In another bid to woo holdouts, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC endorsed by McCarthy, and the conservative Club for Growth, which had initially signaled opposition to McCarthy as speaker, announced a deal Wednesday to stay out of open House primaries for safe Republican seats.
Thursday Reads
Posted: January 5, 2023 Filed under: just because 38 CommentsGood Morning!!
We’re in day 3 of a non-functioning House of Representatives. It’s basically a government shutdown, since the Senate can’t legislate without the House participating. This morning, my Representative Katherine Clark had harsh words for the Republicans who have paralyzed Congress. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader, followed up.
Nancy Pelosi had this to say on Twitter. The Hill: Pelosi: Republicans’ ‘cavalier’ attitude in Speaker election ‘frivolous, disrespectful.’
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is criticizing the GOP’s approach to the Speakership election as it reaches its third day, saying that Republicans’ “cavalier” attitude is “frivolous, disrespectful.”
“All who serve in the House share a responsibility to bring dignity to this body,” Pelosi tweeted late Wednesday. “Sadly, Republicans’ cavalier attitude in electing a Speaker is frivolous, disrespectful and unworthy of this institution.”
“We must open the House and proceed with the People’s work,” she continued.
The House has been brought to a standstill as the body has been unable to elect a Speaker during the first two days of its new session. The House is not able to conduct any additional business, including swearing in new members, until a Speaker is elected.
Kevin McCarthy is twisting himself into a pretzel with endless concessions to the terrorists in the “Freedom Caucus.”
The Washington Post: McCarthy makes fresh concessions to try to woo hard-right Republicans in speaker bid.
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has made fresh concessions to a group of 20 GOP lawmakers in hopes of ending their blockade of his speakership ahead of votes Thursday, a stunning reversal that, if adopted, would weaken the position of speaker and ensure a tenuous hold on the job….
In a major allowance to the hard-right Republicans, McCarthy offered to lower from five to one the number of members required to sponsor a resolution to force a vote on ousting the speaker — a change that the California Republican had previously said he would not accept.
McCarthy also expressed a willingness to place more members of the staunchly conservative House Freedom Caucus on the House Rules Committee, which debates legislation before it’s moved to the floor.
And he relented on allowing floor votes to institute term limits on members and to enact specific border policy legislation.
It remained unclear early Thursday whether the concessions could move the holdouts, several of whom have said they will not support McCarthy no matter what. The House is scheduled to reconvene at noon Thursday for more voting. But some moderates have grown irate at the moves, after pledging last month they would never support a rules package that gives one House member the power to vacate the speaker….
“Kevin McCarthy has effectively led House Republicans from the Minority to the Majority and we want to see him continue to lead the party so we can pick up seats for the third cycle in a row,” Conservative Leadership Fund President Dan Conston said in a statement.
During the midterm elections, the McCarthy-endorsed group worked to elect more moderate Republican candidates considered more willing to govern, an intervention that alienated staunch hard-liners in the House Freedom Caucus.
Club for Growth President David McIntosh said Wednesday that the agreement not to interfere with “safe-seat primaries” fulfilled a major concern they had pressed for.
Meanwhile the House is paralyzed. Imagine if this were a presidential year. Tomorrow is January 6, the anniversary of the insurrection and the day the Congress would need to meet to certify electoral votes.
From the Bulwark article:
As Kevin McCarthy repeatedly fails to secure enough votes to become speaker and the House of Representatives sits in limbo, Democrats say they are increasingly concerned about the risks to national security involved in a prolonged period without any active members or ability to conduct legislative business.
Currently, every elected member of the House has yet to be sworn in to office, leaving committee structures up in the air and creating a backlog of onboarding for freshmen and their staffs.
Lawmakers’ families who came to Washington for the pomp and circumstance of the first day, including the swearing-in of members, have grown exhausted waiting. House staffers have lamented they have no work to start until there’s a successful vote. Meanwhile, freshmen members have been prevented from accessing official House emails; some prematurely sent out press releases announcing their swearing-in, even though it has yet to happen.
A more serious matter is the committee work. Although most committees under a GOP majority are expected to shift the focus of their work, there is some committee work that should have continued over from the previous Congress and already been underway. Right now, however, members of Congress are unable even to view classified documents. This has some Democrats uneasy about the next few days—and if the speakership impasse drags out, potentially much longer.
“We can’t even do basic things,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Cal.) told The Bulwark. “We can’t conduct any oversight. You can’t have an entire branch of government simply not function. And we don’t have a House right now because no one’s even sworn in.”
“And the chaos on the Republican side is having real consequences for the country and it’s going to get very serious very fast,” he added. “Imagine if there’s some unexpected crisis either domestically or somewhere in the world and you needed Congress to act. We couldn’t right now because we don’t have a speaker.”
Lieu also painted a picture of a future speakership fight with even more disturbing consequences—if a dispute like this were to occur during a year in which Congress is charged with certifying a presidential election….
Jerry Nadler, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, joined Lieu in suggesting that Republicans are neglecting their duties and putting the country in a dangerous position.
“If God forbid there was a crisis we couldn’t respond to it in any way,” Nadler said. “Either [Republicans] do and they don’t care or they don’t understand it.”
From The New York Times: ‘Nobody Is in Charge’: A Ragged G.O.P. Stumbles Through the Wilderness.
After two days of chaos and confusion on the House floor, Republicans have made it abundantly clear who is leading their party: absolutely no one.
From the halls of Congress to the Ohio Statehouse to the back-room dealings of the Republican National Committee, the party is confronting an identity crisis unseen in decades. With no unified legislative agenda, clear leadership or shared vision for the country, Republicans find themselves mired in intraparty warfare, defined by a fringe element that seems more eager to tear down the House than to rebuild the foundation of a political party that has faced disappointment in the past three national elections.
Even as Donald J. Trump rarely leaves his Florida home in what so far appears to be little more than a Potemkin presidential campaign, Republicans have failed to quell the anti-establishment fervor that accompanied his rise to power. Instead, those tumultuous political forces now threaten to devour the entire party.
Nowhere was that on more vivid display than the House floor, where 20 Republicans on Wednesday stymied their party from taking control for a second day by refusing to support Representative Kevin McCarthy’s bid for speaker.
“Nobody is in charge,” John Fredericks, a syndicated right-wing radio host and former chairman of Mr. Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns in Virginia, said in an interview. “Embrace the chaos. Our movement is embracing the chaos.”
That ideology of destruction defies characterization by traditional political labels like moderate or conservative. Instead, the party has created its own complicated taxonomy of America First, MAGA and anti-Trump — descriptions that are more about political style and personal vendettas than policy disagreements.
This iteration of the Grand Old Party, with its narrow majority in the House empowering conservative dissidents, represents a striking reversal of the classic political maxim that Democrats need to fall in love while Republicans just fall in line.
“The members who began this have little interest in legislating, but are most interested in burning down the existing Republican leadership structure,” said Karl Rove, the Republican strategist who embodies the party’s pre-Trump era. “Their behavior shows the absence of power corrupts just as absolutely as power does.”
Read the rest at the link.
The House will meet again this afternoon, and we’ll see if McCarthy’s concession make any difference. Even if they elect him, he will be an extremely weak speaker and the crazies will still be in charge. I just saw on CNN that Republicans are expected one or two more losing ballots and another adjournment. This is insane.
In other news, President Biden is showing real leadership.
Yahoo News: In bipartisan event with McConnell, Biden shows contrast with House Republicans.
“Total chaos.”
That was how President Biden described conditions on the frequently congested Brent Spence Bridge between Covington, Ky., and Cincinnati, where he arrived on Wednesday to tout implementation of his $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan, of which $1.5 billion will be used to fix the notorious crossing.
But the phrase, uttered on the banks of the Ohio River, could have just as easily been used to describe the state of affairs on the Potomac, where chaos has reigned for the last two days, as Republicans failed to select a speaker of the House of Representatives. In what is turning out to be an increasingly acrimonious battle, a group of around 20 far-right conservatives are resisting what had once been seen as the all-but-certain elevation of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to the speakership.
Their resistance, which has resulted in six inconclusive votes since Tuesday, has embarrassed mainstream Republicans while providing the White House with a narrative almost too obvious in its juxtapositions.
Flanked by members of both parties, including Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, both of whom are Republicans, Biden was happy to bask in the contrast with congressional GOP members, who won control of the House in last November’s election. Two days into the 118th Congress, however, Republicans have managed only to lay bare their ideological and political differences.
“I just think it’s a little embarrassing,” Biden told reporters from the South Lawn of the White House before departing for Kentucky. “And the rest of the world is looking.”
The speakership fight seemed to validate Biden’s argument — made insistently in the months and weeks before last year’s midterms — that the Republican Party had fallen captive to a pro-Trump “MAGA” faction that was uninterested in governing. Inside the West Wing, staffers have been watching the GOP’s internecine fight with quiet relish, recognizing the scenes of intraparty acrimony as a kind of political gift that was best left to unspool on its own.
“I hope they get their act together,” Biden told reporters.
Read more at the Yahoo link.
Elon Musk’s Twitter is another embarrassment for right wingers.
https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1610807705261805568?s=20&t=quuV4_fIn8Su3_wlj_mm3g
From The Washington Post: Hackers leak email addresses tied to 235 million Twitter accounts.
Records of 235 million Twitter accounts and the email addresses used to register them have been posted to an online hacking forum, setting the stage for anonymous handles to be linked to real-world identities.
Tuesday Reads
Posted: January 3, 2023 Filed under: just because 49 CommentsGood Morning!!
Today House Republicans will decide whether Kevin McCarthy will be Speaker of the House in the new Congress. Right now, it’s not looking good for him. As Dakinikat wrote yesterday, a failure to elect a Speaker on the first ballot would be “history-making.” It has been 100 years since a vote for speaker went to a second ballot. The first vote could take place while I’m working on this post, so I’ll update with any results.
McCarthy met again with the right wing members and again, it didn’t go well. Lauren Bobert, who hadn’t been vehemently opposed to McCarthy so far, emerged from the meeting calling McCarthy’s presentation “bullshit.”
Here’s what the press is saying this morning.
The New York Times: McCarthy Remains Short of Support to Become Speaker as Vote Nears.
Only hours before the vote, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California was still laboring on Tuesday to lock down the support he needed to be elected speaker, with ultraconservative holdouts digging in for what could become a chaotic floor fight at the dawn of the new House Republican majority.
The standoff hung over what was supposed to be a day of jubilation for Republicans, exposing deep divisions within the party as it embarks on its first week in power. It all but guaranteed that even if Mr. McCarthy eked out a victory, he would be a diminished speaker beholden to an empowered right flank.
In a vote planned for around midday Tuesday, when the new Congress convenes, Mr. McCarthy must win a majority of those present and voting — 218 if every member of the House were to attend and cast a vote — to become speaker. Republicans are to control 222 seats and Democrats are all but certain to oppose Mr. McCarthy en masse, leaving him little room for defections from his own party.
With at least five Republicans vowing to oppose him and more quietly on the fence, Mr. McCarthy appeared short of the necessary votes, despite a series of major concessions he has made in an attempt to appease the far-right lawmakers. Republicans were set to meet at 9:30 Tuesday morning behind closed doors as Mr. McCarthy grasped for a last-minute boost of support.
But if anything, the momentum appeared to be headed in the other direction. Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, on Tuesday morning released a scathing statement saying that Mr. McCarthy had scuttled his own chances of becoming speaker by refusing to agree to the demands of the right wing.
Ronald Brownstein at CNN: The right has already won the House speakership election.
No matter how they resolve Tuesday’s vote choosing the next speaker of the House, Republicans appear poised to double down on the hard-edged politics that most swing state voters rejected in last November’s midterm election.
Stubborn conservative resistance to House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy has put the party at risk of precipitating the first speakership election that extends to more than a single ballot since 1923 – and only the second since the Civil War. But even if McCarthy ultimately prevails, the show of strength from the GOP’s conservative vanguard has ensured it enormous leverage in shaping the party’s legislative and investigative agenda. And that could reinforce the image of extremism that hurt Republicans in the midterm election, especially in the key swing states likely to decide the next presidential contest – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona.
Whoever Republicans ultimately select as speaker “will be subject to the whims and the never-ending leveraging of a small group of members who want to wield power,” said former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent, a CNN political commentator. “You’re going to have this group on the far right that is going to continue to push the leadership to go further right on issues.”
Tuesday’s vote may create a kind of drama that was common in the House during the 19th century but has virtually disappeared since. Before the Civil War, when party allegiances were more fluid, the House failed to elect a speaker on the first ballot 13 times, according to the House historian’s office. The most arduous struggles occurred in roughly the decade before the Civil War, as the existing party system crumbled under the pressure of the escalating conflict between the North and South, and the newly formed Republican Party supplanted the Whigs as the major competitor to the Democrats, then the dominant party. One speakership election during that tumultuous decade required 133 ballots (and two months of balloting) to resolve; the final speaker selection before the Civil War began took 44 ballots.
Since then, the only selection that has required more than a single ballot came in 1923, when Republicans holding only a narrow majority comparable to their advantage this year took nine ballots to select their speaker. Then the complication was that a minority of left-leaning progressive Republicans initially resisted conservative incumbent Speaker Frederick Gillett.
Today McCarthy faces resistance from the opposite pole of his caucus-a circle of hard-right conservatives who have pledged not to support him, at least on the first ballot. Many in the party establishment still believe that even if conservatives initially block McCarthy, he will ultimately succeed – largely because there is no other alternative likely to draw broader support across the party.
Again, as Dakinikat wrote yesterday, if McCarthy can’t get the votes, a possible candidate for Speaker would be Louisiana Representative Steve Scalise. Interestingly, Scalise has been very quiet lately. Right wing outlet News Max wonders why that is.
Phillip Elliott at Time: Why Kevin McCarthy Is So Bad at This.
When Rep. Kevin McCarthy left his downtown D.C. condo just before 8 a.m. on Tuesday, the first full day of work after the holiday recess, he was like the student who shows up for the final without doing all the studying, running solely on ambition and a confidence that everything would turn out fine in the end. Except for McCarthy, his proctored exam hall is the floor of the House of Representatives, and whether he passes will be determined by his classmates, most of whom may be cheering on his failure.
McCarthy, making his second bid to become the Speaker of the House, started his Tuesday undeniably short of the 218 aye votes he needs to claim the gavel and lead the lower chamber. Assuming every one of his GOP colleagues casts a vote for Speaker—and votes for a real person, and not just present—he can afford to lose just four votes. At least five of his fellow Republicans were in the Never Kevin camp, and another seven were Seldom Kevins. In other words, he potentially has three times that shortfall.
McCarthy’s team spent the holiday break working to lock down votes. They turned the calendar from 2022 to 2023 with ambivalence if not apprehension about Tuesday. They are starting with a majority that’s the narrowest for a new Speaker since 1931, and McCarthy’s polling numbers are mediocre at best among the party base. He has traded away just about everything he can, winning the likes of fringe voices like Marjorie Taylor Greene with promises of seats at tables, a move smartly predicted by TIME’s Molly Ball back in June. But McCarthy still can’t secure unanimous support among the firebrands inside the Freedom Caucus.
McCarthy, recognizing the need to feed the far-right base of his party, has already promised to allow his House to probe into Hunter Biden’s businesses, the treatment of those charged and detained for their alleged roles in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and how the Justice Department and FBI have possibly considered politics in their decisions. McCarthy is open to impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the conditions on the U.S.-Mexican border, and hasn’t closed the door to other investigations that could embarrass President Joe Biden and his administration. As one Wall Street Journal columnist put it, McCarthy is offering up “a Committee on Censors and Snoops.”
Yet the holdouts still don’t trust McCarthy for any number of reasons: he’s seen as unreliably conservative; he has not embraced government shutdowns as useful tools to remake government or to cut off foes like Planned Parenthood; he is noncommittal about impeaching President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris; he is too weak in supporting ex-President Donald Trump’s Big Lie—and they don’t seem willing to bend, unlike McCarthy, who has proven to be entirely pliable.
Which brings us to this point: the House, before it can do anything else, has to elect a Speaker. Until that happens, the rules from the previous Congress guide the chamber, and precedent doesn’t really allow a new Rules package to come to a vote, nor does it provide for the House to move forward with seating of committee or subcommittee chairs—the people who actually write the laws. A paralyzed House as Republicans take control for the first time since the 2018 elections isn’t a good look for the GOP, regardless of who holds the gavel.
Meanwhile, McCarthy has already moved into the Speaker’s office. If he can’t get the votes, he’ll have to move out again. And now McCarthy has spoken his piece:
The Republican Party is very much disarray, no matter what happens.
Another problem for House Republicans is that George Santos will be sworn in today. Despite being caught in multiple lies about his own background, Santos is determined to join the Republican caucus.
Annie Karni at The New York Times: George Santos Comes to Washington. It Could Be Awkward.
Representative-elect George Santos has been hard to pin down.
“No one can find him,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the incoming minority leader, said at a news conference last week, pressing for answers on the geyser of falsehoods about Mr. Santos’s background that have been revealed since he flipped a Democratic seat on Long Island in November.
But beginning on Tuesday, Mr. Santos will not be able to hide anymore.
He is to arrive on Capitol Hill for what is shaping up as a chaotic opening day of the 118th Congress, perhaps as the most notorious member of a new House Republican majority that is toiling to overcome deep divisions as it assumes control and the speakership is still up in the air.
It will most likely be an awkward moment for Mr. Santos, who will get his first taste of navigating the Capitol and its all-permeating press corps in the midst of a scandal of his own making.
He is under the shadow of active investigations by federal and local prosecutors into potential criminal activity during his two congressional campaigns. Prosecutors told The New York Times on Monday that Brazilian law enforcement authorities intended to revive fraud charges against him stemming from an incident in 2008 regarding a stolen checkbook.
Santos is in hot water with both political parties.
Democrats are already calling for him to give up his seat, and members of his own party are demanding more detailed explanations of his conduct.
That includes making up claims about his résumé, his education, his ties to Wall Street firms and his charitable endeavors — all of which have been revealed as part of a fantasy persona created as the backbone of his pitch to voters.
In addition to his background, Mr. Santos has misrepresented parts of his finances and filed incomplete or inaccurate congressional disclosures. He has also claimed that he is Jewish and the descendant of Holocaust survivors. Mr. Santos is Catholic.
Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether he committed crimes involving his finances or misleading statements.
Mr. Santos, the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent, has yet to offer a full accounting to the voters who elected him based on a largely made-up biography. He has admitted to “embellishing” his résumé and to the fact that he did not graduate from any institution of higher education.
Read more at the NYT.
Santos is in trouble in Brazil too. The New York Times: Brazilian Authorities Will Revive Fraud Case Against George Santos.
When Representative-elect George Santos takes his seat in Congress on Tuesday, he will do so under the shadow of active investigations by federal and local prosecutors into potential criminal activity during his two congressional campaigns.
But an older criminal case may be more pressing: Brazilian law enforcement authorities intend to revive fraud charges against Mr. Santos, and will seek his formal response, prosecutors said on Monday.
The matter, which stemmed from an incident in 2008 regarding a stolen checkbook, had been suspended for the better part of a decade because the police were unable to locate him.
A spokeswoman for the Rio de Janeiro prosecutor’s office said that with Mr. Santos’s whereabouts identified, a formal request will be made to the U.S. Justice Department to notify him of the charges, a necessary step after which the case will proceed with or without him….
Just a month before his 20th birthday, Mr. Santos entered a small clothing store in the Brazilian city of Niterói outside Rio de Janeiro. He spent nearly $700 using a stolen checkbook and a false name, court records show.
Mr. Santos admitted the fraud to the shop owner in August 2009, writing on Orkut, a popular social media website in Brazil, “I know I screwed up, but I want to pay.” In 2010, he and his mother told the police that he had stolen the checkbook of a man his mother used to work for, and used it to make fraudulent purchases.
A judge approved the charge in September 2011 and ordered Mr. Santos to respond to the case. But by October, he was already in the United States and working at Dish Networkin College Point, Queens, company records show.
Right now, in the House, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik has just nominated McCarthy for Speaker. Now Democratic Rep. Peter Aguilar is now nominating Hakim Jeffries. I’m going to end right here and I’ll post updates in the comments.
Have a great day everyone!
Mostly Monday Reads: The Truth should set us Free
Posted: January 2, 2023 Filed under: just because | Tags: 2023 New Year's baby, Final report on January 6 insurrection, Ginnie "whackado" Thomas, Kevin McCarthy, Truthiness 29 Comments
Happy First Monday of the year 2023!
Out with the old and in with the new! Well, in some circumstances.
The truth will be hidden if you are a pregnant woman in Louisiana. Your truth will be that you are the state’s chattel, as are all other women. The state will still think you asked for every act of violence and violation of your personal rights because your truth is irrelevant.
Laws may cost your life and freedom if you are black in America. The truth will be wrapped up in perfidious stereotypes that may cost you everything. Chances are it will be the state that doles out this ending to you.
The truth may never translate to you if you seek asylum, refuge, or safety from the violence United States Drug and Foreign policy brings to your country. This will be especially true if you come from a “shithole” country or one that “never sends its best people” because you’re not of the ‘proper’ ethnic heritage.
The truth of Domestic Terrorism may never be entirely spoken if you were attacked in a religious space that isn’t respected by the group in power in this country. If you’re a member of the GLBT community, you’ve been told clearly that your truth must hide in a closet and never be seen in libraries, schools, or what was to be a safe space for your community.
There are others in this country where the truth of their lies is exposed, yet they get to keep at it in their everyday lives. They may ‘grab pussies’ and not be held to account in a court of law for sexual battery. They may be found out about their sexual misdeeds– many of which are illegal–and they still get to be the President of the United States. They may call for insurrection and actively plot with prominent political figures from many states and at the Federal Level, and they will be given a pass. They may even be the President, and they may run again. They may make up an entire life and work history, continue to hide the truth from their constituency, and still head to the District, where they will be welcomed by a power-hungry pol who just wants to be Speaker of the House.
This is the old stuff I’d really like to be rid of, and I wish the list wasn’t longer than I deal with in one blog post.
In the aftermath of that election, Ms Thomas personally lobbied White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, according to text messages obtained by the committee and leaked to journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” she wrote on November 10, after Joe Biden had been projected as the winner.
In an interview with the January 6 Committee, which took place on 29 September 2022, committee members repeatedly pressed Ms Thomas to reveal what evidence of election fraud had motivated her to approach Mr Meadows.
“I can’t say that I was familiar at the time with any specific evidence. I was just hearing it from news reports and friends on the ground, grassroots activists who were inside of various polling places that found things suspicious,” Ms Thomas said in response to a question from committee member Jamie Raskin about the most significant evidence she had seen.
Later asked by Republican committee member Liz Cheney to confirm that she had seen no list of fraud or irregularities, Ms Thomas replied: “Right. I know. I wasn’t very deep; I admit it.”
Ms Thomas’ lobbying effort raised concerns among Democrats about a conflict of interest in the Thomas household, as Justice Thomas may have been called upon to rule on cases involving the 2020 election — a matter on which his wife was a committed political activist.
In her opening statement to the committee ahead of her interview, Ms Thomas said the couple maintain an “ironclad” agreement to avoid discussing Supreme Court cases in their home.
There was a lot of Twitter Trash around the entire Insurrection episode and the follow-up fake electors. Here’s a good summary from The Daily Beast. “Hope Hicks, Ivanka Aide Fumed at Karlie Kloss’ Jan. 6 Tweets. The pair also worried the insurrection would wreck their reputations and careers, newly released text messages reveal.” How far do things go before you stop enabling lies and the rule of chaos and ego?
After a mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a top aide to Ivanka Trump and presidential adviser Hope Hicks fumed about tweets posted by supermodel Karlie Kloss, the wife of Jared Kushner’s brother.
That’s according to text messages released by the House’s Jan. 6 committee—which also reveal the aide, Julie Radford, and Hicks were worried that the insurrection would destroy their reputations.
After the riot, Kloss took to Twitter to write: “Accepting the results of a legitimate democratic election is patriotic. Refusing to do so and inciting violence is anti-American.” She also responded to a Twitter user who encouraged her to “tell your sister-in-law and brother-[in]-law” by replying, “I’ve tried.”
The newly released texts show that Hicks flagged the Kloss tweets for Radford, who responded, “Unreal. She just called me about it.”
Hicks then texted back: “I am so done” and added, “Does she get how royally fucked they all are now?”
Hicks and Radford also fretted that they would face fallout from the deadly Capitol riots.
“In one day, he ended every future opportunity that doesn’t include speaking engagements at the local proud boy’s chapter,” Hicks wrote, apparently referring to lame-duck President Trump.
“And all of us that didn’t have jobs lined up will be perpetually unemployed,” she continued. “I’m so mad and upset. We all look like domestic terrorists now.”
Radford wrote that she’d “been crying for an hour.”
The self-pity didn’t end there, with Hicks moaning that she and other Trump White House officials would be “unemployable” and “untouchable” after the violence aimed at overturning the election of Joe Biden
“God, I’m so fucking mad,” she wrote.
Radford, who was Ivanka’s chief of staff, said the backlash was underway. “Visa also sent me a blow-off email today. Already,” she said.
“Not being dramatic, but we are all fucked,” Hicks fired back—while privately admitting Trump White House official Alyssa Farah Griffin’s resignation made her look like a “genius.”
Of course, we see young women in the administration whining about the entire episode. This one slayed me. “Hope Hicks to aide on Jan. 6: ‘We all look like domestic terrorists now’.” You may find it at The Hill. See any existential angst from the good ol’ boys’ side, or am I missing something?
Former White House aide Hope Hicks told a fellow aide in text messages during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that “we all look like domestic terrorists now” as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.
Texts released by the House select committee investigating that day show Hicks texting with Julie Radford, former chief of staff to Ivanka Trump, as the violence unfolded.
If you’re the right person, you get to make up all kinds of shit and still serve in the beltway! . This is from the New York Times. “As His Life of Fantasy Comes Into Focus, George Santos Goes to Washington. Mr. Santos, under scrutiny for lies about his background, is set to be sworn into Congress on Tuesday even as records, colleagues, and friends divulge more about his past.” The byline is shared by Michael Gold and
It remains unclear how the controversy might affect Mr. Santos’s debut in Congress, including his committee assignments. Mr. Santos told NY1 last month that he hoped to serve on the House Financial Services or Foreign Affairs committees, based on his “14-year background in capital markets” and a “multicultural background.” He has since admitted to misrepresenting his work in financial services, while aspects of his heritage have been called into question.
New reporting by The Times brings a clearer picture of his earlier life into view, including information about the gaps in his personal history, along with discrepancies in how he described his mother’s life.
Mr. Santos has said that he grew up in a basement apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens. Until Wednesday, Mr. Santos’s campaign biography said that his mother, Fatima Devolder, worked her way up to become “the first female executive at a major financial institution.” He has also said that she was in the South Tower of the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that she died “a few years later.”
In fact, Ms. Devolder died in 2016, and a Brazilian community newspaper at the time described her as a cook. Mr. Santos’s friends and former roommates recalled her as a hardworking, friendly woman who spoke only Portuguese and made her living cleaning homes and selling food. None of those interviewed by The Times could recall any instance of her working in finance, and several chalked the story up to Mr. Santos’s tendency for mythmaking.
His apparent fabrications about his own life begin with his claims about his high school. He said he attended Horace Mann School, a prestigious private institution in the Bronx, and said he dropped out in 2006 before graduating and earning an equivalency diploma. A spokesman for Horace Mann said that the school had no record of his attending at all.
This guy lives on Fantasy Island. But, hey, he’s getting away with it so far!
So, I buried the lede or saved the last big act for the Center Ring. Your choice. Representative Kevin McCarthy is still struggling to attain the Speaker of the House position in the next Republican-led Congress. I have no idea why he wants to steer this ship of fools other than wanting to be The Speaker for some reason other than being able to accomplish anything in the position.
This is from POLITICO Playbook. It’s called “McCarthy on the brink,” with shared bylines by Rachel Blade, Eugen Daniels, and Ryan Lizza.
There’s no way to sugarcoat this: Seven years after his last, failed bid for the speakership, KEVIN McCARTHY’s dreams of wielding the gavel are again in peril. Despite years of political contortions aimed at winning over his critics on the far right, with just over 24 hours left until the critical floor vote, the California Republican’s math problem is getting worse, not better.
On Sunday evening, McCarthy announced on a private conference call that he would give his antagonists one of their top demands: The threshold to trigger a vote ousting a speaker would shrink from half the GOP conference, as had been agreed to by a majority of the members, to five dissatisfied lawmakers. But hours later, a group of nine House conservatives issued a letter saying that’s not good enough.
That’s in addition to the five “Never Kevin” lawmakers who have already declared they’re opposing McCarthy. (Remember: He can lose only four votes if all House members cast votes Tuesday.)
But this morning, we can report that that’s not even the worst of it. We caught up Sunday with one of the GOP fence-sitters, a member who has been in the room for these negotiations. And he told us that some of these undecided members won’t support McCarthy — even if he gives them everything they want.
“The problem is people don’t trust Kevin McCarthy and a number won’t vote for him. Those are just the facts,” this lawmaker told us. “The list [of demands] that we offered was not for guaranteed support but rather the kinds of things that might move some of his detractors.”
That’s a huge issue for McCarthy — one that his allies told us days ago they’re worried about. Notably, on the conference call Sunday, McCarthy repeatedly dodged questions from his own rank and file about whether his proposed “motion to vacate” change would even get him the votes.
It won’t, as the missive from the nine conservatives demonstrated Sunday night. And it’s unclear what more McCarthy can give them to change their minds before voting begins.
It will be history-making if his bid fails. These are some hints of who or what may come next if that happens. This is from the New York Times. “Here Are the House Republicans to Watch If McCarthy’s Bid For Speaker Falters. Representative Kevin McCarthy has so far faced no viable challenger for the speakership. But if he is unable to secure the votes, an alternative could quickly emerge.”
But the landscape could quickly change should Mr. McCarthy falter on Tuesday, when the new Congress convenes and lawmakers vote to elect a new speaker. House precedent requires that lawmakers continue voting on ballot after ballot if no one is able to win the gavel. If Mr. McCarthy is unable to quickly win election, Republicans would be under immense pressure to coalesce around an alternative, ending a potentially chaotic and divisive fight on the floor that could taint the start of their majority in the House.
The bad news is Sleazy Steve Scalise (also known as David Duke without the Baggage) is at the top of the list. Run for your lives!
Here are other items to read on tomorrow’s drama.
Farnoush Amiri / Associated Press: EXPLAINER: How the House of Representatives elects a speaker
Eileen Grench / The Daily Beast: Rep. Bob Good Teases Rival to Kevin McCarthy for House Speaker
Brendan Buck / New York Times: A Failed Speaker Vote for Kevin McCarthy Would Be a Historical Event
Politico: McCarthy relents on key conservative demand — but uncertainty remains over speaker bid
One last harbinger of evil tidings, I’m off to relax one more day before returning to student time. This is from Bess Levin, writing at Vanity Fair. “A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO WHY A RON DESANTIS PRESIDENCY WOULD BE AS TERRIFYING AS A TRUMP ONE. His bigoted policies and authoritarian behavior make him just as bad a pick for the top job in Washington.”
He thinks it’s okay to treat human beings like chattel
Remember when the state of Florida sent a bunch of planes to Texas; lured Venezuelan migrants onto said planes with the promise of housing, jobs, and basic services; told them they were headed for Boston; and then dumped them on the tiny island of Martha’s Vineyard? All so the governor could score some cheap political points with the gang at Fox News and anyone else who thinks it’s cool to treat people from other countries as subhuman? You should, considering it happened quite recently, it was absolutely stomach-churning, and it’s presumably the kind of stunt DeSantis would look forward to regularly engaging in on a mass scale as president.
He’s dangerously anti-science
After three weeks of taking the COVID-19 pandemic seriously by declaring it a public health emergency and ordering a statewide lockdown, DeSantis apparently decided science was for suckers. “We will never do any of these lockdowns again,” he said in April 2020—as thousands of Americans were dying each day—lifting all restrictions on schools, businesses, and government buildings and banning local governments from enforcing their own public health measures, like mask mandates.
After initially telling people to get vaccinated against the virus, he reversed course, refusing to say if he’d gotten a booster shot. He enacted a law prohibiting businesses from requiring proof of vaccination, including in petri dish environments like cruise ships. He withheld pay from school board members requiring masks; held a press conference with a guy who claimed COVID vaccines change your RNA; and offered unvaccinated cops $5,000 to relocate to Florida. In September 2021, he appointed Joseph Ladapo to serve as surgeon general of the state, apparently having appreciated the flurry of op-eds the doctor had written promoting hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, opposing masking and lockdowns, and questioning the safety of vaccines. Ladapo later recommended that healthy children not get vaccinated against COVID-19, despite the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics advising they do so and cited what experts said was a deeply flawed study that also recommended men between 18 to 39 not be vaccinated.
In December, DeSantis announced that he’d petitioned the Florida Supreme Court to convene a grand jury to investigate “crimes and wrongdoing” related to COVID-19 vaccines, and suggested in the petition that anyone who recommended people receive the lifesaving vaccine—like the CDC and Joe Biden—must have been financially compensated to do so. That announcement came approximately one month after the Palm Beach Post noted that “the coronavirus has killed more people aged 65 and over in Florida than any other state in the nation” and that “public health experts outside of the state attribute the trend to the DeSantis administration’s counterproductive COVID-19 policies,” which started when “the Governor began weaponizing health care.”
He wants to make it harder for people to vote and had Floridians arrested as part of another one of his political stunts
Like many a Republican, DeSantis is a big proponent of disenfranchising voters, and has signed a raft of laws making it harder for people to cast ballots for their candidates of choice, including ones limiting the use of drop boxes, hampering Floridians’ ability to vote by mail, and preventing the distribution or food or water to voters waiting on long lines. That a judge found such measures “unconstitutional and especially discriminatory toward minority voters,” according to USA Today, did not stop DeSantis from signing a bill this year creating the Office of Election Crimes and Security, and tasking it with investigating alleged voter fraud. During a press conference he held in August to brag about his work cracking down instances of supposed wrongdoing, the governor told reporters that more than a dozen people had been arrested on charges of voting illegally in the 2020 election and warned, “This is the opening salvo.”
But wait! There’s more! Go read the link and be aware if he decides to throw his black hat into the ring!
So, I hope you had a great New Years’ weekend! All hail to the Krewe of Crazy Cat ladies and to the Queen who carries the golden litter scoop! I joined my neighbors to wander the neighborhood and give treats to our huge feral cat community. Feral cat colonies are protected and fed by the city. Since we’re an international port and a tropical zone, cats really keep the vermin in check! We love them!! We also loved the free New Year’s buffets at the three bars in our Barmuda Triangle! I had two glasses of wine and napped the afternoon and night away like the super fun old lady I’ve become!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: December 31, 2022 Filed under: just because 15 CommentsHappy Caturday!!
By Elena Salnikova
Today is the last day of 2022. Another year has gone by without Trump being held criminally accountable. His crimes are being revealed on a daily basis though; perhaps he will pay a price in 2023? We can only hope.
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about the public release of Trump’s tax returns, and it’s not looking good for him from that standpoint. Here’s some more analysis out today:
David Cay Johnston at The Daily Beast: Trump’s Taxes Are the Best Case Yet for Putting Him in Prison.
Johnston makes an impassioned argument for using Trump’s manipulations of the tax system to make important changes.
Among other things, Trump’s tax returns make a strong case for restoring the law that until 1924 made all income tax returns public. Newspapers back then ran long lists showing the income of and taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans.
Knowing that your income, deductions, and tax paid will be publicly available can do far more to encourage honest tax-paying than audits, which are increasingly rare and increasingly superficial.
Not even 500 of the nearly 25,000 households reporting incomes of $10 million or more in 2019 were audited. That’s 2 percent—just 1 in 50. Only 66 audits were completed.
People like Trump who earn money from legal sources can cheat like crazy on their tax returns with almost nothing to fear. That’s because fewer than 600 people at all income levels are convicted of tax fraud in a typical year.
That makes the odds of conviction about 1 in 275,000 taxpayers. But the odds for business owners are much better (which is to say less), because most people convicted of tax crimes are drug dealers, politicians who took bribes, or people who paid bribes.
The IRS, as funded by Congress, spent far more money auditing the working poor than the 24,457 households with incomes of $10 million and up in 2019. But don’t get angry at the IRS. They are just the tax police, enforcing the law as they are instructed by Congress. If Congress tells the IRS to focus on high-income tax cheating, it will….
Specific discussion of Trump’s taxes:
Trump also turned a profit off a portion of the tax system, making $2.8 million profit off the Alternative Minimum Tax, or AMT.
He paid $15.9 million in AMT, while collecting $18.7 million in refunds in 2015 through 2020, as a Congressional staff analysis released last week showed. No one should be able to turn a tax into a profit center, but rich people and big companies do it all the time, as I showed in my book Perfectly Legal.
Since 1987, tens of millions of Americans have paid AMT, mostly married couples with children who are homeowners. Some paid because they spent huge sums on medical expenses to save the life of a family member.
Their AMT, by the way, was used to finance tax rate cuts for the likes of Donald Trump under the George W. Bush 2001 tax law. Think about that. Our Congress taxes the sick to help the rich.
Unlike those American families, Trump gets his AMT refunded.
That’s because of a 1992 law that Trump successfully lobbied Congress to restore after President Ronald Reagan signed a 1986 law denying those juicy AMT refunds to some real estate investors.
This is all Greek to me, but it’s clear that the rich a favored by our tax system. No surprise there.
By Elena Kirillova
Bernie Becker and Benjamin Guggenheim at Politico: Trump taxes show foreign income from more than a dozen countries.
Trump’s returns, which were made public by House Democrats on Friday after a lengthy legal fight, disclosed income from 2015 to 2020 from a wide range of foreign countries, including Canada, Panama, the Caribbean island of Saint Martin, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, among others.
While the documents did not provide details on the money flows, Trump owns golf courses in Scotland and Ireland, and his name has adorned luxury hotels from Panama to Canada.
The former president was known for fusing his business interests with America’s highest public office, drawing allegations of using his role to promote his private resorts, direct federal money to his hotels and encourage foreign governments to spend money that would directly benefit the Trump family interests.
His far-flung concerns, foreign and domestic, are nested in more than 400 separate business entities. A 2019 report by the watchdog group OpenSecrets said he had more than $130 million in assets in more than 30 countries.
The six years of tax returns disclosed Friday show that Trump received extensive income from Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom — including gross business income of at least $35.3 million from Canada in 2017, the year he entered office.
That year, Trump also brought in $6.5 million from China, $5.8 million from Indonesia and $5.7 million from India.
By 2020, his last full year in office, Trump reported $8.8 million in income from the U.K. and another $3.9 million in Ireland.
David Goldman, Allison Morrow, and Alecia Wallace at CNN Business: Unanswered questions about Trump’s tax returns.
Here are some of the questions; read the rest at the link.
What was Trump doing with a Chinese bank account?
Trump reported having foreign bank accounts, including a bank account in China between 2015 and 2017, his tax returns show.
The tax returns do not show what the bank account was used for or how much money passed through it or to whom. The New York Times first reported about Trump’s Chinese account in 2020, and Trump Organization lawyer Alan Garten told the Times that the account was used to pay taxes on the Trump International Hotels Management’s business push in the country.
Trump did not report the Chinese bank account in personal financial disclosures when he was president, likely because it was listed under his businesses. Yet he may have still been required to report accounts to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
What’s the scope of Trump’s foreign business operations, and who are his partners?
Trump’s companies and business interests span the globe. On his tax return, Trump listed business income, taxes, expenses or other notable financial items from or in Azerbaijan, Panama, Canada, India, Qatar, South Korea, the United Kingdom, China, the Dominican Republic, United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, Grenada, US territory Puerto Rico, Georgia, Israel, Brazil, St. Maarten, Mexico, Indonesia, Ireland, Turkey and St. Vincent.
But the tax returns don’t explain what business ties he had in those countries and with whom he might have been working while he was president.
Why was Trump loaning money to his adult children? And did Trump claim gifts to his children as loans?
In each year of Trump’s presidency, Trump claimed that he had loaned three of his adult children – Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Eric – undisclosed sums of money on which he collected interest.
Snow Cat by Vicky Mount
The tax returns don’t say how much he lent them or why he gave them loans in the first place.
Between 2017 and 2020, Trump claimed he received exactly $18,000 in interest on a loan he gave his daughter Ivanka Trump and $8,715 in interest from his son Donald Trump, Jr.. In 2017 to 2019, Trump said he received exactly $24,000 from his son Eric Trump, and Eric paid him $19,605 in interest in 2020.
The bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation said the loans and the amounts of claimed interest could indicate Trump was disguising gifts to his children. If the interest Trump claims to have charged his children was not at market rate, for example, it could be considered a gift for tax purposes, requiring him to pay a higher tax rate on the money.
More interesting questions at the link.
The New York Times with more evidence of corruption on the Supreme Court: A Charity Tied to the Supreme Court Offers Donors Access to the Justices.
In some years, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. does the honors. In others, it might be Justice Sonia Sotomayor or Justice Clarence Thomas presenting the squared-off hunks of marble affixed with the Supreme Court’s gilded seal.
Hewed from slabs left over from the 1930s construction of the nation’s high court and handed out in its magnificent Great Hall, they are a unique status symbol in a town that craves them. And while the ideological bents of the justices bestowing them might vary, there is one constant: All the recipients have given at least $5,000 to a charity favored by the justices, and, more often than not, the donors have a significant stake in the way the court decides cases.
The charity, the Supreme Court Historical Society, is ostensibly independent of the judicial branch of government, but in reality the two are inextricably intertwined. The charity’s stated mission is straightforward: to preserve the court’s history and educate the public about the court’s importance in American life. But over the years the society has also become a vehicle for those seeking access to nine of the most reclusive and powerful people in the nation. The justices attend the society’s annual black-tie dinner soirees, where they mingle with donors and thank them for their generosity, and serve as M.C.s to more regular society-sponsored lectures or re-enactments of famous cases.
The society has raised more than $23 million over the last two decades. Because of its nonprofit status, it does not have to publicly disclose its donors — and declined when asked to do so. But The New York Times was able to identify the sources behind more than $10.7 million raised since 2003, the first year for which relevant records were available.
At least $6.4 million — or 60 percent — came from corporations, special interest groups, or lawyers and firms that argued cases before the court, according to an analysis of archived historical society newsletters and publicly available records that detail grants given to the society by foundations. Of that, at least $4.7 million came from individuals or entities in years when they had a pending interest in a federal court case on appeal or at the high court, records show.
There’s just no end to the corruption, is there?
This doesn’t look good for Elon Musk. Kyle Wiggers at TechCrunch: Fidelity slashes the value of its Twitter stake by over half.
Fidelity, which was among the group of outside investors that helped Elon Musk finance his $44 billion takeover of Twitter, has slashed the value of its stake in Twitter by 56%. The recalculation comes as Twitter navigates a number of challenges, most the result of chaotic management decisions — including an exodus of advertisers from the network.
Unknown artist
Fidelity’s Blue Chip Growth Fund stake in Twitter was valued at around $8.63 million as of November, according to a monthly disclosure and Fidelity Contrafund notice first reported today by Axios. That’s down from $19.66 million as of the end of October.
Macroeconomic trends are likely to blame in part. Stripe took a 28% internal valuation cut in July, while Instacart this week reportedly suffered a 75% cut to its valuation.
But Twitter’s wishy-washy policies post-Musk clearly haven’t helped matters.
The network’s become less stable at a technical level as of late, on Wednesday suffering outages after Musk made “significant” backend server architecture changes. Twitter recently laid off employees in its public policy and engineering department, dissolving the group responsible for weighing in on content moderation and human rights-related issues such as suicide prevention. And the company’s raised the ire of regulators after banning — and then quickly reinstating — accounts belonging to prominent journalists.
There were two notable deaths yesterday.
AP: Benedict XVI, first pope to resign in 600 years, dies at 95.
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, the shy German theologian who tried to reawaken Christianity in a secularized Europe but will forever be remembered as the first pontiff in 600 years to resign from the job, died Saturday. He was 95.
Benedict stunned the world on Feb. 11, 2013, when he announced, in his typical, soft-spoken Latin, that he no longer had the strength to run the 1.2 billion-strong Catholic Church that he had steered for eight years through scandal and indifference.
His dramatic decision paved the way for the conclave that elected Pope Francis as his successor. The two popes then lived side-by-side in the Vatican gardens, an unprecedented arrangement that set the stage for future “popes emeritus” to do the same.
And now Francis will celebrate Benedict’s funeral Mass on Thursday, the first time in the modern age that a current pope will eulogize a retired one. As tributes poured in from political and religious leaders around the world, Francis himself praised Benedict’s “kindness” Saturday and thanked him for “his testimony of faith and prayer, especially in these final years of retired life.” [….]
The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger never wanted to be pope, planning at age 78 to spend his final years writing in the “peace and quiet” of his native Bavaria.
Instead, he was forced to follow the footsteps of the beloved St. John Paul II and run the church through the fallout of the clerical sex abuse scandal and then a second scandal that erupted when his own butler stole his personal papers and gave them to a journalist.
Being elected pope, he once said, felt like a “guillotine” had come down on him.
The New York Times: Barbara Walters, a First Among TV Newswomen, Is Dead at 93.
Barbara Walters, who broke barriers for women as the first female co-host of the “Today” show and the first female anchor of a network evening news program, and who as an interviewer of celebrities became one herself, helping to blur the line between news and entertainment, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 93.
Her publicist, Cindi Berger, confirmed the death but did not cite a cause. ABC News, where Ms. Walters was a longtime anchor and a creator of the talk show “The View,” reported the death earlier.
Irina Garmashova
Ms. Walters spent more than 50 years in front of the camera and, until she was 84, continued to appear on “The View.” In one-on-one interviews, she was best known for delving, with genteel insistence, into the private lives and emotional states of movie stars, heads of state and other high-profile subjects.
Ms. Walters first made her mark on the “Today” show on NBC, where she began appearing regularly on camera in 1964; she was officially named co-host a decade later. Her success kicked open the door for future network anchors like Jane Pauley, Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer.
Ms. Walters began at NBC as a writer in 1961, the token woman in the “Today” writers’ room. When she left NBC for ABC in 1976 to be a co-anchor of the evening news with Harry Reasoner, she became known as the “million-dollar baby” because of her five-year, $5 million contract.
The move to the co-anchor’s chair made her not only the highest-profile female journalist in television history, but also the highest-paid news anchor, male or female, and her arrival signaled something of a cultural shift: the moment when news anchors began to be seen less as infallible authority figures, in the Walter Cronkite mold, and more as celebrities. A disgruntled Mr. Reasoner privately dismissed her hiring as a gimmick.
Gimmick or not, the ABC experiment failed. Chemistry between the co-anchors was nonexistent, ratings remained low, and in 1978 Mr. Reasoner left for CBS, his original television home, and Ms. Walters’s role changed from co-anchor to contributor as the network instituted an all-male multiple-anchor format. Shortly after that she began contributing reports to ABC’s newsmagazine show “20/20.” In 1984 she became the show’s permanent co-host alongside Hugh Downs, her old “Today” colleague.
But it was her “Barbara Walters Specials” more than anything else that made her a star, enshrining her as an indefatigable chronicler of the rich, the powerful and the infamous. The specials, which began in 1976, made Ms. Walters as famous, or nearly as famous, as the people she interviewed.
The Los Angeles Times: Barbara Walters dies at 93; news anchor broke the boy’s club of network television.
Barbara Walters, the first woman to break up the all-male club of network television anchors and one of the last remaining megastars in broadcast news who deftly coaxed world leaders and celebrities alike into revealing their secrets and deepest fears, has died.
“Barbara Walters passed away peacefully in her home surrounded by loved ones, She lived her life with no regrets. She was a trailblazer not only for female journalists but for all women,” Cindi Berger, Walters’ publicist, said in a statement to The Times….
Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger, Walters’ former boss, announced on Twitter that Walters died Friday evening at her home in New York.
“Barbara was a true legend, a pioneer not just for women in journalism but for journalism itself. She was a one-of-a-kind reporter who landed many of the most important interviews of our time, from heads of state and leaders of regimes to the biggest celebrities and sports icons,” Iger wrote….
A canny interviewer who prodded ranks of public figures into tearful confessions, Walters was an aggressive practitioner of “the get” who outmaneuvered competitors to land exclusives with figures as varied as Cuban leader Fidel Castro, actress Katharine Hepburn and White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
She made history when she was named the first female co-host of NBC’s “Today” show in 1974 and again two years later when ABC tapped her as the first female co-anchor of the network evening news. Walters faced open hostility from her male counterparts in both places, but never let it rattle her publicly, despite being shadowed by deep insecurities that she said lifted only late in her career.
“I was completely unwelcome,” she told The Times in 2008. “They didn’t want a woman, and they didn’t want me.”
Veteran network producer Av Westin, who worked with her at CBS and ABC, said Walters overcame what was a huge hurdle at the time: “To be able to plow through the resistance of a woman being accepted as more than a bit of pretty fluff — she really was the first who did that.”
She was a trailblazer, that’s for sure.
That’s all I have for you today. What are your thoughts? What other stories are you following today?
Fruitful Friday Reads
Posted: December 30, 2022 Filed under: just because | Tags: Justice Kagan's higher purpose, McCarthy's Song and Dance, Trump taxes 19 Comments
Burpee’s Farm Annual 1895
Good Day Sky Dancers!
We got one good day of Sunshine yesterday, and now it’s grey and raining! The only good thing is that the freezing temperatures have gone away! My brightest day this month was when Burpee’s seed catalog came, and I could page through the promise of spring planting and summer harvests! Burpee’s has been publishing its catalog since 1876.
My Burpee’s blackberry slip in its pot went outdoors yesterday for a bit of sun! It and my potted herbs were in the dining room while we got rid of the hard freezes. Today, they’re getting a good watering along with all the plants that survived. I’d planned to get some big yard trash bags and tackle some of the dead stuff today. Instead, I’m warm and snug inside, waiting for the next sunny day.
The big news today is the release of the Trump tax forms. They really are a mess! This is from Noah Bookbinder, writing for The Atlantic. “The IRS Really, Really Should Have Audited Trump. The failure to do so is outrageous and needs to be investigated.” Indeed! However, I’m not sure the Republican Congress will do it.
Six years after Donald Trump should have disclosed his tax returns to the public, they have finally been released. This took advocacy, congressional action, and litigation that went to the Supreme Court—all to obtain basic financial transparency from a president.
But the House Ways and Means Committee’s report on its investigation, released last week in conjunction with the committee’s vote to disclose Trump’s tax returns, revealed new information that may be as astonishing as anything in the returns themselves: The IRS did not even begin auditing Trump’s taxes until 2019, on the same day the committee began asking the agency about them. This is outrageous, and it must be investigated.
Getting Trump’s tax returns should not have been this hard. Every president elected since Richard Nixon—with the exception of Trump—has publicly disclosed his tax returns. Tax returns can tell the American people, and Congress, whether a president is following the law and behaving honestly. Crucially for Trump, who uniquely and inappropriately retained ownership of a massive international business while president, they can provide information about conflicts of interest that may have swayed his decision making.
Examining Trump’s tax returns and discovering all they can reveal about how his finances may have intersected with his presidency will take time. The committee released an analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation stating that Trump had paid nothing, or close to it, in some years of his presidency. The income information included in that analysis also seems to support the assertion that Trump’s use of the presidency to steer business to himself from the government and those seeking to influence it may have reversed years of financial losses for Trump’s companies and led to hefty profits in 2018 and 2019, until COVID’s arrival in 2020 reversed his fortunes again. Now that the detailed returns are available, we’ll learn much more about those companies’ earnings, losses, and tax payments, and about Trump’s financial interests.
Burpee’s catalog from 1944
CNN has begun the analysis of the documents. “Trump’s tax returns shed new light on former president’s finances.” There’s a team of reporters on this story.
Six years of Donald Trump’s federal tax returns released on Friday show the former president paid very little in federal income taxes the first and last year of his presidency, claiming huge losses that helped limit his tax bill, among other revelations.
The returns, long shrouded in secrecy, were released to the public on Friday by the House Ways and Means Committee, the culmination of a battle over their disclosure that went to the Supreme Court. They confirm a report issued from the Joint Committee on Taxation that Trump claimed large losses before and throughout his presidency that he carried forward to reduce or practically eliminate his tax burden. For example, his returns show that he carried forward a $105 million loss in 2015 and $73 million in 2016.
The thousands of pages of documents from the former president’s personal and business federal tax returns – which spanned the years 2015 through 2020 – provide a complex web of raw data about Trump’s finances, offering up many questions about his wealth and income that could be pursued both by auditors and Trump’s political opponents.
The returns were obtained by the Democratic-run committee only a few weeks ago after a protracted legal battle. The committee voted last week to release the tax returns, but their release was delayed to redact sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers.
CNN is currently reviewing the tax returns.
David Corn has already sniffed out something interesting. What would we do without great investigative journalists?
In writing for Politico, Josh Gerstein analyzes “How Justice Kagan lost her battle as a consensus builder. ‘She’s clearly not very happy,’ one associate says.”
Speaking at a small university in Rhode Island earlier this year, Justice Elena Kagan committed an act of Supreme Court heresy.
For years, justices have told the same anecdotes to assure the public that — despite the court’s increasingly polarized decisions in high-profile cases— the powerful jurists are committed to putting the best interests of the institution ahead of their personal agendas.
They point to genteel traditions like the handshakes exchanged before arguments, the ban on discussing cases during their private lunches, and the camaraderie they share when discussing books, vacations, children, grandchildren and sports, often baseball. The oft-told tale of Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg bonding over a mutual love of opera took the sting out of any notion that the court’s most high-profile conservatives and liberals were angry with each other.
But Kagan, the Democratic appointee who has sought to be a consensus-builder for much of her legal career, broke sharply with the court’s tradition of downplaying disagreements and emphasizing off-the-bench bonhomie. In her speech at Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I., last September, she even went so far as to argue that these mundane staples of the justices’ public patter may actually now be obscuring the dysfunction on the nation’s highest court.
“To be a truly collegial, collaborative court, you have to be talking about more than: ‘Do they talk about baseball together?’” Kagan declared to about 1,000 students gathered on the lawn. “You have to be talking about: ‘Can they engage in the real work that they’re doing in collegial and collaborative ways?’ … That comes only with serious, sometimes difficult, but persistent effort to engage. And to try to work out divisions and reach places you thought you could not be — places of common ground.”
About a month later, speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, Kagan again suggested that the justices’ ability to make small talk is no substitute for genuine engagement on the crucial issues the court is asked to resolve.
“I don’t see why anybody should care that I can talk to some of my colleagues about baseball, unless that becomes a way for a better, more collaborative relationship about our cases and work,” Kagan said. “I think it is in service of that.”
Kagan, a nominee of President Barack Obama, then unmistakably signaled there have been breakdowns in the substantive give-and-takeshe views as essential to the court’s success.
“That is a work in progress. I mean, some years are better than other years,” she said. “Time will tell whether this is a court that can get back … to finding common ground.”
I’m not holding my breath for any of this. Hardliners on the bench think heaven anointed them and speaks through them. The best we can hope for is some meaningful reform of court ethical behavior.
If you haven’t heard, Maryland Representative Jame Raskin is facing cancer and treatment. You may read about his diagnosis and treatment plan on his Twitter link. We wish him the speediest of healing and success in his treatments! He’s one of the jewels of the House of Representatives.
Burpee’s seed catalog, 1898
I was Wednesday years old when I found a reference to this disgusting misogynist on Greta Thunberg’s Twitter feed. I was Thursday years old reading this about him and his brother. I found this on the BBC, and I hope you’ve digested your most recent meal if you read this. “Andre Tate detained in Romania over rape and human trafficking case.”
Controversial online influencer Andrew Tate has been detained in Romania as part of a human trafficking and rape investigation.
Tate – who was detained alongside his brother Tristan – had his house raided in the capital, Bucharest.
A police spokesperson confirmed the arrests to the BBC.
The former kickboxer rose to fame in 2016 when he was removed from British TV show Big Brother over a video which appeared to show him attacking a woman.
He went on to gain notoriety online, with Twitter banning him for saying women should “bear responsibility” for being sexually assaulted. He has since been reinstated.
Despite social media bans he gained popularity, particularly among young men, by promoting an ultra-masculine, ultra-luxurious lifestyle.
He regularly appeared in videos with a fleet of expensive sports cars, on private jets, and enjoying expensive holidays.
- Andrew Tate: The self-proclaimed ‘misogynist’ influencer
- ‘I fear online influencer radicalised my son’
Speaking to the BBC, a spokesperson for the Directorate for Investigating Organised Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) said prosecutors had applied to hold the influencer at a “detention centre” for an additional 30 days.
A judge will rule on the application on Friday afternoon, the spokesperson added. The brothers have been under investigation since April alongside two Romanian nationals.
“The four suspects… appear to have created an organised crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialised websites for a cost,” DIICOT said in a statement.
Video on social media showed Tate and his brother being led away from a luxury villa.
Burpee Catalog from 1903
With men like these, we will never take back the night, let alone any other places. Women should not have to create safe places because of the predatory behavior and power of so many men.
CNN reports on how many concessions to crazies Kevin McCarthy has made to secure the Speakership. This cannot be good for the country. The report is by Melanie Zanona.
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy has offered a key concession to critics of his bid for the House speakership during private conversations this week: reducing the threshold that is required to force a floor vote on ousting the sitting speaker, according to six Republican sources familiar with the internal discussions.
McCarthy has been trying to find a compromise threshold that would appease his critics enough to earn their speaker vote, while still being palatable to the rest of the House GOP, and has been sounding out all corners of the conference in private phone calls this week.
One of the numbers that has come up in recent conversations between McCarthy and GOP lawmakers – and which has not been previously reported – is a five-person threshold, according to two of the Republican sources.
Currently, the majority of the House GOP is required to call for the so-called motion to vacate the speaker’s chair. But some conservative hardliners are pushing for a single member to be able to call for such a vote, which they see as an important mechanism to hold the speaker accountable.
A five-person threshold, however, may be too low for the moderate wing of the party, some of whom have privately suggested they would be willing to agree on a 50-person threshold.
And some of McCarthy’s fiercest critics, including Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Ralph Norman of South Carolina, told CNN they see the five-person threshold as still too high, underscoring the significant challenge McCarthy faces as he works to lock down the speakership.
“No, less than 5!!” Norman said in a text message of the proposed motion to vacate threshold. “2 or less (my opinion).”
And Gaetz said: “He’s gotta get down to 1.”
All of this will be a major topic of discussion during a crucial conference call on Friday afternoon that McCarthy scheduled with the various ideological caucuses in the House GOP, just four days ahead of the January 3 speaker’s vote.
I could just spend a few moments here going on about “your reap what you sow” or “‘For there will be peace for the seed, the vine will yield its fruit, the land will yield its produce, and the heavens will give their dew, and I will cause the remnant of this people to inherit all these things.” That last bit is from Zechariah 8:12. There are all kinds of fruit and seed quotes in literature, so I guess I may not be the only one that looks forward to the harvest. I try to know what I plant and yank out the weeds. I’m a believer in karma, and I see some ripen.
“Hang there like fruit, my soul,
Till the tree die.”
It’s just kind of nice that the day after the darkest and longest night of the year, Burpee’s keeps offering a promise of food and beauty for sunnier days from the farms of my great grandparents to the victory gardens of my grandparents and my yard here in New Orleans. Have a great New Year’s week! I will see you on Monday. Let’s hope this year we get many fruitful days!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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