Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: March 16, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, Cats, caturday, Donald Trump | Tags: "absolute immunity", Alvin Bragg, Benjamin Netanyahu, Chuck Schumer, E. Jean Carroll, Elon Musk, Fani Willis, Gaza, israel, Jared Kushner, Judge Scott McAfee, Letitia James, Mike Pence, SpaceX, Stormy Daniels, Supreme Court, Tommy Tuberville | 2 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

Walter Chandoha plays with one of his subjects at his home studio in 1955.

Today I’m featuring cat photos by Walter Chandoha. Chandoha was a famous photographer of animals–mostly cats. You can read about him and see more photos in this 2019 New York Times obituary by Richard Sandomir: Walter Chandoha, Photographer Whose Specialty Was Cats, Dies at 98.

Taking pictures of cats soon began to look like a more fulfilling career path than the one in advertising that Mr. Chandoha had planned while attending New York University, after serving in World War II. So, after graduating, he turned to freelance photography for a living — and, by the mid-1950s, he had begun a long period as the dominant commercial cat photographer of his era.

“Walter Chandoha’s cat models, shown on this page, must be alert, graceful and beautiful,” read a newspaper ad in 1956 for a cat food brand that featured his photos. “To keep them that way, Mr. Chandoha feeds them Puss ‘n Boots because Puss ‘n Boots is good nutrition.”

On a winter’s evening in 1949, Walter Chandoha was walking to his three-room apartment in Astoria, Queens, when he spotted an abandoned gray kitten shivering in the snow. He put it in a pocket of his Army coat and brought it home to his wife, Maria.

The kitten’s antics — racing through the apartment each night as if possessed, shadowboxing with his image in a mirror — inspired the couple to name him Loco. Mr. Chandoha (pronounced shan-DOE-uh) was moved to photograph Loco and quickly sold the pictures to newspapers and magazines around the world.

By the time he died, on Jan. 11, Mr. Chandoha had taken some 90,000 cat photos, nearly all before cats had become viral darlings of social media. He was 98.

Now, on to the day’s news:

It’s becoming very clear that the courts are not going to protect us from a possible Trump dictatorship. Thank goodness for E. Jean Carroll and NY AG Letitia James. At least two New York courts have hit Trump where it hurts–his finances. But the two federal cases seem stalled and the Georgia case just took a bit hit. Those three prosecutions of Trump are unlikely to take place before the election now. We are going to have to defeat him at the ballot box.

At The New Republic, Michael Tomasky writes: We Have to Beat Donald Trump. Clearly, the Broken Legal System Won’t.

Judge Scott McAfee has ruled that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis can stay on the case against Donald Trump in that jurisdiction, provided that Nathan Wade, the prosecutor on the case with whom she had a relationship, withdraws. I guess we count that a win, although to be honest, Willis has so damaged herself by her colossally terrible judgment that it probably would have been better if she were out of the picture.

Cats play together in 1962.

The other problem with Willis’s scandal is how it slowed the case down, giving Trump’s lawyers a chance to make this not about the defendant but about her—and another chance to delay, delay, delay.

Meanwhile, Thursday, down in Florida, we saw Trumpy Judge Aileen Cannon issue yet another ruling in the classified documents case that helps Trump. She didn’t support Trump’s lawyers’ motion to dismiss the case, but she kicked the can down the road in a way that’s very helpful to Trump. MSNBC analyst Andrew Weissmann even called it the “worst possible outcome” for the government. “If the judge had simply said, ‘I agree with Donald Trump, and I find that this is vague, and I’m dismissing it,’ the government could have appealed it to the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, as they have done twice before and won twice before,” Weissmann said. “But she also did not want to rule in favor of the government. So what she did is said, ‘Why don’t you bring this up later? I think there’s some real issues here.’”

Also this week, in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case against Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg shocked us all by asking for a 30-day delay in the trial, which was scheduled to start March 25. Trump’s lawyers had requested a 90-day delay. Bragg conceded that some delay was appropriate.

Why? It looks like it’s the fault of federal prosecutors. Bragg’s office requested certain documents a while ago from the Southern District of New York, and it shared them with Trump’s lawyers during the discovery process. Trump’s lawyers suspected there was more, especially relating to Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, so they subpoenaed the SDNY. That happened in January. It was only earlier this month that the Southern District turned over all the documents….

It’s more than fair to ask: Why did the Southern District take so long to produce these documents? And we must also ask this: Did Merrick Garland know his prosecutors were taking so long to hand over documents, and thus playing into Trump’s hands? And if he knew, did he do anything about it?

And then there’s the most significant case of all–the one about Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Finally, let’s recall the status of the fourth criminal case against Trump, the biggest one, at least to my mind—the January 6 insurrection case. On that one, we’re basically waiting on the Supreme Court, which announced on February 28 that it would hear arguments in Trump’s claim of complete immunity but set the argument date for April 25. The high court could easily take another month—or even two—to hand down its decision after that, meaning that this crucial trial, about whether a sitting president initiated an insurrection against the government of the United States, may not happen before Election Day.

How in the world did all this happen? A few weeks ago, it looked like the wheels of justice were finally turning, catching up on a man who has flouted and broken laws not only during his presidency but for his entire adult life,

going back to when he and his father wouldn’t rent apartments to Black people in Queens. There was the judgment in the E. Jean Carroll case. And then the whopping penalty in the New York attorney general’s case against the Trump Organization.

But this week, it looks like everything is falling apart.

An American shorthair in 1966.

We can’t count on the courts. They move slowly and they favor the rich and powerful. We can’t count on the media either. They seem to favor another Trump presidency because the bosses believe the insanity and chaos would be good for their bottom line.

CNN on the Fani Willis case:

Another problem comes from MAGA threats. MSBNC’s Kyle Griffin wrote on Twitter that

“Judge Scott McAfee had written his order on Willis and Wade early last week, according to NBC News, but because he had been receiving threats, he waited until today to make it public in order to allow for proper security to be in place for him and his family.”

At NBC, Rebecca Shabad, Adam Reiss and Tom Winter write about the status of the Stormy Daniels election interference case: Trump hush money trial postponed until mid-April, judge rules.

The trial in the New York hush money case against former President Donald Trump has been delayed until the middle of April, Judge Juan Merchan ruled Friday.

Merchan said the trial — originally scheduled to begin March 25 — would be pushed back 30 days from Friday.

He also scheduled a hearing for the trial’s initial start date, to discuss a motion filed by Trump’s attorneys regarding document production in the case.

Merchan said he will set a new trial date “if necessary” when he rules on that motion, meaning it’s possible the trial proceedings could be delayed beyond the middle of next month.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had previously said he would support the trial being delayed at least 30 days, into late April. Trump’s legal team requested that it be postponed 90 days.

Bragg said Thursday that Trump’s request to delay the trial was the result of the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan providing over 100,000 pages of discovery, which Bragg said were “largely irrelevant to the subject matter of this case.” The U.S. Attorney’s Office provided an additional 15,000 pages of discovery on Friday, which Bragg’s office said were also “likely to be unrelated to the subject matter of this case.”

The documents relate to Michael Cohen’s guilty plea in 2018 to numerous criminal charges, including making secret payments to women who claimed they had affairs with Trump, lying to Congress about Trump’s business dealings with Russia and failing to report millions of dollars in income.

Echoing MIchael Tomasky, WTF is going on with the Southern District and the DOJ. Are there MAGA people still in place that are helping Trump delay justice?

This 1955 photo is one of Walter Chandoha’s most famous shots. “My daughter Paula and the kitten both ‘smiled’ for the camera at the same time. … But the cat’s not smiling, he’s meowing.”

Speaking of the rich and powerful, why is Elon Musk still getting federal contracts after his support for Nazis and white supremacists and his support for Russia’s war against Ukraine?

Joey Roulette and Marisa Taylor at Reuters: Exclusive: Musk’s SpaceX is building spy satellite network for US intelligence agency, sources say.

SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. intelligence agency, five sources familiar with the program said, demonstrating deepening ties between billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s space company and national security agencies.

The network is being built by SpaceX’s Starshield business unit under a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2021 with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an intelligence agency that manages spy satellites, the sources said.

The plans show the extent of SpaceX’s involvement in U.S. intelligence and military projects and illustrate a deeper Pentagon investment into vast, low-Earth orbiting satellite systems aimed at supporting ground forces.

If successful, the sources said the program would significantly advance the ability of the U.S. government and military to quickly spot potential targets almost anywhere on the globe.

The contract signals growing trust by the intelligence establishment of a company whose owner has clashed with the Biden administration and sparked controversy, opens new tab over the use of Starlink satellite connectivity in the Ukraine war, the sources said.

The Wall Street Journal reported, opens new tab in February the existence of a $1.8 billion classified Starshield contract with an unknown intelligence agency without detailing the purposes of the program.

Reuters reporting discloses for the first time that the SpaceX contract is for a powerful new spy system with hundreds of satellites bearing Earth-imaging capabilities that can operate as a swarm in low orbits, and that the spy agency that Musk’s company is working with is the NRO.

Will Musk have access to this program, as he does with Starlink? How do we know he won’t share information with Russia? Am I an idiot to ask that?

Chandoha’s backlighting technique dramatizes the defensive posture of a kitten seeing a dog in 1957.

Another tale of the rich and powerful from Eric Lipton, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman at The New York Times: Kushner Developing Deals Overseas Even as His Father-in-Law Runs for President.

Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald J. Trump, confirmed on Friday that he was closing in on major real estate deals in Albania and Serbia, the latest example of the former president’s family doing business abroad even as Mr. Trump seeks to return to the White House.

Mr. Kushner’s plans in the Balkans appear to have come about in part through relationships built while Mr. Trump was in office. Mr. Kushner, who was a senior White House official, said he had been working on the deals with Richard Grenell, who served briefly as acting director of national intelligence under Mr. Trump and also as ambassador to Germany and special envoy to the Balkans.

One of the proposed projects would be the development of an island off the coast of Albania into a luxury tourist destination.

A second — with a planned luxury hotel and 1,500 residential units and a museum — is in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, at the site of the long-vacant former headquarters of the Yugoslav Army destroyed in 1999 by the NATO bombings, according to a member of Parliament in Serbia and Mr. Kushner’s company.

These first two projects both involve land now controlled by the governments, meaning a deal would have to be finalized with foreign governments.

A third project, also in Albania, would be built on the Zvërnec peninsula, a 1,000-acre coastal area in the south of Albania that is part of the resort community known as Vlorë, where several hotels and hundreds of villas would be built, according to the plan.

Mr. Kushner’s participation would be through his investment firm, Affinity Partners, which has $2 billion in funding from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, among other foreign investors. In a statement, an official with Affinity Partners said it had not been determined whether the Saudi funds might be a part of any project Mr. Kushner is considering in the Balkans.

How does Kushner get away with this? Why aren’t Congressional Democrats investigating him, even if the DOJ is too busy or corrupt? I don’t get it.

Commentary from Carl Gibson at Raw Story: ‘Corrupt’: Jared Kushner’s overseas business deals under fire as Trump runs for president.

Former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner (who was also a senior adviser in his White House) has been ramping up his overseas business dealings undeterred by the optics of doing so in the midst of his father-in-law’s presidential campaign.

A Friday report in the New York Times scrutinized Kushner’s real estate deals in Balkan countries of Albania and Serbia, in which he stands to reap significant financial benefits once they’re completed. The Times reported that Kushner has been working with Richard Grenell, who was Trump’s former acting Director of National Intelligence who also served as German ambassador and a special envoy to the Balkans.

An American shorthair squeezes into a glass in 1960.

Notably, two of the three projects Kushner is aiming to finalize this year involve the transfer of land currently owned by Albania and Serbia, meaning a member of the president’s immediate family (Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka) stands to receive money directly from foreign governments. According to the Times, the first project involves redeveloping an island off the Albanian coast into a high-end luxury resort, and the second would be a 1,500-unit apartment building, museum and luxury hotel in the Serbian capital city of Belgrade. The third — which doesn’t involve a direct land acquisition from a foreign government — is a planned resort development in coastal southern Albania.

Kushner has been capitalizing on his foreign connections since leaving the White House. After Kushner’s departure became official, he launched his investment firm, Affinity Partners, which received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund as well as from other foreign business interests in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

The former president’s son-in-law worked closely with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin-Salman while he was in the White House, as Trump frequently put him in the driver’s seat in negotiations with Middle Eastern countries. In 2018, bin-Salman was accused of playing a direct role in the dismemberment and murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi (President Joe Biden made it clear in 2022 that the Saudi crown prince was immune from any legal action in relation to Khashoggi’s assassination)….

Meanwhile, Republicans continue to investigate Biden’s son, Hunter, for his own foreign business deals even as Kushner plows ahead in the Balkans. House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) and House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) both maintain that the president improperly influenced foreign governments in his son’s favor, though their respective investigations have yet to yield any smoking gun evidence.

In Israel-Hamas war news, Senator Chuck Schumer spoke out this week about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Jonathan Weisman at The New York Times: A Watershed Moment for the Politics of Israel, Courtesy of Chuck Schumer.

Over 44 painstakingly scripted minutes on the floor of the Senate on Thursday, the majority leader, Chuck Schumer, spoke of his Jewish identity, his love for the State of Israel, his horror at the wanton slaughter of Israelis on Oct. 7 and his views on the apportionment of blame for the carnage in Gaza, saying that it first and foremost lay with the terrorists of Hamas.

Then Mr. Schumer, a New York Democrat and the highest-ranking elected Jew in American history, said Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was an impediment to peace, and called for new elections in the world’s only Jewish state.

The opposition was not nearly so painstaking.

Within minutes, the House Republican leadership demanded an apology. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname, declared: “Make no mistake — the Democratic Party doesn’t have an anti-Bibi problem. It has an anti-Israel problem.” And the Republican Jewish Coalition proclaimed that “the most powerful Democrat in Congress knifed the Jewish state in the back.”

Walter Chandoha, 1962

The months that have followed the slaughter of Oct. 7 and the ensuing, calamitously deadly war in Gaza have been excruciating for American Jews, caught between a tradition of liberalism that has dominated much of Jewish politics and an anti-Israel response from the political left that has left many feeling isolated and, at times, persecuted.

But Mr. Schumer’s speech was potentially a watershed moment in a much longer political process, pursued initially by Republicans but joined recently by left-wing Democrats — to turn Israel into a partisan issue. Republicans, as they see it, would be the party of Israeli supporters. Democrats, as the rising left would have it, would be the party of Palestine

At the root of that divide is a fundamental question: Is support for the Jewish State separable from the support of Israel’s democratically elected government? For years, Republicans have said no. Increasingly, the Democratic left agrees but from a different perspective: Israel is bad, regardless of who governs it.

“The pressure — electoral, social, cultural — on American Jews right now to declare themselves” on the justice of the war in Gaza and on the legitimacy of the Israeli prime minister has been “unrelenting, unforgiving and sometimes downright vicious,” said David Wolpe, a prominent rabbi in Los Angeles and a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School.

Mr. Schumer’s speech and the ensuing partisan response have made that pressure even more intense.

“It’s impossible to understate the seismic event this was,” said Matthew Brooks, the longtime chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who made it clear that the group would use the speech to drive Jewish voters to the G.O.P.

Finally Friday Reads: Bye Bye Wade!

Posted: March 15, 2024 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: just because | Tags: @repeat1968, Are you better off without the Covid-19 disaster?, Elise Stefanik, Fulton County DA Fani Willis, John Buss, Manhattan DA, SCOTUS and social media, TikTok, tRump lies lies lies | 1 Comment

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

It’s another busy news week and Friday. The most consequential headline this morning is on the decision of Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee on the “appearance of impropriety” brought about by Willis’ romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade. This analysis is from NBC News.

A Georgia judge ruled Fridaythat Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should not be disqualified from prosecuting the racketeering case against former President Donald Trump and several co-defendants — with one major condition.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee found the “appearance of impropriety” brought about by Willis’ romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade should result in either Willis and her office leaving the case — or just Wade, whom she’d appointed to head the case.

The choice is likely to be an easy one: If Willis were to remove herself, the case would come to a halt, but having Wade leave will ensure the case continues without further delay.

The judge said the prosecution “cannot proceed” until Willis makes a decision.

Trump attorney Steve Sadow said in a statement that, “While respecting the Court’s decision, we believe that the Court did not afford appropriate significance to the prosecutorial misconduct of Willis and Wade.”

“We will use all legal options available as we continue to fight to end this case, which should never have been brought in the first place,” he added.

Willis’s office did not immediately comment on the ruling.The judge found there was no “actual conflict” brought about by the relationship, a finding that would have required Willis to be disqualified. “Without sufficient evidence that the District Attorney acquired a personal stake in the prosecution, or that her financial arrangements had any impact on the case, the Defendants’ claims of an actual conflict must be denied,” the judge wrote.

“This finding is by no means an indication that the Court condones this tremendous lapse in judgment or the unprofessional manner of the District Attorney’s testimony during the evidentiary hearing. Rather, it is the undersigned’s opinion that Georgia law does not permit the finding of an actual conflict for simply making bad choices — even repeatedly — and it is the trial court’s duty to confine itself to the relevant issues and applicable law properly brought before it,” he added.

The judge did, however, also find “the prosecution is encumbered by an appearance of impropriety.”

“As the case moves forward, reasonable members of the public could easily be left to wonder whether the financial exchanges have continued resulting in some form of benefit to the District Attorney, or even whether the romantic relationship has resumed,” he wrote. “As long as Wade remains on the case, this unnecessary perception will persist.”

The Manhattan D.A. has joined the list of Judiciary officials letting Trump delay trials on frivolous and specious arguments. This is from the New York Times. “As Trump Seeks Trial Delay, N.Y. Prosecutors Offer 30-Day Postponement. The Manhattan district attorney’s proposal came in response to Donald J. Trump’s request for a 90-day delay to allow his lawyers time to review a new batch of records.”

Less than two weeks before Donald J. Trump is set to go on trial on criminal charges in Manhattan, the prosecutors who brought the case proposed a delay of up to 30 days, a startling development in the first prosecution of a former American president.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which accused Mr. Trump of covering up a sex scandal during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, said the delay would give Mr. Trump’s lawyers time to review a new batch of records. The office sought the records more than a year ago, but only recently received them from federal prosecutors, who years ago investigated the hush-money payments at the center of the case.

In response to the records — tens of thousands of pages of them — Mr. Trump’s lawyers requested that the trial be delayed 90 days. Although the former president frequently requests such delays, prosecutors consenting to any postponement makes one far more likely.

Mr. Trump, who clinched the Republican presidential nomination for the third time this week, faces four criminal trials and several civil lawsuits. The Manhattan case had been the only one of the four criminal cases not mired in delays.

“Mired in delays” is the understatement of the year-to-date. Meanwhile, Trump gets more incoherent by the day. His appearance is more startling than usual. Susan B. Glasser of The New Yorker has this analysis. “I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You. The ex-President is building a whole new edifice of lies for 2024.”

And yet, like so much about Trump’s 2024 campaign, this insane oration was largely overlooked and under-covered, the flood of lies and B.S. seen as old news from a candidate whose greatest political success has been to acclimate a large swath of the population to his ever more dangerous alternate reality. No wonder Biden, trapped in a real world of real problems that defy easy solutions, is struggling to defeat him.

This is partly a category error. Though we persist in treating the 2024 election as a race between an incumbent and a challenger, it is not that so much as a contest between two incumbents: Biden, the actual President, and Trump, the forever-President of Red America’s fever dreams. But Trump, while he presents himself as the country’s rightful leader, gets nothing like the intense scrutiny for his speeches that is now focussed on the current occupant of the Oval Office. The norms and traditions that Trump is intent on smashing are, once again, benefitting him.

Consider the enormous buildup before, and wall-to-wall coverage of, Biden’s annual address to Congress. It was big news when the President called out his opponent in unusually scathing terms, referring thirteen times in his prepared text to “my predecessor” in what was, understandably, seen as a break with tradition. Republican commentators grumbled about the sharply partisan tone of the President’s remarks and the loud decibel in which he delivered them; Democrats essentially celebrated those same qualities.

Imagine if, instead, the two speeches had been covered side by side. Biden’s barbed references to Trump were all about the former President’s offenses to American democracy. He called out Trump’s 2024 campaign of “resentment, revenge, and retribution” and the “chaos” unleashed by the Trump-majority Supreme Court when it threw out the decades-old precedent of Roe v. Wade. In reference to a recent quote from the former President, in which Trump suggested that Americans should just “get over it” when it comes to gun violence, Biden retorted, “I say: Stop it, stop it, stop it!” His sharpest words for Trump came in response to the ex-President’s public invitation to Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to nato countries that don’t spend what Trump wants them to on defense—a line that Biden condemned as “outrageous,” “dangerous,” and “unacceptable.”

Trump’s speech made little effort to draw substantive contrasts with Biden. Instead, the Washington Post counted nearly five dozen references to Biden in the course of the Georgia rally, almost all of them epithets drawn from the Trump marketing playbook for how to rip down an opponent—words like “angry,” “corrupt,” “crooked,” “flailing,” “incompetent,” “stupid,” and “weak.” Trump is, always and forever, a puerile bully, stuck perpetually on the fifth-grade playground. But the politics of personal insult has worked so well for Trump that he is, naturally, doubling down on it in 2024. In fact, one of the clips from Trump’s speech on Saturday which got the most coverage was his mockery of Biden’s stutter: a churlish—and, no doubt, premeditated—slur.

Trump still is unhinged when it comes to Hillary Clinton. This analysis was written by Phillip Bump for the Washington Post. “Trump goes on a weird riff about acid — again. The former president claimed that Hillary Clinton destroyed some emails with acid, an assertion that is not only untrue but has been debunked countless times.”

For his interview with Newsmax’s Greg Kelly, Donald Trump didn’t stray far from home. The two sat down in uncomfortable-looking, formal chairs in one of Mar-a-Lago’s self-consciously ornate rooms for a discussion about how inept President Biden is.

“We have a man that can’t talk,” Trump said of Biden. “He can’t negotiate. He doesn’t know he’s alive.” As a result, the former president concluded, “this is a very dangerous time for our country.”

All of this came shortly after Trump claimed that Hillary Clinton had destroyed some emails with acid — an assertion that is not only untrue but has also been debunked countless times over the past eight years. But it’s still lodged in his brain, somehow, and he is unable or unwilling to dislodge it.

Because this claim is so old and because it has been debunked so many times (for example), we’ll just run through this quickly. In August 2016, after House Republicans investigating Clinton had stumbled onto her use of a private email server, former South Carolina congressman (and current Fox News host) Trey Gowdy announced that Clinton’s team had used free software called BleachBit to erase a hard drive that once contained her emails. (Messages determined by her attorneys to pertain to her government work had already been turned over.)

…

In his most recent telling, the claim is very specific. Clinton used “acid testing,” or, I guess, “essentially acid that will destroy everything within 10 miles.” This is very Trumpian, the effort to take a minor detail and inflate it to apocalyptic proportions. Not only has debunking this claim not had an apparent effect, he is now so used to making this nonsensical assertion that he feels like the baseline misinformation isn’t enough for his audience.

This is common behavior from Trump, certainly, in the abstract and the specific example. But it is more fraught now than it used to be, given the extent to which Trump and his allies have focused on mental sharpness as a necessary qualification for the presidency. Americans are asked — as Trump endeavors in his conversation with Kelly — to view Biden as muddled and addled.

That has triggered some blowback, including from Biden’s campaign team, focused on elevating moments in which Trump himself seems to be confused. Just this week, Democratic lawmakers responded to criticism of Biden’s memory by compiling clips showing Trump misspeaking or misidentifying people.

Meanwhile, the TikTok and social media battle continues. We have a Supreme Court Decision plus an interest by MAGA cultists to buy TikTok to use as a propaganda tool. NBC News reports on the latest SCOTUS foray into social media control. “In shadow of Trump tweets, Supreme Court outlines when officials can be sued for social media use. Former President Donald Trump’s frequent use of Twitter lurked in the background as the justices weighed whether an official’s online activities can constitute government action.” This analysis is written by Lawrence Hurley.

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that members of the public in some circumstances can sue public officials for blocking them on social media platforms, deciding a pair of cases against the backdrop of former President Donald Trump’s contentious and colorful use of Twitter.

The court ruled unanimously that officials can be deemed “state actors” when making use of social media and can therefore face litigation if they block or mute a member of the public.

In the two cases before the justices, they ruled that disputes involving a school board member in Southern California and a city manager in Michigan should be sent back to lower courts for the new legal test to be applied.

In a ruling written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court acknowledged that it “can be difficult to tell whether the speech is official or private” because of how social media accounts are used.

The court held that conduct on social media can be viewed as a state action when the official in question “possessed actual authority to speak on the state’s behalf” and “purported to exercise that authority.”

While the officials in both cases have low profiles, the ruling will apply to all public officials who use social media to engage with the public.

During October’s oral argument, Trump’s use of Twitter — before it was renamed X — was frequently mentioned as the justices considered the practical implications.

The cases raised the question of whether public officials’ posts and other social media activity constitute part of their governmental functions. In ruling that it can, the court found that blocking someone from following an official constitutes a government action that could give rise to a constitutional claim.

But the court made it clear that conditions have to be met for a claim to move forward, with Barrett noting that government officials are also “private citizens with their own constitutional rights.”

Determining whether a claim can move forward is not based simply on whether the person is a government official, but on the substance of the conduct in question, she added.

Factors such as whether the account is marked as official and the official is invoking his or her legal authority in making a formal announcement can be taken into account, Barrett said.

“In some circumstances, the post’s content and function might make the plaintiff’s argument a slam dunk,” she added

The TikTok story just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

It appears MAGA billionaires want to buy it and turn it into a propaganda outlet. https://t.co/XLRDatcYof

— Dr. Kat PhD. … not your kiddo, buddy🇺🇦🌻 (@Dakinikat) March 15, 2024

The Washington Examiner had this screaming Op-Ed today by someone named Jeremiah Poff. “TikTok needs a conservative US buyer.” Yup, just what we need; more Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk to create a more violent and unhinged right wing.

The prospect of TikTok needing a U.S. buyer increased this week after the House of Representatives passed a bill that would require the social media app’s parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the app or face a ban.

On a 352-65 vote on Wednesday, the House showed unusual bipartisanship and passed a bill that would force the app to decouple from China or be banned in the United States. The app’s connection to the Chinese Communist Party has raised serious national security concerns that have motivated the legislative action.

While the bill’s fate is uncertain in the Senate despite President Joe Biden pledging to sign it, there needs to be some consideration about what will happen to the app if the bill becomes law and TikTok is sold to a U.S. investor.

Social media companies such as Meta and Google are dominated by the Left. As was evidenced by the 2020 election, they have a sizable influence on what content people see and their political perceptions. A similar concern was obvious with Twitter until it was bought by Elon Musk and rebranded as X.

TikTok has an enormous user base of 170 million in the U.S. Its potential for influencing the population at large is vast, which means Silicon Valley tech companies with an overrepresentation of left-wing views must not be allowed to buy it, lest censorship and liberal propaganda replace Chinese government propaganda.

So, that last sentence is why we don’t need right-wing hysterical and culturally nasty propaganda replacing Chinese government propaganda. You heard it from me first.

My last word is, please remember where and who we were four years ago with President (sic) Trump and his bumbling management of Covid-19. I think it’s an excellent answer to Stefank’s question with a loud YES. The media should remind us how awful it was. Refrigerator trucks with dead bodies and no toilet paper are just two reminders. This is from Mediaite. “Hannity Claims Democrats’ Cannot Run on, Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?” Michael Luciano has the lede. Hannity is still carrying Trump’s diseased water.

Sean Hannity said President Joe Biden and Democrats will be unable to make the case that Americans are better off in 2024 than they were four years ago.

Biden is seeking a second term and will face former President Donald Trump as congressional Democrats try to retake the House of Representatives and undertake the tall order of holding the Senate.

“They spread fear, hysteria, all things hate Trump, hate Trump 24/7,” Hannity said of Democrats during his opening monologue Thursday on Fox News. “And of course, Democrats will call Republicans racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic that want dirty air and water. In other words, Democrats are using fear and division to mask what has been a terrible four years under Biden.”

Hannity then invoked an election refrain made famous by Ronald Reagan during a 1980 debate with then-President Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

“I repeat, they cannot run on, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’” Hannity said. “This is all they have left.”

Some quick, back-of-the-napkin math indicates that four years ago, the year was 2020. History buffs may recall that this period in time was marred by a once-in-a-century global pandemic that wound up killing more than one million Americans and torpedoed the economy. Trump’s handling of the country’s pandemic response arguably cost him reelection.

In the early days of the pandemic, Trump sought to downplay the threat posed by Covid-19. In February 2020, he reacted to the news that a handful of Americans had been diagnosed with the virus by saying, “And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

This headline made me giggle. It’s from Raw Story. It’s written by Kathleen Culliton. “‘Freudian slip?’ RNC chair says America is better off under Biden than Trump:” It takes a lot of energy to keep lies going in the face of obvious truth.

The Republican National Committee’s new chair Friday gave a resounding “No” to a question he asked himself on nationally broadcast television: Was the nation better off under former President Donald Trump?

Whoops.

Michael Whatley appeared on Fox News to promote the presumptive Republican nominee and the RNC’s co-chair Lara Trump’s father-in-law in his bid to reclaim the White House in 2024.

Have a great weekend! We’re about to get a rainstorm, and I’m getting ready to make a good-sized meatloaf and potatoes, which was basically my mother’s weekly recipe.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Wednesday Reads: Robert Hur Is a Lying Liar.

Posted: March 13, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, just because | Tags: Adam Schiff, Bill Barr, classified documents, cognitive decline, Eric Swalwell, House Judiciary Committee, James Comey, memory issues, President Joe Biden, Special Counsel Robert Hur | 2 Comments

Good Day!!

The self-satisfied Mr. Robert Hur

Yesterday Robert Hur testified before the House Judiciary Committee. Before his appearance, Hur resigned from the Department of Justice and reportedly worked with Republicans in preparing his testimony. Hur and his Republican pals made every effort to make Biden look bad, but Democrats were well prepared to counter those efforts. And, unfortunately for Hur, the transcript of his interviews with Biden was also released yesterday.

You probably recall that Hur’s final report included gratuitous claims about President Biden’s age and cognitive abilities. Some observers have compared Hur’s behavior with that of James Comey’s attack on Hillary Clinton just before the 2016 election. Fortunately, we are months away from the 2024 vote.

Molly Jong-Fast at MSNBC: Robert Hur took a page from the James Comey playbook — and made it worse.

I remember where I was on Oct. 28, 2016, the day James Comey released his letter. I was at a health food restaurant with a Republican friend of mine. “This is going to lose her the election,” I told my friend. I felt like I was going to throw up. I knew what a Donald Trump presidency would mean for women, for all of us.

“Don’t be silly,” said my friend, who I suspect later voted for Trump. The New York Times had the story on the front page: “Emails in Anthony Weiner Inquiry Jolt Hillary Clinton’s Campaign.” On Nov. 8, 2016, Clinton lost the election to Trump 304 to 227. The Comey letter had created just enough muddiness to make it seem like both candidates were ethically challenged. It was the false equivalence that Trump was able to ride to the White House. Data guru Nate Silver wrote that the Comey letter “was probably enough to change the outcome of the Electoral College.” Not only did Comey make Trump president but then he wrote numerous very tedious books. He became a resistance hero, riding his regret all the way to the bank.

Fast-forward to Feb. 8, 2024, when Republican special counsel Robert Hur released his 345-page report. The report is being seen by some as an exoneration, saying that no criminal charges are warranted in the classified documents case against President Joe Biden. But Hur, who used to work for the Trump administration, couldn’t let Biden off the hook entirely, especially 269 days before an election. Hur, a member of a Republican Party that now largely works as a campaign arm for the former president, delivered the goods for his party. Sure, he found no legal basis to charge Biden, but but but… Hur proceeded to editorialize ad nauseam about Biden’s mental acuity, delivering right-wing talking points up on a platter. He wrote, “[At] trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Saying you don’t remember stuff in a deposition is pretty much standard. For example, Dr. Anthony Fauci said “I don’t recall” 174 times during a deposition about alleged collusion between the Biden administration and social media platforms — but because there isn’t a narrative about Fauci’s age crafted by Trump World, no one thought this had anything to do with his mental acuity….

Lies, by Edel Rodriguez

Hur’s report was a partisan hit job, but it didn’t matter, as former Obama chief of staff Jim Messina tweeted: “Let’s be clear — the special counsel isn’t a dummy and we should be very careful not to take the bait after Comey pulled this in 2016. Hur, a lifelong Republican and creature of DC, didn’t have a case against Biden, but he knew exactly how his swipes could hurt Biden politically.”

Joe Scarborough put it even more succinctly: “He couldn’t indict Biden legally, so he tried to indict Biden politically.” Yet again, a Republican special counsel had put his finger on the scale, just like Comey did in 2016. Hur isn’t a neurologist; he has no idea what Biden’s mental acuity is. Former attorney general Eric Holder condemned the report: “Special Counsel Hur report on Biden classified documents issues contains way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions,” he posted on X, adding: “Had this report been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised.” Shame on Attorney General Merrick Garland for letting this partisan hit job be released.

Some background information on Hur from AP (written before yesterday’s testimony): Who is Robert Hur? A look at the special counsel due to testify on Biden classified documents case.

The special counsel who impugned the president’s age and competence in his report on how Joe Biden handled classified documents will himself be up for questioning this week.

Robert Hur is scheduled to testify before a congressional committee on Tuesday as House Republicans try to keep the spotlight on unflattering assessments of Biden.

Some Biden aides and allies have suggested that Hur, a Republican appointed to his role as U.S. attorney by Donald Trump, is a political partisan. Hur’s defenders say he has shown throughout his career that his work is guided by only facts and the law — not politics.

A review of Hur’s professional life shows he’s no stranger to politically charged investigations. He prosecuted former elected officials as Maryland’s chief federal law enforcement officer. And as a Justice Department official, he helped monitor special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election….

The Naked Truth and the Masked Lies, by Rosita Allinckx

Hur held one of the most powerful jobs in the Justice Department during a tumultuous time in the Trump administration, serving as the top aide to [Rod] Rosenstein, the department’s second-in-command.

As the principal associate deputy attorney general, Hur helped run day-to-day operations of the department in 2017 and early 2018. He also helped Rosenstein stay on top of Mueller’s progress in the Russia investigation. Hur held bi-weekly meetings with the special counsel’s team and reported back to Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general said in an interview.

Rosenstein said he hired Hur because he knew he would maintain a calm and steady demeanor and “approach cases in a nonpartisan way.”

Um . . . Sure, Jan. Read more background at the link.

Why did Hur resign from the DOJ before testifying? Doesn’t that seem suspicious?

Igor Deyrsh at Yahoo News: Biden special counsel Robert Hur’s resignation from DOJ makes his testimony “even more problematic.”

Hur, a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who was tapped to lead the Biden probe by Attorney General Merrick Garland, formally stepped down one day before his Tuesday appearance at the request of Republicans led by Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. He drew criticism from Biden and the Democrats for criticizing the president’s memory in the report even as he declined to charge him.

Former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann explained that the Justice Department “cannot give instructions” to a former employee about what he “can and cannot testify to.”

“That makes it even more problematic from our perspective … if he was still a federal employee, DOJ would have to approve his testimony and they’d be involved in his appearance tomorrow,” a Democratic Judiciary Committee source told The Independent.

“It’s hard not to anticipate some real ugliness with Robert Hur’s testimony,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman. “He already showed his partisan colors in the inappropriate parts of his report. And he and the [Republicans] obviously contemplate he can vilify Biden now that he’s testifying as a ‘private citizen.’”

So it appears Hur’s motivation was to have the freedom to attack Biden without any DOJ influence on what he would say. Before I get to the testimony, here are some stories about Hur’s final report:

Adam Serwer at The Atlantic: How Hur Misled the Country on Biden’s Memory.

“First impressions stick,” writes Serwer. No matter that clarifications follow–it’s what people hear first that stays with them.

Five years ago, a partisan political operative with the credibility of a long career in government service misled the public about official documents in order to get Donald Trump the positive spin he wanted in the press. The play worked so well that a special counsel appointed to examine President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, Robert Hur, ran it again.

In 2019, then–Attorney General Bill Barr—who would later resign amid Trump’s attempts to suborn the Justice Department into backing his effort to seize power after losing reelection—announced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had not found sufficient evidence to indict Trump on allegations that he had assisted in a Russian effort to sway the 2016 election and had obstructed an investigation into that effort. Mueller’s investigation led to indictments of several Trump associates, but he later testified that Justice Department policy barred prosecuting a sitting president, and so indicting Trump was not an option. Barr’s summary—which suggested that Trump had been absolved of any crimes—was so misleading that it drew a rebuke not only from Mueller himself but from a federal judge in a public-records lawsuit over material related to the investigation. That judge, Reggie Walton, wrote in 2020 that the discrepancies “cause the court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller report to the contrary.”

Truth and Lies, by Louise Fletcher

As my colleague David Graham wrote at the time, the ploy worked. Trump claimed “total exoneration,” and mainstream outlets blared his innocence in towering headlines. Only later did the public learn that Mueller’s report had found “no criminal conspiracy but considerable links between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, and strongly suggested that Trump had obstructed justice.”

Now this same pattern has emerged once again, only instead of working in the president’s favor, it has undermined him. Hur, a former U.S. attorney in the Trump administration, was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden for potential criminal wrongdoing after classified documents were found at his home. (Trump has been indicted on charges that he deliberately mishandled classified documents after storing such documents at his home in Florida and deliberately showing them off to visitors as “highly confidential” and “secret information.”)

In Hur’s own summary of his investigation, he concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” even absent DOJ policy barring prosecution of a sitting president. But that part was not what caught the media’s attention. Rather it was Hur’s characterization of Biden as having memory problems, validating conservative attacks on the president as too old to do the job. The transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden, released yesterday by House Democrats, suggest that characterization—politically convenient for Republicans and the Trump campaign—was misleading.

Read the rest at the Atlantic.

And how did Hur mislead?

Andrew Prokop at Vox: Robert Hur’s report exaggerated Biden’s memory issues.

When special counsel Robert Hur released his report last month explaining why he wouldn’t charge President Joe Biden with mishandling classified documents, his claim that Biden displayed a “poor memory” and “diminished faculties” in their interview received enormous attention.

But now, the full transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden have been released — and they make Hur’s claims about Biden’s memory appear cherry-picked and exaggerated.

Biden sat for more than five hours with Hur’s team over two days. In that time, he said he did not recall specifics about how particular boxes ended up in his residences or offices after his vice presidency. But he engaged at length about his process for handling classified information and many other topics.

Hur’s claim that Biden had demonstrated some sort of general “poor memory” hangs almost entirely on mix-ups by Biden about in what specific year several years-old events occurred. The transcript makes clear Biden remembers all those events. But it seems Biden just doesn’t pay a lot of attention to which specific year stuff happened in.

So why did Hur hype this up so much?

His report and his House testimony Tuesday suggest one reason. Hur proposed a theory, outlined in the report, about Biden’s deliberate wrongdoing — that Biden kept classified documents about Afghanistan policy deliberations to help burnish his reputation and legacy.

However, Hur couldn’t prove this theory, in part because Biden said he couldn’t recall why these documents were in his garage. Hence, the special counsel bashed Biden for his “poor memory” — knowing full well how that would play when the report became public.

truth-hidden-between-the-lies-jeff-klena

Truth Hidden Between the Lies, by Jeff Klena

This is a good article, and it also deals with Hur’s testimony and how Democrats’ countered his claims. After breaking down problems with Hur’s report, Prokop quotes Adam Schiff:

Hur’s report looks less like a smoking gun proving Biden’s supposed age-related decline, and more like dirty pool, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) argued.

“You know this, I know this, there is nothing more common with a witness of any age, when asked about events that are years old, than to say ‘I do not recall.’ Indeed, they’re instructed by their attorney to do that, if they have any question about it,” Schiff said.

Hur argued back that his consideration of Biden’s memory was relevant to his charging decisions, and that he was perfectly willing, indeed required, to explain his thinking on that topic in his report to the attorney general.

Schiff disputed this. “What is in the rules is, you don’t gratuitously do things to prejudice the subject of an investigation when you’re declining to prosecute. You don’t gratuitously add language that you know will be useful in a political campaign.”

“You were not born yesterday,” Schiff added. “You understood exactly what you were doing. It was a choice.”

Why on earth did Merrick Garland appoint this guy?

Chris Megerian at AP: Hur said Biden couldn’t recall when his son died. The interview transcript is more complicated.

The White House knew it had a political problem on its hands when a special counsel report questioned President Joe Biden’s memory last month, but Biden saw a much more personal affront as well.

Robert Hur, who had been appointed to investigate whether Biden mishandled classified documents, wrote that the president couldn’t recall in an interview with prosecutors the date when his adult son, Beau, died of cancer. It was a shocking contention about a keystone event in Biden’s life, and it fed into questions about whether the 81-year-old president is fit to serve another term….

Hur didn’t ask the president about his son’s death; Biden brought it up himself during a discussion about how he stored documents at a rental home in Virginia after leaving the vice president’s office in 2017.

And Biden recalled the specific date that Beau died, although he briefly wondered aloud about the year as the conversation toggled between various events.

“What month did Beau die?” Biden mused. “Oh, God, May 30th.”

A White House lawyer interjected by saying, “2015.”

“Was it 2015 he had died?” Biden asked. When someone responded affirmatively, the president added, “It was 2015.” [….]

Hur, in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, said his report’s discussion of Biden’s memory was “necessary and accurate and fair” because his state of mind was an important part of evaluating whether he committed a crime.

“I did not sanitize my explanation nor did I disparage the president unfairly,” he said.

What an asshole! As Adam Serwer wrote, Hur made sure that the first impression he gave of Biden’s interviews was on of a doddering old man with cognitive issues.

Fraud, by Carl Bowlby

Yesterday, Eric Swalwell got Hur to admit that during one of the interviews he characterized Biden as having a “photographic memory!” From HuffPost, via Yahoo News: Robert Hur Admits Telling Biden He Seemed To Have ‘Photographic Recall.’

Although special counsel Robert Hur impugned Joe Biden’s memory in his investigation over whether the president mishandled classified documents, he actually told Biden that he appeared “to have a photographic understanding and recall.”

The comment, which appears in transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden, did not make it into Hur’s final report. Hur concluded in the report that Biden should not be charged over the documents, but made sure to mention his doubts about the president’s memory.

But Hur admitted he made those comments during an exchange with Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) during his Tuesday meeting with the House Judiciary Committee.

The California Democrat asked Hur about a comment that appears on “Day 1, Page 47” of the transcript.

“You said to President Biden, ‘You appear to have a photographic understanding and recall of the House,’” Swalwell said. “Did you say that to President Biden?”

Hur conceded that “those words do appear on Page 47 of the transcript.”

Swalwell pressed further.

“‘Photographic’ is what you said, is that right?” he asked.

“That word does appear on Page 47 of the transcript,” Hur responded.

“Never appeared in your report, though. Is that correct? The word ‘photographic’?” Swalwell asked.

“It does not appear in my report,” Hur said.

Interesting that he chose to leave that out.

Andrew Weissman and Ryan Goodman at Just Security: The Real “Robert Hur Report” (Versus What You Read in the News).

The Special Counsel Robert Hur report has been grossly mischaracterized by the press. The report finds that the evidence of a knowing, willful violation of the criminal laws is wanting. Indeed, the report, on page 6, notes that there are “innocent explanations” that Hur “cannot refute.” That is but one of myriad examples we outline in great detail below of the report repeatedly finding a lack of proof. And those findings mean, in DOJ-speak, there is simply no case. Unrefuted innocent explanations is the sine qua non of not just a case that does not meet the standard for criminal prosecution – it means innocence. Or as former Attorney General Bill Barr and his former boss would have put it, a total vindication (but here, for real).

But even without the prompting of a misleading “summary” by Barr, the press has gotten the lede wrong. This may be because of a poorly worded (we’re being charitable) thesis sentence on page 1 of Hur’s executive summary. Hur writes at the outset: “Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” You have to wait for the later statements that what the report actually says is there is insufficient evidence of criminality, innocent explanations for the conduct, and affirmative evidence that Biden did not willfully withhold classified documents. Put another way, that same sentence about “our investigation uncovered evidence” could equally apply to Mike Pence, who had classified documents at his home, which is similarly some “evidence” of a crime, but also plainly insufficient to remotely establish criminality.

The press incorrectly and repeatedly blast out that the Hur report found Biden willfully retained classified documents, in other words, that Biden committed a felony; with some in the news media further trumpeting that the Special Counsel decided only as a matter of discretion not to recommend charges.

Read a details analysis of the report at the link.

Charlie Savage has a very detailed comparison of Robert Hur’s claims about Biden’s memory and the transcript of the interviews: How the Special Counsel’s Portrayal of Biden’s Memory Compares With the Transcript. It’s too long and detailed to excerpt, but it’s worth a read if you’re interested.

One more article that addresses yesterday’s testimony:

Jeremy Herb and Marshall Cohen at CNN: Takeaways from Robert Hur’s testimony on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.

Former special counsel Robert Hur appeared before Congress on Tuesday to explain his investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents – which led to no charges against the president but plenty of consternation among Democrats when Hur described Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” in his report.

While Hur came ready to defend his investigation, outlining a specific, legal case — or lack thereof – the members of the House Judiciary Committee were fighting a battle over the much more subjective political consequences to Hur’s report just months before the 2024 presidential election.

Truth Lies at the Bottom of the Well, by Frances MacDonald

Republicans attacked Biden as they pressed Hur on his decision not to prosecute the president, while Democrats criticized Hur for his comments about Biden’s memory – while also focusing much of their attention on former President Donald Trump and the differences in the former president’s classified documents case, which led to an indictment last year.

Hur tried his best to stick to what was in his report, even as he was pushed to go further either to criticize Biden – or to declare his innocence.

Hur was clear on Tuesday that he did not want to play ball with Republicans on whether Biden is “senile,” given the former special counsel’s decision to describe Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” in his investigative report.

“Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘senile’ as exhibiting a decline of cognitive ability, such as memory, associated with old age,” Republican Rep. Scott Fitzgerald of Wisconsin said. “Mr. Hur, based on your report, did you find that the president was senile?”

“I did not. That conclusion does not appear in my report,” Hur replied emphatically.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat, tussled with Hur over his conclusions, claiming Hur “exonerated” Biden. But Hur immediately took issue with the term during a tense exchange in which they both repeatedly cut each other off.

“This lengthy, expensive an independent investigation resulted in a complete exoneration of President Joe Biden for every document you discussed in your report, you found insufficient evidence that the president violated any laws about possession or retention of classified materials,” Jayapal said.

“I need to go back and make sure that I take note of a word that you used, ‘exoneration,’” Hur said. “That is not a word that is used in my report and that is not a part of my task as a prosecutor.”

“You exonerated him,” Jayapal retorted.

“I did not exonerate him,” Hur said. “That word does not appear in the report.”

Okay then. But he didn’t charge him either. What can I say. Hur is just an asshole. Also, please note that Hur was question about whether he would accept a role in a second Trump administration, and he refused to answer. We can only hope that this controversy will be forgotten by the time we get to November.

Mostly Monday Reads: What to do with the Tempest in the Gold-plated Trump Pot

Posted: March 11, 2024 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: just because | Tags: #Blabbermouth Trump, @repeat1968, A Criminal mind, E. Jean Carroll, Jim Sciutto, John Buss, media's "fantasy version of Trump", Trump crimes, Trump cult, Viktor Orban, Vile Trump speeches | 4 Comments

“Now he’s going after the Grey Vote.” John Buss @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

It’s tough to understand why the rapist, racist, Orange Fraudster continues to be supported by anyone other than the insane right wing of this country. Trump’s speeches and social media posts are that of a madman with advanced dementia. It’s even more challenging to understand why so much of the media still can’t figure out how to report about him. This is from Stephen Robinson, who wrote in Public Notice. “The media is still selling a fantasy version of Trump. We should all know better by now.”

Yes, major news outlets, including the New York Times, are now more likely to acknowledge that Trump outright lies than simply makes “false” statements, but the press still resists definitively calling him out for the terrible and dangerous person he is. Because their baseline assumption is that Trump is erratic and malevolent, it’s not generally regarded as big news when Trump does awful things, such as mocking Biden’s speech impediment during a speech over the weekend. (Watch the footage below, though it should be mentioned that the NYT published an article noting that Trump mocked Biden’s stutter.)

Implicit in the media’s ongoing coverage of Trump is the idea that he might suddenly stop behaving like Donald Trump. Case in point was an absurd article Axios ran last week from national politics reporter Sophia Cai with the headline, “Top Trump advisers try to steer him off personal drama.” The top of the article is bad enough, as it presents Trump’s unhinged vendettas like a “Sex and the City” brunch scene, but the low point is Cai’s suggestion that Trump is “toning down” his rhetoric as he attempts to woo college-educated voters.

On what was once Twitter, the caption above Axios’s article read, “Looking to November, Trump tempers his claims about the 2020 election — a little.” (An earlier version of the tweet that didn’t hedge as much and was widely criticized was deleted — see it at top of the post.) Cai wrote, “In some recent speeches, Trump has used different terms in describing his typical complaint that the 2020 election he lost was ‘stolen’ — saying, ‘We were interrupted,’ or ‘something very bad happened.’”

These are obvious euphemisms for Trump’s ongoing election lies, but Cai’s assertion isn’t even true. He told supporters at a North Carolina rally just days before the Axios article that “what happened at that last election is a disgrace, and we’re not going to let it happen again. Did you ever notice they go after the people that want to find out where the cheating was — and, by the way, 82 percent of the country understands that it was a rigged election, OK? You can’t have a country with that.” (Surprise! Trump’s “82 percent” claim is a lie.)

I don’t have much hope for the New York Times, but maybe the Washington Post is coming around. This analysis popped up on the Memorandum feed. “Trump’s freewheeling speeches offer a dark vision of a second term. A close examination of one appearance in Rock Hill, S.C., offers an anatomy of a signature rally by the former president.” Three authors share the byline; Ashley Parker, Marianne LeVine, and Ross Godwin.

A Donald Trump rally is a freewheeling extravaganza. A festival of grievance and retribution. A dystopian vision of darkness and despair. A political rock show. A bacchanalia of lies and mistruths. A pitch to voters.

Since bursting onto the presidential scene in 2015, Trump has transformed the American public’s conception of a political rally, taking the stage after hours ofeardrum-shattering decibels of a self-curated playlist and offering a spectacle that changes depending on the place, the news cycle and the former president’s mood.

On the last Friday in February, the day before the South Carolina primary, Trump took the stage in Rock Hill, S.C., where he spoke for just over an hour and a half. A close examination of his remarks that day offers an anatomy of a Trump rally speech.

Like many of his recent speeches, it was long and laden with resentments, offering a dark vision for the nation that terrifies Democrats and animates his Republican base. It touched on recurring themes, including his election denialism, his promise of a sudden transformation in another Trump term and his claims of persecution and martyrdom.

Perhaps more importantly, Trump’s stump speech provides a road map of what a second Trump term might look like — fulfilling his promises to root out the so-called “deep state” of civil servants, harshly cracking down on illegal immigration and crime, and pulling back from the world stage. It also reveals many of his weaknesses as a candidate, such as sometimes slurring his words, confusing names of world leaders and attacking minorities in offensive ways.

At times, Trump hews to a teleprompter, while at others he careens gleefully off script. He can channel both comedy and rage,charisma and revenge.

Over time, his stump speech has evolved, though certain hallmarks remain. One constantis that it is certain to contain a slew of falsehoods and mistruths, ranging from hyperbole to outright lies, like his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

The one specific prop at any Trump rally is the assortment of disheveled, obviously low-education, wipipo misfits behind him, with the occasional black man who is either a paid prop or seriously deluded. Well, this is South Carolina, the state of perpetual revolt. But Trump voters don’t have their wits about them, and that’s if they possess any. I am very tired of getting way too much information on cult behavior. But seriously, how do you explain this analysis from the Washington Post’s Phillip Bump last week? “A fifth of Trump supporters think he committed a serious crime.”

Juries will — or, perhaps, may — decide whether former president Donald Trump committed serious federal crimes. He faces trial in Washington, D.C., and Florida on felony charges, and, unless he’s reelected to the presidency or cuts a deal with prosecutors, those will result in verdicts adjudicating his guilt.

Most Americans, though, already think he has committed serious federal crimes. A poll conducted by Siena College for the New York Times found that more than half of registered voters thought he’d done so. That includes more independents, nearly all Democrats and even a fifth of Republicans.

It also includes a fifth of people who say they plan to vote for him in November.

In other words, a fifth of Trump’s support in a general election rematch against President Biden thinks their preferred candidate committed a serious crime.

He goes on ad infinitum about the same damn things. The one thing you think he would shut up about is E. Jean Carol. But he doesn’t, he isn’t, and he won’t. This is from CNBC. “E. Jean Carroll lawyer suggests third Trump defamation lawsuit possible after new comments.” The story is reported by Kevin Breuninger.

Donald Trump on Monday once again denied allegations by E. Jean Carroll that he raped and defamed her, despite facing nearly $90 million in civil penalties for making similar statements about the writer.

Carroll’s attorney quickly responded that they are closely monitoring Trump’s latest remarks about her — and suggested that a third defamation lawsuit could be in store for the former president.

Trump in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” claimed that several civil court judgments against him in New York — two of them in Carroll’s favor — will cause companies to leave the state.

“People aren’t moving into New York, because of the kind of crap they’re pulling on me,” he said.

They’re “the most ridiculous decisions,” Trump said, “including the ‘Ms. Bergdorf Goodman,’ a person I’d never met.”

Carroll has said Trump raped her in a dressing room in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s.

“I have no idea who she is, except one thing, I got sued,” he said in Monday’s interview. “From that point on I said, ‘Wow, that’s crazy, what this is.’”

“I got charged, I was given a false accusation and had to post a $91 million bond on a false accusation,” Trump added, referring to the bond he secured in recent days to guarantee a judgment in Carroll’s favor.

The interview echoed remarks Trump made about Carroll over the weekend at a campaign rally in Georgia, where the presumptive Republican presidential nominee accused her of making “false accusations.”

After the CNBC interview aired, Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan in a statement obtained by NBC News said, “The statute of limitations for defamation in most jurisdictions is between one and three years.”

“As we said after the last jury verdict, we continue to monitor every statement that Donald Trump makes about our client, E. Jean Carroll,” Kaplan said.

https://twitter.com/VABVOX/status/1767170121158590744

So, we know from the moment that Trump started down that escalator and the first words out of his mouth that Trump has no shame. The Atlantic‘s John Hendrickson has this to say on Trump’s second mocking of a disabled person. “Trump Finds Another Line to Cross. The former president used to exercise a modicum of restraint around Joe Biden’s stutter. No longer.”

Former president Donald Trump, perhaps threatened by President Joe Biden’s well-received State of the Union address, mocked his opponent’s lifelong stutter at a rally in Georgia yesterday. “Wasn’t it—didn’t it bring us together?” Trump asked sarcastically. He kept the bit going, slipping into a Biden caricature. “‘I’m gonna bring the country tuh-tuh-tuh-together,’” Trump said, straining and narrowing his mouth for comedic effect.

Trump has made a new habit of this. “‘He’s a threat to d-d-democracy,’” Trump said in his vaudeville Biden character at a January rally in Iowa. That jibe was also a response to a big Biden speech—one tied to the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection. (Guess who the he was in that sentence.)

More than Trump’s ugly taunt, one thing stands out to me about these moments: the sound of Trump’s supporters laughing right along with him. This is a building block of Trumpism. The man at the top gives his followers permission to be the worst version of themselves.

Those who are used to somewhat civil discourse continually feel beaten down by all this nastiness. What is it about the Trump Cult that digs it? Here are some strong statements from analysts in the media that are finally coming to print. This first report is from Chauncey DeVega at Salon. He argues that the only way we defang the Trump Cut and the Fascist Christian Right is to kill the Republican Party. “The GOP can’t leave MAGA — “Americans must electorally mercy-kill the Republican Party”. An ex-MAGA activist warns “no civic savior is coming” as Donald Trump’s cognitive decline becomes undeniable.”

What if Donald Trump defeats President Biden and takes control of the White House in 2025? He has already announced his plans to become the country’s first dictator, and to launch a reign of terror and revenge against his so-called enemies. As detailed in documents such as Project 2025, Agenda 47, and elsewhere, the infrastructure is being created right now to put Trump’s neofascist plans to end multiracial pluralistic democracy in effect on “day one.” The so-called resistance will not have the courtesy of ramping up or mobilizing to stop Dictator Trump’s onslaught. It will be a “shock and awe” campaign visited upon the American people.

Dictator Trump’s reign of terror will be made even worse by the fact that as shown during recent speeches, interviews, and at other events he appears to be encountering severe difficulties in cognition, language, and memory.

In a series of recent conversations with me here at Salon, Dr. John Gartner, a prominent psychologist and contributor to the bestselling book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” has issued this warning: “Not enough people are sounding the alarm, that based on his behavior, and in my opinion, Donald Trump is dangerously demented. In fact, we are seeing the opposite among too many in the news media, the political leaders and among the public. There is also this focus on Biden’s gaffes or other things that are well within the normal limits of aging. By comparison, Trump appears to be showing gross signs of dementia. This is a tale of two brains. Biden’s brain is aging. Trump’s brain is dementing.”

If Dr. Gartner and the other medical professionals I have spoken to, both here at Salon and off the record, about Trump’s apparent mental and emotional challenges are in fact correct about how the corrupt ex-president will only get worse and not better, the American people will then be confronted by a horrible reality where Donald Trump will be both a dictator and a mad king. In total, there will be a horrific synergy between an American pathocracy and how the worst people seek political power and a leader who appears to have a diseased mind – which makes Trump easily manipulated by individuals and forces who are even more malevolent and dangerous than he is.

Philip Bump gave this analysis at WAPO today. “The twin challenges of warnings about Trump’s support of authoritarianism.”

Donald Trump welcomed Hungarian leader Viktor Orban to his Mar-a-Lago home last week, offering unqualified praise for Orban’s strongman approach to politics.

“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban. He’s fantastic,” Trump said during a reception Friday evening. “He does a great job. He’s a noncontroversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss.”

This sort of rhetoric is exactly what President Biden and others warn about with Trump’s elevation to his party’s presidential nomination. The former president has repeatedly made obvious his support for centralized, hard-line executive power in the United States and elsewhere, something that is clearly at odds with American democracy and divided government.

Because Trump has effectively framed Biden as behaving as an autocrat to his supporters and because modern autocrats don’t necessarily look like those in the past, many Americans are likely to consider those warnings hollow.

“Starved for attention, that one.” John Buss @repeat1968,
Me: “Truck Stop Tart”

Chris Lehmann of The Nation adds this. “The MAGA Aesthetic Is Beginning to Rot. The stable of imagery associated with the far-right insurgency no longer seems as fresh as it did when Trump first donned his red cap.” It was rotten from the beginning, but at least more of the media is pointing at it.

For headline writers and Beltway pundits, the takeaway from last week’s State of the Union address was clear: Despite ongoing speculation about President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, he delivered a pugnacious, energetic, and policy-driven speech, which served as the unofficial debut of his 2024 reelection pitch. But beyond the forensic attention devoted to Biden’s delivery from the podium, there was another pronounced theme amid the SOTU pageantry: the corresponding enfeeblement of the MAGA aesthetic, which played such a central role in Donald Trump’s surprise election to the presidency in 2016.

The MAGA brand crisis was telegraphed most dramatically in the immediate run-up to the speech, as Biden did the traditional presidential slow-walk toward the podium, greeting assembled lawmakers along the way. Georgia GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene approached Biden wearing a red MAGA hat and handed the president a badge commemorating Laken Riley, the Georgia nurse allegedly murdered by a suspect who entered the country illegally. Greene also sported a “Say Her Name” T-shirt, again in reference to Riley. When Biden espied Greene’s ensemble, he delivered an astonished double take as eloquent as any line in his speech.

Biden’s shock no doubt stemmed in part from the knowledge that such overt electioneering is illegal in the Capitol. More than that, though, it registered a broader truth: The stable of imagery associated with the right-wing Trump insurgency is showing signs of wear and tear. Where Trump-branded messaging and merchandise once had the power to upend establishment mores and expectations, they now feel like the political equivalent of a rock ensemble’s county fair tour: a purely formalist effort to satisfy the nostalgic longings of a diminishing fan base.

What was most telling about Greene’s stunt wardrobe was the date on the hat: Instead of being minted for the looming 2024 general election, it came from Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, which—despite the lies of Trump, Greene, and other MAGA leaders— he lost decisively. And make no mistake: Greene, a perfect specimen of do-nothing right-wing congressional service, lives for these camera-ready moments of political theater. She certainly didn’t descend to the same level of sartorial carelessness back when she dressed as a Chinese spy balloon.

Amazingly, Greene’s get-up wasn’t even the most outlandish clothes-themed show of MAGA sympathies in the chamber. That honor fell to Texas Representative Troy Nehls, who wore a “Never Surrender” T-shirt featuring Trump’s mugshot and displayed a Laken Riley badge of his own on his lapel. To pull the look together, he sported an American flag bow tie. The outfit didn’t evoke a fearless mustering of Real American patriots so much as a Chippendale dancer gone to seed.

CNN’s Jim Sciutto has a new book out. Josephine Harvey at HuffPost has this to say about that. “John Kelly Shares His ‘Theory’ On Why Trump Likes Dictators So Much: New Book. The book by CNN’s Jim Sciutto also contains quotes about the former president’s reported “admiration” of Hitler.”

John Kelly, Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, discussed the former president’s apparent dictatorial aspirations for a new book by CNN’s Jim Sciutto.

“My theory on why he likes the dictators so much is that’s who he is,” Kelly said, according to an article published Monday about the forthcoming book by the CNN anchor and chief national security analyst.

Kelly told Sciutto, “Every incoming president is shocked that they actually have so little power without going to the Congress, which is a good thing. It’s Civics 101, separation of powers, three equal branches of government.”

“But in his case, he was shocked that he didn’t have dictatorial-type powers to send U.S. forces places or to move money around within the budget,” the quote continued. “And he looked at Putin and Xi and that nutcase in North Korea as people who were like him in terms of being a tough guy.”

Kelly was one of several former Trump administration officials who spoke to Sciutto for his book, “The Return of Great Powers,” reportedly warning that Trump is ill-prepared to lead the country in the current global climate, and that “they believe that the root of his admiration for these figures is that he envies their power.”

The book also revisits previously reported allegations that Trump praised Adolf Hitler, including Kelly’s claim that the former president lamented that his senior staff were not as loyal to him as the Nazi leader’s officers were.

“He truly believed, when he brought us generals in, that we would be loyal — that we would do anything he wanted us to do,” Kelly told Sciutto.

Sciutto writes this at CNN. “Former advisers sound the alarm that Trump praises despots in private and on the campaign trail.” I’d like to think this might get into the thick skulls of some people but then I’ve become quite jaded over the last decade or so.

To Donald Trump, Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán is “fantastic,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping is “brilliant,” North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is “an OK guy,” and, most alarmingly, he allegedly said Adolf Hitler “did some good things,” a worldview that would reverse decades-old US foreign policy in a second term should he win November’s presidential election, multiple former senior advisers told CNN.

“He thought Putin was an OK guy and Kim was an OK guy — that we had pushed North Korea into a corner,” retired Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff, told me. “To him, it was like we were goading these guys. ‘If we didn’t have NATO, then Putin wouldn’t be doing these things.’”

Trump’s lavish praise for Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán while hosting him at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, just days after all but sealing the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday, shows it’s a worldview he’s doubling down on.

“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán,” Trump said, adding, “He’s the boss and he’s a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.”

The former president’s admiration for autocrats has been reported on before, but in comments by Trump recounted to me for my new book, “The Return of Great Powers,” out Tuesday, Kelly and others who served under Trump give new insight into why they warn that a man who consistently praises autocratic leaders opposed to US interests is ill-suited to lead the country in the Great Power clashes that could be coming, telling me they believe that the root of his admiration for these figures is that he envies their power.

“He views himself as a big guy,” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser under Trump, told me. “He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys like Erdogan in Turkey get to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. He kind of likes that.”

“He’s not a tough guy by any means, but in fact quite the opposite,” Kelly said. “But that’s how he envisions himself.”

I just hope it’s not too late but it feels less toothy now then it would’ve had they done something when he was still in office. So this is my first post on my new PC and I’ve advanced to the bigger screen, bigger key board part of aging. It feels great! Now, I just gotta pay for it.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Lazy Caturday Reads: Skydancing Cats

Posted: March 9, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Cats, caturday, just because | Tags: Chub Group, Donald Trump, E. Jean Carroll, Katie Britt, Response to the SOTU, Skydancing cats, Society for American Civic Renewal, State of the Union Address, TradWives | 7 Comments

Pepper, my brother’s sweet cat.

Happy Caturday!!

I overslept today, and I’m just getting going a 1PM Eastern. Today, I’m going to look at fallout from the strange and embarrassing Republican response to Biden’s SOTU by Alabama Senator Katie Britt.

The photos are of cats who live with my brother John (I don’t have cats of my own anymore, sadly), Dakinikat and JJ–Skydancing cats!

About Katie Britt:

Martin Pengelly at The Guardian: Republicans baffled by Katie Britt’s State of the Union response: ‘One of our biggest disasters.’

Katie Britt’s Republican response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address drew reactions ranging from the baffled to the satirical to the appalled, even among fellow rightwingers.

“What the hell am I watching right now?” an unnamed Trump adviser told Rolling Stone.

“It’s one of our biggest disasters ever,” another unnamed Republican strategist told the Daily Beast.

Delivering the official State of the Union response can be a thankless task, as the former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and the Florida senator Marco Rubio, deliverers of previously panned speeches, would ruefully attest.

Nonetheless, the 42-year-old Alabama senator is a rising Republican star, widely respected on Capitol Hill and her selection to respond to Biden was a golden opportunity to introduce herself to the wider American electorate.

Another view of Pepper.

In his address Biden used his bully pulpit effectively, attacking Republicans in a fiery speech and inviting a strong response. But Britt’s speech, delivered with overt theatricality, oscillating in tone between the wholesome and the wholly horrific, did not land well even in her own party.

Charlie Kirk, founder of the far-right Turning Point USA youth group, said: “I’m sure Katie Britt is a sweet mom and person, but this speech is not what we need. Joe Biden just declared war on the American right and Katie Britt is talking like she’s hosting a cooking show, whispering about how Democrats ‘dont get it’.”

That pointed to widespread confusion over the setting for such a figure to give such an important speech: a kitchen.

As a Gallup poll showed 57% of American voters think the US would be better off if more women were in elected office, Alyssa Farah Griffin, a Trump aide turned never-Trumper, said: “Senator Katie Britt is a very impressive person … I do not understand the decision to put her in a KITCHEN for one of the most important speeches she’s ever given.”

Speaking to CNN, Griffin added: “The staging of this was bizarre to me. Women can be both wives and mothers and also stateswomen, so to put her in a kitchen, not at a podium or in the Senate chamber where she was elected after running a hard-fought race, I think fell very flat and was completely confusing to some women watching it.”

	dakinikat on Wednesday Reads: The Iran War…
	dakinikat on Wednesday Reads: The Iran War…
	dakinikat on Wednesday Reads: The Iran War…
	dakinikat on Wednesday Reads: The Iran War…
	dakinikat on Wednesday Reads: The Iran War…
	bostonboomer on Wednesday Reads: The Iran War…
	bostonboomer on Wednesday Reads: The Iran War…

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