Month: May 2021

Huh. It appears that Donald Trump’s cult members share his toxic narcissism. How shocking to think that the people who are refusing to admit that they lost the election might be just a little bit narcissistic:

New research from PLOS One suggests that Trump supporters may share some of the narcissistic traits that were exhibited by the former U.S. president himself during his 2020 re-election campaign. The study revealed that people who scored higher in the antagonistic and indifferent facets of narcissism were more likely to say they were voting for Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Donald Trump’s leadership style was characterized by an exaggerated sense of self-importance and a disregard for others — two key characteristics of narcissism. While many psychologists have pointed out Trump’s narcissistic personality traits, little research has considered whether his supporters might have similar narcissistic tendencies.

Study author Matthew M. Yalch suggests that people with inflated self-images combined with a  susceptibility to feeling undervalued might be attracted to Trump’s grandiose personality. In other words, people with narcissistic tendencies themselves might be drawn to Trump’s narcissistic persona, looking to defend their worth by identifying with his entitled and aggressive ways.

In October 2020, Yalch conducted a study to examine whether certain aspects of pathological narcissism might predict the decision to vote for Trump in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. A total of 495 U.S. workers between the ages of 18 and 79 responded to a questionnaire asking them who they intended to vote for in the upcoming election. They also completed several scales measuring various aspects of grandiose narcissism (characterized by overt displays of egoism and aggression) and vulnerable narcissism (characterized by introverted self-centeredness and an inability to accept criticism).

Using a statistical technique called a principal components analysis, the researchers explored pathological narcissism as a hierarchy of related concepts. Each dimension within the hierarchy was then tested to see whether it could predict the intention to vote for Trump in 2020.

The results showed that self-centered antagonism and indifference to others were the two aspects of narcissism that best predicted intent to vote for Trump. This was even after controlling for a series of relevant demographic variables.

Yalch says these findings point to the grandiose aspects of narcissism being most strongly tied to the decision to vote for Trump in 2020. The researcher says this is unsurprising given the way Trump ran his 2020 campaign. While his 2016 campaign might have appealed to the vulnerability of voters, Trump’s aggressive position during his 2020 campaign likely appealed to the antagonistic facets of narcissism.

“By all accounts,” Yalch discusses, “Donald Trump ran his 2020 reelection campaign and his presidency more broadly based on the dimensions of narcissism highlighted in this study: antagonism and indifference seem to have been guiding principles, both implicitly and explicitly.”

The study author notes that the findings shed light on the role of personality in political campaigning. Appealing to voters’ darker emotions might not be an effective tactic when running for an election, considering Trump’s loss of both the popular vote and the electoral college in 2020. “A platform rooted in animosity towards others can generate a substantial amount of angry enthusiasm (as was clear during the election and its immediate aftermath),” Yalch adds, “but may not be one that is convincing to the majority of people, at least not in a country as diverse as the U.S.”

The study, “Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump”, was authored by Matthew M. Yalch.

Trump and his followers share more than just those traits of course, first among them is a puerile sense of grievance that leads to relentless whining about everything.

In case you thought crazy General Michael Flynn was an anomaly in right wing politics, take a look at this:

A group of more than 100 retired generals and admirals who have accused President Joe Biden of being a communist have been pranked by a faux flag officer going by the nom de guerre “Rear Adm. Jack Meehoff.”

If you don’t get the joke, just say the name “Jack Meehoff” aloud. That’s right. You understand now.

Earlier this month, the group Flag Officers 4 America posted an open letter that repeated lies spread by former President Donald Trump and the elected leaders who support his claims that the FBI and Supreme Court ignored “election irregularities” in 2020.

The myth that the presidential election was stolen led to the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. So far, one active-duty Marine major, four service members from the reserve component, and 41 veterans have been charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol, Army Lt. Col. Martin Meiners, a Pentagon spokesman, said on May 13.

In their letter, the retired generals and admirals – most of whom have been out of uniform for several years – claim the Biden administration has “launched a full-blown assault on our Constitutional rights in a dictatorial manner” by passing executive orders. They also claim the administration is damaging the military’s ability to fight wars through an “infusion of Political Correctness.” And they raise doubts about Biden’s ability to serve as commander in chief by claiming: “The mental and physical condition of the Commander in Chief cannot be ignored.”

“Under a Democrat Congress and the Current Administration, our Country has taken a hard left turn toward Socialism and a Marxist form of tyrannical government which must be countered now by electing congressional and presidential candidates who will always act to defend our Constitutional Republic,” reads the heavily capitalized letter. “The survival of our Nation and its cherished freedoms, liberty, and historic values are at stake.”

Enter “Jack Meehoff.”

After Christopher Mathias of the Huffington Post wrote a May 12 story about the letter, he received an email the following day from someone showing how he had managed to get the apocryphal “Rear Adm. Jack Meehoff” added to the list of signatories.

Mathias later tweeted emails from the man, whose name he redacted, showing how he had provided the false name to retired Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Arbuckle, who left active duty in 2000.

“Thank you for your support,” Arbuckle replied. “Your name will be added to the letter today. Thank you for standing tall.”

The man included a screenshot showing that – for a period of time – “Rear Adm. Jack Meehoff” had succeeded in being included with such a distinguished collection of retired leaders.

As it turns out, there is no flag officer named “Jack Meehoff” in the Navy’s records, said Cmdr. David Hecht, a spokesman for the Chief of Naval Personnel, who confirmed the name is a fake.

Arbuckle confirmed on Monday that the name has been removed from the letter’s signatures.

On Monday, Task & Purpose spoke to “Jack Meehoff” – not his real name – who said was prompted to prank the cabal of McCarthyites because he felt their open letter was “f—ing absurd”, especially in the context of the Jan. 6 riots.

The man – who declined to provide his real name or a copy of his DD-214 – claimed to be a former enlisted submariner. He said Flag Officers 4 America removed “Rear Adm. Jack Meehoff” from the letter on Saturday after Mathias tweeted about how they had fallen for his ruse.

He also said he didn’t put much thought into coming up with the name “Jack Meehoff” as opposed to other joke names – such as “Ben Dover” – and he only realized afterward that the rank “rear admiral” added a double entendre to his fictional pseudonym.

The Flags 4 America is the latest example of retired general and flag officers offering their names and reputations to a partisan political cause. It comes at a particular poisonous time in our democracy, when Trump and his allies refuse to admit that the 2020 presidential election was fair.

In a commentary for Defense One, retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Paula G. Thornhill wrote that the opinions expressed by the retired leaders who signed the Flag Officers 4 America Letter do not deserve any sort of special consideration just because of the signatories’ former ranks.

“It’s a small step, but one place to start is give an ‘F’ to a poorly written missive, supported by a self-selected group of retired white men, posted on a website that implies, somehow, these retirees are uniquely ‘for America,’” wrote Thornhill, associate director of the Strategic Studies program at Johns Hopkins SAIS. “This letter demonstrates just how unworthy they are of the public voice they tried to claim as flag officer retirees.”

There have always been kooks in the officer corps. It’s a little disconcerting to know that there are this many illiterate flag officers but I guess we can be happy they are all long retired. We got through the cold war without nuclear war so maybe the system worked?

National Public Radio this morning ran an “All Things Considered” promo for a story tonight on how the QAnon conspiracy is a reprise of the Satanic cult panic of the 1980s. By 1998, key elements of both were found in this 90-second clip from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Red pills and blue pills entered the lexicon the next year in The Matrix. By 2016, some found it believable that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi eat babies to extend their lives.

Religion Dispatches laments that Dave Neiwert’s “Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us” released last fall did not receive the attention it might have:

It is now widely understood, as Neiwert explains, that one driver of conspiracist thinking is a perceived loss of social status. Conspiracy theories are essentially stories “about power: who has it, and who doesn’t.” By constructing fantastical theories that supposedly explain why their believers are being deprived of social status, conspiracists tend to misidentify false targets “as both demonic and a source of pollution, people fit only for elimination.”

I have used the same power phrasing myself. We are social animals, animals wired to read the room for who has power and who does not, and to assess our own place in the pecking order in each setting. Race is just a handy shorthand for people whose awareness of power dynamics is only skin-deep. Humans assign entire peoples to groups whose purpose is to remain permanently at the bottom of the social ladder so that even the lowest higher-ups never will be. See Barry Jenkins’ “The Underground Railroad.”

“Conspiracy theories are the one constant thread that runs through the backgrounds of every right-wing domestic terrorist of the past half-century.” In many cases, those narratives are fueled by moneyed plutocrats determined to secure their own status, Neiwert finds.

The other part of the story has to do with authoritarianism. As Neiwert shows, conspiracist thinking is often closely tied to an authoritarian disposition among individuals who don’t believe in equality as an important social value and would prefer a strongman who will punish the demonic cabal that they’ve been persuaded is responsible for all of their ills. Authoritarians can be found everywhere on the political spectrum, but they are concentrated decidedly on the right.

Neiwert “doesn’t just diagnose the problem,” writes Katherine Stewart:

Drawing on the insight of deradicalization experts, Neiwert lays out “a toolkit that ordinary people could use to bring their friends and loved ones out of the dark world of conspiracy theories and back into the sunlight of reality.” The road ahead will not be easy, he notes, but the work of deradicalization has never been so important. Conspiracy is “a lethal combination that destroys the lives of the people it infects, and then destroys the lives of thousands of innocents whose misfortune places them within their sphere,” he writes. It is “quite literally killing us all.”

The “paranoid style” goes back much further than the 1980s, of course. Housewives were “fighting Communism three nights a week” back in the early 1960s. But widespread paranoia waxes and wanes as a social force. The poor we will have with us always. Also with conspiracists. So far, the poor have never taken down the nation.

Why does this CNN report from last week make me feel we are in deep shit?

“Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, Space Operations Command commander, relieved Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier of command of the 11th Space Warning Squadron, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado, May 14, due to loss of trust and confidence in his ability to lead,” a Defense Department official told CNN.

Lohmeier, author of “Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military,” had appeared on a conservative podcast alleging infilitration of the military by Marxist ideologies. And in our children’s schools!

Pressed to elaborate, “Lohmeier decried the New York Times 1619 Project, a historical look at how slavery formed America’s institutions, as ‘anti-American.'”

Something in the CNN report sounded really familiar (emphasis mine):

“Since taking command as a commander about 10 months ago, I saw what I consider fundamentally incompatible and competing narratives of what America was, is and should be,” Lohmeier said. “That wasn’t just prolific in social media, or throughout the country during this past year, but it was spreading throughout the United States military. And I had recognized those narratives as being Marxist in nature.

Ummm:

Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty six. Nineteen forty six, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your postwar commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard core commie works.
Mandrake: Jack… Jack, listen, tell me, ah… when did you first become, well, develop this theory.
Ripper: Well, I ah, I I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.
Mandrake: sighs fearfully
Ripper: Yes a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly: loss of essence.
Mandrake: Yes…

The day before CNN’s original story, I posted this in response to Rep. Elise Stefanik, the new House GOP Conference Chair, claiming she would lead their fight against the “radical Socialist Democrat agenda“:

I’ll say it again. When the Berlin Wall fell, Republicans declared Sir Ronald of Reagan had slain the Evil Empire and won the Cold War. Yet 30 years later in a different century, one they believe only they are fit to lead, Republicans are still warning of Commies hiding in woodpiles as though it is 1963.

(h/t Dave Johnson of Seeing the Forest)

TPM catches up with the latest down in Arizona:

The board of supervisors of Maricopa County, Arizona railed against a review of the county’s 2020 election results ordered by the state Senate during a fiery board meeting Monday. 

“As chairman of this board, I just want to make it clear: I will not be responding to any more requests from this sham process,” board Chairman Jack Sellers (R) said at the end of the meeting. “Finish what you’re calling an audit and be ready to defend your report in a court of law. We all look forward to it.” 

Sellers and the rest of the board — which is comprised of four Republicans and one Democrat — were responding to a letter from Senate President Karen Fann last week in which Fann wrote that auditors had discovered “apparent omissions, inconsistencies, and anomalies relating to Maricopa County’s handling, organization, and storage of ballots,” among other issues. 

The audit was commissioned by the Republican-controlled state Senate, and Fann chose the firm “Cyber Ninjas” to lead the review, even though the company’s CEO boosted wild conspiracy theories about the election results online and has ties to fringe pro-Trump figures, including the lawyer Lin Wood. The audit has stumbled into a series of logistical issues — most recently the end of its lease at the coliseum at which it was counting votes (the local school district had booked the venue for high school graduations).

In addition to Fann’s letter outlining several serious allegations of wrongdoing, the Senate’s Twitter account — which Fann has said she doesn’t control — recently accused Maricopa County of “spoliation of evidence!” because of a purportedly missing database on the county’s server.

County Recorder Steven Richer, a Republican who took office in January, dismissed that allegation quickly on Monday. 

“Every file the Senate has asked for is there,” he said. “No files from the 2020 elections have been deleted.” 

The county’s written response to Fann, which the board voted to approve Monday, laid fault at the feet of the auditors: “[T]he failure of your so called ‘auditors’ to locate data files on the copy they made of the County’s server speaks more to their ineptitude than it does to the integrity and actions of our dedicated public employees who effectively and accurately run the elections in the fourth largest county in the United States.” 

Another complaint from Fann, alleging that transmission slips accompanying the ballots did not match the actual number of ballots present, was “the result of enlisting auditors who have no experience or background in elections, and failing to understand how to read election transmission slips,” Richer said.

Earlier, Sellers had referred to Fann’s letter as a request to do “on-the-job training” for the Cyber Ninjas auditors. He called the recount a “grift disguised as an audit.” And after Richer finished summarizing the county’s response, the rest of the board of supervisors tee’d off as well. 

Fann had invited the board to attend a meeting to discuss her concerns on Tuesday, but supervisor Bill Gates (R) dismissed the invitation: “This board was going to be part of a political theater broadcast on livestream by OAN,” he said, referring to One America News, the far-right broadcaster and Senate-approved live-streamer of the audit process. 

“The Arizona Senate is better than that, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is better than that, we’re not going to be a part of that,” Gates said. 

Steve Gallardo, the board’s only Democrat, said Fann had “let the Senate go and be in the hands of outside consultants that have no idea how elections are conducted.” 

“The fact is this, folks: The election wasn’t in question until a couple days after the final vote count. That’s when, all of the sudden, ‘Woah, there might be problems! We don’t like who won the election, so let’s call it into question,’” he said. 

Gallardo alleged that “outside forces” had taken control of the Arizona Senate. “President Fann does not have the political courage, the wisdom, to be able to stop it,” he said. “She has gone along with it.” 

In the supervisors’ letter responding to Fann, the supervisors concluded by calling for Fann to shut down the audit altogether, saying that Arizona had become a “laughingstock.” 

“You certainly must recognize that things are not going well at the Coliseum,” the board wrote. “You also must know that the County’s election was free and fair, and that our Elections Department did an outstanding job conducting it.” 

“It is time to end this,” they added. “For the good of the Senate, for the good of the Country and for the good of the Democratic institutions that define us as Americans.”

The freakshow happening down in Arizona is truly beyond belief. But it sounds as though there will be a showdown among Republicans when this thing comes to an end and it will end up having a full airing in court. I don’t know that that’s a guarantee it will be thrown into the toilet as it should be — and exposed for the absurd amatuer hour it is — but it doesn’t appear that the entire Arizona GOP is on board with it.

Just imagine if these people had even a modicum of professionalism and competence and wasn’t being run by a bunch of grifters and cranks. I’m sorry to say that they could probably easily get away with it.

Fred Hiatt in the Washington Post focuses on what I also consider to be the greatest threat to our democracy at the moment. It’s not just the vote suppression, as bad as that is. There is a much more nefarious plot unfolding that really could set us on a path to real autocracy:

President Donald Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 presidential election fell short. Now Republicans across the country are promoting changes to laws and personnel that could allow him — or someone like him — to succeed in 2024.

I’m not referring to the hundreds of GOP proposals in statehouses across the country that will make it harder for many people, in particular Black Democrats, to vote. Those measures are egregious and offensive. They are the strategy of a party that has given up on winning by putting forward more appealing policies and candidates and so hopes to win by keeping as many of its opponents away from the ballot box as possible.

What I’m talking about is in some ways even more insidious: an insurance policy to potentially steal the election if the vote-suppression strategy fails.

Recall Trump’s post-election campaign last fall. Having lost decisively, he thought he could pressure local and state officials to nullify the results.

He implored the Republican majority in the Pennsylvania legislature to defy their people’s will and appoint a slate of electors who would vote for him in Washington.

He urged the Georgia secretary of state to claim that Joe Biden’s victory there was fraudulent.

He pressured the Michigan Board of State Canvassers not to certify Biden’s clear victory in their state.

He failed because enough local officials had more integrity and courage than a majority of the Republican caucus in the U.S. House has mustered. The leaders of the Pennsylvania legislature said they didn’t have the authority to do what Trump was demanding. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger simply refused to go along. One of two Republicans on the Michigan board caved to the pressure, but the other, Aaron Van Langevelde, listened to his conscience, and his vote alongside the board’s two Democrats was enough to turn aside Trump’s attempted theft.

All of this was inspiring to many of us. To the anti-democracy forces ascendant in the Republican Party, it provided a challenge and a road map.

Michigan Republicans chose not to nominate Van Langevelde to another term. Raffensperger will face a primary challenge from an amplifier of Trump’s lies about election fraud, Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), who already has Trump’s endorsement.

“At the end of the day, there were good people on both sides of the aisle who were determined to protect people’s right to vote,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said in a meeting with Post reporters and editors this month. “If those people change in 2022, then you have a scenario in 2024 where the good people who protected their states in 2020 aren’t there any more.”

Nor are the anti-democracy forces focused only on top officials. Another Democratic secretary of state, Arizona’s Katie Hobbs, told us that “people around the state are very worried that they’re going to come infiltrate poll workers in the next election.” The law requires a balance of Republicans and Democrats as poll workers — but, Hobbs noted, “it’s very easy to change your affiliation from R to D.”

As they target the people and positions that stood in their way last time, they also are attempting to change the rules, so a pro-Trump legislature could more easily override the will of the people — and the objections of any honest secretary of state who stood in the way.

“In 2021, state legislatures across the country — through at least 148 bills filed in 36 states — are moving to muscle their way into election administration, as they attempt to dislodge or unsettle the executive branch and/or local election officials who, traditionally, have run our voting systems.”

That is the conclusion of a recent report, “A Democracy Crisis in the Making,” by two nonpartisan organizations, States United Democracy Center and Protect Democracy, and a nonprofit law firm in Wisconsin, Law Forward.

“Had these bills been in place in 2020,” the report found, “they would have significantly added to the turmoil that surrounded the election, and they would have raised the alarming prospect that the outcome of the presidential election could have been decided contrary to how the people voted.”

One such measure was included in Georgia’s recent electoral “reform.” While many of us paid attention to the mean-spirited ban on giving water to people waiting in line — and understandably so — the intrusion of the legislature into the counting process could have far more nefarious consequences.

This is why it matters so much that Trump continues to lie about 2020, and that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and most of his party have abjectly surrendered to the lie. It’s not just about history. The lie is being used to give cover for actions that in 2024 could turn the big lie into the big steal.

This is the long game. They are normalizing the idea in GOP circles that its perfectly democratic for partisan state legislators to overturn the electoral college results and for the majority in the US Congress to refuse to certify an election they don’t like. There is no reason to believe the conservative Supreme Court won’t be won over to this absurd notion either.

There is only one party that is seeking to do this. I think you know who they are and why. It’s profoundly unnerving but it’s exactly the way modern democracies die — it’s a death by a thousand cuts, all superficially legal and incremental until one day you wake up and it’s passed to the great beyond. Don’t think it can’t happen to us.

There are lots of reasons to be suspicious of the surveillance powers of the US government. There is a long history of using them for political purposes and it’s important to always stay vigilant.

But having to listen to the Trumpers squeal incessantly about the “Deep State” when they were doing stuff like this is just infuriating. This was using the full power of the government to punish a satirical opponent of one of the president’s allies. They’ve done a lot of questionable thing over the year but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this level of pettiness by the DOJ before and it’s kind of terrifying. We don’t know what they planned to do to the person who ran “Devin Nunes’ Cow” on twitter:

A newly unsealed court filing reveals an attempt by the Justice Department, in the waning days of the Trump administration, to force Twitter to identify the person (or people) behind a parody account that poked fun at Republican congressman and Trump sycophant Devin Nunes (CA). On November 24, 2020, Twitter was served with a subpoena demanding the name of whoever was running @NunesAlt, along with a gag order prohibiting the company from going public about the request.

“After receiving the Subpoena, Twitter’s counsel promptly contacted the Assistant United States Attorney who had issued it,” according to the filing. “Twitter’s counsel explained Congressman Nunes’s history of litigation and the Congressman’s numerous prior attempts to unmask accounts critical of the Congressman.” I

n the past two years, Nunes and his campaign committee have brought no fewer than nine lawsuits against various entities for criticizing him, two of which were other Twitter parodies, @DevinCow and @DevinNunesMom, it continues. “In each of these cases, Congressman Nunes sought damages for what he believes were targeted attacks against his reputation, by being called names such as a ‘treasonous cowpoke’ on Twitter, and sought to unmask anonymous commenters critical of his job as a politician,” the filing says.

The feds tried to tell Twitter that it was looking into “potential violations of 18 U.S.C. Section 875(c) (threatening communications in interstate commerce).” But the government wouldn’t—or couldn’t—provide any examples or further information.

In response, Twitter argued, “As the custodian entrusted with the private identifying information that the government seeks, Twitter is concerned the Subpoena may not be supported by a legitimate law enforcement purpose, and that therefore, there cannot be any need—let alone a compelling need—for the government to unmask the user.”

Right wing caterwauling that they’ve been censored is simply nonsense. In this case, Big Tech actually held the line against Trump’s corrupt DOJ which was the right thing to do. The fact that they tried this is just more evidence that they are being self-serving in their complaints.

This is not to say that Big Tech doesn’t need to be regulated whether by anti-trust or some other means, of course. But taking the right seriously on this is a folly.

Giuliani really doesn’t like being treated the same way he treated people for years when he was a prosecutor and mayor. It’s so very predictable:

Lawyers for Rudy Giuliani slammed prosecutors on Monday for secretly obtaining electronic access to the former New York City mayor’s accounts—likening the operation that resulted in the April 28 FBI raid of his home and office to that of a drug cartel takedown.

“Unfortunately for Giuliani, and even more unfortunately for the attorney-client privilege and executive deliberation privilege, and the public’s perception that those privileges are real, the SDNY simply chose to treat a distinguished lawyer as if he was the head of a drug cartel or a terrorist, in order to create maximum prejudicial coverage of both Giuliani, and his most well-known client—the former President of the United States,” the letter filed Monday on behalf of Giuliani states.

The letter is the first legal response from Giuliani’s team since the April 28 raid on Donald Trump’s former attorney’s Manhattan home and office. Federal prosecutors have asked the U.S. Southern District of New York to appoint a special master to review the evidence seized during the raid to ensure material that falls under attorney-client privilege isn’t released.

Giuliani’s lawyers, however, claimed Monday that the government’s push for a special master amounts to a “do over” after prosecutors failed to seek one in what they say was a similar search during the Trump administration.

When prosecutors seized contents of Giuliani’s iCloud account with an undisclosed 2019 search warrant, his attorneys claim that they assembled their own “secret taint team” to determine whether the information in the former New York City mayor’s iCloud account benefited from attorney-client privilege rather than asking a judge to appoint an independent special master to make those determinations.

They further allege that “the fruits of that 2019 search were certainly used in some part to secure the 2021 largely duplicative search warrant.” As a result, Giuliani’s attorneys have asked a federal judge to halt the appointment of a special master in the 2021 warrant to provide more time for them to review the circumstances and evidence supporting the 2019 search.

Giuliani’s team also complained about the government’s non-disclosure order issued alongside its fall 2019 iCloud warrant, in which prosecutors claimed that the existence of the warrant must remain secret because of the risk that Giuliani “might destroy evidence or intimidate witnesses.” His lawyers called the allegation “false” and “extremely damaging to Giuliani’s reputation” and demanded that the government reveal the evidence it used to back up the assertion.

Giuliani’s attorneys claim that prosecutors intentionally waited until the Biden administration took office and “senior members of the Justice Department had been removed and replaced by Biden appointees” to carry out the raid on their client’s apartment. As evidence, they claim that prosecutors applied for a warrant to search Giuliani’s devices twice before, once in November 2020 and again in January 2021, and were denied.

I’m sure the Trumpers covered for Giuliani. But I also understand that the DOJ or a judge (it’s not clear to me who denied the warrant) might not have been anxious to unleash the hounds on Giuliani in the middle of the post-election circus.

Sadly, Rudy seems to be on his own now:

As previously reported by The Daily Beast, Giuliani’s attempts to get out of legal trouble have prompted the former mayor to unsuccessfully seek help from his former allies—including Trump. The former president, however, has been unwilling to help his embattled friend as the feds ramp up their probe into whether Giuliani’s work with Ukrainian officials during the last administration was illegal.

I’m surprised, actually. I would have thought Trump would be openly supportive in the hopes of making this even more partisan and political than it already is. There’s protection for him in that.

He should be careful. Giuliani can draw this out for a bit but it’s not infinite. If he’s on the hook he’s going to have to decide if he’s willing to go to jail to protect Donald Trump. What are the odds? Trump might feel that he’ll be another Manafort or Stone but he’s in a very different position. No pardon is available to him and Manafort, at least, at bigger problems than going to jail if he flipped. (He owed some powerful Russians a lot of money.) Rudy is an old guy and I doubt he wants to spend his last years in jail to protect Donald Trump.

They are doing better than they usually do. I don’t know if it’s enough but at least they are doing something:

One of the big missteps of the early days of the Obama administration was Democrats’ meager defense of the benefits of the stimulus package they passed to bail out the U.S. economy.

We’re seeing a bit of a different tact (sic) taken this time around. House Majority Forward — a major Dem outside group — is dropping another $1.2 million on ads thanking lawmakers for voting for the legislation, and bragging about its benefits. This is its second million-dollar round of ads, and it’s going to Democrats who are in political peril. 

Here’s an ad thanking Rep. Cindy Axne (D-Iowa):

I think it’s a very good idea to keep this drumbeat going all over the country in these vulnerable districts. Dems are betting that things will be a lot better in a year when the next campaign is heating up and this way people will already have it in their heads that the Democrats delivered.

I’m a little bit concerned, however, about activism on the ground. The Republicans are reporting a lot of activity at their local meetings with many new recruits lining up to support Dear Leader. Their bet is that they can get their base out in 2022 and the Democrats can’t. And it’s not a bad bet. The out party usually does. However, the grassroots Democrats simply cannot sit on their hands or they will be very sorry. They have no time to lose.

This is what Amy Coney Barrett was born to do:

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a challenge to a Mississippi law that prohibits nearly all abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. That means that Dobbs will be the first abortion case to be fully briefed and argued before the Supreme Court since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation last October.

Barrett is an outspoken opponent of abortion, and she joined a Court that almost certainly already had five votes to roll back abortion rights before her confirmation gave Republicans a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court.

Last June, four justices voted to uphold a Louisiana anti-abortion law that was virtually identical to a Texas law that the Supreme Court struck down in 2016. Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts cast a surprising vote in that June case, June Medical Services v. Russo, to strike down Louisiana’s law. But Roberts’s opinion emphasized that he disagreed with many of the Court’s seminal abortion rights decisions, and that he only voted the way he did in June Medical out of respect for the principle that the Court should not simply ignore a ruling that it handed down just a few years earlier.

With Barrett on the Court, the four dissenters in June Medical no longer need Roberts’s vote to make significant incursions on reproductive freedom. And the legal issue in Dobbs is sufficiently distinct from the one in June Medical that Roberts is unlikely to vote with his liberal colleagues again on those grounds.

The legal issue in Dobbs is straightforward. A2018Mississippi law prohibits all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, “except in a medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality.” Notably, this law applies even before thefetus is viable — meaning that it is capable of surviving outside the uterus. But, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed, “a State may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability.”

Notably, the Supreme Court decided to focus its argument in Dobbs on a single question — “Whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional” — which suggests that the Court could use this case as a vehicle to end the rule providing that an abortion patient gets to make the final decision whether to “terminate her pregnancy before viability.”

A conservative federal appeals court struck down the Mississippi law, with even Judge James Ho, a staunch opponent of abortion, conceding that existing Supreme Court precedent “establishes viability as the governing constitutional standard.”

Now that the case is before the justices themselves, however, Dobbs gives the Court’s new majority a vehicle it could use to toss out this longstanding rule. Indeed, it potentially gives them a vehicle to overrule Roe v. Wade in its entirety and permit outright bans on abortion.

The Court’s new majority, moreover, has already signaled that it is eager to roll back protections for abortion rights. Earlier this year, the Court handed down a decision permitting the Food and Drug Administration to impose limits on an abortion-inducing drug that it does not impose on any other medication.

The Court did not publish a majority opinion in that earlier case, FDA v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, so the American College decision did not make any explicit changes to the Court’s existing abortion rights doctrine. Nevertheless, the Court’s anti-abortion decision in American College may well foreshadow what’s to come.

And listen to this deceitful garbage coming from the anti-abortion zealots:

Anti-abortion groups cheered the court’s move, with the March for Life asserting, “States should be allowed to craft laws that are in line with both public opinion on this issue as well as basic human compassion, instead of the extreme policy that Roe imposed.”

“This is a landmark opportunity for the Supreme Court to recognize the right of states to protect unborn children from the horrors of painful late-term abortions,” said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser, pointing to the slew of state-level abortion restrictions introduced this year “aimed at humanizing our laws and challenging the radical status quo imposed by Roe.”

This is not about late-term abortions. It’s about banning abortions altogether and everyone knows it. If it takes a few cases for Justice Amy to get there, they’ll be patient enough to let her do her evil work. But as they always do, they lie and suggest it’s just a matter of “states’ rights” and individual freedom. They are among the most deceitful people on the right with their lugubrious bullshit about “humanizing” the laws when what they really want to do is impose monstrous suffering on desperate women and their families.

But we knew this would happen. It was inevitable when Trump and McConnell packed the court with hard right wingnuts. Now we are stuck. Get ready for a huge fight but it’s very hard to see how women are going to win this one.