Month: January 2022

What a sad little weasel Mike Pence is. They wanted to hang him for failing to enact their coup and now he’s trying to get back in their good graces. In an op-ed for the Washington Post he wrote about January 6th as a terrible day — and then suggests that the Big Lie was right and that access to the franchise amounts to fraud:

In the year since that fateful day, states across the country have enacted measures to try to restore confidence in the integrity of our elections while ensuring access to voting for every American. Georgia, Arizona and Texas have led the way with common-sense reforms, such as requiring verifiable identification on absentee ballots and using cameras to record ballot processing.

Despite this steady progress of state-based reforms, now come President Biden and Senate Democrats with plans to use the memory of Jan. 6 to attempt another federal power grab over our state elections and drive a wedge further into our divided nation.

Their plan to end the filibuster to allow Democrats to pass a bill nationalizing our elections would offend the Founders’ intention that states conduct elections just as much as what some of our most ardent supporters would have had me do one year ago.

Under the Constitution, elections are largely determined at the state level, not by Congress — a principle I upheld on Jan. 6 without compromise. The only role of Congress with respect to the electoral college is to “open, present and record” votes submitted and certified by the states. No more, no less. The notion that Congress would break the filibuster rule to pass a law equaling a wholesale takeover of elections by the federal government is inconsistent with our nation’s history and an affront to our Constitution’s structure.

Democrats in Congress don’t like the way many states have governed over the past year. In fact, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) recently compared Republican state officials to “violent insurrectionists” who stormed the Capitol because they had the audacity to pass legislation designed to eliminate voter fraud.

Biden and the Democrats’ plan advancing in Congress would massively increase opportunities for election fraud, further erode confidence in our elections and deliver an irreversible victory for the radical left.

The plan would mandate the most questionable and abuse-prone election rules nationwide, while banning common-sense measures to detect, deter and prosecute election fraud.

For example, states would be forced to adopt universal mail-in ballots, to provide same-day voter registration, online voter registration, easier voter registration through motor vehicle department offices and a minimum 15 days of early voting. Duplicate voter registration records would abound, states’ voter-ID requirements would be dramatically weakened, and anyone, including undocumented people,who simply signed a sworn written statement claiming to be eligible to vote would be permitted to do so. The opportunities for voter fraud would explode.

Just look at what he is complaining about: universal mail-in ballots, to provide same-day voter registration, online voter registration, easier voter registration through motor vehicle department offices and a minimum 15 days of early voting.

The humanity!!! This is what he says will create opportunities for voter fraud? How pathetic.

Meanwhile, the man whose boots he polished assiduously still blames him for failing to follow through on the coup and is telling everyone they need to get partisan vote counters in to cheat on his behalf. But that’s fine.

I do not think Mike Pence is ever going to be president. He is Reek.

You’ll recall that in the early days of the Trump administration the very stable genius said this:

He obviously had no idea who Frederick Douglass was and he assumed nobody else did either. And when it comes to his MAGA followers, that seems to be the case:

Now check this out:

Amid a flurry of bills nationwide that seek to ban the teaching of critical race theory in schools, one such proposal in Virginia stood out.

Tucked inside a bill introduced by Wren Williams, a Republican delegate, was a glaring error: Among the concepts that school boards would be required to ensure students understood was “the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.”

But as scholars, Mr. Williams’s colleagues in the House of Delegates and others on social media noted, that debate was between not Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, but Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois.

“The gross mistake in this bill is indicative of the need to have scholars and teachers, not legislators/politicians, shaping what students at every level learn in the classroom,” Caroline Janney, a professor of Civil War history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said in an email.

On Friday, Addison Merryman, a spokesman for Mr. Williams, released a statement from the state’s Division of Legislative Services, which took the blame for the error.

The mistake was inserted at the “drafting level following receipt of a historically accurate request from the office of Delegate Wren Williams,” according to the division, which described itself as a nonpartisan state agency that drafts, edits and releases “thousands of legislative drafts” for the General Assembly each session.

Mr. Merryman did not respond to additional questions about whether a historian had been consulted on the legislation or about concerns that the proposal could run afoul of the First Amendment. (Parts of that bill, such as a section that tells school boards not to “teach or incorporate into any course or class any divisive concept,” have been criticized as overly broad and likely to infringe on the free speech of students and educators.)

Instead, he referred to statements that he and Mr. Williams had made on Townhall, a conservative website. Mr. Merryman told Townhall that Mr. Williams had submitted an “anti-discrimination bill” that correctly referred to the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

[…]

The error should not distract the public from the general contents of the bill, which would keep conversations about the United States’ racial history out of classrooms, said Lara Schwartz, a professor of government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington.

“If this so-called divisive concepts bill became law, all of Virginia’s students would be the worse for it, and ignorance of our history would not just be a sad punchline — it would become more the norm,” she said in an email.

Critical race theory — an advanced academic concept generally not introduced until college — is not part of classroom teaching in Virginia. But during the statewide race last year, Mr. Williams, 33, a lawyer who worked on Mr. Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the election results in Wisconsin, said he would ban it in schools if he won.

He won the Republican nomination last June, unseating Charles Poindexter, a longtime legislator in the district, and then won 77 percent of the vote in the November general election, beating Bridgette Craighead, a Democrat.

This is what we are going to be dealing with all over the country with Mini Trump morons in charge.

Joseph Stalin’s apocryphal quote is right:

“Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.”

I’m sure Trump heard that somewhere:

Trump tells PA GOP why he is placing an emphasis on Supervisor of Elections races in 22: “We have to be a lot sharper the next time when it comes to counting the vote .. Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate. They have to get a lot tougher and smarter.” pic.twitter.com/WdzStuLxFH

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 15, 2022

Aaaand:

Bannon this morning says the purpose of the Trump rally in AZ today is to pressure the AZ legis to decertify the 2020 Biden electors, then PA, WI, and GA will follow suit and make Biden an illegitimate president in the minds of swing voters heading into the 2022 elections. pic.twitter.com/DOj4N8QyS9

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 15, 2022

It’s not as if they’re trying to hide it. Steve Bannon may be a weirdo but he’s got millions of followers and no matter how ridiculous, he channels the MAGA movement.

I know this will shock you, but it turns out that the Trump administration’s political appointees tried to manipulate the census count for political advantage:

A newly disclosed memorandum citing “unprecedented” meddling by the Trump administration in the 2020 census and circulated among top Census Bureau officials indicates how strongly they sought to resist efforts by the administration to manipulate the count for Republican political gain.

The document was shared among three senior executives including Ron S. Jarmin, a deputy director and the agency’s day-to-day head. It was written in September 2020 as the administration was pressing the bureau to end the count weeks early so that if President Donald J. Trump lost the election in November, he could receive population estimates used to reapportion the House of Representatives before leaving office.

The memo laid out a string of instances of political interference that senior census officials planned to raise with Wilbur Ross, who was then the secretary of the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau. The issues involved crucial technical aspects of the count, including the privacy of census respondents, the use of estimates to fill in missing population data, pressure to take shortcuts to produce population totals quickly and political pressure on a crash program that was seeking to identify and count unauthorized immigrants.

Most of those issues directly affected the population estimates used for reapportionment. In particular, the administration was adamant that — for the first time ever — the bureau separately tally the number of undocumented immigrants in each state. Mr. Trump had ordered the tally in a July 2020 presidential memorandum, saying he wanted to subtract them from House reapportionment population estimates.

The census officials’ memorandum pushed back especially forcefully, complaining of “direct engagement” by political appointees with the methods that experts were using to find and count unauthorized noncitizens.

“While the presidential memorandum may be a statement of the administration’s policy,” the memo stated, “the Census Bureau views the development of the methodology and processes as its responsibility as an independent statistical agency.”

The memorandum was among hundreds of documents that the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school obtained in a lawsuit seeking details of the Trump administration’s plans for calculating the allotment of House seats. The suit was concluded in October, but none of the documents had been made public until now.

These are the same people who accuse Democrats of cheating in elections. The boldness of their projection never ceases to amaze.

Leaving this right here. The tweet is new; the Reuters story is old. But as Eric Boehlert reminds Twitter this morning, “GOP gets lots of its ideas from Putin.” Good to remember.

The Danish intelligence has accused Russia of forging a 2019 letter to Senator Tom Cotton, claiming to be from Greenland's foreign minister & alleging there'd be an independence referendum.

Tom Cotton claims to have given Trump the idea to buy Greenland.https://t.co/9GDbPfMJq5 pic.twitter.com/15CtcxpkXK

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) January 15, 2022

Reuters (5/31/21).

Sen. Tom Cotton says he floated the idea of buying Greenland to Trump

Monty Python lampooned them as “upper class twits,” people for whom higher education is more a fashion accessory to be displayed than personal betterment to be internalized.

By most accounts the MAGA rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol may not have been the elite, but by and large were not plebians either. Eighty-five percent were employed. They included doctors, attorneys, architects, and business owners.

They included Douglas Austin Jensen of Des Moines whose Jan. 6 selfie video helped get him arrested. “This is me, touching the f—— White House,” he said, touching the wall of the U.S. Capitol.

They included Nathan Wayne Entrekin of Cottonwood, Arizona who came dressed as a Roman gladiator. Dubbed “Caesar No Salad,” by Sedition Hunters. He believed himself portraying Captain Moroni, a character from the Book of Mormon. “Wow, Mom. I wish you were here with me,” he said in one video. “Here comes the riot police, Mom.” On Friday Entrekin pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor.

They included disbarred, Yale-educated attorney, Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Proud Boys militia group. Federal authorities charged Rhodes and multiple others in his merry band this week with seditious conspiracy.

What is remarkable is not that they are abnormal but how sadly normal they are.

In my working life, I was a professional engineer, a PE. Titles and credentials do not impress. I’ve worked with PEs who were useless and PhDs who were clueless. The beliefs and behaviors of the rioters reconfirm that maxim.

But not just the rioters. Their representatives inside the Capitol they attacked do indeed represent them.

In testifying before a Senate committee this week, Dr. Anthony Fauci, probably the nation’s most foremost authority on infectious diseases, faced questions about his finances from Senator Roger Marshall, Republican of Kansas:

Marshall said that according to Forbes, Fauci had an annual salary of $434,000 in 2020. He asked if Fauci would make his finances public — but as a government employee, Fauci’s financial information is already publicly available.

Marshall, a doctor of obstetrics and gynecology, seemed not to understand that “The Ethics in Government Act also requires public financial disclosure by senior U.S. government officials.”

“What a moron,” Fauci muttered into a still-hot mic as the senator’s time expired. “Jesus Christ.”

The Washington Post reports:

Of all the paragraphs in a bill to ban “divisive concepts” from being taught in Virginia public schools, Section B3 may seem the most innocuous. After all, it is in the part of the proposal that defined what could actually be taught in history classes, not the myriad things that would be banned or the consequences teachers could face for teaching them, including prosecution and being fired.

Section B3 of the bill, sponsored by Republican freshman Del. Wren Williams, defines what can be taught as “the founding documents,” like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, excerpts from the Federalist Papers, the writings of the Founding Fathers and Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic “Democracy in America.” Oh, and one more thing: “the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.”

Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas, not the Black abolitionist icon Douglass.

From The Guardian:

“New rule,” wrote Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor. “If you don’t know the difference between Frederick Douglass and Stephen Douglas, you don’t get to tell anyone else what to teach.”

Like Rhodes, Wren Williams is an attorney. But neither is President of the United States.

“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice,” said Donald J. Trump, graduate of the Wharton School of Business, dubbed “the dumbest goddam student I ever had,” by one of his professors and a moron by his own secretary of state.

But a man of the people.

Baby pandas in the snow!

Best thing about 2022 so far: Baby panda. pic.twitter.com/wjZwJvLFr6

— The Recount (@therecount) January 8, 2022

They love him:

Senator Joe Manchin may be an outlier among most of his Democratic colleagues in Washington, but he knows what plays back home.  A new survey by Republican pollster Mark Blankenship of MBE Research* finds Manchin is on solid ground with most voters in West Virginia.

Manchin has a 61 percent approval rating among registered voters, while 37 percent disapprove of the job he is doing.

“Voters want to be listened to.  When they feel like you’re listening to them, they will reward that either at the polls or in numbers like this,” Blankenship said on MetroNews Talkline Monday. “I think that’s what’s recognized here is that Senator Manchin is listening to the people of West Virginia.”

For example, Manchin supported the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that President Biden signed into law yesterday.  That legislation includes about $6 billion for roads, bridges, water and sewer projects, broadband and other traditional infrastructure projects in West Virginia.

That is a popular position in West Virginia.  The MBE Poll found that a whopping 77 percent of those questioned support Senators Manchin and Republican Shelley Moore Capito “working together in a bipartisan effort to pass a national infrastructure bill.”

Bipartisanship.  Money for roads, bridges and broadband.  No wonder both Manchin and Capito get high numbers on the infrastructure bill.  It fits the narrative for many West Virginians of how Congress is supposed to work.

The survey finds that Manchin, at least for now, is aligned with West Virginia voters on the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better proposal.  Sixty-one percent agree with Manchin’s current position of opposing the spending proposal.

I’m open to ideas here. Anyone???

Personally, it appears to me that they are following his lead rather than the other way around. But there’s no way to prove that. He’s secure in the knowledge that most of his constituents love him, donors are grateful and Republicans consider him their best friend. It’s all good.

This isn’t good:

The Biden administration has information indicating Russia might soon launch a false-flag operation to provide a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine, a U.S. official told POLITICO.

Per the official, Russia has already placed a group of operatives “trained in urban warfare and in using explosives” in eastern Ukraine. The intel suggests that this group might “carry out acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxy-forces,” thereby providing the Kremlin a convenient excuse to send some or all of its 100,000 troops stationed outside of Ukraine over the border

The Russian military plans to start these activities “several weeks” before a potential invasion, which is estimated to begin sometime between mid-January and mid-February, the official continued. “We saw this playbook in 2014 with Crimea.”

CNN first reported on the obtained intelligence.

Top U.S. officials, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in recent days previewed that the U.S. had information suggesting that Moscow was setting the groundwork for another incursion.

“Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating a pretext for an invasion, including through sabotage activities and information operations, by accusing Ukraine of preparing an imminent attack against Russian forces in Eastern Ukraine,” Sullivan told reporters at the White House Thursday, promising the administration would share more details within the following 24 hours.

The revelation comes after a week of talks in Europe between the United States, its allies and Russia. Little progress was made, leading officials to express their pessimism out in the open. “At the present time, we’re facing a crisis in European security,” Michael Carpenter, America’s ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told reporters Thursday. “The drumbeat of war is sounding loud, and the rhetoric has gotten rather shrill.”

This is the last thing we need. By we , I mean the world.

I don’t think there will be a wider war over this. I hope. But it’s pretty clear to me that Russia is making these moves at least partly because the division in the US and Europe makes it far less likely that anyone will step in strongly to stop it. Obviously he is driven by his own domestic needs and goals more than anything else and they are not hidden. But it doesn’t help that the rest of the west is in domestic political chaos. These are the circumstances that make aggressive people make mistakes.

By the way, contrary to what some people are saying, the Ukrainians are not welcoming this:

“Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine has a large Russian population, but opinion has turned against Russia since the Kemlin stirred up a separatist war in the nearby Donbas and is threatening invasion. [….]

You know, I came here expecting to find pro-Russian sentiment in the east, and I haven’t seen that at all, Ari. To the contrary, there are Ukrainian flags everywhere. And in front of the town hall and the Christmas market, there’s a big exhibit about Russian aggression. There’s, like, pictures showing Putin with a Hitler mustache and signs talking about boycotting Russian products.

And people here even tell me that they’re making an effort now to speak Ukrainian, whereas before everyone mostly always spoke Russian. [….]”

Sooo… this could get very ugly.

This has been a very bad week for the Biden administration. I assume that Manchin and Sinema are very proud that they have done the GOP’s dirty work for them. I’m sure Mitch and the gang gave them plenty of high fives last night.

But Biden might have the last laugh. Julian Zelizer points out that first terms are often fraught:

President Joe Biden is struggling politically. Recent polls have shown that his approval ratings continue to fall. According to CNN’s Poll of Polls, the President stands at 42%, while Quinnipiac’s January poll placed him at 33%. Those are the kinds of numbers that would leave any White House unsettled.The fate of the Build Back Better legislation remains precarious, while the President’s emboldened words about the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act were tougher than ever.

On Tuesday, he asked elected officials, “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?” in what appeared to be a question implicitly targeting Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who still refuse to accept the filibuster carve-out that would allow the voting rights legislation to overcome Republican opposition. Even worse, Omicron has driven up hospitalizations and left huge swaths of the population despondent about when the pandemic will come to an end. “It’s déjà vu all over again,” as the baseball legend Yogi Berra liked to say.

Obama backs Biden’s call to change Senate rules to pass voting rights in op-edOthers complain that the President isn’t even doing a good job showcasing his many accomplishments. “Jobs, jabs, infrastructure, prosperity and peace,” one columnist urged in a piece criticizing Biden for failing to boast enough about what his administration has done.

Then there is inflation. Rising prices are overwhelming all good economic news in recent days, including low unemployment and a buoyant economy. Although initially many economists thought that the price increases would be “transitory,” the widely accepted outlook is that inflation will remain high for a while. One Nevada voter, Laura Godinez, who told CNN she used to lean Republican but had shifted toward the Democrats in recent elections, commented: “I don’t want to say this, but when Donald Trump was here, it was nothing like this.”

Does this all add up to a doomed presidency? That question will naturally enter into the minds of Democrats as they speculate about where this is heading, particularly with the distinct possibility that Trump could run again in 2024.

Those who are worried should find some solace in the fact that contemporary presidents have been able to come back from difficult moments like these. Challenging first terms don’t inevitably put a commander in chief on path toward a one-term presidency. It’s possible to struggle in the polls, deal with difficult economic challenges and criticism from different factions of one’s own party and still go on to be considered a successful two-term president.Enter email to sign up for the CNN Opinion newsletter.close dialog

Sign up for the latest thoughts and analysis on today’s news headlines, political op-eds, and social commentary.SIGN ME UPBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Just look at Ronald Reagan, who served from 1981 until 1989, and is considered one of the most transformative presidents in recent times. In early 1982, Reagan was struggling to stay above water. The economy had entered into a serious recession, a result of the anti-inflationary moves of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. Democrats were furious about Reagan’s efforts to gut the social safety net, while many conservatives feared that the president was unwilling to go far enough.

Reagan’s approval ratings fell to 46%, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll in May 1982. (While that was higher than Biden’s current ratings, it was low compared to Lyndon B. Johnson at a similar moment in his presidency (67%) or Richard Nixon (66%).Reagan was veering closer to Jimmy Carter (43%) and Gerald Ford (45%). In August 1982, Reagan’s approval fell to 41%, according to Gallup.

Kevin McCarthy’s comment is a warning signBut conditions started to change dramatically in 1983 and 1984. As the economy rebounded, so too did Reagan’s standing. The president finally found his footing, figuring out a way to identify himself with the nation’s economic recovery and to calm the nerves of conservatives who wanted him to go much further on issues such as limiting reproductive rights.He used the themes of tax cuts and anti-communism to hold his coalition together. In 1984, he touted his willingness to stand up to the Soviet Union and ran an ad declaring it was “Morning in America.” That year, Reagan won a landslide victory against Democrat Walter Mondale.A few years later, Democrat Bill Clinton was also struggling in his second year in office. The president had gotten off to a rocky start, with some high-profile nominations going downin flames. The recession, which was one of the reasons Clinton won the election, didn’t go away as quickly as he hoped.Clinton’s controversial health care plan in 1993 seemed to anger almost everyone: liberals preferred a single-payer system to his regulatory approach to lowering costs and conservatives blasted the plan as socialism. The administration’s success at raising taxes on upper income Americans also energized the GOP.In June 1993, his approval rating had fallen to 37%, according to Gallup. When Republicans swept the 1994 midterms, taking control of both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1955, it didn’t take long for pundits to speculate that Clinton would end up being a one-term president like his predecessor, George H.W. Bush. “I want my presidency back,” Clinton allegedly said in a moment of frustration to a group of close advisers.

He found a way. As a result of the government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996, support for the administration started to rise, as voters blamed House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republicans for the dysfunction in Washington.

The president’s tough stand following the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 generated widespread praise. Following the advice of strategist Dick Morris, Clinton shifted to the center on a number of issues, including welfare reform, stealing thunder from Republicans. And the economy started to grow.

Despite the anger that emerged from the left about his centrist shift, overall, the strategy put him in strong position to defeat Republican Robert Dole in 1996. Clinton presented himself as a bridge to the future while casting Dole as a bridge to the past. Even though House Republicans would vote to impeach the president in 1998, he ended his second term with approval ratings at 66%, according to Gallup.

And, certainly, Biden remembers the experience of President Barack Obama, under whom he served. Obama took over under terrible circumstances, and his first few years were anything but fun. He started his term with the nation still reeling from the implosion of financial markets in 2008. American troops were also bogged down in an unsuccessful and unpopular war in Iraq.When the president moved forward with a major health care proposal, the Affordable Care Act, he triggered fierce opposition from conservatives and left many congressional Democrats fearful about the cost they would pay for the plan. Even the passage of the legislation didn’t allay those concerns, as ACA was initially not popular with voters.

As with Clinton, many on the left were unhappy. They thought that Obama was moving too far to the center. As with Biden, there were also concerns that the president was not doing enough to tout his accomplishments, including a major economic stimulus bill that helped put the nation on the right path.

Obama’s approval ratings dropped from 68% at the start of his presidency to 46% in October 2010. The midterm elections, which returned control of the House to Republicans, felt devastating. He admitted to being “humbled” by the outcome, which he called a “shellacking.”But Obama also recovered and thrived. Americans began to feel the effects of the economic rebound, and the president found his political footing during standoffs with Tea Party Republicans who were pushing the GOP toward new extremes, such as when they threatened to send the nation into default by not raising the debt ceiling.Get our free weekly newsletter

Obama was in much better shape by 2012, when he faced off against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Once again, Obama ran an effective campaign, reviving hope about the promise of his political vision and painting Romney as a right-wing figure who had little compassion for those who were struggling economically. Obama, of course, went on to win reelection and left office with his approval ratings at about 59%, remaining a hugely influential figure in the party.

While Biden’s current challenges are very real, they shouldn’t be seen as a clear indication of where his presidency is headed. This challenging moment is a snapshot of his term rather than the conclusion. In modern times, we have seen many presidents recover from a difficult start. Not everyone ends up like Carter, H.W. Bush or Trump, one-term presidents who campaigned for reelection under poor conditions (Carter was dealing with the Iran-Hostage crisis and stagflation; H.W. Bush with the recession; Trump with the pandemic and ongoing political turmoil). It’s possible that Biden’s troubles will fade, and he and the nation will eventually look back on a successful two-term administration.

I remember my Dad insisting that Clinton was “a first termer” and laughing in my face when I said it would be a mistake to count him out. I was too respectful to lugh in his when Clinton won in 96.

As Zelizer says, it’s a long way to 2024. Next November however … yikes.