January 6 Capitol attack: Anatomy of an insurrection: How military veterans and other rioters carried out the Jan. 6 assault on democracy, by Jordan Green.

The slow-moving tedium of prosecutorial legal machinery and the GOP campaign to deflect responsibility can make it easy to lose sight of the big picture of what transpired on Jan. 6. But based on an aggregate review of individuals cases, along with other sources, a Raw Story analysis of the critical events in the Jan. 6 siege reveals a striking degree of coordination, sustained and intentional violence, planning and preparation, and determined effort to disable the United States’ critical governance apparatus by participants, including many with recent military experience. Many of the rioters who played critical roles in breaching the Capitol came away from the experience vowing to wage war against the United States. Few among those who are being prosecuted have expressed any remorse for their actions.

Day Trip, by William Haskell

Amid the hundreds of prosecutions of Trump supporters motivated by the big lie, the GOP has punished lawmakers who fail to bear allegiance to the former president and run afoul of the party line that the election was stolen, while thwarting the House investigation into the events of Jan. 6. GOP intransigence makes it likely that the Democratic-led investigation will become reduced to another partisan snipe-fest, undermining its potential to hold people accountable and prevent future attempts to overturn democracy….

A handful of defendants, including Oath Keepers members, have pleaded guilty, as fresh arrests fatten the docket weekly. Those recently charged are not minor players: In addition to people who trashed media equipment and assaulted reporters, they include the first boogaloo-identified rioter, with hints that there are more to come, and a man who organized a resistance cell under the cover of a Bible study. Critically, the FBI has yet to make an arrest for bombs that were planted outside the Democratic and Republican headquarters on the eve of the insurrection. Even under the most optimistic scenario, the prosecutions are likely to drag on for years: Among the few cases set for trial, white nationalist Christian Secor isn’t scheduled to begin deliberations until January 2022.

Beyond the chaotic events that took place when hundreds of Trump supporters unleashed mayhem on the Capitol, it remains unknown to what degree, if any, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers coordinated their actions. And beyond Trump’s feverish promotion of the Jan. 6 “Save America” rally and instruction to his followers to “walk down to the Capitol,” it also remains to be seen whether the siege may have been directed by the president or his surrogates through intermediaries such as Trump confidant Roger Stone or “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander.

Notably, the mob began its advance on the Capitol well before Trump had finished speaking at the Ellipse, suggesting that key players had decided in advance to disrupt the certification of the electoral vote, while Trump’s exhortations mobilized thousands more to reinforce the riot that was already unfolding at the seat of American government.

This is a very long and interesting article. I hope you’ll check it out.

I’m sorry to have to keep focusing on Trump news, but that’s what’s out there today. As always, this is an open thread. What’s on your mind?

Thursday Reads: Top Generals suspected Trump was plotting a coup

Posted: July 15, 2021 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: 2020 Elections, morning reads, The Big Lie | 7 Comments

Honoré Daumier, “The Uprising,” 1848 or later

Good Day Sky Dancers!

I’m doing today’s post. BB’s in bed healing atm so I’m going to scramble to get stuff up before I see students at noon.

The details coming out from General Mark Milley in the latest tell-all book from two Pulitzer Prize-winning WAPO reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker are simply horrifying. This is from CNN: “‘They’re not going to f**king succeed’: Top generals feared Trump would attempt a coup after election, according to new book”

The top US military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, was so shaken that then-President Donald Trump and his allies might attempt a coup or take other dangerous or illegal measures after the November election that Milley and other top officials informally planned for different ways to stop Trump, according to excerpts of an upcoming book obtained by CNN.

The book, from Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, describes how Milley and the other Joint Chiefs discussed a plan to resign, one-by-one, rather than carry out orders from Trump that they considered to be illegal, dangerous or ill-advised.

“It was a kind of Saturday Night Massacre in reverse,” Leonnig and Rucker write.

The book, “I Alone Can Fix It,” scheduled to be released next Tuesday, chronicles Trump’s final year as president, with a behind-the-scenes look at how senior administration officials and Trump’s inner circle navigated his increasingly unhinged behavior after losing the 2020 election. The authors interviewed Trump for more than two hours.

The book recounts how for the first time in modern US history the nation’s top military officer, whose role is to advise the president, was preparing for a showdown with the commander in chief because he feared a coup attempt after Trump lost the November election.

The authors explain Milley’s growing concerns that personnel moves that put Trump acolytes in positions of power at the Pentagon after the November 2020 election, including the firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and the resignation of Attorney General William Barr, were the sign of something sinister to come.

Milley spoke to friends, lawmakers and colleagues about the threat of a coup, and the Joint Chiefs chairman felt he had to be “on guard” for what might come.

“They may try, but they’re not going to f**king succeed,” Milley told his deputies, according to the authors. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.”

In the days leading up to January 6, Leonnig and Rucker write, Milley was worried about Trump’s call to action. “Milley told his staff that he believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military.”

Milley viewed Trump as “the classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose,” the authors write, and he saw parallels between Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric as a victim and savior and Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides, according to the book. “The gospel of the Führer.”

Francisco Goya, “The Third of May,” 1808

Ben Jacobs–writing for New York Magazine–had more to say about the Hitler referrences. “Top U.S. General Said Trump Preached ‘Gospel of the Führer’.

Tump had appointed Milley to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 2018, over the objections of Defense Secretary James Mattis. The Army general’s tenure at the top of the Pentagon had been relatively quiet, until last summer, when he appeared in uniform during an infamous photo opportunity for Trump in Lafayette Square that followed the clearing of protesters in front of the White House. Milley later apologized for creating a “perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”

Although the book chronicles Milley’s concern with Trump dating back to that moment, the general’s worries grew rapidly as the president plunged the nation into chaos following Election Day. Seven days later, Milley got a call from “an old friend” with an explicit warning that Trump and his allies were trying to “overturn the government.” Milley was confident that any attempts by Trump to hold on to power would be thwarted, because the military wouldn’t go along. “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed,” he told aides. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with guns.”

Still, Milley was disturbed by the sight of Trump supporters rallying to his cause in November, calling them “Brownshirts in the streets.” Leonnig and Rucker wrote that Milley “believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military.” The general likened the U.S. to Germany’s fragile Weimar Republic in the early 1930s. “This is a Reichstag moment,” he said, referring to the arson attack on Germany’s Parliament that Hitler used as a pretext to assume absolute power and destroy democracy.

On January 6, Milley watched with disgust as Trump addressed his supporters. Soon after Trump finished speaking, a violent mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the certification of the presidential election by a joint session of Congress — and many promised to return for Biden’s inauguration. “These guys are Nazis, they’re boogaloo boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II,” Milley said a week after the attack on the Capitol.

After Biden took the oath of office on January 20, and Trump was finally an ex-president, former First Lady Michelle Obama encountered Milley at the Capitol and asked how he was feeling. “No one has a bigger smile today than I do,” he said. “You can’t see it under my mask but I do.”

Konstantin Yuon, “New Planet,” 1921

Meanwhile out in the states, the Big Lie continues to be a Republican Election tactic. This is from the Atlantic Journal-Constituion: “Georgia Republicans center campaigns on false claims of election fraud.” These people are a crazy-ass Death Cult.

The organizers at the door handed out soft-pink “Trump Won” signs to each attendee. An out-of-state radio host spouted far-right conspiracies. Speaker after speaker insisted that Joe Biden couldn’t have won the November election and that Georgia couldn’t be a blue state.

The gathering this week in Rome might seem like a pro-Donald Trump fantasy convention. But this was no fringe group. Some of the biggest stars in the Georgia GOP were in attendance.

State Sen. Burt Jones, a wealthy executive who is expected to run for lieutenant governor, was given a hero’s welcome. A fellow Republican, state Sen. Brandon Beach, regaled the group with stories about standing up to the party establishment. Two other congressional candidates worked the room.

And U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene opened by telling the crowd, “I do not think Joe Biden won the election.”

Across the state, candidates for public office are repeating Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged and the contest was stolen from him. Many are running for local office and state legislative seats, while some are seeking the most powerful posts in the state.

Diego Rivera, “The Arsenal,” 1928

Where does the exercise of freespeech trip over into inciting insurrection? Hey DOJ! Hey AG Garland! Can we get some action here before there’s a repeat of Jan in–say–August? Or say, let’s get back to the Bender book. (See BB’s post on this) and discuss the former guy doing that interview for it. This is from Poliltico: “Trump rages over post-presidential books he did interviews for. The avalanche of coming books has caused recriminations. And there is anxiety about what’s to come by Meredith McGraw.

The guessing game that Bender’s book sparked added to the schisms and points of tensions that have erupted in Trump’s orbit in recent weeks. As the deluge of Trump-related books has hit the shelves, the already tenuous alliances that bind aides and associates of the former president have been strained further. Ex-aides have publicly attacked one-time allies while others have sought distance from a presidency they once dutifully served.

Fear is mounting, too, about the tea-spilling to come. In particular, Trump officials are anxiously awaiting the books set to be published by actual colleagues, chief among them counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway and Jared Kushner, who plan to write their own accounts of the Trump presidency.

“I think it’s fraught right now as to who is telling the truth,” said a Trump adviser. “They’re all trying to go back in time and curate their own images.”

Privately, former administration officials and top campaign aides have shared concerns about Conway’s upcoming tell-all in particular. The ex-president’s loyal former counselor is expected to give a hold-no-punches account of her time in the White House and those she worked alongside. Conway herself sat down with Trump for her book at Mar-a-Lago.

Right! Just what we need! A book from Ms “Alternative Facts”. Well, here’s another attention grabber. From The Guardian.

https://twitter.com/dansabbagh/status/1415612547781300224

Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.

The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present.

They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.

Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature.

By this point Trump was the frontrunner in the Republican party’s nomination race. A report prepared by Putin’s expert department recommended Moscow use “all possible force” to ensure a Trump victory.

Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.

The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Incidental details come across as accurate. The overall tone and

The Revolution, 1937 by Marc Chagall

AG Garland? Hello? Are you there? Please rid us of this meddlesome TV Reality Bimbo. You know? The Former Guy?

So, that’s enough to discuss and read for awhile. I think we’re likely in for a Friday surprise tomorrow. There are hints from Politico: ” Pigs fly: McConnell weighs giving Biden a bipartisan win. The self-appointed Senate GOP “Grim Reaper” has aired remarkably little criticism of the physical infrastructure deal that his members helped negotiate.” I personally will believe it when I see it.

Something strange is happening in Washington: Mitch McConnell might go along with a central piece of Joe Biden’s agenda.

The self-appointed “Grim Reaper” of the Senate, a minority leader who said just two months ago that “100% of my focus is on standing up to this administration,” has been remarkably circumspect about the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure deal. He’s privately telling his members to separate that effort from Democrats’ party-line $3.5 trillion spending plan and publicly observed there’s a “decent” chance for its success.

So, lots of headines to share today! What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Tuesday Reads

Posted: July 13, 2021 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | 12 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

There’s lots of gossip in the news because two Trump books were released today and a third is coming out next Tuesday. There’s also quite a bit of actual news out there: Fired Social Security Administration head Andrew Saul is still whining about his firing. Texas Democrats fled the state to once again try to block Republicans’ voter suppression bill. Biden will deliver a speech on voting rights in Philadelphia today. People in Cuba are demonstrating against the dictatorship there. The Trump Organization has removed Allen Weisselberg from many of it’s subsidiary businesses. Lets see how much of this news I can cram into this post.

First up, the gossip. Here are some links to check out if you want to know what’s in those tell-all books without spending money:

Axios: Trump unloads on Kavanaugh in new Michael Wolff book.

NBC News: Michael C. Bender This Air Force One fight over Trump’s Covid mask helped transform the 2020 race.

The Washington Post: ‘I Alone Can Fix It’ book excerpt: Inside Trump’s Election Day and the birth of the ‘big lie.’

Der Spiegel: Michael Wolff on His Latest Trump Book“There Was No Plan. He Is Deranged.”

CNN: Trump said whoever ‘leaked’ info on his White House bunker stay should be ‘executed,’ new book claims.

The Daily Beast: New Michael Wolff Book Says Murdoch Told Fox to Call Arizona Against Trump: ‘F*ck Him.’

Social Security Administration News:

The Washington Post: Fired and defiant, former Social Security chief is cut off from agency computers.

Ousted Social Security commissioner Andrew Saul, the Trump appointee who declared Friday he would defy his firing by President Biden, on Monday found his access to agency computers cut off, even as his acting replacement moved to undo his policies.

Andrew Saul

“I’m here to do the job,” Saul said from his home in Katonah, N.Y., where he had led the agency since the coronavirus pandemic forced most operations to shift in March 2020 to remote work, “but I can’t do anything with the communications shut down.”

Saul, 74, called his firing and that of his deputy David Black, in an email from the White House Personnel Office, a “palace coup” that he said blindsided him, given that his six-year term was not set to expire until 2025. As Republicans made plans to defend him, Saul said he had no public announcement — yet — on his strategy to remain in office as the “duly confirmed Social Security commissioner.”

“There will be more,” said Saul, a wealthy former women’s apparel executive and prominent Republican donor who had served on the board of a conservative think tank that has called for cuts to Social Security benefits. “Stay tuned.”

CNN: Biden administration took steps to ‘off-board’ fired Social Security chief, administration official says.

The Biden administration has worked to off-board the fired commissioner of the Social Security Administration who said he would report to work on Monday despite being terminated on Friday, an administration official said.

“As with any employment termination, the government has taken steps to off-board Andrew Saul as we would any other former employee,” an administration official says.

Those steps should essentially prevent Saul, who was a holdover from President Donald Trump’s administration and refused to resign when requested last week, from accessing the agency’s systems after his termination. Saul previously told the Washington Post that he still planned to report to work on Monday by signing in remotely from his home in New York….

Saul has questioned the legality of the President’s decision, but a White House official says they believe the President has the authority to remove these officials due to precedent from the Supreme Court. A Justice Department memo written Thursday also outlined the justification.

Ironically, Biden’s firing of Saul was enabled by the conservative Trump Supreme Court.

If Biden had not fired Andrew Saul, Saul would've remained in control of @SocialSecurity until January 19, 2025. Biden would've spent *his entire term* fighting a Trump-nominated Social Security commissioner who was hellbent on destroying Social Security.
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) July 12, 2021

Check out the Slate story to learn how SCOTUS made it easier for Biden to get rid of Trump’s political appointees.

The fight for voting rights:

Stephen Collinson at CNN: Texas Democrats are on a desperate mission to stop GOP voting bills.

Texas state lawmakers, enacting an intricately plotted escape, left their posts and the Lone Star state itself and took flight to Washington on Monday on an extraordinary mission to halt Republican restrictive voting bills built on former President Donald Trump’s fraud lies.

After stepping off two chartered jets, they insisted they planned to stay until a highly unlikely scenario unfolds in which moderate Democratic senators kill filibuster rules used by the GOP to block voting rights reform.

“We are coming to DC to put pressure on them to act, because this isn’t just Texas,” Texas Democratic state Rep. John Bucy III told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday.

“All over the South and in Republican states, we are seeing voter suppression bills. We need Congress to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act,” said Bucy, who unlike his colleagues set off the long drive from Texas to the US capital.

The spectacle is the latest stunning example of how the US political system is on the edge of meltdown as a result of turmoil triggered by Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, which are now taken as fact by millions of Republican voters. The move also represents the growing desperation of Democrats who believe that their chances of winning future elections, including in 2022 and 2024, are being undermined by orchestrated assaults on the voting system by the GOP.

Texas Democrats flee on chartered flight to Washington DC.

Ian Millhiser at Vox: The GOP voting bill that literally caused Texas Democrats to flee the state, explained.

So what, exactly, is in this bill that led Democrats to literally flee their homes in order to keep it from becoming law?

The short answer to that question is that there are two versions of the bill, both modest compared to some GOP voting proposals, though both still worrisome. Both the House and the Senate versions of the bill would add new restrictions to Texas’s already very restrictive laws governing absentee voting. They also would prevent drive-through polling sites, an innovation that some Texas counties used during the pandemic to protect voter health. And they impose new restrictions and paperwork requirements on individuals who help disabled voters and non-English speakers cast a ballot.

The bills would also make it much harder for election officials to remove partisan poll “watchers” sent by political campaigns or parties if those poll watchers harass voters or otherwise attempt to disrupt the election — with the Senate bill making it particularly difficult to remove such saboteurs. And the Senate bill could impose a draconian array of civil and criminal penalties on election officials, political campaigns, and even individual volunteers who commit fairly minor violations of the state’s election law.

The state’s Republican leadership, moreover, has made it quite clear that it is willing to wield the criminal law harshly to punish even very minor election-related transgressions. Texas’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton is currently prosecuting a 62-year-old man who mistakenly voted a few months before his right to vote was restored — the man, Hervis Rogers, was nearing the end of his parole period after being convicted of two felonies. If Rogers is convicted, he could face up to 20 years in prison for the crime of voting.

If the GOP’s bill passes, in other words, Texas may do far more than simply make it harder to vote. They could give officials like Paxton broad authority to bring criminal charges against individuals who commit minor offenses no more serious than what Rogers did.

To read more details about the bill, head over to Vox.

Back in 2003, I broke quorum with Texas Democrats over partisan gerrymandering.

It’s a difficult, last-resort decision.

But issues at the heart of our democracy — such as voting rights and fair elections — are too important to surrender without exhausting every option. #txlege pic.twitter.com/n7yvmtNvPc
— Joaquin Castro (@JoaquinCastrotx) July 13, 2021

Politico: Biden to call for ‘a new coalition’ to defend voting rights.

In a high-profile voting rights speech Tuesday, President Joe Biden plans to “blast the denial of the right to vote as grounded in autocracy, undemocratic, un-American, and unpatriotic,” a White House official shared with POLITICO.

And the president will call for a “new coalition” of advocates, activists, students, faith leaders, labor leaders, and business executives “to overcome this un-American trend and meet the moment” through “turnout and voter education.”

Biden will say “in no uncertain terms” that attempts to limit voting access in Republican-led states “are the most significant threat today to the integrity of our elections, and to the security of the right to vote for people of all races and backgrounds,” said the official, who shared some details of the speech. And the president will take aim at election changes that “could allow partisans to throw out the votes of anyone for made up reasons,” in what appears to be a reference to Georgia’s new law where the state legislature now appoints the majority of the board of elections and that board can replace local election officials.

Biden’s speech on voting rights at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center on Tuesday comes as the president is facing rising pressure from civil rights activists, progressives and some in party leadership to use new and aggressive tactics to combat Republican voting laws.

The protests in Cuba:

The New York Times: ‘Everyone Has a Tipping Point’: Hunger Fuels Cuba’s Protests.

Hospitals and pharmacies have run out of medicines as basic as penicillin and aspirin. Blackouts have become maddeningly frequent and agonizingly long. Cubans lucky enough to have foreign currency wait in line for hours for staples like beans and rice.

A searing economic decline, leading to hardships Cubans have rarely seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union devastated their country in the 1990s, has stirred the island’s largest protest movement in decades, eliciting a chorus of support from American politicians and angry threats from Cuba’s government.

v
Cubans take to the streets to protest economic

“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom,” President Biden said in a statement on Monday, citing what he called “decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime.”

His comments followed an astonishing wave of demonstrations on Sunday, when thousands took to the streets around the nation, shouting phrases like “freedom” and “Homeland and life,” a twist on the governing Communist Party’s motto: “Homeland or death.”

Protesters even overturned a police car and looted a government-run store — acts of open defiance shared widely online in a nation with a long and ruthlessly effective history of quashing dissent.

Cubans take to the streets to protest economic situation.

The Washington Post: Biden seizes on protests with tougher tone toward Cuba.

In sharply warning Cuba’s leaders Monday against repressing a wave of anti-government protesters, President Biden signaled a more muscular approach toward a communist regime that he had previously pledged to engage, taking a step toward shifting a Democratic message that some in the party feel has been politically costly.

A day after the island’s biggest demonstrations in decades, Biden praised Cubans’ “clarion call for freedom” following “decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime” — rhetoric that has often been more typical of conservative Republicans in Florida. Later, Biden warned Havana against “attempts to silence the voice of the people of Cuba.”

By siding so starkly with the dissidents, Biden seized on what some Democrats see as an unexpected opening for their party to chart a course correction on Cuba and rebrand its strategy after years of being seen by some voters — particularly in Florida — as too accommodating of the authoritarian regime and perhaps too soft on communism in general.

“It is an opportunity for us to change the course of events in Cuba,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), the son of Cuban immigrants and a vocal critic of prior Democratic efforts to forge closer relations with the Cuban government.

“If we can help change the course of events in Cuba and give echo to the cries of the Cuban people, that will inure to the benefit of this administration,” Menendez said, adding that he and Biden were scheduled to speak late Monday.

The Trump Organization and Allen Weisselberg:

The Washington Post: Trump Organization removes indicted top finance officer Allen Weisselberg from leadership roles at dozens of subsidiaries.

The Trump Organization has removed indicted chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg from his leadership roles at more than 40 subsidiary companies, according to corporate filings in the United States and Scotland.

The changes were made Thursday and Friday, a week after a grand jury in Manhattan indicted Weisselberg on 15 felony counts, including grand larceny and tax fraud. Weisselberg was accused by New York prosecutors of helping run a 15-year scheme to evade income taxes by concealing executives’ salaries — including more than $1.7 million of his own income — from tax authorities. Two Trump corporate entities were indicted alongside Weisselberg.

Allen Weisselbeg perp walk

On Thursday, the Trump Organization removed Weisselberg as a director of the company that runs its golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland, according to British corporate records.

The next day, the company filed paperwork in Florida to remove Weisselberg as a director at 40 different subsidiaries registered in the state, according to an online database of Florida records.

Those subsidiaries included a holding company that owns many Trump businesses, a corporate entity that handles payroll for many Trump employees, and even a Trump project in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that went bust more than a decade ago.

Previously, Weisselberg had shared the leadership of these companies with one of former president Donald Trump’s adult sons or, in the case of the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., with Trump himself. Now, records show, the Trump family members are left in charge.

That wraps up my news summary for today. Have a nice Tuesday Sky Dancers!