Finally Friday Reads: Pobre Diabla
Posted: November 1, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, abortion rights, Abusive Relationships, American Fascists, just because, Right Wing Angst | Tags: #DonOld, 2024 Elections, @repeat1968. John Buss, Halloween Horror Movies, Liz Cheney, Texas abortion laws 4 Comments
“Voting can stop it.” John Buss @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
It was a dark and drizzly night, not one to make the rounds to all the Halloween parties in the hood. So, I settled into watching a friend from around Flagstaff, Arizona, stream a set of Horror Movies on Discord to a bunch of us who play a Zombie survival game together. It was like a pajama party with the girls, except my girls are all furry, and everyone else was scattered all over the country. I retwisted my ankle last night which was still hurting from a Tuesday mishap and feeling really old. The live Oaks of New Orleans’ Avenues drop acorns that rapidly become a coffee ground-like mess everywhere. That was the trick. I was glad that I stocked up on treats and wine earlier because I just missed the fog and the mist rolling in over the city. A very apt setting for Interview with a Vampire. I was hurting, traumatized by the DonOld Garbage Truck Cosplay spewing from the News Channels, and thought settling down to some movies would be a good break.
I saw a new version of Children of the Corn and was treated to several movies, including two of the “The Hills Have Eyes” franchises. It was hard to believe that the original version by Wes Crave had come out when I was at university. The fact the newest version of Children was centered in Nebraska was not lost on me. The original of that one came out when I was finishing my Masters. Back then, I’d take out the Beta tapes of the old Vincent Price horror movies that I recorded off the few cable channels back then.
The more I watched the Hill films, the more I could see Trump supporters in all the cannibal zombies in the Hills. Seriously, right down to their caps, their messy English, and the way they treated the two women in that National Guard Unit, I could swear I was watching a MAGA ambush. The creepy preacher in Children of the Corn and his implied “sin” against the little girl Eden was like the perfect metaphor for all those white Christian nationalist men whose arrest mug shots for crimes against children keep popping up on my X feed.
I had watched the news earlier and the meltdown that MAGA husbands are having at the idea their wives might get in the voting booth and vote their conscience instead of the will of their Patriarchal captor. One dude on Fox likened it to committing adultery, at which point the women on the panel laughed, and then he looked straight at the camera and told his chattel Emma that it would be finished if he found she’d done that. I thought she should get a lawyer to get her share, then Run Emma, RUN!! That and go have some fun with some young men that know what they’re doing! Just don’t bring them home or marry them.
This is from Vanity Fair. The analysis is provided by Bess Levin. “Fox News Host Says He’d Divorce His Wife for Voting for Kamala Harris. “If I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair.” If you’d like, I can reference the part from the Hill movie where the mutant grabs a woman National Guard soldier, starts grabbing and raping her, and says, “You make nice babies!” Who among us can’t see DonOld in his prime doing that same thing?
How much respect do Donald Trump’s male supporters have for women? So much that at least one of them has said he’d end his marriage if his wife exercised her constitutional right to vote for Kamala Harris.
On an episode of The Five this week, Fox News host Jesse Watters told fellow panelists that if he learned his wife, Emma, cast her ballot for the vice president, after letting him think she was voting for Trump, he would consider it a betrayal on par with having an extramarital affair and it would be “over.”
“If I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair,” Watters said. “That, to me, violates the sanctity of our marriage. What else is she keeping from me? What else has she been lying about?” Asked by cohost Jeanine Pirro, “Why would she lie to you? Have you threatened her?” Watters responded, “Why would she do that and then vote Harris? Why would she say she was voting…. And I caught her and then she said, ‘I lied to you for the last four years—’”
“So you admit you intimidate people,” Pirro interjected. “It’s over, Emma!” Watters said. “That would be D-Day!”
Watters and co. were discussing an ad put out in support of the Harris campaign that reminds women, “You can vote any way you want, and no one will ever know.” Which is apparently a necessary point to make to women who are married to extremely fragile Trump-supporting men.
I know that once they think they’ve got you, they show their true colors, but seriously, who could stand to live like that? Salon has this great article up with an even more wonderful headline. “”It is so disastrous”: MAGA men are freaking out that wives may be secretly voting for Kamala Harris, “That’s the same thing as having an affair,” Fox News host argues as women fuel early vote in key states.” The entire concept of Control Freak is not hyped enough for these guys. Charles R Davis takes them on.
When you’re a star, Donald Trump has said more than once, women will let you do whatever you want to them. As president, that meant putting three right-wing justices on the Supreme Court and stripping half the country of a constitutional right, enabling people like him — their self-proclaimed “protector” — to have the final word on what any woman does with her body.
“I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not,” the former president asserted at a campaign stop on Wednesday. “I am going to protect them.”
Women, it turns out, do not care for this — a large majority of them, at least. While millions will still vote for the Republican candidate, perhaps hating immigrants more than they love reproductive rights, the only certainty at this point is that many millions more will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. In the latest ABC News/Ipsos national poll, the Democrat enjoyed a 14% advantage with women over Trump; among women with a college degree, that number rose to 23%; among women voters under 40, it rocketed to 34%.
According to the Brookings Institution, Harris’ strength among women angered by the 2022 Dobbs decision could explain why Democrats, for the first time in forever, are polling better with older voters than Republicans. The think tank’s Michael Hais and Morley Winograd noted that, per the ABC News/Ipsos survey, there has been a 10-point swing to Harris among voters over the age of 65 compared to 2020.
“Some observers think this shift is driven by the ‘revenge of Boomer feminists’ among the women of that famous generation, all of whom are now over 65 but who cut their political teeth in the battle for equality when they were much younger,” Hais and Winograd wrote. Younger voters may be angry over losing a right they had never lived without, but older people have seen hard-fought progress rolled back. They are also the most reliable group of voters — and they tend to vote early.
In battleground states, that appears to be exactly what’s happening. According to an analysis of early-voting tallies by Politico, women account for 55% of all ballots cast thus far in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
That, in turn, is causing some MAGA commentators to break from their usual posture of feigned confidence to outright panic.
“Early vote has been disproportionately female,” Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA and helping to lead the Trump campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort, posted on social media. “If men stay at home, Kamala is president. It’s that simple.” (Kirk, seeking to motivate these voters, offered Orwellian misogyny: “If you want a vision of the future if you don’t vote, imagine Kamala’s voice cackling, forever.”)
I feel seen for once, hopefully, not by the Children of the Garbage Bags and AR-15s. DonOld really has gone over the edge. During his rally in New Mexico, he made a loosely veiled threat at former Congresswoman Liz Cheney. This is from the Bulwark, as written by Bill Kristol. Don’t Horror shows make allies out of the strangest folks? That’s what happens when your very life is on the line.
Donald Trump’s two strongest personality traits each had a moment on the campaign trail yesterday.
At a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the buffoon: “I’m here for one very simple reason. I like you very much, and it’s good for my credentials with the Hispanic and Latino community.”
And later, on stage with Tucker Carlson in Glendale, Arizona, the menace. Here he was on former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney: “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
U.S. News has this headline. “Trump Says Liz Cheney Might Not Be Such a ‘War Hawk’ if She Had Rifles Shooting at Her. Donald Trump is calling former Rep. Liz Cheney, who’s one of his most prominent Republican critics, a “war hawk” and he’s suggesting she might not be as willing to send troops to fight if she had guns shooting at her.”
Donald Trump is suggesting that former Rep. Liz Cheney, one of his most prominent Republican critics, should have rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight. It was his latest suggestion that his rivals should be targeted with violence.
Cheney responded by branding the GOP presidential nominee a “cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
The Republican presidential candidate has been using increasingly threatening rhetoric against his adversaries and talked of “enemies from within” undermining the country. Some of his former senior aides and Vice President Kamala Harris have labeled him a fascist in response.
At an event late Thursday in Arizona with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Trump was asked whether it was strange to see Cheney campaign against him. The former Wyoming congresswoman has vocally opposed Trump since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris, joining the vice president at recent stops as they try to win over Republicans disaffected with Trump.
Trump called Cheney “a deranged person” and added, “But the reason she couldn’t stand me is that she always wanted to go to war with people. If it were up to her we’d be in 50 different countries.”
The former president continued: “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with the rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. OK, let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.
The results of Donald Trump’s first reign of Terror are killing women. The Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have the blood of innocents on their hands. ProPublica has once again followed the trail of deaths left in Texas by the hypocrites who scream they are “pro-life.” “A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms. It took three ER visits and 20 hours before a hospital admitted Nevaeh Crain, 18, as her condition worsened. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm “fetal demise.” She’s one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban.”
Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.
Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.
The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.
Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.
By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.
Hours later, she was dead.
Fails, who would have seen her daughter turn 20 this Friday, still cannot understand why Crain’s emergency was not treated like an emergency.
But that is what many pregnant women are now facing in states with strict abortion bans, doctors and lawyers have told ProPublica.
“Pregnant women have become essentially untouchables,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor emerita at George Washington University.
Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, whether the pregnancy is wanted or not. It includes exceptions for life-threatening conditions, but still, doctors told ProPublica that confusion and fear about the potential legal repercussions are changing the way their colleagues treat pregnant patients with complications.
In states with abortion bans, such patients are sometimes bounced between hospitals like “hot potatoes,” with health care providers reluctant to participate in treatment that could attract a prosecutor, doctors told ProPublica. In some cases, medical teams are wasting precious time debating legalities and creating documentation, preparing for the possibility that they’ll need to explain their actions to a jury and judge.
Dr. Jodi Abbott, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University School of Medicine, said patients are left wondering: “Am I being sent home because I really am OK? Or am I being sent home because they’re afraid that the solution to what’s going on with my pregnancy would be ending the pregnancy, and they’re not allowed to do that?”
There is a federal law to prevent emergency room doctors from withholding lifesaving care.
Passed nearly four decades ago, it requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients in medical crises. The Biden administration argues this mandate applies even in cases where an abortion might be necessary.
No state has done more to fight this interpretation than Texas, which has warned doctors that its abortion ban supersedes the administration’s guidance on federal law, and that they can face up to 99 years in prison for violating it.
ProPublica condensed more than 800 pages of Crain’s medical records into a four-page timeline in consultation with two maternal-fetal medicine specialists; reporters reviewed it with nine doctors, including researchers at prestigious universities, OB-GYNs who regularly handle miscarriages, and experts in emergency medicine and maternal health.
Puerto Rican Americans continue to speak out about the horrible racist slurs spoken by #DonOld about their Island home and their presence on the mainland. Does he understand that Puerto Ricans are Americans and that they live everywhere in this country? This is from The Daily Beast. “J.Lo Claps Back at Trump Rally Puerto Rico Jab: ‘We Are Americans’, “Our pain matters,” the singer said at a Las Vegas event for Kamala Harris.” This is reported by Claire Lampen.
As promised, Jennifer Lopez took the stage at Kamala Harris’s rally in Las Vegas on Thursday night, responding to racist statements about Puerto Rico made at one of Donald Trump’s recent events.
“I am an American woman. I am the daughter of Guadalupe Lupe Rodríguez and David Lopez, a proud daughter and son of Puerto Rico. I am Puerto Rican,” Lopez said, restating the final point in Spanish. “And yes, I was born here. And we are Americans.”
In his much-maligned comedy routine at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” His comments, Lopez said, should offend “anyone of decent character.”
“It’s about us, all of us, no matter what we look like, who we love, who we worship, or where we’re from,” Lopez said. “[Harris’s] opponent, on the other hand, doesn’t see it that way. He has consistently worked to divide us. At Madison Square Garden, he reminded us who he really is and how he really feels.”
Trump‘s rally featured a parade of extremist speakers, though it was Hinchcliffe’s act that really dominated headlines. In it, he claimed Latinos “love making babies,” a riff whose anti-immigrant punchline fell flat, and threw in some racist stereotypes about Black people as well.
Although the Trump campaign has since attempted to distance itself from Hinchcliffe’s set—Trump trotting out a classic “I don’t know her” defense—it garnered criticism from all sides, even from his own party.
Trump’s enablers cannot stop him from his hate-filled speeches and comments.
“It wasn’t just Puerto Ricans who were offended that day,” Lopez added. “It was every Latino in this country, it was humanity.”
J.Lo went on to say that, “with an understanding of our past, and a faith in our future,” she‘s proud to vote for Harris. “You can’t even spell American without Rican,” she said. “This is our country, too, and we must exercise our right to vote.”
Towards the end of her speech, Lopez appeared to fight back tears. “I promised myself I wouldn’t get emotional,” she told the audience. “But you know what? We should be emotional. We should be upset. We should be scared and outraged, we should. Our pain matters. We matter. You matter. Your voice and your vote matters.”
“This election is about your life,” J.Lo continued. “It‘s about you, and me, and my kids, and your kids. Don‘t make it easy; make them pay attention to you. That’s your power. Your vote is your power.”
“Your vote is your power” is the line I want everyone to remember today. Another one is a quote from the late Senator Paul Wellstone from Minnesota. Five Days until we get the opportunity to never hear that man or his zombie cultists again.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Finally Friday Reads: Full-on Full Moon Crazy
Posted: October 18, 2024 Filed under: "presidential immunity", 2024 Elections, democracy is threatened, Foreign Affairs, Fox News, Harris Walz 2024, Iran, Israel, Kamala Harris 2024, North Korea, Right Wing Angst, Russia, Ukraine | Tags: @repeat1968. John Buss, Full Moon Madness, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Trump's dementia 4 Comments
“Every single time he opens his mouth…” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
If you got to look into the sky last night, you got to see the Hunter’s supermoon. There certainly was a lot of Lunacy yesterday. That causation or even correlation doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, but it has a literary tradition covering nearly all periods of history. DonOld’s Yesterday fits the adage neatly.
“It is the very error of the moon.She comes more near the earth than she was wont. And makes men mad.”
—William Shakespeare, Othello
Speaking of madness, “North Korea sends troops to support Russia in Ukraine war: NIS.” This was announced in The Korea Herald.
North Korea has dispatched special forces to support Russia in its war against Ukraine, with the first batch already having arrived in Russia and a second group of North Korean troops expected to follow soon, South Korea’s intelligence agency claimed on Friday.
The National Intelligence Service said it “confirmed that North Korea began its participation in the war by transporting special forces to Russia via Russian Navy transport ships from Oct. 8 to 13.”
However, the NIS provided no substantial evidence to support this claim, other than satellite imagery showing Russian vessels docked at the port of Chongjin in North Hamgyong Province.
Four amphibious ships and three escort ships from the Russian Pacific Fleet transported around 1,500 North Korean special forces to Vladivostok during this period, departing from areas near Chongjin and Musudan-ri in North Hamgyong Province, as well as Hamhung in South Hamgyong Province, according to the NIS.
The NIS further stated that a second operation to transport North Korean troops to Russia is “expected to take place soon.”
The North Korean soldiers deployed to Russia have been stationed at military bases in the Far East, spread across cities such as Vladivostok, Ussuriysk, Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk.
“They are expected to be sent to the battlefield once they complete their adaptation training,” the intelligence agency added.
According to the NIS, the North Korean soldiers were provided with Russian military uniforms and Russian-made weapons. They were also issued fake identification documents resembling residents of Siberian regions such as Yakutia and Buryatia, whose appearance is similar to North Koreans.
“This appears to be an attempt to disguise them as Russian soldiers and conceal their involvement in the war,” the NIS stated.
The NIS also reported that Kim Jong-sik, the first vice director of North Korea’s Munitions Industry Department and a key figure in the country’s missile development, was observed visiting a North Korean KN-23 missile launch site near the Russia-Ukraine front. He was accompanied by dozens of North Korean military officers to provide on-site guidance.
“It’s incomprehensible,” John Buss. @repeat1968. “More Full moon Madness!!!” me
American Madman DonOld is showing his age; finally, the legacy media have noticed and are reporting it. It only took 39 minutes of swaying to his playlist at a rally for them to start asking the real questions. He’s evidently tuckered out. “Trump cancels a streak of events with only days until election.” This is reported in AXIOS by Ivana Saric
Former President Trump’s planned appearance at a National Rifle Association event next week was cancelled Thursday, the latest in a slew of scuttled public appearances and interviews by the former president in recent weeks.
Why it matters: With only 17 days to go until Election Day, the spate of cancellations gives voters fewer chances to hear from Trump before heading to the polls in a coin toss race.
- Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, has been on a media blitz after enduring criticism from Republicans about a perceived lack of interviews.
- And while Harris has ventured into the unfriendly territory of a Fox News interview, Trump has stuck to the safe spaces of conservative outlets.
- In the appearances he has made, Trump’s rhetoric has grown more violent and nativist. In recent weeks, he has decried his critics as the “enemy from within” and fanned the flames of false conspiracy theories about migrants.
Driving the news: The NRA said Thursday it had cancelled its “Defend the 2nd” event with Trump in Savannah, Georgia, next week due to “campaign scheduling changes.”
- Trump also pulled out of two mainstream media interviews this week, with NBC News and CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
- Earlier this month he backed out of a scheduled appearance on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” while Harris appeared on the program.
- The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment.
Between the lines: Several of the events and interviews Trump has appeared at in recent weeks have raised eyebrows.
- Trump cut short a Pennsylvania town hall this week to listen and sway to music for more than half an hour. “Let’s make it into a music fest,” Trump said. “Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”
- In an interview with Bloomberg News at the Chicago Economic Club Tuesday, Trump downplayed the Capitol riot and struggled to respond when confronted about the costs of his economic plans
- Trump later claimed he was “hoodwinked” into the interview.
- During an all-women Fox News town hall that aired Wednesday, Trump declared himself the “father of IVF,” a decades-old fertility treatment that has come under threat since overturning Roe v. Wade — which Trump has repeatedly bragged about ending.
DonOld is asking for a sitdown with Rupert Murdoch. This is from MEDIAITE’s Isaac Schorr. “Donald Trump Outlines His Demands For Rupert Murdoch Live On Fox News Ahead of Private Meeting: ‘I Don’t Know If He’s Thrilled.’”
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump outlined his demands for conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch live on Fox News Friday morning, musing that Murdoch should stop airing negative ads and allowing Democratic guests on the network in the run up to Election Day.
After Fox & Friends’ Lawrence Jones thanked Trump for appearing on the show Friday, the former president jumped back in to ask Jones and his co-hosts, “You know what the event I have now?”
“No,” said Brian Kilmeade.
“A very big event,” continued the former president. “I’m going to see Rupert Murdoch.”
A pensive Kilmeade replied, “Alright,” and Steve Doocy exclaimed, “Okay!” before Trump pressed on.
“That’s a big event. I don’t know if he’s thrilled that I say it. And I’m going to tell him, I’m gonna tell him something very simple because I can’t talk to anybody else about it: Don’t put on negative commercials for 21 days, don’t put them. And don’t put on the air their horrible people. They come and lie. I’m going to say, ‘Rupert, please do it this way.’”
“Right,” interjected Kilmeade.
“And then we’re going to have a victory, because I think everyone wants that,” concluded Trump.
Salon Fellow Griffin Eckstein reports that Faux News Reader Brett Baier is very sorry about his behavior during his interview with Vice President Harris. “”I did make a mistake”: Baier apologizes for playing edited Trump clip in Harris interview. The Fox News anchor’s deceptive video clip left out Trump’s remarks about “enemies from within.”
Fox News anchor Bret Baier is apologizing for playing a misleadingly edited clip in an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Harris sat down with Baier on Wednesday for a tense interview, in which the “Special Report” host repeatedly cut off and chastised the Democratic candidate. One exchange in particular gave the game away.
When Harris admonished former President Trump over suggestions that he’d sic the military on his political opponents, Baier aired a portion of a Trump interview that omitted his comments against “the enemy from within.”
“I’m not threatening anybody,” Trump said in the clip Baier played. “They’re the ones doing the threatening.”
In a Thursday night episode of “Report,” Baier owned up his misdirection.
“I wanna say that I did make a mistake,” Baier admitted. “When I called for a soundbite, I was expecting a piece of the ‘enemy from within’ from Maria Bartiromo’s interview, to be tied to the piece from [Harris Faulkner’s ]town hall.”
Baier went on to play the intended clip for his audience, though Harris was still able to get her point across the previous night despite the misleading edit.
“You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people,” the vice president said on Wednesday. “In a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he would lock people up for doing it.”
Even the New York Times is noticing DonOld’s crazy demeanor and speech these days. “Trump’s Meandering Speeches Motivate His Critics and Worry His Allies. Some advisers and allies of former President Donald J. Trump are concerned about his scattershot style on the campaign trail as he continues to veer off script.” This is reported by Michael C. Bender.
Now, some Trump advisers and allies say privately they are concerned that the dynamic may be repeating itself four years later. They worry that Mr. Trump’s impetuousness and scattershot style on the campaign trail needlessly risk victory in battleground states where the margin for error is increasingly narrow.
At a time when his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, has stepped up her attacks on him as “unstable,” Mr. Trump has struggled to publicly hone his message by veering off script and ramping up personal attacks on Ms. Harris that allies have urged him to rein in.
“When he’s good, he’s great, and when he’s off message, he’s not so great,” said David Urban, a Trump adviser. “I don’t think anyone is really changing their mind at this point, but when he distracts from his biggest, broadest messaging, it’s counterproductive because the Harris campaign uses it to turn out their voters.”
During a speech on Saturday in California, he described mail-in ballots as “so corrupt,” reviving one of his false attacks on the 2020 election results, and did a play-by-play of his internal thoughts when he watched SpaceX, Elon Musk’s spaceflight company, fly a rocket back onto its launch site.
On Sunday, in response to a question on Fox News about the possibility of foreign adversaries’ meddling in the election, he reverted to autocratic language by saying “the bigger problem is the enemy from within.” On Monday, he halted a town-hall event in suburban Philadelphia after five questions when two people in the crowd needed medical attention. He spent roughly the next half-hour playing D.J., swaying and grooving in front of his crowd to a playlist he curated from the stage. “Let’s just listen to music,” he said.
Last week, he canceled a CBS interview on “60 Minutes,” in which he and Ms. Harris were both scheduled to appear — and has not stopped talking about it. He complained about it during events in Detroit and Reno, Nev., and again on Monday in a social media post at 1:12 a.m.
All of this makes me wonder if he doesn’t care about winning or if he’s just relying on a country-wide repeat J6 event and his cronies planted in positions to disrupt the voting process in many states. It might be he has other things on his rapidly disintegrating mind. Just a few hours ago, Judge Tanya Chutkin, keeper of the American Way and the U.S. Constitution, allowed the Special Counsel to open up the floodgates of evidence. This is from CNN. “Special counsel releases trove of redacted documents in 2020 election subversion case against Trump.” October Surprise, perhaps? Care to Dance in the Moonlight with me?
Special counsel Jack Smith on Friday released a massive trove of heavily redacted documents in his 2020 election subversion criminal case against former President Donald Trump.
There are nearly 2,000 pages in a massive trove of documents released Friday, but nearly all of the pages appear to be completely redacted.
The redacted appendices filed on the public docket in the case are related to Smith’s expansive filing from earlier this month that laid out his fullest picture yet of the case against Trump and Smith’s belief that his actions around the 2020 election should not be shielded by presidential immunity.
One volume is filled with sealed pages as well as tweets and other social media posts from Trump, his campaign and allies, including some posted during the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
One of the tweets include Trump’s post that day that Vice President Mike Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done” that day in supporting his effort to change the election results.
Others include a myriad of claims of voter fraud during the 2020 election.
Prosecutors have argued that these tweets from Trump should be allowed to be used in the trial because they were personal in nature or part of his campaigning efforts and not his official duties as president.
The documents were released a day after Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected a bid by Trump to pause the release. Trump argued that posting the documents now could be seen as election inference and had asked them to remain under seal until after Election Day.
“If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute – or appear to be – election interference,” Chutkan wrote in a decision late Thursday.
Another volume contains memos from lawyer John Eastman with a plan for Pence to reject the congressional certification of the 2020 election. The volume also includes a public statement Trump released the night before January 6 claiming he and Pence were on the same page about the congressional certification, Trump’s prepared remarks for his speech on January 6, and fundraising emails sent out by his 2020 campaign in the days before January 6.
Pence’s letter to Congress on January 6 explaining why he could not reject certifying the election and a transcript of Trump’s 2023 CNN town hall are also included in the documents.
The redacted files were expected to include an array of materials, including grand jury transcripts and notes from FBI interviews conducted during the yearslong investigation.
This was a big news dump week. Hopefully, the death of Yahya Sinwar will lead to a peaceful conclusion to this latest Mid-Eastern War. I’m not sure that’s what Bibi wants, but I’m sure the return of the hostages and a ceasefire would be a good start to ending hostilities. This is from Reuters. “Yahya Sinwar threw stick at drone just before death, according to Israel video. “
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was tracked by an Israeli mini drone as he lay dying in the ruins of a building in southern Gaza and filmed him slumped in a chair covered in dust, according to video released by Israeli authorities on Thursday.As the drone hovered nearby, the video showed him throwing a stick at it, in an apparent act of desperation or defiance. Not long afterwards, the military said, a tank shell was fired into the building.After an intensive manhunt that had lasted for more than a year, the Israeli troops that killed Sinwar were initially unaware that they had caught their country’s number one enemy after a gun battle on Wednesday, Israeli officials said.Dental records, fingerprints and DNA testing provided final confirmation of Sinwar’s death for Israel and on Friday, Hamas confirmed their leader had been killed.Intelligence services had been gradually restricting the area where Sinwar could operate, the military said. But unlike other militant leaders tracked down by Israel, including Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on July 13, the encounter which finally killed Sinwar was not a planned and targeted strike, or an operation carried out by elite commandos.
Mostly Monday Reads: Prepare for a Toxic Election Season
Posted: July 17, 2023 Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, corporate money, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, corruption, Right Wing Angst, Tax Evasion and offshore banking | Tags: @repeat1968, Jr., RFK 7 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I can assuredly say that everyone I know has been so worn down by the Trump years that I cannot imagine this election season could get any worse than the last four. But, the more Trump wannabes enter races and the likelihood that Trump will prevail in the Republican party means that Republicans will amp up the campaign rhetoric as well as the trash passed by the House. Their infighting spills into the news also. Get ready to stock up on all your comfort items! It’s not even Labor Day, and the Crazy Train has left the station.
There are also the usual gadflies running to the left of Joe Biden. They’re not only attracting gasps from the Democratic party, they attracting Republican Donor money in the hopes they can cut into Biden’s lead. This is from Michael Tomasky, writing for The New Republic. “This Is the Time for Quixotic, Corrosive Campaigns? Seriously? Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, and No Labels are effectively surrogates for Donald Trump’s 2024 bid.”
You might think, in a two-party democracy where the man who is a dead-on bet to be the presidential nominee of one of those parties has all but pledged to wipe out said democracy and promised to use his second term to destroy all internal enemies, that the rest of the society would band together to try to prevent that from happening.
That Donald Trump has so pledged is, to everyone who is not a supporter of his, beyond dispute. He has stated many times some version of his belief that “the greatest threat to Western civilization” is “some of the horrible, USA-hating people” in our midst, by which he means the many millions who disagree with him. When he was president, his people were preparing a plan for a possible second term that involved firing thousands of government employees and replacing them with staff loyal to him. He called for the termination of the Constitution’s rules that allowed Joe Biden to win in 2020, even though those rules worked properly to elect the person who won. He led a riot against the U.S. government to overthrow the election results. He calls the press the “enemy of the people.” There’s no telling what a new Trump term would bring. Our democracy would be disfigured at best and, at worst, destroyed.
You’d think people would take that pretty seriously. If we were all watching a Star Trek episode in which a teetering democratic society faced an imminent, dangerous threat, we’d be cheering for the society to come to its senses and work in unison to defeat the threat. That’s what should be happening in real life. But instead, a lot of people have chosen this moment, when the democracy is hanging by a few tattered threads and its future depends directly on the result of next year’s election, to say, Hey, let’s have some fun! This is all a game anyway.
Well, it’s not a game. And it’s astonishing to me that people can be so blithe about it. Let’s look at four (or four and a half) examples.
First, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has decided that this is the right time to run a quixotic and corrosive presidential campaign whose end result can only be to fuel cynicism not just about Biden but about the whole system. That’s the inevitable outcome when a crackpot conspiracy theorist who spouts nothing but lies is given a platform like the one Kennedy now has.
His latest WTF moment, that Covid was “targeted to attack Caucasian and Black people” and that Jewish and Chinese people were most immune, may finally have signaled to the political-media establishment that this guy should not be indulged any further. Let us hope so. He won’t come close to winning the nomination. His support has slipped since the spring—he’s been polling at single digits in some state polls.
That isn’t the threat. The threat is that his out-there beliefs and cuckoo theories and refusal to denounce expressions of support from right-wing extremists up to and including Alex Jones (in his recent interview with David Remnick) lend support to the Trumpian view of the world. If his Democratic support ends up being a disgruntled 6 or 7 percent, without him on the November ballot, won’t the bulk of that 6 or 7 percent turn to the guy who sounds most like him? And in Wisconsin, Georgia, and a few other close states, that could be the ball game.
RFK, Jr. belongs in the Loony Tunes universe right next to the QAnon creeps. Think of what Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner could do to them! That’s why Junior is managing to get Republican support. I also believe that he’ll drive the narratives in the press of the BothSiderists. You know who they are. This article from Politico is a depressing look at political funding by billionaire Republicans. “RFK Jr.’s secret fundraising success: Republicans. A POLITICO analysis shows donor overlap with DeSantis and Trump supporters.” This analysis was written by Jessica Piper.
The top contributors to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign included donors who typically give to Republicans, according to campaign finance filings — underscoring the extent to which Kennedy, running as a Democrat, is resonating with the other party.
Kennedy’s campaign committee reported raising $6.3 million since his April launch, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission on Saturday. He spent $1.8 million and had $4.5 million cash on hand as of June 30.
Some of that money came from donors who have more recently supported Republicans. Kennedy’s campaign raked in at least $100,000 from donors who previously gave to committees associated with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or former President Donald Trump, according to a POLITICO analysis of federal and state campaign finance filings. The analysis is based solely on Kennedy’s itemized donations, although he also raised more than $2 million from small-dollar donors, whose names the campaign does not have to disclose.
Such crossover giving is unusual, but Kennedy is running on a platform that includes opposition to efforts to vaccinate against Covid-19, which is increasingly resonating with the Republican base. Though there has been an uptick in vaccine skepticism in recent years, the biggest increases tend to be among voters who identify as Republican.
Kennedy has also been a frequent guest on Fox News since launching his campaign in April, criticizing President Joe Biden on issues including the war in Ukraine and the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Among the donors who maxed out donating to Kennedy despite having recent histories of giving to Republicans is banking executive Omeed Malik, who Axios reported is hosting separate fundraisers for DeSantis and Kennedy in the Hamptons this summer.
We can always hope he drains voters from DeSantis, but DeSantis is doing a great job of that on his own.
https://twitter.com/SIfill_/status/1680371100583182337
This is from the Traister analysis. “RFK Jr.’s Inside Job. How a conspiracy-spewing literal Kennedy posing as a populist outsider jolted the Democratic Party.”
But they aren’t the only ones who took exploitative advantage of the suffering of millions: Kennedy’s vilification of Fauci as a fascist sold more than 1 million copies, and his public profile grew with his every outsize utterance, including that vaccine mandates “will make you a slave” and that “even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” a nadir so low that even his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, had to issue a statement condemning it.
But however off-kilter he sounded — indeed, precisely because he was extra off-kilter in his attacks on lockdowns and vaccines and masks — Kennedy’s COVID performance became the springboard that launched his current campaign against Biden for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2024. Kennedy kicked off his bid in Boston in April, addressing a roomful of people cheering and holding signs with his name in the air. He had the look of a man getting the reception he’d been waiting for his whole life, and his extemporaneous remarks stretched to almost two hours, his expensive education and resemblance to his famous forebears covering for quite a bit of rambling. “He can look and sound so thoughtful and contemplative,” said one person who has known him a very long time. “And he’s just bursting with madness.” Kennedy soon began polling at an eye-catching nearly 20 percent in multiple surveys, and though a recent New Hampshire poll showed him at 9 percent in June, he earned higher favorability numbers in an Economist-YouGov poll than either Biden or Donald Trump.
He has spent the summer traveling to every dark-web–cancel-cultured–just-asking-questions–anti-woke whistle-stop that’ll have him, appearing on podcasts with Bari Weiss, Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, and Jordan Peterson, among others. He can count among his reply guys and fans (and, in some cases, early endorsers) a clutch of Silicon Valley CEOs and financiers, including hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman; venture capitalists Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks; and Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, the current and former overlords of Twitter, respectively. He has been friendly with many in the media, including Salon founder and former editor-in-chief David Talbot and Rolling Stone co-founder and longtime editor Jann Wenner. Kennedy’s campaign manager is Dennis Kucinich, the former Cleveland mayor and Ohio congressman. A super-PAC called American Values 2024 has reportedly raised millions in support of Kennedy’s campaign, and Sacks held a fundraising dinner for him in June for which diners paid $10,000 a ticket. Kennedy’s drive to speak his mind has been praised by those on the far right, including Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, and some on the self-described left, like Matt Taibbi and Max Blumenthal.
Kennedy crowed to me about his horseshoe coalition gathered round a campaign he views as fundamentally populist. And it’s quite a band he has put together: crunchy Whole Foods–shopping anti-vaxxers, paunchy architects of hard-right authoritarianism looking to boost a chaos agent, Nader-Stein third-party perma-gremlins, some Kennedy-family superfans, and rich tech bros seeking a lone wolf to legitimize them. Their convening can give the impression of weightiness, but if you so much as blew on them, the alliance would shatter into a million pieces. The only thing that seems to bind them is Kennedy, the current embodiment of a warped fantasy of marginalization and martyrdom that has become ever more appealing — and thus politically significant — in an age of disinformation and distrust in government and institutions.
Que Susan Sarandon, or does she only hate Hillary? At least Marianne Williamson is running out of cash. FiveThirtyEight asks the question. “How Seriously Should We Take Marianne Williamson And Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?”
But nobody who covers elections (including us) seems to be taking Williamson and Kennedy particularly seriously. So I come to the FiveThirtyEight brain trust with two questions today:
- There’s plainly some kind of appetite for a non-Biden candidate on the Democratic side — so why are oddball candidates like Williamson and Kennedy the only ones who have jumped in?
- Are we underestimating Williamson and Kennedy’s ability to make Biden’s life difficult as we get closer to the Democratic primaries?
nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): Interesting, Amelia, I’m not sure I agree with your premise there! I think a lot of people are taking Williamson and Kennedy more seriously than I’d like them to.
ameliatd: ((Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior reporter) Ooh, we’re bickering already! I love it. Please say more …
nrakich: Basically, they’re being covered like serious candidates. Reporters are going to their rallies and writing exposés on them. Even if they say they are extreme long-shot candidates, they aren’t treating them that way. Actions speak louder than words.
The Republicans are just vile. This is from Lawyers, Guns, and Money. “The decline and decline of Pudding Ron.” These signs were noticed by Scott LeMieux in the New York Times.
All the signs of a campaign flameout are there:
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has started cutting campaign staff just months into his presidential bid, as he has struggled to gain traction in the Republican primary and lost ground in some public polls to former President Donald J. Trump.
The exact number of people let go by the DeSantis team was unclear, but one campaign aide said it was fewer than 10. The development was earlier reported by Politico.
The dismissals are an ominous sign for the campaign and also underscore the challenges that Mr. DeSantis faces with both his fund-raising and his spending, at a time when a number of major donors who had expressed interest in him have grown concerned about his performance.
[…]
Mr. DeSantis’s struggles appear to be not just about the numbers, but also with the campaign’s message. Late last week, two top DeSantis advisers, Dave Abrams and Tucker Obenshain, were announced to be leaving to join an outside group supporting Mr. DeSantis.
Mr. DeSantis’s campaign finance disclosure with the Federal Election Commission shows he raised roughly $20 million but spent almost $8 million, a so-called burn rate that leaves him with just $12 million in cash on hand. Only about $9 million of that cash can be spent in the primary, with the rest counting toward the general election if he is the nominee.
The filing indicated a surprisingly large staff for a campaign so early in a candidacy, particularly for one with a super PAC that has made a show of how much of the load it is prepared to handle. More than $1 million in expenditures were listed as “payroll” and payroll processing.
Ah, the “burning tons of cash to go backward” trajectory. To be fair, there is no precedent for a Florida Republican becoming an establishment darling, raising lots of money, and having his presidential campaign become a pathetic joke.
Speaking of Pathetic Jokes … “The Standoff Between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert Is Worse Than You Think” from The Daily Beast. This report is by Zachary Pitrizzo.
It’s no secret that the relationship between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert has never been worse. The two U.S. representatives yelled at each other on and off the House floor. Greene recently called Boebert a “little bitch” to her face. And Boebert supported Greene’s removal from the Freedom Caucus.
But, lawmakers told The Daily Beast, the situation between the two is still even worse than most people think.
“A fistfight could break out at any moment,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) told The Daily Beast.
Burchett, who later clarified that he was serious, said he was enjoying the standoff as a “professional wrestling fan.”
“I am friends with both of them. It’s entertaining to think that a fistfight could break out at any movement. I kind of dig that,” he continued.
Burchett isn’t the only person who thinks the feud could turn even nastier.
Yeah, “men” just love a catfight. So here’s one for them between Pudding Ron and Orange Caligula. They’re such nasty men. This is from The Hill. “Trump campaign calls Iraq veteran ‘lily-livered’ for flipping to DeSantis.” Why Does he hate our Military so much?
Former President Trump’s campaign described Iowa state Sen. Jeff Reichman (R) as “lily-livered” for flipping his endorsement to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) following Trump’s attack on Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) earlier this week.
In a statement to The Hill, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung stated, “There is no room for weak-kneed and lily-livered people on Team Trump.”
Reichman, an Iraq veteran, announced Thursday he would be flipping his endorsement of Trump, and backing DeSantis instead. The state senator, who is serving his first term in Iowa’s upper chamber, was included on a list of around a dozen Iowa officials who the Trump campaign considered early endorsers of the former president.
In his statement, Cheung goes on to claim DeSantis is “so desperate that he’s willing to offer buyouts in the form of fundraisers for endorsements.”
“The truth is that those who have been promised financial support are now regretting their deal with the devil because none of them have been able to schedule fundraisers with DeSantis,” the statement continued.
DeSantis’s campaign said earlier this month it raised $20 million during the second quarter of 2023, while the Trump campaign hauled in more than $35 million in the second quarter, the Trump campaign confirmed to The Hill.
Reichman’s decision to flip support comes days after Trump lashed out at Reynolds on Truth Social on Monday for not endorsing a presidential candidate in the 2024 election. The social media post followed a New York Times report describing the Trump campaign’s frustration with Reynolds’s multiple appearances with DeSantis during his stops in Iowa.
My final offering today is from ProPublica, which is still investigating the roles of Billionaires in Political and SCOTUS decisions. “In lavishing gifts on the Supreme Court justice, the billionaire GOP donor may have violated tax laws, according to tax experts.” And how about Uncle Thomas?”
Crow’s lawyer argues that Congress has no authority to probe the GOP donor’s generosity and that doing so violates a constitutional separation of powers between Congress and the Supreme Court.
Members of Congress say there are federal tax laws underlying their interest and a known propensity by the ultrarich to use their yachts to skirt those laws.
Tax data obtained by ProPublica provides a glimpse of what congressional investigators would find if Crow were to open his books to them. Crow’s voyages with Thomas, the data shows, contributed to a nice side benefit: They helped reduce Crow’s tax bill.
The rich, as we’ve reported, often deduct millions of dollars from their taxes related to buying and operating their jets and yachts. Crow followed that formula through a company that purported to charter his superyacht. But a closer examination of how Crow used the yacht raises questions about his compliance with the tax code, experts said. Despite Crow’s representations to the IRS, ProPublica reporters could find no evidence that his yacht company was actually a profit-seeking business, as the law requires.
“Based on what information is available, this has the look of a textbook billionaire tax scam,” said Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore. “These new details only raise more questions about Mr. Crow’s tax practices, which could begin to explain why he’s been stonewalling the Finance Committee’s investigation for months.”
Crow, through a spokesperson, declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions.
So, ‘Ain’t That Pretty at All.’
Well, I’ve seen all there is to seeAnd I’ve heard all they have to sayI’ve done everything I wanted to do . . .I’ve done that tooAnd it ain’t that pretty at allAin’t that pretty at allSo I’m going to hurl myself against the wall‘Cause I’d rather feel bad than not feel anything at all
Warren Zevon
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: The Case of Consumer Protection, Fiat money, and Other off-budget Agencies.
Posted: May 15, 2023 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, American Fascists, Right Wing Angst | Tags: Consumer Financial Protection Agency, debt ceiling crisis, Debt ceiling negotiations, Elon Musk, Fifth Circuit, Recep Tayyip Erdogan 9 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Yes, it’s another rabbit hole. Yes, it’s rather scholarly and lawyerly. Yes, we all didn’t catch this back in February when the 5th Circuit made a decision that may impact more than just the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Bureau has been on every outrage list of right-wingers and the financial industry due to its oversight of how it snags borrowers and then proceeds to drain every last drop of money it can. You may remember this being set up by the Obama Administration under the leadership of Elizabeth Warren before her Senate run.
The most revealing thing about the scope of the case that SCOTUS agreed to review is the weird logic of the 5th Circuit and the actual grounds of the case. This is from Scotus Blog on February 27. It’s written by Amy Howe. “Court will review constitutionality of consumer-watchdog agency’s funding.”
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to take up a major case involving funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was formed in response to the 2008 financial crisis. A federal appeals court ruled in October that the funding mechanism for the CFPB violates the Constitution, but the Biden administration, which had asked the justices to weigh in, says that allowing the lower court’s decision to stand could raise “grave concerns” for “the entire financial industry.”
The announcement came as part of a list of orders from the justices’ private conference last week.
The case involving the CFPB began as a challenge by the payday-lending industry to a 2017 rule that (as relevant here) barred lenders from making additional efforts to withdraw payments from borrowers’ bank accounts after two consecutive failed attempts due to a lack of funds.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected most of the groups’ challenges to the rule, but it ultimately struck down the rule based on the CFPB’s unique funding scheme, which operates outside the normal congressional appropriations process. Instead of receiving money allocated to it each year by Congress, the CFPB receives funding directly from the Federal Reserve, which collects fees from member banks. And that scheme, the court of appeals concluded, violates the Constitution’s appropriations clause, which directs that “[n]o Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” The appropriations clause, the court of appeals explained, “ensures Congress’s exclusive power over the federal purse,” which is in turn essential to ensure that other branches of government don’t overstep their authority. The court of appeals vacated the 2017 rule on the ground that the CFPB was receiving funding through that unconstitutional funding mechanism when it adopted the rule.
The CFPB came to the Supreme Court in November, asking the justices to take up the case and overrule what it characterized as the lower court’s “unprecedented and erroneous understanding of the Appropriations Clause.” The appropriations clause, the CFPB argued, means “simply that no money can be paid out of the Treasury unless it has been appropriated by an Act of Congress.” In the case of the CFPB, the government contends, “Congress enacted a statute explicitly authorizing the CFPB to use a specified amount of funds from a specified source for specified purposes. The Appropriations Clause requires nothing more.”
Let me explain why the court’s logic and the current makeup of SCOTUS worry me. Many quasi-agencies are funded the same way the CFPB is funded. If they let the logic of the 5th circuit stand, you would be surprised at what would likely be eliminated next. This is from Nina Totenburg’s All Things Considered on February 27.
The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to take up a case that could threaten the existence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and potentially the status of numerous other federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve.
A panel of three Trump appointees on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last fall that the agency’s funding is unconstitutional because the CFPB gets its money from the Federal Reserve, which in turn is funded by bank fees.
Although the agency reports regularly to Congress and is routinely audited, the Fifth Circuit ruled that is not enough. The CFPB’s money has to be appropriated annually by Congress or the agency, or else everything it does is unconstitutional, the lower courts said.
The CFPB is not the only agency funded this way. The Federal Reserve itself is funded not by Congress but by banking fees. The U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Mint, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which protects bank depositors, and more, are also not funded by annual congressional appropriations.
In its brief to the Supreme Court, the Biden administration noted that even programs like Social Security and Medicare are paid for by mandatory spending, not annual appropriations.
“This marks the first time in our nation’s history that any court has held that Congress violated the Appropriations Clause by enacting a law authorizing spending,” wrote the Biden administration’s Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar.
Lydon Larouche, The John Birch Society, and now cryptocurrency maniacs, including Elon Musk, have been after all of these agencies for decades. Have they found the court and the basis that could do that? Tottenberg also notes this.
A conservative bête noire
Conservatives who have long opposed the modern administrative state have previously challenged laws that declared heads of agencies can only be fired for cause. In recent years, the Supreme Court has agreed and struck down many of those provisions. The court has held that administrative agencies are essentially creatures of the Executive Branch, so the president has to be able to fire at-will and not just for cause.
This is from the Consumer Finance Monitor. “SCOTUS agrees to decide whether CFPB’s funding is unconstitutional but will not hear case until next Term.” We’re going to have to watch this one.
The sole question presented by the CFPB’s petition is:
Whether the court of appeals erred in holding that the statute providing funding to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), 12 U.S.C. 5497, violates the Appropriations Clause, U.S. Const. Art. I, § 9, Cl. 7, and in vacating a regulation promulgated at a time when the CFPB was receiving such funding.
Thus, by denying CFSA’s cross-petition and also rejecting CFSA’s request to consider the alternative grounds as antecedent questions to the CFPB’s petition, the Supreme Court is poised to decide the Appropriations Clause issue.
While the Court’s decision not to hear the case this Term means the Fifth Circuit decision will continue to be a cloud over all CFPB actions and could slow the pace of enforcement activity (particularly in pending cases where defendants can be expected to assert the Appropriations Clause issue as a defense), we do not expect it to impact the CFPB’s ongoing supervisory activity in any material way or deter Director Chopra from continuing to pursue his aggressive regulatory agenda.
Here’s an exciting read by Dave Troy, writing for The Washington Spectator, if you’d like to visit the crockpot of crazy folks wanting to tank our economy through debt default or any other possible way. “The Wide Angle: Crash the Global Economy? It’s Harder than It Sounds.”
Just yesterday, I visited the “Rage Against the War Machine” rally at the Lincoln Memorial. Organized by the Libertarian Party, the People’s Party, and the Schiller Institute (run by LaRouche’s widow, Helga Zepp), it was thick with leafleteers pushing LaRouche messaging and featured speeches by two dozen or so Putin-friendly speakers, including presidential candidates Jill Stein, Dennis Kucinich, Tulsi Gabbard, and Ron Paul.
One speaker led the crowd in a chant, “all wars are bankers’ wars,” bringing things full circle: the assertion being that it is only because we have departed from pure, good, and undefiled Austrian economics and the gold standard can (usually Jewish) bankers print the money required to fuel endless war. It seems no one at this anti-war rally had arrived at the most obvious solution: tell Vladimir Putin to withdraw his troops and go home.
Paul, the final live speaker of the day, predictably took the podium to chants of “End the Fed” with a phalanx of Russian flags behind him in the afternoon light. (Ironically, the Eccles Federal Reserve building, barely a block away, is undergoing renovations.)
The North-Paul strategy seems to be alive and well. The most obvious strategy to achieve it would be to crash the global economy by failing to raise the debt ceiling. Kevin McCarthy has repeatedly and explicitly stated his intent to pursue this, and the Washington Post recently reported that the strategy has been developed by former Trump budget director Russell Vought. But two things stand in his way.
The Debt Ceiling Crisis looms eminently. This is from Sahil Kapur and NBC News. “The big problem with trying to cut spending in a debt ceiling bill. President Biden and congressional leaders have a major hurdle to overcome as negotiators meet privately to consider a way forward and prevent a self-inflicted economic calamity.”
Heading into an expected meeting between President Joe Biden and congressional leaders this week, Republican lawmakers say an agreement on “spending caps” is important in securing their support to avert a dangerous debt default.
The House-passed debt ceiling bill would slash federal spending to fiscal year 2022 levels, requiring appropriators charged with allocating government funding to cut $131 billion compared with what Congress is currently spending.
Meeting that target without cutting defense funding would require a steep 17% cut to nondefense discretionary spending.
“Democrats will not let nondefense take a disproportionate share of deep cuts. So Republicans will have to moderate their cut demands if they want to spare defense,” said Brian Riedl, a former Senate Republican policy aide who now works at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative public policy think tank.
Riedl said they may be able to avoid the dispute by freezing spending rather than making cuts, suggesting “a two-year freeze” on federal spending as one possible endgame.
The trick is that Republicans do not want to touch Defense Spending. We’re not at war anywhere anymore so that should be the item to look for any cuts. Spending on the Military generally is just about half of discretionary spending. No country spends the kinds of money we spend on its military budget.
We’re watching Turkey’s election go to run-offs while it appears Elon Musk is using Twitter in the interests of Erdogan and his business interests there.
Erdogan is currently trending on Twitter, along with a lot of information on how Twitter has successfully fought off Erdogan’s attempt to censor its content.
All of this should make for an interesting few weeks.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Finally Friday Reads: A Neoconfederacy of Elephant-riding Corrupt Dunces
Posted: April 14, 2023 Filed under: A thread for Ranting, abortion rights, American Fascists, Donald Trump, double-speak, fundamentalist Christians, Psychopaths in charge, Right Wing Angst, Uncle Clarence Thomas, War on Women, White Christian Nationalism, white nationalists 13 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
So what does a Florida-based Dotard Ex-President have in common with a Massachusetts-based Computer Geeky Junior Airman? They both have a need to share Top-Secret Documents to impress their friends.
The biggest difference is that the Geek was frog-marched into court and arrested for posting them on Discord. He was charged under the Espionage Act. The Dotard is still at large, and likely so are some Top Secret Documents. We know he flaunted them around The Donny Dotard Clubhouse, but what other things happened with them? There are so many questions about our classified documents processes now that we’re an international embarrassment.
There’s other news too. Ron DeSantis quietly–and in the dead of night– signed a six-week ban on abortion in Florida. Florida used to have abortion access making the South a death zone for fertile women. Attorney General Garland has asked the Supreme Court to block the order by the Texas Grand Inquisitor on the status of mifepristone. Regulatory chaos is likely to result in the FDA and could spread to other agencies, given the implications of the judge’s lunatic rationale. It’s the one day you can be happy there is such a thing as Big Pharma. The manufacturer of the pill has also filed for an immediate stay. We’re on Supreme Court Watch now. If they do nothing, the chaos will start at midnight with this decision and the conflicting one from Washington State. All of these restrictions are highly unpopular with voters.
Oh, and have I mentioned Uncle Clarence Thomas sold his mother’s house to his billionaire buddy without reporting it, so he broke the law? She still lives in the house, and her new landlord takes care of the place.
Welcome to the Neoconfederacy of Dunces or, as JJ mentioned yesterday, the Dawning of the Age of Idiocracy.
This one comes pretty directly out of some weirdo world. This is from Hans Nichols, writing for AXIOS. “Conservatives plot text warnings on “woke” products.” Yes, this does seem like a direct assault on the first amendment rights of businesses granted by Scalia et al. not that long ago.
A conservative group is offering a new service that texts “Woke Alerts” straight to the phones of grocery shoppers who want to know which brands are accused of taking political positions that are offensive to the right.
So, you can see that we have so much to write about this week that we’re torn between leaving something uncovered or quoting so much we run up the word counts. And, of course, JJ shows us that the political cartoon crowd has a lot of fodder.
So, there are a lot of links up top. Let me just highlight a few things.
Here is more detail on the Supreme Court Watch for the ruling on mifepristone. This is from NBC News.” The Justice Department and the drugmaker are asking the Supreme Court to block the abortion pill ruling. The Biden administration and Danco Laboratories want to freeze a court decision that curbs access to the abortion pill mifepristone.”
The Biden administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to block part of a court decision that prevents pregnant women from obtaining the key abortion drug mifepristone by mail.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Food and Drug Administration, urged the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, to put on hold the entirety of a decision issued by Texas-based U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk that handed a sweeping victory to abortion opponents.
“This application concerns unprecedented lower court orders countermanding FDA’s scientific judgment and unleashing regulatory chaos by suspending the existing FDA-approved conditions of use for mifepristone,” Prelogar wrote in court papers.
Danco Laboratories, which makes Mifeprex, the brand version of the pill, filed a similar request on Friday.
Danco said it would be “irreparably harmed” if the decision goes into effect because it “will be unable to both conduct its business nationwide and comply with its legal obligations.”
This is the latest set of witnesses to discuss Trump’s Classified Documents theft. This is from the New York Times. “Witnesses Asked About Trump’s Handling of Map With Classified Information. The map is just one element of the Justice Department’s inquiry into former President Donald Trump’s possession of sensitive documents and whether he obstructed justice in seeking to hold onto them.”
Federal investigators are asking witnesses whether former President Donald J. Trump showed off to aides and visitors a map he took with him when he left office that contains sensitive intelligence information, four people with knowledge of the matter said.
The map has been just one focus of the broad Justice Department investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after he departed the White House.
The nature of the map and the information it contained is not clear. But investigators have questioned a number of witnesses about it, according to the people with knowledge of the matter, as the special counsel overseeing the Justice Department’s Trump-focused inquiries, Jack Smith, examines the former president’s handling of classified material after leaving office and weighs charges that could include obstruction of justice.
One person briefed on the matter said investigators have asked about Mr. Trump showing the map while aboard a plane. Another said that, based on the questions they were asking, investigators appeared to believe that Mr. Trump showed the map to at least one adviser after leaving office.
A third person with knowledge of the investigation said the map might also have been shown to a journalist writing a book. The Washington Post has previously reported that investigators have asked about Mr. Trump showing classified material, including maps, to political donors.
The question of whether Mr. Trump was displaying sensitive material in his possession after he lost the presidency and left office is crucial as investigators try to reconstruct what Mr. Trump was doing with boxes of documents that went with him to his Florida residence and private club, Mar-a-Lago.
Among the topics investigators have been focused on is precisely when Mr. Trump was at the club last year. In particular, they were interested in whether he remained at Mar-a-Lago to look at boxes of material that were still stored there before Justice Department counterintelligence officials seeking their return came to visit in early June, according to two people familiar with the questions.
Hannah Knowles writes on “How DeSantis backed a six-week abortion ban — while barely talking about it. The Florida governor went from signing a 15-week ban last year to signing a six-week ban late at night on Thursday.”
The governor’s quiet embrace of the six-week ban reflects his team’s political calculations heading into 2024, as he gears up for a presidential primary where hard-line activists and voters wield influence. It underlines the continued pressure in the GOP for politicians to embrace tighter laws — even as numerous Republicans, including some DeSantis allies, worry that abortion bans have helped sink their candidates in critical general elections. And it highlights DeSantis’s longtime reluctance to make abortion a signature part of his public profile, though he has enacted major changes to laws on the procedure.
“The numbers show that Florida is a destination” for abortion, said Chad Davis, a candidate for the state House who worked for ex-state senator Kelli Stargel, the sponsor of the 15-week ban. “That’s an embarrassment to him.”
DeSantis has generally avoided talking about abortion, even as he tours the country touting other legislation he’s signed. Rather than roll out the six-week bill as a major agenda item, he gave vague endorsements: “I’m willing to sign great life legislation,” he told one reporter who put him on the spot. A six-week ban has proved divisive in his orbit, with some donors strongly opposed and other Republicans eager to simply move on.
President Biden has put out a statement on the arrest of the Leaker and his plans to review the classified documents processes. Not let’s see hin do something about getting White Christian Nationalists out of the Military.
I’ll leave you with this from the High Priestess of QAnon.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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