Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: January 20, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump | Tags: "the face of evil", Biden's Israel policies, continuing resolution, Hezbollah, Houthis, iran, israel, Japanese cat art, Niki Haley, Poland, Racism, saving democracy, Trump's cognitive decline, Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky | 8 Comments

Happy Caturday!!

Tama the Cat by Hiroaki Takahashi I’m really late getting started today, so I’m just going to get right to today’s news. Things are getting out of hand in the the Middle East, and Republicans in the House are determined to make the worse. They are also working hard to shut down the government unless they get all the goodies they are demanding. Johnson did manage to get a continuing resolution passed, but he depended on Democratic votes. Meanwhile the Republicans are holding back funding for Ukraine’s fight against Russia.

This is from Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American: January 18, 2024.

This afternoon, Congress passed a new continuing resolution necessary to fund the government past the upcoming deadlines in the previous continuing resolution. Those deadlines were tomorrow (January 19) and February 2. The deadlines in the new measure are March 1 and March 8. This is the third continuing resolution passed in four months as extremist Republicans have refused to fund the government unless they get a wish list of concessions to their ideology.

Today’s vote was no exception. Eighteen Republican senators voted against the measure, while five Republicans did not vote (at least one, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, is ill). All the Democrats voted in favor. The final tally was 77 to 18, with five not voting.

In the House the vote was 314 to 108, with 11 not voting. Republicans were evenly split between supporting government funding and voting against it, threatening to shut down the government. They split 107 to 106. All but two Democrats voted in favor of government funding. (In the past, Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts and MIke Quigley of Illinois have voted no on a continuing resolution to fund the government in protest that the measure did not include funding for Ukraine.)

This means that, like his predecessor Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to turn to Democrats to keep the government operating. The chair of the extremist House Freedom Caucus, Bob Good (R-VA), told reporters that before the House vote, Freedom Caucus members had tried to get Johnson to add to the measure the terms of their extremist border security bill. Such an addition would have tanked the bill, forcing a government shutdown, and Johnson refused.

Republican extremists in Congress are also doing the bidding of former president Donald Trump, blocking further aid to Ukraine in its struggle to fight off Russian aggression and standing in the way of a bipartisan immigration reform measure. Aid to Ukraine is widely popular both among the American people and among lawmakers. Immigration reform, which Republicans have demanded but are now opposing, would take away one of Trump’s only talking points before the 2024 election.

Richardson discusses a column in yesterday’s Washington Post about what happens when a country backslides on democracy: Poland is a test case for reviving a corrupted democracy, by Lee Hochstader. This could apply to Ukraine and potentially to the U.S.

With authoritarians and tyrants on the march across the world, Poland is an emerging test case of whether a corrupted democracy can be revived. The discouraging early signs are that it might be harder than building one from scratch.

Contempt for the niceties of representative and pluralistic democracy, along with florid rhetorical excess, were the trademarks of the man who controlled Poland’s ruling party for the past eight years, before a shock electoral defeat last fall cast him into political exile.

Ghost Cat, by Chikanobu Toyohara 1838-1912

Now Jaroslaw Kaczynski, having meted out death by a thousand cuts to Polish democracy in a failed effort to cement his grip on power, leads an irreconcilable opposition.

His escalating standoff with the new government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk is a stress test that is likely to subject Eastern Europe’s biggest and most influential country to a bitter contest of wills for the foreseeable future. And it is far from clear that Poland can regain the vibrant democracy, independent judiciary and robust institutions it worked so hard to establish from the ruins of communism more than 30 years ago.

“It was easier then because there was broad consensus in society and the political class about the general direction,” Piotr Buras, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Warsaw office, told me. “Now this is the core of the conflict.”

Tusk, who was prime minister from 2007 to 2014, took office again last month. It doesn’t mean that he took power.

Over the course of its two terms in government, Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party jury-rigged systems, rules and institutions to its own partisan advantage, seeding its allies in the courts, prosecutors’ offices, state-owned media and central bank. Kaczynski’s administration erected an intricate legal obstacle course designed to leave the party with a stranglehold on key levers of power even if it were ousted in elections.

On top of that, President Andrzej Duda, a Kaczynski ally, is set to remain in office until his term expires in August next year. He retains broad powers, including to veto legislation, and has already thwarted Tusk’s agenda where possible.

Read more at the WaPo. This is the danger we face if we let Trump gain power again.

This is funny. From The Kiyv Independent: Zelensky invites Trump to Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has extended an invitation to Donald Trump to visit Kyiv, with a specific condition attached.

Speaking with U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 News, Zelensky said that Trump would be warmly received in the capital under one stipulation: the former U.S. president must demonstrate his ability to bring an end to the war with Russia within 24 hours, as he once promised.

Trump has repeatedly said that the war would not have happened if he was still in power in Washington, and that he would bring it to an immediate end if voted back in because he has what he described as “a good relationship” with both Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Beyond that, former U.S. president has provided no details of what his peace deal would involve.

Zelensky, who has previously extended the invitation without receiving a response, emphasized that if Trump indeed has a “formula” for resolving the war, he is eager to learn the specifics.

“So, I invite President Trump. If he can come here, I will need 24 minutes — yes, 24 minutes. Not more. Yes. Not more — 24 minutes to explain [to] President Trump that he can’t manage this war. He can’t bring peace because of Putin.”Zelensky said on air: “He is very welcome to come here, but I think he can not end the war in 24 hours, without giving our land to Putin.”

On the Israel situation, from The Washington Post: Growing number of Senate Democrats question Biden’s Israel strategy.

Five Senate Democrats on Friday signed onto a measure that would condition aid to Israel on its compliance with international law, bringing the total number of co-sponsors to 18. And a prominent Democrat, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, is rounding up support for his amendment to stop President Biden from circumventing Congress when he orders weapons transfers to Israel, a maneuver the president has pursued twice in recent months.

Kobayashi Kiyochika, Cat and Lantern

Earlier this week, 11 senators voted for a bill by Sen. Bernie Sanders aimed at forcing the Biden administration to examine potential human rights abuses by Israel.

After weeks of unquestioning support, the Senate is emerging as a center of resistance to Biden’s unwavering embrace of Israel — at least in modest ways — as even centrist Democrats are signaling their discomfort with the president’s “bear hug” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A number of prominent Democrats have proposed or backed measures that aim to hold Israel accountable or to shift American strategy, even if they are unlikely to garner enough support to pass.

The growing willingness of establishment Democrats to criticize or push back on Israel — a move that would have come with serious political ramifications just a few months ago — signals a shift in the politics of the party since the war in Gaza began more than 100 days ago. Senators from swing states, including Georgia, Wisconsin and Minnesota, have signed on to some of these measures as polls show a notable drop in support for Biden among young, Muslim and Arab American voters over his handling of the issue.

While few senators are voicing full-throated criticism of Biden’s Israel policy, the new, more skeptical tone reflects an increasing unease as the civilian toll in Gaza rises and Israel repeatedly flouts U.S. requests to modify its military onslaught.

“Every week the Netanyahu coalition promises the Biden administration that we will see meaningful changes, and every week it never materializes,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who, along with Kaine, organized the effort to impose conditions in exchange for aid. Van Hollen noted that some members of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition are even “bragging” about ignoring American requests.

Wintry Wednesday Reads

Posted: January 17, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, court rulings, Donald Trump, just because, SCOTUS | Tags: DC Circuit Court, defamation case, E Jean Carroll, Federal agencies, Jack Smith, Joseph W. Fischer v. United States, Judge Aileen Cannon, Loper Bright case, Neil Gorsuch, Supreme Court, Trump's Twitter feed | 4 Comments

Good Day Sky Dancers!!

Winter Moonlit Scene by Hendricks Hallett ( American, 1847-1921)

We finally got some snow here in the Boston area. It snowed overnight on Monday and for most of the day yesterday. It’s also quite cold, but our weather can’t compare to the deep freeze that has hit the South. Dakinikat’s house was only 54 degrees indoors this morning!

There’s another storm moving across the Midwest and it will dump more snow in the East over the weekend. I talked to my sister in Portland, OR last night, and they are also getting below normal temperatures. She said there was an ice storm happening when I called her.

In the news, there’s quite a bit about Trump’s legal messes. This post will focus on those as well as some SCOTUS news.

Yesterday was the first day of the second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial. Trump chose to show up, even though he doesn’t need to be there. He’s in court again today; I have to assume he is there trying to intimidate Carroll. Here’s the latest:

CNN: Takeaways from first day of Trump’s defamation trial.

Donald Trump attended the first day of his civil defamation trial, watching as a jury was selected to determine how much, if any, damages the former president must pay to E. Jean Carroll for his 2019 defamatory statements about Carroll’s sexual assault allegations….

Trump watched as prospective jurors were asked about their political donations to him and his political opponents, whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen and how they got their news. He left court before opening statements to travel to New Hampshire for a campaign event Tuesday evening with the primary one week away.

Trump may return to New York later this week for the rest of the trial, and his lawyers have suggested he could testify in the case, though the judge has ruled that Trump cannot try to contest a previous jury’s verdict that he sexually abused and defamed Carroll….

Trump left court Tuesday before opening statements began, where Carroll’s lawyer Shawn Crowley told the jury that it had already been proven that Trump sexually assaulted Carroll in a high-end department store in the 1990s.

That jury’s finding stemmed from statements Trump made in 2022, while the current case is dealing with statements Trump made while he was president in 2019.

“Donald Trump sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. He managed to get her alone in an empty department store one evening and sexually assaulted her. That’s a fact,” Crowley said. “That fact has been proven and a jury sitting in the exact seats where you’re sitting now found that it happened.”

Crowley said that Trump’s attacks on her while he was president “unleashed his followers” and caused her to receive threats. “Trump was president when he made those statements, and he used the world’s biggest microphone to attack Ms. Carroll to humiliate her and to destroy her reputation,” Crowley said.

The damages awarded to Carroll “should be significant, very significant,” her lawyer argued.

“You will also be asked to decide how much money Donald Trump should have to pay as punishment for what he’s done and to deter him and others from doing it again,” Crowley said, noting Trump continued to post about her on social media, even as the trial got underway on Tuesday.

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: January 13, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, SCOTUS, U.S. Politics | Tags: "Memphis Seven", abortion rights, Climate change, disappearing snowpack, EMTALA, homeless encampments, Hunter Biden, IRS, Labor Unions, snow, Trump legal news | 5 Comments

Happy Caturday!!

By Vanessa Stockard

Last year in Massachusetts we had a winter with almost no snow. Weather people quite often predicted it, but it never came. It really bothered me. I realized how much I love snowstorms and how much I miss snow when it doesn’t arrive. It looks like this year will be another mild winter with very little snow. We got a few inches recently, but mostly we’re getting rain.

I’m far from alone in missing snow. A few days ago, I came across two articles about what climate change is doing to our winters.

Zoë Schlanger at The Atlantic: The Threshold at Which Snow Starts Irreversibly Disappearing.

In January 1995, when The Atlantic published “In Praise of Snow,” Cullen Murphy’s opus to frozen precipitation, snow was still a mysterious substance, coming and going enigmatically, confounding forecasters’ attempts to make long-term predictions. Climate change registered to snow hydrologists as a future problem, but for the most part their job remained squarely hydrology: working out the ticktock of a highly variable yet presumably coherent water cycle. “We still don’t know many fundamental things about snow,” Murphy wrote. “Nor do we understand its relation to weather and to climate—the dynamics of climate being one of the perennials on the ‘must figure out’ list of science.”

In January 2024, at long last, someone has figured out a formula of sorts for how snow reacts to climate change, and the answer is: It reacts nonlinearly. Which is to say, if we think snow is getting scarce now, we ought to buckle up.

Nonlinear relationships indicate accelerated change; shifts are small for a while but then, past a certain threshold, escalate quickly. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, two Dartmouth researchers report finding a distinctly nonlinear relationship between increasing winter temperatures and declining snowpacks. And they identify a “snow loss cliff”—an average winter-temperature threshold below which snowpack is largely unaffected, but above which things begin to change fast.

That threshold is 17 degrees Fahrenheit. Remarkably, 80 percent of the Northern Hemisphere’s snowpack exists in far-northern, high-altitude places that, for now, on average, stay colder than that. There, the snowpack seems to be healthy and stable, or even increasing. But as a general rule, when the average winter temperature exceeds 17 degrees (–8 degrees Celsius), snowpack loss begins, and accelerates dramatically with each additional degree of warming.

Already, millions of people who rely on the snowpack for water live in places that have crossed that threshold and will only get hotter. “A degree beyond that might take away 5 to 10 percent of the snowpack, then the next degree might cut away 10 to 15 percent, then 15 to 20 percent,” Alexander Gottlieb, the first author on the paper, told me over the phone as I looked out my window in New York City, where it has rained several times over the past few days. “Once you get around the freezing point”—32 degrees Fahrenheit—“you can lose almost half of your snow from just an additional degree of warming,” he said. New York City, which was recently reclassified as a “humid subtropical” climate, has clocked nearly 700 consecutive days with less than an inch of snowfall. It’s definitely over the snow-loss cliff, and as global temperatures increase, more places will follow.

By Malysheva Nastenka

Gottlieb and his co-author, Justin Mankin, figured this out by looking at how changes in temperature and precipitation drove changes in snowpack in 169 river basins across the Northern Hemisphere from 1981 through 2020. Using machine learning, they found a clear signal that human-induced climate change was indeed forcing changes in the snowpack in the places where most people live. The sharpest declines were in the watersheds of the southwestern and northeastern United States, and in Central and Eastern Europe. “In places where we are able to identify this really clear signal that climate change has reduced spring snowpack, we expect that to really only accelerate in the near term,” he said. “Those are places where the train has already kind of left the station.” Indeed, the Hudson River watershed, in which New York City sits, experienced among the steepest declines over that period. In the Northeast, which is not as reliant on spring snowmelt for water, that loss is felt most keenly as a loss of recreation; whole economies in the Northeast are based on skiing.

In the Mountain West, the stakes are even higher. Hydrologists already worry about the future reliability of the region’s snow-fed water supply: Previous research found snowless winters in the Mountain West are likely to be a regular occurrence by mid-century. But crucially, Gottlieb doesn’t see any room for cheerfulness about individual years with off-the-charts snowfall, such as last year’s record snowpack in the Colorado River basin. “This work really shows that we can definitely still get these one-off anomaly years that are incredibly wet, incredibly snowy, but the long-term signal is incredibly clear,” he said. Once you’re over the cliff, there’s no going back. The snow will keep disappearing.

In this piece, Lora Kelley interviews Zoë Schlanger (author of the previous article) on “the sense of loss when climate change transforms winter”: The Feeling of Losing Snow. Kelley and Schlanger mostly rehash the information from the previous article, but they also discussed the feeling of losing snowy winters:

Zoe: One of the hydrologists I spoke with was a former ski-patrol person, and he was talking so beautifully about what it meant for him to ski on a cold, bright day high in the mountains in Utah with perfect powder. It was just so vital to his enjoyment of life. For future generations, snow could just become slush, or not be there at all.

I don’t ski. I don’t live in the mountains. But even for me, there’s a sense of loss. It makes me think of a word that an Australian philosopher coined a number of years ago: solastalgia, which is essentially the sense of homesickness for an environment that you never left, but is leaving without you in some way. I feel like we’re all experiencing that when there are these touchstones of the year that seem to not be there anymore. It’s a strange sense of in-place homesickness.

Lora: This strikes me as a really stark example of climate change affecting how people experience nature. How do you think about these more obvious losses versus less visible, more incremental changes to the environment?

Zoë: Snow is a reminder that, actually, a lot of the changes we’re dealing with aren’t that incremental. We may not be able to see rising temperatures in quite the same way. But in many cases, those changes are just as sudden and dramatic and are happening faster than people thought they were. The wildfires we saw last year, for example, were wildly out of proportion from anything we’ve seen before. Records aren’t getting broken by small degrees now. They’re getting broken by leaps and bounds.

Climate change is real, it’s happening quickly, and it affects our lives in so many ways.

In the news, the Supreme Court will hear a case about whether hospitals can be required to treat pregnant women who will likely die without abortion care. Rolling Stone: The Supreme Court Will Decide if States Can Force Hospitals to Let Women Die.

The Supreme Court will decide this term whether states can force doctors to turn away patients suffering serious, life-threatening medical complications, or if doctors will be allowed to provide standard medical care to those patients: abortions. The court announced last week it will hear arguments over the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, or EMTALA, in April.

By Vicky Mount

EMTALA is a more than three-decade-old federal law that says hospitals that accept Medicare (most hospitals in this country) cannot turn away anyone with an emergency medical condition; they are required to provide stabilizing treatment to prevent that person from suffering serious medical complications. After Roe v. Wade was overruled in 2022, the Biden administration issued guidance clarifying that if a pregnant patient arrives at a hospital with an emergency condition that could only be stabilized with an abortion, the hospital is required to provide that care — regardless of state law.

To the Supreme Court, Idaho has argued that states — not doctors, and not the federal government — should be permitted to decide what kind of emergency medical care women can receive. “The federal government cannot use EMTALA to override in the emergency room state laws about abortion any more than it can use it to override state law on organ transplants or marijuana use,” the state’s attorney general wrote in its petition to the high court.

Lawyers for the Department of Justice sued the state of Idaho last year over the criminal abortion ban passed by the GOP-controlled legislature, which only allows for abortions to prevent a patient’s death — language one Idaho doctor said “is not useful to medical providers because this is not a dichotomous variable.”

The Biden administration argued the Idaho law violates care requirements mandated by EMTALA, and a lower court agreed, blocking the law as it applied to medical emergencies. But on Jan. 5, the Supreme Court lifted the lower court injunction, reinstating the ban and sending the chilling message to Idaho doctors that they cannot offer the care they have been trained to provide to pregnant patients without fear of criminal prosecution.

Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, called the Supreme Court’s intervention in the case “deeply troubling.”

“EMTALA is currently the only federal protection for patients who need emergency abortions. If the Supreme Court eviscerates that, there is no doubt that people will die,” Northup said in a statement.

More SCOTUS news from The Washington Post: Supreme Court to review restrictions on homeless encampments.

The Supreme Court said Friday it will consider whether state and local officials can punish homeless individuals for camping and sleeping in public spaces when shelter beds are unavailable.

The justices will review a lower court decision that declared it unconstitutional to enforce anti-camping laws against homeless individuals when they have nowhere else to sleep.

Photo by Frank Herfort

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which covers Western states, including California, Oregon and Washington, first held in 2018 that the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment prohibits cities from criminalizing public camping when shelter is unavailable.

The city of Grants Pass, Ore., asked the justices to overturn a similar recent decision involving civil fines and warned that the ruling would paralyze cities across the West from addressing safety and public health risks created by tents and makeshift structures. The 9th Circuit’s decision, the officials said, is standing in the way of a comprehensive response to the growth of public encampments.

“The consequences of inaction are dire for those living both in and near encampments: crime, fires, the reemergence of medieval diseases, environmental harm and record levels of drug overdoses and deaths on public streets,” lawyers for the city told the high court.

News on one more SCOTUS case from The Hill: Supreme Court steps into Starbucks union fight.

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear Starbucks’s appeal of a decision ordering the coffee chain to reinstate seven terminated employees, who were part of a high-profile union drive and became known as the “Memphis Seven.”

With implications for labor organizing more broadly, the justices will take up the case to decide the proper standard for court injunctions requested by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as they battle against employers in administrative proceedings.

The injunctions, aimed at keeping the status quo, have forced companies to reinstate employees, keep facilities open and pause corporate policy changes as the NLRB adjudicates alleged unfair labor practices.

Federal appeals courts have been split on what test the NLRB must clear to receive such an order, however.

Starbucks, backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business interests, argues that some courts — like the one that ordered the Memphis Seven be reinstated — have been too lenient, emboldening the NLRB to interfere with employers without due cause.

“That split carries enormous consequences for employers nationwide and unacceptably threatens the uniformity of federal labor law,” Starbucks’s attorneys wrote to the justices.

Hunter Biden has reversed course and offered to testify behind closed doors in the House. The Guardian: Hunter Biden offers to testify privately if House Republicans issue new subpoena.

Hunter Biden offered on Friday to comply with any new subpoena and testify in private before House Republicans seeking to impeach his father over alleged but unproven corruption, an attorney for Joe Biden’s son said.

By Troy Brooks

“If you issue a new proper subpoena, now that there is a duly authorised impeachment inquiry, Mr Biden will comply for a hearing or deposition,” Abbe Lowell wrote to James Comer and Jim Jordan, the Republican chairs of the oversight and judiciary committees.

“We will accept such a subpoena on Mr Biden’s behalf.”

Republicans are interested in Hunter Biden’s business dealings and struggles with addiction. Outside Congress, he faces criminal charges over a gun purchase and his tax affairs that carry maximum prison sentences of 25 and 17 years. In Los Angeles on Thursday, he added a not guilty plea in the tax case to the same plea in the gun case.

Biden previously refused to comply with a congressional subpoena for testimony in private, giving a press conference on Capitol Hill to say he would talk if the session were public.

On Wednesday, Comer held a hearing to consider a resolution to hold Biden in contempt of Congress, a charge that can result in a fine and jail time.

The hearing descended into chaos with Biden and Lowell making a surprise appearance, sitting in the audience while Republicans and Democrats traded partisan barbs. The resolution was sent to the full House for a vote. The White House said Joe Biden had not been told of his son’s plan to attend the oversight hearing.

Congressional Republicans are dead set on taking more funding away from the IRS, even though–or maybe because–the extra money has resulted in millions more income for the government. Raw Story: Funding GOP wants to cut helped IRS collect $500 million from rich tax cheats.

The Internal Revenue Service said Friday that it has collected more than $500 million from wealthy tax dodgers since 2022, thanks to a funding boost that is now in jeopardy as Republican lawmakers work to claw back tens of billions of dollars from the agency.

The IRS has used a budget increase approved under the Inflation Reduction Act to ramp up enforcement efforts, targeting millionaires over significant sums of unpaid taxes. The agency announced Friday that it has retrieved $520 million through its new initiatives.

“This is why we fought for a fully funded IRS, and why it’s so reckless for Republicans to try to slash its budget again,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) wrote in response to the agency’s announcement.

The congressional GOP, which has long worked to starve the IRS of funding in service to rich tax cheats, is aiming to more quickly implement $20 billion in cuts that they secured as part of last year’s bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling, potentially compromising tax enforcement. The $20 billion represents a quarter of the $80 billion IRS funding boost in the Inflation Reduction Act, which Republicans unanimously opposed.

Under a spending tentative agreement that congressional leaders announced this past weekend, the $20 billion in IRS cuts would be frontloaded to 2024 instead of being spread out over two years. The deal still must pass Congress—hardly a forgone conclusion as far-right Republicans push House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to back out of the agreement, complaining that government spending is too high overall.

Johnson is also aiming to slash an additional $10 billion from the tax agency’s 2025 funding.

A couple of 2024 campaign stories:

CNN: Biden campaign grapples with undecided voters who don’t yet believe Trump could be the nominee.

Even as the Biden reelection campaign forges ahead with preparations for another potential general election match-up between Biden and his predecessor, it is grappling with a stubborn reality: The majority of undecided voters simply do not seem to believe – at least not yet – that Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican presidential nominee.

According to the campaign’s internal research, this is the case for most of the undecided voters that the campaign is targeting – nearly three-in-four of them, senior Biden campaign officials told CNN. Those officials said one of the biggest reasons driving this is the simple fact that many voters are not paying close attention to the election, including the ins and outs of the GOP nomination process.

“You can’t conceive of how tuned out these folks are,” one senior campaign official said.

To that end, Biden campaign officials see the task of helping voters recognize that Trump is a strong frontrunner as one of their most important and urgent challenges, with the first GOP caucus in Iowa now just days away. A key part of that work is painting a vivid picture of what a second term of a Trump White House would look like.

At some point in the near future, Biden campaign officials say they expect that a switch will turn on for many of these voters who are not yet convinced that Trump is likely to be on the ballot in the fall. As one senior official put it, a realization will hit: “Oh s—, it is an election between that guy and that guy.”

But what’s impossible for the campaign to predict at this point in the election cycle is when exactly it will click for voters that “that guy” – Trump – is poised to be the GOP presidential nominee. Just 20% of the public has been paying a lot of attention to the 2024 presidential campaign, according to an AP-NORC poll from the end of last year; meanwhile, 47% said they have paid little or no attention.

Lisa Lerer at The New York Times: On the Ballot in Iowa: Fear. Anxiety. Hopelessness.

Across Iowa, as the first nominating contest approaches on Monday, voters plow through snowy streets to hear from candidates, mingle at campaign events and casually talk of the prospect of World War III, civil unrest and a nation coming apart at the seams.

Four years ago, voters worried about a spiraling pandemic, economic uncertainty and national protests. Now, in the first presidential election since the siege on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, those anxieties have metastasized into a grimmer, more existential dread about the very foundations of the American experiment.

“You get the feeling in Iowa right now that we’re sleepwalking into a nightmare and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Doug Gross, a Republican lawyer who has been involved in Iowa politics for nearly four decades, ran for governor in 2002 and plans to support Nikki Haley in the state’s caucuses on Monday. “In Iowa, life isn’t lived in extremes, except the weather, and yet they still feel this dramatic sense of inevitable doom.”

Donald J. Trump, the dominant front-runner in the Republican primary race, bounces from courtroom to campaign trail, lacing his rhetoric with ominous threats of retribution and suggestions of dictatorial tendencies. President Biden condemns political violence and argues that if he loses, democracy itself could falter.

Bill Bradley, 80, who served for 18 years as a New Jersey senator, remembered when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000, spending more than 75 days in Iowa during his bid. “We debated health care and taxes, which is reasonable,” he said, adding, “Civil war? No. World War III? No, no, no.”

This presidential race, he said, is “a moment that is different than any election in my lifetime.”

Wednesday Reads

Posted: January 10, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: abortion rights, Donald Trump, just because | Tags: abortion, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, E. Jean Carroll, Glenn Kirschner, House Judiciary Committee, House Oversight Committee, Hunter Biden, John Sauer, Judge Florence Y. Pan, Judge Lewis Kaplan, Margery Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, post-Dobbs cruelty to pregnant women, Rep Jim Jordan, Rep. James Comer, Special Counsel James I. Pearce, Trump's presidential immunity appeal | 9 Comments

Good Day!!

Peder Mørk Mønsted, Sunny winter landscape with a road, 1907

I was just about to get going on my post when I glanced at the TV screen (sound muted) and noticed a wild scene in the House Oversight Committee hearing. The Republicans scheduled the meeting today to hold Hunter Biden in contempt for ignoring their subpoena to appear for a secret deposition.

You’ll recall that Rep. James Comer originally said that Hunter could testify either in a public hearing or behind closed doors with committee staff. Hunter offered to testify publicly under oath but Comer freaked out and said it would have to be in a closed deposition. Obviously, they have no evidence of wrongdoing and Comer wanted to be able to lie about what happened in a closed hearing.

Anyway, Hunter showed up at the hearing today with two of his attorneys and sat in the audience. The media was all a-flutter.

Republicans were outraged. Nancy Mace yelled at Hunter and accused him of not having the “balls” to respond to the subpoena. After a long, idiotic rant by Mace, it was Margery Taylor Greene’s turn. Unfortunately for her, Hunter and his attorneys left the meeting as she began to speak, and all of the press followed them out the door, leaving Greene with no one to record whatever stupid things she planned to say.

Here’s the report from NBC News: Hunter Biden makes surprise appearance at House committee hearing to hold him in contempt.

The son of the president arrived on Capitol Hill on Wednesday morning to attend in person congressional committee meetings called to hold him in contempt of Congress — setting up an unprecedented standoff on live television between Hunter Biden and House Republicans who have long sought his testimony as part of their impeachment inquiry into his father.

Hunter Biden was accompanied by his attorneys Abbe Lowell and Kevin Morris. He did not initially respond to questions.

House Republicans on the Oversight and Judiciary Committees are holding separate committee votes on Wednesday recommending that Hunter Biden be charged with contempt of Congress.

Hunter Biden is at odds with Republicans over their demand that he testify behind closed doors. The president’s son, who is facing two separate criminal indictments, has agreed to testify publicly, an offer Republicans have refused, continuing to insist that the testimony be given behind closed doors.

During the Oversight Committee’s markup Wednesday morning, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., called for Hunter Biden’s arrest on the spot for defying the congressional subpoena.

“Hunter Biden you are too afraid for a deposition, and I still think you are today,” she said.

“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” she added.

Outside the chamber, Lowell said committee Republicans were motived by “improper partisan motives.” He said he and his client had offered to work with Republicans on the committees on a half dozen occasions since February of last year to see “how relevant information to any legitimate inquiry could be provided,” but their first five offers were ignored. He called the subsequent GOP subpoena for a closed-door deposition “a tactic that the Republicans have repeatedly misused in their political crusade to selectively leak and mischaracterize what witnesses have said.”

Asked by NBC News shortly after leaving the Oversight hearing whether he would testify today if asked, Hunter Biden replied “yes.” He and his team left the building afterwards.

This is interesting. It appears that Chairman Comer has a hypocrisy issue as he accuses Joe and Hunter Biden of “corruption.” Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast: Oversight Chairman James Comer’s ‘Legitimate’ Shell Company Was Shut Down—Twice.

As Rep. James Comer (R-KY) plows ahead with his sensationalized impeachment inquiry premised on Hunter Biden’s business dealings, the Oversight Chairman has alleged that Biden’s opaque financial operations merit investigation, and that people who own corporations have a “responsibility” to maintain proper “books and records.”

But a review of dozens of tax, real estate, and business filings in Kentucky and Tennessee indicate that Comer’s own personal “books and records” are opaque at best—and improper at worst.

Jef Bourgeau (American, b.1950), The Gloaming, 2024

Those records include the dealings of Comer’s shell company, Farm Team Properties LLC, which the state of Kentucky has dissolved twice for failure to file annual reports—first in 2020, then again in 2022.

Kentucky law states that an administratively dissolved business “continues its existence but shall not carry on any business except that necessary to wind up and liquidate its business and affairs.” An official with the Kentucky Department of Revenue told The Daily Beast that a company in administrative dissolution may not legally conduct business in the state—such as executing deals and leases, securing loans, or collecting rent as an LLC.

But in response to questions about the shell company last month, Comer told Fox Business that Farm Team Properties not only holds properties, it also “manages” them, “leases hunting on my 1,600 acres of farmland,” and generates “lots of revenue, legitimate revenue.” (The previous month, he denied having an LLC during a committee hearing.)

While Comer and his wife rectified the first dissolution within a few weeks, they allowed the October 2022 dissolution to languish for more than a year, only reinstating the entity last month, after The Daily Beast first reported on the company and flagged the dissolution on social media. It’s not clear from Comer’s filings whether Farm Team Properties ceased business activity for those 14 months.

The “books and records” questions also run to Comer’s real estate holdings, which directly contradict his recent public statements about his LLC. For one, Comer reports rental income from all of his farmland holdings, but it’s not clear whether that income derives from Farm Team’s alleged hunting leases. If so, experts told The Daily Beast, his records should reflect that, and they do not.

The opacity of Comer’s disclosures—along with his contradictory defenses of the shell company—mean the public still doesn’t have a clear picture of his finances. And Comer’s broadsides targeting Hunter Biden’s cloudy corporate entities would seem to invite parallel scrutiny into the similar haze that has settled over his own business dealings….

On personal financial disclosures starting from 2017—the year Comer’s wife created Farm Team Properties—and continuing through his most recent statement covering 2022, Comer has listed the income from the company as “none.” But after recent reports from The Daily Beast and the Associated Press raised questions about the shell company, Comer has called into question whether he’s really making no money from the entity.

House ethics rules state that members who “own an interest in a partnership or limited liability company established for the purpose of holding real estate,” must describe “each individual property held by the company.” Members also “must disclose each asset held by the company in which your interest (or that of your spouse or dependent child) had a period-end value of more than $1,000” or had recorded “more than $200 in income during the reporting period.”

Brendan Fischer, an ethics expert and deputy director of watchdog Documented, told The Daily Beast that it seems as if Comer should disclose more information.

“For a company created to hold investment properties—which sounds like Farm Team Properties, LLC—a Congressperson not only must disclose the company, they must also provide details about the properties it owns, and the amount of any income (such as rental income) from those properties,” Fischer said, noting that the rules apply “regardless of whether the entity is taxed as a partnership or corporation.”

Comer’s disclosures list his FTP ownership as a business interest, not as investment or real estate, despite the fact that it owns properties and is engaged in “real estate speculation.” This was true in 2017, when Farm Team Properties was created to hold property and obscure Comer’s co-ownership with a campaign donor, the Associated Press reported last month.

Sollenberger notes that Comer is a millionaire, because his father handed over two valuable properties for $10 apiece. Read much more about Comer’s shady dealings at The Daily Beast link.

The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Jim Jordan (who refused to honor a subpoena from the House January 6 Committee) is also meeting today in order to decide whether to hold Hunter Biden in contempt.

Winter Trees, by Egon Schiele

CNN on the Judiciary Committee hearing:

In a different committee room, Jordan gaveled in the Judiciary panel’s meeting.

“Rather than come before us and answering questions about these and other concurring instances of the Biden family trading cash for influence, Hunter Biden held a press conference a few hundred yards from here, a press conference where he said I’m happy to answer questions in public but when he finished his statement he abruptly left, taking no questions from the press,” Jordan said.

“We have no choice but to hold Mr. Biden in contempt,” he added.

The pair of markups on Wednesday kick off a lengthy process and underscore that the Republican effort to obtain testimony from the president’s son will remain difficult. If the contempt resolution passes out of committee, it is referred to the full House for a contempt vote.

If an eventual House floor vote succeeds, the Department of Justice, which is already pursuing two criminal cases against the president’s son, would have to determine whether to prosecute the president’s son for evading a congressional subpoena.

Yesterday, Trump showed up in person for the hearing on his appeal of Judge Tanya Chutkan’s denial of his claim of “absolute presidential immunity” from criminal prosecution. The hearing didn’t go well for him. Joyce Vance wrote about it at Civil Discourse: Trump’s Bad Day in Court. The first of many to come.

Following Tuesday morning’s oral argument in the District of Columbia, Donald Trump made some predictable comments to the press from a Washington, D.C., hotel. As he finished, a reporter shouted out a request that he use the moment to tell his followers, “No violence.” The former president walked out of the room without responding.

The Judges came prepared for oral argument on Trump’s immunity motion. Let’s start with the key figures in the argument:

Judges: Bush appointee Karen LeCraft Henderson. Biden appointees Florence Y. Pan and J. Michelle Childs.

Lawyer for Trump: Former Missouri Solicitor General John Sauer.

Lawyer for the Special Counsel: James I. Pearce, a career federal prosecutor who has worked in both DOJ’s public integrity section, which Jack Smith previously led, and in the Criminal Division’s appellate section.

The top line from the argument: a broad consensus among observers that the panel didn’t buy Trump’s immunity argument. None of the Judges seemed to believe Trump should be immune from prosecution. But each Judge came at it from a different vantage point. While they may end up agreeing on a single rationale for their decision, it’s also possible we could have an opinion with concurrences by one or more of the Judges, using different reasoning.

Mr. Sauer argued first because Trump is the petitioner—he lost in the trial court and is asking the Court of Appeals to reverse Judge Chutkan’s decision. Mr. Pearce, who argued second, began by telling the court that no other president in history claimed his immunity from prosecution extended beyond his time in office. A president’s role is unique, Pearce said, “but not above the law.”

The most telling points in the oral argument centered on hypotheticals offered by Judge Pan. Judges frequently use hypotheticals to help them understand what a ruling would mean both for the case at hand and in future cases. Judge Pan posed three to Sauer, asking whether, under his view of immunity, a president could:

order Seal Team 6 to execute a political rival, and get away with it

accept a payment for issuing a pardon, and get away with it

sell nuclear secrets to a foreign power, and get away with it

Landscape with Snow, Vincent Van Gogh

Sauer argued that presidents can only be prosecuted if they are first impeached and convicted by the Senate. He, of course, has to argue this because otherwise, his client Donald Trump is in trouble.

It’s an unappetizing position. Sauer ran into still more trouble as the hypothetical was played out with both lawyers in turn, exploring the ways a president could avoid being impeached and convicted. They ranged from a president who resigns to avoid conviction, succeeds in concealing criminal conduct until he leaves office so he is never impeached, or even one who orders the deaths of his opponents in the Senate to prevent conviction. Under Trump’s theory of immunity, no prosecution would be available in these cases.

You don’t have to be a high-end appellate lawyer to understand that this argument is a stone-cold loser. At least in a democracy.

Read the rest of Vance’s analysis at the link above.

HuffPost recaps an interview from last night’s Lawrence O’Donnell show on MSNBC: Ex-Prosecutor Surprised By ‘Jarring’ Aspect To Trump Court Appearance.

Former U.S. Army prosecutor Glenn Kirschner on Tuesday said Donald Trump’s demeanor as he appeared before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — while his attorneys argued his “absolute immunity” for acts he committed during his presidency ― was “kind of jarring.”

The former president and Republican 2024 front-runner behaved “entirely like a defendant, not like a politician,” Kirschner told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.

It was in stark contrast to Trump’s usual bluster.

“I think I know what retail politics means,” said Kirschner. “He didn’t look anybody in the eye, he didn’t take an interest in anyone around, he kept his head down. He sort of lumbered forward to counsel table and plopped down.”

Trump “seemed like a defeated defendant who was kind of resigned to his fate,” he added.

Kirschner later described the argument being put forward by Trump’s legal team as “harebrained.”

From Raw Story: ‘Dead man walking’: Legal expert explains the moment Trump lost immunity appeal.

Former President Donald Trump’s attorney John Sauer failed catastrophically in selling an absolute immunity argument the appellate judges considering whether special counsel Jack Smith’s election conspiracy prosecution can move forward, argued former federal prosecutor Harry Litman on MSNBC Tuesday.

In particular, he said, it was over as soon as Sauer seemed to concede their position would imply Trump can assassinate his opponents with no recourse.

Edvard Munch, Winter Landscape

“He basically threatened some sort of unrest or bedlam if things didn’t go his way,” said anchor Chris Hayes. “He didn’t take any questions … and the headline comes from a hypothetical that appears in Jack Smith’s own briefs, which is to say the argument that Trump and his lawyers are making proves too much, obviously goes too far. It cannot be the case. Under the Constitution and under the rule of law, in a democracy and such as ours, it would allow it to be possible to order Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival and not face accountability but for some impeachment and conviction.”

“Cannot be, that is the headline, all three judges will reject that proposition,” agreed Litman. “Basically after Judge Pan asked that hypo about Seal Team Six, Sauer … was a dead man walking. He will lose. He should lose. Legally, historically, logically, et cetera. So in that sense there is the satisfaction that this vampire will have a stake in its heart.”

“But below the headline, Chris, there’s more drama, I would say, because this is one of the cases in which the three judges were kind of probing different theories, and one at one stage Judge Henderson said maybe we need to remand, to Judge Chutkan, this. They were probing different ideas, none of which was in lockstep with what Chutkan said. There are two reasons it matters. Depending on how they decide, even if they were unanimous, and you could see it concurring with Judge Henderson, if they were unanimous it could affect the prospects for a remand, and remand might entail a subsequent round of appeals under the remanded standard by Trump and a little bit more delay. And also could affect whether the Supreme Court takes review. So that lower level, there was some drama.”

George Conway wrote a long piece about yesterday’s hearing at The Atlantic: Trump’s Lawyer Walked Into a Trap. It’s pretty entertaining, if you can get through the paywall. They usually allow one free article, before they cut you off.

The second E. Jean Carroll case is also coming up soon. From Jose Pagliery at The Daily Beast: Judge Signals Trump Is Doomed in New E. Jean Carroll Trial.

With Donald Trump’s second rape defamation trial only one week away, a federal judge has rewarded the billionaire’s unceasing legal insolence and delusional defense strategy with a brutal order laying out just how punishing the court battle is going to be.

Until recently, the former president’s lawyers had been preparing for the upcoming defamation trial as if the first one never happened—seeing it as a chance to rewrite history and try to clear Trump’s name after a jury last year concluded he sexually assaulted the journalist E. Jean Carroll decades ago.

But on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan made it clear that Trump is not getting another go at whether he raped Carroll.

“In other words, the material facts concerning the alleged sexual assault already have been determined, and this trial will not be a ‘do over’ of the previous trial,” Kaplan wrote in an order.

In the 27-page order, the federal judge reiterated that the jury will merely be deciding how badly to reprimand Trump for dragging Carroll’s name through the mud while he was at the White House in 2019—when he denied a coercive sexual encounter that did, according to a jury last year, occur.

This new jury will see the most damning evidence of Trump’s misogyny, from the Access Hollywood tape in which he gloats about how he can “grab them by the pussy” to the videotaped deposition where he remarks that stars get away with sexual assault “unfortunately—or fortunately.”

The previous iteration of this case dealt with the defamatory denials Trump made after leaving office, a trial that cost him $5 million in damages (which he apparently paid).

The second defamation trial, which begins next week, deals with the denials Trump made as U.S. president, with all the additional attention and gravitas his former position of power bestowed upon him at the time he made those comments.

Kaplan’s order on Tuesday clarified that Trump will have the obligation—but not the right—to remain silent about nearly everything the billionaire intended to say in court.

“Mr. Trump and his counsel are precluded, in the presence of the jury, from claiming that Mr. Trump did not sexually abuse (“rape”) Ms. Carroll, that Mdid not make his… 2019 statements concerning Ms. Carroll with actual malice… or that Ms. Carroll fabricated her account,” he wrote.

In other (not new) news, Republican politicians are showing themselves to be sadistic psychopaths when it comes to women’s abilities to make choices about their bodies and health care. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: Republican Officials Openly Insult Women Nearly Killed by Abortion Bans.

For many years before S.B. 8 passed in Texas and was then swept into existence by the Supreme Court, and before Dobbs ushered in a more formal regime of forced childbirth six months later, the groups leading the charge against reproductive rights liked to claim that they loved pregnant women and only wanted them to be safe and cozy, stuffed chock-full of good advice and carted around through extra-wide hallways for safe, sterile procedures in operating rooms with only the best HVAC systems. Then Dobbs came down and within minutes it became manifestly clear that these advocates actually viewed pregnant people as the problem standing in the way of imaginary, healthy babies—and that states willing to privilege fetal life would go to any and all lengths to ensure that actual patients’ care, comfort, informed consent, and very survival would be subordinate.

We are only beginning to understand the extent to which pregnant women are dying and will continue to die due to denials of basic maternal health care, candid medical advice, and adequate treatment. The issue of emergency abortions, though, has already rocketed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed on Friday to decide whether federal law compels hospitals to terminate dangerous pregnancies regardless of state bans. No matter how SCOTUS rules, the fallout is already all around us. The stories of Kate Cox in Texas, devastated would-be mothers in Tennessee, and a horrifying prosecution of a mother who miscarried in Ohio all surface the brutal reality of the post-Dobbs zeitgeist: Any woman who seeks to terminate a pregnancy is wicked, any woman who miscarries is evil, and any woman who—for reasons of failing health, circumstance, or simple bad luck—does not prove to be an adequate incubator deserves whatever she gets. Every unborn fetus is the priority over the pregnant person carrying it and must be carried to term at all costs. So goes the moral calculus of the death-panel judges who now determine how to weigh the competing interests between real, existing human life and a state’s dogmatic fixation with a fetus that, by definition, must be seraphically innocent.

Frosted Evening, by Paul Evans

One need only look at red states’ scramble to defend their draconian abortion bans to witness this perverse moral hierarchy in action. In the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise, the victims of these laws are no longer hypothetical: They are flesh-and-blood women, directly and viscerally injured by the denial of basic health care, and some of them have even had the gall to fight for their rights. Republican attorneys general have responded with furious indignation, openly demeaning these women as liars, wimps, partisans, and baby killers.

A recent filing by the office of Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan T. Skrmetti, a Republican, captures the dynamic all too well. Skrmetti has been fighting a lawsuit filed by a group of Tennessee women denied emergency abortions under the ultranarrow medical exception to that state’s ban. The women plaintiffs suffered an appalling range of trauma, including sepsis and hemorrhaging, because they could not terminate their pregnancies. The attorney general’s response to their complaint is a scathing, shockingly personal broadside against the victims of the ban. He accused them of attempting to draw “lines about which unborn lives are worth protecting” by imposing a medical exception “of their own liking.” He mocked them for asserting that ostensibly minor conditions like “sickle cell disease” might justify an abortion. And he insisted that the lead plaintiff, Nicole Blackmon, lacks standing, because she underwent sterilization after the state forced her to carry a nonviable pregnancy and deliver a stillborn baby. The attorney general viciously suggested that, if Blackmon really wanted to fight Tennessee’s ban, she could have tried for another doomed pregnancy.

Perhaps Skrmetti deserves half credit for candor, because he did not even pretend to treat these plaintiffs like compelling moral human beings. Instead, he wrote that Tennessee may allow different standards of care for pregnant and nonpregnant women. A pregnant woman, the attorney general averred, may be refused a treatment if it “has the potential to harm unborn lives—an issue not implicated” when treating nonpregnant women. “No equal-protection rule,” he concluded, “bars lawmakers from acting on that difference to protect unborn babies.” In other words, once a woman is pregnant, she becomes a vessel for “unborn babies,” giving the state authority to cut off her access to urgently necessary health care. Since nonpregnant women don’t immediately suffer the consequences of abortion bans, those bans don’t discriminate on the basis of sex.

There’s much more at the link.

One more story before I wrap this up. I’m sure you’ve heard that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was was treated for prostate cancer in December and was hospitalized with complications from surgery on Jan. 1. The problem is that President Biden and other top officials had no clue this was happening. From BBC News: President Joe Biden was only told that US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin was being treated for cancer on Tuesday, the White House has said.

Mr Austin, 70, was admitted to hospital on 1 January and then to the intensive care unit for complications following surgery in December.

He has faced criticism for not telling senior officials about it for days.

He has since apologised for not “ensuring the public was appropriately informed”.

The lag in notifying the White House raised potential national security concerns and issues of transparency within the Biden administration.

The defence secretary sits just below the president in the chain of command for the US military, and is one of the most important members of the president’s Cabinet.

The Pentagon confirmed Mr Austin remained hospitalised on Tuesday.

At a press briefing on Tuesday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that President Biden was only informed that day about the diagnosis of prostate cancer.

“Nobody at the White House knew that Secretary Austin had prostate cancer until this morning,” he said.

While he emphasised the president’s initial reaction was concern for the secretary’s health, Mr Kirby acknowledged the communications were “not optimal.”

“This is not the way it is supposed to go,” Mr Kirby said.

Mr Biden and Sec Austin have not spoken since their last interaction over the weekend, according to Mr Kirby.

Mr Austin’s deputy, Kathleen Hicks, was not informed of his hospital stay despite being asked to assume some of his responsibilities.

This seems pretty odd. It’s not clear what is going to happen to Austin yet.That’s it for me today. What stories have you been following?

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: January 6, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, just because, SCOTUS | Tags: 14th amendment, abortion, Colorado, democracy, Idaho, January 6 criminal cases, January 6 insurrection, January 6 pipe bomber, Liz Cheney, President Joe Biden, Supreme Court | 9 Comments

Happy Caturday!!

By Matt McCarthy, Surreal Cat Art

Today is the third anniversary of the January 6, 2001 Capitol insurrection, which Trump incited and applauded. It was a failed coup attempt–a last ditch effort to keep Trump in power after all his legal efforts had failed.

Yesterday, President Biden spoke about the insurrection in the first speech of his campaign for reelection, and it was a barn-burner.

David Smith at The Guardian: Fired-up Biden shows gloves are off in January 6 anniversary speech.

This time it’s personal. On Friday Joe Biden tore into his predecessor Donald Trump as never before. He brimmed with anger, disdain and contempt. He apparently had to stop himself from swearing. So much for “when they go low, we go high” – and plenty of Democrats will be just fine with that.

If Biden was seeking to jolt his half-conscious 2024 re-election campaign into life, this may have done the trick. The palpable loathing of Trump took a good 10 or 20 years off him. Keep hating like this and he might do a Benjamin Button all the way to election day.

There is no better illustration of Biden’s evolution than a speech he delivered on the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection. On that occasion, he denounced a “web of lies” but never mentioned Trump by name, preferring to cite the “former president”. Those were still the days when he would talk about “the former guy” and get a laugh.

Two years on, in an address near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, Biden spoke the name “Trump” more than 40 times in less than an hour as he warned that his likely 2024 opponent would sacrifice American democracy to put himself in power. The 81-year-old president generally seems like a grandfatherly figure predisposed to give people the benefit of the doubt, which makes his detestation of Trump all the more striking.

Trump’s failure to act as a violent mob stormed the US Capitol, despite the pleas of staff and family members, was “among the worst derelictions of duty by a president in American history”, Biden said, noting that Trump went on to lose 60 court cases that took him back to the truth “that I had won the election and he was a loser”….

The president went on to recall how Trump has called the insurrectionists “patriots” and claimed there was a “lot of love” on January 6. At that, Biden shook his head, blinked and let out a gasp of disbelief, as if stunned anew by the assertion. “The rest of the nation, including law enforcement, saw a lot of hate and violence,” he said.

Biden furiously denounced political violence and Trump’s habit of joking about the big lie-influenced intruder who attacked Paul Pelosi, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, with a hammer, saying: “And he thinks that’s funny. He laughed about it. What a sick – ”

He halted. At the last moment, the president of the United States had saved himself from uttering a profanity. The urge coursed through his body and found relief in his hands, which clenched into fists, as the crowd filled in with laughter and whooping. “My God,” Biden said. “I think it’s despicable, seriously, not just for a president but for any person to say that.”

Read the rest at The Guardian. Read the full transcript of Biden’s speech at The White House site.

By Andrey Scherbak, Russian artist

This review of the speech is by Reid J. Epstein at The New York Times: Biden Condemns Trump as Dire Threat to Democracy in a Blistering Speech.

President Biden on Friday delivered a ferocious condemnation of Donald J. Trump, his likely 2024 opponent, warning in searing language that the former president had directed an insurrection and would aim to undo the nation’s bedrock democracy if he returned to power.

On the eve of the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Mr. Trump’s supporters, Mr. Biden framed the coming election as a choice between a candidate devoted to upholding America’s centuries-old ideals and a chaos agent willing to discard them for his personal benefit.

“There’s no confusion about who Trump is or what he intends to do,” Mr. Biden warned in a speech at a community college not far from Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, where George Washington commanded troops during the Revolutionary War. Exhorting supporters to prepare to vote this fall, he said: “We all know who Donald Trump is. The question is: Who are we?”

In an intensely personal address that at one point nearly led Mr. Biden to curse Mr. Trump by name, the president compared his rival to foreign autocrats who rule by fiat and lies. He said Mr. Trump had failed the basic test of American leaders, to trust the people to choose their elected officials and abide by their decisions.

“We must be clear,” Mr. Biden said. “Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.”

The harshness of Mr. Biden’s attack on his rival illustrated both what his campaign believes to be the stakes of the 2024 election and his perilous political standing. Confronted with low approval ratings, bad head-to-head polling against Mr. Trump, worries about his age and lingering unease with the economy, Mr. Biden is turning increasingly to the figure who has proved to be Democrats’ single best motivator.

In a speech in New Hampshire, Liz Cheney also issued a dire warning.

The Daily Beast: Liz Cheney Warns That Voting for Trump in 2024 Could Be ‘Last Vote You’ll Ever Cast.’

On the eve of the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) warned the 2024 election could be the nation’s last.

Speaking to a room full of Dartmouth College students, Cheney expressed her belief that former President Donald Trump would refuse to hand over the reins of power if elected to a second term.

“He won’t leave office,” Cheney said. “He already tried not to leave office once. So I think there’s a lot of living in a fantasy world that’s going on with Republicans telling themselves, ‘Look, we’ll vote for him, it won’t be so bad.’ It may well be the last real vote you ever get to cast. It will be that bad.”

Giant Cats, artist unknown

What’s more, Cheney looks at her former colleagues in Congress and sees a group of enablers who would happily acquiesce to Trump’s designs and help muscle him back to power if the 2024 election result is in doubt.

The biggest enabler of all, Cheney said, might be her former “good friend” Mike Johnson—the backbencher turned Speaker of the House.

If no presidential candidate is able to secure 270 electoral votes in November, the decision could head to a House floor controlled by Johnson, the architect of the House GOP’s legal efforts to swing the last election to Trump.

“I think we need to be concerned about a Mike Johnson speakership, particularly in an instance where there’s a contested election,” Cheney said on Friday. “It’s a dangerous situation if the Republicans are in the majority.”

The AP discusses the status of the January 6 criminal investigations and trials, as well the unsolved mystery of who planted two pipe bombs.: Hundreds of convictions, but a major mystery is still unsolved 3 years after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Authorities are still working to identify more than 80 people wanted for acts of violence at the Capitol and to find out who placed pipe bombs outside the Republican and Democratic national committees’ offices the day before the Capitol attack. And they continue to regularly make new arrests, even as some Jan. 6 defendants are being released from prison after completing their sentences.

The cases are playing out at the same courthouse where Donald Trump is scheduled to stand trial in March in the case accusing the former president of conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss in the run-up to the Capitol attack….

More than 1,230 people have been charged with federal crimes in the riot, ranging from misdemeanor offenses like trespassing to felonies like assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy. Roughly 730 people have pleaded guilty to charges, while another roughly 170 have been convicted of at least one charge at a trial decided by a judge or a jury, according to an Associated Press database.

Only two defendants have been acquitted of all charges, and those were trials decided by a judge rather than a jury.

About 750 people have been sentenced, with almost two-thirds receiving some time behind bars. Prison sentences have ranged from a few days of intermittent confinement to 22 years in prison. The longest sentence was handed down to Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys national chairman who was convicted of seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors described as a plot to stop the transfer of power from Trump, a Republican, to Joe Biden, a Democrat….

Defense attorneys and prosecutors are closely watching a case that will soon be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court that could impact hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants. The justices agreed last month to hear one rioter’s challenge to prosecutors’ use of the charge of obstruction of an official proceeding, which refers to the disruption of Congress’ certification of Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory over Trump.

More than 300 Jan. 6 defendants have been charged with the obstruction offense, and so has Trump in the federal case brought by special counsel Jack Smith. Lawyers representing rioters have argued the charge was inappropriately brought against Jan. 6 defendants.

The justices will hear arguments in March or April, with a decision expected by early summer. But their review of the obstruction charge is already having some impact on the Jan. 6 prosecutions. At least two defendants have convinced judges to delay their sentencings until after the Supreme Court rules on the matter.

On the pipe bombs:

One of the biggest remaining mysteries surrounding the riot is the identity of the person who placed two pipe bombs outside the offices of the Republican and Democratic national committees the day before the Capitol attack. Last year, authorities increased the reward to up to $500,000 for information leading to the person’s arrest. It remains unclear whether there was a connection between the pipe bombs and the riot.

Giant Cat with a Wireless Tail, by 3d1viner

One of the biggest remaining mysteries surrounding the riot is the identity of the person who placed two pipe bombs outside the offices of the Republican and Democratic national committees the day before the Capitol attack. Last year, authorities increased the reward to up to $500,000 for information leading to the person’s arrest. It remains unclear whether there was a connection between the pipe bombs and the riot….

The explosive devices were placed outside the two buildings between 7:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 5, 2021, but officers didn’t find them until the next day. Authorities were called to the Republican National Committee’s office around 12:45 p.m. on Jan. 6. Shortly after, a call came in for a similar explosive device found at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The bombs were rendered safe, and no one was hurt.

Video released by the FBI shows a person in a gray hooded sweatshirt, a face mask and gloves appearing to place one of the explosives under a bench outside the DNC and separately shows the person walking in an alley near the RNC before the bomb was placed there. The person wore black and light gray Nike Air Max Speed Turf sneakers with a yellow logo.

In other news, the Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether Trump can be kept off the Colorado primary ballot. Their decision will obviously affect the other similar cases in multiple states. This week, efforts to disqualify Trump based on the 14th Amendment were initiated in Illinois and Massachusetts.

Adam Liptak at The New York Times: Supreme Court to Decide Whether Trump Is Eligible for Colorado Ballot.

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether former President Donald J. Trump is eligible for Colorado’s Republican primary ballot, thrusting the justices into a pivotal role that could alter the course of this year’s presidential election.

The sweep of the court’s ruling is likely to be broad. It will probably resolve not only whether Mr. Trump may appear on the Colorado primary ballot after the state’s top court declared that he had engaged in insurrection in his efforts to subvert the 2020 election, but it will most likely also determine his eligibility to run in the general election and to hold office at all.

Not since Bush v. Gore, the 2000 decision that handed the presidency to George W. Bush, has the Supreme Court taken such a central role in an election for the nation’s highest office.

The case will be argued on Feb. 8, and the court will probably decide it quickly. The Colorado Republican Party had urged the justices to rule by March 5, when many states, including Colorado, hold primaries.

The number of challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility across the country can only have added pressure on the court to hear the Colorado case, as they underscored the need for a nationwide resolution of the question.

The case is one of several involving or affecting Mr. Trump on the court’s docket or on the horizon. An appeals court will hear arguments on Tuesday on whether he has absolute immunity from prosecution, and the losing side is all but certain to appeal. And the court has already said that it will rule on the scope of a central charge in the federal election-interference case in a decision expected by June.

Mr. Trump asked the Supreme Court to intervene after Colorado’s top court disqualified him from the ballot last month. That decision is on hold while the justices consider the matter.

Cathedral of St. Paul, by JReischl on Deviant Art

The Supreme Court also agreed to hear an abortion case yesterday, and, since it *only* involves women’s lives and safety, it was overshadowed by the Trump eligibility case. But this one is horrific.

Ann E. Marimow at The Washington Post: Supreme Court to decide if U.S. law requires some emergency room abortions.

The Supreme Court said Friday it will review a case challenging Idaho’s strict abortion ban, which the Biden administration says conflicts with a federal law requiring emergency room doctors to perform the procedure in some circumstances.

Idaho’s attorney general asked the justices to intervene after a lower-court judge blocked a section of Idaho’s abortion statute targeting doctors. The judge said the provision violates a federal law that requires hospitals receiving Medicare funding to guarantee emergency care. In its brief order Friday, the justices allowed the Idaho law to take full effect for now and said they would review the matter on an expedited basis in April.

The Biden administration turned to the Medicare law as a narrow way to challenge state-level abortion bans in federal court after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned the fundamental right to an abortion established decades earlier in Roe v. Wade. The effort was seen as one of the few paths the administration could pursue to preserve access to abortion, which remains a galvanizing and divisive issue across the country in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election.

The issue of access to abortion in health emergencies is not the only reproductive-rights case to reach the high court this term. The justices also will decide whether to limit access to the widely used abortion medication mifepristone , first approved by the Food and Drug Administration more than 20 years ago.

Idaho was one of several states to pass a “trigger” law before the 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, with the expectation that it would automatically take effect if the high court overturned Roe. The Idaho law, passed in 2020, bans most abortions and imposes penalties of up to five years in prison on doctors who perform the procedure, with an exception when “necessary to prevent the death of a pregnant woman.”

Abortion rights advocates and medical experts say the Idaho law, and similar bans in more than two dozen other states, have put doctors and hospitals at legal risk as they navigate life-or-death decisions for pregnant patients and seek to interpret vague medical exceptions to decide whether it is permissible in some circumstances to terminate a pregnancy.

In a similar case in Texas, the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit this week ruled against the Biden administration, saying Texas hospitals and doctors are not obligated to perform abortions under the federal emergency-care law.

From the AP: The Supreme Court is allowing Idaho to enforce its strict abortion ban, even in medical emergencies.

The Supreme Court on Friday allowed Idaho to enforce its strict abortion ban, even in medical emergencies, while a legal fight continues.

The justices said they would hear arguments in April and put on hold a lower court ruling that had blocked the Idaho law in hospital emergencies, based on a lawsuit filed by the Biden administration.

The Idaho case gives the court its second major abortion dispute since the justices in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed states to severely restrict or ban abortion. The court also in the coming months is hearing a challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s rules for obtaining mifepristone, one of two medications used in the most common method of abortion in the United States.

In the case over hospital emergencies, the Biden administration has argued that hospitals that receive Medicare funds are required by federal law to provide emergency care, potentially including abortion, no matter if there’s a state law banning abortion.

U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill in Idaho agreed with the administration. But in a separate case in Texas, a judge sided with the state.

Idaho makes it a crime with a prison term of up to five years for anyone who performs or assists in an abortion.

One more from the White House website: Statement from President Joe Biden on Supreme Court Order on Idaho’s Abortion Ban.

Today’s Supreme Court order allows Idaho’s extreme abortion ban to go back into effect and denies women critical emergency abortion care required by federal law. The overturning of Roe v. Wade has enabled Republican elected officials to pursue dangerous abortion bans like this one that continue to jeopardize women’s health, force them to travel out of state for care, and make it harder for doctors to provide care, including in an emergency. These bans are also forcing doctors to leave Idaho and other states because of laws that interfere with their ability to care for their patients. This should never happen in America.

The Vice President and I believe that health care decisions should be made by women and their doctors, not politicians. We will continue to defend a woman’s ability to access emergency care under federal law. As this case continues, the stakes could not be higher for women across America. Congress must immediately restore the protections of Roe v. Wade so that women in every state can access the health care they need.

That’s it for me today. What else is happening?

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