I never wanted a week to end so much in my life as this one. I’m not one for TV viewing because reality shows are not my thing. There are very few movies and series that grab my attention, too. This time of year, it’s good to have the weather channel. You already know I’m a news junkie, but the news is more like a staged reality show than about actual events that matter. It also is getting too far into the Beltway gossip zone to be of any real use. The media is on a few stories like flies on rice. I searched for something beyond the Beltway jive talk today.
[17] Mr. Clinton, however, has a different agenda.
[18] At its top is unrestricted abortion on demand. When the Irish-Catholic governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, asked to say a few words on behalf of the 25 million unborn children destroyed since Roe v. Wade, Bob Casey was told there was no place for him at the podium at Bill Clinton’s convention, no room at the inn.
[19] Yet a militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at that same convention and say: “Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.” And so they do.
[20] Bill Clinton says he supports school choice – but only for state-run schools. Parents who send their children to Christian schools, or private schools, or Jewish schools, or Catholic schools need not apply.
[21] Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents, and Hillary has compared marriage and the family as institutions to slavery and life on an Indian reservation.
[22] Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.
[23] This, my friends, is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.
[24] The President of the United States is also America’s commander-in-chief. He’s the man we authorize to send fathers and sons and brothers and friends into battle.
[25] George Bush was 17-years-old when they bombed Pearl Harbor. He left his high school graduation, he walked down to the recruiting office, and he signed up to become the youngest fighter pilot in the Pacific war. And Mr. Clinton? And Bill Clinton? When Bill Clinton’s time came in Vietnam, he sat up in a dormitory room in Oxford, England, and figured out how to dodge the draft.
That time I got to see both President HW Bush and President Bill Clinton together presenting aid to the city’s Universities on the Campus at UNO. I was sitting nearly up front and even had a nice chat with a secret service woman. Where did those days go? (December 7,2005)
Needless to say, I voted for Bill Clinton even though I had previously supported Bush against Reagan when he pulled that stunt about Welfare Queens. If you haven’t read Josh Levin’s book ‘The Queen’, you should. Here’s an interview with him from PBS by Hari Sreenivasan from June 2019. Reagan used a criminal who was an outlier to slur an entire group of women, as detailed in “The True Story Behind the ‘Welfare Queen’ Stereotype.”
Hari Sreenivasan:
Josh there’s this “welfare queen” moniker that’s been used really to demonize entire groups of people. You go through this entire book and take a dive not just into that phrase but really that it’s based on a real person. She was an outlier while at the same time becoming an icon for a whole category.
Josh Levin:
Yeah that’s exactly right. Her name was Linda Taylor and she was identified by the Chicago Tribune in 1974 as a person who had committed welfare fraud while driving fancy cars, including a Cadillac. And very quickly after that she was given the nickname the welfare queen. And it was a nickname and a stereotype that really very quickly blew up.
Hari Sreenivasan:
You know it was a Chicago paper that gave her that nickname but it’s really Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail that makes that phrase such a household idea. How did it get from the Chicago paper into his speeches?
Josh Levin:
One of his advisers had found a wire story about it and Reagan was looking for kind of outrageous stories about welfare because welfare reform had been one of his big accomplishments as governor of California. And it was also something that voters were outraged about in the mid 1970s increased welfare spending at a time when the economy was really poor. And this idea that there were welfare cheats out there was something that created outrage.
Ronald Reagan Campaign Speech, 1976: In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veterans husbands. Her tax-free cash income, alone, has been running $150,000 a year.
Josh Levin:
He didn’t say the phrase “welfare queen” in his speeches he would talk about how there was this woman in Chicago who’d stolen as much as one hundred fifty thousand dollars in welfare money in a single year, which was an exaggerated sum. But there was such baggage attached to welfare at that point that I think the electorate really understood what he was saying and really knew what he was talking about. Welfare has been an effective talking point for a whole generation of politicians.
Me and the nuns at Congo Square protesting the caging of children and Donald’s family separation policy. (July 2,2017)
Now we have promises to deport and look up and one that is painted with the brush of ‘illegal immigrant with brown skin.’ They’re also developing a scheme of citizenship that would deprive citizenship for all kinds of folks that would actually include Melania if the law passed. This is from the page of America’s Voice.
Selected immigration components of Project 2025 are below:
Mass Detention and Family Separation: Project 2025 paves the way for mass family separation by eliminating important benefits for unaccompanied children and transfers the care of unaccompanied minors from Health and Human Services to DHS to allow for large scale detention of young children. The proposal recommends weakening standards for migrant detention, calling for mass detention in temporary structures such as tents.
Attacks on Dreamers and Parents of US Citizens: Project 2025 calls for the elimination of family-based immigration and DACA.
Raid Schools Hospitals and Religious Zones: Project 2025 removes prohibitions on ICE acting in ‘sensitive zones’ thus allowing raids on schools, hospitals, and religious institutions.
Suspending Due Process: Project 2025 removes legal processes allowing immigrants a day in court by expanding the use of expedited deportations to the ‘fullest extent’ throughout the country. It also gives DHS the authority to declare a ‘mass migration event’ and enact anything to avert it (e.g. scrapping all Title 8 requirements and automatically expelling migrants). The proposal further undermines due legal processes by allowing immediate expulsion of migrants in the case of ‘loss of operational control’ or USCIS backlogs which is caused by consistent underfunding from Republican officials. Project 2025 would create a show-me-your-papers style mandate and require ICE to remove, arrest, and detain immigration violators anywhere in the country and without warrant, if possible. The plan authorizes local law enforcement to participate in border security actions and penalizes jurisdictions that do not comply. The project also plans to remove oversight authorities from ICE and classify all USCIS operations.
Use of the Military: Project 2025 encourages the use of the US military to crack down on peaceful migrants arriving at the border. The proposal also considers engaging in war with drug cartels in Mexico.
Attacks Legal Immigration: Project 2025 seeks to restrict legal immigration by barring certain groups or nationalities from accessing work and student visas, eliminates DACA, family-based immigration, TPS, and visas for victims of crime, reduces asylum and discounts gang and domestic violence as grounds.
Yup, I am photobombing my friends at the Women’s March (Jan.23, 2013). All the Donald Cult probably thinks I doth protest too much.
These kinds of things happen when White Christian Nationalists take over a party and embrace a criminal, narcissistic, lying, and authoritarian leader. We’ve gone from a B-movie Actor to a Reality Show Actor who sure does a good job at Crisis Acting, too. I’ll rely on JJ to outline the absolute misogyny demanded by Project 2025. My point is that the RNC this year was basically the showboat for Project 2025. It was a festival of the Donald Cult wreaking racism, misogyny, and white Christian nationalism. Plus, the Vice Presidential nominee is a self-loathing hillbilly. His book is all about blaming poor people in Appalachia for the systemic problems they face. This is from Aja Romano, who is writing for VOX. “Revisiting Hillbilly Elegy, the book that made J.D. Vance. The bestseller proves Trump’s VP pick has abiding disdain for absolutely everyone.”
At one time, liberal and conservative centrists alike hailed Vance’s bestselling 2016 memoir of making it out of rural, poverty-stricken Appalachia, transforming himself from a tempestuous teen into a successful Yale law school grad.
Yet years on, Vance has undergone a transformation of a different sort, remolding himself from a fairly moderate professed conservative who once compared Trump to Hitler and wrote with disdain about the outer edges of the party into a would-be authoritarian.
That’s not to say Vance doesn’t have some nuanced and even appealing positions. His populist economic instincts are a running theme of Elegy, and today he makes deals across the aisle with Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But to understand his larger worldview, you have to look past his economic ideas to his social ideas — and to what Vance actually displays about himself throughout the book.
Perhaps readers in 2016 were eager to look past the book’s highly loaded subtext and overt classism, as the promise of a sympathetic conservative who could unlock Trumplandia for liberals was just too appealing. It also seems likely that readers loved the book because it confirmed all of the negative stereotypes they already held about country hicks. As a read on Vance himself, though, in the context of his subsequent embrace of Trump and far-right ideology, Hillbilly Elegy paints a portrait of a man obsessed with status — and brimming with contempt for just about everyone he meets.
Another one about J.D. This is from the Independent. “I’m from the same place as JD Vance, and there’s nothing to celebrate now that he’s Trump’s VP. We are both Appalachians, with eerily similar working-class backgrounds which JD Vance wrote about in his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy. Yet, says Skylar Baker-Jordan, our views — and our reactions to this attempted assassination — couldn’t be more different.”
Like so many millions of my fellow citizens, I watched in horror on Saturday as a would-be assassin came perilously close to murdering former president Donald Trump. This was not just an attack on him and those innocent people simply exercising their First Amendment right to attend a political rally. It was not just an attack on the Republican Party.
It was an attack on the very fabric of American democracy.
Political violence has become a norm in our divided and beleaguered nation. From the 2011 attack on Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to the 2017 shooting of Republican Steve Scalise to the attack last year on Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, to this weekend’s horrific attack which left one of our fellow citizens dead, we are increasingly solving our differences not with ballots and votes, but bullets and violence.
Neither side in this cold civil war, now cataclysmically close to boiling point, can claim the moral high ground. Would that someone told my fellow Appalachian, JD Vance.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” the junior senator from Ohio tweeted last night following the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.
So the man they’re hailing as being just a good old boy is really just another elite enthralled by bigger elites. That’s what reality television has done with political reality. It’s made an entire group of people believe that a staged, scripted, false narrative wrapped up in a box with reality printed on it must be true. Let me show you some data rather than speculation. This is from Newsweek. This was published two days ago. The data comes before that awful RNC ho-down. “Donald Trump’s Chances of Winning Election Are Declining.” This comes from who once was a candidate and has worked campaign since High School. Don’t trust polls too far away from Election Day!
According to the tracker, Biden is favored to win in 534 out of 1,000 of FiveThirtyEight’s simulations of how the election could go, while Trump wins in 462. The poll also shows that the simulations indicate that Biden is on track for a three-point win.
The polling website said its forecast is based on a combination of polls and campaign “fundamentals,” such as economic conditions, state partisanship and incumbency.
It comes after a Presidential Voting Intention poll of 3,601 swing state voters by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, found that Trump’s margins over President Joe Biden have narrowed since June in two key states: Florida and North Carolina.
Trump previously defeated Biden in both states in 2020, while he held a six-point lead over Biden in Florida in a Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll from that June.
This craziness at The Daily Beast has me seething. It’s written by Jake Lahut. “Trump’s Plan to Slam Dems for Their ‘Coup’ Against Biden: Campaign. No matter who may replace Biden, the Trump camp plans to attack Democrats for an unruly ouster of their nominee.”
It is not the only recent poll to give Trump only a four-point lead in Florida. A June Fox News survey gave Trump 50 percent of the vote, compared to 46 percent for Biden.
You would think a few folks would be reading them just to notice the trend. But, nope. Not with a big dose of Potomac Fever going on. So this one from The Daily Beast has me seething. It’s written by Jake Lahut. “Trump’s Plan to Slam Dems for Their ‘Coup’ Against Biden: Campaign, No matter who may replace Biden, the Trump camp plans to attack Democrats for an unruly ouster of their nominee.” Notice how we get two for one here.
Donald Trump‘s campaign will attack the Democrats for conducting a “coup” if Joe Biden quits the presidential race, the GOP campaign co-chair told The Daily Beast on Thursday.
The former president’s campaign for president will try to throw the charge leveled at him over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection back in Democrats’ faces, Chris LaCivita told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
“Here’s what’s fascinating about it,” LaCivita said as he mingled on the convention floor in Milwaukee. “You are watching a coup. Literally. In front of your eyes.”
LaCivita, the architect with Susie Wiles of Trump’s 2024 campaign, offered the first insight into how Republicans will deal with a new Democratic candidate as Biden appeared increasingly likely to accede to calls to step aside.
The attack as a “coup plotter” will be matched with a playbook that continues to attack Biden’s record especially if Biden is succeeded by his vice president, Kamala Harris.
The campaign will run the same strategy if Harris takes over, he said. Biden has already given Republicans too much fodder, he acknowledged. They will also demand that Biden step down as president if he won’t run. That would give them extra ammunition to attack Harris as a sitting president who benefited from a “coup.”
“It’s Joe Biden,” he added, even if the nominee will not, in fact, be Joe Biden, should he step aside.
And AOC says the quiet part out loud. We knew this. “AOC goes live on Instagram saying many who want Joe Biden to drop out of race also want to remove Kamala. ‘A lot of them are not just interested in removing the president. They are interested in removing the whole ticket,’ congresswoman says.” This is from the Independent.
“If you think that there is consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave … that they will support, Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken,” she told viewers.
“My community does not have the option to lose,” she said.
“If they’re going to come out and say all their little things on background, off the record, but they’re not going to be fully honest, I’m going to be honest for them. I’m in these rooms. I see what they say in conversations,” the congresswoman said.
Terrell Davis and his family were looking forward to vacationing in California when pro football Hall of Famer was handcuffed and removed from a United Airlines plane – for no apparent reason.
“I was stripped of my dignity. I was powerless. I couldn’t do anything,” the two-time Super Bowl champion told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday.
The incident happened Saturday at the end of a flight from Denver to Orange County, California. Davis, 51, was flying with his wife, two sons and daughter when one of the sons asked for a cup of ice during beverage service, Davis wrote on Instagram. A flight attendant “either didn’t hear or ignored his request and continued past our row,” the post read.
Terrell Davis and his family were looking forward to vacationing in California when pro football Hall of Famer was handcuffed and removed from a United Airlines plane – for no apparent reason.
“I was stripped of my dignity. I was powerless. I couldn’t do anything,” the two-time Super Bowl champion told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday.
The incident happened Saturday at the end of a flight from Denver to Orange County, California. Davis, 51, was flying with his wife, two sons and daughter when one of the sons asked for a cup of ice during beverage service, Davis wrote on Instagram. A flight attendant “either didn’t hear or ignored his request and continued past our row,” the post read.
We should really be careful. It is getting ugly out there. But, if there is a protest of anything here in Orleans Parish, I will be there. I will also vote. I will also drag my neighbors to the voting booth if I have to.
We shall overcome.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Nothing reminds me of the worst stuff to come out of the 80s than Disco. Nothing says cultural appropriation like three white guys from the Isle of Man morphing funk and black slang into a song that’s all about themselves!!!!!! But it’s a good message to the pols and media that won’t settle down and do their damned jobs!
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This drone photo of the vent area in Butler, Pennsylvania, shows the building in the upper left-hand corner where the shooter’s body was found.
Dear Sky Dancers, this is not a good day for our Republic.
Judge Cannon used this moment to distract the press from what I believe might be a staged coup attempt by Donald on Donald. He golfed right after the shooting and had no bandages or marks to be seen. I have reached this theory of the case after spending a day and a half asking questions and reviewing materials with JJ, BB, and a friend of my friend PB from the late Fire Dog Lake site. The press is characterizing people like us as BlueAnon conspiracy theorists. Frankly, I just have questions about things. I’m up to being proved wrong. I’m just someone who has watched decades of Law and Order and Criminal Minds, and I’m also smarter than your average bear.
Understand what Judge Cannon did. She saw the non-stop media coverage of the shooting, used that distraction to overturn decades of legal precedent without citing a single case in her ruling’s favor, & dismissed Trump’s classified documents case. This is how republics collapse.
To be sure, Cannon’s absurd ruling is so extreme that only one of the MAGA justices supported it in his immunity decision (Thomas). Her decision will likely be reversed because it has absolutely zero basis in precedent whatsoever.But Cannon’s indefensible opinion still serves its purpose of delaying Trump’s trial long enough to prevent any form of accountability before the November election. That was the move all along. And the DOJ delayed & delayed & that helped Trump get away with this. Smh.
Judge Aileen Cannon and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images/USDC for the Southern District of Florida)
This is from Eric Tucker at the AP. “Federal judge dismisses Trump classified documents case over concerns with prosecutor’s appointment.”
The federal judge presiding over the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump in Florida dismissed the prosecution on Monday, siding with defense lawyers who said the special counsel who filed the charges was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, which can be appealed and may later be overturned by a higher court, brings at least, for now, a stunning and abrupt conclusion to a criminal case that at the time it was filed was widely regarded as the most perilous of all the legal threats the Republican former president confronted.
I’ve been doing a bit of digging and found this article from Salon on May 7. “Judge Cannon’s secret right-wing getaway: Why didn’t we know about this? Federal judge in Trump’s documents trial didn’t tell us about those right-wing conferences at a Montana resort.” It’s reported by columnist Lucian Truscott IV.
Let me ask you a question: How many all-expenses-paid vacations at luxury hunting and fishing lodges have you enjoyed over the last few years? I’m not talking about a motel in the boonies of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or a drafty log cabin on a lake in Maine or Minnesota. We’re talking about a luxury resort on 1,200 acres alongside the Yellowstone River just outside Yellowstone National Park. We’re talking about a lodge featuring rooms with stone fireplaces that go for upwards of $1,000 a night in high season, meals that include “house-cured meats from local ranches, garden-fresh produce from nearby farms, and, of course plenty of Northwest craft beers and spirits,” as the resort’s website describes the offerings.
It’s called the Sage Lodge in Pray, Montana, and it’s where George Mason University sends gaggles of federal judges for a week-long “colloquium” every year or so. Paid for by the Law and Economics Center at the Antonin Scalia Law School, the “colloquium” held at the Sage Lodge in 2021, for example, featured lectures on such subjects as “Woke Law!” – and yes, the exclamation point is part of the lecture topic — by one Todd J. Zywicki, who is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School and a senior fellow at the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives of the Cato Institute. Another juicy topic covered at the Sage Lodge in 2021 was “Unprofitable Education: Student Loans, Higher Education Costs, and the Regulatory State,” also featuring a lecture by Zywicki, a topic that rings what we might call a rather different bell after the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program last year.
The Antonin Scalia Law School, by the way, was established and largely funded by the efforts of Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, who helped put together $30 million from conservative donors, including Leo himself, to rename the law school after the late legendary right-wing justice, who it will be remembered died of a heart attack in 2016 at another luxury hunting lodge, that one in Texas, while on a trip paid for by wealthy conservative “friends of the court,” I guess we could call them. The other major donor to the Scalia Law School was the Charles Koch Foundation, which threw in a handy $10 million.
Why are we talking about luxury hunting lodges and right-wing “colloquiums” for judges? Because one of our favorite federal judges, Aileen Cannon of Florida, currently presiding over the case against Donald Trump over the secret documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago, was a guest at that same 2021 “colloquium” at the Sage Lodge, and the one held in 2022 as well. The thing is, Cannon failed to file the form known as a Privately Funded Seminar Disclosure Report, which lists whoever paid for the judge to attend the seminar, who the speakers were and what topics were discussed. The form is supposed to be posted on the website of every federal court within 30 days of the time a judge attending such an all-expenses-paid seminar. Cannon, however, somehow forgot to do so, so anyone who might be interested in learning who was paying for Cannon’s vacations and the nature of her judicial education would have been out of luck.
So why do we suppose Judge Cannon was so shy about who’s paying for her luxury trips and what she might have learned there? Oh, I don’t know … might it be because she didn’t want anyone to know about her links to the Leonard Leo wing of legal theory? Could it have been that she didn’t want it known that she had taken money from an organization that was in large part funded by billionaires friendly to the man whose case she was presiding over?
Procedurally, this may actually not help Trump in the way he’d like (because DOJ has the option of appealing it or having a US Attorney charge Trump).
But it’s also hilarious, since Aileen Cannon has been treating herself like an Appellate Judge that she hasn’t been confirmed to be.
Update: One thing Cannon appears upset about is Merrick Garland’s invocation of Section 533, which appoints FBI-like figures.
Special Counsel Smith argues that Section 533(1) confers on the Attorney General the authority to appoint special counsels, specifically, constitutional officers wielding the “full power and independent authority . . . of any United States Attorney.” 28 C.F.R. § 600.6. After careful review, the Court is convinced that it does not. Congress “does not . . . hide elephants in mouseholes.” Whitman v. Am. Trucking Associations, 531 U.S. 457, 468 (2001). Special Counsel Smith’s interpretation would shoehorn appointment authority for United States Attorney-equivalents into a statute that permits the hiring of FBI law enforcement personnel. Such a reading is unsupported by Section 533’s plain language and statutory context; inconsistent with Congress’s usual legislative practice; and threatens to undermine the “basic separation-of-powers principles” that “give life and content” to the Appointments Clause. Morrison, 487 U.S. at 715 (Scalia, J., dissenting). The Court explains below.
33 Order No. 5730-2023 (appointing David C. Weiss); Order No. 5588-2023 (appointing Robert K. Hur).
That is her only mention of Robert Hur, whose appointment would be unconstitutional under her theory as well. (I’m still trying to figure out whether Cannon will help Hunter Biden go free, too.)
Update: Okay, I’ve read the thing.
It’s hilarious.
It’s hilarious, because it doesn’t create any delay that Cannon was not pursuing anyway. Indeed, Jack Smith could immediately appeal this and try to get her tossed, so it may hasten things (unless Trump wins!).
It’s hilarious because it is unbelievably hubristic. The only credible future for Judge Cannon now is Trump’s first SCOTUS appointment in a second term.
It’s hilarious because the way she did this, if it were upheld (not an impossibility given how nutty SCOTUS has gotten), it would be even more useful for Hunter Biden than Donald Trump (especially if Trump didn’t win reelection), because the statutes of limitation on Hunter’s alleged crimes have started to expire.
So, back to Donald and his surprising recovery from a shooting that killed one and critically injured two. So my Nancy Drew senses started tingling when I saw how composed Donald was after the shooting; he was more worried about getting his shoes than leaving the scene. Posing for pictures all along the way. PB first contacted me with this bit.
Talked to a friend who’s a Psych and body language expert. 100% staged. Look at their unified messaging.
In a recently released transcript of a deposition as part of a lawsuit filed by a group of protesters who alleged they were assaulted by Trump’s security guards at a 2015 campaign rally, the subject of fruit – and fruit being flung, in particular – came up.
Here’s the full – and fully epic – back-and-forth between Trump and Benjamin Dictor, an attorney representing the protestors.
Dictor: Okay. And you said that, ‘If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them would you.’ That was your statement?
Trump: Oh, yeah. It was very dangerous.
Dictor: What was very dangerous?
Trump: We were threatened.
Dictor: With what?
Trump: They were going to throw fruit. We were threatened. We had a threat.
Dictor: How did you become aware that there was a threat that people were going to throw fruit?
Trump: We were told. I thought Secret Service was involved in that, actually. And you get hit with fruit, it’s – no – it’s very violent stuff. We were on alert for that.
Trump attorney Jeffrey Goldman: A tomato is a fruit after all, I guess. … It has seeds.
Just enough time for a NAZI salute also, which is being used by the Press right now. They’re using the fist bumps. The campaign is now using for fundraising and political materials.
And where did Donald get the idea to lead an assassination attempt on himself? This is from Newsweek, May 3, 2023. “Russia Staged Putin ‘Assassination’ to Justify Mass Mobilization: ISW” I know now about self-coups and staged assassination attempts as political tools of fascists. What a world! Funny how Donald has disappeared from the campaign trail for a few weeks but suddenly was paling around with Viktor Orban last week, too.
The alleged attempt to “assassinate” Russian President Vladimir Putin was likely staged by the Kremlin to justify a future effort to mobilize troops for the war in Ukraine, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
The Russian government on Wednesday issued a statement alleging that two Ukrainian drones had been destroyed near Putin’s official residence in Moscow. The Kremlin said that the drones were attempting to carry out “a planned terrorist attack” by assassinating Putin just before “Victory Day” celebrations on May 9. Ukraine has denied any involvement.
While video of the drones dramatically exploding over Kremlin grounds appeared online soon after the purported attack occurred, the incident immediately raised eyebrows, with a number of experts and commentators suggesting that it may have been a staged “propaganda” event intended to drum up Russian support for the war.
ISW, the U.S.-based think tank, said in a report published on Wednesday night that the Russian government “likely staged” the purported assassination attempt “to bring the war home to a Russian domestic audience and set conditions for a wider societal mobilization.”
5 months ago, Alex Jones and InfoWars guest Ivan Raiklin discussed how assassinating Trump would be beneficial, according to them, because it would lead to retaliatory “in kind” assassinations of a “deep state” list which includes President Joe Biden.
Ivan Raiklin: “If they [assassinate Trump], option 2, behind Trump, is going to be so much better for us and so much worse them.”
Alex Jones: “I was about as to say, If they kill him, that’s best case scenario from a sick level. From a sick level medium, ‘Oh, please kill him.’ I mean, it’s so good after that.”
Raiklin: “Oh, it’s going to be the best cleansing and the fastest cleansing that we’ve ever seen in my lifetime. I guaran—, I access, with almost certainty, with the highest level of confidence, that if they assassinate Trump, it is so game over for them.”
Authorities released few updates Sunday on the progress of their investigation into Trump’s would-be assassin, but a portrait of Crooks — a 2022 graduate of Bethel Park High School who worked as a dietary aide at a local nursing and rehabilitation center — began to emerge.
He had no criminal history, almost no presence on social media, and lived in a middle-class suburb about an hour away from the site of the shooting.
His political leanings were not immediately apparent. Though he was registered as a Republican, according to state voter rolls — and this year’s election would have been the first in which he was eligible to cast a ballot for president — campaign finance reports show a man with the same name gave $15 to a progressive political action committee in January 2021, on the day Biden was sworn into office.***
Crooks’ father, Matthew, reached by CNN late Saturday, said he was trying to figure out “what the hell [was] going on” and declined to comment further until he had spoken with authorities. Attempts to reach other family members were unsuccessful Sunday.
Kevin Rojek, head of the FBI’s field office in Pittsburgh, told reporters Sunday that agents recovered bomb-making material from inside Crooks’ car and his residence. The rifle he used in the attack, which was believed to have been purchased at least six months earlier by his father, as well as Crooks’ cell phone and other evidence had been sent to the FBI lab in Quantico, Va., “for processing and exploitation,” Rojek said.
Meanwhile, several former classmates offered conflicting characterizations of Crooks. Some described him as a loner who had been bullied during his high school years. Jason Kohler, who graduated alongside Crooks, told reporters that students had harassed him “almost every day” and that he often wore “hunting” outfits to class.
“He was just an outcast,” Kohler said.
*** Author note: There’s some evidence this was not the shooter but a 69-year-old man with the same name from Pittsburg.
Here are some additional things I have questions about. Most of these are based on photography at the scene. For example, Kim Wexler’s Ponytail shows this TikTok of a New Angle of Trump at Rally shooting. It basically shows either Donald’s bodyguards or the Secret Service moving photographers close to the stairs. Perhaps for a better shot of the exit act? The TikTok comes from
Why was there such lackluster Security at the Rally?
I had a lot of weird things from early on that I thought were just not right. One was the interview by an MSNBC reporter of a man who was supposed to be standing next to Donald at the podium from the onset. He told the reporter something to the effect that he got up there, introduced himself, and was then told by Donald to go ahead and come up to the podium, only to be quickly told, wait, let’s do that later, and shuffled him off to sit somewhere else. I cannot find that clip by my neighbor across the street, who I had been with earlier for cocktails, who told me that she had seen it, too.
I also heard Frank Figluzzi discuss the fact that it was odd that the roof wasn’t in the area where the check-for-weapons zone was. He also said that on the other side was where the protestors were allowed to gather and even march. My thought was, wow! Sounds like a setup to blame a protestor and let the guy onto the roof. The fact that he was a right-wing Republican gun nut just really puts that on display as planning.
One of the most questionable things is that photos of Trump show him looking in the direction of the building where the shooter was. This is precisely when he turned his head to point to his whiteboard. At that point, local police went to the roof, saw him, and went back down the stairs. There was also a hesitation by the Secret Service Sniper to shoot him. Acyn, the Senior Digital Editor for MeidasTouch.com, captured this on CSPN. He’s looking directly at the shooter and then angling towards the White Board. The shooter was only about 165ish feet away from Donald. That’s definitely a distance that a good sniper could handle.
So, several things I noticed from this bit. First, when you speak to a large audience, you look straight ahead. You do not fixate on a spot to your right. Nowadays, politicians use teleprompters, but the ones that are guarded by the Secret Service have bulletproof shields. Do you see one?
I had another conversation with a neighbor this morning who has friends who have been military snipers, and their hypothesis on this I would put under the conspiracy theory. They’re saying they think the Republican Party mainstream was working with the Secret Service to take him out. That’s pure speculation. It’s obvious, though, that there’s something wrong with the security there.
The U.S. Secret Service is investigating how a gunman armed with an AR-style rifle was able to get close enough to shoot and injure former President Donald Trump at a rally Saturday in Pennsylvania, a monumental failure of one the agency’s core duties.
The gunman, who was killed by Secret Service personnel, fired multiple shots at the stage from an “elevated position outside of the rally venue,” the agency said.
An Associated Press analysis of more than a dozen videos and photos taken at the Trump rally, as well as satellite imagery of the site, shows the shooter was able to get astonishingly close to the stage where the former president was speaking. A video posted to social media and geolocated by the AP shows the body of a man wearing gray camouflage lying motionless on the roof of a manufacturing plant just north of the Butler Farm Show grounds, where Trump’s rally was held.
The roof was less than 150 meters (yards) from where Trump was speaking, a distance from which a decent marksman could reasonably hit a human-sized target. For reference, 150 meters is a distance at which U.S. Army recruits must hit a scaled human-sized silhouette to qualify with the M16 assault rifle in basic training. The AR-15, like the shooter at the Trump rally had, is the semi-automatic civilian version of the military M16.
On Monday, Cheatle said in a statement: “Since the shooting, I have been in constant contact with Secret Service personnel in Pennsylvania who worked to maintain the integrity of the crime scene until the FBI assumed its role as the lead investigating agency into the assassination attempt.”
She added that the Secret Service is working with other law enforcement agencies to “understand what happened, how it happened, and how we can prevent an incident like this from ever taking place again. … We will also work with the appropriate Congressional committees on any oversight action.”
Neither Cheatle or the Secret Service’s communications office have weighed in on criticism of women in the agency more broadly.
I have a few more weird angles from various drones and photogs that make me even more suspicious, but according to White Christian Nationalists, it’s all just a miracle. I’m sticking with a staged attempt ala Putin because that seems more in line with Trump’s lack of anything decent.
So, I’m open to comments and criticism, but this is my case so far. I’m likely not going to leave this rabbit hole for a while. Keep an eye on the things Republicans don’t want you to know. And please, don’t take in any of the stupidity of the Republican Convention. This one is going to be insane.
The FBI continues to investigate the shooting incident at the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, as an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump and as potential domestic terrorism. The investigation is still in the early stages, and the FBI is providing the following updates:
FBI technical specialists successfully gained access to Thomas Matthew Crooks’ phone, and they continue to analyze his electronic devices.
The search of the subject’s residence and vehicle are complete.
The FBI has conducted nearly 100 interviews of law enforcement personnel, event attendees, and other witnesses. That work continues.
The FBI has received hundreds of digital media tips which include photos and videos taken at the scene, and we continue to review incoming tips. We encourage anyone with information that may assist with the ongoing investigation to continue to submit it online at tips.fbi.gov or call 1-800-CALL-FBI.
While the investigative work continues, FBI victim services personnel have offered assistance to the victims of Saturday’s incident.
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The U.S. media and the pundit class are still trying to drive Joe Biden out of the presidential race, and I’m sick and tired of it. These privileged people have the wherewithal to leave the country if Trump gets back in the White House; I don’t.
I see no evidence that Biden is experiencing “cognitive decline,” and he certainly does not have dementia. Democrats should be rallying around Biden, whether they like him personally or not. He is the only thing standing between us and a MAGA dictatorship. Biden needs to stay in the race and beat Trump. He did it once; I believe he can do it again.
Once he’s elected, if Biden wants to retire before the end of his term, Kamala Harris will be there to take over. If he leaves now, Harris will likely be unable to appoint someone as VP, because both houses of Congress have to confirm her choice. The Republicans would joyfully block anyone she picks.
Last night Biden submitted to an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. I tried to watch it, but I had to turn it off. Stephanopoulos’s questions were ignorant, insulting, and patronizing. I just couldn’t handle it. You can read the full transcript at ABC News.
I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.
They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose, and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.
According to one journalist’s tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech they wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away “would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment” and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment.
Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases, and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, AKA most of these pundits.
Serial Cuddlers, by Daniel Ryan
Speaking of coups, we’ve had a couple of late, which perhaps merit attention as we consider who is unfit to hold office. This time around, Trump is not just a celebrity with a lot of sexual assault allegations, bankruptcies, and loopily malicious statements, as he was in 2016. He’s a convicted criminal who orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election both through backroom corruption and public lies and through a violent attack on Congress. The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term have themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference.
His own former staffers are part of the Heritage Foundation’s team planning to implement Project 25 if Trump wins, which would finish off our system of government with yet another coup. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” said the foundation’s president the other day. This alarms me. So does the behavior of the US mainstream media, which seems more concerned with sabotaging the only thing standing between us and this third coup.
“Why aren’t we talking about Trump’s fascism?” demands the headline of Jeet Heer’s piece in the Nation, to which the answer might be a piece by the Nation’s own editor-in-chief titled “Biden’s patriotic duty” that proposes his duty is to get lost. Sometimes I wonder if all this coverage is because the media know how to cover a normal problem like a sub-par candidate; they don’t know how to cover something as abnormal and unprecedented as the end of the Republic. So for the most part they don’t.
Biden is old. He was one kind of appalling in the 27 June debate, listless and sometimes stumbling and muddling his words. But Trump was another kind of appalling, in that almost everything he said was an outrageous lie and some of it was a threat. I get that writing about the monstrosity that is Trump faces the problem that it’s not news; he’s been a monster spouting lurid nonsense all his life (but his political crimes are recent, and his free-associating public soliloquies on sharks, batteries, toilets, water flow, and Hannibal Lector, among other topics, are genuinely demented). He’s a racist, a fascist, and a rapist (according to a civil-court verdict).
We are deciding if this nation has a future as a more-or-less democratic Republic this November, and on that rides the fate of the earth when it comes to acting on climate change. If the US falters at this decisive moment in the climate crisis, it will drag down everyone else’s efforts. Under Trump, it will. But the shocking supreme court decisions this summer and the looming threat of authoritarianism have gotten little ink and air, compared to the hue and cry about Biden’s competence.
President Joe Biden registered his best showing yet in a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult tracking poll of battleground states, even as voters offered withering appraisals of his debate performance amid panic within his party.
Cat in a cardboard box, by Ruskin Spear
Republican Donald Trump led Democrat Biden by only 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%, in the critical states needed to win the November election. That’s the smallest gap since the poll began last October. Biden now leads Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin. He’s within the poll’s statistical margin of error in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, and is farthest behind in the critical state of Pennsylvania.
Swing-state voters thought Biden acquitted himself poorly in the debate, with fewer than one in five respondents saying the 81-year-old was the more coherent, mentally fit or dominant participant.
The poll results land as the Democratic Party finds itself in an extraordinary bind mere weeks before its nominating convention. To pressure Biden into releasing delegates would be to abandon a candidate who has beaten Trump before and has portrayed his debate debacle as the latest surmountable setback in a career marked by personal tragedies and three previous White House campaigns.
Voters’ reactions to Biden’s debate performance:
The Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll is the first comprehensive survey of the states most likely to decide the outcome in the Electoral College since the debate on June 27. Its findings run counter to some recent national polls, which showed a worsening picture for Biden. The poll could turn out to be a statistical outlier.
While the results show a “modest boost” in concerns about Biden’s mental acuity, they’re “nothing to match the level of alarm expressed by prominent voices in the Democratic Party,” said Eli Yokley, US political analyst for Morning Consult. “This suggests the age matter was already baked into most voters’ minds: The only difference now is more Democrats are acknowledging it.”
The view from the swing states could be affected by an advertising blitz from Biden and his Democratic allies, who have lately outspent their Republican rivals 5-to-1 in those places.
The Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll also started four days after the debate — later than some national polls — giving voters more time to evaluate Biden’s performance.
The poll’s first responses came on the day the Supreme Court granted Trump immunity for criminal acts he may have committed as part of his “official responsibilities.” The issue of democracy now rivals immigration as the second-biggest concern among swing-state voters, and it’s one of few issues — including climate change, abortion and health care — where Biden enjoys a significant edge in voter trust.
Read more if you can get past the paywall. I signed up for free articles for one day.
NBC News has a gossipy article about supposed conflicts between President Biden’s family and staff. I’m no going to quote from it; it’s very similar to the gossip column-like pieces that the NYT and WaPo like to publish. But here’s a link, if you want to read it. It’s quite melodramatic, so have a fainting couch and smelling salts handy: ‘It’s Shakespearean’: Long-simmering tensions between Biden’s family and aides spill out.
Meanwhile, Trump is up to no good, as usual. He and his thugs have noticed that Americans might not want to have an unfettered strongman in place of a normal president. They are starting to hear about the Heritage Foundation and “Project 2025, and it’s not going over well with normal people as opposed the MAGA maniacs. So yesterday, someone post at Truth Social in Trumps name, claim to know nothing, nothing at all about Project 2025. (I know Trump didn’t actually write the post, because there were no misspellings or oddly capitalized words; and it included words like “abysmal.”
Donald Trump is trying to claim he has “nothing to do” with Project 2025, a political roadmap created by people close to him for his potential second term.
The project, which is led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, seeks to crack down on various issues including immigration, reproductive rights, environmental protections and LGBTQ+ rights. It also aims to replace federal employees with Trump loyalists across the government.
From the book “Tell us a story,” by Dolores McKay, 1923
Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social network: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
The former president’s post came a day after the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, said the US was in the midst of a “second American revolution” that can be bloodless “if the left allows it to be”. He made the comments on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, adding that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back”.
In response to Trump’s post, several critics were quick to point out that it appears unlikely that he is unaware of Project 2025, given that many individuals involved in the project are his closest allies.
“Many people involved in Project 2025 are close to Trump world & have served in his previous admin,” CNN’s Alayna Treene said.
“Project 2025” is nothing short of a 900-page blueprint for guiding Donald Trump’s second term of office if he’s re-elected.
After the Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025 in April last year, when Trump was seeking the Republican nomination, he had no problem with it.
But now that the nation is turning its attention to the general election, Trump doesn’t want Project 2025 to draw attention. Its extremism is likely to turn off independents and moderates.
So Trump is now claiming he has “no idea who is behind” Project 2025….
The Project 2025 playbook was written by more than 20 officials who Trump himself appointed during his first term. If he has “no idea” who they are, he’s showing an alarming cognitive decline.
One of the leaders of Project 2025 is Russ Vought. Vought was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, a key position in the White House. Vought is also drafting Trump’s 2024 GOP platform.
Trump says he “knows nothing” about Project 2025. And he says he “disagrees” with it.
As the former chairman of the Republican party, Michael Steele put it, “Ok, let’s all play with Stupid for minute … so exactly how do you ‘disagree’ with something you ‘know nothing about’ or ‘have no idea’ who is behind, saying or doing the thing you disagree with?”
Artist unknown
Trump may also be worried that Heritage president Kevin Roberts could alarm independents and moderates. On Wednesday, Roberts raised the prospect of political violence. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts told the War Room podcast, founded by Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
But let’s be clear. The Trump campaign platform is basically Project 2025. Trump’s Make America Great Again Pac is running ads calling it “Trump’s Project 2025”.
The Make America Great Again Pac also created the website TrumpProject2025.com. In case there’s any doubt that Trump and the Heritage Foundation are working in close partnership, Trump can be seen in this video praising the Heritage Foundation and saying he “needs” them to “achieve” his goals.
The close relationship between Trump and the Heritage Foundation goes back years. In 2018, the Heritage Foundation bragged that Trump implemented two-thirds of their policy recommendations in his first year – more than any other president had done for them.
The goals of Project 2025 are the same goals Trump tried to achieve in his first term or has been advocating in this campaign.
One key goal of Project 2025 is to purge all government agencies of anyone more loyal to the constitution than to Trump – a process Trump himself started in October 2020 when he thought he would remain in office.
Trump has promised to give rightwing evangelical Christians what they want. Accordingly, Project 2025 calls for withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, expelling trans service members from the military, banning life-saving gender affirming care for young people, ending all diversity programs, and using “school choice” to gut public education.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
Trump is trying to use the SCOTUS “immunity” ruling to get rid of the espionage and other charges against him for stealing and hoarding secret government documents.
Donald Trump says the Supreme Court’s ruling that he has blanket immunity from prosecution for his “official acts” as president should result in a monthslong pause of his criminal proceedings in Florida.
The Friday filing by Trump’s legal team with U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is the latest move by the former president to seize on the high court’s landmark immunity ruling to sideline his lingering criminal cases. He is asking Cannon for a chance to argue the immunity issue before her between now and early September, effectively pausing all other proceedings in the case by two months.
Trump has argued that his decision to transmit classified documents to his Florida home as he prepared to leave the presidency should be treated as an “official act” and be removed from special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump for allegedly hoarding national security secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Now, he says, the Supreme Court’s ruling requires that the case be put on hold until the immunity issue is resolved.
The push by Trump is the latest effort to wield the Supreme Court’s decision as a weapon in his ongoing cases in Florida, Washington, D.C. and Georgia, each of which implicate some of Trump’s actions in his final months in the White House. The ruling has already scrambled plans for New York state judge Juan Merchan to sentence Trump on his 34-count conviction for concealing evidence of his alleged 2006 affair wiAlth porn star Stormy Daniels. Though that case centered on Trump’s private actions, some of the evidence prosecutors relied on overlapped with his first two years in the White House, which Trump contends should have been treated as off-limits.
““No Mortal Man is Above the Law,” sayeth the Supremes. Enjoy your Independence Day; if the Conflicted Convicted Felon is elected, it’ll be our last.” John Buss, Repeat 1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Independence Day has always been my favorite holiday, and it’s my youngest daughter’s too. When we lived in the Quarter, we would always walk our 2 blonde labs to the Mississippi River Bank and watch the left and east bank boats launch a huge fireworks display. Down here in the Bywater, it’s still the same short walk to the riverbank, but the Poland Avenue Wharf or the newest Crescent Park are the favorite places to go. Cars always turn to our local NPR station for patriotic music and blast it loud. You can tell when it’s time for the display because all the bars and houses empty into the streets and head south to the banks of the Mississippi River. I have always wondered what past celebrations were like, but that’s a rabbit hole for another day.
I spent the pre-show hours with friends listening to his industrial band livestream their efforts while sitting in their driveway patio. It seemed like a normal fourth. While everyone headed to the river, I headed home to Temple to let her dig a burrow under me to hide from the noise. No displays for me in the last 10 years. Just time at home in bed comforting Temple. The weird thing this year was the fireworks didn’t seem to bother her, and she spent most of the time spooning me. Maybe she sensed that my fear was far greater than hers today. It’s a thought.
Twilight’s last gleaming from last night at my neighbor’s driveway patio.
The swiftboating of the democratic candidate season has begun. My friend who owns the bar on the corner told me she’s hearing from others besides me who are looking for places to become expats. Given the Le Pen elections, I’m researching the south of France right now, although they may soon have their counter-revolution. Russia is happy about that one. I’m sure they have high hopes for us.
If you haven’t seen this little speech, you really should. “Leader of the pro-Trump Project 2025 suggests there will be a new American Revolution. Kevin Roberts said the revolution will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.” This is from the AP but sourced at Politico.
The leader of a conservative think tank orchestrating plans for a massive overhaul of the federal government in the event of a Republican presidential win said that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts made the comments Tuesday on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, adding that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back.”
Democrats are “apoplectic right now” because the right is winning, Roberts told former U.S. Rep. Dave Brat, one of the podcast’s guest hosts as Bannon is serving a four-month prison term. “And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Roberts’ remarks shed light on how a group that promises to have significant influence over a possible second term for former President Donald Trump is thinking about this moment in American politics. The Heritage Foundation is spearheading Project 2025, a sweeping road map for a new GOP administration that includes plans for dismantling aspects of the federal government and ousting thousands of civil servants in favor of Trump loyalists who will carry out a hard-right agenda without complaint.
His call for revolution and vague reference to violence also unnerved some Democrats who interpreted it as threatening.
“This is chilling,” former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson wrote on the social platform X. “Their idea of a second American Revolution is to undo the first one.”
James Singer, a spokesperson for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, pointed to this week’s Fourth of July holiday in an emailed statement.
“248 years ago tomorrow America declared independence from a tyrannical king, and now Donald Trump and his allies want to make him one at our expense,” Singer said, adding that Trump and his allies are ”dreaming of a violent revolution to destroy the very idea of America.”
Roberts, whose name Bannon recently floated to The New York Times as a potential chief of staff option for Trump, also said on the podcast that Republicans should be encouraged by the Supreme Court’s recent immunity ruling.
Bannon is in jail right now, serving time for contempt of Congress. The New Republic‘s Parker Malloy has a good point here. “Why Does the Media Insist on Helping Steve Bannon Act the Martyr? NBC and ABC snagged pre-prison interviews with the far-right globalist. But to what end? They became tools in his propaganda machine.” The press just falls right in line by normalizing this behavior.
NBC News’s Vaughn Hillyard and ABC News’s Jonathan Karl recently made a journalistic misstep by interviewing Steve Bannon right before he reported to prison. This move, which might seem innocuous at first glance, actually elevates Bannon’s “political prisoner” narrative, a misleading storyline that does little but bolster the War Room host’s victim complex.
By interviewing Bannon just before he heads to prison, both NBC and ABC are essentially giving him a platform to paint himself as a martyr.
It allows Bannon to control the narrative. This plays directly into the hands of Bannon and his supporters, who are eager to cast any legal action against them as part of a broader conspiracy to silence dissent. It’s a classic tactic: position yourself as a victim to garner sympathy and rally support.
But Bannon is not going to prison for his political beliefs or his support for Donald Trump. He’s going to prison because he defied a congressional subpoena. By allowing Bannon to put some focus on his claims of political persecution, these interviews shift attention away from his actual misconduct and the legal consequences of that misconduct. This undermines the rule of law and gives credence to the idea that powerful individuals can evade accountability by crying foul.
Beyond that, it normalizes extremist rhetoric. In his interview with Karl, Bannon doubled down on his inflammatory language, discussing “retribution” and the need for investigations and potential imprisonments of political figures. Bannon listed former FBI Director James Comey, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and former Attorney General Bill Barr as people who should be “very worried” about prosecution under a second Trump administration. Bannon defended his use of the slogan “Victory or Death!” at the recent Turning Point Action convention and rolled his eyes at Karl for even asking him about his 2020 comments about beheading Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Mark Robinson, the extremist GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina, appeared to endorse political violence in a bizarre and extended rant he delivered on June 30 in a small-town church.
“Some folks need killing!” Robinson, the state’s lieutenant governor, shouted during a roughly half-hour-long speech in Lake Church in the tiny town of White Lake, in the southeast corner of the state. “It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!”
Robinson’s call for the “killing” of “some folks” came during an extended diatribe in which he attacked an extraordinary assortment of enemies. These ranged from “people who have evil intent” to “wicked people” to those doing things like “torturing and murdering and raping” to socialists and Communists. He also invoked those supposedly undermining America’s founding ideals and leftists allegedly persecuting conservatives by canceling them and doxxing them online.
In all this, Robinson appeared to endorse lethal violence against these unnamed enemies, particularly on the left, though he wasn’t exactly clear on which “folks” are the ones who “need killing.”
Robinson, a self-described “MAGA Republican,” has a long history of wildly radical and unhinged moments. He has linked homosexuality to pedophilia, called for the arrest of trans women, pushed hallucinogenic antisemitic conspiracy theories, endorsed the vile “birther” conspiracy about Barack Obama, described Michelle Obama as a man, hinted at the need to violently oppose federal law enforcement and the government, and posted memes mocking and denying the brutal, violent assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, among many other things.
President Joe Biden will hold a rally Friday in Wisconsin and then sit for his first televised interview since his disastrous debate performance last week, events could be crucial in determining whether he can salvage his embattled candidacy.
The interview with anchor George Stephanopoulos of ABC News is shaping up to be one of the most high-stakes moments for a president or a candidate in many years. Democratic elected officials, donors and voters will be closely watching to see whether he can still deliver in an adversarial setting and turn in a performance worthy of being the party’s nominee to defeat Donald Trump this fall.
The interview will “air in its entirety as a primetime special” at 8 p.m. ET Friday, ABC said, adding that a “transcript of the unedited interview will be made available the same day.”
Before that, Biden is expected to speak this afternoon at a campaign rally in Madison, Wisconsin. At the rally, Biden will “underscore the stakes of this election for our democracy, our rights and freedoms, and our economy,” a campaign official said. Also speaking will be Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., among others.
The White House said the interview team from ABC “will be with us all day in Wisconsin” and able to cover the rally event and to observe the president as he participates in his schedule, and said it has “some flexibility” around the length of the sit-down but “no exact estimate” of the duration of the conversation.
Read the next paragraph, which I will not print here, and try not to bang your head against your desk, wall, or coffee table. Law Professor Richard W. Painter is floating a Constitutional Amendment on X.
Const. Amend. 28: “The President and the judges of the United States courts including the Supreme Court, shall be bound by the criminal laws of the United States and also by financial disclosure and conflict of interest laws enacted by Congress.” So who votes against?
So, I have to share this one from the New York Times even though I’m about to cancel my subscription. “Biden Tells Governors He Needs More Sleep and Less Work at Night. The president’s opening remark to a group of key Democratic leaders — that he was in the race to stay — chilled any talk of his withdrawal, participants said.” The usual suspects, Reid J. Epstein and Maggie Haberman, reported it.
President Biden told a gathering of Democratic governors that he needs to get more sleep and work fewer hours, including curtailing events after 8 p.m., according to two people who participated in the meeting and several others briefed on his comments.
The remarks on Wednesday were a stark acknowledgment of fatigue from the 81-year-old president during a meeting intended to reassure more than two dozen of his most important supporters that he is still in command of his job and capable of mounting a robust campaign against former President Donald J. Trump.
But Mr. Biden told the governors, some of whom were at the White House while others participated virtually, that he was staying in the race.
He described his extensive foreign travel in the weeks before the debate, something that the White House and his allies have in recent days cited as the reason for his halting performance during the debate. Initially, Mr. Biden’s campaign blamed a cold, putting out word about midway through the debate amid a series of social media posts questioning why Mr. Biden was struggling.
Mr. Biden said that he told his staff he needed to get more sleep, multiple people familiar with what took place in the meeting said. He repeatedly referenced pushing too hard and not listening to his team about his schedule, and said he needed to work fewer hours and avoid events scheduled after 8 p.m., according to one of the people familiar with what took place at the meeting.
After Gov. Josh Green of Hawaii, a physician, asked Mr. Biden questions about the status of his health, Mr. Biden replied that his health was fine. “It’s just my brain,” he added, according to three people familiar with what took place — a remark that some in the room took as a joke, including Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, according to a person close to her. But at least one governor did not, and was puzzled by it.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, Mr. Biden’s campaign chair, who attended the meeting, said in a statement that he had said, “All kidding aside,” a recollection confirmed by another person briefed on the meeting. Ms. O’Malley Dillon added: “He was clearly making a joke.”
So, I fully admit to being depressed and worried. I know that BB stopped her NYT subscription. I hope John Buss doesn’t mind. I shared this bit he posted to his FaceBook about canceling his. I seriously worry about him in North Carolina, too. None of us in the old Confederate States are safe right now.
This is from a poll taken in April and reported by the AP on May 1. “Half of US adults mistrust media coverage of 2024 elections, a poll finds. About half of Americans say they are extremely or very concerned that news organizations will report inaccuracies or misinformation during the election. According to a poll, 42% express worry that news outlets will use generative artificial intelligence to create stories. (AP Video: Serkan Gurbuz)”
I think it’s likely that if they redid that this month, they’d find a statistically significant increase in the number of people saying that. However, I admit that I live in the Southern City that promptly surrendered when Captain David Farragut of the Union Navy bombed two forts and arrived at the port. We are a haven for the GLBT community. We also have a strong Jewish presence and are well known for being a place of refuge for many diasporas. Our new governor hates us and wants to take away our city charter, which is the legal means by which we don’t become the rest of the state. You have to wonder how many cities like ours will come under direct attack if MAGA either gets its way or doesn’t.
The only way out of this is to VOTE and get everyone you know to VOTE because our lives depend on it.
I really hope you got to enjoy a little celebration on Independence Day. I’m still on board with ensuring liberty and justice for all. I am also standing by the Biden/Harris ticket. Again, you realize that I have had a lot of gripes in the past about Biden and what happened to Anita Hill. It is somewhat karmic that what is going on now is somewhat built in by the bad decision he, Teddy Kennedy, and John Kerry made about Clarence Thomas. Forty-eight percent of the Senate was against his confirmation. He should’ve been Borked. That, unfortunately, is toxic water under the bridge of democracy, but we have what we have now, and it is what it is. Remember the words of Benjamin Franklin and fight for it. The Roberts Supreme Court just took down the republic.
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
–Benjamin Franklin’s response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean I love the country but I can’t stand the scene And I’m neither left or right I’m just staying home tonight Getting lost in that hopeless little screen But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags That time cannot decay I’m junk but I’m still holding up This little wild bouquet Democracy is coming to the U.S.A
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Today, the press and cable TV are mostly focused on tomorrow’s debate and how Biden can deal with Trump’s insanity and incoherence. I don’t find the discussions about this very interesting. I think Biden knows how to bait Trump, and no one really knows what crazy nonsense Trump will unleash. I hope Biden will mock Trump’s fear of sharks and electric boats; his claims that there’s not enough water in shower heads and dishwashers; and his claim that he got his vast knowledge about “nuclear” by osmosis from his uncle the MIT professor. Trump has absolutely no interest or knowledge about policy and Biden can demonstrate that too.
It is concerning that Trump is claiming Biden will be “jacked up” on drugs, because low information voters appear to be incredibly stupid and will likely believe it. Of course, Trump is the one who could be using drugs as a crutch.
Allies of Donald Trump have painted themselves into a cognitive corner. President Biden is unfit for office, they argue, because he is so old, and his mental abilities have deteriorated markedly. But then Biden will, say, deliver a State of the Union address in which he is energetic and pointed for more than an hour.
So they modify their claim: Biden is addled and wandering, except when he is given some sort of medication, perhaps a stimulant, that reverses that effect. And here we are, with Trump and those seeking his reelection to the White House demanding that Biden submit to some sort of drug test before this week’s first presidential debate, purportedly in effort to sniff out this theoretical drug.
Experts who spoke with The Washington Post, though, confirm that no such medicine exists.
At the outset, we should recognize that this claim is generally not offered seriously. It is, instead, an effort to escape the aforementioned contradiction, a way to hold both that Biden is incapable of serving as president and yet, unquestionably at times, not demonstrating any such impairment. What’s more, the demand that Biden undergo a drug test is itself not serious. It is, instead, meant to create a condition that allows Trump and his allies to continue to claim that any strong performance from Biden is a function of medication. The result is win-win for Trump, who can blame any loss on this wonder drug.
The wackos at Fox “News” are busy speculating about what drugs Biden could be using.
Host Maria Bartiromo — no stranger to conspiratorial argumentation — hosted Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) where she offered an observation made by Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.).
“Jackson says Biden will have been at Camp David for a full week before the debate,” Bartiromo said, “and that they’re probably experimenting with getting doses right. Giving him medicine ahead of the debate.”
Burlison agreed that this was possible, though he offered that it might be more innocuous than medication. Perhaps, he said, Biden’s team is “jack[ing] him up on Mountain Dew.”
“Nothing like that exists,” Thomas Wisniewski, director of the NYU Langone Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, told The Washington Post by phone. “There are no medications or stimulants that can reverse a dementing process transiently.”
but quite often that can just exacerbate their confusion, as well,” he added. “They can be more stimulated, but they are not going to be behaving in a more cogent or normal fashion as a result of being stimulated by anything. Very often it’s the reverse.”
Adam Brickman, associate professor of neuropsychology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, concurred with that assessment.
“I’m not aware of any medications that would reverse or mask cognitive decline,” Brickman said. What’s more, he noted that “the association between energy and cognition is a very weak one. In other words, someone could have low energy but totally intact cognition and vice versa.”
Of course the goal of these drug claims is to prepare the idiots who support Trump for the likelihood that Biden will wipe the floor with Trump during tomorrow’s debate.
Donald Trump has been thinking a lot about cocaine lately, even though drug-running is one of the few felony charges he’s not been indicted or convicted for. He has been routinely accusing President Joe Biden of using drugs, with the usual vivid details Trump injects into all his weird fantasies. “So a little before debate time, he gets a shot in the a—,” Trump told rallygoers in Philadelphia Saturday. “I say he’ll come out all jacked up,” he added, before going off on a diatribe accusing Biden of being the owner of a bag of cocaine found in a White House visitors’ closet last year.
La Lecture, 1877, by Henri Fanton-Latour
Since there’s no flight of Trump’s fancy too bizarre for right-wing media, this obsession of Trump’s is getting echoed by Republican politicians and MAGA talking heads. Fox News hosts, Republican politicians, MAGA media influencers, and every right-wing troll on Twitter have been playing their part as well-trained parrots, repeating the lie. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is even putting the lie in paid advertising.
What’s telling about this lie is, as with many MAGA falsehoods, it seems few, if any, of the people repeating it actually believe it. Trump and his allies have accused Biden not just of being a little tired at times, but of having dementia. As Mona Charen pointed out on the “Daily Blast” podcast, if Adderall could restore a demented person’s brain, they’d be mass distributing it to the millions of people who are suffering from this disease. As for the cocaine accusation, even the most naive person in the country knows cocaine makes people less coherent, not sharper. It causes people to ramble on about nonsense, which is closer to describing your average Trump speech, not anything Biden has been up to.
Trump isn’t trying to convince anyone of this lie. He’s convincing them that, by repeating the obvious lie, they can share in what they believe is his mastery over reality itself. The lie is not a thing the MAGA person sincerely believes. It’s a weapon Trump has provided them. When he loses the debate, which they clearly expect he will, the lie gives them a way to participate in the post-debate spin. But it’s also the stupidity of the lie that makes it so fun. Saying something deliberately dumb is a reliable way to drive the liberals mad. Angering liberals is the emotional core of the MAGA base….
As I’ve written about before, this strategy is the oldest technique in the con artist’s book. The best way for a grifter to gain a mark’s trust is to make him feel like he’s in on the con. Cult leaders operate the same way, by creating this sense of intimacy with their victims. Once the mark feels he’s part of the conspiracy, it’s that much easier to victimize him. The mark feels like the predator and not the prey, and so he lets his guard down around the actual villain picking his pocket. Trump does this to his followers over and over again, and they always fall for it. Even the Capitol insurrection is a good example. Trump convinced the rioters that they were his partners in the attempted coup. In reality, they were his patsies, set up to take the fall while he hid away in the White House.
With Trump and Biden now near even in the latest polls, and many Americans unenthused — and still undecided — about voting for either of them, Thursday’s debate offers both candidates an opportunity. But it’s not without risks.
It’s likely to be a memorable night if 2020 is any indication. Here’s a look at what happened last time Trump and Biden took the stage together….
Albert Edelfelt, Portrait of the artist’s sister Bertha Edelfelt, 1881
The first round, in September 2020, was by many accounts a disaster. NPR’s Domenico Montanaro called it “maybe the worst presidential debate in American history.”
Trump arrived on the debate stage trailing in the polls and, apparently, jonesing for drama. He interrupted Biden constantly, peppering him with questions and personal slights despite moderator Chris Wallace’s pleas for order.
At one point, while Biden was talking about his late son Beau’s military service, Trump jumped in to attack his other son, Hunter, for his drug use (which Biden managed to seize as a sympathetic moment).
Biden tried in vain to ignore Trump talking over him throughout — but called the then-president a “clown” more than once. At one point he had clearly had enough.
“Will you shut up, man?” he said exasperatedly, as Trump continued accusing him of wanting to pack the Supreme Court. “This is so unpresidential.”
Trump even bulldozed over Wallace, prompting the then-Fox News anchor to declare, “Mr. President, I am the moderator of this debate and I would like you to let me ask my question and then you can answer.”
A bit more on the first “debate”:
Still, a few substantive moments stood out amidst the chaos and crosstalk.
One was when Wallace asked if Trump was willing to condemn white supremacists and tell them to “stand down.”
Trump blamed the “left-wing” instead, but said he was prepared to do so. At that point, both Wallace and Biden urged him to go ahead. Trump asked for a name, and Biden suggested the Proud Boys.
“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Trump said, in what sounded more like a call to action, and quickly became part of the far-right extremist group’s new social media logo.
Trump also repeatedly made baseless claims about the upcoming election being rigged, saying “This is going to be fraud like you’ve never heard.”
When Wallace asked if he would urge his supporters to stay calm during a potentially prolonged period of counting ballots, Trump demurred. He said instead that he was “urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully.”
“If it’s a fair election, I am 100% on board,” he said. “But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that.”
Read the rest at NPR.
The Supreme Court is still releasing decisions. Once again, they have held back the one on Trump’s claim of “presidential immunity.” They announced two decisions today.
The US supreme court has struck down a lower court ruling in the case of Murthy v Missouri, finding that the government’s communications with social media platforms about Covid-19 misinformation did not violate the first amendment. The court’s decision permits the government to call on tech companies to remove falsehoods and establishes boundaries around free speech online.
The court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs had no standing to bring the case against the Biden administration, with conservative justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissenting.
The ruling is a blow to a longstanding Republican-backed effort to equate content moderation with censorship. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which included the founder of a far-right conspiracy website, argued that the government and federal agencies were coercing tech companies into silencing conservatives through demands to take down misinformation about the pandemic.
The US Supreme Court again pared back a public corruption law, this time saying that state and local officials who accept “gratuities” aren’t covered by a federal bribery statute.
The 6-3 ruling by Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Wednesday was the latest in a string of cases cutting the reach of federal corruption laws and prosecutorial discretion to bring charges against government officials.
Woman reading in garden. Ignacio Díaz Olano
In the latest case, Snyder v. United States, the justices said a law which makes it a crime for certain state or local officials to “corruptly” accept anything of value over $5,000 doesn’t reach gratuities paid in recognition of past actions.
The ruling undoes the conviction of former Portage, Indiana, Mayor James Snyder for receiving $13,000 from a trucking company after it was awarded city contracts.
A contrary ruling had the potential to criminalize “commonplace gratuities” like a Dunkin’ Donuts gift card, Chipotle dinner, or tickets to a Hoosiers game, the court said.
The ruling split the justices along ideological lines. Writing for the liberal justices in dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said “Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love.”
The justices’ concern over prosecutorial overreach could have implications for a number of criminal cases over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The justices in Fischer v. United States are considering whether federal prosecutors went too far in charging some defendants with an Enron-era statute prohibiting obstruction of an official proceeding.
Judge Aileen Cannon held another hearing yesterday in her efforts to waste as much time as possible and prevent the stolen documents case from going to trial. Here’s some of what happened:
Nearly two years after the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s effort to suppress the evidence that agents found inside his personal residence and social club appeared to fall flat on Tuesday.
Trump’s attorney, Emil Bove, argued that the search warrant was not detailed enough to survive Fourth Amendment scrutiny.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon pointedly disagreed: “It seems like it is, based on the caselaw that’s been submitted,” she said, minutes before court adjourned.
Though Cannon did not immediately issue a ruling, Trump’s challenge hinges on the “particularity” of the warrant, and her remarks throughout the proceedings left little doubt as to her leanings.
“It’s clearly delineated there to search for documents with classification markings,” she remarked toward the start of the hearing.
In the stolen documents case in Florida, Trump called the special counsel’s motion to stop him from spreading vicious lies about the FBI agents who searched Mar-a-Lago a “naked effort to impose totalitarian censorship of core political speech, under threat of incarceration, in a clear attempt to silence President Trump’s arguments to the American people about the outrageous nature of this investigation and prosecution.” [….]
In Florida, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to bar Trump from accusing the FBI agents who executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago of trying to assassinate him.
The backstory is that on May 21, Trump claimed to have been “shown Reports” that President Biden “AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE” back in August 2022 when it raided the private club where he was storing stolen government documents.
Sleeping Woman with a Book, by Ferdinand Max Bredt
In fact, the “Report” was boilerplate language from the FBI’s operations order for the warrant, attached as an exhibit to his own motion to suppress the evidence kicked up on that raid. The FBI took great care to execute the warrant at a time when the club was shuttered for the season and there was no prospect that the former president and his family would be there. Nevertheless, Trump and his MAGA henchmen spent several news cycles claiming that President Biden had sent in agents “locked and loaded” ready to shoot him.
Those agents will necessarily be witnesses at the trial (should it ever happen), and yet Trump is falsely accusing them of attempted murder. Two of them were already publicly outed back in 2022 when someone gave the unredacted warrant to Breitbart and a former Trump aide, both of whom published it with the agents’ signatures visible.
After the agents were doxxed, they and their families were threatened and harassed, which influenced Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart’s decision to keep under seal parts of the affidavit in support of the warrant.
“Given the public notoriety and controversy about this search, it is likely that even witnesses who are not expressly named in the Affidavit would be quickly and broadly identified over social media and other communication channels, which could lead to them being harassed and intimidated,” he wrote.
Judge Cannon doesn’t seem to think this is a big deal.
Trump insists that his lies about the FBI are “core political speech” protected by the First Amendment. He also deliberately distorts the “heckler’s veto,” as he has done many times before, claiming that he cannot be silenced to prevent foreseeable, violent acts by his supporters. But as the DC Circuit wrote in its order upholding the gag order in the election interference case, “That doctrine prohibits restraining speech on the grounds that it ‘might offend a hostile mob’ hearing the message.” [….]
The DC Circuit judges noted that the trial judge need not find that the defendant’s statements had led to violent attacks in this case, they could infer the danger from attacks on everyone from Atlanta poll workers, to grand jurors in Fulton County, to the jury foreperson doxxed in the Roger Stone case. Applying the standard set out by the Supreme Court in Gentile v. State Bar of Nevada, the judges blessed the gag order based on a finding that Trump’s attacks on witnesses, jurors, and court staff posed a “substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing” the proceedings.
But that may not matter to Judge Aileen Cannon, who showed marked hostility to this (and every other) prosecutorial motion at a hearing Monday in Fort Pierce, where she waved away the ample record of Trump endangering witnesses and law enforcement, as well as an exhibit showing threats to FBI agents by a man who was killed in an attempted attack on an FBI building in Cincinnati just days after the warrant on Mar-a-Lago was executed.
“There still needs to be a factual connection between A and B,” the judge said, rebuffing Assistant US Attorney David Harbach’s efforts to make the government’s case.
“Mr. Harbach, I don’t appreciate your tone,” she fumed in response to the complaint that she wasn’t letting the government articulate its position, according to Just Security’s Adam Klasfeld, who was in the courtroom. “I expect decorum in this courtroom at all times. If you cannot do that, I’m sure one of your colleagues can take up this motion.” [….]
It seems highly unlikely that Cannon will do anything to curb Trump’s speech, until someone else gets hurt — and, if and when that happens, she will blame the government for failing to properly argue in favor of the gag order.
On Monday night, following Trump’s latest disingenuous contention—that the FBI agents who seized and reviewed the contents of boxes upon boxes of sensitive materials stored at Mar-a-Lago “failed to maintain” the exact order of the documents within, which Trump now claims could somehow exonerate him—government lawyers filed a scathing response letting the air out of Trump’s contentions.
Nikolai Bekker Portrait of Countess Maria Hilarionovna Worontsov-Dachkova (1919).
Far from a neatly ordered system under which Trump, a notorious pack rat, maintained a precise inventory of important documents, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, along with prosecutors Jay Bratt and David Harbach, noted the “cluttered collection of keepsakes,” which “traveled from one readily accessible location to another” around the Palm Beach, Florida club.
“[T]his is not a case where reams of identically-sized documents were stacked neatly in file folders or redwelds, arrayed perfectly within a box,” the filing states. “To anyone other than Trump, the boxes had no apparent organization whatsoever.”
Trump kept highly guarded secrets in boxes with “personally chosen keepsakes of various sizes and shapes from his presidency—newspapers, thank you notes, Christmas ornaments, magazines, clothing, and photographs of himself and others,” the government’s filing goes on.
“After they landed in stacks in the storage room, several boxes fell and splayed their contents on the floor; and boxes were moved to Trump’s residence on more than one occasion so he could review and pick through them,” the filing continues. “Against this backdrop of the haphazard manner in which Trump chose to maintain his boxes, he now claims that the precise order of the items within the boxes when they left the White House was critical to his defense, and, what’s more, that FBI agents executing the search warrant in August 2022 should have known that.”
Smith, Bratt, and Harbach included a slew of exhibits to back up their position, with numerous previously unseen pictures of Trump’s decidedly chaotic storage methods. One shows assorted wadded-up golf shirts side-by-side with a folder marked “CONFIDENTIAL.” Another shows extremely sensitive defense-related documents carelessly stacked up on the floor beside cases of Diet Coke, a Hermes tie box, and a “Save America” cap, several toppled boxes with papers, binders, and folders spilling out, and a box containing a Christmas pillow and a random length of bubble wrap, beneath which, as national security analyst and writer Marcy Wheeler pointed out, at least one document prosecutors say was related to America’s nuclear weapons program.
In one exhibit, Smith & Co. provide a new photo of a storage closet at Mar-a-Lago where the contents of at least five upturned bankers boxes can be seen spilling out onto the floor. Several suit jackets in plastic dry cleaning bags hang from a rack above them, a Gibson guitar case leans against the wall, and what appears to be a piece of rococo plaster molding teeters atop a cardboard box nearby. According to the indictment, one of the boxes seen here contained a 2019 document marked “SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY,” which denotes the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.
Read more and see photos at the Daily Beast link.
This post is getting really long, so I’m going going to end there. I’ll add a few more links in the comment thread. Have a great day, everyone!!
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Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Today, Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries put to rest a story at the Washington Post yesterday. I would like to think this will stop all the headlines out there speculating when and if President Biden will give up his bid for his second term.
Another one about J.D. This is from the Independent. “I’m from the same place as JD Vance, and there’s nothing to celebrate now that he’s Trump’s VP. We are both Appalachians, with eerily similar working-class backgrounds which JD Vance wrote about in his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy. Yet, says Skylar Baker-Jordan, our views — and our reactions to this attempted assassination — couldn’t be more different.”
So the man they’re hailing as being just a good old boy is really just another elite enthralled by bigger elites. That’s what reality television has done with political reality. It’s made an entire group of people believe that a staged, scripted, false narrative wrapped up in a box with reality printed on it must be true. Let me show you some data rather than speculation. This is from Newsweek. This was published two days ago. The data comes before that awful RNC ho-down. “Donald Trump’s Chances of Winning Election Are Declining.” This comes from who once was a candidate and has worked campaign since High School. Don’t trust polls too far away from Election Day!
You would think a few folks would be reading them just to notice the trend. But, nope. Not with a big dose of Potomac Fever going on. So this one from The Daily Beast has me seething. It’s written by Jake Lahut. “Trump’s Plan to Slam Dems for Their ‘Coup’ Against Biden: Campaign, No matter who may replace Biden, the Trump camp plans to attack Democrats for an unruly ouster of their nominee.” Notice how we get two for one here.
And AOC says the quiet part out loud. We knew this. “AOC goes live on Instagram saying many who want Joe Biden to drop out of race also want to remove Kamala. ‘A lot of them are not just interested in removing the president. They are interested in removing the whole ticket,’ congresswoman says.” This is from the Independent.
One last story that really shows what the ramping up of Wipipo privilege has done to our society. This is from CNN. “‘Treated like a convict’: NFL legend Terrell Davis describes getting handcuffed on a plane near his kids after asking for ice.” This story is reported by Holly Yan.
All these corrupt Republican Judges seem to lead right back to Leonard Leo, don’t they? Something is very rotten here. Marcie of Empty Wheel reads the 93 pages, so we don’t need to.
So, back to Donald and his surprising recovery from a shooting that killed one and critically injured two. So my Nancy Drew senses started tingling when I saw how composed Donald was after the shooting; he was more worried about getting his shoes than leaving the scene. Posing for pictures all along the way. PB first contacted me with this bit.
And then there’s good old Alex Jones, the father of seeing everything as staged with crisis actors. Listen to this. It’s from Patriot Takes. This is a conversation with Ivan Raiklin, who calls himself Trump’s Secretary of Retribution. Check him out on TNR: “Trump Ally Exposed for Horrific Hit List of Political Enemies. Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed “secretary of retribution” is even more bloodthirsty than the former president.” He’s an absolute skinhead. Both BB and I have posted on him before. Please follow the link to Patriot Takes and watch him talk. It’s bone-chilling. BB found this one.
There’s no way to blame Biden for the shooter, given his personal history as a gun-toting right-wing Republican, either. “FBI probing motives, the background of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the Western Pa. gunman behind Donald Trump assassination attempt. Former classmates described Crooks as politically conservative and a “loner.” Authorities believe the AR-15-style rifle he used belonged to his father.” This is from the Philadelphia Inquirer,
Here are some additional things I have questions about. Most of these are based on photography at the scene. For example, Kim Wexler’s Ponytail shows this TikTok of a New Angle of Trump at Rally shooting. It basically shows either Donald’s bodyguards or the Secret Service moving photographers close to the stairs. Perhaps for a better shot of the exit act? The TikTok comes from
One of the most questionable things is that photos of Trump show him looking in the direction of the building where the shooter was. This is precisely when he turned his head to point to his whiteboard. At that point, local police went to the roof, saw him, and went back down the stairs. There was also a hesitation by the Secret Service Sniper to shoot him. Acyn, the Senior Digital Editor for MeidasTouch.com, captured this on CSPN. He’s looking directly at the shooter and then angling towards the White Board. The shooter was only about 165ish feet away from Donald. That’s definitely a distance that a good sniper could handle.
Some of the weirdest Republican attacks have been on Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who is a 27-year-old veteran of the force. She is being called a DEI hire by really nasty Republican pols. She is the second woman to have the office. Of course, these black faces and the woman who heads the agency are suspected of being in a “deep state.” I won’t go deeper into any of these cringeworthy moments.
Trump has argued that his decision to transmit classified documents to his Florida home as he prepared to leave the presidency should be treated as an “official act” and be removed from special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump for allegedly hoarding national security secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Now, he says, the Supreme Court’s ruling requires that the case be put on hold until the immunity issue is resolved.
Bannon is in jail right now, serving time for contempt of Congress. The New Republic‘s Parker Malloy has a good point here. “Why Does the Media Insist on Helping Steve Bannon Act the Martyr? NBC and ABC snagged pre-prison interviews with the far-right globalist. But to what end? They became tools in his propaganda machine.” The press just falls right in line by normalizing this behavior.
Also, from TNR is this headline about the black man running for governor on the insanity platform. “MAGA Gov Candidate’s Ugly, Hateful Rant: “Some Folks Need Killing!” Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina, has a long history of incendiary comments. But he may have topped himself this time.” 
If you want a real shock, go see The Economist Cover Picture today with the heading “No way to Run a Country.” The attached story is “Biden Must Withdraw.” This is from a country where the General Election just kicked the Conservative PM (a hedge fund manager) and replaced him with a Human Rights Lawyer and member of the Labour Party. Fourteen years of Conservative Rule has just been tossed for something different. Of course, CNN has joined the swiftboating effort. This is from Dr. Sanjay Gupta at CNN. “It’s time for President Biden to undergo detailed cognitive and neurological testing and share his results.”
So, I fully admit to being depressed and worried. I know that BB stopped her NYT subscription. I hope John Buss doesn’t mind. I shared this bit he posted to his FaceBook about canceling his. I seriously worry about him in North Carolina, too. None of us in the old Confederate States are safe right now.
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