Read more at the WaPo link.
Thursday Reads
Posted: May 19, 2022 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: coronavirus, Covid-19, Democracy in peril, Donald Trump, election deniers, fascism, food shortages, Idaho, midterm elections 2022, Ukraine war 19 Comments
Rainy Day Boston, Frederick Childe Hassam
Good Morning!!
Here’s what I see as the major topics in the news today: world events stemming from Russia’s war on Ukraine; the ongoing Trumpist attack on U.S. democracy; and the new wave of Covid-19 cases.
Outgrowths of Ukraine War
Fascism and totalitarianism expert Timothy Snyder at The New York Times: We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.
Fascism was never defeated as an idea.
As a cult of irrationality and violence, it could not be vanquished as an argument: So long as Nazi Germany seemed strong, Europeans and others were tempted. It was only on the battlefields of World War II that fascism was defeated. Now it’s back — and this time, the country fighting a fascist war of destruction is Russia. Should Russia win, fascists around the world will be comforted.
We err in limiting our fears of fascism to a certain image of Hitler and the Holocaust. Fascism was Italian in origin, popular in Romania — where fascists were Orthodox Christians who dreamed of cleansing violence — and had adherents throughout Europe (and America). In all its varieties, it was about the triumph of will over reason.
Because of that, it’s impossible to define satisfactorily. People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism. But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin. It has a cult of the dead, organized around World War II. It has a myth of a past golden age of imperial greatness, to be restored by a war of healing violence — the murderous war on Ukraine.
You’ll need to read the whole essay to get the full impact of Snyder’s argument, but here’s a bit more:
We understand more about fascism than we did in the 1930s. We now know where it led. We should recognize fascism, because then we know what we are dealing with. But to recognize it is not to undo it. Fascism is not a debating position, but a cult of will that emanates fiction. It is about the mystique of a man who heals the world with violence, and it will be sustained by propaganda right to the end. It can be undone only by demonstrations of the leader’s weakness. The fascist leader has to be defeated, which means that those who oppose fascism have to do what is necessary to defeat him. Only then do the myths come crashing down.
Paris Street in the rain, by Gustave Caillebotte
As in the 1930s, democracy is in retreat around the world and fascists have moved to make war on their neighbors. If Russia wins in Ukraine, it won’t be just the destruction of a democracy by force, though that is bad enough. It will be a demoralization for democracies everywhere. Even before the war, Russia’s friends — Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban, Tucker Carlson — were the enemies of democracy. Fascist battlefield victories would confirm that might makes right, that reason is for the losers, that democracies must fail.
Had Ukraine not resisted, this would have been a dark spring for democrats around the world. If Ukraine does not win, we can expect decades of darkness.
The Economist: The coming food catastrophe. War is tipping a fragile world towards mass hunger. Fixing that is everyone’s business.
By invading Ukraine, Vladimir Putin will destroy the lives of people far from the battlefield—and on a scale even he may regret. The war is battering a global food system weakened by covid-19, climate change and an energy shock. Ukraine’s exports of grain and oilseeds have mostly stopped and Russia’s are threatened. Together, the two countries supply 12% of traded calories. Wheat prices, up 53% since the start of the year, jumped a further 6% on May 16th, after India said it would suspend exports because of an alarming heatwave.
The widely accepted idea of a cost-of-living crisis does not begin to capture the gravity of what may lie ahead. António Guterres, the un secretary general, warned on May 18th that the coming months threaten “the spectre of a global food shortage” that could last for years. The high cost of staple foods has already raised the number of people who cannot be sure of getting enough to eat by 440m, to 1.6bn. Nearly 250m are on the brink of famine. If, as is likely, the war drags on and supplies from Russia and Ukraine are limited, hundreds of millions more people could fall into poverty. Political unrest will spread, children will be stunted and people will starve.
Mr Putin must not use food as a weapon. Shortages are not the inevitable outcome of war. World leaders should see hunger as a global problem urgently requiring a global solution.
Landscape with rain, Wassily Kandinsky
Russia and Ukraine supply 28% of globally traded wheat, 29% of the barley, 15% of the maize and 75% of the sunflower oil. Russia and Ukraine contribute about half the cereals imported by Lebanon and Tunisia; for Libya and Egypt the figure is two-thirds. Ukraine’s food exports provide the calories to feed 400m people. The war is disrupting these supplies because Ukraine has mined its waters to deter an assault, and Russia is blockading the port of Odessa.
Even before the invasion the World Food Programme had warned that 2022 would be a terrible year. China, the largest wheat producer, has said that, after rains delayed planting last year, this crop may be its worst-ever. Now, in addition to the extreme temperatures in India, the world’s second-largest producer, a lack of rain threatens to sap yields in other breadbaskets, from America’s wheat belt to the Beauce region of France. The Horn of Africa is being ravaged by its worst drought in four decades. Welcome to the era of climate change.
The Trumpist Attack on U.S. Democracy
This is from The Washington Post news analysis by Leigh Ann Caldwell, Theodoric Meyer: Trump uses Pa. primary to continue effort to undermine electoral system.
Donald Trump‘s continued effort to discredit or manipulate the electoral process is playing out in two distinct but related ways in the wake of Tuesday’s primary contests in Pennsylvania.
First, he is casting doubt on the result of the Senate GOP primary by once again making baseless claims that mail-in ballots are causing problems and suggesting his preferred candidate, Mehmet Oz, should just declare victory.
“It makes it much harder for them to cheat with the ballots that they ‘just happened to find,’” Trump said, providing no evidence, on his social media platform Truth Social, our colleague Colby Itkowitz reports.
Second, the nominee he backed for governor, Doug Mastriano, won the primary and if he wins the election in November, Mastriano would have considerable influence over how the state’s presidential election results are handled in 2024 when Trump may be on the ballot as our colleague’s Rosalind S. Helderman, Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey explain.
Mastriano has been one of the staunchest backers of Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election and the steps he wanted officials to take to deny Joe Biden victory.
Rain swept street, by Mike Barr
“As governor, Mastriano would have the opportunity not just to speak, but to act,” Roz, Isaac and Josh write. A possibility that is “worrying experts already fearful of a democratic breakdown around the 2024 presidential contest.”
“Those concerns are made especially acute in Pennsylvania by the fact that the governor has the unusual authority to directly appoint the secretary of state, who serves as chief elections officer and must sign off on results. If he or she refuses, chaos could follow.”
Reid Epstein at The New York Times: Midterm Stakes Grow Clearer: Election Deniers Will Be on Many Ballots.
Republican voters in this week’s primary races demonstrated a willingness to nominate candidates who parrot Donald J. Trump’s election lies and who appear intent on exerting extraordinary political control over voting systems. The results make clear that the November midterms may well affect the fate of free and fair elections in the country.
In Pennsylvania, Republican voters united behind a nominee for governor, Doug Mastriano, who helped lead the brazen effort to overturn the state’s 2020 election and chartered buses to the rally before the Capitol riot, and who has since promoted a constitutionally impossible effort to decertify President Biden’s victory in his state.
In North Carolina, voters chose a G.O.P. Senate nominee, Representative Ted Budd, who voted in Congress against certifying the 2020 results and who continues to refuse to say that Mr. Biden was legitimately elected.
And in Idaho, which Mr. Trump won overwhelmingly in 2020, 57 percent of voters backed two Republican candidates for secretary of state who pushed election falsehoods, though they lost a three-way race to a rival who accepts Mr. Biden as president.
The strong showings on Tuesday by election deniers, who have counterparts running competitively in primaries across the country over the coming months, were an early signal of the threat posed by the Trump-inspired movement.
This story about what’s happening in Idaho was published before yesterday’s primaries, but it’s still an important read. Christopher Mathias at HuffPo: Living With The Far-Right Insurgency In Idaho.
IDAHO — White nationalist Vincent James Foxx had a new video for his nearly 70,000 subscribers on BitChute, one of the few tech platforms that hasn’t banned him. On Feb. 16, he appeared wearing a baseball hat emblazoned with the state’s outline tilted on its side so that it resembled a pistol.
“We are going to take over this state,” Foxx declared. “We have a great large group of people, and that group is growing. A true, actual right-wing takeover is happening right now in the state of Idaho. And there’s nothing that these people can do about it. So if you’re a legislator here, either get in line, or get out of the way.”
Foxx, 36, isn’t from Idaho. He only recently moved from California to Post Falls. But in the video, he showed off photos of himself posing with a string of prominent Republican politicians in the state as he explained who he’s supporting in the upcoming primaries, slated for May 17.
Gregory Thielker,, Rainy Day in Washington, DC
He was especially excited about a selfie he’d taken a week prior: It showed him and fellow white nationalist Dave Reilly, a recent Pennsylvania transplant also living in Post Falls, standing alongside Idaho’s lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin. All three were smiling.
“We’re supporting her,” Foxx said, bragging of his movement’s “deep connections” to McGeachin, whom former President Donald Trump endorsed in the GOP primary race for governor. Foxx then explained how his particular brand of Christian white nationalism is poised to conquer Idaho, then the country.
“The solution is local politics: Amassing power in these pockets of the country until it’s time to unify,” he said. “I’ve only been here for a couple of months and I’m tapped in the way that I am. You can do it too.”
Fascists like Foxx are famous fabulists, experts at exaggerating their influence and success. But Foxx wasn’t just talking shit.
He is one of many far-right activists who have flocked to Idaho in recent years, where a large and growing radical MAGA faction in the state’s Republican Party has openly allied itself with extremists to a shocking extent, even for the Trump era. This faction is accruing more and more power in Boise, the state capital: Imagine a statehouse full of Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Steve Kings. At the local level, they have seized seats on school boards and county commissions at a fast clip.
Please read the rest. This could easily happening in other small states.
New Covid Wave
The Washington Post: Top Biden health officials sound warning on rising covid infections.
Top Biden administration officials warned Wednesday that one-third of Americans live in communities experiencing rising levels of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations and urged them to resume taking personal protection measures, including wearing masks.
The increase in new infections — nearing 100,000 a day — comes as the nation heads into Memorial Day weekend with its large gatherings and travel. That case count is almost certainly an undercount, officials said, given the widespread use of at-home tests for which results are often not reported to health officials.
Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, strongly encouraged those living in communities designated yellow or orange, indicating they have large numbers of new infections and hospitalizations, to consider wearing masks in indoor public spaces and taking other steps to protect themselves.
“As we’re currently seeing a steady rise of cases in parts of the country, we encourage everyone to use the menu of tools we have today to prevent further infection and severe disease, including wearing a mask, getting tested, accessing treatments early if infected and getting vaccinated or boosted,”she said.
Wednesday’s warnings from Walensky and two other officials — Ashish Jha, White House coronavirus coordinator, and Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser — came on the same day the United States surpassed the grim milestone of 1 million covid-19 deaths, a toll that even the starkest predictions at the start of the pandemic in 2020 did not anticipate.
In the Rain, Franz Marc
Also from The Washington Post: How big is the latest U.S. coronavirus wave? No one really knows.
Experts say Americans can assume that infections in their communities are five to 10 times the official counts.
“Any sort of look at the metrics on either a local, state or national level is a severe undercount,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist at the Pandemic Prevention Institute, housed at theRockefeller Foundation. “Everyone knows someone getting covid now.”
Hospitalizations nationally have increased 57 percent since bottoming out six weeks ago. But the roughly 23,000 covid patients in hospitals over the last week still represent nearly the lowest hospitalization levels of the entire pandemic.The recentincrease is led by the Northeast, where hospitalization rates are almost twice as high as in any other region.
Reported cases of covid have also tripled in the Northeast in just over a month, driving much of the growth nationally, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The country has averaged about 100,000 new cases each day over the past week —more than three times as high as at the lowest point in March.
The latest uptick in infections is testing a new CDC alert system adopted by many local and state governments that categorizes community levels of covid-19 as “low” even with the number of new cases rising to a level once considered high.
More than two-thirds of Americans live in low-risk areas under these metrics. But 43 percent of residents in the Northeastlive in areas considered high-risk, compared with 9percent in the Midwest and less than 1 percent each in the South and West.
I recommend clicking the link and reading the entire article.
Morning on the Seine in the rain, Claude Monet
Top U.S. health officials on Wednesday reiterated their calls for Congress to pass funding for the nation’s fight against Covid-19, warning that failure to act now would result in an unnecessary loss of life in the fall and winter.
Their warning comes as new infections and hospitalizations are on the rise as the more transmissible omicron subvariants sweep the U.S.
The nation is reporting more than 94,000 new infections daily on average as of Monday, a 25% increase over the previous week, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition, hospitalizations have increased 18% over the past week with about 3,000 people admitted with Covid every day on average, according to CDC data.
Dr. Ashish Jha, the new White House Covid response coordinator, said the fact that many people are now taking at-home tests, results of which are not captured in the data, has to be taken into consideration.
“We know that the number of infections is actually substantially higher than that, hard to know exactly how many, but we know that a lot of people are getting diagnosed using home tests,” Jha said during a White House update on the pandemic Wednesday. “We’re clearly undercounting cases. There’s a lot of infections across America.”
Those are today’s top stories as I see it. What do you think? What stories are you following?
Tuesday Reads
Posted: May 17, 2022 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: Buffalo racist massacre, Elise Stefanik, Fox News, GOP mainstreams violence, mass shootings, Payton Gendron, red flag laws, replacement theory, Republicans, Tucker Carlson, Wendy Rogers, White supremacists 12 Comments
Garden Cats, Hilary Pecis, 1979
Good Afternoon!!
I’m really late getting started today, because I had a chance to get a second Moderna booster shot and I took it. My town held a booster clinic in my apartment building late this morning. My arm is sore and I expect I’ll have some symptoms for a few days like I did with the last shot. I hope it won’t be too bad.
Anyway, there’s lots happening today. Of course there’s quite bit of discussion of the racist mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, and I’m going to focus on that. The massacre has also put a spotlight on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson’s hate filled rants and drawn attention to NY Rep. Elise Stefanik promotion of the so-called “great replacement theory.” Another Trumpist politician in Arizona is also being investigated for her claims about the Buffalo mass shooting.
The Washington Post: Buffalo shooting suspect wrote of plans 5 months ago, messages show.
As this data shows, the American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left. And the 10 victims in Buffalo this past weekend are now part of this toll. “Right-wing extremist violence is our biggest threat,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, has written. “The numbers don’t lie.”
The pattern extends to violence less severe than murder, like the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. It also extends to the language from some Republican politicians — including Donald Trump — and conservative media figures that treats violence as a legitimate form of political expression. A much larger number of Republican officials do not use this language but also do not denounce it or punish politicians who do use it; Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, is a leading example.
Talia Lavin at Rolling Stone: The Buffalo Shooter Isn’t a ‘Lone Wolf.’ He’s a Mainstream Republican.
There’s no such thing as a lone wolf — an appellation often given, in error, to terrorists who act alone, particularly those of the white supremacist variety. There are only those people who, fed a steady diet of violent propaganda and stochastic terror, take annihilatory rhetoric to its logical conclusion.
Such was the case on Saturday, when a teenaged white supremacist named Payton Gendron opened fire in a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 people, while livestreaming the carnage on the live-video site Twitch. Prior to the shooting, he had posted a 180-page manifesto in which he laid out his rationale clearly: He was an adherent of what is called Great Replacement Theory, the idea that white people, in the United States and white-majority countries around the world, are being systematically, deliberately outbred and “replaced” by immigrants and ethnic minorities, in a deliberate attempt to rid the world of whiteness. It’s a conspiracy theory that has inspired terror attacks in New Zealand and Pittsburgh, San Diego, and El Paso – an ideology that marries demographic panic with the idea of a cunning, nefarious plot. Reading through the document, what struck me hardest, however, was how very close the killer’s ideas were to the American mainstream – the white-hot core of American politics.
Apple tree, Gustav Klimt
Five years ago, when white supremacists walked down the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and carrying tiki torches, few people understood their intent – the fact that they were referring to replacement theory. The idea seemed outlandish, even incomprehensible; at the time, it was a fairly obscure rallying cry, based around a 2012 book by French novelist Renaud Camus fearmongering about a nonwhite-majority Europe, absorbed into the fetid stew of white-supremacist cant, where it acquired a vicious antisemitism. For many white supremacists, it is Jews who are orchestrating the “reverse colonization,” as Camus put it, of white countries, in order to more easily manipulate a nonwhite and therefore more malleable general populace. In Gendron’s manifesto, after explaining in detail why he picked the particular supermarket he did — it was in a majority-Black neighborhood with a majority-Black clientele — he felt the need to explain why he did not choose to attack Jews. “[Jews] can be dealt with in time, but the high fertility replacers will destroy us now, it is a matter of survival we destroy them first,” he wrote, before listing his weaponry in detail with price points included — a manual for future murders. While Gendron’s choice to engage in mass slaughter puts him on the radical fringe of those who enforce their beliefs with bullets, and his overt antisemitism differs slightly from vaguer blame of “elites,” “Democrats” and “globalists,” his fixation on white birthrates and demographic change are neither fringe nor particularly unusual. The gnawing fear of a minority-white America has utterly consumed conservative politics for the past half-decade, creating a Republican party whose dual obsessions with nativism and white fertility have engendered a suite of policies engineered to change the nature of the body politic. What unites murderers like Gendron, and the long list of white supremacist attackers he cited with admiration, with the mainstream of the Republican party is the dream of a white nation.
What are your thoughts? What other stories are you following today?
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: May 14, 2022 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: abortion rights, cats relaxing, caturday, Clarence Thomas, January 6 Committee, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Republicans, Roe v. Wade, SCOTUS, Ukraine, women's rights 26 Comments
Liquid Cat, photo by Karen Slagle
Happy Caturday!!
My stress level is sky high lately. If only I could relax like a cat, blissfully unaware of the daily shocks we humans have to deal with these days. At least it’s the weekend, so maybe we’ll get a break–or maybe even some good news? Here’s the latest:
The Guardian: Demonstrators across the US protest expected reversal of Roe v Wade.
With the US supreme court apparently poised to overturn the 1973 landmark decision which made abortion legal, hundreds of thousands of people across America are planning to take to the streets to protest the looming decision.
A coalition of groups such as Planned Parenthood, UltraViolet, MoveOn and the Women’s March are organizing Saturday’s demonstrations, whose rallying cry is “Bans Off Our Bodies”. More than 370 protests are planned, including in Washington DC, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago….
The “Bans Off Our Bodies” gatherings will take place three days after Democrats in the US Senate on Wednesday made a largely symbolic effort to advance legislation that would codify the right to an abortion into federal law. All 50 Republicans and one conservative-aligned Democrat – West Virginia’s Joe Manchin – voted against the measure, leaving it well short of the 60 votes necessary for it to advance.
Also from The Guardian: Protesters rally outside US supreme court justices’ homes ahead of pro-choice marches.
Pro-choice demonstrators continue to turn up outside the homes of supreme court justices, with the latest target being conservative Amy Coney Barrett, who signed on to a majority draft opinion that was leaked to reveal an intention to overturn the constitutional right to seek an abortion in the US.
“The right to your own body – to do what you want with your own body – is the most personal freedom you can have,” one protester said from among a group wearing long red “handmaid” capes and white bonnets earlier this week to symbolize forced childbearing, as members of the Virginia state police watched nearby….
Several organizations, led by Planned Parenthood and the Women’s March, are preparing for a nationwide day of pro-choice marches on Saturday….
Protesters have so far gathered outside the residences in the Washington DC area of Samuel Alito, who wrote the scorching draft opinion, and Brett Kavanaugh, as well as Barrett and the chief justice, John Roberts, who did not sign on to the draft opinion, unlike the other three and Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.
Yesterday, British medical journal The Lancet released a scathing editorial warning the U.S. Supreme Court that if they overturn Roe v. Wade, they will have women’s “blood on their hands.”
The Lancet: Why Roe v. Wade Must Be Defended.
“Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.” So begins a draft opinion by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, leaked from the US Supreme Court on May 2, 2022. If confirmed, this judgement would overrule the Court’s past decisions to establish the right to access abortion. In Alito’s words, “the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives”. The Court’s opinion rests on a strictly historical interpretation of the US Constitution: “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.” His extraordinary text repeatedly equates abortion with murder.
The Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution has been the main foundation underpinning the right of American women to an abortion. That 1868 Amendment was passed during the period of American Reconstruction, when states’ powers were being subjected to certain limitations. The goal of the Amendment was to prevent states from unduly restricting the freedoms of their citizens. That guarantee of personal liberty, so the Supreme Court had previously held, extended to pregnant women, with qualifications, who decided to seek an abortion. Alito rejected that reasoning. He argued that for any right not mentioned in the Constitution to be protected, it must be shown to have had deep roots in the nation’s history and tradition. Abortion does not fulfil that test. Worse, Roe was an exercise in “raw judicial power”, it “short-circuited the democratic process”, and it was “egregiously wrong” from the very beginning. It was now time, according to Alito, “to set the record straight”.
What is so shocking, inhuman, and irrational about this draft opinion is that the Court is basing its decision on an 18th century document ignorant of 21st century realities for women. History and tradition can be respected, but they must only be partial guides. The law should be able to adapt to new and previously unanticipated challenges and predicaments. Although Alito gives an exhaustive legal history of abortion, he utterly fails to consider the health of women today who seek abortion. Unintended pregnancy and abortion are universal phenomena. Worldwide, around 120 million unintended pregnancies occur annually. Of these, three-fifths end in abortion. And of these, some 55% are estimated to be safe—that is, completed using a medically recommended method and performed by a trained provider. This leaves 33 million women undergoing unsafe abortions, their lives put at risk because laws restrict access to safe abortion services.
Read the rest at the link.
At The Washington Post, Dana Millbank writes: Roe’s impending reversal is a 9/11 attack on America’s social fabric.
Washington’s reaction to the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade has been typically myopic.
Republicans first tried to make people believe that the issue wasn’t the opinion itself but the leak. Now they’re absurdly trying to portray Democrats as supporters of infanticide. Democrats, in turn, squabbled among themselves before a show vote on a doomed abortion rights bill. And the news media have reverted to our usual horse-race speculation about how it will affect the midterms.
This small-bore response misses the radical change to society that Justice Samuel Alito and his co-conspirators are poised to ram down the throats of Americans. Their stunning action might well change the course of the midterms — but more importantly, it is upending who we are as a people.
Assuming little changes from the draft, overturning Roe would be a shock to our way of life, the social equivalent of the 9/11 attacks (which shattered our sense of physical security) or the crash of 2008 (which undid our sense of financial security). As epoch-making decisions go, this is Brown v. Board of Education, but in reverse: taking away an entrenched right Americans have relied upon for half a century. We remember Brown because it changed us forever, not because it altered the 1954 midterms.
Read more at the WaPo.
Clarence Thomas, husband of Ginni Thomas, who supported a coup against the U.S. government, is still whining about the SCOTUS link, which most likely came from a right wing source. Adam Liptak at The New York Times: Justice Thomas Says Leaked Opinion Destroyed Trust at the Supreme Court.
The leak of a draft opinion has done irreparable damage to the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas said at a conference in Dallas on Friday night, adding that it had destroyed trust among its members.
“What happened at the court is tremendously bad,” Justice Thomas said. “I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them.”
The leak of the opinion, which would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion, was “like kind of an infidelity,” Justice Thomas said.
“Look where we are, where that trust or that belief is gone forever,” he said. “And when you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I’m in, it changes the institution fundamentally. You begin to look over your shoulder.”
Tough shit. My trust in SCOTUS was gone after Thomas was confirmed by lying about his sexual harassment of Anita HIll.
I won’t quote from this one, but if you want to read an argument by a constitutional scholar who is a Democrat who supports abortion rights but opposes Roe, check out this article at The Wall Street Journal by Akhil Reed Amar: The End of Roe v. Wade. I found it interesting but not that helpful for women who are facing a disastrous and traumatic future around pregnancy and childbirth. The article wasn’t behind the paywall when I opened it.
In other news, Republican Senators refused to visit Ukraine with Democrats, but then they organized their own trip. Please note that one of their GOP colleagues, Rand Paul, is currently blocking a bill to provide more aid to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia. The New York Times: McConnell and other Republican senators make a secret visit to Ukraine.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, visited Ukraine on Saturday to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky, leading the latest delegation of American lawmakers to the country as the United States deepens its commitment to Kyiv’s fight against the Russian invasion.
The surprise visit by Mr. McConnell, who was accompanied by three other Republican senators, comes as the Senate is working to pass a $40 billion emergency military and humanitarian aid package for Ukraine. It follows a string of other clandestine visits, including by the first lady, Jill Biden, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi….
“Helping Ukraine is not an instance of mere philanthropy — it bears directly on America’s national security and vital interests that Russia’s naked aggression not succeed and carries significant costs,” Mr. McConnell said this week. “If Ukraine fails to repel Russian aggression, there is no question that the threat to American and European security will grow.”
The trip was disclosed by Mr. Zelensky’s office. Details were not yet available from the lawmakers.
Mr. McConnell was joined by Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming, a member of his leadership team and the Foreign Relations Committee; John Cornyn of Texas, a member of the Intelligence Committee; and Susan Collins of Maine, who sits on both the Intelligence Committee and the Appropriations Committee, which oversees government funding.
In the photos I’ve seen, Zelensky doesn’t look as happy as he did when Jill Biden and Nancy Pelosi visited him.
The New York Times’s Luke Broadwater and Emily Cochrane on the subpoenas of members of Congress by the January 6th committee: Subpoenas for Republicans Raise New Questions for Jan. 6 Panel.
The decision by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to issue subpoenas to five Republican members of Congress, including Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, has sent a shock wave through Capitol Hill, heightening tensions in an already hostile environment and raising questions about the future of the inquiry and the institution itself.
The move by the Democratic-led panel set up a showdown with Republicans that could result in the threat of jail time against sitting members of Congress — including Mr. McCarthy, who is in line to be speaker if his party wins control of the House in November. It also had major implications for the investigation, and whether the country will ever get full answers about the deadly mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, that disrupted the peaceful transfer of power and left more than 150 police officers injured.
Some Democrats immediately began clamoring for Mr. McCarthy and other lawmakers to be held in criminal contempt if they fail to appear at their scheduled depositions in late May, while Republicans warned of retaliation if they take control of the House after the midterm elections.
“I wouldn’t be for it, but turnabout is fair play,” Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, said of retaliatory subpoenas. He called the Jan. 6 committee’s subpoenas a “horrible precedent for the institution,” adding: “It’s a race to the bottom.”
I’d say the refusal of Republicans and Trump associates to honor Congressional subpoenas looks bad for Republicans, especially if they try to investigate Democrats in the future; but for the NYT, it’s always about how everything that happens is bad for Democrats.
Meanwhile at Axios: More bombshells for Jan. 6 committee before June hearings.
The Jan. 6 committee may seek testimony from additional lawmakers as soon as next week, ahead of blockbuster TV hearings that kick off next month, Axios has learned.
Driving the news: Chiefs of staff and other aides to members of the House select committee were told Friday on their weekly call with committee staff to brace for more bombshells ahead of the June 9 start to public hearings, according to two sources on the call….
The big picture: The committee created a major stir with post-election implications when on Thursday it issued subpoenas to five House Republicans, including two of the GOP’s top brass — House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and the Judiciary Committee’s ranking member Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
— Members haven’t said how they would enforce those subpoenas.
— Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the committee, told Axios on Thursday that “the fact-gathering process will continue through the hearings.”
What we’re hearing: A U.S. Capitol Police security briefing for members and their chiefs of staff, to prepare for the June hearings, is scheduled for May 20.
That’s what’s happening so far today, as I see it. What’s on your mind?
Thursday Reads
Posted: May 12, 2022 Filed under: just because 21 CommentsGood Morning!!
We have passed another horrific milestone in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. One million Americans have now died from the virus. ABC News: ‘Unthinkable tragedy’: U.S. COVID-19 death toll surpasses 1 million.
One million Americans have now died from the coronavirus, according to an announcement made Thursday by President Joe Biden, marking a long-dreaded milestone for an incomprehensible tragedy.
“Today, we mark a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to COVID-19. One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a nation forever changed because of this pandemic. Jill and I pray for each of them,” Biden said in a statement. “As a nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow. To heal, we must remember.” [….]
Over the last two years, the deadly virus has kept the nation tightly in its clutch, with wave after wave of the virus washing over with only relatively brief respites in between.
“This unthinkable tragedy will forever appear in the history books,” said John Brownstein, Ph.D. an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor.
The loss of 1 million lives is a reality that is still difficult for many to comprehend, and to accept. In some respects, the death toll remains hidden from view.
Experts said the statistic, however massive, does not fully capture the magnitude of the human tragedy.
“It’s one thing to talk about numbers, but then to realize that each one of those numbers represents a grandparent or a spouse or someone with their own unique story that we’ve lost. Already over a million of those stories in you know, in this country alone — it really is a tragedy and a tragedy, in many ways, of unprecedented proportions,” Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told ABC News.
CNN: Biden mourns 1 million US Covid deaths as ‘irreplaceable losses.
President Joe Biden on Thursday mourned 1 million American deaths from Covid-19, using the occasion to again urge Congress to pass additional funding to control the pandemic.
While other official tallies have placed the figure a bit short of that mark, Biden marked the moment during the White House’s latest virtual Global Covid-19 Summit, reflecting on the pandemic’s devastation on the nation after more than two years.
“This pandemic isn’t over. Today, we mark a tragic milestone here in the United States — 1 million Covid deaths. One million empty chairs around the family dinner table. Each irreplaceable, irreplaceable losses. Each leaving behind a family, a community, forever changed because of this pandemic. Our hearts go out to all those who are struggling,” Biden said during his opening remarks at the summit, later acknowledging that “around the world, many more millions have died” as a result of the pandemic.
“That’s why I continue to call on Congress here at home to take the urgent action to provide emergency Covid-19 funding that is vital to protect Americans to make sure we’re that we maintain our supplies of Covid-19 test treatments and vaccines, including next generation vaccines that are being developed,” he said, later highlighting the request’s $5 billion proposal “to keep up our global partnership in the fight against Covid-19.”
In a proclamation issued Thursday ordering flags to be flown at half-staff to mark the milestone, Biden wrote that the nation “must not grow numb to such sorrow.”
Thursday’s summit is aimed at “redoubling” efforts to control Covid-19 and preparing the world for future variants of the coronavirus or the next deadly pandemic, two senior administration officials said.
The event, which is also co-hosted by Germany, Indonesia, Senegal and Belize, is calling for countries to invest in the new Global Pandemic Preparedness and Health Security fund at the World Bank, and the US announced that its pledge will increase to $450 million, up from the initially promised amount of $250 million. The summit will also highlight an additional $3.1 billion in new funding commitments from countries around the world to combat Covid-19.
Have you heard about what happened to a women’s lacrose team from Delaware State University, an HBCU? It’s pretty shocking. FYI, I had to register to read this story: A Bus Carrying an HBCU’s Lacrosse Team Was Pulled Over. Deputies Searched It for Drugs.
The president of a historically Black university says he is “incensed” that the institution’s women’s lacrosse team was subjected to a “trying and humiliating” traffic stop in Georgia, where law enforcement used a minor traffic violation as an opportunity to search the students’ belongings for narcotics.
Nothing illegal was found, and coaches and members of the Delaware State University team — the majority of whom are Black — have spoken out about the experience in the days since, describing the stop-and-search as racial profiling and a frightening ordeal.
“We do not intend to let this or any other incident like it pass idly by. We are prepared to go wherever the evidence leads us,” President Tony Allen of Delaware State University wrote in a letter to the campus community. “We have video. We have allies. Perhaps more significantly, we have the courage of our convictions.” Allen also noted that he’s reached out to Georgia law enforcement and that he’s exploring “options for recourse — legal and otherwise.” [….]
The April 20 Delaware State incident was first reported last week by Sydney Anderson, a sophomore who was on the bus when deputies from the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office stopped the vehicle as it traveled north on I-95, taking the team back to campus after several games in Florida.
In The Hornet Newspaper, Anderson wrote thatthe incident was traumatic, especially for those who’d never had an encounter with the police before, and called it one of the “constant reminders of being Black in America.”
During a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, Sheriff William Bowman of Liberty County, who is Black, told reporters that the deputies didn’t know that the bus was carrying students from a historically Black university before they entered the vehicle, nor did the sherriff’s office realize the incident had been perceived as racial profiling.
Obviously, that is not true.
The Delaware State lacrosse players’ bus was pulled over about two and a half hours after the team left its hotel on the morning of April 20, Head Coach Pamella Jenkins said in an interview with The Chronicle. A police officer came to the door and asked the driver for his license and registration, saying commercial vehicles aren’t supposed to drive in the left lane.
Nobody on board thought much about it until one of the students noticed the officers pulling their luggage out from underneath the bus to search it, with the help of a drug-sniffing dog, Jenkins said.
Video footage taken by one of the players shows two white officers standing at the front of the bus as players and coaches look on. One of the officers can be heard saying, “If there is anything in y’all’s luggage, we’re probably gonna find it. … I’m not looking for a little bit of marijuana, but I’m pretty sure you guys chaperones probably gonna be disappointed if we find any.”
“I was definitely scared,” Jenkins said. “As a coach, especially traveling away from campus, I’m responsible for them and their safety, and in the moment, I felt helpless.” She credited the students for their level heads in face of an uncertain situation. “My hope was to just stay calm, stay quiet, so that they could do what they needed to do so that we could hurry up and get back to campus.”
Shortly after informing the students and coaches of their search, one of the deputies returned with a wrapped gift addressed to one of the players and asked what was inside. Jenkins said the student told the deputy that she didn’t know because it was a gift from a relative that she’d been told not to open until she got home. To this, the deputy said he would open the package off the bus but she would need to step off if it was anything that warranted discussion. The deputy returned a few minutes later and said they were free to go.
More reads on this incident:
Yahoo Sports: Sheriff falsely claims deputies didn’t search luggage during HBCU lacrosse bus stop in Georgia.
CNN: Lacross team claims racial profiling by Georgia deputies during traffic stop.
NPR: Delaware AG asks for federal civil rights review after HBCU team stopped by police.
Yesterday, Republicans and one “Democrat” in the Senate defeated a bill to protect abortion rights. Could Democrats be getting angry enough to really fight back against GOP misogyny and lies? Here’s what women from the House of Representatives did before what they knew would be a losing vote:
And check out this rant from Rep. Hakeem Jeffries:
The Hill: Hakeem Jeffries to Clarence Thomas: ‘Why are you such a hater?’
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) this week blasted Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for his stance on a number of issues facing the court, including abortion rights.
“Let me ask this question of brother Thomas,” Jeffries said during a House Judiciary Committee hearing this week. “Why are you such a hater? Hate on civil rights. Hate on women’s rights. Hate on reproductive rights. Hate on voting rights. Hate on marital rights. Hate on equal protection under the law. Hate on liberty and justice for all. Hate on free and fair elections. Why are you such a hater?”
Jeffries added the senior conservative justice “thinks he can get away with” his stances on those key issues and “escape public scrutiny.” [….]
Thomas is one of several conservatives on the court who has indicated, according to a leaked draft opinion published earlier this month, that they would rule in favor of a Mississippi state law on abortion that would directly overturn Roe v. Wade, which made abortion a federally protected right.
“We are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like,” Thomas said last week in response to public outcry over the court’s reported stance. “We use stare decisis as a mantra when we don’t want to think.”
Jeffries referenced Thomas’s comments, telling the justice to “start in your own home.”
“Have a conversation with Ginni Thomas. She refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Why?” the congressman said. “Because she didn’t like the outcome. Because the former twice-impeached so-called president of the United States lost legitimately to Joe Biden. How did she respond? Instead, she said the Bidens should face a military tribunal in Guantánamo Bay on trumped-up charges of sedition. You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Joe Biden sounds fired up too.
This is from Politico: ‘The great MAGA king’: Biden sharpens midterm attacks.
The president traveled the country on Wednesday, sharpening his lines of attack against the Republican Party as primary season kicks into full gear. Throughout the day, he laid into the GOP and baited former President Donald Trump, even testing a new nickname for his predecessor: the great MAGA king.
“Look at my predecessor, the great MAGA king — the deficit increased every single year he was president,” Biden said in Chicago at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers International convention, contrasting the deficit reductions during his tenure with Trump’s term.
With a little over six months to go until the November midterms — what is often a referendum on the president’s performance — Biden is moving into full-fledged campaign mode. The noticeable change in tone comes as economic concerns hover over Democrats’ prospects and the White House tests out a new strategy — painting a clear picture of the differences between Democrats and Trump and his followers.
With his MAGA king nickname, Biden was just getting started. At a DNC fundraiser later Wednesday, the president called his 2020 victory against Trump a “low bar,” and dug into his favorite phrase of late, “MAGA Republicans,” twice calling these politicians “petty,” “mean-spirited” and “extreme.”
“They are cowered by Trump,” Biden said, telling the audience that Democrats have to make their case in 2022. “The fact of the matter is, they run the show — the MAGA Republicans. … It really is beyond the pale.”
The president, speaking to roughly 40 guests, said the GOP has a “radical agenda” and said it isn’t “your father’s Republican Party.”
What’s on your mind today? What stories are you following?
Tuesday Reads
Posted: May 10, 2022 Filed under: just because 21 Comments
William Merritt Chase, Afternoon by the Sea
Good Afternoon!!
Chris Coons, so-called Democratic Senator from Delaware, worked with Texas Senator John Cornyn to introduce a bill to protect the families of Supreme Court justices from scary peaceful demonstrations against their efforts to turn American women into broodmares. Coons could be working to protect women from Republicans who want them to loose their constitutional rights, but apparently that’s not important to him.
The Hill: Senate passes security bill for Supreme Court family members.
The Senate on Monday easily cleared a bill to extend security protections to the immediate family members of Supreme Court justices.
The bill — spearheaded by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) — passed the Senate by unanimous consent, meaning all 100 senators had to sign off in order for it to pass without a formal vote.
It still now heads to the House for passage.
“Threats to the physical safety of Supreme Court Justices and their families are disgraceful, and attempts to intimidate and influence the independence of our judiciary cannot be tolerated,” Cornyn said in a statement.
“I’m glad the Senate quickly approved this measure to extend Supreme Court police protection to family members, and the House must take up and pass it immediately,” he added.
Coons, in a statement, said that he was “glad to see this bipartisan bill unanimously pass the Senate in order to extend security protection to the families of Supreme Court members.”
Have there been “threats to the physical safety” of SCOTUS justices and their families? I haven’t seen it reported in the media. It seems to me that the people whose physical safety is threatened are women of childbearing age and their families. Apparently not. WTF?!
Chris Coons on getting rid the filibuster and reaction after SCOTUS leak at Raw Story:
After supporting Harry Reid’s filibuster reform as a freshman senator, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) later wished he could take it back. But there are no take backs in Congress.
“I have come over time to regret…changing the rules,” Coons told his colleagues from the Senate floor back in 2017, right before McConnell and Republicans followed Democrat’s lead and destroyed the filibuster so they could swiftly seat Neil Gorsuch on the court.
Last week, after the leak-heard-round-the-world, Coons rebuffed Raw Story’s question about filibuster reform, regret, and Roe v. Wade.
“I’m sorry. I’m out of energy. I’m out of time. I’m tired. Leave me alone,” Coons said.
Fuck you Coons!! And this guy is supposedly close to President Biden.
https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1524059677457367040?s=20&t=tze7gAxvbQsLCJipFeUfPg
Here are the scary protesters on Sam Alito’s street.
Catherine Rampell usually writes about economic issues, but today she has a column on abortion rights.
The Washington Post: These GOP politicians aren’t pro-life. They’re pro-forced birth.
Republican politicians working to overturn Roe v. Wade say they are pro-life and antiabortion. In fact, they are neither. What they are is pro-forced birth.
This distinction is about more than semantics. These officials have drawn a clear line, as evidenced by policies they’ve adopted in conjunction with their opposition to Roe. GOP-led states are making choices, today, that increase the chances of unplanned pregnancies and, therefore, demand for abortions; their choices also limit access to health care and other critical programs for new moms, endangering the lives and welfare of mothers and their children.
Mother and Child, Mary Cassatt
Consider Mississippi.
It was a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks that has set the stage for the Supreme Court to roll back nearly 50 years of reproductive rights. If the court does overturn Roe, as a leakeddraft decision suggests it soon will, another Mississippi law would automatically “trigger,” banning nearly all abortions.
Some residents who find themselves with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy might be able to leave the state to seek an abortion. But others without the means to travel or take time off from work will be forced to give birth. And in Mississippi, that is an unusually dangerous undertaking.
Here’s why that is:
The United States has the highest maternal death rate in the developed world; Mississippi has one of the higher maternal death rates within the United States. The odds are worse for Black women, whose risk of death related to pregnancy and childbirth are nearly triple those for White women in the state.
Mississippi also has the country’s highest infant mortality and child poverty rates.
Mississippi’s legislature recently considered whether to extend Medicaid postpartum coverage from 60 days to a full year after birth, as federal law newly allows states to do. If you care about the lives of new moms (and, by extension, their kids), this is a no-brainer. Roughly 6 in 10 births in the state are covered by Medicaid; 86 percent of the state’s maternal deaths occur postpartum. Pregnancy and delivery raise the risk of many health complications, including infections, blood clots, high blood pressure, heart conditions and postpartum depression. Giving low-income moms access to health care a full year after birth would save lives.
But Mississippi’s Republican leadership rejected the proposal. Not because the state lacks the funds (which would be partly covered by the federal government); one thing state pols did manage to get through this session was the state’s largest-ever tax cut.
Janet Yellen has weighed in on the abortion issue.
Politico: Yellen: Banning abortion would be ‘very damaging’ to U.S. economy.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday argued that banning abortion would be “very damaging” for the economy by reducing women’s ability to balance their careers and their families.
“I believe that eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades,” she said in response to a question at a Senate Banking Committee hearing.
In her comments, Yellen said the 1973 ruling helped allow women to finish school and increase their earning potential, leading to higher participation in the workforce.
Research also shows that it had a favorable impact on the well-being and earnings of children,” she said. “There are many research studies that have been done over the years looking at the economic impacts of access or lack thereof to abortion, and it makes clear that denying women access to abortion increases their odds of living in poverty or need for public assistance.”
According to a new poll by Yahoo News/YouGov: Confidence in Supreme Court has collapsed since conservatives took control.
A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that Americans’ confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court has collapsed over the last 20 months — a period that began with former President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans installing a 6-3 conservative majority ahead of the 2020 election and culminated last week with the leak of a draft opinion signaling that five GOP-appointed justices plan to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The last time Yahoo News/YouGov asked about confidence in the court was in September 2020, a few days after liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and a few days before Trump nominated conservative jurist Amy Coney Barrett to replace her.
Back then, 70% of registered voters said they had either “some” (50%) or “a lot” (20%) of confidence in the court, and 30% said they had either “a little” (23%) or “none” (7%).
But the new survey of 1,577 U.S. adults, which was conducted immediately after the leak, found that registered voters have swung from mostly having confidence in the Supreme Court — by a colossal 40-point margin — to being evenly split on the question.
Today, just half of voters still express some (37%) or a lot (14%) of confidence in the court, while the other half now expresses either a little (24%) or none (26%).
And among all Americans — as opposed to just registered voters — most (53%) now say they have either no confidence in the Supreme Court (28%) or only a little (25%).
Mother and Child, Pablo Picasso
As usual, Trump’s negative influence on U.S. politics is in news. A journalist whose family arrived in Nebraska in 1856 weighs in on the damage Trump has done to the state.
Ted Genaways at The New York Times: How Trump Helped Transform Nebraska Into a Toxic Political Wasteland.
LINCOLN, Neb. — In the old days, Charles W. Herbster, a cattle baron and bull semen tycoon who used his fortune and influence to get into Donald Trump’s good graces, almost certainly would have been forced to pull out of Nebraska’s Republican primary for governor by now. In recent weeks, eight women, including a state senator, have come forward to allege that Mr. Herbster groped them at various Republican events or at beauty pageants at which he was a judge.
But this is post-shame, post-“Access Hollywood” America, so Mr. Trump traveled to Nebraska last week for a rally at the I-80 Speedway between Lincoln and Omaha to show his continued support for Mr. Herbster. “He is innocent of these despicable charges,” Mr. Trump said. And Mr. Herbster, in true Trump fashion, has not only denied the allegations but also filed a defamation suit against one of his accusers and started running a television ad suggesting that the claims are part of a political conspiracy.
Mr. Herbster sees conspiracies everywhere — conspiracies to destroy him, conspiracies to undermine Mr. Trump, conspiracies to unravel the very fabric of the nation. “This country is in a war within the borders of the country,” he told the crowd at the Starlite Event Center in Wahoo on Thursday, a few days before Tuesday’s primary election. Over more than an hour, Mr. Herbster, dressed in his trademark cowboy hat and vest, unspooled a complex and meandering tale of the threat to America, interspersed with labyrinthine personal yarns and long diatribes about taxes.
It was convoluted but (as best I can understand) goes something like this: The coronavirus was manufactured in a lab in China and released into the United States in early 2020 by “illegals” from Mexico who were also smuggling Chinese-made fentanyl across the border. One of the smugglers, he said, had enough fentanyl in a single backpack to kill the entire population of Nebraska and South Dakota. The goal of this two-pronged attack, he explained, was to create a panic, stoked by Facebook and $400 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s money, to justify allowing voting by mail. Then, through unspecified means, the Chinese government used those mail-in ballots to steal the election — though Mr. Herbster hates that word. “They didn’t ‘steal’ it,” he told the crowd, his finger raised. “Do not use that terminology. They did not ‘steal’ it. They rigged it.”
Read more at the NYT link.
Woman and child on the balcony, Berthe Morisot
Former acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper is still making the rounds to sell his book. Here are his latest revelations about Trump.
Business Insider: Trump wanted to court-martial the retired Navy SEAL who led the bin Laden raid for criticizing him, former defense chief says.
Former President Donald Trump wanted to take the extraordinary step of reactivating retired US Navy Adm. William McRaven so that he could court-martial the former Navy SEAL commander for criticizing him, Trump’s former Pentagon chief claims in his new book.
Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper writes that he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, had to talk then-President Trump out of a plan to recall both retired US Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal and McRaven to active duty as a way to open the two former senior military officers up to court-martial proceedings.
“Doing this ‘will backfire on you, Mr. President,’ we said,” Esper wrote of a May 2020 meeting in his book, “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times,” which is out today.
Trump told Esper and Milley that McRaven and McChrystal were “so disloyal” because of what he thought they were doing and had said about him. Esper writes that Trump “was spun up” by media stories in Breitbart claiming that McChrystal was advising Democrats on how to use artificial intelligence to “track down and counter Trump supporters.”
Also from Business Insider: Trump was the ‘biggest leaker of all’ in his administration and it was ‘generally bad’ for the country, his former Pentagon chief says.
Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper in his new book said that “leaks were a chronic problem” in the Trump administration and former President Donald Trump was the “biggest leaker of all.”
“The individual motivations for the leaks ranged from advancing a preferred policy outcome to enhancing the leaker’s own role or credentials to currying favor with the president. It was a noxious behavior learned from the top. The president was the biggest leaker of all. It turned colleague against colleague, department against department, and it was generally bad for the administration and the country,” Esper wrote in “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times.”
Esper said the leaks “damaged trust” and made people “far more reluctant to speak up and share their views.”
“Nobody wanted to see their name in the morning news, especially when the words were so often twisted, misinterpreted, and taken out of context,” he added. “In the Trump administration, this could get you blacklisted or fired.”
One more Trump-related story from The Daily Beast: OAN Finally Admits ‘No Widespread Voter Fraud’ After Settling Defamation Suit.
The right-wing cable network One America News Network on Monday ran a pre-recorded 30-second segment acknowledging that there was “no widespread voter fraud” by Georgia election workers in the 2020 presidential election. The segment appears to be part of a recent settlement relating to a defamation lawsuit brought against the network by two such workers.
The segment notes that an investigation by state officials into unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud made by ex-President Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani turned up nothing. “The results of this investigation indicate that Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ‘Shaye’ Moss did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct,” a narrator states.
“A legal matter with this network and the two election workers has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement,” the voiceover adds.
Mother and children, William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Freeman and her daughter, Moss, say they were harassed online and in person after baseless rumors began circulating online, due in part to content published by the conspiracy website The Gateway Pundit, which the pair also sued.
In January 2021, when Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to try to “find” votes to overturn the state’s election results, he mentioned Freeman’s name 18 times. Freeman was also visited by a publicist for Kanye West, who threatened her in an effort to extract a confession about committing election fraud.
And if that weren’t enough, video of the pair doing their jobs was hyped up by Rudy Giuliani—and Sean Hannity—who falsely claimed that it showed “blatant, clear, obvious” fraud. While speaking to Georgia State House Republicans about the video during a Zoom meeting in December 2020, Giuliani at one point can be heard saying, “We should try to get this on Newsmax and OANN.”
Freeman and Moss sued Giuliani as well, and that case is ongoing.
That’s it for me. What stories are you following today?
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