Finally Friday Reads: No Kings!

“Happy No Kings Eve!” @repeat1968, John Buss

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Last week was a tough one for those of us committed to keeping a working democracy in this country and with those who have been long-standing allies. We’ve watched the USA, countries aligned with NATO, and even Israel, where fascist-leaning leaders have won elections with less than a majority.

A lot of these countries have parliamentary democracies, so they may get a composite of parties choosing the leader.  There’s been a tendency for the right wing to join up with factions that can include those with strict religious beliefs hoping for theocracy, people looking to nationalism and clinging to xenophobia to overcome their fear and hatred of others, and of course, those just around for the spoils of corruption. The militia movement is a significant part of the Trump coalition.  I love my country and all its people. I was excited to put money in my friend’s boxes to grow trees in Israel as a kid.  Israelis deserve better than Netanyahu.  Poland and Hungary are in play now, too. WTF is going on?

This piece was written by a UK blogger, Carolyn Gallaher is an excellent read. It was written back in February about the pardons of all the J6 criminals and others associated with the militia movement.  “Trump’s pardons suggest he will run a far-right government with paramilitary backing.”

Trump’s pardons suggest he has adopted a personalistic approach to law. While he isn’t likely to meddle with the legal code, he is likely to intervene when his high-profile supporters are charged with breaking the law. Intervention will be at a distance, but effective. Indeed, all he will need to do is post negative commentary about the charges on social media, and at least some officers of the court will respond. Prosecutors, for example, may refuse to indict Trump’s cronies, or judges may may dismiss legally solid cases, as US District Judge Aileen Cannon did with the government’s classified documents case in the summer of 2024. Trump can also use the bully pulpit to change how a prosecution is seen. Trump adopted this approach with January 6 cases, spending the last four years priming the wider public to see the government’s prosecutions as “politically motivated” and the defendants “hostages” and “political prisoners.”

The most particularly alarming event this week was Trump’s speech at Fort Bragg, where the soldiers attending the event were filtered for Trump enablers and cheered to a clearly political and self-serving rally.  Military News has this analysis.

It was supposed to be a routine appearance, a visit from the commander in chief to rally the troops, boost morale and celebrate the Army‘s 250th-birthday week, which culminates with a Washington, D.C., parade slated for Saturday.

Instead, what unfolded Tuesday at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, bore little resemblance to the customary visit from a president and defense secretary. There, President Donald Trump unleashed a speech laced with partisan invective, goading jeers from a crowd of soldiers positioned behind his podium — blurring the long-standing and sacrosanct line between the military and partisan politics.

As Trump viciously attacked his perceived political foes, he whipped up boos from the gathered troops directed at California leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom — amid the president’s controversial move to deploy the National Guard and Marines against protesters in Los Angeles — as well as former President Joe Biden and the press. The soldiers roared with laughter and applauded Trump’s diatribe in a shocking and rare public display of troops taking part in naked political partisanship.

As I have been politically active for over 50 years, I really have seen it coming–especially the White Christian Nationalist movement–but always felt that our institutions would be strong enough to head it off. These folks do play the long game, and little by little, they’ve worked to put their followers into the military, police, school boards, judges, and all levels of elected officials. They’ve embedded themselves in the institutions with the intention of twisting them to their personal views.  One of the best sources of information on the movement in our country comes from people who grew up, then left. This interview from the PBS News Hour with former evangelical minister within this movement,  Brad Onishi, is worth a look or listen.

Brad Onishi, Co-Host, “Straight White American Jesus”: Christian nationalism is an ideology that is based around the idea that this is a Christian nation, that this was founded as a Christian nation, and, therefore, it should be a Christian nation today and should be so in the future.

According to survey data, Christian nationalists agree with statements like the federal government should declare the United States of America a Christian nation. Our laws should be based on Christian values. being a Christian is important if you want to be a real American.

The unprecedented move by Trump of sending Marines and the National Guard to hype the L.A. immigration protests for a reality show production and excite the xenophobes is really beyond anything we’ve ever seen. The birth of our country really wasn’t the Boston Tea Party. It was the Boston Massacre that happened on March 5, 1770.

I know, my history major roots are showing, but this really is the seminal event and situation that started our country. You may read more about it at the History Channel. Basically, British soldiers were occupying the city.  You may not know that there was a black man among those protesting the soldiers and the enforcement of what was essentially tariffs among the five American dead.  His name was Crispus Attucks,

The British soldiers were put on trial, and patriots John Adams and Josiah Quincy agreed to defend the soldiers in a show of support of the colonial justice system. When the trial ended in December 1770, two British soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter and had their thumbs branded with an “M” for murder as punishment.

The Sons of Liberty, a Patriot group formed in 1765 to oppose the Stamp Act, advertised the “Boston Massacre” as a battle for American liberty and just cause for the removal of British troops from Boston. Patriot Paul Revere made a provocative engraving of the incident, depicting the British soldiers lining up like an organized army to suppress an idealized representation of the colonist uprising. Copies of the engraving were distributed throughout the colonies and helped reinforce negative American sentiments about British rule.

April 1775 is usually where most of us start our first American History lesson. The seminal events here were the Battles of Lexington and Concord.  All of this is good to know as we watch our Army celebrate its 250th anniversary.

Unfortunately, Trump has turned this into an event worthy of the Dear Leader of North Korea. There is a massive, nationwide protest planned called “No Kings. that day.”  It also appears likely that there will be heavy rains in the District.  I pity the soldiers with this assignment. They’re already sleeping on the floors of federal buildings with mixed feelings, I’m sure.

This is the one thing that I thought I’d recommend.  It’s from The Bulwark. It’s written by Jill Lawrence. “The Patriotic Rich.  Not all of them are like Trump, willing to see the poor get poorer so the rich can get richer.”

DONALD TRUMP HAS HUGGED A FLAG more than once, and he’s now adding flagpoles on the north and south White House lawns. He addressed uniformed troops at Fort Bragg (at least the fit ones who love him and don’t look fat) and he’s ordered up a $45 million military parade on June 14 that could wreck D.C. streets to the tune of $16 million.

He probably thinks of himself as a patriotic billionaire.

Imagine, if you would, a different kind of wealthy role model for our nation’s youth—and its grownups, too, for that matter. A millionaire or billionaire who does not waste taxpayer money, destroy government services, attack science, undermine public health, pave the Rose Garden, and decorate the Oval Office with so much gilt that you halfway expect Marie Antoinette to show up anytime.

How about a millionaire or billionaire who obeys the law and isn’t constantly, voraciously on the hunt for more power and more money? Who would prefer a more equitable society and would pay more taxes to make it so?

These people do exist. Some are philanthropists. Some put money into political activism. And some create policy advocacy groups, like the nonpartisan Patriotic Millionaires. The group’s members are self-described “proud traitors to their class,” offering a platform of foundational economic changes to coincide with the nation’s 250th birthday next year: AMERICA 250: The Money Agenda.

“Over the long term, the unfair tax system is a cause of the oligarchy being able to do what it does. The proposals that even the progressives are making are not sufficient to actually change the course of history,” Patriotic Millionaires Chair Morris Pearl, former managing director at BlackRock, told me in an interview.

The group’s four-part proposal, released in April, aims to do just that. It starts with exempting people below a certain income from federal taxes and making up the revenue by imposing a 3 percent surtax on income above $1 million, rising to 8 percent above $10 million. Other elements include raising the minimum wage to the cost of living for a single adult, and indexing it; equalizing the tax rate for capital gains and ordinary income over $1 million; and significantly taxing the intergenerational transfer of wealth.

Forget false modesty. “The solutions to the problem are not complicated, and the Patriotic Millionaires have them all,” the group says on its home page. Their plan, they say, would “ensure prosperity and stability for America’s next 250 years.”

I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry about that. The interesting thing today is that the headlines are all about the real events in the world, like Israel Bombing Iran and Iran attacking back.  L.A. is still on the front pages, and Kristi Noem, the psycho puppy killer. The only place you’ll find the parade is in the political cartoons.

The other thing is that Trump’s Budget Busting Bill is now buried by the distraction and the truly awful Noem event, where a U.S. Senator was manhandled into the hallway, put in cuffs, and treated quite the way you’d expect an SS Storm Trooper.  We will now call the Storm Trumpers.  This is from Paul Krugman’s Substack. “Reverse Robin Hood and Trumpian Totalitarianism. Trump’s big beautiful bill is a sadistic monstrosity.”

House Republicans have passed Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. After having spent decades covering Republican domestic policies, I have a pretty jaundiced view of their intentions. But this bill is so cruelly regressive that it shocked even me. This bill is truly unprecedented in the extent to which it takes away from the have-nots and gives to the ultra-haves. It slashes Medicaid, taking health care away from millions. It slashes food stamps, ensuring that many will go hungry. At the same time, it gives huge tax cuts to the wealthy.

Those of us who followed the legislation knew that it would be highly regressive. New estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan agency of economic technocrats, confirm in detail just how bad the OBBBA is.

C.B.O.’s numbers, released yesterday, are startling. Here’s the percentage change in households’ purchasing power by decile of the income distribution caused by the OBBBA:

That 4 percent income decline for the poorest 10 percent of Americans is the scale of economic damage you’d expect from a severe recession. But here it is being deliberately inflicted on the poorest Americans.

In the OBBBA, pain on the least well-off Americans is not a price that is being paid in order to reduce the U.S. budget deficit. Remember,the benefit cuts for those in the bottom decile of the income distribution are being paired with tax cuts at the top of the income distribution. So the net effect will be a large increase in the U.S. budget deficit.

Wait, it gets worse. The CBO’s analysis doesn’t consider the effect of the Trump tariffs on household incomes. This is important because tariffs are taxes — regressive taxes, that fall more heavily on lower-income than higher-income families. I’ll be writing about the distributional impact of tariffs in the future.

I have just one more article to recommend on this topic by HuffPo by Jennifer Bendary. “Senate GOP Strips Contempt Provision From Tax Bill — But Still Lets Trump Be King. They took language out of the House GOP’s “big, beautiful bill” that limited courts’ powers, but now want to price people out of being able to sue the government at all.”

Senate Republicans have removed a disturbing provision from the House GOP’s massive tax-and-spending bill that would have allowed President Donald Trump to circumvent the courts and essentially serve as a king.

But they have swapped in new language that would still let Trump ignore the courts amid his lawlessness: Their provision would make it nearly impossible for people to sue the federal government by forcing them to cough up millions, if not billions, of dollars to do so.

Late Thursday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) released the panel’s proposed text for the GOP’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill. The House passed its version of the bill last month, so now the Senate is making its changes. Each committee is tasked with putting together language for its relevant section in the legislation.

The text that Grassley released for the bill’s judicial section doesn’t include this jarring, one-sentence provision that House Republicans buried in their 1,116-page bill:

Translated, this provision would restrict the ability of any court, including the Supreme Court, to enforce compliance with its orders by holding people in contempt. Contempt citations are an essential tool for the courts; they allow judges to threaten fines, sanctions or even jail if people disobey their orders.

The provision in the House GOP’s bill also would apply retroactively to all temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions, leaving courts with no real way of enforcing orders they’ve already handed down.

Yam Tits has definitely put the dismal into the dismal science. There’s more.   Okay, here are the two big stories.  This is from Tommy Christopher writing for Mediaite. “Sen. Alex Padilla Tells MSNBC FBI ‘Escorted’ Him To Trump DHS Presser They Claim He Crashed.”  Both Patel and Noem have some explaining to do.  Don’t forget, we also have a New Jersey Congresswoman waiting for her trial for something that the facts really don’t support, either.  “U.S. Representative LaMonica McIver was charged in a three-count indictment today for forcibly impeding and interfering with federal officers, U.S. Attorney Alina Habba announced.”   Back to the Senator’s story.

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) told MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff that he was “escorted” to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference by FBI agents, where he was then manhandled by agents under the claim they didn’t know who he was.

Sen. Padilla found himself at the center of a maelstrom when he tried to ask a question Thursday at Noem’s briefing on ICE protests in Los Angeles and was brought to the ground and handcuffed by Secret Service and FBI agents. Noem and her agents falsely claimed Padilla didn’t identify himself as a U.S. senator and accused him of “lunging” in a threatening manner.

The incident sparked widespread shock and criticism, and an impassioned response from Sen. Padilla after his release.

On Thursday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber, Padilla gave his first sit-down after his release, and called out several inaccuracies. He told Soboroff he didn’t “barge” into the presser, he was signed in and escorted, and was listening in the room for 10 minutes before he tried to ask a question:

SOBOROFF: We heard from you briefly at the press conference after you came outside of the federal building in Westwood. We’ve heard more extensively from Secretary Noem and the Department of Homeland Security. And I want to just tell you a little bit, because I’m sure this has been a whirlwind, about what they’ve been saying.

Secretary Noem said that you, quote, “lunged” towards her at this press conference. The Department of Homeland Security said the Secret Service believed that you were an attacker. And the Department of Homeland Security called this political theater. What’s your response and what’s your version of what happened?

PADILLA: Well, first of all, that’s ridiculous. It’s a lie, but par for the course for this administration, right? So here’s the stage. Look, I was in the federal building here in Los Angeles for a scheduled briefing, just as when my colleagues and I had to go all the way to Guantanamo Bay to begin to get information about that facility being used as a detention facility. They’ve been non-responsive to requests for information. And so I had scheduled. They approved a briefing with representatives of the Northern Command in that federal building.

We were there prior to the 10:30 original appointment date when we caught wind that secretary of Homeland Security was going to be down the hall at a press conference. And — and our briefing was now delayed because of that press conference. So since the secretary has been non-responsive, I figured, let me go over and listen to what she has to say. Maybe we can glean some information here.

SOBOROFF: So let me make sure I understand the…

PADILLA: But so the…

SOBOROFF: Go ahead.

PADILLA: So the … whole time, right, we’re, the whole time, being escorted in this federal building by somebody from the National Guard, somebody from the FBI. I’ve gone through screening. This is a federal building. And so tell them, let’s go listen to the press conference. They escort me over to that room. And I’m sitting in the back of the room, behind the cameras, behind the reporters, listening, listening. And at one point, it was just too much to take. Not the first, but the second attack on the political leadership of California and this notion that Donald Trump and Kristi Noem have to come in and rescue the people of Los Angeles from Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass? It was too much. And so I spoke up. I introduced myself and said I had a question.

Look, they said I wasn’t wearing my pin, my polo says “United States Senate.” There was no threat. There was no lunging. I raised my voice to ask a question. And it took, what, maybe half a second before multiple agents were on me.

SOBOROFF: The video clearly shows, and you can hear on the audio, that you identify yourself as Senator Padilla. Did you — she said you barged into the room or you — you basically broke into the room. I’m paraphrasing here. Just set the record straight on that.

PADILLA: I didn’t barge into the room. As I mentioned, I was in a different conference room a couple doors down the hall. I let it be known, I’d like to go listen to the press conference. The folks that were escorting me in the building walked me over. I didn’t even open the door. The door was opened for me. And I spent a few minutes in the back of the room just listening in until the rhetoric, the political rhetoric got to be too much to take. So I spoke up.

And now for the Congresswoman’s story.    This is from Liz Die at Public Notice. “We’ve reached the indicting the opposition stage of fascism. There’s no sane world in which Rep. McIver committed felonies during her altercation with ICE. ” If this entire event was not staged, I’ll eat my favorite summer hat.

On Tuesday, June 10, Alina Habba, the interim US attorney for New Jersey, indicted sitting Democratic Rep. LaMonica McIver. The Newark Democrat is charged with two felony counts and one misdemeanor for assaulting, resisting, and impeding a federal officer in the performance of his official duties.

Habba has zero prosecutorial background and came to the job after her spectacular performance as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, where she got him half a billion dollars in civil fraud penalties in New York, $83 million in damages in the E. Jean Carroll assault and defamation cases, and a million dollars in sanctions for filing a RICO trollsuit against Hillary Clinton, James Comey, the Perkins Coie law farm, and half the Democrats in DC. (Spoiler alert: It’s never RICO.)

The indictment of Rep. McIver arises from an incident outside Delaney Hall, an ICE facility in Newark. In February, the GEO Group, the private prison company which runs the facility, was awarded a 15-year, $1 billion contract to run the 1,000-bed facility. It became an immediate flashpoint for protesters, as well as city officials, who said that they’d been blocked from inspecting for health and safety.

…

But Habba wasn’t hired for her legal chops — she was hired to advance political agendas. So even as she’s facing a civil suit for malicious prosecution and defamation by Baraka, she filed a criminal complaint against Rep. McIver, and then followed it up with an actual indictment.

The charges are thin, to say the least. Footage shows McIver, in the red jacket, attempting to shield the mayor with her body. She is jostled in the crowd and swipes at an agent who grabs her. No body slam was recorded.

It’s often said that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. The joke here is that the standard for an indictment is so low and the scales so tilted toward the prosecution at the grand jury stage, that an indictment is virtually guaranteed. The target is not entitled to be present or to introduce competing evidence. A grand jury need only find that there is probable cause to believe that the crime occurred, and need not be unanimous. And an indictment can be secured if a mere 12 jurors out of 16-23 assembled vote in favor of it.

Convincing a jury of 12 Garden State citizens, most likely the congresswoman’s own constituents, that she assaulted an ICE officer and made him fear for his safety beyond a reasonable doubt, is another matter. Rep. McIver will also have a powerful defense in the Speech or Debate Clause, which protects members of Congress from prosecution when they are carrying out official business.

I especially liked Die’s conclusion.

If Habba does not slink off again, the case will be heard by Judge Jamel Semper, a veteran of the US attorney’s office Habba now leads, who was appointed to the bench by President Biden. Arraignment is set for next Monday.

McIver, who declined a plea agreement Habba tried to foist on her earlier, called the indictment “a brazen attempt at political intimidation.”

Noem’s appearance on Fox following all that drama was definitely right out of a right-wing reality wet dream. This is from Talking Points Memo.    Nicole Lafond has the story. “Noem Says National Guard Occupation Is Meant To ‘Liberate’ LA From Its Mayor And Governor.”  Psychopaths have no shame.

Just before Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) was forcibly removed from a Department of Homeland Security press briefing, forced to the ground and then handcuffed for asking a question, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was in the middle of making a bizarre but crucial point.

“We are not going away,” she said, referring to the National Guard and DHS presence in Los Angeles this week amid protests against Trump’s sweeping and drastic deportation mission in the city. “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

The statement said the quiet part out loud: the military was there to “liberate” a city from its democratically elected governor and mayor. (It was also not entirely clear what “burdensome” actions she was referring to.)

Leading up to this moment in the press briefing, Noem spent several minutes thanking the National Guard, FBI, local law enforcement and the IRS (??) for their efforts on the ground in LA. (Apparently, per Noem, IRS agents have been there in person working to determine what groups are organizing the protests in the city! Normal stuff!) She then said that the National Guard and DHS were working to “make every single community great again and safe again” before lamenting that the people of LA were “suffering” “under the policies of Governor Newsom and under the policies of Mayor Bass.”

Those remarks combined with the liberation speak amount to a pretty pellucid admission of the Trump administration’s ultimate vision here. As I noted earlier this week, much of the effort to deploy troops to LA to clamp down on mostly peaceful protesters in the city can be seen through the lens of the president’s months-long effort to punish blue cities and states. While he is hiding behind the guise of targeting Democratic-led states and cities that function as sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants, Trump’s barely disguised his bloodlust for using his second term to punish all of his perceived political enemies. Gov. Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass most certainly fall into this category.

So, I’m going to put a few links up about the attacks by Israel on Iran.  They’re supposedly trying to knock back the nuclear capabilities of Iran.  It seems strange, though, that Trump had already scheduled the Middle East envoy to Iran and that the US was heavily involved with the preplanning, according to Israel.  This is the latest from NBC News.  Netanyahu is like Trump to me.  Love the country and the people.  The leaders need to be sent to the World Court for Justice.  “Live updates: Israel strikes Iranian nuclear facilities as fears of war mount. Iran’s top military official, Mohammad Hossein Bagheri and Hossein Salami, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, were killed, according to state media.”

• TENSIONS REACH NEW HEIGHTS: Israel launched strikes on Iran early Friday local time, a dramatic escalation of long-running tensions between the two countries.

• NUCLEAR PROGRAM TARGETED: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the operation targeted Iran’s nuclear program and “will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.” Explosions continue to rock Tehran and other sites in Iran.

• IRAN RETALIATES: In a televised address, Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian promised a “powerful response.” The IDF have reported attacks from Iran throughout the day, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Israelis to brace for retaliation.

• POWERFUL LEADERS KILLED: In a significant blow to Iran’s army, it’s top military official, Mohammad Hossein Bagheri, was killed along with Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

• CASUALTIES IN TEHRAN: The strikes killed nearly 80 people and injured more than 300 in Iran’s capital, Tehran, according to semiofficial Fars news agency. Iranian authorities have not confirmed these numbers.

• ​U.S. POSITION: Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially said the U.S. was “not involved in the strikes against Iran.” However, President Donald Trump later said “we knew everything,” about the strikes and that Israel had used American weapons.

STATUS OF U.S.-IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL: In a phone call with NBC News, Trump said Iran had missed an opportunity to make a deal. “Now, they may have another opportunity. We’ll see.” Iranian State TV reported that Iran had pulled out from the next round of talks.

“Give me your rich, screw the huddled masses.” John Buss, @repeat1968

All of the chaos comes back to the fact that we have a weak president.  He doesn’t know a damn thing about economics. He couldn’t care less about the military or foreign policy. He’s only interested in what he can get out of this country.  Where is the money coming from for this parade and all the damage it will do to the streets of Washington, DC?  Here’s what the Google AI entity has to say about spending at Homeland Security. I just asked it if they were spending more than their budget.

Yes, spending on Homeland Security is at risk of exceeding its allocated budget, particularly for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Reports indicate that ICE has already begun spending beyond its appropriated level, leading to concerns about violating the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from spending funds before Congress authorizes them. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is likely to shift funds between accounts to sustain current operations, potentially impacting other agencies and their priorities. 

It makes no sense to give the rich tax breaks, pay for all this nonsense that is nothing but a political display of faux strength, then expect the rest of the country to give up public education, Medicaid, and likely Medicare?  Are we going to have another infrastructure week? What about the inflation and expected negative impacts on the economy?  What about our long-standing allies? Are we just buddies now with the world’s bullies?

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?