Finally Friday Reads: Republicans Breaking Bad Edition

Posted: October 7, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , | 16 Comments

The Steer (The Bull), Franz Marc, 1911

Good Day Sky Dancers!

There is so much abnormality to the behavior of the Republican Party these days that it’s difficult to characterize the news that comes to light about them.  We keep getting headlines that are shocking but not surprising.  They all are off in the deep end. Take this headline from The Guardian: “US justice department says Trump didn’t turn over all documents.  Investigators are skeptical Trump has been fully cooperative in efforts to recover documents, reports says, which will force difficult choice on next steps.”  BB has covered the story in detail, and every day there’s something new.

The US Department of Justice has told lawyers for Donald Trump it thinks he has not handed back all the documents he took from the White House, the New York Times reported.

The paper said Jay Bratt, the DoJ head of counterintelligence operations, communicated with lawyers for Trump “in recent weeks”.

The news, the Times said, is “the most concrete indication yet that investigators remain skeptical that Mr Trump has been fully cooperative in their efforts to recover documents … supposed to have [been] turned over to the National Archives at the end of his term”.

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, said the news “looks like a major step toward an indictment of Trump by DoJ for obstruction of justice”.

Head of a Dog, Edvard Munch, 1930

The Herschel Walker stories just get juicier by the day.  This is accompanied by the characteristic hypocrisy of White Evangelicals who simply do not care about his obvious brain damage, moral deficiencies, and lack of intellect.  This is from The Washington Post: “GOP crisis in Herschel Walker race was nearly two years in the making. In Georgia, Republicans are stuck with a problematic Senate candidate they saw coming but decided they couldn’t stop”

In early 2021, as football star Herschel Walker considered running for Senate, he approached some of Georgia’s top Republican operatives about advising his campaign. The operatives were warned about political vulnerabilities in Walker’s past — including allegations of violence against women — that were openly discussed in the state’s political circles, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Walker’s reaction to being confronted with the allegations was also troubling, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. When the consultants would ask the candidate about incidents even in the public record, he would often get simultaneously defensive and aggressive, accusing the questioner of being a Democratic plant or ally of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the minority leader.

Those consultants passed on working with Walker, but he pressed ahead with his campaign. After all, Walker’s overwhelming name recognition in Georgia as a Heisman Trophy-winning football star and backing from former president Donald Trump instantly made him so formidable that state and national Republican leaders didn’t mount a serious challenge in the primary, despite concerns about Walker’s baggage.

Now, less than five weeks before the midterm elections, they’re stuck with him as those liabilities threaten to dominate the news and derail his campaign in a state widely viewed as a must-win for Republicans to retake the Senate.

This is a party that no longer has a platform. Their only agenda appears to be power at any cost to ensure anyone who is not a white male christianist is disenfranchised from their constitutional rights and standing.  The other is ensuring taxes are only paid by poor people.  They’re empowered by dark money and now a weird cult of brown-shirt militias ready and willing to commit violence to the cause of White Nationalism and patriarchy. The Oath Keepers Trial is just surreal.  I’m not sure the press quite knows how to report it.

I am looking forward to Rachel Maddow’s latest podcast, “Ultra” which outlines the last time we had to deal with NAZIs in our midst.

Sitting members of Congress aiding and abetting a plot to overthrow the government. Insurrectionists criminally charged with plotting to end American democracy for good. Justice Department prosecutors under crushing political pressure. Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra is the all-but-forgotten true story of good, old-fashioned American extremism getting supercharged by proximity to power. When extremist elected officials get caught plotting against America with the violent ultra right, this is the story of the lengths they will go to… to cover their tracks. Follow now and join Rachel Maddow for the first two episodes on October 10th.

You may read the interview with her at Rolling Stone.  “The MSNBC host’s eight-part series explores what the prosecution of American fascists in the WW II era can teach us about accountability for Jan. 6”.  So, I’m hoping that puts all this into perspective.  The article is from Maddow Blog.

As part of the proceedings, federal prosecutors revealed a recording in which Rhodes said just days after the Jan. 6 attack that his “only regret” about that day is that members of his pro-Trump paramilitary group didn’t bring rifles.

In other words, the assault on the U.S. Capitol, according to the Oath Keepers founder, wasn’t quite violent enough.

Part of what makes these developments striking is the seriousness of the details. Prosecutors have alleged that Rhodes and his confederates conspired to use force to stop the peaceful transfer of power. To that end, they not only breached the Capitol, they also stashed a significant number of weapons, including grenades, just outside of D.C. in preparation for an escalated offensive.

Federal law enforcement has also alleged that it believes Oath Keepers members intended to launch a second armed attack intended to prevent President Joe Biden from taking office.

But as Rachel noted on last night’s show, there’s also a historical dimension to this: Rhodes’ case is the largest sedition trial in the United States since World War II. Charges like these are incredibly uncommon — Americans rarely try to overthrow their own government — and hard to prove.

That said, as a New York Times report explained, “Because of the nature of the Oath Keepers’ defense — and because of the government’s wealth of evidence — the trial is less likely to focus on disputes over what the group did in the days and weeks leading up to Jan. 6 than it is to hinge on the question of why they did it.”

The White Cat, Pierre Bonnard, 1894

It is difficult for me to understand the thirst for violence, insurrection, and overall destruction of our American Democracy.  It just keeps popping up. There are some already arguing that we’re in a second civil war.   This is from the New York Times: “After Mar-a-Lago Search, Talk of ‘Civil War’ Is Flaring Online.”  How stupid are these people?

Soon after the F.B.I. searched Donald J. Trump’s home in Florida for classified documents, online researchers zeroed in on a worrying trend.

Posts on Twitter that mentioned “civil war” had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours as Mr. Trump’s supporters blasted the action as a provocation. Similar spikes followed, including on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Parler, Gab and Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform. Mentions of the phrase more than doubled on radio programs and podcasts, as measured by Critical Mention, a media-tracking firm.

Posts mentioning “civil war” jumped again a few weeks later, after President Biden branded Mr. Trump and “MAGA Republicans” a threat to “the very foundations of our republic” in a speech on democracy in Philadelphia.

Now experts are bracing for renewed discussions of civil war, as the Nov. 8 midterm elections approach and political talk grows more urgent and heated.

More than a century and a half after the actual Civil War, the deadliest war in U.S. history, “civil war” references have become increasingly commonplace on the right. While in many cases the term is used only loosely — shorthand for the nation’s intensifying partisan divisions — observers note that the phrase, for some, is far more than a metaphor.

Polling, social media studies and a rise in threats suggest that a growing number of Americans are anticipating, or even welcoming, the possibility of sustained political violence, researchers studying extremism say. What was once the subject of serious discussion only on the political periphery has migrated closer to the mainstream.

But while that trend is clear, there is far less agreement among experts about what it means.

Some elements of the far right view it literally: a call for an organized battle for control of the government. Others envision something akin to a drawn-out insurgency, punctuated with eruptions of political violence, such as the attack on the F.B.I.’s Cincinnati field office in August. A third group describes the country as entering a “cold” civil war, manifested by intractable polarization and mistrust, rather than a “hot” war with conflict.

Given the idiots we see coming to politics as Trumpists, I think it’s a literal call to battle.  Let’s not forget the case against the Proud Boys.

These groups go after the military, veterans, and police officers.  This is from Empty Wheel.

While the Oath Keepers, like the Proud Boys, intentionally recruit law enforcement, the Proud Boys have been better at co-opting cops. Around five of the charged Proud Boys were former or still cops when charged. Tarrio had been a formal informant during a prior criminal prosecution. And several other members of the Proud Boys, including Joe Biggs, provided information to the FBI about what they claimed were Antifa.

Biggs described his own relationship with the FBI this way:

By late 2018, Biggs also started to get “cautionary” phone calls from FBI agents located in Jacksonville and Daytona Beach inquiring about what Biggs meant by something politically or culturally provocative he had said on the air or on social media concerning a national issue, political parties, the Proud Boys, Antifa or other groups. Biggs regularly satisfied FBI personnel with his answers. He also stayed in touch with a number of FBI agents in and out of Florida. In late July 2020, an FBI Special Agent out of the Daytona Beach area telephoned Biggs and asked Biggs to meet with him and another FBI agent at a local restaurant. Biggs agreed. Biggs learned after he travelled to the restaurant that the purpose of the meeting was to determine if Biggs could share information about Antifa networks operating in Florida and elsewhere. They wanted to know what Biggs was “seeing on the ground.” Biggs did have information about Antifa in Florida and Antifa networks in other parts of the United States. He agreed to share the information. The three met for approximately two hours. After the meeting, Biggs stayed in touch with the agent who had called him originally to set up the meeting. He answered follow-up questions in a series of several phone calls over the next few weeks. They spoke often.

This is the same office where an FBI Agent, in August, refused to participate in the arrest of militia-associated men who planned to bring weapons to January 6. The agent then ran to Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, bitching, after his clearance was suspended because he didn’t like the way FBI was running domestic terrorism investigations.

The single FBI informant known to have been present on January 6 appears not to have told his handlers about a meeting he was at the night before where using violence was discussed. And so DOJ has given two members of the Kansas City Proud Boy cell who were with him — Ryan Ashlock and Louis Colon — unbelievably sweet plea deals, I suspect to sustain the rest of the cases against the Proud Boys.

Both Tarrio and Biggs have made specific requests for their own communications with law enforcement — in Tarrio’s case, he claims it is Brady material. That is, they plan to argue they couldn’t be guilty of plotting against the government because they’ve been so chummy with often right wing authoritarian cops in the past.

Notice one of the rogue FBI agents ran to two Republican congressmen.  We haven’t even begun to hear about the complicity of Republican elected officials in the January 6th insurrection, the fake electors scheme, and their relationships to militias and other kook cults.

The Tabby, Henri Rousseau
Original Title: Le Chat Tigre

Let’s dive into the Politico story.  These guys do scare me because think of how many angry white men basically decide to take out innocent women and children when they finally explode.  Elmer’s wife and kids have a right to be frightened.

Bertino, who previously testified to the Jan. 6 select committee, was involved in key conversations and chats with other members of the group, including national chair Enrique Tarrio and other leaders facing seditious conspiracy charges in the weeks before Jan. 6.

Tarrio is set to go on trial in December, along with Proud Boys Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola, who was the first member of the Jan. 6 mob to breach the Capitol when he shattered a Senate-wing window with a police riot shield.

Prosecutors say Tarrio and his allies developed a plan to besiege the Capitol, relying on — and in fact organizing and spurring on — members of the mob to help break through police lines and get inside the Capitol. It was part of an effort that prosecutors say was intended to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

Kelly accepted Bertino’s plea after asking Bertino a series of standard questions to ensure, under oath, that Bertino entered it voluntarily and without being threatened or coerced.

The seditious conspiracy charges against the Proud Boys leaders are the gravest leveled by the Justice Department against any of the more than 850 defendants charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Bertino was briefly featured during video testimony aired by the Jan. 6 select committee during its first public hearing in June. He described a surge in Proud Boys membership after then-President Donald Trump urged the group to “stand back and stand by” during a debate against Joe Biden.

“Would you say that Proud Boys numbers increased after the stand back, stand by comment?” an investigator asked.

“Exponentially. I’d say tripled probably,” Bertino replied.

Several leaders of the far-right Oath Keepers, including founder Stewart Rhodes, are currently on trial for seditious conspiracy as well, just down the hall from where Bertino entered his plea. Prosecutors say they spent the weeks after Election Day fomenting an “armed rebellion” against the government and seizing on the opportunity created by the Jan. 6 mob to disrupt the transfer of power.

Head of a Dog, Edouard Manet,1876

These cases are very interesting.  As I said, I’m looking forward to listening to Maddow’s podcast.  I was a history major at university, and I’d never heard this story.  I hope we can get some insight into what happens as we move deeper into holding Trump and his droogies accountable.

Don’t forget!  Trump asked the Supreme Court to intervene in his documents case, which is sitting on Uncle Clarence Thomas’ desk.  What do you want to bet Ginnie’s fingerprints are all over it now?  Is it a Trump stall play?  A Hail Mary? All I know is the Supreme Court and Judge Loose Cannon have gone to the dogs now.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Mostly Monday Reads

Posted: October 3, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , | 14 Comments

Kristal and her dog, Temple

Good Day Sky Dancers!

I’m sorry I’m a little late today!  I had to wake up early and get Kristal uptown.  I don’t even fake being a morning person anymore and returned to bed when I got home. Kristal’s there to get spayed. If you’d like to help out a great organization helping me with her, please send any donations to Trap Dat Cat. Trap Dat Cat is a 501c3 Nonprofit TNR and Rescue group in New Orleans.  Feral Cat colonies are supported by the city here.. This excellent group run by the fabulous Miss Nita helps ensure they’re healthy and fixed!

Many states have entirely cut off access to abortion services due to religious activists on the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. I was reminded today as I drove by our Planned Parenthood uptown, wondering which of our rights they’ll cut off next. This good news comes from NPR. “Planned Parenthood mobile clinic will take abortion to red-state borders.”

With a growing number of patients in states that now prohibit abortion traveling for the procedure, Planned Parenthood says it will soon open its first mobile abortion clinic in the country, in southern Illinois.

“Our goal is to reduce the hundreds of miles that people are having to travel now in order to access care…and meet them where they are,” said Yamelsie Rodriguez, President of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, said in an interview with NPR.

The mobile clinic will begin offering consultations and dispensing abortion pills later this year. It will operate within Illinois, where abortion remains legal, but will be able to travel closer to neighboring states’ borders, reducing the distance many patients travel for the procedure.

“It gives us a lot of flexibility about where to be,” Rodriguez said.

Temple and Kristal are inseparable come naptime. July 1, 2022

I’m still excited about the project that will put Clinic Ships in the Gulf since the surrounding states are hostile to medical science, women, and human development knowledge.

The pillow guy has lost an appeal to the Supreme Court in his defamation case.  This is from NBC News. “Supreme Court rejects Trump ally Mike Lindell’s appeal in 2020 election lawsuit.”The MyPillow CEO is fighting a defamation lawsuit filed by the voting machine company Dominion over his election conspiracy theories.”  Tough toenails, freak!

The Supreme Court on Mondayrejected MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s bid to fend off a defamation lawsuit the voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems filed over his far-fetched claims about the 2020 presidential election.

The justices’ decision not to hear the case means a federal judge’s ruling in August 2021 that allowed the lawsuit to move forward remains in place.

Lindell, a prominent TV salesman for the pillows his company makes, is an outspoken supporter of former President Donald Trump.

Dominion sued Lindell and MyPillow in February 2021, claiming $1.3 billion in damages and alleging that Lindell purposely pushed the “big lie” that Trump won the 2020 election. Lindell repeatedly echoed baseless claims that Dominion’s machines manipulated vote counts to ensure that Joe Biden defeated Trump. The claims have been widely debunked. In the lawsuit, Dominion argues that Lindell knew his claims were false, while Lindell’s lawyers say he genuinely believes them.

BB told me about this interview with former Capitol Officer and insurrection assault victim Michael Fenone at Rolling Stone. This is written by Alex Morris. “Michael Fanone Is Not Your Fucking Hero. He almost lost his life defending the Capitol on Jan. 6. Now, he’s a #resistance star — and he hates it.” His book is entitled “Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul.” 

It’s behind a paywall. But, things slip to other places.  Here’s something from The Guardian: “Former DC police officer Michael Fanone blasts Kevin McCarthy as a ‘f**king weasel b***h’. The former Washington Metropolitan police officer unloaded on Republicans in an interview with Rolling Stone.”  Just so you know, he voted from Trump in 2016.  That didn’t work out so well for him.

Mr Fanone became famous after he responded to a call to help defend the US Capitol on 6 January of last year and was tazed by supporters of former president Donald Trump, which led to him having a heart attack. His book Hold the Line will be released next week on 11 October.In a new profile for Rolling Stone, he criticises the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives for lying his way through his meeting with Mr Fanone and the mother of Officer Brian Sicknick, who died after the riot.

“I think at night, when the lights are turned off, Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan have some pretty choice words to say about the fact that they have to hang on Kevin McCarthy’s wall,” he said. “They did some f**king above-average things. And they’ve got to adorn the wall of this f**king weasel b***h named Kevin McCarthy, with his fake f**king spray-on tan, whose f**king claim to fame, at least in my eyes, is the fact that he amassed a collection of Donald Trump’s favorite-flavored Starburst, put them in a Mason jar, and presented them to f**king Donald Trump. What the f**k, dude?”

Mr Fanone said he is writing the book because he is broke.

“I’m pretty sure that’s why people do things like this,” he said. “I said the things that I said for free and f**king destroyed my career, made my job untenable, and then tried to make hard lemonade out of lemons.”

He also noted that back in 2016, he voted for the former president.

“I’m cognizant of the fact that I talk like a f**king redneck, I wear camo-colored Crocs, I drive a f**king truck with camo seats, I like guns, I go hunting, I f**king drink beer from a can some places that I shouldn’t drink beer from a can at, and I’m kind of a caricature of what people think of when they think of a Trump-supporting hillbilly,” he said.

Mr McCarthy wasn’t the only target of Mr Fanone’s harsh words.

The former officer also called out notable GOP faces Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley.

Kristal on my desk chair, June 26, 2022

From The Washington Post: “FBI investigating menacing calls to ex-D.C. police officer Michael Fanone. Fanone, who was seriously injured defending the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has been an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump.”

Federal authorities are investigating menacing phone calls and other messages directed at Michael Fanone, a former D.C. police officer who was seriously hurt defending the Capitol from rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, and has since become an outspoken critic of former president Donald Trump, according to Fanone and another person familiar with the matter.

Fanone said a prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. told him Thursday that the FBI had launched an inquiry into the communications he received, after he forwarded a recording of call in which someone told him: “The world would be a better place if you were hit by a fast moving bus tomorrow.”

That call came hours after Fanone, who was beaten and shocked with a stun device until he lost consciousness and suffered a heart attack during the Jan. 6 riot, testified at a sentencing hearing for one his attackers Tuesday in federal court. A judge sentenced Fanone’s assailant to seven years and two months in prison after Fanone told the man, “I hope you suffer.”

Meanwhile, Florida Man is in the House and all in for killing his constituents in Florida’s Panhandle.

 

 

Kristal’s June calendar shot on June 4, 2022

This is from Newsweek‘s Anne Skinner: “Matt Gaetz Votes Against Disaster Relief Days After Hurricane Ian Hits.”

Just days after Hurricane Ian ravaged his home state, Representative Matt Gaetz was one of many Republicans to vote against a stopgap measure that would continue funding the government and provide billions of dollars in extra disaster assistanceThe House of Representatives approved a continuing resolution on Friday, giving the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) the ability to spend through the Disaster Relief Fund, freeing up $15 million more in aid for disaster relief. Only 10 Republicans voted for the measure, two days after a Category 4 hurricane barreled through Florida, killing dozens and causing billions in economic damage.

Gaetz indicated he’d vote against funding to benefit government agencies earlier this week. He joined dozens of his colleagues in signing a letter that they would “do what is necessary” to prevent additional funding for the Biden administration.

Temple and Kristal immediately adopted each other as besties. Here she is on May 24, 2022.

A Monmounth University poll shows that it’s still “the economy, stupid” with many voters.  “Economic Issues Outweigh Concerns About Rights in Midterm Vote.”

Economic issues are a bigger factor in this year’s midterm elections than concerns about rights and democracy, according to the latest Monmouth (“Mon-muth”) University Poll. Democrats prioritize a fairly wide range of issues from climate change to abortion, while Republicans focus on a more limited set including inflation, crime, and immigration. Independents, though, tend to hone in on one issue above all: rising prices. Further dampening Democrats’ prospects are the poor numbers President Joe Biden gets for his performance on the issues most important to independents.

Republicans have made slight gains in the public’s preference for party control of Congress since the summer. Currently, 36% of Americans say they want the GOP in charge and another 11% have no initial preference but lean toward Republican control. Democratic control is preferred by 34% with another 10% leaning toward the Democrats. The combined 47% who choose Republican control is up from 43% in August, while the 44% support level for Democratic control is down from 50%.

A majority (54%) of Americans say it is very important to have their preferred party in control of Congress. This control importance metric is slightly higher among those who want Republicans (62%) than those who want Democrats (58%) leading Congress, which is a flip of the partisan result for this question in last month’s poll. Similarly, those who want Republican leadership (65%) are somewhat more likely than those who want Democrats in charge (58%) to say they are extremely motivated to vote this year.

Kristal sleeps soundly on what is likely close to her one month birthday and her 5th day at the kathouse. It’s hard work waking everyone up every several hours for your bottle of kitten formula!

Writers Holly Otterbein and Jessica Piper of Politico assert “Weak rural turnout could hurt GOP in November. A POLITICO analysis of turnout in this year’s special elections suggests that since Dobbs, rural voters are less motivated to cast ballots than others.”

The Democratic Party’s newest star has an unlikely group to thank for his upset victory: rural voters.

Rep. Pat Ryan prevailed in a close race over his Republican opponent in an August special election in upstate New York in part because rural voters came out to the polls at lower rates than voters in more populated places in his bellwether congressional district.

The race in New York’s 19th District wasn’t unique. A POLITICO analysis of turnout data before and after Roe v. Wade was struck down in June shows that voters in rural counties were less motivated to cast ballots than those in more Democratic-leaning suburbs and cities after the Supreme Court decision. Though special elections are not a crystal ball, that could spell potential trouble for the GOP if the trend continues to the midterms in November, because rural voters, who overwhelmingly supported former President Donald Trump, are a key constituency for Republican candidates.

“Republicans are not as energized as they want or expected, and Democrats are very energized right now,” said Chris Walsh, Ryan’s campaign manager.

In four congressional special elections that have been held since June to fill vacant House seats — in Nebraska, Minnesota and New York — the portion of registered voters who cast ballots averaged 27 percent in suburban and urban counties, compared to 22 percent in rural counties, according to the analysis. Ahead of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe, those three groups had turnout numbers similar to each other.

Not coincidentally, in each of the contests that saw lower rural turnout, Democratic candidates overperformed compared to President Joe Biden’s 2020 results. Democrats’ higher turnout numbers have given the party hope that voter anger over the elimination of abortion rights would turn an anticipated red wave in the midterms into more a ripple.

Kristal on the morning of May 12. This is the day after she was found flea-ridden, anemic, and dehydrated on the Elysian Fields neutral ground. She was a tiny little miracle!

Let’s hope this trend continues!

Anyway, that’s it for me! I hope you have a good week and I’ll let you know when Kristal gets home to us!  Keely, once the baby cat, is already searching for her wrestling and chasing mate!

Take care!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

 

 

Finally Friday Reads: Professional Cult Member and wife of Supreme Sex Pest Speaks to the J6 Committee

Posted: September 30, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , , | 15 Comments

Good Morning Sky Dancers! 

Must be nice to be rich and powerful enough to live in your own private reality and be allowed on public streets. Ginnie Thomas stuck to her QAnon vision of life while testifying to the January 6 Committee yesterday. We don’t have much information on it, but it sounds delusional.  This is from the New York Times: “Ginni Thomas Denies Discussing Election Subversion Efforts With Her Husband. In a closed-door interview with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, Ms. Thomas reiterated her false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald J. Trump.”  I’m just wondering how many committee members were snickering during these statements. The analysis is by Luke Broadwater and Stephanie Lai.

In a statement she read at the beginning of her testimony, Ms. Thomas denied having discussed her postelection activities with her husband.

In her statement, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Ms. Thomas called it “an ironclad rule” that she and Justice Thomas never speak about cases pending before the Supreme Court. “It is laughable for anyone who knows my husband to think I could influence his jurisprudence — the man is independent and stubborn, with strong character traits of independence and integrity,” she added.

The interview ended months of negotiations between the committee and Ms. Thomas over her testimony. The committee’s investigators had grown particularly interested in her communications with John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who was in close contact with Mr. Trump and wrote a memo that Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have likened to a blueprint for a coup.

“At this point, we’re glad she came,” Mr. Thompson said.

After Ms. Thomas’s appearance on Thursday, her lawyer Mark Paoletta said she had been “happy to cooperate with the committee to clear up the misconceptions about her activities surrounding the 2020 elections.”

“She answered all the committee’s questions,” Mr. Paoletta said in a statement. “As she has said from the outset, Mrs. Thomas had significant concerns about fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election. And, as she told the committee, her minimal and mainstream activity focused on ensuring that reports of fraud and irregularities were investigated. Beyond that, she played no role in any events after the 2020 election results. As she wrote in a text to Mark Meadows at the time, she also condemned the violence on Jan. 6, as she abhors violence on any side of the aisle.”

I still can’t forget how unhinged those texts were to Mark Meadows, who is likely in more trouble than anyone else.  Still, I can’t believe she didn’t discuss this with her husband. I also think more will come from Thomas’ role in the fake electors’ scheme.

The GOP is pouring lots of money into primaries where gerrymandering and the pattern of the out-party in midterms should be helping.  But is it?  Nate Cohn of the New York Times argues that structurally, the Republicans have the momentum. But can this hold given the number of extremists on the ballots and the ongoing legal troubles of its defacto lead, Orange Caligula? Cohn offers this analysis: “Gerrymandering Isn’t Giving Republicans the Advantage You Might Expect. Yes, the G.O.P. has a structural edge in the House, but it isn’t anything near insurmountable for Democrats.”

Now, Mr. Biden won the national vote by 4.5 percentage points, so even a map that’s biased toward Republicans might still have more Biden districts than Trump districts. But the simple fact that Mr. Biden won the most districts is a clear enough indication that the Republican advantage in the House isn’t totally insurmountable.

To account for Mr. Biden’s victory in 2020, a somewhat better — though more complex — measure is needed: a comparison between how districts voted and how the nation as a whole voted. If Mr. Biden won a district by more than he did nationally, it might be said to be a district where Democrats have the advantage if the national vote is tied. On a perfectly fair map, half the districts would lean toward Democrats with respect to the nation, while half would vote for Mr. Trump or vote for Mr. Biden by less than 4.5 points. And on this perfectly fair map, the district right in the middle — the median district — would have voted for Mr. Biden by 4.5 points, just like the nation.

Theo Van Rysselberghe, Bathers On The Rocks, 1920

Phillip Bump has one explanation: “A new reminder that candidate quality matters.”  This opinion is in the Washington Post. The Trumpiest candidates are winning many Republican Primaries and are a way to the right and as delusional as Ginnie Thomas.

What’s apparent at this point, just over a month before voting ends in the 2022 midterm elections, is that nearly any national outcome is possible. FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of the state of play figures there’s about a 3 in 10 chance that Republicans win the House and Senate, about a 3 in 10 chance that the Democrats win both, and about a 4 in 10 chance that the parties split the two (Democrats, Senate; Republicans, House).

For all of the elevation of the importance of these elections, the field appears to remain fairly even. Or, perhaps, it’s because of the elevation of importance that it does. There are two reasons that a tug-of-war rope remains over the center point: No one is pulling at all, or both sides are pulling very hard.

This big-picture perspective, though, blurs the fact that overall patterns are dependent on individual races. And a spate of new polls conducted for Fox News by its bipartisan polling team shows, in essence, the importance of picking viable candidates in the first place.

The new polls evaluate the state of play in four states that are electing both governors and senators this year: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The widest overall margin is in the Pennsylvania governor’s race, where Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) leads state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R) by 11 points. The closest race is in Wisconsin, where Gov. Tony Evers (D) earns the same level of support as his challenger, businessman Tim Michels (R). Generally, the picture is consistent: These races are too close to be able to identify a clear leader.

‘The Fragrance of a Bath’ (1930) by Itō Shinsui.

As I mentioned earlier, there’s a bump in GOP Fundraising, from GOP  Billionaires.  This is from CNBC: “GOP billionaire donors direct cash to Senate leaders as Trump candidates lag Dems in fundraising.”

Republican megadonors want the GOP to take back the Senate, but they don’t have confidence that some of former President Donald Trump’s top picks can catapult their party to a victory in November.

Billionaire financiers Paul Singer, Dan Loeb and Larry Ellison have so far avoided donating directly to some or all of Trump’s staunchest allies running for Senate in the midterms: J.D. Vance in Ohio, Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Adam Laxalt in Nevada and Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, according to Federal Election Commission records and people familiar with the billionaires’ donations.

All of those candidates have been endorsed by Trump. And many of them have previously sided with the former president on the false claims that the 2020 presidential election had widespread voter fraud — an accusation that’s been debunked by Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, federal courts and several other top Republicans who served in Trump’s administration.

One GOP fundraiser said, “They would be lighting their money on fire if they got totally swayed by these candidates.” That strategist is advising clients to, instead, give to the super PAC closely aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — the Senate Leadership Fund — because “they have the best polls and they won’t sink money into races they know they can’t win.” The super PAC is run by Steven Law, McConnell’s former chief of staff.

Ad tracker AdImpact last week said that the Senate Leadership Fund has canceled the rest of its TV bookings in Arizona, a state where the campaign poll tracking website FiveThirtyEight shows Masters trailing Kelly by more than seven percentage points.

We have to take care of this campaign finance issue to maintain democracy. It is just one of the Republican’s fuckery with democracy.   Citizens United may prove one of the biggest hurdles to full inclusion in our democracy plus all the voting rights shenanigans by the Courts has been even worse. We have Justice Roberts to thank for a lot of that.

And, of course, while the rest of us are losing access to voting and bodily autonomy, let’s pity the poor little boys. If you want one of David Brooks’ most whiny pieces yet, try this one: “The Crisis of Men and Boys” at the New York Times, of course.

Richard V. Reeves’s new book, “Of Boys and Men,” is a landmark, one of the most important books of the year, not only because it is a comprehensive look at the male crisis, but also because it searches for the roots of that crisis and offers solutions.

I learned a lot I didn’t know. First, boys are much more hindered by challenging environments than girls. Girls in poor neighborhoods and unstable families may be able to climb their way out. Boys are less likely to do so. In Canada, boys born into the poorest households are twice as likely to remain poor as their female counterparts. In American schools, boys’ academic performance is more influenced by family background than girls’ performance. Boys raised by single parents have lower rates of college enrollment than girls raised by single parents.

Second, policies and programs designed to promote social mobility often work for women, but not men. Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, visited Kalamazoo, Mich., where, thanks to a donor, high school graduates get to go to many colleges in the state free. The program increased the number of women getting college degrees by 45 percent. The men’s graduation rates remained flat. Reeves lists a whole series of programs, from early childhood education to college support efforts, that produced impressive gains for women, but did not boost men.

Reeves has a series of policy proposals to address the crisis, the most controversial of which is redshirting boys — have them begin their schooling a year later than girls, because on average the prefrontal cortex and the cerebellum, which are involved in self-regulation, mature much earlier in girls than in boys.

There are many reasons men are struggling — for example, the decline in manufacturing jobs that put a high value on physical strength, and the rise of service sector jobs. But I was struck by the theme of demoralization that wafts through the book. Reeves talked to men in Kalamazoo about why women were leaping ahead. The men said that women are just more motivated, work harder, plan ahead better. Yet this is not a matter of individual responsibility. There is something in modern culture that is producing an aspiration gap.

Bathers, 1918 Pablo Picasso

I really didn’t want to include this but I think it’s important to understand just how entitled men are in this country. My experience in school was that the boys didn’t have to do much of anything but just show up. Maybe someone needs to tell them that participation trophies don’t count when you’ve got a lot of women and minorities motivated to succeed without them.

I thought I’d end with this Ed Yong article at The Atlantic about the legacy of the Covid -19 Pandemic. “All of this will happen again.”

American leaders and pundits have been trying to call an end to the pandemic since its beginning, only to be faced with new surges or variants. This mindset not only compromises the nation’s ability to manage COVID, but also leaves it vulnerable to other outbreaks. Future pandemics aren’t hypothetical; they’re inevitable and imminent. New infectious diseases have regularly emerged throughout recent decades, and climate change is quickening the pace of such events. As rising temperatures force animals to relocate, species that have never coexisted will meet, allowing the viruses within them to find new hosts—humans included. Dealing with all of this again is a matter of when, not if.

In 2018, I wrote an article in The Atlantic warning that the U.S. was not prepared for a pandemic. That diagnosis remains unchanged; if anything, I was too optimistic. America was ranked as the world’s most prepared country in 2019—and, bafflingly, again in 2021—but accounts for 16 percent of global COVID deaths despite having just 4 percent of the global population. It spends more on medical care than any other wealthy country, but its hospitals were nonetheless overwhelmed. It helped create vaccines in record time, but is 67th in the world in full vaccinations. (This trend cannot solely be attributed to political division; even the most heavily vaccinated blue state—Rhode Island—still lags behind 21 nations.) America experienced the largest life-expectancy decline of any wealthy country in 2020 and, unlike its peers, continued declining in 2021. If it had fared as well as just the average peer nation, 1.1 million people who died last year—a third of all American deaths—would still be alive.

America’s superlatively poor performance cannot solely be blamed on either the Trump or Biden administrations, although both have made egregious errors. Rather, the new coronavirus exploited the country’s many failing systems: its overstuffed prisons and understaffed nursing homes; its chronically underfunded public-health system; its reliance on convoluted supply chains and a just-in-time economy; its for-profit health-care system, whose workers were already burned out; its decades-long project of unweaving social safety nets; and its legacy of racism and segregation that had already left Black and Indigenous communities and other communities of color disproportionately burdened with health problems. Even in the pre-COVID years, the U.S. was still losing about 626,000 people more than expected for a nation of its size and resources. COVID simply toppled an edifice whose foundations were already rotten.

This, along with the Hurricane Ian experience reminded me that we’re not particularly forward-looking people anymore. I was happy to see Space Dart take out an astroid’s moon.  However, it seems to me that were more likely to be taken down by our own hubris.  Why do folks ignore climate change and still fall for developers’ promises of paradise on the beaches of Florida?  We should be looking for the next big virus while learning lessons to plan for the next.  We hurl from one emergency to the next without thinking about what in our system fails us?  Even Democracy is failing us in significant ways.  I no longer look to the Supreme Court to save us from ourselves.  They now represent the worst of our political system.

Getting Donald Trump off the Public stage is vital but the preparations for the next big trouble start with revitalizing our democratic institutions and shoring them up.  Also, getting the damn money out of politics would help too. Anyway, sorry to be Debbie Downer today.  Maybe I’m just more somber today because the heat of summer has broken. Also, I had my first training class in community organizing yesterday. I’m sitting here relationship mapping who I’m going to nag into to voting.  So, I started with my beloved community here.  Drag your ass and everyone you know to the polls!  I got granddaughters now!

This election is important. Please, get everyone you know to vote blue. A lot is at stake.

What’s on your blogging and reading list today?

 

Mostly Monday Reads: A Fascist Returns to Power in Italy and the Return of the January 6th Committee

Posted: September 26, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , | 20 Comments

Pearblossom Highway, 1986, David Hockney-

Good Day Sky Dancers!

I’ve been trying to get a handle on today’s headlines, and wow, there’s chaos afoot in the world and our country.  The New York Times has this for a headline: “U.S. Warns Russia of ‘Catastrophic Consequences’ if It Uses Nuclear Weapons.” That’s nothing I thought I’d see again since the Cold War was over.

Then, Italy’s voters elected one of those bleach-blonde fascists we see so much these days on Fox News and Republican Conventions. For Eyes on the Right, Damon Linker analyzes the election results for us: ” What just happened in Italy? Much the same as what’s happened in France, Great Britain, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, and the U.S.”

What happened in yesterday’s election in Italy?

At the purely factual level, a coalition of right-wing and center-right parties won big in an election trigged by the collapse of a government led by the center-left Mario Draghi.

Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli D’Italia (Brothers of Italy) was the biggest vote winner. The Fratelli were founded in 2012 as a successor to the post-fascist MSI (Italian Social Movement), which was itself founded in 1946 by Giorgio Almirante, who served as a minister under Mussolini. The other major members of the coalition are Matteo Salvini’s Lega and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. A fourth party called Noi Moderati (really a coalition of small, centrist parties) is also expected to join a right-leaning government. At the time of this writing, with about half of the votes counted, it looks like the right will take something in the range of 60 percent of the seats in both the lower and upper houses of the legislature while winning a slightly smaller share of the vote than polls had predicted. (With Salvini’s Lega, especially, under-performing.)

The reality is somewhat less ominous than one might conclude from hearing we’re living through “the return of fascism in Italy.” The incoming government is certainly Italy’s most right-wing since World War II. But it’s also the case that the members of the victorious coalition have much more in common with other right-leaning politicians and parties around the contemporary world than they do with the politics of the 1930s.

I’m not confident that reassures me especially given the Italian voter turnout.  This is from The New York Times: “Giorgia Meloni’s Hard-Right Party Leads in Italy’s Voting. Early results suggest that she could be Italy’s next prime minister, the first woman to hold the position and the first with post-Fascist roots. It will still be weeks before a new government is formed.” One-third of Italian voters sat out the election.

She grew up with a single mother in a working-class area of Rome, and being a woman, and mother, has been central to her political identity.

Being a woman has also distinguished her, and marked a major shift, from her coalition partners, especially Mr. Berlusconi, the subject of endless sex scandals.

But Ms. Meloni, Mr. Berlusconi and Mr. Salvini share a hard-right vision for the country. Ms. Meloni has called for a naval blockade against migrants and spread fears about a “great replacement” of native Italians. The three share populist proposals for deep tax cuts that economists fear would inflate Italy’s already enormous debt, and a traditionalist view of the family.

Despite the constraints of an Italian Constitution that is explicitly anti-Fascist and designed to stymie the rise of another Mussolini, many liberals are now worried that the right-wing coalition will erode the country’s norms. There was concern that if the coalition were to win two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, it would have the ability to change the Constitution to increase government powers.

On Thursday, during one of Ms. Meloni’s final rallies before the election, she exclaimed that “if the Italians give us the numbers to do it, we will.”

But the coalition, while winning 44 percent of the vote and a majority in Parliament, appeared not to hit that mark.

There seems to be a growing voter backlash against what the Trump Regime SCOTUS appointments have done to Abortion Rights.  Let’s hope we have a massive turnout for our elections in November.

Politico writer Steven Shepard reports, “Pollsters fear they’re blowing it again in 2022. Democrats seem to be doing better than expected with voters. But if the polls are wrong, they could be disappointed in November — again.”

Pollsters know they have a problem. But they aren’t sure they’ve fixed it in time for the November election.

Since Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory, pre-election polls have consistently understated support for Republican candidates, compared to the votes ultimately cast.

Once again, polls over the past two months are showing Democrats running stronger than once expected in a number of critical midterm races. It’s left some wondering whether the rosy results are setting the stage for another potential polling failure that dashes Democratic hopes of retaining control of Congress— and vindicates the GOP’s assertion that the polls are unfairly biased against them.

It’s not that pollsters haven’t tried to fix the issues that plagued them in recent elections. Whether they’re public firms conducting surveys for the media and academic instructions or private campaign consultants, they have spent the past two years tweaking their methods to avoid a 2020 repeat.

But most of the changes they have made are small. Some pollsters are hoping that since Trump isn’t running in the midterms, the problems of underestimating Republicans’ vote share will disappear with him. But others worry that Trump’s ongoing dominance of the news cycle — from the FBI seizure of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago to litigation against his businesses in New York — effectively is making him the central political figure going into Election Day.

“There’s no question that the polling errors in [20]16 and [20]20 worry the polling profession, worry me as a pollster,” said Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll in Milwaukee and a longtime survey-taker in the battleground state of Wisconsin. “The troubling part is how much of that is unique to when Donald Trump is on the ballot, versus midterms when he is not on the ballot.”

David Hockney, Pop Art Paintings 2006 -2009

Let’s hope people just turn out to say no to Trumpism.

The upcoming January 6 Committee public hearing is being overshadowed by a book and the release of information by former senior technical adviser Denver Riggleman.  Riggleman looks a bit too opportunistic for me to fully trust his rationale for doing this. This is an interview with him via CBS’ 60 minutes.

Bill Whitaker: Wait a minute: Someone in the White House was calling one of the rioters while the riot was going on?

Denver Riggleman: On January 6th, absolutely.

Bill Whitaker: And you know who both ends of that call?

Denver Riggleman: I only know one end of that call. I don’t know the White House end, which I believe is more important. But the thing is the American people need to know that there are link connections that need to be explored more.

As senior technical adviser for the January 6th committee, Denver Riggleman, a former House Republican and ex- military intelligence officer, ran a data-driven operation pursuing phone records and other digital clues tied to the attack on the Capitol.

Denver Riggleman: From my perspective, you know, being in counterterrorism, you know, if the White House, even if it’s a short call, and it’s a connected call, who is actually making that phone call?

CNN has identified the rioter and has more information on the Rigglemen story.  Many texts from Mark Meadows “reveal direct White House communications with pro-Trump operative behind plans to seize voting machines.”  Will this be part of the next public hearing?

As allies of then-President Donald Trump made a final push to overturn the election in late-December 2020, one of the key operatives behind the effort briefed then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows about his attempts to gain access to voting systems in key battleground states, starting with Arizona and Georgia, according to text messages obtained by CNN.

Phil Waldron, an early proponent of various election-related conspiracy theories, texted Meadows on December 23 that an Arizona judge had dismissed a lawsuit filed by friendly GOP lawmakers there. The suit demanded state election officials hand over voting machines and other election equipment, as part of the hunt for evidence to support Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.

In relaying the news to Meadows, Waldron said the decision would allow opponents to engage in “delay tactics” preventing Waldron and his associates from immediately accessing machines. Waldron also characterized Arizona as “our lead domino we were counting on to start the cascade,” referring to similar efforts in other states like Georgia.

David Hockney

Mark Meadows should be in some deep doo-doo over this, to use a Poppy Bushism. This analysis of the Riggleman interview comes from The Hill‘s Brad Dress. “Riggleman says Mark Meadows text messages reveal ‘roadmap to an attempted coup.’”

“The Meadows text messages show you an administration that was completely eaten up with a digital virus called QAnon conspiracy theories,” the former GOP lawmaker said. “You can look at text messages as a roadmap, but it’s also a look into the psyche of the Republican Party today.”

Before he stepped down in April, Riggleman and his team combed through phone records, emails, social media posts and text messages on behalf of the House committee.

That included 2,000 messages connected to Meadows, which Riggleman called “a roadmap to an attempted coup … of the United States.”

In those messages, Riggleman said his team traced the phone numbers of previously unidentified contacts to members of Congress and Trump allies including Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who pushed to overturn the 2020 election.

Riggleman said what “shook me was the fact that if Clarence agreed with or was even aware of his wife’s efforts, all three branches of government would be tied to the stop the steal movement.”

 

And, there’s this already.

This is from the Tweet posted above. “If Trump is charged, it should be for the worst of his crimes. ‘Seditious conspiracy’ and ‘insurrection’ are more fitting charges than ‘interfering with an official proceeding’ or ‘defrauding the U.S.’”

The significance of Jan. 6 shouldn’t be obscured by legalese before a public contending with the seduction of insurrectionist rhetoric. Charging Trump only with narrowly defined crimes could backfire, and Garland should resist, even if that’s what the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 ends up recommending. The vice chair of the committee, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), has hinted at a possible criminal referral to the Justice Department, both in hearings last month and in interviews during the course of the investigation, by highlighting two potential crimes: interfering with an official proceeding and defrauding the United States. A brief the committee filed in a legal dispute with Trump attorney John Eastman, who hatched the fake-electors scheme in the multipronged effort to overturn the election, also highlights these two offenses. Cheney has further suggested that the committee may include a referral on witness tampering, based on contact Trump had with those called to testify before the panel.

The committee may be tempted to stake out a moderate position regarding criminal charges in a misguided effort to garner public support and make the unprecedented prosecution of a former president more palatable, but the Justice Department must act independently in deciding what, or whether, to charge. To be sure, the DOJ should consider any evidence of criminality uncovered by the committee, but it should give no weight to the committee’s opinion in reaching its determination.

Restricting a federal prosecution to two rather obscure-sounding charges — and a possible third relating to the integrity of the process — would not only downplay the seriousness of Trump’s offenses but could also exacerbate the view that any such prosecution is politically motivated. After the Mar-a-Lago search, that perception took hold among Trump supporters, who accuse the FBI of acting on a technicality involving federal records, even though the bureau had a search warrant signed by a federal judge and based on a showing of probable cause that a crime had been committed. Violating the Presidential Records Act by removing or destroying government documents is not in itself in the same league as insurrection or seditious conspiracy; if, however, the records in question pertain to serious national security breaches — The Washington Post has reported that some of the documents relate to nuclear weapons — that might be a different matter.

You may continue reading that at the WAPO link.

So, I think I’m confused, dazed, and befuddled enough today trying to think all this through.  What do you think?

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Finally Friday Reads

Posted: September 23, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: campaign financing, corporate money, corruption, court rulings, executive privilege, misogyny, Republican politics, Treason and Sedition Republican Style, tRump crimes against humanity, War on Women | 22 Comments

Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, c. 1809,

Good Day Sky Dancers!

The headlines are filled with Republican Shenanigans. Holding them accountable for illegal actions appears difficult.  This highlights the difference in treatment for everyone else and white men.

The case against Rep. Matt Gaetz has now been considered too difficult to prosecute because all of the witnesses are not upstanding citizens.  What do you expect from a gang of sex traffickers of underage women?  Devlin Barret, writing for The Washington Post, states: “Career prosecutors recommend no charges for Gaetz in the sex-trafficking probe. Investigators see credibility challenges for two of the main witnesses in the probe of the congressman’s past dealings with a 17-year-old.”

Career prosecutors have recommended against charging Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) in a long-running sex-trafficking investigation — telling Justice Department superiors that a conviction is unlikely in part because of credibility questions with the two central witnesses, according to people familiar with the matter.

Senior department officials have not made a final decision on whether to charge Gaetz, but it is rare for such advice to be rejected, these people told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the deliberations. They added that it is always possible additional evidence emerges that could alter prosecutors’ understanding of the case.

Nevertheless, it is unlikely that federal authorities will charge Gaetz with a crime in an investigation that started in late 2020 and focused on his alleged involvement with a 17-year-old girlseveral years earlier. Gaetz,40, has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, saying he has never paid for sex. He has also said the only time he had sex with a 17-year-old was when he was also 17.

Chase William Merritt, Idle Hours .1894

The congressman is likely a role model for these guys.  Again, this is from The Washington Post, written by Taylor Lorenz. “The online incel movement is getting more violent and extreme, report says. The Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed more than 1 million posts showing a rise in advocacy of rape, mass killings.”

The most prominent forum for men who consider themselves involuntarily celibate or “incels” has become significantly more radicalized over the past year and a half and is seeking to normalize child rape, a new report says.

The report, by the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s new Quant Lab, is the culmination of an investigation that analyzed more than 1 million posts on the site. It found a marked spike in conversations about mass murder and growing approval of sexually assaulting prepubescent girls.

The report also says that platforms including YouTube and Google, as well as internet infrastructure companies like Cloudflare are facilitating the growth of the forum, which the report said is visited by 2.6 million people every month. “These businesses should make a principled decision to withdraw their services from sites causing such significant harm,” the report says.

“This is a novel, new violent extremist movement born in the internet age, which defies the usual characteristics of violent extremist movements that law enforcement and the intelligence community are usually used to,” said Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of CCDH, a US-based nonprofit. “Our study shows that it is organized, has a cogent ideology and has clearly concluded that raping women, killing women, and raping children is a clear part of the practice of their ideology.”

Incels blame women for their failings in life. The term originated decades ago, and while the first incel forum was founded by a woman in the mid 1990s, incel communities have since become almost exclusively male. Incel ideology has been linked to dozens of murders and assaults over the past decade, the most prominent one involving Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old self-described incel who murdered six people in a stabbing and shooting rampage in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 2014. Before killing himself, he posted a long manifesto and YouTube videos promoting incel ideology.

In March, the U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center released a report warning that anti-woman violence was a growing terrorism threat.

According to the CCDH analysis, members of the forum post about rape every 29 minutes, and more than 89 percent of posters support rape and say it’s acceptable. The CCDH analysis also found that posters on the forum are seeking to normalize child rape. More than a quarter of members of the forum have posted pedophilia keywords, the analysis found, and more than half of the members of the forum support pedophilia.

I don’t believe this is necessarily a new thing.  This is the problem with the internet.  It lets the worst of society hang together and leads to an evil gestalt.  These men gain confidence and ideas from their online cult.  Also, they can see how easy it is for certain types of men to avoid legal entanglements.

This is written by Brian Bennet.   Steal food or smoke a joint, and you wind up in jail for years. This is especially true if you’re a minority or a poor person.  Steal millions via government grants; they ignore you.  Like in sports, Colin Kaepernick and Michael Vick get demonized for their behaviors and dumped. Brett Favre steals millions for welfare recipients in Mississippi and crickets.

On Wednesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James compounded Trump’s legal woes, announcing that the state was suing Trump, his three adult children, the Trump Organization, and senior management in the company, alleging business fraud involving the value of assets to banks, insurance companies and the state tax authorities.

The sheer number of investigations and the increasingly tangled defenses his legal team is having to put on paper and argue in court amount to a stress test of Trump’s standard strategy to deny, deflect, delay, and not put anything in writing.

“I don’t think there’s any other president who was in a similar legal jeopardy” after leaving office, says Timothy Naftali, a historian at New York University and former director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. Warren Harding was investigated by his own vice president and successor, Calvin Coolidge. Nixon would have been the target of investigations for years if Gerald Ford had not pardoned him in September 1974, a month after Nixon resigned from office.

“Even Nixon pales by comparison,” says Norman Eisen, an anti-corruption expert at Brookings Institution and the former special counsel to the Democrat’s House Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2020 during Trump’s first impeachment. “Nixon just had one Watergate scandal. Trump has had a succession of them, each one more concerning than the last.”

In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is looking into how Trump pressured election officials to swing the 2020 presidential election in his direction. The House Jan. 6 Committee and the Department of Justice are both looking at what role Trump played in the lead up to the deadly attack on the Capitol Building to stop the lawful counting of electoral college votes. Federal prosecutors have an active criminal investigation into how and why Trump took thousands of government documents—many containing state secrets—to his residence at Mar-a-Lago and why he refused repeated requests to return them.

And New York’s civil lawsuit announced by James on Wednesday is on top of a separate criminal investigation out of the Manhattan District Attorneys’ Office into the Trump Organization that is set to go to trial in October.

In all of the ongoing cases, Trump is employing the tried-and-true playbook he first learned all those years ago from Cohn for staying out of prison and staying in business, according to Jennifer Taub, a professor at Western New England University School of Law who has tracked the ways that Trump had evaded accountability for decades.

Beach in Pourville, Claude Monet, 1882

This exclusive headline from CNN really is fascinating.  I imagine the move is to stop the prosecutors from being able to find and flip associates.  “Exclusive: Trump’s secret court fight to stop grand jury from getting information from his inner circle.”

Former President Donald Trump‘s attorneys are fighting a secret court battle to block a federal grand jury from gathering information from an expanding circle of close Trump aides about his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, people briefed on the matter told CNN.

The high-stakes legal dispute — which included the appearance of three attorneys representing Trump at the Washington, DC, federal courthouse on Thursday afternoon — is the most aggressive step taken by the former President to assert executive and attorney-client privileges in order to prevent some witnesses from sharing information in the criminal investigation events surrounding January 6, 2021.

The court fight over privilege, which has not been previously reported and is under seal, is a turning point for Trump’s post-presidency legal woes.

How the fight is resolved could determine whether prosecutors can tear down the firewall Trump has tried to keep around his conversations in the West Wing and with attorneys he spoke to as he sought to overturn the 2020 election and they worked to help him hold onto the presidency.

This dispute came to light as former Trump White House adviser and lawyer Eric Herschmann received a grand jury subpoena seeking testimony, the people briefed said.

Other former senior Trump White House officials, including former White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy Patrick Philbin, appeared before the grand jury in recent weeks, after negotiating specific subjects they would decline to answer question about, because of Trump’s privilege claims.

Have you ever seen anyone claim privilege this many times?  Nixon didn’t get away with it, so what’s the deal with the Trump claims?  This Trumper candidate seems pretty audacious with the lies too.  Uh, that’s not how this works JR, this is not how any of this works.

But these folks will be bankrolled!  Check out these links!

Alex Isenstadt / Politico:  Trump to unleash millions in the midterms in possible prelude to 2024

 Peter Stone / The Guardian: Alarm as Koch bankrolls dozens of election denier candidates

Former Justice Stephan Breyer warns the current Supreme Court Cartel not to take its backward-facing privilege too seriously.  This is also from CNN, and then I am done with all these bad boys.  “Breyer warns justices that some opinions could ‘bite you in the back’ in exclusive interview with CNN’s Chris Wallace.”

Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is warning his colleagues against “writing too rigidly” in their opinions, saying that such decisions could “bite you in the back” in a world that is constantly changing.

In a wide-ranging interview with CNN’s Chris Wallace on “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace,” which debuted Friday on HBOMax and airs Sunday night on CNN, Breyer also bemoaned his position in the court’s minority liberal bloc during his final year on the bench, addressed the court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and spoke about the ongoing controversy regarding Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.

Breyer said it was a “very frustrating” spot to be in as he found himself in dissent in a number of historically consequential cases where he said the majority side (conservatives — although the retired justice did not use that description) was unwilling to bend.

“You start writing too rigidly and you will see, the world will come around and bite you in the back,” Breyer said in his first televised interview since leaving the bench earlier this year. “Because you will find something you see just doesn’t work at all. And the Supreme Court, somewhat to the difference of others, has that kind of problem in spades.”

“Life is complex, life changes,” Breyer added. “And we want to maintain insofar as we can — everybody does — certain key moral political values: democracy, human rights, equality, rule of law, etc. To try to do that in an ever-changing world. If you think you can do that by writing 16 computer programs — I just disagree.

The comments from Breyer come days before the Supreme Court begins its first term without him in nearly 30 years. In the new term, the justices will consider issues including voting rights, immigration, affirmative action, environmental regulations and religious liberty — areas where the solid conservative majority can easily control the outcomes.

Okay, that’s “all I can stands and I can’t stands no more.”  (To quote my childhood hero.)

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

 

The great nations of Europe were standing on the shore.
They’d conquered what was behind them
And now they wanted more
So they looked to the mighty ocean
And took to the Western sea
The great nations of Europe in the 16th century

Hide your wives and daughters, hide the groceries too
The great nations of Europe comin’ through

 

 

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