Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: July 22, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Crime, Donald Trump, Economy, education, Florida, Joe Biden, just because | Tags: Agnes Miller Parker, Arizona, Bidenomics, Brian Kemp, Doug Ducey, Fani Willis, Georgia, Judge Aileen Cannon, Kamala Harris, Mark Meadows, Ron De Santis, slavery, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Trump trial dates, women's liberation, Women's Rights |
Happy Caturday!!
The Uncivilized Cat, 1930, by Agnes Miller Parker
Today I’m highlighting the work of Scottish artist Agnes Miller Parker. She is best known for her wood engravings of animals, often used as book illustrations. She was also a woman’s right activist. “The Uncivilized Cat” was an illustration for the book “Love’s Creation,” by Marie Stopes, published in 1928, the year women won the right to vote in the UK. The the image is filled with symbols of women’s liberation. Read about them at this link.
We are still waiting for the expected indictment of Donald Trump in the January 6 case. Special Counsel Jack Smith is till conducting grand jury interviews in the investigation, so maybe it won’t happen right away–or maybe it will come next week. Meanwhile, there is some Trump legal news.
The Latest on the Trump Investigations
Alan Feuer at The New York Times: Trial in Trump Documents Case Set for May 2024.
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents set a trial date on Friday for May 2024, taking a middle position between the government’s request to go to trial in December and Mr. Trump’s desire to push the proceeding until after the 2024 election.
In her order, Judge Aileen M. Cannon said the trial was to be held in her home courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., a coastal city two and a half hours north of Miami that will draw its jury pool from several counties that Mr. Trump won handily in his two previous presidential campaigns.
Judge Cannon also laid out a calendar of hearings, throughout the remainder of this year and into next year, including those concerning the handling of the classified material at the heart of the case.
The scheduling order came after a contentious hearing on Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce where prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, and lawyers for Mr. Trump sparred over when to hold the trial.
The timing of the proceeding is more important in this case than in most criminal matters because Mr. Trump is now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and his legal obligations to be in court will intersect with his campaign schedule.
The date Judge Cannon chose to start the trial — May 20, 2024 — falls after the bulk of the primary contests. But it is less than two months before the start of the Republican National Convention in July and the formal start of the general election season.
Mr. Trump’s advisers have been blunt that winning the presidency is how he hopes to beat the legal charges he is facing, and he has adopted a strategy of delaying the trial, which is expected to take several weeks, for as long as possible.
The Challenge, Agnes Miller Parker, 1934
Analysis by Aaron Blake at The Washington Post: Trump’s trial date conjures GOP’s nightmare scenario.
When the trial date for Donald Trump’s Manhattan hush money case was set for March — during the GOP presidential primary schedule — the former president and leading 2024 Republican candidate shook his head.
The Republican Party as a whole might have that reaction to Trump’s latest trial date.
U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon on Friday set Trump’s Florida classified documents case to begin on May 20, 2024. Cannon wound up more or less splitting the difference between the government’s request to begin in December and Trump’s lawyers’ preference to begin after the 2024 election.
The date could still be pushed back, especially given that Cannon has labeled the case “complex.” But it means we’re currently looking at this for a schedule of Trump’s upcoming trials:
- Oct. 2: New York civil fraud trial
- Jan. 15: Second E. Jean Carroll civil defamation trial
- March 25: Manhattan hush-money trial
- May 20: Federal classified documents trial in Florida
That’s a lot of legal issues to face in the heart of a campaign, keeping Trump or at least his lawyers in court for a huge chunk of time he’s supposed to be on the trail. But Trump’s most serious bit of legal jeopardy — at least for now, with potential Jan. 6-related indictments looming federally and in Georgia — won’t fully play out until the end of the primary season.
Nomination contests are often effectively wrapped up by March or April at the latest, with the final contests held in June but generally not consequential to the outcome. Republican National Committee rules effectively require every state to hold its contest by May 31, meaning a two-week classified documents trial would place the meat of the proceedings beyond the window for any GOP voters making their decisions.
More commentary from Bess Levin at Vanity Fair: That Sound You Hear Is Donald Trump Screaming, Crying, and Throwing Up in a Mar-a-Lago Bathroom.
Donald Trump received some no good, extremely bad legal news on Friday, when The Guardian reported that Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney criminally investigating his attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia has “developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month,” according to people familiar with the matter. Obviously, being charged with racketeering would be exactly as bad as it sounds—and yet somehow, that wasn’t even the worst news the ex-president received today.
Instead, it was likely the decision by Aileen Cannon—a federal judge Trump himself appointed—to set a trial date of May 20, 2024, for Trump to face off with the federal government in the classified-documents case, that had staffers and aides hiding in hallways and coat closets to avoid Trump’s ire (and whatever ketchup bottles he could get his hands on). While the spring date is several months later than prosecutors had requested, it is very much well before the postelection one Team Trump had been angling for in the hopes of putting it off until the ex-president could have won a second term and made all of his legal problems—on the federal level, that is—go away.
Of course, just because Cannon issued a ruling that Trump will undoubtedly be very unhappy about today does not mean she won’t, as many fear, blow up the case in his favor when the trial finally kicks off. (As The Washington Post notes, “In her role, Cannon can have a significant impact on the case, including by ruling on what evidence can be included and deciding on any potential motions challenging the charges.”) On the other hand, the government’s indictment against Trump is said to be extremely strong: After the charges were unveiled last month, former attorney general Bill Barr opined: “I was shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were, frankly. If even half of it is true, he’s toast.” As one Fox News legal analyst noted, “All the government has to do is stick the landing on one count, and he could have a terminal sentence. We’re talking about crimes that have a 10- or 20-year period as a maximum.” (Trump, along with his alleged co-conspirator, has pleaded not guilty.)
Siamese Cat, 1950, by Agnes Miller Parker
The news about Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis came from Hugo Lowell at The Guardian: Fulton county prosecutors prepare racketeering charges in Trump inquiry.
The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia has developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter.
The racketeering statute in Georgia requires prosecutors to show the existence of an “enterprise” – and a pattern of racketeering activity that is predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes.
In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has evidence to pursue a racketeering indictment predicated on statutes related to influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the people said.
Willis had previously said she was weighing racketeering charges in her criminal investigation, but the new details about the direction and scope of the case come as prosecutors are expected to seek indictments starting in the first two weeks of August.
The racketeering statute in Georgia is more expansive than its federal counterpart, notably because any attempts to solicit or coerce the qualifying crimes can be included as predicate acts of racketeering activity, even when those crimes cannot be indicted separately.
The specific evidence was not clear, though the charge regarding influencing witnesses could include Trump’s conversations with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which he asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, the people said – and thereby implicate Trump.
For the computer trespass charge, where prosecutors would have to show that defendants used a computer or network without authority to interfere with a program or data, that would include the breach of voting machines in Coffee county, the two people said.
The breach of voting machines involved a group of Trump operatives – paid by the then Trump lawyer Sidney Powell – accessing the voting machines at the county’s election office and copying sensitive voting system data.
More details at The Guardian.
Special Counsel Jack Smith is also interested in 2020 election interference in Georgia as well as Arizona. The Hill reports that: DOJ special counsel contacts Kemp, former Arizona governor in Jan. 6 probe: reports.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has been contacted by the federal special counsel investigating former President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Kemp’s office confirmed Friday.
Former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) was also contacted for the investigation, according to CNN reports.
Special Counsel Jack Smith is investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and his actions related to the Jan. 6 insurrection. He served Trump a target letter on Sunday, informing the former president that he is the target of the probe.
By Agnes Miller Parker
The move shows overlap between Smith’s federal investigation and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s investigation into the same conduct in Georgia.
A spokesperson for Kemp’s office confirmed that he had been contacted by Smith, but did not give further details, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Smith’s probe in Arizona is questioning lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign against the state which alleged that the election was fraudulent. Smith subpoenaed the Arizona Secretary of State’s office earlier this month and subpoenaed state lawmakers in February.
Trump called Ducey multiple times to pressure him to overturn Arizona’s election results. President Biden won Arizona, the first time the state voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1996.
At The Washington Post, some tidbits about Mark Meadows: Before Jan. 6, Mark Meadows joked about Trump’s election claims.
Mark Meadows joked about the baseless claim that large numbers of votes were fraudulently cast in the names of dead people in the days before the then-White House chief of staff participated in a phone call in which then-President Trump alleged there were close to 5,000dead voters in Georgia and urged Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the 2020 election there.
In a text message that has been scrutinized by federal prosecutors, Meadows wrote to a White House lawyer that his son, Atlanta-area attorney Blake Meadows, had been probing possible fraud and had found only a handful of possible votes cast in dead voters’ names, far short of what Trump was alleging. The lawyer teasingly responded that perhaps Meadows’s son could locate the thousands of votes Trump would need to win the election. The text was described by multiple people familiar with the exchange.
The jocular text message, which has not been previously reported, is one of many exchanges from the time in which Trump aides and other Republican officials expressed deep skepticism or even openly mocked the election claims being made publicly by Trump, according to people familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the criminal investigation.
Special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading a Justice Department investigation of Trump’s activities in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, has focused on exploring whether Trump and his closest advisers understood that claims of fraud in the election were baseless, even as they pressed state officials and others to overturn Biden’s victory and convinced Trump’s millions of supporters that the election had been stolen, people familiar with the probe have said.
The text message is a small part of a broader portrait of Meadows that Smith appears to be assembling as he weighs the actions of not just Trump but a number of his closest advisers, including Meadows.
Ron DeSantis’s Struggles
The New York Times: DeSantis Faces Swell of Criticism Over Florida’s New Standards for Black History.
After an overhaul to Florida’s African American history standards, Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state’s firebrand governor campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, is facing a barrage of criticism this week from politicians, educators and historians, who called the state’s guidelines a sanitized version of history.
Siamese cats, Agnes Miller Parker
For instance, the standards say that middle schoolers should be instructed that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” — a portrayal that drew wide rebuke.
In a sign of the divisive battle around education that could infect the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris directed her staffers to immediately plan a trip to Florida to respond, according to one White House official.
“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Ms. Harris, the first African American and first Asian American to serve as vice president, said in a speech in Jacksonville on Friday afternoon.
Ahead of her speech, Mr. DeSantis released a statement accusing the Biden administration of mischaracterizing the new standards and being “obsessed with Florida.”
Florida’s new standards land in the middle of a national tug of war on how race and gender should be taught in schools. There have been local skirmishes over banning books, what can be said about race in classrooms and debates over renaming schools that have honored Confederate generals.
Cleve R. Wootson, Jr. at The Washington Post: Harris, on DeSantis’s turf, blasts Florida curriculum on Black history.
Vice President Harris, taking aim at Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke” on Friday in his home state, blasted Florida politicians for making changes to the public school curriculum that she said amounted to little more than a “purposeful and intentional policy to mislead our children,” especially when it comes to slavery.
Harris never mentioned DeSantis (R) by name, referring only to “extremists” and people who “want to be talked about as American leaders.” But her fiery speech in Jacksonville focused squarely on the policies of the Florida governor and presidential candidate, as well as on the state’s Board of Education and its Republican-controlled legislature.
Florida’s new standards on Black history lay out numerous benchmarks, but one has especially caught critics’ attention — a statement that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Since the guidelines were approved on Wednesday, many civil rights leaders have denounced the notion that slavery benefited its victims in some ways.
“Come on — adults know what slavery really involved,” Harris said. “It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world.”
By Agnes Miller Parker
She added, “How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?”
Since DeSantis announced his bid for the presidency in May, polls have cast him as former president Donald Trump’s top competition for the Republican nomination, at least for now. As DeSantis makes his pitch in early-voting primary states, he has blasted what he calls “woke indoctrination” in schools and said recent legislative changes in Florida could be a model for the rest of the nation.
Harris’s trip to the governor’s home state to rip into his policies could be a pivotal moment both for the Biden campaign, which has generally resisted going after the GOP presidential hopefuls, and for the vice president, who has sometimes seemed to cast about for a resonant issue.
Read more at The WaPo.
Bidenomics News
It’s difficult to understand why President Biden isn’t more popular. He has really delivered on his promises. What more do voters want? Are people really stupid enough to fall for GOP propaganda about the economy?
Christina Wilke at CNBC: Morgan Stanley credits Bidenomics for ‘much stronger’ than expected GDP growth.
Morgan Stanley is crediting President Joe Biden’s economic policies with driving an unexpected surge in the U.S. economy that is so significant that the bank was forced to make a “sizable upward revision” to its estimates for U.S. gross domestic product.
Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is “driving a boom in large-scale infrastructure,” wrote Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley, in a research note released Thursday. In addition to infrastructure, “manufacturing construction has shown broad strength,” she wrote.
As a result of these unexpected swells, Morgan Stanley now projects 1.9% GDP growth for the first half of this year. That’s nearly four times higher than the bank’s previous forecast of 0.5%.
“The economy in the first half of the year is growing much stronger than we had anticipated, putting a more comfortable cushion under our long-held soft landing view,” Zentner wrote.
The analysts also doubled their original estimate for GDP growth in the fourth quarter, to 1.3% from 0.6%. Looking into next year, they raised their forecast for real GDP in 2024 by a tenth of a percent, to 1.4%.
“The narrative behind the numbers tells the story of industrial strength in the U.S,” Zentner wrote.
Morgan Stanley’s revision came at a pivotal time for the Biden White House. The president has spent the summer crisscrossing the country, touting his economic achievements. “Together we are transforming the country, not just through jobs, not just through manufacturing, but also by rebuilding our infrastructure,” Biden said Thursday during a visit to a Philadelphia shipyard.
Read more at CNBC.
Have a fabulous Caturday and a great weekend, everyone!!
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Thanks to Dakinikat for the information about Agnes Miller Parker.
I love her illustrations! Wonderful to read about the symbolism in the Top Painting. That’s the first one I saw and fell in love with it!
Reporter Robert Draper argues that Aileen Cannon may not be as bad as we think.
I wonder if inside what passes for his mind the Dump really assumed running for Prez would put all his cases on hold until he could pardon himself?
It would be the ultimate working the system, which he’s been doing since he was in diapers.
Maybe at least the Jan6 case in DC will start before hell freezes over.
About the “slaves learned useful things” shit. As a matter of bald fact it’s true because learning is what humans do, no matter how awful the circumstances.
The point behind DeSantis bringing it up, though, is to take the focus off the perps. One way to get it back on them (shouting at the MSM here…) is to worry less about the hypocrisy of it all (I mean, duh, right) and to note that if the perps, not the victims, the perps were thinking about new skills, they would have used apprenticeship programs.
As long as they were slaves, nothing else matters. They were human chattel with no freedom to control their lives. Not to mention they were subject to rape, torture, and endless abuse.
Agreed.
I’m trying to talk about how you can frame it to dope slap the ones spewing the BS.
From the slaves’ point of view, as you say the only one that’s significant, the crime is the only topic. (And they certainly don’t need reminders that it’s the perps’ fault.)
But the more eyes you can open on the perp-adjacent side, the better it will be for all of us in the long run. DeSantis could do nothing all by himself. And the way to wean off supporters is to show the context, the one being hidden by pretending the whole thing was an exercise in civilization. Because that, for them, is the idea behind saying it “helped” slaves. Pointing out that if it was about learning, the slaveholders would apply very different methods, which gives the lie to the whole myth. It takes away the basis for fooling yourself that you can be a good person and commit those atrocities. And that’s the first step toward not committing them any more.
Anyway, don’t know if that makes it any clearer. My take on why shifting the framework, sometimes, is worth it.
I see. That makes sense.
(emojis didn’t come through. Just trying to say ‘thanks for letting me know’ 🙂 )
Slaves were priced by the skills they had…from Benin where there were fabulous bronze metal workers,blacksmith. The white enslavers did not teach or help develope these skills! Whatta load!
In various tribes,different skills geared toward the African natural minerals,resources developed….basketry,carpentry, ceramic clay vessels, weaving, brick making,farming,herding,etc. There were many bought because of their “artisan” skills. These people esposing the Florida curriculum should be shunned& humiliated for their stupidity,ignorance and kept away from children.