I don’t know if anyone is reading this. I’ve had quite a disturbing day so far. My phone suddenly stopped working and I was unable to make or receive calls. I spent a couple of hours messaging back and forth with tech support, and they finally got things working. Somehow I got thrown off the network and couldn’t get back on. But the guy finally figured it out and I can phone and text again. Fortunately, I got a very kind and patient representative who hung in there with me all that time.
Dakinikat wondered if the problem could have something to do with the solar storm that made the northern lights visible all the way down South. I guess it’s possible. The phone was working yesterday until around 1PM. I didn’t realize there was a problem until later though. Anyway, enough of my boring life.
Since it’s Caturday, I want to recommend a lovely piece in The Atlantic by Tom Nichols about his much loved cat Carla, who recently passed away: The Cat Who Saved Me. I will never owe another cat the debt that I owe her.
Almost 15 years ago, I was in bad shape. I was divorced, broke, drinking too much, and living in a dated walk-up next to a noisy bar. (It was only minutes from my young daughter, it had a nice view of the bay here in Newport, and I could afford it.) The local veterinary hospital was a few doors down; they always kept one or two adoptable animals in the window. One day, a gorgeous black cat, with a little white tuxedo patch and big gold-green eyes, showed up in a small cage. I stared at her for a while. She stared back patiently.
Tom NIchols with Carla
I wasn’t taking very good care of myself at that moment, so I decided I couldn’t take care of a cat. I walked on. For weeks, the cat sat there. For weeks, we stared at each other. One day, as I was deep in my cups, I took a walk with a friend and co-worker who also happened to be my next-door neighbor. “You look at that damn cat every day,” he said. “Just go in and get it.”
So I did.
The cat was called “RC” and she was a stray, but her preexisting spaying and good health showed that she’d once had a home. Now she was the queen of the animal clinic: Because of her gentle temperament, the staff would let her out of the cage after hours, and she would sit on their desks while they did their paperwork.
I picked her up. She looked at me as if to say: Yeah, I recognize you. You’re the doofus who stared at me for weeks. I signed the papers and took her home. She was fluffy and black-haired, so I decided I would name her after Carla Tortelli from the show Cheers; thus, she became Carla T. Nichols. She explored the apartment quietly for a day or two, and then, one afternoon, I found her on my bed, stretched out on her back, paws up, purring. Yep, she was saying. This will do.
I was still deeply depressed, but every night, Carla would come and flake out over my keyboard as I struggled to work. That’s enough of that,she seemed to say. And then we would go into the living room, where I would sit in a chair and Carla would sit on the armrest. (We’ve now both seen almost every episode of Law & Order.) Slowly, she added routine to my life, but mostly, we had lots of hours of doing nothing—the quiet time that can feel sort of desolate if you’re alone, but like healing if you have the right company.
Soon, I started to see daylight. I met a woman named Lynn. I laid off the booze. I got help of various kinds.
Lynn started to come to the apartment more often, but Carla gave her a full examination before bestowing approval: That cat was not going to let some newcomer waltz in and wreck the careful feline therapy she’d been providing. Finally, Carla climbed on the pillows one morning and curled up around Lynn’s head. Okay, she was saying. Lynn can stay.
That was the beginning of the turnaround. I hope you’ll go read the rest. It’s a wonderful description of what can happen when you welcome a special animal into your life.
A few interesting news stories to check out:
ProPublica: IRS Audit of Trump Could Cost Former President More Than $100 Million.
Former President Donald Trump used a dubious accounting maneuver to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower, according to an IRS inquiry uncovered by ProPublica and The New York Times. Losing a yearslong audit battle over the claim could mean a tax bill of more than $100 million.
The 92-story, glass-sheathed skyscraper along the Chicago River is the tallest and, at least for now, the last major construction project by Trump. Through a combination of cost overruns and the bad luck of opening in the teeth of the Great Recession, it was also a vast money loser.
But when Trump sought to reap tax benefits from his losses, the IRS has argued, he went too far and in effect wrote off the same losses twice.
The first write-off came on Trump’s tax return for 2008. With sales lagging far behind projections, he claimed that his investment in the condo-hotel tower met the tax code definition of “worthless,” because his debt on the project meant he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, ProPublica and the Times found.
Emile Munier, A small child reading to a cat
There is no indication the IRS challenged that initial claim, though that lack of scrutiny surprised tax experts consulted for this article. But in 2010, Trump and his tax advisers sought to extract further benefits from the Chicago project, executing a maneuver that would draw years of inquiry from the IRS. First, he shifted the company that owned the tower into a new partnership. Because he controlled both companies, it was like moving coins from one pocket to another. Then he used the shift as justification to declare $168 million in additional losses over the next decade.
The issues around Trump’s case were novel enough that, during his presidency, the IRS undertook a high-level legal review before pursuing it. ProPublica and the Times, in consultation with tax experts, calculated that the revision sought by the IRS would create a new tax bill of more than $100 million, plus interest and potential penalties….
The reporting by ProPublica and the Times about the Chicago tower reveals a second component of Trump’s quarrel with the IRS. This account was pieced together from a collection of public documents, including filings from the New York attorney general’s suit against Trump in 2022, a passing reference to the audit in a congressional report that same year and an obscure 2019 IRS memorandum that explored the legitimacy of the accounting maneuver. The memorandum did not identify Trump, but the documents, along with tax records previously obtained by the Times and additional reporting, indicated that the former president was the focus of the inquiry.
Read more at the ProPublica link. There’s also an article at The New York Times: Trump May Owe $100 Million From Double-Dip Tax Breaks, Audit Shows.
More trouble for Trump? Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast writes: Trump Campaign Hid Settlements With Women, New Complaint Says.
A sex discrimination lawsuit against Donald Trump’s campaign has triggered new accusations that Trump’s lawyers have intentionally covered up settlement payments to women, in violation of federal law.
On Friday, watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, demanding an investigation into the alleged cover-up. The complaint cites new allegations from 2016 Trump campaign aide A.J. Delgado, which she lodged in a sworn court declaration earlier this week as part of her ongoing discrimination suit against Trump’s political operation.
Delgado’s filing presented evidence of top Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz openly admitting that the campaign wanted to use a law firm to cover up a potential settlement payout in 2017. The arrangement, as Delgado described it, appears specifically designed to evade the consequences of federal disclosure laws that require campaigns to publicly report the identities of payment recipients.
“In other words, the payment would be routed through a middleman, to hide the fact that the Campaign had settled, from the public and the FEC,” Delgado stated. “I thus have direct, personal experience with the Defendant-Campaign hiding settlement payments to women, routing them through a ‘middleman law firm,’ which to the public would only appear as payments ‘for legal services.’”
Delgado also claimed to have “information and reason to believe” that other campaign payments have hidden settlements with women “who raised complaints of gender discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, and sexual harassment.” Those payments, she said, are related to the $4.1 million that flowed to Kasowitz’s law firm over a two-month period immediately following the November 2020 election, as well as millions in mysterious legal reimbursements to the campaign’s compliance firm, Red Curve Solutions, which The Daily Beast first reported earlier this month, prompting a federal complaint.
The declaration is particularly significant in that it captures a direct admission of the campaign’s actual intentions behind this middleman arrangement—to keep the existence of a settlement from the public, and, by doing so, from the FEC itself.
More at the Daily Beast link.
Did you hear about Trump promising to cut taxes for oil companies in return for a $1 billion donation to his campaign? Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Sleazy $1 Billion Shakedown of Oil Execs Gives Dems an Opening.
A new Washington Post report that Trump made explicit policy promises to a roomful of Big Oil executives—while urging them to raise $1 billion for his campaign—is a powerful story in part because it wrecks what’s left of that mystique. In case you didn’t already know this, it shows yet again that if Trump has employed that aforementioned knowledge of elite corruption and self-dealing to any ends in his public career, it’s chiefly to benefit himself.
James Pelham, little girl reading with her cat
That counter narrative is a story that Democrats have a big opportunity to tell—if they seize on this news effectively. How might they do that?
For starters, the revelations seem to cry out for more scrutiny from Congress. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who has been presiding over hearings into the oil industry as chair of the Budget Committee, says it’s “highly likely” that the committee will examine the new revelations.
“This is practically an invitation to ask more questions,” Whitehouse told me, describing this as a “natural extension of the investigation already underway.”
There’s plenty to explore. As the Post reports, an oil company executive at the gathering, held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last month, complained about environmental regulations under the Biden administration. Then this happened:
Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.
Obviously industries have long donated to politicians in both parties in hopes of governance that takes their interests into account, and they explicitly lobby for this as well. But in this case, Trump may have made detailed, concrete promises while simultaneously soliciting a precise amount in campaign contributions.
For instance, the Post reports, Trump vowed to scrap Biden’s ban on permits for new liquefied natural gas exports “on the first day.” He also promised to overturn new tailpipe emission limits designed to encourage the transition to electric vehicles, and he dangled more leases for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, “a priority that several of the executives raised.”
“The phrase that instantly came to mind as I was reading the story was ‘quid pro quo,’” Whitehouse told me. He also pointed to a new Politico report that oil industry officials are drawing up executive orders for Trump to sign as president. “Put those things together and it starts to look mighty damn corrupt,” Whitehouse said.
I mean, it would be a bribe, wouldn’t it?
Clarence Thomas is whining again. The AP via Politico: Thomas says critics are pushing ‘nastiness’ and calls Washington a ‘hideous place.’
FAIRHOPE, Alabama — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told attendees at a judicial conference Friday that he and his wife have faced “nastiness” and “lies” over the last several years and decried Washington, D.C., as a “hideous place.”
Thomas spoke at a conference attended by judges, attorneys and other court personnel in the 11th Circuit Judicial Conference, which hears federal cases from Alabama, Florida and Georgia. He made the comments pushing back on his critics in response to a question about working in a world that seems meanspirited.
Jan Steen, Children want to teach a cat reading
“I think there’s challenges to that. We’re in a world and we — certainly my wife and I the last two or three years it’s been — just the nastiness and the lies, it’s just incredible,” Thomas said.
“But you have some choices. You don’t get to prevent people from doing horrible things or saying horrible things. But one you have to understand and accept the fact that they can’t change you unless you permit that,” Thomas said.
Thomas has faced criticisms that he accepted luxury trips from a GOP donor without reporting them. Thomas last year maintained that he didn’t have to report the trips paid for by one of “our dearest friends.” His wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas has faced criticism for using her Facebook page to amplify unsubstantiated claims of corruption by President Joe Biden, a Democrat.
He did not discuss the content of the criticisms directly, but said that “reckless” people in Washington will “bomb your reputation.”
“They don’t bomb you necessarily, but they bomb your reputation or your good name or your honor. And that’s not a crime. But they can do as much harm that way,” Thomas said.
His reputation is already shot to hell. Why doesn’t he just resign and get out of Washington if he hates it so much?
The New York Times: Will You Accept the Election Results? Republicans Dodge the Question.
Less than six months out from the presidential contest, leading Republicans, including several of Donald J. Trump’s potential running mates, have refused to commit to accepting the results of the election, signaling that the party may again challenge the outcome if its candidate loses.
In a series of recent interviews, Republican officials and candidates have dodged the question, responded with nonanswers or offered clear falsehoods rather than commit to a notion that was once so uncontroversial that it was rarely discussed before an election.
The evasive answers show how the former president’s refusal to concede his defeat after the 2020 election has ruptured a tenet of American democracy — that candidates are bound by the outcome. Mr. Trump’s fellow Republicans are now emulating his hedging well in advance of any voting.
For his part, Mr. Trump has said he will abide by a fair election but has also suggested that he already considers the election unfair. Mr. Trump frequently refers to the federal and state charges he is facing as “election interference.” He has refused to rule out the possibility of another riot from his supporters if he loses again.
“If we don’t win, you know, it depends,” Mr. Trump said last month when asked by Time magazine about the prospect of political violence. “It always depends on the fairness of an election.”
The authors go on to list several prominent Republicans who have refused to say if they will accept the election results. Read the rest at the NYT.
I’m going to end there. I’m really stressed out by my phone issue and a think I need a nap. Take care everyone.
A woman sewing blue denim pants, by “Master of the Blue Jeans.”
I’m going to begin today with a story that has nothing to do with politics or current events–just because I think it’s interesting. Did you know that people wore blue jeans way back in the 16th century? I didn’t. An art exhibit will soon open in Paris that will focus on a mysterious artist, known only as “Master of the Blue Jeans.”
Sonja Anderson at Smithsonian Magazine: When Were Blue Jeans Invented? These Paintings Suggest the Fashion Trend Dates Back to the 1600s.
An exhibition centered on the “Master of the Blue Jeans” is opening in Paris this month—and the work on display is not that of Levi Strauss, founder of the eponymous clothing company, but rather a 17th-century Italian painter.
The upcoming show at Galerie Canesso features two paintings by the mysterious artist, who was active in northern Italy in the 1600s and is known only by his “master” moniker. The painter’s oil canvases depict early iterations of the stiff blue fabric beloved today, as worn by Italian peasants. According to a statement, the pieces have proved to be important artifacts in garment history, “pushing back [blue jeans’] provenance by centuries.”
Speaking with Artnet’s Vittoria Benzine, Maurizio Canesso, an art collector and the gallery’s founder, says, “People are still not very familiar with the true history of blue jeans, as they confuse it with the material made by Levi Strauss.”
In truth, Canesso argues, when the American businessman behind Levi’s jeans started selling denim work pants in the late 1800s, he merely added metal rivets and structure to a fabric that already boasted a storied European past.
“Jeans come from Genoa, while denim comes from the French city of Nîmes,” says Canesso. Blue jeans were made with perpendicular stitches in northwest Italy, while denim was woven in chevron patterns in southern France. But the key component of the fabric’s history is its coloration.
“Until the 11th century, no one could wear blue fabric because they didn’t know how to make blue color adhere,” Canesso says. “Only in the year 1000 did this begin to happen using woad leaves, and at a very high cost. The genius of the Genoese was to find the indigo stone in India and make this an industrial and therefore low-cost process.”
The ten denim-themed paintings attributed to the master were previously thought to be the work of several different artists. But in 2004, curator Gerlinde Gruber reattributed the group of artworks to a single unnamed painter then dubbed the Master of the Blue Jeans. By 2010, Canesso had acquired all of the master’s works, and he presented them in an exhibition at his Paris gallery that same year.
“Unfortunately, we have no new theories about who the Master of the Blue Jeans was,” Véronique Damian, an art historian at Galerie Canesso, tells the Observer’s Vanessa Thorpe. Evidence indicates the artist spent the bulk of his career in Italy’s northern region of Lombardy, though he may trained elsewhere.
I’m including some of the artist’s work in this post, just because.
In the more painful world of politics, Trump had a bad day in New York yesterday, and he got some bad news in India; but he got some gifts from judges in Florida and Georgia.
As I’m sure you’re aware, Stormy Daniels testified in Trump’s hush money case yesterday.
The Washington Post: Stormy Daniels testifies, Trump curses in an angry day in court.
Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress at the center of Donald Trump’s hush money trial, testified Tuesday about a disturbing sexual encounter she says she had with him, leading to angry, profane muttering from the former president that alarmed the judge.
It sounds like the sex actually was nonconsensual though. Daniels’ description of what happened sounds very much like a date rape situation in which she was taken advantage of by a much older and more powerful man. She was 27. He was 60. He was much taller and stronger. She was invited for dinner, but there was no dinner. When she was ready to leave, she went to the bathroom. When she came back, he was on the bed in boxers. She tried to leave, but he blocked the door. This description is from Harry Litman on Twitter:
thought time to go. when opened the bathroom door, Trump had come in and was on the bed, in boxer shirts and a t-shirt. she was startled. felt like room spun in full motion. blood leaves my hands and feet. “ohmygod — what did I miss to get here?” she laughed nervously
The next thing I knew I was on the bed. opposite side of bed. missionary position. objection – sustained
I blacked out. but I was not drugged in any way, no alcohol. didn’t feel threatened physically “There was an imbalance of power for sure. but I was not threatened verbally or physically”
Had sex with him on the bed. Merchan sustaining objections to details. Staring at ceiling didn’t know how I got there. sustained. stricken touch his skin? objection sustained. he wasn’t wearing a condom. concerning to her but didn’t say anything.
sex was brief. remembers getting dressed. sitting on edge of bed, noticed completely dark outside. hard to get shoes on, hands shaking so hard. DJT: “oh it’s great, let’s get together again honey bunch.” I just wanted to leave. DVD she signed was on nightstand.
DJT: “We have to get together again soon” “we were so fantastic together. talked about the show” I just left as fast as I could. Didn’t express any concern about Melania. or mention her. didn’t have dinner. took cab back to hotel.
I felt ashamed I didn’t stop the sex so I didn’t tell many people about it. Remembered some additional details later. Merchan very stern about level of detail — wants to keep it spare.
It’s pretty clear from Daniels’ description that she was traumatized. I doubt if the judge understands that, but maybe some jurors will. Just because she is a porn actress doesn’t mean she can’t be raped. Her description is also reminiscent of E. Jean Carroll’s experience–Trump lifted her up against the wall and grabbed her genitals before she realized what was happening. It’s also reminisce of his own description in the Access Hollywood tape–how he can grab women “by the pussy. If you’re a star they let you do it.”
Amanda Marcotte at Salon: “He was bigger and blocking the way”: Stormy Daniels takes the stand and reminds people who Trump is.
Daniels matters for reasons outside of the courtroom and the specifics of this hush-money trial. Daniels’ story is yet another reminder of what may prove to be Trump’s electoral downfall: His bottomless misogyny.
On the witness stand, Daniels reportedly spoke quickly and was apparently quite nervous. Initially, her story of meeting Trump sounded funny. She painted him as a pathetic older man trying — and failing — to impress the younger woman. When he first asked her to dinner, she replied “no,” but with an expletive. Her publicist eventually talked her into it, hoping Daniels could leverage the connection into a spot on “The Apprentice.” In his hotel room, she described him wearing “silk or satin” pajamas and asked him to put on real clothes. He allegedly used the “don’t even sleep in the same room” line when she asked about his wife, Melania, who had recently had a baby. Daniels described Trump as “pompous” and “arrogant.” She recounted how she jokingly spanked him with a magazine, hoping to tease him into being less of a jerk.
Then the tone of her story changed, as she described how they came to have sex. Trump waited until she was in the bathroom, Daniels said, and then he stripped down to boxer shorts and a T-shirt. “The room spun in slow motion,” she recalled on the witness stand. When she made for the door, “he was bigger and blocking the way,” she said of Trump. She denied it was sexual assault, however, because “I was not threatened either verbally or physically.” [….]
Whether or not Trump’s sexual encounter with Daniels was consensual in the legal sense, she describes it as unwanted.
“I didn’t say anything at all,” she told the court repeatedly. Claiming that she “blacked out” during the encounter, afterward, Daniels said, “my hands were shaking so hard” and “I felt ashamed that I didn’t stop it and that I didn’t say ‘No.'”
Another painting by Master of the Blue Jeans
A person doesn’t have to be threatened in order for sex to be nonconsensual. Back to Marcotte’s piece:
Following Daniels’ testimony on Tuesday, I was struck by how much it has in common with what E. Jean Carroll described in her two recent civil trials, where both juries found that Trump had sexually assaulted her in the 90s. Carroll, too, told of a random encounter with Trump she initially thought to be flirty but not sexual. Like Daniels, Carroll describes teasing Trump, who famously has no sense of humor about himself. In both cases, the women describe Trump becoming aggressive after the light mockery. In Carroll’s case, the judge described what happened after as what “many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.'” Daniels, to be clear, frames her encounter with Trump differently.
Since the release of the “Access Hollywood” video in 2016, in which Trump can be heard bragging about sexual assault, the Beltway media has repeatedly tried to move on from the story of Trump’s legion of issues with women. Indeed, when Carroll’s accusations first came out in 2019, the press barely paid any mind. But the story of his rampant misogyny has never fully gone away. There was the Women’s March that overshadowed his 2017 inauguration. Then the over two dozen women who stepped forward with stories of being subject to the sexual harassment and assault Trump himself described so vividly. Trump, of course, is more responsible than any other person on the planet for the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the stampede of Republican state legislators banning abortion. He promised to stack the Supreme Court with anti-choice justices, and his three appointees provided the votes necessary in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended the legal right to abortion. While Trump has tried to make moderate-sounding noises on this issue, he keeps inadvertently revealing his anti-choice radicalism. In a recent Time interview, for instance, he indicated that he’s fine if states “monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion.”
Noah Berlansky at Public Notice: Stormy Daniels details Trump’s sleazy contempt for women.
On the stand, Daniels provided ugly details about how Trump treated her, and about how Trump treats, and views, women. These insights are notable, but they’re not new. In 2016, leaked audio of Trump making grotesque and sexist comments about women to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush almost derailed his presidential campaign. Last year, Trump was held liable for sexual assaulting and then repeatedly defaming advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.
But Daniels’s testimony is a reminder that contempt and mistreatment of women is a core theme of Trump’s life and politics. Both the press and Democratic opponents have struggled to make this issue central to 2024, even though abortion rights and women’s health care are the key issues of the campaign. It’s unclear whether the trial will spark more reporting and discussion of Trump’s treatment of and attitudes about women. But it should….
Daniels’s testimony is intended to establish the background facts of the payment. It also, though, paints Trump as a liar, a bully, and a sexual manipulator. Daniels said while she was in Trump’s hotel room, she went to the bathroom, and when he came out he was in his boxer shorts, a moment Daniels describes as “like a jump scare.” She said, “the room spun in slow motion” and she realized “I’ve put myself in this bad situation.”
Daniels is careful to emphasize that Trump did not physically coerce her. He did, however, according to Daniels, suggest that if she cooperated with him he could help her career through his connections and a possible appearance on the Celebrity Apprentice reality show, where Trump was the star. She eventually agreed to have sex even though Trump did not use a condom — she was adamant about using condoms in her adult film shoots.
By Master of the Blue Jeans.
She testified that during sex she stared at the ceiling and tried to think of something else, and afterwards she had trouble dressing because her hands were shaking. She said, “I felt ashamed that I didn’t stop it and that I didn’t say no.”
Daniels kept in touch with Trump for some time because he was still offering her the chance to appear on Celebrity Apprentice, which would have been a huge mainstream boost to her career. She met with Trump once more in Los Angeles, at which point “he kept trying to make sexual advances, putting his hand on my leg, scooting closer.” She rebuffed him, and in a later phone call he admitted he was not going to put her on his television show. At that point she ceased communicating with him.
Again, Daniels has not accused Trump of sexual harassment or violence, and she says their encounter was consensual. Her testimony makes clear, though, that Trump was pressuring her for sex in return for business opportunities — a variation on the ugly tradition of the Hollywood casting couch. We don’t know if Trump ever had any intention of keeping his promises or of helping Daniels. But whether he did or not, his actions as she describes them were sleazy at best, and she found the experience painful and traumatic enough to leave her literally shaking.
The encounter doesn’t sound consensual to me. As I said above, it sounds like date rape.
More Trump legal news, and it’s not good.
Kyle Cheney at Politico: Judge Cannon indefinitely postpones Trump’s classified docs trial.
The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s criminal case in Florida — on charges that he hoarded classified secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate after his presidency — has indefinitely postponed the trial, once scheduled for May 20.
The date had been widely expected to move amid a tangle of pretrial conflicts between special counsel Jack Smith and Trump’s attorneys. Smith had urged Judge Aileen Cannon to reschedule the trial to begin on July 8, but an order from the judge on Tuesday afternoon suggested that she is unlikely to even decide on a new trial date before late July.
Cannon, a Trump appointee who took the bench in late 2020, indicated in the order that, before setting a new trial date, she intends to resolve the backlog of other issues in the case that have piled up on her plate. Smith’s defenders have criticized Cannon for what they see as a plodding pace in resolving pretrial matters, and tensions between the special counsel and the judge have flared in recent months over a series of puzzling rulings that threatened to derail the case.
“[F]inalization of a trial date at this juncture — before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and [classified evidence] issues … would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions,” Cannon wrote in the five-page order.
That reshuffling further clouds the picture for Smith, who is also awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity that could determine whether his other case against Trump — charges in Washington D.C. for attempting to subvert the 2020 election — can move forward this year….
Trump has sought to delay all of his criminal cases until after this year’s election. If he wins, he could shut down the two federal cases brought by Smith, and the state cases in New York and Georgia also might have to be frozen.
And from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Court of Appeals agrees to consider DA removal in Trump election case.
The Georgia Court of Appeals on Wednesday decided to hear an appeal of a judge’s ruling allowing District Attorney Fani Willis to remain at the helm of Fulton County’s election interference case against former President Donald Trump.
The court’s decision almost certainly means a significant delay of a trial here for Trump and his 14 co-defendants and signals that Willis’ leadership role isn’t guaranteed. It is unclear how long the appeals court will take to decide the issue but they are not known for moving swiftly.
Farmers wearing jeans, 1930s
“There’s no way this case gets to trial this year,” said Atlanta defense attorney Andrew Fleischman, who is closing following the case. “I would expect the appeals court to issue its opinion some time next year.”
On March 29, Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee issued a “certificate of immediate review,” which allowed the defendants to appeal his ruling to the Georgia Court of Appeals before a trial begins.
Under Appeals Court rules, such a pretrial — or interlocutory — appeal is typically assigned to a three-judge screening panel. And all it takes is for one of those judges to decide whether the court accepts the appeal. The court’s order one-page order did not divulge which judge voted to grant the application.
In his order granting the pre-trial review, McAfee said he will continue working on the case, resolving pending motions, while the appeals court takes up the removal issue.
The bad news for Trump is that he is losing a significant percentage of Republican voters in the primaries, which are still going on. Niki Haley is still getting votes. Adam Wren and Madison Fernandez at Politico: Unexpected warning signs for Trump in busy Indiana primary.
In 2016, Indiana put Donald Trump on the doorstep of the GOP presidential nomination. But eight years later, the state he called “Importantville” delivered his campaign some flashing red warning signs as Nikki Haley cleaned up in the suburbs.
By virtue of its late-in-the-nominating-calendar primary, the Hoosier state has always occupied a unique and occasionally powerful perch to make or break candidacies: Sen. Ted Cruz and then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich dropped out immediately after Trump’s victory that year. But the barn-red state also often acts as a pace car for Republicans nationally.
And in a primary that saw a record-breaking $98 million splash across the state, according to AdImpact, Tuesday was no exception.
A zombie Haley candidacy continued to punch above its weight in the Trumpiest of states: The former South Carolina governor is on track to break 20 percent for the first time since she dropped out of the race two months ago.
Read more at the link.
I don’t know if you’ve been following the reporting about New York Times editor Joe Kahn and his pathetic explanations for why his paper seems to be rooting for another Trump presidency.
Dan Froomkin at Press Watch: New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act and he won’t do it.
Joe Kahn, after two years in charge of the New York Times newsroom, has learned nothing.
He had an extraordinary opportunity, upon taking over from Dean Baquet, to right the ship: to recognize that the Times was not warning sufficiently of the threat to democracy presented by a second Trump presidency.
But to Kahn, democracy is a partisan issue and he’s not taking sides. He made that clear in an interview with obsequious former employee Ben Smith, now the editor of Semafor.
Kahn accused those of us asking the Times to do better of wanting it to be a house organ of the Democratic party:
To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda.
But critics like me aren’t asking the Times to abandon its independence. We’re asking the Times to recognize that it isn’t living up to its own standards of truth-telling and independence when it obfuscates the stakes of the 2024 election, covers up for Trump’s derangement, and goes out of its way to make Biden look weak.
Marlon Brando wearing jeans in The Wild One
Kahn’s position is, not coincidentally, identical to that of his boss, publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who I recently wrote about in my post, “Why is New York Times campaign coverage so bad? Because that’s what the publisher wants.”
And to the extent that Kahn has changed anything in the Times newsroom since Baquet left, it’s to double down on a form of objectivity that favors the comfortable-white-male perspective and considers anything else little more than hysteria.
Throwing Baquet under the bus, Kahn called the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests “an extreme moment” during which the Times lost its way.
“I think we’ve learned from it. I think we found our footing after that,” he said.
I translate that to mean that the old guard has reasserted total control over the rabble.
Read the rest at Press Watch.
I’ll wrap this up with a couple of creepy stories about Robert Kennedy Jr.
The New York Times: R.F.K. Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain.
In 2010, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was experiencing memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumor. Mr. Kennedy said he consulted several of the country’s top neurologists, many of whom had either treated or spoken to his uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, before his death the previous year of brain cancer.
Several doctors noticed a dark spot on the younger Mr. Kennedy’s brain scans and concluded that he had a tumor, he said in a 2012 deposition reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Kennedy was immediately scheduled for a procedure at Duke University Medical Center by the same surgeon who had operated on his uncle, he said.
While packing for the trip, he said, he received a call from a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital who had a different opinion: Mr. Kennedy, he believed, had a dead parasite in his head.
The doctor believed that the abnormality seen on his scans “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Mr. Kennedy said in the deposition.
Gross. Maybe that explains some of his weird ideas?
NBC News: RFK Jr.’s new hire who downplayed Jan. 6 appears to have been at the Capitol during the attack.
A right-wing social media influencer hired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign who previously said Jan. 6 was “Democrat misdirection” appears to have himself been on the restricted grounds of the U.S. Capitol during the attack.
Marilyn Monroe in blue jeans
NBC News first reported that Kennedy’s campaign hired Zach Henry’s firm, Total Virality, for “influencer engagement” in March. Henry had worked as deputy communications director for Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign, as well as for Blake Masters during his Senate run in Arizona.
Henry, as NBC News reported, had posted that Jan. 6 was “no MAGA insurrection Just more Democrat misdirection” and appears to have embraced conspiracy theories about the Capitol attack, including posting that “antifa” was behind it, which is false.
But photos and videos uncovered by NBC News and online “sedition hunters,” who have aided the FBI in hundreds of cases against Capitol rioters, appear to show Henry among the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, beyond the previously established police lines, although it is unclear whether any of the barricades and “restricted” signs remained by the time he arrived.
There is no indication that Henry entered the Capitol or that he engaged in assaults on police officers or in destruction of property. Federal prosecutors have almost entirely focused their resources on Jan. 6 participants who either went inside the building or committed violence or destruction outside it, so there is little chance that Henry would be charged; the few nonviolent Jan. 6 defendants who were charged solely for going on restricted Capitol grounds were generally charged with misdemeanors.
But Henry’s presence on Capitol grounds would be significant given his previous social media posts about Jan. 6 and his new position on Kennedy’s campaign as Kennedy runs for president as an independent against former President Donald Trump.
That’s it for me today. What stories have you been following?
The Supreme Court hears arguments on Trump’s immunity claim, John Buss, @repeat1968.
I got the cutest picture of the granddaughters today. The girls were smiling and looking at each other with adoration. Both were pretty in pink. All I can think of is what kind of country they may inherit.
I watched and listened to trials and hearings that were so surreal that I was pretty sure we’d entered the Evil Spock Timeline. I remember when the Supreme Court protected everyone’s rights. Now, rights are confined to those who brought the men there and paid for their holidays. It was like watching a Skeleton Dance. Not one TV Lawyer could find anything constitutional about the show they put on yesterday. We all laughed at him when he said,‘ I Could … Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn’t Lose Any Voters’ Evidently, he can do worse than that, and the Supreme Court would make up something to cover his farty, diapered ass.
This is a must-read from Slate: “The Last Thing This Supreme Court Could Do to Shock Us There will be no more self-soothing after this.” This is written by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern.
For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.
For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.
On Thursday, during oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the Republican-appointed justices shattered those illusions. This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear—brutally so. These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act. These justices fear that it is Trump’s prosecution for election subversion that will “destabilize” democracy, requiring them to read a brand-new principle of presidential immunity into a Constitution that guarantees nothing of the sort. They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power. They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.
However the court disposes of Trump v. U.S., the result will almost certainly be precisely what the former president craves: more delays, more hearings, more appeals—more of everything but justice. This was not a legitimate claim from the start, but a wild attempt by Trump’s attorneys to use his former role as chief executive of the United States to shield himself from the consequences of trying to turn the presidency into a dictatorship. After so much speculation that these reasonable, rational jurists would surely dispose of this ridiculous case quickly and easily, Thursday delivered a morass of bad-faith hand-wringing on the right about the apparently unbearable possibility that a president might no longer be allowed to wield his powers of office in pursuit of illegal ends. Just as bad, we heard a constant minimization of Jan. 6, for the second week in a row, as if the insurrection were ancient history, and history that has since been dramatically overblown, presumably for Democrats’ partisan aims.
All this with the husband of an insurrectionist sitting on the bench. I heard Nicole Wallace give the best explanation of anything I’ve heard on why these men act out their grievances in court decisions last night. Two of the guys that sit on the bench are sex pests and were publicly shown to be so. Alito is just perpetually mad at everything but mostly at being branded a bigot because he has issues with women and gay people. His hateful take on religion basically focuses on controlling the objects of his hatred. Protecting his religious practice means he should get away with whatever. Nicole Wallace argued that they love Trump because they are all angry and aggrieved. They identify with Trump because they feel they’re in a similar situation. Civil rights are all about not letting white boys be white boys. They all want absolute immunity. We have to rely on Amy and John to be reasonable. Amy’s line of questions actually gave me a bit of hope.
It’s a weird timeline for me to quote Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger. This is from the Bulwark. “ Trump Melts Institutions, SCOTUS Edition. The Supreme Court’s no-win situation and the healthy liberalism we need.”
… reading the tea leaves of oral arguments is always an exercise in guesswork. Hopefully SCOTUS won’t be long in unveiling their opinion on the matter.
But one other thing is worth saying: It’s completely understandable that so many people’s first instinct was to roll their eyes at the Court’s apparent interest in using this case to trace out the complex contours of any newly explicit presidential right to official-act immunity—given the remarkable hubris of Trump’s bringing those arguments in the first place.
After all, here’s a guy who, during his second impeachment, explicitly arguedthat prosecuting an ex-president was the role of the criminal courts: “a president who left office is not in any way above the law,” his lawyers argued, “as the Constitution states he or she is like any other citizen and can be tried in a court of law.”
Now Trump articulates just the opposite position: No act that is “official” in form—which, his lawyers have had to admit during arguments, would include such acts as ordering the military to carry out a coup—can be criminally prosecuted after he leaves office unless he was first convicted in an impeachment trial for that conduct. How any president enjoying such expansive power could ever be impeached by a Congress he could apparently order murdered without consequence remains unclear.
It’s a ridiculous exercise, a transparent stalling tactic. For Team Trump, just getting the argument in front of SCOTUS was a victory in and of itself, further diminishing the odds of a jury getting to rule on Trump’s stolen-election charges before the November election. “Literally popping champagne right now,” one lawyer close to Trump told Rolling Stonewhen the court announced it would consider the immunity claim in February. This week, RS quoted another Trump source that it hardly matters what the court does now: “We already pulled off the heist.”
At the same time, no matter how transparent Trump’s run-out-the-clock motivations in bringing the petition to the Court, it’s true that the claims of presidential immunity at hand have never been litigated. The justices are highly unlikely to endorse Trump’s theory that every presidential act that is official “in form” is exempt from prosecution—but are some presidential acts immune? What is the line between a president acting in his capacity as president and acting in his capacity as a candidate or private citizen? And could it be true—as Trump’s lawyers have argued—that opening up too broad a swath of presidential actions to post-presidency prosecution could hamper a president’s ability to run the country effectively?
Evidently, Kavanaugh’s love of beer causes him to be delusional and totally out of it.
One last SCOTUS send-up and I’m changing the topic. This is from Adam Sewer, who is writing for The New Republic. ” The Trumpification of the Supreme Court. The conservative justices have shown they are ready to sacrifice any law or principle to save the former president.”
The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.
“How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer. “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act,” Sauer said after a brief exchange. “If it were an official act … he would have to be impeached and convicted.”
“That sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?” Kagan replied later.
The Democratic appointees on the bench sought to illustrate the inherent absurdity of this argument with other scenarios as well—Kagan got Sauer to admit that the president could share nuclear secrets, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented a scenario in which a president orders the military to assassinate a political rival. Sauer said that might qualify as an official act too. It was the only way to maintain the logic of his argument, which is that Trump is above the law
This Mike Luchovich cartoon is brutal and true. I am shifting to the other SCOTUS shit show this week. CNN has “Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s oral arguments over emergency abortions.” Again, thank goodness my youngest daughter is in Denver. Who knows what her outcome may have been? Dr. Daughter is getting more colleagues in Washington State because of Idaho. Pregnant women are gestational containers there. This analysis was provided by Tierney Sneed and John Fritze.
In a Supreme Court hearing on the Biden administration’s challenge to aspects of Idaho’s strict abortion ban, US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar sought to appeal to conservative justices who just two years ago ruled that states should have the ability to prohibit the procedure.
The dispute, stemming from the Justice Department’s marquee response to the high court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, turns on whether federal mandates for hospital emergency room care override abortion bans that do not exempt situations where a woman’s health is in danger but her life is not yet threatened.
To prevail, the Biden administration will need the votes of two members of the court’s conservative bloc, and with Justice Brett Kavanaugh signaling sympathies toward Idaho, the case will likely come down to the votes of Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett. The two justices had tough questions for both sides of the case.
The court’s far-right wing, perhaps in an attempt to keep those two justices on their side, framed the case as a federal overreach into state power. The court’s liberals, meanwhile, focused on the grisly details of medical emergencies faced by pregnant woman that were not covered by the limited life-of-the-woman exemption in Idaho’s ban.
So, back to Pecker and the man who has to pay for sex coming and going. There’s been a whole of objecting accompanied by “sustained.”
More will be coming once the print journalists get their stories in. I wish I could be Pollyanna and play the glad game, but I can only come up with the bad news. We get to see this continually, which is also the thing I’m glad about. I m feel like a total masochist every time I turn the TV on or read a magazine article, but just think how awful it would be if we didn’t know about this. I’m not sure what will become of Donald, but I’m certain that we still have time to make certain he doesn’t get back into the White House. We have time to stop the MAGAdons that want to clone that agenda into every state and the U.S. Congress. We’ll see and read nothing else but propaganda if we don’t stop them now.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Guess who John Prine wrote this about?
“Wake up call Sleepy Don”. John Buss, @repeat1968
I thought I’d spend most of today’s post covering the antics and jury selection process in Trump’s Hush Money Case. However, there are also a lot of awful things coming out of the block of MAGA states down here on the Gulf Coast. Louisiana has joined the backwards-in-time parade, and it’s looking like we may soon be worthy of a Dickens novel. Texas continues to prove that its women are chattel. But let’s start with The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump. Today is the 4th day, and things are just weird.
First, we found out today that Donald has a babysitter who is paid $105k annually. She’s been sitting in court with a wireless printer, printing stories that will make him more optimistic and upbeat. She was sitting close to him, but the Judge made her move to the back. So, he wears diapers, takes naps, and has a nanny. I wonder if she’s solved his ketchup tantrums yet. I firmly believe a jury of his peers would likely be found in the toddler section of daycare.
Last night, the Judge’s fears of juror intimidation became real as Fox News broadcasted the workplace of the nurse that had been selected to serve earlier this week. The big complaint about her was that she had a master’s and lived on the east side with her boyfriend. That supposedly made her likely to be a liberal activist. This is from The Daily Beast. “Jesse Watters Goes Juror by Juror to Sow Doubt in Trump Hush-Money Case. “I think at this point we can say: It’s not going to be an acquittal,” the Fox host reacted mere hours after seven jurors were selected.” This is reported by William Vaillancourt. The bottom line is that Fox News continues to be the flagship of the insurrection.
It didn’t take long after the general outlines of seven jurors in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial were made public Tuesday for Fox News host Jesse Watters to suggest that, based on that information alone, Trump wouldn’t be acquitted.
While on air Tuesday night, Watters went through each juror, whose identities will remain anonymous in light of the potential for threats directed at them.
The second juror, Watters described, is “a nurse from the Upper East Side with a Masters degree.”
“She’s not married, has no kids and lives with her fiancé who works in finance,” Watters said, chuckling for some reason. “She gets her news from The New York Times, Google and CNN.”
Two items in this juror’s questionnaire “really stuck out,” according to Watters: “‘I don’t really have an opinion of Trump,’ and ‘No one is above the law.’ I’m not so sure about juror No. 2,” Watters reacted, stopping short of explaining why. Watters later said vaguely that he found her to be “concerning.”
The Fox host then made a point to note that juror 3’s law firm “features DEI on its home page.” DEI, an acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion, has been a boogeyman for some on the right. Watters would make the same observation regarding the seventh juror, a lawyer whose firm, he claimed, “is big into DEI and ESG.” ESG, which relates to how companies score on environmental, social and governance metrics, has also been fodder for conservative criticisms.
“So that’s the jury of Trump’s peers so far,” Watters scoffed. “The fate of a billionaire real estate tycoon, TV celebrity-turned-45th president of the United States is in the hands of New York City lawyers, teachers and Disney workers who like to dance and get their news from the Times, but swear they can be impartial.”
When Watters introduced Fox News contributor Charlie Hurt, he began by blatantly sowing doubt over the jury pool.
The AP reported this last night after the Judge spoke to Ms Watters, who expressed concern when family and friends began to text her to ask if she was on the jury. “Judge in Trump case orders media not to report where potential jurors work.”
The judge in Donald Trump’s hush money trial ordered the media on Thursday not to report on where potential jurors have worked and to be careful about revealing information about those who will sit in judgment of the former president.
Judge Juan Merchan acted after one juror was dismissed when she expressed concerns about participating in the trial after details about her became publicly known.
The names of the jurors are supposed to be a secret, but the dismissed juror told Merchan she had friends, colleagues and family members contacting her to ask whether she was on the case. “I don’t believe at this point I can be fair and unbiased and let the outside influences not affect my decision-making in the courtroom,” she said.
Merchan then directed journalists present in the courthouse not to report it when potential jurors told the court their specific workplaces, past or present. That put journalists in the difficult position of not reporting something they heard in open court.
The jury has been seated with a replacement. The last of the alternative jurors are being processed today. We could see opening arguments on Monday.
The most disturbing news of the week is coming from Republican Governors and legislatures who continue to push a White Nationalist Agenda. We’ll get to the frightening examples in the news shortly. I want to introduce the topic for those of you that we can mark safe from Republican Governors. Hence, you get an idea of the deranged laws becoming laws that are aimed at eliminating rights for the majority of people. This is an Op-Ed by Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times today.
The U.A.W. is targeting 13 automakers — including Toyota, Hyundai, Honda, Nissan, Volvo and Tesla — employing around 150,000 workers in 36 nonunion plants across the South. It faced the first major test of its strategy on Wednesday, when 4,300 workers at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tenn., began voting on whether to unionize. The vote ends on Friday. If it’s successful, it will be a breakthrough for a labor movement that has struggled to build a footing in the South.
The mere potential for union success was so threatening that the day before the vote began, several of the Southern Republican governors announced their opposition to the U.A.W. campaign. “We the governors of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas are highly concerned about the unionization campaign driven by misinformation and scare tactics that the U.A.W. has brought into our states,” their joint statement reads. “As governors, we have a responsibility to our constituents to speak up when we see special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.”
It is no shock to see conservative Republicans opposing organized labor. But it is difficult to observe this particular struggle, taking place as it is in the South, without being reminded of the region’s entrenched hostility to unions — or any other institution or effort that might weaken the political and economic dominance of capital over the whole of Southern society.
The history of Southern political economy is to a great extent a history of the unbreakable addiction of Southern political and economic elites to no-wage and low-wage labor. Before the Civil War, of course, this meant slavery. And where the peculiar institution was most lucrative, an ideology grew from the soil of the cotton fields and rice paddies and sugar plantations, one that elevated human bondage as the only solid foundation of a stable society.
“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina declared in an 1858 speech. “It constitutes the very mudsill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mudsill.”
A decade later and the slave system was dead, crushed underfoot by the armies of emancipation. The landowning Southern elites had lost their greatest asset — a seemingly inexhaustible supply of free labor. They would never regain it, but they would fight as hard as they could to approximate it.
With that, I give you the ClownFish of Lousiana’s latest workforce law. “Louisiana lawmakers vote to remove lunch breaks for child workers, cut unemployment benefits. A House committee approved the bill along with others to reduce unemployment benefits and workers’ compensation wages.” As BB said yesterday when I texted her this article, this is positively Dickensian.
A Louisiana House committee voted Thursday to repeal a law requiring employers to give child workers lunch breaks and to cut unemployment benefits — part of a push by Republicans to remove constraints on employers and reduce aid for injured and unemployed workers.
The House Labor and Industrial Relations panel advanced the child labor legislation, House Bill 156, along with House Bill 119, which would slash the amount of time for which people can collect unemployment aid. A third bill the committee approved, House Bill 529, would change how workers’ compensation wages are calculated in ways that could reduce benefits received by some injured laborers.
The bills, which head to the full House, are part of a broad effort by Republicans to weaken labor unions and strengthen employers’ hands in Louisiana. They are aligned with steps other Republican-led legislatures have taken in recent years, and on Thursday, GOP lawmakers attributed the moves to Gov. Jeff Landry’s directive to “reform” the business environment and remove bureaucratic red tape.
First-term state Rep. Roger Wilder, R-Denham Springs, who sponsored the child labor measure and owns Smoothie King franchises across the Deep South, said he filed the bill in part because children want to work without having to take lunch breaks. He questioned why Louisiana has the requirement while other states where he owns Smoothie King locations, such as Mississippi, don’t have them, and criticized people who have questioned the bill’s purpose.
Evidently Louisiana Republicans do not want children to eat for some reason. “The Breakdown: Summer meal options for kids, after Landry refuses EBT program. In your Breakdown: what options are out there for summer meals for kids in need?”
Governor Jeff Landry just declined more than 70-million dollars in federal funding for the Summer EBT program. It’s a pandemic-era program that would have provided extra grocery money to the families of 600-thousand kids out of school for the summer.
Census data shows more than one in four Louisiana kids live in poverty.
And, Kentucky and Florida are now relaxing laws so that children work instead of going to school too.
The only thing these state Republicans accomplish is setting free Robber Barons to do the worst and making the lives of the rest of us intolerable. “Top employees at Louisiana environmental agency resign in clash with leader, an ex-Trump official. New top DEQ employees are resigning or transferring under Jeff Landry-appointed leader.” They are also after a tenured professor who is an expert on Climate Change.
Four officials named to prominent positions at the state Department of Environmental Quality by Gov. Jeff Landry’s nascent administration have already left after clashing with Landry’s appointee to the agency’s top job, Aurelia Giacometto, according to interviews with senior aides and documents obtained by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate.
Senior officials who remain at the DEQ and who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal said the agency is also in turmoil over Giacometto’s insistence on pre-approving any contact made by employees with individuals in other state agencies, federal agencies, businesses and industries, and non-governmental organizations.
Giacometto’s actions may have caused delays in applying for and approval of federal grants worth millions of dollars, delayed routine inspections of numerous businesses for weeks, and may have violated employees’ rights to request leave under the federal Family Medical Leave Act, the aides said.
“During my two-week tenure, I witnessed numerous atrocities, with the most egregious being the harassment of longtime employees,” Chandra Pidgeon, who was undersecretary of the DEQ’s Office of Management and Finance, wrote in a March 1 resignation letter to Landry obtained by the news organization. Pidgeon did not respond to a request for comments on her letter.
Then, there’s Texas, again and Florida and North Carolina. “Emergency rooms refused to treat pregnant women, leaving one to miscarry in a lobby restroom.”
One woman miscarried in the lobby restroom of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to admit her. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.
Complaints that pregnant women were turned away from U.S. emergency rooms spiked in 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, federal documents obtained by The Associated Press reveal.
The cases raise alarms about the state of emergency pregnancy care in the U.S., especially in states that enacted strict abortion laws and sparked confusion around the treatment doctors can provide.
The more you read about these states, the more frightening it gets. Also, you should not think yourselves safe either because if they get back in control of the National agenda they will make these laws go national and there will be no reasonable Supreme Court to block them. Think and vote local and encourage your friends and relatives to do the same.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Reading Woman Daydreaming, by Henri Matisse
Those of us who are hanging onto hope that U.S. democracy can still be saved must not only fight Republicans, but also powerful media organizations, especially The New York Times and The Washington Post.
If you follow social media, you’ve undoubtedly seen people mocking New York Times headlines that suggest any good news for Biden is actually negative–along the lines of “The economy is booming–why that’s bad for Biden.”
Despite the fact that news organizations will certainly be persecuted by a second Trump administration, it really appears that at least the wealthy people in charge want another Trump presidency because they believe it will help their bottom line. Working journalists are facing layoffs these days, so perhaps fear of losing their jobs makes them willing to do their bosses’ bidding.
Right now, as Trump faces a historic criminal trial, the Times and Washington Post continue to publish gossipy lightweight stories.
David Kurtz writes in the TPM Morning Memo about a piece in the NYT yesterday on Melania Trump: NYT Is Said To Have Learned Nothing From Its Trump I Coverage.
Yesterday’s NYT apologia for Melania Trump was laugh-out-loud funny, by which I mean so, so bad. Reminiscent of its much-mocked coverage of Javanka during Trump I, the piece had all the usual hallmarks of NYT toadyism.
Let’s start with the passive-voice headline: “Melania Trump Avoids the Courtroom, but Is Said to Share Her Husband’s Anger”
“Said to” is one of the great journalistic sophistries. It does so much apparent work with so little actual effort.
What is this awkward headline construction meant to convey? That despite all her heartache over the Stormy Daniels affair, Melania, too, is outraged (OUTRAGED!) over Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s wrongful criminal prosecution of her husband.
How does the NYT know this? So glad you asked!
Melania hasn’t said anything publicly about her supposed outrage. She hasn’t attended legal proceedings with Trump. She hasn’t been by his side at the trial.
But wait! She’s has purportedly spoken “in private” about her feelings.
It’s the classic dipsy-do of the Javanka coverage: Why take any risk of speaking publicly when you can launder it through the NYT. We are never so courageous as we are in our private musings.
But how is the NYT privy to Melania’s private thoughts and comments?
The sourcing: “according to several people familiar with her thinking.” Yes! Bravo! It’s self serving on top of self serving, with two degrees of separation to play it safe.
Why are these “people familiar” granted anonymity? Because they can’t speak publicly “out of fear of jeopardizing a personal relationship with the Trumps.” Perfect! These brave truth-tellers are risking so much – by which I mean, so little – to get their essential truths out into the public sphere.
Here’s the nugget of “reporting” around which the entire article is built:
But Mrs. Trump, the former first lady, shares his view that the trial itself is unfair, according to several people familiar with her thinking.
In private, she has called the proceedings “a disgrace” tantamount to election interference, according to a person with direct knowledge of her comments who could not speak publicly out of fear of jeopardizing a personal relationship with the Trumps.
The rest of the piece is a filament of speculation, pop psychology, knowing winks about cliched relationship tropes, and lazy stereotypes about wives and mothers – all in service of trying to wring a drop of compassion from readers for the private turmoil that comes with being married to DJT.
Read the rest at TPM. But really, who the hell cares what Melania thinks? As the back of her famous jacket read, “I really don’t care, do u?”
Albert Reuss 1889-1975, Woman Reading
Another lightweight story from yesterday’s New York Times by style critic Guy Trebay (at least, I guess it’s favorable to Biden): The Biden Guide to Dressing Younger.
Joe Biden is a dapper guy. He always has been. When he turned up decades ago for a first date with the woman who would become his wife and the country’s first lady, her gut reaction was, “This is never going to work, not in a million years.”
Dressed in a sports coat and loafers, Joe Biden was too dapper for someone who had previously gone out with men in T-shirts and clogs.
They worked it out. And the future president stuck to his style. It was one that sometimes skewed Gatsby, for which in 1974 Washingtonian magazine noted his penchant for pinstripe suits and tasseled loafers when citing him as one of the best dressed men in the Senate. It was one that was sometimes too high-toned for its setting. In 1979, Mr. Biden, then a second-term senator, exuded confidence in a “tailored suit and expensive tie” for a campus speech at the University of Alabama, The New Yorker later reported.
It was one that, on occasion, even threatened to upstage the boss. Yes, it must have been flattering to be praised by The Chicago Tribune as the “best-dressed guy” at Bill Clinton’s 2000 State of the Union address. Politically, however, it was not the best look.
Still, dapper cred has stood President Biden in good stead. When Donald J. Trump, now 77, derides his 81-year-old opponent as doddering Uncle Joe, he is missing a point any tailor would be happy to clarify. There is getting old, and there is looking old. To avoid having your clothes add unnecessary years, make style your friend.
“Joe Biden’s style is timeless and doesn’t have any expiration date,” the designer Todd Snyder said recently. If you think that is accidental, you are not paying attention.
Meanwhile, Trump is a dumpy old guy in baggy suits and extra long ties who claims Biden has dementia, an obvious projection.
A campaign story from Clive Wootson, Jr. at The Washington Post: Scranton vs. Mar-a-Lago: Biden turns sharply to populism.
SCRANTON — President Biden’s schedulers did not publicly announce his second stop Tuesday during his visit to his hometown, but it came as little surprise that he’d end up at the gray house with black shutters where he spent the earliest years of his life. He even nodded to the visit in a speech that mixed his biography with his thoughts on tax policy.
By Berthe Morisot, 1873
“Scranton is a place that climbs in your heart, and it never leaves,” Biden said. “For me it was 2446 North Washington Avenue.”
But the trip was about more than sentiment during the first day of Biden’s three-day swing through this pivotal battleground state. He leaned into populist anger against the rich and worries of a world weighted against the middle class as he sought to draw distinctions between himself and his likely Republican opponent in November, Donald Trump.
“All I knew about people like Trump is that they looked down on us,” Biden told the crowd in his childhood town, contrasting his upbringing with Trump’s frequent visits to his resort in Palm Beach, Fla. “They wouldn’t let us into their homes and their country clubs. When I look at the economy, I look at it through the eyes of Scranton, not through the eyes of Mar-a-Lago.”
Biden will further stress that contrast Wednesday when he travels to Pittsburgh to address the United Steelworkers and unveil a raft of new trade protections for the steel industry. The president will call for a tripling of the 7.5 percent tariff on Chinese steel imports, as well as increased pressure to prevent China from shipping steel to America through Mexican ports….
The actions are just the latest sign of the president’s determination to be seen as a defender of American workers like those in the steel industry, whose employees are spread across states in the industrial Midwest, the so-called “blue wall” that could decide Biden’s political fate in November.
In making the argument, he has leaned into his middle-class upbringing, including the years he spent in Scranton, which he portrays as a scrappy, working-class town. He argues that Trump, on the other hand, is a billionaire who lives in a gilded club in Florida and would bolster other billionaires, the very people who have had an unfair advantage for too long.
Again, I guess at least it’s favorable to Biden.
A serious piece from Mark Joseph Stern at Slate Magazine: Hundreds of Jan. 6 Prosecutions—Including Donald Trump’s—Are Suddenly in Peril at the Supreme Court.
Will the Supreme Court jeopardize the prosecution of more than 350 defendants involved with Jan. 6, including Donald Trump, by gutting the federal statute that prohibits their unlawful conduct? Maybe so. Tuesday’s oral arguments in Fischer v. United States were rough sledding for the government, as the conservative justices lined up to thwap Joe Biden’s Department of Justice for allegedly overreaching in its pursuit of Jan. 6 convictions. Six members of the court took turns wringing their hands over the application of a criminal obstruction law to the rioters, fretting that they faced overly harsh penalties for participating in the violent attack. Unmentioned but lurking in the background was Trump himself, who can wriggle out of two major charges against him with a favorable decision in this case.
There are, no doubt, too many criminal laws whose vague wording gives prosecutors near-limitless leeway to threaten citizens with decades in prison. But this isn’t one of them. Congress wrote a perfectly legible law and the overwhelming majority of judges have had no trouble applying it. It would be all too telling if the Supreme Court decides to pretend the statute is somehow too sweeping or jumbled to use as a tool of accountability for Jan. 6.
Start with the obstruction law itself, known as Section 1552(c), which Congress enacted to close loopholes that Enron exploited to impede probes into its misconduct. The provision is remarkably straightforward—a far cry from the ambiguous, sloppy, or muddled laws that typically flummox the judiciary. It’s a mainstay of the Department of Justice’s “Capitol siege” prosecutions, deployed in about a quarter of all cases. Overall, 350 people face charges under this statute, Trump among them, and the DOJ has used it to secure the convictions of about 150 rioters. It targets anyone who “corruptly … obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” And it clarifies that an official proceeding includes “a proceeding before the Congress.”
A Woman Reading, by Pablo Picasso, 1920
The government argues that some rioters attempted to “obstruct” an “official proceeding” by halting the count of electoral votes through “corrupt” means. That includes Joseph Fischer, the defendant in the current case. Fischer, who served as a police officer before Jan. 6, allegedly texted that the protest “might get violent”; that “they should storm the capital and drag all the democrates [sic] into the street and have a mob trial”; and that protesters should “take democratic congress to the gallows,” because they “can’t vote if they can’t breathe..lol.” Video evidence shows Fischer assaulting multiple police officers on the afternoon of Jan. 6 after breaching the Capitol.
Would anyone seriously argue that this person did not attempt to corruptly obstruct an official proceeding? For a time, it seemed not: 14 of the 15 federal judges—all but Judge Carl Nichols in this case—considering the charge in various Jan. 6 cases agreed that it applied to violent rioters bent on stopping the electoral count. So did every judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit except one, Judge Gregory Katsas. Both Nichols and Katsas were appointed by Trump. Their crusade to kneecap the law caught SCOTUS’ attention, and the court decided to intervene despite overwhelming consensus among lower court judges. The Supreme Court’s decision will have major implications for Trump: Two of the four charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith in the former president’s Jan. 6 prosecution revolve around this offense. A ruling that eviscerates the obstruction law would arguably cut out the heart of the indictment.
Stern writes that at least three justices–Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito appear likely to do that. Read the rest at Slate.
Catherine Belton at The Washington Post: Secret Russian foreign policy document urges action to weaken the U.S.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry has been drawing up plans to try to weaken its Western adversaries, including the United States, and leverage the Ukraine war to forge a global order free from what it sees as American dominance, according to a secret Foreign Ministry document.
In a classified addendum to Russia’s official — and public — “Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation,” the ministry calls for an “offensive information campaign” and other measures spanning “the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological spheres” against a “coalition of unfriendly countries” led by the United States.
“We need to continue adjusting our approach to relations with unfriendly states,” states the 2023 document, which was provided to The Washington Post by a European intelligence service. “It’s important to create a mechanism for finding the vulnerable points of their external and internal policies with the aim of developing practical steps to weaken Russia’s opponents.”
The document for the first time provides official confirmation and codification of what many in the Moscow elite say has become a hybrid war against the West. Russia is seeking to subvert Western support for Ukraine and disrupt the domestic politics of the United States and European countries, through propaganda campaigns supporting isolationist and extremist policies, according to Kremlin documents previously reported on by The Post. It is also seeking to refashion geopolitics, drawing closer to China, Iran and North Korea in an attempt to shift the current balance of power.
Using much tougher and blunter language than the public foreign policy document, the secret addendum, dated April 11, 2023, claims that the United States is leading a coalition of “unfriendly countries” aimed at weakening Russia because Moscow is “a threat to Western global hegemony.” The document says the outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine will “to a great degree determine the outlines of the future world order,” a clear indication that Moscow sees the result of its invasion as inextricably bound with its ability — and that of other authoritarian nations — to impose its will globally.
Albert Reuss, Lady Reading a Book
The Russians have clearly succeeded in subverting much of the Republican Party. Right now, far right Republicans are talking about getting rid of House Speaker Mike Johnson because he appears to be trying to pass some military aid for Ukraine.
The Washington Post: Momentum builds to oust Johnson from House speakership.
House Speaker Mike Johnson’s job is in serious jeopardy as two far-right lawmakers are threatening to oust him after the embattled Republican leader proposed a complex plan intended to fund key foreign allies during wartime.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Memeorandum Crooks and Liars Democracy NOW The UK Guardian
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments