Mostly Monday Reads: Republican Dystopia

An April Mood, Charles Burchfield

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

It’s a weird news day today. The most laughable thing I’ve ever read is trending on the X Zone.  I was hoping the hashtag on the #DaytheDelusionDied was about how Republicans have finally come to realize Trump sold the country to the highest bidder, even his lawyers are pleading guilty and selling him out, and this was the day that The New York Times had to apologize for printing Hamas propaganda. Instead, some Karen has written something weird about us waking up after the Hamas terrorist attack and becoming interested in owning guns, securing the border, and not voting for rational actors in elections.  It was a good thing because the commenters are mostly a running list of who to block on the dead brain/open mouth site. Delusional people with binders full of conspiracy theories don’t get to redefine words in the dictionary.

So, yes, the New York Times apologized for getting the information on the Gaza Hospital attack wrong. I know I fell for it.

On Oct. 17, The New York Times published news of an explosion at a hospital in Gaza City, leading its coverage with claims by Hamas government officials that an Israeli airstrike was the cause and that hundreds of people were dead or injured. The report included a large headline at the top of The Times’s website.

Israel subsequently denied being at fault and blamed an errant rocket launch by the Palestinian faction group Islamic Jihad, which has in turn denied responsibility. American and other international officials have said their evidence indicates that the rocket came from Palestinian fighter positions.

The Times’s initial accounts attributed the claim of Israeli responsibility to Palestinian officials, and noted that the Israeli military said it was investigating the blast. However, the early versions of the coverage — and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels — relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified. The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.

Sultry Moon, Charles Burchfield

It’s part and parcel of their “both sides having the right information” policy.  They also don’t get to scream how patriotic they are when their cult leader sells the country’s secrets to please a billionaire from Australia who buys big-ticket items at Mar a Lardo.  The 60 Minutes Australia interview of Anthony Pratt should be a cautionary tale to letting this guy get near our democracy again. We’re not a wholesale outlet for Trump.  This is from CNN.  “Reports: Trump told Mar-a-Lago member about calls with foreign leaders.”  The details about our Nuclear subs appear to be just the beginning.

Mar-a-Lago member and Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt said then-President Donald Trump told him about his private calls with the leaders of Ukraine and Iraq, according to reports published Sunday about private recordings of Pratt, a key prosecution witness in Trump’s classified documents case.

The reports from The New York Times and “60 Minutes Australia” revealed previously unknown recordings of Pratt candidly recalling his conversations with Trump – and build on existing allegations that Trump overshared sensitive government material.

In the tapes, Pratt says Trump shared insider details about his phone calls with world leaders during his presidency. Pratt also offers searing critiques of Trump’s personal ethics.

CNN previously reported that Pratt gave an interview to special counsel Jack Smith, who charged Trump with mishandling national security materials by hoarding dozens of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. (Trump pleaded not guilty.) Pratt is also on Smith’s witness list for the trial, which is scheduled for May.

Concerns about Trump’s freewheeling approach to state secrets are at the center of that case. Past reports from ABC News said Trump discussed potentially sensitive information with Pratt about US nuclear submarines. The new reports Sunday expand what is known about Pratt’s recounting of their conversations to include foreign policy matters.

“It hadn’t even been on the news yet, and he said, ‘I just bombed Iraq today,’” Pratt said in one recording that was made public Sunday, recalling a conversation with Trump.

Pratt then recalled Trump’s description of his December 2019 call with Iraqi President Barham Salih. According to Pratt, Trump said, “The president of Iraq called me up and said, ‘You just leveled my city. … I said to him, ‘OK, what are you going to do about it?’”

The recordings also indicate that Trump spoke with Pratt about his now-infamous September 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump pressured Zelensky to help him win the 2020 election by publicly launching unfounded corruption probes into Joe Biden. That phone call formed the basis of Trump’s first impeachment.

“That was nothing compared to what I usually do,” Trump told Pratt about the Zelensky call, according to the tape.  “That’s nothing compared to what we usually talk about.”

Storm at Sunset, 1959 Charles Burchfield

This is the fun part.

The new recordings also shed light on Pratt’s candid, private thoughts about Trump’s behavior. It’s unclear who Pratt was speaking to, but Pratt said in one tape that Trump “says outrageous things nonstop,” and compared his business practices to “the mafia.”

“He knows exactly what to say — and what not to say — so that he avoids jail. But gets so close to it that it looks to everyone like he’s breaking the law,” Pratt said in one tape.

We all knew that, but what will Jack Smith do with the information?  Will Judge Loose Cannon ever let this trial go forward? So, one of the big questions was what Melania thought when Trump asked her to trot around in a bikini? This is from Newsweek.  There are audio recordings btw.

According to the audio recordings, one of the conversations Pratt shared about the former president were details surrounding Trump and the former first lady.

In the recordings, Pratt shares that Trump asked Melania to parade around the pool at Mar-a-Lago in a bikini “so all the other guys could get a look at what they were missing.”

In response, according to Pratt’s audio, “Then Melania said back to him, ‘I’ll do that when you walk around with me in your bikini.'”

Autumnal Fantasy, Charles Burchfield

Trump is denying everything, but you know, the recordings!!!

Meanwhile, Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, is in a moral quandary. This is from Insider. “Quash my subpoena, Ivanka Trump tells NY judge, in asking not to testify against her father.”  What will Daddy’s crash do? 

Ivanka Trump is fighting hard against being forced to testify against her father and her brothers in the ongoing Trump civil fraud trial in New York.

On the eve of a Friday deadline, by which she must agree to take the stand as early as later this month, her lawyer made a lengthy objection to her subpoena.

The objection, in court papers filed late Thursday, calls the subpoena from the New York attorney general’s office overly broad.

It also accuses the attorney general’s office of botching how it served Trump with her subpoena, alleging a technical foul her lawyer says should invalidate her obligation to testify.

The technical foul? Copies of the subpoena were sent to three of her corporate addresses but not to her personally, said the lawyer, Bennet J. Moskowitz.

“Each of these three subpoenas listed Ms. Trump’s name only in the ‘to’ line above the LLCs’ names and the names and addresses of their registered agents,” Moskowitz wrote.

“The body of the Subpoenas requested a ‘personal appearance’ ‘to give testimony’ at trial but did not identify any specific employee, officer, or director that the NYAG wanted to appear,” he wrote.

Former President Donald Trump’s elder daughter was originally named as a defendant in the lawsuit from New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, but her name was removed earlier this year.

Wind Blown Asters, Charles E. Burchfield,1951

We’re living in a subpar Soap Opera/Mafia series. So, the  House Speaker’s race is still being run like a grade-school student council election. This is from Scott LeMieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money.  “If you have nine candidates for Speaker you have no candidates for speaker.”

 I would call this the political equivalent of a “let’s remember some guys” blog except that you would have had to ever have known who they were to remember them:

The House GOP’s enormous speaker field is officially set, with nine Republicans seeking to somehow unify their splintered party after almost three weeks without a leader.

It’s the most crowded field since former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s fall 19 days ago. The latest round of candidates includes current GOP leaders — like Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) and Vice Chair Mike Johnson (R-La.) — as well as more surprising rank and file members like Reps. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.). Another last-minute addition, Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.), who serves as GOP policy chair, raised eyebrows on Sunday.

House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), who had been encouraged to run by fellow Texans, announced Sunday that he won’t. “I’m standing down for this round,” Arrington told POLITICO. “Hope we get there.”

The full GOP conference will hear from all nine members on Monday night for a candidate forum, followed by an internal vote Tuesday morning. And all will be under intense pressure to present a pitch that can bring together an exasperated House GOP that is rife with division.

“This is my tenth term in Congress. This is probably one of the most embarrassing things I’ve seen,” House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas) told ABC News on Sunday. “We’re essentially shut down as a government.”

McCarthy, who was stripped of the gavel earlier this month after working with Democrats to avert a shutdown, also called the chaos “embarrassing” for the party and the country, stressing the need to elect Emmer — his No. 3 deputy — next week.

Emmer has thus far avoided getting the ultimate kiss of death — an endorsement from Elise Stefanik — but is still hard to see his candidacy going anywhere, and I have no idea who the runner-up would even be. The aristocrats!

Charles Burchfield : Ancient Maples in August, 1957

Public Notice features Ken Buck today with this odd headline. “The House GOP’s unlikely resistance fighter. Ken Buck is mostly terrible. But amid the speakership crisis, bad actors are taking bold stands.”  Oy. We come not to praise Caesar but to bury him?

The ongoing GOP House speakership debacle has been a clownish, humiliating spectacle which has made basically every Republican involved look like a dunderhead unfit to look smug on Sean Hannity’s show, much less govern the country. So it’s all the more surprising that one legislator who has emerged as a figure of resolve is Colorado’s Ken Buck.

Buck has not, up to now, been a figure of integrity, to put it mildly. He’s a radical right Freedom Caucus member who was instrumental in defenestrating former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Buck was in fact one of the eight Republicans who voted with oleaginous self-promoter Matt Gaetz to end McCarthy’s speakership, plunging the caucus into chaos.

And yet, suddenly and unexpectedly, Buck has located a spine and used it to stand up to his colleagues. In the leadership forum following McCarthy’s ouster, Buck demanded that the two leading candidates, Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan, state clearly that Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, won the 2020 election. When neither would do so, Buck said he wouldn’t vote for either of them. You have to imagine Buck asking his question during the leadership forum and every single Republican in the room doing a spit take, wiping the coffee off their chins, and having flashbacks to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

Buck’s newfound concern with election integrity doesn’t make him a good person. It does indicate, though, that the GOP House leadership crisis has, perhaps, opened up space for some bad actors to make better choices. And it’s also a reminder that, if the GOP is going to get to a better place, some pretty awful people will need to decide to be — tactically, perhaps temporarily — less awful.

It sounds like Noah Berlatsky has a future at the New York Times.

February Thaw, Charles Burchfield

And, in the Republican Presidential Primary, there’s a horse race at the bottom of the pack.  This is from USA Today. “Exclusive poll: Nikki Haley surges, nearly ties Ron DeSantis as the alternative to Trump. Haley’s support has surged to 11% and DeSantis’ plunged to 12%, the USA TODAY/Suffolk Poll finds. But Trump still dominates.”  Who amongst us has found a poll these days we don’t trust?  One poll?  Several polls?  All polls?  Uh, check out the MOE on this baby!

Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley has surged nationally in a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, challenging a faltering Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the top alternative to Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination.

Haley’s support has risen to 11% of registered voters who plan to vote in GOP primaries or caucuses, up from 4% in the USA TODAY/Suffolk poll taken in June and just one percentage point below DeSantis. His 12% standing was a steep fall from his 23% support four months ago.

Trump continues to dominate the field, backed by 58%, up 10 points.

The survey of 309 Republican and Republican-leaning voters, taken Tuesday through Friday by landline and cell phone, has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.6 percentage points.

This party deserves to go the way of the Whig Party. They can’t govern.  They can’t get a platform together.  They only care about air time on Fox, granting their donors their most fond wishes, destroying our democracy, and hurting women, immigrants, and people of color.

So, that’s enough weirdness for today. I’ve had enough weirdness since the weekend.  The reason I’ve chosen the art of Charles E. Burfield is because of his weirdish take on landscape.  We’ve got marsh fires down here that stink up the place and have brought us “Super Fog.”  Yes, that’s the technical word for it.  It’s been an eerie weekend of thick black fog and nasty smells.  You may remember me writing this blog from a small university on the other side of the river for a few years. You may also remember me complaining about how extending daylight savings time made the morning commute seem like a midnight funeral.  Well, the combination of no sunshine in the morning and Super Fog messed up that morning commute for many folks.  Today, it cost some of them their lives.

We are seeing aftermath video of the fiery crash on I-55 between Ruddock and Manchac.

Video Courtesy: Carolyn Millerhttps://t.co/3oTobtgpVn pic.twitter.com/eZUOw4FOBc

— wdsu (@wdsu) October 23, 2023

 

Horrible situation on I-55 with multiple vehicles on fire, at least one death and emergency responders on the scene. I-10 closed in both directions at the Bonne Carre Spillway to enable first responders to get to the scene. pic.twitter.com/buppTR292l

— WWL-TV (@WWLTV) October 23, 2023

It figures it’s trending on the dead site.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?