Tuesday Reads: Odds and Ends

Laurette With a Cup of Coffee, Henri Matisse

Good Morning!!

Over the weekend, Todd Gitlin, one of the most well-known leaders of the 1960s New Left died, possibly from Covid-19. The Washington Post: Todd Gitlin, activist and scholar who shaped and chronicled the New Left, dies at 79.

From The Boston Globe, Canadian and U.S. anti-vax truck drivers have taken over the city of Ottowa and created a nightmare for residents and law enforcement: Ottawa declares emergency after protests spin ‘out of control.’

Canada’s capital city declared a state of emergency Sunday as police struggled to rein in protests against vaccine mandates and COVID-19 restrictions.

Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson, who declared the emergency, said that increasingly rowdy demonstrations posed a “serious danger and threat to the safety and security of residents.” Hundreds of trucks continue to occupy the downtown area near Canada’s parliament with no sign that the protesters plan to leave.

Truckers and their supporters have been stockpiling jerry cans of diesel and other necessities. They built a wood shed as a kitchen and set up logistics centers in a downtown park and the parking lot of a baseball stadium.

But on Sunday, police fenced off the park and showed up at the stadium location to seize fuel cans, propane cannisters and vehicles. A total of seven people were arrested as part of investigations related to the protests, according to a statement from the Ottawa Police Service. It said there are more the 60 active criminal investigations, primarily for mischief, thefts, hate crimes and property damage.

Protesters gathered near Parliament Hill during the Freedom Convoy demonstration in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on Saturday, Feb. 5, 2022. David Kawai, Bloomberg

The protests started in reaction to Canadian and Us laws that went into effect in January, requiring truckers crossing the border to be fully vaccinated. They’ve since morphed into a rally against COVID restrictions more broadly. Demonstrators have been camped out in the capital since Jan. 28.

The Canadian protest, which expanded to cities across the country this weekend, was championed by the likes of Fox News and by podcaster Joe Rogan, Tesla billionaire Elon Musk and former US President Donald Trump.

In Ottawa, the truckers’ blockade of streets and use of air horns for days — sometimes deep into the night — has angered residents. The city’s police force warned people that they could be arrested for bringing “material supports,” including fuel, to the protest zone.

So far, the Canadian federal government has refused to get involved. I think they may have to do that. This story is behind a paywall, but I’ve given you the gist.

Will Saletan has moved from Slate Magazine to The Bulwark, and yesterday he published an outstanding article on Trump’s anti-democracy movment: Lies Are the Building Blocks of Trumpian Authoritarianism.

Americans like to think our country is immune to authoritarianism. We have a culture of freedom, a tradition of elected government, and a Bill of Rights. We’re not like those European countries that fell into fascism. We’d never willingly abandon democracy, liberty, or the rule of law.

But that’s not how authoritarianism would come to America. In fact, it’s not how authoritarianism has come to America. The movement to dismantle our democracy is thriving and growing, even after the failure of the Jan. 6th coup attempt, because it isn’t spreading through overt rejection of our system of government. It’s spreading through lies.

It turns out that you don’t have to renounce any of our nation’s founding principles to betray them. All you have to do is believe lies: that real ballots are fake, that prosecutors are criminals, and that insurrectionists are political prisoners. Once you believe these things, you’re ready to disenfranchise your fellow citizens in the name of democracy. You’re ready to cover up crimes in the name of fighting corruption. You’re ready to liberate coup plotters in the name of justice.

And that’s where we are. Donald Trump and his party have sold these lies to more than 100 million Americans. He has built an army of authoritarian followers who think they’re saving the republic….

At a rally in Arizona this past Jan. 15, Trump repeated his standard lie that “the real insurrection took place on Election Day,” through voter fraud. From that standpoint, he noted, the Jan. 6th uprising was an attempt to restore democracy, and the people arrested in the uprising were “political prisoners.” The House Jan. 6th Committee is, in Trump’s words, a partisan cabal that trampled innocent people “like this is . . . a communist country.” So are the federal and state prosecutors looking into Trump’s possible financial and political crimes. In the name of law and order, he urged his supporters to rise up against these agents of the state: “We must protect our nation from these monsters that are using law enforcement for political retribution.”

Trump continued his Orwellian themes at a Jan. 29 rally in Texas. He argued that President Joe Biden had been installed by fake ballots, not real voters, and that legislation to make voting easier would just lead to more fake ballots. Democrats “don’t have a voting rights bill,” Trump scoffed. “They have a voting fraud bill.”

This strategy—inserting lies into conventional moral appeals, so that his listeners think they’re doing the right thing when they’re actually doing the opposite—is central to Trump’s propaganda. Without the lies, the evil would That’s what happened a week ago, when Trump forgot to lie. In a statement, he complained that when Congress counted electoral votes on Jan. 6th, Vice President Mike Pence could have, and should have, “change[d] the results” and “overturned the Election.” The words “change” and “overturn” revealed Trump’s despotic intent. So, in a follow-up statement two days later, he replaced them. His true purpose, he insisted, was to “ensure the true outcome” and “ensure the honest results.”

I hope you can find the time to read the whole thing.

More stories to check out today

Politico: Senate GOP backlash smacks RNC after Cheney-Kinzinger censure.

CNN: Republicans are frustrated by RNC move reopening party’s January 6 divide ahead of midterms.

The Daily Beast: ‘Stop the Steal’ Organizer Scored Big Payout at Curious Time. Ali Alexander received a major payout to his old consulting firm right when he was subpoenaed.

The New York Times: Supreme Court Restores Alabama Voting Map That a Court Said Hurt Black Voters.

Gawker: We Have Kyrsten Sinema’s Social Security Number.

Politico: Biden’s top science adviser, Eric Lander, resigns amid reports of bullying.

The New York Times: Putin Warns the West and Ukraine, but Keeps His Intentions a Mystery.

Financial Times: France says Vladimir Putin is moving towards de-escalating Ukraine crisis.

The Washington Post: Documents reveal U.S. military’s frustration with White House, diplomats over Afghanistan evacuation.

Have a nice Tuesday, Sky Dancers!!

Thursday Reads, With Rabbits

Wolpertinger, in the style of Albrect Durer.In German folklore, a wolpertinger (also called wolperdinger or woiperdinger) is an animal[1] said to inhabit the alpine forests of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg in south.

Good Morning!!

Today I want to share some interesting stories I came across in my internet browsing yesterday.

From Mother Jones, Ali Breland has a piece about a woman who went underground to learn about the Trumpist far right: The Plan Was Simple: Infiltrate MAGA World and Tell Everyone What She Saw. Then She Was Found Out. This is long and involved, so you’ll need to read the whole thing; but here are some excerpts:

“Looks like my cover is fully blown, actually, fuck,” Amanda Moore told me over Twitter direct message. It was a Saturday night in late October, and the mission that had probably saved her life was coming to an end.

She had spent months attending MAGA events across the country while undercover and after carefully constructing an alias. While she had messaged me a few weeks earlier to say the truth was trickling out, her real identity hadn’t yet spread widely. She thought it might stay that way. It didn’t. 

“This was my life,” she told me a week later over FaceTime, still rattled from the project’s abrupt end. She described her situation at the beginning of the pandemic: “Before this, I thought about killing myself every day. I was not making a livable income. I couldn’t even order shit off Amazon, and the other things people were doing to keep themselves entertained and cope—because I had no fucking money.” Instead, her coping strategy was to embed deep within MAGA land. 

It’s rare for a journalist to really go undercover these days….But what if you weren’t a journalist? Say, if you had the skills of an amateur investigator and the ability to focus so deeply on a single subject that you almost lose yourself to it. If you had the time, money, resources, desire, and general wherewithal, you could embed into something interesting. During the pandemic, Amanda Moore found herself fitting the bill.

Moore had not initially set out to embed in MAGA world. But when pandemic shutdowns dried up her income from being a booking agent connecting models with businesses who need them for live events, she found herself with little money but plenty of free time. At first, she used it to aggressively badger DC politicians on Twitter about the slow pace of her Covid unemployment benefits, and, once they expired, the staffers of national politicians whom she held responsible for the program’s deficiencies. 

Even when she was able to get benefits, the contract model-booking work didn’t count, leaving her with only about $100 a week based on a brief stint as a bartender. “I was thinking about killing myself, every day, for hours a day. That’s all I did,” Moore later told me, emphasizing that her suicidal thoughts were very real: “I reached a point where it no longer mattered to me if I lived or died.” 

A Hare in the Forest, by Hans Hoffmann, c. 1585

What she learned was fascinating and frightening.

Moore, who is 33, didn’t initially build a cover story. But she realized that if she didn’t wear a mask, held her tongue, and acted friendly, demonstrators simply assumed she was on their side, and would warm up to her and speak freely with little prompting. After the November 2020 rally and several other events, Moore realized that she was noticing things—observations that kept her from being as surprised as many people were by the January 6 storming of the Capitol. 

“December was incredibly disturbing,” she explained, describing a tone of menace at the next major MAGA rally in DC that followed Biden’s victory. “It was tense all day and people were telling me about how the Proud Boys had protected and saved them at the last rally, and how the police can’t do anything”—anything meaning, she says, commit violence against counterprotesters. “I remember, this guy walking by me and saying ‘When it gets dark…’”

When the sun set, a group of men in “America Strong” hats and clothing with golden laurel wreaths—a typical Proud Boys uniform—surrounded and beat a Black counterprotestor outside of Harry’s bar, the group’s notorious DC hangout. (The protestor fought back with a knife and was arrested, along with one man who was stabbed.) Other fights broke out, as the Proud Boys, known for inciting street brawls, roamed around town. By the end of the night, four churches had been vandalized.

Amid the rampaging, Moore heard Proud Boys claim that everything beyond the domain of the MAGA rally was dangerous and riddled with antifascists looking to sow violence. “They would offer to walk me places. They offered this to old men and other women,” Moore says, describing how it created paranoia, and the impression that it wasn’t safe to move around DC without protection.

Still Life with Rabbits, by Johann Georg Seitz, c. 1870

Moore also published her own story at Logically: I Was At The Capitol On Jan 6. This Is What I Saw.

Before there was a riot at the Capitol, there were two other D.C. Stop the Steal rallies, where baseless fear-mongering and distortion of facts helped accelerate the rally goers’ acceptance of violence. At both events, members of the Proud Boys helped convince attendees that they were in constant danger of being attacked by random people who were secretly Antifa, and then used the fear they had created to “justify” attacking and terrorizing residents of Washington, D.C. The evening of the second rally, held on December 12, 2020, was particularly instrumental in ramping up tension and distrust between rally goers, local residents, and the various police forces in D.C.

After the speeches wrapped up on December 12, rally goers milled around in front of the Supreme Court stage. They made small talk with one another, casually making sure everyone had mace, and swapping stories about times they alleged they had been attacked by BLM and Antifa. One woman told me she was almost attacked after the November D.C. Stop the Steal rally; her phone was dead, she was separated from her group, and she was walking to the train station when a few guys ran by her. While she never quite got to the part where an attack almost occurred, she was sure to tell me that she was furious it had happened.

“I’m angry. I’m angry. Average American citizens being attacked, and nobody’s doing anything other than Proud Boys. The police don’t, they’re a joke. I back the blue, I do, but they have got to do something…[Today] is much more intense [than November’s rally]. I marched with the Proud Boys last night about 1 o’clock in the morning.”

Later that night, hundreds of people congregated downtown, holding what was essentially an unpermitted block party in the streets, primarily in front of Harry’s Restaurant, a place that served as a meet-up point for the Proud Boys. At some point there was a stabbing; information on the ground was confusing, and at the time, many people seemed to agree the Proud Boys had done the stabbing to save the rest of us.

Feeding White Rabbits, Frederik Morgan, Paris

On January 6:

I found myself marching down to the Capitol around 12:45 pm on January 6, ten feet from the QAnon Shaman — without a gas mask. By the time I made it to the edge of the Capitol grounds, it was packed. A man with tears pouring down his face came up to me. “I just punched a fucking cop!! He was trying to hurt some lady, and I told him we don’t do that where I’m from, and I just hit him!!! I’m not crying, they’re gassing us.” His eyes focused on my shirt, which reads “Biden: Not My President” in the same font used by the real campaign. For a brief, terrifying moment he looked furious, before he laughed. “I thought you were one of them for a minute. Hey, I want you to know — I’m really not crying. It’s because of the tear gas.”

After he ran off, I joined the group marching forward. Having just had a conversation with a man who told me he was fighting with the police close to the Capitol, it was surreal to be surrounded by old ladies and young children as I headed in the exact direction he had told me violence was occurring. No one around me seemed to care. Every so often, small groups of men would against the crowd, one or two of them with chemically induced tears streaming down their faces, led by others who would clear a path yelling, “PROUD BOYS, COMING THROUGH. BACK UP! MEDICAL EMERGENCY!” At no point did anyone seem to think it was a bad idea to continue walking toward whatever was causing these “medical emergencies.”

A couple of times the police let off smoke bombs. Each time they would go off, people around me cheered. Where I was standing, the consensus was the cops were trying to clear out the counter-protesters who were hoping to keep us from getting to the Capitol — except, of course, there weren’t any counter-protesters; it was the police who didn’t want us in the Capitol. At no point did anyone around me consider we might be the bad guys.

I hope you’ll read these pieces for an inside perspective of the Capitol insurrection.

Edwin Landseer, Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Titania and Bottom with white rabbits, 1851

From Heather Digby Parton at Raw Story: Donald Trump’s having an awful week — and it’s only Wednesday

Generally speaking, the Washington press corps and, in particular, the political reporters at the New York Times are not ones to engage in hyperbole when it comes to Donald Trump. If anything, the paper of record has been downplaying the ongoing saga of Trump’s Big Lie and all the evidence that’s been piling up about what happened in the lead-up to January 6th recently. But this week’s Trump news seems to have shaken even their jaded attitude.

For instance, the Times’ Peter Baker tweeted on Tuesday, “Even for Trump it’s quite a week — first dangling pardons for capitol attackers, then admitting his goal was to have ‘overturned the election’ and now calling on the House to investigate Pence for not throwing out votes of multiple states so a president who lost could keep power.” Then the Times’ Maggie Haberman, appearing on CNN on Tuesday night, said, “it’s been a breathtaking couple of days.” This NYT piece by Shane Goldmacher headlined “Trump’s Words, and Deeds, Reveal Depths of His Drive to Retain Power” says it all.

Earlier this week, I wrote about Trump’s scripted comments at the rally in Texas over the weekend in which he promised pardons for the January 6th insurrectionists who were “treated unfairly” and called for protests against prosecutors who are investigating him. But that was just the beginning. On Monday, Trump put out a truly revealing statement (which some might call an admission of guilt.)

Republican leaders have picked a side and it appears to be Trump’s. As usual, there hasn’t been much of an outcry about any of this. Oh sure, a few have said it’s “inappropriate” to talk about pardoning the January 6th rioters and there has been some tut-tutting about how “the process worked” but that’s about it.

Trump followed up his confession that he wanted to overturn the election by suggesting that the January 6th Committee should investigate Mike Pence if they believe he could have overturned the election and ask him why he didn’t do it. I would guess that’s Trump’s pathetic attempt at trying to clean up his earlier comment but it’s incredibly lame and self-defeating. He shouldn’t be pushing Mike Pence toward the committee — Pence’s closest aide and his lawyer both testified for hours this week.

Read much more at the link.

This is interesting and depressing from Scientific American: Schoolkids Are Falling Victim to Disinformation and Conspiracy Fantasies.

When Amanda Gardner, an educator with two decades of experience, helped to start a new charter elementary and middle school outside of Seattle last year, she did not anticipate teaching students who denied that the Holocaust happened, argued that COVID is a hoax and told their teacher that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Yet some children insisted that these conspiracy fantasies were true. Both misinformation, which includes honest mistakes, and disinformation, which involves an intention to mislead, have had “a growing impact on students over the past 10 to 20 years,” Gardner says, yet many schools do not focus on the issue. “Most high schools probably do some teaching to prevent plagiarism, but I think that’s about it.”

Two Rabbits in the Bush, Meiji era

Children, it turns out, are ripe targets for fake news. Age 14 is when kids often start believing in unproven conspiratorial ideas, according to a study published in September 2021 in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. Many teens also have trouble assessing the credibility of online information. In a 2016 study involving nearly 8,000 U.S. students, Stanford University researchers found that more than 80 percent of middle schoolers believed that an advertisement labeled as sponsored content was actually a news story. The researchers also found that less than 20 percent of high schoolers seriously questioned spurious claims in social media, such as a Facebook post that said images of strange-looking flowers, supposedly near the site of a nuclear power plant accident in Japan, proved that dangerous radiation levels persisted in the area. When college students in the survey looked at a Twitter post touting a poll favoring gun control, more than two thirds failed to note that the liberal antigun groups behind the poll could have influenced the data.

Disinformation campaigns often directly go after young users, steering them toward misleading content. A 2018 Wall Street Journal investigation found that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which offers personalized suggestions about what users should watch next, is skewed to recommend videos that are more extreme and far-fetched than what the viewer started with. For instance, when researchers searched for videos using the phrase “lunar eclipse,” they were steered to a video suggesting that Earth is flat. YouTube is one of the most popular social media site among teens: After Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Information and Library Science, spent time searching for videos on YouTube and observed what the algorithm told her to watch next, she suggested that it was “one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”

Click the link to read the whole article.

A few more stories to check out:

Raw Story: Stewart Rhodes’ wife says he planned for Trump to install Oath Keepers as his ‘brownshirts’

Politico: Trump considered blanket pardons for Jan. 6 rioters before he left office.

The New York Times: Read the Nov. 18 Memo on Alternate Trump Electors.

Raw Story: Jan. 6 docs from Mike Pence that Trump tried to block will be handed to Congress in 30 days

Satire from Alexandra Petri at The Washington Post: Opinion: Relax, the coup people weren’t very good at it and won’t try again until 2024.

What interesting stories have you been finding? Please share.

Tuesday Reads: Trump Crime Spree

Good Morning!!

Donald Trump is a rolling crime wave. Will anyone stop him? I hate to join in the bashing of Merrick Garland, but honestly, wtf is going on with the Department of Justice? Will Trump ever be held accountable for staging a coup against the United States government? Does Garland read the newspapers? More is leaking out about Trump’s crime spree every single day.

https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1488468456362192897?s=20&t=TvGKyX1T_WJ4gAo1NEk8Rg

Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines.

Mr. Trump pressed Mr. Giuliani to make that inquiry after rejecting a separate effort by his outside advisers to have the Pentagon take control of the machines. And the outreach to the Department of Homeland Security came not long after Mr. Trump, in an Oval Office meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr, raised the possibility of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a previously undisclosed suggestion that Mr. Barr immediately shot down.

The new accounts show that Mr. Trump was more directly involved than previously known in exploring proposals to use his national security agencies to seize voting machines as he grasped unsuccessfully for evidence of fraud that would help him reverse his defeat in the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the episodes.

The existence of proposals to use at least three federal departments to assist Mr. Trump’s attempt to stay in power has been publicly known. The proposals involving the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security were codified by advisers in the form of draft executive orders.

But the new accounts provide fresh insight into how the former president considered and to some degree pushed the plans, which would have taken the United States into uncharted territory by using federal authority to seize control of the voting systems run by states on baseless grounds of widespread voting fraud.

As everyone knows by now, Trump publicly confessed to several crimes at his hate rally in Texas over the weekend. This piece by Will Bunch explains in plain English.

For a nation that’s awakened every morning for nearly two years to a Groundhog Day of pandemic and paranoia, the scenes from Donald Trump’s latest comeback rally on Saturday at a fairground in the East Texas flatlands of Conroe could certainly numb the American mind with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.

The mile-long line of Trump fanatics, braving the January prairie chill to see the twice-impeached ex-president and passing rows of vendors, including the occasional Confederate flag. Then the viral clips of the true believers — the woman in her Trump 2024 hat expounding that the “Joe Biden” currently in the White House is fake and that the real one was assassinated at Gitmo in March 2019, another woman peddling a book containing all of Trump’s tweets before he was banned from Twitter, and the guy peddling doses of the quack COVID-19 cure ivermectin while lashing out at anyone wearing a mask for trying to “save Grandma.”

As darkness fell and the crowd swelled to the thousands, the sound system blared the late Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” the same tune that had electrified Trump’s most diehard followers at the D.C. Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021. Over at the zealously pro-Trump One America News Network, or OANN, analysts awaited the 45th president as their antidote to what they called “the divisiveness” of President Biden’s first year, insisting in the words of Liz Harrington that “Trump will unite us.” But more mainstream outlets like CNN were busy obsessing on the possible retirement of football’s Tom Brady, having decided — wisely — after Jan. 6 not to cover Trump’s words live, but to only revisit his rallies if he actually makes any news.

Hey, guys … Trump made some news! Unfortunately.

More from Will Bunch’s piece:

In fact, the man who’d occupied the White House little more than one year ago delivered one of the most incendiary and most dangerous speeches in America’s 246-year history. It included an appeal for all-out mayhem in the streets to thwart the U.S. justice system and prevent Trump from going to jail, as the vise tightens from overlapping criminal probes in multiple jurisdictions. And it also featured a stunning campaign promise — that Trump would look to abuse the power of the presidency to pardon those involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

It’s impossible for me to understate or downplay the importance of this moment, and I hope that my colleagues in the media — who too often over the last year have craved or even pretended about a return to the politics of “normal,” when we are nowhere near normal — will wake up and see this. Of course, Biden’s presidency deserves our full scrutiny, with praise for what’s gone right (an economic boom) and criticism for what’s gone wrong (broken promises on climate and student debt). But while Biden is seeking to restore democratic norms, a shadow ex-president — unpunished so far for his role in an attempted coup on Jan. 6 — is rebuilding a cult-like movement in the heartland of America, with all the personal grievance and appeals to Brownshirts-style violence that marked the lowest moments of the 20th century. On the 89th anniversary of the date (Jan. 30, 1933) that Adolf Hitler — rehabilitated after his attempted coup — assumed power in Germany, are we repeating the past’s mistakes of complacency and underestimation?

Amid the predictable reiterations of the Big Lie that Biden’s legitimate 2020 election was stolen and his other narcissistic blather, Trump’s lengthy speech in Conroe contained three elements that marked a dangerous escalation of his post-presidential, post-Jan. 6 rhetoric. Let’s digest and analyze each of them:

— For the first time, Trump — if somehow elected again in 2024 and upon returning to the White House in January 2025 — dangled pardons before people convicted of crimes in the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill. “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he told the rally, adding: “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.” The statement raises as many questions as it answers — for example, was he including many or all of the more than 700 mostly low-level insurrectionists, or sending a message to his higher-up friends like Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, and others who could be subject to criminal probes?

Predictably, Trump has been paying off potential witnesses to his crimes. 

From NBC News: Trump gave $1M to Meadows nonprofit weeks after Jan. 6 panel’s creation.

Former President Donald Trump’s political action committee donated $1 million to the conservative nonprofit organization where his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, is a senior partner, according to a campaign finance report filed Monday night with the Federal Election Commission.

In December, the House voted to recommend that the Justice Department pursue contempt of Congress charges against Meadows over his refusal to cooperate with an investigation into the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The tax-deductible seven-figure contribution to the Conservative Partnership Institute is by far the largest chunk of $1.35 million in donations Trump’s “Save America” PAC made to political allies over the last six months of 2021, according to the campaign finance report….

The contribution to Meadows’s nonprofit stands out both for its size and for its timing. On July 1, the House voted to establish a select committee to investigate the Capitol attack. Trump’s PAC donated to the Conservative Partnership Institute, which bills itself as a training ground for conservative staff and elected officials, on July 26.

“CPI is proud to have the support of President Trump, along with tens of thousands of Americans across the nation, for our work to build and unite the conservative movement,” CPI chief operating officer Wesley Denton said in a statement to NBC News.

Trump’s message to Meadows: zip your lips.

I have no doubt we’ll learn more about Trump’s constant criming today, but will we ever hear anything about it from Merrick Garland?

What are your thoughts? What stories are you following?

Lazy Caturday Reads

Good Morning!!

The big nor’easter moving up the East Coast appears to be behaving as predicted. We are still under a blizzard warning and the snow is coming down steadily outside my windows. In fact, I can’t see much but white out there. The Boston Globe: Blizzard warning in effect for much of Eastern Mass., all of R.I., with predicted totals of up to two feet.