Caturday Reads (kat edition)
Posted: January 22, 2022 Filed under: just because | Tags: Racism, religious extremists, Sexism, Trump family crime syndicate and grift rodeo, white nationalism 24 Comments
Chinese Folk Art – Cat under the Tea Table
Happy Saturday Sky Dancers!
BB is still having issues with her sciatica so I’ll be sitting in the catbird seat today again!
An interesting article showed up today in The Washington Post suggesting that one day in 1973 changed our country. I was a junior in high school and remember the day and events. However, I never viewed it as being that significant. See what you think. “Jan. 22, 1973: The day that changed America” written by James D. Robenalt.
It was a day unlike any other in U.S. history. Jan. 22, 1973, was the day Henry Kissinger flew to Paris to end the Vietnam War for the United States. It was the day the Supreme Court issued its opinion on abortion rights in Roe v. Wade. And it was the day the nation’s 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, died of a heart attack in Texas at 64.
Few days have represented such a turning point in the trajectory of our history, and what happened that day started a chain reaction that turned politically nuclear, leaving us with the current landscape of unbridgeable divides.
Less than a decade earlier, the American populace had seemed as united as ever in a time of landslide elections and political consensus. The disintegration of that unity began well before Jan. 22, 1973, but no date more fully captures the end of the spirit of the ’60s and the start of a darker era of seemingly permanent political schism.
More than anything, the Roe ruling drew an enduring red line through American politics, where compromise was impossible and opponents were not only wrong but wicked. Every year since 1973, D.C. has been flooded in the days around Jan. 22 with antiabortion protesters for what has become known as the March for Life. (Last year’s events were called off because of the coronavirus, yet many still came to Washington. This year, despite the ongoing pandemic, the gathering took place Friday.) Promoters refer to the event as “the world’s largest annual human rights demonstration.”
The vaccine requirements for certain events at this year’s march sparked a vicious online battle, with many abortion opponents asserting that vaccines cause abortions or are produced using fetal cells. “It is tragic that a PRO-LIFE organization would be coerced into promoting ground-up murdered baby injections!” one person posted in the comments on the March for Life website. “This is evil.”
The radicalization of our politics would not have seemed possible to the actors who made Jan. 22, 1973, such a fateful day.
Chinese Folk Art Kitties, Zhu Suzhen
I do have to say that after a few years of just being relieved that women were no longer subjected to state control I had no idea there was a group of hardcore fanatics that would twist and turn every reality about the human reproduction process and gestation period into something unrecognizable and so focused on protohumans and unaware that viable 3rd term babies are simply born. For me, it was just my first introduction to hard-core idiots. We just used to call them “holy rollers” and got a good laugh at them if we saw their tents anywhere between our trips from Omaha to Kansas City on the backroads.
You can read the rest at the link including a triggering walk down Nixon Lane.
Mississippi Today reports that “Every Black Mississippi senator walked out as white colleagues voted to ban critical race theory. The historic, unprecedented walkout came over a vote on the academic theory that state education officials and Republican lawmakers acknowledge is not even taught in Mississippi.” This is reported by Bobby Harrison. The theory is clearly the new black welfare queen with a Cadillac trope. It’s another example of hard-core idiots. The struggle continues.
Every Black Mississippi senator walked out of the chamber Friday, choosing not to vote on a bill that sponsors said would prohibit the teaching of critical race theory in the state’s public schools and colleges and universities.
The historic, unprecedented walkout came over a vote on the academic theory that state education officials and Republican lawmakers acknowledge is not even taught in Mississippi. Republicans hold supermajority control of the Senate, meaning they can pass any bill without a single Democratic vote.
“We walked out as a means to show a visible protest to these proceedings,” state Sen. John Horhn, D-Jackson, said of the unprecedented action.
In 1993, Black caucus members left before then-Gov. Kirk Fordice delivered his State of the State speech in protest of his policies. But no Capitol observer could recall an instance of members leaving en mass in protest before a vote on a bill.
“We felt like it was a bill that was not deserving of our vote,” said Sen. Derrick Simmons, D-Greenville. “We have so many issues in the state that need to be addressed. We did not need to spend time on this.
“Even the author of the bill (Michael McLendon, R-Hernando) said this was not occurring in Mississippi,” Simmons continued.
Chinese Folk Art – Girl Stroking Cat on her Lap
Yes, it is also now the partial-birth abortion myth of Racism. It’s yet another law designed to signal hard-core idiots to panic over a nonexistent situation also. And speaking of hard-core idiots, let’s see today’s reads on The Oath Keepers.
Erin Mansfield / Stars & Stripes: Leaked Oath Keepers list names 20 current military members
When they enlisted in the military, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and to obey the orders all the way up to those from the president of the United States.
But then, while still in the service, they went on to swear a different allegiance — one to the now extremist, anti-government Oath Keepers. Dozens of military members vowed they would never obey potential government orders that group leaders considered acts of war or cause for a revolution.
At least 20 are still serving.
USA TODAY confirmed with all five branches of the U.S. military that 81 people signed up for the Oath Keepers while in uniform. The names are from a hacked list that a watchdog group shared with journalists last fall. The military members are in addition to the 40 current and former law enforcement officers USA TODAY confirmed in October 2021.
The Defense Department has known for decades that its members were joining extremist groups but often did not punish them, instead keeping in place a vague policy that banned their active participation, such as through fundraising or recruiting.
In December, the Defense Department clarified more than a dozen examples of active participation, but it’s unclear whether joining the Oath Keepers and remaining a member of the militia would run afoul of the new rules.
Hu Yongkai, Chinese Folk Cat Paintings
CNN: Videos show ‘Stop the Steal’ rally organizer saying he would work with extremist groups
An organizer of the “Stop the Steal” rallies that preceded the attack on the US Capitol a year ago said he would work with two extremist groups, who later had members charged in the attack, about providing security and housing for the January 6, 2021, rally in Washington.
In previously unreported videos from the social media platform Periscope reviewed by CNN’s KFile, Ali Alexander, a leader of the “Stop the Steal” rally and a central figure in the House select committee’s investigation of January 6, said he would reach out to the right-wing Proud Boys and Oath Keepers on providing security for the event. Both groups later had members charged in the attack on the Capitol, including conspiracy. Last week, the Justice Department charged the Oath Keepers leader and 10 others with seditious conspiracy related to the attack.
Alexander has not been charged or implicated in any unlawful act. He has denied working with anyone, including lawmakers or extremist groups, to attack the Capitol.
In other videos removed from Periscope — it’s unknown who removed the videos, when and why — Alexander claimed to describe further details of his communications and coordination with several Congressional Republicans pushing to overturn the election result. The lawmakers have denied planning rallies or coordinating with Alexander in any way.
Woman with Cat
Modern Chinese Art Painting, Mo Nong
And finally, from Lawfare: What Does the Seditious Conspiracy Indictment Mean For the Oath Keepers?
Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke at length recently on the Justice Department’s expansive efforts to prosecute “all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law—whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy.” President Biden pointedly referred to the events of the day as “an armed insurrection … looking to subvert the Constitution.” Indeed, the prosecution of Rhodes and his co-defendants serves to elevate these Oath Keepers to a new tier of criminal conduct, into territory far more significant than trespassing, assault or obstruction of a congressional proceeding. This indictment may also serve as a warning to other high-level members of domestic violent extremist movements who allegedly engaged in similar conspiracies, including Proud Boys leaders such as Ethan Nordean and Joseph Biggs and potentially Proud Boys president Enrique Tarrio.
The arrest of Stewart Rhodes is likely to serve as a short-term blow to the operational activities of the Oath Keepers as a formal entity. The indictment against him makes it clear how important he is to the organization. He allegedly ran point on creating online encrypted groups where he pushed out orders to his followers. In one chat, entitled “Leadership intel sharing secured,” he noted two days after the November election, “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war. Too late for that. Prepare your mind, body, spirit[.]” Four days later, he led an online go-to meeting with fellow Oath Keepers where he “outlined a plan to stop the lawful transfer of presidential powers,” according to charging documents. While Oath Keepers general counsel Kellye SoRelle announced she is taking over as acting president, it is unclear what a post-Rhodes Oath Keepers organization will look like, or whether it will enjoy the same significance in anti-government circles without Rhodes. Rhodes played an outsized role in the organization and, in many ways, was the glue that kept the group together.
As the prosecution of Rhodes and hundreds of other Capitol Hill Siege defendants continues, it is more crucial than ever to ensure the government’s efforts to combat domestic violent extremism focus not only on the individual hierarchical groups and brands like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys but also on their ideological adherents who may not formally join organized groups. The government’s indictment makes it apparent that Rhodes felt the events of Jan. 6 were far from a final crescendo of anti-government activity in the United States, noting that after the inauguration, Rhodes “messaged others to organize local militias to oppose President Biden’s Administration.”
This is from The Mother Jones link cited in the above Tweet. You can read the precise details there.
In court filings this week, the Justice Department further revealed the scope of the alleged plot by Oath Keepers to mobilize a heavily armed “quick reaction force” (also known as a “QRF”) just outside of downtown Washington, part of a plan to unleash violence in the nation’s capital and stop the lawful transfer of the presidency to Joe Biden. One filing, a detention memo in the case against Oath Keeper Edwards Vallejo of Arizona, hints that more people could yet be charged in connection with the conspiracy. Evidence it contains also shows that extremists have embraced Trump’s most recent rhetoric reinforcing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him through fraud, messaging that continues to fuel a violent far-right movement.
Hu Yongkai, Chinese Folk Cat paintings
Ed Pilkington–writing for The Guardian–elucidates the troubles of the Trump Family Crime Syndicate. “House of Trump is crumbling’: why ex-president’s legal net is tightening”.
In a new filing released this week designed to pressure Trump and two of his children – Ivanka and Donald Jr – into facing questioning, James forensically dissects how such strikingly large valuations came about. The 2011 estimate for the Scottish property, her investigators discovered, included an estimated £75,000 ($120,000 at 2011 exchange rates) for undeveloped land at the site.
Investigating deeper, they found that the figure had been created for an article in Forbes magazine. The revelation prompted a line in this week’s filing that must be among the tartest in US financial history.
“It thus appears,” James writes, “that the valuation of Trump Aberdeen used for Mr Trump’s financial statement was prepared for purposes of providing information to Forbes magazine in a quote.”
James’s legal document is packed with similarly juicy titbits. The 2014 value of the Scottish golf club was based in part on the projected sale price of 2,500 houses on the land, even though none of the houses actually existed and the company had planning permission for only half that number.
In 1995 the Trump Organization bought a parcel of land in Westchester, New York, known as the Seven Springs Estate, for $7.5m. By 2004 it was valued at $80m and by 2014 at $291m. That 2014 figure, James notes in another exquisitely tart reference, included a valuation of $161m for “seven non-existent mansions”.
The juiciest titbit of all concerns Trump’s former home, the gilded Fifth Avenue temple to his own ego dubbed “Versailles in the sky”, in which he lived before moving into the White House. James’s investigators were puzzled to find the Trump Tower triplex in Manhattan was listed at $327m in 2015, based on the apartment’s size, allegedly 30,000 sq feet.
In fact the property is 11,000 sq feet, which produces a value of $117m. That’s an overstatement in Trump’s official financial statements of more than $200m.
You might think this family of hard-core idiots was talking about the size of fish caught or the length of the family jewels.
James is pursuing her investigation as a civil case, which means that were Trump to be found liable it could cost him heavily in fines and penalties. More seriously, James is working in coordination with the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, a similarly tenacious and relentless prosecutor equipped with a large and highly experienced team of investigators.
Bragg is asking exactly the same questions as James: did the Trump Organization commit accounting, bank, tax or insurance fraud? The critical difference is that Bragg’s investigation is criminal, threatening Trump not with fines but prison time.
“Trump could end up in an orange jumpsuit at the end of that one,” said Timothy O’Brien, a senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
So, history rolls on and rolls over a lot of people. Just remember, we’ll shortly enter the Year of the Tiger.
The Year of the Rat (2020) was about survival, and the Year of the Ox (2021) was about anchoring ourselves in a new reality. The Year of the Tiger will be about making big changes. This will be a year of risk-taking and adventure. We’re finding enthusiasm again, both for ourselves and for others. Everyone is fired up, generosity is at an all-time high and social progress feels possible again.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Freezing Friday Reads
Posted: January 21, 2022 Filed under: tRump crimes against humanity | Tags: Trump Family Crime Syndicate 13 Comments
Vue de toits (Effet de neige), Gustave Caillebotte, 1878/1879
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Wow was yesterday one of those news days! I settled in under my goose-down comforter while the temperatures dropped precipitously yesterday afternoon to read some things and watch a little Nicole. The breaking news was fast and furious. We’re beginning to see the fruits of investigations into the Trump Family Crime Syndicate. It’s almost too much to digest.
There are many nefarious players in the Republican Party these days. Most seem deeply connected to the right-wing conspiracy machine that geared up during the 1990s which was an unholy alliance of right-wing political interests, extremist fundamentalist patriarchal white christianists, and a bunch of nutter greedy billionaires funding a conspiracy mill that brought us all kinds of things. It went somewhat undercover during the Dubya years but popped up with full-fury when the country elected Obama. At that point, the leftover neo confederates raised their heads and we went full throttle white nationalism. Their combined fanaticism, fury, and years of stacking courts and local political positions brought Trump into seal the deal.
You may recall that none of what happened this decade was nothing new to me having grown up in Omaha, Nebraska, and unable to get out due to circumstances of birth and then marriage. Most of my real friends spent as little time there as possible and got out as quickly as possible. I lived in fear of Southern Baptists, big Barn Evangelicals, cultish Catholics, and libertarians who worshipped Donald Segretti. In short, they did a number on me and my children to the point I was afraid to leave my house. I finally got out. But, let me tell you if there’s one person that went to my high school that personified the worst of all of this it was Ginnie Lamp. She was a few years behind me and Kurt Andersen was a few years ahead. He got out. Ginnie did too but only to inflict massive damage on the country.
Cranes on Branch of Snow-covered Pine, late 1820s,Katsushika Hokusai
Ginnie Lamp rode into the District wearing a huge black hat. She’s in it out of malice and greed. No one has ever been able to convince me that she doesn’t have undue influence over the one man on the court just about anyone can influence with the right combination of religion, malice, and greed. I was thrilled to see this article in The New Yorker today by Jane Mayer who is one of our better investigative reporters. She especially excels at finding the villain in the room. “Is Ginni Thomas a Threat to the Supreme Court? Behind closed doors, Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife is working with many groups directly involved in controversial cases before the Court.” Spoiler Alert: of course she is and Janes brought the receipts.
In 2016, Republicans in Congress, in an unprecedented act, refused to let President Barack Obama fill a vacancy on the Court. Trump subsequently pushed through the appointment of three hard-line conservative Justices. Last summer, Democrats in Congress introduced a bill that would require the Judicial Conference of the United States to create a binding code of conduct for members of the Supreme Court. They also proposed legislation that would require more disclosures about the financial backers behind amicus briefs—arguments submitted by “friends of the court” who are supporting one side in a case.
So far, these proposals haven’t gone anywhere, but Gillers notes that there are extant laws circumscribing the ethical behavior of all federal judges, including the Justices. Arguably, Clarence Thomas has edged unusually close to testing them. All judges, even those on the Court, are required to recuse themselves from any case in which their spouse is “a party to the proceeding” or is “an officer, director, or trustee” of an organization that is a party to a case. Ginni Thomas has not been a named party in any case on the Court’s docket; nor is she litigating in any such case. But she has held leadership positions at conservative pressure groups that have either been involved in cases before the Court or have had members engaged in such cases. In 2019, she announced a political project called Crowdsourcers, and said that one of her four partners would be the founder of Project Veritas, James O’Keefe. Project Veritas tries to embarrass progressives by making secret videos of them, and last year petitioned the Court to enjoin Massachusetts from enforcing a state law that bans the surreptitious taping of public officials. Another partner in Crowdsourcers, Ginni Thomas said in her announcement, was Cleta Mitchell, the chairman of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative election-law nonprofit. It, too, has had business before the Court, filing amicus briefs in cases centering on the democratic process. Thomas also currently serves on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars, a group promoting conservative values in academia, which has filed an amicus brief before the Court in a potentially groundbreaking affirmative-action lawsuit against Harvard. And, though nobody knew it at the time, Ginni Thomas was an undisclosed paid consultant at the conservative pressure group the Center for Security Policy, when its founder, Frank Gaffney, submitted an amicus brief to the Court supporting Trump’s Muslim travel ban.
Bruce Green, a professor at Fordham specializing in legal ethics, notes, “In the twenty-first century, there’s a feeling that spouses are not joined at the hip.” He concedes, though, that “the appearance” created by Ginni Thomas’s political pursuits “is awful—they look like a mom-and-pop political-hack group, where she does the political stuff and he does the judging.” It’s hard to imagine, he told me, that the couple doesn’t discuss Court cases: “She’s got the ear of a Justice, and surely they talk about their work.” But, from the technical standpoint of judicial ethics, “she’s slightly removed from all these cases—she’s not actually the legal director.” Green feels that the conflict of interest is “close, but not close enough” to require that Thomas recuse himself.
David Luban, a professor of law and philosophy at Georgetown, who specializes in legal ethics, is more concerned. He told me, “If Ginni Thomas is intimately involved—financially or ideologically tied to the litigant—that strikes me as slicing the baloney a little thin.”
Boulevard Saint-Denis, Argenteuil, in Winter, Claude Monet, 1875
Read more at the link.
CNN releases a poll showing exactly unpopular the idea of overturning Roe v. Wade is among Americans. Will that stop the right-wing radicals on the Supreme Court?
Most Americans oppose overturning the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade precedent, according to a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS, with a majority saying that if the decision was vacated, they’d want to see their own state move toward more permissive abortion laws.
Just 30% of Americans say they’d like to see the Supreme Court completely overturn its Roe vs. Wade decision, with 69% opposed — a finding that’s largely consistent both with other recent polling and with historical trends. In a set of three surveys taken last autumn by different pollsters, support for overturning Roe vs. Wade stood between 20% and 31%, depending on the precise framing of the question. And in CNN’s polling dating back to 1989, the share of the public in favor of completely overturning Roe has never risen above 36%.
Fifty-nine percent of Americans say that if Roe vs. Wade were overturned, they’d like their state to set laws that are more permissive than restrictive toward abortion, a preference that stands in opposition to the prediction most make that abortions would likely be restricted or banned in the areas where they live. Another 40% say they’d like their state to set more restrictive laws.
Saturday marks the 49th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision, which established the constitutional right to an abortion, at least in the first three months of pregnancy. Six in 10 Americans, including 68% of women, say they personally know someone who’s had an abortion.
Meanwhile, the crusades continue for the right-wing christianists who appear to leave the Christ out of everything. It seems that Tennessee passed a law allowing adoption agencies to refuse adoptions to SAME-SEX couples on the basis of “written religious or moral convictions or policies.” Well, of course, they couldn’t just leave it at that.
Read more at The Miami Herald.
A Jewish couple is suing the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, saying a state-sponsored adoption agency declined to help them because of their religion. At the beginning of 2021, Elizabeth and Gabriel Rutan-Ram were making plans to adopt a child from Florida, according to a news release from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the nonprofit organization that filed the lawsuit on their behalf. Before they could do so, they had to complete state-mandated foster-parent training and receive a home-study certification. The child they were hoping to adopt had a disability, and the couple wanted to provide him a “loving and nurturing home” in Knox County, the lawsuit said.
The two of them turned to the only agency near them that would help out with an out-of-state adoption. But on the day they were set to begin their foster-parent training, they were told by the agency, Holston United Methodist Home for Children, that it only provided help to prospective families that “share our [Christian] belief system,” the lawsuit said. As a result, the lawsuit said, the couple was left unable to foster or adopt the child, as no other agencies in the Knox County area could provide the services necessary for out-of-state adoptions.
French: La Neige à Vaugirard II, ou Jardin sous la neige I
Garden under Snow, Paul Gauguin, 1879
Here are some of the latest findings on Trump, the Insurrection, and the Big Lie. That had me shivering beneath my comforter worse than the cold.
Betsy Woodruff Swan / Politico: Read the never-issued Trump order that would have seized voting machines — Among the records that Donald Trump’s lawyers tried to shield from Jan. 6 investigators are a draft executive order that would have directed the defense secretary to seize voting machines and a document titled “Remarks on National Healing.”
The draft executive order shows that the weeks between Election Day and the Capitol attack could have been even more chaotic than they were. It credulously cites conspiracy theories about election fraud in Georgia and Michigan, as well as debunked notions about Dominion voting machines.
The order empowers the defense secretary to “seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records required for retention under” a U.S. law that relates to preservation of election records. It also cites a lawsuit filed in 2017 against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Additionally, the draft order would have given the defense secretary 60 days to write an assessment of the 2020 election. That suggests it could have been a gambit to keep Trump in power until at least mid-February of 2021.
If this isn’t an act of seditious conspiracy I’d be shocked. But then, there’s more.
Hokusai, Tea House at Koishikawa. The Morning After a Snowfall, (1830)
The Washington Post: Supreme Court, investigators force Trump and his children on the defensive on multiple fronts
A flurry of decisions by the Supreme Court and federal and state investigators has forced Donald Trump and his adult children to defend their conduct on multiple fronts, potentially jeopardizing their futures — or perhaps yet again allowing the former president to escape unscathed.
On Tuesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) submitted a 157-page filing detailing much of the evidence her investigators have gathered so far on the business practices of Trump and his children, focused on a possible pattern of fraud. The civil investigation is separate from a criminal probe James is running in tandem with new Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D).
Then, on Wednesday, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s request to block the release of some of his White House records to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
Thursday brought a double whammy: The House committee sent a letter to Ivanka Trump requesting her voluntary testimony. In the letter, the panel said witnesses have told investigators that the former White House adviser might have direct knowledge of her father’s actions before, during and after the mob of his supporters tried to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden as president.
And in Atlanta, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) requested a special-purpose grand jury to aid in her investigation into whether Trump and others committed crimes by trying to pressure Georgia election officials to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
The Daily Beast: Ivanka Ghosts Trumpland as Investigators Turn Up the Heat
Whether it’s the lawmakers on Capitol Hill plumbing the depths of last year’s failed coup, or prosecutors in New York putting former President Donald Trump’s sprawling family business under a microscope, investigators working very different probes are increasingly looking to pressure the same person: Ivanka Trump.
There’s hardly any indication the corporate heiress is under investigation herself, or that she faces possible criminal charges. But sources on both sides—in law enforcement and those close to her—say Ivanka is a key witness to a litany of alleged crimes.
And it’s all coming to a head this week.
On Tuesday, the New York attorney general filed court documents that claim Ivanka Trump played a much more insidious role in the company’s web of financial deceit than previously known. Investigators are asking a judge to enforce a subpoena that would make her testify under oath.
And on Thursday, the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection formally asked Ivanka to sit down and answer questions about her interactions with her then-president father during the hours the Capitol building was under attack. The request for a “voluntary interview” is widely perceived to be a first pass that, should it be rejected, could be followed by a congressional subpoena—and the implicit threat of a Justice Department criminal prosecution if it’s ignored.
The DOJ is already pursuing a case against political strategist Steve Bannon and may soon do the same with another two of the president’s men.
On both fronts, Ivanka will be pressured to explain her father’s crooked tactics—tactics that Ivanka appears desperate to distance herself from now.
Caspar David Friedrich, ‘Winter Landscape’, probably 1811
Why does anyone want to involve themselves with these absolute vile people? Remind me to write Rudi G in Jail. This is from CNN: “Trump campaign officials, led by Rudy Giuliani, oversaw fake electors plot in 7 states” BB has written extensively about this. Rachel Maddow has been on top of it too.
Trump campaign officials, led by Rudy Giuliani, oversaw efforts in December 2020 to put forward illegitimate electors from seven states that Trump lost, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the scheme.
The sources said members of former President Donald Trump’s campaign team were far more involved than previously known in the plan, a core tenet of the broader plot to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory when Congress counted the electoral votes on January 6.Giuliani and his allies coordinated the nuts-and-bolts of the process on a state-by-state level, the sources told CNN. One source said there were multiple planning calls between Trump campaign officials and GOP state operatives, and that Giuliani participated in at least one call. The source also said the Trump campaign lined up supporters to fill elector slots, secured meeting rooms in statehouses for the fake electors to meet on December 14, 2020, and circulated drafts of fake certificates that were ultimately sent to the National Archives.
Trump and some of his top advisers publicly encouraged the “alternate electors” scheme in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada and New Mexico. But behind the scenes, Giuliani and Trump campaign officials actively choreographed the process, the sources said.
When I was a sophomore at the High School I shared with Kurt Andersen and Ginnie Lamp, we spent a good amount of English class on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. We watched the 1953 black and white edition even though a remake was around from 1970. My favorite quote is this one spoken by Mark Antony as played by Marlon Brando.
“The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”
My thought today is there isn’t one person in the Trump Family Crime syndicate that will have enough good to take to the grave with them.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Open Thread
Posted: January 20, 2022 Filed under: just because 17 CommentsGood Morning!!
This will be another brief post, because I’m still really struggling with sciatic nerve pain. Here are the stories I’ve been looking at this morning.
After last night’s vote in the Senate ended voting rights legislation for now. Louisiana’s Foghorn Leghorn was thrilled.
Ari Berman at Mother Jones: GOP States Are Shredding Voting Rights and Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema Are Now Complicit.
For the fifth time during the last year, Senate Republicans blocked Democrats on Wednesday from passing sweeping legislation that would roll back GOP efforts to make it harder to vote.
Their justification: there is no GOP effort to make it harder to vote.
“The big lie on the other side is that state legislatures controlled by Republicans are busily at work trying to make it difficult for people to vote,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said this week.
That, of course, is exactly what Republicans have been doing.
Nineteen states passed 34 new laws in 2021 reducing voting access, according to the Brennan Center, which catalogued at least 16 different ways Republicans have sought to restrict voting rights, including making it more difficult to vote by mail and easier to remove voters from the rolls, cutting the number of early voting days, erecting new barriers to voter registration, and reducing the number of polling places.
Of course, it’s in McConnell’s interest to deny this. More surprising was how Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who co-wrote the Freedom to Vote Act precisely to counter these GOP voter suppression bills, claimed that no voters would be disenfranchised after he and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) announced they would side with Republicans to block a change to the Senate rules that would have allowed his bill to pass.
Hugo Lowell at The Guardian:
The former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack that Donald Trump hosted secret meetings in the White House residence in days before 6 January, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
The former senior Trump aide also told House investigators that the details of whether Trump actually intended to march to the Capitol after his speech at the Ellipse rally would be memorialized in documents provided to the US Secret Service, the sources said.
The select committee’s interview with Grisham, who was Melania Trump’s chief of staff when she resigned on 6 January, was more significant than expected, the sources said, giving the panel new details about the Trump White House and what the former US president was doing before the Capitol attack….
The secret meetings were apparently known by only a small number of aides, the sources said. Grisham recounted that they were mostly scheduled by Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and that the former chief usher, Timothy Harleth, would wave participants upstairs, the sources said.
Harleth, the former director of rooms at the Trump International Hotel before moving with the Trumps to the White House in 2017, was once one of the former first family’s most trusted employees, according to a top former White House aide to Melania Trump.
But after Harleth sought to ingratiate himself with the Biden transition team after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election in order to keep his White House role, Trump and Meadows moved to fire him before Melania Trump stepped in to keep him until Biden’s inauguration.
Grisham told the select committee she was not sure who exactly Trump met with in the White House residence, but provided Harleth’s name and the identities of other Trump aides in the usher’s office who might know of the meetings, the sources said.
NPR: Experts see ‘red flags’ at nonprofit raising big money for Capitol riot defendants
Josephine Harvey at HuffPost: Eric Trump Pleaded The Fifth More Than 500 Times In Deposition, Court Filing Says.
Eric Trump and Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg invoked their Fifth Amendment rights more than 500 times when questioned by the New York attorney general’s office for its investigation into the company’s finances, according to a Tuesday court filing.
“Eric Trump then invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in response to more than 500 questions over six hours,” the filing says of an Oct. 5, 2020, interview with former President Donald Trump’s son.
Weisselberg reportedly did so during an interview on Sept. 24, 2020: “After answering a number of preliminary questions, Allen Weisselberg invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to more than 500 questions over five-and-a-half hours.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office argues that these instances demonstrate that the men were aware of potential criminal liability in the case….In her motion to compel Tuesday, James argued that Donald Trump and two of his children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, should be forced to testify under oath as part of her office’s ongoing civil investigation into the Trump Organization’s business dealings.
James’ motion seeks a court order enforcing testimonial subpoenas issued to the three Trumps, as well as the production of documents that have been withheld since they were subpoenaed in 2019.
NPR: Experts see ‘red flags’ at nonprofit raising big money for Capitol riot defendants.
In right-wing media, Cynthia Hughes has become one of the most prominent public faces representing families of the people held in jail, awaiting trial for allegedly attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Cynthia, you’re a true patriot,” former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told Hughes on his “War Room” podcast, where he included her in a roundup of “People of the Year.”
Hughes, who lives in New Jersey, has become a regular on Bannon’s show, where she and Bannon describe the 1/6 defendants as “political prisoners.” On New Year’s Eve, Bannon even pledged to send Hughes 1,000 coins from his new cryptocurrency venture, the “Let’s Go Brandon” or FJB coin.
Bannon’s promised crypto contribution added to the considerable pool of donations amassed by Hughes’ group, the Patriot Freedom Fund – close to $900,000 as of early December, the group claimed. There are many online fundraisers for Capitol riot defendants, which have collectively raised millions from the small, but notable minority of Americans sympathetic to the Capitol riot defendants. Most fundraisers go directly to individual defendants.
Patriot Freedom Fund, by contrast, is incorporated as a nonprofit corporation, and describes itself as a kind of central hub – soliciting donations from the public to then provide services to families, including cash grants, gifts, and legal aid. And they have asked for big donations. “We need somebody to drop us $500,000 today – today, Steve – because we need to have our own attorneys on these cases,” Hughes said on Bannon’s show in November 2021.
The group’s pitch has attracted prominent supporters on the right, including Republican U.S. Senate candidate and “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance, as well as the conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, who announced a $100,000 donation last year. Bannon has also promised that a portion of “transaction fees” from the “Let’s Go Brandon” coin will go to the Patriot Freedom Project. And a former Trump administration official, Rachel Semmel, who previously worked in the White House Office of Management and Budget, is also volunteering with the group.
Jennifer Rubin at The Washington Post: The media wants to paint Joe Biden as a failure. He won’t let that happen.
Tuesday Reads
Posted: January 18, 2022 Filed under: just because 25 Comments
Rain, by Edvard Munch, 1902
Good Morning!!
Good morning Sky Dancers! I’m sorry to report that I’m having another pain flare-up and so this post will be brief. I think I’m doing better with breathing and relaxing, and that does help the pain somewhat. I’m just hoping this won’t last too long. In the meantime, here’s what I’m seeing in the news today.
This is trending on Twitter, but I haven’t seen any reporting in the mainstream media yet.
https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1483429547295092736?s=20
Read the letter dated December 15, 2021 at the Conservative Action Project. The letter is addressed to Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy and requests that Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger be removed from the GOP caucus and attacks the January 6 committee and claims that those involved with the January 6 insurrection “have done nothing wrong.”
As you are aware, this committee has no formal representation from Republicans. Both Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger serve at the request of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). As part of Pelosi’s team, Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger have deliberately sought to undermine the privacy and due process of their fellow Republicans, and those of private citizens, with improperly issued subpoenas and other investigatory tactics designed not to pursue any valid legislative end, but merely to exploit for the sake of political harassment and demagoguery.
The actions of Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger on behalf of House Democrats have given supposedly bipartisan justification to an overtly partisan political persecution that brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law, legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong, and which demeans the standing of the House….
We ask that the GOP conference meet immediately to vote on stripping Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger from their membership in the GOP conference. We further inform you that conservative leaders are launching a nationwide movement to add citizens’ voices to this effort.
That’s the gist of it. Here’s the full list of signers.
CNN has the photos from the disaster in Tonga: First images of Tonga volcano damage show entire communities covered in thick ash.
A thick layer of ash covering entire island communities can be seen in the first images of disaster-hit Tonga to emerge following what experts believe to be the world’s biggest volcanic eruption in more than 30 years.
Aerial photos released by the New Zealand Defense Force from Tonga’s central Ha’apai islands show trees, homes and fields coated in gray ash — spewed out by the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai undersea volcano as it erupted on Saturday, sending tsunami waves crashing across the Pacific.
Satellite images show a similar scene in the capital’s Kolofo’ou district, on Tonga’s main island, with trees and homes completely blanketed by volcanic debris. Some buildings appear to have collapsed and aid workers are now concerned about water contamination and food security in the district.
An Aerial view from a P-3K2 Orion serveillance flight shows heavy ask fall in Nomuka, Tonga,on Jan. 17, 2022
See more photos at CNN.
This is from Jake Tapper at CNN: Former Trump administration officials hold call to strategize against former boss’ efforts in 2022 and 2024.
Around three dozen former Trump administration officials, disillusioned with their former boss and concerned about his impact on the GOP and the nation, held a conference call last Monday to discuss efforts to fend off his efforts to, in their view, erode the democratic process, several participants told CNN.
The only items the group seemed to agree upon in its first meeting, however, were that they’re not sure what their way forward should be, and that they are way behind the efforts of former President Donald Trump and his allies to set the stage for 2022, 2024, and beyond.
The highest-ranking participant was former White House chief of staff and retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, who told CNN that because of a prior commitment he was only able to “monitor” about 10 minutes of the call, which lasted about an hour.
Other participants included former Trump White House communications directors Alyssa Farah Griffin (now a CNN political commentator) and Anthony Scaramucci, former Homeland Security and counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Pence Olivia Troye, former Department of Homeland Security official Elizabeth Neumann, and former Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Chris Krebs, among others. Stephanie Grisham, who first publicly discussed this group a couple of weeks ago on CNN’s “New Day,” was not on the call because she was sick with Covid-19, though she told CNN she is engaged with the group….
Miles Taylor, the former DHS chief of staff who became a leading anti-Trump voice after writing an op-ed and book as “Anonymous,” helped lead the call and described participants as “overflowing with ideas” on how to be most effective. They ranged from “shining a light” on Trump’s corporate contributors to targeting for defeat in the primary or general election each individual Trump has endorsed for state and local races, although Kelly is reluctant to do anything that involves specifically endorsing any candidate.
“We’re still trying to figure out what it is” that we want to do, one participant told CNN. “Outcomes are key.” This individual said there was unanimity on the call, from those who spoke, that “this cannot just be a professional trolling operation, putting out ads like the Lincoln group.” The Lincoln Project was a group of so-called never-Trump GOP consultants who banded together to oppose the 45th President’s reelection, often running ads in the Washington, DC, area targeted to Trump.
From the CBS article:
Prosecutors granted immunity to an ex-girlfriend of Representative Matt Gaetz before she testified last week in front of a federal grand jury hearing evidence in the investigation of the congressman, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Gaetz has been under investigation to determine if he violated sex trafficking laws and obstructed justice in that probe. Gaetz has previously denied all wrongdoing, and has said he has never paid for sex nor had sex with an underage girl.
The woman, who CBS News is not naming to protect her privacy, testified in front of a federal grand jury in Orlando last Wednesday. She is viewed as a potential key witness, according to two sources familiar with the investigation. One of the sources said she has information related to the investigation of both the sex trafficking and obstruction allegations.
“This may be a willing participant who has a smart lawyer who sought an immunity deal from the government,” said former prosecutor and CBS News legal analyst Rikki Kleiman. “The government does not give immunity blindly, they know what they’re getting in exchange.” [….]
A source told CBS News last week that as a part of an obstruction probe, investigators are looking into whether Gaetz had a phone call with the ex-girlfriend, and another woman, who was already a witness in the federal investigation.
Multiple sources told CBS News that the ex-girlfriend and the other woman traveled to the Bahamas with Gaetz in 2018, along with a third woman with whom Gaetz was in a sexual relationship. That third woman was 18 at the time of the Bahamas trip, but investigators are also looking into whether she was 17 when the sexual relationship began.
https://twitter.com/sherrisjoy/status/1483474593444769800?s=20
The Washington Post: Florida governor proposes special police agency to monitor elections.
https://twitter.com/benjaminblouin/status/1483472324825341953?s=20
That’s all the news I have for you today–another insane news day with the ongoing pandemic and GOP coup in the background. What stories are you following?
Martin Luther King Day Reads: Whither Voting Rights
Posted: January 17, 2022 Filed under: Dr. Martin Luther King, Voter Ignorance, Voting Rights, Voting Rights and Voter Suppression 12 Comments
Today, we celebrate the life and works of Doctor Martin Luther King! Good Day!
I was fortunate to live during a time when great change was possible that came from the grassroots up. It did not come from a specific church, the military-industrial complex, or the whims of billionaires whose hobbies were to be funded by allowing them not to pay taxes. A crooked president was shamed out of the office with a bi-partisanship agreement and on full-display on TV. We achieved reproductive rights, voting rights, GBLT civil rights, and great scientific advances, and moved towards inclusion provided by the decisions of a balanced Supreme Court and Legislation hashed through with supporters on both sides of Congress.
This seems no longer possible due to the increasing belligerence of one party representing religious fanatics, billionaires, the war and fossil fuel machines, science deniers, white nationalists, and what still remains of the Confederacy. It’s all or nothing for them. Our country is scorched earth. We’re experiencing extreme weather events, extremist violence including insurrection, and extreme wealth inequality.
We do not want to continue down this path. It will not end well.
This is from Dr. Hakeem Jefferson quoting Dr. King. I am glad he is on our side and can elucidate the struggle so eloquently.
[A]ll types of conniving methods are still being used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters.” Continuing, he argued that “The denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition.”
Jefferson’s San Francisco Chronicle op-ed is righteous, powerful, and urgent.
For me, I’ve found comfort in the words of Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who, when asked how she avoids despair at times like this, said, “I don’t know of anything in the history of Black people in this country in which I’ve read some account in which it ended with, ‘And then they gave up.’ That’s just not what we do.”
That, dear reader, is the legacy of King. That is the legacy of Black people in a country that has long failed to live up to its ideals. That is the legacy that gives me hope, even as there is much reason to despair. That is the legacy I call up today and every day because those committed to justice cannot rest “until justice rolls down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
There are many books being written these days on the move towards autocracy in these United States. I’d like to offer up the work of David Peper interviewed by reporter Paul Rosenberg who writes on “How the states have become “Laboratories of Autocracy” — and why it’s worse than you think. Former Ohio Democratic Party head David Pepper has a dire warning: Rigged state legislatures are destroying America.” This is from Salon and it is an interview with David Pepper, the book’s author.
It was funny — it was when I thought of the term that the book came to me. I was going to tweet the words out, “You know, these states are no longer acting like laboratories of democracy, but laboratories of autocracy.” I didn’t send the tweet, because the minute I wrote it I thought, “Boy, there’s a lot more to say than this tweet.” And everything flowed from that.
Obviously, it comes out of this age-old term that Justice Louis Brandeis made famous but that many have used, a very idealized notion of states doing good things that then become models for the country. Clearly, that’s been the case sometimes. But as I argue in the book, in our history sometime it’s been the exact opposite. That’s how we got Jim Crow. States have enough power that in the wrong hands they can do great damage, and the point of the title was to say that’s what’s happening now in very stark ways.
But both words matter. “Autocracy” matters, as these states are hacking away at pillars of democracy that could lead to autocracy. But the “laboratories” part matters too, because they’re always learning, they’re always improving. So they are functioning as laboratories. Until you start adding some accountability and pushing back, they’ll just keep going. So my hope is that “autocracy” wakes people up, but “laboratories” is a really important part of that title because it explains how they operate.
I’ve been fighting the voting rights battle in Ohio for a number of years. The worst is still the purging of voters, but to have a secretary of state intentionally cause long traffic jams for the form of voting that he knew minorities and Biden voters were using, and lying over and over again about what the law actually, was such a troubling thing. And this was not your right-wing, Trump-type secretary of state. He had held himself out as more moderate.
So I tell the story because you look at the traffic jams that his one-drop-box-per-county policy created, and anyone with a commonsense response would say, “Don’t ever do that again.” But in a world of “laboratories of autocracy,” as I tell in the story, the state legislature of Ohio, seeing those jams, began pushing for bills to have traffic jams forever by making that not just a policy decision, but state law. And what do we see at the same time? States around the country looked at those traffic jams and saw the effect on — let’s be clear — Black voters waiting in long lines. So now we have the same effort in other states to minimize drop boxes and to do what happened here: Put the drop boxes where people are already voting early in person, which creates the maximum congestion possible. So it’s a great example of how they behave as laboratories against democracy.
We thought we could get so much done this last election only to see everything held hostage by two Democratic Senators. Ron Brownstein argues this in The Atlantic: “How Manchin and Sinema Completed a Conservative Vision. A nationwide standard of voting rights now seems like a pipe dream.” What follows is a blasting damnation of Roberts’ decisions in Shelby County v. Holder.
Roberts, who served as a young clerk to conservative Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist and as a Justice Department assistant in the Reagan administration, has long expressed hostility to federal oversight of voting and election rules. As the journalist Ari Berman recounted in his 2015 book, Give Us the Ballot, Roberts “led the charge” against the bipartisan 1982 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, which ultimately reversed a Supreme Court decision (supported by Rehnquist) weakening one key section of the law. Roberts wrote “upwards of 25 memos” opposing the legislation’s provision requiring that the Justice Department prove only discriminatory “effect” rather than purposeful “intent” in order to block state or local voting restrictions. (The Court had ruled the opposite, severely limiting the law’s applicability.)
In one memo reported by Berman, Roberts revealed his broader philosophy about voting rights: The test for federal objection to local voting laws should be extremely difficult to meet, he wrote, “since they provide the basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.”
That approach has guided Roberts on the Supreme Court. As the Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos, an expert in voting law, wrote in a 2019 law-review article, “The Roberts Court has … never nullified a law making it harder to vote.” To the contrary, in a series of landmark decisions, it has nullified efforts to ensure voter access, combat gerrymanders, and to limit political contributions and spending.
Those cases have included Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, which swept away federal prohibitions on undisclosed, unlimited corporate spending in federal elections; Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, which eviscerated the Justice Department’s authority under the Voting Rights Act to review, or “preclear,” any changes in voting procedures in states with a history of discrimination against minorities; Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, which ruled that federal courts cannot overturn even the most extreme partisan gerrymanders; and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee in 2021, which severely weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—the same provision that Roberts, as a young Reagan aide, targeted all the way back in 1982.
Those decisions generally aligned every Republican-appointed justice on the Court at the time against every Democratic-appointed justice (with the exception of Citizens United, in which one GOP-appointed justice, the center-left John Paul Stevens, sided with the minority). The first three cases were decided by the narrowest possible 5–4 majorities, and the most recent one by a 6–3 count that reflected the Court’s larger GOP advantage. Roberts personally wrote the decisions in both the Shelby and Rucho cases.
Roberts has often appeared reluctant to let the Court be seen in purely partisan terms. But that instinct, as many critics have noted, has not extended to cases involving the core electoral interests of the two political parties—cases in which he’s been entirely willing to engineer sharply divided rulings that separate the justices along partisan and ideological lines. (No Democratic-appointed justice has supported any of these rulings.)
I’m pretty sure I’ve given you enough long pieces to read so I’ll end here.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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