“The trump criminal trial has so much drama.” John Buss @repeat 1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Last night was ladies’ night in the Congressional House Oversight Committee meeting. And oh, what a night! The sidewalk display outside the Trump Hush Money Trial wasn’t much better. And then there was the Kansas City Ball Kicker who gave a commencement speech at a small Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. It’s been a sad week for women in leadership positions or those who strive for leadership positions. It’s been a week of sexism and misogyny unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
I’m going to start with the Ball Kicker. This analysis is from Vox, written by Li Zhou. “The controversy over Harrison Butker’s misogynistic commencement speech, explained. Butker’s address was a textbook case of conservative sexism and homophobia.”
NFL kicker Harrison Butker is facing widespread backlash after giving a college commencement speech that casually dabbled in misogyny and homophobia.
Butker, who has won three Super Bowls with the Kansas City Chiefs in recent years, delivered the address at Benedictine College, a private Catholic institution in Kansas, on May 11. In it, he criticizes everything from women prioritizing professional careers to Pride Month to abortion access.
An outspoken conservative who is close with leading right-wing figures including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Butker’s speech closely echoed Republican rhetoric and fixated on issues that have been popular fodder for conservatives as they try to mobilize their voters ahead of the 2024 election.
“I think it is you, the women who have had the most diabolical lies told to you,” Butker said in his speech. “Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.”
The Chiefs have not commented on Butker’s remarks and the NFL league office distanced itself from them. “His views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger,” Jonathan Beane, the NFL’s senior vice president and chief diversity and inclusion officer, told People.
Butker’s speech advances the same agenda that the GOP has been pushing not only in its rhetoric but through policy. At least 21 Republican-led state legislatures have approved laws that ban or restrict abortion access and at least 20 have approved bills that curb access to gender-affirming care for minors. Butker’s remarks — which emphasized people “staying in [their] lane” — are the latest attempt to weaponize religion to achieve the same goals.
Butker’s speech is being characterized by the usual suspects as just “expressing unpopular opinions.” It’s more than that.
Below are some of the lowlights:
On women’s careers: One of the sections getting the most attention is Butker’s comments about the importance of women’s roles in the home. Singling out the women in the audience, he argued that they’re likely more eager to become wives and mothers than to have successful careers.
“I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother,” he said.
In addition to speaking on women’s behalf, Butker also reduced the primary goal of their lives to one biological function. Being a homemaker is an important role that should be celebrated, but it’s far from the only one a woman can choose — a key reason his remarks spurred such backlash. Butker also described women’s roles very differently than he described men’s: While he touted the virtues of being a present father, he did not say that being a dad was likely the primary goal of a man’s life.
In recent days, a parade of Republicans have shown up at the Manhattan courthouse where Donald Trump faces criminal charges related to the hush-money scheme he concocted to deceive American voters during the 2016 election. The goal of those MAGA allies is simple: to make it unimpeachably clear that their primary fealty is to Donald Trump over the rule of law.
Unfortunately, some of media coverage has obscured these fundamentals. Some accounts describe these Republicans as “currying favor” with Trump or showing “loyalty” to him, as if they are just demonstrating personal support for him at a trying moment. Others have noted that some making this pilgrimage—none more odiously than Ohio Senator J.D. Vance—are really vying to be his running mate, which might be true but reduces all this to a form of political jockeying that seems fairly conventional.
If we are going to treat this as a story about loyalty signaling, let’s frame the question this way: Loyalty to what, exactly? Not just loyalty to Trump. This episode—and others like it, such as the stampede of Republicans backing Trump’s refusal to commit to accepting the 2024 election results—is better seen as a statement of ultimate fealty to Trump over and above our institutions, as a declaration that he is paramount and they are thoroughly dispensable.
“This trial is a scam and a sham, and it shouldn’t happen,” Trump raged on Thursday at the court, with Representative Matt Gaetz and other Republicans standing behind him. Gaetz proudly posted a picture of himself “standing back and standing by” for Trump at the courthouse, deliberately echoing the language Trump used about his paramilitary goons in the first 2020 debate.
This comes after House Speaker Mike Johnson descended on the courthouse this week and attacked presiding Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter, who fundraised for Democrats, blasting the proceedings as a “sham.” Vance and Florida Senator Rick Scott similarly attacked Merchan’s daughter. Many Republicans blasted the credibility of Michael Cohen, the former Trump fixer and chief prosecution witness. Still others slammed the lead prosecutor, based on an absurd, convoluted theory about his previous work at the Justice Department, as a tool of President Biden.
If Republicans were merely criticizing the prosecution on the facts and the law in substantive terms, it would be one thing. But here they are attacking the judge, his family, the witnesses, and the line prosecutors as actors in a fundamentally illegitimate proceeding.
Those are things the gag order on Trump prohibits him from doing, which has some commentators asking whether he is surreptitiously inducing his boosters to carry out those attacks to circumvent it. There is some evidence of this, but as Brian Beutler writes, that question misses the point: Either way, the surrogates wouldn’t be doing any of it if Trump didn’t want them to, and they are echoing Trump’s own precise language and claims.
To grasp the real force of this, it’s worth recalling the reason we don’t want proceedings like these subjected to demonization campaigns in the first place: It threatens to sabotage public confidence in the justice system’s integrity and makes it harder for good-faith actors to play their roles in it without fear or favor. And so, the whole point of these GOP depravities is to dramatize, in the form of spectacle, that their fealty is to Trump over and above those rules and norms, the ones that make the system work at the most fundamental level.
Rep. Lauren Boebert made headlines with her show of support at former President Donald Trump’s hush-money trial on Thursday, but has been conspicuously absent for her own son’s court appearances, according to multiple reports.
The Colorado congresswoman joined a gaggle of Freedom Caucus loyalists at the Manhattan criminal court on Thursday, writing on X: “I’ll never stop standing up for President Trump, even if I’m the last one standing.”
Speaking at a makeshift press conference outside the court, Boebert was heckled with chants of “Beetlejuice” — a reference to when she was thrown out of a Denver theater showing the film after vaping and apparently groping a male companion.
While Trump is facing criminal charges of falsifying business records in relation to a hush-money scheme to silence porn actor Stormy Daniels, Boebert’s 19-year-old son Tyler has also had court dates.
Tyler Boebert was arrested in February on multiple felony charges including the criminal possession of identity documents, criminal trespass, and possession of a financial device.
He’s had two court hearings to date — one on April 11 and another on May 9.
During the April hearing, Boebert was in Congress voting against the passage of the Sea Turtle Rescue Assistance and Rehabilitation Act, records show.
Trump took advantage of the photo op and whining in court by appearing at Barron’s graduation today. He’s headed off for a fundraiser tonight in the Twin Cities. He’s probably airborne, as I write. Another MAGA governor is getting slammed for being more interested in appearances than Governing. They’re the most emotionally abusive group of misfits I’ve ever seen or read about. “‘A Governor Who Doesn’t Seem to Have Much Interest in Governing Arkansas.’ Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ increasing number of critics think she’s too worried about her national profile.” This is in Politicoand reported by Dana Liebelson. If she was that worried about her profile, you would think she’d stop wearing outfits suggesting she’s about to board a Prarie Schooner to Oregon. Still, I can’t see this kind of coverage of Jeff Landry, our governor, down here in Lousyana.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders assumed a podium on a recent spring morning in Arkansas, her familiar voice instantly evoking her pugnacious press conferences under Donald Trump. That day, there were no reporters to spar with, nor culture wars to wage, only a few dozen Arkansans who’d come to applaud millions in ongoing state grants for playgrounds and parks. “When my kids were younger, we could plan a huge trip just to find out that our kids would prefer to actually play on a jungle gym or a swing set,” she said. The 41-year-old governor wore an above-the-knee metallic skirt and pumps, a millennial-friendly outfit that matched her refreshed brand as the youngest governor in the country. She reminisced about her husband, Bryan, planning outdoor adventures with their three children, “some of which I am glad that I went on.” The crowd, which included Bryan, laughed.
Sanders was a long way from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2018, when she sat silently, a rictus fixed on her face, as comedienne Michelle Wolf joked about her burning facts and using the ash “to create a perfect smoky eye.” The former White House press secretary made her name defending Trump’s version of reality, while whittling down the actual press briefing. To her supporters, she played the outsider in Washington who couldn’t be corrupted by the D.C. establishment.
Now that she’s returned home, they say she still puts Arkansas first. In a close-knit state where some of Sanders’ colleagues have known her since college or younger, they insist her time with Trump didn’t fundamentally change her. Washington was one of her adventures, some of which she’s glad she went on. And many people in Arkansas love her for the same reason her national audience does: “She’s a fighter, an amazing communicator, and people connect to her,” Chris Caldwell, her 2022 campaign manager, told me.
But she has brought her experience in Trump’s Washington back with her. She shows little trust in the media. She cruises between events in a black SUV with tinted windows, accompanied by a state police detail in suits and a comms director who worked for Trump and his 2020 presidential campaign. At open-press events, she takes so few questions, Arkansas reporters are fatalistic about the idea of asking many. Instead, as befits a national figure with national ambitions — she’s shown up on lists as a possible running mate for Trump — she reaches her audience on her terms, including on Fox News, or Instagram and Elon Musk’s X, where she has over 2.3 million collective followers. At times, she seems to govern for the latter. Arkansas may not share a border with Mexico, but she has traveled to Eagle Pass, Texas, and talked about the border crisis on Fox & Friends. And sent down the Arkansas National Guard. Arkansas has long allowed gender-neutral IDs, of which there are a few hundred issued, but she justified banning them in the state, using the same playbook from the Republican war on trans rights.
Criticism of a member’s “fake eyelashes” and another’s intelligence. A question about discussing a member’s “bleach blond, bad-built butch body.”
A House Oversight Committee meeting Thursday night devolved into chaos amid personal attacks and partisan bickering in a rare evening session that was supposed to center on a resolution recommending Attorney General Merrick Garland be held in contempt of Congress.
The already tense hearing was derailed when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., responded to a question from Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, by saying, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”
Democrats, led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, immediately moved to strike Greene’s words from the record and make her apologize to Crockett.
“That is absolutely unacceptable,” Ocasio-Cortez said over cross talk. “How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person?”
Greene taunted Ocasio-Cortez, asking, “Are your feelings hurt?”
“Oh, girl? Baby girl,” Ocasio-Cortez shot back. “Don’t even play.”
Greene attacked a second member just minutes after she criticized Crockett, asserting that Ocasio-Cortez did not have “enough intelligence” for a debate.
Greene had asked Ocasio-Cortez, “Why don’t you debate me?”
Ocasio-Cortez responded that she thought “it’s pretty self-evident.”
“You don’t have enough intelligence,” Greene said as members of Congress audibly groaned at her attack.
Greene agreed to strike her comments toward Crockett but vehemently refused to apologize for the evening’s attacks, declaring, “You will never get an apology out of me.”
Green asked if any member of the Democrat party was employing Judge Marchand’s daughter, which had nothing to do with the committee topic, which was supposed to be about AG Merrick Garland.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on all of this because I’m “hopping mad,” as my mother would say. It seemed to be an equal opportunity week to discuss why women should return to the kitchen and nursery. Sometimes, I’d like to be wherever David and Warren are, packing my guitars and piano with me and ignoring this world for a while.
I have one thing to bring to your attention. This is from the Texas Monthly. “Why Did Greg Abbott Pardon a Racist Murderer? The governor didn’t offer much of a rationale in granting clemency to Daniel Perry, who killed a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020, but apparently the enemy of his enemy is his friend.” It was written by Christopher Hooks. May all the wisdom beings protect every living thing and person in a red state.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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I’m really late getting started today, so I’m just going to get right to today’s news. Things are getting out of hand in the the Middle East, and Republicans in the House are determined to make the worse. They are also working hard to shut down the government unless they get all the goodies they are demanding. Johnson did manage to get a continuing resolution passed, but he depended on Democratic votes. Meanwhile the Republicans are holding back funding for Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
This is from Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American: January 18, 2024.
This afternoon, Congress passed a new continuing resolution necessary to fund the government past the upcoming deadlines in the previous continuing resolution. Those deadlines were tomorrow (January 19) and February 2. The deadlines in the new measure are March 1 and March 8. This is the third continuing resolution passed in four months as extremist Republicans have refused to fund the government unless they get a wish list of concessions to their ideology.
Today’s vote was no exception. Eighteen Republican senators voted against the measure, while five Republicans did not vote (at least one, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, is ill). All the Democrats voted in favor. The final tally was 77 to 18, with five not voting.
In the House the vote was 314 to 108, with 11 not voting. Republicans were evenly split between supporting government funding and voting against it, threatening to shut down the government. They split 107 to 106. All but two Democrats voted in favor of government funding. (In the past, Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts and MIke Quigley of Illinois have voted no on a continuing resolution to fund the government in protest that the measure did not include funding for Ukraine.)
This means that, like his predecessor Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to turn to Democrats to keep the government operating. The chair of the extremist House Freedom Caucus, Bob Good (R-VA), told reporters that before the House vote, Freedom Caucus members had tried to get Johnson to add to the measure the terms of their extremist border security bill. Such an addition would have tanked the bill, forcing a government shutdown, and Johnson refused.
Republican extremists in Congress are also doing the bidding of former president Donald Trump, blocking further aid to Ukraine in its struggle to fight off Russian aggression and standing in the way of a bipartisan immigration reform measure. Aid to Ukraine is widely popular both among the American people and among lawmakers. Immigration reform, which Republicans have demanded but are now opposing, would take away one of Trump’s only talking points before the 2024 election.
Richardson discusses a column in yesterday’s Washington Post about what happens when a country backslides on democracy: Poland is a test case for reviving a corrupted democracy, by Lee Hochstader. This could apply to Ukraine and potentially to the U.S.
With authoritarians and tyrants on the march across the world, Poland is an emerging test case of whether a corrupted democracy can be revived. The discouraging early signs are that it might be harder than building one from scratch.
Contempt for the niceties of representative and pluralistic democracy, along with florid rhetorical excess, were the trademarks of the man who controlled Poland’s ruling party for the past eight years, before a shock electoral defeat last fall cast him into political exile.
Ghost Cat, by Chikanobu Toyohara 1838-1912
Now Jaroslaw Kaczynski, having meted out death by a thousand cuts to Polish democracy in a failed effort to cement his grip on power, leads an irreconcilable opposition.
His escalating standoff with the new government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk is a stress test that is likely to subject Eastern Europe’s biggest and most influential country to a bitter contest of wills for the foreseeable future. And it is far from clear that Poland can regain the vibrant democracy, independent judiciary and robust institutions it worked so hard to establish from the ruins of communism more than 30 years ago.
“It was easier then because there was broad consensus in society and the political class about the general direction,” Piotr Buras, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Warsaw office, told me. “Now this is the core of the conflict.”
Tusk, who was prime minister from 2007 to 2014, took office again last month. It doesn’t mean that he took power.
Over the course of its two terms in government, Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party jury-rigged systems, rules and institutions to its own partisan advantage, seeding its allies in the courts, prosecutors’ offices, state-owned media and central bank. Kaczynski’s administration erected an intricate legal obstacle course designed to leave the party with a stranglehold on key levers of power even if it were ousted in elections.
On top of that, President Andrzej Duda, a Kaczynski ally, is set to remain in office until his term expires in August next year. He retains broad powers, including to veto legislation, and has already thwarted Tusk’s agenda where possible.
Read more at the WaPo. This is the danger we face if we let Trump gain power again.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has extended an invitation to Donald Trump to visit Kyiv, with a specific condition attached.
Speaking with U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 News, Zelensky said that Trump would be warmly received in the capital under one stipulation: the former U.S. president must demonstrate his ability to bring an end to the war with Russia within 24 hours, as he once promised.
Trump has repeatedly said that the war would not have happened if he was still in power in Washington, and that he would bring it to an immediate end if voted back in because he has what he described as “a good relationship” with both Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Beyond that, former U.S. president has provided no details of what his peace deal would involve.
Zelensky, who has previously extended the invitation without receiving a response, emphasized that if Trump indeed has a “formula” for resolving the war, he is eager to learn the specifics.
“So, I invite President Trump. If he can come here, I will need 24 minutes — yes, 24 minutes. Not more. Yes. Not more — 24 minutes to explain [to] President Trump that he can’t manage this war. He can’t bring peace because of Putin.”Zelensky said on air: “He is very welcome to come here, but I think he can not end the war in 24 hours, without giving our land to Putin.”
Five Senate Democrats on Friday signed onto a measure that would condition aid to Israel on its compliance with international law, bringing the total number of co-sponsors to 18. And a prominent Democrat, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, is rounding up support for his amendment to stop President Biden from circumventing Congress when he orders weapons transfers to Israel, a maneuver the president has pursued twice in recent months.
Kobayashi Kiyochika, Cat and Lantern
Earlier this week, 11 senators voted for a bill by Sen. Bernie Sanders aimed at forcing the Biden administration to examine potential human rights abuses by Israel.
After weeks of unquestioning support, the Senate is emerging as a center of resistance to Biden’s unwavering embrace of Israel — at least in modest ways — as even centrist Democrats are signaling their discomfort with the president’s “bear hug” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A number of prominent Democrats have proposed or backed measures that aim to hold Israel accountable or to shift American strategy, even if they are unlikely to garner enough support to pass.
The growing willingness of establishment Democrats to criticize or push back on Israel — a move that would have come with serious political ramifications just a few months ago — signals a shift in the politics of the party since the war in Gaza began more than 100 days ago. Senators from swing states, including Georgia, Wisconsin and Minnesota, have signed on to some of these measures as polls show a notable drop in support for Biden among young, Muslim and Arab American voters over his handling of the issue.
While few senators are voicing full-throated criticism of Biden’s Israel policy, the new, more skeptical tone reflects an increasing unease as the civilian toll in Gaza rises and Israel repeatedly flouts U.S. requests to modify its military onslaught.
“Every week the Netanyahu coalition promises the Biden administration that we will see meaningful changes, and every week it never materializes,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who, along with Kaine, organized the effort to impose conditions in exchange for aid. Van Hollen noted that some members of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition are even “bragging” about ignoring American requests.
Commanders from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Lebanon’s Hezbollah group are on the ground in Yemen helping to direct and oversee Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, four regional and two Iranian sources told Reuters.
Iran – which has armed, trained and funded the Houthis – stepped up its weapons supplies to the militia in the wake of the war in Gaza, which erupted after Iranian-backed militants Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, the four regional sources said.
Tehran has provided advanced drones, anti-ship cruise missiles, precision-strike ballistic missiles and medium-range missiles to the Houthis, who started targeting commercial vessels in November in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, the sources said.
IRGC commanders and advisers are also providing know-how, data and intelligence support to determine which of the dozens of vessels travelling through the Red Sea each day are destined for Israel and constitute Houthi targets, all the sources said.
Washington said last month that Iran was deeply involved in planning operations against shipping in the Red Sea and that its intelligence was critical to enable the Houthis to target ships.
A suspected Israeli strike killed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ espionage chief for Syria and three other guard members on Saturday, Iran has said, in an attack that destroyed much of a multistorey residential building in Damascus.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said six people were killed in the Israeli strike on the upmarket Mazzeh neighbourhood in the Syrian capital.
Four Cats Sleeping, by Inagaki Tomoo
In recent weeks, Israel has been accused of intensifying strikes on senior Iranian and allied figures in Syria and Lebanon, raising fears the war in Gaza could expand into a regional conflict.
“The Revolutionary Guards’ Syria [intelligence] chief, his deputy and two other guard members were martyred in the attack on Syria by Israel,” Iran’s Mehr news agency said.
In a statement, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) confirmed it had lost four of its members and blamed Israel.
When asked about the strike, the Israeli army said: “We do not comment on reports from the foreign media.”
Tensions between Iran and Israel have risen to a new high after the bloody surprise attack launched by Hamas into Israel on 7 October.
Trump has been directing racist attacks against Niki Haley, now that the Republican primary campaign has moved to New Hampshire.
Former president Donald Trump is lobbing racially charged attacks at Republican rival Nikki Haley, a daughter of Indian immigrants who served as his U.N. ambassador, days before a hotly contested New Hampshire primary that could determine the trajectory of the party’s nominating contest.
In a lengthy post on his social media platform Friday, Trump gave his GOP rival a nickname that appeared to be yet another racist dog whistle.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump repeatedly referred to Haley as “Nimbra,” an apparent intentional misspelling of her birth name. Haley, whose parents moved to the United States in the 1960s, was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa.
Reminiscent of his spurious claims about former president Barack Obama’s citizenship, Trump also last week spread a false “birther” claim about Haley when he shared a post on Truth Social from the Gateway Pundit, a far-right website that propagates baseless accusations. [IOW: lies]
The post falsely suggested Haley was ineligible to be president or vice president because her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born. This is not true. The Constitution states that a natural-born citizen can be president, and Haley automatically became a U.S. citizen when she was born in South Carolina in 1972.
Friday wasn’t the first time Trump has mocked Haley’s name. After the Iowa caucuses on Monday, Trump embarked on a tirade against Haley, misspelling her given first name.
“Anyone listening to Nikki ‘Nimrada’ Haley’s wacked out speech last night, would think that she won the Iowa Primary,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “She didn’t, and she couldn’t even beat a very flawed Ron DeSanctimonious, who’s out of money, and out of hope. Nikki came in a distant THIRD!” (DeSanctimonious is a Trump nickname for another GOP rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.)
Meanwhile, Trump is demonstrating his cognitive decline in his campaign speeches. Yesterday, he confused Nicki Haley with Nancy Pelosi–claiming Haley was responsible for Congressional security on January 6, 2021.
Donald Trump on Friday was skewered online for apparently confusing Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, resulting in the ex-president blaming the former for the events of Jan. 6.
Leisure Day by Togyu Okumura
Trump was delivering remarks in Concord, New Hampshire, on Friday, when he said that Haley was “offered 10,000 people” on Jan. 6, and implied that she was involved in the deleting of video evidence. These are common allegations that the former president has previously lobbed at Pelosi and the Jan. 6 subcommittee.
The video quickly went viral, causing people to make fun of Trump and even suggest he has mental health concerns.
“Do we need to do the dementia test again?” asked national security attorney Bradley P. Moss. MSNBC personality Mehdi Hasan had a similar take, asking, “Does he need to take the ‘person woman man camera TV’ test again?”
Hasan had been responding to a Biden-Harris HQ post in which the campaign says a “deeply confused Trump confuses Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley multiple times.”
Trump has also begun bragging again about how he “aced” a cognitive test as president. Actually the test he took is designed to detect dementia and has nothing to do with IQ or intelligence generally.
Donald Trump this week bragged about purportedly acing a widely used cognitive test that was administered to him when he was president, suggesting that the test included identifying drawings of three animals.
“I think it was 35, 30 questions,” the former president said in Portsmouth, N.H., of the test, which he said involved a few animal identification queries. “They always show you the first one, like a giraffe, a tiger, or this, or that — a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?’ Okay. And that goes on for three or four [questions] and then it gets harder and harder and harder.”
The only problem: The creator of the test in question, called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA, said it has never included the specific combination of animals described by Trump in any of its versions over the years.
In fact, Ziad Nasreddine, the Canadian neurologist who invented the test, said the assessment — intended primarily to test for signs of dementia or other cognitive decline — has never once included a drawing of a whale.
“I don’t think we have a version with a whale,” said Nasreddine, who added there are three versions of the test currently in circulation.
He and other physicians allowed for the possibility that Trump was just offering hypothetical examples. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
For nearly four years, Trump has periodically boasted about his performance on the cognitive test, always tweaking the questions he alleges he aced, from correctly reciting a series of words in order — “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” — to, most recently, identifying an animal — a whale — that did not appear on the test.
Experts also note that the assessment is not an I.Q. or intelligence test, though Trump has often talked about it as if it was.
“It’s a very, very low bar for somebody who carries the nuclear launch codes in their pocket to pass and certainly nothing to brag about,” said Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist and professor of medicine and surgery at the George Washington School of Medicine & Health Sciences.
And get this: part of Trump’s deposition for his civil fraud case has just been released.
Combative, angry and prone to grandiose claims — newly unveiled footage of an April 2023 deposition gives a glimpse into how former President Donald Trump behaves when testifying under oath.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Looking Tiresome
The video, released to CBS News on Friday in response to a freedom of information request, shows Trump claiming to have averted a “nuclear holocaust” and “saving millions of lives” as president. A transcript of the deposition was previously made public as an exhibit in Trump’s New York civil fraud case.
Trump testified at trial on Nov. 6, and his testimony that day often mirrored the April deposition.
During the trial, Trump said he was too “busy in the White House” to worry about his businesses. “My threshold was China, Russia and keeping our country safe,” he said.
It echoed a response he gave in his April 2023 testimony in a small conference room with New York Attorney General Letitia James. He went further that day, explaining just what he believes he kept Americans safe from:
“I was very busy. I considered this the most important job in the world, saving millions of lives. I think you would’ve had nuclear holocaust if I didn’t deal with North Korea. I think you would’ve had a nuclear war if I weren’t elected. And I think you might have a nuclear war now, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said.
Appearing on MSNBC on Saturday morning, conservative attorney George Conway was asked how the jury in the E.Jean Carroll defamation trial is likely viewing Donald Trump in the flesh as opposed to just seeing clips of him on TV.
Getting right into it with the hosts of MSNBC’s “The Weekend,’ Conway explained, “When you see little clips of him, you kind of think you know, it’s reality TV. He’s silly, he’s harmless, it’s just nonsense and he just does his thing, he does his schtick. But when you see him up close and in person you start to realize there’s something seriously wrong with him.”
“And that’s what happens with his own people,” he continued before recalling, “Remember how his chief of staff, General Kelly, brought in a book, like the psychiatrists had written about Donald Trump, saying he was completely out of his mind, and he [Kelly] is like, ‘This is the key. We could figure this out!'”
“People learn, there is something seriously wrong with this guy, and I think what this jury is going to learn, which is like you are in this solemn proceeding you are taking this seriously, and jurors generally don’t look at scams and people behaving badly in the courtroom, and here, they have this psychopath sitting right there,” he elaborated. “It’s got to be off-putting and scary, and just appalling to them, because they were actually seeing him in the flesh, this real person, not this caricature on TV, this self-caricature on TV. They’re seeing the face, the face literally, of evil right there.”
Yes, the face of evil is accurate–I agree.
What do you think about all this? What other stories are you interested in?
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It’s 2024, and the media and the Republicans are gearing up for the presidential election in November. What are the Democrats doing? I’m sure they are raising plenty of money, but when will they wake up and start fighting back against the Republicans and the media? Make no mistake, big media is hoping for another Trump presidency, because it will mean chaos and gobs of money for those who cover the chaos. It will mean riches for the media bosses and reporters alike–think of all the new books they can sell as Trump destroys democracy and attempts to gain dictatorial power?
You’ve probably heard that The Washington Post recently got rid of 240 employees through buyouts. They chose to keep right wing columnists like Hugh Hewitt and dumped liberals like Greg Sargent. Fortunately, Sargent has been hired by The New Republic.
The good news is that the Post has been able to meet its goal of trimming staff through buyouts instead of layoffs. The bad news is the Post will enter the new year with fewer employees — perhaps a couple of hundred.
Greg Sargent
Back in October, the Post announced that it was offering buyouts with the hopes of reducing staff by 240. (At the time, the Post had approximately 2,500 employees.)
Then late last month, Post interim CEO Patty Stonesifer told staff only half of the desired number of staffers — about 120 or so — had accepted the buyouts and that there would be layoffs if not enough employees took the buyouts. At the same time, The Daily Beast’s Corbin Bolies reported that Post executive editor Sally Buzbee told staff in an email that about 36 of the 120 who accepted the buyouts were from the newsroom. She said that was “about 30 percent of our goal across the News department.”
Then came Tuesday’s news that the Post had enough buyouts to avoid layoffs — for now (my words, not the Post’s). The exact number of buyouts isn’t known publicly.
In an email to staff, Stonesifer said the company “will enter the new year with a smaller organization but a better financial position.” Stonesifer also wrote, “I am very aware of how difficult this process has been for everyone involved and I want to thank you for the grace and respect you have shown at every step.”
For the gossip columnists at the WaPo, President Biden is boring. Imagine how much better the paper’s “financial position” will be when Trump gets back in the White House and consolidates his power. The same will be true of The New York Times. Maggie Haberman will be cleaning up, along with her co-writers.
In another positive development, historian and political observer Rick Perlstein will be writing for The American Prospect. I’m seriously thinking about dumping my Washington Post subscription and giving that money to one of these liberal publications.
Perlstein has published his first column. In it, he addresses three issues I worry about: the media focus on polls, the failure of journalists to address real issues, while tending to favor right wing narratives, and the failure of Democratic politicians to fight back hard against those narratives.
As a historian who also writes about the present, there are certain well-worn grooves in the way elections get written about by pundits and political journalists from which I instinctively recoil. The obsession with polling, for one. Polls have value when approached with due humility, though you wonder how politicians and the public managed to make do without them before their modern invention in the 1930s. But given how often pollsters blow their most confident—and consequential—calls, their work is as likely to be of use to historians as object lessons in hubris as for the objective data they mean to provide.
Pollsters themselves are often the more useful data to study, especially when their models encode mistaken presumptions frozen in place from the past. In 1980, for instance, Ronald Reagan’s landslide was preceded by a near-universal consensus that the election was tied. The pollster who called it correctly, Lou Harris, was the only one who thought to factor into his models a variable that hadn’t been accounted for in previous elections, because it did not yet really exist: the Christian right.
Polling is systematically biased in just that way: toward variables that were evident in the last election, which may or may not be salient for this election. And the more polls dominate discussions of campaigns and elections, the more they crowd out intellectual energy that could be devoted to figuring out those salient, deeper, structural changes conditioning political reality: the kind of knowledge that doesn’t obediently stand still to be counted, totted up, and reduced to a single number.
On media predictions:
Another waaaaay too well-worn journalistic groove isprediction. I have probably read thousands of newspaper opinion column prognostications going back to the 1950s. Their track record is too embarrassing for me to take the exercise seriously, let alone practice it myself. Like bad polls, pundits’ predictions are most usefulwhen they are wrong. They provide an invaluable record of the unspoken collective assumptions of America’s journalistic elite, one of the most hierarchical, conformist groups of people you’ll ever run across. Unfortunately, they help shape our world nearly as much, and sometimes more, than the politicians they comment about. So their collective mistakes land hard….
Rick Perlstein, author, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980.
And how ritualized? Consider one of elite journalism’s most deeply worn grooves: the morning-after declarations, should any Democrat win a presidential election, that the Republican politics of demagogic hate-mongering has shown itself dead and buried for all time—forgetting how predictably it returns in each new election, often in an increasingly vicious form.
In 1964: When the author of the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson, defeated a Republican who voted against the Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater, one of the most distinguished liberal newspaper editors in the South, Sam Ragan of the Raleigh News & Observer, pronounced that all future American elections would be decided “on issues other than civil rights.” His essay quoted the Los Angeles Times’ Washington bureau chief, who affirmed that conventional wisdom by observing that henceforth, whichever party takes the Black vote would be no more predictable than who would win “freckle-faced redheads and one-armed shortstops.” [There are many more examples of this phenomenon in the essay.]
This particular bias is rooted into elite punditry’s deepest, most dangerous groove of all: a canyon, if you will. On one side of the yawning gulf is the perennial fantasy that America is a nation fundamentally united and at peace with itself, “moderate,” “centrist,” where exceptions are epiphenomena entirely alien to settled American “norms.”
The media habits that make it so hard to grasp that reality—that made Trump and his merry band of insurrectionists such a surprise to us—are perhaps as systematic as any foisted upon the public by state media in authoritarian nations. A little more innocent than, say, Pravda, however, because one wellspring of this stubborn fantasy, and why audiences are so receptive to it, is simple psychology. To acknowledge the alternative is to stare into a terrifying abyss: the realization that America has never not been part of the way to something like a civil war.
But suddenly, in 2024, no one can avoid acknowledging that abyss anymore. And that leaves journalism in a genuine crisis.
Generations of this incumbent, consensus-besotted journalism have produced the very conceptual tools, metaphors, habits, and technologies that we understand as political journalism. But these tools are thoroughly inadequate to understanding what politics now is.
According to polls (which, yes, have their uses, in moderation), something around half of likely voters would like to see as our next president a man who thinks of the law as an extension of his superior will, who talks about race like a Nazi, wants to put journalistic organizations whose coverage he doesn’t like in the dock for “treason,” and who promises that anyone violating standards of good order as he defines them—shoplifters, for instance—will be summarily shot dead by officers of the state who serve only at his pleasure. A fascist, in other words. We find ourselves on the brink of an astonishing watershed, in this 2024 presidential year: a live possibility that government of the people, by the people, and for the people could conceivably perish from these United States, and ordinary people—you, me—may have to make the kind of moral choices about resistance that mid-20th-century existentialist philosophers once wrote about. That’s the case if Trump wins. But it’s just as likely, or even more likely, if he loses, then claims he wins. That’s one prediction I feel comfortable with.
I’ve already quoted too much, but I hope it’s enough so that you’ll want to read the rest at The American Prospect.
Every morning, I read Joyce Vance’s substack, Civil Discourse. Today, she offered “a warning” to all of us who want to save democracy. We have to remember that no everyone is following news and politics closely.
One morning before Christmas, I was working out with a friend who I adore, and workout with regularly. She’s young, smart, and a recent college graduate. In the middle of our session, my phone started going off incessantly and I finally picked it up. It was, of course, breaking news. That day, it was about the Giuliani bankruptcy.
I apologized to her for taking the call. I got off quickly and told her, by way of explanation, “Rudy Giuliani just filed for bankruptcy.”
Joyce Vance
“Who’s Rudy Giuliani?” she asked.
One morning before Christmas, I was working out with a friend who I adore, and workout with regularly. She’s young, smart, and a recent college graduate. In the middle of our session, my phone started going off incessantly and I finally picked it up. It was, of course, breaking news. That day, it was about the Giuliani bankruptcy.
I apologized to her for taking the call. I got off quickly and told her, by way of explanation, “Rudy Giuliani just filed for bankruptcy.”
“Who’s Rudy Giuliani?” she asked.
You know that noise they make in TV sitcoms, the one where the needle scratches across the record, and everything is interrupted? That was what I heard in my head. My mind worked over the implications of her question for the remainder of our time together.
She was born after 9-11. She never knew Giuliani as America’s mayor when the Towers fell and certainly not as the staunch pro-law enforcement mayor in the city in earlier years. But it shocked me that someone of voting age was unaware of Giuliani—didn’t recognize his name and associate it with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
She asked me about the bankruptcy. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” I explained that he’d lost a big defamation case in Georgia because he said horrible things about two election workers and disrupted their lives. Still no signs of recognition, but she got the point. “What an a**hole,” she concluded, based on my brief description of what he’d done.
Read the rest at the substack link.
Like Joyce Vance, I grew up in a politically engaged family. It’s always a shock to me when I learn that some people have no idea what’s going on in the government. We need to reach out to the people us and discuss the danger of autocracy.
I’m really troubled by what happened to Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president. She may well have some issues with past plagiarism, but if she had been white, I doubt if the issue would have even come up. The truth is, she was set up by Congressional Republicans who hate diversity in education. Two articles:
At The Atlantic, David Graham expresses the typical liberal media response: it’s a shame and of course she was targeted by right wingers, but Harvard still had to do the “right” thing: An Old-Fashioned Scandal Fells a New Harvard President.
Gay, a political scientist, resigned…, making her the second president of an Ivy League institution to bow out in the past month. University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill stepped down on December 9, but the cases are not as similar as they might initially seem. Magill’s departure stemmed directly from the shaky December 5 congressional testimony by a panel of college presidents about anti-Semitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and was viewed as a victory for Elise Stefanik, the Republican representative who led the questioning.
What appear to have doomed Gay were the allegations of plagiarism lodged against her. This is an important distinction. Penn’s board of trustees was spooked by pressure from donors and politicians. The Harvard Corporation, an equivalent body, was not. In a December 12 statement, it acknowledged that Gay’s testimony had gone poorly, but said she would remain in her post, describing its position as a defense of open discourse and academic freedom. Although Stefanik is already claiming credit, what ended Gay’s short tenure were not the hot-button issues of campus speech and anti-Semitism but was instead the kind of scandal that one might expect to fell the president of any educational institution, whether a member of the Ivy League or a community college.
Yes, because Harvard initially supported her remaining president, so the right wingers had to find another reason to get rid of her.
On December 5, Gay, Magill, and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth were hauled before Congress to speak about anti-Semitism on campus, though many GOP members really seemed to be upset about what they saw as inconsistent standards for deciding what speech is and isn’t acceptable on campuses. The hearing was remarkable for, among other things, how little intellectual agility the presidents showed in the face of questioning. A college president has to fulfill a dual role, serving not only as an academic officer but also as a sort of front woman for her institution. The failure of these presidents to represent their universities well in such a public setting was bound to raise questions about their leadership, regardless of the subject matter.
Claudine Gay
Gay survived the initial backlash to her testimony, but since then, the furor around allegations of plagiarism has grown. Many of the examples that have been made public represent extremely lazy rewriting of source material—Gay borrowed sentences or paragraphs, making minor changes to their wording or order of clauses without adding much analysis of her own. Some academics have described this as entirely unacceptable, while others have defended Gay—including some, such as David Canon, from whose work she repeatedly drew. “I am not at all concerned about the passages. This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism,” Canon toldThe Washington Free Beacon….
The origin of the complaints is still murky. Allegations of academic misconduct against Gay had floated around online message boards for some time, The Wall Street Journal reported. One unnamed individual claims to be the source of the current charges. On October 24, the New York Post contacted the university to ask about allegations against Gay. On December 10, the conservative agitator Christopher Rufo and the journalist Christopher Brunet published claims of plagiarism in Gay’s 1997 Harvard dissertation. The next day, The Washington Free Beaconadded more reporting….
Conservatives have long had it out for Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, whose appointment they viewed as a sop to progressive diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. The identity of the initial anonymous complainant against Gay is unclear, as is when he or she brought the complaints forward. The appearance of the allegations in conservative outlets and their timing, coming shortly after the war in Gaza thrust Gay into the spotlight, certainly suggest a politically motivated effort.
I’ve quoted the parts of Graham’s article that support my point of view. He still thinks she should have been fired.
Claudine Gay’sresignation from her post as president of Harvard University is a shocking new twist in the ongoing saga over campus free speech. Gay resigned on Tuesday amid new allegations of plagiarism leveled through an unsigned complaint published in the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet that has long criticized Gay. The news, which was broken by the Crimson, comes after months of attacks on Gay’s response to campus antisemitism and weeks after university leaders reaffirmed their support for her. Gay’s stunning departure is the latest casualty in a growing conservative crusade against “diversity in education” and a chilling reminder of the state of campus free speech amid Israel’s war on Gaza.
“It has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign,” Gay wrote in a letter to the Harvard community. “It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am.”
Gay’s 186-day tenure is the shortest in the school’s 388-year history.
Just six months ago, Gay was heralded as the future of Harvard University. “I stand before you on this stage with the weight and honor of being a first,” she told a rain-soaked crowd during her inauguration ceremony. Her journey to becoming Harvard’s first Black female president felt like the quintessential American dream: she is the daughter of Haitian immigrants, a Stanford graduate with a doctorate from Harvard. An accomplished political scientist with an emphasis on race, democracy, and politics, she was praised by university and political leaders alike after being named Harvard’s 30th president in late 2022. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey called her “a leader for our time” driven by the “values to meet the moment” at Gay’s September inauguration ceremony. Harvard’s governing board announced her selection with glee. “We are confident Claudine will be a thoughtful, principled, and inspiring president for all of Harvard,” wrote Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker. “She will be a great Harvard president in no small part because she is such a good person.”
Gay’s brief tenure collided with historic political assaults against diversity and education. In June, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in a case in which Harvard was at its center. The October 7 terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas instigated an ongoing war that’s claimed more than 22,000 lives. The war also set off a fierce debate on college campuses across the country over free speech. In one well-documented incident, a conservative group paid for a truck to circle around Harvard Square with a billboard on which the names and photos of opponents of Israel’s actions were displayed. The billboard dubbed them “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.”
The end result of the controversy and the efforts of right wingers:
Her resignation not only shakes things up at the most prestigious university in the country, it also exposes a larger trend of racial regression that picked up in the years following the 2020 uprisings as Black leaders have been installed in positions of power only to find themselves undermined by the systems they sought to save. Love it or hate it, Harvard sets the tone for national and international debates. To conservative activists celebrating on Twitter, Gay’s ouster is part of a larger project to purge progressive Black leaders from public institutions. Or as Chris Rufo put it, to abolish “DEI ideology from every institution in America.” In the end, Gay’s presidency has created yet another first: Harvard’s first Black female president was also its shortest-serving.
Those are my top stories for today. Lots more is happening, of course. Here are more stories you might find interesting/enraging:
Cats can be mysterious creatures to begin with, but their ability to purr has long perplexed scientists. How can so small an animal make such a deep sound?
Now, scientists may be one step closer to solving this perplexing pet puzzle. Cats, they say, have pads within their vocal cords that may help produce the low-frequency vocalizations involved in purring, according to a new paper published last week in the journal Current Biology.
Big animals, like elephants, have longer vocal cords than smaller animals do, which allows them to produce lower sounds. The same rule applies to musical instruments: A large double bass can produce lower notes than a small violin does, for example.
“Typically, the larger the animal, the longer the vocal folds and so the lower the frequency of sound created,” says study co-author Christian Herbst, a voice scientist at the University of Vienna, to New Scientist’s Jason Arunn Murugesu.
But domestic cats, with their relatively short vocal cords, seem to be an exception to this rule. Though they typically weigh around ten pounds, when purring, they can make low-frequency rumbles between 20 and 30 hertz—lower than the lowest bass sounds made with the average human voice.
To explain this phenomenon, researchers studied eight domestic cats that had already been euthanized because of terminal illness. With the cat owners’ consent, the scientists removed the animals’ larynges from their bodies, then pushed warm air through them to simulate feline vocalizations.
With this method, the researchers were able to produce purring sounds at frequencies between 25 and 30 hertz—without any input from the cat’s brain, and without any muscle contractions. The vocal cords vibrated in a way that resembled “vocal fry” in humans, or the creaky, low register sound some people make when speaking.
Other vertebrates produce sounds in a similar way—via a passive process known as flow-induced self-sustained oscillation. When this occurs, the brain sends a signal to the vocal cords that causes them to press together. As air flows through the vocal cords, they begin to vibrate—and from here, physiology takes over, and the brain is no longer involved….
The researchers analyzed the deceased cats’ vocal cords and found masses of tissue embedded within them that they theorize might be the key to purring. These structures, which they termed “pads,” might slow down the vocal cords’ vibrations by making them denser, enabling the animals to make lower-frequency sounds in spite of their diminutive size.
Interesting, huh?
In people news, longtime GOP strategist and author Kevin Phillips has died.
“The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.”
That insight was the brainchild of Kevin Phillips, the longtime political analyst who passed away this week at 82 years old. Phillips’s 1969 book, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” provided the blueprint for the “southern strategy” that the Republican Party adopted for decades to win over White voters who were alienated by the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights in the 1960s.
Phillips advised Republicans to exploit the racial anxieties of White voters, linking them directly to issues such as crime, federal spending and voting rights. The strategy, beginning with Richard M. Nixon’s landslide victory in the 1972 presidential race, helped produce GOP majorities for decades.
To the witch’s house we go, by Margaryta Yermolayeva
Though Phillips later reconsidered his fealty to the GOP, updated versions of the “southern strategy” live on in today’s Republican Party, shaping the political world we inhabit today. So I asked historians and political theorists to weigh in on Phillips’s legacy. Their responses have been edited for style and brevity.
Kevin Kruse, historian at Princeton University and co-editor of “Myth America”: Kevin Phillips was a prophet of today’s polarization. He drew a blueprint for a major realignment of American politics that is still with us. For much of the 20th century, Democrats dominated the national scene, because of the reliable support of the “Solid South.”
But the “Negro problem” of the 1960s, Phillips argued, presented Republicans an opportunity to take the South and Southwest, too, a new region he anointed “the Sun Belt.” All they had to do was appeal to the hatreds of White voters there, through racially coded “law and order” appeals.
Phillips, of course, proved correct about the regional realignment. Republicans won every single state in the South in the 1972, 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns. Today, Republicans dominate the region partly because they still employ Phillips’s polarizing politics of resentment and reaction, from complaints about Black Lives Matter to panics about “woke” education. Donald Trump’s continued dominance of the GOP shows that the underlying instinct to exploit division and inflame hatred remains.
Read the rest, including more quotes by experts, at The WaPo.
House Republicans are still in chaos. Yesterday, one of the craziest House reps, George Santos, had an insane freakout in the midst of the Speaker fight.
We’ve all had an extremely long week, as you’re likely aware. On Friday afternoon, George Santos, the New York representative whose tally of alleged federal crimes is now up to 23, was spotted screaming in the hallway of the Longworth House Office Building. It appears Santos — who famously suggested his family was Jewish then revised this to “Jew-ish” — was accosted by pro-Palestinian protesters.
Normally, neither a small protest on Capitol Hill nor George Santos shouting in front of a gaggle of reporters would be all that notable. But there’s the twist: Santos was holding a 2-month-old baby when this all went down….
You probably have a lot of questions right now, as do I. Hartmann doesn’t have any answers. She posted some tweets, but WordPress won’t let me do that anymore. You can read them at NY Mag.
Rep. George Santos (R-NY) had a complete meltdown on Friday afternoon during a tense interaction on Capitol Hill that ended with a man in police custody—and somehow involved a baby.
According to a clip shared by NBC News’ Sahil Kapur, Santos called the man, identified by cops as Shabd Khalsa, “human scum” for asking him questions critical of Israel’s bombings in Gaza….
“You came into my personal space yelling at me,” Santos fumed. “What are you doing about terrorists destroying Israel?” He then sped down a hallway in the Capitol’s Longworth Building, screaming statements condemning Hamas….
Capitol Police said in a statement to The Daily Beast that 36-year-old Khalsa was arrested and charged him with simple assault “after an officer witnessed him have physical contact with a congressional staffer in the Longworth Building.” The staffer was not identified.
A profile on X under the name Shabd Singh, the same name Khalsa gave to reporters, says that he is a former campaign organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT).
He told The Hill that he was Jewish-American and that Santos, who was previously busted falsely claiming to be Jewish, “began yelling at me, essentially framing what I am saying as some sort of antisemitic trope.”
Still no information about the baby. If you’ve heard anything about the origins of the child or what Santos was doing with him/her, please let us know.
As Daknikat wrote yesterday, Insurrectionist Jim Jordon is currently the leading candidate for House Speaker, but he doesn’t yet have the votes to be election, thank goodness.
After a series of setbacks, Republicans ended the week no closer to electing a new speaker as deep internal divisions have left the conference struggling to govern and the House in a state of paralysis.
The chaos within House GOP ranks intensified dramatically over the past several days as the conference has tried and so far failed to find a viable successor to Kevin McCarthy following his unprecedented ouster at the hands of a small faction of hardline conservatives.
Black Cat Halloween, by Iva Wilcox
Rep. Jim Jordan is the new GOP speaker nominee following Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s exit from the race. But the Ohio Republican faces the same kind of grim vote math that doomed Scalise’s speaker bid as Jordan lacks the 217 votes needed to win the gavel in a full House floor vote.
Jordan has the weekend to continue to make his case and attempt to flip holdouts, but he faces a steep uphill battle.
The GOP conference faced whiplash this week after Scalise won an initial vote to become speaker nominee, only to drop out not long after as a result of entrenched opposition to his candidacy. The week ended with another vote, this time to make Jordan the new nominee. But it soon became clear that Jordan also faces a stiff wall of resistance.
The House remains effectively frozen as long as there is no speaker, a dire situation that comes as Congress faces a fast-approaching government funding deadline in mid-November and as crisis unfolds abroad in Ukraine and with Israel’s war against Hamas.
Asked by CNN’s Manu Raju how the entire episode reflects on the GOP, McCarthy said on Friday, “it’s terrible.”
Centrists are signaling they’re open to a deal. Democrats are outlining terms. With no speaker in sight yet, House Republicans are ramping up their discussions about a way to reopen the chamber.
A bipartisan solution to the GOP’s leadership chaos still sounds farfetched to most on the Hill — but then, so does the idea that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) might overcome his dozens of skeptics and win a floor vote early next week.
There’s just one problem with the idea that a temporary compromise could get the House back to legislative business: It has the same issue that plagued the speakership bids of Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise and now Jordan. Right now, no solution has the near-unanimous House Republican support that’s required to pass on the floor.
Which means that, unless Jordan can overcome his skeptics and push to victory on the floor in the next several days, the only way forward might be with Democrats. A group of centrist Democrats wrote to Acting Speaker Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) on Friday to propose a limited agenda and some perks for the opposing party in exchange for temporarily restarting House business during a time of global crisis.
Some self-described GOP pragmatists have suggested that if Republicans can’t chart a course on their own, they could cut a deal with Democrats to break the 10-day impasse.
“At some point we have to do a bipartisan deal. I mean, they don’t want to acknowledge it, but these guys do not want to govern,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said of his own party’s conservatives.
But as desperation creeps into the GOP while Jordan pushes to lock down the gavel, it’s clear that any attempt to further empower a caretaker speaker would fall short within their own party. McHenry has indicated that his future role as acting speaker is up to his colleagues to settle — even as the Nov. 17 shutdown deadline draws closer and Israel seeks U.S. aid — but his fellow Republicans simply can’t agree on anything.
Read more at the link above.
I suppose I have to include some news from the war between Israel and Hamas. (BTW, is it just me, or has the Ukraine war completely disappeared from the media?)
A blast has struck a convoy on an evacuation route in Gaza, killing a number of people including several children, after a stark deadline ahead of a possible Israeli ground assault.
The IDF told civilians in and around Gaza City Friday that they must move south to avoid being caught up in Israeli military operations and announced a six-hour evacuation window on Saturday.
Black Cat at Halloween, by Daniel Eskridge
Israel has massed troops and military equipment at the border with Gaza, and continued bombarding the densely populated territory in response to the deadly October 7 attacks by the Islamist militant group, Hamas.
Videos authenticated by CNN showed a scene of extensive destruction following Friday’s blast on Salah Al-Deen street. A number of bodies, including those of children, can be seen on on a flat-bed trailer that appears to have been used to carry people away from Gaza City. There are also a number of badly burned and damaged cars.
It’s unclear what caused the widespread devastation. CNN has reached out to the IDF for comment on any airstrikes in the same location.
Even before the evacuation warning, more than 400,000 Palestinians had already been internally displaced by the past week of fighting as conditions worsen inside the bombarded strip.
But the evacuation statement and the prospect of a potential incursion have been sharply criticized by rights groups, including the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) head, who warned that such a move could bring “catastrophic humanitarian consequences.”
As Israel engages in a massive air campaign ahead of an anticipated full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Friday that all citizens of Gaza are responsible for the attack Hamas perpetrated in Israel last weekend that left over 1,200 people dead.
“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said at a press conference on Friday. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”
When a reporter asked Herzog to clarify whether he meant to say that since Gazans did not remove Hamas from power “that makes them, by implication, legitimate targets,” the Israeli president claimed, “No, I didn’t say that.”
But he then stated: “When you have a missile in your goddamn kitchen and you want to shoot it at me, am I allowed to defend myself?”
At another point in the press conference, Herzog presented a different perspective, saying, “Of course there are many, many innocent Palestinians who don’t agree to this — but unfortunately in their homes, there are missiles shooting at us, at my children.”
Ghost Cat, by Neocale at Deviant Art
Herzog’s comments follow Israel’s announcement that it had directed the 1.1 million residents of northern Gaza to evacuate, likely ahead of a ground invasion. Israel dropped thousands of flyers over northern Gaza and left voice messages on Friday directing people to leave their homes and flee south.
Human rights groups and the United Nations denounced the evacuation order.
“The United Nations considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences,” Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN secretary-general, said in a statement. “The United Nations strongly appeals for any such order, if confirmed, to be rescinded avoiding what could transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.”
“Ordering a million people in Gaza to evacuate, when there’s no safe place to go, is not an effective warning,” Clive Baldwin, senior legal advisor to Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “World leaders should speak up now before it is too late, he added.
Documents exclusively obtained by NBC News show that Hamas created detailed plans to target elementary schools and a youth center in the Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Sa’ad, to “kill as many people as possible,” seize hostages and quickly move them into the Gaza Strip.
The attack plans, which are labeled “top secret” in Arabic, appear to be orders for two highly trained Hamas units to surround and infiltrate villages and target places where civilians, including children, gather. Israeli authorities are still determining the death toll in Kfar Sa’ad.
The documents were found on the bodies of Hamas terrorists by Israeli first responders and shared with NBC News. They include detailed maps and show that Hamas intended to kill or take hostage civilians and school children.
One page labeled “Top Secret” outlines a plan of attack for Kfar Sa’ad, saying “Combat unit 1” is directed to “contain the new Da’at school,” while “Combat unit 2” is to “collect hostages,” “search the Bnei Akiva youth center” and “search the old Da’at school.”
Another page labeled “Top Secret Maneuver” describes a plan for a Hamas unit to secure the east side of Kfar Sa’ad while a second unit controls the west. It says “kills as many as possible” and “capture hostages.” Other orders include surrounding a dining hall and holding hostages in it.
The detailed plan to attack Kfar Sa’ad is part of a trove of documents that Israeli officials are analyzing, according to one source in the Israeli army and one in the government. Surveillance video of Hamas terrorists entering a kibbutz on Oct. 7 shows tactics similar to those laid out in the documents obtained by NBC News.
The Israeli officials said that the wider group of documents show that Hamas had been systematically gathering intelligence on each kibbutz bordering Gaza and creating specific plans of attack for each village that included the intentional targeting of women and children.
The judge presiding over the upcoming damages trial against Rudy Giuliani said Friday she will tell jurors that the former Trump lawyer intentionally hid financial documents and other records in defiance of court orders.
Vlad Vampire Cat, by Carrie Hawks
In a five-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said the move was necessary given “Giuliani’s continued and flagrant disregard of this Court’s August 30 Order that he produce financial-related documents concerning his personal and his businesses’ past and present assets” and other pertinent information.
That means jurors deciding how much Giuliani should pay two Georgia election workers he defamed will be told they can assume the worst about why the former New York City mayor has failed to turn over the court-ordered records.
“The jury will be instructed that it must, when determining an appropriate sum of compensatory, presumed, and punitive damages, infer that defendant Giuliani was intentionally trying to hide relevant discovery about the Giuliani Businesses’ finances for the purpose of shielding his assets from discovery and artificially deflating his net worth,” the judge wrote.
Additionally, Giuliani and his lawyer will be prohibited “from making any argument, or introducing any evidence, stating or suggesting that he is insolvent, bankrupt, judgment proof, or otherwise unable to defend himself” since he failed to hand over evidence that would show that’s true, the judge wrote.
You might be forgiven for thinking it’s been a very quiet few months for the Covid-19 pandemic. Besides the rollout of new boosters, the coronavirus has largely slipped out of the headlines. But the virus is on the move. Viral levels in wastewater are similar to what they were during the first two waves of the pandemic. Recent coverage of the so-called Pirola variant, which is acknowledged to have “an alarming number of mutations,” led with the headline “Yes, There’s a New Covid Variant. No, You Shouldn’t Panic.”
Even if you haven’t heard much about the new strain of the coronavirus, being told not to panic might induce déjà vu. In late 2021, as the Omicron variant was making its way to the United States, Anthony Fauci told the public that it was “nothing to panic about” and that “we should not be freaking out.” Ashish Jha, the Biden administration’s former Covid czar, also cautioned against undue alarm over Omicron BA.1, claiming that there was “absolutely no reason to panic.” This is a telling claim, given what was to follow—the six weeks of the Omicron BA.1 wave led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in a matter of weeks, a mortality event unprecedented in the history of the republic.
Indeed, experts have been offering the public advice about how to feel about Covid-19 since January 2020, when New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo opined, “Panic will hurt us far more than it’ll help.” That same week, Zeke Emanuel—a former health adviser to the Obama administration, latterly an adviser to the Biden administration—said Americans should “stop panicking and being hysterical.… We are having a little too much [sic] histrionics about this.”
This concern about public panic has been a leitmotif of the Covid-19 pandemic, even earning itself a name (“elite panic”) among some scholars. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned, three and a half years into the current crisis, it’s that—contrary to what the movies taught us—pandemics don’t automatically spawn terror-stricken stampedes in the streets. Media and public health coverage have a strong hand in shaping public response and can—under the wrong circumstances—promote indifference, incaution, and even apathy. A very visible example of this was the sharp drop in the number of people masking after the CDC revised its guidelines in 2021, recommending that masking was not necessary for the vaccinated (from 90 percent in May to 53 percent in September).
As that example suggests, emphasizing the message “don’t panic” puts the cart before the horse unless tangible measures are being taken to prevent panic-worthy outcomes. And indeed, these repeated assurances against panic have arguably also preempted a more vigorous and
urgent public health response—as well as perversely increasing public acceptance of the risks posed by coronavirus infection and the unchecked transmission of the virus. This “moral calm”—a sort of manufactured consent—impedes risk mitigation by promoting the underestimation of a threat. Soothing public messaging during disasters can often lead to an increased death toll: Tragically, false reassurance contributed to mortality in both the attacks on the World Trade Center and the sinking of the Titanic.
Read the rest at The Nation. The gist is that Covid-19 is still out there and still dangerous. Pretending it’s not won’t help us.
That’s my contribution for today. What do you think? What other stories have caught your interest?
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Dakinikat turned me on to the world of truck drivers who have cat companions along for the ride. Here’s an article that discusses the phenomenon. CharityPaws.com: Trucker Cats May Be The Coolest Cats!
For what it’s worth, having a pet is hard work.
Love is easy enough to provide while on the road – but food, water, space, and entertainment are all needs too, and sometimes hard to come up with.
In the case of dogs especially, playtime is the hardest need to fill for truckers. After several hour-long walks, a game of tug-of-war, and an afternoon in the sun spent playing fetch, who wouldn’t be tired? But for truckers this can be time consuming and delay important deliveries!
That’s why many truckers have turned to cats as the solution for those lonely road trips. Trucker cats are the coolest cats with their chill laid back personalities and ability to make truckers feel awesome. They also have some great hearing which is why the made it to our list of “what animal has the best hearing” list. Having a companion with good hearing on board can help you find critters that may sneak around while you are sleeping or even alert you to danger!
With most of their time spent on the road in a little truck cab, cats are the perfect companion for truckers– and here’s some of the best reasons why according to one trucker’s resource:
Cats are low-maintenance: they eat less than their canine counterparts, take up less room, and don’t need as much playtime.
They’re loving and affectionate: cats are just as sweet as any other animal, once they have a chance to warm up to you.
They’re obedient, and trainable: cats can do tricks and walk on leashes, with the proper time and training!
They’re protective: though not as scary as a dog, cats are perfectly capable of altering truckers if something looks, sounds, or even smells off.
Other reasons topping truckers’ lists include cleanliness, cuteness, and the fact that having a cat in a truck is a pretty good conversation starters. Some even say that having a feline friend is a constant reminder to drive and act safely during the long haul. They are also incredibly loyal as shown by the Room 8 cat – and having that kind of loyalty on the road will make any trucker feel amazing!
Read more at the link above.
Here’s a video about trucker cats, posted on YouTube by Cheezburger.
Long Read: Are Americans Experiencing Collective Trauma?
I want to call your attention to an excellent, but very long read in The New Republic by Anna Marie Cox: We Are Not Just Polarized. We Are Traumatized. Subhead: “The pandemic. The mass shootings. Insurrection. Trump. We’ve been through so much. What if our entire national character is a trauma response?”
This is a very long piece, so I’m just going to give you some samples to help you decide if you want to tackle reading the whole thing.
As of last year, four in 10 Americans knew at least one person who died from Covid. This year, three in 10 Americans say they know someone who has been affected by an opioid addiction, and one in five knows someone who’s died from a painkiller overdose. In 2022, more than three million adults were displaced by some form of natural disaster—that’s more than three times as many displaced per year between 2008 and 2021. Last year, some cities saw a 50 percent increase in evictions over pre-pandemic levels. One in five knows someone who’s died due to gun violence; one in six has witnessed a shooting; 21 percent have been personally threatened by a gun. Half of Americans know someone personally who has experienced at least one of those events.
After Trump’s “grab her by” tape became public, calls to the national sexual assault hotline jumped up by 35 percent (as Michelle Goldberg observed, Trump was a walking trigger for assault survivors). During the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, calls to the sexual assault hotline spiked 201 percent. Lockdown—the first two months of the pandemic—saw a rise in intimate partner violence of 101 percent, with the rate stabilizing at an increase of about 8 percent from pre-pandemic numbers as of 2022.
Another photo of Trucker cat Percy, by Paul Robertson
And then there are the frontline workers and “essential personnel,” those who risked their lives for our safety and comfort during the spring of 2020. I assume that we agree health professionals faced trauma (and may well still). There are 22 million of them in the United States, and after the pandemic, 55 percent reported experiencing burnout, and three in 10 said they were now considering leaving the profession. The 55 million essential personnel who worked through the worst days of Covid suffered a similar toll: A year into the pandemic, the American Psychiatric Association found that 34 percent of essential workers had been treated by a mental health professional, 80 percent had trouble over- or under-sleeping, and 39 percent said they were drinking more alcohol than they had before….
These are traumas at the individual level in numbers so large that they demand national attention because there are national consequences—think of the nationwide therapist shortage and “the Great Resignation.”
So, what if the reason so many people identify as trauma survivors is that they are? What if the horrors of the last seven years do translate into a nation that is suffering more than mere political dysfunction? What if the polarization, paranoia, conspiracism, and hopelessness that bog us down have a more holistic origin than structural malfunctions or individual malfeasance?
What if our entire national character is a trauma response?
Before you say “bullshit,” remember: Cynicism is a trauma response.
Next Cox explores expert opinions about the concept of “collective trauma.”
The origin of the academic study of “collective trauma” has been credited to Kai Erikson’s 1977 book, Everything in Its Path, an account of the aftermath of the Buffalo Creek flood in Logan County, West Virginia, five years prior, which killed 125 people and destroyed 550 homes in a small mining community. In the book, Erikson writes of grappling with “thousands of pages of transcript material, whole packing boxes full of it,” that confounded him “not because the material is contradictory or difficult to interpret but because it is so bleakly alike.” He found respondents echoing one another to a frustrating degree, so much so that “a researcher is very apt to conclude after rummaging through these data that there is really not very much to say.” Eventually, however, he came to believe that the uniformity itself was meaningful; the damage done at Buffalo Creek was something more than a mere collection of individual harms.
Collective trauma, he wrote, means “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality.” Collective trauma happens in slow motion, “A form of shock all the same…. ‘I’ continue to exist, though damaged and maybe even permanently changed. ‘You’ continue to exist, though distant and hard to relate to. But ‘we’ no longer exist as a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger communal body.”
Trucker Abdirahman Abdul and Aisha
In other words, the defining characteristic of collective trauma—and what makes it almost impossible to self-diagnose—is that people who have been through it no longer believe in the integrity of their community. How does anyone see themselves as a traumatized collective if no one feels that they belong?
So, pull back to the macro level. For a moment, put aside your or anyone else’s individual experience. Think of the country itself as a patient.
In the past seven years, the country has sustained significant, repeated damage to its institutions. The courts, elections, law enforcement, and so on are its vital organs. Trump has been punching America in the kidneys since he first floated the idea of a “rigged election.” January 6 was a heart attack. The musculature that is the justice system, well, it was always spasmodic. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery shocked many white people into awareness of our already dysfunctional law enforcement apparatus, and then the Dobbs decision drove home how easily the rights that support us can be yanked away. Were we ever really as strong as we thought?
The country was already weakened by Trumpism when the pandemic attacked our nervous systems more than figuratively. It cut away at the millions of tiny threads that knit up our towns and cities. Think of the loose social ties that grow from just seeing the same people at the grocery store (or the office) every day—think of the mail. Our national proprioception—our awareness of where our parts are in relation to one another—deteriorated. Our creaky supply chain is another symptom of this disconnect. So is “you’re on mute.”
I won’t quote any more, but these excerpts are just from the introductory part of the article. Cox later demonstrates with examples how the notion of trauma can apply to our collective experience as a nation. There is so much in the piece, that I wonder if Cox is planning to turn it into a book.
I’m not sure how the MAGA world fits into this hypothesis, but after my reading about the traumas of Appalachia–from poverty, drugs, unemployment, and breakdown of families (see my Wednesday post), I wonder if an argument could be made that the attraction to Trump as powerful father figure could also have arisen out of trauma. At any rate, I highly recommend this article.
Citing threats against individuals former President Donald Trump has targeted, special counsel Jack Smith has asked a federal judge for a narrowly tailored gag order that restricts the 2024 presidential candidate from making certain extrajudicial statements about the election interference case brought against him.
A redacted copy of a government filing — released Friday, after an order from U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan — comes in connection with the election interference case, one of four criminal cases the former president is facing, two of which are federal.
“The defendant has an established practice of issuing inflammatory public statements targeted at individuals or institutions that present an obstacle or challenge to him,” the special counsel’s office wrote.
Whispur and DanDan, photo by Whispurer on Reddit
The government said Trump “made clear his intent to issue public attacks related to this case when, the day after his arraignment, he posted a threatening message on Truth Social.”
Trump’s Aug. 4 post read: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”
Trump, the office wrote, “has made good on his threat,” spreading “disparaging and inflammatory public posts on Truth Social on a near-daily basis regarding the citizens of the District of Columbia, the Court, prosecutors, and prospective witnesses.
“Like his previous public disinformation campaign regarding the 2020 presidential election, the defendant’s recent extrajudicial statements are intended to undermine public confidence in an institution—the judicial system—and to undermine confidence in and intimidate individuals—the Court, the jury pool, witnesses, and prosecutors,” the prosecutors wrote.
Naturally, Trump responded publicly to the filing:
At an event in Washington, Trump made his first public remarks on the filing by attacking Smith, arguing that the special counsel “wants to take away my rights under the First Amendment, wants to take away my right of speaking freely and openly.”
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, responded earlier Friday by calling the filing “nothing more than blatant election interference because President Trump is by far the leading candidate in this race.”
The federal prosecutors who charged former President Donald J. Trump with a criminal conspiracy over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election obtained 32 private messages from his Twitter account through a search warrant this winter as part of their investigation, court papers unsealed on Friday said.
Questions have lingered about what prosecutors were looking for in Mr. Trump’s Twitter account ever since it was revealed last month that the government had served the warrant on Twitter in January. In an earlier release of documents, prosecutors disclosed that they had obtained some private messages from Mr. Trump’s account but not how many.
The 32 messages, whose content has not been disclosed, were only a small fraction of the larger body of data that Twitter was forced to turn over under the terms of the warrant, the new court papers said. Much of the legal wrangling over the matter focused on the Justice Department’s demand that Twitter, purchased last year by Elon Musk and now known as X, not inform Mr. Trump of the search warrant.
Mr. Trump’s posts on the platform in the chaotic months after the election were mentioned several times in the indictment that the special counsel, Jack Smith, filed against him in Washington last month. What remains unclear is whether Mr. Smith’s team sought the warrant for Mr. Trump’s account merely to confirm that he had posted the messages that appeared in public, or whether they suspected that some private data in the account might also be important.
What were investigators looking for in the private messages?
The newly unsealed documents — an exhaustive record of the legal fight between Twitter and the Justice Department over whether to hide the execution of the warrant from Mr. Trump — added a few new details about what the government may have been seeking.
Waylon the Trucker Cat, photo by owner Nick
For example, the materials showed that prosecutors wanted to learn if there were other accounts that Mr. Trump had been logging into from the same internet address he used for his Twitter account, which during his presidency was a main channel for his public statements. But it was not clear whether looking for other accounts was merely a routine step or whether investigators had a specific reason to be asking.
The new materials — unsealed at the request of a coalition of news media organizations, including The New York Times — opened a broader window into the back and forth between the special counsel’s office and Twitter. The dispute touched on how to balance the government’s need to protect a sensitive investigation with the social media company’s desire to be transparent with its most famous user.
The documents were particularly sharp in describing Mr. Trump’s repeated attempts to obstruct federal inquiries — an argument that prosecutors used in securing permission from a judge in Washington not to tell the former president for months that they had obtained the warrant for his account.
In detailing Mr. Trump’s “pattern of obstructive conduct,” the new papers cited his attempts to interfere with the special counsel’s other inquiry — one in which the former president stands accused of illegally holding on to dozens of classified documents after leaving office.
The attorney for President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, who is facing felony gun charges, said Friday that the statute is “likely unconstitutional” and he expects “the case will be dismissed before trial.”
“On the facts, we think we’ll have a defense,” Abbe Lowell told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in an interview on “Good Morning America.”
The younger Biden has been indicted by special counsel David Weiss on three felony gun charges, bringing renewed legal pressure on him after a plea agreement he struck with prosecutors imploded in recent months.
The conduct described in the indictment dates back to October 2018, when Hunter Biden procured a Colt Cobra 38SPL despite later acknowledging that he was addicted to drugs around that time.
While the criminal statutes cited in the indictment are clear — it is a crime to lie on a gun application form or to possess a firearm as a drug user – Hunter Biden’s attorney suggested that the charges could be unconstitutional, citing a recent appeals court ruling that drug use alone should not automatically prevent someone from obtaining a gun.
“The only change that has occurred between when they investigated [this alleged crime] and today is that the law changed,” Lowell said. “But the law didn’t change in favor of the prosecution. The law changed against it.”
With Republicans launching an impeachment inquiry on Capitol Hill, Lowell suggested that political pressure on prosecutors played into their decision, questioning the timing of the charges in light of revelations from whistleblowers about the investigation.
No kidding. The political pressure from right wing Congresspeople has been off the charts. And Special Counsel David Weiss himself was appointed by Bill Barr after political pressure from Donald Trump.
“History is also our best teacher. Yes, our past is filled with too much violence, too much hatred, too much prejudice. But can we really say that we are not confronting those same evils now?” Jackson said at the church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Trucker cat, photo by abbenquesnel on flicker
“We have to own even the darkest parts of our past, understand them and vow never to repeat them. We must not shield our eyes. We must not shrink away lest we lose it all,” she said.
The justice didn’t invoke a particular case, but as a whole her speech nodded to efforts targeting the teaching of critical race theory in schools and books about the struggle for racial equality and other topics.
“If we are going to continue to move forward as a nation, we cannot allow concerns about discomfort to displace knowledge, truth or history. It is certainly the case that parts of this country’s story can be hard to think about,” she said. “I know that atrocities like the one we are memorializing today are difficult to remember and relive. But I also know that it is dangerous to forget them.”
At times, Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, drew a personal connection to the tragedy, in which a bomb exploded at the church on September 15, 1963, killing Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robertson. Nearly two dozen others were injured.
“As a mother of two young women who will always be my little girls, I can imagine no greater horror than to lose a child this way,” Jackson said.
“And even now, six decades later, the magnitude of that tragic loss weighs heavily on all of us because those girls were just getting started. They could have broken barriers. They could have shattered ceilings. They could have grown up to be doctors or lawyers or judges appointed to serve on the highest court in our land,” she added.
Read more at CNN.
That’s a sampling of today’s news. Feel free to discuss anything and everything in the comment thread.
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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.
athan Beane, the NFL’s senior vice president and chief diversity and inclusion officer, told People.
These last 10 years have taught us that we may have come a long way from not being able to vote, but the party of Troglydites can send us right back to being chattel and slaves in a matter of years. Women, the GLBT community, immigrant populations, and America’s black community are having basic rights stripped from them daily. The shit show in front of the Manhattan Courthouse yesterday was appalling. “MAGA Rage at Trump’s Trial Just Got Darker and More Dangerous. Republicans aren’t just showing “loyalty to Trump.” They’re saying that Trump is more important than the rule of law.” This is from Greg Sargent writing for The New Republic.
“Matt Gaetz evokes ‘standing by’ language adopted by Proud Boys as he attends court with Donald Trump.” They all basically helped Trump avoid his gag order. If they were ordered by Donald to do it, they are all in trouble. Boebert also made a huge fool of herself and, once again, showed her “family values.” This is from Business Insider. “Lauren Boebert skipped Congress to support Trump’s trial, but didn’t show up to her own son’s hearings: reports.”
Trump took advantage of the photo op and whining in court by appearing at Barron’s graduation today. He’s headed off for a fundraiser tonight in the Twin Cities. He’s probably airborne, as I write. Another MAGA governor is getting slammed for being more interested in appearances than Governing. They’re the most emotionally abusive group of misfits I’ve ever seen or read about. “‘A Governor Who Doesn’t Seem to Have Much Interest in Governing Arkansas.’ Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ increasing number of critics think she’s too worried about her national profile.” This is in Politico and reported by Dana Liebelson. If she was that worried about her profile, you would think she’d stop wearing outfits suggesting she’s about to board a Prarie Schooner to Oregon. Still, I can’t see this kind of coverage of Jeff Landry, our governor, down here in Lousyana.
I’m really late getting started today, so I’m just going to get right to today’s news. Things are getting out of hand in the the Middle East, and Republicans in the House are determined to make the worse. They are also working hard to shut down the government unless they get all the goodies they are demanding. Johnson did manage to get a continuing resolution passed, but he depended on Democratic votes. Meanwhile the Republicans are holding back funding for Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
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