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Month: May 2020

“An absolute chaotic disaster”

Published by digby on May 9, 2020

President Obama had some things to say:

Former President Barack Obama, talking privately to ex-members of his administration, said Friday that the “rule of law is at risk” in the wake of what he called an unprecedented move by the Justice Department to drop charges against former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn.

In the same chat, a tape of which was obtained by Yahoo News, Obama also lashed out at the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as “an absolute chaotic disaster.”

“The news over the last 24 hours I think has been somewhat downplayed — about the Justice Department dropping charges against Michael Flynn,” Obama said in a web talk with members of the Obama Alumni Association.

“And the fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.” 

The Flynn case was invoked by Obama as a principal reason that his former administration officials needed to make sure former Vice President Joe Biden wins the November election against President Trump. “So I am hoping that all of you feel the same sense of urgency that I do,” he said. “Whenever I campaign, I’ve always said, ‘Ah, this is the most important election.’ Especially obviously when I was on the ballot, that always feels like it’s the most important election. This one — I’m not on the ballot — but I am pretty darn invested. We got to make this happen.”

Obama misstated the charge to which Flynn had previously pleaded guilty. He was charged with false statements to the FBI, not perjury. But the Justice Department, in a filing with a federal judge on Thursday, asked that the case brought by special counsel Robert Mueller be dismissed, arguing that FBI agents did not have a justifiable reason to question the then national security adviser about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak — talks FBI agents and Mueller’s prosecutors concluded he had lied about.

Still, Obama’s unvarnished remarks were some of his sharpest yet about the Trump administration and appeared to forecast a dramatically stepped-up political role he intends to play in this year’s election. The comments came during a lengthy chat in which he also sharply criticized the response to the coronavirus pandemic, blaming it on the “tribal” trends that have been stoked by the president and his allies.

“This election that’s coming up on every level is so important because what we’re going to be battling is not just a particular individual or a political party. What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy — that has become a stronger impulse in American life. And by the way, we’re seeing that internationally as well. It’s part of the reason why the response to this global crisis has been so anemic and spotty. It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalized in our government.

“That’s why, I, by the way, am going to be spending as much time as necessary and campaigning as hard as I can for Joe Biden,” he added.

Obama’s remarks about Flynn seemed especially pointed in light of the fact that the former Army general had served in his administration as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency — until he was forced out by administration officials who viewed him as a chaotic, insubordinate manager. During the transition, Obama even warned Trump not to hire Flynn — advice that Trump ignored.

You can hear these excerpts at the link. It’s jarring to hear his voice talking about this because he’s so coherent and normal.

Here’s the current president sounding quite …. different on the subject:

Trump has not weighed in on Obama’s comments yet, which makes me nervous. He’s at Camp David with the joint chiefs of staff. What’s he doing if he isn’t tweeting?

This is not how any of this works

Published by digby on May 9, 2020

Lol.

As for where the Secret Service is … well, they’re in quarantine:

 Multiple members of the U.S. Secret Service have tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, according to Department of Homeland Security documents reviewed by Yahoo News. 

In March, the Secret Service, which is responsible for the protection of President Trump and other leaders, acknowledged that a single employee tested positive in March. However the problem is currently far more widespread, with 11 active cases at the agency as of Thursday evening, according to a daily report compiled by the DHS. 

This report comes as a pair of cases among White House staffers close to Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have put the West Wing’s coronavirus security procedures in the spotlight.

According to the DHS document, along with the 11 active cases there are 23 members of the Secret Service who have recovered from COVID-19 and an additional 60 employees who are self-quarantining. No details have been provided about which members of the Secret Service are infected or if any have recently been on detail with the president or vice president.

The DHS, which oversees the agency, referred all requests for comment to the Secret Service, which in turn declined to comment on the number of coronavirus cases among its employees. 

“To protect the privacy of our employee’s health information and for operational security, the Secret Service is not releasing how many of its employees have tested positive for COVID-19, nor how many of its employees were, or currently are, quarantined,” Justine Whelan, a Secret Service spokesperson, said.  

The president doesn’t think testing is necessary. He wants this the virus to “wash over the country” so he can win the election. (Yes, I know that allowing massive numbers of Americans to die an excruciating death seems like an odd electoral strategy, but he’s just thinking outside the box. You, know, like injecting Lysol. Or buying massive amounts of a drug that doesn’t work.)

The virus is obviously spreading inside the White House. Trump was reportedly “lava level” angry to discover that members of his staff haven’t been “protecting him.”

He clearly does not understand how this works. He doesn’t understand how any of this works:

Deadly dereliction

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 9, 2020
CDC’s Roybal campus in Atlanta, Georgia

Consider the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Founded in 1946 as the Communicable Disease Center under the Truman administration, the agency was established in Atlanta to fight the malaria endemic across the region. It is one of the world’s premiere health protection agencies, not just America’s.

The agency and its scientists have been sidelined by the Donald Trump administration during the worst pandemic in a century. Nearly 4 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported worldwide and 275,000 deaths (as of this moment per Johns Hopkins).

Politico reported Thursday that detailed CDC advice to local leaders on how to safely reopen public spaces has been shelved by the White House. One CDC official not authorized to speak with the press told the Associated Press that CDC colleagues heard the 17-page report scheduled for release May 1 “would never see the light of day.” Nonetheless, AP obtained an unauthorized copy from a second federal official.

Politico continues:

Traditionally, it’s been the CDC’s role to give the public and local officials guidance and science-based information during public health crises. During this one, however, the CDC has not had a regular, pandemic-related news briefing in nearly two months. CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield has been a member of the White House coronavirus task force, but largely absent from public appearances.

The dearth of real-time, public information from the nation’s experts has struck many current and former government health officials as dangerous.

The administration quashed the “touchstone document” containing “detailed advice for making site-specific decisions related to reopening schools, restaurants, summer camps, churches, day care centers and other institutions” because it wants governors to make reopening decisions themselves.

Trump’s reelection sales pitch has been to take credit for an economy already on the upswing when he took office. With the economy now in the toilet and unemployment numbers rivaling the Great Depression, Trump needs scapegoats for failed containment efforts that this week made the White House campus itself a coronavirus ward. Facing intense criticism, Trump “has settled into a messaging routine: deflect, reject and minimize.” That includes burying government projections and data that spotlight his failures, and cutting off funding to the World Health Organization.

But the CDC is not the only federal agency to fall victim to political pressures, writes Charles Seife at Slate. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have had their stars tarnished by political pressures over decades. Internal weaknesses are simply more visible during a crisis, he explains. Standards have slipped to accommodate commercial interests:

Not all American government agencies are internationally recognized for their excellence, but the ones that are have a lot in common. They attempt to base their decisions on scientific or engineering data or, at the very least, objective criteria that leave little wiggle room for political interference. They invite scrutiny; a high degree of transparency keeps them from departing from their standards on the fly. And above all, they maintain and nurture a pool of expert staff that is as good as or better than anything one can find in the commercial sector on a scale that no private company could ever hope to match. These are the attributes that make an institution healthy enough to resist the crushing political pressure that bears on all high-stakes regulatory agencies.

Faced with and administration that rejects science and regulation as well as accountability, federal agencies from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the U.S. Postal Service to the Department of Justice have had their missions compromised to serve Trump’s whims.

Transparency itself is under attack. The Trump administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to to prevent the Department of Justice from releasing grand jury testimony in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered the documents released in March. The D.C. court ruled the documents belong to the court and not to Justice.

Seife adds:

I’ve had to take the FDA to court to get it to release certain basic information about clinical trials—information that its European sister agency, the EMA, releases as a matter of course—deeming the records confidential. In-house experts are gainsaid by leadership or even made entirely irrelevant as their duties are passed off to the commercial sector. The FAA was dependent on Boeing employees to vouch for the 737 Max rather than independently verifying the plane’s safety itself. The FDA’s dependence on test manufacturers to vouch for the accuracy of its coronavirus tests is unlikely to have much better results.

As once-respected federal agencies come increasingly under the thumb of Trump and his White House ideologues, the world looks on with pity and dismay. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports, “observers from the Asia Pacific to Europe expressed incredulity, amusement and sadness at President Donald Trump’s briefings on the virus, saying they are deeply damaging to the US image abroad.” Instead of leading the global fight, Trump has not just abandoned it to focus on his reelection, he’s making things worse. The White House now skips international meetings convened to develop a coronavirus vaccine.

Trump’s non-leadership is “stranger than fiction,” says Thomas Gomart, director of the Paris-based French Institute of International Relations.

“The way we look at Trump, it was a lot of fun at first,” Spanish journalist Javier del Pino said. “It’s not funny anymore.”

In fact, it’s deadly.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on May 8, 2020

https://twitter.com/MorrisAnimal/status/1255957560894554113

There is good advice in this twitter thread. All illustrated with more adorable cat gifs.

The cover-up

Published by digby on May 8, 2020

Surprise:

The decision to shelve detailed advice from the nation’s top disease control experts for reopening communities during the coronavirus pandemic came from the highest levels of the White House, according to internal government emails obtained by The Associated Press.

The files also show that after the AP reported Thursday that the guidance document had been buried, the Trump administration ordered key parts of it to be fast-tracked for approval.

The trove of emails show the nation’s top public health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spending weeks working on guidance to help the country deal with a public health emergency, only to see their work quashed by political appointees with little explanation.

They want Governors to open up without requiring safety measures that could inhibit people from going back to normal. They don’t care how many people die, they just want to create a false perception that everything is fine.

The Cult will go along and happily turn themselves into human sacrifices for Dear Leader. And many workers will have no choice. But that’s not going to be enough to create Trump’s Great Revival. It will all be for nothing.

Yes, it’s the pandemic, stupid

Published by digby on May 8, 2020

In 1992, Bill Clinton’s camaign managerJames Carville came up with one of the most famous campaign slogans in history when he pinned a note to the bulletin board of the campaign headquarters that said “It’s the economy, stupid.” There was a lot of stuff going on at the time, the tail end of the first Gulf War, the Rodney King Riots, Ross Perot’s quixotic campaign among other things. But we were in a recession that wasn’t particularly deep but it seemed to be hitting certain people very hard. Carville understood that everything flowed from being able to address that problem.

It seems that the Trump administration thinks that slogan applies to their circumstance. And it is true that the record high unemployment claims and the small business crisis is as acute as anything we’ve ever seen. They believe they can just “open the country” and everything will fall into place as people just go back to normal, maybe with a few adjustments and people over 60 staying inside their houses for the foreseeable future.

But, as always, they are missing the point. This piece in The Atlantic explains why:

“There is no good news in this jobs report, but it’s important to remember that these are not normal times, and these are not normal job losses,” Adam Ozimek, the chief economist at Upwork, told me. “The task for policy makers is to ensure that when the economy opens back up, these 20.5 million jobs and the companies that employed them have not disappeared. If even a fraction of them do not, a major recession will be all but unavoidable.”

This crisis represents a unique and existential threat to America’s small businesses. Almost half of all job losses in April occurred in leisure and hospitality, where small businesses are overrepresented in places such as restaurants and stores. The decimation of small business would have several long-lasting implications. It would destroy jobs that would be unlikely to return quickly, delaying a recovery and creating a crisis of economically and psychologically ruinous long-term unemployment. It would trigger an extinction-level event for entrepreneurs, who might be less likely to take a risk in the future. And restaurants, cafés, theaters, community centers, and specialty shops that embody the civic memory of a neighborhood would be wiped off the face of the street. This would be a first-order economic tragedy, but it would also be a social calamity.

How do we stop one horrible month from becoming a 10-year depression? The most obvious solution to bring the global pandemic to a halt would be a medical deus ex machina, like effective antiviral treatments or accelerated vaccine development and manufacturing. But pharmaceutical science works on a multiyear time horizon, and the survival of millions of American businesses and tens of millions of jobs is endangered right now.

The White House and most Republicans seem to think that this crisis will be solved by loudly announcing the reopening of the economy. But this is a dangerous misunderstanding of what’s actually driving the recession: It’s the pandemic, stupid. The shutdowns themselves had “little or no impact on economic activity” according to an analysis by a team of economists at Harvard. Several papers now show that the decline in spending and employment in most cases occurred before states officially shut down their economy. Governments didn’t close state economies on their own, and they can’t open the economies on their own, either.

[…]

Speaking to Americans as their economy was plunging into a depression in 1932, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that the only thing Americans had to fear was “fear itself.” It was a lovely line, and it might have even been true once. But in the current crisis, there is so much more to fear than fear.

The virus is real, the hospitalizations are real, the deaths are real, the need for masks and social distancing is real, the threat to millions of restaurants and shops is real, and the incomparable levels of unemployment are real, too. The White House plan to reverse this cavalcade of horrors is to “reopen” the economy. But 20 million Americans just lost their jobs in the past few weeks, not because the government shut down the economy, but because a pandemic scared millions of American into staying at home. There is plenty to be wisely afraid of, but Washington thinking that a pandemic economy is like a garage door that it can reopen by pressing a button might be the scariest thing of all.

It is terrifying.

Of course people want to go back to work and resume their normal lives. I know I do. And businesses are desperate to re-open. Everything they’ve worked for, their livliehoods are in jeopardy.

But the only was to make that happen sooner rather than later is to get a handle on the fucking pandemic!

A competent government would have used the time since January to get money to individuals and businesses that need it so they can go into an induced economic coma while the government built up the health care system, put in place the testing and tracing regime, pushing the distancing guidelines as a social imperative for everyone and doing everything possible to make people feel secure enough to resume some semblance of normal life within those parameters.

Other countries are doing this. We, on the other hand, are making everything worse.

Cops didn’t enforce law on anti-lockdown protesters, COVID-19 spread @spockosbrain

Published by Spocko on May 8, 2020

Remember the April 15th “Operation Gridlock?” in Lansing Michigan? In my piece on April 21st I said we needed to start tracking these protesters to show that they will spread the virus to other communities. Well, someone did.

michigan_cell_data
Cellphone data shows 300 of the people who had gathered in Lansing for “Operation Gridlock” scattered throughout the state after the protest. The color of the dot represents device activity: yellow is more activity, red is lighter.

The people at the Committee to Protect Medicare released data which shows the protesters dispersing to smaller communities across Michigan in the following days. The map above shows that cellphones that were in Lansing on April 15 scattered across the state. (Link)

Rob Davidson, executive director of The Committee to Protect Medicare said on Lawrence O’Donnell on April 30th that they saw a rise of 50-200% in COVID19 cases at the places those cell phones ended up.

Davidson predicts that we will see more of this following the April 30th protests. “If we keep doing the same thing over and over we’re never going to get out of this.”

Protesters without masks, PPE may have spread COVID-19 to North, West Michigan

The data is a “bright red flag” that shows the irresponsible actions of a few hundred people could put medically under-equipped communities at risk of experiencing higher infection rates, according to Dr. Rob Davidson, an emergency physician in West Michigan who ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2018.

“Every public health expert and medical professional has been warning America that people who don’t maintain physical distance could be dispersing a highly contagious, lethal virus into their communities and endangering their neighbors and their loved ones,” Davidson said. “These reckless actions threaten to set back all our efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19 and reduce the rate of infections.” (May 4th, Michigan Advance)

Michigan state law enforcement needs to change how they handle protesters.

At the April 30th protest the Michigan state police decided not to enforce the executive order.

This is a not a hoax pandemic. 3,789 people in Michigan have died because of it, and that’s not going to stop if protesters are allowed to violate the lawful emergency orders on social distancing.  But at the April 30th event no one was cited. They could have been  cited for breaking MCL 10.33 & MCL 30.405(3), a misdemeanor.

Here is Michigan State Police First Lt. Darren Green, the state security operation commander for the Capitol, telling the unmasked protesters standing closer than 6 feet apart the police will not be enforcing the social distancing orders.brighter New text goal is to not enforce Green 7

 

In this interview Michigan State Police First Lt. Darren Green gave several reasons for using “extreme discretion” for social distancing enforcement during stay-at-home protest. (link) Those reasons might have made sense at the time, but we now know how easily this deadly virus spreads.

How do we get a change in public health policing?

Elected officials should listen to the doctors who are looking at the evidence and making decisions to limit the spread. Michigan state government needs to tell police to start enforcing Executive Order 2020-11 re: Temporary prohibition on large assemblages and events (PDF Link) The doctors can educate the police why they need to start citing and arresting people who willfully and intentionally break public health orders.

When I last wrote about this people worried about how enforcement can be applied unjustly against POC. They were also concerned about the use of widespread surveillance techniques by government. All valid concerns. If we are going to ask for an increase in policing during the pandemic we should also demand independent oversight to address injustices and ensure that privacy requirements are built into the system.

Who does the public need to call, email or tweet to support health department orders?

I asked my friends who live in Michigan for ideas on who specifically to contact and what to say. They suggested their state representatives. My friend Vicki shared with me this delightful letter she wrote to Senator Mike Shirkey and Representative Lee Chatfield, both Republicans:

I don’t know if either of you are scientists or understand science–it appears that you don’t, after you allowed the protesters with their penis extensions (AKA guns and assault rifles) into the Capitol yesterday–but you both need to be told, apparently, that this virus doesn’t have a political affiliation. It doesn’t care if you are a Democrat, a Republican, or a Pastafarian. It’s an equal opportunity virus, and it will seek you out if you are in crowded spaces with no protection. A sizable majority of constituents in the State of Michigan (I can cite sources, if need be) agree with the Governor, that our safety is more important than politics or opening the economy–even if it is painful for some right now. We all get it, it’s stressful for everyone–we are all in this TOGETHER (or at least we should be).

..these fools (yes, they are fools) put all of our lives in danger with their behavior and their demands. Thankfully, we have a Governor who follows science.

..Follow the science. If you don’t understand it, research it. But follow the science. Opening this state up too soon because some troglodytes are screaming about LIBERTY is a foolish, foolish move.

Sadly some Michigan Republicans are listening to “Dr. Trump” by playing political games and filing lawsuits.

robert-gordon_0_i
Robert Gordon, Director of  State Of Michigan, Department Of Health And Human Services

Why aren’t they doing what Robert Gordon, Director of  State Of Michigan, Department Of Health And Human Services says in Emergency Order Pursuant to MCL 333.2253 Regarding Executive Orders 2020-11, 2020-20, and 2020-21?  That order is based on the “advice of scientific and medical experts employed by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. That is the document law enforcement should be following (read it here)

What needs to happen next?

  • Call your reps! Demand police change their policies to enforce physical distancing laws at protests.
  • The Governor needs the director of DHHS to talk to elected officials and explain how and why policing needs to change.
  • The Governor needs to direct the Attorney General, Dana Nessel to tell the director of the Michigan State Police, Col. Joseph Gasper, that he needs to direct his officers to start citing and arresting protesters violating the law.
  • The media needs to be informed how protests will be handled going forward. (They can use California as a model since they just arrested 32 anti-lock down protesters. )

We focus on the protesters yelling in these photos. I think we should focus on the police being yelled at. They are being put at risk by protesters who aren’t masked and could be carrying a deadly virus. Police have families too.

Anyone who says they “support our first responders” or tweets “#BlueLivesMatter” should be demanding reckless protesters stop spreading a highly contagious, lethal virus. That means PPE for first responders and enforcement of policies designed to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

In Michigan people have heard the story of 5-year old Skylar Herbert. Her dad is a firefighter, her mom is a police officer. At some point they were exposed to COVID-19, which infected Skylar.  On April 5th Skylar became the youngest person to have died of the virus in Michigan–so far.

We don’t know where all the people at these protests went. So call your state senators (link) and representatives (link) Demand the police stop letting people violate the emergency orders.

Make a call. Save lives.

Cross posted to Spocko’s Brain

Prepping the show trial

Published by digby on May 8, 2020

I don’t think they have the guts to indict Obama. But Strzok, McCabe, Comey, Clapper, Brennan? You bet.

Grenell and Barr are evil fascists. They will do it for their own reasons. Trump needs the drama to drive his re-election campaign.

I know it sounds crazy but this is Trump.

The great betrayal

Published by digby on May 8, 2020

In this time of global pandemic and Great Depression economics, it seems almost quaint to think back just a few months and remember simpler days. Once upon a time, we were all consumed with the impeachment trial of the president of the United States, and worried about whether or not he had been bamboozled into betraying the nation to its cunning adversary, Vladimir Putin. It all seems so far away now as we face the daily onslaught of statistics showing Americans dying by the tens of thousands and 30 million people out of work.

But then, the Russia investigation and the Ukraine scandal were really just an earlier chapter of the same story — the Donald Trump magnum opus called “American Carnage.” One atrocity leads inexorably into another.

On Thursday we witnessed another nail being pounded into the coffin of the Department of Justice as Attorney General Bill Barr’s attempt to rewrite the conclusions of the Mueller report continues unabated. We still await the release of the “Durham report,” which looks at this point to be a partisan hit job run out of the attorney general’s office. But in the meantime, Barr and his accomplices decided to give the Trump cult a little red meat to tide them over by dropping their prosecution of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, the man who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

It is not in the least surprising that Barr would be sympathetic to Flynn, even without President Trump’s open proselytizing on his behalf. They are both immersed in the right-wing fever swamps at a level that makes them little more credible than your average MAGA Twitter bot.

Barr showed his true colors when he auditioned for the attorney general job by writing an unsolicited memo to the White House explaining why the Mueller investigation was illegitimate. Flynn famously let his wingnut flag fly at the Republican convention in 2016 when he led chants of “Lock her up.” Later, he extolled the virtues of disgraced far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and spread conspiracy theories that accused Hillary Clinton of pedophilia.

When Flynn was first arrested he seemed to sober up and cooperated with federal prosecutors, offering them valuable information regarding his various nefarious and lucrative schemes with foreign governments. As a result, Mueller’s team went remarkably easy on him, recommending probation.

The judge in the case was unimpressed, however, and told Flynn he had to try harder. Flynn’s sentencing was delayed and in the interim, he returned to the Fox News bunker, fired his competent lawyers and replaced them with political hacks. This turned out to be a smart strategy after all. He will in all likelihood be able to make a great deal of money in the wingnut welfare racket after he becomes the Nelson Mandela of the Trump campaign.

That’s not an exaggeration. The Daily Beast reports:

“Years ago when Nelson Mandela came to America after years of political persecution he was treated like a rock star by Americans,” John McLaughlin, one of President Trump’s chief pollsters, told The Daily Beast on Thursday evening. “Now after over three years of political persecution General Flynn is our rock star. A big difference is that he was persecuted in America.”

Michael Flynn did not serve a day in jail. This move to drop the indictment is an unprecedented show of favoritism for an ally of the president of the United States. Mandela? Not exactly?

The New York Times quoted several legal scholars who were flabbergasted by this decision, all saying the legal rationale was absurd. Former federal prosecutor and New Jersey attorney general Ann Milgrim argued that the context of the decision is even more important: Barr’s Justice Department was “undercutting the law enforcement officials and prosecutors who investigated the 2016 election and its aftermath,” which she likened to “eating the Justice Department from the inside out.”

Not one legal analyst or former prosecutor could think of a case in which someone had lied to the FBI and pleaded guilty twice to doing it, and then saw the charges withdrawn by the Justice Department. There are thousands of cases involving matters much less important where people are incarcerated right now, today. This “one standard” only applies to friends of Donald Trump.

And Barr knows it. Get a load of this smug comment to CBS News, revealing to all the world that this is nothing more than partisan combat:

Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, late on Thursday the House Intelligence Committee released 57 transcripts from the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation which had been languishing for months in the office of the director of national intelligence for months. The committee had rightly objected to the office handing over transcripts to the White House to redact however it saw fit, so were waiting for the ODNI to do the job properly. This week, acting director Richard Grenell started bizarrely throwing his weight around, saying in effect, “If you don’t release the transcripts, I will” — despite the fact that his office was the one who’d been holding them back.

So now the right-wingers are screeching that Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is panicking because he had to release these transcripts, when he was the one trying to get them released in the first place. If you didn’t know better, you might think they were trying to make something out of nothing in order to keep the troops excited.

Most of what was in the transcripts was already known through earlier releases, leaks and evidence in the Mueller report. They show how disrespectful and frankly obnoxious the Trump witnesses were — a preview of how this administration has continuously held the Congress in total contempt. The interviews with Jared Kushner are particularly hard to take, showing the kind of arrogance and ineptitude that have now manifested in the deaths of many Americans after Kushner was once again handed a job for which he has no experience or ability.

These transcripts are for history now. The most important evidence remains what it’s always been: The Russian government interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump, and he has tried to deny that and cover it up ever since.

And yet, even after everything he’s been through, Trump has learned absolutely nothing. During a meeting in the oval office with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday, Trump informed the press that he’d recently spoken with Putin. And you won’t believe what Trump said he told the Russian leader:

I said, “You know, it’s a very appropriate time, because things are falling out now and coming in line showing what a hoax this whole investigation was, it was a total disgrace, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you see a lot of things happen over the next number of weeks. This is just one piece of a very dishonest puzzle.”

He knows that Putin’s government interfered in the election. We all do. And he’s openly admitting in public that he informed Putin himself that he’s planning to discredit the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusions, and those of the Department of Justice, to that effect.

In the middle of our global catastrophe that almost seems trivial now. We have much bigger problems. But when all is said and done and we’re able to sort through the wreckage of this catastrophic administration — assuming that day eventually comes — this will be remembered as the most astonishing betrayal by a president in American history. 

My Salon column reprinted with permission.

With liberty and justice for some

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 8, 2020
Open Ohio Rally photo (April 20, 2020) by Paul Becker via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Jamelle Bouie tweeted Thursday morning he had been struggling to turn some thoughts into a New York Times column about anti-lockdown protesters. You know them, with their weapons and Confederate flags and complaints of federal and state “tyranny”:

This morning he has done it.

By images, the vast majority of such protesters are white, Bouie begins, “in stark contrast to the victims of Covid-19 (who are disproportionately black and brown).” Those who have lost their jobs are also disproportionately black and brown. One cannot separate the protesters’ whiteness from awareness that it is not their racial group most affected by the pandemic lockdowns.

White racial identity, legal scholar Cheryl Harris found in a 1993 Harvard Law Review article, developed in contrast to the heritage of blacks in this country as property: 

“Whiteness,” Harris continued, “was the characteristic, the property of free human beings.” To be white was to have control over oneself and one’s labor. It was to be autonomous and subject to no one’s will but one’s own. 

Call it rugged individualism defined as darkness is by the absence of light. But there is more:

Freedom from domination and control is one aspect of the meaning of whiteness. The other aspect, in a kind of ideological inversion, is the right to control the presence and the lives of nonwhites. To be white in antebellum America, for instance, was to be able to enslave Africans and expropriate native land. It was, as Harris notes, the right to exclude as well as the right to discipline; to punish those who violated the terms of the racial order.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, lynchings, “sundown towns,” Japanese internment camps — even the killing of a black man allegedly shot by a white father and son as he jogged through a middle-class neighborhood of coastal Brunswick, GA — fall under the conception of white freedom as defined by the ability to control others, Bouie explains. In this sense, white dominance is the “natural order” of things.

To that, I’d add the white evangelical conception of the 1st Amendment as guaranteeing freedom of religion only so long as theirs remains the socially dominant one and their mores the ones with legal teeth. White freedom is not about race alone; it is about power, who has it, and who is unwilling to share it. Same as it ever was.

Bouie concludes:

The great irony, of course, is that this conception of freedom, situated within racial hierarchy and meant to justify deprivation and inequality, has always been impoverished when compared with an expansive, inclusive vision of what it means to be free. And in the particular context of a deadly pandemic, the demand to be free of mutual obligation is, in essence, a demand to be free to die and threaten those around you with illness and death. Most Americans, including most white Americans, have rejected this freedom of the grave. But among the ones who haven’t are the people leading our government, which means that this “freedom” remains a powerful — and dangerous — force to be reckoned with.

But Bouie’s conclusion dovetails with something Digby wrote about anti-lockdown protesters this week. The lockdown is not the issue. Not that their complaints are insincere:

They are just people who once followed the same sort of organizing for the Tea party and Gun Rights groups which have now switched to Trump Cult organizing. These have always been the same people. They aren’t “issues based.” After all, they claimed to care deeply about deficits during the Great Recession but sat by idly as Trump spent like a drunken sailor while cutting taxes.

These groups are soldiers in the culture wars, organized around fighting Democrats. Period. The “issues” aren’t the point.

Democrats is shorthand for Other the way race is. And like evangelicals and the 1st Amendment, the same people, red-faced and armed to the teeth, will defend the 2nd Amendment only so long as people who look like them are the ones with the most weapons. Guns and flags and Real Americans™ and “who is more patriotic than whom” is about power, who has it, and who in this sometime democratic republic is unwilling to share it. Same as it ever was.

E pluribus unum is for losers. The Trump faction, its improbably coiffed avatar, and his attorney general, are all about who gets to be the alpha dog and write the history. Democracy and the rule of law are disposable conveniences, mere window dressing. They don’t want to govern. They mean to rule.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.