“Crappy New Year!” John Buss, @johnbuss.bsky.social
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
It’s only 3 days into 2025. It feels a lot longer. I’m exhausted. It’s difficult to wake up one day and be asked by the FaceBook AI to mark yourself safe from the Attack on New Orleans. It was good that I hadn’t sipped that hot tea yet because buying a new computer was way out of my budget. Yesterday, my news feed was flooded with notifications from friends and neighbors marking themselves safe. It was surreal. All I see everywhere is Attack on Bourbon. We even have one of those newsroom theme songs.
The 2025 chaos has already started. They held the Sugar Bowl at a heavily fortified Super Dome. Bourbon Street reopened with several of the city’s preachers leading a second line. People went back to work because even if you do work you’re desperate from the affordable housing shortage plaguing the entire country. We’re still stunned and tired.
People got to see our lousy governor and our very drunk Senator while the New Orleans leader contingent paid second and third fiddles and was blamed for not doing what they’ve been doing for decades superbly. The presser included a drunk Senator John Neely Kennedy spitting tobacco into a red plastic cup while looking like he’d been drinking still. He shoved the FBI Special Agent–a black woman–away from the microphone where she was answering a reporter’s question. Social Media is not treating him kindly and righteously so.
That said, during times of crisis, it’s our local, state, and national leaders who are expected to act with prudence and do their best to avoid placing personal grievances and their egos above what’s best for the citizens who elected them to serve.
That’s not what we saw from Louisiana Senator John Kennedy yesterday.
The press conference, where the bodies of the victims were still lying on Bourbon Street, was not the time to make cheap political points by taking shots at the director of Homeland Security or the media.
Senator, I know you. I know you’re better than that. You’re smarter than that. Act better than that because it embarrasses our state and our city.
Again, I know you. And that comedic rooster act yesterday isn’t who you are.
You’re a U.S. senator, for the love of God. Act like it because calling for unity while making cheap political points at a press conference is nothing other than contradictory.
If you disagree, call in, please, because I’d love to talk to you about it. As I understand it, we tried to get you on yesterday, but you refused. You didn’t have time to come on WWL—the official emergency management station of New Orleans—but did have time to go on Fox and spread misinformation, like claiming the federal government doesn’t have, or will care to provide, the necessary resources to investigate and deal with this horrific attack.
Senator, do yourself and the state of favor: resign your damn seat and let another Republican take over—someone who won’t do a Foghorn Leghorn impersonation and make a mockery of themself during one of the darkest moments in their state’s history.
Just so you can see that Kennedy’s Schtick isn’t real, these clips compiled by Ron FilipKowski will show the difference between the Senator when he was the State Treasurer and now. He’s really not that stupid. Kennedy graduated from Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia School of Law before attending Oxford University. He just plays stupid for the state’s swamp billies and KKK remenents.
I made this montage of clips of LA Sen John Kennedy. The old clips are when Kennedy was a Democrat and was Treasurer for LA. The new clips are after he switched parties to Republican. Check the difference.
I’m always left with the big question of why it is that suicidal cis men can’t commit suicide without taking a contingent of innocents and law enforcement folks with them. They must be deluded into thinking they have the last word. It’s the ultimate Act of ManSplaining.
The entire MAGA contingent and their propaganda media whores are still suggesting that this American who served in the U.S. Army and was the Son of Americans was somehow a border-crossing invader instead of a man who just couldn’t deal with the challenges of modern life in American and found purpose in radicalizing his religion to the detriment of the world.
Then, we got the Tesla bomber. A Green Beret on leave making some kind of statement while wiring a Tesla to burn in front of a Trump Property. At least he shot himself, and no one else got killed in whatever statement he was trying to make on the way out the earthly door. The more we learn about him, the more I want to stay indoors and away from people I haven’t known for a long time. This is from the Daily Beast. “Suspected Las Vegas Cybertruck Bomber Was a ‘Big’ Trump Supporter: Source. Sources say, Matthew Livelsberger, a Green Beret who enlisted in the U.S. Army as a teenager, was a fan of the president-elect.” I’m waiting for a J6 “rally” and a Charlottesville march with very “decent people on both sides” now. It’s deja vu all over again.
The man suspected of being behind Tesla Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas was a “big” supporter of Donald Trump and voted for him in November, a senior law enforcement official tells the Daily Beast.
That revelation came from an interview between Matthew Livelsberger’s loved ones and investigators, the source said. His family added that they believed the 37-year-old Green Beret, who died in Wednesday’s blast outside Trump International Hotel, had Republican leanings.
The revelation tracks with old Facebook comments and what Livelsberger’s uncle, Dean, told The Independent about his nephew’s politics on Thursday.
“He loved Trump, and he was always a very, very patriotic soldier, a patriotic American,” Dean said. “It’s one of the reasons he was in Special Forces for so many years.”
Records in El Paso County, Colo., indicate that he registered in 2020 with the No Labels party, which supports centrist “commonsense” candidates, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. The same email Livelsberger used to sign up for LinkedIn was listed in a data breach last year that revealed he had an account on the far-right news website The Post Millennial.
Much remains unknown about what allegedly drove Livelsberger to rent a Cybertruck in his hometown of Colorado Springs and drive it to Trump’s Las Vegas property.
The truck was filled with explosives and, perhaps miraculously, only injured seven when it burst into flames just steps from the hotel’s front lobby. Livelsberger was the only fatality in the blast.
These two stories completely ran this one off of the news for days. This is from People Magazine. “10 People Injured After Multiple Males Fired Over 30 Shots in N.Y.C. Nightclub Shooting. “Let me start by saying that there’s zero tolerance for these senseless shootings,” NYPD Chief Philip Rivera said at a press conference.” Notice a trend here?
Police say the venue was at capacity with 90 people inside at the time of the incident, therefore a line of about 15 people formed outside. The venue is named Amazura, according to ABC7, The Guardian and FOX5.
“Three to four males then opened fire over 30 times in the direction of the group standing outside the event space, striking multiple victims,” Rivera said.
The suspects fled the scene and were seen getting into a Sedan with out-of-state license plates, according to authorities.
Police noted that out of the 10 victims, six were females and four were male.
All victims were taken to nearby hospitals and “are expected to recover with non-life-threatening injuries,” per the NYPD.
Rivera encouraged people to speak up if they have any information about the crime, saying, “The public has been very instrumental in the recent weeks to help us capture dangerous individuals like these four men.”
Police are investigating the cause of the crime, though Rivera said it was “not a terrorist attack.”
ABC7 reports that the gathering was to celebrate the birthday of Tae’arion Mungo, a 16-year-old who was fatally shot in Brooklyn in October 2024.
The Republican House Speaker Brawl is headed to new lows this month. President Eject Incontinentia’s buttocks are lobbying Republicans to support Moses on the Bayou. John Thune is now the Senate Majority Leader. It will be an interesting few years with these razor-thin Republican majorities and a fairly united Democratic Party. This is from AXIOS and the analysis is by Andrew Solendar. “House GOP tensions erupt ahead of speaker vote.”
House Republicans’ chronic infighting is resurfacing in spectacular fashion in the run-up to Friday’s vote to elect a speaker of the House.
Why it matters: Right-wing hardliners and allies of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) are at each others’ throats in a likely preview of what is to come in the next two years.
Johnson is struggling to secure the support he needs to retain his gavel, with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) digging in in opposition and claiming to reporters several of his colleagues will join him in voting no.
With a 219-215 majority and Democrats firmly behind House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Johnson will likely not be able to afford multiple GOP defections.
A number of House Republicans, mostly members of the right-wing Freedom Caucus, still refuse to commit to voting for Johnson.
Driving the news: Johnson’s skeptics are circulating an unsigned memo, a copy of which was obtained by Axios, outlining his “4 ‘successes’ and 26 ‘fails’ for House Republicans” since taking office in November 2023.
The document homes in on the government spending bill Johnson shepherded through Congress last month along bipartisan lines.
It also takes aim at Johnson for not pushing harder for spending cuts, passing aid to Ukraine and reauthorizing FISA.
“The House must be organized to deliver on the historic mandate granted to President Trump and Republicans. It currently is not,” the memo says.
The other side: Johnson allies are growing increasingly frustrated with their right-wing colleagues.
“Anybody who’s voting against the speaker to try to get personal favors or to try to get publicity needs to rethink why they’re in Congress,” fumed Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.).
Another House Republican, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Axios there is “a very small group within our party who are trying to extract something, not for the country … but for themselves.”
At least Matt Gaetz is gone. Punchbowl News has information on what’s going on today as the House changes hands. “Johnson’s jam: It’s a new Congress but the same problems.*
Legislative business starts today at 11 a.m. with the closing of the 118th Congress. The new Congress begins at noon with the quorum call and the vote to elect a speaker.
And the 119th Congress will kick off with drama. Speaker Mike Johnson is facing an alarming revolt from conservative hardliners. Does this sound familiar? President-elect Donald Trump hasbeenlobbying Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) on Johnson’s behalf, as we scooped for you on Thursday. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a frequent Johnson critic, is backing him. But this may not be enough.
Johnson has a tenuous single-digit majority, while a dozen hardliners have publicly questioned whether he deserves to remain speaker.
Let’s be clear: It’s entirely possible that Johnson could lose the speakership today or this weekend, or that the balloting goes more than one round.
The latest. Johnson spent Thursday making phone calls and holding meetings in his Capitol office in a bid to shore up his vote count. Johnson met with members of the House Freedom Caucus, including Roy and GOP Reps. Ralph Norman (S.C.) and Victoria Spartz (Ind.), both of whom are still publicly undecided on whether they’ll back the Louisiana Republican again.
During the meeting, hardliners aired various grievances about Johnson while laying out a number of process reforms they want enacted. These include assurances on spending cuts, pay-fors and the use of the so-called suspension calendar, among other things. Johnson told reporters he’s “open” to some of these ideas.
Yet the most controversial topic discussed by far was whether Johnson should appoint Roy as chair of the Rules Committee. This has been one of the asks from some of the Freedom Caucus holdouts, we’re told by multiple sources. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) even raised it publicly in an interview on OANN. We wrote about the Roy-for-Rules-Committee-chair push Thursday morning.
But GOP leadership sources insist Johnson isn’t considering making Roy the Rules chair.
Roy has been a huge problem for Johnson and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy since he was added to the Rules panel, which controls what legislation gets on the floor and how it’s considered. Making Roy the chair would be an incredibly risky move for Johnson. It would give Roy gigantic sway over what gets to the floor and spur a backlash from moderates.
Roy was tight-lipped leaving the speaker’s office Thursday, as were other holdouts. The conservatives said they expect to speak with Johnson again before the roll-call vote today. Johnson, however,insisted on multiple occasions Thursday he’d win on the first ballot.
Remember this — for every inch Johnson yields to conservatives, he risks losing trust with the middle of the conference.
The team of reporters outlines three possible outcomes from today’s mess. One includes Sleazy Steve Scalise, which always makes me gag. This is the horse race analysis from The Washington Postteam. I chose my favorite part.
What might a delay in choosing a speaker mean for Trump’s agenda?
If there’s no speaker by Jan. 6, the House not only risks delaying the certification of the 2024 election — which is scheduled to happen on that day — but also delaying the implementation of Trump’s agenda. The incoming administration wants the GOP-led Congress to quickly pass policies addressing border security and energy-related reforms before working on reauthorizing Trump’s 2017 tax law.
I’m exhausted and plan to use my last few days without student obligations, being lazy. I hope everything is going well for you and yours!
I’ll see you on the Dark Side of the Moon.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Welcome to the return of this century’s lunatic. We need a recut of this with a new slide show. This one shows Reagan, Saddam, and a bunch of the end of last century’s lunatics.
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“There ya go, that explains it! Trump is in serious decline.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
This week has been rather mind-blowing for me. First, I watched Former Congresswoman Liz Cheney stand beside Vice President Kamala Harris and heartily endorse her. The number of top Republicans going out of their way to stop DonOld is really heartening. The utter destruction left in the path of Hurricane Helene was beyond the warzone feeling I saw when I finally got to return home to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I can only imagine what’s in store for us in the future if we don’t speed up policy and action on Climate Change. Then, there’s the kind of shock only practitioners of the Dismal Science could feel. “U.S. Hiring Accelerated in September, Blowing Past Expectations” is a headline in today’s Wall Street Journal. Our economy is so good we’ve booted the once-assumed takeover of the title of the largest economy in the world by China. It has been moved farther into the future if ever.
The U.S. labor market strengthened in the weeks before Election Day, as job growth accelerated in September and the unemployment rate ticked lower.
Employers added 254,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday. That was significantly more than the 150,000 economists expected, and marked the largest monthly increase since March. The unemployment rate slipped to 4.1%.
Friday’s bumper payrolls report is likely to close the door on another half-percentage-point rate cut by the Federal Reserve at its next meeting in November. It should keep officials on track to lower rates by a quarter point.
The Fed is trying to engineer what is called a soft landing, in which inflation moves down without major deterioration in the labor market. Though Friday is just one data point, it suggests that the U.S. is headed in that direction.
“It puts another set of wheels under the plane in terms of assuring a soft landing,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon.
Friday’s report also signaled that hiring this summer wasn’t as weak as initially thought. Revised figures show employers added 72,000 more jobs in July and August combined than earlier reported.
The latest snapshot of the labor market’s health comes just a month before the U.S. presidential election, where the economy and inflation are key issues for voters. The strong jobs report could help Vice President Kamala Harris. In polls, she trails former President Donald Trump on the economy.
Stocks ticked higher. During much of the inflationary post-Covid-19 boom, stocks often quaked temporarily at stronger-than-expected economic data, because traders took such shocks as a sign that the Fed would tighten monetary policy more aggressively. Investors’ positive reaction Friday showed that they view good news as good news again—even if futures contracts tied to the federal-funds rate suggest traders are now expecting a slower pace of Fed easing.
Employers added jobs at bars and restaurants and construction, as well as in sectors that are less sensitive to the economy’s ups and downs like government, education and healthcare.
There were a few weak spots. Employers modestly cut head count in manufacturing, transportation and warehousing, and temporary help services.
Analysts also said that although September’s jobs report was unexpectedly strong, other economic data point to a slightly less robust hiring picture. Labor Department data released earlier this week showed that the share of workers quitting their jobs each month fell to its lowest rate in more than four years in August, a sign people are more hesitant about leaving their current roles for new ones.
Liz Cheney described the Republican Party as being the MAGA Party. Those left in the MAGA party are living in lies, bigotry, and a world of active sabotage of the truth and of the country. In one of the most callous moves I’ve seen in Congress, Speaker Johnson refuses to call the House back into session to provide the funding needed for FEMA. He wants it to wait until November 12. He’s wandering around Florida today.
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday that a congressional emergency spending decision in response to Hurricane Helene “will probably correspond when Congress is expected to return to session.”
Congress will be on recess for more than a month, and is set to return to session on Nov. 12. Johnson seemed to rule out a return before then, although President Joe Biden indicated this week that he may ask Congress to convene before the break’s scheduled end.
“Right before we left on Wednesday, a week ago, Congress appropriated $20 billion to FEMA to cover the immediate aftermath of the storm,” Johnson said in Steinhatchee Thursday. “Of course, we knew it was headed into the coast at that time, so FEMA has the funding that needs to respond immediately. We’re glad to see them on the ground here.”
Johnson said damage assessments must be complete before Congress can update the disaster budget.
“It will take some time to tabulate this storm — it’s one of the biggest in our history,” Johnson said. “So, a lot of that work’s being done immediately, and I think the timing of that will probably correspond when Congress is expected to return to session right after the election, and so we’ll be on that.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the Federal Emergency Management Agency lacks enough funding to last through hurricane season, which ends Nov. 30.
Johnson appeared with Florida U.S. Reps. Kat Cammack and Neal Dunn at Roy’s Restaurant, which was ravaged by Helene.
The speaker of the House said that funding further disaster response will be bipartisan.
“There’ll be an appropriate amount requested to Congress, and we’ll have to dig deep and find a way to do that,” he said.
Johnson assured that Congress “will do what’s necessary to make sure that Americans are taken care of.”
What’s most impressive is to see just precisely who 175 Republicans are that voted against the aid. And, yes, it’s basically to make the Biden/Harris Administration look bad so DonOld can rant and make people forget his lousy response to disasters when he occupied the White House. This is from Newsweek. “Full List of Republicans Who Voted Against FEMA Funding Before Helene Hit,” written by Khaleda Rahman.
As Hurricane Helene careened toward Florida’s Panhandle, numerous Republicans voted against extending funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Last week, Congress approved $20 billion for FEMA’s disaster relief fund as part of a stopgap spending bill to fund the government through December 20. But the measure left out billions of dollars in requested supplemental disaster funding.
The Senate approved the measure by a 78-18 vote on September 25 after it passed the House in a 341-82 vote. Republicans supplied the no votes in both chambers.
Some of the Republicans who voted against the bill represent states that have been hard hit by Helene, including Florida Representative Matt Gaetz.
Some Republicans railed against FEMA funding being allocated for assisting migrants after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters on Wednesday that FEMA will run out of money before the hurricane season is over. The agency is facing a multibillion-dollar deficit, even after imposing new spending restrictions.
The New Republichas released a “Transcript: Trump’s Unhinged Handling of Disasters Revealed By Insider. An interview with Olivia Troye, a top homeland security official in the Trump administration, about how badly Trump politicized disaster response as president—as seen from the inside.” Former Republican Women are not holding back on what a disaster DonOld was. This is from Greg Sargent’s podcast, The Daily Blast.
Sargent: OK, let’s start here. The other day after Trump started pushing that lie that disaster relief is being denied to Republicans, you did a tweet that got some attention. It said this, “As a Homeland Security Advisor in the Trump White House, I witnessed firsthand how Donald Trump politicized disaster relief, leaving devastated Americans waiting for help. Leaders across the country & government were calling my office, desperate for action as Trump failed them in moments of crisis.” Can you expand on that for us?
Troye: I have a lot of memories of working in the Trump White House where there are numerous situations where the government apparatus that does the whole disaster relief declaration process would come to a halt because the disaster declaration that needed to be signed by the president was sitting on Donald Trump’s desk. It was frustrating, as you can imagine, because we as national security officials serve for the greater good of the country. Our job is to help Americans, especially someone like me, who’s in the Homeland Security role working and advising the vice president. Our jobs are to work in response to a crisis as fast as possible and manage this. There were numerous instances where I had the head of government agencies calling me saying, Can you maybe get the vice president to weigh in on this because it’s still sitting on [Trump’s] desk and he hasn’t approved it yet.
Sargent: You were working for the vice president at the time. Can you characterize your official position?
Troye: Sure. I was Mike Pence’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor. In that role, I covered any crisis, global breaking news event that was related to whether it was global terrorism. On the Homeland space, I covered anything that was mass shootings, disaster relief like natural disasters like flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes. Anything that was a crisis domestically here that was related to the security and safety of Americansfall under me.
Sargent: All right. Just to be clear, what you just told us is that you had leaders who were trying to deal with disasters, whether in federal agencies or at the level of states or whatever, call you and try to get you to move stuff along that was being held up by the president of the United States, Donald Trump. They would try to get action by coming to you and working through the vice president. Is that what you’re telling us?
Troye: Yeah. There were numerous times when it was the secretary of DHS or the head of FEMA or even internally in the National Security Council process with the senior director we worked very closely on this effort. At times when they felt like it was stalled because Donald Trump was sitting on it or somebody had gotten to him, someone in OMB, one of whom was disagreeing with whatever was happening, depending on what state it was, they would come to me and say, We cannot get this moved forward, the people in this state are hurting right now, what can you do to help us?
I can think of a time when even Mike Pence was flying out. I believe he was flying to California and he called me. They called me from Air Force Two and said, Where is the disaster declaration? We still haven’t seen it. And I said, Well, sir, it’s sitting on the president’s desk, I can follow up on it. And he said, Please do that. I remember walking over to the West Wing and sitting outside the Oval Office saying the vice president would like to know what the status is on the disaster declaration, he would really like to get this moved along, we’ve been sitting on it for three days.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates pushed back on what he called “lies” shared by some Republican figures regarding the Hurricane Helene response.
In a new memo shared today, Bates said: “Some Republican leaders — and their partners in right wing media — are using Hurricane Helene to lie and divide us.”
“Their latest missive: baselessly claiming that FEMA is out of money to respond to Hurricane Helene — because of an existing program that supports cities and towns that are sheltering migrants. … This is FALSE,” Bates wrote.
“No disaster relief funding at all was used to support migrants housing and services. None. At. All,” he continued.
Trump echoed that false theory at a rally in Michigan yesterday, saying, “They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank so they could give it to illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.”
Bates clarified that funding for communities to support migrants is appropriated by Congress to U.S. Customs and Border Protection and is merely administered by FEMA, and the funding isn’t related to FEMA’s response and recovery efforts.
“FEMA has the funds it needs for immediate response and recovery efforts for Hurricane Helene. In fact, FEMA has been able to provide over $45 million in direct financial assistance to individuals and families affected by Hurricane Helene, including over $17 million to those recovering and rebuilding in North Carolina,” Bates added.
I also wanted to point out that Republicans are still plotting ways to overturn the election. In the middle of all of this, is the sentencing of Tina Peters. Watch this on CNN where Jim Acosta shows the incredible number of voters that still believe Trump won the 2024. Check this sentencing hearing. This Judge rocks.
Former Colorado clerk Tina Peters, the first local election official to be charged with a security breach after the 2020 election as unfounded conspiracy theories swirled, was found guilty by a jury on most charges Monday.
Peters, a one-time hero to election deniers, was accused of using someone else’s security badge to give an expert affiliated with My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell access to the Mesa County election system and deceiving other officials about that person’s identity.
Lindell is a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from Donald Trump. His online broadcasting site has been showing a livestream of Peters’ trial and sending out daily email updates, sometimes asking for prayers for Peters and including statements from her.
Prosecutors said Peters was seeking fame and became “fixated” on voting problems after becoming involved with those who had questioned the accuracy of the 2020 presidential election results.
The breach Peters was charged of orchestrating heightened concerns over potential insider threats, in which rogue election workers sympathetic to partisan lies could use their access and knowledge to launch an attack from within.
A 64-year-old white man in Springfield, Ohio, was accused of illegally hunting geese at a golf course pond as former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, were spreading racist lies that Haitian immigrants in the area were eating geese and people’s pets.
Brian Comer was charged with a misdemeanor in connection with the Sept. 10 incident. According to an arrest affidavit obtained by HuffPost, a golfer at Rocky Lakes Golf Course in Springfield reported seeing a Canada goose floating in a pond and Comer using a shotgun to shoot another bird.
Comer didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from HuffPost, but court records show he entered a guilty plea. A court spokesperson told HuffPost he paid $200 to cover a fine and court fees.
Journalist Steven Monacelli first posted about the arrest on Thursday on X, formerly Twitter.
Two men recognized and exploited the anti-democratic loopholes within America’s rickety democracy in order to deliver Republicans victories that they could never win at the ballot box.
Now their willfully minoritarian creations threaten the very essence of a representative democracy: if Donald Trump, rightwing courts, gerrymandered state legislatures and an extreme Republican caucus in the US House of Representatives create constitutional chaos over the certification of this presidential election, two men cleared the path.
The single-minded determination of Leonard Leo built a conservative supermajority on the US supreme court and stacked lower and state courts with Republican ideologues that have pushed the nation to the right via the least accountable branch of government.
Chris Jankowski masterminded the partisan gerrymanders that tilted state legislatures and congressional delegations across the south and the purple midwest toward extreme Republicans, ended Barack Obama’s second term before it started, and rendered elections in Wisconsin and North Carolina all but meaningless over the last decade and a half.
Leo and Jankowski understood, separately, that the courts and state legislatures were undervalued and often undefended targets for a deliberate strategy aimed at capturing important levers of power that sometimes float under the radar. They could be Moneyball-ed, to borrow the term Michael Lewis used in his book about how the Oakland A’s made an end-run around large-market teams by understanding value that their opponents overlooked.
What Leo and Jankowski built separately would soon reinforce the other’s creation (with, of course, crucial assists from chief justice John Roberts), tightening the knots around meaningful elections, pushing policy to the extreme right and making it nearly impossible for voters to do anything about it.
Leo’s relentless focus on turning the judiciary Republican, first identifying and fast-tracking conservative jurists through his various roles at the Federalist Society, then coordinating the often eight-figure efforts to secure their confirmation on the US supreme court, helped conservatives to unpopular court-imposed victories on voting rights, abortion restrictions, gun access and gutting the regulatory state that would not have been won through the political process.
As I revealed in my book Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count, Jankowski pioneered Redmap, short for the Redistricting Majority Project. That 2010 strategy, coordinated when he worked at the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), flipped state legislative chambers in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Alabama, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Indiana, Tennessee and several other states just ahead of the decennial redistricting. Then, with complete control of those processes, as well in Florida, Georgia, Texas and elsewhere, the RSLC helped draw some of the most extreme partisan gerrymanders in history, locking in huge Republican advantages in state legislatures and congressional delegations.
The supreme court’s decision in Citizens Unitedhelped make possible the $30m that funded Redmap. Redmap’s lines then proved so stout that they could hold back electoral waves. In 2012, the Republican party would easily hold the US House of Representatives even as they won 1.4m fewer votes nationwide; Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan and Wisconsin all went for Obama statewide, but the Republicans got 64 of those states’ 94 congressional seats.
Meanwhile, as Republicans drew themselves giant edges in the US House and state chambers, and packed Democrats into fewer seats they won with bigger majorities, low-turnout, base-driven Republican primaries became the key races to win, producing a new generation of lawmakers fixated on solutions for “voter fraud”.
This grim result is a US supreme court that has been captured by conservatives, which has delivered a decade of anti-democracy decisions that have advantaged the Republican party in elections, as well as an audacious plan to gerrymander Republicans into power in state legislatures nationwide and helped produce ever-more-extreme caucuses eager to adapt draconian voter restrictions in the name of stopping fraud that they cannot prove exist. The Roberts court has blessed this as well.
You better believe all these anti-democracy folks are just waiting to get Vance into the Oval Office. Trump is chaos, but Vance is single-minded, and there’s a method to his meanness. Then there is foreign interference in this election, too. The Hill reports that “Democrats suspect Netanyahu attempting to tilt Trump-Harris race.” This is written by Alexander Bolten. ( And, of course, all the end-time fundies are wild about all-out war in that area.)
Democrats increasingly suspect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics by ignoring President Biden’s calls to negotiate a peace deal in Gaza and by confronting Hezbollah and Iran weeks before the U.S. election.
The rapidly escalating confrontation between Israel, Hezbollah and Hezbollah’s ally, Iran, has undercut Biden’s efforts to achieve peace through diplomacy.
The growing threat of a broader conflict has opened the door for former President Trump to argue that the world is “spiraling out of control” on Biden’s watch.
Biden’s polling numbers with Muslim Americans continue to deteriorate amid the mounting violence in the region, which poses a serious political liability to Vice President Harris in Michigan, a must-win state for Democrats.
Trump traveled to Michigan on Thursday to speak at a rally in Saginaw.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s relationship with even the most pro-Israel Democrats has becoming increasingly confrontational.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) made headlines in March when he called Netanyahu a “major obstacle” to peace and urged Israel to hold new elections. Around that time, Biden called Israel’s offensive in Gaza “over the top.”
“I certainly worry that Prime Minister Netanyahu is watching the American election as he makes decisions about his military campaigns in the north and in Gaza,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN’s Erin Burnett in a Tuesday interview.
I continue to write these long blog reads these days. Every day reveals more weirdness and criminal activity. I would like to note that this was a headline. “Fox News host: Trump ‘resorted to crimes’ to hold on to power.” That also was one of the shocking events that happened this week.
Fox News host Neil Cavuto said Wednesday that a newly unsealed filing in the federal Jan. 6 case revealed former President Trump “resorted to crimes” to stay in office.
“It was in this newly unsealed court paper we’re learning that former President Trump resorted to crimes to cling to power after the 2020 election. We don’t know much more than that,” Cavuto said Wednesday on Fox News.
“A lot of this stuff was going to be coming out anyway. We’re going to be getting the latest on that, and a legal look at what is being revealed here and whether it’s giving us any new information, anything we don’t know. The timing of this, of course, is little more than about five weeks before the general election,” he added.
I see more October surprises on the horizon.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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Crime, including serious violent incidents like murder and rape, dropped nationally from 2022 to 2023, according to new data released by the FBI on Monday.
Violent crime was down about 3% from 2022 to 2023 and property crime took a similar drop of 2.4%, the FBI reported in its annual “Summary of Crime in the Nation.” The most serious crimes went down significantly: Murder and non-negligent manslaughter were down an estimated 11.6% — the largest single year decline in two decades — while rape decreased by an estimated 9.4%.
Preliminary numbers showed that 2024 crime numbers were also dropping for the early part of this year, continuing a trend of crime easing as America has come out of the pandemic.
The Economic Data from the U.S. is impressive. This is from The Real Economic Blog. “American outperformance in the post-pandemic global economy.” This analysis is by Joseph Brusuelas. American Economists can no longer claim to be practitioners of the dismal science during the Biden administration. Everything is going much better than expected.
One of the more underdiscussed economic developments following the shocks of the pandemic has been the United States’ outperformance compared to its peers.
This success can be traced to bold monetary and fiscal policies put in place that have hardened supply chains, bolstered energy independence and started to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure.
Since 2020 real U.S. GDP has increased 9.4% compared with:
Canada 4.9%
Italy 4.7%
EU 4%
France 3.8%
Japan 3.1%
UK 2.3%
Germany 0.3%
Perhaps more important, the U.S. is approaching what I think is a productivity boom.
If one asks how the U.S. can grow so fast even as hiring slows, the answer is productivity. With productivity increasing at 2.7% year over year, the American economy is experiencing its best gains in that area since the boom from 1995 to 2004.
That is why wages are rising above inflation, corporate earnings and profits are increasing and the U.S. continues to outperform its peers.
It’s all a result of smart decisions after the pandemic that increased supplies across the economy and encouraged long-term investments that integrate sophisticated technology into the production process.
President Joe Biden on Thursday called the Federal Reserve’s rate cut the day before an “important signal” from the Fed to Americans that inflation is cooling, but he cautioned that it “doesn’t mean the work is done” to improve the economy.
In remarks on Thursday at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., Biden said, “Yesterday was an important day for the country.”
“Two and a half years after the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates, it announced that it began lowering interest rates,” Biden said. “I think it’s good news for consumers, and that means the cost of buying a home, a car, and so much more would be going down. And it’s good news in my view, for the overall economy.”
The president in his remarks discussed how far the U.S. has come since the COVID-19 pandemic, including supply chain issues, high costs of food and goods, and baby formula shortages. He also checked through all of his legislative achievements such as the American Rescue Plan, Inflation Reduction Act, Chips and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
“At its peak, as you all know, inflation was 9.1% in the United States. Today it’s much closer to 2%,” Biden said. “It doesn’t mean our work is done. Far from it. Far from it, no one should confused why I’m here. I’m not here to take a victory lap. I’m not here to say, ‘A job well done.’ I’m not here to say ‘We don’t have a hell of a lot more work to do.’ We do have more work to do.”
“Secret Service stepping up its game on the campaign trail.” John Buss, @repeat1968
If you search the legacy media, you can find a few stories about the normalcy and improvements the Biden/Harris administration has provided our country. Ronald Reagan’s economic stewardship has been mischaracterized for years and these stories are still hanging around. I think the treatment that the press gave Reagan prepared us for the total media meltdown on Trump Coverage. Max Boot has a new book that will hopefully demonstrate it’s mostly myth,. Boot, you may recall, was a Republican Operative at the time. This is the Washington Post‘s review of his Reagan biography “Reagan: His Life and Legend.” Geoffrey Kabaservice wrote the review, and the lede states, “How Important was Reagan? Max Boot’s biography deflates the Gipper’s legacy.”
This splendid new account of the 40th president’s life shows that Reagan’s influence doesn’t loom so large 35 years after he left the White House.
Reagan’s conservatism, in Boot’s telling, was little more than a farrago of erroneous statistics, spurious quotations and incendiary claims about an ever-present communist conspiracy — many of them derived from his reading of tracts from the lunatic-right John Birch Society. Boot suggests that Reagan didn’t care about factual accuracy because he “was convinced his larger moral point was correct and that was all that mattered.” Yet Boot notes with some irritation that throughout Reagan’s career, “reporters seldom held him to account for his falsehoods,” and that on the rare occasions when they did, “they found that most readers did not care.”
To some extent such criticisms bounced off Reagan simply because reporters and the public liked him. His mastery of symbolism, largely derived from his Hollywood experience, also meant he never suffered politically for the contradictions between, for example, the traditional values he preached and his dysfunctional family life. (Reagan’s two children with his previous wife, the actress Jane Wyman, and his two children with Nancy were alienated from their emotionally detached parents as well as each other and engaged in a range of self-destructive behaviors.) As Boot perceptively observes, “The trappings of family, displayed in photographs and videos, conveyed the right image even if they were disassociated from the underlying reality.”
Reagan’s presidency likewise was more symbol than substance. Boot goes so far as to say that Reagan was “an oddly passive chief executive,” “a disengaged president who had little interest in, or aptitude for, running the federal government.”
In Boot’s telling, few of Reagan’s apparent successes owed much to Reagan himself. Several significant bipartisan bills were passed during his presidency, including a comprehensive tax overhaul and Defense Department restructuring, but “he did not take an active role in crafting any of them.” The most important economic policymaker was not the president but Paul Volcker, the chairman of the quasi-independent Federal Reserve Board — though Boot does credit Reagan for showing “considerable courage and perspicacity” in backing Volcker despite the economic costs of his anti-inflationary policies. In any case, “there was nothing particularly impressive or unusual about the Reagan economic record,” given that, according to the statistics Boot cites, annual growth in the gross domestic product during his presidency was about the same as what it had been under Richard Nixon and below the rates during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson
The worst headlines still fill today’s papers and are always about you-know-who or the candidates running with MAGA status. North Carolina Gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson is the latest in the MAGA lineage of someone who shouldn’t hold public office. The CNN headline is “Nearly all of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign staff quits after CNN report.” But the big question is, why did they go to work for him before? It’s not like he just turned into a deplorable overnight! As usual, CNN goes with normalizing MAGA behavior even when each story about them is more abnormal than the last.
Days after a CNN report about racist and sexual comments posted on a pornography forum, all but a few of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign team quit their jobs on Sunday.
A campaign news release said that four top staffers have left the campaign: Conrad Pogorzelski, general consultant and senior advisor who’s worked for Robinson since his initial 2020 lieutenant governor campaign; Chris Rodriguez, campaign manager; Heather Whillier, finance director; and Jason Rizk, deputy campaign manager.
But WUNC has confirmed that other staffers have quit as well, leaving Robinson with just three people working on his campaign — two campaign spokesmen and a bodyguard. The list of departures also include longtime director of operations Patrick Riley and political directors John Kontoulas and Jackson Lohrer.
Sunday’s news release says that new staff hires will be announced “in the coming days.” But hiring a new campaign team less than two months from Election Day will be tough for a campaign rocked by scandal.
The lengthy CNN report, published Thursday afternoon, highlights comments posted to an online pornography forum called “Nude Africa” from an user calling themselves Mark Robinson with many of his personal biographical details and an email address associated with the man who’s now the Republican nominee for governor.
The report includes a long list of sexually explicit and racist comments posted to the site between 2008 and 2012, long before Robinson entered politics as a candidate for lieutenant governor in 2020. The commenter describes himself as a “Black Nazi,” calls for the reinstatement of slavery, says he enjoys watching transgender pornography and describes a time he spied on women taking showers in a locker room.
Robinson has denied that he wrote the posts, but other Republicans have been distancing themselves from the GOP nominee for governor in recent days. President Donald Trump made no mention of Robinson during a Saturday rally in Wilmington, even as the GOP nominee for attorney general, Congressman Dan Bishop, spoke to the crowd.
Yesterday, we learned that Barron Trump—according to an insider—allegedly “slapped the sh*t” out of his nanny years ago. But apparently Barron’s behavior is far worse than that.
After one poster—who nannied for a kid who went to the same New York school as Barron after every DC school allegedly refused to take him—started dishing the dirt on the young psycho-in-training, even more stories started to come out about the youngest Trump.
“The more y’all annoy me, the more Imma keep telling the Trumps business,” original poster @WonderKing82, aka Mr. Weeks, promised Trump supporters in his replies. And boy, did he deliver. Soon after telling the story about the nanny, a few other damning details came to light, mostly about Barron’s treatment of small animals.
For Barron, the bad behavior allegedly didn’t stop with animals. He also directed his abuse at other classmates, according to Mr. Weeks.
The part about the inappropriate touching and investigation is especially disturbing. And for the people in the comments claiming that these are somehow signs of autism, that’s not only incredibly untrue, it’s irresponsible and harmful for individuals who are actually autistic. Folks on the autism spectrum don’t tend to harm animals or classmates, and it’s a little bit ridiculous that this has to be said out loud.
There are even people in the replies trying to find a way to blame Barron’s behavior on Hillary Clinton. Good luck with that!
Whatever the truth is about Barron Trump, you can be sure it will eventually come to light. For now, we’re going to keep a close eye on these disturbing, utterly believable claims.
Congressional leaders announced an agreement Sunday on a short-term spending bill that will fund federal agencies for about three months, averting a possible partial government shutdown when the new budget year begins Oct. 1 and pushing final decisions until after the November election.
Temporary spending bills generally fund agencies at current levels, but an additional $231 million was included to bolster the Secret Service after the two assassination attempts against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and additional money was added to aid with the presidential transition, among other things.
Lawmakers have struggled to get to this point as the current budget year winds to a close at month’s end. At the urging of the most conservative members of his conference, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., had linked temporary funding with a mandate that would have compelled states to require proof of citizenship when people register to vote.
But Johnson abandoned that approach to reach an agreement, even as Trump insisted there should not be a stop-gap measure without the voting requirement.
Bipartisan negotiations began in earnest shortly after that, with leadership agreeing to extend funding into mid-December. That gives the current Congress the ability to fashion a full-year spending bill after the Nov. 5 election, rather than push that responsibility to the next Congress and president.
In a letter to Republican colleagues, Johnson said the budget measure would be “very narrow, bare-bones” and include “only the extensions that are absolutely necessary.”
“While this is not the solution any of us prefer, it is the most prudent path forward under the present circumstances,” Johnson wrote. “As history has taught and current polling affirms, shutting the government down less than 40 days from a fateful election would be an act of political malpractice.”
As I said, the film leaves the impression that Lev was arrested to protect Trump during impeachment by silencing the key witness.
But that’s not why Lev went to prison (as a news clip in the movie tacitly admits).
Lev and Igor Fruman (along with David Correia and Andrey Kukushkin) were first charged on October 9, 2019, via indictment that was (according to then US Attorney for SDNY Geoffrey Berman’s memoir) drafted quickly overnight in advance of Lev and Igor’s trip to meet Dmitry Firtash in Vienna. From Berman’s memoir, I’m not 100% sure whether he pushed it because he genuinely feared they were about to flee the country, felt he had to do so before Barr intervened … or for more nefarious reasons.
The charges were:
Conspiring to make a bunch of political donations in the name of Global Energy Producers
Lying to the Federal Election Commission
Falsifying a document to the FEC
Laundering donations from Russian Andrey Muraviev to pay pro-cannabis politicians
As Bondy described, the indictment implied that Lev and Igor’s political contributions to Pete Sessions were tied to an attempt to fire Marie Yovanovitch. But that was not charged as FARA.
On September 17, 2020, the indictment was superseded. Lev and Correia’s longterm Fraud Guarantee fraud was added and the charges tied to Muraviev (who was secretly indicted that same day) were bumped up. The paragraph describing a payment to Sessions took out the reference to an Ambassador, describing it instead as to “further their political goals.” There were still no FARA charges though.
Ultimately, Lev was convicted at trial in October 2021 of the GEP and Muraviev donations, and in March 2022, pled guilty to the fraud guarantee charges. He was never charged with FARA violations.
Bondy’s insinuation that SDNY took out the foreign agent aspect to protect Rudy is wholly inconsistent with the warrants (linked below) targeting Lev and Rudy unsealed last year.
They show that the investigation into Lev, which started based on a Campaign Legal Center complaint, initially focused on campaign finance crimes. In August 2019 — after the firing of Marie Yovanovitch but before the disclosure of the Perfect Phone Call — SDNY began to turn to Foreign Agent suspicions (though one of two warrants obtained in August 2019 was not executed). After the arrest, SDNY more aggressively turned to developing the Foreign Agent prong of the investigation. On November 4, 2019, SDNY obtained warrants targeting Rudy (which were not released last year). On December 10, 2019, the Foreign Agent prong continued.
That’s when Bill Barr intervened to kill that prong of the investigation, certainly as it pertained to Rudy, as I’ll lay out below.
After that point, SDNY focused on the Fraud Guarantee fraud.
It’s not that Lev went to prison for this but Rudy did not. On the contrary, Barr worked hard to ensure no one could go to prison on such charges.
While Barr was doing that, SDNY appears to have put that investigation on ice and attempted, without success, to resuscitate once Barr was out of office.
A central reason for this is the deep polarization in American politics, particularly around Trump himself. In 2016 and 2020, he earned a bit under 50 percent of the vote, about where he is in most recent polls. The shift from Biden to Harris helped firm up the Democratic electorate, which may be crucially important in who actually turns out to vote — but the race generally went from a narrow national Trump lead to a narrow Harris one. The 2024 race continues to be largely a referendum on Trump, much as the 2020 race was.
There has been one notable difference this year, though. While Trump’s 2016 campaign was unabashedly indifferent to policy specifics and his 2020 campaign centered on his incumbency, his 2024 effort has often — largely through the energies of his boosters — been presented as a campaign centered on the policies he seeks to implement.
It’s an unexpected argument, but a common one. You will often hear that Trump has an advantage on policy; that, if the campaign set aside all of the fluff of personal emotion, Trump would prevail simply by virtue of the popularity of his positions. That his support is rooted in what he stands for, not who he is.
Juan Williams dives in further at The Hill. “Trump is at 48 percent. How could this be possible but for widespread racism?”
Who are these people who look the other way when their candidate tells a bold lie about Black immigrants eating a mostly white Ohio town’s cats and dogs?
How can it be that not a soul among the 48 percent cares that Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, says it is okay to “create” racist lies about immigrants eating pets “so the American media actually pays attention”?
How can 48 percent of voters back a candidate who says immigrants coming from “infested” places are “poisoning the blood of our country?”
Is it just snowflakes who notice when one of Trump’s close allies says, “The White House will smell like curry” if Vice President Kamala Harris, the daughter of an Indian immigrant, wins the presidency?
Do these voters also prefer to sail past Trump once calling a Black woman and former aide a “dog”? And he called Alvin Bragg, the Black Manhattan district attorney who successfully prosecuted him for business fraud, an “animal.”
Maybe Trump’s 48 percent don’t excuse his racism so much as get the message. They are inside a Republican Party that is 82 percent white. Most of those white Republicans are in small towns and rural areas.
Harris said Trump can’t be trusted to serve as president after “engaging in…hateful rhetoric that, as usual, is designed to divide us as a country…to have people pointing fingers at each other.”
In this year’s campaign, one of Trump’s regular dog-whistles at his rallies is his false claim that big cities, full of racial minorities and immigrants, are scary places full of crime and failure. Last week he flatly lied at a rally when he said a parent who leaves a child alone on the New York subway has “about a 75 percent chance that [they’ll] never see [their] child again. What the hell has happened here?”
Trump’s use of racism to stir up his white supporters was called out by writer Fran Lebowitz back in 2018. Trump, she wrote, has “allowed people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven’t been able to in quite a while and they really love him for that…It’s a shocking thing to realize people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives.”
Ashley Parker writes this at The Washington Post. “Donald Trump’s imaginary and frightening world. His extreme caricatures serve as a way to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris administration.”
In Donald Trump’s imaginary world, Americans can’t venture out to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged or raped. Immigrants in a small Ohio town eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs. World War III and economic collapse are just around the corner. And kids head off to school only to return at day’s end having undergone gender reassignment surgery.
The former president’s imaginary world is a dark, dystopian place, described by Trump in his rallies, interviews, social media posts and debate appearances to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris administration.
It is a distorted, warped and, at times, absurdist portrait of a nation where the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to deadly effect were merely peaceful protesters, and where unlucky boaters are faced with the unappealing choice between electrocution or a shark attack. His extreme caricatures also serve as another way for Trump to traffic in lies and misinformation, using an alternate reality of his own making to create an often terrifying — and, he seems to hope — politically devastating landscape for his political opponents.
Trump, for instance, regularly claims that Democrats favor abortions up until the day of birth — and, in some cases, even after birth.
Speaking at the Sept. 10 presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris in Philadelphia, Trump falsely claimed that Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has said “abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine.”
“He also says, ‘execution after birth’ — execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born — is okay,” Trump continued.
In fact, Walz has not said this, The Washington Post Fact Checker found, and “execution after birth” — or infanticide — is illegal in all states. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021, nearly all abortions — 93.5 percent — occur at or before 13 weeks, and fewer than 1 percent were performed after 21 weeks. World War III, too, is another all-but-certainty should Trump not be elected in November, the former president frequently claims. In July, before a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his private Mar-a-Lago Club, Trump told reporters that only his electoral victory could stave off another global conflagration.
“If we win, it’ll be very simple. It’s all going to work out and very quickly,” Trump said. “If we don’t, you’re going to end up with major wars in the Middle East and maybe a Third World War. You are closer to a Third World War right now than at any time since the Second World War. You’ve never been so close, because we have incompetent people running our country.”
Seeing this dark stuff, or as Dubya put it back at his inauguration, “some weird shit,” we can only ask ourselves what causes people to swallow this hook, line, and sinker. Is this what makes you feel better about yourself? I keep wondering if it’s their brand of religion, their lack of education, or just their Iron Age tribalistic hate of any “other than them.” I had to even call it weird because, to me, the word evil is far more descriptive. It’s certainly no way to run a country. And, it’s not the way to have fun.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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“Felonious trump is angry, the deep state wouldn’t let him use his golf cart..” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
For the first time since moving here, I’ve got a bout of agita that’s gone to my stomach. I’m thankful for my meditation training from doctors, sangha, and teachers. It really helps. However, surfing Samsara has gotten more difficult these days. You may need to sit on a mat after reading some of the things I will share today. I’m going to go dig in the soil once I finish this. There are a lot of weeds to pull. I can visualize who represents which weed.
It was a given, of course, that Trump backers would spring to his defense following his conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Trump’s supporters are trying to dox the jurors, a sheriff is saying that it’s time we put a felon in the White House, and a bunch of MAGAs are flying the American flag upside down (though we have no update from the Alitos on the status of their flagpole). One of Trump’s lawyers and his legal spokesperson have both gone on Fox News and called on the Supreme Court to get their client off the hook. (More on that later.)
But one statement stands out in all this sound and furor: GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson’s call for SCOTUS to “step in.”
The morning after the conviction, Johnson went on Fox & Friends to reassure Trump supporters that he has the ear of the justices.
“I think that the justices on the court — I know many of them personally — I think they’re deeply concerned about [Trump’s conviction], as we are. So I think they’ll set this straight, but it’s going to take awhile.”
Johnson went on to say “this will be overturned, guys, there’s no question about it. It’s just going to take some time to do it.” (Watch below.)
This remarkable statement highlights how Republicans have come to — correctly — count on the federal courts to ensure they stay in power.
The Supreme Court already overturned Colorado’s decision to remove Trump from the ballot and agreed to hear his outrageous absolute immunity claim in the January 6 case after refusing to hear it on an expedited basis when asked by prosecutor Jack Smith. That foot-dragging resulted in the March 4 date for Trump’s DC trial being removed from the calendar, and it’s exceedingly unlikely there will be a new trial date before the election.
So why wouldn’t Johnson look to the conservatives on the Supreme Court to save Trump this time around?
Too bad David McCullough passed recently. We’ll need a narrator for this version of Ken Burns’ Civil War. Burns gave the commencement speech for undergraduates at Brandeis University. It’s worth a listen or read. Burns has documented a lot of our recent history and knows us well.
Another voice, Mercy Otis Warren, a philosopher and historian during our revolution put it this way, “The study of the human character at once opens a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul. We there find a noble principle implanted in the nature of people, but when the checks of conscience are thrown aside, humanity is obscured.” I have had the privilege for nearly half a century of making films about the US, but I have also made films about us. That is to say the two letter, lowercase, plural pronoun. All of the intimacy of “us” and also “we” and “our” and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the US. And if I have learned anything over those years, it’s that there’s only us. There is no them. And whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life that there’s a them, run away. Othering is the simplistic binary way to make and identify enemies, but it is also the surest way to your own self imprisonment, which brings me to a moment I’ve dreaded and forces me to suspend my longstanding attempt at neutrality.
There is no real choice this November. There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route. When, as Mercy Otis Warren would say, “The checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed.” The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems. When in fact with him, you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, “a bigger delusion”, James Baldwin would say, the author and finisher of our national existence, our national suicide as Mr. Lincoln prophesies. Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer.
The lies are more evident than ever, but they’re directed at an audience with no interest in the truth. Here’s another one from Senator Tim Scott via Axios. And yes, I’m quoting William Kristol again.
Sen. Tim Scott wants you to know: 2024 is not an abortion-policy election.
“The Supreme Court has already ruled that this is a states’ issue. President Trump and Speaker Johnson have both said that this will remain a states’ issue,” Scott said yesterday on Fox News Sunday. “That is a settled issue for our party, and frankly, it is one that takes that issue off the table for the Democrats, who have the most extreme position on abortion
Nine witnesses in the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump have received significant financial benefits, including large raises from his campaign, severance packages, new jobs, and a grant of shares and cash from Trump’s media company.
The benefits have flowed from Trump’s businesses and campaign committees, according to a ProPublica analysis of public disclosures, court records and securities filings. One campaign aide had his average monthly pay double, from $26,000 to $53,500. Another employee got a $2 million severance package barring him from voluntarily cooperating with law enforcement. And one of the campaign’s top officials had her daughter hired onto the campaign staff, where she is now the fourth-highest-paid employee.
These pay increases and other benefits often came at delicate moments in the legal proceedings against Trump. One aide who was given a plum position on the board of Trump’s social media company, for example, got the seat after he was subpoenaed but before he testified.
Significant changes to a staffer’s work situation, such as bonuses, pay raises, firings or promotions, can be evidence of a crime if they come outside the normal course of business. To prove witness tampering, prosecutors would need to show that perks or punishments were intended to influence testimony.
A pair of Texas professors figured out that their female students have sex and, boy, they do not like it. So now the philosophy professor and finance professor are suing for the right to punish their students who, outside of class, have abortions.
“Pregnancy is not a disease, and elective abortions are not ‘health care,'” University of Texas at Austin professor Daniel Bonevac sneers in a federal court filing with professor John Hatfield. Instead, Bonevac writes, because pregnancy is the result of “voluntary and consensual sexual intercourse,” students should not be allowed time off to get abortions. If the students disobey and miss class for abortion care, the filing continues, the professors should be allowed to flunk students. Additionally, Bonevac asserts that he has a right to refuse to employ a teaching assistant who has had an abortion, calling such women “criminals.”
The sexual hang-ups of abortion opponents are rarely far from the surface, but even by those low standards, the unjustified male grievance on display in this new Texas lawsuit is a doozy. At issue are federal regulations, called Title IX, first signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1972. They currently bar publicly funded schools from discriminating on the basis of sex or gender. This means that schools cannot penalize students for health care based on sex. As a male student would be granted leave if he had to travel for surgery, so must a female student, the federal statute requires. The two men argue that granting students an excused absence in such cases violates their First Amendment rights.
Even though the plaintiffs suing for the right to flunk female students for abortion include boilerplate arguments in which they feign concern that abortion is “killing,” the legal filing makes it clear that what really outrages Bonevac and Hatfield is that Title IX prevents them from controlling the private lives of students. Along with their anger about abortion, they grouse about not being allowed to punish students “for being homosexual or transgender.” They also argue they should be able to penalize teaching assistants for “cross-dressing,” by which they appear to mean allowing trans women to wear skirts.
It’s really difficult to describe these angry Christian white nationalists with any label but utter shitgibbons. If they can’t quote the Beatitudes, then they’re not really dealing with the historical Jesus. A shake-up at the Washington Post may make me finally cancel my subscription. This is the summary of the state of affairs by Politicotoday. “Playbook: The Trump Verdict Lands on the Hill.”
WAPO SHOCKER —SALLY BUZBEE is out as the Washington Post’s executive editor after a three-year run, to be immediately replaced by former WSJ editor in chief MATT MURRAY and, after the election, by the Telegraph’s ROBERT WINNETT. Both have previously worked under WaPo Publisher and CEO WILL LEWIS.
The announcement came in an 8:38 p.m. news release and landed as a thunderbolt to the Posties we spoke to, who were uniformly shocked by the sudden timing of Buzbee’s departure, if not necessarily by the fact of it. It was an unusually abrupt transition for the Post, where top leadership transitions are typically announced months in advance. (The newsroom did not immediately have a story ready to publish and, adding insult to injury, the NYT managed to get theirs up first.)
The buried lede: After Winnett takes over the “core” newsroom in November, Murray will lead a “third newsroom … comprised of service and social media journalism and run separately from the core news operation. The aim is to give the millions of Americans — who feel traditional news is not for them but still want to be kept informed — compelling, exciting and accurate news where they are and in the style that they want.”
It’s all about the clicks these days. Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an Op-Ed from one of Alito’s former clerks. “I was a law clerk for Justice Alito. He must recuse himself from hearing cases involving Donald Trump. Flying the U.S. flag upside down, once a signal of distress, has become a symbol of those who reject the results of the 2020 presidential election. When Alito did so, it was indeed a distress call.” These are the thoughts of Susan Sullivan.
As a former law clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., I often admired him as a person for his integrity and honesty. As a progressive liberal, however, I vehemently disagreed with the approach he takes to reading the Constitution, the narrow interpretation he adopts, and his reverence for the framers’restrictive intent.
Over the years, I became increasingly distressed with the results of his decisions. And then came Dobbs.
By striking down the rights of women to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy, the decision last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which he wrote, eviscerated women’s fundamental right to self-determination. Dobbs is not just about abortion; it is about setting the clock back and undermining the core protections enshrined within the Constitution of liberty, equality, and access to justice.
And then came the flag.
Flying the American flag upside down, formerly a signal of distress, is now understood to unequivocally telegraph support for those who have co-opted and corrupted its original intent. It has become the symbol of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol in a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, who challenged — and continue to deny — the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election. It is the emblem for the “Stop the Steal” Trump factions, the symbol now held hostage by those who attacked our democracy at its very core.
The New York Times reported earlier this month that Justice Alito flew an upside-down flag at his home in Fairfax, Va., and another controversial flag at his beach house on Long Beach Island — acts that are widely accepted as an abhorrent affront to anyone who respects our constitutional democracy. So, when that flag is flown upside down by a member of the nation’s highest court, it is indeed a distress call.
If the Supreme Court decides that he has blanket immunity — a decision expected any day now — these criminal charges, and any others, disappear. This means a president could commit serious crimes while in office, having nothing to do with the legitimate function of government, without facing any consequences. A president could theoretically hire an assassin to kill a competitor with impunity.
Justice Alito must recuse himself from having any role in the decision of these cases.
You may continue to read her rationale at the link. Meanwhile, this is an interesting read at The Guardian. “The reich stuff – what does Trump really have in common with Hitler? Comparisons between the ex-president and the 20th-century Nazi leader are controversial but a new book says they resemble each other as political performance artists.”
WhenDonald Trump shared a video that dreamed of a “unified reich” if he wins the US presidential election, and took nearly a full day to remove it, the most shocking thing was how unshocking it was.
Trump has reportedly said before that Adolf Hitler did “some good things”, echoed the Nazi dictator by calling his political opponents “vermin” and saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, and responded to a white supremacist march in Charlottesville by claiming that there were “very fine people on both sides”.
The Hitler-Trump analogy is controversial. “Some of Trump’s critics – including Biden’s campaign – argue that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and authoritarian behavior justify the comparison,” the Politico website observed recently. “Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders – and even some of his more historically-minded critics – argue that the comparison is ahistorical; that he’s not a true fascist.”
The former camp now includes Henk de Berg, a professor of German at the University of Sheffield in Britain. The Dutchman, whose previous books include Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies, has just published Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying.
In it, De Berg compares and contrasts Hitler and Trump as political performance artists and how they connect with their respective audiences. He examines the two men’s work ethic, management style and narcissism, as well as quirks such as Hitler’s toothbrush moustache and Trump’s implausible blond hair.
In a Zoom interview from his office at the university campus, De Berg quotes the American comedian and actor George Burns: “The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” He adds: “The most important thing in populism is authenticity. The moment you’re able to fake that, you’re in.”
De Berg, 60, happened to be renewing his study of National Socialism, and rereading Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, just as Trump was first running for the White House in 2015. “Obviously, there are massive differences,” he acknowledges. “Hitler was an ideologically committed antisemite who instigated the second world war and was responsible for the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died.
“But then I looked at their rhetorical strategies and their public relations operations and I began to see how similar they are in many ways. So I thought, OK, why not do a book looking at Hitler from the perspective of Trump?
Well, it’s another Monday in this version of the United States.
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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!
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.
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.
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 Clintonwarned 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 Clintonwarned 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
People got to see our lousy governor and our very drunk Senator while the New Orleans leader contingent paid second and third fiddles and was blamed for not doing what they’ve been doing for decades superbly. The presser included a drunk Senator John Neely Kennedy spitting tobacco into a red plastic cup while looking like he’d been drinking still. He shoved the FBI Special Agent–a black woman–away from the microphone where she was answering a reporter’s question. Social Media is not treating him kindly and righteously so.
Then, we got the Tesla bomber. A Green Beret on leave making some kind of statement while wiring a Tesla to burn in front of a Trump Property. At least he shot himself, and no one else got killed in whatever statement he was trying to make on the way out the earthly door. The more we learn about him, the more I want to stay indoors and away from people I haven’t known for a long time. This is from the 
These two stories completely ran this one off of the news for days. This is from 
The Republican House Speaker Brawl is headed to new lows this month. President Eject Incontinentia’s buttocks are lobbying Republicans to support Moses on the Bayou. John Thune is now the Senate Majority Leader. It will be an interesting few years with these razor-thin Republican majorities and a fairly united Democratic Party. This is from AXIOS and the analysis is by Andrew Solendar. 
The team of reporters outlines three possible outcomes from today’s mess. One includes Sleazy Steve Scalise, which always makes me gag. This is the horse race analysis from 
Liz Cheney described the Republican Party as being the MAGA Party. Those left in the MAGA party are living in lies, bigotry, and a world of active sabotage of the truth and of the country. In one of the most callous moves I’ve seen in Congress, Speaker Johnson refuses to call the House back into session to provide the funding needed for FEMA. 
What’s most impressive is to see just precisely who 175 Republicans are that voted against the aid. And, yes, it’s basically to make the Biden/Harris Administration look bad so DonOld can rant and make people forget his lousy response to disasters when he occupied the White House. This is from 
Not only do the MAGA Republicans want the country to fail and our country to fall to Tinpot dictator wannabe Donald, but they seriously want to see more death and destruction by tanking one of the most necessary and enormous FEMA responses ever. This is from NBC News. 
It would be nice to think that future evil-doers would take the hint and fear a 9 year-sentence, but MAGA weirdos are nuts. So, this is an interesting tidbit from Springfield, Ohio. 
This headline from The Guardian is frightening
You better believe all these anti-democracy folks are just waiting to get Vance into the Oval Office. Trump is chaos, but Vance is single-minded, and there’s a method to his meanness. Then there is foreign interference in this election, too. 
I continue to write these long blog reads these days. Every day reveals more weirdness and criminal activity. I would like to note that this was a headline. “
The Economic Data from the U.S. is impressive. This is from 
Canada is our mini-me. They shadow and follow are economic results so it’s not surprising they’re number two on that list. But, the same reason we could not get a bi-partisan immigration bill is the same reason we may get a government shut-down right before the election. 
The worst headlines still fill today’s papers and are always about you-know-who or the candidates running with MAGA status. North Carolina Gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson is the latest in the MAGA lineage of someone who shouldn’t hold public office. 
Controversies have been present in most of the MAGA set. I mean, what type of weirdo can vote for a guy who’s about to get his sentence for committing 34 felons, is an adjudicated felon, and still has plenty of my felonies lined up to get him if he doesn’t get into office. His wife won’t even be seen with him, and she was just paid to show up at a Log Cabin Republican meeting by some unknown person. 
We’re basically seeing a family tree full of sociopaths! And blame that on Hillary??? WTF? So, there appears to be a spending deal that my avoid the government shutdown Trump wants. 
I have just a few other recommendations. The first one comes from Emptywheel. Also, if you haven’t watched From Russia, with Lev, You should.
There are also a few more articles analyzing DonOLD. I’ll be brief with these. 
Juan Williams dives in further at 
Ashley Parker writes this at The Washington Post. “Donald Trump’s imaginary and frightening world. His extreme caricatures serve as a way to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris administration.”
The lies are more evident than ever, but they’re directed at an audience with no interest in the truth. Here’s another one from Senator Tim Scott via 
Here’s one from Amanda Marcotte–writing for Salon–that will once again show how far the fetus fetishists will go to control women and deny them bodily autonomy. 
It’s really difficult to describe these angry Christian white nationalists with any label but utter shitgibbons. If they can’t quote the Beatitudes, then they’re not really dealing with the historical Jesus. A shake-up at the Washington Post may make me finally cancel my subscription. This is the summary of the state of affairs by 
It’s all about the clicks these days. 
You may continue to read her rationale at the link. Meanwhile, this is an interesting read at 
PBS has further information. 
Vanity Fair continues to spotlight Trump’s plan to replace our democratic republic with an autocratic one. This is written by Eric Lutz. 
Read more at the link. Liz Dye from Public Notice has a good reminder for us, too.
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. 
Yes. You read that right. This is from Raw Story. 
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. 
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. Y
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