Thursday Reads, With Rabbits
Posted: February 3, 2022 Filed under: just because 10 Comments![Wolpertinger, in the style of Albrect Durer.In German folklore, a wolpertinger (also called wolperdinger or woiperdinger) is an animal[1] said to inhabit the alpine forests of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg in south](https://skydancingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/wolpertinger-in-the-style-of-albrect-durer.in-german-folklore-a-wolpertinger-also-called-wolperdinger-or-woiperdinger-is-an-animal1-said-to-inhabit-the-alpine-forests-of-bavaria-and-bade.jpg?w=301&h=341)
Wolpertinger, in the style of Albrect Durer.In German folklore, a wolpertinger (also called wolperdinger or woiperdinger) is an animal[1] said to inhabit the alpine forests of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg in south.
Good Morning!!
Today I want to share some interesting stories I came across in my internet browsing yesterday.
From Mother Jones, Ali Breland has a piece about a woman who went underground to learn about the Trumpist far right: The Plan Was Simple: Infiltrate MAGA World and Tell Everyone What She Saw. Then She Was Found Out. This is long and involved, so you’ll need to read the whole thing; but here are some excerpts:
“Looks like my cover is fully blown, actually, fuck,” Amanda Moore told me over Twitter direct message. It was a Saturday night in late October, and the mission that had probably saved her life was coming to an end.
She had spent months attending MAGA events across the country while undercover and after carefully constructing an alias. While she had messaged me a few weeks earlier to say the truth was trickling out, her real identity hadn’t yet spread widely. She thought it might stay that way. It didn’t.
“This was my life,” she told me a week later over FaceTime, still rattled from the project’s abrupt end. She described her situation at the beginning of the pandemic: “Before this, I thought about killing myself every day. I was not making a livable income. I couldn’t even order shit off Amazon, and the other things people were doing to keep themselves entertained and cope—because I had no fucking money.” Instead, her coping strategy was to embed deep within MAGA land.
It’s rare for a journalist to really go undercover these days….But what if you weren’t a journalist? Say, if you had the skills of an amateur investigator and the ability to focus so deeply on a single subject that you almost lose yourself to it. If you had the time, money, resources, desire, and general wherewithal, you could embed into something interesting. During the pandemic, Amanda Moore found herself fitting the bill.
Moore had not initially set out to embed in MAGA world. But when pandemic shutdowns dried up her income from being a booking agent connecting models with businesses who need them for live events, she found herself with little money but plenty of free time. At first, she used it to aggressively badger DC politicians on Twitter about the slow pace of her Covid unemployment benefits, and, once they expired, the staffers of national politicians whom she held responsible for the program’s deficiencies.
Even when she was able to get benefits, the contract model-booking work didn’t count, leaving her with only about $100 a week based on a brief stint as a bartender. “I was thinking about killing myself, every day, for hours a day. That’s all I did,” Moore later told me, emphasizing that her suicidal thoughts were very real: “I reached a point where it no longer mattered to me if I lived or died.”
A Hare in the Forest, by Hans Hoffmann, c. 1585
What she learned was fascinating and frightening.
Moore, who is 33, didn’t initially build a cover story. But she realized that if she didn’t wear a mask, held her tongue, and acted friendly, demonstrators simply assumed she was on their side, and would warm up to her and speak freely with little prompting. After the November 2020 rally and several other events, Moore realized that she was noticing things—observations that kept her from being as surprised as many people were by the January 6 storming of the Capitol.
“December was incredibly disturbing,” she explained, describing a tone of menace at the next major MAGA rally in DC that followed Biden’s victory. “It was tense all day and people were telling me about how the Proud Boys had protected and saved them at the last rally, and how the police can’t do anything”—anything meaning, she says, commit violence against counterprotesters. “I remember, this guy walking by me and saying ‘When it gets dark…’”
When the sun set, a group of men in “America Strong” hats and clothing with golden laurel wreaths—a typical Proud Boys uniform—surrounded and beat a Black counterprotestor outside of Harry’s bar, the group’s notorious DC hangout. (The protestor fought back with a knife and was arrested, along with one man who was stabbed.) Other fights broke out, as the Proud Boys, known for inciting street brawls, roamed around town. By the end of the night, four churches had been vandalized.
Amid the rampaging, Moore heard Proud Boys claim that everything beyond the domain of the MAGA rally was dangerous and riddled with antifascists looking to sow violence. “They would offer to walk me places. They offered this to old men and other women,” Moore says, describing how it created paranoia, and the impression that it wasn’t safe to move around DC without protection.
Still Life with Rabbits, by Johann Georg Seitz, c. 1870
Moore also published her own story at Logically:
Before there was a riot at the Capitol, there were two other D.C. Stop the Steal rallies, where baseless fear-mongering and distortion of facts helped accelerate the rally goers’ acceptance of violence. At both events, members of the Proud Boys helped convince attendees that they were in constant danger of being attacked by random people who were secretly Antifa, and then used the fear they had created to “justify” attacking and terrorizing residents of Washington, D.C. The evening of the second rally, held on December 12, 2020, was particularly instrumental in ramping up tension and distrust between rally goers, local residents, and the various police forces in D.C.
After the speeches wrapped up on December 12, rally goers milled around in front of the Supreme Court stage. They made small talk with one another, casually making sure everyone had mace, and swapping stories about times they alleged they had been attacked by BLM and Antifa. One woman told me she was almost attacked after the November D.C. Stop the Steal rally; her phone was dead, she was separated from her group, and she was walking to the train station when a few guys ran by her. While she never quite got to the part where an attack almost occurred, she was sure to tell me that she was furious it had happened.
“I’m angry. I’m angry. Average American citizens being attacked, and nobody’s doing anything other than Proud Boys. The police don’t, they’re a joke. I back the blue, I do, but they have got to do something…[Today] is much more intense [than November’s rally]. I marched with the Proud Boys last night about 1 o’clock in the morning.”
Later that night, hundreds of people congregated downtown, holding what was essentially an unpermitted block party in the streets, primarily in front of Harry’s Restaurant, a place that served as a meet-up point for the Proud Boys. At some point there was a stabbing; information on the ground was confusing, and at the time, many people seemed to agree the Proud Boys had done the stabbing to save the rest of us.
Feeding White Rabbits, Frederik Morgan, Paris
On January 6:
I found myself marching down to the Capitol around 12:45 pm on January 6, ten feet from the QAnon Shaman — without a gas mask. By the time I made it to the edge of the Capitol grounds, it was packed. A man with tears pouring down his face came up to me. “I just punched a fucking cop!! He was trying to hurt some lady, and I told him we don’t do that where I’m from, and I just hit him!!! I’m not crying, they’re gassing us.” His eyes focused on my shirt, which reads “Biden: Not My President” in the same font used by the real campaign. For a brief, terrifying moment he looked furious, before he laughed. “I thought you were one of them for a minute. Hey, I want you to know — I’m really not crying. It’s because of the tear gas.”
After he ran off, I joined the group marching forward. Having just had a conversation with a man who told me he was fighting with the police close to the Capitol, it was surreal to be surrounded by old ladies and young children as I headed in the exact direction he had told me violence was occurring. No one around me seemed to care. Every so often, small groups of men would against the crowd, one or two of them with chemically induced tears streaming down their faces, led by others who would clear a path yelling, “PROUD BOYS, COMING THROUGH. BACK UP! MEDICAL EMERGENCY!” At no point did anyone seem to think it was a bad idea to continue walking toward whatever was causing these “medical emergencies.”
A couple of times the police let off smoke bombs. Each time they would go off, people around me cheered. Where I was standing, the consensus was the cops were trying to clear out the counter-protesters who were hoping to keep us from getting to the Capitol — except, of course, there weren’t any counter-protesters; it was the police who didn’t want us in the Capitol. At no point did anyone around me consider we might be the bad guys.
I hope you’ll read these pieces for an inside perspective of the Capitol insurrection.
Edwin Landseer, Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Titania and Bottom with white rabbits, 1851
From Heather Digby Parton at Raw Story: Donald Trump’s having an awful week — and it’s only Wednesday
Generally speaking, the Washington press corps and, in particular, the political reporters at the New York Times are not ones to engage in hyperbole when it comes to Donald Trump. If anything, the paper of record has been downplaying the ongoing saga of Trump’s Big Lie and all the evidence that’s been piling up about what happened in the lead-up to January 6th recently. But this week’s Trump news seems to have shaken even their jaded attitude.
For instance, the Times’ Peter Baker tweeted on Tuesday, “Even for Trump it’s quite a week — first dangling pardons for capitol attackers, then admitting his goal was to have ‘overturned the election’ and now calling on the House to investigate Pence for not throwing out votes of multiple states so a president who lost could keep power.” Then the Times’ Maggie Haberman, appearing on CNN on Tuesday night, said, “it’s been a breathtaking couple of days.” This NYT piece by Shane Goldmacher headlined “Trump’s Words, and Deeds, Reveal Depths of His Drive to Retain Power” says it all.
Earlier this week, I wrote about Trump’s scripted comments at the rally in Texas over the weekend in which he promised pardons for the January 6th insurrectionists who were “treated unfairly” and called for protests against prosecutors who are investigating him. But that was just the beginning. On Monday, Trump put out a truly revealing statement (which some might call an admission of guilt.)
Republican leaders have picked a side and it appears to be Trump’s. As usual, there hasn’t been much of an outcry about any of this. Oh sure, a few have said it’s “inappropriate” to talk about pardoning the January 6th rioters and there has been some tut-tutting about how “the process worked” but that’s about it.
Trump followed up his confession that he wanted to overturn the election by suggesting that the January 6th Committee should investigate Mike Pence if they believe he could have overturned the election and ask him why he didn’t do it. I would guess that’s Trump’s pathetic attempt at trying to clean up his earlier comment but it’s incredibly lame and self-defeating. He shouldn’t be pushing Mike Pence toward the committee — Pence’s closest aide and his lawyer both testified for hours this week.
Read much more at the link.
This is interesting and depressing from Scientific American: Schoolkids Are Falling Victim to Disinformation and Conspiracy Fantasies.
When Amanda Gardner, an educator with two decades of experience, helped to start a new charter elementary and middle school outside of Seattle last year, she did not anticipate teaching students who denied that the Holocaust happened, argued that COVID is a hoax and told their teacher that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Yet some children insisted that these conspiracy fantasies were true. Both misinformation, which includes honest mistakes, and disinformation, which involves an intention to mislead, have had “a growing impact on students over the past 10 to 20 years,” Gardner says, yet many schools do not focus on the issue. “Most high schools probably do some teaching to prevent plagiarism, but I think that’s about it.”
Two Rabbits in the Bush, Meiji era
Children, it turns out, are ripe targets for fake news. Age 14 is when kids often start believing in unproven conspiratorial ideas, according to a study published in September 2021 in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. Many teens also have trouble assessing the credibility of online information. In a 2016 study involving nearly 8,000 U.S. students, Stanford University researchers found that more than 80 percent of middle schoolers believed that an advertisement labeled as sponsored content was actually a news story. The researchers also found that less than 20 percent of high schoolers seriously questioned spurious claims in social media, such as a Facebook post that said images of strange-looking flowers, supposedly near the site of a nuclear power plant accident in Japan, proved that dangerous radiation levels persisted in the area. When college students in the survey looked at a Twitter post touting a poll favoring gun control, more than two thirds failed to note that the liberal antigun groups behind the poll could have influenced the data.
Disinformation campaigns often directly go after young users, steering them toward misleading content. A 2018 Wall Street Journal investigation found that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which offers personalized suggestions about what users should watch next, is skewed to recommend videos that are more extreme and far-fetched than what the viewer started with. For instance, when researchers searched for videos using the phrase “lunar eclipse,” they were steered to a video suggesting that Earth is flat. YouTube is one of the most popular social media site among teens: After Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Information and Library Science, spent time searching for videos on YouTube and observed what the algorithm told her to watch next, she suggested that it was “one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”
Click the link to read the whole article.
A few more stories to check out:
Politico: Trump considered blanket pardons for Jan. 6 rioters before he left office.
The New York Times: Read the Nov. 18 Memo on Alternate Trump Electors.
Raw Story: Jan. 6 docs from Mike Pence that Trump tried to block will be handed to Congress in 30 days
Satire from Alexandra Petri at The Washington Post: Opinion: Relax, the coup people weren’t very good at it and won’t try again until 2024.
What interesting stories have you been finding? Please share.
Tuesday Reads: Trump Crime Spree
Posted: February 1, 2022 Filed under: just because 15 CommentsGood Morning!!
Donald Trump is a rolling crime wave. Will anyone stop him? I hate to join in the bashing of Merrick Garland, but honestly, wtf is going on with the Department of Justice? Will Trump ever be held accountable for staging a coup against the United States government? Does Garland read the newspapers? More is leaking out about Trump’s crime spree every single day.
Former President Donald Trump‘s advisers drafted two versions of an executive order to seize voting machines — one directing the Department of Defense to do so and another the Department of Homeland Security — as part of a broader effort to undermine the 2020 election results, multiple sources tell CNN.
The idea of using the federal government to access voting machines in states that Trump lost was the brainchild of retired Col. Phil Waldron and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, the sources said. Both Army veterans spread misinformation about the election being stolen from Trump.
While advisers publicly floated the idea at the time, revelations that two draft executive orders were actually drawn up for different agencies to carry out the job underscores the extent to which the former President’s allies wanted to weaponize the powers of his lame-duck administration to overturn the election.
Any operation for the military or federal agents to seize voting equipment for political purposes would have been unprecedented in US history….
It’s unclear who drafted the executive orders, and neither was issued.
But Flynn and Trump’s former attorney Sidney Powell advocated for the idea during a now-infamous Oval Office meeting in mid-December 2020. The meeting devolved into screaming matches as some of the President’s advisers pushed back on various proposals, including invoking martial law and naming Powell special counsel to investigate voter fraud claims, CNN reported at the time.
The House select committee is now looking into the effort to draft an executive order and how it began, including the roles of Flynn, Waldron and Powell as well as another Trump attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and Bernie Kerik, who worked alongside Giuliani after the election to find any evidence of voter fraud.
https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1488468456362192897?s=20&t=TvGKyX1T_WJ4gAo1NEk8Rg
Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said.
Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines.
Mr. Trump pressed Mr. Giuliani to make that inquiry after rejecting a separate effort by his outside advisers to have the Pentagon take control of the machines. And the outreach to the Department of Homeland Security came not long after Mr. Trump, in an Oval Office meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr, raised the possibility of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a previously undisclosed suggestion that Mr. Barr immediately shot down.
The new accounts show that Mr. Trump was more directly involved than previously known in exploring proposals to use his national security agencies to seize voting machines as he grasped unsuccessfully for evidence of fraud that would help him reverse his defeat in the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the episodes.
The existence of proposals to use at least three federal departments to assist Mr. Trump’s attempt to stay in power has been publicly known. The proposals involving the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security were codified by advisers in the form of draft executive orders.
But the new accounts provide fresh insight into how the former president considered and to some degree pushed the plans, which would have taken the United States into uncharted territory by using federal authority to seize control of the voting systems run by states on baseless grounds of widespread voting fraud.
As everyone knows by now, Trump publicly confessed to several crimes at his hate rally in Texas over the weekend. This piece by Will Bunch explains in plain English.
For a nation that’s awakened every morning for nearly two years to a Groundhog Day of pandemic and paranoia, the scenes from Donald Trump’s latest comeback rally on Saturday at a fairground in the East Texas flatlands of Conroe could certainly numb the American mind with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.
The mile-long line of Trump fanatics, braving the January prairie chill to see the twice-impeached ex-president and passing rows of vendors, including the occasional Confederate flag. Then the viral clips of the true believers — the woman in her Trump 2024 hat expounding that the “Joe Biden” currently in the White House is fake and that the real one was assassinated at Gitmo in March 2019, another woman peddling a book containing all of Trump’s tweets before he was banned from Twitter, and the guy peddling doses of the quack COVID-19 cure ivermectin while lashing out at anyone wearing a mask for trying to “save Grandma.”
As darkness fell and the crowd swelled to the thousands, the sound system blared the late Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” the same tune that had electrified Trump’s most diehard followers at the D.C. Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021. Over at the zealously pro-Trump One America News Network, or OANN, analysts awaited the 45th president as their antidote to what they called “the divisiveness” of President Biden’s first year, insisting in the words of Liz Harrington that “Trump will unite us.” But more mainstream outlets like CNN were busy obsessing on the possible retirement of football’s Tom Brady, having decided — wisely — after Jan. 6 not to cover Trump’s words live, but to only revisit his rallies if he actually makes any news.
Hey, guys … Trump made some news! Unfortunately.
More from Will Bunch’s piece:
In fact, the man who’d occupied the White House little more than one year ago delivered one of the most incendiary and most dangerous speeches in America’s 246-year history. It included an appeal for all-out mayhem in the streets to thwart the U.S. justice system and prevent Trump from going to jail, as the vise tightens from overlapping criminal probes in multiple jurisdictions. And it also featured a stunning campaign promise — that Trump would look to abuse the power of the presidency to pardon those involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
It’s impossible for me to understate or downplay the importance of this moment, and I hope that my colleagues in the media — who too often over the last year have craved or even pretended about a return to the politics of “normal,” when we are nowhere near normal — will wake up and see this. Of course, Biden’s presidency deserves our full scrutiny, with praise for what’s gone right (an economic boom) and criticism for what’s gone wrong (broken promises on climate and student debt). But while Biden is seeking to restore democratic norms, a shadow ex-president — unpunished so far for his role in an attempted coup on Jan. 6 — is rebuilding a cult-like movement in the heartland of America, with all the personal grievance and appeals to Brownshirts-style violence that marked the lowest moments of the 20th century. On the 89th anniversary of the date (Jan. 30, 1933) that Adolf Hitler — rehabilitated after his attempted coup — assumed power in Germany, are we repeating the past’s mistakes of complacency and underestimation?
Amid the predictable reiterations of the Big Lie that Biden’s legitimate 2020 election was stolen and his other narcissistic blather, Trump’s lengthy speech in Conroe contained three elements that marked a dangerous escalation of his post-presidential, post-Jan. 6 rhetoric. Let’s digest and analyze each of them:
— For the first time, Trump — if somehow elected again in 2024 and upon returning to the White House in January 2025 — dangled pardons before people convicted of crimes in the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill. “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he told the rally, adding: “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.” The statement raises as many questions as it answers — for example, was he including many or all of the more than 700 mostly low-level insurrectionists, or sending a message to his higher-up friends like Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, and others who could be subject to criminal probes?
Predictably, Trump has been paying off potential witnesses to his crimes.
From NBC News: Trump gave $1M to Meadows nonprofit weeks after Jan. 6 panel’s creation.
Former President Donald Trump’s political action committee donated $1 million to the conservative nonprofit organization where his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, is a senior partner, according to a campaign finance report filed Monday night with the Federal Election Commission.
In December, the House voted to recommend that the Justice Department pursue contempt of Congress charges against Meadows over his refusal to cooperate with an investigation into the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The tax-deductible seven-figure contribution to the Conservative Partnership Institute is by far the largest chunk of $1.35 million in donations Trump’s “Save America” PAC made to political allies over the last six months of 2021, according to the campaign finance report….
The contribution to Meadows’s nonprofit stands out both for its size and for its timing. On July 1, the House voted to establish a select committee to investigate the Capitol attack. Trump’s PAC donated to the Conservative Partnership Institute, which bills itself as a training ground for conservative staff and elected officials, on July 26.
“CPI is proud to have the support of President Trump, along with tens of thousands of Americans across the nation, for our work to build and unite the conservative movement,” CPI chief operating officer Wesley Denton said in a statement to NBC News.
Trump’s message to Meadows: zip your lips.
I have no doubt we’ll learn more about Trump’s constant criming today, but will we ever hear anything about it from Merrick Garland?
What are your thoughts? What stories are you following?
Monday Reads: More, more, more of the same
Posted: January 31, 2022 Filed under: just because | Tags: #TrumpCult, Covid-19 and children, Neil Young, presidential pardons 11 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
It’s finally warmed up around here again! I’m still thinking about all of our Sky Dancers–including BB–that got slammed by that wicked snowstorm over the weekend. I hope it’s melting faster than the wicked witch of the west after that bucket of water hit her!
We’re gearing up for Mardi Gras. I’m still hoping that turns out okay but I’m not going to head someplace and wallow in crowds that likely include folks from the plague rat states and our surrounding rural areas. I know the city needs the cash and folks need jobs but still, I fret.
There are now two Republican governors who have openly decided to diss a Trump second run for the Presidency. That happens while Susan Collins dithers. Ron DeSantis is getting a little feisty too. It seriously couldn’t happen to a better crowd of turncoats. This is from the New York Times: “Trump’s Grip on G.O.P. Faces New Strains. Shifts in polls of Republicans, disagreements on endorsements and jeers over vaccines hint at daylight between the former president and the right-wing movement he spawned.” It’s written by Shane Goldmacher.
About halfway into his Texas rally on Saturday evening, Donald J. Trump pivoted toward the teleprompter and away from a meandering set of grievances to rattle off a tightly prepared list of President Biden’s failings and his own achievements.
“Let’s simply compare the records,” Mr. Trump said, as supporters in “Trump 2024” shirts cheered behind him, framed perfectly in the television shot.
Mr. Trump, who later went on to talk about “that beautiful, beautiful house that happens to be white,” has left increasingly little doubt about his intentions, plotting an influential role in the 2022 midterm elections and another potential White House run. But a fresh round of skirmishes over his endorsements, fissures with the Republican base over vaccines — a word Mr. Trump conspicuously left unsaid at Saturday’s rally — and new polling all show how his longstanding vise grip on the Republican Party is facing growing strains.
In Texas, some grass-roots conservatives are vocally frustrated with Mr. Trump’s backing of Gov. Greg Abbott, even booing Mr. Abbott when he took the stage. In North Carolina, Mr. Trump’s behind-the-scenes efforts to shrink the Republican field to help his preferred Senate candidate failed last week. And in Tennessee, a recent Trump endorsement set off an unusually public backlash, even among his most loyal allies, both in Congress and in conservative media.
The most appalling Trump event speech hit when Orange Caligula offered up pardons to his insurrectionists.
As I’ve mentioned before, the artists who design and construct the parade floats are simply amazing.Design for Proteus Parade Float, 1906, by Bror Anders Wikstrom
This is from the CBS link above.
The Justice Department is navigating unique and profound logistical problems with its January 6 cases. The D.C. federal courthouse remains closed to jury trials through at least February 7, due to COVID risks. Most hearings are occurring virtual, through Zoom and phone connections. But trials must occur in person inside the courthouse, which is a short walk from the U.S. Capitol.
The agency is also trying to corral an unprecedented avalanche of evidence. The U.S. Capitol riot prosecution, which the agency has characterized as one of the largest criminal cases in U.S. history, is saturated with tips and possible evidence.
In a series of recent court filings, the Justice Department said there are 14,000 hours of Capitol surveillance video, 250 terabytes of data and more than 200,000 tips from the public. Along with a growing collection of social media posts, phone videos and witness interviews, federal prosecutors are trying to manage and organize a growing tower of evidence and materials.
This week, the agency notified a judge there is still “work to do” in preparing the evidence for the court, defense lawyers, defendants and trial.
“This investigation has generated an enormous amount of evidence,” the Justice Department said in a court filing Thursday, as part of its request for a time extension in the case of a defendant from New Jersey.
Judges have set some trial dates, including in the high-profile cases against accused OathKeepers conspirators. Some of those trials are scheduled to begin in April, while others are expected in July and September. The later dates include defendants charged with seditious conspiracy, some of whom are in pretrial detention.
CBS News has learned approximately 40 defendants in January 6 cases are in pretrial detention in the Washington, D.C., jail, some of whom have spent nearly a year behind bars, without firm trial dates. Judges have said the cases involving defendants in pretrial custody should be prioritized for the earlier trial dates.
Could a president pardon people involved in a crime he incited? Remember, Nixon secretly promised pardons to the Watergate instigators and those active in the cover-up. Haldeman eventually asked for a pardon. Nixon, however, would’ve directly implicated himself in the crime and he resigned quickly after the request.
Trump, however, is openly offering pardons. This is from The Guardian: Trump pardon promise for Capitol rioters ‘stuff of dictators’ – Nixon aide.”
John Dean, 83, was White House counsel from 1970 to 1973 before being disbarred and detained as a result of the Watergate scandal, which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Dean responded to Trump on Twitter.
“This is beyond being a demagogue to the stuff of dictators,” he wrote. “He is defying the rule of law. Failure to confront a tyrant only encourages bad behaviour. If thinking Americans don’t understand what Trump is doing and what the criminal justice system must do we are all in big trouble!”
Trump was generous with pardons in office, recipients including Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, both now targets of the House committee investigating January 6 and with Trump in its sights. On Sunday morning, the New Hampshire governor, Chris Sununu, widely seen as a relative moderate in Trump’s Republican party, was asked if pardons should be offered to Capitol rioters.
“Of course not,” he told CNN’s State of the Union. “Oh, my goodness. No.”
Even Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator and dogged Trump ally, said the former president was wrong.
“I don’t want to send any signals that it was OK to defile the Capitol,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation. “I want to deter what people did on January 6, and those who did it, I hope they go to jail and get the book thrown at them because they deserve it.”
But a moderate Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, indicated the hold Trump has on the party.
Appearing on ABC’s This Week, the senator said Trump should not “have made that pledge to do pardons. We should let the judicial process proceed.”
But Collins, who voted to convict Trump over the Capitol attack, would not say that she would not support him if he ran for president again.
“Well certainly it’s not likely given the many other qualified candidates that we have, that have expressed interest in running,” she said. “So it’s very unlikely.”
Dither away, Susan. We see you.
We need people to fight all this Trumpism in the trenches of Main Street. I found this article in TNR to be invigorating.
https://twitter.com/melindahoehn/status/1488079523170197506
These folks–retired election auditors–protected the Arizona election results. We may need more like them throughout many states.
Trump’s agents were plotting to fabricate a favorable vote count. But they were stymied by their vast inexperience in elections. As important, they were boxed in at key junctures by three retired election technologists who used public records to hold them accountable. The trio warned the pro-Trump contractors and their legislative sponsors that their “audit” was being watched, repeatedly reported why it was a propaganda-filled hoax, and gradually won local and national press coverage.
Most strikingly, it was the technologists—not Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, nor Democratic Party lawyers, experts in policy circles and academia, or journalists—who showed that tens of thousands of loyal Republican voters from Phoenix’s suburbs did not vote for Trump. That pattern alone, based on hard data, confirmed his loss in Arizona.
The retirees did more. They rebutted the lie from Trump’s noisemakers that tens of thousands of dead people and made-up people voted, by pairing every ballot cast with a legal voter. They showed that there was no collusion to alter vote counts when local election officials reviewed sloppily marked ballots to determine a voter’s intent, again using public data that tracked the officials’ actions.
And months after Arizona Senate Republicans hired the Cyber Ninjas, a data security firm led by a Trump cultist with no experience in elections, to oversee its 2020 election review in Maricopa County (greater Phoenix), the retirees boxed the Ninjas into revealing that they could not accurately recount votes—again using public records. That strategy culminated last September, when Cyber Ninja CEO Doug Logan testified that Biden had won Arizona, after all.
Read more at the link.
So, I have to adult today. I can no longer be completely feral as I’ve got places to go outside my neighborhood where they are used to me. I may even cut my hair again! Y’all take care and be safe if you’re going to venture out. The Covid-19 numbers are not looking good. Oh, btw my less evil Senator did something positive with Senator Tammy Baldwin today so I sent him a nice note.
This is the most disturbing news. I would just like to say Fuck you to all those anti-Vaxxers.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
And just a small tribute to Neil Young who lived as a child with polio and epilepsy and whose children all have challenging diseases present from childhood. His daughter has epilepsy and his two sons have cerebral palsy. This comes from his album Trans. The music was to help Young communicate with his youngest son who could not speak. Young has a foundation to help children live with long-term health disabilities. I have left Spotify.
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: January 29, 2022 Filed under: just because 17 Comments
Good Morning!!
The big nor’easter moving up the East Coast appears to be behaving as predicted. We are still under a blizzard warning and the snow is coming down steadily outside my windows. In fact, I can’t see much but white out there. The Boston Globe: Blizzard warning in effect for much of Eastern Mass., all of R.I., with predicted totals of up to two feet.
A snowstorm that could bring up to two feet to some Eastern Massachusetts communities is barreling down on Southern New England, with blizzard conditions expected in the eastern third of the state and all of Rhode Island, the National Weather Service said.
The “significant winter storm” arrived after midnight and is expected to stick around through Saturday night. It will bring heavy snowfall, near hurricane-force wind gusts, and power outages, according to the weather service. The greatest snowfall amounts are expected across Eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
The weather service expanded its blizzard warning Friday to include not just coastal areas but much of Eastern Massachusetts and all of Rhode Island. The warning is in effect from midnight Friday through early Sunday morning. A winter storm warning was also issued for much of Central Massachusetts.
Eastern portions of the state are expected to be hit the hardest. In Boston, Plymouth, and parts of Cape Cod at least 18 to 24 inches of snow is likely, forecasters said. Depending on the location of isolated snow bands, some areas could see up to 30 inches, with forecasters predicting that snow totals in certain spots will break records or come close.
From 7 p.m. on Friday through 7 a.m. on Sunday, forecasters anticipate 24.7 inches in Boston, while South Shore communities could see higher amounts of 26 inches or more. like Plymouth are expected to see the highest amounts, with 26.8 inches.
As long as the power doesn’t go out, I’m just going to be cozy and warm in my apartment, sipping tea and reading a good book.
Republicans and right wing media are attacking President Biden’s commitment to appointing the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. From Media Matters: Biden pledged to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court. Right-wing media are rushing to dismiss the idea.
Following the news that Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring from the Supreme Court, right-wing media began launching racist attacks at the yet-unnamed nominee who would replace him based solely on President Joe Biden’s campaign pledge that he would nominate a Black woman.
Biden is not the first president who committed to diversity in his judicial selection. Ronald Reagan also made a similar pledge during his presidential campaign in 1980, saying he would nominate a woman to “one of the first Supreme Court vacancies in my administration.” Biden himself has already diversified appellate courts, nominating eight Black women so far to serve in the nation’s second highest courts.
However, once the news of Breyer’s retirement broke, right-wing media were quick to attack Biden’s promise. Through outright racist language, tangential broadsides at Vice President Kamala Harris, and far-fetched comparisons between Biden’s pledge and affirmative action, right-wing figures have been dismissing the future nominee.
Examples:
— The Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro, in a set of since-deleted tweets, claimed that Biden’s selection process would result in him selecting a “lesser black woman” even though there are more deserving candidates. Shapiro also claimed that because of Biden’s pledge, his nominee “will always have an asterisk attached.”
— On Fox’s Outnumbered, guest and conservative radio host Leo Terrell claimed the “racial component” of the nomination process would mean “the race card is going to be played if you vote against this particular nominee.”
— Tom Elliot, the founder of right-wing news aggregation website Grabien, tweeted, “If only Biden could perform a vivisection, assembling a SCOTUS nominee” from Rep Maxine Waters’ (D-CA) “black skin,” Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-UT) “Boy Scout background,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) “insane politics,” Vice President Kamala Harris’ “vagina,” comedian Benny Drama’s “ambiguous sexuality,” and Justice Stephen Breyer’s “disdain for the Constitution.”
— Fox host Dan Bongino asserted on his radio show that nominating a Black woman meant she “could come out and say anything she wants — anything you say against it, you will automatically be deemed a racist.”
— Infowars’ Owen Shroyer, in discussing Biden’s pledge, said Democrats were “destroy[ing] everything with their commitment to diversity” and that Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman is “illegal and racist.”
This is hilarious from Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker. Ashton Pittman at the Mississippi Free Press: Wicker: Black Woman Supreme Court Pick An Affirmative Action ‘Beneficiary’
The first Black woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court in history will be a “beneficiary” of affirmative action, U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker told a radio show this afternoon. The senior Republican senator from Mississippi made clear that he has no plans to vote for Biden’s yet-to-be-announced pick.
Biden has vowed to select a Black woman to replace outgoing Justice Stephen Breyer, who announced his retirement yesterday.
“The irony is that the Supreme Court is at the very time hearing cases about this sort of affirmative racial discrimination while adding someone who is the beneficiary of this sort of quota,” Wicker told host Paul Gallo on SuperTalk Mississippi Radio today, referring to a pending U.S. Supreme Court case challenging affirmative action in college admissions.
“The majority of the court may be saying writ large that it’s unconstitutional. We’ll see how that irony works out.”
Wicker notably did not raise an objection when former President Donald Trump vowed to appoint a woman to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she died weeks before the 2020 election. Instead, the GOP senator enthusiastically supported Trump’s choice, Amy Coney Barrett, despite having stated in 2016 that then-President Barack Obama should not be allowed to appoint a U.S. Supreme Court justice in an election year
Despite not knowing who Biden will nominate, Mississippi’s senior senator predicted that Biden’s pick will be less palatable to Republicans like himself than the white, male justice who currently holds the seat. He compared the unannounced nominee to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who became the high court’s first Latina justice when former President Barack Obama appointed her in 2009.
“We’re going to go from a nice, stately liberal to someone who’s probably more in the style of Sonia Sotomayor,” Wicker said. “… I hope it’s at least someone who will at least not misrepresent the facts. I think they will misinterpret the law.”
Then, he lamented that more Republicans did not turn out to help re-elect former President Donald Trump in 2020.
The Washington Post on one potential SCOTUS nominee: White House confirms South Carolina judge is under consideration for Supreme Court.
The 44-year-old leader faulted the West for waiting to impose more damaging sanctions on Moscow
Lost in translation:Friday Reads: With Justices for All
Posted: January 28, 2022 Filed under: SCOTUS 10 Comments
Federal Appeals Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson
Happy Friday Sky Dancers!
I am sorry to be so late today but I had a lot of errands to run this morning! I even had the topic I wanted to cover today by last night but just couldn’t get to it until this afternoon! I’d like to introduce you to all the wonderful black women Judges that are potential Supreme Court Nominees.
The First on the list is Federal Appeals Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson who replaced Merrick Garland when he became AG. This is an excerpt from an NPR interview with her by Nina Totenberg last June.
BROWN JACKSON: I am a federal judge, which means people generally treat me with respect. But in the evenings, when I leave the courthouse and go home, all of my wisdom and knowledge and authority evaporates. My daughters make it very clear that as far as they’re concerned, I know nothing. I should not tell them anything, much less give them any orders, that is if they talk to me at all.
She’s got all the receipts and still gets “oh mother!” from her daughters!
Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51, serves as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She was born in Washington, the daughter of two graduates of historically Black colleges and universities who instilled in her a sense that she could do or be anything she set her mind to, she recalled in a speech in March.
In June, Biden nominated Jackson to fill Merrick Garland’s seat on the D.C. Circuit after Garland was confirmed as attorney general. This fueled speculation that she was on the president’s shortlist for potential justices because the D.C. court is considered the second-most powerful in the country and because high court nominees are traditionally chosen from the federal appeals bench.
Jackson has clerked for Breyer and for two other federal judges. She attended Harvard University as an undergraduate and a law student, serving as an editor for the Harvard Law Review. And her experience as a public defender has endeared her to the more liberal base of the Democratic Party.
The US Senate confirmed Jackson in 2013 to the federal trial court in Washington, DC, where she served for eight years before Biden put her on the powerful US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, a court that has served as a launch pad to the Supreme Court.
Jackson’s tenure as a federal district court judge was highlighted by an opinion in which she ordered former Trump White House counsel Donald McGahn to comply with a House Judiciary Committee subpoena to testify as part of the first impeachment inquiry into the former president. In a more than 100-page opinion, she forcefully rejected the Trump administration’s claims that a president’s close advisers are absolutely immune to demands for testimony before Congress.
The decision made waves with a single line: “Presidents are not kings.”
Jackson brings not just experience on the federal bench but a background that the Biden administration has sought out in its push to fill judicial vacancies.
Before she served on the US Sentencing Commission and on the federal bench, Jackson— a Harvard Law School graduate — worked as an assistant federal public defender in the District of Columbia.
“There could not be a better choice than her. She’s extremely intelligent, very hard-working, and — most importantly in my line of work — she’s compassionate and truly cares about the individuals who come before her,” said Jon Jeffress, who worked with Jackson in the federal public defender’s office in Washington, DC.
Next on the list is Leondra Kruger. This is from the WaPo link above too.
Leondra Kruger, 45, is a California Supreme Court justice. At the U.S. Department of Justice, she served as deputy solicitor general, the federal government’s second-ranking representative in arguments at the Supreme Court, before becoming one of the youngest people ever nominated to the high court in California, taking her seat in 2015.
During her tenure in the Office of the Solicitor General, Kruger argued 12 cases before the Supreme Court, according to her court biography.
She has previously rebuffed offers from the White House to take a job in the administration.
This is from the Reuters Tweet above.
Before she turned to law and became one of the youngest justices ever appointed to the California Supreme Court, Leondra Kruger had journalism in her blood.
Kruger, considered a potential U.S. Supreme Court nominee for President Joe Biden to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, was editor-in-chief of her high school’s newspaper. Later, at Harvard University, she wrote for the daily student paper, the Crimson. While attending Yale Law School, she became editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal.
The reputation she gained as a young journalist for being thoughtful and careful has followed her to the judiciary, where the 45-year-old jurist has become known for her incremental approach to deciding cases.
Her moderate approach might help her win confirmation in a U.S. Senate evenly split between Democrats and Republicans if Biden chooses her to replace Breyer. Kruger would make history as the first Black woman to serve on the top U.S. judicial body.
Vox has a deep list of impressive black women serving as judges that make for a very long and deep bench. Vox is looking strictly at women younger than 55 which automatically means Lawyer Sharon Ifill — the former President and Director of NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund–did not make their cutoff.
Judge Candace Jackson-Akiwumi
Here are the justices proposed by VOX.
Judge Candace Jackson-Akiwumi — whom Biden appointed to the Seventh Circuit, which oversees federal litigation in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin — is a Yale law graduate who clerked for a federal circuit judge before entering practice. Although she was a partner at a large law firm immediately before her elevation to the bench, she spent 10 years as a public defender.
Judge Eunice Lee of the Second Circuit,
Similarly, Judge Eunice Lee, a Biden nominee to the Second Circuit, also graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for a federal appellate judge (Lee clerked for Judge Eric Clay of the Sixth Circuit, who I also clerked for). She has more than two decades of experience arguing appeals for indigent criminal defendants.
Here’s more on Judge Lee from News One.
Christina Swarns, executive director of The Innocence Project, tweeted in support of Lee’s confirmation. Swarns called Lee “absolutely brilliant” and “an exceptional addition” to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. Lee and Swarns previously served together at the Office of the Appellate Defender in New York.
Judge J. Michelle Childs, a federal district judge in South Carolina.
Judge Michelle Childs is getting a lot of attention for being from South Carolina and championed by Representative James Clyburn. She is still considered a long shot.
Judge J. Michelle Childs, a federal district judge in South Carolina. Appointed to the bench by President Obama in 2009, Childs was the first Black woman to become a partner in one of South Carolina’s major law firms, according to the New York Times. She also held various positions in state government. Biden recently nominated her to a seat on the DC Circuit.
Childs’s best shot at a Supreme Court nomination stems from the fact that she has a powerful advocate. Rep. Jim Clyburn, a senior House Democrat who played a significant role in helping Biden win the presidential primary in South Carolina that reinvigorated his 2020 campaign, reportedly floated Childs as a potential Supreme Court justice.
The same New York Times article that reported Clyburn’s interest in Childs also mentioned two other names that “have caught the eye of lawmakers” — Danielle Holley-Walker, the young dean of Howard University’s law school, and Leslie Abrams Gardner, a federal district judge who is also the younger sister of Georgia politician and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams.
And, of course, there’s the Fox News Wipipo Outrage from their Talking Dickheads.
This is from the Huffpost link in the above Tweet. It’s written by Lee Moran.
“The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah on Thursday pointed out the basic flaw in an argument Fox News personalities are pressing against President Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson have led the chorus of criticism on the conservative network, claiming Biden’s pledge is “beyond extremely divisive.”
But being a Black woman isn’t the sole qualification for the job, Noah noted.
“Biden is going to pick a Black woman who is also qualified,” he said. “These people act like Biden is just going to show up to the mall and be like, ‘Yo, Shaniqua, come with me.’”
“And why not try to make the Supreme Court a little more representative of the country it represents?” the comedian asked. “I mean, their rulings impact the lives of every person in the country.”
From Chait at New York Magazine:
President Biden has not named his choice to fill Stephen Breyer’s vacancy on the Supreme Court, but the first major talking point against her has already emerged: She is the unqualified product of affirmative action.
“Biden has unwisely limited his options by preemptively declaring during the 2020 campaign that his first Supreme Court nominee would be a black woman,” editorializes National Review. “In a stroke, he disqualified dozens of liberal and progressive jurists for no reason other than their race and gender. This is not a great start in selecting someone sworn to provide equal justice under the law.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial page clucks, “Mr. Biden’s campaign promise that he’d appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court is unfortunate because it elevates skin color over qualifications.” Cato’s Ilya Shapiro complained, before deleting the tweet, “Because Biden said he’s only consider black women for SCOTUS, his nominee will always have an asterisk attached.” Even grosser versions of the same basic idea are already emanating from the likes of Tucker Carlson.
Somehow the idea has taken hold that, before Biden came along and junked the standards, nominations to the Supreme Court used to be awarded solely on the basis of merit. The pick would go to the finest and most accomplished jurist in the land, like a law review editorship for the entire court system.
But when exactly did this era exist? Was it before 1967, when the most qualified judges were all white men? No, there was widely held to be a “Jewish seat” and a “Catholic seat” on the Court for decades during that time.
The basis for identity representation on the Court widened after the 1960s. Ronald Reagan promised during his 1980 campaign to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. George H.W. Bush did not openly say he needed a Black jurist to replace Thurgood Marshall, but it would take heroic levels of delusion to believe Clarence Thomas was selected on the basis of his career accomplishments.
Their hypocrisy and ability to lie know no boundaries.
Meanwhile, I’ll be looking forward to hearing a lot more about these fantastic judges!
Have a great weekend!
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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