Lazy Caturday Reads With Weird Medieval Cats

Posted: December 16, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, abortion rights, cat art, Cats, caturday, just because | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 17 Comments

ugly-cat9Good Morning!!

Two hundred and fifty years ago today, a bunch of protesters in Boston staged a demonstration in our country’s a long fight for democracy. From WCVB Boston: ‘Grand-scale’ reenactment planned for 250th anniversary of Boston Tea Party.

The 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, a pivotal event on the road to the American Revolution, will be marked with a series of events in the city on Saturday, culminating in a reenactment of the destruction of the tea.

On Dec. 16, 2023, the Sons of Liberty stormed aboard the brig Beaver and ship Eleanor to destroy wooden chests of East India Company tea. They dumped more than 300 crates of tea into Boston Harbor to protest taxes imposed on the colonies, who did not have representation in Parliament.

Two-and-a-half centuries after that famous act of defiance, reenactors plan to recreate the historic event starting at 8 p.m. Saturday. Members of the public are invited to the Harborwalk at 510 Atlantic Ave. to witness the reenactment.

“When history asked Boston in 1773 if we were willing to do what it takes to defend our liberties, we took tea leaves for ink and made the ocean our page,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said.

Earlier Saturday, a series of other events are planned:

  1. 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.: An outdoor screening at Faneuil Hall plaza of “Faneuil Hall and the Boston Tea Party: A protest in principle. A retrospective on revolution.” Free tickets to this event are sold out.
  2. 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.: Reenactors portraying citizens of colonial Boston will present news of the tea crisis at Downtown Crossing, Reader’s Plaza at Milk St. and Washington St.
  3. 6:15 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.: Reenactors will recreate a vigorous debate inside Old South Meeting House, which hosted several meetings about the tea crisis, including the final meeting before Samuel Adams gave the signal that started the Boston Tea Party. Tickets for this event are sold out.
  4. 7:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.: A fife and drum corps will lead a rolling rally from Old South Meeting House to the Harborwalk for the tea party reenactment.

From The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board: Editorial: The Boston Tea Party 250 years later, and we’re still fighting for democracy.

In the 250 years since members of the Sons of Liberty boarded ships in Boston Harbor to dump their cargo of imported tea overboard — on Dec. 16, 1773 — the right to protest over inadequate representation has been a central liberty of Americans.

There was already broad agreement in 18th century Britain and its American colonies that taxation without representation violated a supposedly free person’s rights.

ugly-cat6But the British government had a far more limited view of what constitutes actual representation than the Colonists did. Parliament asserted that it represented the people in Britain’s American colonies even if they had no role in electing it.

After the Sons of Liberty action, Americans began to feel differently. A mercantile protest against tax breaks and corporate welfare for a private but influential monopoly (the British East India Co.) became a blow against the entire panoply of legislation and taxation adopted to coerce loyalty to the crown and Parliament.

The principle of no taxation without representation became increasingly about the definition of representation.

In the ensuing two and a half centuries, the American republic has moved in fits and starts toward perfecting democratic representation. It has had a very long way to go. Enslaved Africans and their descendants, Native Americans on reservations and women were represented in government in name only until recently, without voting power, the same way British Parliament once claimed to represent people who had no ability to say “yes” or “no” to their supposed delegates. In a sense, American democracy did not actually come into being until 1965, when the Voting Rights Act finally guaranteed Black voters equal rights to elect their government officials.

The fight isn’t over. Court rulings have permitted racial and partisan gerrymandering that undermine the Voting Rights Act and weaken the principle of one-person, one-vote — itself a fairly recent principle in American democracy. Residents of the District of Columbia will tell you, accurately, that they are taxed without representation. In many states, people who have served time for felonies cannot regain their right to vote, at least not without re-enfranchisement procedures so cumbersome as to be practically impossible….

In observing the semiquincentennial of the Boston Tea Party, it’s important to recall that although it began as an anti-tax protest, it was ultimately about the true meaning of representative government. The people of Boston in 1773 were unwilling to support a government in which they had no say. The Tea Party’s proper legacy is the continuing fight for fuller, more representative voting rights.

If you’d like a longer read about the Boston Tea Party, the long struggle for democracy in the U.S. and the unique dangers to liberty we face today, check out this interesting piece in The New York Times by Jennifer Schluessler: The Boston Tea Party Turns 250 and Raises 21st-Century Questions.

Yesterday was a very bad day for Rudy Giuliani. Eileen Sullivan at The New York Times: Jury Orders Giuliani to Pay $148 Million to Election Workers He Defamed.

A jury on Friday ordered Rudolph W. Giuliani to pay $148 million to two former Georgia election workers who said he had destroyed their reputations with lies that they tried to steal the 2020 election from Donald J. Trump.

Judge Beryl A. Howell of the Federal District Court in Washington had already ruled that Mr. Giuliani had defamed the two workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. The jury had been asked to decide only on the amount of the damages.

ugly-cat15The jury awarded Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss a combined $75 million in punitive damages. It also ordered Mr. Giuliani to pay compensatory damages of $16.2 million to Ms. Freeman and $16.9 million to Ms. Moss, as well as $20 million to each of them for emotional suffering.

Mr. Giuliani, who helped lead Mr. Trump’s effort to remain in office after his defeat in the 2020 election but has endured a string of legal and financial setbacks since then, was defiant after the proceeding.

“I don’t regret a damn thing,” he said outside the courthouse, suggesting that he would appeal and that he stood by his assertions about the two women.

He said that the torrent of attacks and threats the women received from Trump supporters were “abominable” and “deplorable,” but that he was not responsible for them.

His lawyer, Joseph Sibley IV, had also argued that Mr. Giuliani, the former New York mayor and federal prosecutor, should not be held responsible for abuse directed to Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss by others.

Mr. Sibley had warned that an award of the scale being sought by the women would be the civil equivalent of the death penalty for his client. Outside the courthouse on Friday, Mr. Giuliani called the amount “absurd.”

Break out the tiny violin. A bit more:

Over hours of emotional testimony during the civil trial in Washington, Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss described how their lives had been completely upended after Dec. 3, 2020, when Mr. Giuliani first suggested that they had engaged in election fraud to tilt the result against Mr. Trump in Georgia, a critical swing state.

The women, who are Black and are mother and daughter, were soon flooded with expletive-laden phone calls and messages, threats, and racist attacks, they testified. People said they should be hanged for treason or lynched; others told them they fantasized about hearing the sound of their necks snapping.

They showed up at Ms. Freeman’s home. They tried to execute a citizen’s arrest of Ms. Moss at her grandmother’s house. They called Ms. Moss’s 14-year-old son’s cellphone so much that it interfered with his virtual classes, and he finished his first year of high school with failing grades.

“This all started with one tweet,” Ms. Freeman told the jury, referring to a social media post from Mr. Giuliani saying, “WATCH: Video footage from Georgia shows suitcases filled with ballots pulled from under a table AFTER supervisors told poll workers to leave room and 4 people stayed behind to keep counting votes.”

All lies, of course.

No one knows how much Rudy is worth these days, because he refused to provide information on his assets to the court. But it’s highly unlikely he has anything like the millions he’s been ordered to pay. Of course, he’s planning to appeal.

ugly-cat3From CBS News: What is Rudy Giuliani’s net worth in 2023? Here’s a look into his assets amid defamation trial.

Rudy Giuliani followed his time in public service with a lucrative career in the private sector that turned him into a multimillionaire. But the former New York mayor now faces legal damages of $148 million in a defamation case filed by two Georgia election workers.

A jury of eight Washington, D.C., residents ruled Giuliani must pay $148 million to the election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss. Their attorneys had asked the jurors to award $24 million each in damages. Giuliani was earlier found liable for several defamation claims against them.

The jury on Friday said the former mayor must pay $16.2 million to Freeman and $17 million to Freeman, as well as $20 million to each for emotional distress and an additional $75 million in punitive damages.

So how much is he worth today?

Giuliani’s current net worth could be worth less than $50 million, based on his attorney’s comment that the damages sought by Moss and Freeman would “be the end” of him.

About 15 years ago, Giuliani’s net worth was more than $50 million, with $15 million of that total from his business activities, including his work with lobbying firm Giuliani Partners, according to CNN. At the time, he earned about $17 million a year, the news outlet reported.

How much has Giuliani’s net worth changed over the years?

Giuliani faces considerable expenses, hurt by a third divorce and pricey lawsuits, and signs suggest they have taken a financial toll. To generate cash, he’s sold 9/11 shirts for $911 and pitched sandals sold by Donald Trump ally Mike Lindell. He also started selling video messages on Cameo for $325 a pop, although his page on the site says Giuliani is no longer available.

Giuliani owes about $3 million in legal fees, according to The New York Times. He earns about $400,00 a year from a radio show and also receives some income from a podcast, but it’s not enough to cover his debts, the newspaper reported. Earlier this year, Giuliani’s long-term attorney sued him, alleging that the former mayor owes him almost $1.4 million in legal fees.

Meanwhile, Giuliani in July listed his Manhattan apartment for $6.5 million, and it was still available in mid-December, according to Sotheby’s. The 3-bedroom, 3-bathroom co-op includes a library with a wood-burning fireplace and a butler’s pantry.

Unfortunately, Trump is still in the news. Here’s what’s happening with the narcissistic wannabe dictator.

From The Wall Street Journal: The Conservative Coterie Behind Trump’s Second-Term Agenda. A small group of loyalists is influencing his campaign policy plans, as many past top aides have broken with the former president.

When Donald Trump sat down in the office of his Bedminster, N.J., golf club late this summer to flesh out his trade and border policy, familiar faces were across from him: Robert Lighthizer and Russell Vought, two of the architects of the former president’s populist first-term record.

ugly-cat16Trump’s former trade representative and White House budget director, respectively, are part of a cadre of allies helping him shape policy proposals across a range of topics, laying the groundwork for what would be an aggressive and controversial second-term agenda.

The group—which also includes Stephen Miller, driver of hard-line immigration policies, former Housing Secretary Ben Carson and John Ratcliffe, former director of national intelligence, among others—is stocked with veterans of Trump’s first term who are closely aligned with his vision of protectionist economic policies and an isolationist approach to foreign policy. 

They are likely to take key administration roles should Trump win the election, according to the campaign, which has worked to counter speculation over Trump’s inner circle and policy-formulation process.

Importantly for Trump, these figures have stuck by him following his loss to President Biden in 2020, unlike the many past cabinet officials and other top aides who now oppose him. Trump’s first term was marked by dissension, with policy disagreements and personality clashes leading to heated Oval Office arguments and damaging leaks to reporters.

In contrast, aides say, the current group of Trump confidantes is on the same page. Whether such harmony could be preserved in an actual second Trump administration—which would include hundreds more aides and a full cabinet—is less clear.

This is pretty much the same agenda that The Washington Post and The New York Times have described recently.

Trump’s policy development, like much of what he has brought to government, is unorthodox—a mix of his gut instincts and working style. He eschews traditional meetings and flowcharts, aides say, and instead draws on his experience in business and direct conversations with an extended network of contacts of longtime friends, CEOs and people he has met in politics. He often pits one viewpoint against another, a hallmark of his first tenure in office.

Flights to and from campaign events have turned into policy huddles with staff and are where Trump reads articles, instructing aides to get someone on the phone when they land or the following day, according to people involved in the discussions.

His policy agenda has excited core supporters while alarming Democrats and some Republicans.

ugly-cat8“He’s been pretty clear in saying he will use the levers of government to go after his political opponents, which is anathema to conservatives,” said Marc Short, who served in the Trump administration and was a top adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence’s presidential campaign. Short said Trump’s 2016 platform appealed to the party in part by focusing on appointing conservative judges and cutting taxes.

Other key people Trump and his team are in regular communication with over policy ideas—and who could take important administration roles—include the following:

  • Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing border agents
  • Matt Whitaker, former acting attorney general, who took over after Jeff Sessions was forced out of the job

There’s more at the link. I got in by clicking the link at Memeorandum.

Another article about Trump’s plans at Politico: The Crazy Conservative Scheme to Make Trump Look Normal: Rehabilitate Nixon.

Among a small but influential group of young conservative activists and intellectuals, “Tricky Dick” is making a quiet — but notable — comeback. Long condemned by both Democrats and Republicans as the “crook” that he infamously swore not to be, Nixon is reemerging in some conservative circles as a paragon of populist power, a noble warrior who was unjustly consigned to the black list of American history.

Across the right-of-center media sphere, examples of Nixonmania abound. Online, popular conservative activists are studying the history of Nixon’s presidency as a “blueprint for counter-revolution” in the 21st century. In the pages of small conservative magazines, readers can meet the “New Nixonians” who are studying up on Nixon’s foreign policy prowess. On TikTok, users can scroll through meme-ified homages to Nixon. And in the weirdest (and most irony laden) corners of the internet, Nixon stans are even swooning over the former president’s swarthy good looks.

“I’ve always been pretty fascinated with him,” said Curt Mills, a conservative journalist and self-professed Nixon fan. (Mills has contributed to POLITICO Magazine.) “I think the Nixon story is really an American story. He really is this guy who is from nowhere, and he’s just absolutely reviled … [but] I do think he has this charisma that’s sort of underrated.”

ugly-cat7The Nixon renaissance is being driven in part by young conservatives’ genuine interest in Nixon, whom Mills colorfully described as “our Shakespearean president.” But when pressed about their pro-Nixon views, even his most sincere supporters readily admit that the Nixon-mania isn’t being driven solely — or even primarily — by academic interest in Nixon. Instead, the populist right’s ongoing effort to rehabilitate Nixon, which is unfolding against the backdrop of the 2024 Republican primary, is really about another divisive former Republican president: Donald Trump.

In the topsy-turvy historical tableau of 2023, to defend Nixon is to back Trump — and to rescue the former from historical ignominy is, according to the thinking of some young conservatives, to save the latter from the same fate.

“If we can rehabilitate Richard Nixon in a balanced and fair manner — or even if we can just create questions in the public discourse about Nixon and about Nixon’s presidency — then I think, by way of analogy, it will provoke similar questions about Donald Trump,” said the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who published a lengthy defense of Nixon earlier this year for City Journal. “It will give us the kind of template, it will give us the precedents, it will give us the skills, where we can more effectively defend a conservative president against these kinds of attacks.”

Read the rest at Politico, if you can handle it.

Time Magazine has a piece about Texas abortion laws and Kate Cox, the woman who fled the state in order to get abortion care after learning she was carrying a non-viable fetus and faced the prospect of losing her ability to have children in the future: That Texas Abortion Case Is Even Worse Than You Think.

So much of the national conversation this week has been about Kate Cox, the 31-year-old mom who had to flee Texas to have an abortion to end a doomed pregnancy as the state’s Supreme Court slowly decided to substitute its judgment for her doctor’s advice.

But what’s been missing from most of the talk about this case is this reality: Texas has at least three separate laws on the books designed to make getting an abortion nearly impossible. Those overlapping, vague statutes not only create one of the most restrictive environments in the country for reproductive rights, but shaped Cox’s case in ways that many following her ordeal likely missed. It also shows how even minor details can matter, especially when judges have political bents and time is an urgent component.

ugly-cat2To understand the lay of the land that Cox, her family, and her doctor were facing, we need to look at what Texas lawmakers put in place before Dobbs, the 2022 case that invalidated a half-century of protections enshrined in Roe v. Wade. A year earlier, Texas passed a so-called “trigger ban” that would outlaw abortions should the Supreme Court overturn Roe. We’ll call this Ban A. It serves up a felony life sentence for health care providers who perform abortions and a $100,000 fine.

A second 2021 law—let’s call it Ban B—was a novel attempt at effectively banning most abortions in Texas without waiting for the Supreme Court to give permission, and it largely succeeded. That law runs along civil lines by deputizing neighbors and strangers to enforce it through lawsuits. Under Ban B (also known as S.B. 8), even an Uber driver who ferries a customer to a place where abortions are performed can be civilly charged. Critics have labeled it a Bounty Law. Yet unlike Ban A, Ban B isn’t a complete ban, though it functions as one in practice. It blocks most pregnant individuals from seeking an abortion after about six weeks, or when lawmakers decided there exists a beating “fetal heart”—a term doctors do not use, because a fetus at that point does not yet have a heart. (What abortion opponents describe as a heartbeat at that stage is actually the electrical impulses developing cells start to emit.)

Finally, there is Ban C, which are the pre-Roe laws in Texas, dating back to the state’s first criminal code of 1857. At that time, the state had a ban on abortion—including the funding of it—except in cases when the pregnant person’s life was at risk. The penalty? Five years in prison for those providing the care. Texas officials have asserted that those laws snapped back into effect when Roe fell.

All three abortion bans include language that provides exceptions when the health of the pregnant person is in question, although the specific definitions and conditions are different and vague. (None, it also should be noted, holds the pregnant party criminally liable.)

This all created a legal and medical minefield for Kate Cox, the Dallas-area mother of two who has been public about wanting, in her words, “a large family.” When Cox and her family learned the fetus she was carrying had tested positive for a genetic condition that almost always results in a miscarriage or stillbirth, she took action. She had already been to the hospital four times in two weeks seeking emergency attention and worried what this troubled pregnancy would mean for her future potential; her doctor agreed that an abortion would leave her with the greatest potential for a pregnancy at a future date.

There’s much more at the link.

You’ve probably heard about the latest horror story in Israel’s war with Hamas. The IDF accidentally killed three Israeli hostages. From the Guardian: IDF says Israeli hostages it killed in Gaza were bare chested and waving white flag.

Three Israeli hostages killed by the Israel Defence Forces in Gaza were bare chested and carrying a white flag when they were shot, according to an initial military investigation.

The killing of the three men – who were kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October during its assault on southern Israel – has triggered widespread anger and incredulity in Israel amid a mounting sense of anxiety over the safety of the remaining hostages in Gaza.

According to reports of the IDF probe in the Israeli media, the three men Yotam Haim, Samer El-Talalka and Alon Shamriz – all in their 20s – had somehow escaped their captors and were approaching an IDF position in the Shejaiya area of Gaza City where there has been heavy fighting.

One of the men was carrying a stick with a white cloth tied to it and all had removed their shirts. Spotting the three, an Israeli soldier on a rooftop, however, opened fire on the men, shouting “Terrorists!”.

While two of the hostages fell to the ground immediately, the third fled into a nearby building. When a commander arrived on the scene, the unit was ordered into the building where it killed the third hostage despite his pleas for help in Hebrew.

It emerged too that the IDF had identified a nearby building marked with “SOS” and “Help! Three hostages” two days earlier but had believed it might be a trap.

As the first details of the killing were released by the IDF on Friday night, after most Israelis had begun to mark Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, a hastily called demonstration converged on the Kirya, Israel’s sprawling military headquarters compound in Tel Aviv.

Chanting “Shame”, “There’s no time” and “Deal now!” – the last a demand for a new ceasefire agreement with Hamas and a hostage exchange – the protesters represent a growing thread of anger in Israel at the way in which the war is being prosecuted, as the situation of the remaining hostages in Gaza has taken a series of dark of turns in the past week.

There’s much more at the link.

That’s all I have for you today. I hope you all have a terrific weekend!

Finally Friday Reads: The Republican Crazy Train

Posted: November 17, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: 2024 Elections, A thread for Ranting | Tags: , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Have you noticed that a good deal of Republican Politicians need some serious intervention and more than a few psychiatric evaluations?  As part of my training to be a teacher at university, I was trained to spot issues and quickly send the individual off to the District’s psychologist. I can’t say I know what happens after you get diagnosed with, say, a significant personality disorder or two, but I do know how to recognize symptoms and get the person’s help.  It was a massive effort in ’70s education colleges since School Districts could be held accountable for not diagnosing student needs and getting them help as soon as possible.  Perhaps it’s time to introduce a similar methodology to aides, staff, and those working daily with Republican officeholders. The amount of abnormal behavior screams at you from your television screen daily. I remember Nixon’s paranoia well, but it didn’t seem like a larger pattern in the party then.

Leave it to Ozzy.

All aboard Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay
Crazy, but that’s how it goes
Millions of people living as foes
Maybe it’s not too late
To learn how to love
And forget how to hate
Mental wounds not healing
Life’s a bitter shame
I’m going off the rails on a crazy train
I’m going off the rails on a crazy train
Let’s go

The Washington Monthly starts at the very head of the rotting fish. “Has Trump Gone Even Crazier?  Forget parsing every Biden utterance. The likely GOP nominee is forgetting where he is, stumbling over words, and waxing full fascist.”  This is written by James D. Zirin.

While neither Trump nor Biden projects John F. Kennedy’s vigor, Trump, 77, has been even more bizarre of late—doddering and disoriented in a new way.

Listen to what he has been saying lately.

He has repeatedly confused Biden and Obama, even calling Obama the current president. Doctors often ask stroke victims who is the current president to test mental acuity. We all misspeak. But put this in the context of many other indicia of cognitive decline.

Trump doesn’t know where he is. On the stump in Sioux City, Iowa, he said hello to Sioux Falls, which is in South Dakota. Okay, not that big a deal. Of course, his aides later said the teleprompter got it wrong. I wonder whether the aides are still in his employ. Perhaps they are moving boxes in Mar-a-Lago.

Misidentifying world leaders. He described Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whom he admires, as the “great leader of Turkey.” Recep Tayyip Erdogan is authoritarian like Orban but with an Islamic hue rather than a Christian nationalist drag. Trump has said that Hungary shares a border with Russia. Seven countries border Hungary, but not Russia.

Referring to Kim Jong-Un, the hereditary dictator who rules North Korea, Trump said he was in charge of a country of 1.4 billion people, obviously confusing the Hermit Kingdom of 26 million with the Middle Kingdom of 1.4 billion.

But it’s not just misidentification. It’s the cadence and slurring of speech, too. Trump is having trouble with names. “On purpose” came out as “on perfect.” Adherents of Karl Marx came out as “markers,” not Marxists. He warned that Biden is drifting us into World War II.

Perhaps more worrisome than Trump’s mental miscues is the fact that his authoritarian tendencies have veered into even more fascistic territory, and his insults have become even more intemperate, which is saying something. (Recall that after the first 2016 presidential debate, he flogged Megyn Kelly with a reference to menstruation.) Special Counsel Jack Smith is “deranged.” While this might be understandable since Smith has indicted Trump in a Washington, D.C. federal court for using illegal means to overturn the 2020 election results and in Florida for mishandling classified documents, the bile has boiled over into invective against Smith’s wife and family, whom he insists “despise me much more than he does.”

Trump called Nancy Pelosi a “crazed lunatic” and continued to joke about the hammer assault on her 83-year-old husband, Paul, by a crazed, seemingly pro-Trump intruder who was convicted on multiple felony accounts on Thursday.

From bad to wurst. In a Veterans Day speech in New Hampshire, Trump called his political enemies “vermin,” channeling the dehumanizing language of OG fascists Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and arguing paradoxically—and paranoically—that the pests are also “radical left thugs” who pose a greater threat to the United States than Russia, China, or even North Korea. He promised to “root out” the vermin if he regained power.

And, if you dare call out the reference to vermin or blood as Hitlerian, his spokesman threatens that your “entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

In New Hampshire, he also called himself a “very proud election denier.” Are there humble election deniers?

Jewish and Latino groups, as well as an untold number of columnists, have condemned his statement that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” the kind of volk talk that sounded better in the original German.

Deranged people, as we all have learned, can be dangerous. While it can be hard to diagnose if the unhoused man who regularly yells at you at the street corner has just plateaued or will be given to a violent attack, Trump’s policy pronouncements have become more incendiary and more insane, if that were possible.

The list of policy pronouncements should have a chilling effect on any person who values the U.S. Constitution.  But, crazy is at all levels of U.S. Federal and State Republican officials. 

The Economist had this headline today. “Donald Trump poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024.  What his victory in America’s election would mean.” Are any other media outlets listening or are the too focused on Joe Biden’s Age?

A shadow looms over the world. In this week’s edition we publish The World Ahead 2024, our 38th annual predictive guide to the coming year, and in all that time no single person has ever eclipsed our analysis as much as Donald Trump eclipses 2024. That a Trump victory next November is a coin-toss probability is beginning to sink in.

Mr Trump dominates the Republican primary. Several polls have him ahead of President Joe Biden in swing states. In one, for the New York Times, 59% of voters trusted him on the economy, compared with just 37% for Mr Biden. In the primaries, at least, civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions have only strengthened Mr Trump. For decades Democrats have relied on support among black and Hispanic voters, but a meaningful number are abandoning the party. In the next 12 months a stumble by either candidate could determine the race—and thus upend the world.

This is a perilous moment for a man like Mr Trump to be back knocking on the door of the Oval Office. Democracy is in trouble at home. Mr Trump’s claim to have won the election in 2020 was more than a lie: it was a cynical bet that he could manipulate and intimidate his compatriots, and it has worked. America also faces growing hostility abroad, challenged by Russia in Ukraine, by Iran and its allied militias in the Middle East and by China across the Taiwan Strait and in the South China Sea. Those three countries loosely co-ordinate their efforts and share a vision of a new international order in which might is right and autocrats are secure.

Because maga Republicans have been planning his second term for months, Trump 2 would be more organised than Trump 1. True believers would occupy the most important positions. Mr Trump would be unbound in his pursuit of retribution, economic protectionism and theatrically extravagant deals. No wonder the prospect of a second Trump term fills the world’s parliaments and boardrooms with despair. But despair is not a plan. It is past time to impose order on anxiety.

The greatest threat Mr Trump poses is to his own country. Having won back power because of his election-denial in 2020, he would surely be affirmed in his gut feeling that only losers allow themselves to be bound by the norms, customs and self-sacrifice that make a nation. In pursuing his enemies, Mr Trump will wage war on any institution that stands in his way, including the courts and the Department of Justice.

This nutter is from Louisiana and believe me, the majority of us are super embarrassed by him. The YouTube below is about Representative Clay Higgin’s “Ghost Bus” comment to the Director of the FBI.  Higgins evidently believes that January 6th was a false flag operation by the deep state in the Homeland Security Department. FBI Director Christopher Ray had to remind him that the FBI was not part of that Department.

Higgins represents Southernmost Louisiana which is basically Cajun Country. He was a police captain know for his tough on crime, often violent approach to gangs in the area. Here’s more on the craziness of Representative Clay Higgins from The Guardian. “Republican praises January 6 attacker’s ‘good faith and core principles’ Louisiana congressman Clay Higgins asks judge to show leniency to Ryan Nichols, charged with assaulting police at US Capitol.”

Seeking leniency for a January 6 rioter charged with assaulting police, the Louisiana Republican congressman Clay Higgins – a former law enforcement officer himself – saluted the man’s “good character, faith and core principles”.

In video taken during the attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, the rioter was seen to say: “It’s going to be violent and yes, if you are asking, ‘Is Ryan Nichols going to bring violence? Yes, Ryan Nichols is going to bring violence.’”

Nichols, in an affidavit, admitted posting the video, attacking officers with pepper spray and urging rioters on with shouts including, “This is not a peaceful protest”

In court in Washington last week, Nichols, of Longview, Texas, pleaded guilty to two charges: obstruction and assaulting, resisting or impeding police and obstruction of an official proceeding.

More than 1,000 arrests have been made over the attack and hundreds of convictions secured, some for seditious conspiracy. Donald Trump, who incited the riot as he attempted to overturn his 2020 presidential election defeat by Joe Biden, faces 17 charges related to his election subversion, four federal and 13 at state level in Georgia.

Nine deaths have been linked to the attack staged by the former president’s supporters, including law enforcement suicides.

Higgins’ own website describes him as having “spent much of his career dedicated to uniformed service [as] an army veteran and law enforcement officer”. It also says he is “widely regarded as one of the most conservative members of Congress”.

Nonetheless, in a letter dated 7 November, he asked the US district judge in Nichols’s case, Royce C Lamberth, to show leniency when passing down sentence.

“Sir,” Higgins wrote. “I submit to you this letter in support of Ryan Taylor Nichols. He is a man of good character, faith, and core principles.

“I humbly ask that he receive fair consideration of the whole of circumstances regarding his case, condition, and background. He has already served nearly two years in the District of Columbia jail in pretrial confinement, which has been destructive to his physical (liver issues) and mental health (PTSD).”

Nichols had been under house arrest since 22 November 2022 and had “not sought to flee nor shown any indication of dangerous activity”, Higgins said.

He added: “Prior to his arrest, Mr Nichols had no criminal background and served honorably in the United States Marine Corps. He continued to serve domestically in a search and rescue capacity, even being publicly recognised for his heroic actions on national television.”

So, that cartoon sums up Higgin’s views of thugs pretty well.  I’m sure you can all name at least 5 crazy Republicans in Congress.  Now, add Higgins to that list.  Right Wingers with money, businesses, and platforms that serve as Republican enablers and donors are equally as nuts these days. I’ve heard more than a few references to Henry Ford’s wingnuttery and the bat shit crazy Elon Musk.  Musk is placing NAZI propaganda on X quite close to the ads he relies on for revenues.  This is from MediaMatters for America. “As Musk endorses antisemitic conspiracy theory, X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content. CEO Linda Yaccarino previously claimed that brands are “protected from the risk of being next to” toxic posts.”  This is reported by Eric Hananoki.

Update (11/16/23): IBM released a statement to the Financial Times saying that it has “suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation.” Media Matters will update if the other major companies in this report take any similar actions. 

As X owner Elon Musk continues his descent into white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, his social media platform has been placing ads for major brands like Apple, Bravo (NBCUniversal), IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity (Comcast) next to content that touts Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. The company’s placements come after CEO Linda Yaccarino claimed that brands are “protected from the risk of being next to” toxic posts on the platform.

Yaccarino has been trying to bring advertisers back to the platform by claiming it’s safe for business. She’s also claimed that X (formerly Twitter) has been “demonstrating its absolute commitment to combating antisemitism on the platform” and that “antisemitism is evil and X will always work to fight it on our platform.”

But her boss last night endorsed the pernicious antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish people are supporting “hordes of minorities” who are “flooding” into the country to replace white people. That conspiracy theory was the same one that motivated the deadly 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting.

X has also reinstated numerous accounts of bigots and paid far-right extremists, apparently including a pro-Hitler and Holocaust denier account, as part of its creator ad revenue sharing program.

During all of this Musk-induced chaos, corporate advertisements have also been appearing on pro-Hitler, Holocaust denial, white nationalist, pro-violence, and neo-Nazi accounts. Yaccarino has attempted to placate companies by claiming that “brands are now ‘protected from the risk of being next to’ potentially toxic content.”

But that certainly isn’t the case for at least five major brands: We recently found ads for Apple, Bravo, Oracle, Xfinity, and IBM next to posts that tout Hitler and his Nazi Party on X

You may see the ads placements and the offending material at the link.  CNN has this analysis by Allison Morrow. “With antisemitic tweet, Elon Musk reveals his ‘actual truth’.”

Elon Musk has publicly endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory popular among White supremacists: that Jewish communities push “hatred against Whites.”

That kind of overt thumbs up to an antisemitic post shocked even some of Musk’s critics, who have long called him out for using racist or otherwise bigoted dog whistles on Twitter, now known as X. It was the multibillionaire’s most explicit public statement yet endorsing anti-Jewish views.

ICYMI: Musk was responding to a post Wednesday that said Jewish communities “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” The post also referenced “hordes of minorities” flooding Western countries, a popular antisemitic conspiracy theory.

It’s the kind of post you can find easily on X these days, and likely would have gone unnoticed had Musk, with more than 160 million followers, not re-shared the post with the comment: “You have said the actual truth.”

The antisemitic conspiracy theory — which posits that Jews want to bring undocumented minority populations into Western countries to reduce White majorities in those nations — is often espoused by hate groups.

It’s the same conspiracy echoed in the final written words of Robert Bowers, the convicted murderer of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. His last social media post said that a Jewish nonprofit dedicated to aiding refugees “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people.” The mass shooting was the deadliest attack against Jews in American history.

Musk, in subsequent posts, expounded on his views. He wrote that he does not believe hatred of White people extends “to all Jewish communities.” But then he singled out the Anti-Defamation League, claiming that it promotes racism against White people.

X did not respond to requests for comment.

This confuses me to no end because other than the late Sammy Davis, Jr., I thought all European Jews were white.  I just don’t get this weird view of race and gender where some right wing nut gets to have purity standards based on some genetic code only they seem to know. I hope this sinks X for good but all that will do is likely get an even more outrageous set of hate crimes against our Jewish population.  I have issues with the Bibi’s government and with the entire concept of Zionism but for goodness’ sake, having policy differences with a nation does not mean I hate its people.  It certainly doesn’t mean I blame any American Jewish person for what the approach is now to the West Bank either. I also do not blame the population of the West Bank or Gaza on the actions of Hamas. All this right winger craziness torched to a burnt earth strategy by messianic cults just makes me very sad.

So, we need to address the continuing saga which is Congressman George Santos. He appears to be the only Drag Queen that right wing Republicans want to keep around.  After he announced he would not be running for reelection this week, he likely believed his expulsion was less likely.  That’s not a good assumption, gurl! The AP has this breaking news headline. “Ethics chairman launches a new bid to expel George Santos after a withering report on his conduct.”

The chairman of the House Ethics Committee announced Friday he has filed a resolution to force a vote on expelling Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., from Congress, one day after the committee issued a withering report detailing substantial evidence that Santos converted campaign donations for his own personal use.

Santos easily survived an expulsion vote earlier this month as lawmakers in both parties stressed the need to allow due process, as Santos is also facing nearly two dozen charges in federal court. But the release of the committee’s findings has generated new momentum for ousting the scandal-plagued freshman. Shortly after the report was released, Santos announced he would not seek reelection.

“The evidence uncovered in the Ethics Committee’s Investigative Subcommittee investigation is more than sufficient to warrant punishment and the most appropriate punishment, is expulsion,” said Rep. Michael Guest, R-Miss.

Mary Trump wrote a lot about some of the pathology of her Uncle Donald. She really slammed him for his NAZI rhetoric.  I’ll just let her discuss the Republican Crazy Train. She’s got far better credentials than me.  All I see are people with scads of delusions of grandeur.  That would be representative of Jill Stein too as far as I am concerned.   You can check out her substack here.

Stein’s Candidacy: Mary Trump also weighed in on Jill Stein’s announcement that she would run for office in 2024 on behalf of the Green Party. Calling her a “pro-Putin hack,” Mary Trump noted that she played a spoiler to Hillary Clinton’s presidential run in 2016.

“She had no chance of winning; and the only candidate whose chances she was going to hurt was Hillary Clinton. That was precisely the point,” Mary Trump said.

The psychologist said her stance against Stein was not simply because of the enormous damage she did eight years ago, but also because in those intervening years, she has done nothing. “She’s a fraud whose only purpose seems to be lining her own pockets in the service of undermining the only party that has a shot at saving American democracy,” the ex-president’s niece said.

Look Ahead: Mary Trump also said the focus in the coming weeks would be “Whether or not Donald’s mental decline is worsening or just becoming more obvious as the stressors in his life compound” and “Will the corporate media focus, in a serious and sustained way, on his multiplying verbal gaffes and cognitive errors.”

The psychologist noted that Donald Trump’s dangerous rhetoric has been ramping up and he was not only echoing Hitler but was also sometimes quoting the German dictator. While Hitler promised to “get rid of the communist vermin,” the ex-president in his “Veteran’s Day” message promised to get rid of “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.

Yes, once again I’m reporting all the news that no one really wants to hear.  I just want to keep scaring everyone into voting for anyone but these crazy people.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Finally Friday Reads: All the News that’s fit to Scream About!

Posted: November 10, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign | Tags: , , , , , , | 11 Comments

@repeat1968, John Buss

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

There are some surprising and unsurprising headlines today as we find out precisely how undemocratic and undedicated to the U.S. Constitutional some certain officials are. There’s one headline that has surprised and given me some relief that shining light on the Courts can bring about some positive results.  Let’s start with that!

This is from The Independent. Andrew Feinberg reports this breaking news. “Judge rejects Trump bid to delay classified documents trial. Judge Aileen Cannon’s order left room for her to aid the president who nominated her to the bench by delaying his trial at a later date.”  Maybe she’s seen the sunlight the press has thrown on her little outback courtroom.

The judge overseeing the criminal case against former president Donald Trump in the Southern District of Florida has rejected the ex-president’s most recent attempt to delay his trial on charges that he violated the Espionage Act and obstructed a probe into how he still had classified documents at his home long after his presidency had ended.

In an order issued on Friday, Judge Aileen Cannon rejected Mr Trump’s request to delay the trial that she scheduled for 20 May 2024 earlier this year.

Judge Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Mr Trump and confirmed just weeks before he left office, left open the possibility that she would step in to aid his efforts to push any trial back until after next year’s presidential election in hopes that he will win and be able to order prosecutors to drop the charges after he is sworn in for a second term.

She wrote in her order that she would consider more requests to delay Mr Trump’s trial during a scheduling conference on 1 March.

Mr Trump’s attorneys had asked her to grand an extension of several months in the trial schedule, citing what they described as delays in accessing evidence the government has turned over as part of the pre-trial discovery process.

PBS has further information. “Trump’s classified documents trial won’t be delayed but federal judge moves back other deadlines.” So, it was mixed news.  Here’s a reminder that Trump’s got a lot of appearances in a lot of court dockets.

The decision from Cannon is notable given that she had signaled during a hearing this month that she was open to pushing back the trial date, pointing to the other trials Trump faces as well as the mounds of evidence that defense lawyers need to review. Trump’s lawyers had complained about the burden of scouring more than 1 million pages of evidence that prosecutors have produced. Prosecutors had resisted any effort to delay, saying they’d already taken steps to make the evidence easier for the defense to review.

Trump is currently set for trial on March 4, 2024, in Washington on federal charges that he plotted to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. He also faces charges in Georgia accusing him of trying to subvert that state’s vote, as well as another state case in New York accusing him of falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments to porn actor Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.

In addition, Trump has been sued in a business fraud case in New York, where a trial is taking place. Trump has denied wrongdoing in all of the cases, claiming without evidence that they are part of a politically motivated effort to prevent him from returning to the White House.

Vanity Fair continues to spotlight Trump’s plan to replace our democratic republic with an autocratic one.  This is written by Eric Lutz. “Donald Trump Isn’t Even Trying To Hide His Authoritarian Second-Term Plans. The former president is telling the country exactly what he wants to do. Are voters listening?”

Sit for a minute with these comments the GOP frontrunner for president has made on national television in recent days. “They’ve released the genie out of the box,” Donald Trump said in a Univision interview aired Thursday, referring to the four indictments he faces that he insists are attempts to interfere with his 2024 campaign. “If I happen to be president, and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’”

“Now that he indicted me,” Trump said at a rally a day earlier of Joe Biden, who did not indict him, “we’re allowed to look at him…He did real bad things. We will restore law and order to our communities. And I will direct a completely overhauled [Department of Justice] to investigate every Marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist-in-reverse enforcement of the law.”

It is easy to overlook these kinds of pronouncements from the former president, given the frequency with which he makes them. But it’s also important to really take them in—to listen to his threats with fresh ears, as if you haven’t heard him say some version of them a thousand times before. Here is the frontrunner for the Republican nod—and possibly the presidency—vowing to use the government to go after political opponents. A second Trump term “would be the end of our country as we know it,” Hillary Clinton warned in an appearance on the View Thursday, “and I don’t say that lightly.”

Clinton, of course, has long been the subject of Trump’s threats of political prosecution. “Lock her up!” was something of an unofficial slogan of his 2016 campaign—a rally refrain as ubiquitous as “Build the wall!” and “Drain the swamp!” and “Make America Great Again!” But it was never just about his 2016 opponent; “lock her up,” like other Trump catchphrases, was really more of a mnemonic—one he has repurposed in attacks on Biden, Anthony Fauci, and others who have been cast as villains in the MAGAverse. These authoritarian threats are not tit-for-tat responses to his own indictments, as he suggested this week. They’ve always been a central tenet of his movement.

Sit for a minute with these comments the GOP frontrunner for president has made on national television in recent days. “They’ve released the genie out of the box,” Donald Trump said in a Univision interview aired Thursday, referring to the four indictments he faces that he insists are attempts to interfere with his 2024 campaign. “If I happen to be president, and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’”

“Now that he indicted me,” Trump said at a rally a day earlier of Joe Biden, who did not indict him, “we’re allowed to look at him…He did real bad things. We will restore law and order to our communities. And I will direct a completely overhauled [Department of Justice] to investigate every Marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist-in-reverse enforcement of the law.”

It is easy to overlook these kinds of pronouncements from the former president, given the frequency with which he makes them. But it’s also important to really take them in—to listen to his threats with fresh ears, as if you haven’t heard him say some version of them a thousand times before. Here is the frontrunner for the Republican nod—and possibly the presidency—vowing to use the government to go after political opponents. A second Trump term “would be the end of our country as we know it,” Hillary Clinton warned in an appearance on the View Thursday, “and I don’t say that lightly.”

Clinton, of course, has long been the subject of Trump’s threats of political prosecution. “Lock her up!” was something of an unofficial slogan of his 2016 campaign—a rally refrain as ubiquitous as “Build the wall!” and “Drain the swamp!” and “Make America Great Again!” But it was never just about his 2016 opponent; “lock her up,” like other Trump catchphrases, was really more of a mnemonic—one he has repurposed in attacks on Biden, Anthony Fauci, and others who have been cast as villains in the MAGAverse. These authoritarian threats are not tit-for-tat responses to his own indictments, as he suggested this week. They’ve always been a central tenet of his movement.

Though this bluster is nothing new, it has taken on an even more menacing overtone recently: Trump, who is leading Biden in some recent polls, is running for a second term on an explicitly authoritarian platform—and allies like Stephen Miller are already plotting to clear the way for him to make good on his threats, to remove the roadblocks that kept his autocratic fantasies from being fully realized in his first term.

It’s possible to forget just how close he did come that first time around and to get desensitized to his repeated threats, praise for dictators, and other outrages. Which is why it’s so important to remain clear-eyed about the danger he represents. As Clinton warned, “Trump is telling us what he intends to do. Take him at his word.”

Read more at the link. Liz Dye from Public Notice has a good reminder for us, too. “Trump’s right, the system is RIGGED. In his favor. Imagine being a rich white guy complaining that the legal system is stacked against you.”

On Monday, Donald Trump took the witness stand in his civil fraud trial in New York and proved once again that there is a “two-tiered justice system” in this country … just not in the way that he thinks. In fact, he’s treated far better than most criminal defendants, and has gotten away with behavior which would have gotten anyone not named Donald Trump held in contempt of court.

…

On top of the abuse, Trump spewed preposterous lies under oath. For instance, he’s still insisting that Mar-a-Lago is worth upwards of one billion dollars, despite having agreed to massive encumbrances on its future development which decrease its value. As the New Republic notes, Trump signed a deed of development with the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2002 stating that “the Club and Trump intend to forever extinguish their right to develop or use the Property for any purpose other than club use.”

But on the witness stand Trump was adamant that he still retains the right to subdivide and develop the property.

“‘Intend’ doesn’t mean we will do it,” he smirked.

Later he was confronted with evidence from Forbes Magazine that his former CFO Allen Weisselberg had lied on the witness stand. Trump sidestepped the question, saying, “I have very little respect for Forbes. I haven’t dealt with them for years. I believe they are out of business actually.” In fact, he screamed at Forbes reporter Dan Alexander on Truth Social just a month ago when the magazine dropped him from its Forbes 400 list.

Trump’s lies on Monday included his constant refrain that he has an “IRONCLAD DISCLAIMER CLAUSE!” which immunizes him from consequences for overestimating his net worth by a billion dollars in an effort to get banks to lend him money. The judge already rejected this get-out-of-jail-free card on September 26, noting that New York law places the “onus for accuracy squarely on defendants’ shoulders” as the party in the transaction with more complete knowledge.

“If you want to know about the disclaimer clause, read my opinion again. Or for the first time, perhaps,” the court reminded Trump when he trotted out the disclaimer.

“You’re wrong in the opinion,” Trump retorted, showing once again that he wasn’t going to be bound by any normal standard of behavior. And then he pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket with the rejected disclaimer language on it, saying “I’d love to read this, your honor, if I could, if I’m allowed to do that.”

To be clear, witnesses simply cannot introduce uncorroborated evidence on the stand under direct examination. Trump knows this perfectly well, and so do his lawyers, so it was no surprise that Justice Engoron put the kibosh on this little stunt.

“Shocker. I’m shocked,” Trump muttered sarcastically, affecting to be once again oppressed by a manifestly unfair legal system, stacked against the poor, defenseless former president.

The Republicans have no clear plan on how to avoid the government shutdown. Mike Johnson and his clan of incompetence and theocracy is a disaster happening in prime time.  This is from NPR. “Speaker Johnson navigates ‘mission impossible’ to avoid shutdown, without clear plan.”

Speaker Mike Johnson is learning quickly that, although he may have received unanimous support to get the gavel, the sharp divisions among House Republicans over spending bills remain.

Two times this week, Johnson, R-La., was forced to pull federal budget bills from the floor after it became clear that Republican opposition meant they would fail to pass.

Now, there are just seven days left before the federal government is due to shutdown at the end of the day on November 17, not enough time to pass the full suite of annual budget bills.

Despite the time crunch, Speaker Johnson has not announced the details of his plan for a stopgap funding measure, which would temporarily extend government funding in order to allow lawmakers to sort out their disagreements on the full budget.

The Transportation and Housing funding bill, which leaders pulled from the floor late Tuesday, ran into problems when a group of Republicans from the Northeast opposed the bill’s funding cuts to Amtrak. Conservatives insisted they remain in the bill.

Johnson pulled the Financial Services and General Government funding measure on Thursday, after moderate members of his conference opposed a provision in the bill that would have overruled Washington, D.C.’s abortion law.

One of the members opposed to the bill, Rep. John Duarte of California, pointed to Tuesday’s election results in several states showing voter pushback to Republican efforts to restrict abortion rights.

“The American people are telling us very clearly they don’t want Washington, D.C., meddling in their abortion rights,” Duarte said. “That’s clear and we’re trying to make sure we can deliver on that.”

The Financial Services bill also faced opposition over funding for a new FBI headquarters, which the government announced this week would be built D.C.’s Maryland suburbs.

After a proposed amendment to bar any funding for the building failed, conservatives including Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan threatened to vote against final passage of the bill.

Yes.  You read that right. This is from Raw Story. “Republican spending bill implodes over ’embarrassing’ birth control spat.”  The story is reported by Sarah K. Burris. 

Another government funding bill from Republicans was pulled on Thursday morning after many leaders refused to back several pieces of the bill, including one aimed at overturning a law that barred companies from discriminating against employees who use birth control.

The birth control plank was just one of dozens of amendments that were added to the bill from Republican lawmakers, as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) pledged to pass the budget by the Nov. 17 shutdown deadline.

According to Politico, there were more than 100 amendments proposed in all, including some that drew rebukes from swing-district Republicans.

Rep. Max Miller (R- OH) called it “embarrassing” and “incredibly upsetting” that House GOP leadership had to pull the final passage of the funding bill, reported CNN’s Annie Grayer. He went on to bash his colleagues for hyper-partisan amendments to bills that must pass to keep the government open.

The law being targeted by the House GOP is a local Washington, D.C. ordinance that prevents any employer from discriminating against a worker who seeks contraception or family planning services. The GOP bill would block that from taking effect.

In an interview Sunday, Johnson was asked by Fox’s Shannon Bream about some of his extreme opinions and bills regarding birth control.

“I really don’t remember any of those measures,” he told her.

This is the discussion as voters from deep red states continue to enshrine Roe v. Wade in state constitutions via ballot measures. Even Nebraska is getting a ballot measure to its voters.  Republicans are entirely hogtied from their previous positions as voters dump their ideas against reproductive freedom.  The Democratic Party is rushing to get the issue on as many state ballots as possible.  Now, they’ve got reason to go even farther.  This is from AXIOS.

After Ohio’s vote Tuesday to protect abortion rights, Democrats are rushing to get similar measures on the ballot next year in key states such as Arizona, Nevada and Florida — partly to boost President Biden and down-ballot Democrats.

Why it matters: In the face of bleak polling on the economy, abortion continues to be a winning issue for Democrats — one that could motivate otherwise uninspired voters to turn out and keep the White House in the party’s hands.

  • Voters now have explicitly endorsed abortion rights via ballot initiatives in seven states since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year — in California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Vermont and now Ohio.
  • The wins are boosting confidence among Democrats that similar ballot measures — and candidates who cast the high court’s Dobbs ruling as a government assault on individual rights — can help the party ride the backlash in the 2024 elections.
  • In private and with a group of abortion-rights organizers in Miami last month, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff has described Democrats’ path to victory in 2024 as “Dobbs and Democracy,” according to two people familiar with his comments.
  • A White House spokesperson said that Emhoff’s “public comments speak for themselves.”

What to watch: There’s now added urgency to efforts to get abortion-rights initiatives on 2024 ballots in battleground states of Arizona, Nevada and Florida as well as Republican-dominated Nebraska and South Dakota, advocates tell Axios.

Zoom in: Florida has the earliest deadline for voter signatures to get a measure on the 2024 ballot — Feb. 1 — and organizers have been trying to get national Democrats more involved in their efforts.

  • “If you’re really interested in affecting turnout in Florida in 2024, then the place to put your money is in this ballot initiative because it’s going to pay off all the way down the ballot,” said Anna Hochkammer, executive director of Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition.

Reality check: Florida has one of the nation’s most difficult processes for getting a state constitutional amendment initiative on the ballot, and some national Democrats believe proponents there began organizing too late.

  • Any ballot initiative requires more than 890,000 signatures with at least half of the state’s 28 congressional districts represented — and the conservative state Supreme Court could still throw it off the ballot, as Florida’s attorney general is already arguing they should.
  • Florida has veered to the right in recent years, but Biden lost to former President Trump by just 3 percentage points in 2020.
  • The coalition of advocacy groups behind the effort, called Floridians Protecting Freedom, is nearing 500,000 signatures. It launched the campaign in May.
  • Meanwhile, presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) has leaned into the issue in the other direction, signing a six-week abortion ban into law earlier this year.

Zoom out: The Dobbs decision ignited an active network of fundraising and spending in support of abortion-rights initiatives that hasn’t been matched by anti-abortion groups.

Imagine a country where abortion rights are the primary turn-out reason!  Or birth control!    Mike Johnson is like the poster child for white Christian nationalism’s oppression of everyone! “The Key to Mike Johnson’s Christian Extremism Hangs Outside His Office. The newly elected House Speaker has ties to the far-right New Apostolic Reformation — which is hell-bent on turning America into a religious state. ”  This is from The Rolling Stone, written by Bradley Onishi and Mattew D. Taylor.

THE AMERICAN PUBLIC has had much to learn about Mike Johnson over the past two weeks. Until his surprise elevation to House Speaker, the Louisiana representative was an obscure, mild-mannered, and bookish four-term back-bencher. He is a former constitutional lawyer and hardly the type of political figure who jeers during a State of the Union address, or gets caught in a Beetlejuice groping scandal, or shows up on cable news to take a victory lap after ousting the leader of his own party. Johnson is focused, methodical, and up until now was happy to operate behind the scenes.

He’s also a dyed in the wool Christian conservative, and there’s a flag hanging outside his office that leads into a universe of right-wing religious extremism as unknown to most Americans as Johnson was before he ascended to the speakership.

Johnson slots firmly within the more hardline evangelical wing of the Republican coalition. He holds stringent positions on abortion, thinks homosexuality is a lifestyle choice that should not be recognized under legal protections against discrimination, defends young earth creationism, blames school shootings on the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and questions the framework of the separation of church and state. “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,” he has said.

Johnson was also integral to Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. As The New York Times has reported, he collected signatures for a brief supporting a Texas lawsuit alleging, without evidence, irregularities in election results; served a key role in the GOP’s attempts to prevent the certification of Biden’s election; and touted Trump’s conspiracy theories about election fraud, even saying, “You know the allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there’s a lot of merit to that.”
If this was all we knew about Mike Johnson, we could accurately say that he is a full-bore, right-wing Christian and an election denier who dabbles in conspiracy theories — qualities that might give one pause before putting him second in line to the presidency. But there is another angle to Johnson’s extremism that has received less scrutiny, and it brings us back to that flag outside his office.

To understand the contemporary meaning of the Appeal to Heaven flag, it’s necessary to enter a world of Christian extremism animated by modern-day apostles, prophets, and apocalyptic visions of Christian triumph that was central to the chaos and violence of January 6. Earlier this year we released an audio-documentary series, rooted in deep historical research and ethnographic interviews, on this sector of Christianity, which is known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The flag hanging outside Johnson’s office is a key part of its symbology.

Read up on NAR.  They’re a frightening bunch of inquisitors who are hell-bent on turning us into their ‘Christian’ idea of the Taliban states.  You can read more about them at The New Republic.  Did I mention Mike Flynn is one of them?

On 20 January, 1994, a group of 120 churchgoers at Toronto Airport Vineyard Church fell to the floor in hysterical laughter, some of them barking like dogs and roaring like lions.

Randy Clark, the visiting preacher from St. Louis who sparked the outburst, proudly described them as “drunk” on the Holy Spirit. But that raucous week sparked what’s come to be known as the Toronto Blessing, a twelve-and-a-half-year revival that attracted visitors from scores of countries to a crusade that, 30 years later, has transformed into what might be the most influential force in Christianity today: the New Apostolic Reformation. And they have one clear goal in mind—ruling over the United States and, eventually, the world.

They sound perfectly insane.  Am I right?  If you haven’t gotten enough, try this article by The Nation.  It’s written by Jeet Heer.  “The Folksy Fanaticism of Mike Johnson. The new speaker of the House combines Christian nationalism and MAGA.”

Yet, if Johnson is a mystery man to the world at large, to the power brokers of the religious right his new role is no surprise. They’ve been grooming Johnson for this position for many years.

In a deeply researched article in The Washington Spectator, journalist Anne Nelson documents how Johnson’s path to power was facilitated by the Council for National Policy (CNP), an outfit founded in 1981 “by a group of right-wing fundamentalists and oil barons” that works “largely behind the scenes, to reshape America into a country that protects gun rights, counters federal regulation, favors plutocrats, and rolls back the social progress wrought by the New Deal and the Great Society.”

At a 2019 meeting of the CNP in New Orleans, Executive Director Bob McEwen singled out Johnson, expressing the group’s prophetic hope: “As we go through the success of this next election, we can then take the leadership that needs to be done. If we were to choose a person to represent our values, who would be skilled, likeable, loveable, loves his country and loves the Lord, it would be [Mike Johnson] our speaker tonight.”

Like Johnson himself, the CNP is shrouded in a protective obscurity. It doesn’t have the fame of such right-wing institutions as the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, or the Family Research Council. But the CNP gains its power by effectively networking between these institutions and elected Republicans. In particular, it was the CNP that officiated over the fateful marriage between the profane Donald Trump and the leaders of the religious rights.

As Nelson reports, in 2016 CNP strategists “rallied a thousand ‘Mega-Christian Leaders’ to New York City on behalf of Donald Trump’s struggling campaign. They had already defined the terms of the deal: the previous March, CNP Board of Governors member Leonard Leo had met with Trump to present him with a list of ultra-conservative candidates for the federal judiciary.”

Trump’s unshakable bond with the holy rollers who call themselves “Mega-Christian leaders” has puzzled many observers. After all, there has never been a major American political figure so starkly sacrilegious as Trump, so utterly bereft of any biblical knowledge (remember the “Two Corinthians” gaffe?), so purely committed to his own self-aggrandizement at the expense of any traditional values.

However, this will be interesting as Trump can read the writing on the wall in all these ballot initiatives. There’s a breach in the damn of ignorance.  “The Pro-life Movement Is Fuming at Donald Trump. Should he care? Its supporters will vote for him anyway.”  This is from The Atlantic. It’s reported by Elaine Godfrey.

A few weeks ago, the Texas anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson told me that he viewed Donald Trump as the Constantine of the anti-abortion movement: a man who, like the Roman emperor, had been converted to a righteous cause and become its champion.

“There are some who believe that Constantine was a sincere Christian and others who believe that he wasn’t,” Dickson said. Regardless of whether Trump is genuinely opposed to abortion rights, “he was good for Christianity and the pro-life movement.”

The Rolling Stone reports on a rally meant to make Trump Pro-life again.  They’re just another bunch of suckers that Trump has thrown under the bus. Unfortuantely, he gave them a lot before we could stop him.

IN ANOTHER SIGN of the political havoc the Dobbs decision continues to wreak on the Republican party, protesters upset over Donald Trump’s stance on abortion gathered outside the former president’s rally in South Florida on Wednesday.

They weren’t pro-choice, though — they were anti-abortion activists upset that Trump, the one person most directly responsible for the end of Roe v. Wade, is in their view, caving on abortion.

In recent months, Trump has privately bemoaned the fact that the GOP is “getting killed on abortion” — even as he seeks to shore up support from the anti-abortion groups and religious figures who helped secure his victory in 2016.

A dozen members of the anti-abortion political action group Students for Life, which endorsed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, gathered outside the president’s rally in Hialeah on Wednesday holding signs that read “Make Trump Pro-Life Again.”

“We’re out here to send a message not only to Trump, but to the whole GOP party that we want our candidates to be unapologetically and fundamentally pro-life,” said Mary-Logan Miske, a campus organizer with Students for Life. Over the past year, Trump had failed that test, in her view. “He blamed pro-lifers for the loss of our midterms. He said that this issue, [abortion], isn’t a federal issue. And his latest thing was he basically said that DeSantis passing a heartbeat bill was a terrible, terrible thing.”

But don’t forget Ayatollah Mike! This is from The Guardian. ‘”Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House, is a gender extremist.Gender conservatism does not tend to attract as much notice as the other pillars of the far-right ideology, but it is central to the Republican ideology ”  This is written by Moira Donegan. And hands off my pants Mickie!

But the picture that has emerged instead of the once-obscure Louisiana congressmen has not been that of the typically cynical climber, maneuvering corporate heights in pursuit of their own ambition without regard to ethics. Instead, the revelations that have emerged about Mike Johnson since his ascent to the speakership paint a picture of a fevered zealot: in thrall of baroque and morbid religious fantasies; beholden to a regressive, bigoted and morbid worldview; and above all, obsessed – with a lurid and creepy enthusiasm – with sex, and how he thinks it should be done.

The enforcement of a Christian sexual morality and a strict gender hierarchy of men over women have not been incidental or minor themes of Johnson’s career: they have been its primary goal, one he pursued doggedly through his pre-congressional life. As a lawyer, he worked against gay marriage, and to uphold Louisiana’s criminal ban on gay sex, writing briefs that described homosexuality as “inherently unnatural” and “a dangerous lifestyle” which he compared to pedophilia and bestiality. He still opposes marriage equality, and led efforts to squash the speakership candidacy of Tom Emmer last month in part because of Emmer’s support for gay marriage rights. Along the way, Johnson has authored a national version of Florida’s so-called “don’t say gay” bill, which would outlaw mentions of homosexuality at schools, hospitals and other federally funded facilities. He opposes access to transition-related healthcare for adolescents and adults alike, and both he and his wife have worked to advance so-called “conversion therapy”, an abusive, homophobic practice that has been outlawed in several states.

It probably goes without saying that Johnson, like many Republicans and nearly all of the party’s luminaries, favors a national ban on abortion, which he calls a “holocaust.” While more savvy Republicans like Glenn Youngkin have attempted to frame themselves as “moderates” by placing their preferred abortion bans at supposedly more amenable points in pregnancy, like 15 weeks, Johnson has made no such effort: he has sponsored legislation that would ban abortion nationwide at all stages of pregnancy, establishing a “right to life” for fertilized eggs that supersedes women’s rights to dignity and self-determination.

His sweeping antagonism to abortion rights has extended to several kinds of birth control, such as IUDs, implants and many birth control pills. In his career as a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom – a rightwing legal shop spearheading efforts to advance Christian gender conservatism through litigation – he argued that the most popular kinds of hormonal birth control, and those that are controlled by women, are equivalent to abortion and should therefore be banned. When the House advanced a bill to codify the right to contraception after the US supreme court’s Dobbs ruling in 2022, Johnson voted against it. He has since played dumb on the issue, claiming he does not remember his opposition to birth control in an interview with Shannon Bream of Fox News.

In light of his aggressively misogynist and anti-gay views on public policy, it is likely not surprising that Johnson also advances a disturbing and sexist view of the private sphere. He has condemned no-fault divorce, the liberalized regime of divorce law that was won by feminists in the 20th century, and which allowed women to initiate divorce and to exit marriages without having to prove either infidelity or abuse to a court. Johnson says that women’s freedom to leave marriages, along with their freedom to elect out of motherhood when they choose, is responsible for mass shootings.

We will get rid of your theocratic nonsense one ballot initiatve at a time if need be! Boo fucking who you fascists assholes!  (I’m channelling my inner JJ!)

So, this is getting to be a high stakes election year with high stakes high jinx.  Hang in there!  We’re here for each other!  VOTE BLUE!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today!

 

 

Wednesday Reads: Allies Turning on Trump, and A MAGA Speaker Candidate

Posted: October 25, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Donald Trump, 2020 Elections, 2024 Elections | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

vase-of-flowers-Paul gauguin

Vase of Flowers, by Paul Gauguin

Yesterday, another shoe dropped in the Georgia election interference case when former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis accepted a plea deal.

CNN: Former Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis pleads guilty in Georgia case.

Former Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty Tuesday in the Georgia election subversion case and will cooperate with Fulton County prosecutors – the third guilty plea in the past week.

At an unscheduled hearing in Atlanta, Ellis pleaded guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements, a felony stemming from the election lies that Ellis and other Donald Trump lawyers peddled to Georgia lawmakers in December 2020.

She was sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution.

Ellis delivered a tearful statement to the judge Tuesday while pleading guilty, disavowing her participation in Trump’s unprecedented attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

“If I knew then what I knew now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges. I look back on this experience with deep remorse,” Ellis said, her voice breaking at times.

The development comes after back-to-back guilty pleas last week in the sprawling case from former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, who helped devise the fake electors plot.

These three plea deals are a monumental step forward for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who charged the case in August and is preparing for trials against Trump, his former attorney Rudy Giuliani, his chief of staff Mark Meadows and other top figures. (They have all pleaded not guilty.)

Ellis, Chesebro and Powell all agreed to testify on behalf of the prosecution at future trials. By flipping, these onetime Trump insiders are now on track to become major Trump nemeses. They are all lawyers and can shed light on what was happening behind the scenes in 2020.

The New York Times: With Plea Deals in Georgia Trump Case, Fani Willis Is Building Momentum.

Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., had no shortage of doubters when she brought an ambitious racketeering case in August against former president Donald J. Trump and 18 of his allies. It was too broad, they said, and too complicated, with so many defendants and multiple, crisscrossing plot lines for jurors to follow.

But the power of Georgia’s racketeering statute in Ms. Willis’s hands has become apparent over the last six days. Her office is riding a wave of momentum that started with a guilty plea last Thursday from Sidney K. Powell, the pro-Trump lawyer who had promised in November 2020 to “release the kraken” by exposing election fraud, but never did.

Maple Tree Listening, by Kazuko Shiihashi

Maple Tree Listening, by Kazuko Shiihashi

Then, in rapid succession, came two more guilty pleas — and promises to cooperate with the prosecution and testify — from other Trump-aligned lawyers, Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis. While Ms. Powell pleaded guilty only to misdemeanor charges, both Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Ellis accepted a felony charge as part of their plea agreements.

A fourth defendant, a Georgia bail bondsman named Scott Hall, pleaded guilty last month to five misdemeanor charges.

With Mr. Trump and 14 of his co-defendants still facing trial in the case, the question of the moment is who else will flip, and how soon. But the victories notched thus far by Ms. Willis and her team demonstrate the extraordinary legal danger that the Georgia case poses for the former president.

And the plea deals illustrate Ms. Willis’s methodology, wielding her state’s racketeering law to pressure smaller-fry defendants to roll over, take plea deals, and apply pressure to defendants higher up the pyramids of power.

The strategy is by no means unique to Ms. Willis. “This is how it works,” said Kay L. Levine, a law professor at Emory University in Atlanta, referring to large-scale racketeering and conspiracy prosecutions. “People at the lower rungs are typically offered a good deal in order to help get the big fish at the top.”

Later yesterday, ABC News published a scoop about former chief of staff Mark Meadows: Ex-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows granted immunity, tells special counsel he warned Trump about 2020 claims: Sources.

Former President Donald Trump’s final chief of staff in the White House, Mark Meadows, has spoken with special counsel Jack Smith’s team at least three times this year, including once before a federal grand jury, which came only after Smith granted Meadows immunity to testify under oath, according to sources familiar with the matter.

According to the sources, Meadows also told the federal investigators Trump was being “dishonest” with the public when he first claimed to have won the election only hours after polls closed on Nov. 3, 2020, before final results were in.

“Obviously we didn’t win,” a source quoted Meadows as telling Smith’s team in hindsight.

Trump has called Meadows, one of the former president’s closest and highest-ranking aides in the White House, a “special friend” and “a great chief of staff — as good as it gets.”

The descriptions of what Meadows allegedly told investigators shed further light on the evidence Smith’s team has amassed as it prosecutes Trump for allegedly trying to unlawfully retain power and “spread lies” about the 2020 election. The descriptions also expose how far Trump loyalists like Meadows have gone to support and defend Trump.

Sources told ABC News that Smith’s investigators were keenly interested in questioning Meadows about election-related conversations he had with Trump during his final months in office, and whether Meadows actually believed some of the claims he included in a book he published after Trump left office — a book that promised to “correct the record” on Trump.

Emil-Nolde-Peonies-and-irises-via-satchygallerycom

Peonies and Irises, by Emil Nolde

ABC news found several passages in the book that differ from Meadows’ reported testimony. See examples at the link. People are claiming that Meadows “flipped” on Trump, but that’s not what this sounds like:

Under the immunity order from Smith’s team, the information Meadows provided to the grand jury earlier this year can’t be used against him in a federal prosecution.

That immunity came after a lawyer for Meadows requested that his client be immunized to testify before the grand jury, sources familiar with the matter said. A senior Justice Department official signed off on the request and an immunity order was then issued by U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge at the federal court in Washington, D.C., days before Meadows appeared before the grand jury in March, sources said.

Had Meadows not been granted immunity, prosecutors expected him to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, sources said.

It sounds like Meadows was given “use immunity” in order to force him to testify without taking the Fifth. That’s not “flipping.” It just means that he cannot be prosecuted for truthful testimony he gave to the grand jury. He may end up cooperating with the government, but he hasn’t done it yet.

The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell agrees: Trump chief Mark Meadows testified in 2020 election case after immunity order.

Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows testified to a federal grand jury earlier this year about efforts by the former president to overturn the 2020 election results pursuant to a court order that granted him limited immunity, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The immunity – which forces witnesses to testify on the promise that they will not be charged on their statements or information derived from their statements – came after a legal battle in March with special counsel prosecutors, who had subpoenaed Meadows.

Trump’s lawyers attempted to block Meadows’ testimony partially on executive privilege grounds. However, the outgoing chief US district judge Beryl Howell ruled that executive privilege was inapplicable and compelled Meadows to appear before the grand jury in Washington, the people said.

The precise details of what happened next are unclear, but prosecutors sought and received an order from the incoming chief judge James Boasberg granting limited-use immunity to Meadows to overcome his concerns about self-incrimination, the people familiar with the matter said.

That Meadows testified pursuant to a court order suggests prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith were determined to learn what information he was afraid to share because of self-incrimination concerns – but it does not mean he became a cooperator.

Typically, under limited-use immunity orders, witnesses provide limited statements. With the payoff potentially small and with the increased difficulty that comes from charging immunity recipients in the future, the justice department is broadly averse to seeking such orders.

The approval must also come from the top echelons of the justice department, according to guidelines, and the preferred method for federal prosecutors to obtain testimony is to have defendants plead guilty, and then have them offer cooperation for a reduced sentence.

Nevertheless, I think it’s unlikely that Meadows will be willing to go to prison for Trump; so he may end up cooperating. He just hasn’t done it yet.

Anemones, Edvard Munch

Anemones, Edvard Munch

Last night in a Truth Social post, Trump blatantly attempted to witness tamper Mark Meadows.

From an analysis post by Stephen Collinson at CNN: Trump rages as former acolytes turn against him under legal heat.

In a rage-filled stream of consciousness on his Truth Social network on Tuesday night, Trump lashed out at the ABC report about Meadows.

“I don’t think Mark Meadows would lie about the Rigged and Stollen 2020 Presidential Election merely for getting IMMUNITY against Prosecution (PERSECUTION!),” the former president wrote.

“Some people would make that deal, but they are weaklings and cowards, and so bad for the future our Failing Nation. I don’t think that Mark Meadows is one of them, but who really knows? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

The other big story today is House Republicans’ endless search for a Speaker candidate they can agree on. The latest candidate is Rep. Mike Johnson, an ultra-MAGA guy, after Trump put the kibosh on previous candidate Tom Emmer, who supported the transition of power in 2020.

Politico: ‘I killed him’: How Trump torpedoed Tom Emmer’s speaker bid.

Just hours after Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) won the Republican Conference’s nomination to be House speaker on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to deride the congressman as “totally out-of-touch with Republican Voters” and a “Globalist RINO.”

He then got on the phone with members to express his aversion for Emmer and his bid for speaker.

By Tuesday afternoon Trump called one person close to him with the message, “He’s done. It’s over. I killed him.”

Just minutes later, Emmer officially dropped out of the race.

His withdrawal made Emmer the third nominee for speaker to have his hopes dashed for the most cursed job in politics. And it showed that while Trump may not be able to elevate someone to the post — his earlier choice for the job, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), also flopped — he can very well ensure that a person doesn’t get it….

Trump had signaled to aides last week that he did not support Emmer’s bid for the speakership. The former president complained that Emmer had criticized him following the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 Capitol riot and, among other things, had not forcefully enough defended him against his multiple indictments.

The House will supposedly vote on Johnson for Speaker today. So who is Mike Johnson?

The Washington Post: 5 things to know about Mike Johnson, the GOP’s latest House speaker nominee.

It remains unclear whether Johnson has enough support to win the gavel. But after he was nominated in a Republican closed-door vote on Tuesday, Johnson, flanked by his colleagues, projected confidence, promising to restore voters’ trust in government and to govern effectively if he is elected speaker.

Alex-Katz-Red-Roses-with-Blue-2001-detail-via-Sothebys

Red Roses with Blue, by Alex Katz

Here are five things to know about Mike Johnson and his political views.

He opposed certifying the 2020 election.

Johnson, 51, contested the results of the 2020 election — urging President Donald Trump to “stay strong and keep fighting” as he tried to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the presidential race.

Johnson also objected to certifying Biden’s electoral win and was one of the architects of a legal attack on the election that consisted of arguing that states’ voting accommodations during the pandemic were unconstitutional. He led a group of 126 Republican lawmakers in filing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court alleging that authorities in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan “usurped” the constitutional authority of state legislatures when they loosened voting restrictions because of the pandemic. The court rejected the underlying complaint — filed by the state of Texas — due to lack of standing, and dismissed all other related motions, including the amicus brief.

He voted against further Ukraine aid.

Johnson, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, was one of 57 lawmakers — all of them Republicans — who voted against a $39.8 billion aid package for Ukraine in May.

According to the Shreveport Times, Johnson explained his opposition to the bill by saying that the United States “should not be sending another $40 billion abroad when our own border is in chaos, American mothers are struggling to find baby formula, gas prices are at record highs, and American families are struggling to make ends meet, without sufficient oversight over where the money will go.”

Johnson has also called for more oversight of the aid sent to Ukraine — totaling more than $60 billion to date. In February, following a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the topic, he tweeted that American taxpayers “deserve to know if the Ukrainian government is being entirely forthcoming and transparent about the use of this massive sum of taxpayer resources.” [….]

He is anti-abortion.

Johnson, a constitutional lawyer who identifies as a Christian, opposes abortion and has celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that established constitutional protections for abortions nationwide.

“There is no right to abortion in the Constitution; there never was,” Johnson told Fox News on the day the decision was announced, calling it “a great, joyous occasion.”

The antiabortion nonprofit Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America gives Johnson an A+ ranking on this issue, stating that he “has voted consistently to defend the lives of the unborn and infants,” including by “stopping hard-earned tax dollars from paying for abortion, whether domestically or internationally.”

He is a close ally of Donald Trump

Johnson is a close ally of Trump, having served on the former president’s legal defense team during his two impeachment trials in the Senate.

He has called charges against Trump — which include a federal case relating to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election — “bogus,” and has said the legal and political systems have treated Trump unfairly.

He supports LGBTQ restrictions.

Johnson has positioned himself on the far right of the political spectrum on several social issues, even within the current conservative Republican conference. Notably, he introduced legislation last year — modeled after Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill — that would have prohibited discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as related subjects, at any institution that received federal funds. The Human Rights Campaign, a pro-LGBTQ civil rights organization, gave Johnson a score of 0 in its latest congressional scorecard.

Johnson also opposes gender-affirming care for minors and led a hearing on the subject in July. In a statement, he described gender-affirming care — meaning medical care that affirms or recognizes the gender identity of the person receiving the care, and which can include giving puberty or hormone blockers to minors under close monitoring from a doctor — as “adults inflicting harm on helpless children to affirm their world view.”

Roses, Vincent Van Gogh

Roses, by Vincent Van Gogh

NBC News: GOP speaker nominee Mike Johnson played a key role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Well before he secured the GOP nomination for House speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., played a key role in efforts by then-President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory in the 2020 election.

Johnson, who currently serves as the GOP caucus vice chair and is an ally of Trump, led the amicus brief signed by more than 100 House Republicans in support of a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate the 2020 election results in four swing states won by Biden: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The lawsuit, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, called on the Supreme Court to delay the electoral vote in the four states in order for investigations on voting issues to continue amid Trump’s refusal to concede his loss. It alleged that the four states changed voting rules without their legislatures’ express approval before the 2020 election.

Johnson at the time sought support from his GOP colleagues for the lawsuit, sending them an email with the subject line “Time-sensitive request from President Trump.”

“President Trump called me this morning to express his great appreciation for our effort to file an amicus brief in the Texas case on behalf of concerned Members of Congress,” Johnson wrote in the December 2020 email, which was obtained by NBC News….

The lawsuit swiftly drew backlash from battleground state attorneys general, who decried it as a “publicity stunt” full of “false and irresponsible” allegations. Legal experts also pointed to a series of hurdles the lawsuit had faced, saying that Texas lacked the authority to claim that officials in other states failed to follow the rules set by their legislatures….

Johnson’s role in pursuing efforts to overturn the 2020 election results has regained attention recently amid his speakership bid. On Tuesday, the political team of former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming — who broke with Trump over his baseless claims of a stolen election — circulated a New York Times article that called him “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections” on Jan. 6, 2021, aimed at keeping then-President Trump in office even after he lost.

The Times reported last year that many Republicans who voted to discount pro-Biden electors cited an argument crafted by Johnson, which was to ignore the false claims about mass fraud in the election and instead hang the objection on the claim that certain states’ voting changes during the Covid-19 pandemic were unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court ultimately rejected Texas’ effort to overturn the election results.

This guy is MAGA all the way. As speaker, he would likely try to find a way for the House to decide the 2025 election. We’ll find out later today if House Republicans can get together enough votes to elect him.

That’s all I have for you today. No war news. I’m really burned out on that. Feel free to post on anything in the comment thread.

Finally Friday Reads: Trump Faces 641 Years in Jail

Posted: August 4, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign | Tags: , , , | 8 Comments

“Yesterday was a bad hair day.” John Buss, @Repeat1968

Happy Indictment Week Three, Sky Dancers!

We anticipate Fulton County, Georgia’s DA, will give us a week 4 shortly!  So, I’ll start right out!  What the fuck is wrong with one-third of the country?  Tal Axelrod of ABC News reports on this new poll. “Nearly two-thirds of Americans think Jan. 6 charges against Trump are serious: POLL  —  Trump was indicted for the third time on Tuesday and has pleaded not guilty.”

A majority of Americans (51%) think Tuesday’s federal indictment of former President Donald Trump related to Jan. 6 and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election is very serious, marking the highest figure yet of the three indictments he’s faced, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll.

Overall, 65% of adults think the charges are serious, including 51% who said they are very serious and 14% who said they are somewhat serious.

Only 24% said they are not serious, including 17% who said they are not serious at all.

Just over half — 52% — think Trump should have been charged with a crime in this case, while 32% said he should not have been. And a plurality of Americans (49%) said Trump should suspend his presidential campaign, while 36% said he shouldn’t.

At the same time, 46% think the charges against Trump are politically motivated, while 40% do not, per the ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel.

The results show that the public believes the latest charges are more serious than those in two other indictments: one federal case in Florida concerning Trump’s alleged mishandling of and refusal to return government secrets after leaving office and the other state case in New York City over his hush money payments to an adult film actress in the days before the 2016 election, for which he is accused of falsifying business records.

He has pleaded not guilty in both of those cases and denies all wrongdoing.

In ABC News/Ipsos polls in the wake of the previous indictments, 42% of Americans said the documents-related charges were very serious and 30% saw the hush money-related charges as very serious, compared to 51% in this most recent indictment.

The asshole staged a violent coup attempt at the People’s House.  WTF are these complacent assholes thinking?  It was televised!  Some of his droggies are in jail for Seditious Conspiracy.  What will it take to wake these jerks up?  I agree with this Congress Critters.  Let the Trial be televised!  Let them resee how all the freaking witnesses against him are Republicans.  Trump even got charged under the KKK Act and will now face a tough Black Woman as judge.  How is that a political set-up by Democrats! Rebecca Shabad of NBC News has this story. “House Democrats call for live broadcasts of court proceedings in Trump criminal cases.”

More than three dozen House Democrats are calling on the policymaking body for federal courts to permit live broadcasting of court proceedings in the Justice Department’s cases charging former President Donald Trump with federal crimes.

In a letter led by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who served on the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Democrats asked that the Judicial Conference “explicitly authorize the broadcasting of court proceedings in the cases of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump.”

“It is imperative the Conference ensures timely access to accurate and reliable information surrounding these cases and all of their proceedings, given the extraordinary national importance to our democratic institutions and the need for transparency,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter, sent Thursday to Judge Roslynn R. Mauskopf, the secretary of the Judicial Conference.

The letter, whose signatories also included other members who served on the former Jan. 6 committee, noted that the Judicial Conference has “historically supported increased transparency and public access to the courts’ activities.”

“Given the historic nature of the charges brought forth in these cases, it is hard to imagine a more powerful circumstance for televised proceedings,” the letter said. “If the public is to fully accept the outcome, it will be vitally important for it to witness, as directly as possible, how the trials are conducted, the strength of the evidence adduced and the credibility of witnesses.”

The letter was sent on the same day that Trump was arraigned at the federal courthouse in Washington during a proceeding that was not televised or live-streamed. He pleaded not guilty to four federal counts over his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which led to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Federal prosecutors filed the grand jury indictment Tuesday.

Trump’s next court hearing in the case is set for Aug. 28. A trial date has not yet been set.

Before I continue, I should mention that the headline contains the number of years Trump could face so far, as calculated by the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump.  You can get a great list of all the indictments and charges there with their individual number of maxium years for conviction.

Dan Ladden-Hall writing at The Daily Beast had this interesting color from the courtroom. “Trump Was Seriously Salty About the Way a Judge Addressed Him. PRESIDENT GRUMP!”

Donald Trump was in a massive huff Thursday after he entered his not guilty plea to four charges stemming from his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, according to CNN. Sources told the outlet the former president was “pissed off” after departing the courthouse in Washington, D.C., and that he had been especially annoyed by one particular aspect of the hearings: namely, being referred to by Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya as “Mr. Trump.” He’s apparently grown accustomed to still being called “Mr. President” by supporters at his Bedminster golf club and Mar-a-Lago, despite being turfed out of the Oval Office over two years ago.

We also have this reporting from CNN’s Caitlin Collins. “Trump was in a sour and dejected mood following his arraignment, sources say.”

Trump was “pissed off” after he motorcaded through traffic, the sources said.

After the 27-minute legal proceeding, the former president did not take questions as he had planned to do at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport before his return flight to New Jersey.

Trump did speak briefly to the media, criticizing the charges and claiming he was being persecuted because he was running for office.

Trump had been fingerprinted and processed at the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse before he pleaded not guilty to four criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

One aspect of the hearing that irked the former president — who is still referred to by his former title when at his Bedminster golf club or Mar-a-Lago resort — was when Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya referred to him as simply “Mr. Trump.”

I just hope it has serious agita from the experience and chokes on a grizzly, greasy over-cooked Big Mac.

Lawrence O’Donnell had me glued to the screen last night discussing two press concerence held by Trump Lawyer John Lauro. Instance one had his panel talking about a mistep.  The second instance had them stumped. Was this simply a PR stunt to help find a hold out Trumper in the Jury?  This is from The Daily Beast. “MSNBC Panel Stunned by Trump Lawyer’s ‘Admission’ on Fox News. Attorney John Lauro appeared on Fox News Thursday night to discuss the events of Trump’s latest indictment—but analysts say he said too much.” This is reported by William Vaillancourt.

An MSNBC panel was shocked by a pair of television interviews Thursday where Donald Trump lawyer John Lauro seemed to confirm an allegation contained within the Jan. 6-related indictment of the former president.

Lauro had told Fox News host Laura Ingraham earlier in the evening that, leading up to Jan. 6, Trump voiced his approval for Pence to send the election back to the states rather than have the Electoral College vote be certified.

“What President Trump said is, ‘Let’s go with option D,’” Lauro said on The Ingraham Angle. “Let’s just halt, let’s just pause the voting and allow the state legislatures to take one last look and make a determination as to whether or not the elections were handled fairly. That’s constitutional law. That’s not an issue of criminal activity.”

Lauro said basically the same thing on Newsmax a bit later.

MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell was surprised at the revelation.

“That is a Trump criminal defense lawyer quoting Donald Trump committing a crime,” he said. “Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer tonight added information to Jack Smith’s 42-page description of Donald Trump’s crimes. The conversation that John Lauro just described appears on page 34 of the indictment against his client.”

There was fun to be had when two Former Federal Prosecutors had to figure out what they had just seen.

MSNBC contributor and former Department of Justice lawyer Andrew Weissman considered Lauro’s statements to be “an admission,” as he wrote in a tweet.

“So, I don’t know why a defense lawyer is going to start giving facts about a critical moment,” he said on air, prompting O’Donnell to exclaim: “It’s the whole case!”

Weissman added: “It is such a damning thing when you put it in context because remember what the indictment alleges…[that] the reason this had to be done with the vice president is because prior to that, all the efforts that Donald Trump took with respect to the secretaries of state did not work.”

“I just don’t know why John, who is a good lawyer, didn’t just zip it and not say anything,” he continued.

“They don’t teach TV in law school,” O’Donnell quipped.

Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner, also an MSNBC contributor, was stunned as well, saying bluntly, “It makes no sense.”

A few cartoon characters preening like stereotypical white men with big signs and not much else. Why do they all look alike?

My additional favorite headline came from The Washington Post. “Among MAGA extremists, Trump charges draw big talk, small crowds. The threat of pro-Trump political violence isn’t gone but has shifted from organized movements, analysts say.”  They are all afraid of getting time in the Big House and that ain’t Mar-a-Lardo.

“Many people have really given up,” said Steve Corson, 66, of Fredonia, Ariz., standing alone outside the courthouse in a “We the People” hat, a starkly different experience from Jan. 6, 2021, when he marched to the U.S. Capitol alongside thousands of other Trump fans.

For all the online outrage, only a handful of Trump supporters turned out to protest the latest charges against the former president, continuing a shift in the right-wing fervor that once drew thousands to D.C. rallies, clogged lakes with boat parades and mobilized a de facto “MAGA militia” in the armed groups that took his extremist rhetoric to the streets.

So, that’s it for me today.  I’m trying to beat the heat and do what I can around the house.  Right now, it’s my ritual cold bath and blasting fan and something to read.  Stay safe out there!  Cross the street if you see any dude in his maga militia playsuit!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

 

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