Wednesday, February 7, 2024

Three Women Say No To Trump

From Charlie Pierce on the ruling by the D.C. Court of Appeals.

There was a time in our history, and not so very long ago, that the evaporation of a ludicrous legal claim in a federal appeals court would not rate a box on page 21 of the Metro section. But this is not then, so when El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago brought his ludicrous claim on limitless presidential immunity before the D.C Court of Appeals, and when, after a substantial (and nerve-wracking) delay, the Court on Tuesday left that claim a pile of smoking meat on a back road, it was a veritable legal earthquake. Three women on the bench looked at the exalted claims of a guy who already has been judged a sexual predator and laughed in his face. From the decision:

Since then, hundreds of people who breached the Capitol on January 6, 2021, have been prosecuted and imprisoned. And on August 1, 2023, in Washington, D.C., former President Trump was charged in a four-count Indictment as a result of his actions challenging the election results and interfering with the sequence set forth in the Constitution for the transfer of power from one President to the next. Former President Trump moved to dismiss the Indictment and the district court denied his motion. Today, we affirm the denial. For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution…

…“We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a President has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power — the recognition and implementation of election results. Nor can we sanction his apparent contention that the Executive has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and to have their votes count…

..At bottom, former President Trump’s stance would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the President beyond the reach of all three Branches. Presidential immunity against federal indictment would mean that, as to the President, the Congress could not legislate, the Executive could not prosecute and the Judiciary could not review. We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter. Careful evaluation of these concerns leads us to conclude that there is no functional justification for immunizing former Presidents from federal prosecution in general or for immunizing former President Trump from the specific charges in the Indictment.

Moreover, the Appeals panel clearly has lost tolerance for the former president*’s well-worn strategies for running out the clock. It gave him until Monday to bring his case to the Supreme Court, or else it will all go back to Judge Tanya Chutkan for trial. (His lawyers may have to buy a new box of crayons.) And that low hum you hear is the slow revving of the machinery back there. The system is powering up again.

It’s a big week for big issues in the courts. On Thursday, the Supremes will hear oral arguments on whether or not states can deny the former president* a place on their ballots based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Smart money says that they’ll find a way to duck the obvious constitutionality of that case, but that, now, they might not even agree to hear an appeal on the immunity case. The true danger would be a Supreme Court decision that shoves the case past the 2024 election on the calendar, which would raise the possibility of the case dying as a result of a Grifter Restoration. Hell, in that case, special counsel Jack Smith might find himself hauled away. The safe play is for the Supreme Court.

For the nonce, though, sanity and common sense are singing in tune, a rare melody in this cacophonous time. Of course, the indicted former president*’s camp has their story and they’re sticking to it. From The Hill:

“Prosecuting a President for official acts violates the Constitution and threatens the bedrock of our Republic. President Trump respectfully disagrees with the DC Circuit’s decision and will appeal it in order to safeguard the Presidency and the Constitution,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement.

The “respectful disagreement” lasted an entire paragraph.

“Deranged Jack Smith’s prosecution of President Trump for his Presidential, official acts is unconstitutional under the doctrine of Presidential Immunity and the Separation of Powers,” Cheung said.

“Deranged” Jack Smith has the whip hand again, and no matter how much the former president* and his lackeys bluster and fume, he’s got a good grip on it.

I’m surprised that they didn’t just say, “Are you fucking kidding me?” to each of the claims, but that’s what they meant.

Monday, February 5, 2024

Simple Choice

The Senate released their bipartisan proposal for border security and also included funding for Ukraine and Israel.  This took a lot of work from members from both sides doing something that should be a no-brainer… which makes it instant fodder for the no-brainers in the House.  But now the bill is out there, and this statement from the White House makes it clear that President Biden isn’t in the mood to cave to the whims of those who think their re-election or sucking up to a despot-in-waiting is good for anyone but their fevered dreams of winning an election based on fear and loathing.

It will make our country safer, make our border more secure, treat people fairly and humanely while preserving legal immigration, consistent with our values as a nation. It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. It will make our asylum process fairer and more efficient while protecting the most vulnerable. It will expedite work permits so that those who are here and qualify can get to work more quickly. It will create more opportunities for families to come together – through short-term visits as well as increased permanent lawful pathways. It ensures the most vulnerable, unaccompanied young children, have paid legal representation. And it will provide the resources I have repeatedly requested to secure the border by adding border patrol agents, immigration judges, asylum officers, and cutting-edge inspection machines to help detect and stop the flow of fentanyl. While this agreement doesn’t address everything I would have wanted, these reforms are essential for making our border more orderly, secure, fair, and humane.

The bipartisan national security agreement would also address two other important priorities. It allows the United States to continue our vital work, together with partners all around the world, to stand up for Ukraine’s freedom and support its ability to defend itself against Russia’s aggression. As I have said before, if we don’t stop Putin’s appetite for power and control in Ukraine, he won’t limit himself to just Ukraine and the costs for America will rise. This agreement also provides Israel what they need to protect their people and defend itself against Hamas terrorists. And it will provide life-saving humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people.

There is more work to be done to get it over the finish line. But I want to be clear about something: If you believe, as I do, that we must secure the border now, doing nothing is not an option. Working with my administration, the United States Senate has done the hard work it takes to reach a bipartisan agreement. Now, House Republicans have to decide. Do they want to solve the problem? Or do they want to keep playing politics with the border? I’ve made my decision. I’m ready to solve the problem. I’m ready to secure the border. And so are the American people. I know we have our divisions at home but we cannot let partisan politics get in the way of our responsibilities as a great nation. I refuse to let that happen. In moments like these, we have to remember who we are. We’re the United States of America and there is nothing, nothing beyond our capacity if we do it together.

Speaker Johnson has a rather simple choice: work with the Senate and pass the bill that will do what the Republicans have been yammering for, or go down in history as Trump’s bitch.

Sunday, February 4, 2024

Sunday Reading

Fear Itself — Charles P. Pierce on why we’re frightened.

The fear is not simply in this room, as Edward R. Murrow once told his staff when they were preparing their landmark coverage of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The fear is everywhere in our political life these days. It is vividly clear that it exists in the halls of Congress. It is suspiciously active in the courts; in the former president’s second trial for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, the presiding judge found it necessary to tell the jurors not to tell anyone that they were sitting on the case. In Georgia, Fulton County DA Fani Willis found it necessary to employ a body double to keep her safe going back and forth to court. Also, the fear is more than a politician’s dread for their professional careers which, when you come right down to it, was a huge part of what McCarthy had for a threat to hold over his victim. The fear this time is of physical danger, and it is everywhere.

The good people at the Brennan Center For Justice have produced a startling report about the cloud of danger hanging over local politicians, over members of town councils, and school board members, and county clerks, especially the ones tasked with overseeing elections. The abuse runs the gamut from distasteful attacks on social media to credible death threats. (Just to be clear, all death threats are credible when you’re the recipient thereof.) Its effects on the good functioning of self-government ripple outward. Good people leave public service, and other good people decline to replace them, figuring the game not to be worth the car bomb. One state legislator told the Brennan Center researchers,

“Last fall was the last really serious death threat I got. It was like date, time, location specific. They were going to kill me and then go to the police station and blow themselves up and take as many officers with them as possible.”

This is not some heat-in-the-kitchen political boilerplate. Not with the number of guns in this country. Not after a 50-year campaign of domestic terrorism by anti-abortion fanatics that culminated in a Supreme Court decision that gave them everything they’ve ever wanted. Not with the Capitol Hill pipe bomber still wandering the streets. Not after January 6, 2021.

Some respondents mentioned viral social media and deregulation of guns as aggravating factors. Significant numbers were unaware of formal procedures to report incidents or of any recent increases in government provided security for buildings or their transport. In a time of heated debate about existential issues such as reproductive autonomy, gun regulation, and racial equity, these threats to the free and fair functioning of representative government implicate everyone. As Virginia House Delegate Eileen Filler-Corn put it, “We were going to help improve others’ lives. But we never thought our lives, or most importantly, our family members’ or significant others’ lives, would be in jeopardy. I think you’re going to lose a lot of good people because of it.”

Not while we have armed sedition on the Texas border. Not while we have the current Republican presidential frontrunner. Not with the only other contender’s expressing the opinion that states can secede from the Union if they want to do so, despite the fact that it was just about the only issue that the Civil War actually settled for good. (Pro Tip: they can’t.) Not in this country. Not now. Again, from the new report:

Officeholders across these demographic categories reported experiencing threats or attacks within the past three years. And the volume and severity of abuse have increased in recent years, they said. More than 40 percent of state legislators experienced threats or attacks within the past three years, and more than 18 percent of local officeholders experienced threats or attacks within the past year and a half. The numbers balloon to 89 percent of state legislators and 52 percent of local officeholders when less severe forms of abuse — insults or harassment such as stalking — are included.

Not in this country. Not now.

The statistical findings should surprise approximately nobody who has been even semi-conscious over the last decade and a half. The election of a Black president broke many brains and a lot of them were put back together wrong, and in such a way as to make them vulnerable to the worst kind of political stimuli.

Larger shares of women than men, and larger shares of Republicans than Democrats, reported increases in the severity of abuse since first taking public office. Women were three to four times as likely as men to experience abuse targeting their gender.  Officeholders of color were more than three times as likely as white officeholders to experience abuse targeting their race.  Larger shares of women and people of color serving in local elected office experienced abuse related to their families — including their children — than did other officeholders.  Women serving in state legislatures were nearly four times as likely as men to experience abuse of a sexual nature.

You will note that more Republicans than Democrats reported that the abuse directed at them has worsened over their terms of office. However, as the study also reports, much of that abuse is coming from inside…the…house.

Republican state legislators reported more increases in the volume of abuse than did Democrats. As their leaders have at times failed to condemn violence and violent rhetoric, state and local Republican officeholders have experienced abuse from within their own party for refusing to back extreme positions.

So, basically, and unsurprisingly, the increase in threats and abuse are bipartisan, but most of it is coming from the same sources. Democrats are being abused because they’re Democrats, and Republicans are being abused for not abusing Democrats constantly, nor harshly enough. The fear is nonpartisan, and it is free-floating, and it seeks targets for its own implacable reasons. Like Joyce’s snow, the fear is general, all over the country.

The fear intensified over the years from 2017-2021, and it hit a kind of peak during the insurrection after the 2020 presidential election. But it did not begin there, I remember sensing a kind of wildness in the air during the 2012 campaign, when Barack Obama was running for re-election. His presidency had begun in an atmosphere of ginned-up white hysteria; even before his administration truly had done much of anything. I’m not sure we can chalk up all that video of white people howling about wanting “their” country back to the signing of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

The atmosphere around the 2012 campaign stank with that raw anger, even with as non-threatening opponent as Mitt Romney. (I remember talking to Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett about it at a rally in Florida shortly before the election.) It became clear that the anger had erupted from sources far beyond the fact of who the Republican nominee was, be that Zombie Dwight Eisenhower or Zombie Richard Speck. Obama’s re-election did not dispel the anger. It remained floating in the interstitial spaces between election, looking for new targets and, especially, searching for a focal point around which it could concentrate.

In 2016, it found one, a candidate with a predator’s instinct for identifying the anger and how to utilize it. It was Donald Trump’s only true political talent, and he has exploited that talent ever since. In return for finding its focus, the anger armored him to the point at which he could act with impunity and without shame, a quality he lacked in any case.

Aristotle called this tune back in the Fourth Century when he wrote his essential Politics. There is very little that is complicated about a despotism except the sources of the anger that give it power.

In fact owing to this tyranny is a friend of the base; for tyrants enjoy being flattered, but nobody would ever flatter them if he possessed a free spirit—men of character love their ruler, or at all events do not flatter him. And the base are useful for base business, for nail is driven out by nail, as the proverb goes.1 And it is a mark of a tyrant to dislike anyone that is proud or free-spirited; for the tyrant claims for himself alone the right to bear that character, and the man who meets his pride with pride and shows a free spirit robs tyranny of its superiority and position of mastery; tyrants therefore hate the proud as undermining their authority.

So the anger begets the fear and the fear begets more anger until the anger is all that’s left and the fear is its only weapon. It is where we are today. It is everywhere.

Doonesbury — Change…

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Pop Culture Influencers

For those of you who haven’t been tuned in to Taylor Swift and her political machinations, here’s an update from Charlie Pierce.

I was undecided on Sunday’s AFC championship game. I could’ve lived with watching either Patrick Mahomes or Lamar Jackson slinging it around in the Super Bowl. My heart was in the NFC with the Detroit Lions. My heart is a lousy gambler. Anyway, I have to say that watching the MAGA crowd, and especially its He-Man Women Haters auxiliary, lose its shit over the romance of Taylor Swift and Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce has made me into a Chiefs fan, at least for the interminable two-week run-up to the game, which is an annual festival of heavily covered non-news and nonsense. There will be no end of stories about the happy couple which, if we’re all really lucky, will have heads exploding in all corners of the wingnut media universe.

Vivek Ramaswamy, rumored to once be a presidential candidate, was the first one into the pool. He xweeted,

I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.

Then there’s this Scott Greer mook.

To those who might say, “The Right need its own Taylor Swift for young women to look up to!” I answer we already have that. Her name is Lauren Boebert.

Dope on a grope.

And Sunday’s result already has launched another wingnut fever dream—the NFL has rigged the playoff so that the Swift-Kelce Chiefs win it all, which will convince everyone to get vaccinated and vote for Joe Biden. Rolling Stone collected some of the most febrile examples.

Failed GOP candidate Jack Lombardi II wrote on X that he has “never been more convinced that the Super Bowl is rigged. With all the unneeded and unwanted Taylor coverage at the games. KC’s journey to the Superbowl – totally scripted … KC wins. And then later [they announce] their support for Biden. Coincidental? No. Bought and paid for couple. SMH.” “Taylor Swift is nothing more than a controlled influencer who has been put to work by those who seek to destroy America,” Lombardi added in a separate post. “She is a very talented operative working for the same group responsible for the timely and coincidental covid-19.”

Podcast host Mike Crispi raged that “The NFL is totally RIGGED for the Kansas City Chiefs, Taylor Swift, Mr. Pfizer (Travis Kelce). All to spread DEMOCRAT PROPAGANDA,” referencing past right-wing attacks against Kelce over his promotion of the Covid-19 vaccine. “Calling it now: KC wins, goes to Super Bowl, Swift comes out at the halftime show and ‘endorses’ Joe Biden with Kelce at midfield.” Crispi added.

Republican Georgia politician Kandiss Taylor wrote that she “tried to warn yall back in October that the influence of [Taylor Swift] on our youth with witchcraft was demonic, evil, and Luciferian.” “Of course, Satan wants to use her now to elect Joe back into the White House to destroy what’s left of America,” Taylor added.

It’s going to be a long, lovely two weeks.

If only the Lions had won.

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

Never Had A Chance

Charlie Pierce:

A dream is a wish your heart makes, quoth Disney’s Cinderella. Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough, quoth J.M. Barrie’s (and Disney’s) Peter Pan. Ron DeSantis will now return to his regular day job of misruling Florida full in the knowledge that his presidential campaign will be reckoned among history’s worst and that, quite possibly, Disney believed that karmic revenge was a dish best served cold. Tinkerbell did it. The Magic Kingdom served up poisoned apples of the mind, and not only did DeSantis take a huge bite out of one of them, but a substantial portion of the elite political press gobbled them down like penny candy.

Don’t pick fights you can’t win, Ron. Not against Disney, and not against El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago. Don’t you ever learn?

DeSantis’s sudden rise to allegedly serious contender mystified those of us who remember him as a MAGA-addled meathead in Congress who evinced all the charisma of a doorknob. The slobberknocking coverage in which his success in wrecking Florida was treated as evidence of a national Republican renaissance as “Trumpism without Trump” was never examined with the kind of ridicule it demanded. Good lord, the man couldn’t lead sheep to grass. He was lost in the debates, which the frontrunner rather shrewdly skipped.

But even if he weren’t the unlikable replicant that he proved to be on the national stage, DeSantis never had a chance. (By the way, neither does Nikki Haley, the last sucker standing, but that’s a post for another day.) The way you know he didn’t is the speed with which he endorsed the former president*. The Republican Party wants its rapist king and his 91 federal indictments. The Republican Party prefers its delusions to our reality. It has suspended disbelief from an improvised gallows. Fascism is a wish its heart makes.

Additional commentary from Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice:

Now that DeSantis has been exposed as a paper tiger, I doubt the corrupt oafs in the statehouse will keep sticking their necks out for him. With any luck, maybe some of the votes they took to bolster his disastrous campaign will come back to bite them on the ass. Maybe better people will emerge.

But no matter what happens in Florida, the Republican Party’s drive to extend Trump’s vicious campaign of dominance and retribution will go on, and there are dozens if not hundreds of DeSantis-like fascist creeps waiting in the wings for their shot. The only thing that can end the whole nauseating Trump circus is us showing up in droves in November, leaving nothing left for the hyper-ambitious sadists to inherit.

As Butch noted, he joins Scott Walker, Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal, and a host of other grease-fires that drew the attention of the media for their fifteen minutes.  Maybe they should start a desert retreat.

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Not If But When

Of course Trump won the Iowa caucuses; that’s a study in foregone conclusions.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis finished a distant second, just ahead of former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.

The results left Trump with a tighter grip on the GOP nomination, though it could take several more months for anyone to formally become the party’s standard bearer. The magnitude of Trump’s victory, however, posed significant questions for both DeSantis and Haley. Neither candidate appeared poised to exit the race, though they leave Iowa struggling to claim making much progress in trying to become Trump’s strongest challenger.

So the question becomes when will Ron DeSantis quit his day job and come home to pick up his side hustle of being the governor of Florida.  Not that he really likes it now that the Republicans have decided to go with a felon rather than just a big mouthed bully and coward.  The only chance he and Nikki Haley have of gaining any foothold now is if Trump dropped dead.

The next question is when will DeSantis fold and then endorse Trump.  His campaign says he has enough money to run until March, but I’m pretty sure his wife and cronies will tell him the next best thing would be to suck up and hope for something in the second iteration of the Trump Reich.  Maybe a tour guide at Disney World.

Sunday, January 14, 2024

Sunday Reading

You Keep Using That Word — Charlie Pierce on Trump’s “hostages.”

One of the more odious developments of this election cycle, about to kick off for real in the quadrennial useless bungle in Iowa, is the determination of some in the Republican Party to hijack the language and baptize the January 6 insurrectionist criminals as “hostages.” This process is led, of course, by Fulton County (Ga.) Inmate No. P01135809, who has continued to ladle on the whitewash. From NBC News:

Trump brought up the rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 who remain in prison, many who pled guilty or were convicted by a jury and sentenced to serve time behind bars. Trump called them “hostages” and called on Biden to release them from federal prison. “They ought to release the J6 hostages. They’ve suffered,” Trump said, using the abbreviation for Jan. 6. “I call them hostages. Some people call them prisoners. I call them hostages. Release the J6 hostages Joe. Release them Joe. You can do it real easy, Joe.” Trump has suggested that if returned to the White House he would pardon those who have been charged in connection with the riot.

To be fair, much of the GOP seems to be wary of this particular linguistic legerdemain, at least publicly. From The Hill:

“I don’t condone that characterization at all, no,” said Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) when asked about Trump calling Jan. 6-related convicts hostages.“We got a justice system and they’re working through it,” Thune said of the nearly 900 people convicted of Jan. 6-related crimes, including more than 200 people who have pleaded guilty to felonies. Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), a member of the Senate Republican leadership team, dismissed Trump’s claim — echoed by some other Republicans — that individuals who were convicted of destroying property or assaulting police officers in the Capitol are “hostages.”

“Somebody who’s been duly convicted of a federal crime is not a hostage,” he said.

Asked about the third anniversary of Jan. 6 and the characterization of people convicted of storming and damaging the Capitol as “hostages,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters that he stands by the remarks he made at the end of Trump’s second impeachment trial when he denounced the former president and the “criminals” who “were carrying his banners, hanging his flags and screaming their loyalty to him…Let me say this about Jan. 6: I’ve had remarks that I made on Feb. 13 of ’21 about how I felt about Jan. 6. I recently reread it, I stand by what I said,” McConnell said.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) balked at the notion that people convicted of Jan. 6 crimes are somehow hostages or political prisoners. “That’s like calling drug traffickers unlicensed pharmacists. At the end of the day, they’re J6 convicts to me,” he said.

Good line, Thom. Take a rim shot into retirement with you.

“If they were proven guilty in a court of law of a crime, it is what it is,” he said. “Are there some people that were swept up in it? Yeah, but use better judgment. If you were only accidently [sic] in the Capitol, you probably didn’t get convicted. If you hurt a police officer, you should have been convicted. If you broke anything on the Capitol, you should have been convicted. You should serve your time. Period, end of story. “That’s not a hostage,” he added. “We have hostages held by Hamas right now. I have a different standard for what I consider hostages.”

Who knows whether this all will last beyond the spring. The GOP follow-through on condemnations regarding January 6 has not been stout. But we take our spasms of common sense from these people as we get them.

Doonesbury — It’s gonna cost…

Friday, January 12, 2024

Happy Friday

It’s Art Deco Weekend on Miami Beach, and the weather looks like it’s going to rain.  But the party — including the car shows Saturday and Sunday — go on rain or shine.  So I’ll be there.

This picture is from 2019 when it was raining as we set up, the rain squall giving the scene and the Pontiac an Edward Hopper kind of feel.

Meanwhile, the revelations about former M-DCPS school board member Lubby Navarro’s spending habits are getting more detailed and weirder, including 56 lemon pies and a “Pirate Vixen” adult Halloween costume.  (“Yo, ho…”)  Then there’s this…

In November 2022, Miami-Dade School Board vice chair Lubby Navarro made a strange purchase with her school district-issued credit card: Two silicone and cotton fake pregnancy bellies from Amazon that she used to try and convince her ex-boyfriend she was carrying his baby, according to state investigators and prosecutors.

She likely knew where to find him, because earlier that year she used the same credit card to buy two Apple AirTag tracking devices that were later found attached with duct tape to the underside of her ex-boyfriend’s car, the investigators say. One was near a wheel. The other, under the front grill.

Hey, whatever floats your boat, but not with District funds.

Thursday, January 11, 2024

Florida Grift Part Infinity

From the Miami Herald:

Former Miami-Dade School Board member Lubby Navarro was arrested Thursday morning for allegedly using her district-issued credit car[d] to rack up personal expenses of $100,000 over several years, according to several sources with knowledge of the arrest.

Navarro, who resigned in late December 2022, a day before a new Florida law prohibiting elected officials from working as lobbyists went into effect. Navarro is a registered lobbyist for the South Broward Hospital District, which includes Memorial Healthcare System hospitals in Hollywood, Pembroke Pines, Miramar and Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in Hollywood.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Rundle is expected to offer more details at a 2:30 p.m. press conference at her downtown office.

Navarro earned upwards of $220,000 working for Memorial in 2022. School Board members earn $46,773, according to the Miami-Dade Elections Department.

Back in 2014, I helped Ms. Navarro edit and revise her letters to then-Gov. Rick Scott to get her appointed to the M-DCPS board to replace Carlos Curbelo, who had won a seat in Congress.  Once on the board, she turned hard-right, dissing LGBTQ rights, and otherwise becoming a wormtongue for Ron DeSantis before she was forced to resign due to her lobbying.  (She was known by some as Lobbyin’ Lubby.)

In a way I am sorry I got her on the board and for screwing over the students, but if she hadn’t been there, she wouldn’t have done what got her arrested, so karma did its stuff.

That First Amendment Is A Bitch, Ron

From the New York Times:

Dealing a blow to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a federal court of appeals on Wednesday ruled that he had violated First Amendment protections when he suspended a progressive state prosecutor for political gain.

The ruling, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, undercut Mr. DeSantis on an episode he has made a key credential in his presidential campaign. Mr. DeSantis forced Andrew Warren, a Democratic state attorney representing the Tampa area, out of office in August 2022 after he had spoken out against Republican policies on abortion and transgender rights.

On the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis has used the suspension of Mr. Warren, who had been elected to his post twice, to illustrate his strong-arm approach to progressive public officials who push what he calls a “woke” agenda.

The court on Wednesday vacated a decision from a federal judge in Tallahassee in January 2023 not to reinstate Mr. Warren, who has fought the suspension in court, arguing that it violated his First Amendment right to free speech. Now, that judge must reconsider his ruling.

Testimony and records released as part of a late 2022 trial in the case revealed the extent to which the removal of Mr. Warren was motivated by a desire to bolster Mr. DeSantis’s political standing. The district court judge, Robert L. Hinkle, ruled that Mr. DeSantis did not violate Mr. Warren’s First Amendment rights when he suspended him for his own political benefit.

But in its 59-page decision, a three-judge appeals court panel unanimously ruled that Mr. DeSantis did violate Mr. Warren’s First Amendment rights. The panel said Mr. DeSantis needed to prove that Mr. Warren’s performance and policies were the reason he was suspended, and not his personal views on matters such as abortion.

DeSantis has been running on Mr. Warren’s ouster as proof he’s the King Shit of Anti-Woke Mountain… and it’s falling apart as fast as his presidential campaign.

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Sunday Reading

Ghosts — Susan B. Glaser in The New Yorker on the specter of January 6, 2021.

The long shadow of January 6, 2021, hangs over this election. Three years after a mob of Americans stormed their own Capitol, seeking to block Joe Biden’s victory and keep Donald Trump in the White House, Biden and Trump each began 2024 with plans to make the tragic events of that day the centerpiece of his campaign. For the incumbent, it’s the rationale for his entire Presidency and the most compelling reason to give him a second term—a continuation of the “battle for the soul of America” that animated Biden’s run in 2020. For Trump, it’s the false battle cry around which he hopes to rally the MAGA mob once again. Already, he has proved that millions of his supporters are immune to the truth about January 6th. It will be an incredible act of political sorcery if he can ride his lies about the 2020 election and its violent aftermath back into the White House. And yet, as the year begins, his chances of doing so are better than even.

On Wednesday, in his first day back in the office this new year, the President hosted lunch for a group of American historians to advise him on how to frame the stakes of this election. One attendee, Heather Cox Richardson, a Civil War scholar whose latest book, “Democracy Awakening,” was Biden’s most conspicuous purchase during a day of post-Thanksgiving shopping, has called the visual of Trumpists parading the Confederate flag through Congress on January 6th “a gut-punch larger than any other moment in history.” Biden’s first campaign ad of the year, released on Thursday, leans heavily on the history theme, interspersing violent images of January 6th with old footage of civil-rights and suffragist marches, of Martin Luther King, Jr., and American Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima in the Second World War. “I’ve made the preservation of American democracy the central issue of my Presidency,” Biden says.

The challenge for Biden, though, is recapturing the visceral outrage of the insurrection—voters have, for years, been bombarded with horrific images of the riot and a steady drip of investigative revelations about how Trump helped conjure it into being—while imbuing it with new meaning and relevance. It is a necessary act of remembrance, but one that risks reminding Americans of how annoyed they are about a 2024 election that looks very likely to be a repeat of 2020. Is there anyone who truly relishes the prospect of Biden and Trump going at it once again, changing few minds while reinforcing for everyone how mired we remain in the division and rancor of that unpleasant year? No country would want to be stuck in such a doom loop.

But doom loop it looks to be. There is no moving on from that day so long as its instigator remains the leader of the Republican Party. In less than two weeks, Trump is on track to secure what could be the largest win in the history of the Iowa Republican caucuses. His lead is so wide that some expect him to sew up the Republican nomination by March. If and when Trump does, he will have accomplished it with a platform that doubles down on January 6th and his own sorry role in calling forth the mob. He is not denying the facts; he is outright rewriting them.

To his original Big Lie about the “rigged election” in 2020, Trump has added ever more lies. He now calls January 6th “a beautiful day” and the nearly thirteen hundred defendants arrested in connection with the attack on the Capitol martyrs and “hostages.” In recent months as he has campaigned for his return to the White House, he has dangled pardons for the insurrectionists, to be issued “on Day 1” of his second term, and threatened instead to lock up the police who tried to defend the Capitol that day. “When people who love our country protest in Washington, they become hostages unfairly imprisoned for long portions of their life,” he told a rally in Iowa last month.

This rhetoric is likely only to escalate in the course of the campaign, as Trump faces both a federal and a state trial on criminal charges connected with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. In fourteen states, meanwhile, there is pending litigation to keep Trump off the ballot on the ground that his role in inciting the events of January 6th makes him an “insurrectionist” as defined by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution—a matter soon to make its way to the Supreme Court since both Colorado and Maine have already disqualified him from their ballots. Trump’s legal team is also challenging the federal case against him, on the basis that his extraordinary post-2020-election acts were part of his official duties and thus covered by Presidential “immunity.” One thing we can pretty much say for sure about 2024 is that not a day will go by without the ghost of January 6th echoing loudly in our courtrooms and in our politics.

Another sad but inescapable truth is that Trump’s January 6th revisionism has proved even more politically salient with the Republican electorate than anyone could have predicted on the day itself. Remember all those panicky texts to the White House, begging Trump to call off the mob? “He is destroying his legacy,” Laura Ingraham warned Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff. Even Don, Jr., begged Meadows to intervene: “He’s got to condemn this shit. Asap.” But Trump, it turns out, knew better. A Washington Post/University of Maryland survey published this week found that, in the intervening three years, the number of Republicans who believe Trump’s lies about a “rigged election” has, in fact, gone up. Today, only thirty-one per cent of Republicans believe that Biden is the “legitimate” President, down from thirty-nine per cent in late 2021. The number of Republicans, meanwhile, who believe that Trump personally bears “a great deal” or “a good amount” of responsibility for the events of January 6th has gone down from twenty-seven per cent two years ago to just fourteen per cent today. The right-wing media ecosystem has been so effective in pumping out Trump’s propaganda that the Post/Maryland poll found thirty-four per cent of Republicans now say they believe the bogus conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. itself was responsible for inciting the attack on the Capitol.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in recent years about Trump’s hold over the G.O.P., it’s this: where his voters go, eventually, even the Republican holdouts in Congress will follow. On Wednesday, Trump was endorsed by House Majority Whip Tom Emmer—barely two months after Trump sank Emmer’s candidacy for the House Speakership, with a social-media post warning that Emmer would be a “tragic mistake” and calling him a “Globalist RINO” who was “totally out-of-touch” with Republican voters. One reason for Trump’s animus? Emmer had voted to certify Biden’s election on January 6th. “They always bend the knee,” the Times quoted Trump as saying of Emmer’s act of self-abasement.

Lesson learned: there is no political future in the G.O.P. without bowing to even Trump’s mightiest lies. The Republicans’ modern-day political alchemist has, in just three years, made 2020-election denialism—and its corollary set of falsehoods about January 6th—a core tenet in the Republican catechism. Who’s to say where this will all end up? The prospect of Trump restored as President, back in the Oval Office on January 20, 2025, pardoning himself and all the other “hostages” seems a lot more real than it did three years ago.

Usually, it’s the winning side that dictates how history will be written. No wonder Biden has started this campaign year by calling in the historians.

Doonesbury — Reversal.

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

Fretful

Go ahead, worry yourself into a frazzle.

Former President Donald Trump is uneasy about how the Supreme Court will rule on some states’ decisions to remove him from their ballots in the upcoming Republican primaries, according to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

Some of Trump’s advisers “think there is a political advantage” to the cases in Colorado and Maine, “at least in the short term,” Haberman told CNN, according to Mediaite. “In Colorado, he’s still on the ballot. So even as that case is likely to go forward to the Supreme Court, he is on the ballot because the decision of the ruling there has been stayed. In Maine, we don’t quite know yet what’s going to happen. They believe, generally speaking, he and his advisers, that they will have success at the Supreme Court.”

But Trump “has also voiced some concern that a court that has, you know, he appointed three of the justices to the Supreme Court and gave the conservatives a supermajority,” Haberman added. “He is concerned that they are going to look as if they’re trying not to rule in his favor and might rule against him. We will see.”

I frankly don’t hold out any hope that the Court will rule him ineligible, but anything to fray the nerves of TFG is fine with me.

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

Those Are The Rules

Kelly Garrity in Politico cites Rep. Jeremy Raskin (D-MD) on “the most democratic disqualifier.”

The constitutional amendment that election officials in Colorado and Maine are relying on to block former President Donald Trump from the ballot is clear — and isn’t undemocratic, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) argued Sunday.

“Is it undemocratic that [former California Gov.] Arnold Schwarzenegger and [Energy Secretary] Jennifer Granholm can’t run for president because they weren’t born in the country? If you think about it, of all of the forms of disqualification that we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic because it’s the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified,” Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, said Sunday during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” (Schwarzenegger was born in Austria, Granholm in Canada.)

“Donald Trump is in that tiny, tiny number of people who have essentially disqualified themselves,” he added.

Officials in Colorado and Maine have blocked Trump from the ballot in their states, on the grounds that he engaged in insurrection via his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and, thereby, is disqualified based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

The backlash from Republicans — and some Democrats — has been swift and fierce, and the heated legal debate is expected to soon come before the Supreme Court.

“We have a number of disqualifications in the Constitution for serving as president,” Raskin pointed out Sunday. “For example, age. I mean, I’ve got a colleague who’s a great young politician, Maxwell Frost, he’s 26. He can’t run for president. Now would we say that that’s undemocratic? Well, that’s the rules of the Constitution. If you don’t like the rules of the Constitution, change the Constitution.”

Notice that those staunch defenders of certain parts of the Constitution — the Second Amendment comes to mind — are completely baffled by other parts of it, especially when they don’t agree with it.

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Job Evaluation

A former student in the Sarasota school district hands in his evaluation of “Moms for Liberty” banshee Bridget Ziegler’s performance as a member of the school board.  It is, as others have noted, a thing of beauty.

Monday, December 18, 2023

Children At Work

Via Balloon Juice and the Orlando Weekly:

Florida lawmakers moved forward on Wednesday with a bill that would weaken child labor protections for 16- and 17-year-olds in the state’s workforce, who the bill sponsor described as “youth workers” and “not children.”

Sponsored by Republican State Rep. Linda Chaney, the bill (HB 49) was advanced during its first of three committee stops by a 10–5 vote along party lines, with Democrats opposed.

Six amendments proposed by Democrats, including language requiring businesses that employ 16- and 17-year-olds to maintain a record of workplace sexual harassment incidents and provide that to their parents, were shot down by the subcommittee’s Republican majority.

Backed by industry groups representing restaurant and hotel owners, the proposed bill would get rid of state guidelines on when 16- and 17-year-olds can work and would limit local governments’ ability to enact stronger regulations in their communities.

The bill, for instance, would make it legal for employers to put older teens to work on overnight shifts, even if they have school the next day.

Currently, under Florida law, it’s illegal for employers to work minors under 18 more than 30 hours a week during the school year, put them to work during school hours, put them to work overnight (between 11 p.m. to 6:30 a.m.) or schedule older teens to work more than six days in a row.

There are exceptions to this, including students enrolled in public school career and technical education programs, minors who are or have been married, and minors employed in homes (think babysitting) or employed by their parents. Waivers can also be requested.

The Republican-backed bill, fed to Rep. Linda Chaney by the right-wing Foundation for Government Accountability — a think tank that wrote the bill — would gut the state’s  current restrictions on child labor for older teens, which were originally established to prevent work from interfering with a child’s health, safety and education.

This story reminded me of the poem by Sarah Norcliff Cleghorn in 1914:

The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.

 

Sunday, December 17, 2023

Sunday Reading

They Learned Nothing from History — Charlie Pierce on what impeaching a Democratic president for purely political reasons informs our world today.

On November 19, 1998, a remarkable scene unfolded in the chambers of the House Judiciary Committee. In the witness chair was Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor originally tasked with what began as the Whitewater “scandal” that had evolved, improbably, into the criminalization of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. So there was much wrangling among the Democrats on the committee about why one would impeach a president on charges so very distant from a land deal in the Ozarks on which the president and his wife had lost money. But, as the Washington Post pointed out deep in an account of Starr’s appearance:

While damning Clinton for the Lewinsky matter, though, Starr finally cleared him in relation to the firing of White House travel office workers in 1993 and the improper collection of FBI files revealed in 1996. He said his office drafted an impeachment referral stemming from Whitewater last year, but decided not to send it because the evidence was insufficient. One key witness, former Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker (D), has exonerated Clinton regarding some aspects of the financial dealings, Starr reported.

In other words, Starr’s investigations into all the pre-Lewinsky “scandals” had cleared the president of wrongdoing. It was all Arkansas moonshine — Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate — and, at the end of it all, Starr had come up with the same conclusion that had gotten his predecessor, Robert Fisk, replaced by Starr — that the president had not broken the law in losing money in the Whitewater land deal. This meant that poor Vince Foster had not killed himself because of what he knew about Whitewater. It meant that the famous billing records had not been squirreled away to hide evidence of the Clintons’ culpability in the crimes of Watergate. And that all the petty, bullshit, ancillary accusations about the firing of the White House travel personnel and the unwise collection of FBI files were not crimes. Nevertheless, the country had wasted two years of its time pursuing them.

I spent a lot of 1995 watching then-Senator Al D’Amato conduct hearings into the Whitewater matter and I came out of it understanding less about the actual Whitewater affair than I did when the hearings opened. D’Amato clearly didn’t know what he was talking about and, therefore, didn’t know how little his witnesses knew about it, either. The committee spiraled into incoherence so swiftly that even The New York Times roasted it as a mess. And now, here was Starr mumbling to the Judiciary Committee that there was no there there.

A number of Democrats were frosted that Starr hadn’t announced these conclusions before the 1998 midterm elections, in which the country spoke fairly clearly that it was quite sick of all the scandal-mongering. Back in 2013, I wrote a piece for this magazine about the anniversary of these events, and I spoke to Julian Epstein, who had been the chief counsel for the Democratic minority on the House Judiciary Committee. Epstein told me:

“The most amazing thing I had to report back to my caucus was what happened on the day after the elections in 1998…I went to see the general counsel and I asked him if the elections had given us a way out. But they were going full speed ahead. The elections hadn’t changed their plans one bit. I was very surprised.”

The House Republicans pursued impeachment during a lame-duck session of Congress anyway, and it was the end of Speaker Newt Gingrich, and the end of his putative successor, Robert Livingston. (It produced Speaker Denny Hastert, so you can’t win ‘em all.) They were so enthralled with their six-year fantasy of White House criminality that they brought their impeachment into the Senate, where they looked completely ridiculous. Among other people, in her videotaped testimony, Monica Lewinsky stood them on their heads. Ken Starr went on to ignominy as president of Baylor University, where it became abundantly clear that he was nothing more than the corrupt bureaucrat he’d always been.

It all came back to me this week when the House Republicans continued to pursue their vaporous impeachment investigation of the current president. They never learn.

Against all possible odds, the Republican who are pushing this nonsense have even less evidence behind them than Al D’Amato had on Whitewater. Take, for example, one Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, Republican of Pennsylvania. He was running the ball in the House Rules Committee for continuing the impeachment inquiry. Democratic Rep. Joe Naguse of Colorado engaged him in a colloquy that left Reschenthaler an emptier suit than he was when it began.

Neguse: “What is the specific constitutional crime that you’re investigating?”

Reschenthaler:“Well, we’re having an inquiry so we can do an investigation to compel the production of witnesses and documents,”

Neguse: “And what is the crime you’re investigating?”

Reschenthaler: “High crimes, misdemeanors and bribery.”

Neguse: “What high crime and misdemeanor are you investigating?”

Reschenthaler: “Look, once I get time, I will explain what we’re looking at.”

And, later, the kitty comes screeching from the burlap.

Reschenthaler: “Now we have a situation where the standard of impeachment has been lowered to such a degree that, again, it’s merely at this point a political exercise. Not that this is a political exercise, but the bar has been lowered.”

Why would anyone think this whole thing is a proxy exercise in vengeance from El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago? Let us look at the facts. The Republicans had more on Andrew Johnson in 1868. The Republicans had more on Bill Clinton in 1998. God knows the House had more on the former president* (twice) than the Republicans in the House have on the current president. The Republicans in the House have nothing. And they know it, which is why they turned down Hunter Biden’s offer to testify in public.

Moreover, some people in the impeachment forces are beginning to learn the hard lesson that Gingrich and Livingston learned in 1998. House Oversight Committee James Comer has been a constant presence in the House and on television, telling dark and mysterious tales about the endless network of Biden family shell companies. You can probably guess what’s coming. From the AP:

Rep. James Comer, a multimillionaire farmer, boasts of being one of the largest landholders near his rural Kentucky hometown, and he has meticulously documented nearly all of his landholdings on congressional financial disclosure documents – roughly 1,600 acres (645 hectares) in all…The AP found that Farm Team Properties functions in a similarly opaque way as the companies used by the Bidens, masking his stake in the land that he co-owns with the donor from being revealed on his financial disclosure forms. Those records describe Farm Team Properties as his wife’s “land management and real estate speculation” company without providing further details.

It’s not clear why Comer decided to put those six acres in a shell company, or what other assets Farm Team Properties may hold. On his most recent financial disclosure forms, Comer lists its value as being as much as $1 million, a substantial sum but a fraction of his overall wealth.

All indications are that the Republicans intend to go full speed ahead on this. It’s likely to accelerate every time the former president* loses again in court, and it’s likely to go to Warp 9 if he’s convicted.  If all of that is before the election, and if the Republicans hang onto the House (and if they win the Senate, god help us), and if the president is re-elected, he’s likely to be impeached at one of inaugural balls. The Republican Party has developed the idea fixe into a political strategy. It is, admittedly, easier than working for a living.

At the end of President Clinton’s trial before the Senate, his old Arkansas ally Dale Bumpers delivered the closing argument. It was as though a cool wind blew through the Senate chamber. He told his former Senate colleagues that everybody should finally settle down and confront the reality of how they’d come to that point.

This is the only caustic thing I will say in these remarks this afternoon, but the question is, “How did we come to be here?” We’re here because of a five-year, relentless, unending investigation of the President. Fifty billion dollars, hundreds of FBI agents fanning across the nation examining in detail the microscopic lives of people. Maybe the most intense investigation not only of a President but of anybody — ever….But after all of those years and 50 million dollars of Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, you name it, nothing, nothing, the President was found guilty of nothing, official or personal.

We’re here today because the President suffered a terrible moral lapse, a marital infidelity; not a breach of the public trust, not a crime against society, the two things Hamilton talked about in Federalist Paper number 65 I recommend it to you before you vote but it was a breach of his marriage vows…The American people are now and for some time have been asking to be allowed a good night’s sleep. They’re asking for an end to this nightmare. It is a legitimate request.

We are only in the opening moments of the latest nightmare, which seems to be a recurring one. They had more on Andrew Johnson.

Doonesbury — Everything is under control.

Sunday, December 10, 2023

Sunday Reading

What’s At Stake — Gregg Barak in Salon.

I do not imagine that there are more than a handful of Salon readers who are not familiar with the danger of electing Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States for a second time. It is not hyperbole for me or anyone else to write that the upcoming 2024 presidential election will be the most dreadful election since the one of 1860. In that election, and again in 1864, Abraham Lincoln’s victory heralded the end of slavery and the beginning of the Civil War. A victory next fall by the former president would portend the end of American Democracy as we have known it for some 250 years and the instigation of a new illiberal democracy or autocracy.

The GOP’s assault on the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law combined with a Trumpian desire to censor the fourth estate, restructure democratic institutions, and weaponize systems of power are all in sync with a rising wave of anti-democratic and authoritarian movements worldwide.As a kleptocratic and wannabe authoritarian dictator, Donald Trump and the US are not alone in the contemporary world of neoliberal, illiberal, and authoritarian regimes engaged in various geopolitical struggles between competing democratic and autocratic styles of governance. These battles are commonly immersed in nationalist and/or populist movements of xenophobia. Most of the nations involved – democratic or authoritarian — are also trending towards fascism, standardization, and disinformation. During Trump’s recent Veterans Day speech, for example, the Insurrectionist-in-Chief used everyday parlance that echoed those authoritarian leaders who rose to power in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the 1930s.

Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, there is President Putin invading Ukraine and promising another Russian Empire. In Brazil, there was former Army Captain Jair Bolsonaro elected to office in a landslide in 2018. Bolsonaro, a Trump ally, had surfed the anti-corruption wave promising to put an end to the “old politics” only to be narrowly defeated in 2022 by the progressive and former jailed President Lula da Silva. In Argentina there is right-wing libertarian and newly-elected President Javier Milei, a 53-year-old economist and former TV pundit promising to reduce the size of government and three decades of triple-digit inflation. To most people’s surprise, Milei at least temporarily has broken the hegemony of the nation’s two leading political forces, the Peronists or left of center party and the older conservative party, the Union Civica Radical. In the Netherlands, there is also the newly elected anti-immigrant Geert Wilders promising “to break a few rules, shake up democratic institutions and spread a populist message.

In MAGA America, there is demagogue Trump who has hijacked and broken the Grand Old Party. Trump has been all too willing to exploit aggrieved voters and disavowed crowds of citizens who espouse conspiracies while he gaslights everybody else. Like Adolf Hitler in post-World War Germany, there is the racist, homophobic, and misogynistic Trump who also refers to people of color, homosexuals, leftists, progressives, and communists as vermin who are busy poisoning the blood of America and who need to be rooted out and destroyed. Trump, similar to another celebrity turned dictator with a “cult of personality” fanbase and a fascination with violence, elicits the performative style if not the self-discipline of Benito Mussolini — the man known as The Leader during post-World War Italy.

Among other things, déjà vu Trump has once again been promising to overturn Obamacare, ban Muslims, and to make America great for a second time. Hopefully, not like when he was screwing up the USA’s security responses to COVID-19 and needlessly facilitating the death of a quarter of a million Americans.

As Barton Gellman reflects in The Atlantic as part of its “If Trump Wins” special issue, Trump “tried and failed to cross many lines during his time in the White House. He proposed, for example, that the IRS conduct punitive audits of his political antagonists and that Border Patrol officers shoot migrants in the legs.” We also know from the second volume of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, that on 10 occasions, Trump tried to obstruct justice. These failed attempts to violate the law, like Trump’s failed coup, were stymied because other officials such as Vice President Pence refused to go along with Trump. Should Trump regain the White House in 2025, not only will there be no persons or officials left to stymy Trump in his second administration, but there will only be Trumpists left in the House, if not, the Senate too.

In the fall of 2023, one year out from the 2024 election, Trump and his minions, joined by the newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson – an ultraconservative and right-wing Christian from Louisiana –  are promising to return God-fearing heterosexual Americans to the mythical days of a glorious white supremacist past. At the same time, these Trumpists have been uniformly calling for revenge and seeking retribution from all those people standing in the way of the former president’s treasonous rebellion masquerading as some kind of revelatory salvation or patriotic revolution. For the criminal record, it was the mild-mannered Republican speaker from the Bayou State who wrote the amicus legal brief signed by more than 100 House Republicans in support of the failed Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate the 2020 presidential election.

In brief, today’s Republican Party is a de facto political crime organization and three years after his failed coup attempt to remain in power, Boss Trump is still in charge. The former president rules this organization through fear, intimidation, and the threat of violence from Mar-a-Lago, his golf club and winter home in Palm Beach, Florida. As Robert Kagan, a Washington Post contributing editor and author of the forthcoming “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again” has argued, “Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination.”

If this were not bad enough, America’s leading mental health professionals have concluded that Donald Trump is mentally unwell, likely a sociopath – if not a psychopath. In starker terms, Trump has shown himself to have a “diseased mind, which in turn amplifies his already corrupt morality and ethics, attraction to violence,” and capacity for wickedness.

After Thanksgiving and the publication of Thomas Edsall’s essay in The New York Times on the state of Trump’s mental health, Chauncey DeVega underscored that “Trump’s aberrant behavior is getting worse” and he questioned, “Why are Americans ignoring his decline?” Not to be too reductionist, I would contend that this is because absent his legal troubles and polling numbers the mass media with the exception of MSNBC is no longer paying much attention to Trump, let alone, covering him 24/7 as they had previously done for more than five years.

Putting Your Money Where It Matters — Tynesha McHarris in Salon on donating to political funds.

As we gather with family and friends to celebrate the holidays, millions of us will also set aside time to give back — through volunteering, political advocacy, and financial support. In a season inspired by generosity, we have an opportunity to focus our giving on justice, equality, and political change.

And while there’s no shortage of causes to support this year, it can be tough to figure out where your dollars will make the most impact. For years, many donors have been told to solve this problem by giving to groups with the smallest overhead budgets or the highest growth rates, interpreting these metrics as signs of maximal impact.

As feminists, when it comes to supporting non-profits, we have a different theory of change. There’s a lot to be said for the simple act of charity; but in this moment, we are called to think bigger: to support the movements that address underlying causes of inequality and injustice around the world. While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to giving, as philanthropists and social justice activists with a combined four decades in the field, we’ve collected a few best practices on how to support that broader change and are sharing them below.

Invest in Black women.

Many of us look at the rising tides of authoritarianism and injustice sweeping nations across the globe and feel helpless to stop its horrifying escalation.

Luckily, there is an answer. Black feminists have been on the forefront of nearly every meaningful social movement in modern history. Too often, assaults on Black women’s bodies and livelihoods operate as “canaries in the coal mine,” sounding the alarm bell on hate, discrimination, and inequity long before these trends emerge in the mainstream. It’s no accident that reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, and racial equity are among the first lines of attack for fascists around the world, from Hungary to Brazil to the United States. In the face of these attacks, feminist organizing takes a proactive stance against inequity to transform society, systems, and culture for the better.

According to the Black Feminist Fund, Black feminist-led organizations receive a shocking 0.1% – 0.35% of annual grants made by foundations; yet these are the very organizations who hold the solutions to the problems so many donors want to solve. Don’t let this status quo take hold in a new generation of givers—let’s fill the gap, and defeat authoritarianism in the process.

Support women’s funds and other social justice funds to ensure your money reaches activists on the ground.

If you want to support social movements and the people who lead them, but aren’t sure how to reach them, we’ve got good news. Women’s funds and other social justice funds are already doing the legwork for you, and are ready for your support. Sometimes called intermediaries, public charities or pooled funds, these entities pool resources to make a larger collective impact—while making sure your dollars reach grassroots organizers who are creating change from the ground up.

Much like investing in mutual funds, supporting these institutions allows you to benefit from the knowledge of experts who create a balanced portfolio of movement-linked grantees. Many of these may not have a high profile, but are doing outstanding work in communities overlooked by private philanthropy; you probably wouldn’t find them otherwise, especially if you’re giving internationally from the United States. For example, MADRE supports women and communities on the ground in countries torn apart by war, whether in Gaza or Iraq; the Black Feminist Fund maximizes resources for Black feminist organizers, creating a world where liberation is achieved and freedom abounds; and the Ms. Foundation for Women provides strategic assistance to organizations at the intersection of gender and racial equity. This is just a snapshot of the many organizations allowing your money to go further, faster with pooled support.

Don’t be afraid to get political: Make donations that are not tax-deductible.

We are in the midst of an historic disruption—in politics, the economy, and the planet. Gone are the days when donors could operate as detached, disinterested, and above the fray—the coordinated attacks on the foundations of our democracy pose too grave a threat.

In fact, without a functioning democracy, we are incapable of making progress on racial, gender, climate and economic justice. Rather than shy away, donors need to join the struggle. For those giving in the US, this means giving beyond tax-advantaged 501(c)(3) funding. These donations may not come with a tax benefit, but they pay off manifold in social change—supporting organizations that elect pro-democracy candidates and pass pro-democracy policies. In the US, an imbalance in political giving has tilted the scales for decades: just look at the current Supreme Court rolling back civil rights in real time—the direct result of years of right-wing donations. In order to meet that challenge with an equal and opposite force, donors who believe in democratic institutions need to be prepared to give accordingly to politically-oriented organizations.

Doonesbury — Tastes like candy!

Wednesday, December 6, 2023

Tuberville Caves

At long last.  Via the AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate in a single stroke Tuesday approved about 425 military promotions after Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama ended a monthslong blockade of nominations over his opposition to a Pentagon abortion policy.

Tuberville had been under pressure from members of both sides of the political aisle to end his holds as senators complained about the toll it was taking on service members and their families, and on military readiness.

President Joe Biden called the Senate’s action long overdue and said the military confirmations should never have been held up.

“In the end, this was all pointless. Senator Tuberville, and the Republicans who stood with him, needlessly hurt hundreds of servicemembers and military families and threatened our national security — all to push a partisan agenda. I hope no one forgets what he did,” Biden said in a statement released by the White House.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer teed up the military confirmations for a vote just a few hours after Tuberville emerged from a closed-door lunch with fellow GOP senators and told reporters he’s “not going to hold the promotions of these people any longer.” He said holds would continue, however, for about 11 of the highest-ranking military officers, those who would be promoted to what he described as the four-star level or above.

There were 451 military officers affected by the holds as of Nov. 27. It’s a stance that had left key national security positions unfilled and military families with an uncertain path forward.Tuberville was blocking the nominations in opposition to Pentagon rules that allow travel reimbursement when a service member has to go out of state to get an abortion or other reproductive care. The Biden administration instituted the new rules after the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to an abortion, and some states have limited or banned the procedure.

The hold got so bad that even other Republicans were yelling at him.  As far as I can tell, the whole point of this months-long clusterfuckery was to draw attention to the fact that he’s an idiot. Then again, “Republican from Alabama” already conveys that message.

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

The View From There

Nate White in the London Daily once explained why the British don’t like Trump.

A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?’ If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.

Prat, git, wanker…