Month: May 2021

Harry Enten delivers some truth that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up:

The events of January 6 and its aftermath can be difficult to fathom. A number of Republicans don’t seem to comprehend them at all. They have fallen back on the lies that the riots we all saw on television and online that day were not an insurrection by supporters of Donald Trump.Dangerously, the base’s reaction to January 6 are part of a larger worldview about the 2020 election and its aftermath, all steeped in mistruths in an effort to protect Trump’s legacy.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll from late March found that an astounding 55% of Republicans agreed that the January 6 riots were led by left-wing protesters trying to make the former President look bad. Just 30% of Republicans disagreed with this statement.

What arguably makes this stat even worse is that people don’t believe or are choosing to ignore their own eyes. There is video literally showing rioters pumping up Trump and denouncing now President Joe Biden and Democrats.

There is no real proof that liberals were behind the insurrection. It’s a lie by some conservatives that was made up to excuse the violent actions of Trump supporters that day.

Republicans are also trying to perform some mind jujitsu by trying to separate out the insurrection from the larger January 6 protests. While it is true that some January 6 protesters were not rioters, many of them were.

Yet 51% of Republicans believe that the protesters were mostly peaceful and law-abiding. Put it together, a majority of Republicans think that the protesters were mostly peaceful, and a majority think those who rioted at the US Capitol were put up to it by left-wing agitators.

[…]

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that many Republicans are able to believe two things that seem to be in paradox with each other.

Republicans have believed unbelievable things about the election and its aftermath for more than half a year now.

The 51% and 55% are part of a larger package of lies propagated since the election. The majority who have false thoughts about January 6 is similar to the percentage of Republicans who believe, falsely, that President Joe Biden didn’t legitimately earn enough votes to beat Trump in the election.

These statistics being so similar makes a lot of sense. When you believe something ridiculous, it’s not the toughest jump to believe something else ridiculous on the same topic.

Moreover, if you are wrongly of the belief that the election was somehow stolen, you might too be OK with a riot to protest those results.

[…]

We shouldn’t lose sight of how crazily high these stats are. They’re not normal, even in our deeply partisan age.

Biden clearly won the election with room to spare. In similar elections outcomes since 2004 (competitive but not too close), only about 10% to 15% of the losing candidate’s backers had no confidence that the votes were counted fairly. Following this past election, it’s around 50 points higher than that.

The difference between those elections and this one seems pretty obvious and is the same as the linking factor between the reaction to the 2020 election and the events of January 6: Trump.

Most Americans seem to recognize that link. A clear majority, 55%, told Quinnipiac University back in February that the riots wouldn’t have happened if Trump had not spent months lying about how the 2020 election was stolen. Not surprisingly, 59% of Republicans think the riots still would have happened without Trump saying anything about the election’s legitimacy.

Many Republicans can’t believe anything bad about Trump. Most, 68%, said that Trump did everything he could to stop the events of January 6. Just 25% of Americans overall believe that.Trump still has this almost hypnotic spell over most Republicans. This has led him to not only leading in the 2024 Republican primary polls, but puts him in the strongest polling position of any former President who could run for another term.

And because so many Republicans are willing to believe so many lies that make Trump look good, it’s a big reason you should take his polling advantage seriously.

Yes it is. I know I’m about to get boring with this but it’s just so important. Democrats are making a huge mistake if they hang everything on “economic recovery” for 2022. These economic upheavals are important and will obviously have an influence on the body politics, but unless they alert their voters to the danger coming from the right wing, they may just think everything’s coming up roses, no need to vote! The other side is working themselves up into a frenzy over the Big Lie and will come out in droves. It could 2010 all over again and that’s not good, not good at all.

“Accountability for Mr. Floyd’s murder is not justice,” write Dr. William Barber II of the Poor People’s Campaign and Repairers of the Breach, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, author of “Revolution of Values: Reclaiming Public Faith for the Common Good.” One conviction is more of a fluke than justice. “If we cannot stop the killings of unarmed Black people before they happen, any collective affirmation of Black life rings hollow.”

On the first anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, the New York Times publishes a series on the impact of last year’s on-camera killing that sparked the largest civil rights protests in decades. Barber and Wilson-Hartgrove revisit the Third Reconstruction theme Barber invokes in speech after speech:

As hard as it may be to achieve, the Third Reconstruction is about more than Black people surviving encounters with law enforcement. It’s about America taking steps to protect and value its Black citizens as it has never done before. A Third Reconstruction is about ensuring Black Americans are no longer twice as likely as white Americans to die in a pandemic. It’s about remaking a system that saddles them with student debt and then offers them poverty wages.

A Third Reconstruction will ensure that all Americans can access decent housing for their families and quality education for their children, as outlined in a resolution introduced Thursday by Representatives Barbara Lee and Pramila Jayapal, and supported by our organization, the Poor People’s Campaign. Their resolution seeks to ensure all Americans access to clean and unleaded water and, in the face of widespread voter suppression efforts, a guarantee that their participation in American democracy is expanded and protected.

The Third Reconstruction is about confronting policies and practices that produce death, whether from police killings, poverty, lack of health care, ecological devastation or unnecessary war. It is, in short, a declaration that unnecessary death is intolerable and that democracy is still possible.

Possible but not inevitable. Events since Floyd’s killing demonstrate that unnecessary deaths remain tolerable in a “warrior cop” culture.

Just last week, the Associated Press released 2019 body-camera footage of Louisiana State Police punching and dragging a chained, tazed, and bleeding Black man who apologized for leading them on a high-speed chase. Ronald Greene was pronounced dead at the hospital:

Body-camera footage published by the Associated Press — withheld for two years by authorities — captures Greene wailing and saying, “I’m sorry!” as Louisiana state troopers violently arrest him, deploying what the AP identifies as a stun gun after the Black man appears to raise his hands inside his car. Troopers later punch Greene in the face, drag him briefly by his shackled ankles and leave him to moan alone while handcuffed for more than nine minutes, according to the AP.

Police insisted Greene died when his car hit a tree. That is his car above after impoundment, its air bag undeployed.

There is more. Such stories are by now familiar. Such behavior by police is intolerable.

No Third Reconstruction is coming before some deconstructing of the system that treats white suspects with deference while a traffic stop can be a death sentence for Black citizens.

The Third Reconstruction is about more than any single bill or the agenda of a political party. It is about building power to fundamentally reimagine what is possible in our society. Both the First and Second Reconstructions in American history happened because moral movements reclaimed the promises of democracy and a new, expanded electorate insisted on new priorities. If the Trayvon Martin generation has pricked the nation’s conscience and sparked a moral movement, we believe a coalition of poor and low-income people who have historically been “low-propensity” voters has the potential to shift the political landscape. We must organize around an agenda that lifts from the bottom so that everyone can rise.

No single verdict or election can bring about the racial reckoning America needs after 400 years of building systems that have rested upon white supremacy. But the generation of young people who saw themselves in Trayvon Martin knows that whatever the color of their skin, their lives will not matter in this society until Black lives matter in our public policy.

For that to happen, however, white people, poor and not, will have to see themselves and their children in the Trayvon Martins and George Floyds. Bloody Sunday pricked the conscience of enough Americans that even President Lyndon Johnson of Texas summoned the fortitude to support sweeping civil rights reforms. To be determined is whether there remains enough residue of conscience, virtue and fortitude among Americans to do the work of justice today. Too many will have to be brought to it kicking and screaming.

The clock is ticking, a friend casually remarked this week. A few years younger than me, he is already contemplating how much life he has left. His mother died at 76; his father, in his fifties. Meanwhile, an acquaintance still lives alone at 99, still drives, and writes cogent letters to the editor. My relations tend to make it into their nineties. Genetics is a crap shoot. For now.

The period immediately after the Spanish Flu pandemic of a century ago was the last time life spans dipped around the world. The New York Times reposts to its landing page today a story from last month about the doubling of life spans in the century since. The reasons are traceable to a myriad of little-noticed changes along the way that helped us dodge death early in life: “the smallpox infection that didn’t kill you at age 2; the accidental scrape that didn’t give you a lethal bacterial infection; the drinking water that didn’t poison you with cholera,” etc. The rates of death in childbirth and infant mortality have plummeted. My mother at nearly 90 just discovered an aunt she never knew about who died at the age of two over a century ago.

Infant-mortality rates in the United States dropped by half between 1915 and 1935, the Times adds:

One strange thing about the story of global life expectancy is how steady the number was for almost the entirety of human history. Until the middle of the 18th century, the figure appears to have rarely exceeded a ceiling of about 35 years, rising or falling with a good harvest or a disease outbreak but never showing long-term signs of improvement. A key factor keeping average life expectancy low was the shockingly high rates of infant and childhood mortality: Two in five children perished before reaching adulthood. Human beings had spent 10,000 years inventing agriculture, gunpowder, double-entry accounting, perspective in painting — but these undeniable advances in collective human knowledge failed to move the needle in one critical category: how long the average person could expect to live.

But germ theory, pasteurized milk, chlorination, antibiotics, the smallpox vaccine, and more were life-changing and life-extending. When life spans exceeded 50 for the first time in human history, Nobel-laureate economist Angus Deaton has called it “the great escape.” Discovering that bread mold had antibacterial properties was one thing. Engineering how to produce penicillin at scale the way the world just produced COVID-19 drugs at scale saved millions of lives.

The history books tend to spotlight major scientific breakthroughs, but little things like mechanics and social habits add up. One engineering professor noted how even everyday things like better personal hygiene and inventions like the washing machine and refrigerator are contributors.

The consequences of extending life spans, however, have led to a new set of issues with which to grapple:

All those brilliant solutions we engineered to reduce or eliminate threats like smallpox created a new, higher-level threat: ourselves. Many of the key problems we now face as a species are second-order effects of reduced mortality. For understandable reasons, climate change is usually understood as a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution, but had we somehow managed to adopt a lifestyle powered by fossil fuels without reducing mortality rates — in other words, if we had invented steam engines and coal-powered electrical grids and automobiles but kept global population at 1800 levels — climate change would be much less of an issue. There simply wouldn’t be enough humans to make a meaningful impact on carbon levels in the atmosphere.

Runaway population growth — and the environmental crisis it has helped produce — should remind us that continued advances in life expectancy are not inevitable. We know from our recent history during the industrial age that scientific and technological progress alone do not guarantee positive trends in human health. Perhaps our increasingly interconnected world — and dependence on industrial livestock, particularly chickens — may lead us into what some have called an age of pandemics, in which Covid-19 is only a preview of even more deadly avian-flu outbreaks. Perhaps some rogue technology — nuclear weapons, bioterror attacks — will kill enough people to reverse the great escape. Or perhaps it will be the environmental impact of 10 billion people living in industrial societies that will send us backward. Extending our lives helped give us the climate crisis. Perhaps the climate crisis will ultimately trigger a reversion to the mean.

In a companion story, the Times examines how birth rates and fertility rates have dropped as the world population grows older. “Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can’t find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks,” proving again there is no free lunch. For every action, etc.

Most everywhere, “the era of high fertility is ending,” the Times reports:

That declining birthrate, coupled with a rapid industrialization that has pushed people from rural towns to big cities, has created what can feel like a two-tiered society. While major metropolises like Seoul continue to grow, putting intense pressure on infrastructure and housing, in regional towns it’s easy to find schools shut and abandoned, their playgrounds overgrown with weeds, because there are not enough children.

Expectant mothers in many areas can no longer find obstetricians or postnatal care centers. Universities below the elite level, especially outside Seoul, find it increasingly hard to fill their ranks — the number of 18-year-olds in South Korea has fallen from about 900,000 in 1992 to 500,000 today. To attract students, some schools have offered scholarships and even iPhones.

To goose the birthrate, the government has handed out baby bonuses. It increased child allowances and medical subsidies for fertility treatments and pregnancy. Health officials have showered newborns with gifts of beef, baby clothes and toys. The government is also building kindergartens and day care centers by the hundreds. In Seoul, every bus and subway car has pink seats reserved for pregnant women.

There are political repercussions, of course, especially with shifting ethnic populations in this diverse nation. And political challenges:

Many countries are beginning to accept the need to adapt, not just resist. South Korea is pushing for universities to merge. In Japan, where adult diapers now outsell ones for babies, municipalities have been consolidated as towns age and shrink. In Sweden, some cities have shifted resources from schools to elder care. And almost everywhere, older people are being asked to keep working. Germany, which previously raised its retirement age to 67, is now considering a bump to 69.

Going further than many other nations, Germany has also worked through a program of urban contraction: Demolitions have removed around 330,000 units from the housing stock since 2002.

In this country, consolidation in the cities has closed rural hospitals and created housing shortages in cities, with competition for eager buyers and unaffordability for paycheck workers.

Postscript:

About those little things reducing infant mortality. One of my clients was a former classmate. She came in one Monday looking tired and drawn. One of her twins had come down with a form of pneumonia infants get that landed her in the intensive care ward over the weekend. It was frightening, she said.

“Was it RSV?” I asked. Respiratory syncytial virus.

“Yes,” she said. “But they gave her this shot. It was like a miracle. It cleared up overnight and we took her home.”

“Synagis. Monoclonal antibodies. MedImmune. Frederick, Maryland,” I said. I’d done some design work on their biotech lab in Gaithersburg.

She looked me square in the eye and said quietly, “Thank you.”

Update: I’d reversed the cities above in the original post.

Here we go:

A Georgia state judge on Friday ordered Fulton County to allow a group of local voters to inspect all 147,000 mail-in ballots cast in the 2020 election in response to a lawsuit alleging that officials accepted thousands of counterfeit ballots.

The decision marks the latest instance of a local government being forced to undergo a third-party inspection of its election practices amid baseless accusations promoted by President Donald Trump that fraud flipped the 2020 contest for President Biden.

In Georgia, Superior Court Judge Brian Amero ruled on Friday that the nine plaintiffs and their experts could examine copies of the ballots but never touch the originals, which will remain in the possession of Fulton election officials. Further details of how the inspection will proceed are expected next week, said one of the plaintiffs, Garland Favorito.

The order for the new ballot inspection comes after Georgia officials did three separate audits of the vote last year, including a hand recount, which produced no evidence of widespread fraud.

Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts said it was “outrageous” that the county “continues to be a target of those who cannot accept the results from last year’s election.”

This is just the beginning. They’ll be “recounting” the 2020 election for years.

And the inane insistence among DC Republicans that they just want to “move on” from the last election to concentrate on the “real issues” has never been more absurd. They may want to move on but their Dear Leader and his delusional cult of misfits have other ideas.

Lol:

“Many people consider Trump Doral to be unmatched from a gaming perspective — at 700 acres, properties just don’t exist of that size and quality in South Florida, let alone in the heart of Miami,” Eric Trump said in an email. He did not respond to a request for comment this week.

Yes, he is “unmatched from a gaming perspective”, for sure. No one else on earth can bankrupt casinos as efficiently as he does.

Poor little Eric was referring to this openly corrupt move by Trump bootlicker Ron DeSantis:

Florida legislators approved a legislative package Wednesday that will dramatically expand gambling in the state and sets the stage for former president Donald Trump to pursue a casino license at his Doral golf resort.

The legislation includes a 30-year compact with the Seminole Tribe of Florida, negotiated by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a Trump ally. The compact includes a provision barring the tribe from interfering should the state issue a gambling license to a facility more than 15 miles “in a straight line” from the tribe’s Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood.

Trump’s Doral resort, which he purchased in 2012 and then spent an estimated $250 million renovating, is slightly more than 15 miles away.

Trump’s son Eric Trump, who has managed the company since Trump entered office in 2017, told The Washington Post in March that Doral would be a natural fit for a casino.

[…]

Opponents of the legislation, which could dramatically increase sports and online gambling in Florida, called the compact too deferential to Trump’s Doral resort and another prospective casino site, the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel, owned by developer Jeffrey Soffer. The tribe’s opposition has been a major obstacle to efforts to establish new casinos.

State Rep. Michael Grieco, a Democrat whose district includes Miami Beach, said he doesn’t know who put the 15-mile language in the compact.

“That line, I don’t know where it came from, but I know why it’s there,” Grieco said. “It removes one of the major hurdles that someone would need to jump in order to make a gaming license in Florida portable, and specifically for two or three people, including the owner of the Fontainebleau and our 45th president.”

They’re not even trying to hide it anymore. I would guess that part of DeSantis’s strategy is to entice Trump back into the business world so he can run for president. But it won’t work. Trump is driven by money to be sure. But nothing is more important to him right now than revenge. He’s fine with Eric pretending to know what he’s doing with the golf resorts. But he’s focused on vengeance.

Update: recall this grotesque moment:

In 1993, Donald Trump testified before a House subcommittee that the mafia was running rampant on Native American gaming casinos. Here, he bickers with members of Congress about taxes, the FBI and if certain tribes “look Indian.”

Charlie Pierce lays some relevant history on us:

Nullification was a bad idea at the time, and John C. Calhoun should have been locked up on a prison hulk forever for even mentioning it. It looks even worse in retrospect. And like all things evil, vile, and fundamentally racist, it’s back with a vengeance.

From WMUR:

The chair of the state House Election Law Committee – state Rep. Barbara Griffin, R-Goffstown — is sponsoring an amendment asserting that if the federal bill becomes law, the state will maintain the “full force and effect” of its authority over elections for state offices, such as governor, the Legislature and the Executive Council. If both measures become law, a situation could arise in which New Hampshire would have one set of federal rules for elections for the U.S. Senate and U.S. House seats and another for state and county offices. Presidential elections are also conducted on a state-by-state basis.

Under the amendment, the state would keep its authority over “procedures and requirements relating to voter eligibility, voter registration, absentee voting, conducting the vote and counting of votes” in state elections.

The wormwood in democracy is right there in the first sentence. This amendment proposes to put in place a law that would obviate a federal statute in New Hampshire. This used to be called “interposition.” Martin Luther King, Jr. name-checked it in his speech at the March on Washington. Its basis is in the theory of nullification, and not only was it used to create the legal infrastructure for Jim Crow, but also it was the philosophical basis for the Massive Resistance campaign against integration.

Wouldn’t it be easier just to tailor your policies to people’s needs and to reach out to groups of voters whom you’ve otherwise ignored? Instead, political hacks at the state level are doing their level best to make sure that any progressive measure or hint of reform stops at the state border by concocting ludicrous “constitutional” arguments against them, and establishing laws that passed their sell-by date in 1859.

Nullification had its roots in the push-pull politics embedded in the country’s constitutional structure right from jump. The grappling between the powers of the states and the powers of the federal government is the reason we have a Constitution in the first place. As an independent doctrine in what became the United States of America, it had its roots in the fight waged by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison against the policies of the administration of John Adams, specifically against the Alien and Sedition Acts. Nullification was the central argument of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions in 1789 and 1790.

(Madison, ever the pragmatist and constitutional mechanic, saw where nullification ultimately had to lead and, once Adams was sent back to Massachusetts, spent the rest of his life trying to scrub his fingerprints off the resolution. He lived long enough to help President Andrew Jackson fight nullification in the 1830s.)

John C. Calhoun was a defining contributor to nullification as an American philosophy.

As a critical issue in our national politics, it emerged in the tariff battles during the Jackson administration, but that was merely the most convenient flashpoint. Nullification was about what kind of nation this was going to be and, like so many other things in the country’s history, that included the future of chattel slavery. The founding document was the product of the roiling, steaming intellect of then-Vice President John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. In December of 1828, he published his “Exposition and Protest,” all 35,000 words of it. Ostensibly, it was an attack on the so-called Tariff of Abominations. In reality, it was an assault on the constitutional structure of the government.

If it be conceded, as it must be by every one who is the least conversant with our institutions, that the sovereign powers delegated are divided between the General and State Governments, and that the latter hold their portion by the same tenure as the former, it would seem impossible to deny to the States the right of deciding on the infractions of their powers, and the proper remedy to be applied for their correction. The right of judging, in such cases, is an essential attribute of sovereignty, of which the States cannot be divested without losing their sovereignty itself, and being reduced to a subordinate corporate condition. In fact, to divide power, and to give to one of the parties the exclusive right of judging of the portion allotted to each, is, in reality, not to divide it at all; and to reserve such exclusive right to the General Government (it matters not by what department) to be exercised, is to convert it, in fact, into a great consolidated government, with unlimited powers, and to divest the States, in reality, of all their rights, it is impossible to understand the force of terms, and to deny so plain a conclusion.

By 1832, Calhoun was Jackson’s vice president. (Their pairing remains the greatest argument for party-ticket elections in our history.) The South Carolina Legislature declared that the tariff of 1828 was null and void in that state. With fire-eaters in his state already whispering about secession, Calhoun pitched nullification as a middle ground between them and Jackson’s assertion of national authority, which very few people believed. In 1830, senators Robert Hayne of South Carolina and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts fought out the issue in one of the most famous Senate debates in history.

An 1832 cartoon depicts a nullification crisis created by South Carolina.

But there was far more going on than an argument over trade policy. There were all the issues raised by a rapidly expanding country. There also was, inevitably, slavery. As historian Harry Watson writes, the Webster-Hayne debate was touched off by a proposal by another senator that would’ve slowed the roll on sales of newly acquired lands in the West, guaranteeing that the government’s reliance on tariff revenues would continue. During the course of that debate, Webster set the feline screeching from the burlap.

…[Webster] scoffed at South Carolina’s constitutional theories and referred to the blighting effects of the slave economy, suggesting that the free labor system would always make allies of the North and West. Webster’s suggestion that Southern problems could be blamed on slavery touched a raw nerve…Hayne lashed back at Webster with a fiery defense of the peculiar institution. Hayne insisted slavery was a blessing, not a curse, that blacks were wholly unqualified for liberty and far better off in slavery than in the “savagery” of Africa or the penury of freedom…The debate had wandered far afield from public lands or even from the tariff, but Hayne’s reply gave Daniel Webster the perfect opportunity to present an alternative vision of the American Republic.

Thus did a trade dispute become an existential debate over the political nature of the country, one that went on even beyond Appomattox, and one that will go on beyond our own moment. It wasn’t about tariffs then, and it’s not about environmental regulations now.

Which brings us to Louisiana, which wants to make itself safe for poisoning people. From The Guardian:

But McCormick, a Republican, introduced a bill at the Louisiana capitol last week that would protect oil companies and not residents in his district who have to breathe in that air. The bill would establish Louisiana as a “fossil fuel sanctuary state” and ban local and state employees from enforcing federal laws and regulations that negatively impact petrochemical companies. The idea for the bill, McCormick said, came about after President Joe Biden began putting new restrictions on oil and gas companies, including a pause on new oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters. “Look at what they did to the coal industry,” he said at a Louisiana house committee hearing. “We already know what the game plan is. They already picked off coal. Now they’re going after oil and gas.”

(The “sanctuary cities/states” trope is popular among the modern nullifiers. It has been used to pre-emptively resist proposed—and, occasionally, utterly imaginary—federal gun-control statutes, and to declare one locale or another anti-choice. The people using it believe themselves to be clever in a hackneyed Own The Libs way.)

The coal industry is dying because a) people want to breathe, b) people don’t want to have to buy seafront property in Indiana, and c) we don’t ride in coal-driven anything any more. And it is well within established law that the federal government can craft environmental regulations that states have to follow.

McCormick’s bill was tabled because of concerns that the current language could cause the US Environmental Protection Agency to revoke the state’s authority to enforce federal rules. But his colleagues still offered their support. The chairman of the Louisiana House Natural Resources and the Environment Committee, Jean-Paul P Coussan (R-Lafayette), said he would work with McCormick to resolve issues with the bill that could give the federal government more power over oil and gas companies in Louisiana.

The environmental abuse of poor Louisianans is a national disgrace. But to enshrine it with some high-falutin’ legislative language is an insult to the 21st century. This is no more about oil than Webster-Hayne was about cotton. Nullification was itself never nullified by history. Its death is continual and, too often, sealed in blood.

And so it goes …

Here’s a useful primer from the Washington Post’s David A. Fahrenthold and Shayna Jacobs on the various Trump legal problems:

On Tuesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, announced a significant change in her long-running investigation of former president Donald Trump’s business practices.

Previously, her investigation had been a civil one ― if James found wrongdoing, the worst she could do was sue Trump or his businesses.

On Tuesday, however, James’s office said in a statement it also was pursuing a criminal investigation, meaning that James could eventually file criminal charges against someone in Trump’s orbit. A spokesman for the attorney general’s office said James is working with Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, a Democrat, who has been conducting a separate criminal investigation into Trump’s finances since 2018.

Here’s what we know — and what we don’t — about these two New York state investigations.

What does this tell us about the New York attorney general’s investigation?

James has not said what triggered the change. But experts on New York law said that, in past cases, the attorney general has started criminal investigations after finding evidence that shows a suspect not only broke the law — but did so on purpose. That evidence of intent would be key to proving a criminal case.

“The civil [investigation] is really concerned with, did you break rules?” said Erin Murphy, a law professor at New York University. “And criminal is concerned with, were you trying to do wrong?”

Veterans of the New York attorney general’s staff said that this sort of move — a civil investigation becoming a criminal one — was relatively rare for that office.

“You’re getting into the internal, mental state of the actor,” said Tristan Snell, who worked in the state attorney general’s office from 2011 to 2014. To start a criminal investigation of someone, Snell said, the attorney general would want evidence that “they knew what they were doing at the time, and they went and did it anyway.”

Snell said James’s announcement on Tuesday could indicate that she has found that sort of evidence illuminating the decision-making of someone in Trump’s orbit.

Can James use the evidence she gathered in her civil investigation now, if she pursues a criminal case?

Most likely, legal experts said.

“Using civil evidence in criminal cases is fine,” said Daniel Alonso, who served as chief assistant district attorney under Vance but who left the office before the Trump investigation. One exception, Alonso said, would be if Trump could prove that James had concealed the true nature of her investigation from its targets — telling them that it was a lower-stakes civil probe, when she had always intended to use the evidence in a criminal case.

In this case, James interviewed several key Trump Organization figures, including CFO Allen Weisselberg and Trump’s son Eric, before announcing that her investigation had become a criminal one.

Legal experts say it would be an uphill battle to have that testimony thrown out.

“Most of the time, those types of claims do not prevail, unless there’s real evidence that the authorities got together and actually, affirmatively, tricked or misled the defendant,” said Miriam Baer, a professor at Brooklyn Law School.- — –

What part of Trump’s life are the district attorney and the attorney general investigating?

We don’t yet know the full scope of either investigation. From public filings, it appears both are focused on Trump’s career as a private business executive, in the decade before he became president in 2017.

The New York attorney general appeared to have taken a more targeted approach, focusing on a handful of transactions — and asking witnesses if, in those transactions, Trump had misled taxing authorities or lenders. James asked, for instance, if Trump had exaggerated the value of his Seven Springs estate outside New York to claim a $21 million tax break for preserving it as open space. And she asked if Trump had improperly avoided paying taxes when a lender forgave $100 million in debt on his Chicago tower.

Vance has sought documents on some of the same transactions that James highlighted. But his investigation has been far more broad. Vance asked for eight years’ worth of tax documents from Trump’s accountants — millions of pages that would cover many of Trump’s businesses. Vance did not obtain those records until February. Since then, he has given little hint as to what he has found in that mountain of data.

Neither James nor Vance has so far accused anyone of wrongdoing. It’s still possible that both investigations will end without anyone being sued or criminally charged.

On Wednesday, Trump attacked James’s investigation on his personal blog, calling it “an investigation that is in desperate search of a crime.”

Why is this taking so long?

In Vance’s case, the delay was caused by his focus on Trump’s tax returns. As president, Trump sued to block Vance from getting them, setting off a court fight that twice went to the Supreme Court. Vance eventually won, but Trump’s tactics kept the records out of reach for 17 months. Now, Vance has prosecutors and accountants combing through the records, but it is not clear how long that will take.

It’s less clear, from the outside, what the timeline is for James’s office. In 2019 and 2020, her investigation seemed to be moving faster than Vance’s. Her investigators obtained records by subpoena about several Trump properties, and interviewed key witnesses including Eric Trump and Weisselberg. Since August, however, James’s office had said little about the progress of its investigation — until Tuesday.

Is this development bad for Trump?

It doesn’t change anything at the moment. Although the New York attorney general says she is considering criminal charges, she hasn’t filed anything yet. And the attorney general’s statement said nothing about who might face those charges, so there’s no indication they are focused on Donald Trump.

But the move does raise potential danger for the ex-president and his inner circle.

Trump has faced civil lawsuits from the New York attorney general before — in 2013, over his collapsed Trump University, and again in 2018, over his use of funds in the Donald J. Trump Foundation charity. Both cases cost him money: Trump settled suits over Trump University for $25 million and paid $2 million in damages for his misuse of the foundation.

But neither case threatened his liberty, or that of his family. Criminal charges might. If James files charges against a member of Trump’s inner circle, it could increase pressure on that person to “flip” on Trump and testify against the former president to reduce their own legal liability.

Does this mean that the two New York investigators are now merged into one?

No. James’s office said it is still pursuing its separate civil investigation of the Trump Organization.

What’s unclear is how closely the two sets of investigators are collaborating. The statement from James’s office said investigators there were working “along with the Manhattan District Attorney,” but it didn’t provide details about whether the offices were sharing personnel or information. It’s unclear whether James’s criminal investigation should be counted as something separate or as a part of Vance’s existing probe. Vance’s office has declined to comment.

Trump has been a real Teflon Don so far. But then the original Teflon John ended up in jail so maybe Trump shouldn’t be so sanguine about his chances. (Of course John Gotti didn’t have an army of 50 million people …)

Frank Luntz a phony? Say it ain’t so!

Republican pollster and Kevin McCarthy friend-slash-roommate Frank Luntz isn’t afraid of boasting about his personal achievements. “Dr. Frank I. Luntz is one of the most honored communication professionals in America today,” reads a biography on his website. But some of his former employees tell a remarkably different story.

Chris Ingram, a former senior vice president at the Luntz Research Company who worked at the company from 1997 through the early 2000s, told Salon that Luntz’s claim to deliver objective data is a “total shtick and a scam.” 

Ingram described observing Luntz trying to manipulate focus groups that used “dial testing,” in which participants spin a small handheld device, yielding real-time results in response to questions asked by the presenter. “Frank, when he would be hired by clients, whether they would be corporate or political, would sit in that room yelling, ‘Keep turning the dials! Keep turning the dials!'” Ingram told Salon in a phone interview. Luntz’s primary concern, Ingram said, was results that would yield more “compelling” data to be “present[ed] to the client.” 

Ingram said that Luntz does not work as an “impartial” or honest survey researcher but is better described as a pay-for-play pawn in Washington. In 1997, the American Association for Public Opinion Research largely agreed with Ingram’s current analysis, finding after a 14-month investigation that Luntz had “violated the Association’s Code of Professional Ethics and Practices.” 

Luntz’s “keep turning the dials” approach, Ingram said, is “clearly not the type of stuff that legitimate public opinion and survey researchers employ,” adding that this was just one of many examples. He described additional ways Luntz would deceive viewers and media companies with such tactics, including screening and selecting participants in a manner that Ingram called “quite frankly bullshit.” 

“The clowns at MSNBC didn’t have a clue about how the focus groups or panels worked, or what Frank what was doing,” Ingram said. “The actions were basically contrived: He screened out anybody that isn’t going to give the viewers the opinion that Frank, on behalf of his client, is looking for. Somehow, he is able to bullshit people.”

Yeah. He’s still doing it, wringing his hands over what the party has become. As you know, I’m pretty forgiving of Never Trumpers generally speaking, in the hopes that these heretics and apostates will somehow be able to lead certain people away from the fascist cliff. But Luntz is a tough one for me:

Throughout the pandemic, Luntz was living in his 7,000-square-foot luxury condo in Washington, and his former employees all told Salon he had no business taking the PPP loan, which was ostensibly meant to help struggling small businesses survive. Luntz also owns a Los Angeles mansion that includes a three-fourths scale replica of Bill Clinton’s Oval Office and a replica of the Lincoln Bedroom that features a photo of Clinton and Luntz on the bedside table — with a “version” of Monica Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress hanging on a wall. (Luntz played an instrumental role in Clinton’s 1998 impeachment.) 

The Gingrich propaganda machine of the 1990s opened up this new era in GOP politics (building on what came before, of course) and Luntz was right in the middle of it. He and Gingrich trained the right in this language of hate and derision that has metastasized into the toxic cult it has become. I hold him more responsible than most for what’s happened. And for all of his recent “concern” about the direction of the country, I haven’t really seen him come to grips with that. The fact that he still celebrates his role in the 90s turn toward nuclear partisan warfare tells me he’s still full of shit.

With no offense to anyone making observations on the nature of the former Republican Party, we are missing the forest for the trees. All the handwringing over our conservative neighbors’ misbehavior misses something in attributing it to racism or ambition or money or simple hatred of its foes.

It is about power. Who has it. Who doesn’t. And who is unwilling to share it. (All they really need to know they failed to learn in kindergarten.)

“American politics is being conducted under the threat of violence,” Michael Gerson wrote this week. “If Trump has a political philosophy, one of its main tenets is toxic masculinity — the use of menace and swagger to cover his mental and moral impotence. “

Trump’s art of the deal is in fact Digby’s Art of the Hissy Fit, simply alpha dog behavior — showing who’s boss by barking loudly in the other dog’s face until he rolls over on his back and pees in the air. This is called winning. For all the long-gone conservative pretensions to being a party of ideas, the idea is to win and hold power for its own sake.

Whether it is money or politics or intimidation by people “who view the right to bear arms as the right to make armed threats,” as Gerson wrote, having power and wielding it is everything. Base instinct. Nothing more.

"Many news outlets, particularly at the local level, avoid honestly describing the Republican Party as increasingly at war with democracy." https://t.co/2abiFP5ieu

What @perrybaconjr sees in this column is also what I see.

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) May 20, 2021

Like Trump, the more conservative whites feel their monopoly on power slipping away, the more dangerous our situation becomes. Yes, as Jay Rosen suggests, exploitation of standard process is common in both the Big Lie and the denial of tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones.

This is an interesting point. In retrospect, an early harbinger of GOP radicalization was the refusal to raise the debt limit as a point of leverage against Obama. We also see this tendency now in the refusal to seat Dems who win elections. And the debt limit is coming up again. https://t.co/a3tN1twPtl

— Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) May 22, 2021

But the real common thread is not the particularities of the exploitation of process or the rejection of democracy, but a feral instinct for domination. Like the T-800, that cannot be reasoned with or bargained with.

Adam Serwer addressed this at The Atlantic:

In the specific case of Hannah-Jones and UNC, the objective is to intimidate those who might share her views by showing that such views could cost them a job. As the conservative writer and aspiring politician J. D. Vance put it in a speech to the Claremont Institute, “If you’re fighting the values and virtues that make this country great, then the conservative movement should be about nothing if not reducing your power and if necessary destroying you.” The traditional argument between American liberals and conservatives is over what problems the state can or should remedy; the position of the Trumpist GOP is that the state is an instrument for destroying your enemies—by which its members simply mean Americans who disagree with them.

Q.E.D.

Except it’s not about values and virtues. That’s highfalutin window dressing. It’s about power, and about who wields it over whom.

In a post on worker exploitation a week ago, I quoted one restaurant veteran saying, “The entire industry preys upon desperation.”

“They call us essential, but the reality is they treat us like we’re disposable,” said Cris Cardona, a shift manager at an Orlando McDonald’s. “They like to say that no one wants to work, that they’re having trouble finding workers and they blame this on unemployment benefits, but the problem is no one wants to work for a poverty wage, to risk their lives for $7.25 an hour.”

I also mentioned last week seeing a local fast food joint offering $12/hr for new hires. Since then, I saw this tweet.

This is what happens when people refuse to work for $7.25/hr. KUDOS.#RaiseTheWage #FightFor15 pic.twitter.com/w732VE4BJT

— Richard Angwin (@RichardAngwin) May 20, 2021

Be very, very careful about that asterick in the sign above. As a Guardian article last week indicated, workers are finding that signing bonuses and promises of higher wages sometimes don’t pan out. The sign, however, suggests that employers are now experiencing a little desperation of their own.

David Leonhardt writes in a New York Times newsletter that “the labor shortage is more myth than reality.” In fact, capitalism has an answer for shortages. It’s a simple matter of supply and demand:

When a company is struggling to find enough labor, it can solve the problem by offering to pay a higher price for that labor — also known as higher wages. More workers will then enter the labor market. Suddenly, the labor shortage will be no more.

One of the few ways to have a true labor shortage in a capitalist economy is for workers to be demanding wages so high that businesses cannot stay afloat while paying those wages. But there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the U.S. economy does not suffer from that problem.

If anything, wages today are historically low. They have been growing slowly for decades for every income group other than the affluent. As a share of gross domestic product, worker compensation is lower than at any point in the second half of the 20th century. Two main causes are corporate consolidation and shrinking labor unions, which together have given employers more workplace power and employees less of it.

Just as telling as the wage data, the share of working-age Americans who are in fact working has declined in recent decades. The country now has the equivalent of a large group of bakeries that are not making baguettes but would do so if it were more lucrative — a pool of would-be workers, sitting on the sidelines of the labor market.

Corporate profits, on the other hand, have been rising rapidly and now make up a larger share of G.D.P. than in previous decades. As a result, most companies can afford to respond to a growing economy by raising wages and continuing to make profits, albeit perhaps not the unusually generous profits they have been enjoying.

Sure enough, some companies have responded to the alleged labor shortage by doing exactly this. Bank of America announced Tuesday that it would raise its minimum hourly wage to $25 and insist that contractors pay at least $15 an hour. Other companies that have recently announced pay increases include Amazon, Chipotle, Costco, McDonald’s, Walmart, J.P. Morgan Chase and Sheetz convenience stores.

Capitalism is catching up with capitalists. They won’t like it.

(h/t TJ)