Yesterday the press again focused on the Hur report that found no crimes in President Biden’s inadvertent possession of classified documents from his time as Vice President. But reporters only cared about one tiny portion of the report, in which Hur said Biden would be sympathetic to a jury because he comes across as a “well meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
The gossip columnists at the NYT and WaPo were out in force. I’m not going to dignify these yellow journalists by excerpting their articles. It’s James Comey in 2016 all over again, except that the Hur report didn’t come out less than 2 weeks before the November election.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media overlooks Trump’s confusion, verbal flubs, and inability to form coherent sentences. Just last night he gave a speech full of examples of his cognitive issues.
The former president slurred when saying the word “subsidies,” said “dino-dollars” instead of “dollars,” and even said he doesn’t like being frontpage news every time he “said one word a little bit mispronunciation.” He also said that three years ago things were great, despite that being when Joe Biden became president, and he claimed twice there were no terror attacks during his tenure as president. He also said that Biden hasn’t spoken in months despite him addressing the press last night.
The flubs drew wide criticism from online onlookers.
Democratic youth activist Harry Sisson, in response to the ex-president’s “subsidies” flub, said, “Yikes.”
“Trump is slurring his speech again claiming that ‘Rich people are given $7,000 subsies.’ Uh…subsies?” he asked. “I’m not sure what that is and I don’t think anyone else does either. He can’t say subsidies properly so he must have dementia. Right, Republicans?”
Regarding the “subsies,” former prosecutor Ron Filipkowski said, “Dementia Trump is staring at the teleprompter, pauses to think about it, and still can’t say it.”
In yet another instance pointed out by the Biden-Harris HQ account on social media, Trump “gets distracted with bizarre story.”
“I know all about the marbles. I can tell you every marble,” Trump said.
Trump also appeared to mistake what day it was, saying, “If I wasn’t here, I’d be having a nice Saturday afternoon.” He said that, of course, on a Friday. This one was also picked up by Biden-Harris HQ.
Imagine if Biden were that befuddled? The press would have a field day.
The Biden campaign and the White House have landed on an initial strategy for responding to special counsel Robert Hur’s report that has spurred questions about the president’s fitness to hold office: Attack Hur and the media covering the report.
Woman Holding Black Cat, by TAkehisa Yumeji, 1919
The morning after Biden flashed anger at Hur for what he and other senior advisers argue was an inappropriate and excessive focus on his age, Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House counsel, sparred with the press corps for cherry-picking findings in the report, which he suggested was written in a way to shield Hur from political pressure from Republicans.
“I know it’s hard to wade through 400 full pages,” he said. “The report lays out example after example of how the president did not willfully take classified documents.”
Behind the scenes, Biden advisers in both the White House and his campaign were more scathing. One Biden ally said the report angered some of his supporters and, as a result, it was rallying them to his defense.
“People who are supporters of Biden are looking at that thinking that’s a cheap shot and he was playing politics,” the ally said.
The White House’s simmering animosity toward the media also burst into the public. One Biden aide said the media was “shameful” in its handling of the highly sensitive political moment.
“Hur couldn’t make his case and he takes partisan, personal and untrue swipes at Joe Biden,” one aide, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about internal views of the president’s team, said. “[He] did it so the media would take the bait, and none of you have learned a damn thing since 2016.”
The aide was referring to another fraught episode when then-FBI Director James Comey determined that while Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton had been “extremely careless” in handling classified information, she would not face charges for using a private email server.
On Sunday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson went on television and mixed up Iran and Israel. “We passed the support for Iran many months ago,” he toldMeet the Press, erroneously referring to an aid package for the Jewish state. Last night, the Fox News prime-time host Jesse Watters introduced South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as hailing from South Carolina. I once joined a cable-news panel where one of the participants kept confusing then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions with Representative Pete Sessions of Texas. I don’t hold these errors against anyone, as they are some of the most common miscues made by people who talk for a living—and I’m sure my time will come.
Yesterday, President Joe Biden added another example to this list. In response to a question about Gaza, he referred to the Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as the president of Mexico. The substance of Biden’s answer was perfectly cogent. The off-the-cuff response included geographic and policy details not just about Egypt, but about multiple Middle Eastern players that most Americans probably couldn’t even name. The president clearly knew whom and what he was talking about; he just slipped up the same way Johnson and so many others have. But the flub could not have come at a worse time. Because the press conference had been called to respond to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents, which dubbed the president an “elderly man with a poor memory,” the Mexico gaffe was immediately cast by critics as confirmation of Biden’s cognitive collapse.
Tama the Cat by Hiroaki Takahashi
But the truth is, mistakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career. Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining “why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, “Look, here’s what happened.”’” The only problem with this story, Slate laconically noted, was that “FDR wasn’t president then, nor did television exist.”
In other words, even a cursory history of Biden’s bungling shows that he is the same person he has always been, just older and slower—a gaffe-prone, middling public speaker with above-average emotional intelligence and an instinct for legislative horse-trading. This is why Biden’s signature moments as a politician have been not set-piece speeches, but off-the-cuff encounters, such as when he kneltto engage elderly Holocaust survivors in Israel so they would not have to stand, and when he befriended a security guard in an elevator at The New York Times on his way to a meeting with the paper’s editorial board, which declined to endorse him. And it’s why Biden’s key accomplishments—such as the landmark climate-change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s first gun-control bill in decades, and the expected expansion of the child tax credit—have come through Congress. The president’s strength is not orating, but legislating; not inspiring a crowd, but connecting with individuals.
As part of his Don Quixote-like quest to avoid criticism, Attorney General Merrick Garland has binged on special counsel appointments throughout his tenure at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Now, following a string of debacles, including allowing Special Counsel John Durham to continue his useless four-year probe of the Mueller investigation—elevating the Hunter Biden prosecutor, David Weiss, to special counsel status after a half-decade of investigation—Garland’s hand-picked Special Counsel Robert Hur has produced a report on President Joe Biden’s handling of classified information that rivals former FBI Director James Comey’s infamous political hatchet-job on Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Hur concludes what everybody already knew—namely that no criminal charges are warranted in Biden’s handling of classified materials—but gratuitously slams Biden’s fitness for office by describing him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” By allowing this unprofessional, partisan dig to be published, Garland plays right into the hands of former President Donald Trump and the extreme right’s ageist attacks on the president.
by Ayako Ishiguro
To be fair, maybe Hur was only trying to exercise what he thought was proper prosecutorial discretion in not bringing a weak case. Or perhaps, he may just be an inept, clumsy writer/editor.
But it was Garland’s responsibility to ensure that Hur’s report did not stray from proper Justice Department standards. Garland should have known the risks when he picked Hur—who had clerked for conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist, served as the top aide to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who assisted Bill Barr’s distortion of the Mueller Report, and who was a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney.
The bottom line is that Hur has produced a report that should have reassured the American people that President Biden did nothing wrong, but instead supplies Biden’s political rivals with ammunition for baseless attacks on Biden’s fitness for office.
Hur opens his report in a way that invites misinterpretation, by stating he “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials.” But Hur waits until the next paragraph to state that the evidence does not establish Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
The verb “uncovered” suggests evidence was hidden and only Hur’s skillful investigation discovered it. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the rest of the report demonstrates that President Biden hid nothing from the investigation and was entirely forthcoming. Hur’s wording also makes it sound like he believes Biden committed a crime, but he just can’t prove it when his report actually concludes there is a lack of evidence of Biden possessing criminal intent to commit a crime.
A report explaining the reasons for declination should be written in a very factual, non-pejorative way. Hur should have simply said that the evidence found in the investigation did not support a recommendation of criminal prosecution, and then gone on to explain what evidence had been evaluated.
Joe Biden has told aides and outside advisers that Attorney General Merrick Garland did not do enough to rein in a special counsel report stating that the president had diminished mental faculties, according to two people close to the president, as White House frustration with the head of the Justice Department grows.
Cats practicing their music, Utagawa Kuniyoshi
The report from special counsel Robert Hur ultimately cleared Biden of any charges stemming from his handling of classified documents that were found at Biden’s think tank and his home. But Hur’s explanation for not bringing charges — that Biden would have persuaded the jury that he was a forgetful old man — upended the presidential campaign and infuriated the White House.
Biden and his closest advisers believe Hur went well beyond his purview and was gratuitous and misleading in his descriptions, according to those two people, who were granted anonymity to speak freely. And they put part of the blame on Garland, who they say should have demanded edits to Hur’s report, including around the descriptions of Biden’s faltering memory.
In White House meetings, aides have questioned why Garland felt the need to appoint a special counsel in the first place, though Biden has publicly said he supported the decision.
While Biden himself has not weighed in on Garland’s future, most of the president’s senior advisers do not believe that the attorney general would remain in his post for a possible second term, according to the two people.
A bit more:
“This has been building for a while,” said one of those people. “No one is happy”
Frustration within the White House at Garland has been growing steadily.
Last year, Biden privately denounced how long the probe into his son was taking, telling aides and outside allies that he believed the stress could send Hunter Biden spiraling back into addiction, according to the same two people. And the elder Biden, the people said, told those confidants that Garland should not have eventually empowered a special counsel to look into his son, believing that he again was caving to outside pressure.
Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss private matters. That trial still could take place before the election and much of the delay is owed not to Garland but to deliberate resistance put up by the former president and his team.
A plea to my Democratic friends: It’s time to start calling Joe Biden a great president. Not a good one. Not a better choice than Donald Trump. Joe Biden is a historically great president. Say it with passion backed by the conviction that it’s true.
Because it is.
Yes, the desire to see the 2024 election as a choice between a normal, stable president versus an erratic thug under indictment in multiple states is seductive. But don’t base a campaign on that contrast. Don’t go into 2024 with the game plan to win because Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy. That’s true, he is, but that’s only making the case that Donald Trump shouldn’t be president. It’s not the reason Joe Biden should be reelected.
Joe Biden should remain president because of his historic level of achievement here at home while standing on the side of freedom versus tyranny in the largest land war in Europe since World War II, a role no American president has played since the Roosevelt-Truman era. Be bold. Walk into this campaign with swagger and confidence and pride.
It’s become a 2024 trope that Donald Trump is the only Republican whom President Biden could beat, and that Biden is the only Democrat whom Trump could defeat. Like a lot of things in politics, it’s true if you accept it. But that acceptance is voluntary. Reject that framing for the industrial political complex bullshit that it is, brought to you by the same class of experts who knew without question that Bill Clinton was dead in June 1992, when he was running third to Ross Perot and George Bush, with 24 percent of the vote.
Stop the nonsense that only a weak opponent gives Joe Biden a chance to win. It’s more than wrong—it’s dangerous, completely misjudging Donald Trump’s strength. Trump is dominating a contest for a presidential nomination like no candidate in modern history because he’s the weakest candidate?
No. Donald Trump is going to win the Republican nomination easily, be endorsed by all his opponents not named Christie or Hutchinson, and emerge from the primaries better positioned to face an incumbent president than any candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1980. If you don’t want to wake up with Trump as your president a year from now, stop fantasying that Trump might not be the Republican nominee. End the whining about a Trump-Biden choice that only helps Trump and get about the business of uniting behind a great president.
A bit more:
As someone who worked in Republican campaigns for almost 30 years, I say without hesitation that the Democratic Party is the only pro-democracy party in America. But guys, why do so many of you have this need to act like ungrateful children of wealthy parents—impossible to please and always demanding more? Name a president who accomplished as much in his first term.
A shapeshifting cat, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi
The stock market is hitting record highs. Unemployment is at a record low, with 14 million new jobs. Talk to small-business owners, and the biggest problem they are facing is finding workers. A child born in the first Republican “infrastructure week” would have been entering grade school by the time President Biden passed the largest public spending initiative in American history. As a Republican media consultant, I made hundreds of ads about the high cost of prescription drugs. But it took President Biden to give Medicare the power to directly negotiate with Big Pharma to lower prices and cap the cost of insulin for Medicare beneficiaries at $35. For all the bitching about gas prices, the United States is now producing more oil than any country in history. Yes, more than Russia or Saudi Arabia, and that’s one of the reasons gas prices are now lower in inflation-adjusted prices than in 1974. Yeah, I know, fossil fuels suck, and the world should run on solar power. But the Biden administration also launched a $7 billion solar power investment project.
What is most amazing is that Biden got this done in a world in which the majority of Republicans believe he is not a legal president. Ponder that for a minute. You are a White House staffer working to help pass Biden initiatives, and you are dealing with members of Congress and senators who don’t just disagree with your boss—they think he’s an illegitimate president.
Wake up and show some gratitude. You wanted student loan forgiveness. You got it, for three million borrowers. You wanted a president who would finally pass gun safety legislation. You got the most comprehensive bill in nearly 30 years, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which passed with the support of 15 Republican senators and 14 Republican House members, opening the door to some hope that laws on gun violence might finally start to reflect the wishes of the majority of the country. Maybe you’re a Democrat who actually cares about the federal deficit, unlike the Republicans who fake concern. Since Biden took office, the deficit has decreased by $1.7 trillion.
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Jack Smith’s arguments to Judge Aileen Cannon that secret grand jury information from government witnesses should not be made public or given to Trump and his co-defendants. Yesterday Cannon ordered Smith to hand over the files today. It’s not clear yet what will happen, but Smith could appeal this to the 11th Circuit. One reason Smith wants to keep the documents sealed is because there is an active investigation of witness intimidation involved.
Federal authorities are currently investigating a series of threats made online to a potential witness related to special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents case against former President Donald Trump, according to a new court filing from Smith’s team.
In the filing late Wednesday in federal court in Florida, Smith’s team asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing the case, to let them file an exhibit under seal because, they wrote, “The exhibit describes in some detail threats that have been made over social media to a prospective Government witness and the surrounding circumstances, and the fact that those threats are the subject of an ongoing federal investigation being handled by a United States Attorney’s Office.”
“Disclosure of the details and circumstances of the threats risks disrupting the investigation,” the filing said.
The targeted witness was not identified.
The three-page filing discussing the probe was submitted as part of a dispute between Smith’s team and Trump’s lawyers over how much information should be redacted — or totally withheld from public view — in certain court filings.
In their filing Wednesday, Smith’s team urged Judge Cannon to let them file the exhibit completely under seal because, they said, simply redacting names or other parts of the document could still “provide information to the suspect to which he/she may not otherwise be entitled.”
Donald Trump and his legal team will receive unredacted FBI witnesses’ reports as part of the classified documents case after Special Counsel Jack Smith failed in his bid to withhold the information.
Beauty and the Cat , by Kunisada Utagawa
Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the trial against the former president, ordered federal prosecutors to hand over unredacted materials sought by Trump’s legal team in discovery, as well as the two other co-defendants in the case, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira….
On Thursday, Smith accused Cannon of making a “clear error” when she allowed that the documents be handed over. He said in filings that the move would reveal the identities of numerous potential witnesses, as well as potentially exposing them to “significant and immediate risks of threats, intimidation, and harassment.” Newsweek contacted the Department of Justice on Saturday via email.
Cannon had originally paused deadlines for Smith’s team to hand over the documents while she considered the special counsel’s motion. However, the stay lasted only a few hours, and later she ruled on Friday that the information must be delivered to Trump and the other defendants by Saturday, February 10.
The judge ruled that the information, including the names of potential witnesses, will be sealed from the public until a later court order.
Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, has long faced calls to recuse herself from the case after she made a number of decisions that favored the former president; these include ones that could potentially delay the start of the trial, scheduled for May.
Twitter lawyers are still suggesting that Jack Smith may take his case to the 11th Circuit. I’ll post in the comments if anything happens.
A crucial system of ocean currents may already be on course to collapse, according to a new report, with alarming implications for sea level rise and global weather — leading temperatures to plunge dramatically in some regions and rise in others.
Using exceptionally complex and expensive computing systems, scientists found a new way to detect an early warning signal for the collapse of these currents, according to the study published Friday in the journal Science Advances. And as the planet warms, there are already indications it is heading in this direction.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (the AMOC) — of which the Gulf Stream is part — works like a giant global conveyor belt, taking warm water from the tropics toward the far North Atlantic, where the water cools, becomes saltier and sinks deep into the ocean, before spreading southward.
The currents carry heat and nutrients to different areas of the globe and play a vital role in keeping the climate of large parts of the Northern Hemisphere relatively mild.
For decades, scientists have been sounding the alarm on the circulation’s stability as climate change warms the ocean and melts ice, disrupting the balance of heat and salt that determines the currents’ strength.
While many scientists believe the AMOC will slow under climate change, and could even grind to a halt, there remains huge uncertainty over when and how fast this could happen. The AMOC has only been monitored continuously since 2004.
Scientists do know — from building a picture of the past using things like ice cores and ocean sediments — the AMOC shut down more than 12,000 years ago following rapid glacier melt.
Now they are scrambling to work out if it could happen again.
This new study provides an “important breakthrough,” said René van Westen, a marine and atmospheric researcher at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and study co-author.
Read the rest at CNN. Maybe Quixote will comment on this story if she comes by.
I hope everyone is having a great weekend!
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This symbol of the endless knot features the Green Wood-Dragon. Wood Dragon years come every 60 years. The dragon is associated with incredible strength, positive transformation, and challenges. The element wood symbolizes creativity and adaptability.
𝗟𝗢𝗦𝗔𝗥 𝗧𝗔𝗦𝗛𝗜 𝗗𝗘𝗟𝗘𝗞!
Happy New Year of the Wood Dragon, Sky Dancers!
It would be now if we ever needed an auspicious Lunar New Year prediction. Fortunately, we are in the year of the Green Wood Dragon. So, here’s the soothsaying for the year from CNN. “What’s in store for the Year of the Dragon?” The Dragon is the only mythical creature in this zodiac. That’s special.
“This year will also be significant because it’s the year when the world enters a new chapter from the eighth period to the ninth period of Xuan Kong flying star.”
She explains that there are nine Xuan Kong flying stars that affect the feng shui of the world. Each of them lords over us for two decades before passing the torch to the next star.
The year 2024 marks the beginning of the next 20-year reign under the ninth flying star.
“The number nine star represents feminine energy – so ladies are going to take over in a lot of the areas. It also represents technology, art and design as well as spirituality,” says Chow.
I always see reading these forecasts as aspirational; in other words, if we think about them, we can make them happen. We certainly need to make something happen right now.
Yesterday was an insane news day. The SCOTUS hearing on the Colorado 14th Amendment was heard yesterday morning. There weas a live stream broadcast of the voices only. I heard Clarence Thomas fall asleep a few times and leave early via a young activist I follow on Threads. I also found out that was not unusual. When you’re just a paid vote, there’s not much to say, do, or think about.
I will make this our top story today, even though it appears the media is more interested in parsing every word President Biden spoke while looking through one of the more opinionated special counsel reports I’ve ever seen. The press is less involved with the idea that Joe was not determined to have any grounds for prosecution than with the description of him as an elderly man who forgets many things. If I were questioned on the past 40 years of my life while trying to handle the US response to the Hamas attack on Israel, I’d be a bit muddled, too. We also learned that Special Counsel Jack Smith is questioning a decision on how flooded everyone will be with various top-secret documents that the folks who moved the boxes around probably didn’t even see.
This is from NBC News. “Supreme Court signals unlikely to let Colorado kick Trump off the ballot. Trump is appealing a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that said he could be barred from the Republican primary ballot because of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.”
he Supreme Court on Thursday signaled deep skepticism that Colorado had the power to remove former President Donald Trump from the Republican primary ballot because of his actions trying to overturn the 2020 election results.
A majority of the justices appeared to think during the two-hour argument that states do not have a role in deciding whether a presidential candidate can be barred from running under a provision of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment that bars people who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office.
Justices from across the ideological spectrum raised concerns about states reaching different conclusions on whether a candidate could run, and several indicated that only Congress could enforce the provision at issue.
Throughout the argument, the justices barely touched upon the meaty issue at the center of the case: whether Trump participated in an insurrection. The ruling is unlikely to hinge on that question.
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, is tackling several novel and consequential legal issues concerning Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, enacted in the wake of the Civil War. Colorado voters filed a lawsuit saying Trump should be barred because of his efforts to defy the 2020 election results in events that led to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Section 3, aimed at preventing former Confederates from returning to power in the U.S. government, says anyone who had previously served as an “officer of the United States” and was then involved in an insurrection would be barred from holding federal office.
But during the oral argument, justices pushed back on the idea that the provision can be enforced by states.
So many of these oral arguments were framed around various words. Trump’s lawyers have been arguing various things around the applicability of the presidency to the idea of an “office.” I just have one question. If that’s the case, why have a big parade and inaugural whoop-ti-do surrounding the president taking “the oath of office.” If we’ve done this inaugural oath for a long time and named it as taking an ‘oath of office’, doesn’t that mean he’s an “officer of the United States.” I hate word games, and this seemed a lot like one.
You might find it interesting that this case is known as Trump V Anderson. Norma Anderson is a 91-year-old Legislator from Colorado and a lifelong Republican. This is from Politico.
Norma Anderson — the Anderson in the Trump v. Anderson case that the Supreme Court will hear on Thursday — is taking on Trump over whether he is eligible to serve as president after his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
Anderson, a lifelong Republican who rose through the state party to become one of the top GOP lawmakers in Colorado, said she immediately agreed to participate when recruited by an attorney working with the liberal government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
“When asked, and when duty calls, you do it,” she told POLITICO. “My reason for doing it is saving democracy. Because Donald Trump will destroy our democracy.”
The case rests on an interpretation of a clause in the 14th Amendment that says those who “engaged in” an insurrection against the United States after taking an oath to “support” the Constitution are ineligible to hold future office.
It takes a lot of chutzpah and bravery to face down the crazies in the Trump Cult. This is from The Atlantic. “The Supreme Court Is Eager to Rid Itself of This Difficult Trump Question. It just doesn’t know how.” This analysis is written by Quinta Jurecic
Two things seemed clear after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Anderson, the case concerning whether Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment bars Donald Trump from the presidency as an insurrectionist. First, most of the justices want to rule in Trump’s favor. Second, they’re struggling to figure out how to do so.
Maybe Section 3 doesn’t apply to the presidency per se, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson said—and perhaps, along those same lines, it doesn’t prohibit oath-breaking former presidents from holding future office either? Or perhaps, Justice Samuel Alito pondered, the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits insurrectionists from holding office, but not from running for it? Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed enamored of the idea that the amendment doesn’t allow states to disqualify candidates for federal office—as Colorado did here—without Congress first giving the go-ahead. In a related line of inquiry, which the justices seemed to coalesce around as arguments went on, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan suggested that perhaps there’s something inappropriate about allowing individual states to make decisions that could potentially determine a national election.
Brandi Buchman reports on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s move last night in the Stolen Documents Case. This is from Law & Crime. “‘Relentless and misleading’: Jack Smith shreds new Trump motion as proof he will ‘stop at nothing’ to delay Mar-a-Lago documents case.” Judge Loose Cannon is at it again.
In a new motion, special counsel Jack Smith shredded Donald Trump’s latest attempt to indefinitely delay the classified documents case in Florida before U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, urging the court to resist the former president’s efforts to “stop at nothing” to delay facing a jury.
“Their objective is plain — to delay trial as long as possible. And the tactics they deploy are relentless and misleading — they will stop at nothing to stall the adjudication of the charges against them by a fair and impartial jury of citizens. The Court should promptly reject the defendants’ motion,” Smith wrote in the 9-page brief filed in Florida late Thursday.
A tentative May 20 trial date has been set but it increasingly looks like that won’t get off the ground as Cannon has agreed to extend deadlines for other pretrial issues. For now, the next hearing approaches on March 1 when federal prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers will convene to discuss the schedule.
Meanwhile, Smith is eager to keep things on track and in the terse motion, lamented to Cannon that Trump’s pretrial motions for the indictment were due in November and yet, he reminded her, that deadline was vacated the same day.
Trump’s lawyers were either simply unprepared or were flatly ignoring court orders, according to the special counsel, and now, three months on, as Trump’s team has filed requests to adjourn the case completely, they still come asking for more time to file pretrial documents.
“This sequence of events fully exposes the defendants’ motive here: to achieve delay,” Smith wrote.
So, I have to write about the Hur Report, which basically showed a contrast between a President who did everything to hold on to documents he purposefully heisted and one who thought his aides were doing everything correctly and didn’t check on them. It’s turned into a discussion about Biden’s mental state, which is way out of this guy’s pay level. Now, we’re just endlessly hearing about the age thing. This is from Josh Marshall, who wrote it in Talking Points Memo. People age somewhat differently. My mother was unable to fend off dementia in her 70s. My father was good up until his 90s. I have senior moments, but I can’t do my job or live my life. Trump’s got advanced dementia. Biden has senior moments.
Let me share a few thoughts on the Biden special counsel report.
First off, this is another example of the universal rule: Republican special counsels are chosen to investigate Democrats. And Republican special counsels are chosen to investigate Republicans. It may not have been a great idea for Merrick Garland to have a two-time Trump appointee investigate Joe Biden. But here we are. Robert Hur totally slimed Biden with these gratuitous comments about his mental acuity and memory, referring to him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Even if you assume they are the product of a good faith evaluation they are still wildly inappropriate.
DOJ guidelines make clear that if you’re not bringing charges you don’t bash the subject of the investigation in your announcement (a la James Comey). You certainly aren’t supposed to affirmatively attempt to demean the subject of the investigation with clearly political attacks that aren’t even related to what you’re investigating. Hur might as well have called him “Fake News Joe Biden.” It’s really that transparent and that bad.
Are we sure that Hur let his political bias get in the way of his professional judgment? Can we draw that from his background as a politically connected Republican lawyer? I don’t even think it’s a serious question. The lengthy and gratuitous comments speak for themselves. Of course he did.
The descriptions in the report sound bad because they are designed to sound bad. These are from a five hour discussion the day after the October 7th attacks on Israel when I’m sure Biden was focused on that unfolding crisis. Without watching the interview we have no way of knowing whether these are representative of the tenor of the conversation or cherry-picked gotchas.
But there’s no crying in baseball. Entirely justified outrage from Biden supporters won’t counter whatever damage these comments will have. The White House will need to get Biden in front of interviewers, where he actually does quite well, and in widely seen venues, to counter it. It’s really as simple as that.
On the merits, some of these quotes that Hur came up with really do suggest that Biden knew in some sense that he had classified material in the documents or at least made references to it being in his possession. I need to look more closely at the specifics. And it’s still a prosecutor’s brief. But that did surprise me. And not in a good way.
This is a closing argument. This language is wildly inappropriate in a declination memo, because Hur didn’t find the evidence to back this story!
Worse still, it’s stupid. Because all Biden needed for vindication was that 40-page memo, the one he mentioned in the very same sentence as he mentioned the classified documents. The one stored inside the house, not in a discarded box in the garage. The one he never used during the 2020 election.
But Hur was undeterred by a stupid motive argument.
Next, after admitting that the FBI never succeeded in tracing the Afghan documents, much less proving they were in the basement of the Virginia house, he used this photo analysis to claim that the box found in the garage is the same one that appeared in two pictures taken in Biden’s Wilmington office in 2019, shortly after everything was shipped from Virginia to Delaware.
If you look at news aggregators like Memorandum, you’d think this was the only story in the world to follow right now. What we have here is a failure to communicate. A few articles like this are up today, given Nevada’s debacle of a primary/caucus vote. Blocking votes is a Republican strategy. “How Trump turned the GOP into the party of lawless disorder. Can Republicans win by promoting contempt for the rule of law? We’re about to find out.” It’s written by David R Lurie at Public Notice.
In the wake of his loss, Trump gave up any pretense of standing for law and order. He schemed to undue the outcome of the election, culminating in a violent attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters in a desperate attempt to prevent the certification of Biden’s victory.
With his recent victories in the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, Trump made it a virtual certainty that he will again be the Republican Party’s presidential candidate. But as he prepares for his third general election campaign, Trump is making clear that he will be a very different candidate this time.
It is Trump the insurrectionist who will be running at the top of the 2024 GOP ticket. Trump has discarded even the pretense that he intends to “fix” the nation, let alone foster order and respect for the rule of law. The upcoming election is therefore lining up as a test of whether an anti-law and order Republican can win the presidency. Trump and his supporters have made that all the more clear over the past several weeks, after Trump’s early primary victories sealed his status as the presumptive GOP presidential candidate.
Trump celebrated his New Hampshire win by setting out to further alienate women voters. During his “victory” speech, he relentlessly engaged in misogynistic and racist attacks on his sole remaining primary opponent, Nikki Haley.
Trump them flew to New York for the apparent purpose of drawing further attention to the fact that a jury found him liable for sexually assaulting and then defaming E. Jean Carroll. He devoted his short time in the courtroom to expressing contempt for Carroll, the judge and even the jury, which proceeded to award Carroll more than $83 million.
Unsurprisingly given all this, a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that, just over the past several weeks, Trump managed to widen the already gaping gender gap he faces in November. Women voters now support Biden over Trump 58 to 36 percent, versus 53 to 41 percent in December 2023. Apparently pleased with that debacle, Trump indicated that he plans to spend the campaign shuttling between courtrooms wherein he is a criminal defendant.
Then, after the GOP successfully forced Biden to accept a “border security” bill filled with GOP priorities in return for providing funding for Ukraine, Trump stepped in to successfully pressure Republicans to scuttle the Republican bill.
Trump, and his most loyal MAGA acolytes, were open and transparent about the reason for their about face: They want the Department of Homeland Security to remain as overwhelmed and under-resourced as possible during the months prior to the election. In short, they want to maintain an appearance of chaos.
All this chaos is really tough on this old lady. But I’m now near the incoherent stream of blather from the Orange One. Neither too much wine or lack of sleep or signs of aging make me sound this insane. Trump sounds like he has an inchoate understanding of reality day in and day out.
Krugman: 'Disgusting' obsession with Biden’s age ignores Trump’s 'incoherent rambling' https://t.co/GHhZB0hbDB
Yesterday was a huge news day. The top story was the decision by the DC Circuit Court ruling stating that Trump does not have immunity from prosecution for crimes committed as president. Now Trump must decide by Monday whether to take the case to the Supreme Court.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments regarding the Colorado case arguing that the 14th Amendment makes Trump ineligible to appear on the state’s primary ballot.
Trump is also awaiting a decision from Judge Engoron in the New York fraud case that could potentially bankrupt him.
In addition, Republicans in the House and Speaker Mike Johnson failed miserably as he lost two votes he put on the floor: aid to Israel and impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. On top of that, the head of the RNC announced her resignation.
In the Senate, Mitch McConnell knifed Senator James Lankford in the back after assigning him to negotiated a border bill that included aid to Ukraine and Israel. Democrats gave Republicans everything they wanted, but they backed down on Trump’s orders.
Former President Donald Trump — and indeed any other former president — may be prosecuted for alleged crimes they committed while in office, a federal appeals court panel ruled Tuesday.
The unanimous 57-page decision from a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is a major win for special counsel Jack Smith, who is seeking to put Trump on trial this year on federal felony charges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump quickly vowed an appeal, which could be at the Supreme Court by Monday.
“For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant,” the D.C. Circuit judges wrote. “But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.”
The ruling affirms U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s historic conclusion that former presidents may be prosecuted for crimes they committed in office, even if those alleged crimes arguably related to their official duties. Trump had argued that former presidents could not be prosecuted for such actions without first being impeached and convicted by Congress.
The judges put their decision on hold only until Monday to allow Trump to ask the Supreme Court to take up the immunity fight on an emergency basis. If he does so, the decision won’t take effect until the high court acts on his request, the appeals panel decreed.
Trump could also ask the D.C. Circuit to rehear the case. But the panel said doing that won’t delay the return of the case to Chutkan, the trial judge, unless the full bench of the D.C. Circuit agrees to a rehearing, which requires a majority of the 11 active appellate judges.
The force of Tuesday’s unanimous ruling Tuesday, backed by two liberal judges and one staunch conservative, may have been worth the wait for Smith. Rather than a splintered decision that could be picked apart more easily, the ruling lays out a groundbreaking legal and political framework for bringing a former president to trial.
On July 24, 1974, when the Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Nixon, ordering President Richard Nixon to produce the Watergate tapes, the president turned to his chief of staff, Alexander Haig, to understand what had just happened. He later recounted the exchange in his memoirs:
“Unanimous?” I guessed.
“Unanimous. There’s no air in it at all,” he said.
“None at all?” I asked.
“It’s tight as a drum.”
These words echoed through my mind today, nearly 50 years later, as I read the historic opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in United States v. Trump, holding that former President Donald Trump does not enjoy immunity from prosecution for any crimes he committed in attempting to end constitutional democracy in the United States.
The result was no surprise. As I said last month, no one who attended the oral argument could have believed Trump had any chance of prevailing. The question was timing: How long would an appeal delay Trump’s trial, originally scheduled for March 4? Many of us thought that the decision might come sooner, perhaps within days of the argument, given how quickly the court had scheduled briefing and argument. And by the end of last week, some commentators had, by their own reckoning, reached the “freakout stage” as to why the decision was taking so long.
They—and we—needn’t have worried. Issued exactly four weeks after the argument, the court’s decision came plenty fast. It’s not that often that you get a unanimous 57-page decision on novel questions of law in 28 days. And you almost never get an opinion of this quality in such a short period of time. I’ve read thousands of judicial opinions in my four decades as a law student and lawyer. Few have been as good as this one.
Unanimous. No air. Tight as a drum. The court’s per curiam opinion—per curiam meaning “for the court,” in that no individual judge authored it—is all that and more. It’s a masterful example of judicial craftsmanship on many levels. The opinion weaves together the factual context, the constitutional text, the judicial precedent, history, the parties’ concessions, and razor-sharp reasoning, with no modicum of judicial and rhetorical restraint, to produce an overwhelmingly cohesive, and inexorably convincing, whole. The opinion deserves a place in every constitutional-law casebook, and, most important—are you listening, members of the Supreme Court?—requires no further review.
The opinion far exceeds any commentator’s poor power to add or detract, so I’ll mostly let it speak for itself. The bottom line:
For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.
I shared this as a gift link (see above), so you should be able to read the whole piece without a subscription.
The Supreme Court on Thursday will confront the critical question of Donald Trump’s eligibility to return to the White House, hearing arguments in an unprecedented case that gives the justices a central role in charting the course of a presidential election for the first time in nearly a quarter-century.
Reading the Newspapers, by Aristarkh Lentulov
The justices will decide whetherColorado’s top court was correctto apply a post-Civil War provisionof the Constitution to order Trump off the ballot after concluding his actions around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol amounted to insurrection.Primary voting is already underway in some states. Colorado’s ballots for the March 5 primary were printed last week and include Trump’s name. But his status as a candidate will depend on what the Supreme Court decides.
The justices — especially their cautious, consensus-building chief, John G. Roberts Jr. — may be reluctant to wade into such a politically fraught dispute, experts say. The court could rule more narrowly, finding, for example, that Colorado was wrong to bar Trump from the ballot because of a technicality.
But election law experts have implored the justices to definitively decide the key question of whether Trump is disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, settling the issue nationwide so that other states with similar challenges to Trump’s candidacy follow along.
They warn of political instability not seen since the Civil War if the court was to overturn Colorado’s ruling but leave open the possibility that Congress could try to disqualify Trump later in the process, including after the general election.
“You can see this one coming. There are flashing red lights warning 10 months before the election that chaos this time is not only possible but more than likely given that 2020 broke the norm and dented the guardrails,” said veteran Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg, who played a central role for Bush in the Florida recount.
Note the other SCOTUS cases coming up:
Trump’s eligibility is not the only question before the court that could affect the former president’s political future. Later this term, the justices are set to review the validity of a law that was used to charge hundreds of people in connection with the Jan. 6 riot and is also a key element of Trump’s four-count federal election obstruction case in Washington. Trump’s claim that he is protected by presidential immunity from being prosecuted for trying to block Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory also appears headed to the high court after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled against Trump this week.
In the Colorado case, the justices will have to weigh untested legal issues against the backdrop of broad concerns about democracy. Put simply, should the ramifications of disqualifying the leading Republican candidate in the midst of the primary election outweigh the consequences of allowing a candidate to run again after he tried to subvert the outcome of the last election?
In the civil fraud case in New York, we are awaiting a decision by Judge Arthur Engoron, but there is a problem. The Trump Organization’s former CFO Allan Weisselberg is trying to negotiate a settlement with the Manhattan DA in the election interference case, because he may have committed perjury in that case. Judge Engoron wants to know whether that affects his case.
The judge overseeing Donald J. Trump’s civil fraud case has questioned whether a key witness committed perjury during the former president’s trial, a new court filing shows.
The judge, Arthur F. Engoron, asked Mr. Trump’s lawyers to address the truthfulness of the witness, Allen H. Weisselberg, Mr. Trump’s longtime chief financial officer. Mr. Weisselberg and Mr. Trump are both defendants in the case, which was brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James.
Man Reading Newspaper, by Cliff Wilson
Justice Engoron, who is expected to issue a decision in the nonjury case this month, cited a recent New York Times article about Mr. Weisselberg’s testimony. The article reported that Mr. Weisselberg, 76, is negotiating a potential agreement with the Manhattan district attorney’s office that would require him to plead guilty to perjury for his testimony.
“I of course want to know whether Mr. Weisselberg is now changing his tune, and whether he is admitting he lied under oath in my courtroom at this trial,” Justice Engoron wrote to the lawyers on both sides of the case in a recent email made public on Tuesday.
The complex situation stems from overlapping criminal and civil cases brought by the two New York law enforcement agencies.
The district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, has jurisdiction over perjury and other crimes committed in Manhattan. In addition to scrutinizing Mr. Weisselberg’s testimony in the civil fraud case, Mr. Bragg is preparing to put Mr. Trump on trial next month for criminal charges stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star.
In the civil fraud case, the attorney general, Ms. James, accused Mr. Trump, Mr. Weisselberg and others of fraudulently inflating the former president’s net worth and is asking the judge to impose a roughly $370 million penalty. The monthslong trial took place in the fall.
Mr. Weisselberg was one of more than 40 witnesses. While it is unclear which of his statements might have caught the district attorney’s attention, the attorney general’s office stopped questioning him shortly after Forbes magazine published an article in which it accused Mr. Weisselberg of having lied under oath about his involvement in valuing Mr. Trump’s penthouse apartment.
As to how Trump will manage to pay the huge settlement that is very likely coming from Judge Engoron, Jose Pagliery writes at The Daily Beast: Inside Donald Trump’s Incredible Cash Crunch.
Donald Trump is just days away from getting slammed with a court judgment that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars as a punishment for his decades of bank fraud with the Trump Organization. And two little-known New York laws could leave Trump scrambling for cash: a requirement that he immediately front the money to appeal the decision, and a sky-high state interest rate.
During a deposition with the New York Attorney General in April 2023, Trump boasted that he had $400 million in cash, bragging about how it’s “a lot for a developer.” But even if that were true, it likely won’t be enough to simultaneously cover last month’s $83 million verdict at his rape defamation trial—which he needs to immediately set aside to appeal that case—and the $370 million demanded by the AG for his incessant lying to banks.
Woman Reading Newspaper, by Arne Kavli
While the judge deciding the bank fraud case hasn’t come up with a final figure that Trump owes, every indication is that it will be into the hundreds of millions. A message from the judge on Tuesday actually suggested it could be even more than what the New York AG is seeking.
Trump’s sudden cash demands are exacerbated by a quirk in New York law. Not only would the judgment get automatically inflated by an unusually high interest rate of 9 percent, but Trump would need to give the court the enlarged total—plus an extra 10 to 20 percent—in order to appeal and have another day in court. And it would all be due by mid-March.
The self-proclaimed billionaire real estate tycoon is about to be caught in a trap of his own making, forced to front a massive amount of cash and possibly liquidate assets—while potentially unable to access the money, because the court order could limit his ability to tap his Monopoly board of properties.
Meanwhile, Trump also faces mounting difficulty in finding surety companies and banks to guide him through the appeal, because his credibility is the very focal point of the case in question. (Trump also has a long history of stiffing banks and creditors.)
One more interesting read (h/t JJ) by Ankush Khardori at New York Magazine: What Happens, Exactly, If Trump Is Sentenced to Prison? New York Mag. usually allows only one free article, so clear your cashe before you head over there.
The House GOP under Speaker Mike Johnson is flopping around like a fish in the bottom of the boat.
In a nearly unprecedented failure, Johnson brought articles of impeachment to the House floor and lost. He lost! He didn’t have the votes! He couldn’t do the math!
It was a spectacular and unexpected failure. The impeachment was bogus to begin with. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had not committed any high crimes or misdemeanors and hadn’t even been accused of doing so. This was purely a political impeachment, designed to front the border issue for the House GOP and Donald Trump in an election year. So even on its own terms as a political hatchet job, Johnson was unable to get the job done.
House Republicans insist they can bring the impeachment back to the floor later and win because Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) would have been the deciding vote last night but was absent for treatment for cancer. We shall see.
As a fitting coda to the day, Johnson brought up an Israel funding bill right after the impeachment vote, and it failed, too.
Once Mike Johnson’s speakership was merely implausible. Now it looks incompetent.
The rookie Republican leader – already struggling to wield a tiny, extreme and malfunctioning majority – suffered a spectacular embarrassment on Tuesday night in a failed vote to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
The drama undermined what was already a questionable case for impeachment – more over policy disagreements than the constitutional standard of treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors.
And it told a story of a House in utter disarray.
Joe Reading Newspaper, by David Tanner
Setting up a high-stakes, televised tour de force for the impeachment of a Cabinet official for only the second time in history was a daring act. But failing to actually pull it off by a couple of votes broke the cardinal rule of not putting a bill on the floor until the numbers are rock solid.
The result was a debacle that made the House leadership a laughing stock.
The failure played into the hands of a White House that delights in portraying Johnson’s majority as an engine for Donald Trump’s political stunts more than a serious governing force. And it raised serious doubts over the GOP’s capacity to pull off another politized maneuver designed to please the former president – an impeachment of President Joe Biden.
The malpractice of Johnson’s impeachment team was encapsulated by Democrats outmaneuvering them to bring a shoeless Rep. Al Green, who was recovering from surgery, to the chamber in a wheelchair to cast a dramatic vote.
Moments after the Mayorkas impeachment failed, Johnson was also unable to pass a standalone bill containing billions of dollars in aid for Israel. It was another busted gambit to jam the Biden administration. The president had threatened to veto the bill in protest of Johnson’s refusal to hold votes on a broader package that also included aid to Ukraine and Taiwan. The speaker said Biden and Democrats should be “ashamed” of failing to support an ally embroiled in a war. But the double failure on the House floor did more to highlight his own deficiencies than discomfort Biden.
It was late on a Thursday afternoon in the marbled halls of the Senate, and a small group of negotiators — one Republican, one Democrat and one independent — had just about finished a painstakingly put together border security compromise it took them months to forge.
But what should have been a triumphant moment felt more like an ordeal for the lone Republican in the trio.
“I feel like the guy standing in the middle of the field in a thunderstorm, holding up the metal stick,” Senator James Lankford, the Oklahoma Republican who was his party’s lead broker of the deal, told reporters last week.
The plight of Mr. Lankford, a slim, understated Baptist minister with a neatly combed shock of red hair and a baritone voice that regularly delivers deadpan quips, reflects the extraordinary rise and fall of the border and Ukraine deal that is expected to collapse in a test vote in the Senate on Wednesday — and the political forces within the Republican Party that brought it down.
For months, Mr. Lankford, a staunch conservative, labored over the package alongside Senators Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, and Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona independent, demanding strict immigration policies his party insisted must be a part of any bill to send a fresh infusion of aid to Ukraine. But when Mr. Lankford managed to extract them, he found his fellow Republicans unwilling to embrace the plan, in a vivid illustration of how the political ground for any compromise on immigration has vanished for a party that has decided the issue is too valuable as a political weapon to resolve….
Just as Mr. Lankford and his fellow negotiators neared a deal, former President Donald J. Trump stepped in, trashing the bill both before and after it was released on Sunday and opening the floodgates of Republican resistance. That left Mr. Lankford fighting to keep the deal alive while being attacked by members of his own party, including in his home state, where the Republican Party tried to censure him late last month for “playing fast and loose with Democrats on our border policy.” (The resolution was later rescinded.)
My dad traded my flute for a guitar in the 8th grade, and I taught myself to play and pick “Both Sides Now.” That was 1968. She sang it last night at the age of 80. Judy Collins first made it famous, but it was all Joni. I saw Joni perform at my first Jazz Fest in New Orleans in 1995 before I started playing around town and doing sound for the Fest. I cannot tell you how much I wanted to see her live. I watched how she did all those alternative tunings. I played her album ‘Free Man in Paris’ in my first year at university. There I was, watching those fingers work their magic as close as I could get. I’d already worn the tracks off of ‘Blue’.
In 2024, the Grammys lived up to their often-dubious claim to being “music’s biggest night,” with highs like Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs’ “Fast Car” duet, lows like the shocking arrest of Killer Mike, and whoas like Album of the Year winner Taylor Swift announcing a new album titled The Tortured Poets Department. But for me, the highlight of the evening was a quieter, if no less historic moment: Joni Mitchell taking the Grammy stage for the first time, at 80, to perform her classic ballad “Both Sides, Now.” I’d like to think Swift—the woman of the hour, night, and year, as well as a Joni superfan who calls Mitchell’s Blue her favorite album—would agree.
The song began as a piano playing through darkness, out of which Mitchell emerged, spotlit and facing backstage in a regal Victorian chair. Decked out in her signature beret and braids, and surrounded by crystal chandeliers, she used a bejeweled cane to keep time. And as she sang the opening lines, voice deeper now than that of the soprano who trilled its high notes on her 1969 album Clouds, her throne revolved until she was staring straight at the audience. Seated around Mitchell, like acolytes at her feet, were younger musicians—Brandi Carlile, Jacob Collier, Allison Russell, SistaStrings, Blake Mills, and Lucius—accompanying her with guitar, strings, woodwinds, and backing vocals. She didn’t strain her voice, but she sounded strong and clear.
Joni Mitchell at the 2024 Grammys
If Joni ruled my guitar picking in the sixties and seventies, Tracy Chapman grabbed me in the 1980s. I jumped on singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman’s ‘Give Me One Reason’, a track from Chapman’s 1988 album, with a 5-year-old daughter sitting beside me. When I moved to New Orleans and started performing again, that older and mouthier daughter corrected my timing several times. Given my lack of interest in country music, some singer I’d never heard that recorded her song shared the stage with Mitchell at the Grammies last night. Her album that enriched my life has never been re-released. I bet it will now. It topped the iTunes Chart after her Grammy performance. She looks and sounds better than ever!
“Fast Car,” the folk anthem by Tracy Chapman, is continuing to have its renaissance moment.
Chapman joined country singer Luke Combs for a rare performance of the song at Sunday’s Grammys ceremony. Moments after, “Fast Car” shot to No. 1 on the iTunes Top Songs chart. Her 1988 debut album, Tracy Chapman, also sat at No. 1.
Chapman’s original song peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart following its release. She has performed the song on the Grammy stage before, when she won best female pop vocal performance for it at the 1989 Grammys.
Combs’ version peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100 chart after it was released last year and was nominated for a Grammy this year, though it did not win.
Chapman was not listed as an official performer this year, and the crowd cheered loudly when she appeared onstage, providing one of the most powerful moments at a Grammys show that was packed with memorable moments. Artists Taylor Swift and Jelly Roll were seen standing and singing along, and Chapman herself beamed with a smile.
Chapman has won four Grammys in the past, three of which were tied to her self-titled album, which included “Fast Car.” For that, she won Best Contemporary Folk Album, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and Best New Artist in 1989.
And yes, Taylor was there. A shot of her standing, dancing, clapping, and singing ‘Fast Car’ is viral today. ‘I became a Swifty’ with her 2014 hit ‘Shake it off’. It got a lot of play during Hillary’s campaign. She was a Hillary supporter but never quite got around to “endorsing’ her. Here’s a typical headline for that time of my life. “Can Hillary Clinton Shake It Off?” was all over the media. It was a meme-worthy song once Clinton stood on a town hall stage with Stalking Donnie Dotard and actually shook off his hateful rhetoric.
Swift won her 4th Album of the Year last night with intense competition. This is from People Magazine. “Taylor Swift Makes History as She Wins 4th Album of the Year at 2024 Grammys: ‘Unbelievably Blown Away’.”
Taylor Swift was awarded album of the year at Sunday’s awards show in Los Angeles for her album Midnights, making her the only artist to ever win album of the year four times.Midnights, Fearless, 1989 and Folklore have all won the achievement.
Next up for Swift is watching The Super Bowl and more grief on all those nutty conspiracy theories from the left-hand tail of the MAGA IQ charts. Don’t even ask where the mean sits for these freaks of nature. She’s reportedly turned down performances for its Half Time Program several times, according to Fortune.
I would like to honor these two women in the category of causing all other female artists to have hope and awe. They are Annie Lennox and the late Sinead O’Connor. I love to tell this story of what the neighborhood kids said about me when I was in the skinny as hell and even balder stage of having chemotherapy in 1980. They went around telling everyone that I was a big music star! They thought I was Sinead! That’s the best compliment I’ve ever gotten!
This is from Rolling Stone. “Annie Lennox Calls for Gaza Ceasefire During Sinéad O’Connor’ Grammys Tribute.”
After performing “Nothing Compares to U” on Sunday, the singer became the first artist to call for a ceasefire in Gaza at a major awards show this year.
“Artists for a ceasefire. Peace in the world,” Lennox said with her fist in the air, as an image of O’Connor displayed in the background.
Fans celebrated the Eurythmics icon for making the bold statement and honoring O’Connor in the “most meaningful and honest way.” O’Connor, who was also known for speaking up, famously ripped an image of the Pope to call out the Catholic church’s approach to clergy child sex abuse while performing on Saturday Night Live in 1992.
Oh, Annie of THAT voice! She killed it. The song written by Prince has one of the more gut-wrenching melodies and lyrics you’d ever want to croon.
So, anyway, that’s all I want to do today. I am glad that these female singer-songwriters are finally getting their due at the Grammys. Okay, I’ve shared my inner fan girl and inspirations with you. You probably need more coffee now.
Have a great week! And go on! Listen to their music!
Here’s a bonus: Annie with the Queen of Soul singing that funky music in 1985. It’s Aretha!!!
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National security officials are used to shaking off absurd conspiracy theories, but the latest rumor that’s gripped MAGA world just hits different.
The claims by Fox News and far-right influencers that pop star Taylor Swift is part of a Pentagon “psychological operation” to get President Joe Biden reelected, and somehow rig the Super Bowl to benefit Kansas City Chiefs tight end (and Swift’s boyfriend) Travis Kelce, has been met with forehead slaps in the national security world.
“The absurdity of it all boggles the mind,” said one senior administration official, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly on the matter. “It feels like one of those ‘tell me you are a MAGA conspiracy theorist, without telling me you are a MAGA conspiracy theorist’ memes.”
Let’s go back to December: A wild theory gained traction on far-right corners of social media after Swift was named Time magazine’s person of year on Dec. 6. Last month, Fox News host Jesse Watters did a segment about the idea, playing a clip from a NATO conference that he said backed up the theory that Swift was part of a Pentagon “psy-op,” or psychological operation, for combating online information.
“It’s real. The Pentagon psy-op unit pitched NATO on turning Taylor Swift into an asset for combating misinformation online,” Watters said.
Robert Downey Jr.
The Pentagon responded at the time, but the rumors continued to proliferate on social media. Influential MAGA types are now promoting the dizzying notion that Swift’s relationship with Kelce — another right-wing anti-hero after appearing in an ad for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer promoting the Covid and flu vaccines — is part of a plot by the NFL and Democratic Party for Swift to endorse Biden at the Super Bowl.
Faced with an onslaught of journalist questions about the theory, spokesperson Sabrina Singh was ready for it.
In the name of being honest, Singh vehemently denied Swift is part of a DOD operation.
“We know all too well the dangers of conspiracy theories, so to set the record straight — Taylor Swift is not part of a DOD psychological operation. Period,” Singh told POLITICO.
I’m sure MAGA world will just find a way to work this denial into their nutty theories. Unfortunately, Swift is going to need serious protection from the Trump crazies.
The United States launched attacks Friday against 85 sites in Iraq and Syria used by Iranian forces and Iran-backed militants, its first retaliatory strikes for the killing of three American soldiers in Jordan last weekend, U.S. officials said.
U.S. military forces struck targets at seven facilities tied to attacks on U.S. personnel in the region, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters. U.S. Central Command said the facilities included command and control operations, intelligence centers, rockets and missiles, and drone storage sites.
Stephen King
“Our response began today. It will continue at times and places of our choosing,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world. But let all those who might seek to do us harm know this: If you harm an American, we will respond.”
The Biden administration had made clear that the U.S. would take military action after the drone attack by Iran-backed militants at a remote U.S. base in Jordan, in which more than 40 others were wounded. Biden attended the dignified return of the three slain U.S. soldiers at Dover Air Force Base earlier Friday.
President Biden met Friday with the families of American service members killed last month in a drone strike in Jordan and participated in a dignified transfer, a solemn ceremony in which the troops’ remains return to the U.S.
The president and first lady Jill Biden attended the ceremony at Dover Air Force Base along with other U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. C.Q. Brown, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The president and first lady looked on with their hands over their hearts as three flag-draped coffins were removed from a C-5 plane and taken by military personnel to a van.
The Pentagon on Monday identified the soldiers, who all served in the Army Reserve and were assigned to Georgia’s Fort Moore. The soldiers are Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, 46, of Carrollton, Ga.; Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, of Waycross, Ga.; and Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, of Savannah, Ga.
Biden spoke Tuesday with the families of the fallen service members to express his condolences, and he met with them in person Friday.
“They risked it all,” Biden said Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast. “And we’ll never forget [their] sacrifices and service to our country.”
The three troops were killed, and roughly 40 others were injured in a drone strike in Jordan near the Syrian border Sunday. The White House has attributed the attack to the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group that contains different militias backed by Iran.
In the world of President Donald Trump, he has paid his respects to “many, many” returning soldiers killed in the line of duty, with daughter and top presidential aide Ivanka Trump adding that “each time” she has stood by his side at one of these ceremonies, it has hardened his resolve to bring troops home.
In the real world, Trump has traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware exactly four times ― fewer than half as many times as his vice president ― and avoided going at all for nearly two years after getting berated for his incompetence by the father of a slain Navy SEAL, according to a former White House aide who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Bill Owens, the father of William “Ryan” Owens, refused to shake Trump’s hand at that Feb. 1, 2017, encounter, the aide said, and then told Trump that he was responsible for his son’s death for approving the disastrous raid in Yemen without bothering to understand the risks.
“He refused to go back for two years, he was so rattled,” the aide said, adding that the main reason Trump had approved the raid just five days after taking office was that predecessor Barack Obama had refused to do so.
What’s more, Trump made the decision at a social dinner that included his son-in-law and top adviser, Jared Kushner, and then-chief strategist Stephen Bannon, rather than his National Security Council staff.
“You can count on one hand the number of times Donald Trump has been to Dover,” said Jon Soltz, chairman of the progressive political group VoteVets and an Iraq War veteran. “There simply is no bottom when it comes to what he’ll lie about. I wish there was more outrage about Trump lying about the dignified transfer of the fallen for political reasons, because as a veteran it really disgusts me.”
Just a reminder of the embarrassment to his country Trump was and is.
Before I get to the new about Trump’s legal woes, I was amazed that The New York Times actually published a somewhat positive story about Vice President Kamala Harris: Kamala Harris Bolsters Biden for 2024 and Lays Groundwork for 2028, by Reid Epstein and Maya King.
When President Biden pushed Democrats to place South Carolina first on their presidential primary calendar, the geography for the party’s political strivers changed. They are now working to build support not in mostly white Northern places but in a Southern state with a predominantly Black primary voting base that better represents the modern Democratic Party.
So when Vice President Kamala Harris arrived on Friday in Orangeburg, S.C., for her ninth visit to South Carolina since taking office, she came as a known quantity. While she and Mr. Biden are running for renomination without serious challengers, the relationships she has developed in the state are expected to play a part in lifting their ticket to a comfortable triumph on Saturday in the party’s first recognized primary election.
Sigourney Weaver
Ms. Harris’s trip, as well as her college tour last year and an ongoing circuit to defend abortion rights and promote the Democratic agenda, also served two larger purposes: working to shore up Mr. Biden’s lingering vulnerabilities with Black voters and young voters, and keeping the first woman and first woman of color to serve as vice president at the forefront for the next presidential contest in 2028.
Perhaps the most influential Democrat in South Carolina is already on board with Ms. Harris as a future White House candidate.
“I made very clear months ago that I support her,” said Representative James E. Clyburn, whose 2020 endorsement of Mr. Biden before his state’s primary election helped rejuvenate the former vice president’s struggling campaign and carry him to the nomination. “That’s why we got to re-elect the ticket. Then you talk about viability after that.”
“There is an unspoken language between the vice president and African American women in this state,” said Trav Robertson, a former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. “She doesn’t have to go into a room and say things — because they already know they have a shared experience.”
Read the rest at the NYT.
The legal news is kind of depressing–Trump is succeeding with his delay tactics.
It is unclear when exactly the trial will now start, but the case has been on pause for nearly two months — Trump’s team requested a stay on Dec. 7, and it was granted on Dec. 13 — which would mean the soonest the trial could start would likely be late April or early May.
A start date in early May could easily mean the trial won’t conclude until after the Republican National Convention, scheduled for July 15-18 in Milwaukee.
In a previous order, Chutkan reiterated that a total of seven months was “sufficient time” for Trump to prepare for trial, not including the time the case has been on pause.
Friday’s ruling comes as the D.C. Circuit Court has not yet decided on whether the former president is immune from prosecution. A panel of federal appeals court judges heard oral argumentson Jan. 9, and the case is on an expedited schedule.
“The court will set a new schedule if and when the mandate is returned,” said the court orderfrom Chutkan.
In December, when a federal appeals court agreed to hear former President Donald J. Trump’s sweeping claims to be immune from charges of plotting overturn the 2020 election, it laid out a lightning-fast briefing schedule, asking the defense and prosecution to file their papers on successive Saturdays during the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
Elvis Presley
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit also moved with unusual alacrity in setting up a hearing for arguments on the issue, scheduling the proceeding on Jan. 9, just one week after all of the papers were submitted — a remarkably short window by the standards of the judicial system.
But after sending up what appeared to be clear signals that they intended to swiftly resolve this phase of the immunity dispute — which lies at the heart of both the viability and timing of Mr. Trump’s trial on the election subversion charges — the appeals court judges have yet to issue a decision….
The disconnect between the expectations set up by the panel’s early moves to expedite the case and the weeks that have now accumulated without a ruling has captured the attention of some legal experts who are closely watching the case.
It has also caught the eye of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, who have been watching from the sidelines with something akin to quiet glee. Each day that passes without a ruling bolsters their strategy of seeking to postpone the trial until after the presidential race is decided.
So what’s going on? It seems there could be another judge like Aileen Cannon trying to help Trump.
“It is surprising, given how quickly they moved to have this appeal briefed and argued, for the court to not yet have issued a decision,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a University of Texas at Austin law professor who specializes in federal courts. “It’s surprising both just because of how fast they moved and because of the broader timing considerations in this case — both the March 4 trial date and the looming specter of the election.”
It is impossible at this point to gain real insight into what is going on among the members of the panel, which is composed of two judges appointed by President Biden and one placed on the bench by President George H.W. Bush.
The latter judge, Karen L. Henderson, had previously dissented from expediting the immunity appeal and has voted in Mr. Trump’s favor in several previous politically charged cases. As the panel’s senior jurist, Judge Henderson has the authority to write the opinion if she is in the majority. And she faces no deadline to complete the job.
Professor Vladeck said that many people in the legal community had been speculating about what Judge Henderson’s role in the delay might be, though he also noted that no formal rule prevented the other two judges on a panel from moving ahead in issuing a ruling on their own.
While that would be a “breach of judicial decorum,” he said, Judge Henderson’s colleagues — Florence Y. Pan and J. Michelle Childs — could in theory release a decision without her.
So far that’s not happening–just more obstruction. And after this court gives their opinion, the case might go to the Supreme Court for more delays.
Robert De Niro
Judge Cannon is stalling the stolen documents case, and the case in Georgia is also facing difficulties. It’s looking like the first criminal trial Trump will face is the one over paying hush money to Stormy Daniels. From The Washington Post:
Trump’s legal team had already been preparing for the New York case to be first, according to people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal strategy. Some Trump advisers view the New York case as the weakest of the four and believe that indictment last March helped Trump rebuild support among Republicans, these people said. Many advisers think the GOP reaction to Trump’s criminal charges would have been different if another case — related to possession of classified documents — had come first.
So instead of hearing evidence about efforts to block a U.S. election or improperly keep highly classified U.S. secrets, the first jury to weigh alleged crimes by Trump as he again runs for president could be focused on sordid allegations of a long-ago sexual encounter with an adult-film star. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him.
“This was the first indictment of Trump but quickly became seen as the runt of the litter, compared to bigger, more consequential cases,” said Ronald Kuby, a veteran criminal defense lawyer in New York. He said the New York trial may be a “garden-variety fraud case,” but its simplicity is also its saving grace.
“Unlike the D.C. case, this does not involve any question of presidential immunity. Unlike the Florida documents case, this does not involve the lengthy proceedings that are needed in cases where classified information is at issue, and unlike the Georgia case, it is not a sprawling indictment of 18 people — there’s one defendant,” Kuby said. “And the evidence that has been made publicly available is compelling.”
I guess one criminal conviction is better than none.
This is crazy: I guess some FBI agents didn’t want to do a surprise search of Mar-a-Lago, and when they did do it, they may have missed something important.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has questioned several witnesses about a closet and a so-called “hidden room” inside former President Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago that the FBI didn’t check while searching the estate in August 2022, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
As described to ABC News, the line of questioning in several interviews ahead of Trump’s indictment last year on classified document charges suggests that — long after the FBI seized dozens of boxes and more than 100 documents marked classified from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate — Smith’s team was trying to determine if there might still be more classified documents there.
According to sources, some investigators involved in the case came to later believe that the closet, which was locked on the day of the search, should have been opened and checked.
As investigators would later learn, Trump allegedly had the closet’s lock changed while his attorney was in Mar-a-Lago’s basement, searching for classified documents in a storage room that he was told would have all such documents. Trump’s alleged efforts to conceal classified documents from both the FBI and his own attorney are a key part of Smith’s indictment against Trump in Florida.
Benedict Cumberbatch
Jordan Strauss, a former federal prosecutor and former national security official in the Justice Department, called the FBI’s alleged failure to search the closet “a bit astonishing.”
“You’re searching a former president’s house. You [should] get it right the first time,” Strauss told ABC News.
In addition to the closet, the FBI also didn’t search what authorities have called a “hidden room” connected to Trump’s bedroom, sources said.
Smith’s investigators were later told that, in the days right after the search, some of Trump’s employees heard that the FBI had missed at least one room at Mar-a-Lago, the sources said.
According to a senior FBI official, agents focused on areas they believed might have government documents.
Special counsel Jack Smith used a routine legal filing Friday to offer a forceful public rebuttal against Donald Trump’s claims that his criminal prosecution for allegedly hoarding classified documents has been infected by politics and legal impropriety.
The 68-page document began with what Smith’s team described as an effort to correct false assertions the former president had made about the nature of the case against him.
“It is necessary to set the record straight on the underlying facts that led to this prosecution,” the prosecutors argued. “The government will clear the air on those issues … because the defendants’ misstatements, if unanswered, leave a highly misleading impression.”
What followed was a lengthy recitation of the events that led prosecutors to suspect Trump had been squirreling reams of classified records at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Rather than the bloodthirsty partisan endeavor Trump describes, prosecutors say federal officials from the National Archives, intelligence community and White House counsel’s office took “measures” and “incremental” steps to retrieve the documents — often in coordination with some of Trump’s own designated advisers — before escalating the matter as the former president continued to resist.
The approach taken in the legal brief is somewhat unusual for the Justice Department. Though the filing was submitted to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, at times it sounded like an opening argument to a jury Trump could face in the future or the first chapter of a report meant to detail investigative findings to the public.
It’s unclear whether the “misimpressions” prosecutors say they’re trying to correct are ones they fear Cannon could fall prey to, whether the target audience for the brief is a larger one, and how the Fort Pierce, Fla.-based Trump appointee will respond to the tactic.
The substance of the prosecution brief is aimed at countering the demands by Trump and his two co-defendants — Walt Nauta and Carlos DeOliveira — for access to a broad range of documents from across the government that the defense attorneys contend could be useful in defending their clients. They’ve asked Cannon to consider massive executive branch agencies and the White House as appendages of Smith’s prosecution team — a decision that could open their files to defendants beyond the typical evidence-sharing that occurs for witnesses in criminal proceedings.
Sam Elliot
Here’s the most shocking part of the brief:
The brief is also peppered with factual claims that make Trump’s behavior sound more serious and egregious. When discussing the defense’s request for more information from the Secret Service, prosecutors assert that their interaction with the federal agency that guards the president and his family underscored Trump’s recklessness in keeping a large volume of classified information at his Florida home, which also serves as a social club and a site for political and social events with lengthy guest lists.
The Secret Service reported that “of the approximately 48,000 guests who visited Mar-a-Lago between January 2021 and May 2022, while classified documents were at the property, only 2,200 had their names checked and only 2,900 passed through magnetometers,” the prosecution filing says.
All while Trump left secret documents in a bathroom, on a ballroom stage, and in a storage room located near the swimming pool.
There is an assumption, probably particularly among those who cover the news and those who read it, that Donald Trump’s legal travails are common knowledge. We talk about things like the potential effects of a Trump conviction on the 2024 presidential election with the assumption that this would be an event that rose to the nation’s consciousness, triggering a response from both his supporters and detractors.
But this is a sort of vanity: Just because it is interesting to us certainly doesn’t mean it is interesting to others. Polling released by CNN on Thursday shows that only a quarter of voters seek out news about the campaign; a third pay little to no attention at all.
As it turns out, even major developments often fly under the average American’s radar. New polling conducted by YouGov shows that only a bit over half of the country on average is aware of the various legal challenges Trump faces. And among those Republicans on whose political support he depends? Consistently, only a minority say they are aware of his lawsuits and charges.
YouGov presented American adults with eight legal scenarios to judge the extent of the public’s awareness. Two were invented: that Trump faces charges related to emoluments or related to drug trafficking. Happily, less than a quarter of respondents said those legal threats actually existed.
The other six were real. The one that was familiar to the most people was the federal classified-documents case that is moving forward in Florida; 6 in 10 Americans said they were aware of that case. The one that had the least awareness was the civil suit in New York in which a judge determined that he’d fraudulently inflated the value of his assets. Just under 50 percent of Americans knew about that.
But the pattern among Republicans is clear. At most, 45 percent of Republicans said they knew about legal issues: specifically, the documents case and his being found liable for assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll. Only a quarter knew about the value-inflation suit, and only 4 in 10 knew about the criminal charges in Manhattan related to the hush money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.
And with that, I’ll turn the floor over to you. What’s do you think about all this? What else is on your mind?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
This is from 
So many of these oral arguments were framed around various words. Trump’s lawyers have been arguing various things around the applicability of the presidency to the idea of an “office.” I just have one question. If that’s the case, why have a big parade and inaugural whoop-ti-do surrounding the president taking “the oath of office.” If we’ve done this inaugural oath for a long time and named it as taking an ‘oath of office’, doesn’t that mean he’s an “officer of the United States.” I hate word games, and this seemed a lot like one.
It takes a lot of chutzpah and bravery to face down the crazies in the Trump Cult. This is from 
Brandi Buchman reports on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s move last night in the Stolen Documents Case. This is 
So, I have to write about the Hur Report, which basically showed a contrast between a President who did everything to hold on to documents he purposefully heisted and one who thought his aides were doing everything correctly and didn’t check on them. It’s turned into a discussion about Biden’s mental state, which is way out of this guy’s pay level. Now, we’re just endlessly hearing about the age thing. This is from Josh Marshall, who wrote it in 
If you look at news aggregators like 
Next up for Swift is watching The Super Bowl and more grief on all those nutty conspiracy theories from the left-hand tail of the MAGA IQ charts. Don’t even ask where the mean sits for these freaks of nature. She’s reportedly turned down performances for its Half Time Program several times, according to 
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