Lazy Caturday Reads

Happy Caturday!!

By Utagawa Kuniyoshhi

Yesterday the press again focused on the Hur report that found no crimes in President Biden’s inadvertent possession of classified documents from his time as Vice President. But reporters only cared about one tiny portion of the report, in which Hur said Biden would be sympathetic to a jury because he comes across as a “well meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

The gossip columnists at the NYT and WaPo were out in force. I’m not going to dignify these yellow journalists by excerpting their articles. It’s James Comey in 2016 all over again, except that the Hur report didn’t come out less than 2 weeks before the November election.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media overlooks Trump’s confusion, verbal flubs, and inability to form coherent sentences. Just last night he gave a speech full of examples of his cognitive issues.

David McAfee at Raw Story: ‘Yikes’: Internet erupts after ‘Dementia Trump’ makes several verbal slip-ups at NRA rally.

The former president slurred when saying the word “subsidies,” said “dino-dollars” instead of “dollars,” and even said he doesn’t like being frontpage news every time he “said one word a little bit mispronunciation.” He also said that three years ago things were great, despite that being when Joe Biden became president, and he claimed twice there were no terror attacks during his tenure as president. He also said that Biden hasn’t spoken in months despite him addressing the press last night.

The flubs drew wide criticism from online onlookers.

Democratic youth activist Harry Sisson, in response to the ex-president’s “subsidies” flub, said, “Yikes.”

“Trump is slurring his speech again claiming that ‘Rich people are given $7,000 subsies.’ Uh…subsies?” he asked. “I’m not sure what that is and I don’t think anyone else does either. He can’t say subsidies properly so he must have dementia. Right, Republicans?”

Regarding the “subsies,” former prosecutor Ron Filipkowski said, “Dementia Trump is staring at the teleprompter, pauses to think about it, and still can’t say it.”

In yet another instance pointed out by the Biden-Harris HQ account on social media, Trump “gets distracted with bizarre story.”

“I know all about the marbles. I can tell you every marble,” Trump said.

Trump also appeared to mistake what day it was, saying, “If I wasn’t here, I’d be having a nice Saturday afternoon.” He said that, of course, on a Friday. This one was also picked up by Biden-Harris HQ.

Imagine if Biden were that befuddled? The press would have a field day.

From Mike Memoli at NBC News: ‘Cheap shot’: Biden allies go on the attack against the special counsel and the media.

 The Biden campaign and the White House have landed on an initial strategy for responding to special counsel Robert Hur’s report that has spurred questions about the president’s fitness to hold office: Attack Hur and the media covering the report.

Woman Holding Black Cat, by TAkehisa Yumeji, 1919

The morning after Biden flashed anger at Hur for what he and other senior advisers argue was an inappropriate and excessive focus on his age, Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House counsel, sparred with the press corps for cherry-picking findings in the report, which he suggested was written in a way to shield Hur from political pressure from Republicans.

“I know it’s hard to wade through 400 full pages,” he said. “The report lays out example after example of how the president did not willfully take classified documents.”

Behind the scenes, Biden advisers in both the White House and his campaign were more scathing. One Biden ally said the report angered some of his supporters and, as a result, it was rallying them to his defense.

“People who are supporters of Biden are looking at that thinking that’s a cheap shot and he was playing politics,” the ally said.  

The White House’s simmering animosity toward the media also burst into the public. One Biden aide said the media was “shameful” in its handling of the highly sensitive political moment. 

“Hur couldn’t make his case and he takes partisan, personal and untrue swipes at Joe Biden,” one aide, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about internal views of the president’s team, said. “[He] did it so the media would take the bait, and none of you have learned a damn thing since 2016.”

The aide was referring to another fraught episode when then-FBI Director James Comey determined that while Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton had been “extremely careless” in handling classified information, she would not face charges for using a private email server.

Yair Rosenberg at The Atlantic: What Biden’s Critics Get Wrong About His Gaffes.

On Sunday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson went on television and mixed up Iran and Israel. “We passed the support for Iran many months ago,” he told Meet the Press, erroneously referring to an aid package for the Jewish state. Last night, the Fox News prime-time host Jesse Watters introduced South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as hailing from South Carolina. I once joined a cable-news panel where one of the participants kept confusing then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions with Representative Pete Sessions of Texas. I don’t hold these errors against anyone, as they are some of the most common miscues made by people who talk for a living—and I’m sure my time will come.

Yesterday, President Joe Biden added another example to this list. In response to a question about Gaza, he referred to the Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as the president of Mexico. The substance of Biden’s answer was perfectly cogent. The off-the-cuff response included geographic and policy details not just about Egypt, but about multiple Middle Eastern players that most Americans probably couldn’t even name. The president clearly knew whom and what he was talking about; he just slipped up the same way Johnson and so many others have. But the flub could not have come at a worse time. Because the press conference had been called to respond to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents, which dubbed the president an “elderly man with a poor memory,” the Mexico gaffe was immediately cast by critics as confirmation of Biden’s cognitive collapse.

Tama the Cat by Hiroaki Takahashi

But the truth is, mistakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career. Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining “why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, “Look, here’s what happened.”’” The only problem with this story, Slate laconically noted, was that “FDR wasn’t president then, nor did television exist.”

In other words, even a cursory history of Biden’s bungling shows that he is the same person he has always been, just older and slower—a gaffe-prone, middling public speaker with above-average emotional intelligence and an instinct for legislative horse-trading. This is why Biden’s signature moments as a politician have been not set-piece speeches, but off-the-cuff encounters, such as when he knelt to engage elderly Holocaust survivors in Israel so they would not have to stand, and when he befriended a security guard in an elevator at The New York Times on his way to a meeting with the paper’s editorial board, which declined to endorse him. And it’s why Biden’s key accomplishments—such as the landmark climate-change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s first gun-control bill in decades, and the expected expansion of the child tax credit—have come through Congress. The president’s strength is not orating, but legislating; not inspiring a crowd, but connecting with individuals.

Former federal prosecutor Shan Wu at The Daily Beast: Special Counsel Robert Hur’s Report on Biden’s Classified Documents Is Partisan and Unprofessional.

As part of his Don Quixote-like quest to avoid criticism, Attorney General Merrick Garland has binged on special counsel appointments throughout his tenure at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Now, following a string of debacles, including allowing Special Counsel John Durham to continue his useless four-year probe of the Mueller investigation—elevating the Hunter Biden prosecutor, David Weiss, to special counsel status after a half-decade of investigation—Garland’s hand-picked Special Counsel Robert Hur has produced a report on President Joe Biden’s handling of classified information that rivals former FBI Director James Comey’s infamous political hatchet-job on Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Hur concludes what everybody already knew—namely that no criminal charges are warranted in Biden’s handling of classified materials—but gratuitously slams Biden’s fitness for office by describing him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” By allowing this unprofessional, partisan dig to be published, Garland plays right into the hands of former President Donald Trump and the extreme right’s ageist attacks on the president.

by Ayako Ishiguro

To be fair, maybe Hur was only trying to exercise what he thought was proper prosecutorial discretion in not bringing a weak case. Or perhaps, he may just be an inept, clumsy writer/editor.

But it was Garland’s responsibility to ensure that Hur’s report did not stray from proper Justice Department standards. Garland should have known the risks when he picked Hur—who had clerked for conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist, served as the top aide to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who assisted Bill Barr’s distortion of the Mueller Report, and who was a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney.

The bottom line is that Hur has produced a report that should have reassured the American people that President Biden did nothing wrong, but instead supplies Biden’s political rivals with ammunition for baseless attacks on Biden’s fitness for office.

Hur opens his report in a way that invites misinterpretation, by stating he “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials.” But Hur waits until the next paragraph to state that the evidence does not establish Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

The verb “uncovered” suggests evidence was hidden and only Hur’s skillful investigation discovered it. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the rest of the report demonstrates that President Biden hid nothing from the investigation and was entirely forthcoming. Hur’s wording also makes it sound like he believes Biden committed a crime, but he just can’t prove it when his report actually concludes there is a lack of evidence of Biden possessing criminal intent to commit a crime.

A report explaining the reasons for declination should be written in a very factual, non-pejorative way. Hur should have simply said that the evidence found in the investigation did not support a recommendation of criminal prosecution, and then gone on to explain what evidence had been evaluated.

There’s much more at the Daily Beast link.

Wu is not the only one who blames Merrick Garland for this fiasco. At Politico, Jonathan Lemire and Sam Stein write: White House frustration with Garland grows.

Joe Biden has told aides and outside advisers that Attorney General Merrick Garland did not do enough to rein in a special counsel report stating that the president had diminished mental faculties, according to two people close to the president, as White House frustration with the head of the Justice Department grows.

Cats practicing their music, Utagawa Kuniyoshi

The report from special counsel Robert Hur ultimately cleared Biden of any charges stemming from his handling of classified documents that were found at Biden’s think tank and his home. But Hur’s explanation for not bringing charges — that Biden would have persuaded the jury that he was a forgetful old man — upended the presidential campaign and infuriated the White House.

Biden and his closest advisers believe Hur went well beyond his purview and was gratuitous and misleading in his descriptions, according to those two people, who were granted anonymity to speak freely. And they put part of the blame on Garland, who they say should have demanded edits to Hur’s report, including around the descriptions of Biden’s faltering memory.

In White House meetings, aides have questioned why Garland felt the need to appoint a special counsel in the first place, though Biden has publicly said he supported the decision.

While Biden himself has not weighed in on Garland’s future, most of the president’s senior advisers do not believe that the attorney general would remain in his post for a possible second term, according to the two people.

Newsweek: Donald Trump Handed Boost by Judge Cannon After Jack Smith Fury.

Donald Trump and his legal team will receive unredacted FBI witnesses’ reports as part of the classified documents case after Special Counsel Jack Smith failed in his bid to withhold the information.

Beauty and the Cat , by Kunisada Utagawa

Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the trial against the former president, ordered federal prosecutors to hand over unredacted materials sought by Trump’s legal team in discovery, as well as the two other co-defendants in the case, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira….

On Thursday, Smith accused Cannon of making a “clear error” when she allowed that the documents be handed over. He said in filings that the move would reveal the identities of numerous potential witnesses, as well as potentially exposing them to “significant and immediate risks of threats, intimidation, and harassment.” Newsweek contacted the Department of Justice on Saturday via email.

Cannon had originally paused deadlines for Smith’s team to hand over the documents while she considered the special counsel’s motion. However, the stay lasted only a few hours, and later she ruled on Friday that the information must be delivered to Trump and the other defendants by Saturday, February 10.

The judge ruled that the information, including the names of potential witnesses, will be sealed from the public until a later court order.

Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, has long faced calls to recuse herself from the case after she made a number of decisions that favored the former president; these include ones that could potentially delay the start of the trial, scheduled for May.

Twitter lawyers are still suggesting that Jack Smith may take his case to the 11th Circuit. I’ll post in the comments if anything happens.

I’ll end with this climate change story from CNN: Critical Atlantic Ocean current system is showing early signs of collapse, prompting warning from scientists.

A crucial system of ocean currents may already be on course to collapse, according to a new report, with alarming implications for sea level rise and global weather — leading temperatures to plunge dramatically in some regions and rise in others.

Using exceptionally complex and expensive computing systems, scientists found a new way to detect an early warning signal for the collapse of these currents, according to the study published Friday in the journal Science Advances. And as the planet warms, there are already indications it is heading in this direction.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (the AMOC) — of which the Gulf Stream is part — works like a giant global conveyor belt, taking warm water from the tropics toward the far North Atlantic, where the water cools, becomes saltier and sinks deep into the ocean, before spreading southward.

The currents carry heat and nutrients to different areas of the globe and play a vital role in keeping the climate of large parts of the Northern Hemisphere relatively mild.

For decades, scientists have been sounding the alarm on the circulation’s stability as climate change warms the ocean and melts ice, disrupting the balance of heat and salt that determines the currents’ strength.

While many scientists believe the AMOC will slow under climate change, and could even grind to a halt, there remains huge uncertainty over when and how fast this could happen. The AMOC has only been monitored continuously since 2004.

Scientists do know — from building a picture of the past using things like ice cores and ocean sediments — the AMOC shut down more than 12,000 years ago following rapid glacier melt.

Now they are scrambling to work out if it could happen again.

This new study provides an “important breakthrough,” said René van Westen, a marine and atmospheric researcher at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and study co-author.

Read the rest at CNN. Maybe Quixote will comment on this story if she comes by.

I hope everyone is having a great weekend!