Month: July 2021

Krugman’s column is always good but his newsletter has been especially interesting lately. Here’s the latest. Apparently, Republicans are worried about the economy. But they have a solution: tax cuts!

Don’t make a big deal out of one month’s employment numbers! That’s been a cardinal rule of short-term economic analysis and good economic journalism as long as I’ve been in the business. Month-to-month numbers are noisy in the best of times. They’re especially noisy now, as documented in a recent blog post from Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers: The pandemic and its aftermath have thrown things like normal seasonal patterns out of whack, so what looks like a big number, good or bad, may well just be random measurement error.

The council has been urging us to focus on three-month averages, which is a reasonable if imperfect fix. As of a month ago the three-month average showed employment growing at an annual rate of 4.54 percent; the latest report raised that to 4.7 percent. Both are very good numbers; leaving aside the wild pandemic-related swings of 2020, we haven’t seen this kind of growth since 1984. But your assessment of how we’re doing shouldn’t have changed much.

What actually happened, of course, was a huge change in the tone of media economic coverage — and an even huger change in the tone from Republicans. Before Friday’s report, they were all denouncing Biden for presiding over a weak economy. As soon as the new number came out, they swung 180 degrees and began touting the economy’s extraordinary success, which they said was a dramatic vindication of … Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut.

This wasn’t the first time we’ve seen this story — or the second, or the third, or …. In fact, it’s behavior that goes back to the Clinton years. When Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993, Republicans en masse declared that a depression was imminent. When the economy boomed instead, they insisted that credit for the good economy of the late 1990s be given to Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Applying the same time lag to Reagan-era developments would imply giving credit for the 1983-84 boom to Lyndon Johnson, but somehow that wasn’t part of the argument.

Now, it’s not news that there is, in fact, not a shred of evidence in favor of claims that tax cuts have magical effects. Here, for example, is a picture of taxes and job growth over the decade before Covid-19 hit:

The actual tax changes were bigger than the picture shows: Barack Obama also introduced new taxes to pay for the Affordable Care Act, and Trump’s tax cut was largely focused on corporate profits. But you see that there were two big changes in tax policy. Do you also see the big economic downshift after Obama raised taxes and the big upshift after Trump cut them? Neither do I.

Nor is it news that tax-cut fanatics will always find a way to excuse the failure of their predictions: Anything good that happens to the economy is a delayed payoff to past tax cuts.

What is news, and something I find somewhat surprising, is that the G.O.P. is still doing this stuff with everything else going on. It’s not that the party is coming to its senses — quite the opposite. We’re talking about a party with some members who believe that Jewish space lasers have been setting forest fires and Italian satellites were used to switch vote counts. More important, we’re talking about a party that has basically decided that its opponents can never legitimately win elections and that violent attempts to overthrow election results are no big deal, or maybe even justified.

And in the middle of all this they still have time for voodoo economics?

OK, a couple of explanations for what’s going on.

One is the Upton Sinclair principle: It’s difficult to get people to understand something when their salaries depend on their not understanding it. The G.O.P. was once a party run to serve the interests of plutocrats who fanned white rage to win elections; now the white rage has taken over. But it still depends on plutocrats’ money, so despite all the talk of “populism” it remains committed to an ideology that justifies redistributing income upward.

Another is the intellectual insularity of right-wing politicians. I’d be curious to know how many Republicans in Congress have ever seen a chart like the one above, showing no break in economic performance after Trump took office, or know that America gained more jobs under Clinton than it did under Reagan. My guess is very few: They aren’t numbers guys, they don’t know much about economic history, and the people they talk to always claim that the Reagan expansion was unmatched until the Trump boom.

Furthermore, they probably imagine that what they hear from right-wing think tanks represents mainstream economic opinion and are almost surely unaware that a great majority of professional economists rejects the idea that tax cuts pay for themselves and believes that tax rates have little impact on economic growth.

Anyway, it’s almost reassuring to see that in the midst of the greatest challenge to democracy since the Civil War, right-wing zombie economics is still shambling along, eating brains.

Obviously, someone decided that they will have to have something “positive” to sell as an agenda in 2022 and this is literally the only thing they’ve got. If they aren’t packing the courts and rigging the electoral process, they have nothing to do. Tax cuts are it. They don’t even have flag-waving, pseudo-patriotism anymore. It’s trolling Trumpish culture war babble and tax cuts. That’s it.

98-year-old World War II veteran Pete DuPré played the national anthem on a harmonica before the @USWNT’s Olympic send-off match 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/wnrOnZJhkC

— ESPN (@espn) July 5, 2021

Sweet, right? Makes you proud to see it.

But leave it to the wingnuts to turn it into something ugly:

Right-wing talk radio host Clay Travis defended the faux controversy over the U.S. Women’s National Team supposedly showing disrespect to a 98-year-old World War II veteran during the national anthem, telling Fox News on Tuesday that the false story was “emblematic” of where we are as a nation because a “huge percentage of American sports fans totally think it’s believable.”

Following right-wing media’s weeklong fit of anger over U.S. Olympian Gwen Berry’s podium protest during the national anthem, Canadian conservative ragebait site The Post Millenial kicked off another outrage cycle when it accused the soccer team of “turn[ing] their backs” on World War II veteran Pete DuPre as he played “The Star-Spangled Banner” before their Monday match with Mexico.

The story was quickly picked up by other conservative news sites and attracted online anger from the usual suspects, only for the women’s team’s communication reps to expose the story as completely bogus.

“Not true. No one turned their back on WWII Veteran Pete DuPré during tonight’s anthem,” the soccer squad’s communication team posted. “Some USWNT players were simply looking at the flag on a pole in one end of the stadium. The players all love Pete, thanked him individually after the game and signed a ball for him.”

The team’s reps also posted video of each player personally thanking DuPre after the game and signing a ball for him. Additionally, DuPre apparently has a close relationship with the team as he’s played the national anthem before other U.S. Women’s games.

Appearing on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom on Tuesday, Travis—who recently took over the late Rush Limbaugh’s radio time slot—shrugged off the false narrative about the soccer team’s supposed protest against the anthem and DuPre, seemingly justifying it because it just felt right.

With the Fox News chyron blaring “U.S. Women’s Soccer Team Explains Anthem Flap,” anchor Dana Perino said there was a “dust-up” over the team because “some people who think that there were members of the team who were turning away from the flag and the anthem that was being played there.”

Adding that the team says it’s “not true” and players were facing a flag in a different direction, Perino stated that it “makes sense” to her but wanted to know what Travis saw in that video.

“I think this is emblematic of where we are with sports now,” the talk radio host declared. “A huge percentage of American sports fans totally think it’s believable that the U.S. women’s soccer team would turn their back on a 98-year-old World War II veteran as he plays the national anthem and not even think twice about it.”

Saying he felt the video of the players was a “bit confusing” because they all aren’t facing the same direction, Travis defended the latest right-wing outrage over a fake story.

“I think it is, unfortunately, a sign of where we are as a country that so many of us just presume that level of disrespect is occurring by our national teams during the anthem,” he concluded.

Anchor Bill Hemmer, meanwhile, noted that you could “tell the sensitivity on behalf of the women’s team by how forcefully they were resisting the suggestion that there was any disrespect” for DuPre or the anthem.

“But, Clay, I tell you, in Tokyo, this is going to be a story. It’s going to be a bigger story than the [Olympic] Games themselves,” Hemmer added, preparing the audience for upcoming outrage cycles about protesting athletes.

This is respect. Each and every player waited for their opportunity to come up to Pete post-game before getting on the bus, said hello, thanked him and signed his ball. https://t.co/0fhtkTSxIF

— U.S. Soccer Comms (@ussoccer_comms) July 6, 2021

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” declared Stephen Colbert’s conservative pundit persona. And when reality and conservatives’ need to stoke their base’s anger conflict, reality must yield. If love means never having to say you’re sorry (Real Americans™ never do), freedom means reality is whatever the party (or Donald Trump) says it is.

The Republican and Chinese Communist parties share this in common, writes “man without a party” Max Boot in the Washington Post. Where once Chinese emperors claimed legitimacy from the Mandate of Heaven, the CCP works overtime to ensure history validates its glorious record of undemocratic rule. “What the party seeks to stop, of course, is not the distortion of history but an accurate rendering of it,” Boot writes:

Woe to any person in China who challenges the official version of the past; that is a crime for which you can be sent to prison. The United States is different. We are a free country where nothing is off-limits. We can talk about the good, the bad and the ugly. Can’t we? Yes, we can — but Republicans are doing their level best to change that. How ironic that the GOP, which claims to be the “tough on China” party, wants to make America more like China. As the party of White America, Republicans seek their own political legitimacy from history by trying to minimize the impact of racism.

In the guise of fighting “critical race theory,” Republican legislators in 22 states want to outlaw the teaching of certain interpretations of U.S. history. Such laws have already passed in five states — Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas and Tennessee — while the Florida Board of Education has enacted its own ban. Taken together, this is the most far-reaching assault on academic freedom since the McCarthy era in the 1950s.

These bills are likely unconstitutional, Boot believes. You don’t need a court (or a weatherman) to know they are un-American.

Nonetheless, the GOP’s red-hat shock troops, the armed and unarmed, will cheerfully go along with their Long March towards the unmaking of the American experiment. But like the Village People’s “YMCA,” they’ll need to adapt Lee Greenwood, too.

And I’m proud to be an American
Where at least I’m CCP….

David Daley’s (“Ratf**ked” & “Unrigged“) and Sister District co-founder Gaby Goldstein’s Monday offering at Salon speak exactly to what I try to draw progressive attention regularly: down-ballot races.

The trigger event was last week’s Brnovich decision by the Roberts Supreme Court. That 6-3 decision on two Arizona voter suppression laws that banned ballot collection and limited out-of-precinct voting all but neutered Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Lowering barriers to voting for Black, Latino, and Natives American citizens in the heavily rural state is not the court’s concern. That was clear with the 2013 ruling in Shelby County that killed preclearance requirements in Section 5.

Preserving white voting power has long taken precedence for conservative state lawmakers, Daley and Goldstein write (emphasis mine):

That means this decision must serve as a last chance, five-fire alarm bell to progressives — indeed, all Americans who care about protecting the foundational right to vote and perhaps the most valuable piece of civil rights legislation in our history—about the urgent need to invest in state legislatures, which are ever increasing in power. State legislatures are the final boss in the Republican quest to vanquish democracy. We cannot cede this fight to them.

Too much progressive energy and attention focuses on marquee races at the gridlocked federal level. In the states Republicans still make disenfranchisement sausage in party-line votes that don’t provoke handwringing by the national media. After failing to retake one branch of the state legislature last November, North Carolina Democrats are bracing for another ten years of litigation over Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression laws that caused great confusion and multiple redraws of congressional districts. Even when they lost in court, Republicans won by running out the clock on the last decade.

The key to quashing that as well as stopping voter suppression laws where they gestate lies not in the Supreme Court but in Democrats taking back control of Republican-held legislatures, argue Daley and Goldstein (again, emphasis mine):

As Rick Hasen has explained, Alito’s opinion in the 2018 Abbott v. Perez case makes it essentially impossible for a court to find racially discriminatory intent in voting laws when race and party categories overlap. But, obviously, given long-existing patterns of racial voting polarization, they will often overlap. This means that state legislatures can use this naturally-occurring circumstance to shield discriminatory intent to their heart’s content, without concern for violating Section 2. They can discriminate based on race while pretending they’re simply using partisanship. This has been the recent GOP strategy on gerrymandering. It will now be the go-to move in red state legislatures nationwide on voter suppression. This Court won’t stop it. They’ve rolled out green lights and eliminated any speed limit.

The bottom line is that the Brnovich decision must serve as a loud warning: The Roberts Court cannot and will not protect voting rights. And the truly breathtaking deadlock in the Democratic federal trifecta over a new federal voting rights law makes clear that we absolutely cannot wait for Congress to act either. The answer is clear: On voting rights and so much more, the buck does and will continue to stop with state legislatures. We must elect legislators who will fight to protect voting rights — down-ballot, where it matters most and is too often overlooked — or risk becoming a nation filled with democracy deserts, where your right to vote depends on where you live and your access to the polls depends on the color of your skin. 

Democracy deserts to go along with those spread via climate change. Terrific.

Down-ballot state legislative races are not sexy, but they are bite-sized. A little bit of campaign money and good organizing can go a long way. But those red districts are tough nuts if you wait until the last months before the elections to make friends and build capacity. Prospective candidates, especially first-timers, need local to see local infrastructure in place to support them or they won’t run.

I do try to help with that.

Jeffrey Epstein and President Donald Trump appeared to be close in several photos and videos of the two over the past 30 years. But according to Michael Wolff’s new book, Trump was terrified that the arrest of a longtime girlfriend of Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, would embroil him in the Epstein scandal.

Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency describes the former president as sitting lonely at Mar-a-Lago begging others for advice about lawyers he could hire to help him face his mounting lawsuits.

“Has she said anything about me?” Trump wondered. “Is she going to talk? Will she roll on anybody?”

I guess our suspicions about these weird comments have been confirmed:

President Donald Trump again extended well-wishes to accused sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, apparently expressing sympathy for Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime companion.

“Her friend, or boyfriend, was either killed or committed suicide in jail. She’s now in jail,” Trump told Axios’ Jonathan Swan in an interview that aired Monday night on HBO.

“Yeah, I wish her well,” he said. “I’d wish you well. I’d wish a lot of people well. Good luck. Let them prove somebody was guilty.”

The president’s latest remarks on Maxwell come after he drew significant criticism two weeks ago for his initial reaction to the news of her arrest.

“I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is,” Trump told reporters at a White House coronavirus briefing.

CNN reports:

Congressional Democrats’ years-long attempt to nail down whether then-President Donald Trump lied to special counsel Robert Mueller effectively ended on Friday, with the US Supreme Court wiping away court decisions where the House Judiciary Committee was told it could access secret grand jury records from key witnesses in the Mueller investigation.The House now won’t get those grand jury records — bringing to a close Democrats’ pursuit of what witnesses in the Mueller investigation said confidentially under oath about their interactions with Trump and others during the 2016 campaign.

Since 2019, the Judiciary Committee had sought access to records from the Mueller investigation’s grand jury proceedings, which were cited in Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The House had repeatedly said it wanted the records so it could consider whether to impeach Trump for attempting to obstruct the Russia investigation, which Mueller also documented.

But over the past two years, the fight plodded through the court system, with the Justice Department under Trump unsuccessfully arguing to block the release of the grand jury documents. The Supreme Court initially had agreed to hear the case, but then delayed it following Trump’s loss of the presidency in November.

On Friday, the high court vacated earlier rulings. The Justice Department under President Joe Biden wanted this result, saying the case had become moot. The House didn’t oppose the department’s move.But a top lawyer for the House in June noted the case was ending because Trump was no longer President.Enter your email to sign up for CNN’s “What Matters”

“The Trump Administration succeeded in running out the clock and thereby undermined the ability of the House of Representatives to have access to all of the relevant facts as it considered impeachment,” House General Counsel Douglas Letter wrote in a filing to the Supreme Court. In the future, “the Committee fully trusts that the Justice Department will return to its prior longstanding position and support disclosure at the appropriate time. Any failure to do so would gravely unsettle the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution and undermine the public’s trust in our system of government.”

About as neat an illustration as we have of the structural failure of the Special Counsel process to produce any possibility of accountability.

.@MarciaCoyle has told me in the past about the joy of lawyers who follow cases all the way from trial courts to the Supreme Court. I can now say I’ve done this as a journalist, and it’s a wild ride to watch a case go all the way

This one: https://t.co/caIV7T89Vx

— Katelyn Polantz (@kpolantz) July 6, 2021

The Special Counsel considered himself forbidden from holding the President he was appointed to investigate responsible for anything, even by a mere accusation, and the AG and judiciary (departing from Judge Sirica’s precedent) blocked the info he uncovered from reaching Congress and now the judiciary and the administration that was next elected have ensured the public won’t learn what the full scope of Mueller found out about Trump either. What good is a process that collects a bunch of secrets that can’t be used in any way in an impenetrable vault?

Originally tweeted by southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) on July 6, 2021.

This is truly astonishing. If you think our problems with Red State Trumpers is bad when it comes to vaccinations, get a load of this:

As I write this, Russia is firmly in the grip of the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Every day, there are about 22,000 reported new infections—twice as many as during the peak of the first wave in May 2020—and more than 600 deaths. The new Delta variant of the virus, which Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin says is responsible for 90 per cent of new infections in the Russian capital, has caught Russia almost completely unawares. Despite having access to the brain power and resources of one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world, Russian authorities have repeatedly squandered almost every chance to beat the pandemic.

Their massive, bloated propaganda apparatus failed to do the one job it was designed for: Get the message out. Instead, the pandemic has exacerbated the crisis of trust between the Russian government and citizens. Now, the campaign for parliamentary elections in September could make fighting the pandemic even harder, since the ruling United Russia party may be even more reluctant to impose unpopular measures such as lockdowns.

Russian independent observers and journalists—including me and my colleagues at Meduza—already knew something was terribly off with Russia’s handling of the pandemic in late spring of 2020. We had looked at the numbers and recognized that COVID-19 deaths were being underreported in many regions of Russia. According to the official statistics at the time, tens of thousands of Russians were dying in 2020 of a mysterious pneumonia epidemic unrelated to COVID-19. This was hardly plausible. The more likely explanation: Russian regional authorities were writing off the majority of COVID-19 cases as “community-acquired pneumonia.”

[…]

The next time I felt a sense of foreboding was in early December 2020, when I called my local clinic during the start of the Sputnik V vaccine rollout. At the time, only certain categories of frontline workers were eligible. However, vaccine uptake was so slow that the clinic told me it didn’t matter that I wasn’t prioritized—and asked if I could turn up right now. And so I did, and became one of the first Russians vaccinated with Sputnik V. I was down with a flu-like fever and fatigue for a couple of days after each of the two required doses, but recovered without any complications. I am now protected against the virus with an impressive level of spike protein antibodies. I still maintain social distancing whenever possible, avoid large public gatherings, and wear a mask.

Astonishingly, six months later I am part of only a tiny minority of Russians who have chosen to be vaccinated—or managed to be, amid a chronic shortage of vaccine doses. Off to an early start with its own vaccine, Russia is now severely lagging behind. At the time of writing, about 12 per cent are fully vaccinated, while another 4.7 percent have received a single dose—a much lower vaccination rate than China and Brazil, let alone most of the developed world. And Russians are steadfast in their anti-vaccine convictions: According to a recent Morning Consult poll, Russia now has one of the highest levels of vaccine skepticism in the world, with 35 percent saying they are unwilling to get vaccinated. Even the United States, where vaccine skepticism is rampant, has only 19 percent committed anti-vaxxers. Recently the Kremlin admitted that its original goal to vaccinate 60 percent of the population by September will be unachievable, according to a report by TV Rain. Instead, the government has settled for a more realistic 30 percent.

In fact, the situation is so dire that some of Russia’s regions are already reintroducing lockdowns. In Moscow, city authorities have ordered compulsory vaccinations for certain categories of public servants and service industry workers and barred unvaccinated people from entering bars and restaurants. Not that Russians are easily cowed: There is now a booming black market for fake vaccination certificates. There are also reports of Russians paying bribes to have their vaccine dose discarded and be injected with saline solution instead.

Why is his happening you ask? Well, look to Russian media propaganda (and our own, thankfully, less severe problem with the same thing.)

None of this should come as a surprise. Instead of promoting safety measures and campaigning to get the public vaccinated, Russian state-owned media have spent an inordinate amount of time ridiculing other nations for their harsh lockdowns—which Russia never imposed—and trashing their vaccines. Not that Russians have much of a choice over which jab to get: Only the domestically produced Sputnik V, EpiVacCorona, and Covivac vaccines are permitted for use in Russia. One of these, EpiVacCorona, has been embroiled in a constant stream of scandal and skepticism about its efficacy and has been all but publicly accepted as a dud.

Television news programs and state news agencies, such as RIA Novosti, have gleefully amplified every complication and casualty from vaccines produced by BioNTech-Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca and gloated over every development hiccup. Unsurprisingly, vaccine skepticism is so rampant at these media outlets that the CEO of state news agency Rossiya Segodnya sent out a company-wide memo pleading the employees to get vaccinated and avoid the fate of three of their colleagues who died in intensive care in Moscow during a single week.

Meanwhile, Russian foreign broadcaster RT has been feeding Western audiences with anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories, comparing lockdowns and other restrictions to the Nazi occupation and apartheid. That same twisted rhetoric is now spreading in Russia: On June 22, Egor Beroev, a prominent Russian TV and film actor, spoke at an awards ceremony and gave an impassioned defense of unvaccinated Russians, who he claimed were being “segregated” from the rest of the society like the Jews under the Nazis. To drive the point home, Beroev wore a yellow six-pointed star. His speech was met with applause. Similar stars adorned the T-shirts of protesters picketing the campaign headquarters of the ruling United Russia party in Moscow to protest against mandatory vaccinations.

Among Russians, the reasons for refusing to be vaccinated vary—some will mention that Sputnik V was rushed through development and approved before phase III trial data was available. Others will insist that they don’t need any vaccines since they’ve already recovered from COVID-19. More cling to a motley array of conspiracy theories involving the Antichrist or a secret cabal seeking to make Russians infertile. Russia’s vaccine skeptics are found all over society; their ranks include Russian Orthodox right-wingers, center-left parliamentary leaders, and anti-Putin activists. If there were an anti-vaccine party, it would easily beat United Russia in the upcoming elections.

Not all unvaccinated Russians subscribe to conspiracy theories or are influenced by the example of top government officials who don’t wear a mask in public, let alone get a jab on national television. Sometimes there are simply not enough doses, especially in Russia’s far-flung regions. Back in December, when the first batch of Sputnik V arrived in Argentina, some Russians were grumbling that there were more Russian vaccines available in Buenos Aires than major Russian cities.

In fact, less than one month after Argentina became the first foreign country to adopt Sputnik V in December 2020, it had more people vaccinated with the Russian vaccine than all of Russia outside of Moscow, according to Russian independent news site Mediazona. Even now, the Argentinian Ministry of Health’s reports are the most extensive source of information about Sputnik V’s safety. And they confirm what the Russian government has failed to convey to its own citizens: Russia’s primary vaccine is indeed safe and effective.

You can certainly see why there is such an affinity between the American right wing and Putin regime and why Trump admires the Russian leader so much. they are ideological comrades.

Idiocracy was a documentary https://t.co/0Vfdtlgy8V

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 5, 2021

Actually:

That speaks for at least 81 million Americans who voted and probably a lot more. Last year, when Trump was holding his super-spreader event at Mr Rushmore, people were dying by the thousands every day.

Kristi Noem is doing everything she possibly can to prove that she can be as juvenile and stupid as Trump. And she’s succeeding.

Update —

Lol!!!

It appears the image that Kristi Noem used as an example of the Fourth of July in "Trump's America" was taken during the Obama Administration https://t.co/n4Oxgneeqx pic.twitter.com/1D3SrE8MFn

— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) July 5, 2021

If this is true, Trump may be making a mistake. Rudy has some real problems with the SDNY. Trump has no pardon power anymore. It’s not smart to cut him loose under these circumstances:

Donald Trump’s family has cut off Rudy Giuliani, and the former president has been irked that the lawyer asked to be paid for his work challenging Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, a new book says.

On Sunday, The Times of London published an excerpt from “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency,” the coming book on the Trump presidency from the author Michael Wolff.

In the extract, Wolff delves into Trump’s postpresidential life at his Mar-a-Lago resort and describes Trump as frustrated by the lack of progress in his quest to overturn the 2020 election result.

Giuliani, a longtime ally and personal lawyer of the president, started leading the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the election on November 4 but departed sometime in February after a series of setbacks.

Since then, reports have detailed how Giuliani and his allies have sought to get paid for the legal work, but to no avail, falling foul of the president in the process.

“Trump is annoyed that he tried to get paid for his election challenge work,” Wolff wrote, per The Times.

The excerpt said Giuliani had “gotten only the cold shoulder” while seeking payment from Trump amid the prospect of expensive legal battles of his own.

Trump’s family has “cast out, cut off” Giuliani, the excerpt said, without specifying which members of the clan.https://980465898c7ccd8cfa9f64faaab3bd81.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Giuliani is the subject of a Justice Department investigation into whether he broke foreign lobbying laws while working as Trump’s lawyer. Giuliani has not been charged with a crime.

According to Wolff, Trump has also taken to asking visitors to his Mar-a-Lago resort “if they know any good” lawyers to help him continue his plan to overturn the election via the US courts.

Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.

The amount owed to Giuliani by Trump is not known, but at one point Maria Ryan, an aide and rumored girlfriend of Giuliani, told the Trump campaign that his rate for working on the election challenge was $20,000 a day, The New York Times reported.

One of the most grotesque actions of Trump’s rogue DOJ was the AG’s decision to reinstate the federal death penalty. Recall:

Since the federal death penalty was reinstated by the US Supreme Court in 1988, executions carried out by the national or federal government in the US have remained rare.

Before Mr Trump took office, only three federal executions had taken place in this period.

All were carried out under Republican President George W Bush, and included inmate Timothy McVeigh, convicted of the Oklahoma City federal building bombing. Since 2003, there have been no federal executions at all.

In July 2019, Mr Barr announced the scheduled executions of five death row prisoners, despite prevailing practices and public opinion.

“Congress has expressly authorised the death penalty,” the country’s top legal official said in a statement at the time. “The justice department upholds the rule of law – and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

The selected inmates had been convicted of murdering or raping children and the elderly, Mr Barr said.[…]

The 10 inmates executed in 2020 have led to a single-year total unmatched in modern history.

“We’d have to go back to 1896 to find another year where there were 10 or more executions,” Ms Ndulue said.

The Trump administration has also chosen to carry out federal executions in the midst of a political transition, with a lame-duck president, for the first time in more than a century.

Incumbent presidents have typically deferred to their successors, allowing presidents-elect to set the course.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Mr Barr defended the post-election executions.

“I think the way to stop the death penalty is to repeal the death penalty,” he said. “But if you ask juries to impose it, then it should be carried out.”

But it is a controversial choice, especially as the incoming Biden administration has said it will work to end the death penalty.

These bloodthirsty monsters went out of their way to kill as many people as possible in the final days of the administration. They killed thirteen in the final six months.

Luckily, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced last week that they are going to suspend all executions:

Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered a temporary stop Thursday to scheduling further federal executions.

In a memo to senior officials, he said serious concerns have arisen about the arbitrariness of capital punishment, its disparate impact on people of color, and “the troubling number of exonerations” in death penalty cases.

“The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States but is also treated fairly and humanly,” he said.

Court fights over the traditional three-drug memo for carrying out lethal injections, and a shortage of one of those drugs, brought federal executions to a halt for nearly two decades.

It’s hard to believe we still have this barbaric law on the books anywhere in the US. But you would think that since the federal government had only executed three people (under a GOP president of course) in over three decades, the Trump administration would have been a little bit more restrained. But no. They went for it.These 13 killings must be added to the Trump body count.

Let’s hope that Biden and the Democrats can ban the practice. In the meantime, Garland is doing the right thing with this moratorium.