Finally Friday Reads: CNN, Shame Shame Shame!

Posted: June 28, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , | 12 Comments

“I’ve got the real debate covered, so you can watch baseball this debate night. Here it is in one screenshot. You’re welcome.” John Buss, @Repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancing!

The last thing I remember about the debate last night was Donald spewing the usual christofascist lies about abortion.  At some point, I refilled my wine glass, turned it all off, and fell asleep looking at real estate in Mexico.  I even tried to comment at the start, but it became too shocking for me to continue with that at some point.  I didn’t get a live thread up last night.  I woke up at 5 a.m., unable to process what I had seen.

 

I remember why I never watch CNN anymore, and I’m more firmly committed to that decision.  Here’s the best they could do this morning.  It’s a healthy dose of bothsiderism. “Fact-checking the CNN presidential debate  —  Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump made false and misleading claims during CNN’s presidential debate on Thursday – but Trump did so far more than Biden, just like in their debates in 2020.  —  Trump made more than 30 false claims at the Thursday debate.”

The entire thing was a clusterfuck. I’m going with Rebecca Solnit first today. Here is her headline at the Guardian.  “The true losers of this presidential debate were the American people. We didn’t need this show. Each candidate has had time to show us who they are, and one is a felon trying to destroy democracy.”

The American people lost the debate last night, and it was more painful than usual to watch the parade of platitudes and evasions that worked in the debate format run by CNN. The network’s glossy pundit-moderators started by ignoring the elephants in the room – that one of the two men standing at the podiums was a convicted felon, the leader of a coup attempt, an alleged thief of national security documents who was earlier this year found liable in a civil court for rape, and has promised to usher in a vengeful authoritarian regime if he returns to office.

Instead they launched the debate with the dead horse they love to beat in election years, the deficit and taxes. Throughout the excruciating evening, Joe Biden in a hoarse voice said diligent things that were reasonably true and definitely sincere; Donald Trump in a booming voice said lurid things that were flamboyantly untrue. The grim spectacle was a reminder that this is a style over substance game.

Debates are a rite in which not truth but showmanship wins the day, and in which participants get judged as though it was a sporting event – which it pretty much is, in high school and college debate events. Before 2016, presidential debates were relatively decorous events in which the participants slammed each other, but more or less within the parameters of the true and the real with maybe a little distortion and exaggeration.

Then came Trump. You cannot win a debate with a shameless liar, because what you’re supposed to be debating are facts and positions. A lie is a kind of poison; once it’s in the room it makes an impression that is hard to undo, and trying to undo it only amplifies it.

Trump’s positions on anything and everything shift and slide at will, and he lies about his own past with pathological confidence – in this debate he both denied that he had sex with Stormy Daniels and that he praised the white supremacists who stormed Charlottesville in 2017. More substantively he lied – unchallenged, except by Biden – about his role in the January 6 coup attempt, and the CNN pundits did not trouble him further about his crimes. Trump talked about whatever he wanted – asked about the opiates crisis, he reverted to the lurid stories about sex crimes and open borders that obsess him and inflame his followers.

Most outrageous of all, and of course utterly unchecked, was one of the falsehoods Trump has been pushing for years – the claim that abortion continues on into infanticide, that doctors and new mothers are murdering babies at birth. That one candidate has long supported reproductive rights and the other has led the attack on them was not something you would learn from this debate.

I will also share this analysis by Historian Heather Cox Richardson from her substack Letters from an American.

Tonight was the first debate between President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and by far the most striking thing about the debate was the overwhelming focus among pundits immediately afterward about Biden’s appearance and soft, hoarse voice as he rattled off statistics and events. Virtually unmentioned was the fact that Trump lied and rambled incoherently, ignored questions to say whatever he wanted; refused to acknowledge the events of January 6, 2021; and refused to commit to accepting the result of the 2024 presidential election, finally saying he would accept it only if it met his standards for fairness.

Immediately after the debate, there were calls for Biden to drop out of the race, but aside from the fact that the only time a presidential candidate has ever done that—in 1968—it threw the race into utter confusion and the president’s party lost, Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand.

In contrast, Trump came out strong but faded and became less coherent over time. His entire performance was either lies or rambling non-sequiturs. He lied so incessantly throughout the evening that it took CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, speaking quickly, to get through the list.

Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned—both fantastical lies. He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration. He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency; there were many. He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes—this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale—and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt.

Dale went on: Trump lied that the U.S. has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has when it’s the other way around, and he was off by close to $100 billion when he named the amount the U.S. has provided to Ukraine. He was off by millions when he talked about how many migrants have crossed the border under Biden, and falsely claimed that some of Biden’s policies—like funding historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month—were his own accomplishments.

I refuse to listen to calls for Joe to quit.  Me, the nagging naysayer about Joe’s days in the Senate.

This morning, we woke up to more bad news. This is from the Washington Post. “Supreme Court curbs federal agency power, overturning Chevron precedent. The Chevron precedent was targeted by conservatives who say the government gives too much power to federal bureaucrats.”  This is reported by Ann E. Marimow.  They are shamelessly turning us over to their Corporate Overlords. I wonder what gratuity Alito and Thomas get for this one?

The Supreme Court on Friday curtailed the power of federal government agencies to regulate vast swaths of American life, overturning a 40-year-old legal precedent long targeted by conservatives who say the government gives unaccountable bureaucrats too much authority.

For decades, the court’s decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council directed judges to defer to the reasonable interpretations of federal agency officials in cases that involve how to administer ambiguous federal laws.

Writing for the majority in the 6-3 ruling, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that framework has proved “unworkable” and allowed federal agencies to change course even without direction from Congress.

The court is finally ending “our 40-year misadventure with Chevron deference,” Roberts said, reading parts of his opinion from the bench.

The court’s three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented, with Kagan writing that the majority has turned itself into “the country’s administrative czar,” taking power away from Congress and regulatory agencies.

“A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris,” she said, reading part of her dissent from the bench.

The precedent, established in 1984, gave federal agencies flexibility to determine how to implement legislation passed by Congress. The framework has been used extensively by the U.S. government to defend regulations designed to protect the environment, financial markets, consumers and the workplace.

While lower courts have relied on the Chevron in tens of thousands of cases evaluating federal rules and orders, conservatives have balked at the legal precedent, and the approach has fallen out of favor in the last decade as the Supreme Court moved to the right. The high court’s conservative supermajority includes three justices nominated by President Donald Trump, whose administration put a premium on judges skeptical of federal government power and the so-called administrative state.

The second decision announced today was an Appeal from one of the January 6th rioters. This is from the Washington Post.  “Supreme Court says prosecutors improperly charged hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters Supreme Court’s decision on obstruction charge will impact trials of hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters and, potentially, former president Donald Trump.”  It’s also reported by Ann E. Marimow.

Federal prosecutors improperly charged hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants with obstruction, a divided Supreme Court ruled on Friday, upending many cases against rioters who disrupted the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

After the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, federal prosecutors charged more than 350 participants in the pro-Trump mob with obstructing or impeding an official proceeding. The charge carries a 20-year maximum penalty and is part of a law enacted after the exposure of massive fraud andshredding of documents during the collapse of the energy giant Enron.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the government’s broad reading of the statute would give prosecutors too much discretion to seek a 20-year maximum sentence “for acts Congress saw fit to punish only with far shorter terms of imprisonment.”

One last debate thought from David Frum’s article today for the Atlantic. “Trump Should Never Have Had This Platform. The debate was a travesty—because its whole premise was to treat a failed coup leader as a legitimate candidate for the presidency.”

The first question about January 6 was asked at minute 41.

Donald Trump replied with a barrage of crazy lies, ending by seeming to blame Nancy Pelosi’s documentarian daughter.

Then, just to be fair, CNN moderator Jake Tapper followed up with a question to President Joe Biden. Did he really mean to imply that Trump’s voters were a danger to democracy?

Biden fumbled the answer, as he fumbled so many other answers. The octogenarian president delivered a fiasco of a performance on the Atlanta debate stage. But the fiasco was not his alone.

Everything about the event was designed to blur the choice before Americans. Both candidates—the serving president and the convicted felon—were addressed as “President.” The questions treated an attempted coup d’état as one issue out of many. The candidates were left to police or fail to police the truth of each other’s statements; it was nobody else’s business.

Today, CNN is hinting a producer thinks it was just terrific.  But as Frum states, this is not a choice between Colgate and Crest, which is basically how the Nixon-Kennedy debate was presented back in the days of real Don Drapers.   David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo has a similar analysis. How can you present a debate highlighting a sociopath with a proven performance of madness as just another presidential choice regardless of the presumed issues with President Biden?

I’m going to the dentist this afternoon.  It’s a nice, mundane thing to walk down the street, head into the office, and sit in the waiting room with everyone else.  Not my favorite mundane thing, but mundane none the less.  I’m going to try escapism again like retired Lt. General Honore.  I’m not sure what the form will be, but I enjoyed seeing all those nice little houses in Mexico.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Monday Reads: Broken Institutions Edition

Posted: March 4, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , | 9 Comments

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

The big news is that after taking its sweet time, the Supreme Court unanimously decided that states cannot remove Trump from their ballots even though they may have their own version of the 14th Amendment. “Supreme Court keeps Trump on ballot, rejects Colorado voter challenge. While the decision was unanimous, the liberal justices wrote a sharp concurrence that accused the conservative majority of going further than needed.” This is from the Washington Post and reported by Ann E. Marimow.

The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously sided with Donald Trump, allowing the former president to remain on the election ballot and reversing a Colorado ruling that disqualified him from returning to office because of his conduct around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The justices said the Constitution does not permit a single state to disqualify a presidential candidate from national office, declaring that such responsibility “rests with Congress and not the states.” The court warned of disruption and chaos if a candidate for nationwide office could be declared ineligible in some states, but not others, based on the same conduct.

“Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos — arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the inauguration,” the court said in an unsigned, 13-page opinion.

While the decision was unanimous, the court’s three liberal justices also wrote separately, saying the conservative majority went further than necessary in the ruling and decided an issue that was not before the court in an attempt to insulate itself and Trump from “future controversy.”

The court’s decision to keep Trump on the ballot leaves him as the leading candidate for the Republican nomination and for now removes the Supreme Court from directly determining the path of the 2024 presidential election. The justices fast-tracked the challenge from voters in Colorado and issued their decision one day before Super Tuesday, when that state and more than a dozen others hold nominating contests. The ruling applies to other states with similar challenges to Trump’s candidacy.

In a sign of the high court’s awareness of the election calendar, the justices took the unusual step of announcing the opinion on the Supreme Court’s website on a day when the court is not in session, instead of issuing it from the bench later this month.

I think the high court’s awareness was more based on the intense criticism they are getting right now for slowing down the process of getting Trump into the Federal Court to face charges.  Maybe this is a sign of hope that we’ll hear their take on “Presidential Immunity.” Plus, Clarence Thomas is facing denunciation for his absolute refusal to recuse himself from participating in cases where he has apparent conflicts of interest. Liz Dye at Public Interest makes it even more pronounced. “The Supreme Court saves Trump’s bacon.”

The Supreme Court sparked general outrage last week when it agreed to hear Donald Trump’s claim of absolute presidential immunity in his election interference case, with commentators predicting the end of democracy as we know it if the Court rules that a president is immune for crimes committed while in office.

Histrionics serve no one, however, and so it bears speaking plainly: The Supreme Court is not going to find that Donald Trump is immune from prosecution for crimes committed in office. That’s ridiculous.

But the Court’s right-wing majority is going to run exactly the same playbook they did in 2020, when they gifted the then-president almost two years of delay in turning over his financial documents to prosecutors in New York and investigators in Congress. By the time Trump wound up having to comply, he was already out of office.

This time, the consequences of delay will be even more profound. Thanks to the Supreme Court, Trump will now be able to stand for election again without facing trial for his attempts to overturn the last one.

The Supreme Court has joined the House of Representatives in becoming a dysfunctional, political, conflicted institution. The Washington Diplomat had this blunt headline last month. “US political dysfunction a threat to world stability: report.”  We can no longer be trusted to behave like a developed, functioning democracy.  This loss cannot be overstated in historical terms or ramifications. They refer to the US as the world’s most “dysfunctional advanced democracy.”

Many in the United States look beyond their borders and see a dangerous world with raging wars, surging violence and deepening instability.

But a new report by the Eurasia Group, a leading political risk firm, suggests that Americans would be well advised to look in the mirror and recognize that political dysfunction and threats of violence in the United States are frightening people around the world and constitute a serious threat to international stability.

“Fully one-third of the global population will go to the polls this year, but an unprecedentedly dysfunctional U.S. election will be by far the most consequential for the world’s security, stability, and economic outlook,” the Top Risks 2024 report argues.

“The outcome will affect the fate of 8 billion people, and only 160 million Americans will have a say in it, with the winner to be decided by just tens of thousands of voters in a handful of swing states… The world’s most powerful country faces critical challenges to its core political institutions: free and fair elections, the peaceful transfer of power, and the checks and balances provided by the separation of powers.”

The Eurasia Group, which was created in 1998 by political scientist and entrepreneur Ian Bremmer, analyzes global affairs through the prism of political developments and risks. Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group, and Cliff Kupchan, its chairman, are the authors of this year’s report, which outlines the 10 top risks the world faces. The report also discusses several issues that are less serious than they appear.

“Three wars will dominate world affairs: Russia vs. Ukraine, now in its third year; Israel vs. Hamas, now in its third month; and the United States vs. itself, ready to kick off at any moment,” the report says.

Political polarization and social disarray in the United States are seen in the report as the most serious global risk. It predicts that this year’s presidential election “will worsen the country’s political division, testing American democracy to a degree the nation hasn’t experienced in 150 years and undermining U.S. credibility on the global stage.”

“Undecided” November 4, 1944. Man in voting booth w/newspaper. by Norman Rockwell

In a June 2023 article at The Atlantic, Peter Turchin writes “America Is Headed Toward Collapse. History suggests how to stave it off.”

How has America slid into its current age of discord? Why has our trust in institutions collapsed, and why have our democratic norms unraveled?

All human societies experience recurrent waves of political crisis, such as the one we face today. My research team built a database of hundreds of societies across 10,000 yearsto try to find out what causes them. We examined dozens of variables, including population numbers, measures of well-being, forms of governance, and the frequency with which rulers are overthrown. We found that the precise mix of events that leads to crisis varies, but two drivers of instability loom large. The first is popular immiseration—when the economic fortunes of broad swaths of a population decline. The second, and more significant, is elite overproduction—when a society produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions.

This is a long read but worth your time.  Several events point to the shift in power due to our dysfunctional federal institutions.  NATO is just one of the institutions that a return of Trump will endanger. This is from The Guardian.  “Norway, Sweden, and Finland host NATO military exercises. Nordic Response aims to strengthen cooperation between countries and bolster alliance’s ability to defend region.”

Trump complains that NATO nations are slackers.  The Europeans more than understand the current threat from Putin’s Russia.  NATO must stand united with its most significant military defender of democracy in place for the continent to be safe.  Miranda Bryant reports on the event.

A first-of-its-kind training exercise involving more than 20,000 soldiers from 13 countries has launched across northern Norway, Sweden and Finland as the region prepares to become a fully Nato territory within days.

The joint defence exercise, which runs until 14 March, was previously known as Cold Response and held in northern Norway, a founding Nato member, every other year. In recognition of Finland’s recent membership of the western military alliance, and with Sweden expected to join imminently, this year it is being designated Nordic Response for the first time.

The training exercise across air, land and sea – which will also include soldiers from the UK, US, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada – will incorporate a cross-border operations exercise in the Arctic Circle.

The Norwegian military said the exercise was intended to demonstrate “a unique level of cooperation and interoperability as they cross borders on land, sea and air”.

Nordic Response is part of an ongoing series of Nato exercises, Steadfast Defender, involving 90,000 soldiers. It is also closely aligned with the UK-led naval exercise Joint Warrior, which ran between Scotland, Norway and Iceland last week.

The latest exercise, which started on Sunday, will involve more than 50 submarines, frigates, corvettes, aircraft carriers and amphibious vessels at sea, over 100 combat, maritime surveillance and transport aircraft, and thousands of soldiers on the ground using artillery systems, tanks and tracked vehicles.

Most of the activity will be centred on northern Troms county and the west of Finnmark county in Norway, but there will also be maritime activity along the coast of the north of the country and exercises across borders in northern Finland and Sweden.

The newly elected Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, and the Swedish crown princess Victoria are all scheduled to visit.

November 1940, illustrated by Dorothea Cooke.

There are many headlines today about how Trump is more trusted than Biden and rated as better at handling all kinds of things, including the economy.  Then there’s the Biden is ‘too old’ headlines (”Biden’s mental acuity is doubted by 6 in 10 Americans, AP-NORC survey finds” via the AP) concurrent with headlines like this one from The Independent. Trump crowd goes silent as he confuses Biden and Obama again.” 

They’re both too damn old, frankly  Plus, some wonderful people aren’t stale old white men out there. But please, Biden is sane and moral. Trump has the worst personality disorders possible and definitely has dementia.  Plus, Trump cheats at everything and lies about it!  Here’s the latest on the Trump Team’s campaign of deceit. And yes, it’s yet another headline from across the pond. They are old buddies, the Brits. The BBC reports that “Trump supporters target black voters with faked AI images.”  This is on top of Russia outwardly influencing Republican Congress members! 

Donald Trump supporters have been creating and sharing AI-generated fake images of black voters to encourage African Americans to vote Republican.

BBC Panorama discovered dozens of deepfakes portraying black people as supporting the former president.

Mr Trump has openly courted black voters, who were key to Joe Biden’s election win in 2020.

But there’s no evidence directly linking these images to Mr Trump’s campaign.

The co-founder of Black Voters Matter, a group which encourages black people to vote, said the manipulated images were pushing a “strategic narrative” designed to show Mr Trump as popular in the black community.

A creator of one of the images told the BBC: “I’m not claiming it’s accurate.”

The fake images of black Trump supporters, generated by artificial intelligence (AI), are one of the emerging disinformation trends ahead of the US presidential election in November.

Unlike in 2016, when there was evidence of foreign influence campaigns, the AI-generated images found by the BBC appear to have been made and shared by US voters themselves.

One of them was Mark Kaye and his team at a conservative radio show in Florida.

They created an image of Mr Trump smiling with his arms around a group of black women at a party and shared it on Facebook, where Mr Kaye has more than one million followers.

This is Trump speaking on the SCOTUS decision and using the occasion to attack Special Prosecutor Jack Smith and all the Judges still holding him to account.

How do people not see this man’s severe Personality Disorders?  I will end here with a political analysis from the Washington Post by Philip Bump.  “The institutions of government aren’t going to protect democracy.” This is why it is up to ‘We the People’ to fucking VOTE!  If I can hold my nose to vote for Biden twice, you certainly can, too!

The effort to reframe Trump’s actions as understandable, if not acceptable, has been broadly successful. It is not only the case that most Republicans think that Biden’s election was illegitimate, it is also the case that traditional media outlets have at times treated as controversial not the question of whether Trump met the unclear standard of “insurrection” but even whether he tried to subvert the election results. Other Republicans have internalized the idea that the way in which Trump responded to his loss was within the bounds of acceptability — not only by petulantly refusing to concede defeat but by treating the relentless, norm- and law-bending effort to wring victory from defeat as part of the process of winning power.

Because there has been no accountability for Trump.

On Monday morning, the Supreme Court offered its assessment of a state Supreme Court decision in Colorado barring Trump from the ballot. Unsurprisingly — given the ideological constitution of the court — it declined to endorse the idea that Trump was ineligible to hold the presidency. But the decision was unanimous.

“Responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States,” the decision read. “The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand. All nine Members of the Court agree with that result.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett emphasized that latter point again in a concurrence.

“All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case,” the Trump appointee wrote. “That is the message Americans should take home.”

But several liberal members of the court added some nuance, arguing that the conservative majority also decided “novel constitutional questions to insulate this Court and petitioner” — that is, Trump — “from future controversy.”

“Today, the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oathbreaking insurrectionist from becoming President,” Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson write. “Although we agree that Colorado cannot enforce Section 3, we protest the majority’s effort to use this case to define the limits of federal enforcement of that provision.”

The superficial agreement on the decision erodes in the details, which isn’t uncommon. The result, though, is that the institution of the Supreme Court has decided that the institution of Congress is the only element of the American system that can apply the 14th Amendment to a candidate. And Congress, very obviously, won’t do so for Trump.

One would assume that a democratic system predicated on checks and balances would have some process in place to enforce punitive measures when democracy itself was threatened or undermined, but it does not. It has decisions from motivated actors, enough of whom agree politically or ideologically with Trump that his specific actions are waved away. Instead of a defense of democracy, we are repeatedly asked to believe that anything short of Trump retaining power doesn’t count as a substantive challenge to democracy and, therefore, that his participation in the democratic process should be defended.

Had he retained power after Jan. 20, 2021? Then, perhaps, his efforts to do so would have been considered a legitimate threat. And by then, the system that we would assume might hold him to account would already be destroyed.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Finally Friday Reads: A Difficult Year

Posted: January 19, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , | 4 Comments

“We are the United States of Amnesia; we learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

Gore Vidal

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

There are some alarming headlines in the News today. Most of them are related to messes made by Donald Trump or his Republican enablers. The Republican-appointed judges on the Supreme Court continue to be the focus of alarm. Their continued efforts to reshape policy continue to kill people and give concentrated power to the Federalist billionaires that brought them there.

The economy is good, but corporations are taking advantage of the recent spate of inflation to line their pockets.  Prices are higher than they should be. Again, this is because of a decades-effort by billionaires to rig policy. I’ve been horrified at Trump whining about being Herbert Hoover but simultaneously hoping the stock market crashes. Rather than focus on dealing with the budget, that same group of crazies in Congress are turning committees into bedlam. What on earth possesses people to send folks uninterested in solving problems but quite interested in creating drama where there should be none?

You’ll notice that my paintings today come from another difficult time in US history.  Please enjoy the paintings by the CCC artists who painted the workers rebuilding the American dream in the 1930s.  Maybe some of the Infrastructure Money landing around the country will turn into these kinds of good jobs. Here’s an interesting tidbit.  You know all that inflation that’s still hanging around?  The reason is pretty disgusting. This is from The Guardian and was written by Tom Perkins. “Half of recent US inflation due to high corporate profits, report finds. Thinktank report says ‘resounding evidence’ shows companies continue to keep prices high even as their inflationary costs drop.”

A new report claims “resounding evidence” shows that high corporate profits are a main driver of ongoing inflation, and companies continue to keep prices high even as their inflationary costs drop.

The report, compiled by the progressive Groundwork Collaborative thinktank, found corporate profits accounted for about 53% of inflation during last year’s second and third quarters. Profits drove just 11% of price growth in the 40 years prior to the pandemic, according to the report.

Prices for consumers rose by 3.4% over the past year, but input costs for producers increased by just 1%, according to the authors’ calculations which were based on data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and National Income and Products Accounts.

“Costs have come down substantially, and while corporations were quick to pass on their increased costs to consumers, they are surprisingly less quick to pass on their savings to consumers,” Liz Pancotti, a Groundwork strategic advisor and paper co-author, told the Guardian.

Since pandemic inflation spiked in 2021, a high-stakes debate has played out about its sources. Many progressive economists pointed to corporate profits – or “greedflation” – and supply chain issues as a driver of high prices, while their more conservative counterparts singled out government stimulus cash and high wages.

The report’s authors scoured corporate earnings calls and found executives bragging to shareholders about keeping prices high and widening profit margins as input costs come down.

The findings come as the Federal Reserve has hiked interest rates to their highest point in 20 years. The report casts serious doubt on the need for further interest rate hikes, and instead calls for stronger policies to rein in “corporate profiteering”.

Greg Sargent takes on the “Presidential Immunity” defense at The New Republic. “Trump’s Angry Rant About His Legal Mess Reveals an Ugly MAGA Truth. His immunity defense isn’t merely a legal argument. He’s priming his base to back wanton lawbreaking if he wins back the White House.”

Donald Trump’s lawyers have been arguing in court that he should have immunity from prosecution for crimes related to his insurrection because they constituted official acts committed while he was president. Special counsel Jack Smith has countered that this is tantamount to saying presidents should “operate in a realm without law.”

Now Trump has effectively confirmed it: A presidential realm without law is exactly what I want, Jack. In an angry, all-caps social media rant, Trump declared that “A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MUST HAVE FULL IMMUNITY” in order to “PROPERLY FUNCTION.” As observers quickly noted, this is best seen as a threat and a promise: A second Trump term, if voters give him one, will certainly include an untold amount of presidential lawbreaking.

But there’s more. What if this openly telegraphed intention to strain the boundaries of the law in office—or even to commit crimes—is not merely an incidental by-product of Trump’s legal defense but has become a key feature of his political appeal? There are strong indications that Trump is intentionally trying to raise expectations among his core supporters for just that—a presidency unbound by the law. And there are even signs it’s having exactly that effect.

To be clear, Trump’s demand for immunity—which is being decided by a federal appeals court—is weak and likely to fail, as I recently detailed. Indeed, this is exactly why Trump is loudly calling on the Supreme Court to rescue him from accountability by enshrining the notion that post-presidents cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed in office:

ALL PRESIDENTS MUST HAVE COMPLETE & TOTAL PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY, OR THE AUTHORITY & DECISIVENESS OF A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WILL BE STRIPPED & GONE FOREVER. HOPEFULLY THIS WILL BE AN EASY DECISION. GOD BLESS THE SUPREME COURT!

Trump also declared that even presidential acts that “CROSS THE LINE” must be given “TOTAL IMMUNITY” from prosecution. The Justice Department has a long-standing rule against prosecuting sitting presidents. But here Trump insists (inflating his lawyers’ arguments into something even more grotesquely absurd) that for presidents to be effective, they must be free to cross legal lines with immunity from future prosecution that is absolute.

Isn’t this the sort of thing that caused the colonists to overthrow the king in 1776?   At least Trump’s enablers are beginning to face the music. “U.S. seeks jail for Trump adviser Navarro in Jan. 6 contempt case. The former Trump White House trade adviser acted without a lawyer in defying a House subpoena and failed to substantiate a claim that Trump asserted executive privilege to bar his testimony.”  This is from Spencer S. Hsu, reporting for the Washington Post. Six months in jail is for contempt, not that crime.

Federal prosecutors asked a judge Thursday to sentence former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro to six months behind bars for contempt of Congress, saying he put allegiance to former president Donald Trump over the rule of law in refusing to cooperate with a House committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

Navarro, 74, was found guilty in September of two contempt charges for refusing to produce documents or testify after receiving a House subpoena in February 2022. A former trade and pandemic adviser who served throughout Trump’s term in office, Navarro claimed credit for hatching a scheme with longtime Trump political adviser Stephen K. Bannon to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race.

In a 20-page sentencing request, prosecutors said Navarro’s “bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt” deserved severe punishment. Like the rioters, Navarro “put politics, not country, first, and stonewalled Congress’s investigation” even after learning that his claim of executive privilege would not excuse his actions, the prosecutors said.

We must remember that Trump’s plans for his next move into the West Wing include lower lifeforms than this guy. We’ve already had hints about how “radical” his staffing would be. Trump was inkling Tucker Carlson as VEEP. This week, he offered up Elise Stefanik.  This is from NBC.  “‘She’s a killer’: Trump eyes Rep. Elise Stefanik as a potential VP pick. The former president has spoken highly of the New York congresswoman, and his allies say she’s high on the list of vice presidential prospects.”

Ever since then, Trump and a growing group of allies have started to look more closely at Stefanik as a running mate, according to eight people familiar with the matter, including people in Trump’s orbit, Stefanik fundraising bundlers and former Trump administration officials.

At the time, the 39-year-old congresswoman was at the crest of a wave of national publicity after taking on the top leaders of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their answers to the question, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your college’s] rules on bullying and harassment?” eventually resulted in two of them resigning and brought a firestorm of criticism on the schools.

But Stefanik was on Trump’s radar long before that hearing, because she possesses one of the key attributes he’s looking for in a 2024 running mate: loyalty. That, mixed with her ability to drive the news on key issues, may be an irresistible mix for a vice presidential pick.

“Stefanik is at the top,” said Steve Bannon, who was Trump’s chief strategist in the White House and the architect of his 2016 campaign strategy.

“If you’re Trump, you want someone who’s loyal above all else,” a Republican campaign operative said. “Particularly because he sees Mike Pence as having made a fatal sin.”

On Wednesday, after this story was published, Stefanik announced she would be campaigning with Trump in New Hampshire.

Once a moderate Republican who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, Stefanik shifted to the right and rebranded herself as one of Trump’s top allies on Capitol Hill after he won the White House in 2016.

“She’s come a long way, and now she’s really, really with us,” Trump said during a lunch in the spring of 2022, according to a source familiar with his comments, adding, “She was kind of with us before, but she’s really with us now.”

Stefanik declined to comment on whether she would be interested in being Trump’s running mate, telling NBC News she was focused on her role in Congress.

“I’m not going to get into any of my conversations with President Trump. I’m honored to call him a friend. I’m proud to be the first member of Congress to have endorsed his re-election, and he had a huge win in Iowa. So we’re very excited about that,” she said.

We will also be dealing with an insane amount of propaganda and disinformation like this crazy one fact-checked by Reuters on Journalist Mehdi Hassan.

Journalist Mehdi Hasan was not arrested by the U.S. Navy’s legal branch for “treason,” as suggested by an article from a website that regularly publishes false claims about high-profile arrests.

The website Real Raw News published an article on Jan. 9 with a headline that reads: “JAG Arrests Mehdi Hasan.” Screenshots of the Real Raw News headline, “JAG Arrests Mehdi Hasan” surfaced on X, and Facebook.

The Jan. 9 article falsely claims that the MSNBC host was arrested by the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG Corps), the body that provides legal services to the Navy and Marines soldiers and the Army, for his coverage of COVID-19 vaccines after Hasan announced on Jan. 7 that he was leaving the U.S. TV news channel MSNBC, where he presented his own show.

There is no such case involving Hasan logged in Navy-Marine Court filings, or in cases logged by the U.S. Court Martial Public Record System.

All this stuff is so crazy you wish it wouldn’t take up valuable news space. For example, I’d like to hear more about what’s happening in Ukraine.  But wow, we need to know how crazy and how far off normal the Republican party has gone.  We’re still facing a possible government shutdown because the Republicans in Congress prefer performance art to governing.  We are facing yet another threat of a government shutdown, and possibly another tossed Speaker of the House.  This is from Newsweek. “Mike Johnson’s Problems Are Getting Worse.”

Despite Mike Johnson passing a Congressional funding deal on Thursday, the House speaker is still facing political pressure from within his party.

On Thursday, the House of Representatives voted for a short-term funding extension to avoid a government shutdown. It is a temporary fix while Congress decides on details of a $1.66 trillion deal that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Johnson, a Louisiana Republican who became House speaker in October, agreed to earlier this month.

However, more Republicans voted against the bill than voted against a similar bill to avoid a government shutdown in November, with 106 opposing Thursday’s continuing resolution and 93 opposing the November deal, meaning 13 more Republicans were against it than last time.

The Republican Party’s obsession with ensuring the USA maintains a white ruling majority is not only impact how the budget bill goes in the US Congress but pops up all over red states in some truly awful ways. This is from The Guardian.  “Outrage as Oklahoma Republican’s bill labels Hispanic people ‘terrorists’. Lawmaker JJ Humphrey seeks punishments for ‘acts of terrorism’ and defines terrorist as ‘any person who is of Hispanic descent’.”  MAGA Republicans continue to enable blatant racists.

An Oklahoma lawmaker is facing backlash for proposing a discriminatory bill that deems people of Hispanic descent as “terrorists”.

The Republican state representative JJ Humphrey introduced the bill, HB 3133, which seeks to combat problems in the state, such as drug and human trafficking, and lay out punishments to those who have committed these “acts of terrorism”.

The punishment for such a crime would be forfeiting all assets, including any and all property, vehicles and money.

In addition to “a member of a criminal street gang” and someone who “has been convicted of a gang-related offense”, the bill defines a terrorist as “any person who is of Hispanic descent living within the state of Oklahoma”.

You would think someone who spends time in Oklahoma City would know precisely who the terrorists have been there.

I can’t imagine any of these hijinx will improve over the year.  The New Hampshire Primary is on Tuesday. I can’t imagine it being anything to follow on the news. That doesn’t seem right for a country that claims to be a democracy.  Elections used to be like Baseball games to me.  Now, they’re more like being hit by a baseball bat.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?