Month: March 2022

I thought this piece by Carl Hulse was worth sharing because of its unusual straightforward clarity about what just happened in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson. There’s no “both sides” nonsense, which is what the Republicans were hoping for with their three ring circus. This lays out exactly how crude the attacks against her were and how their incessant, infantile whining about how badly they have been treated in the past doesn’t hold up under scrutiny:

 The Republican manhandling of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson this week was convincing evidence that the Senate’s Supreme Court confirmation process is irredeemably broken.

The aggressively hostile interrogation of Judge Jackson, featuring political dog-whistling and relentless re-litigating of Supreme Court feuds of the past, marred what could have been not only a reset for the Senate, but a significant national moment in seeing the first Black woman ascend to the pinnacle of American jurisprudence with strong support.

Instead it was an escalation of what has come before it in recent years: toxic partisanship, bitter attacks and nasty questioning full of innuendo about the supposed character failings of a nominee who will likely carry the scars across the street to the high court.

“Do you believe child predators are misunderstood?” Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, asked in one of the many loaded queries aimed at defining Judge Jackson as some sort of pedophile enabler, despite years of lauded service on the bench.

“Could you fairly judge a Catholic?” asked Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, one of Judge Jackson’s main antagonists despite the fact that he had voted to promote her to a highly influential appellate court just last year, one of only three Republicans to do so.

“Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids that the babies are racist?” asked Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who also took it upon himself to lecture Judge Jackson, whose parents had attended segregated schools, about the teachings of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.

She was questioned about the definition of “woman,” at a time when transgender rights are a hot-button issue, and grilled repeatedly about her views of antiracism and critical race theory.

If there were any Supreme Court confirmation that could have gone differently, it was this one.

Judge Jackson is a historic nominee, rated as highly qualified even by her critics. She has been vetted and confirmed three times by the Judiciary Committee and the Senate, the last time less than a year ago for the appeals court post. Her approval would not change the ideological makeup of the court, lowering the stakes of her confirmation considerably.

Republican leaders had been determined to show that they could be better than Democrats in challenging the nominee of the president of the other party in a respectful way. And they feared the tableau of white Republican men ganging up on a Black woman would not sit well in an election year.Senator Ted Cruz pointing to a visual aid about Judge Jackson’s sentencing records. Democrats argue that Republicans grossly distorted her record in a handful of cases.Credit…T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

But Republicans could not help themselves. In long days of questioning, many of them tried to destroy Judge Jackson, or at least drag her through the muck on her way to a confirmation they knew was certain if Democrats remained united behind her.

In the end, the allure of media attention coupled with the strong gravitational pull of the right fringe of their party proved too much for many Republicans to resist. The stakes of a lifetime seat on a court that will decide some of the most polarizing issues in a divided nation have become too high, the politics surrounding the court too potent.

Plus, Republicans continue to seek revenge for Democrats’ treatment of their party’s nominees dating back 35 years, and are particularly livid at what they consider the vicious attacks on Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh by Democrats during his confirmation four years ago.

“There is this need to punch back,” said Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, bemoaning the steep deterioration in the confirmation climate and the difficulty in correcting course.

But Justice Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault by someone who agreed to testify under oath at his confirmation hearing, a far different circumstance from that of Judge Jackson, who faced a barrage of questions that suggested she was a radical on social issues and a coddler of child sex abusers. And though the Kavanaugh hearings were explosive, Democrats at least agreed to hold them, unlike Republicans who had blockaded President Barack Obama’s 2016 nominee, Merrick Garland.

This time around, Democrats were incensed, though not surprised, by the assault on Judge Jackson via a Republican presentation of sentences in child sexual abuse cases that has been widely discredited, not to mention the accusatory questions, frequent interruptions and lectures to which they subjected her. Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, said he found many of the Republican attacks “cruel and unfair.”

“You faced insults here that were shocking to me,” said Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey and the only Black member of the committee, who then paused before adding, “Well, actually not shocking.”

Democrats argue that Republicans took advantage of the complexity of the law and sentencing around sexual abuse cases to grossly distort Judge Jackson’s record in a handful of cases. They note that Republicans on the panel voted for Republican-nominated judges who sent child sex offenders to jail for terms lower than recommended by the government and never raised a peep about it.

“It is hypocrisy with a capital H,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut.

Even after the questioning concluded, Republicans weren’t finished. Led by Mr. Cruz, some were demanding a delay in any committee vote until the confidential sentencing documents in each of the child sex abuse cases Judge Jackson handled were turned over for review — still seeking more ammunition against her. Democrats shot down that option, leaving Republicans threatening to boycott any committee vote and stall the nomination.

That idea seemed to fizzle when Republicans realized how it would look. A committee vote is now set for April 4.

Republican members of the committee appeared to have few, if any, regrets about their treatment of Judge Jackson.

“I don’t think it was that brutal,” said Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, who referred to Judge Jackson as a “left-wing activist.” “We were just questioning her judgment.”

Doing so dovetails neatly with Republicans’ strategy for the coming midterm elections, in which they plan to use rising crime as a cudgel against Democrats. They saw Judge Jackson’s nomination — and her history as a public defender — as a way to try to capitalize on that.

In announcing his opposition to Judge Jackson on Thursday, less than 24 hours after her testimony ended, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, noted that she “gave certain terrible kinds of criminals light sentences” and that the nation is currently “in the midst of a national violent crime wave and exploding illegal immigration.”

Senator Richard J. Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who chaired the committee hearings, immediately responded to Mr. McConnell, saying, “Republicans are testing their messages for the November election.”

He also said it would be bad for the nation if Judge Jackson failed to win any Republican votes. Like many others, he found the confirmation process to be more of an ordeal than a legitimate inquiry, considering the toll it takes on a nominee who has been a highly celebrated individual right up to the moment the Senate bears down.

“I think we ought to try to change the process and make it a little more humane,” Mr. Durbin said.

Where this leaves the state of Supreme Court reviews is hard to know. The Jackson hearing seemed to open a new frontier in vilification by focusing so heavily on her sentencing history, meaning any sentences handed down by future nominees will now become fodder for attack.

Some senators took the hopeful view that this episode might finally force a reassessment. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, said the hearings had showcased “some truly poisonous, cynical behavior that trawled through the absolute bottom of what the Senate has done in dark times past.”

“Let’s hope that that was the low point, and we move back from that low point,” he said.

They don’t have to follow the rules:

On Wednesday, we learned that Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson would recuse herself from a major case involving Harvard University, where she serves on the governing board. On Thursday, we learned that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife played an even more significant role in events pertaining to cases he has declined to recuse himself from.

The Post’s Bob Woodward and CBS News’s Robert Costa report that Virginia Thomas, who goes by “Ginni,” exchanged at least 29 text messages with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, as both of them strategized about overturning the 2020 election result. It’s the first time we have gotten direct evidence that Ginni Thomas advised the White House in this effort.

Why is that significant? And what new light does it cast on Justice Thomas’s decision not to recuse himself from 2020 election cases?Advertisement

These questions have long lingered around Thomas, given his wife’s prominence in Republican and conservative politics. He has never recused himself from a case because of her. But this case presents perhaps the most controversial intersection, to date, between his wife’s work and his actions on the court. (Asked about the matter on Friday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) declined to call on Thomas to recuse himself from Jan. 6 cases.)

We know considerably more now than we did when these questions were first raised about Thomas’s non-recusal. The Post’s Michael Kranish in late January noted that Ginni Thomas had signed a letter in December 2021 attacking the House Jan. 6 committee. Shortly afterward, her husband became the only justice to dissent when the court granted access to Trump’s White House records. Ginni Thomas has also since confirmed she attended the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington that preceded the Jan. 6 insurrection. (She said she left early because it was cold, and that she didn’t play a part in organizing it.)

It now appears Justice Thomas voted against disclosing information about an effort his wife was directly engaged in. It’s also plausible (though not yet established) that he voted against disclosing his wife’s contacts with the White House — whether knowingly or not.

The texts were on Meadows’s personal phone, and they were among the more than 2,300 texts he voluntarily shared with the committee before he stopped cooperating with it. In other words, these 29 texts weren’t among the materials Justice Thomas voted against giving the committee. (Thomas was hospitalized this week for an infection; the Supreme Court reported that he was discharged Friday morning.)Advertisement

But the text messages indicate that Ginni Thomas’s contact with the White House went beyond these texts to Meadows’s personal phone.

As Woodward and Costa report:Meadows might not have been Thomas’s only contact inside the Trump White House that week. On Nov. 13, she texted Meadows about her outreach to “Jared,” potentially a reference to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser. She wrote, “Just forwarded to yr gmail an email I sent Jared this am. Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved.” The messages provided to the House select committee do not show a response by Meadows.Kushner did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s entirely possible that whatever communications Ginni Thomas had with Kushner or anyone else in the White House didn’t involve official White House accounts. Kushner was among the top White House aides who the House Oversight Committee said in 2019 had used personal email accounts for official business (despite Trump having decried Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server). And aides often use personal accounts for political work. It would also seem advisable for those involved in an effort to subvert democracy to use personal accounts, for increasingly obvious reasons.

But it is also possible that such communications found their way to official White House accounts.Advertisement

Meadows’s emails to Justice Department officials sharing various election conspiracies often came from his official White House account, for example. But the chains began by Meadows sending something to his White House account from another email address — apparently a personal one. It seems likely that he forwarded the emails to his White House account because he didn’t want to email DOJ officials from a personal account. But it raises questions about what the email chains, handed to the Jan. 6 committee by the Supreme Court, might contain.

And even if those emails don’t contain direct communications with Ginni Thomas, they could contain references to her actions, or details about events that involved her.

Regardless of whether Justice Thomas actually wound up voting against the disclosure of any communications his wife had with the White House, it certainly ratchets up questions about conflicts of interest. Supreme Court justices have sole authority to make recusal decisions, but the standard for federal judges recusing themselves is if their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”Advertisement

Thomas, as Kranish wrote, has generally considered his wife’s work in causes related to Supreme Court cases to be a nonissue — or at least not rising to that standard.

He did recuse himself in the mid-90s from a case involving Virginia Military Institute, because his son attended the school. But that was one of just 32 times he has recused himself in 28 years on the court, according to the nonpartisan advocacy group Fix the Court. As with other justices, most of his recusals came early in his tenure, because of conflicts with his previous work. But Thomas has recused himself far fewer times than the average justice on a court that generally features around 200 recusals per term from the nine justices.

Perhaps the most analogous recusal question involving Thomas came in 2011, when 74 House Democrats wrote a letter calling on him to recuse himself from a key Obamacare case. They cited his wife’s work lobbying against the law. But Ginni Thomas wasn’t involved in any group that was actually party to the lawsuit. Justice Thomas spoke out at the time, saying his critics “seem bent on undermining” the institution of the court.Advertisement

This latest situation seems different: This time, she appears to have engaged directly with key figures at the center of the Jan. 6 committee’s work — and on the topic at hand.

Compare that with Jackson’s recusal in the affirmative action case, which is similar to how Thomas handled the VMI case. Legal experts said she could have opted not to recuse if she felt she played no role in the policy — and there is no evidence that she played a role in it — but her tie to Harvard certainly raised the possibility that her “impartiality might be reasonably questioned.”

At the very least, Thomas opted not to recuse himself from a case that could reflect quite poorly on his spouse. The text messages revealed by Woodward and Costa suggest his wife was not only trafficking in bizarre conspiracy theories about the election, but was strategizing with White House officials about the very type of legal claims now at the center of the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation. And that investigation is one the committee has said could reveal something amounting to a criminal conspiracy.

Ginni Thomas’s lawyer, George Terwilliger III, maintained Thursday that “nothing about the text messages presents any legal issues.” That might be the case, but they certainly present plenty of other issues.

I just heard a TV lawyer saying that Supreme Court justices are above the law. Apparently that’s so.

The only people who have influence over him are his fellow justices and I’m not especially hopeful that they will do anything to rein him in on these cases. It’s insane that his wife is involved in these extremist causes but we’ve known that for years. And we also know that if any liberal justices’ spouses were involved in far left causes they would be vilified in the most vicious manner and probably impeached. But that’s how these things go.

I have written many pieces over the last few years about Donald Trump’s criminal culpability and I’ve always believed that if he’s never held accountable for any of it — either his shady business dealings or the numerous crimes against the Constitution that he committed while he was president — the nation may never recover. Trump’s corruption is so blatant that if he gets away with all of it, it’s impossible to see how there can be any more pretense of equal justice under the law.

Having said that, I’ve also written more than once that I’m just not optimistic.

Trump floods the zone with so much bizarre and unconventional behavior for a public figure that it becomes difficult to discern the difference between what is criminal, what is unethical and what is merely performance. In fact, his behavior is so extraordinary that I think it’s convinced many of his followers that he must not be guilty of doing anything nefarious simply because he is so open about it. It’s a neat trick.Advertisement:

I suspect this also spooks the legal system. He cultivated a combative public persona long before he entered politics. There was plenty of evidence that he was doing some extremely corrupt business deals, from running cons on unsuspecting marks to money laundering to doing backchannel deals with terrorist states for years. But there was a sense that nobody could be as ridiculously flamboyant as he was and still be a criminal. His clownishness was a form of shield.

As a politician, he’s exchanged that for something much more powerful: tens of millions of committed followers who have, in turn, cowed out the entire Republican establishment and allowed Trump to beat back two impeachments. And then he leveraged that power to incite a violent insurrection in which those followers stormed the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

He has already threatened to use that leverage again. At a January rally in Texas he bemoaned the legal investigations that plague him:

If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt. They’re trying to put me in jail. These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick. They’re mentally sick. They’re going after me without any protection of my rights by the Supreme Court or most other courts.

If you think it’s strange that he’s calling prosecutors who are investigating him, racists, it’s because he’s referring to the New York Attorney General Tish James, the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Georgia’s Fulton County DA Fani Wallace, all of whom are Black. He doesn’t use a dog whistle, he uses a bullhorn. He wants everyone to hear him, especially those prosecutors.

As far as we know, the civil case being pursued by James over Trump’s business dealings is ongoing as is the investigation into Trump’s pressure campaign to get officials to “find” enough votes in Georgia to overturn the election in 2020. But the criminal investigation in Manhattan, with which James’ office was cooperating, has apparently fizzled, causing the two prosecutors who had been leading the probe to quit last month.

That case was considered by many to be one of the most important because it was looking into some of the practices used by Trump to fraudulently obtain loans from banks by over-inflating his assets and then cheat on his taxes by underestimating them. Before he left office, the previous DA indicted Trump’s COO, Allen Weisselberg, and it had been anticipated that he would turn state’s evidence and testify against his boss. That has not happened, which has led many legal observers to assume that without him they couldn’t make the case that Trump knowingly committed fraud. Trump famously doesn’t write anything down and is known to speak in a Godfather-style code so without a first hand witness, it was believed they probably didn’t have the goods.

The New York Times released the resignation letter of one of the prosecutors Mark F. Pomerantz this week which throws some cold water on all those assumptions. We had learned from previous reports that when Bragg had assumed office after the last election that he had not been particularly interested in the case and had pretty much decided not to pursue it from the beginning. Pomerantz’s letter makes it clear that he thought otherwise — and that Trump committed “numerous felonies.”

Pomerantz wrote, “The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes — he did,” and he said that he and Carey R. Dunne, the other senior prosecutor on the inquiry who resigned along with him, had planned to charge Trump with falsifying his financial statements which is a felony in New York. He said, “whatever the risks of bringing the case may be, I am convinced that a failure to prosecute will pose much greater risks in terms of public confidence in the fair administration of justice.”

According to the Times, Bragg didn’t believe they could prove that Trump “knowingly” inflated his assets, proof of yet another of his slick maneuvers to evade justice.

Too many people believe that Trump is so eccentric that he probably believes all the lies he tells and has no idea when he’s behaving in a criminal manner. I’m sure there’s some truth to that, but I’m not sure why it should matter. The man had the most powerful job on earth. I think the law should expect him to know the difference between reality and fantasy.

Both Bragg and Pomerantz are the very best the American legal profession has to offer. Pomerantz is a specialist in white-collar crime with years of experience as a federal prosecutor. Bragg is equally qualified, with a similar background as an assistant US Attorney and Deputy NY Attorney General. There’s no reason to believe that either are corrupt.

But it’s easy to imagine that, despite the fact that it pertains to Trump’s private business dealings, Bragg looked at the risk of taking on what is inherently a political case, thought of the immense blowback from Republicans and figured it just wasn’t worth it for the crime of falsifying financial statements which is apparently common among the rich and shameless. And I’m sure it didn’t escape Bragg’s notice that over all the years Trump has been threatening to “lock up” Hillary Clinton, his opponents have been screaming that putting political rivals in jail is something that only banana republics do. Is there even the slightest chance that Trump and his minions wouldn’t be throwing that exact line right back at them without the slightest shame?

In my mind, none of that is any excuse, although I can understand the dilemma.

Trump is a corrupt politician, a criminal businessman and a danger to our democratic system. I think it’s outrageous that he keeps escaping serious consequences for any of that. But I’m afraid that even after all we witnessed and continue to learn about Trump’s assault on our democracy and the threat he poses, there still isn’t the will to stop him. It’s clear that a report from the January 6th Committee or a civil case that costs him some money and some time isn’t going to get the job done. Let’s hope somebody, somewhere has the guts to hold him legally accountable.

Salon

There we go. Russian propaganda is now saying Hunter Biden is the man funding the Ukrainian biolabs.

Sputnik is citing Russia's head of Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops, so it's the government line.

They're tying up all of the plot points for the season finale. pic.twitter.com/LAl5TUoH2B

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) March 24, 2022

Aaaaand:

🤦🏻‍♂️ https://t.co/Fy9sdsThp2

— #Relentless MVPnav 🧃🍊🚂⚾️ (@PNav57) March 25, 2022

You’ll get a fair trial followed by a first class hanging.
– Judge Roy Bean (apocryphal)

Not even Judge Roy Bean’s answer from Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would have satisfied Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. They would have accused the accomplished Black jurist of being soft on crime nevertheless. That was, after all, their prearranged line of attack. That and tickling the lizard brains of their pedophilia-fixated QAnon base.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, in particular, was not taking an answer for an answer when he asked Jackson to explain her sentencing in a child porn case Republicans had exhumed from her over 500 judicial opinions. He asked her the same questions again and again. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his Fox News sound bite and fundraising appeals on depend upon his not understanding it.

Jackson displays empathy. No wonder Republicans have trouble comprehending her.

“Traditionally considered an admirable attribute, the ability to empathize with another’s plight has become a touchstone for GOP opposition to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson,” Lisa Mascaro writes for the Associated Press:

Jackson, Republicans have argued, shows compassion for criminal defendants she represented as a lawyer, and they have questioned whether that compassion extends to victims. They say she sentences criminals — in particular, child pornography defendants — too leniently as a judge, despite fact checks of her record that show she’s largely in line with protocol in most cases. They worry Jackson’s empathy will cloud her judgment on the high court.

“It seems as though you’re a very kind person, and that there’s at least a level of empathy that enters into your treatment of a defendant that some could view as maybe beyond what some of us would be comfortable with,” said Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C.

No, really!?

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said he was looking for a justice “who will make decisions based on the law, not based on personal experiences or preferences, not on empathy.”

I kept hoping a Democrat would ask Jackson whether politicians who gave support to Jan. 6 insurrectionists are disqualified from holding office under the 14th Amendment, Section 3. Not that Jackson would answer a question that might (one hopes) come before the court. But it would have been fun for a Democrat to ask with Hawley, Cruz, Cotton, et al. sitting across the room. Alas.

“Chairman Dick Durbin’s inability to control some of the most shocking bullying and abuse from Cruz, Graham, Tom Cotton, and Hawley left observers speechless,” complained Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick. She declared herself not just disappointed but “mystified” by Democrats’ inability or unwillingness to push back against the abuse:

Take my word for this one thing: If you have been subject to abuse, bullying, and intimidation, what you really don’t need to hear from people in power is that they think you are “brave,” or that you’re modeling perseverance and grace. What you really want is for someone to stand beside you and take a punch—or throw one. Yet beyond a handful of such moments, and notably Booker’s final speech, virtually everything Democrats did felt insufficient to the moment. More than that it felt inexplicable.

Not to those in the understanding voters business.

“I subject myself to weekly focus groups — have for a decade — and field constant surveys,” tweeted Anat Shenker-Osorio. “Voters’ chief beef with Dems? That they are slow and weak, not getting stuff done and passing good bills. Excessive ‘wokeness’ barely makes the board.”

I lost faith in Durbin in 2005.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

War propaganda from both sides of the conflict in Ukraine includes overestimates of enemy casualties and friendly losses. Early reports that as many as 1,300 people were trapped or killed in the bombed Mariupol theater have been revised down to about 300 (still unconfirmed). Reports from Eastern Ukraine that Russia is forcibly relocating civilians to Russia may be inflated too, but are nonetheless unsettling (Associated Press):

While millions of Ukrainians have fled west, Ukraine accused Moscow of forcibly removing hundreds of thousands of civilians from shattered cities to Russia to pressure Kyiv to give up. Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s ombudsperson, said 402,000 people, including 84,000 children, had been taken against their will into Russia, where some may be used as “hostages” to pressure Kyiv to surrender.

The Kremlin gave nearly identical numbers for those who have been relocated, but said they were from predominantly Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine and wanted to go to Russia. Pro-Moscow separatists have been fighting for control for nearly eight years in those regions, where many people have supported close ties to Russia.

In former Russian and Soviet republics, fear of Russians knocking on your door “and putting you on a train for Siberia” is embedded in cultural memory. Moscow’s suggestion that relocation today is any more voluntary is doubtful.

NATO is pondering ways to apply even more pain to the Russian dictator prosecuting this war without triggering WWIII and spreading (and multiplying) the human suffering and destruction to alliance countries.

Catherine Rampell argues in the Washington Post that relocating Russians is one lever NATO still might press to put a hurtin’ on Putin.

“We’ve weakened its financial system. We’ve stopped buying Russian oil, caviar, vodka. We’ve vowed to find and seize Russian oligarchs’ yachts and apartments. But we haven’t, to date, gone after the country’s most precious resource: its people,” Rampell writes:

I don’t mean attacking the Russian people. I mean welcoming them here, particularly if they have significant economic and national security value to Russia.

We should start by expediting the most compelling humanitarian cases in the region. In Russia, these include dissidents and journalists risking their necks to challenge Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war. But we should also actively court those who might be less political: the technical, creative, high-skilled workers upon whom Russia’s economic (and military) fortunes depend.

Already, Russian talent is rushing for the exits, in what might represent the seventh great wave of Russian emigration over the past century.

An estimated 50,000 to 70,000 IT specialists alone have recently left, according to a Russian technology trade group, which predicts another 100,000 might leave by the end of April. Others in the outbound stampede include entrepreneurs, researchers and artists. The pace of this brain drain is especially impressive given how difficult sanctions have made it to buy plane tickets or otherwise conduct transactions across borders, as well as how expensive travel has become. The Russian government hasn’t yet blocked emigration, but it is trying to slow the flow by interrogating those who leave or offering enticements to tech workers who stay.

Russians are fleeing for multiple reasons. Some object to their government’s actions. Many are likely motivated by the threats to their livelihoods and freedoms, resulting from both Western sanctions and Putin’s domestic crackdown. Day-to-day work has become more challenging, foreign-based tech firms have pulled out of the country, and basic websites have been blocked. Getting paid has also become difficult, thanks to sanctions affecting the financial system.

The rest is detail. Consider it a bio-economic weapon that while harming Putin might also benefit our own economy, Rampell suggests.

It might even work. Until Putin loads his brain trust onto trains headed east.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.

The messages — 29 in all — reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results.

On Nov. 10, after news organizations had projected Joe Biden the winner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

When Meadows wrote to Thomas on Nov. 24, the White House chief of staff invoked God to describe the effort to overturn the election. “This is a fight of good versus evil,” Meadows wrote. “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”

Thomas replied: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!”

It is unclear to whom Thomas was referring.

The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results — and how receptive and grateful Meadows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stated goals in the messages was for lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team.

Cool, cool.

This is fine because as we know, two Supreme Court Justices ruled in favor of George W. Bush in Bush vs Gore even though they were appointed by his father and three current Supreme Court Justices worked for George W. Bush on the case. So there is no such thing as a conflict of interest for Republicans on the Supreme Court. That’s just the way it is because they are all basically political operatives.

I loved this question from Der Spiegel. The answer was exactly right:

"No election is worth my not doing exactly what I think is the right thing. Not a joke. I'm too long in the tooth to fool with this any longer." — Biden pic.twitter.com/FnMUaXrutM

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 24, 2022

I have always thought there was an element of yolo in Biden at this stage of life. He has no further ambitions and I think it’s clear that he has no hope for his offspring to enter politics now that Beau Biden is gone. This is it for him.

Now, maybe his judgment is flawed or you hate his philosophy, that’s fair enough. But you can’t say that he’s trimming his sails for political reasons. And who knows? Maybe he’s gained some wisdom over the years.

This truly is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen the Republicans do and that’s saying something. It goes way beyond their anti-democratic tactics to something extremely dark and occult. They have no limits:

The online world of adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory sprang into action almost as soon as Senator Josh Hawley tweeted his alarm: that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Biden administration’s Supreme Court nominee, had handed down sentences below the minimum recommended in federal guidelines for possessing images of child sexual abuse.

“An apologist for child molesters,” the QAnon supporter Zak Paine declared in a video the next day, on March 17, asserting without evidence that Democrats were repeatedly “elevating pedophiles and people who can change the laws surrounding punishment” for pedophiles.

By Wednesday, as Judge Jackson appeared for the third day before the Senate Judiciary Committee, claims that she was lenient toward people charged with possessing the illegal imagery had emerged as a recurring theme in her questioning by Republicans.

“Every judge who does what you are doing is making it easier for the children to be exploited,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, picking up the line of attack.

Never mind that those sentences did not come up at Judge Jackson’s confirmation hearing last year to a federal appeals court, that other judicial nominees have faced no questions about similar sentencing decisions, or that a former federal prosecutor called the allegations “meritless to the point of demagoguery” in the conservative National Review.

The line of attack has set off a new debate over the Republican Party’s stance toward QAnon. A White House spokesman this week accused Mr. Hawley of pandering to the conspiracy theory’s believers among his party’s rank and file, calling his comments an “embarrassing QAnon-signaling smear.” Conservatives, in return, blasted the Biden administration for invoking the specter of QAnon for its own political agenda, to fire up the Democratic base without addressing the questions.

“Left Invokes QAnon After Josh Hawley Exposes Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Soft Record on Child Sex Offenders,” declared a headline on the right-wing website Breitbart that was widely shared this week in QAnon circles.

A spokesman for Senator Hawley declined to comment on his motivations.

Although few QAnon followers appeared to take notice of Judge Jackson’s sentencing record before Senator Hawley’s tweets, her judicial career had touched the roots of the conspiracy theory: an earlier internet myth known as Pizzagate.

That debunked theory held that Satan-worshiping Democrats were trafficking children out of the basement of a Washington restaurant, and in 2017 a believer armed with an assault rifle stormed in and fired his weapon. Judge Jackson, as a district court judge, sentenced him to four years in prison, saying his actions “left psychological wreckage.”

The QAnon conspiracy theory was born a few months later when an anonymous writer — often signing as Q — elaborated on the discredited myth that a cabal of top Democrats was abusing children. Q purported to be a top official close to President Donald J. Trump and asserted that the president was waging a secret war against the cabal.

Slogans about protecting the children became catchphrases that QAnon adherents used to identify one another, and their bizarre fantasy — initially encouraged by far-right news outlets, then promoted by a ring of social media influencers — appeared to spread widely among Trump supporters. At least two Republican lawmakers elected in 2020 had made statements supportive of QAnon, and prosecutors say that many people involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol subscribed to the theory.

Among those now echoing the Republican allegations about the judicial nominee, in fact, is Ron Watkins, a former website administrator who is widely believed to have played a major role in writing the anonymous Q posts. Mr. Watkins, who has denied any part in the Q messages, is running for the Republican nomination to an Arizona congressional seat, largely on the strength of his QAnon association; this week, he qualified for the ballot.

“Judge Jackson is a pedophile-enabler,” Mr. Watkins wrote Wednesday on social media. “Any senator who votes to confirm her nomination is also a pedophile-enabler.”

QAnon Telegram channels on Wednesday grew increasingly agitated. “She has committed unbelievable crimes against humanity with her judgeship,” one user wrote. “If she gets confirmed the victims remain victims & trapped in the misery bestowed on them,” said another. Some talked of violence.

Polls suggest that QAnon supporters have continued to make up a significant portion of the Republican base even after Mr. Trump’s departure from office contradicted Q’s predictions. One poll last October found that about 60 percent of Trump voters had heard of QAnon, and 3 out of 10 of those Republicans viewed it favorably.

Hawley is the one who first telegraphed that he was going to this dark place in the hearings. Most people dismissed it and when Andrew McCarthy at National Review chastised Hawley for doing it and it was assumed that the Republicans on the committee would stay hands off. It’s disgusting and they know it.

But it turns out they don’t care. Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee joined Hawley in smearing Brown Jackson in the hearings, giving the QAnon freaks a new focus for their lunacy and ensuring that GOP candidates have a shrill dogwhistle to use against Democrats in the fall: “pedophile-enabler.” It’s as low as it gets. And all the Republicans just sat there and let them do it. They think it will help them win.

These are the people everyone is telling Democrats they must reach out to in order to win elections. The Real Americans don’t like all this “woke” stuff so Democrats must disavow Black Lives Matter and LGBT rights and get behind censoring any teaching of black history or LGBT issues in public schools. They need to accept the fate of incest and rape victims who will soon be required to bear their assaulter’s children. They must allow people to infect them with a deadly disease because they don’t believe in vaccines or masks. And most of all they must be tolerant and understanding of people who call them pedophiles and blood-drinking satanists.

Meanwhile, the GOP establishment is openly appealing to those people and mainstreaming the most disgusting, bullshit conspiracy theories to use against the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court. It’s only a matter of time before they start pushing Frazzledrip. (If you haven’t heard of it, click the link. It’s really something.) Clearly, there is no bottom.

This is just depressing:

There is widespread public support for sanctions imposed by the United States on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, including a ban on importing Russian oil.  However, President Biden has yet to see praise for his efforts to isolate Russia and aid Ukraine.  Fifty-six percent of Americans think Biden’s response has not been tough enough.

I would love to know just what the fuck they think he should be doing? Calling Putin “little rocket man” and threatening nuclear war?

Unfortunately, you’ll notice that it isn’t just Republicans. 43% of Democrats think Biden should be “tougher” whatever that means.

The fact is that Biden has done an excellent job managing this crisis. He’s kept the coalition together, managed these massive sanctions while being mindful of the fact that any misstep can bring on WWIII. These people who want more “toughness” are being ridiculous.

But then it appears that they are just upset with anything Biden does:

If that many Democrats continue to believe Biden is inept in every conceivable way, I think we can pretty much count on getting that brilliant, very stable genius back in 2024.

I think people are being ridiculous, personally. Biden was handed a mountain of problems and he’s doing fine. Today it was reported that we have the lowest unemployment numbers since 1969, for instance. He has demonstrated steady, competent stewardship of foreign policy at a time of great danger.

With 30% of the country refusing to get vaccinated, global supply chain issues causing inflation, a major land war in Europe and a country that is awash in disinformation and culture war propaganda. And that’s on top of the nihilistic MAGA cult that calls itself the GOP and a couple of Democratic Senators determined to sabotage his legislative agenda. It’s not easy

I believe he has done a very good job so far under these difficult circumstances and I’m impatient with this idea that he should somehow have waved a magic wand to fix the mess he inherited. People need to get a grip, Democrats especially, who should realize that they are looking at the orange monster coming back if they don’t.