Posted: January 21, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, Cats, caturday | Tags: Brett Kavanaugh, Covid-19, Davos, debt limit, Doug Letter, Janet Yellen, January 6, John Roberts, leaked draft, medicare, Roe v. Wade, Social Security, Supreme Court |
Goddess, Hunter, Consort, Thief, by Peter Paul Rubens, 16th Century
Happy Caturday!!
The Supreme Court is in the news and not in a good way. You know about John Roberts’ failed “investigation” into the leak of the draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, but did you know about the secret documentary on Brett Kavanaugh? Here’s the latest:
Charlie Savage at The New York Times: Supreme Court’s Inquiry Into Leak Included Interviews With Justices.
The Supreme Court’s internal investigation into who leaked a draft of the opinion last year overturning the landmark decision that had established a constitutional right to abortion included talking to all nine justices, the marshal of the court said on Friday.
But the justices — unlike dozens of law clerks and permanent employees of the court — were not made to sign sworn affidavits attesting that they had not been involved in the leak of the draft opinion overruling Roe v. Wade and that they knew nothing about it.
The clarification by the marshal, Gail A. Curley, who oversaw the inquiry, followed widespread speculation over its scope and limitations. In a 20-page report on Thursday, Ms. Curley disclosed that the investigation had not turned up the source of the leak while leaving ambiguous whether it had extended to interviewing the justices themselves.
“During the course of the investigation, I spoke with each of the justices, several on multiple occasions,” Ms. Curley said on Friday. “The justices actively cooperated in this iterative process, asking questions and answering mine.”
She added: “I followed up on all credible leads, none of which implicated the justices or their spouses. On this basis, I did not believe that it was necessary to ask the justices to sign sworn affidavits.”
Ms. Curley did not indicate whether she searched the justices’ court-issued electronic devices and asked them to turn over personal devices and cellphone records, as she did with other personnel. She also did not address whether she had interviewed any of the justices’ spouses, another question that arose after her report was made public.
It wasn’t much of an investigation if even Gini Thomas was not questioned, and the most likely suspects–the right wing justices– weren’t required to sign affidavits. But no one really expected Roberts to do a serious investigation when he won’t even deal with the justices’ political activities and conflicts of interest. What a weakling he is.
On to the Kavanagh documentary.
The Guardian: ‘I hope this triggers outrage’: surprise Brett Kavanaugh documentary premieres at Sundance.
A secretly made documentary expanding on allegations of sexual assault against supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh has premiered at this year’s Sundance film festival.
Four year old girl with cat, by Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp, 1647
Justice, a last-minute addition to the schedule, aims to shine a light not only on the women who have accused Kavanaugh, a Donald Trump nominee, but also the failed FBI investigation into the allegations.
“I do hope this triggers outrage,” said producer Amy Herdy in a Q&A after the premiere in Park City, Utah. “I do hope that this triggers action, I do hope that this triggers additional investigation with real subpoena powers.”
The film provides a timeline of the allegations, initially that Kavanaugh was accused by Christine Blasey Ford of sexual assault when she was 15 and he 17. She alleged that he held her down on a bed and groped her, and tried to rip her clothes off before she got away. Kavanaugh was also accused of sexual misconduct by Deborah Ramirez, who alleged that he exposed himself and thrust his penis at her face without her consent at a college party.
About the film:
The first scene features Ford, half off-camera, interviewed by the film’s director Doug Liman, whose credits include Mr and Mrs Smith and The Bourne Identity. Justice features a number of interviews with journalists, lawyers, psychologists and those who knew Ford and Ramirez.
“This was the kind of movie where people are terrified,” Liman said. “The people that chose to participate in the movie are heroes.”
In the film, Ramirez, who previously told her story to Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker, also shares her story on-camera. Ramirez is referred to as someone “they worked hard for people not to know”, her story never given the space it deserved until long after Kavanaugh was confirmed to the court in October 2018….
The film then details how the circles around Ramirez and Kavanaugh responded, showing text messages of a discussion when Ramirez’s allegations were about to go public, of a mutual friend being asked by Kavanaugh to go on record to defend him. Another friend refers to it as “a cover-up”.
The New Yorker included a statement from a group of students at the time in support of Kavanaugh. A year later, the film shows that two of them emailed the New Yorker to remove their names from the statement.
Ramirez’s lawyers claim they contacted Republican senator Jeff Flake, who was involved in Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, to explain what happened to her. The next day Flake called to delay the confirmation and insist on a week-long FBI investigation.
But the film details how the FBI failed to call on the many witnesses recommended by Ramirez’s lawyers. Footage is shown of the film-makers meeting with a confidential source who plays tape of Kavanaugh’s classmate Max Stier, now a prominent figure in Washington running a non-profit, who allegedly witnessed Kavanaugh involved in a similar act of alleged drunken exposure with a female student at a dorm party at Yale. The woman has chosen to remain anonymous and this is the first time this recording has been heard.
Read more details at the link. You can also check out this piece at The Hollywood Reporter: How Doug Liman Directed a Brett Kavanaugh FBI Investigation Doc in Secret.
Some January 6 investigation news:
Politico: The House’s legal lieutenant in its Trump wars speaks out — about Jan. 6 and more.
While Congress’ biggest Donald Trump antagonists are household names to political junkies — think Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin — there’s a lesser-known Trump adversary who may have been more effective than the others: Doug Letter.
Portrait of Cleopea Krieg von Bellikon, 1499-1671, by Hans Asper
The former House general counsel was involved in every political brawl between House Democrats and Trump that has defined Washington politics for the past four years. Letter helped guide the work of the Jan. 6 select committee, played a critical role in both Trump impeachments and strategized the certification of Joe Biden’s win — before violent rioters upended those plans on Jan. 6, 2021….
In a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO, the House’s former top attorney described his tenure battling a former president who tested the limits of executive power at every turn, resisting efforts at accountability in ways that previous chief executives had not. But he has faith that his work helped to stem future presidential attempts to push constitutional boundaries, lending more power to lawmakers.
“I just feel like the Biden administration and future administrations are not going to act like the Trump administration,” Letter said. “They’re not going to show such ignorance of our system and think that the executive branch can ignore the legislative branch. That’s not the way it works.”
Doug Letter on January 6:
Letter was returning to the House floor from some basement vending machines when he ran into Speaker Nancy Pelosi being whisked from the Capitol under heavy guard. Don’t go back up there, one official told him. An angry mob had breached the building.
But Letter, in a panic, said he had to retrieve several giant binders that were full of sensitive strategy and scripts for the day’s proceedings. He opted to forgo evacuating with Pelosi and instead raced back to the chamber.
“I was the last person in before they locked the doors,” Letter recalled.
The attack on the Capitol led to the Jan. 6 select committee, where the House’s then-top attorney charted a legal strategy that Letter now describes as one of the hallmarks of his tenure.
Through his work on that panel, Letter secured at least two streams of information that became a core element of the committee’s voluminous findings: Trump’s confidential White House records and the Chapman University emails of attorney John Eastman, an architect of the then-president’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.
Letter also won court fights to obtain telephone records from Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward, who took part in Trump world’s plan to send false electors to Congress. And he helped direct the House’s strategy to hold certain Trump advisers in contempt of Congress, which resulted in prosecutions of Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon.
“We had a whole enormous number of people that, as we now know, were putting together this massive, not just a conspiracy, but a whole bunch of conspiracies, to attack our democracy,” Letter said.
Read the rest at Politico.
Joseph Goodhue Chandler, American folk art
As you know, I went to a meeting in my over-60 apartment building awhile back. Most of the people there weren’t wearing masks. I came down with something a few days later, and it dragged on for weeks. I thought others here in the building were being careful too, but I was wrong. We haven’t talked much about Covid-19 on the blog lately, but yesterday I read this article that really angered me, and I want to share it with you.
Slate: Billionaires at Davos Don’t Think COVID Is a Cold.
In photos of 2023’s World Economic Forum—or Davos as it is commonly called, after the Swiss resort town where it annually occurs—you might not notice the HEPA filters. They’re in the background, unobtrusive and unremarked upon, quietly cleansing the air of viruses and bacteria. You wouldn’t know—not unless you asked—that every attendee was PCR tested before entering the forum, or that in the case of a positive test, access was automatically, electronically, revoked. The folks on stage aren’t sporting masks (mostly), so unless you looked at the official Davos Health & Safety protocol, you wouldn’t be aware that their on-site drivers are required to wear them. You also might be surprised to learn that if, at any point, you start to feel ill at Davos, you can go collect a free rapid test, or even call their dedicated COVID hotline.
It’s hard to square this information with the public narrative about COVID, isn’t it? President Joe Biden has called the pandemic “over.” The New York Timesrecently claimed that “the risk of Covid is similar to that of the flu” in an article about “hold outs” that are annoyingly refusing to accept continual reinfection as their “new normal.” Yet, this week the richest people in the world are taking common sense, easy—but strict—precautions to ensure they don’t catch COVID-19 at Davos.
In addition to high-quality ventilation, masks, hotlines and PCR testing, some have noted the signature blue glow of Far-UVC lighting, demonstrated to kill pathogens in the air, although this is unconfirmed. We can be certain, however, that the testing, high-quality ventilation, and filtration protocol is effective at preventing the kind of super-spreader events most of us are now accustomed to attending.
t seems unlikely to me that a New York Times reporter will follow the super-rich around like David Attenborough on safari, the way one of their employees did when they profiled middle-class maskers last month. I doubt they will write “family members and friends can get a little exasperated by the hyper-concern” about the assembled prime ministers, presidents, and CEOs in Switzerland. After all, these are important people. The kind of people who merit high-quality ventilation. The kind of people who deserve accurate tests.
Why is the media so hellbent on portraying simple, scientifically proven measures like masking—in environments absent of high-quality ventilation, full of people who do not have easy and consistent access to tests—as ridiculous and unnecessary as hundreds of people continue to die daily here in the U.S.?
Why is the public accepting a “new normal” where we are expected to get infected over and over and over again, at work events with zero precautions, on airplanes with no masks, and at social dinners trying to approximate our 2019 normal?
Very good questions. I guess the rich are entitled to protection, but the rest of us can just get sick and die for all they care. I hope you’ll go read the whole article at Slate.
Finally, a couple of articles about the upcoming fight over the debt limit:
CNN: Yellen warns of ‘global financial crisis’ if US debt limit agreement isn’t reached.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Friday warned of the widespread global effects that could be felt if the federal government exhausts extraordinary measures and fails to raise the debt ceiling, telling CNN’s Christiane Amanpour about the ways everyday Americans could face stark consequences.
Yellen’s warning comes after the United States on Thursday hit its $31.4 trillion debt limit set by Congress, forcing the Treasury Department to start taking extraordinary measures to keep the government paying its bills.
Still Life with Fighting Cats, by Frans Snyders (1579-1657), Flemish painter
While those newly deployed extraordinary measures are largely behind-the-scenes accounting maneuvers, Yellen told Amanpour that “the actual date at which we would no longer be able to use these measures is quite uncertain, but it could conceivably come as early as early June.”
Speaking exclusively to CNN from Senegal, Yellen said that after the measures are exhausted, the US could experience at a minimum downgrading of its debt as a result of Congress failing to raise the debt ceiling. The effects of the federal government failing to make payments, she argued, could be as broad as a “global financial crisis.”
“If that happened, our borrowing costs would increase and every American would see that their borrowing costs would increase as well,” Yellen said. “On top of that, a failure to make payments that are due, whether it’s the bondholders or to Social Security recipients or to our military, would undoubtedly cause a recession in the US economy and could cause a global financial crisis.”
“It would certainly undermine the role of the dollar as a reserve currency that is used in transactions all over the world. And Americans – many people would lose their jobs and certainly their borrowing costs would rise,” she continued.
Read more at CNN.
The Washington Post: Biden aides want to force GOP to abandon debt limit threats.
Shortly after last year’s midterm elections, a senior congressional Democrat called White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain and asked how the administration planned to prevent the new Republican House majority from using the debt ceiling — and the threat of a default that could wreck the economy — to force spending cuts.
Klain said the White House’s plan was straightforward, according to the lawmaker: Refuse to entertain any concessions, and launch a barrage of attacks highlighting the GOP position that would force Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to fold.
“This debate is simple: We want to do the responsible thing, and they want to take the entire American economy hostage to cut Social Security and Medicare,” said the member of Congress, speaking on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations. Klain told the lawmaker that the fight could result in substantial political benefits for the Democratic Party. “The point he was making was clear: You can’t negotiate with people who take hostages.”
Felis Syriacus Ulisse Aldrovani (1522-1605), by Vintage Lavoie
But the question remains what the administration will do if Republicans won’t raise the debt limit without negotiations.
House Republicans have increasingly signaled that they will force a showdown with the administration over the nation’s debt ceiling, which sets a statutory limit on how much the federal government can borrow….
Many GOP lawmakers have said that they will not approve a debt ceiling increase without cuts to spending programs that the Biden administration has vowed to protect, creating an impasse with no clear resolution.
…[A]dministration officials [have] conclude[d], at least for now, that the only viable path is to press Republicans to abandon their demands to extract policy concessions over the debt limit — a position they have publicly reaffirmed in recent weeks. The Biden administration is focused on pressing the GOP to unveil a debt limit plan that includes spending cuts, with the hope that such a proposal will prove so divisive among Republicans that they are forced to abandon brinkmanship. This strategy stems in part from the belief among White House officials that it would be enormously risky either to negotiate policy with the GOP on the debt limit or try to solve it via executive order — and they appear willing to put that premise to the test.
How about having Biden and surrogates travel around the country educating voters about the consequences of either letting Republican crash the economy or letting them destroy Social Security and Medicare? Just a thought.
What are your thoughts about all this? What other stories do you recommend?
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Posted: January 19, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because |
Good Afternoon!!
I thought politics had become so ridiculous during the Trump years that it couldn’t possibly get any worse. But I was wrong. It can always get worse. We’re living in the days of George Santos (or whatever his real name is) dominating the news, and Kevin McCarthy selling out whatever decency he may have had left to get the House Speaker’s gavel. He won’t get rid of Santos because he needs his vote. On top of that McCarthy has turned over the most important House committees to the insurrection caucus.
From NBC News: What the 21 McCarthy holdouts got in committee assignments.
The 21 House Republicans who initially blocked Rep. Kevin McCarthy from winning the speakership had demanded big changes to House rules, but they also wanted more influence on the congressional committees that will set the GOP agenda over the next two years.
While not every holdout got exactly what he or she had asked for, some won plum committee assignments from McCarthy, R-Calif., and his allies after they helped him secure the speaker’s gavel, a process that took 15 rounds of voting.
Some highlights–you can click the link to read the rest of the list:
Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, a former head of the Freedom Caucus and one of the five so-called Never Kevins, will keep his spots on the powerful Judiciary and Oversight committees. He changed his vote to “present” on the final ballot for speaker, helping push McCarthy over the finish line….
Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a vocal McCarthy critic who voted “present” on the 14th and 15th ballots, was awarded a seat on the Oversight and Accountability Committee, which plans to launch numerous investigations into the Biden administration. She will continue to serve on the Natural Resources panel, on which she served in the previous Congress.
Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia, another lawmaker who flipped to McCarthy on the 12th ballot, will serve for the first time on Appropriations.
Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, who was nominated to run against McCarthy for speaker and flipped to him on the 12th ballot, was named by McCarthy as the “speaker’s designee” on the influential Steering Committee, which decides which lawmakers get committee gavels and seats. Donalds also won a coveted spot on the Financial Services Committee, a top panel known on Capitol Hill as an “A” committee.
Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, perhaps the most vocal McCarthy foe during the speaker fight, who flipped to “present” in the 14th round, will continue to serve on the Judiciary panel….
Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, who flipped to McCarthy on the 12th ballot, was reinstated by Republicans on two committees —Oversight and Natural Resources panels — after Democrats removed him two years ago for posting threats to lawmakers on social media….
Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the far-right House Freedom Caucus who brokered a deal between conservatives and McCarthy, will remain on the Foreign Affairs Committee. A subject of Jan. 6 investigations, Perry won a new seat on the Oversight committee….
Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, who along with Perry helped negotiate a deal with McCarthy, will keep his seat on the Judiciary panel.
Those are the best known names. See the rest at the link.
In addition, Marjorie Taylor Greene has been assigned to the Homeland Security and Oversight committees.
Even George Santos got two committee assignments. CNN: Santos named to two House committees even as he faces growing calls to resign.
Embattled freshman Rep. George Santos has been awarded seats on two low-level committees after House Republicans debated where to put the New York congressman, who is facing mounting legal issues and growing calls to resign for extensively lying about his resume.
Several GOP sources told CNN that the House Republican Steering Committee, controlled by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his top allies, tapped Santos to serve on two House panels: the Committee on Small Business and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Santos had privately lobbied GOP leaders to serve on two more high-profile committees, one overseeing the financial sector and another on foreign policy, but top Republicans rejected that pitch as some chairmen balked at adding him to their panels.
Still, Republican leaders for now have decided to treat Santos like any other member of the House, even as questions grow over his past and as some have raised security concerns about allowing him to have access to classified briefings.
Unreal. Read more at CNN.
The Washington Post reacts:
The new Republican House majority apparently felt it had to put Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and George Santos (R-N.Y.) on some committees. And in picking which ones, it apparently aimed for (depending on your viewpoint) maximum irony or maximum trolling.
We learned the committee assignments for both members late Tuesday. Greene, who was removed from her committees by all Democrats and 11 House Republicans in 2021, will sit on the Homeland Security Committee, as well as the Oversight Committee. Santos will serve on the Small Business Committee, as well as the Science Committee.
The choice for Greene is particularly remarkable given her penchant not just for conspiracy theories, but conspiracy theories specifically involving homeland security. Indeed, her making such claims was cited as among the very reasons for her removal from committees. Greene has also spread conspiracy theories about and even advocated the use of political violence, including at the U.S. Capitol itself.
The WaPo list of insane remarks by Greene:
In 2018, Greene echoed conspiracy theories doubting that an airplane actually hit the Pentagon on 9/11. She cited “the so-called plane that crashed into the Pentagon,” and added: “It’s odd there’s never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon.” In fact, video of the plane hitting the Pentagon was released in 2006. (When Greene’s comments were unearthed in 2020, she conceded in a tweet, “Some people claimed a missile hit the Pentagon. I now know that is not correct.”)
That same year, Greene “liked” a Facebook comment that began by saying 9/11 “was done by our own gov[ernment],” before it launched into various other conspiracy theories. She also replied by saying, “That is all true,” according to a screenshot by the liberal watchdog Media Matters. (In her 2020 tweets, Greene said, “I’ve seen plenty of evidence that Islamic radicals hijacked four planes, attacked our country, and killed thousands of Americans on 9/11/01.”)
Earlier that year, she repeatedly agreed with the idea that mass shootings were false flags intended to crack down on people’s Second Amendment rights.
Also in 2018, Greene floated the idea that wildfires in California were caused by a laser from space linked to investment banks controlled by the Rothschilds, a prominent Jewish family that is often the target of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Even some GOP colleagues such as Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) have recently ribbed Greene over the “Jewish space laser” conspiracy theory, when they were on opposite sides of the contentious speakership votes.
In addition to liking social media posts that called for the executions of prominent Democrats and federal agents in 2018 and 2019, she in 2019 urged supporters to “flood the Capitol” and use violence “if we have to” to address various grievances (though last year Greene beat back an effort to disqualify her from holding office for allegedly inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection).
Greene also very recently remarked that if she and Stephen K. Bannon had organized the Jan. 6 insurrection, “we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.” She later said it was a joke.
And regarding Santos, another list of outrages:
Santos’s appointment on the Small Business Committee might rival Greene’s installment on Homeland Security in terms of audacity (including because of things we learned just hours after it was announced).
To Wit:
The local news outlet Patch reported late Tuesday that a disabled veteran is accusing Santos of effectively bilking him of $3,000 that was raised for a surgery needed to save his service dog’s life. Santos has denied the accusation, but there is evidence that his pet charity was not the legitimate, tax-exempt organization he claimed it was. Neither the IRS nor the states of New York or New Jersey has records of such a charity. And a New Jersey animal rescue group previously said Santos never gave it the proceeds from a 2017 fundraiser.
Santos in 2010 reportedly admitted to check fraud in Brazil, but authorities were unable to find him to resolve the case. The case has been resurrected in recent weeks. Santos has denied having broken the law.
Santos in recent years worked for Harbor City Capital, which the Securities and Exchange Commission has accused of running a “classic Ponzi scheme” that defrauded investors of millions of dollars. Santos has not personally been accused of wrongdoing and has denied knowledge of such a scheme.
Perhaps the biggest question surrounding Santos involves how he was able to self-fund his 2022 campaign to the tune of about $700,000, despite having reported little income during his 2020 run. Santos has cited a windfall from his business, the Devolder Organization, which he claims linked wealthy individuals to items they wanted to purchase. But there’s little evidence that the business was so successful, and the watchdog Campaign Legal Center has suggested that Santos might have used his business in an illegal straw-donor operation.
And of course there’s Jim Jordan, who will head the powerful Judiciary Committee and control the subcommittee on “the weaponization of government.”
This is going to be a clown show to rival all previous clown shows, especially if Santos sticks around. Yesterday we learned something new about his years in Brazil.
From The Handbasket by Marisa Kabas: The Daily Santos: Vol. 7.
Eula Rochard and George Santos met when she was already a well-known drag queen in Niterói, a city next to Rio de Janeiro where Santos also lived at the time. She says people often seek out her friendship because she’s “highly respected in town,” and she remembers becoming friends with Santos, who at the time went by Anthony (one of his many aliases) or Kitara, his drag name. “I think I met him when he was around 16 or 17-years-old,” she said. “He used to hang out in my house while his mom was playing Bingo.”
So when she saw Santos on Brazilian TV the other day, she couldn’t believe her eyes. She messaged some friends who were around during the time she knew Santos to say she thought it was him, but they all doubted her. So she dug up an old photo and posted it to her Instagram.
“The picture was taken in 2008 at the Pride Parade at Icaraí Beach in Niterói,” she says. “George had disappeared for a little while, and then returned to Brazil with a lot of money, and that was about the same time when the picture was taken.”
Eula also shared this video from a past Niterói pride parade. She’s in pink around the 2:00 minute mark, and she says Santos is the person interviewed around the 4:19 mark.
Eula says Santos was never a professional drag performer, but did it for fun and enjoyed dressing up. “He did not have what it takes to be a professional. George did not have the glamour for that.”
Santos’ complicated relationship with the truth is nothing new, she says. “George always lied about everything. He used to create stories, usually involving money—like that his dad was rich. But then people wondered why his mom was a cleaning lady. There’s nothing wrong with being a cleaning lady, but if his dad was rich, then why?”
See a video at the link.
Kabos report is backed up by Reuters.
Reuters: Embattled U.S. Rep. George Santos was drag queen in Brazil pageants, associates say.
U.S. Representative George Santos competed as a drag queen in Brazilian beauty pageants 15 years ago, two acquaintances told Reuters on Wednesday, adding to contrasts that have drawn criticism of the openly gay Republican congressman’s staunchly conservative views….
A 58-year-old Brazilian performer, who uses the drag name Eula Rochard, said she befriended the now-congressman when he was cross-dressing in 2005 at the first gay pride parade in Niteroi, a Rio de Janeiro suburb. Three years later, Santos competed in a drag beauty pageant in Rio, Rochard said.
Another person from Niteroi who knew the 34-year-old congressman but asked not to be named said he participated in drag queen beauty pageants and aspired to be Miss Gay Rio de Janeiro.
The congressman said on Twitter on Thursday that claims “that I am a drag Queen or ‘performed’ as a drag Queen” are “categorically false,” adding: “I will not be distracted nor fazed by this.”
Sure George, if that is in fact your name.
In more catastrophic news involving McCarthy’s clowns, the U.S. officially hit the debt ceiling today.
The New York Times: America Hit Its Debt Limit, Raising Economic Fears.
The United States hit its debt limit on Thursday, prompting the Treasury Department to begin using a series of accounting maneuvers to ensure the federal government can keep paying its bills.
In a letter to Congress, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said the government would begin using what’s known as “extraordinary measures” to prevent the nation from breaching its statutory debt limit and asked lawmakers to raise or suspend the cap so that the government can continue meeting its financial obligations.
“The period of time that extraordinary measures may last is subject to considerable uncertainty, including the challenges of forecasting the payments and receipts of the U.S. Government months into the future,” Ms. Yellen said. “I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”
The milestone of hitting the country’s $31.4 trillion debt cap is the product of decades of tax cuts and increased government spending by both Republicans and Democrats. But at a moment of heightened partisanship and divided government, it is also a warning of the entrenched partisan battles that are set to dominate Washington in the months to come, and that could end in economic shock.
Newly empowered Republicans in the House have vowed that they will not raise the borrowing limit again unless President Biden agrees to steep cuts in federal spending. Mr. Biden has said he will not negotiate conditions for a debt-limit increase, arguing that lawmakers should lift the cap with no strings attached to cover spending that previous Congresses authorized.
Treasury officials estimate the measures that they began using on Thursday will enable the government to keep paying federal workers, Medicare providers, investors who hold U.S. debt and other recipients of federal dollars at least until early June.
The Washington Post: U.S. begins ‘extraordinary’ steps to avoid debt ceiling.
The Biden administration began “extraordinary measures” Thursday to prevent the federal government from breaching its debt limit and hurtling toward default, a grim scenario with the potential to destabilize markets and devastate the economy.
Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen told lawmakers that officials will alter certain federal investments to preserve the nation’s credit until summer — largely through technical moves that will buy lawmakers time to reach an agreement on how much the government is allowed to borrow.
Treasury’s moves should give lawmakers time to pass legislation that raises the amount the country can borrow, or suspends that limit, which is currently capped at $31.4 trillion, Yellen wrote to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Thursday. But she said there’s “considerable uncertainty” about how much room the measures will provide.
“I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States,” Yellen wrote.
Newly emboldened House Republicans are trying to leverage the standoff to extract major spending cuts, insisting that previous Congresses and administrations have spent too much on social programs. Some GOP lawmakers have even raised the prospect they might seek changes to entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare. But the White House has said it will not negotiate on the debt ceiling, and Biden has pledged to oppose any attempt to cut entitlements.
Note to Biden. Social Security and Medicare are not “entitlements.” We pay for them from our wages.
House Republicans are running a clown show, but it isn’t at all funny.
That’s it for me today. What other stories have you been following?
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Posted: January 17, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because |
Good Day, Sky Dancers!!
I’m getting a very late start today, because I’m still struggling with the aftermath of what I thought was bronchitis. The coughing has almost stopped, but I had several days of what felt like a stomach virus, and now I’m just really tired all the time and can hardly stay awake. It almost makes me wonder if I really had Covid, but I did test myself twice and the result was negative. There is a lot of Covid and other illnesses going around in my mostly elderly apartment building. They even cancelled the monthly tenant meeting. At least I heard yesterday it might be slowing down a bit. Here in Massachusetts we have mostly that new Covid variant XBB 1.5. Oh well, I’ll never know now. I’m just trying to eat healthy stuff and pace myself.
I wish I could find some good news to report, but it’s just the same old stuff today. Here’s what’s happening:
Albuquerque Journal: Failed Republican candidate arrested in shootings targeting Democratic politicians’ homes.
Albuquerque police on Monday arrested the man they say is the “mastermind” behind a recent string of shootings targeting Democratic lawmakers’ homes.
The suspect, Solomon Pena, is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for office in November, has made repeated claims that the election was rigged and appears to have attended the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in Washington, D.C.
Around 3 p.m. APD’s SWAT team swarmed a condominium complex near the ABQ BioPark Zoo to execute a search warrant. They made announcements for Pena — who they said may be armed with a firearm — to surrender as drones flew overhead.
Within an hour officers had arrested Pena, who is accused of paying four men to shoot at the homes of two county commissioners and two state legislators, Police Chief Harold Medina announced Monday evening. Investigators also believe Pena was present for at least one of the shootings.
Solomon Pena arrest
One of the four men Pena is accused of hiring, Jose Trujillo, is being prosecuted federally on drug trafficking and firearm charges but the names of the other suspects were not immediately released.
Pena ran unsuccessfully in the House District 14 race and claimed on social media he should have won the election. He also visited three of the targeted officials’ homes unannounced in November complaining the election was fraudulent and should not be certified.
“APD essentially discovered what we had all feared and what we had suspected — that these shootings were indeed politically motivated,” Mayor Tim Keller said at a news conference. “They were dangerous attacks not only to these individuals … but, fundamentally, also to democracy.”
More details from The New York Times: Republican Ex-Candidate Arrested in Shootings Targeting New Mexico Democrats.
Chief Harold Medina of the Albuquerque Police Department said at a news conference that the former candidate, Solomon Peña, was “the mastermind” behind a conspiracy in which four other men were paid to shoot at the homes of two county commissioners and two state legislators.
Mr. Peña, 39, lost the election on Nov. 8 in a landslide to an incumbent Democrat, Miguel P. Garcia. Days later, Mr. Peña went on Twitter to express support for former President Donald J. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and to say that he had not conceded his own State House race.
Chief Medina said that a SWAT team took Mr. Peña into custody on Monday. The police said they planned to charge him with “several state crimes.” It was unclear if Mr. Peña had a lawyer. Carter B. Harrison, an Albuquerque lawyer who represented Mr. Peña last year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday night.
The police said in a statement that Mr. Peña had paid four men cash and “sent text messages with addresses where he wanted them to shoot at the homes.”
Mr. Peña accompanied the men to the house of State Senator Linda Lopez on Jan. 3 and “attempted to shoot,” but the automatic rifle he was using malfunctioned, the police said. Another man shot more than a dozen rounds from a handgun, the police said, including into the bedroom of Ms. Lopez’s daughter.
Shell casings found at Ms. Lopez’s home matched a handgun that was confiscated after a traffic stop just 40 minutes after the shooting, the police said. The driver, Jose Trujillo, had an unrelated felony arrest warrant, the police said. The car, they said, was registered to Mr. Peña.
That is seriously scary stuff. Republicans have allowed violent extremists to take over their party.
There are a couple of interesting January 6 stories today:
The Washington Post: What the Jan. 6 probe found out about social media, but didn’t report.
The Jan. 6 committee spent months gathering stunning new details on how social media companies failed to address the online extremism and calls for violence that precededthe Capitol riot.
The evidence they collected was written up in a 122-page memo that was circulated among the committee, according to a draft viewed by The Washington Post. But in the end, committee leaders declined to delve into those topics in detail in their final report, reluctant to dig into the roots of domestic extremism taking hold in the Republican Party beyond former president Donald Trump and concerned about the risks of a public battle with powerful tech companies, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the panel’s sensitive deliberations.
Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially Twitter — failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals.The draft report details how most platforms did not take “dramatic” steps to rein in extremist content until after the attack on the Capitol, despite clear red flags across the internet.
“The sum of this is that alt-tech, fringe, and mainstream platforms were exploited in tandem by right-wing activists to bring American democracy to the brink of ruin,” the staffers wrote in their memo. “These platforms enabled the mobilization of extremists on smaller sites and whipped up conservative grievance on larger, more mainstream ones.”
But little of the evidence supporting those findings surfaced during the public phase of the committee’s probe, including its 845-page report that focused almost exclusively on Trump’s actions that day and in the weeks just before.
That focus on Trump meant the report missed an opportunity to hold social media companies accountable for their actions, or lack thereof, even though the platforms had been the subject of intense scrutiny since Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016, the people familiar with the matter said.
Read more at the WaPo.
Politico: Revealed: Who visited the Trump White House before Jan. 6.
Donald Trump spent his time in office fighting the release of his White House visitor logs. Then came the Jan. 6 select committee.
In late December, the committee uploaded hundreds of documents as it wrapped up its exhaustive investigation into the attacks on the Capitol. Tucked into that release was an excel spreadsheet detailing seven full days of Trump’s White House visitor manifests.
Those logs capture key moments pertaining to the Jan. 6 probe, such as the Oval Office meeting on Dec. 18, in which outside advisers, including Sidney Powell and Patrick Byrne, discussed the prospect of seizing voting machines. They also offer a glimpse into dozens of other guests Trump was hosting during the final chaotic stretch of his presidency, from a Dec. 14 holiday reception featuring governors, Fox News personalities and donors, to a Dec. 18 Oval Office visit by country music singer/songwriter Lee Greenwood — whose music was a staple at Trump rallies — and his family.
The logs are not exhaustive. They only deal with a small period of the Trump presidency and do not include the specific purposes of the visit or details to identify the visitor beyond his or her name. For example, many people are listed as having met with Trump on Dec. 14 in the White House residence, though it’s likely they were in attendance at a larger holiday party….
The visitor logs include the dates: Dec. 12, 2020; Dec. 14, 2020; Dec. 18, 2020; Dec. 21, 2020; Jan. 3, 2021; Jan. 4, 2021; and Jan. 5, 2021.
Interesting, but there’s no analysis in the article. Let’s hope more will follow.
Speaking of visitor logs, Republicans are pretending to be outraged because there are no visitor logs for Biden’s home in Delaware.
Mother Jones: House Republicans Want Visitor Logs for Biden’s House—But Not for Mar-a-Lago.
House Republicans are eager to investigate the mishandling of classified documents—some classified documents, anyway.
On Sunday, James Comer, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, appeared on CNN and released a letter demanding visitor logs for Joe Biden’s Wilmington home, where classified material from Biden’s time as vice president was recently discovered. “Without a list of individuals who have visited his residence, the American people will never know who had access to these highly sensitive documents,” Comer, a Kentucky Republican, wrote to White House chief of staff Ron Klain.
The letter followed a White House announcement Saturday that five pages with “classification markings” were found adjacent to Biden’s Wilmington garage on Thursday, a day after one page with a classification marking was found. Personal lawyers for Biden had previously found classified documents at the Penn Biden Center in Washington on November 2 and in Biden’s garage in Wilmington in December.
The discovery of classified material in nonsecure locations has drawn comparisons to Donald Trump’s taking of hundreds of documents, including highly sensitive material, from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago club and residence in Florida….
But the similarities are limited. No evidence has emerged that shows the material at Biden’s office or home was moved there in deliberate violation of the law. And Biden’s lawyers appear to have proactively contacted the Justice Department about their discovery and immediately returned the material to the National Archives after finding it.
But the Secret Service doesn’t keep visitor logs for presidents’ private residences–including Mar-a-Lago.
From Politico, Oct. 2017:
There are no visitor logs or other system of tracking those who visited President Donald Trump at his winter retreat known as Mar-a-Lago, a Secret Service official confirmed Wednesday.
Responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Special Agent Kim Campbell said that her agency had a smattering of records regarding some foreign dignitaries and law enforcement officers who met Trump earlier this year during his stays at the Palm Beach resort he owns.
However, Campbell acknowledged the lack of a comprehensive or even a routine process for tracking such visitors, such as the one used for the White House.
“The…search and review of records confirmed that there is no system for keeping track of Presidential visitors at Mar-a-Lago, as there is at the White House Complex,” wrote Campbell, head of the Secret Service’s Liaison Divison. “Specifically, it was determined that there is no grouping, listing or set of records that would reflect Presidential visitors to Mar-a-Lago.”
But Trump claims he has information on everyone who visits his tacky club in Palm Springs, according Raw Story: Legal experts have questions after Trump proclaims he has ‘info on everyone’ who came to Mar-a-Lago.
Reports spread on Monday afternoon that the White House doesn’t keep visitor logs for the private homes of presidents like President Joe Biden. The same is true for former Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and all of those that came before them. The one discrepancy, however, appears to be the revelation from former President Donald Trump that he has those logs.
Politico confirmed that there are no Secret Service logs of visitors to Mar-a-ago, despite Trump calling it “The Winter White House.”
Taking to his social media account to attack Biden, Trump posted, ” Mar-a-Lago is a highly secured facility, with Security Cameras all over the place, and watched over by staff & our great Secret Service. I have INFO on everyone!”
The Secret Service called this a lie, though not directly.
“The…search and review of records confirmed that there is no system for keeping track of Presidential visitors at Mar-a-Lago, as there is at the White House Complex,” wrote Special Agent Kim Campbell, head of the Secret Service’s Liaison Divison. “Specifically, it was determined that there is no grouping, listing or set of records that would reflect Presidential visitors to Mar-a-Lago.”
It’s unclear who is telling the truth or if Trump is saying that while the Secret Service didn’t keep logs, he personally did through his country club’s records.
Come on…everyone knows that Trump never tells the truth.
The White House wants McCarthy to reveal the secret deals he made with the right wing nuts in the House.
Poltico: White House to McCarthy: ‘Come clean’ on your backroom speaker deals.
The White House is escalating its fight with newly empowered congressional Republicans, with officials Tuesday calling on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to “come clean” about secretive deals he made with hardline members that helped him eventually land the top job.
“An unprecedented tax hike on the middle class and a national abortion ban are just a glimpse of the secret, backroom deals Speaker McCarthy made with extreme MAGA members to end this month’s chaotic elections and claim the gavel,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement shared first with POLITICO. “It is well past time for Speaker McCarthy and the ultra MAGA Republican House members to come out of the dark and tell the American people, in-full, what they decided in secret.”
While McCarthy has insisted he made no formal agreements in exchange for getting conservative holdouts to vote for him, conservative members have said they received certain promises from the new speaker. They have also pointed to action on their priority legislation as a direct result of the recent House leadership negotiations….
President Joe Biden has tried to turn the policy implications of Republicans’ priority bills, including legislation to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and replace more progressive income taxes with a national sales tax, into a political cudgel. White House officials also said the Republican leadership talks laid the groundwork for the House to vote on a national abortion ban and argue the GOP will use the debt limit standoff to try to force cuts to Medicare and Social Security.
“The few agreements we know about would fundamentally reshape our economy in a devastating way for working families and criminalize women for making their own health care decisions,” Bates said. “They’re also planning to plunge the economy into chaos and take millions of American jobs and 401k plans hostage unless they can cut Medicare.”
Sahil Kapur at NBC News: House Republicans gear up for a debt ceiling fight with the White House and Senate Democrats.
The Republican-controlled House has planted the seeds for a debt-ceiling showdown, with Speaker Kevin McCarthy endorsing a push by his hard-liners to demand spending cuts as part of any extension of the country’s borrowing authority….
Ultraconservative lawmakers insist they don’t want the country to default, but their conditions for raising the debt limit are unlikely to be accepted by the Democratic-led Senate or President Joe Biden.
Republicans are on a collision course with the White House, which is demanding that Congress raise the debt limit without conditions.
If they fail to resolve their differences and cause a default, the range of consequences includes a stock market crash, a recession, higher interest rates for consumers, a weaker dollar, a U.S. credit downgrade and a government unable to meet all its obligations, from funding the military to providing Social Security benefits….
Conservative lawmakers say that as part of their negotiations to allow McCarthy the speakership, it secured assurances to include major spending cuts to balance the federal budget in any debt limit increase. And to enforce that, they’ve secured other rule changes that give a small group of members the power to remove McCarthy.
But Democrats, who control the Senate and the White House, are unlikely to accept those cuts. They are also opposed to granting policy concessions to lift the debt ceiling, particularly after a 2011 showdown, during Barack Obama’s presidency, when a GOP House brought the U.S. to within days of economic disaster and caused a rating downgrade by Standard & Poor’s for the first time.
The House’s new rules, adopted by Republicans last week, require an explicit vote to increase U.S. borrowing authority, eliminating an end run that Congress has previously used to fast-track it.
That’s all I have for you today–sorry this isn’t much of a post.
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Posted: January 14, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because |
By Vladimir Rumyantsev
After looking around at today’s news, I’d like to go back to bed, pull the covers over my head and pretend none of the madness is actually happening. But I’ll try to pull myself together and post some stories worth reading today.
The most serious news today is that we are rapidly approaching the debt limit and House Republicans are threatening to force a default on the country’s debt, which would crash the U.S. economy–and likely the global economy.
The Guardian: Treasury secretary: US to reach debt ceiling on Thursday.
Janet Yellen, the US treasury secretary, has notified Congress that the US is projected to reach its debt limit on Thursday, 19 January, and will then resort to “extraordinary measures” to avoid default.
In a letter to House and Senate leaders on Friday, Yellen said her actions will buy time until Congress can pass legislation that will either raise the nation’s $31.4tn borrowing authority or suspend it again for a period of time.
She urged lawmakers to act quickly to raise the debt ceiling to “protect the full faith and credit of the United States”.
“Failure to meet the government’s obligations would cause irreparable harm to the US economy, the livelihoods of all Americans and global financial stability,” she said.
Republicans now in control of the House have threatened to use the debt ceiling as leverage to demand spending cuts from Democrats and the Biden administration. This has raised concerns in Washington and on Wall Street about a bruising fight over the debt ceiling this year that could be at least as disruptive as the protracted battle of 2011, which prompted the brief downgrade of the US credit rating and years of forced domestic and military spending cuts….
The White House said on Friday after Yellen’s letter that it will not negotiate over raising the debt ceiling.
“This should be done without conditions,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters. “There’s going to be no negotiation over it.”
Republicans are suggesting we pay some bills and postpone others. The Washington Post: House Republicans prepare emergency plan for breaching debt limit.
House Republicans are preparing a plan telling the Treasury Department what to do if Congress and the White House don’t agree to lift the nation’s debt limit later this year, underscoring the brinkmanship newly empowered conservatives will bring to the high-stakes negotiations over averting a U.S. default, according to six people aware of the internal discussions.
By Kim Roberti
The plan, which was previously unreported, was part of the private deal reached this month to resolve the standoff between House conservatives and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) over the election of a House speaker. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), a leading conservative who helped broker the deal, told The Washington Post that McCarthy agreed to pass a payment prioritization plan by the end of the first quarter of the year.
The emerging contingency plan shows how Republicans are preparing to threaten to not lift the nation’s debt ceiling without major spending cuts from the Biden administration. Congress must pass a law raising the current limit of $31.4 trillion or the Treasury Department can’t borrow anymore, even to pay for spending lawmakers have already authorized. Economists warn that not raising the debt limit could cause the United States to default, sparking a major panic on Wall Street and leading to millions of job losses.
In the preliminary stages of being drafted, the GOP proposal would call on the Biden administration to make only the most critical federal payments if the Treasury Department comes up against the statutory limit on what it can legally borrow. For instance, the plan is almost certain to call on the department to keep making interest payments on the debt, according to four people familiar with the internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. House Republicans’ payment prioritization plan may also stipulate that the Treasury Department should continue making payments on Social Security, Medicare and veterans benefits, as well as funding the military, two of the people said.
Such a move would be unprecedented and hugely controversial, and even releasing the plan could turn into a major political liability for the GOP. A hypothetical proposal that protects Social Security, Medicare, veterans benefits and the military would still leave out huge swaths of critical federal expenditures on things such as Medicaid, food safety inspections, border control and air traffic control, to name just a handful of thousands of programs. Democrats are also likely to accuse Republicans of prioritizing payments to U.S. bondholders — which include Chinese banks — over American citizens.
Read more details on the GOP’s idiotic “plan” at the link.
The other big story is the ongoing attempts of Republicans and some in the media to draw comparisons between Trump’s theft of hundreds of government documents and refusal to return them to the recent discovery of a small number of classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as Vice President in an old office and at his home in Delaware.
CBS News: Total number of Biden documents known to be marked classified is about 20, source says.
The approximately 10 documents marked classified and discovered at the Penn Biden Center included top-secret material, according to a federal law enforcement official familiar with the investigation.
Top secret is the highest of the three basic levels of classification: confidential, secret and top secret. A leak of top secret information could cause “exceptionally grave damage.”
Fewer than 10 documents marked classified were found at the Biden residence in Wilmington, Del., and none were marked top secret.
In all, the source said, the total number of known documents marked classified is roughly 20,between the two locations.
Toby the Dog, Stephen Hanson
NPR: Here’s what we know about the classified documents found at Biden’s home and office.
President Biden is facing a Department of Justice investigation after his lawyers found classified documents at his Delaware residence and an office in Washington, D.C.
On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed former Justice Department official Robert Hur to lead the DOJ probe.
“This appointment underscores for the public the department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters, and to making decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law,” Garland said Thursday.
The announcement comes three days after news broke that classified documents had been found at Biden’s private office in November less than a week before the midterm elections – a discovery that led the DOJ to launch an initial inquiry.
Details on the documents and where they were located:
Early last November, Biden’s personal lawyers were packing files from his one-time office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think tank founded in 2018 by the University of Pennsylvania where Biden served as a fellow and professor before he became president.
There, in a “locked closet,” the White House says, they discovered some files that were marked as classified, even though the office had not been authorized for the storage of classified documents. The documents were quickly turned over to the National Archives.
Then, on Nov. 4, the National Archives inspector general informed the Department of Justice of the discovery. In mid-November, Garland tapped John Lausch, a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney in Chicago, to begin an initial investigation.
In December, after a review that began after the November discovery, Biden’s personal counsel Robert Bauer informed Lausch that another set of documents had been found in the garage of Biden’s private home in Wilmington, Del. Those documents were soon secured by the FBI.
Finally, on Wednesday night, Biden’s team discovered one more classified document at Biden’s Wilmington home.
As far as we know, Biden’s retention of the documents was unintentional, but the news has provided a golden opportunity for Trump’s dishonest allies.
Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine: Biden’s Document Blunder Is Nothing Like Trump’s Crime. Trump is facing charges because he defied the law.
The sweet spot for Donald Trump’s allies has always been when they can justify his abuses and crimes through misdirected comparisons rather than direct defense. Did Trump extort Ukraine into smearing his opponent? Well, Ted Kennedy once did something kind of like this. Did Trump try to stay in office after losing the election? Maybe so, but let us tell you about the time a Democrat registered an objection to the Electoral College count in Congress.
The key aspect of these arguments is exaggeration, not fabrication. They seize on real events, often genuinely bad things done by other politicians, then use them as pretext to dismiss actions by Trump of a vastly greater order of magnitude.
By Belinda Del Pesco
As many people have very neutrally pointed out, the news that President Biden held on to classified documents is pure manna for Trump’s defenders. It gives them a set of facts to work with that, if examined without any of the important context, can be spun to the willfully credulous as evidence that these men have committed similar crimes.
“There’s no good case for putting a President in prison — much less making two Presidents into cellmates — for improperly retaining materials from recent public office,” intones The Wall Street Journal. “When Mr. Trump was out on a limb by himself, this point was less obvious to some of our media competitors. Now that Mr. Biden faces a similar inquiry, perhaps they see how ridiculous it is.”
But Trump is not potentially facing charges because he improperly took classified documents. It’s because when the government found out about the documents, he refused to give them back and — allegedly — took steps to hide them from the FBI. This is not a small twist on the same crime. It is the crime….
This is how he has operated for his entire career. He cheats, lies, and steals in the expectation that he can brazen out any consequences. He can simply refuse to let Black people rent an apartment or pay contractors what he promised them or lie to his lenders about his worth, and whatever cost he faces will be worth it. The reason his document theft rose to the level of a federal crime was that he applied this method to behavior that is covered by the federal criminal code and handled by prosecutors he can’t necessarily bully or bribe into submission.
As we discovered during the Watergate scandal, it’s the cover-up that gets people in trouble. If Trump had just returned all the documents immediately, as Biden did, he (Trump) wouldn’t be facing the possibility of prosecution for obstruction of justice.
Ethics expert Norm Eisen at CNN: Opinion: I worked on document handling issues in government. Here’s why Biden’s and Trump’s cases are different.
We will all need to be patient now that former Maryland US attorney Robert Hur has been appointed by US Attorney General Merrick Garland as the special counsel in charge of the investigation into the classified documents found at President Joe Biden’s home and private office from his time as vice president.
But giving Hur the time to dig into the legitimate questions he must ask does not mean we should compare Biden’s legal exposure to that of Donald Trump.
Based on what we know now, Biden is unlikely ever to face charges, whereas Trump is at high risk because of his obstructive conduct and other factors absent from the Biden case. The cases have special counsels and classified documents in common — but little else.
Hur, who was nominated by then-President Trump for the US attorney role in Maryland in 2018, will now attempt to determine how the batches of classified documents got to Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware and to his private office in Washington, DC; who was involved; and who may have seen them.
Still Life with Dillan, Alison Friend
He will seek to make sure that there are no more anywhere else on Biden’s personal property (a bone of contention in the Trump investigation) and liaise as necessary with national security officials to assess the risk to national security. And he undoubtedly will look at the logistics of the search; for example, if the first batch of documents was discovered in November 2022, why the review that unearthed the new documents was not completed until this Wednesday….
The bottom line is that so far this appears to be a very different case, and the discovery of the second small tranche of documents and the appointment of the special counsel doesn’t change that. If these preliminary indications bear out, it appears unlikely Biden will face charges at the end of Hur’s investigation (whenever that may be).
Just as Hur must decide the Biden case on its facts, special counsel Jack Smith, who is looking at the Trump documents case, should not be influenced in any way in making his determinations about charging Trump based upon this separate and very different case involving Biden.
The Washington Post addressed the issue of the media response to the Biden story. Will this become another “but her emails” episode? The Biden documents scandal is a test for the media — and an opportunity.
After two years of relative quiet, the Washington press corps mounted familiar battle stations this week as a Biden administration scandal took shape.
“You’re not going to answer the questions, but we’re going to ask them because that’s our job,” Ed O’Keefe, a correspondent for CBS News, told White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre during a press briefing Wednesday in which she repeatedly refused to provide new information about classified documents that had been found improperly stored in the president’s former office space.
It triggered a back-and-forth that led Jean-Pierre to plead, “You don’t need to be contentious with me here.”
Yet for all the pent-up vigor with which they launched into the facts of the case, journalists also labored to contextualize a matter made all the more complex by the shadow of former president Donald Trump’s own ongoing classified-documents scandal. And they girded against partisan criticism that they are going too hard or too soft on the story.
Less than 48 hours after CBS News first broke the story Monday evening, some conservatives were quick to insist that “the media” was somehow downplaying it….
In reality, every network was covering the news that President Biden’s attorneys had voluntarily handed over classified documents on Nov. 2, the same day they discovered them found improperly stored in his private office.
The story was the lead piece on ABC’s and CBS’s evening news shows Monday and the second piece on NBC’s “Nightly News.” CNN devoted 1 hour and 47 minutes to the Biden documents that night compared with 14 minutes spent by MSNBC and 29 minutes on Fox News, according to Media Matters, a liberal group tracking media.
Read the whole discussion at the link if you’re interested. Personally, I expect the media to work hard to try to equate the two scandals. I just hope Biden doesn’t give them any more ammunition.
Woman with book and orange cat, Carol Keiser
Yesterday, the judge in E. Jean Carroll’s sexual assault lawsuit against Trump released the transcript of Trump’s deposition, and it is just as disgusting as I expected.
The Washington Post: Trump falsely claimed in deposition that Carroll spoke about enjoying rape.
Donald Trump used a sworn deposition in a case brought by his sexual assault accuser E. Jean Carroll to continue calling her a liar and to claim she is mentally ill — denying that he sexually assaulted her even as he falsely claimed Carroll said in a CNN interview that she enjoyed being raped.
In rambling and combative testimony during an October session at Mar-a-Lago, Trump reiterated past claims he didn’t know Carroll, except as an adversary in what he termed “hoax” litigation, and said she was a “nut job”who was fabricating the story altogether.
“I know nothing about her,” he said in response to questions from Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan, according to court documents unsealed Friday. “I think she’s sick. Mentally sick.”
The former president twisted Carroll’s comments from a June 2019 interview with CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, in which shesaid she shied away from calling her alleged encounter with Trump a “rape” because the word “has so many sexual connotations” and is a “fantasy” for many.
“I think most people think of rape as being sexy,” she told Cooper, according to a transcript of the interview, explaining that she instead thinks of her alleged attack as a “fight.”
Trump cited the interview in telling Kaplan that Carroll “loved” sexual assault.
“She actually indicated that she loved it. Okay?” Trump said in the deposition. “In fact, I think she said it was sexy, didn’t she? She said it was very sexy to be raped.”
Kaplan then asked: “So, sir, I just want to confirm: It’s your testimony that E. Jean Carroll said that she loved being sexually assaulted by you?”
And Trump answered: “Well, based on her interview with Anderson Cooper, I believe that’s what took place.”
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Posted: January 12, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, just because | Tags: classified documents, CPAC, Herschel Walker staffer, Hunter Biden, hypocrisy, Jeff Beck, Jim Jordan, Joe Biden, Matt Schlapp |
Good Afternoon!!
There isn’t any big overarching story dominating today’s news, so I have a mixed bag of articles to share.
I’m going to begin with a story that should be a huge scandal, but the mainstream media and cable news stations have been slow to cover it–I’m not sure why. I posted the story a couple of times here after Roger Sollenberger of The Daily Beast broke it on January 5: Herschel Walker Staffer: Matt Schlapp ‘Groped’ My Crotch.
A staffer for Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign has alleged to The Daily Beast that longtime Republican activist Matt Schlapp made “sustained and unwanted and unsolicited” sexual contact with him while the staffer was driving Schlapp back from an Atlanta bar this October.
The staffer said the incident occurred the night of Oct. 19, when Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union and lead organizer for the influential Conservative Political Action Conference, “groped” and “fondled” his crotch in his car against his will after buying him drinks at two different bars.
The staffer described Schlapp, who had traveled to Georgia for a Walker campaign event, as inappropriately and repeatedly intruding into his personal space at the bars. He said he was also keenly aware of his “power dynamic” with Schlapp, widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in national conservative politics.
Read more at the link. Yesterday, CNN finally picked up the story and discussed it extensively on the air; and The New York Daily News published an article about it. Maybe now it will get more attention.
From the CNN story: GOP strategist alleges powerful conservative Matt Schlapp sexually assaulted him.
A Republican strategist alleges that Matt Schlapp, the influential chairman of the American Conservative Union, groped and fondled his groin as he drove Schlapp back to an Atlanta hotel several weeks before the November midterm election.
The strategist, a male in his late thirties who was working for the Georgia GOP and Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign at the time, told CNN that Schlapp made the unwanted sexual advances on the ride back from two area bars on October 19. Schlapp allegedly invited the strategist, who was assigned to drive Schlapp, to join him in his hotel room. The staffer declined the offer, and hours later reported the incident to senior campaign staff….
The staffer says he called and texted friends in real time to tell them what happened. CNN reviewed a text exchange between the staffer and a friend in politics, where the staffer is clearly upset and wondering how to tell the campaign that one of their surrogates had allegedly assaulted him. The exchange is being made public for the first time.
“He’s pissed I didn’t follow him to his hotel room,” the staffer wrote.
“I’m so sorry man,” the acquaintance responded. “What a f**king creep.”
The staffer later texted, “I just don’t know how to say it to my superiors thst heir [sic] surrogate fondled my junk without my consent.” [….]
Schlapp runs the ACU, the organization most widely known for staging the Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC. Both Schlapp and the group occasionally butted heads with Donald Trump before he was elected president in 2016, but have since become fierce loyalists. Schlapp, who served in the George W. Bush White House as director of political affairs, took over the ACU in 2014. His wife, Mercedes Schlapp, worked as Trump’s communications director for nearly two years, from 2017 to 2019.
More on the text messages:
According to text messages reviewed by CNN, Schlapp suggested meeting the staffer for drinks.
“I have a dinner at 7. May grab a beer after if you want to join let me know,” Schlapp texted the staffer. The staffer told CNN he joined Schlapp because of the ACU leader’s standing in conservative political circles.
Once at the bar, the staffer says Schlapp began to inappropriately invade his personal space. After leaving the bar, the staffer alleges Schlapp sexually assaulted him as he was driving Schlapp back to his hotel. The staffer said he did not respond in the moment because he was stunned into silence and was focused on getting Schlapp out of the car as quickly as possible.
Later that evening, Schlapp called the staffer, according to a call log reviewed by CNN, to confirm the staffer would be driving him to another Walker event the next morning. After receiving the call, the staffer says he broke down and memorialized what happened by recording videos of himself describing the alleged assault.
“Matt Schlapp, of the CPAC, grabbed my junk and pummeled it at length. And I’m sitting there (in the car) saying, ‘What the hell is going on that this person with a wife and kids is literally doing this to me, from Manuel’s Tavern to the Hilton Garden Inn there at the Atlanta Airport,’” the staffer says in one of the self-recorded clips, which CNN reviewed. “He literally has his hands on me. And I feel so f**king dirty. Feel so f**king dirty. So I don’t know what to do in the morning.”
The next morning, the staffer told top Walker campaign officials about the alleged incident and they immediately directed him not to drive Schlapp and to pass on a number of a car service.
Why isn’t this story getting more traction? Is it because Schlapp is so powerful within the GOP? He heads up organizations that are virulently anti-gay. I’m waiting for it to come out in The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Next, Joe Biden’s lawyers found a second batch of classified documents in Delaware. There’s no comparison with what Trump did, but I’m worried that this may prevent the DOJ from prosecuting Trump for actually stealing government documents and refusing to return them.
The New York Times: Second Set of Classified Documents Were Found at Biden’s Wilmington Home, White House Says.
The second set of classified documents from President Biden’s time as vice president were discovered at a storage space in the garage of his home in Wilmington, Del., a top White House lawyer said on Thursday….
The White House statement, by Richard Sauber, a special counsel to Mr. Biden, did not answer fundamental questions about the contents of the documents, who packed them and whether anyone had gained access to them after he left office. It also did not say when the second batch had been found.
The statement came after the White House acknowledged this week that an earlier batch had been discovered on Nov. 2 in the closet of an office at a think tank that Mr. Biden had used after leaving the vice presidency.
The statement added that the Biden team immediately notified the Justice Department and arranged for it to take possession of the documents.
Mr. Sauber said Mr. Biden’s team had also searched a house the president owned in Rehoboth Beach, Del., but found no documents stored there.
On Tuesday, Mr. Biden told reporters in Mexico City that he was “surprised” to learn in the fall that his lawyers had found classified government documents in his former office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.
He said his staff had fully cooperated with the National Archives and the Justice Department, but made no mention of the documents later found in Delaware.
Mr. Biden’s lawyers discovered “a small number” of classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank last fall, the White House said on Monday, prompting the Justice Department to scrutinize the situation to determine how to proceed.
As you probably know, the Justice Department is investigating and will eventually decide whether a special counsel should be appointed. So far, there isn’t any comparison between what Trump and Biden did, but of course Republicans will make that claim. Here’s a good thread on the differences between the two.
Read the rest on Twitter.
Jim Jordan, who will be in charge of the Judiciary Committee and the so-called “weaponization of government” subcommittee, is probably salivating over this story. This is from Loch K. Johnson, Frederick Baron, and Dennis Aftergut at The Bulwark: Jim Jordan, Church Committee Pretender.
Members of the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives are trying to stick a civil libertarian label on the subcommittee they’re creating to “investigate the investigators.” Its formal name will be the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. But when talking about it to the press, some Republicans have taken to calling it a reincarnated “Church committee.”
They are invoking the 1975-76 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho). That committee was launched after a bombshell 1974 New York Times report about Nixon-era CIA domestic surveillance on anti-war activists and other dissident American citizens.
Two of us (Johnson and Baron) served in key staff positions on the Church committee. The comparison is preposterous. The new House subcommittee is not remotely up to the Church committee standard—in origin, composition, or purpose.
To begin with, the Church committee bore serious moral authority, which arose from its truly bipartisan mission: tough-minded rethinking of intelligence agency activities under administrations of both parties stretching back almost twenty years.
Indispensable to its credibility was the energetic participation of steely moderate Republican senators like Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), Charles Mathias (R-Md.), and Richard Schweiker (R-Penn.). These were statesmen—intellectually honest and adept. In particular, Baker performed an indispensable, fair-minded role for Church committee Republicans, as he had done on the Senate Watergate Committee.
One example: Concerned about the Church committee’s probe into FBI activities against Martin Luther King Jr., Baker sought evenhandedness without obstruction. “Let’s have a balance, not just focus on King,” Baker said. “Perhaps a session on FBI infiltration of the KKK, too.”
On the Church committee, GOP senators—including the committee’s vice chairman, the conservative John Tower (R-Texas)—were willing to pursue the truth about the actions of Republican administrations. In turn, Democratic senators, including Church, Walter Mondale (D-Minn.), and Gary Hart (D-Col.), were willing to probe the actions of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. That commitment to nonpartisan inquiry catalyzed the committee’s powerful, evidence-based critique of intelligence agency misconduct, and serious proposals for agency reforms later adopted in the Ford and Carter administrations.
What the Church Committee did:
The Church committee unearthed dramatic breaches of law and American norms:
- CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro in Cuba and Patrice Lumumba in the Congo.
- FBI COINTELPRO surveillance, infiltration, and disruption targeting King, his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the anti-Vietnam War movement.
- CIA and FBI mail-opening programs that snooped on broad swaths of U.S. citizens.
Those legitimate subjects of investigation are a far cry from what the new House subcommittee is setting out to do: fishing for stories about the mythical deep state and looking into “ongoing criminal investigations”—that is, going after the law enforcement officials investigating the January 6th insurrection.
Read the rest at the link.
Republicans are also salivating about the opportunity to “investigate” Hunter Biden. That could come back to bite Trump though.
The New York Times: Hunter Biden’s Tangled Tale Comes Front and Center.
The way Republicans tell it, President Biden has been complicit in a long-running scheme to profit from his position in public life through shady dealings around the world engineered by his son, Hunter Biden.
Taking a first step in their long-promised investigation, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday demanded information about the Bidens’ banking transactions from the Treasury Department. And in an earlier report on the Bidens intended to lay the groundwork for hearings they plan to hold, they said they had evidence “demonstrating deliberate, repeated deception of the American people, abuse of the executive branch for personal gain, use of government power to obstruct the investigation” and more.
The real Hunter Biden story is complex and very different in important ways from the narrative promoted by Republicans — but troubling in its own way.
After his father became vice president, Hunter Biden, a 52-year-old Yale-educated lawyer, forged business relationships with foreign interests that brought him millions of dollars, raised questions about whether he was cashing in on his family name, set off alarms among government officials about potential conflicts of interest, and provided Republicans an opening for years of attacks on his father.
And after the death of his brother, Beau, in 2015, Hunter descended into a spiral of addiction and tawdry and self-destructive behavior.
He is sober now and no longer entangled in foreign business deals. He is a visible presence in his father’s life — his oldest daughter was married at the White House in November, and he attended a state dinner last month.
But the investigation into his previous dealings may be coming to a head.
David C. Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware, is closing in on a decision about whether to prosecute Hunter Biden on charges stemming from his behavior during his most troubled years.
Investigators have pored over documents related to and questioned witnesses about his overseas business dealings. They include his role on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company led by an oligarch who at the time was under investigation for corruption — a position that Hunter accepted while his father, as vice president, was overseeing Obama administration policy in Ukraine.
They also include his equity stake in a Chinese business venture, and his failed joint venture with a Chinese tycoon who had courted well-connected Americans in both parties — at one point he gave Hunter Biden a large diamond as a gift — but was later detained by Chinese authorities.
Investigators have similarly sought information about interactions between Hunter Biden’s business associates and his father.
But Mr. Weiss, people familiar with the investigation say, appears to be focused on a less politically explosive set of possible charges stemming from his failure to meet filing deadlines for his 2016 and 2017 tax returns, and questions about whether he falsely claimed at least $30,000 in deductions for business expenses.
Mr. Weiss is also said to be considering charging Hunter Biden, who has openly acknowledged his years of struggle with drugs and alcohol, with lying on a U.S. government form that he filled out to purchase a handgun in 2018. On the form, he answered that he was not using drugs — an assertion that prosecutors might be able to challenge based on his erratic behavior and possible witness accounts of his drug use around that period.
One more sad story for us old fans of 1960’s rock. Yesterday, guitar legend Jeff Beck died suddenly of bacterial meningitis.
From the NYT obit: Jeff Beck, Guitarist With a Chapter in Rock History, Dies at 78.
Jeff Beck, one of the most skilled, admired and influential guitarists in rock history, died on Tuesday in a hospital near his home at Riverhall, a rural estate in southern England. He was 78.
The cause was bacterial meningitis, Melissa Dragich, his publicist, said.
During the 1960s and ’70s, as either a member of the Yardbirds or as leader of his own bands, Mr. Beck brought a sense of adventure to his playing that helped make the recordings by those groups groundbreaking.
In 1965, when he joined the Yardbirds to replace another guitar hero, Eric Clapton, the group was already one of the defining acts in Britain’s growing electric blues movement. But his stinging licks and darting leads on songs like “Shapes of Things” and “Over Under Sideways Down” added an expansive element to the music that helped signal the emerging psychedelic rock revolution.
Three years later, when Mr. Beck formed his own band, later known as the Jeff Beck Group — along with Rod Stewart, a little-known singer at the time, and the equally obscure Ron Wood on bass — the weight of the music created an early template for heavy metal. Specifically, the band’s 1968 debut, “Truth,” provided a blueprint that another former guitar colleague from the Yardbirds, Jimmy Page, drew on to found Led Zeppelin several months later.
In 1975, when Mr. Beck began his solo career with the “Blow by Blow” album, he reconfigured the essential formula of that era’s fusion movement, tipping the balance of its influences from jazz to rock and funk, in the process creating a sound that was both startlingly new and highly successful. “Blow by Blow” became a Billboard Top 5 and, selling a million or more copies, a platinum hit.
Along the way, Mr. Beck helped either pioneer or amplify important technical innovations on his instrument. He elaborated the use of distortion and feedback effects, earlier explored by Pete Townshend; intensified the effect of bending notes on the guitar; and widened the range of expression that could be coaxed from devices attached to the guitar like the whammy bar.
Drawing on such techniques, Mr. Beck could weaponize his strings to hit like a stun gun or caress them to express what felt like a kiss. His work had humor, too, with licks that could cackle and leads that could tease.
Click the NYT link to read the rest. I saw the Jeff Beck Group at The Boston Tea Party in 1968 or 1969. The warm-up group was Buddy Miles. Rod Stewart was impressive as the lead singer. That was before he went more mainstream. Anyway, it was a great show. The Tea Party was a great big hall–no seats or anything and it was LOUD.
Have a great Thursday everyone!!
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