Month: July 2021

The Statue of Liberty has a little sister. I’d heard of it but had not thought about it in years. Now France has sent her to visit her taller sibling in the U.S. beginning today, July 4th. The nine-foot bronze will visit Ellis Island in New York for about a week, then spend her next ten years at the French Ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C.

Via Reuters:

“It is a symbol of the friendship between the French and the American people, but it is also a reminder of the importance of the message of liberty and enlightening the world, which is the name of the statue,” said Philippe Étienne, French ambassador to the United States, at an inauguration ceremony.

Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker elaborates with a bit of that history which I admit I knew only sketchily:

Yet, gazing at Liberty a couple of days before the Fourth of July, there is still something hugely moving about her, at any scale. The essential historical confusion that she presents to our understanding is that her proximity to Ellis Island quickly transformed her into a symbol of American immigration, which is not what she was intended to be. She became the “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor” Lady, rather than the “Enlighten the World” Lady. As first imagined, in 1865, when the sculptor [Frédéric-Auguste] Bartholdi and the novelist and essayist Édouard Réne Lefèbvre de Laboulaye sat down at a (likely apocryphal) dinner, shortly after Lincoln’s assassination, the purpose of this first colossal statue since antiquity in the West was apparent: she was to be both a monument to the triumph of American democracy, rooted in the cause of abolition, and a kind of pledge object, promising the restoration of the French Republic, at a time when France was still under the corrupt and autocratic rule of the Second Empire. Laboulaye had in mind a monument to the end of slavery here and the rebirth of republicanism there. He succinctly summarized what Liberty was against in a prescient list: she was to celebrate a people who had “left behind royalty, nobility, the Church, centralization, permanent armies: privilege never came to them.” Inspired by a transatlantic light, France might leave them behind as well.

“As the president of the French Anti-Slavery Society, de Laboulaye believed that the passage of the 13th Amendment (abolishing slavery in the U.S., 1865) was a milestone and it proved that justice and liberty for all was possible,” reads the National Park Service’s page.

The plaque with the poem by Emma Lazarus — “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — added in 1903 quickly overtook de Laboulaye’s original meaning. How very American to emigrate to these shores to redefine oneself.

Paris wishes Bon Voyage to a symbol of 🇫🇷-🇺🇸 friendship and founding values. I first discussed this project in 2019, but little did we know that it would be a light after a year of darkness. We can't wait to meet you, #Liberty2021. Un grand merci @lecnam et @cmacgm.
📸: @lecnam pic.twitter.com/Jm9jS4RmFq

— Philippe Etienne (@Ph_Etienne) June 7, 2021

Gopnik continues:

The dreamers who made the statue had an abiding faith in freedom: they believed that liberty can be the solvent of all other ills. Free people would be prosperous and equal and compassionate. Perhaps sadly, in the past few years, our sense of what liberty alone can do has contracted. We know that liberty guarantees neither social solidarity nor economic equality. A lot of people will tell you that, in the absence of those good things, the liberty from priests and kings, and even the liberty to say what we want isn’t enough—that maybe it isn’t even liberty. Certainly, the faith, once so sure, that free markets would make free men and women has never looked more dubious. (China is providing an instance of how liberty can be squashed in Hong Kong, while a kind of capitalism prospers in Beijing.)

Yet Liberty still counts. This old lady, who is also perpetually young, has never looked more necessary. Indeed, when the little-sister statue was unveiled, a single thing took one’s breath away: compared with her august sister, she has a pinched, determined, furious face. She looks as furious as the suffragists of more than a century ago. This is, in part, a consequence of the rule that, in order for a statue’s facial expression to “carry” across a great distance, it needs to be strong stuff. Yet here the idea implicit in her expression—that the act of enlightening the world with liberty means setting it on fire, that letting freedom ring can mean letting freedom resound, loudly—seems fitting and pleasing and just.

After a year of coast-to-coast protests over the treatment of Black Americans at the hands of police, last week the highest court in the land again took the revanchist position that the right of Americans — Black Americans, especially — to freely exercise this nation’s advertised liberties remains provisional. The broken chain lying at Liberty’s feet remains symbolic.

The heirs of kings, those who would be kings, religious zealots, the rich, the powerful, and their progeny, are forever scheming to reassert their ancient claims to rule over the rest of us as our natural-born superiors. They stand against what Liberty on her pedestal stands for. Today they will celebrate July the Fourth with empty rituals in churches and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.

Putting out the American flag this morning feels less like an act of civic reverence than one of defiance.

The whole team went to the White House:

The 2020 World Series Champions at the White House. pic.twitter.com/KA7Xz2QAhG

— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) July 2, 2021

President Joe Biden praised sports’ ability to heal and bring a nation together in a time of crisis as he hosted the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers at the White House on Friday.

The Dodgers, who captured the title by defeating the Tampa Bay Rays last October, were the first team to be honored at the White House since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first since Biden took office.

“I think what we discovered is that we need sports more than we ever realized,” said Biden, who praised baseball as an important totem of normalcy in “one of the most challenging years” in the nation’s history.

The president saluted the Dodgers as “a lot more than a baseball club, they are a pillar of American culture.” He also praised the team for using its stadium as a mass COVID-19 vaccination site.

The ceremony marked the latest step in the White House’s efforts to return to large in-person events as it seeks to highlight the nation’s emergence from the pandemic. More than 50 members of the team attended the East Room event as well as a number of political heavyweights with California ties, including Vice President Kamala Harris, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Biden kept the mood light, teasing that he didn’t want to dwell on the fact that Harris roots for the Dodgers’ long-standing rival, the San Francisco Giants. He also told stories about his own exploits in a congressional baseball game, saying he hit a ball off the wall that thrilled his sons more than any of his political accomplishments.

Clayton Kershaw, the team’s future Hall of Fame pitcher, presented Biden with what has become the standard gift: a jersey emblazoned on the back with the president’s name and number. Biden, the 46th commander in chief, joked that he was demonstrating that he was “a man of courage” by holding the jersey up because he risked incurring the wrath of First Lady Jill Biden, a rabid Philadelphia Phillies fan.

The jubilant ceremony bore few of the political overtones that became a hallmark of teams’ visits during the presidency of Donald Trump. Some champions, like the Golden State Warriors and Philadelphia Eagles, skipped being honored at the White House. Others, like the New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox, only sent limited delegations, with many players opting to stay home.

The Champs clean up nice. pic.twitter.com/lUW6vLUUAP

— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) July 2, 2021

White House vibes. pic.twitter.com/RlhyeCGuHx

— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) July 2, 2021

*The Trump-voting asshole pitcher they picked up this year didn’t attend, not for political reasons but because he’s suspended for being a psychopath.

Paul Krugman is downright sunny these days. His newsletter today:

In the spring of 2020, the U.S. economy went into what I described at the time as a “medically induced coma”: We shut down much of the economy in an attempt to limit the spread of the coronavirus. This was, in retrospect, a wise policy that should have been followed much more thoroughly. After all, by slowing the spread of the virus, we didn’t just avoid overwhelming the health care system; we also bought time for the development and dissemination of vaccines, so that tens of millions of Americans who would have been infected without the lockdowns ended up dodging the bullet.

But there was a huge initial cost in terms of reduced employment and, to a somewhat lesser extent, reduced G.D.P. Many analysts expected a sluggish recovery at best — similar to the sluggish recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. In fact, we seem to be bouncing back quickly, as some of us predicted we would. (Sorry, I just pulled a muscle patting myself on the back.)

But will the post-Covid economy look the same as the pre-Covid economy? Probably not — for reasons originally laid out by none other than Alexander Hamilton in 1791.

However, Hamilton argued that U.S. industry would be able to compete with British industry if domestic manufacturers were given the opportunity to gain experience — that once Americans had seen that industry could be profitable, once they had had the chance to gain manufacturing experience, a U.S. industrial base would become self-sustaining.

So Hamilton called for, among other things, temporary tariffs to protect U.S. industry and give it time to become competitive. Economists then proceeded to spend the next 220 years arguing about whether and when infant industry protection is actually a good policy. But the idea that sometimes temporary protection for an industry makes it competitive in the long run clearly has a lot to it.

What does this have to do with Covid-19? The pandemic produced some extreme forms of de facto infant industry protection, forcing millions of Americans to work differently from the way they had before. And many, though not all, of these changes are likely to stick: Even with the vaccines, many individuals and businesses won’t go back to the way things were before.

The obvious case, of course, is remote work. American workers with traditional office jobs weren’t hit nearly as hard by the pandemic as, say, restaurant workers, and seem to be mostly though not all the way back to normal:

But they aren’t back in their offices. Office occupancy rates have gone up a bit, but they are still far below normal in major cities, presumably because of the prevalence of working from home:

Many workers will, no doubt, eventually go back to the office. But the past year and a half has shown that much of what used to take place in conference rooms can be done on screens instead, with little loss of effective interaction and big savings in commuting time and personal wear and tear. (I’ve taught a graduate seminar via Zoom; I actually thought that student participation was better than in person, although that wouldn’t have been true in a larger or less advanced class.)

And we have, of course, all gotten much better at using the tools of remote work — just like Hamilton’s industrialists, who he expected to get better at manufacturing after a few years’ experience. “You’re still muted” remains a common phrase, but in my experience, anyway, no more than “I’m sorry, could you please speak up” was in live meetings.

And remote work wasn’t the only thing many Americans learned to do during the pandemic. Many others, perhaps millions, learned to do something different — namely, not work at all.

A vast majority of workers idled by pandemic restrictions will go back to work — mainly out of sheer necessity, but also because for many, work is a source of meaning in their lives. However, forced unemployment gave a significant number of Americans a chance to discover both that they really disliked their jobs and that they can manage financially without them, even without special government aid. Such workers won’t be going back.

This is probably especially true among older workers, who have seen a much sharper drop in labor force participation than prime-age adults.

Many of these older workers were planning to retire fairly soon anyway; now they’ve learned that retirement is a better experience, and the extra money they can earn by working longer is worth less in life satisfaction than they realized. So the pandemic didn’t just provide infant-industry protection to remote work; it also provided infant-industry protection to nonwork among certain groups.

Many of these older workers were planning to retire fairly soon anyway; now they’ve learned that retirement is a better experience, and the extra money they can earn by working longer is worth less in life satisfaction than they realized. So the pandemic didn’t just provide infant-industry protection to remote work; it also provided infant-industry protection to nonwork among certain groups.

And all of this is OK! The purpose of the economy isn’t to maximize G.D.P.; it is to make our lives better. The time saved and aggravation avoided when people telework rather than fight traffic to get to and from the office isn’t counted in G.D.P., but it represents a real gain. And though the increased life satisfaction some people get by retiring early and spending more time at home actually comes at the expense of G.D.P., it makes the nation richer in what matters.

So the post-Covid-19 economy will look different from what we had before: There will probably be a glut of office space, and total employment will probably be a bit lower — Goldman Sachs estimates by around one million — than it would have been otherwise, because of early retirement. But these changes will, on the whole, be good things: The pandemic was deadly and costly, but one small compensation is that it gave us a chance to think, work and live differently.

That’s ok. Everything changes. Let’s just embrace these and save our energy fighting climate change, kay? Because that’s a whole lot more important…

If you are wondering about the status of the Infrastructure Bill negotiations, this analysis by Kate Riga at TPM puts it together nicely, I think:

It’s the classic criticism of Democratic politicians: while Republicans tear up the rulebook and prioritize winning over all else, Democrats insist on teamwork even with bad-faith actors. 

To put it more succinctly: Republicans are Lucy and Democrats, Charlie Brown. No matter how many times she snatches the football away, Charlie Brown obligingly kicks, getting a body full of bruises for trusting someone who has only ever shown that she can’t be trusted. 

So far during the infrastructure negotiations, Democrats have bucked that trend. They’ve largely ignored the insincere Republican whining about the bipartisan and reconciliation bills being linked, and are pressing on with that strategy. Even President Joe Biden’s clarifying statement after days of Republican gripes maintained that he considers the bills to be in tandem.

But old habits die hard. 

For instance: Earlier this week, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), a member of the Senate Budget Committee handling reconciliation, suggested that if the bipartisan negotiations fall through, Democrats will just wrap the bipartisan deal, concessions to the GOP and all, into their reconciliation bill — a package not expected to get any Republican votes.

“We would say, ‘okay you killed the bipartisan deal. But okay, you gave us some good ideas,” he told reporters. “And you’re going to see your priorities included here in reconciliation.”

TPM reached out to Kaine’s office to see if the senator was just speculating, or if that option was on the table should bipartisan talks fail.

“Senator Kaine was saying that if Republicans are unwilling to help pass a bipartisan infrastructure package, then Democrats will take the burden to do a comprehensive infrastructure package on their shoulders and ensure that investments in critical areas like broadband, roads, bridges, water infrastructure and other needs are incorporated into a reconciliation bill,” a Kaine spokesperson said. “Just as he and his Democratic colleagues did when passing the American Rescue Plan, Senator Kaine wants to ensure that this reconciliation package includes priorities from Democrats and Republicans across the country.” 

Budget committee chair Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) office declined to comment, and Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) office did not reply to questions. 

While bipartisan talks seem back on track for now, after days of GOP shirt-rending, and Kaine’s hypothetical may potentially never come to pass, such a position could even risk derailing those delicate negotiations — why would Republicans bother to remain in talks that’ll deliver the Biden administration a win if Democrats promise to get their proposals passed through reconciliation anyway? 

“It makes absolutely no sense,” a former longtime Democratic Senate staffer told TPM. “Take electric vehicle charging for example — if this deal falls apart, why wouldn’t you make it $45 billion in reconciliation?” The number for electric vehicle infrastructure in the bipartisan deal is currently $15 billion, short of the $45 billion Schumer has pitched and “not enough by any measure,” the former aide added.

“I think the senator was probably just talking from the top of his head and was caught without a chance to think about what would happen,” Rich Gold, a former Senate advisor and current leader of lobbying firm Holland & Knight’s public policy group, told TPM. “Really, you think if we’re passing a Democrats-only bill, Biden’s gonna settle for that number on electric vehicles? I wouldn’t say that’s the position of the party.” 

There is a looming factor present in the negotiations that will likely force Democrats to scale back the amount of spending in reconciliation in general, and that could still present a big problem should the bipartisan deal fall apart: Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). 

Manchin has already floated his ideal topline number for a reconciliation package as somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 trillion, a far cry from Sanders’ ideal $6 trillion. 

“One of the biggest questions if the bipartisan deal falls apart is, will he accept a larger reconciliation package than the $1.5 to $2 trillion he suggested he could accept?” political strategist Jim Manley, a former spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Senate Democratic caucus, told TPM.

Manchin’s status as the critical 50th vote guarantees there will be at least some intra-Democratic debate on the spending levels in the reconciliation bill, whether or not the bipartisan bill passes. As President Joe Biden made clear this week, there will likely not be additional hard infrastructure spending in the reconciliation bill if the bipartisan deal goes through. While that’s a position sure to annoy particularly progressive Democrats, it makes some logical sense: Biden is willing to trade additional hard infrastructure funding for a bipartisan victory. 

But as of now, Democrats are still negotiating with Republicans — not yet amongst, or against, themselves.

“Maybe Kaine was saying you gotta make sure to keep this in a realm that the conservative flanks of the Senate Democratic caucus will support,” the former Senate staffer said of the reconciliation package. “But that’s too cute by half at this stage in the game.”

While what Democrats would do if the bipartisan deal falls apart is still a hypothetical — talks seem to be back on track this week, though the Senate is in recess and most members back in their home states — its passage is far from a lock. 

“Oftentimes, one side or the other begins to get spooked and people begin to bail,” Chay English, a Capitol Hill veteran now a vice president at the BGR lobbying group, told TPM. “There’s been a little bit of that already, with some Republicans saying ‘we don’t like tone and tenor of the White House, we don’t like what Pelosi is doing holding this package hostage.’”

The negotiations became even more delicate as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) led his caucus into manufactured fury that Democrats still planned to do the reconciliation bill in step with the bipartisan one, even demanding that leadership explicitly decouple the two pieces of legislation.

“I have no faith that McConnell is not gonna do everything he can to justify why the bill shouldn’t get Republican support,” the former aide said, pointing specifically to upcoming opportunities for the Republican leader in the CBO scoring of the bill.

I have no idea where this ends up at this point and I don’t think anyone else does either. It will come down to the whims of Sinemanchin, the strength of Mitch McConnell and the savvy of Pelosi, Schumer and Biden. Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy flight.

I’ve been waiting for this piece from the NY Times. The parallels are astonishing:

Long before Donald J. Trump’s company was accused of plotting detours around the tax code to compensate its chief financial officer with carpeting, televisions and car leases, there were the $16,135 boilers.

The boilers were bought for that amount by Mr. Trump’s father, Fred, in the 1990s for his numerous apartment buildings. But in a bit of financial alchemy that embodied the family ethos of paying as little tax as possible, the elder Mr. Trump used inflated invoices to pay the bill and the extra money was skimmed off for his children — all to avoid gift and inheritance taxes.

Echoes of the earlier scheme could be found in the indictment on Thursday of the Trump Organization and Allen H. Weisselberg, its chief financial officer, who first went to work for Fred Trump in the 1970s. While the amount of tax-free benefits that Mr. Weisselberg reportedly received is significant — $1.76 million over 15 years — the way the company went about doling them out is strikingly small-bore and incremental.

In fact, the first criminal case against the former president’s company features no grand schemes to launder money through Russia, hide millions offshore or commit other offenses commensurate with a self-described global business empire headquartered in a Fifth Avenue skyscraper. Rather, the details of the charges brought by a Manhattan grand jury have a rather low-rent feel that one might associate with a scrappy real-estate operation born in Brooklyn and Queens.

Which, of course, it is.

The Trump Organization, for all the puffery of its leader, has always been essentially a family business, tightly controlled by Mr. Trump and a small number of relatives and trusted associates, including Mr. Weisselberg. Although the company has about 3,500 employees worldwide, most are lower-tier workers at golf resorts and hotels and only 122 made $100,000 or more in 2018, according to tax records for Mr. Trump and his businesses obtained by The New York Times.

The tax records, which The Times reported on last year, also reveal a deep commitment to green-eyeshades maneuvering to winnow taxes to a minimum. Hundreds of millions of dollars in deductions for business expenses ran the gamut, from $6 for food in Uruguay and $10 for using a telephone in Panama to $13.7 million for “sales and marketing” in Las Vegas.

Of course, efficient accountants would not be doing their job if they did not try to maximize tax breaks. But in the indictment unsealed on Thursday, the Trump Organization is accused of being too clever by half, to the point of criminality, in playing the game.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office and New York State’s attorney general are also investigating whether the company intentionally overvalued a 50,000-square-foot mansion in Westchester County to claim a $21 million tax write-off for a conservation easement. Both agencies are also examining the Trump Organization’s practice of deducting millions of dollars in consulting fees, some of which appear to have been paid to at least one of Mr. Trump’s children who was a full-time company employee at the time she received them.

[…]

The Trump Organization’s relentless quest for tax avoidance has its roots in Fred Trump’s determination to fend off the taxman at every possible turn. A self-made workaholic who built and sold his first house before he was 20, the elder Mr. Trump eventually passed more than $1 billion to his children while employing legally dubious strategies to avoid nearly $500 million in taxes on the transfers, a 2018 investigation by The Times found.

“My father had always been very much opposed to paying taxes, so to the extent he could pay less in taxes, that was a good thing,” Robert Trump, the former president’s younger brother, said in a legal deposition related to Fred Trump’s estate. (Robert Trump died last year at 71.)

Among the Trump family’s machinations was the creation in 1992 of All County Building Supply & Maintenance, a company that existed mainly on paper. It was co-owned by Donald Trump, his three siblings and a cousin, John Walter.

Vendors who sold goods and services to Trump properties were asked to send invoices to All County, which would pad the actual cost by an additional 20 percent or more and bill Fred Trump, who paid the inflated amount. The extra money was then split among the former president, his siblings and Mr. Walter.

Asked in a deposition why the elder Mr. Trump went to such lengths, which tax experts interviewed by The Times said were improper, if not illegal, Mr. Walter suggested it was to avoid the so-called death tax that would incur if the money were simply left to the Trump children in their father’s will.

“He loved to save taxes,” Mr. Walter said.

It is a lesson fully absorbed by his eager-to-please son Donald, who has bragged about avoiding taxes. When his Democratic opponent in 2016, Hillary Clinton, accused him during a debate of not paying federal income taxes, Mr. Trump replied: “That makes me smart.”

The Times’s 2020 investigation of Mr. Trump’s tax records found that by using hundreds of millions in losses from his businesses, as well as by deducting expenses and taking advantage of tax credits, he was able to pay only $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017, and none at all in 10 of the previous 15 years. His aggressive strategies led to an Internal Revenue Service audit, which is believed to be continuing, of the legitimacy of a $72.9 million refund he claimed.

The indictment announced on Thursday accuses the Trump Organization of a new series of off-the-books maneuvers that, in some respects, resemble an updated version of Fred Trump’s model. In Mr. Weisselberg’s case, rather than simply receiving a higher salary, his base pay was set at $540,000 and then augmented with a series of benefits designed to avoid income and payroll taxes, according to the indictment.

Some of the extra benefits to Mr. Weisselberg and other Trump Organization employees came from annual bonuses drawn from various corporate entities controlled by the company and classified as “non-employee” pay, which allowed Mr. Weisselberg to reduce his income taxes by putting the money into a type of retirement account intended for people who are self-employed. The Trump Organization also paid the rent for his apartment, Mercedes-Benz leases and private school tuition, none of which was reported as taxable income.

The indictment says Mr. Weisselberg also “received unreported cash that he could use to pay personal holiday gratuities.”

“Specifically,” it says, “Weisselberg caused the Trump Corporation to issue corporate checks made payable to a Trump Organization employee who cashed the checks and received cash. The cash was given to Weisselberg for his personal use. The Trump Corporation booked this cash as ‘Holiday Entertainment,’ but maintained internal spreadsheets showing the cash to be part of Weisselberg’s employee compensation.”

The indictment charges the Trump Organization with failing to report the cash disbursements as income to the tax authorities, and says Mr. Weisselberg “intentionally caused the receipt of cash payments to be omitted from his personal tax returns.” In addition, the company is accused of writing checks to cover “such items as new beds, flat-screen televisions, the installation of carpeting, and furniture” for Mr. Weisselberg, expenses that were tracked internally at the Trump Organization but not reported as income.

I keep wondering if the prosecution is going to call Trump to testify if he knew anything about these payments. He will, of course, say that he was kept completely in the dark which makes me wonder if they could then charge Weisselberg with something more serious than tax evasion. If the owner didn’t know about it …

No matter how you slice it, this was a crooked scheme. (That he had the brass to call Hillary Clinton “crooked” when he was pulling this shit for decades is just infuriating — but typical.) That someone this blatantly dishonest could become president still shocks me.

And even if such things were not criminal you’d think these sorts of shenanigans would at least preclude a political career, especially as the populist avatar of the working class! WTF? I honestly don’t think there is any better proof of the total vacuousness of the claim that people voted for him because of “economic anxiety” than that. They voted for him because he’s a wealthy, lying, racist and they admire him for it. “That makes him smart.”

He’s everything they aspire to be.

What the hell is this?

A cadre of armed men from a militia group called the Rise of the Moors shut down a highway outside of Boston on Saturday morning after allegedly refusing to comply with police orders and taking off into the woods with guns.

The group says on their website that they’re dedicated to “educating new Moors and influencing our Elders” and, in YouTube videos of the incident, they claimed they were only trying to travel peacefully to their “private land” to camp and “train” on Saturday. CBS Boston reported that they were headed from Rhode Island to Maine.

According to Massachusetts State Police, a trooper saw two cars on the side of the highway at about 2 a.m. with hazard lights on, attempting to add gas to their tanks.

When the officer stopped to assist, they noticed the group of men were wearing military gear and had a lot of guns. The trooper asked for driver’s licenses and gun licenses but the men allegedly refused to provide any and refused to put down their weapons. The trooper called for backup but some of the men fled, police said.

In a livestream video on the group’s YouTube page, titled “Peaceful,” a member of the militia, dressed in camo gear, said they were traveling with gas tanks to refuel their cars so they could avoid “making any unnecessary stops.” He said they did not want to “stop and alert or alarm the public.”

He claimed they had not violated any laws as they were legally allowed to own guns in the state from which they traveled.

He said they were approached by a trooper and he asked for a sergeant and what the probable cause was. The sergeant allegedly said he did not know. “I have that on my body camera,” the man said.

“We do not intend to be hostile, we do not intend to be aggressive,” he said, adding that they are not “anti-police” or “Black-identity extremists“Our nation has a treaty with your government,” the man said, gesturing to another man holding what looks like a Moroccan flag.

“We’re not anti-government, we’re not anti-police and we’re willing to give them any information they need so that way we can continue with our peaceful journey,” he continued.

The Southern Poverty Law Center says that several organizations and lone people have identified with the Moorish sovereign citizen movement in the U.S. since the 1990s. The movement is associated with the anti-government sovereign citizens movement, and some Moorish sovereigns have come into conflict with federal and state governments over their refusal to obey laws. They believe that African Americans “constitute an elite class within American society with special rights,” SPLC writes.

“Their self-professed leader wanted very much known their ideology is not anti-government,” State Police Col. Christopher Mason said in a Saturday morning briefing. “Our investigation will provide us more insight into what their motivation, what their ideology is.”

A section of I-95 was closed in both directions and a shelter in place order was issued for residents in Wakefield and Reading. Large trucks were also brought in to block the highway. The closure was still in place by mid-morning Saturday in what police called a “highly dynamic and evolving situation.”

“We continue to engage the suspects in conversation in an effort to de-escalate the situation on 95 and bring it to a peaceful end,” state police said in a tweet at 9:30 a.m. EDT.

By 10:30 a.m. police said all nine men who were on the highway had been taken into custody by a Special Tactical Operations Team. “We will now conduct sweeps of their 2 vehicles and woods,” they said in a tweet.

Is this a great country or what? Everyone can have their own nutty, conspiracy-addled militias.

“Never a good sign for democracy when political parties start developing paramilitary wings,” tweets “Adam.”

That response came to Greg Sargent’s Friday column on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) staffing selections for the Jan. 6 select committee. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy faces a thorny decision about how Republicans might particpate. The violence was a serious matter. People died. Police officers suffered grievous injuries. Roll the tape.

McCarthy’s dilemma is that the investigation could implicate his caucus members in an attempt to “violently overthrow the U.S. constitutional order.” But appointing Republicans who might disrupt the hearings or attempt to shift their focus “toward some crackpot right-wing media obsession carries its own risks, precisely because the matter is so momentous.”

Sargent cites Rick Perlstein’s assessment of how Republicans brought themselves to this juncture:

Rick Perlstein suggests we’re witnessing “an insurgency against democracy with parliamentary and paramilitary wings.” The first consists of lawmakers who sided with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election through legal means that morphed into efforts at direct theft. The second consists of those who crossed into violence toward that same end, at Trump’s instigation.

Perhaps all this is best understood as a spectrum moving from “parliamentary” to “paramilitary.” Some Republicans fed the lies about Trump’s loss. Some supported sham lawsuits to overturn the results. Some voted to overturn Biden electors. Some state Republicans entertained sending rogue electors.

Some called on people to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally that produced the violence. Some now minimize and distort the attack, giving cover to a movement that actually did attempt to overturn the constitutional order through mob violence.

“Build your party’s power by actively seeking out thugs, and of course things eventually get out of hand,” Perlstein writes.

Combined with the Supreme Court’s fileting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act this week, what we are reliving is “the Reconstruction years after the Civil War,” writes Heather Cox Richardson:

That war had changed the idea of who should have a say in American society. Before the war, the ideal citizen was a white man, usually a property owner. But those were the very people who tried to destroy the country, while during the war, Black Americans and women, people previously excluded from politics, gave their lives and their livelihoods to support the government. 

After the war, when white southerners tried to reinstate laws that returned the Black population to a position that looked much like enslavement, Congress in 1867 gave Black men the right to vote for delegates to new state constitutions. Those new constitutions, in turn, gave Black men the right to vote. 

In order to stop voters from ratifying the new constitutions, white southerners who had no intention of permitting Black Americans to gain rights organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize voters. While they failed to prevent states from ratifying the new constitutions, the KKK continued to beat, rape, and murder Black voters in the South. 

The KKK formed the paramilitary wing of white Southern Democrats calling for “Redemption” – “the return of white supremacy and the removal of rights for blacks – instead of Reconstruction.” Donald Trump’s Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and MAGA footsoldiers seek to redeem a political system that a century and a half later could elect a Black man president of the United States and permit the browning of America.

The parallels with the current Republican flood of anti-democracy sentiment and anti-voting legislation in the states do not require boldface. What has changed since the 1960s is the posture of the two major parties towards participation in the political process by non-white, would-be voters. Republicans stand now where Democrats stood in 1870.

So, in 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to defend Black rights in the South. It also passed a series of laws that made it a federal crime to interfere with voting and with the official duties of an elected officer. And it passed, and the states ratified, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, declaring that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Immediately, white Americans determined to stop Black participation in government turned to a new argument. During the Civil War, the Republican Party had not only expanded Black rights, but had also invented the nation’s first national taxation. For the first time, how people voted directly affected other people’s pocketbooks. 

In 1871, white southerners began to say that they did not object on racial grounds to Black voting, but rather on the grounds that formerly enslaved men were impoverished and were electing to office men who promised to give them things—roads, for example, and schools and hospitals—to be paid for with tax dollars. Because white men were the only ones with property in the postwar South, such legislation would redistribute wealth from white men to Black people. It was, they charged, “socialism.” 

In 1876, white southerners reclaimed control of the last remaining states they had not yet won by insisting they were “redeeming” their states from the corruption created when Black voters elected leaders who would use tax dollars for public programs. 

In 1890, a new constitution in Mississippi, which at the time was about 58% Black, restricted voting not on racial grounds but through a poll tax and a “literacy” test applied against Black voters alone. Mississippi led the way for new restrictions across the country. Although Black and Brown Americans continually challenged the new Jim and Juan Crow laws that silenced them, voting registration for people of color fell into single digits. 

Trump’s new Klan and its parliamentary wing aspire to that again.

History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes and sounds like “Dixie.”

Because Democrats suck so badly at messaging, I joke that every other new activist who wanders into our local headquarters thinks they can do it better. They want to write the white paper that will remake Democratic politics nationwide, issue it somehow from our little redoubt in Western North Carolina, and expect people at the national level to listen. Hell, those at the top won’t even listen to real experts.

Ask my friend Anat Shenker-Osorio (“Don’t Buy It“). She gets more attention abroad than here, it seems. ASO appeared again with Dan Pfeiffer the other day on Pod Save America and had some advice worth repeating here.

Message discipline begins with the discipline part, so Democrats are at a disadvantage from the get-go. “Low-propensity voters” is negative and out. “High-potential voters” is in. Now repeat. Really. (It’s the little things.)

Repetition is really important
And so is repetition

— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) May 25, 2021

The small group that attempted the violent overthrow of our country’s government on Jan. 6 are, as James Madison warned, a faction “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” They have been with us since the beginning of the country and remain committed the proposition that all persons are not created equal. This faction is “fundamentally at odds with America” and American ideals, ASO insists.

Labeling that faction authoritarians, says ASO, is unhelpful (as is repeating right-wing frames such as “stolen election”). It grants them power we do not need to hand them. And among those high-potential voters Democrats need to turn out in the next election, research shows that fosters cynicism.

“It’s not that people don’t think our ideas are right,” ASO explains. “It’s that people don’t think our ideas are possible, so why bother?”

In any election, ASO argues, there are actually three candidates. “There’s ours, there’s theirs, and there’s stay-at-home.” And if you want people to turn out and flex their political power, voters have to feel powerful, that the election is a fight that’s winnable and not a lost cause. Authoritarians risks framing our opponents as too imposing to defeat (edited for clarity):

And so, that is why we want to position them, yes, as powerful, yes, as damaging, yes, as destructive, yes, as nefarious, but not as authoritarians. And that also is the reasoning behind this sort of “faction” idea and language, that they are a potent, lying, horrible group of people that have a hold on many, many things — not least of which is the media, especially their own media channels — but this is something that we have vanquished before and it’s something that we can vanquish again.

One of the things … that was most heartening to me personally after the 2020 election was my friends in Australia where I have lived and work and my friends in the UK where I’ve done some work saying to me, “Whoa! Holy shit! Y’all dealt a blow … to fascism at the ballot box.” That has never happened. The only check that we have had in history on fascist forces has been through military action. And my friends’ views from abroad of our election was like a shot in the arm, at least for me. Yeah, we did do that, we did do that, and we can do it again.

How do we talk about voter ID laws, voter suppression and election certification rigging, etc., without convincing people that their votes do not count? 

So my answer to that is, we’ve been looking at this for a very long time doing, in some cases, daily research, weekly research, feeling all sorts of different instruments — beginning in October and continuing on now through the insurrection, post-election, up until today. And, basically, what I would say is that the encapsulating value or phrase that keeps popping and rising to the top is freedom. And what I mean by that is that we need to talk about this as an attempt to take away your freedom to vote, an attempt to take the freedoms that Americans of every race, place, wallet-sized walk of life, hold dear and cherish. 

And so a message that threads that needle … is that in America we value our freedom. Right now, a handful of lawmakers want to take away our freedom to vote so that they can rule only for the wealthiest few. And then, whatever the ask is … to make the ask framed as a protection of, a preservation of, a continuation of our freedoms. Because what we find is that when we try to talk to people in terms of “democracy”, and “saving our democracy,” or “having a democracy,” or “protecting our democracy”, or whatever, first of all, we run into the challenge of the fact that we’ve never had a democracy. And secondarily, what we find is that democracy is an abstraction. Democracy never bought you dinner. People do not have a tangible feeling about it.

So, what we’ve seen is that we need to make arguments around these anti-voter laws, arguments around these anti-election integrity laws that Republican state legislatures are passing. We need to frame them as them trying to take away your freedom, them trying to silence certain voices, them trying to rule for the already rich. But we can’t let the voting conversation and issue … wander away from what those folks deliver.

This is once again the brownie analogy mentioned in December (repetition):

“When we are walking through the grocery aisle and want to buy brownies,” she begins, “what is the image on the brownie box? The brownie! What’s not staring you in the face? The recipe! … We need to stop messaging our policy and talk about what our policy achieves.”

Don’t argue your policies in public, ASO insists. Talk about outcomes.

So, what I mean by that is (and here she launches into a pre-tested message), in America we value our freedom, the freedom to raise our voices and to cast our votes so that we can elect leaders who deliver on our priorities — from creating jobs to expanding healthcare, to ensuring rights for all. But today, a handful of lawmakers want to take away those freedoms so they can rule only for the already wealthy and powerful few. By coming together to pass the For The People Act, or by coming together to vote in record numbers (or whatever the ask is), we can ensure that this is a place of freedom where the leaders we elect govern in our name and act in our interests.

We have to [retain the message] about good governance. That this is about the delivery of things that we want, whether that be stimulus checks, whether that be the ability to vote freely and fairly, affordable healthcare etc.

Voters won’t stand in line for policy prescriptions. They will for outcomes. From December again:

Universal health care? Talk about how much more money families will have in their pockets at the end of each month. Talk about not worrying the next health care crisis will bankrupt you. Your kids will get well and stay well. You’ll be able to go to the doctor without risking your home. We’ll save 68,000 lives per year. One of them might be yours.

Right now, my truck is sitting in the driveway with a bad water pump. When it goes into the shop, all I want to know is how much it costs and when it will be ready to drive again. I don’t care about the details. That’s why I hire a mechanic. That’s why (less ideological) voters hire politicians. For the results.

On this hot weekend, I think we need some penguins.

While winter school holidays plans across NSW have been thrown into chaos, a few Marine Keepers from Taronga Zoo Sydney have still taken to time to welcome and celebrate the month of June and spread some much-needed laughter and joy around the zoo. To mark the occasion, Taronga’s waddle of little penguins were treated to some very n-ice enrichment!

Kindly donated by Sydney Fish Market, keepers created a mini winter wonderland within the little penguin’s exhibit. As little penguins are found natively along the southern coastlines of Australia this isn’t something they would experience in the wild. For never actually seeing snow, keepers explained that the little penguins were quite brave, tapping their little flippers over the ice and investigating their new environment.

Stay cool everybody!

This rundown of the back and forth on the January 6th investigation made me smile. There are plenty of things to criticize Pelosi for, but deft handling that fatuous dolt Kevin McCarthy isn’t one of them:

In the four-and-a-half months since Speaker Nancy Pelosi first raised the idea of a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, she and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have been locked in a slow-motion struggle over the issue.

It’s been a series of moves and countermoves, with Pelosi finally naming members of a select committee on Thursday. 

And once again, as she has throughout this period, Pelosi pulled another one on McCarthy — GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who was the number three House Republican until mid-May, agreed to be one of the speaker’s picks for the panel. This came a day after we reported that McCarthy had told GOP freshmen that any Republican who accepts a committee assignment from Pelosi may need to get all their committee assignments from Democrats.

That veiled threat failed to faze Cheney. She didn’t even bother to give McCarthy a heads-up about her decision to serve on the panel. “I think it’s clear to all the people on this committee that our oath to the Constitution, our duty, our dedication to the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power has to come above any concern about partisanship or about politics,” Cheney told reporters. “That’s crucially important.”

Since Feb. 15, when she first called for a bipartisan commission to look into the insurrection by supporters of former President Donald Trump, Pelosi has repeatedly forced McCarthy back on the defensive.  Pelosi has tried to push him into a political choice she knows McCarthy can’t make: between Trump, still the most powerful figure in the Republican Party and someone McCarthy can’t afford to alienate if he ever wants to become speaker, and his own responsibility toward the Congress as an institution.

Pelosi, in fact, has tried to make McCarthy himself the issue, and to a point, she’s succeeded. McCarthy has faced numerous questions about his interactions with Trump on Jan. 6. Many Democrats want to see him interviewed by the select committee, although it’s unclear whether that will happen. If it does, don’t be surprised if McCarthy asks the committee to interview Pelosi about her own actions on Jan. 6.

McCarthy initially objected in February to the number of GOP and Democratic seats on the proposed panel, and on how subpoenas would be issued, Pelosi agreed to his suggestions, only to have McCarthy change his position and raise a completely different objection over the scope of the investigation.

When Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chair of the Homeland Security Committee, cut a deal in mid-May with GOP Rep. John Katko (N.Y.), ranking member on Homeland, over legislation to create a bipartisan commission, McCarthy ended up publicly repudiating the agreement his own member made. Thirty-five House Republicans voted for the bill anyway, only to see it blocked by Senate Republicans.

And now with Cheney on the select committee, Pelosi has once more forced McCarthy into a tough situation. Compared to the proposal that Thompson and Katko hashed out — or the compromise floated by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) — the select committee approved by the House is bad format for McCarthy and the Republicans. There’s no time limit on the investigation, Republicans have no say in who or how many subpoenas can be issued and Pelosi has a veto over McCarthy’s appointments.

Even Republicans’ best arguments — that Democrats are just trying to use the Jan. 6 attack against the GOP in 2022 and the current standing committees, as well as the FBI and Justice Department, could handle the probe  — have been blunted by what’s happened during the last four-plus months. 

The media coverage will focus on Trump’s actions that day, what other Trump administration officials said and did, the Trump-McCarthy phone call and how the deployment of the National Guard was delayed — mostly issues Republicans don’t like. McCarthy and his GOP allies will try to call into question security failures leading up to the attack, blaming Pelosi for the lack of preparation, yet Republicans can’t go too far in criticizing the U.S. Capitol Police, dozens of whose officers were injured during the bloody insurrection.

And all the while, Trump will be out there watching, complaining about any signs of GOP weakness he sees.

McCarthy and House Republicans may very well win the House in 2022. History and redistricting are on their side. But McCarthy and the party will face questions over Jan. 6 right up until Election Day.

They could have the very fair, bipartisan January 6th Independent Commission with subpoena power and a time limit. But they all voted en masse against it in the Senate so here we are.

Big mistake. Huge.