Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: December 30, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, just because, SCOTUS | Tags: 14th amendment, Civil War, Elon Musk, fake electors, Jack Smith, Kenneth Chesebro, lost cause theory, Niki Haley, Ron DeSantis, slavery, Supreme Court | 12 Comments

Happy Caturday!!

Benson B. Moore, born Washington, DC 1882-died Stuart, FL 1974

We’ve nearly reached the end of 2023. We’re also at the end of the typically slow news time known as “the holidays.” Therefore, there isn’t a lot of breaking news for me to post about. But here are a few interesting stories that are worth reading, along with some cat art from the Smithsonian “artful cats” collection.

Alex Shephard at The New Republic: Elon Musk Is The New Republic’s 2023 Scoundrel of the Year.

In one sense, Elon Musk has gotten exactly what he wanted. For all his talk about free speech, his primary motivation for sinking $44 billion into buying Twitter last year was clearly an unquenchable desire to be the center of attention. After Donald Trump’s defenestration in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, there was a main-character-size hole on the social network: Enter Musk and his infantile need for validation.

That Twitter—now renamed X, for reasons only Musk really understands—is now teetering on the brink of collapse and worth less than half what the world’s second-richest man paid for it is funny. It elicits deserved schadenfreude. Musk entered Twitter’s office carrying a sink—a terrible joke, and one of his better ones—last fall and has subsequently made countless decisions, big and small, all of which have made the platform significantly less viable and less worth spending any amount of time on. It is hard to think of a billionaire who has done more to damage their own reputation in such a short period of time.

Not so long ago, Musk was seen by many as a good tech billionaire, if not the good tech billionaire. While others like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg built digital trinkets that actively made the world a worse place, Musk was something different: a visionary intent on building real things, whether they be electric cars or rockets, that were aimed at accelerating a Jetsons-like vision of the future. While rivals at Google and Facebook—and, for that matter, Twitter—were hauled before Congress to testify about the deleterious effects of their creations, Musk remained relatively unscathed. Now it is clear that he is not just more villainous than all of them but that he is also a deeply stupid and unserious person.

Elon Musk is evil. While he has mostly made headlines for his incompetence, he has unleashed and legitimized truly heinous forces on Twitter: He has welcomed back some of the world’s most toxic people—Alex Jones, Donald Trump, innumerable Nazis and bigots—and has gone out of his way, again and again, to validate them. That Musk would endorse a heinous antisemitic conspiracy theory, as he did last month, is both unsurprising and reprehensible. It is, more than anything else, a reflection of who he is: He may be fantastically wealthy, but he is also deeply hateful, someone who has decided to devote his fortune and his time to attacking diversity and progress on nearly every front.

Musk has insisted again that he bought Twitter to save it from itself—that the platform had become too restrictive and that, to become a true “digital town square” where the best ideas rise to the top, it needed to welcome everyone. It is now abundantly clear that Musk’s real intention is and always has been to put his thumb on the scale: to elevate his own hateful views about, in no particular order: liberals; the media; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; trans people; and liberal Jews. He sees Twitter as a weapon, a way to not only push his agenda but to sic his army of loyalist losers on anyone he deems an enemy.

For all of the talk about Musk being a “real life Tony Stark,” he has always been a deeply uncool person’s idea of a cool person: He is, in many ways, a sentient m’lady Reddit post circa 2011. It’s hard to think of a more pathetic figure now: someone scraping the internet for conspiracy theories and “jokes” aimed at affirming his status and influence. He has, again and again, done the opposite: Far from showing himself as a swaggering, popular figure, he has revealed himself to be a venal, thin-skinned moron. He may very well be the most unfunny person alive, a fact reified dozens of times a day.

Wow! Read the rest at The New Republic. I wonder if Musk is too stupid to read TNR. If he does read this, he’ll probably sue Alex Shephard

At HuffPost, SV Date assesses the DeSantis campaign: DeSantis’ 2023: More Than $160 Million Spent To Buy A Collapse In The Polls.

A year after Ron DeSantis led Donald Trump in some 2024 presidential primary polls, and with just weeks to go before the first ballots are cast, the Florida governor is already explaining how Democrats conspired to stop him: by repeatedly charging the coup-attempting former president with breaking the law.

DeSantis’ campaign and super PAC have spent more than $160 million to boost him, and he spent the better part of 2023 on the road. But, he now says, it may not have been enough to overcome the advantage he believes Trump received from getting indicted four times.

Jacques Hnizdovsky, born Pylypcze, Ukraine 1915-died New York City 1985

“If I could have one thing change, I wish Trump hadn’t been indicted on any of this stuff,” he told the Christian Broadcasting Network last week. “It sucked out a lot of oxygen.” [….]

“The race was decided totally out of their control,” said one DeSantis donor and supporter who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Trump got indicted. And indicted and indicted and indicted. The race was over after the first indictment.”

Other Republicans are less charitable as they describe DeSantis’ steady decline over the year ― which began with GOP donors giving him unsolicited six- and seven-figure checks, saw him spend far more time and energy attacking the Walt Disney Co. and the nation’s top doctor during the COVID pandemic than he ever did taking on the front-runner in his race, and ended with DeSantis some 40 points behind Trump in national polls.

“He started the primary on third base and stole second,” said David Jolly, who served with DeSantis as a fellow Republican member of Congress from Florida. “We’ve now witnessed one of the most expensive and embarrassing collapses in Republican history.”

Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire Republican Party chair, wondered about DeSantis’ apparent strategy of trying to win over the roughly one-third of primary voters who are “only Trump,” rather than the two-thirds who are open to someone else….

The Florida governor’s various missteps over the year ― as well as those of his campaign and his supporting super political action committee ― have been well documented, from the time he called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “territorial dispute” to the mass campaign layoffs just two months after he officially began his run to the recent dysfunction at the super PAC, Never Back Down.

There’s more at the link.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson weighed in on Niki Haley’s Civil War gaffe at her substack, Letters from an American:

When asked at a town hall on Wednesday to identify the cause of the United States Civil War, presidential candidate and former governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley answered that the cause “was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do…. I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are…. And I will always stand by the fact that, I think, government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people.”

Haley has correctly been lambasted for her rewriting of history. The vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, was quite clear about the cause of the Civil War. Stephens explicitly rejected the idea embraced by U.S. politicians from the revolutionary period onward that human enslavement was “wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.” Instead, he declared: “Our new government is founded upon…the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” [….]

Haley has been backpedaling ever since—as well as suggesting that the question was somehow a “gotcha” question from a Democrat, as if it was a difficult question to answer—but her answer was not simply bad history or an unwillingness to offend potential voters, as some have suggested. It was the death knell of the Republican Party.

Robert Smithson, American, b. Passaic, New Jersey, 1938–1973

That party formed in the 1850s to stand against what was known as the Slave Power, a small group of elite enslavers who had come to dominate first the Democratic Party and then, through it, the presidency, Supreme Court, and Senate. When northern Democrats in the House of Representatives caved to pressure to allow enslavement into western lands from which it had been prohibited since 1820, northerners of all political stripes recognized that it was only a question of time until elite enslavers took over the West, joined with lawmakers from southern slave states, overwhelmed the northern free states in the House of Representatives, and made enslavement national.

So in 1854, after Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act that allowed the spread of enslavement into previously protected western lands, northerners abandoned their old parties and came together first as “anti-Nebraska” coalitions and then, by 1856, as the Republican Party.

At first their only goal was to stop the Slave Power, but in 1859, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln articulated an ideology for the new party. In contrast to southern Democrats, who insisted that a successful society required leaders to dominate workers and that the government must limit itself to defending those leaders because its only domestic role was the protection of property, Lincoln envisioned a new kind of government, based on a new economy.

Lincoln saw a society that moved forward thanks not to rich people, but to the innovation of men just starting out. Such men produced more than they and their families could consume, and their accumulated capital would employ shoemakers and storekeepers. Those businessmen, in turn, would support a few industrialists, who would begin the cycle again by hiring other men just starting out. Rather than remaining small and simply protecting property, Lincoln and his fellow Republicans argued, the government should clear the way for those at the bottom of the economy, making sure they had access to resources, education, and the internal improvements that would enable them to reach markets.

When the leaders of the Confederacy seceded to start their own nation based in their own hierarchical society, the Republicans in charge of the United States government were free to put their theory into practice. For a nominal fee, they sold farmers land that the government in the past would have sold to speculators; created state colleges, railroads, national money, and income taxes; and promoted immigration.

Click the link to read more serious history.

The rest of the notable news this morning is Trump-related. Here’s what’s happening:

At her substack, Civil Discourse, Joyce Vance writes about latest on Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, (which Dakinikat covered yesterday): What does the new reporting about Kenneth Chesebro mean?

CNN had a lengthy piece late Thursday on Kenneth Chesebro’s statement to prosecutors in Michigan (he is also talking to prosecutors elsewhere), that included his emails with others involved in the fake electors scheme and some audio of his statement to prosecutors. You will recall that Chesebro is a Harvard educated lawyer, who has been attributed with the role of architect of the fake electors scheme. Chesebro was charged in the Fulton County case, where he pled guilty, but with an asterisk. Chesebro continues to maintain that there was nothing illegal about the fake electors scheme. He pled guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to file false documents. He continues to maintain through his lawyer that the fake electors scheme was a legitimate strategy, put into play to protect Trump’s legal options. Chesebro’s attorney has said Trump has nothing to fear from his testimony.

So, Chesebro doesn’t look like a cooperator in the traditional sense. Cooperation means pleading guilty, making a full confession, and agreeing to testify against others. And that doesn’t seem to be what has happened here, making the deal Chesebro got in Fulton County, something of a mystery. Chesebro, at least on the surface, isn’t much of a witness for the government. It seems like he would testify there wasn’t an illegal conspiracy to interfere with the results of the election. In some cases, cooperating witness’ statements evolve overtime. Every prosecutor has put a cooperator on the stand who started out with lies, maintaining their innocence, but evolved progressively over time towards the truth—which then had to be corroborated with other evidence and a candid confession to the lies as well, as the crimes. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here, either.

Cat with Lantern Woodblock print, by Kobayashi Kiyochika

Chesebro, and his “cooperation” remain something of an enigma, which makes this new report all the more interesting. Is Chesebro being more cooperative with prosecutors in Michigan? Has he finally had his come to Jesus moment? But much of the story is not new. The Washington Post, for instance, reported previously on his proffer in Georgia. But the CNN story is illuminating when we put it in context with everything else, and particularly with what we already know from the work of the January 6 committee.

Perhaps the most interesting new detail comes midway through the story, when we learn that prior to Chesebro’s guilty plea in Georgia, his lawyers reached out to Smith’s team. But they have still not received a response (or an invitation to proffer as have others, like Rudy Giuliani) from prosecutors. No reason is offered for this.

CNN obtained access to audio of some of Chesebro’s proffer with Michigan prosecutors, however. He has apparently been on the circuit, speaking with prosecutors in a number of different states where there are investigations in progress. The audio reveals a petulant, childish witness, upset about what he perceives as lies told about him by other Trump campaign lawyers and his financial problems. You can read the entire report from CNN here.

That’s a lot of questions. Read Vance’s take at her substack link above.

At Aaron Rupar’s substack Public Notice, Liz Dye writes about Jack Smith’s latest filing in the January 6 case: Jack Smith’s new motion could obliterate Trump’s DC strategy.

On Wednesday, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the court to put the kibosh on Donald Trump’s efforts to “turn the courtroom into a forum in which he propagates irrelevant disinformation.” If Judge Tanya Chutkan grants this motion, it will eviscerate the former president’s plan to defend himself in DC by making the case about anything other than his own plot to obstruct the congressional certification of President Biden’s 2020 victory.

Broadly speaking, Trump wants to make the election interference trial into a glorified segment of Steve Bannon’s podcast. As he screams WITCH HUNT on social media, his lawyers accuse Biden of weaponizing the Justice Department and seek to introduce evidence of every crackpot election theory ever aired on Newsmax.

Unsurprisingly, the prosecution would like to avoid all that, so the special counsel has filed a motion to block Trump from bombarding the jurors with irrelevant and prejudicial evidence. And because Smith takes no prisoners, he’s done it in the most aggressive way possible….

Since before the indictment even dropped in August, Trump screamed daily that Biden is directing the Justice Department to persecute him. He also claimed that Biden is controlling the New York criminal and civil cases, as well as the RICO case in Georgia. He never presents any evidence of this because it’s patently ridiculous. The DOJ has no control over state prosecutions, and the entire purpose of the special counsel statute is to remove investigations which pose a conflict of interest from the immediate control of the DOJ….

Ted Gordon, born Louisville, KY 1924

[The Trump team’s] legal filings are scarcely more subtle. In October, Trump filed a motion to dismiss the case based on “selective and vindictive prosecution” — essentially a claim that the DOJ indicted him solely to kneecap Biden’s 2024 opponent.

The motion itself is a farcical hash of anonymously sourced articles from the supposedly fake news Washington Post and New York Times alleging that Biden confided to his inner circle that he wished AG Garland would be more aggressive. In fact, both stories confirm that Biden stayed far away from the Trump cases, even before Garland handed them off to Smith to avoid the appearance of conflict. Trump’s motion also mangles a quote from a press conference to suggest that “Biden’s publicly stated objective is to use the criminal justice system to incapacitate President Trump, his main political rival and the leading candidate in the upcoming election.” (That’s not remotely what he said.)

Even the most mundane scheduling brief is larded with assertions that “the incumbent administration has targeted its primary political opponent — and leading candidate in the upcoming presidential election — with criminal prosecution.”

In response, Smith argues:

“Through public statements, filings, and argument in hearings before the Court, the defense has attempted to inject into this case partisan political attacks and irrelevant and prejudicial issues that have no place in a jury trial,” Special Counsel Smith argued in a pretrial motion filed Wednesday. “Although the Court can recognize these efforts for what they are and disregard them, the jury — if subjected to them — may not.”

Prosecutors accuse Trump of attempting to engage in jury nullification, that is, securing an acquittal by convincing jurors to disregard the evidence and law in favor of their own personal feelings of justice. They argue that “the defendant should be precluded from raising irrelevant political issues” which might “improperly suggest to the jury that it should base its verdict on something other than the evidence at trial.”

Toward that end, they seek to exclude a broad swath of evidence which maps almost perfectly onto Trump’s motions to compel and to dismiss for selective prosecution.

There’s much more explanation and analysis at the Public Notice link.

Two legal minds weighed in on what the Supreme Court might do about states dropping Trump’s from their ballots.

Adam Liptak at the New York Times: How the Supreme Court May Rule on Trump’s Presidential Run.

The Supreme Court, battered by ethics scandals, a dip in public confidence and questions about its legitimacy, may soon have to confront a case as consequential and bruising as Bush v. Gore, the 2000 decision that handed the presidency to George W. Bush.

Until 10 days ago, the justices had settled into a relatively routine term. Then the Colorado Supreme Court declared that former President Donald J. Trump was ineligible to hold office because he had engaged in an insurrection. On Thursday, relying on that court’s reasoning, an election official in Maine followed suit.

An appeal of the Colorado ruling has already reached the justices, and they will probably feel compelled to weigh in. But they will act in the shadow of two competing political realities.

Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, born Sacramento, CA 1920-died New York City 2012

They will be reluctant to wrest from voters the power to assess Mr. Trump’s conduct, particularly given the certain backlash that would bring. Yet they will also be wary of giving Mr. Trump the electoral boost of an unqualified victory in the nation’s highest court.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. will doubtless seek consensus or, at least, try to avoid a partisan split of the six Republican appointees against the three Democratic ones.

He may want to explore the many paths the court could take to keep Mr. Trump on state ballots without addressing whether he had engaged in insurrection or even assuming that he had.

Among them: The justices could rule that congressional action is needed before courts can intervene, that the constitutional provision at issue does not apply to the presidency or that Mr. Trump’s statements were protected by the First Amendment.

“I expect the court to take advantage of one of the many available routes to avoid holding that Trump is an insurrectionist who therefore can’t be president again,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard.

Read the rest at The New York Times.

Shan Wu at The Daily Beast: Here’s What SCOTUS Should Do With the Trump Ballot Cases.

The U.S. Supreme Court needs to understand that the disqualification of former President Donald J. Trump under Section 3 of the 14^thAmendment from running again for President of the United States is going exactly as it should. The Maine Secretary of State ruled in an administrative proceeding that Trump is disqualified, and the Colorado Supreme Court ruled similarly.

Both states followed the law set forth in the U.S. Constitution that anyone who once took an oath to support the Constitution but then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to enemies of the same” cannot again serve our country. But four other states (Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, California) came out the other way, while fourteen other states (Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming) still have disqualification cases pending. This sets up a potential crazy quilt map of states where Trump is on the ballot in some state but not in others. There is nothing wrong with this. It’s federalism at work.

Under the Constitution, the states have primary power over administering federal elections with Congress also possessing authority to regulate how the elections are run—voter registration being an example. So, the fact that who can run, who can vote and the “time place and manner” in which voting takes place varies from state to state is normal—and, arguably, the high court need not concern itself with these issues.

Woman and Cats, Will Barnet, born Beverly, MA 1911-died New York City 2012

Given this, SCOTUS does not have to take the ultimate appeal of any of these cases. Its discretion to take cases is complete, and letting the different cases stand would be an unreviewable decision on their part that would both keep them out of a repeat of their gross interference in the 2000 presidential election where the high court, not the people, made George W. Bush the 43^rd President, and perhaps staunch the bleed out of their credibility. But the justices—liberal and conservative alike—are unlikely to be able to resist the glamour of taking on a case that can decide who will be president in 2024, and most legal experts believe they will take on the case.

If the justices do take on the cases, then they should limit what issues they decide to the ones that most clearly relate to Constitutional interpretation. Chief among those is the question of whether the president of the United States is an “officer” of the United States since some—including Trump—argue that the President is not an officer of the United States, and therefore the disqualification provision does not apply.

The justices should dispose of this question by holding that the President is an officer of the United States. To conclude otherwise begs the question of what is the president then? Trump would like the answer to be that the president is an emperor or a king rather than a mere officer serving the Constitution, and that’s what SCOTUS would be anointing him if it concludes that presidents do not hold office.

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: December 23, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump | Tags: Christmas, Covid-19, George Conway, israel, Jack Smith, January 6 insurrection, Joyce Vance, Mein Kampf, NASA, peaceful transfer of power, Supreme Court, Trump and HItler, Wisconsin legislative boundaries, Wisconsin Supreme Court | 6 Comments

Good Day!!

A Christmas Ball at Catville, by Louis Wain It’s a fairly quiet news day today, since we are fast approaching Christmas and the New Year. I’m just going to post a mixed bag of stories that caught my eye this morning.

Before we get into any bad news, here’s a cat story from ScienceAlert: NASA Has Beamed The First High-Def Video Across 19 Million Miles. Featuring a Cat.

NASA on Monday announced it had used a state-of-the-art laser communication system on a spaceship 19 million miles (31 million kilometers) away from Earth – to send a high-definition cat video.

The 15-second meow-vie featuring an orange tabby named Taters is the first to be streamed from deep space, and demonstrates it’s possible to transmit the higher-data-rate communications needed to support complex missions such as sending humans to Mars.

The video was beamed to Earth using a laser transceiver on the Psyche probe, which is journeying to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to explore a mysterious metal-rich object. When it sent the video, the spaceship was 80 times the distance between the Earth and Moon.

The encoded near-infrared signal was received by the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, and from there sent to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.

“One of the goals is to demonstrate the ability to transmit broadband video across millions of miles. Nothing on Psyche generates video data, so we usually send packets of randomly generated test data,” said Bill Klipstein, the tech demo’s project manager at JPL.

“But to make this significant event more memorable, we decided to work with designers at JPL to create a fun video, which captures the essence of the demo as part of the Psyche mission.”

Space missions have traditionally relied on radio waves to send and receive data, but working with lasers can increase the data rate by 10 to 100 times….

The ultra-HD video took 101 seconds to send to Earth at the system’s maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second – faster than most home broadband connections.

”In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space,” said Ryan Rogalin, the project’s receiver electronics lead at JPL.

The big news yesterday was that the Supreme Court rejected Jack Smith’s request that they immediately decide the question of whether Trump has complete immunity from prosecution for anything he did in office.

Adam Liptak at The New York Times: Supreme Court Won’t Hear Case on Trump’s Immunity Defense for Now.

The Supreme Court declined on Friday to decide for now whether former President Donald J. Trump is immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

The decision to defer consideration of a central issue in the case was a major practical victory for Mr. Trump, whose lawyers have consistently sought to delay criminal cases against him around the country.

It is unclear what the court’s order will mean for the timing of the trial, which is scheduled to start on March 4, though it makes postponement more likely. The case will now move forward in an appeals court, which has put it on a fast track, and most likely return to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks or months.

In denying review, the justices gave no reasons, which is typical, and there were no noted dissents.

Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting Mr. Trump, had asked the justices to move with extraordinary speed, bypassing the appeals court.

Any significant delays could plunge the trial into the heart of the 2024 campaign season or push it past the election, when Mr. Trump could order the charges be dropped if he wins the presidency.

A speedy decision by the justices was of the essence, Mr. Smith said in his petition seeking immediate Supreme Court review, because Mr. Trump’s appeal of a trial judge’s ruling rejecting his claim of immunity suspended the criminal trial.

Mr. Smith wrote that the case “presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: whether a former president is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin.”

“The United States recognizes that this is an extraordinary request,” Mr. Smith added. “This is an extraordinary case.”

The appeals court has already put the cast on a fast track with argument beginning January 9. Trump celebrated the SCOTUS decision as a huge win, but legal experts beg to differ.

Yahoo.com: George Conway Throws Water on Notion of a Trump Victory From Supreme Court Decision: ‘Isn’t a Big Deal.’

Count George Conway among those who are less than impressed by the Supreme Court’s decision Friday to pass on an expedited request to decide whether Donald Trump is protected by immunity in the Jan. 6-related federal case against him….

Christmas Kitty Cat, by Stella Sherman

“I think today’s order is not a big deal,” Conway told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in an interview you can watch above. “I see a lot of people with their hair on fire. They can just douse their hair in water, because this isn’t a big deal. I don’t think it’s going to affect the trial date that much. Worst case is, the trial gets pushed to the summer.

“The reason is, I think this order shows the weakness of Trump’s immunity case,” Conway added. “And I think the court realizes it’s got the D.C. Circuit that’s going to hear arguments January 9th. It’s not a hard case. I think they’re going to move very quickly. If I was the presiding judge on the panel I’d already be writing the opinion. And once they rule, they can lift the stay, they can issue a mandate and lift the stay, which means, then you’re going to have Donald Trump saying ‘Oh, we need expedition, we need expedition.’”

Conway went on to repeat he thinks the timeline for a trial will be April, May or June and that “Donald Trump is not going to be able to stop it.”

“And the Supreme Court could grant that and hear it in May, hear it in June, and you could still have a summer trial,” Conway continued, regarding a possible post-conviction appeal. “Or better yet they could deny it because he’s already had his argument at a court of appeals before a very distinguished panel. Donald Trump should be frankly treated like every other criminal who’s been convicted in a federal district court and be forced to litigate his arguments after his conviction.”

Joyce Vance also weighed in on her Substack, Civil Discourse: Let’s Debunk This.

This afternoon, the Supreme Court declined Jack Smith’s request to hear Trump’s appeal on presidential immunity, bypassing the court of appeals. Trump’s immunity motion is important because if he wins, it’s game over. The entire indictment would get dismissed if he were immune from prosecution. And while my assessment is in line with Judge Chutkan’s—she denied Trump’s motion—we don’t know for certain what the Supreme Court will do.

Logically, Trump’s motion lacks merit.

To grant it, the Court would have to hold that presidents are above the law. All presidents, not just Trump. Anything they do while they’re president is protected. We’ve seen that same argument rejected repeatedly in a civil context: E. Jean Carroll’s case and the civil suit over January 6 in Washington, D.C., for instance. There’s no analytical reason to believe criminal conduct is any more deserving of protection than civil violations are, once a president is out of office.

Trump claims that even absent total immunity for presidential conduct, the conduct he’s been charged with falls within the “outer perimeter” of a president’s duties, so he’s entitled to immunity. To credit that, the courts would have to believe that the steps Trump took to interfere with multiple states’ votes, elections a president has no role in, are somehow a part of his job. Elections are run by secretaries of state and county officials. The president has no say in the final vote count and no duties, core or outer perimeter, to interfere in those counts or the final report of the Electoral College.

If the Supreme Court granted Trump’s motion, what would prevent Joe Biden or any future president from doing precisely what Trump did in 2020, but with more skill—and succeeding? Nothing. The Supreme Court would have ruled they could do no wrong. And that’s why the Supreme Court has to deny Trump’s motion to dismiss the charges, unless it wants to end democracy by giving a license to the next president to do whatever it takes to stay in power.

Vance goes on to destroy Trump’s claims that this was huge victory for him. Read the details at the link.

A few more Trump stories:

Josh Fiallo at The Daily Beast: Trump Blames His Own Ignorance for Hitleresque Rhetoric.

Donald Trump claimed Friday that his recent comments about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the U.S. weren’t inspired by similar statements made by Adolf Hitler about Jewish people, saying he’s merely ignorant to the specifics of Hitler’s hateful rhetoric.

To drive home his point, Trump insisted in an interview with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he really doesn’t “know anything about Hitler.”

Christmas Cat, by Daniel Rodgers

“I’m not a student of Hitler,” Trump said, defending his comments. “I never read his works. They say that he said something about blood, he didn’t say it the way I said it either, by the way, it’s a very different kind of a statement.”

When Hewitt pressed Trump about his rhetoric, Trump insisted again that immigrants are poisoning the blood of Americans.

“They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums,” Trump said of immigrants. “They’re terrorists, absolutely, that’s poisoning our country, that’s poisoning the blood of our country.”

Later in that rant, after complaining about immigrant children going to U.S. schools without having learned English already, Trump said again, “We are poisoning our country; we’re poisoning the blood of our country.”

Hewitt informed Trump that Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that German blood was being poisoned by Jews, and suggested that his comments didn’t sound all that different from the Nazi leader.

Trump said he didn’t mean any racist sentiment with his “poisoning the blood” comments, and insisted he’s “doing incredibly” with Black and Hispanic voters.

As I have noted previously, Trump doesn’t need to read or study Hitler. He has Stephen Miller to write his speeches, which he then reads on a teleprompter.

This is pretty funny, from Amy B. Wang and Isaac Arnsdorf at The Washington Post: Trump claims he peacefully surrendered power, ignoring Jan. 6 attack.

Former president Donald Trump claimed Friday that he peacefully surrendered power at the end of his term in office, despite having urged a crowd of his supporters to converge on the U.S. Capitol, where some staged a deadly attack that interrupted Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s election on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump’s comments came during an interview with conservative syndicated radio host Hugh Hewitt in which the former president was asked for reassurance that he would not be a dictator if he returned to the White House and whether he would peacefully surrender power at the end of his second term.

“Of course — and I did that this time,” Trump said, before repeating his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. “But I did. I did it anyway.”

Trump’s response omits the fact that he urged his supporters to converge on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while Congress was certifying Biden’s electoral win. Many in the pro-Trump mob that overran the Capitol that day had chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” in the misguided belief — pushed by Trump — that the then-Vice President Pence could have stopped Congress from certifying Biden’s victory.

In video of the Jan. 6 attack, law enforcement officers outside the Capitol were shown being harassed, beaten and sprayed with noxious liquids by members of the mob. In one video from the attack, a rioter can be seen bashing a fallen police officer with a pole flying the American flag. The unprecedented attack left five people dead, including a police officer and a woman shot by police. Two other officers who were on duty that day later died by suicide, and more than 100 officers were injured.

Trump and his supporters have consistently downplayed the severity of the Jan. 6 attack, but the former president’s insistence that he engaged in a peaceful transfer of power in 2021 has sparked new alarm in light of his recent authoritarian rhetoric.

Christmas Cat by Daniella Vasileva

And from Kierra Frazier at Politico: Trump vows a peaceful transfer of power if reelected. [This story is also based on the Hugh Hewitt interview.]

If reelected president in 2024, Donald Trump vowed Friday that he would turn over power peacefully to the next president after him….

Trump has been indicted for his role in trying to overturn the results of that contest, and he repeated his false claims on Friday that the last election was rigged.

“Of course,” Trump responded to Hewitt when asked if he would hand over power peacefully if reelected. “And I did that this time. And I’ll tell you what. The election was rigged, and we have plenty of evidence of it. But I did it anyway.”

I think the more important question is whether he will step aside peacefully if he loses the 2024 election, and I’m absolutely certain that he wouldn’t.

More stories you might find interesting:

Raw Story: A neuroscientist’s guide to surviving Christmas with Trump-loving relatives.

As the holiday season approaches, family gatherings are set to transform homes into microcosms of the national political landscape. In these reunions, conversations can quickly turn from benign banter about sports to the divisive topic of politics. With an election cycle upon us the name “Trump” can be as contentious as it is inescapable, turning a festive gathering of lights and eggnog into an ideological battleground.

This is the challenge many of us face this Christmas: How do we, armed with our morals and convictions, navigate the treacherous terrain of political discourse with those we love — without the feast turning into a fracas?

If you are a lone liberal leaf in a staunchly conservative family tree, you may be dreading the holiday. If you are not alone, and the family is more-or-less divided on political topics, it can be even worse — all holy hell can break loose. It is not an exaggeration to say that families can be — and sometimes are — torn apart in the highly polarized political climate we find ourselves in.

The solution to this problem lies in developing strategies based on an understanding of neuroscience and psychology that can calm the storm within, ensuring that our physiological responses do not commandeer our interactions.

But what if I told you that an understanding of the relevant concepts holds the key to not just surviving these encounters, but potentially bridging family divides? The goal isn’t to convert but to converse, and to plant seeds of thought that might, in time, bear fruit.

Let this article serve as a guide to navigating political discussions with grace and the subtle powers of persuasion.

The first thing we need to know is that two distinct yet interdependent cognitive systems govern our decision-making processes.

If any of this applies to you, read all the details at Raw Story. I’m fortunate that I don’t know and Trump supporters.

Carolyn Kee at Yahoo News: A new COVID variant is dominant in the US: Know these symptoms.

As holiday travel peaks in the United States, a heavily mutated new COVID-19 variant called JN.1 is spreading rapidly and fueling an increasing number of infections. The highly contagious omicron subvariant is now the dominant strain nationwide and accounts for nearly half of all cases.

JN.1 is currently the fastest-growing variant in the country, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

During a two-week period ending on Dec. 23, JN.1 made up an estimated 44% of cases in the U.S., per the CDC’s latest data. After JN.1, the next most common strain was the HV.1 subvariant, which accounted for about 22% of cases nationwide. At the end of November, JN.1 only made up about 8% of cases.

Respiratory virus season has yet to peak in the U.S., which means COVID-19 cases are expected to rise in the coming weeks.

JN.1 is also gaining speed in many other countries. Earlier this week, the World Health Organization classified JN.1 as a “variant of interest” due to its “rapidly increasing spread” globally.

Scientists around the world are closely monitoring JN.1, which has sparked some concern due to its rapid growth rate and large number of mutations. However, the new variant is closely related to a strain we’ve seen before. It’s a direct offshoot of BA.2.86, aka “Pirola,” which has been spreading in the U.S. since the summer.

JN.1 has one extra mutation compared to BA.2.86, which has more than 30 mutations that set it apart from the omicron XBB.1.5 variant. XBB.1.5 was the dominant strain for most of 2023 and it’s the variant targeted in the updated COVID-19 vaccines, TODAY.com previously reported.

All of the most prevalent COVID-19 variants in the U.S. right now are descendants of omicron, which began circulating in late 2021.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin Supreme Court rules legislative maps unconstitutional, orders new boundaries for 2024 vote.

MADISON – The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday ordered the Republican-controlled state Legislature to draw new legislative boundaries ahead of the 2024 election, arguing their GOP advantage is unconstitutional — delivering a long-sought win for Democrats who have stayed deep in the Legislature’s minority for more than a decade.

The court in a 4-3 decision said the court is also prepared to replace the state’s heavily gerrymandered maps if the Legislature and Democratic governor cannot agree on a new plan.

“Wisconsin is a purple state, and I look forward to submitting maps to the Court to consider and review that reflect and represent the makeup of our state,” Gov. Tony Evers said in a statement.Law Forward, a Madison-based liberal-leaning law firm focused on voting issues, brought the legal challenge straight to the Supreme Court in August — bypassing lower courts in an expedited effort to put new maps in place before the fall.

The court ordered lawmakers to have new maps adopted for the August legislative primary. Wisconsin Elections Commission officials have said new maps must be in place by March 15.

The ruling forces half of the state Senate and the full Assembly to run in new legislative districts. Republicans currently hold 64 of 99 seats in the state Assembly and a supermajority in the state Senate, with 22 of 33 seats.

The ruling delivers a political landmine ahead of the 2024 presidential cycle that will all but certainly focus on the battleground state of Wisconsin. It’s the latest chink in Republican power since GOP dominance in Wisconsin state government began diminishing in 2016, when Donald Trump became president.

Since then, Republicans have lost the governor’s office and control of the state Supreme Court.

Lazy Caturday Reads With Weird Medieval Cats

Posted: December 16, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, abortion rights, cat art, Cats, caturday, just because | Tags: Boston Tea Party anniversary, Donald Trump, fighting for democracy, IDF, Israeli hostages, Kate Cox, Richard Nixon, Ruby Freeman, Rudy Giuliani, Shaye Moss | 17 Comments

Good 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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

But 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.

The 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-cat3 From 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.

Trump’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.

“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:

Kevin Hassett, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and a leading champion of Trump’s 2017 tax-cut package

Tom Homan, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who advocated for Trump’s hard-line policies

Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing border agents

Keith Kellogg, former national security adviser to Pence, who this summer threw his support behind Trump

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.”

The 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.

To 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!

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: November 11, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, cat art, Cats, caturday, just because | Tags: Brianna Suggs, Christian nationalism, Clarence Thomas, corruption, Crystal Clanton, dogs, feral cats, Ginni Thomas, Hunter Biden, James Biden, Joe Biden, Mayor Eric Adams NYC, rats, Rep. James Comer, Rep. James Murphy, Speaker Mike Johnson | 9 Comments

Happy Caturday!!

Michael Peter Ancher, Sunday afternoon in a fisher family’s house, a young girl reading.

Dakinikat provided us with plenty of scream-worthy news yesterday, so I’m going to try to find a few more upbeat stories today. Wish me luck.

First up, I looked around for cat news, and I found a heart-warming story about a lost cat and the dog who saved his life. BBC News: Dog leads owner to cat stuck 100ft down Cornish mine shaft.

A lucky cat was rescued by firefighters after falling 100ft (30m) down a mineshaft in Cornwall – and it was all thanks to a quick-thinking dog.

After six days of searching, Mowgli’s owner Michele Rose said she had “almost given up hope” of finding her missing pet.

But she said she saw her dog Daisy “going berserk”, running in and out of woods near their home in Harrowbarrow.

Daisy’s intervention led to the rescue of her feline friend, Ms Rose said.

Daisy guided her along a footpath toward the Prince of Wales old mine workings, she said, before “stopping dead in her tracks” next to the mineshaft.

“Daisy is a superstar, she’s an amazing dog.

“Without Daisy doing that Mowgli could still be down there, that’s for sure,” Ms Rose said.

“She was persistent in making me follow her, it was amazing.”

The RSPCA and Cornwall Fire and Rescue were called but it was “too dark” on the first night to access the mineshaft, the RSPCA said.

The next morning the team, led by RSPCA animal rescue officer Stephen Findlow, spotted Mowgli, who was 100ft down – but remarkably uninjured – and he was pulled to safety.

The family has another cat, Baloo, who greeted Mowgli after he was pulled up.

Ms Rose said she adopted kittens Mowgli and Baloo in December 2022 and oversaw a gentle introduction to Daisy, who was already resident.

She added: “Daisy was already a year old when the kittens arrived and they have all been inseparable ever since.

“She is quite matriarchal and puts up with them, they love her and she’s very protective of them.”

Here’s a story about cats being “crime fighters.” The Chicago Tribune, via Police1.com: Ill. PD to expand program ‘deputizing’ feral cats to contain city’s rat population.

NILES, Ill. — Police in Niles, Illinois — a suburb of Chicago — expressed satisfaction with a pilot program begun in August to “deputize” five feral cats to control the rat population, a police official told Pioneer Press. Now, the department says it is looking to extend the program.

The cats have lived around the 7800 block of Nordica Avenue for about three years under the care of a resident. The Niles police department recruited the cats because they are a natural deterrent to rats, according to Niles Police.

Earlier in the year, Niles officials passed a wildlife ordinance to curb rat problems in the village. According to the village’s website, the Community Development Department tracks and investigates rat complaints and inspects alleys and properties. The department gives out free rat traps to residential properties.

By James Pelham, 1800s

Niles Police Sergeant Dan Borkowski told Pioneer Press through email that the department reviewed complaint data from the Development Department and resident feedback and decided to continue and expand the feral cat program. Borkowski said the department had yet to determine where the cats will be placed because it’s contingent on cat availability and host families to take care of the cats.

Borkowski said they would keep the cats in a more defined territory. The village’s animal control officer gave Sarwat Hakim, the resident who has been watching over the feral cats, three makeshift, tarped shelters for the felines….

Hakim said the cats usually stay in the neighborhood or head off into the forest preserves, where they hunt for rats.

Hakim said before the cats were in the neighborhood, she used to see a lot of rats and rat traps. She hasn’t seen a rat trap in the neighborhood for about a year, which she is a fan of because she worries about kids potentially playing with them.

Hakim said she started caring for one feral cat three years ago when it kept returning for food. The cat gave birth to 15 cats, most of which were put up for adoption, with four of the cats staying behind.

“They’re so united you wouldn’t believe it,” said Hakim.

Hakim said she and her daughter-in-law feed the cats chicken in the morning, canned tuna for lunch and dinner, with cat food, both dried and canned, served as a snack. The cats also like to drink milk, she said.

“I hope nobody harms them and lets them stay because they’re benefiting us getting rid of the rats,” she said.

I suppose I should find some politics news.

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump has a great piece about Rep. James Comer. (He’s the guy who wants to impeach President Biden for lending money to his brother.): The political perils of taking James Comer’s word for it.

One can think of the claims presented by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) as though they are the experiments of a ninth-grade physics class.

The assignment is simple: Build a contraption that will ensure an egg survives a fall from the roof of the school. So Comer and his friends get together and sketch out little parachutes and agree that the parachutes will work great and talk about how cool the different little parachutes are.

They build the parachutes and take them over to Fox News’s desk and Fox News takes the eggs and puts them in the parachute and holds it one hand over the other and lets go: the egg survived! What a parachute! Going to hype this parachute for a few days until you come up with a new one.

Sometimes, though, Comer or one of his buddies has to take the egg to the actual roof. Maybe Comer thinks some of the parachutes will actually work; probably he knows that a lot of them won’t. But either way, the teacher holds them over the edge of the building and subjects them to reality.

Ssssssssssplat. Over and over and over again. Different eggs and different parachutes but the same result.

Thanks to his incessant chatter about his parachutes and how cool they are, Comer has — despite this pattern — built a reputation with his peers as a really great parachute-maker. A lot of them have only heard Comer talk about his parachutes or have only seen the Fox News tests of the parachutes, so they really think he’s got it, he’s a master of Newtonian physics. Asked to head to the roof for their own tests, they simply grab the parachutes that Comer’s made. Bad move.

So what happened when another Republican Congressman tried to use Comer’s “evidence” in a non-Fox appearance?

On Thursday morning, Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) put some to the test. Murphy appeared on CNN to discuss subpoenas issued by Comer’s Oversight Committee to President Biden’s son Hunter and the president’s brother, James Murphy sits on the House Ways and Means Committee, which, along with Oversight and Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) Judiciary Committee, is tasked with leading the stalled impeachment investigation into the president.

Murphy was asked by host John Berman whether he would vote to hold the Bidens in contempt should they not comply with the subpoena. “Absolutely,” Murphy replied. Then he got out the parachute.

WC Mills, Gentleman in a top hat reading with his cat beside him

“You know, here’s the deal, John,” he said with the confidence of a guy who has never seen Comer’s physics experiments at work. “It’s very, very clear. Why … would Hunter and Jim create 20 shell companies to not — to be legal? We’ve seen time and time again — and Representative Comer has proved this — there was money, influencing peddling that Biden had during his last couple of years as vice president. And then after, right afterwards, they wanted to gain the money back.”

Sssssssssplat.

Comer likes to talk about the “shell companies,” ignoring that a number are simply corporate entities like one that serves as the structure for Hunter Biden’s law firm and another that’s a consulting company he ran. The Washington Post examined each of these “20 shell companies” finding that — despite Murphy’s insinuations — they were created because this is how business structures often work. (Comer tends not to talk about the much more extensive web of corporations controlled by the Trump Organization, which might have given Murphy pause.)

What happened when Murphy tried to explain what Joe Biden did that was criminal?

Comer also has not by any stretch proved that there was influence peddling by Joe Biden. That’s the crux of what he wants to prove and what his investigations are pointed toward. He’s shown, with an abundance of evidence, the already-obvious efforts by Hunter Biden to leverage his last name as he sought out business deals — but has also accrued numerous sworn statements from former Hunter Biden partners that Joe Biden wasn’t involved in the effort. (Among those drawing that line was Devon Archer.)

Berman, however, took the conversation in a different direction. He asked Murphy why he’d vote to hold Hunter or James Biden in contempt when he voted against holding former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon in contempt in 2021 after Bannon failed to provide testimony to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

“Well, I think it’s a little bit different when you have a president of the United States,” he said. “We have somebody who’s not an elected official. You know, the president of the United States was selling his influence, his son was selling his influence—”

Berman interjected: “I don’t understand. We’re talking—”

“It’s a little bit different of standards, John, when you have somebody who’s in elected office,” Murphy continued, “versus somebody who’s not in elected office.”

Berman then asked what elected office Hunter Biden held. Oops!

Unfortunately for Rep. Comer, it turns out that he also lent money to his brother.

Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast: James Comer, Like Joe Biden, Also Paid His Brother $200K.

House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) on Wednesday subpoenaed President Joe Biden’s brother, James Biden, who Comer has implicated in unsubstantiated allegations of “shady business practices” in the Biden family.

Comer has in particular been trying to make hay out of two personal loan repayments from James Biden to his brother, for $40,000 and $200,000—with all transactions occurring in 2017 and 2018, when Joe Biden was neither in office nor a candidate.

By Escha van den Bogerd

But if Comer genuinely believes these transactions clear the “shady business practices” bar, he might want to consider a parallel inquiry into his own family.

According to Kentucky property records, Comer and his own brother have engaged in land swaps related to their family farming business. In one deal—also involving $200,000, as well as a shell company—the more powerful and influential Comer channeled extra money to his brother, seemingly from nothing. Other recent land swaps were quickly followed with new applications for special tax breaks, state records show. All of this, perplexingly, related to the dealings of a family company that appears to have never existed on paper.

But unlike with the Bidens, Comer’s own history actually borders a conflict of interest between his official government role and his private family business—and it’s been going on for decades.

While Comer and House GOP allies have tried to cast the Biden transactions as evidence of unsavory and possibly impeachable offenses, multiple news organizations—including CNN, The Wall Street Journal, FactCheck.org, and the conservative-leaning Washington Examiner—have all thrown cold water on the notion that the payments are evidence of anything other than a brother helping a brother.

Click the link to read the rest.

Speaking of conflicts involving people holding high-level positions, The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus has an op-ed about serious ethics issues for Clarence and Ginni Thomas: The Crystal Clanton case shows a system failure.

Well, so much for getting to the bottom of the story of Crystal Clanton, the judicial law clerk accused of sending racist texts. And so much for all the talk about having Supreme Court justices abide by the code of conduct that covers other federal judges. In this case, at least, the mechanism to enforce that code turned out to be toothless. The judicial discipline system is better at self-protection than self-policing.

To review: Clanton is a protégé of Justice Clarence Thomas and Ginni Thomas. She met Ginni Thomas while working at the conservative youth group Turning Point USA. Her employment was terminated in 2017 after the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer unearthed texts apparently sent by Clanton: “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like f— them all … I hate blacks. End of story.” Clanton told Mayer in an email that “I have no recollection of these messages and they do not reflect what I believe or who I am and the same was true when I was a teenager.” (Clanton was 20 when the texts were sent in 2015, and evidence suggests that this was not an isolated episode).

After leaving Turning Point, Clanton went to work for Ginni Thomas and lived in the Thomas’s home for almost a year. She attended George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School and, with enthusiastic backing from Clarence Thomas, secured one of the most prestigious judicial clerkships in the country, for William H. Pryor Jr., chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Pryor, a reliable “feeder” of clerks to Thomas and other conservative justices, recommended Clanton for a district court clerkship, with Judge Corey Maze of Alabama, before she joined his chambers.

Girl with cat, by Merle Keller

And she appears to be en route to the high court. “It is certainly my intention to consider her for a clerkship should she perform as I expect and excel in her clerkships,” Thomas has written.

When the news of Clanton’s clerkships surfaced in 2021, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee filed an ethics complaint; the matter was assigned to the 2nd Circuit to handle. Chief Judge Debra Ann Livingston dismissed the complaint without even appointing a special committee to look into the facts, as provided for under the rules and suggested by the 11th Circuit judge who conducted the initial review.

Livingston did not examine the underlying question of whether Clanton sent the racist texts. Rather, she found only that Pryor and Maze “performed all of the due diligence that a responsible judge would undertake” before hiring Clanton. The judges, she said, were “in possession of information that the allegations were false — that the anonymous sources relied on in the media accounts were not trustworthy,” and that “they have been repeatedly informed that the allegations of racist text messages and remarks are not true.”

In fact, there were on-the-record sources and screen shots of the texts. Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet confirmed to me that Clanton was “terminated from Turning Point after the discovery of problematic texts.”

There’s much more at the link.

Of course, creepy news keeps breaking about the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Tori Otten at The New Republic: Why Is Mike Johnson Flying a Christian Nationalist Flag Outside His Office?

House Speaker Mike Johnson has three flags hanging outside his office: the American flag, the Louisiana state flag, and a flag representing a movement that wants to turn the United States into a religious Christian nation.

Normal stuff, you know?

The flag is white with a green evergreen tree in the middle and the phrase “An Appeal to Heaven” at the top. A report published Friday by Rolling Stone confirmed that the flag is outside his district office in Washington.

The flag was originally used as a banner during the Revolutionary War, but over the past decade, it has been embraced by a sect of Christianity called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR. A central tenet of NAR’s belief system is that it is God’s will for Christians to take control of all aspects of U.S. society—including education, arts and entertainment, the media, and businesses—to create a religious nation.

The NAR fully embraced Donald Trump when he announced he was running for office, endorsing him early on and helping endear him to other Christian movements. As a result, the Appeal to Heaven flag has become popular among Trump supporters.

The flag has appeared in photos of far-right politicians and election deniers such as Doug Mastriano, the Trump-endorsed candidate for Pennsylvania governor. Mastriano lost to Democrat Josh Shapiro.

The flag was also everywhere at the January 6 insurrection. Rolling Stone estimated that there may have been hundreds of Appeal to Heaven flags throughout the mob.

It should not be surprising that Johnson subscribes to the NAR belief system. He has a well-documented history of opposing abortion access, LGBTQ rights, and environmental policy on the grounds that they are non-Christian.

But it’s upsetting and deeply concerning that he is able to embrace it so openly without so much as a slap on the wrist. What’s more, Rolling Stone’s revelation comes just days after the House of Representatives censured Rashida Tlaib for her comments about Israel and Palestine.

Man reading with cat, by Gustaf Dalstrom

One more politics story about the Democratic Mayor of New York City. The New York Times: F.B.I. Seizes Eric Adams’s Phones as Campaign Investigation Intensifies.

F.B.I. agents seized Mayor Eric Adams’s electronic devices early this week in what appeared to be a dramatic escalation of a criminal inquiry into whether his 2021 campaign conspired with the Turkish government and others to funnel money into its coffers.

The agents approached the mayor after an event in Manhattan on Monday evening and asked his security detail to step away, a person with knowledge of the matter said. They climbed into his S.U.V. with him and, pursuant to a court-authorized warrant, took his devices, the person said.

The devices — at least two cellphones and an iPad — were returned to the mayor within a matter of days, according to that person and another person familiar with the situation. Law enforcement investigators with a search warrant can make copies of the data on devices after they seize them.

A lawyer for Mr. Adams and his campaign said in a statement that the mayor was cooperating with federal authorities, and had already “proactively reported” at least one instance of improper behavior….

The surprise seizure of Mr. Adams’s devices was an extraordinary development and appeared to be the first direct instance of the campaign contribution investigation touching the mayor. Mr. Adams, a retired police captain, said on Wednesday that he is so strident in urging his staff to “follow the law” that he can be almost “annoying.” He laughed at the notion that he had any potential criminal exposure.

The Mayor’s attorney says that Adams is not personally under investigation. We’ll see, I guess.

The federal investigation into Mr. Adams’s campaign burst into public view on Nov. 2, when F.B.I. agents searched the home of the mayor’s chief fund-raiser and seized two laptop computers, three iPhones and a manila folder labeled “Eric Adams.”

The fund-raiser, a 25-year-old former intern named Brianna Suggs, has not spoken publicly since the raid.

Mr. Adams responded to news of the raid by abruptly returning from Washington, D.C., where he had only just arrived for a day of meetings with White House and congressional leaders regarding the migrant influx, an issue he has said threatens to “destroy New York City.”

On Wednesday, he said his abrupt return was driven by his desire to be present for his team, and out of concern for Ms. Suggs, who he said had gone through a “traumatic experience.” [….]

The warrant obtained by the F.B.I. to search Ms. Suggs’s home sought evidence of a conspiracy to violate campaign finance law between members of Mr. Adams’s campaign, the Turkish government or Turkish nationals, and a Brooklyn-based construction company, KSK Construction, whose owners are originally from Turkey. The warrant also sought records about donations from Bay Atlantic University, a Washington, D.C., college whose founder is Turkish and is affiliated with a school Mr. Adams visited when he went to Turkey as Brooklyn borough president in 2015.

I guess we’ll learn more as time goes on.

I hope everyone has a great Caturday and Veteran’s Day weekend!!

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: November 4, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: abortion rights, Afternoon Reads, cat art, Cats, caturday, just because, LGBTQIA+ | Tags: Brian Karam, conversion therapy, House Speaker Mike Johnson, israel, Mark Meadows, Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project, Michael T. James, Mike Johnson's adopted son, military promotions, people accused of witchcraft, Tommy Tuberville, Ukraine | 4 Comments

By Daniel Ryan

Happy Caturday!!

It’s the weekend, and I don’t feel like getting down in the weeds about all the bad stuff that’s happening; so I’m going to share a mixed bag of recent stories that caught my fancy. Since it’s Caturday, I’m going to begin with a story about cats.

Margaret Osborne at Smithsonian Magazine: Cats Make Nearly 300 Different Facial Expressions.

…[R]esearchers have discovered that cats use nearly 300 distinct facial expressions to communicate with one another, according to a study published in October in the journal Behavioral Processes.

“Many people still consider cats—erroneously—to be a largely nonsocial species,” Daniel Mills, a veterinary behaviorist at the University of Lincoln who was not involved in the study, tells Science’s Christa Lesté-Lasserre. “There is clearly a lot going on that we are not aware of.”

To collect data on these furry subjects, researcher Lauren Scott of the University of Kansas Medical Center frequented a cat cafe located in Los Angeles for about a year and recorded video footage of interactions between 53 cats. All were adult domestic shorthairs, and the group included males and females, per the study.

In total, Scott gathered 194 minutes of feline footage that contained 186 interactions. With the help of her co-author, evolutionary psychologist Brittany N. Florkiewicz of Lyon College, she analyzed the cats’ facial signals.

By Michael Bridges

The pair discovered 276 expressions made up of a combination of 26 facial movements, including shifts in ear position, blinks, nose licks and whisker and mouth movements. (In comparison, humans make about 44 facial movements, and dogs have 27.) Of all expressions, about 45 percent—or 126—were categorized as friendly, 37 percent were aggressive and 18 percent were ambiguous, writes Jennifer Nalewicki for Live Science.

“These findings show it is good to look at a cat’s ears, eyes and whiskers to understand if they are feeling friendly,” Florkiewicz tells Earth.com’sAndrei Ionescu. “Their mouth provides a lot of information about whether a cat fight is likely. People may think that cats’ facial expressions are all about warning other cats and people off, but this shows just how social and tolerant pet cats can actually be.”

The team also identified a “common play face” among cats, which was characterized by a dropped jaw and drawn back corners of the mouth, per Live Science. People, dogs and monkeys share similar expressions in playful scenarios.

There’s a bit more at the link.

NBC News published an interesting AP story from Massachusetts: Group seeks to clear names of all accused, convicted or executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts.

In 1648, Margaret Jones, a midwife, became the first person in Massachusetts — the second in New England — to be executed for witchcraft, decades before the infamous Salem witch trials.

Nearly four centuries later, the state and region are still working to come to grips with the scope of its witch trial legacy.

The latest effort comes from a group dedicated to clearing the names of all those accused, arrested or indicted for witchcraft in Massachusetts, whether or not the accusations ended in hanging.

The Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project, made up of history buffs and descendants, is hoping to persuade the state to take a fuller reckoning of its early history, according to Josh Hutchinson, the group’s leader.

Hundreds of individuals were accused of witchcraft in what would become the Commonwealth of Massachusetts between 1638 and 1693. Most escaped execution.

While much attention has focused on clearing the names of those put to death in Salem, most of those caught up in witch trials throughout the 1600s have largely been ignored, including five women hanged for witchcraft in Boston between 1648 and 1688.

“It’s important that we correct the injustices of the past,” said Hutchinson, who noted he counts both accusers and victims among his ancestors. “We’d like an apology for all of the accused or indicted or arrested.”

For now, the group has been collecting signatures for a petition but hopes to take their case to the Statehouse.Among those accused of witchcraft in Boston was Ann Hibbins, sister-in-law to Massachusetts Gov. Richard Bellingham, who was executed in 1656. A character based on Hibbins would later appear in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” published in 1850.

Another accused Boston witch, known as Goodwife Ann Glover or Goody Glover, was hanged in the city in 1688. A plaque dedicated to her is located on the front of a Catholic church in the city’s North End neighborhood, describing her as “the first Catholic martyr in Massachusetts.” It’s one of the few physical reminders of the city’s witch trial history.

The group has also encouraged Connecticut to clear the names of accused witches in their state. Read more at the NBC News link.

Mark Meadows is in more trouble–his book publisher is suing him. The Daily Beast: Mark Meadows’ Publisher Sues Him for Millions Over Election Lies in Book.

The publisher of Mark Meadows’ book The Chief’s Chief has filed suit against the former White House chief of staff, seeking millions in damages after he reportedly copped to lying in the book about the 2020 election being “rigged” and “stolen.”

Meadows reportedly met repeatedly with Jack Smith’s team in its investigation into election interference and had admitted the 2020 election was the most secure in U.S. history—contradicting much of what he’d claimed in his book and allegedly breaking his agreement with the publisher.

“Meadows’ reported statements to the Special Prosecutor and/or his staff [sic] and his reported grand jury testimony squarely contradict the statements in his Book, one central theme of which is that President Trump was the true winner of the 2020 Presidential Election and that election was ‘stolen’ and ‘rigged’ with the help from ‘allies in the liberal media,’ who ignored actual evidence of fraud, right there in plain sight for anyone to access and analyze,” the lawsuit from All Seasons Press states.

ABC News, citing unnamed sources, reported that Meadows negotiated an immunity agreement with the special counsel’s office and in the process admitted to his lies about the 2020 election. Meadows’ lawyer later disputed the accuracy of the report….

The lawsuit claims that Meadows agreed that “all statements contained in the Work are true and based on reasonable research for accuracy,” and that he claimed to have “not made any misrepresentations to the Publisher about the Work.”

The book weighs heavily on Meadows’ claims that the election was “rigged” —debunked claims that All Seasons Press was happy to run at the time, but that now come under renewed scrutiny with Meadows’ reported admission that he propagated falsehoods.

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