Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: May 4, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Israel-Hamas war, Joe Biden | Tags: 1968 Democratic convention, 2024 Democratic convention, abortion rights, Access Hollywood tape, BF Borgers, Chicago, Hope Hicks, Karen McDougal, Mark Meadows, Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, Trump Hush Money trial, Trump Media & Technology Group | 6 Comments

Thophile_Alexandre_Steinlen, The Sleeping Cat

Happy Caturday!!

As Dakinikat wrote yesterday, the Trump hush money trial had a marquee witness yesterday in Hope Hicks, who was very close to Trump during the his 2016 campaign and his four years as “president.” A couple of reports/reactions:

CNN: Takeaways from Day 11 of the Donald Trump hush money trial as Hope Hicks testifies.

Donald Trump’s former campaign press secretary and White House communications director Hope Hicks took the stand Friday, sitting feet away from her former boss as she described the fallout from the “Access Hollywood” tape and the Trump White House response to stories about hush money payments.

Hicks was visibly nervous, and she mostly avoided eye contact with Trump while answering questions from prosecutors for more than two hours. When prosecutors finished with their questions and Trump’s attorney took the podium, Hicks began crying and appeared to become overwhelmed; she finished her testimony after a brief break.

Through Hicks’ testimony, prosecutors showed jurors the transcript of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape that upended Trump’s campaign – and, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, fueled Trump’s concern about keeping Stormy Daniels quiet in the days before the November 2016 election….

After sitting in the witness box, Hicks looked visibly uncomfortable and quickly acknowledged as much when she began answering questions.

“I’m really nervous,” she said, adjusting herself and the microphone in front of her.

Trump often had a scowl on his face, occasionally looking at Hicks and frequently passing notes with his attorneys while watching the proceedings play out on the television above him. Hicks, for her part, looked nearly always at assistant district attorney Matthew Colangelo and the jury, not at the defendant’s table.

Much of Hicks’ testimony focused on her role on the Trump campaign in October 2016, just before Election Day. Prosecutors asked what happened when the “Access Hollywood” tape came out.

“The tape was damaging. This was a crisis,” Hicks said.

Tranquility, by Dora Hathazi Mendes

The aftermath of the tape then informed how the campaign responded when the Wall Street Journal reported on Karen McDougal’s deal with American Media, Inc. not to speak about an alleged affair as part of a $150,000 agreement

In the report, which also mentioned Daniels, Hicks, then a Trump campaign spokesperson, denied that Trump had had affairs with either woman.

Hicks was asked about her conversations with Trump as well as Michael Cohen when reporters came to her for comment.

“What I told to the Wall Street Journal is what was told to me,” Hicks said of the denial she gave about the Daniels allegations.

When cross-examining Hicks, Trump attorney Emil Bove elicited testimony that Trump was also concerned about what his wife would think. Trump asked for the newspapers not to be delivered to his residence the day the story published, Hicks testified.

“I don’t think he wanted anyone in his family to be hurt or embarrassed by anything that was happening on the campaign trial. He wanted them to be proud of him,” Hicks said.

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: January 13, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, SCOTUS, U.S. Politics | Tags: "Memphis Seven", abortion rights, Climate change, disappearing snowpack, EMTALA, homeless encampments, Hunter Biden, IRS, Labor Unions, snow, Trump legal news | 5 Comments

Happy Caturday!!

By Vanessa Stockard

Last year in Massachusetts we had a winter with almost no snow. Weather people quite often predicted it, but it never came. It really bothered me. I realized how much I love snowstorms and how much I miss snow when it doesn’t arrive. It looks like this year will be another mild winter with very little snow. We got a few inches recently, but mostly we’re getting rain.

I’m far from alone in missing snow. A few days ago, I came across two articles about what climate change is doing to our winters.

Zoë Schlanger at The Atlantic: The Threshold at Which Snow Starts Irreversibly Disappearing.

In January 1995, when The Atlantic published “In Praise of Snow,” Cullen Murphy’s opus to frozen precipitation, snow was still a mysterious substance, coming and going enigmatically, confounding forecasters’ attempts to make long-term predictions. Climate change registered to snow hydrologists as a future problem, but for the most part their job remained squarely hydrology: working out the ticktock of a highly variable yet presumably coherent water cycle. “We still don’t know many fundamental things about snow,” Murphy wrote. “Nor do we understand its relation to weather and to climate—the dynamics of climate being one of the perennials on the ‘must figure out’ list of science.”

In January 2024, at long last, someone has figured out a formula of sorts for how snow reacts to climate change, and the answer is: It reacts nonlinearly. Which is to say, if we think snow is getting scarce now, we ought to buckle up.

Nonlinear relationships indicate accelerated change; shifts are small for a while but then, past a certain threshold, escalate quickly. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, two Dartmouth researchers report finding a distinctly nonlinear relationship between increasing winter temperatures and declining snowpacks. And they identify a “snow loss cliff”—an average winter-temperature threshold below which snowpack is largely unaffected, but above which things begin to change fast.

That threshold is 17 degrees Fahrenheit. Remarkably, 80 percent of the Northern Hemisphere’s snowpack exists in far-northern, high-altitude places that, for now, on average, stay colder than that. There, the snowpack seems to be healthy and stable, or even increasing. But as a general rule, when the average winter temperature exceeds 17 degrees (–8 degrees Celsius), snowpack loss begins, and accelerates dramatically with each additional degree of warming.

Already, millions of people who rely on the snowpack for water live in places that have crossed that threshold and will only get hotter. “A degree beyond that might take away 5 to 10 percent of the snowpack, then the next degree might cut away 10 to 15 percent, then 15 to 20 percent,” Alexander Gottlieb, the first author on the paper, told me over the phone as I looked out my window in New York City, where it has rained several times over the past few days. “Once you get around the freezing point”—32 degrees Fahrenheit—“you can lose almost half of your snow from just an additional degree of warming,” he said. New York City, which was recently reclassified as a “humid subtropical” climate, has clocked nearly 700 consecutive days with less than an inch of snowfall. It’s definitely over the snow-loss cliff, and as global temperatures increase, more places will follow.

By Malysheva Nastenka

Gottlieb and his co-author, Justin Mankin, figured this out by looking at how changes in temperature and precipitation drove changes in snowpack in 169 river basins across the Northern Hemisphere from 1981 through 2020. Using machine learning, they found a clear signal that human-induced climate change was indeed forcing changes in the snowpack in the places where most people live. The sharpest declines were in the watersheds of the southwestern and northeastern United States, and in Central and Eastern Europe. “In places where we are able to identify this really clear signal that climate change has reduced spring snowpack, we expect that to really only accelerate in the near term,” he said. “Those are places where the train has already kind of left the station.” Indeed, the Hudson River watershed, in which New York City sits, experienced among the steepest declines over that period. In the Northeast, which is not as reliant on spring snowmelt for water, that loss is felt most keenly as a loss of recreation; whole economies in the Northeast are based on skiing.

In the Mountain West, the stakes are even higher. Hydrologists already worry about the future reliability of the region’s snow-fed water supply: Previous research found snowless winters in the Mountain West are likely to be a regular occurrence by mid-century. But crucially, Gottlieb doesn’t see any room for cheerfulness about individual years with off-the-charts snowfall, such as last year’s record snowpack in the Colorado River basin. “This work really shows that we can definitely still get these one-off anomaly years that are incredibly wet, incredibly snowy, but the long-term signal is incredibly clear,” he said. Once you’re over the cliff, there’s no going back. The snow will keep disappearing.

In this piece, Lora Kelley interviews Zoë Schlanger (author of the previous article) on “the sense of loss when climate change transforms winter”: The Feeling of Losing Snow. Kelley and Schlanger mostly rehash the information from the previous article, but they also discussed the feeling of losing snowy winters:

Zoe: One of the hydrologists I spoke with was a former ski-patrol person, and he was talking so beautifully about what it meant for him to ski on a cold, bright day high in the mountains in Utah with perfect powder. It was just so vital to his enjoyment of life. For future generations, snow could just become slush, or not be there at all.

I don’t ski. I don’t live in the mountains. But even for me, there’s a sense of loss. It makes me think of a word that an Australian philosopher coined a number of years ago: solastalgia, which is essentially the sense of homesickness for an environment that you never left, but is leaving without you in some way. I feel like we’re all experiencing that when there are these touchstones of the year that seem to not be there anymore. It’s a strange sense of in-place homesickness.

Lora: This strikes me as a really stark example of climate change affecting how people experience nature. How do you think about these more obvious losses versus less visible, more incremental changes to the environment?

Zoë: Snow is a reminder that, actually, a lot of the changes we’re dealing with aren’t that incremental. We may not be able to see rising temperatures in quite the same way. But in many cases, those changes are just as sudden and dramatic and are happening faster than people thought they were. The wildfires we saw last year, for example, were wildly out of proportion from anything we’ve seen before. Records aren’t getting broken by small degrees now. They’re getting broken by leaps and bounds.

Climate change is real, it’s happening quickly, and it affects our lives in so many ways.

In the news, the Supreme Court will hear a case about whether hospitals can be required to treat pregnant women who will likely die without abortion care. Rolling Stone: The Supreme Court Will Decide if States Can Force Hospitals to Let Women Die.

The Supreme Court will decide this term whether states can force doctors to turn away patients suffering serious, life-threatening medical complications, or if doctors will be allowed to provide standard medical care to those patients: abortions. The court announced last week it will hear arguments over the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, or EMTALA, in April.

By Vicky Mount

EMTALA is a more than three-decade-old federal law that says hospitals that accept Medicare (most hospitals in this country) cannot turn away anyone with an emergency medical condition; they are required to provide stabilizing treatment to prevent that person from suffering serious medical complications. After Roe v. Wade was overruled in 2022, the Biden administration issued guidance clarifying that if a pregnant patient arrives at a hospital with an emergency condition that could only be stabilized with an abortion, the hospital is required to provide that care — regardless of state law.

To the Supreme Court, Idaho has argued that states — not doctors, and not the federal government — should be permitted to decide what kind of emergency medical care women can receive. “The federal government cannot use EMTALA to override in the emergency room state laws about abortion any more than it can use it to override state law on organ transplants or marijuana use,” the state’s attorney general wrote in its petition to the high court.

Lawyers for the Department of Justice sued the state of Idaho last year over the criminal abortion ban passed by the GOP-controlled legislature, which only allows for abortions to prevent a patient’s death — language one Idaho doctor said “is not useful to medical providers because this is not a dichotomous variable.”

The Biden administration argued the Idaho law violates care requirements mandated by EMTALA, and a lower court agreed, blocking the law as it applied to medical emergencies. But on Jan. 5, the Supreme Court lifted the lower court injunction, reinstating the ban and sending the chilling message to Idaho doctors that they cannot offer the care they have been trained to provide to pregnant patients without fear of criminal prosecution.

Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, called the Supreme Court’s intervention in the case “deeply troubling.”

“EMTALA is currently the only federal protection for patients who need emergency abortions. If the Supreme Court eviscerates that, there is no doubt that people will die,” Northup said in a statement.

More SCOTUS news from The Washington Post: Supreme Court to review restrictions on homeless encampments.

The Supreme Court said Friday it will consider whether state and local officials can punish homeless individuals for camping and sleeping in public spaces when shelter beds are unavailable.

The justices will review a lower court decision that declared it unconstitutional to enforce anti-camping laws against homeless individuals when they have nowhere else to sleep.

Photo by Frank Herfort

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which covers Western states, including California, Oregon and Washington, first held in 2018 that the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment prohibits cities from criminalizing public camping when shelter is unavailable.

The city of Grants Pass, Ore., asked the justices to overturn a similar recent decision involving civil fines and warned that the ruling would paralyze cities across the West from addressing safety and public health risks created by tents and makeshift structures. The 9th Circuit’s decision, the officials said, is standing in the way of a comprehensive response to the growth of public encampments.

“The consequences of inaction are dire for those living both in and near encampments: crime, fires, the reemergence of medieval diseases, environmental harm and record levels of drug overdoses and deaths on public streets,” lawyers for the city told the high court.

News on one more SCOTUS case from The Hill: Supreme Court steps into Starbucks union fight.

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear Starbucks’s appeal of a decision ordering the coffee chain to reinstate seven terminated employees, who were part of a high-profile union drive and became known as the “Memphis Seven.”

With implications for labor organizing more broadly, the justices will take up the case to decide the proper standard for court injunctions requested by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as they battle against employers in administrative proceedings.

The injunctions, aimed at keeping the status quo, have forced companies to reinstate employees, keep facilities open and pause corporate policy changes as the NLRB adjudicates alleged unfair labor practices.

Federal appeals courts have been split on what test the NLRB must clear to receive such an order, however.

Starbucks, backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business interests, argues that some courts — like the one that ordered the Memphis Seven be reinstated — have been too lenient, emboldening the NLRB to interfere with employers without due cause.

“That split carries enormous consequences for employers nationwide and unacceptably threatens the uniformity of federal labor law,” Starbucks’s attorneys wrote to the justices.

Hunter Biden has reversed course and offered to testify behind closed doors in the House. The Guardian: Hunter Biden offers to testify privately if House Republicans issue new subpoena.

Hunter Biden offered on Friday to comply with any new subpoena and testify in private before House Republicans seeking to impeach his father over alleged but unproven corruption, an attorney for Joe Biden’s son said.

By Troy Brooks

“If you issue a new proper subpoena, now that there is a duly authorised impeachment inquiry, Mr Biden will comply for a hearing or deposition,” Abbe Lowell wrote to James Comer and Jim Jordan, the Republican chairs of the oversight and judiciary committees.

“We will accept such a subpoena on Mr Biden’s behalf.”

Republicans are interested in Hunter Biden’s business dealings and struggles with addiction. Outside Congress, he faces criminal charges over a gun purchase and his tax affairs that carry maximum prison sentences of 25 and 17 years. In Los Angeles on Thursday, he added a not guilty plea in the tax case to the same plea in the gun case.

Biden previously refused to comply with a congressional subpoena for testimony in private, giving a press conference on Capitol Hill to say he would talk if the session were public.

On Wednesday, Comer held a hearing to consider a resolution to hold Biden in contempt of Congress, a charge that can result in a fine and jail time.

The hearing descended into chaos with Biden and Lowell making a surprise appearance, sitting in the audience while Republicans and Democrats traded partisan barbs. The resolution was sent to the full House for a vote. The White House said Joe Biden had not been told of his son’s plan to attend the oversight hearing.

Congressional Republicans are dead set on taking more funding away from the IRS, even though–or maybe because–the extra money has resulted in millions more income for the government. Raw Story: Funding GOP wants to cut helped IRS collect $500 million from rich tax cheats.

The Internal Revenue Service said Friday that it has collected more than $500 million from wealthy tax dodgers since 2022, thanks to a funding boost that is now in jeopardy as Republican lawmakers work to claw back tens of billions of dollars from the agency.

The IRS has used a budget increase approved under the Inflation Reduction Act to ramp up enforcement efforts, targeting millionaires over significant sums of unpaid taxes. The agency announced Friday that it has retrieved $520 million through its new initiatives.

“This is why we fought for a fully funded IRS, and why it’s so reckless for Republicans to try to slash its budget again,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) wrote in response to the agency’s announcement.

The congressional GOP, which has long worked to starve the IRS of funding in service to rich tax cheats, is aiming to more quickly implement $20 billion in cuts that they secured as part of last year’s bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling, potentially compromising tax enforcement. The $20 billion represents a quarter of the $80 billion IRS funding boost in the Inflation Reduction Act, which Republicans unanimously opposed.

Under a spending tentative agreement that congressional leaders announced this past weekend, the $20 billion in IRS cuts would be frontloaded to 2024 instead of being spread out over two years. The deal still must pass Congress—hardly a forgone conclusion as far-right Republicans push House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to back out of the agreement, complaining that government spending is too high overall.

Johnson is also aiming to slash an additional $10 billion from the tax agency’s 2025 funding.

A couple of 2024 campaign stories:

CNN: Biden campaign grapples with undecided voters who don’t yet believe Trump could be the nominee.

Even as the Biden reelection campaign forges ahead with preparations for another potential general election match-up between Biden and his predecessor, it is grappling with a stubborn reality: The majority of undecided voters simply do not seem to believe – at least not yet – that Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican presidential nominee.

According to the campaign’s internal research, this is the case for most of the undecided voters that the campaign is targeting – nearly three-in-four of them, senior Biden campaign officials told CNN. Those officials said one of the biggest reasons driving this is the simple fact that many voters are not paying close attention to the election, including the ins and outs of the GOP nomination process.

“You can’t conceive of how tuned out these folks are,” one senior campaign official said.

To that end, Biden campaign officials see the task of helping voters recognize that Trump is a strong frontrunner as one of their most important and urgent challenges, with the first GOP caucus in Iowa now just days away. A key part of that work is painting a vivid picture of what a second term of a Trump White House would look like.

At some point in the near future, Biden campaign officials say they expect that a switch will turn on for many of these voters who are not yet convinced that Trump is likely to be on the ballot in the fall. As one senior official put it, a realization will hit: “Oh s—, it is an election between that guy and that guy.”

But what’s impossible for the campaign to predict at this point in the election cycle is when exactly it will click for voters that “that guy” – Trump – is poised to be the GOP presidential nominee. Just 20% of the public has been paying a lot of attention to the 2024 presidential campaign, according to an AP-NORC poll from the end of last year; meanwhile, 47% said they have paid little or no attention.

Lisa Lerer at The New York Times: On the Ballot in Iowa: Fear. Anxiety. Hopelessness.

Across Iowa, as the first nominating contest approaches on Monday, voters plow through snowy streets to hear from candidates, mingle at campaign events and casually talk of the prospect of World War III, civil unrest and a nation coming apart at the seams.

Four years ago, voters worried about a spiraling pandemic, economic uncertainty and national protests. Now, in the first presidential election since the siege on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, those anxieties have metastasized into a grimmer, more existential dread about the very foundations of the American experiment.

“You get the feeling in Iowa right now that we’re sleepwalking into a nightmare and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Doug Gross, a Republican lawyer who has been involved in Iowa politics for nearly four decades, ran for governor in 2002 and plans to support Nikki Haley in the state’s caucuses on Monday. “In Iowa, life isn’t lived in extremes, except the weather, and yet they still feel this dramatic sense of inevitable doom.”

Donald J. Trump, the dominant front-runner in the Republican primary race, bounces from courtroom to campaign trail, lacing his rhetoric with ominous threats of retribution and suggestions of dictatorial tendencies. President Biden condemns political violence and argues that if he loses, democracy itself could falter.

Bill Bradley, 80, who served for 18 years as a New Jersey senator, remembered when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000, spending more than 75 days in Iowa during his bid. “We debated health care and taxes, which is reasonable,” he said, adding, “Civil war? No. World War III? No, no, no.”

This presidential race, he said, is “a moment that is different than any election in my lifetime.”

Finally Friday Reads: The Hypocrisy of the Sanctimonious Season

Posted: December 15, 2023 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: Foreign Affairs, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: #RepublicanCrazyTrain, Abortion is Healthcare, abortion rights, democracy threatened, republican political games, Theocratic Scotus | 7 Comments

Still life with a cup on a tray, 1919, Duncan Grant

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I’m getting ready to be one of the huddled masses who stays at home to avoid the insanity and commercialism of Crassmas season. Check my closets! No ugly sweaters here! Some significant feature articles in the so-called ‘national’ newspapers highlight the decades we’ve endured where a small theocratic cult has managed to capture institutions. Nothing like staying home this time of year with good reads and a good cup of coffee with your favorite music.

I had two doses of the season watching my granddaughters put up a series of ‘squishmallows’ onto one tree branch. These little stuffed plushies are the latest versions of beanie babies or whatever is terrifically overpriced but terribly necessary this year. I frankly had difficulty telling them from the plushies Temple had as a puppy that only cost a few dollars. Puppy toys aren’t generally designer-branded. I also got a photo of the two of them terrified and screaming on a store Santa’s lap, whose smile was fixed in place. I learned there’s such a thing as Santa trauma from BB. I heard my mother’s voice coming from my depths, asking, “What did you do to them?” Music on. Coffee hot. Now, for the reads.

So, let me start with a New York Times article that features the national trauma brought on by Theocratic Inquisitor Samuel Alito and his co-conspirators. “Behind the Scenes at the Dismantling of Roe v. Wade .”

Justice Barrett, selected to clinch the court’s conservative supermajority and deliver the nearly 50-year goal of the religious right, opposed even taking up the case. When the jurists were debating Mississippi’s request to hear it, she first voted in favor — but later switched to a no, according to several court insiders and a written tally. Four male justices, a minority of the court, chose to move ahead anyway, with Justice Kavanaugh providing the final vote.

Those dynamics help explain why the responses stacked up so speedily to the draft opinion in February 2022: Justice Alito appeared to have pregamed it among some of the conservative justices, out of view from other colleagues, to safeguard a coalition more fragile than it looked.

The Supreme Court deliberates in secret, and those who speak can be cast out of the fold. To piece together the hidden narrative of how the court, guided by Justice Alito, engineered a titanic shift in the law, The New York Times drew on internal documents, contemporaneous notes and interviews with more than a dozen people from the court — both conservative and liberal — who had real-time knowledge of the proceedings. Because of the institution’s insistence on confidentiality, they spoke on the condition of anonymity.

At every stage of the Dobbs litigation, Justice Alito faced impediments: a case that initially looked inauspicious, reservations by two conservative justices and efforts by colleagues to pull off a compromise. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a conservative, along with the liberal Justice Stephen G. Breyer, worked to prevent or at least limit the outcome. Justice Breyer even considered trying to save Roe v. Wade — the 1973 ruling that established the right to abortion — by significantly eroding it.

To dismantle that decision, Justice Alito and others had to push hard, the records and interviews show. Some steps, like his apparent selective preview of the draft opinion, were time-honored ones. But in overturning Roe, the court set aside more than precedent: It tested the boundaries of how cases are decided.

Justice Ginsburg’s death hung over the process. For months, the court delayed announcing its decision to hear the case, creating the appearance of distance from her passing. The justices later allowed Mississippi to perform a bait-and-switch, widening what had been a narrower attempt to restrict abortion while she was alive into a full assault on Roe — the kind of move that has prompted dismissals of other cases.

The most glaring irregularity was the leak to Politico of Justice Alito’s draft. The identity and motive of the person who disclosed it remains unknown, but the effect of the breach is clear: It helped lock in the result, The Times found, undercutting Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Breyer’s quest to find a middle ground.

In the Dobbs case, the court “barreled over each of its normal procedural guardrails,” wrote Richard M. Re, a University of Virginia law professor and former Kavanaugh clerk on a federal appellate court, adding that “the court compromised its own deliberative process.”

Still Life, Duncan Grant

It’s a really tough and long read but one that every person concerned with freedom and privacy and every woman should read. Four men were behind the ultimate push. Four bullies got the say over the women

With their waiting game, the justices had nearly broken a record: Dobbs was the second most re-listed case ever granted review.

But sometime before the announcement, Justice Barrett had switched her vote. Just four members of the court, the bare minimum, chose to grant, with Justice Kavanaugh taking the side of Justices Alito, Gorsuch and Thomas. They overrode five colleagues — including all the female justices — who had an array of concerns. The men appeared to be betting that Justice Barrett would ultimately side with them, pushing herinto a case she had not wanted to take.

Her reasons for the reversal are unclear. But as a professor in 2013, she had written a law review article laying out the kind of dilemma she faced in spring 2021. “If the court’s opinions change with its membership, public confidence in the court as an institution might decline,” she noted. “Its members might be seen as partisan rather than impartial and case law as fueled by power rather than reason.”

That July, with its audience before the court secure, Mississippi made the case more monumental, abruptly changing its strategy. “Roe and Casey are egregiously wrong,” the state’s main brief declared on its first page. It urged the justices to be bold. “The question becomes whether this court should overrule those decisions. It should.”

Still Life with Bookcase, Duncan Grant

The Washington Post article is also about Zealot bullies whose patriarchal, xenophobic, and racist religion let them do, say, and back anyone to enable the codification of their deeply hateful beliefs. ” Let’s just melt into some pleasant painting and escape the overarching desire to control everyone for a while.

“Why Bob Vander Plaats thinks some evangelicals can’t quit Trump.” Might as well face it; they’re addicted to hate. Vander Plaats is an evangelical leader in Iowa who is behind Desantis now. As if, Trump wasn’t a big enough bully and control freak for them. The interview is based on a poll from the Iowa-based paper The Des Moines Register. This was my family newspaper of choice growing up. Yes, I feel strongly about these people. I’m glad I’ve moved away from them. They make awful neighbors!

The Early: The poll also found 51 percent of likely caucus-goers who describe themselves as evangelicals support Trump. Do you see a divide between evangelical leaders like yourself and evangelical voters when it comes to Trump?

Vander Plaats: No, I really don’t know if I do. There’s some evangelicals [who] believe Trump of 2016 is going to be Trump of 2024. And I get that. I understand where they’d be like, “I’d rather have Trump than Joe Biden. I want to bring Trump back because Trump was good.” I’m not discounting that stuff at all. I’m just saying I’m looking at electability and who’s going to move us forward.

There may be a disconnect there. I don’t see a huge disconnect otherwise.

The Early: How do you think the Trump of 2024 would be different from the Trump of 2016?

Vander Plaats: First of all, day one, you’re really a lame duck, because you’re in your second term.

And who’s going to make up his team? I’m very concerned about that. A lot of his team members have been under litigation, and it’s been expensive for them. And if that’s the track record — “I’m going to go serve but then I’m going to get sued” — and there’s been no real propensity to say, “I’ve got [former Trump lawyer Rudy] Giuliani‘s back,” or “I’ve got [former White House chief of staff Mark] Meadows’s back” or “I’ve got [former Trump lawyer] Jenna Ellis’s back. It’s awfully hard now to recruit people to come in.

The Early: DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida. He has said he would support a 15-week national ban as president. Trump has not committed to doing so. Why do you think so many evangelical voters are supporting Trump over DeSantis?

Vander Plaats: Trump is well known — 100 percent name ID. And he did things that they remember. And so you’re not going to leave him until you’re sold on somebody. There’s also part of the evangelical community — which I fully understand — they want a disrupter. They just want a disrupter: “This is wrong, and we need a disrupter just to shake it up.” And I think they view Trump being a champion in that.

Still life with Ginger Jar, Sugar Bowl, Oranges, and Bath Towel, Camille Pissarro

Hunker Down! There’s more. This is from Wired‘s David Gilbert. “Moms for Liberty Is Tearing Itself Apart. One of the Republican Party’s most successful grassroots organizations is being torn apart by scandal, including accusations of sexual assault.”

Moms for Liberty, the extremist “parental rights group,” was supposed to help the Republican Party regain the White House. In July, former president Donald Trump called the anti-LGBTQ group with 300 active chapters across the county a “grassroots juggernaut.” They are credited with forcing schools to lift mask mandates, banning books featuring LGBTQ characters, and supporting anti-trans laws and policies across the country. The group was on track to be instrumental to the GOP in the 2024 election.

But, over the course of the past five months, the group has begun to unravel.

Experts have questioned the claims about the size of the group’s membership, and individual members have been exposed as sex offenders and acolytes of the Proud Boys. Then, last month, Moms for Liberty cofounder Bridget Ziegler admitted in a police interview to being in a relationship with her husband and another woman. The interview was conducted after the woman in question alleged that Ziegler’s husband, Florida GOP chair Christian Ziegler, had raped her.

Ziegler’s husband has denied the allegations and refused to resign from his position as GOP chair, despite calls from Florida governor Ron DeSantis and other state Republicans to do so. Ziegler is also a member of the Sarasota County School Board, and has been instrumental in ushering in Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill, pushing a Christian agenda in public schools, and banning the teaching of critical race theory. On Tuesday night, the board voted 4–1 in favor of a nonbinding resolution calling for her to resign, marking a rapid fall from grace for Ziegler and a potential fatal blow to Moms for Liberty.

“The impact of the Zeigler scandal has been enormous on the Moms for Liberty structure,” Liz Mikitarian, the founder of the activist group STOP Moms for Liberty, which closely tracks the group’s activities, tells WIRED. “We see chapters moving away or taking a break, chapter leadership questioning their roles and scrambling at the national level to save their ‘mom’ brand. The organization is trying to distance itself from the Zieglers, but this is impossible because the Zieglers are interwoven into the very fabric of Moms for Liberty.”

Still Life with Teapot (French: Nature morte avec pot de thé), 1902 and 1906, by Paul Cézanne.

Not quite done yet. This is from Politico. “Republicans struggle as they keep getting forced to talk about abortion. The contrast between GOP candidates’ maneuvering toward the middle and real-world events that remind the public of the party’s most aggressively anti-abortion faction shows how vexing the issue remains for the party.” Yes, abortion again! It’s that fucking important. It should be more than vexing because I watched you let these freaks get away with all kinds of things, including murder, these days. The analysis is by Madison Fernandez.

Republicans keep trying to come up with a coherent message on abortion. And real life keeps intruding.

On the campaign trail this week, Nikki Haley was pressed — yet again — to say whether she’d sign a national abortion ban into law. She dismissed the prospect of such a ban as an effort to “scare people” and jostled with Chris Christie over who had the more reasonable position on abortion.

As the two traded shots, though, they were upstaged by events far away from New Hampshire.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, an ally of former President Donald Trump, drew national attention for blocking Kate Cox, whose fetus had a terminal condition, from having an abortion. And then, on Wednesday, the Supreme Court decided to take up a case that could affect access to mifepristone — a ruling that could get in the way of GOP efforts to sound reasonable on the issue.

The contrast between the GOP candidates’ maneuvering toward the middle and the real-world events that remind the public of the party’s most aggressively anti-abortion faction shows how vexing the issue remains for the party. Eighteen months after the fall of Roe v. Wade, even Republicans who try to moderate — or, like Donald Trump, try not to talk about it — are struggling mightily to get on the right side of popular opinion.

“We have to humanize the situation and deal with it with compassion,” Haley told reporters at Tuesday’s New Hampshire town hall when asked about the Texas case.

The conversation around abortion rights has remained front and center since the Supreme Court overturned Roe last year — from Republicans’ ongoing debate about a national abortion ban to off-year elections reemphasizing the salience of abortion rights for voters.

Republicans continue struggling to find a position they can sell to both their base and the general public, a point that Christie stressed at a New Hampshire town hall on Wednesday: “The voters in this state have a right to know where [Haley] stands, not just her happy talk,” he said. “She wants to be everything to everybody on that issue.”

Haley’s comments on the Cox case in Texas stake out a less aggressive position on abortion than some of her fellow Republicans — and it’s not the first time she has taken such a stance. In November’s GOP presidential debate, Haley urged Republicans to be “honest” about the feasibility of enacting a federal abortion ban.

Still Life with a Pewter Jug and Pink Statuette,
Henri Matisse. 1910

Ah, I’m thankful today for Hazelnut Community Coffee and the music of Claude Debussy. Moving on. This is from Vox. “What Trump has already taken from us. Democracy is a culture — and Trump is destroying it.” This analysis is written by Zack Beauchamp.

Democracy has grown and matured by turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy: It persists because everyone in a society believes it should and will exist. If democratic culture dims, democracy’s prospects dim with it.

The United States, the first country to claim the mantle of democracy in the modern era, has long had an exceptionally strong democratic culture. Belief in democratic ideals, liberal rights, and the basics of constitutional government are so fundamental to American identity that they’ve been collectively described as the country’s “civil religion.”

Yet today, America’s vaunted democratic culture is withering before our eyes. American democracy, once seemingly secure, is now in so much trouble that 75 percent of Americans believe that “the future of American democracy is at risk in the 2024 presidential election,” according to a study by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution.

This withering took off during Donald Trump’s rise to power and has continued apace in his post-presidency. The more he attacks the foundations of the democratic system, the less everyone — both his supporters and his opponents — believe American democracy is both healthy and likely to endure.

Moreover, he has birthed an anti-democratic movement inside the Republican Party dedicated to advancing his vision (or something like it). These Republicans vocally and loudly argue American democracy is a sham — and that dire measures are justified in response. This faction is already influential, and will likely become more so given its especial prominence among the ranks of young conservatives.

As worrying as the prospect of a second Trump term is, the damage he and his allied movement have already done to American democratic culture is not hypothetical: It’s already here, it’s getting worse, and it will likely persist — even if Trump loses in 2024.

Put differently, Trump has already robbed us of our sense of security and faith in our democracy. The consequences of that theft are not abstract, but rather ones we’ll all have to deal with for years to come.

Winter Flowers William Henry Hunt, c.1850

The nations of NATO–of which we are still one–are coming to grips with having anti-democratic Hungary in its midsts as it looks to include Ukraine among its members. Hungary is taking active steps along with the Republican Party here that loves itself some Victor Orban to defund Ukraine’s freedom fight. This is a sad statement. This is from the BBC. “Hungary blocks €50bn of EU funding for Ukraine.”

Hungary – which maintains close ties with Russia – has long opposed membership for Ukraine but did not veto that move.

Mr Orban left the negotiating room momentarily in what officials described as a pre-agreed and constructive manner, while the other 26 leaders went ahead with the vote.

He told Hungarian state radio on Friday that he had fought for eight hours to stop his EU partners but could not convince them. Ukraine’s path to EU membership would be a long process anyway, he said, and parliament in Budapest could still stop it happening if it wanted to.

Talks on the financial package ended in the early hours of Friday. EU leaders said negotiations would resume early next year, reassuring Kyiv that support would continue.

Speaking later that day, European Council President Charles Michel said he was “confident and optimistic” the EU would fulfil its promise to support Ukraine.

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo echoed him: “The message to Ukraine is: we will be there to support you, we just need to figure out a few of the details together.”

Mr Michel had earlier confirmed that all but one EU leader had agreed on the aid package and wider budget proposals for the bloc – although Sweden still needed to consult its parliament. He vowed to achieve the necessary unanimity for the deal.

A long delay in financial aid for the country would cause big problems for Ukraine’s budget, Kyiv-based economist Sergiy Fursa told the BBC.

“It pays for all social responsibilities of the government – wages for teachers, doctors for pensions,” he said.

Ukraine is also desperately seeking the approval of a $61bn US defence aid package – but that decision is also being delayed because of major disagreements between Democrat and Republican lawmakers.

Ukraine’s counter-offensive against Russia’s occupying forces ground to a halt at the start of winter, and there are fears that the Russians could simply outgun Ukraine.

Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady, warned in a BBC interview last week that Ukrainians were in “mortal danger” of being left to die without further Western support.

On Thursday, President Putin mocked Ukraine and claimed Western “freebies” were running out.

Still Life against the Light, Henri Matisse, 1899

NATO is opening possible membership to Ukraine. President Biden, himself, says Ukraine will join NATO in the future while Trump wants to withdraw the U.S. from the organization. The U.S. Senate is still trying to get aid to the war-torn nation. This is from HuffPost. “Senate Sticks Around To Help Ukraine As House Republicans Skip Town. A bipartisan deal that includes sharper immigration limits and a tougher border policy in exchange for U.S. aid to Ukraine is proving elusive on Capitol Hill.” It seems they’ve forgotten the whole Prince of Peace thing surrounding this season, like so many.

The Senate delayed the start of its holiday break on Thursday to allow for more time to reach a deal on President Joe Biden’s emergency spending bill that lawmakers hope will pair U.S. assistance to Ukraine with major immigration reforms.

The upper chamber is expected to return to work on Monday. Meanwhile, the GOP-controlled House recessed and isn’t scheduled to return until Jan. 9, 2024, ensuring that critical military and financial assistance to Ukraine to defend against ongoing Russian aggression won’t be approved by Congress and delivered to Kyiv for at least another month.

“We have to get this done,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) insisted in a speech on the Senate floor on Thursday. “Our Republican colleagues who have said action on the border is so urgent should have no problem with continuing to work next week.”

“We know the world is watching,” he added. “We know autocrats like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and [Chinese President Xi] Jinping are hoping for us to fail. So we need to try with everything we have to get the job done.”

Fa la la la la, la la la la … peace on earth, goodwill to everyone! I’ll be at home if you need me!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Finally Friday Reads: All the News that’s fit to Scream About!

Posted: November 10, 2023 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign | Tags: @repeat1968, abortion rights, Accessible Birth Control, Ayatollah Mike Johnson, Ballot Initiatives, Republican Taliban, The Trump Court Reality Show | 11 Comments

@repeat1968, John Buss

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

There are some surprising and unsurprising headlines today as we find out precisely how undemocratic and undedicated to the U.S. Constitutional some certain officials are. There’s one headline that has surprised and given me some relief that shining light on the Courts can bring about some positive results. Let’s start with that!

This is from The Independent. Andrew Feinberg reports this breaking news. “Judge rejects Trump bid to delay classified documents trial. Judge Aileen Cannon’s order left room for her to aid the president who nominated her to the bench by delaying his trial at a later date.” Maybe she’s seen the sunlight the press has thrown on her little outback courtroom.

The judge overseeing the criminal case against former president Donald Trump in the Southern District of Florida has rejected the ex-president’s most recent attempt to delay his trial on charges that he violated the Espionage Act and obstructed a probe into how he still had classified documents at his home long after his presidency had ended.

In an order issued on Friday, Judge Aileen Cannon rejected Mr Trump’s request to delay the trial that she scheduled for 20 May 2024 earlier this year.

Judge Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Mr Trump and confirmed just weeks before he left office, left open the possibility that she would step in to aid his efforts to push any trial back until after next year’s presidential election in hopes that he will win and be able to order prosecutors to drop the charges after he is sworn in for a second term.

She wrote in her order that she would consider more requests to delay Mr Trump’s trial during a scheduling conference on 1 March.

Mr Trump’s attorneys had asked her to grand an extension of several months in the trial schedule, citing what they described as delays in accessing evidence the government has turned over as part of the pre-trial discovery process.

PBS has further information. “Trump’s classified documents trial won’t be delayed but federal judge moves back other deadlines.” So, it was mixed news. Here’s a reminder that Trump’s got a lot of appearances in a lot of court dockets.

The decision from Cannon is notable given that she had signaled during a hearing this month that she was open to pushing back the trial date, pointing to the other trials Trump faces as well as the mounds of evidence that defense lawyers need to review. Trump’s lawyers had complained about the burden of scouring more than 1 million pages of evidence that prosecutors have produced. Prosecutors had resisted any effort to delay, saying they’d already taken steps to make the evidence easier for the defense to review.

Trump is currently set for trial on March 4, 2024, in Washington on federal charges that he plotted to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. He also faces charges in Georgia accusing him of trying to subvert that state’s vote, as well as another state case in New York accusing him of falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments to porn actor Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.

In addition, Trump has been sued in a business fraud case in New York, where a trial is taking place. Trump has denied wrongdoing in all of the cases, claiming without evidence that they are part of a politically motivated effort to prevent him from returning to the White House.

Vanity Fair continues to spotlight Trump’s plan to replace our democratic republic with an autocratic one. This is written by Eric Lutz. “Donald Trump Isn’t Even Trying To Hide His Authoritarian Second-Term Plans. The former president is telling the country exactly what he wants to do. Are voters listening?”

Sit for a minute with these comments the GOP frontrunner for president has made on national television in recent days. “They’ve released the genie out of the box,” Donald Trump said in a Univision interview aired Thursday, referring to the four indictments he faces that he insists are attempts to interfere with his 2024 campaign. “If I happen to be president, and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’”

“Now that he indicted me,” Trump said at a rally a day earlier of Joe Biden, who did not indict him, “we’re allowed to look at him…He did real bad things. We will restore law and order to our communities. And I will direct a completely overhauled [Department of Justice] to investigate every Marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist-in-reverse enforcement of the law.”

It is easy to overlook these kinds of pronouncements from the former president, given the frequency with which he makes them. But it’s also important to really take them in—to listen to his threats with fresh ears, as if you haven’t heard him say some version of them a thousand times before. Here is the frontrunner for the Republican nod—and possibly the presidency—vowing to use the government to go after political opponents. A second Trump term “would be the end of our country as we know it,” Hillary Clinton warned in an appearance on the View Thursday, “and I don’t say that lightly.”

Clinton, of course, has long been the subject of Trump’s threats of political prosecution. “Lock her up!” was something of an unofficial slogan of his 2016 campaign—a rally refrain as ubiquitous as “Build the wall!” and “Drain the swamp!” and “Make America Great Again!” But it was never just about his 2016 opponent; “lock her up,” like other Trump catchphrases, was really more of a mnemonic—one he has repurposed in attacks on Biden, Anthony Fauci, and others who have been cast as villains in the MAGAverse. These authoritarian threats are not tit-for-tat responses to his own indictments, as he suggested this week. They’ve always been a central tenet of his movement.

Sit for a minute with these comments the GOP frontrunner for president has made on national television in recent days. “They’ve released the genie out of the box,” Donald Trump said in a Univision interview aired Thursday, referring to the four indictments he faces that he insists are attempts to interfere with his 2024 campaign. “If I happen to be president, and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’”

“Now that he indicted me,” Trump said at a rally a day earlier of Joe Biden, who did not indict him, “we’re allowed to look at him…He did real bad things. We will restore law and order to our communities. And I will direct a completely overhauled [Department of Justice] to investigate every Marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist-in-reverse enforcement of the law.”

It is easy to overlook these kinds of pronouncements from the former president, given the frequency with which he makes them. But it’s also important to really take them in—to listen to his threats with fresh ears, as if you haven’t heard him say some version of them a thousand times before. Here is the frontrunner for the Republican nod—and possibly the presidency—vowing to use the government to go after political opponents. A second Trump term “would be the end of our country as we know it,” Hillary Clinton warned in an appearance on the View Thursday, “and I don’t say that lightly.”

Clinton, of course, has long been the subject of Trump’s threats of political prosecution. “Lock her up!” was something of an unofficial slogan of his 2016 campaign—a rally refrain as ubiquitous as “Build the wall!” and “Drain the swamp!” and “Make America Great Again!” But it was never just about his 2016 opponent; “lock her up,” like other Trump catchphrases, was really more of a mnemonic—one he has repurposed in attacks on Biden, Anthony Fauci, and others who have been cast as villains in the MAGAverse. These authoritarian threats are not tit-for-tat responses to his own indictments, as he suggested this week. They’ve always been a central tenet of his movement.

Though this bluster is nothing new, it has taken on an even more menacing overtone recently: Trump, who is leading Biden in some recent polls, is running for a second term on an explicitly authoritarian platform—and allies like Stephen Miller are already plotting to clear the way for him to make good on his threats, to remove the roadblocks that kept his autocratic fantasies from being fully realized in his first term.

It’s possible to forget just how close he did come that first time around and to get desensitized to his repeated threats, praise for dictators, and other outrages. Which is why it’s so important to remain clear-eyed about the danger he represents. As Clinton warned, “Trump is telling us what he intends to do. Take him at his word.”

Read more at the link. Liz Dye from Public Notice has a good reminder for us, too. “Trump’s right, the system is RIGGED. In his favor. Imagine being a rich white guy complaining that the legal system is stacked against you.”

On Monday, Donald Trump took the witness stand in his civil fraud trial in New York and proved once again that there is a “two-tiered justice system” in this country … just not in the way that he thinks. In fact, he’s treated far better than most criminal defendants, and has gotten away with behavior which would have gotten anyone not named Donald Trump held in contempt of court.

…

On top of the abuse, Trump spewed preposterous lies under oath. For instance, he’s still insisting that Mar-a-Lago is worth upwards of one billion dollars, despite having agreed to massive encumbrances on its future development which decrease its value. As the New Republic notes, Trump signed a deed of development with the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2002 stating that “the Club and Trump intend to forever extinguish their right to develop or use the Property for any purpose other than club use.”

But on the witness stand Trump was adamant that he still retains the right to subdivide and develop the property.

“‘Intend’ doesn’t mean we will do it,” he smirked.

Later he was confronted with evidence from Forbes Magazine that his former CFO Allen Weisselberg had lied on the witness stand. Trump sidestepped the question, saying, “I have very little respect for Forbes. I haven’t dealt with them for years. I believe they are out of business actually.” In fact, he screamed at Forbes reporter Dan Alexander on Truth Social just a month ago when the magazine dropped him from its Forbes 400 list.

Trump’s lies on Monday included his constant refrain that he has an “IRONCLAD DISCLAIMER CLAUSE!” which immunizes him from consequences for overestimating his net worth by a billion dollars in an effort to get banks to lend him money. The judge already rejected this get-out-of-jail-free card on September 26, noting that New York law places the “onus for accuracy squarely on defendants’ shoulders” as the party in the transaction with more complete knowledge.

“If you want to know about the disclaimer clause, read my opinion again. Or for the first time, perhaps,” the court reminded Trump when he trotted out the disclaimer.

“You’re wrong in the opinion,” Trump retorted, showing once again that he wasn’t going to be bound by any normal standard of behavior. And then he pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket with the rejected disclaimer language on it, saying “I’d love to read this, your honor, if I could, if I’m allowed to do that.”

To be clear, witnesses simply cannot introduce uncorroborated evidence on the stand under direct examination. Trump knows this perfectly well, and so do his lawyers, so it was no surprise that Justice Engoron put the kibosh on this little stunt.

“Shocker. I’m shocked,” Trump muttered sarcastically, affecting to be once again oppressed by a manifestly unfair legal system, stacked against the poor, defenseless former president.

The Republicans have no clear plan on how to avoid the government shutdown. Mike Johnson and his clan of incompetence and theocracy is a disaster happening in prime time. This is from NPR. “Speaker Johnson navigates ‘mission impossible’ to avoid shutdown, without clear plan.”

Speaker Mike Johnson is learning quickly that, although he may have received unanimous support to get the gavel, the sharp divisions among House Republicans over spending bills remain.

Two times this week, Johnson, R-La., was forced to pull federal budget bills from the floor after it became clear that Republican opposition meant they would fail to pass.

Now, there are just seven days left before the federal government is due to shutdown at the end of the day on November 17, not enough time to pass the full suite of annual budget bills.

Despite the time crunch, Speaker Johnson has not announced the details of his plan for a stopgap funding measure, which would temporarily extend government funding in order to allow lawmakers to sort out their disagreements on the full budget.

The Transportation and Housing funding bill, which leaders pulled from the floor late Tuesday, ran into problems when a group of Republicans from the Northeast opposed the bill’s funding cuts to Amtrak. Conservatives insisted they remain in the bill.

Johnson pulled the Financial Services and General Government funding measure on Thursday, after moderate members of his conference opposed a provision in the bill that would have overruled Washington, D.C.’s abortion law.

One of the members opposed to the bill, Rep. John Duarte of California, pointed to Tuesday’s election results in several states showing voter pushback to Republican efforts to restrict abortion rights.

“The American people are telling us very clearly they don’t want Washington, D.C., meddling in their abortion rights,” Duarte said. “That’s clear and we’re trying to make sure we can deliver on that.”

The Financial Services bill also faced opposition over funding for a new FBI headquarters, which the government announced this week would be built D.C.’s Maryland suburbs.

After a proposed amendment to bar any funding for the building failed, conservatives including Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan threatened to vote against final passage of the bill.

Yes. You read that right. This is from Raw Story. “Republican spending bill implodes over ’embarrassing’ birth control spat.” The story is reported by Sarah K. Burris.

Another government funding bill from Republicans was pulled on Thursday morning after many leaders refused to back several pieces of the bill, including one aimed at overturning a law that barred companies from discriminating against employees who use birth control.

The birth control plank was just one of dozens of amendments that were added to the bill from Republican lawmakers, as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) pledged to pass the budget by the Nov. 17 shutdown deadline.

According to Politico, there were more than 100 amendments proposed in all, including some that drew rebukes from swing-district Republicans.

Rep. Max Miller (R- OH) called it “embarrassing” and “incredibly upsetting” that House GOP leadership had to pull the final passage of the funding bill, reported CNN’s Annie Grayer. He went on to bash his colleagues for hyper-partisan amendments to bills that must pass to keep the government open.

The law being targeted by the House GOP is a local Washington, D.C. ordinance that prevents any employer from discriminating against a worker who seeks contraception or family planning services. The GOP bill would block that from taking effect.

In an interview Sunday, Johnson was asked by Fox’s Shannon Bream about some of his extreme opinions and bills regarding birth control.

“I really don’t remember any of those measures,” he told her.

This is the discussion as voters from deep red states continue to enshrine Roe v. Wade in state constitutions via ballot measures. Even Nebraska is getting a ballot measure to its voters. Republicans are entirely hogtied from their previous positions as voters dump their ideas against reproductive freedom. The Democratic Party is rushing to get the issue on as many state ballots as possible. Now, they’ve got reason to go even farther. This is from AXIOS.

After Ohio’s vote Tuesday to protect abortion rights, Democrats are rushing to get similar measures on the ballot next year in key states such as Arizona, Nevada and Florida — partly to boost President Biden and down-ballot Democrats.

Why it matters: In the face of bleak polling on the economy, abortion continues to be a winning issue for Democrats — one that could motivate otherwise uninspired voters to turn out and keep the White House in the party’s hands.

Voters now have explicitly endorsed abortion rights via ballot initiatives in seven states since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year — in California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Vermont and now Ohio.

The wins are boosting confidence among Democrats that similar ballot measures — and candidates who cast the high court’s Dobbs ruling as a government assault on individual rights — can help the party ride the backlash in the 2024 elections.

In private and with a group of abortion-rights organizers in Miami last month, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff has described Democrats’ path to victory in 2024 as “Dobbs and Democracy,” according to two people familiar with his comments.

A White House spokesperson said that Emhoff’s “public comments speak for themselves.”

What to watch: There’s now added urgency to efforts to get abortion-rights initiatives on 2024 ballots in battleground states of Arizona, Nevada and Florida as well as Republican-dominated Nebraska and South Dakota, advocates tell Axios.

Groups also are working to enshrine abortion access in Colorado’s state constitution, while ending restrictions on the use of public funds to pay for abortions. Biden won Colorado in 2020.

Zoom in: Florida has the earliest deadline for voter signatures to get a measure on the 2024 ballot — Feb. 1 — and organizers have been trying to get national Democrats more involved in their efforts.

“If you’re really interested in affecting turnout in Florida in 2024, then the place to put your money is in this ballot initiative because it’s going to pay off all the way down the ballot,” said Anna Hochkammer, executive director of Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition.

Reality check: Florida has one of the nation’s most difficult processes for getting a state constitutional amendment initiative on the ballot, and some national Democrats believe proponents there began organizing too late.

Any ballot initiative requires more than 890,000 signatures with at least half of the state’s 28 congressional districts represented — and the conservative state Supreme Court could still throw it off the ballot, as Florida’s attorney general is already arguing they should.

Florida has veered to the right in recent years, but Biden lost to former President Trump by just 3 percentage points in 2020.

The coalition of advocacy groups behind the effort, called Floridians Protecting Freedom, is nearing 500,000 signatures. It launched the campaign in May.

Meanwhile, presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) has leaned into the issue in the other direction, signing a six-week abortion ban into law earlier this year.

Zoom out: The Dobbs decision ignited an active network of fundraising and spending in support of abortion-rights initiatives that hasn’t been matched by anti-abortion groups.

Imagine a country where abortion rights are the primary turn-out reason! Or birth control! Mike Johnson is like the poster child for white Christian nationalism’s oppression of everyone! “The Key to Mike Johnson’s Christian Extremism Hangs Outside His Office. The newly elected House Speaker has ties to the far-right New Apostolic Reformation — which is hell-bent on turning America into a religious state. ” This is from The Rolling Stone, written by Bradley Onishi and Mattew D. Taylor.

THE AMERICAN PUBLIC has had much to learn about Mike Johnson over the past two weeks. Until his surprise elevation to House Speaker, the Louisiana representative was an obscure, mild-mannered, and bookish four-term back-bencher. He is a former constitutional lawyer and hardly the type of political figure who jeers during a State of the Union address, or gets caught in a Beetlejuice groping scandal, or shows up on cable news to take a victory lap after ousting the leader of his own party. Johnson is focused, methodical, and up until now was happy to operate behind the scenes.

He’s also a dyed in the wool Christian conservative, and there’s a flag hanging outside his office that leads into a universe of right-wing religious extremism as unknown to most Americans as Johnson was before he ascended to the speakership.

Johnson slots firmly within the more hardline evangelical wing of the Republican coalition. He holds stringent positions on abortion, thinks homosexuality is a lifestyle choice that should not be recognized under legal protections against discrimination, defends young earth creationism, blames school shootings on the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and questions the framework of the separation of church and state. “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,” he has said.

Johnson was also integral to Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. As The New York Times has reported, he collected signatures for a brief supporting a Texas lawsuit alleging, without evidence, irregularities in election results; served a key role in the GOP’s attempts to prevent the certification of Biden’s election; and touted Trump’s conspiracy theories about election fraud, even saying, “You know the allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there’s a lot of merit to that.”
If this was all we knew about Mike Johnson, we could accurately say that he is a full-bore, right-wing Christian and an election denier who dabbles in conspiracy theories — qualities that might give one pause before putting him second in line to the presidency. But there is another angle to Johnson’s extremism that has received less scrutiny, and it brings us back to that flag outside his office.

To understand the contemporary meaning of the Appeal to Heaven flag, it’s necessary to enter a world of Christian extremism animated by modern-day apostles, prophets, and apocalyptic visions of Christian triumph that was central to the chaos and violence of January 6. Earlier this year we released an audio-documentary series, rooted in deep historical research and ethnographic interviews, on this sector of Christianity, which is known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The flag hanging outside Johnson’s office is a key part of its symbology.

Read up on NAR. They’re a frightening bunch of inquisitors who are hell-bent on turning us into their ‘Christian’ idea of the Taliban states. You can read more about them at The New Republic. Did I mention Mike Flynn is one of them?

On 20 January, 1994, a group of 120 churchgoers at Toronto Airport Vineyard Church fell to the floor in hysterical laughter, some of them barking like dogs and roaring like lions.

Randy Clark, the visiting preacher from St. Louis who sparked the outburst, proudly described them as “drunk” on the Holy Spirit. But that raucous week sparked what’s come to be known as the Toronto Blessing, a twelve-and-a-half-year revival that attracted visitors from scores of countries to a crusade that, 30 years later, has transformed into what might be the most influential force in Christianity today: the New Apostolic Reformation. And they have one clear goal in mind—ruling over the United States and, eventually, the world.

They sound perfectly insane. Am I right? If you haven’t gotten enough, try this article by The Nation. It’s written by Jeet Heer. “The Folksy Fanaticism of Mike Johnson. The new speaker of the House combines Christian nationalism and MAGA.”

Yet, if Johnson is a mystery man to the world at large, to the power brokers of the religious right his new role is no surprise. They’ve been grooming Johnson for this position for many years.

In a deeply researched article in The Washington Spectator, journalist Anne Nelson documents how Johnson’s path to power was facilitated by the Council for National Policy (CNP), an outfit founded in 1981 “by a group of right-wing fundamentalists and oil barons” that works “largely behind the scenes, to reshape America into a country that protects gun rights, counters federal regulation, favors plutocrats, and rolls back the social progress wrought by the New Deal and the Great Society.”

At a 2019 meeting of the CNP in New Orleans, Executive Director Bob McEwen singled out Johnson, expressing the group’s prophetic hope: “As we go through the success of this next election, we can then take the leadership that needs to be done. If we were to choose a person to represent our values, who would be skilled, likeable, loveable, loves his country and loves the Lord, it would be [Mike Johnson] our speaker tonight.”

Like Johnson himself, the CNP is shrouded in a protective obscurity. It doesn’t have the fame of such right-wing institutions as the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, or the Family Research Council. But the CNP gains its power by effectively networking between these institutions and elected Republicans. In particular, it was the CNP that officiated over the fateful marriage between the profane Donald Trump and the leaders of the religious rights.

As Nelson reports, in 2016 CNP strategists “rallied a thousand ‘Mega-Christian Leaders’ to New York City on behalf of Donald Trump’s struggling campaign. They had already defined the terms of the deal: the previous March, CNP Board of Governors member Leonard Leo had met with Trump to present him with a list of ultra-conservative candidates for the federal judiciary.”

Trump’s unshakable bond with the holy rollers who call themselves “Mega-Christian leaders” has puzzled many observers. After all, there has never been a major American political figure so starkly sacrilegious as Trump, so utterly bereft of any biblical knowledge (remember the “Two Corinthians” gaffe?), so purely committed to his own self-aggrandizement at the expense of any traditional values.

However, this will be interesting as Trump can read the writing on the wall in all these ballot initiatives. There’s a breach in the damn of ignorance. “The Pro-life Movement Is Fuming at Donald Trump. Should he care? Its supporters will vote for him anyway.” This is from The Atlantic. It’s reported by Elaine Godfrey.

A few weeks ago, the Texas anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson told me that he viewed Donald Trump as the Constantine of the anti-abortion movement: a man who, like the Roman emperor, had been converted to a righteous cause and become its champion.

“There are some who believe that Constantine was a sincere Christian and others who believe that he wasn’t,” Dickson said. Regardless of whether Trump is genuinely opposed to abortion rights, “he was good for Christianity and the pro-life movement.”

The Rolling Stone reports on a rally meant to make Trump Pro-life again. They’re just another bunch of suckers that Trump has thrown under the bus. Unfortuantely, he gave them a lot before we could stop him.

IN ANOTHER SIGN of the political havoc the Dobbs decision continues to wreak on the Republican party, protesters upset over Donald Trump’s stance on abortion gathered outside the former president’s rally in South Florida on Wednesday.

They weren’t pro-choice, though — they were anti-abortion activists upset that Trump, the one person most directly responsible for the end of Roe v. Wade, is in their view, caving on abortion.

In recent months, Trump has privately bemoaned the fact that the GOP is “getting killed on abortion” — even as he seeks to shore up support from the anti-abortion groups and religious figures who helped secure his victory in 2016.

A dozen members of the anti-abortion political action group Students for Life, which endorsed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, gathered outside the president’s rally in Hialeah on Wednesday holding signs that read “Make Trump Pro-Life Again.”

“We’re out here to send a message not only to Trump, but to the whole GOP party that we want our candidates to be unapologetically and fundamentally pro-life,” said Mary-Logan Miske, a campus organizer with Students for Life. Over the past year, Trump had failed that test, in her view. “He blamed pro-lifers for the loss of our midterms. He said that this issue, [abortion], isn’t a federal issue. And his latest thing was he basically said that DeSantis passing a heartbeat bill was a terrible, terrible thing.”

But don’t forget Ayatollah Mike! This is from The Guardian. ‘”Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House, is a gender extremist.Gender conservatism does not tend to attract as much notice as the other pillars of the far-right ideology, but it is central to the Republican ideology ” This is written by Moira Donegan. And hands off my pants Mickie!

But the picture that has emerged instead of the once-obscure Louisiana congressmen has not been that of the typically cynical climber, maneuvering corporate heights in pursuit of their own ambition without regard to ethics. Instead, the revelations that have emerged about Mike Johnson since his ascent to the speakership paint a picture of a fevered zealot: in thrall of baroque and morbid religious fantasies; beholden to a regressive, bigoted and morbid worldview; and above all, obsessed – with a lurid and creepy enthusiasm – with sex, and how he thinks it should be done.

The enforcement of a Christian sexual morality and a strict gender hierarchy of men over women have not been incidental or minor themes of Johnson’s career: they have been its primary goal, one he pursued doggedly through his pre-congressional life. As a lawyer, he worked against gay marriage, and to uphold Louisiana’s criminal ban on gay sex, writing briefs that described homosexuality as “inherently unnatural” and “a dangerous lifestyle” which he compared to pedophilia and bestiality. He still opposes marriage equality, and led efforts to squash the speakership candidacy of Tom Emmer last month in part because of Emmer’s support for gay marriage rights. Along the way, Johnson has authored a national version of Florida’s so-called “don’t say gay” bill, which would outlaw mentions of homosexuality at schools, hospitals and other federally funded facilities. He opposes access to transition-related healthcare for adolescents and adults alike, and both he and his wife have worked to advance so-called “conversion therapy”, an abusive, homophobic practice that has been outlawed in several states.

It probably goes without saying that Johnson, like many Republicans and nearly all of the party’s luminaries, favors a national ban on abortion, which he calls a “holocaust.” While more savvy Republicans like Glenn Youngkin have attempted to frame themselves as “moderates” by placing their preferred abortion bans at supposedly more amenable points in pregnancy, like 15 weeks, Johnson has made no such effort: he has sponsored legislation that would ban abortion nationwide at all stages of pregnancy, establishing a “right to life” for fertilized eggs that supersedes women’s rights to dignity and self-determination.

His sweeping antagonism to abortion rights has extended to several kinds of birth control, such as IUDs, implants and many birth control pills. In his career as a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom – a rightwing legal shop spearheading efforts to advance Christian gender conservatism through litigation – he argued that the most popular kinds of hormonal birth control, and those that are controlled by women, are equivalent to abortion and should therefore be banned. When the House advanced a bill to codify the right to contraception after the US supreme court’s Dobbs ruling in 2022, Johnson voted against it. He has since played dumb on the issue, claiming he does not remember his opposition to birth control in an interview with Shannon Bream of Fox News.

Johnson says that women’s freedom to leave marriages, along with their freedom to elect out of motherhood when they choose, is responsible for mass shootings

In light of his aggressively misogynist and anti-gay views on public policy, it is likely not surprising that Johnson also advances a disturbing and sexist view of the private sphere. He has condemned no-fault divorce, the liberalized regime of divorce law that was won by feminists in the 20th century, and which allowed women to initiate divorce and to exit marriages without having to prove either infidelity or abuse to a court. Johnson says that women’s freedom to leave marriages, along with their freedom to elect out of motherhood when they choose, is responsible for mass shootings.

We will get rid of your theocratic nonsense one ballot initiatve at a time if need be! Boo fucking who you fascists assholes! (I’m channelling my inner JJ!)

So, this is getting to be a high stakes election year with high stakes high jinx. Hang in there! We’re here for each other! VOTE BLUE!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today!

Thursday Reads: Election Aftermath

Posted: November 10, 2022 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2022 Elections, Afternoon Reads, Donald Trump | Tags: "red wave", abortion rights, Joe Biden | 22 Comments

The Yellow Cow, Franz Marc

Good Afternoon!!

I’ve been sitting here for awhile with my laptop open, staring into space; and I just realized that I’m kind of in a daze after the past few days.

Election day was much better for Democrats than I expected, even though I had read convincing arguments from Democratic polling experts Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier that they could do well. I actually included their predictions in my election day Tuesday post via a piece by Rosenberg.

My worst fears didn’t materialize, and that’s great; but we’re still in a kind of limbo waiting for results in Arizona and Nevada. It will also be a long time before California counts all the votes, so we may not know who controls the House for some time. In the Senate, we may not know until the December 6 Georgia runoff.

One thing we do know for sure is that abortion rights was an extremely important issue for voters in many states.

The New York Times: ‘My Main, Core Issue’: Abortion Was the Driving Force for Many Voters.

It was a driving force for a retired banker in San Antonio, an artist in Racine, Wis., an event planner in Miami Beach. It motivated college students and retirees, men and especially women. Even those who might usually skip a midterm election had been compelled to make time to cast a ballot.

Across the nation, voters felt an obligation to weigh in on what, for many, was a vital matter: abortion rights.

“Abortion was my main, core issue,” said Urica Carver, 41, a registered Republican from Scranton, Pa.

A single mother of six children, Ms. Carver, a caseworker for the state, said she would have most likely supported Republicans in the midterms. But the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade this summer magnified an issue that outweighed all others, she said. Abortion, she said, was a personal decision, and she would want her own daughters to have the option if needed.

Ms. Carver voted a straight Democratic ticket. “If they didn’t support that right, regardless of who they were,” she said, “they were not getting my vote.”

Two Poodles, Pierre Bonnard

Abortion played a larger role in midterm election results than even many Democrats, who had made it central to their campaigns, expected. Pre-election polls had shown Americans fixated on inflation and crime, with abortion still a concern but not as much of a priority.

Those opposed to abortion rights also said the issue moved them to vote. But in states with ballot initiatives that could affect abortion access, the issue drew more people who supported abortion rights, or did not want more restrictions.

In all five states where abortion-related questions were on the ballot on Tuesday, voters chose to protect access to the procedure or reject further limits. And in some places where the future of abortion rights were uncertain, Democratic candidates who campaigned on the issue fared well — particularly in Michigan, where voters re-elected the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and in Pennsylvania, where the Democrat Josh Shapiro won the governorship and the Democrat John Fetterman won the Senate race.

Read the rest at the NYT.

John Hendrikson at The Atlantic: How Abortion Defined the 2022 Midterms. Where Dr. Oz stumbled, John Fetterman only had to say Roe v. Wade. And so it went across the nation.

In red and blue states alike, reproductive autonomy proved a defining issue of the 2022 midterms. Although much preelection punditry predicted that the Pennsylvania Democratic nominee John Fetterman’s post-stroke verbal disfluency was poised to “blow up” the pivotal Senate race on Election Day, the exit polls suggest that abortion seismically affected contests up and down the ballot.

Concerns over the future of reproductive rights unequivocally drove Democratic turnout and will now lead to the rewriting of state laws around the country. In deep-red Kentucky, voters rejected an amendment that read, “Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.” In blue havens such as California and Vermont, voters approved ballot initiatives enshrining abortion rights into their state constitutions.

In Michigan, a traditionally blue state that in recent years has turned more purple, voters likewise enshrined reproductive protections into law, with 45 percent of exit-poll respondents calling abortion the most important issue on the ballot. In the race for the Michigan statehouse, the incumbent Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, trounced her Republican challenger, Tudor Dixon, who had said that she supports abortion only in instances that would save the life of the woman, and never in the case of rape or incest. Dixon lost by more than 10 percentage points and almost half a million votes.

After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision ended the federal right to abortion in June, many observers wondered whether pro-abortion-rights Democrats would remain paralyzed with despair or whether their anger would become a galvanizing force going into the election season. The answer is now clear—though, in fact, it has been for some time.

In August, just six weeks after Dobbs, Kansas voters rejected an amendment to the state constitution that could have ushered in a ban on abortion. That grassroots-movement defeat of the ballot initiative was a genuine shocker—and it showed voters in other states what was possible at the local level.

William James Webbe, The White Owl, ‘Alone and warming his five wits, The white owl in the belfry sits,’ signed with monogram and dated ‘1856’

Right leaning Axios reports that anti-abortion groups think the problem is that Republicans distanced themselves from the abortion issues: Republicans’ abortion silence backfires in midterms, by Oriana Gonzalez.

The blame game has begun around what led to Republicans’ disappointing results in the midterms, with some outside groups zeroing in on the party’s lack of an abortion message.

Driving the news: Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a large anti-abortion organization with close ties to GOP leaders, slammed Republican candidates who distanced themselves from abortion bans and failed to clearly communicate their stance on the issue, calling it “political malpractice.”

The group said in a memo that to “win in competitive races,” candidates needed to focus on defining their opponents as “abortion extremists” and “contrast that with a clearly defined pro-life position centered around consensus such as pain-capable or heartbeat limits.” [….]

They specifically praised Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Ron DeSantis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Sen.-elect J.D. Vance of Ohio, and Georgia Senate hopeful Herschel Walker, whose closely watched race is headed for a runoff.

Yeah, no. I don’t think that would have worked. The candidates who did talk about it mostly didn’t do well.

More points of view on what kept the anticipated “red wave” from happening

Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: The red wave that wasn’t.

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the results of the 2022 midterms were still uncertain. Control of both the House and the Senate remained up for grabs; the latter may ultimately be determined by a run-off in Georgia in December.

We do know one thing though. Joe Biden has had the most successful midterm of any president in 20 years. The Democrats in disarray narrative looks a lot more like Republicans in disarray. The American people, it turns out, did care about inflation. But they cared about democracy too….

The Democrats currently have 50 seats in the Senate and a narrow majority of 224-213 in the House. Holding that, or losing a handful of seats in the House, may not seem like an impressive outcome. Usually, though, the president’s party gets clobbered in the midterms. Donald Trump in the 2018 midterms lost 40 seats in the House. Barack Obama lost a whopping 63 seats in 2010. In comparison, his 13 seat loss in 2014 seems relatively mild, even though it shifted control to the Republicans again. George W. Bush lost 31 seats in his 2006 midterm.

You have to go back to the 2002 midterm, in the rally around the flag aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, to find a midterm in which the president’s party made any gains. The Republicans that year picked up eight seats, solidifying their hold on the House. Before that, the president’s party lost control of the House in every other midterm election since 1978.

Biden’s achievement — even if he ends up losing a handful of House seats — is all the more remarkable because his popularity remains in the doldrums. Poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight has his approval at around 41.4 percent. That’s lower than Trump’s (42.2 percent) and or Obama’s (44.8 percent) at the same point in their presidencies, when they experienced catastrophic losses.

Biden’s low approval ratings and high inflation nationally led many pundits to believe that there would be a red wave in line with most midterms. Pundits said that New York governor Kathy Hochul could be in danger of losing her blue state to challenger Lee Zeldin. Analysts also suggested Democrats could lose a Rhode Island House seat they’d held since 1991, as Republican Allen Fung looked prepared to unseat Democrat Seth Magaziner. Colorado Democratic Senator Michale Bennett was supposed to be in trouble. So was Washington state’s senator Patty Murray.

Oops! The media’s favorite meme, “Dems in disarray,” might need revisions. Read more at Public Notice.

Cows, by Vincent Van Gogh

This is a “guest essay” at The New York Times by Sohrab Ahmari: Why the Red Wave Didn’t Materialize. Ahmari thinks the Republicans’ failure to help or even empathize with working class Americans explains their electoral losses.

A week before the midterms, a video circulated online of a Starbucks barista crying while explaining the need for a union: “I’m a full-time student. I get scheduled for 25 hours a week, and on weekends they schedule me the entire day — open to close.” The manager is bad, the staffing is inadequate and the stress is overwhelming.

The video should have elicited sympathy from anyone familiar with the lousy wages and grinding conditions that characterize today’s service economy. That was not, though, the response of the full spectrum of conservative media and personalities, from Fox News to The Daily Wire to Sebastian Gorka.

“Boo Hoo!” replied Media Research Center TV, a conservative media site. “This ‘person’” — the barista happens to be transgender, hence, I suppose, the scare quotes around “person” — “was in tears because they had to work eight hours a day on the weekend.”

Episodes like this may be one reason the red wave didn’t materialize, why Republicans failed to usher in a new dawn of prosperity for the multiracial working class that Republican leaders from Senator Ted Cruz to the House policy honcho Jim Banks say they want to champion. When it came down to it, the Republican Party offered ordinary American workers little that might have bolstered their power or leveled the economic playing field. That failure helped dash conservative hopes for a clean Republican sweep.

	JJ Lopez aka Minkoff… on Sunday Mother’s Day: Aurora…
	JJ Lopez aka Minkoff… on Sunday Mother’s Day: Aurora…
	Anonymous on Sunday Mother’s Day: Aurora…
	JJ Lopez aka Minkoff… on Sunday Mother’s Day: Aurora…
	JJ Lopez aka Minkoff… on Sunday Mother’s Day: Aurora…
	JJ Lopez aka Minkoff… on Sunday Mother’s Day: Aurora…
	JJ Lopez aka Minkoff… on Sunday Mother’s Day: Aurora…

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