Like his Dear Leader, he believes he can make something real just by saying it
The opposite is true. Twitter is doing just fine and his dying white elephant of a social media platform is pathetic. Trump doesn’t even post on it.
"what digby sez..."
Month: April 2022
Ketanji Brown Jackson becomes the first Black woman to serve on the high court
This is an awesome moment and a rare bright spot in today’s politics.Even under difficult circumstances, progress happens:
The Senate confirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court on Thursday, making her the first-ever Black woman and former public defender to serve on the nation’s highest court.
Jackson, 51, was confirmed in a 53-47 vote. Every Democrat voted for her, along with three Republicans: Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine) and Mitt Romney (Utah).
Her confirmation seals a promise by President Joe Biden, who vowed as a candidate to pick a Black woman for the Supreme Court.
With Jackson on the court, white men will not be a majority of justices for the first time ever.
Two big milestones. It’s long past time.
Tucker Carlson’s favorite right wing authoritarian Viktor Orban handily won re-election last weekend and it was hardly unexpected. He has successfully tilted the playing field to such an extent that it would be very difficult to beat him. But that doesn’t mean his voters weren’t real. They were. They like him. And this right wing movement is gaining steam.
We’ve already experienced our first brush with the movement with the presidency of Donald Trump. And they aren’t done yet. If the polling is correct, it appears that the chaos of his four years combined with the stress of the pandemic and resulting economic destabilization has opened the door for the right to make yet another comeback here at home.
Maybe you can chalk that up to each country’s unique characteristics. But how about this? Arthur Goldhammer writes about what’s happening in France:
Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term as president is drawing to a close. Most observers believe that Macron will be the first French president to win reelection since Jacques Chirac in 2002. That election is remembered, however, not for Chirac’s victory but for the shocking surprise that made it inevitable: Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right xenophobic demagogue and antisemite, outpolled the Socialist Lionel Jospin by a hair’s breadth in the first round, thus winning the right to square off against Chirac in round two. The prospect of a Le Pen presidency so stunned the French that even leftist voters “held their noses” and voted for their old nemesis Chirac, who handily won reelection with more than 82 percent of the vote.
Times have changed, and so have the French. Odds are that there will once again be a Le Pen in the second round to face a sitting president. But in 20 years, the once solid wall that stood between the far right and the Elysée has crumbled. Polls still give Macron an edge: IFOP, for example, has him defeating Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s daughter and successor, with about 53.5 percent of the vote. But 53.5 percent is a far cry from 82 percent. As Macron himself noted in his only major public rally of this campaign, his predicted margin of victory is now similar to the margins predicted for Britain to remain in the European Union and for Hillary Clinton to beat Donald Trump. Turnout is predicted to be unusually low, and anti-Macron voters are far more passionate about unseating him than Macron supporters are about keeping him in office.
So an upset is possible. If it were to happen, it would be far more shocking than the elder Le Pen’s breakthrough in 2002. In the midst of the Ukraine War, a Le Pen victory would install in the Elysée a candidate who has made a point of her sympathy for Vladimir Putin and who has borrowed from Russian banks to keep her campaign afloat. It would bring the far right into power in the heart of the EU. How did we get to this point?
Emmanuel Macron has never been a popular president. In 2017, he led all first-round candidates with 24 percent of the vote, and his base of support has barely wavered since then. This year, polls show him doing slightly better, with about 28 percent approval, after receiving a rally-round-the-flag boost at the outset of the Ukraine War.
Even during the darkest period of his presidency, when the so-called Gilets Jaunes, or Yellow Vests, were protesting every weekend across the country, Macron’s base remained constant, neither expanding nor contracting. He is fond of comparing French society to a team of mountain climbers, in which those “at the head of the rope” lift those who follow—a French version of the “trickle-down theory,” if you will. And those at the head of the rope return the compliment: France’s well-educated, prosperous managerial and administrative class constitutes the bulk of Macron’s support. His abolition of the wealth tax, labor market reforms, and promise in his next term to raise the retirement age to 65 have endeared him to business leaders. Eric Woerth, who served as budget minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, recently abandoned his center-right Republican Party and announced his support for Macron. He is just one of many former Républicains to do so. Republican voters have followed their leaders in transferring their support to Macron, more than compensating for his loss of left-wing support compared with 2017.
Macron has thus become the dominant figure of the center right. This accounts for the failure of Valérie Pécresse, the official candidate of the Republicans, to gain any traction. Pécresse’s background is similar to Macron’s: Both are products of France’s elite training system who held important administrative and ministerial posts before rising to executive positions (Pécresse is currently president of the Île-de-France region). Both staked out positions independent of their nominal parties: Pécresse quit the Republicans to protest what she saw as their turn to the hard right, just as Macron turned on his patron François Hollande. But unlike Macron, Pécresse returned to the fold to win her party primary and has since espoused some of the more extreme positions that had earlier prompted her withdrawal. This opportunistic flip-flopping backfired: First-round polls currently place her fifth with a dismal 9.5 percent, behind the two far-right candidates (Le Pen has 21.5 percent and Eric Zemmour 11 percent) as well as the candidate of the far left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon (15 percent).
This extreme dispersion of the opposition has served Macron well. Indeed, before Zemmour announced his candidacy, Le Pen seemed likely to dominate the first round, with polls putting her as high as 33 percent compared to Macron’s 25. But Zemmour, who made his name as a TV personality with a gift for polemic and a vociferous hostility to immigrants that earned him three convictions for “incitement of racial hatred,” claimed half of Le Pen’s base in the days immediately after his announcement. His campaign, like Macron’s in 2017, had the benefit of novelty, which assured him a disproportionate amount of media coverage and, for a short time, a small lead over Le Pen.
While Le Pen’s working-class base stuck with her (her Rassemblement National has for some time been France’s leading working-class party), Zemmour attracted many older, better-educated, and more affluent and more traditionalist Catholic R.N. supporters, who responded to his nostalgic evocation of la grande nation of yesteryear. Intoxicated by his own rhetoric, however, he went a bridge too far, embracing the theory of the “great replacement” promoted by writer Renaud Camus (and endorsed by Trump advisor Steve Bannon)—the idea that immigrants of color have moved to France with the intention of overwhelming the white population by producing large numbers of babies. This was a step that Le Pen studiously avoided. Frightened, some of his early supporters reverted to Le Pen, whose toned-down rhetoric made her seem the “safer” choice. Zemmour thus inadvertently ensured the success of Marine Le Pen’s efforts to “de-demonize” her party, purging it of her father’s vitriolic legacy (both Jean-Marie Le Pen, still kicking at age 94, and his granddaughter Marion Maréchal endorsed Zemmour).
Meanwhile, the left ignominiously collapsed. The Socialist Party, which never recovered from the debacle of François Hollande’s presidency, is polling at a historic low of 1.5 percent behind its candidate, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris. The Greens, unlike their counterparts in Germany, have failed to expand their appeal and are stuck at 4.5 percent behind Yannick Jadot, while the Communist Fabien Roussel, an affable fellow who stoutly defends the French bistro staples of beefsteak and wine against vegetarian and abstemious critics, has 3.5 percent. With none of these three candidates likely to pass the 5 percent bar needed to secure reimbursement for campaign expenses, leftist voters hoping to see Macron obliged to debate a left-wing candidate rather than Le Pen in a runoff have been trying to persuade themselves that a vote for Jean-Luc Mélenchon will be un vote utile rather than a wasted ballot. As in 2017, the absence of any other viable left alternative has generated a surge for Mélenchon in the final weeks of the campaign, but with 15 percent against Le Pen’s 21.5 percent, this is unlikely to be enough. Mélenchon, who has reinvented himself as an eco-socialist while remaining an egocentrist running a one-man show, has already drained the reservoirs of left-wing support and is unlikely to pick up enough votes in the remaining days to close the six-point gap separating him from Le Pen.
The election will therefore come down to two things. First, there will be a debate between the two survivors of the first round, in all probability Macron and Le Pen. If this debate is a rerun of 2017, Macron will be home free: Everyone agrees that in their previous confrontation he humiliated the candidate of the far right. The president is a skilled debater, a master of the issues, and, as Europe’s leading representative in the current confrontation with Russia, in a position to embarrass his opponent over her past support for Vladimir Putin.
But political debates turn on optics more often than on issues. In 2017, Le Pen got herself into a muddle over a half-baked proposal to dump the euro. Things could go differently this time. Macron’s greatest weakness is his inability to keep his arrogance in check, especially when confronting intellectual “inferiors.” If Le Pen can lure him into a display of contempt, she might just come out on top.
The other thing Macron has to fear is Mélenchon, or more precisely his voters. Although the leader of France Unbowed has little chance of making it to the second round himself, some think that there is a possibility that a majority of his supporters would prefer “the fascist” to “the neoliberal”—to put the choice in the crude categories in which it is often framed. This was not the case in 2017, when, despite Mélenchon’s refusal to endorse Macron, 53 percent of his supporters voted for the future president in round two (36 percent abstained). With the polls this time putting Le Pen within striking distance and Mélenchon again unlikely to endorse Macron, his voters could make the difference. Others argue that this fear is exaggerated.
The other great unknown this year is what will happen in June’s legislative elections. Five years ago, Macron benefited from a surge of support for his fledgling La République en Marche Party, or LREM. But he failed to capitalize on that victory by building his party’s infrastructure. LREM therefore has only a limited presence at the local level, where the traditional parties, while weakened at the national level, retain power. Although the French presidency structurally dominates the legislature under the constitution of the Fifth Republic, a well-organized opposition can stymie ambitious top-down reform proposals, such as Macron’s announced plans to revamp France’s pension system and restructure schools and universities. Lacking a broad base of support in the population, the reelected president could be obliged to compromise with the National Assembly. The disintegration of the Socialists and Republicans—the traditionally dominant parties at the national level—may thus be alleviated somewhat by their resurrection in the next legislature.
This time, however, there will be no pretense that the president belongs “neither to the right nor the left.” He is now unambiguously the leader of the right, and the various factions of the center right, arrayed around a handful of hopefuls already eyeing the presidential elections of 2027, will be vying more with one another than with Macron, who for now is clearly primus inter pares—no longer the “Jupiter” of 2017, but still a long way from a hapless lame duck.
A Le Pen victory would be devastating for both France and Europe. While she has worked hard to soften her image, at bottom she remains a candidate committed to rounding up immigrants and sending them back where they came from. Although she no longer calls for withdrawal from the EU, she remains hostile to its spirit and would make common cause with her friend Viktor Orbán, whose reelection last weekend was followed by a European Commission disciplinary procedure to sanction Hungary for violations of the rule of law. Her closeness to Putin would break Europe’s united front (Orbán excepted) against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But even if she loses, the fact that she has come so close shows that the dike has been breached: With the left in a shambles and Macron dominating what used to be the center, the far right has become the not-so-loyal opposition. Le Pen, Zemmour, Marion Maréchal, and far-right-leaning Republicans such as Eric Ciotti have become the New Right—not yet united but ripe for consolidation behind a charismatic leader. Macron’s attempt to halt the slide by introducing a new, Silicon Valley–inspired entrepreneurial energy has failed. An ominous darkness hovers over France’s capital, the City of Light.
When things are unstable, people get anxious and you don’t know which way they will turn. And it’s not out of the question that they will go sharply to the right.
Move over Manchin, there’s a new sheriff ready to make America’s life miserable:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said during an Axios NewsShapers interview with Jonathan Swan that he’d be obligated to support former President Trump despite the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol if the GOP renominates him for president in 2024.
McConnell had not previously been pressed on the contradiction between his Senate floor comments in February of 2021 saying Trump was “morally responsible” for January 6th, followed two weeks later by saying he’d “absolutely” support Trump as nominee.
McConnell also stood by Justice Clarence Thomas’ decision not to recuse himself despite wife Ginni Thomas’ activism to overturn the 2020 election. And he would not commit to Supreme Court hearings for Biden nominees if the GOP takes the majority in November.
The Kentucky Republican previewed how a new GOP legislative majority would govern if they win in November.
He said it would focus on inflation, the U.S.-Mexico border, crime and pressing President Biden to ramp up domestic energy production.
McConnell is poised to wield a powerful check on the presidential agenda — and the second half of his term — if Democrats lose control of the House and Senate.
As majority leader, McConnell could force Biden to negotiate with him on everything he wants to get passed in Congress.
“If the House and Senate are Republican next year, the president will finally be the moderate he campaigned as,” McConnell said.
McConnell made clear his approach to supporting candidates is centered on their electability.
McConnell stood by former football star and likely GOP Senate nominee from Georgia Herschel Walker, who has faced allegations of threatening his wife with a gun.
McConnell said Walker “has addressed that issue repeatedly, … he admitted he has some troubles in his life,” but that “he’s been an exemplary citizen” in recent years, adding: “I think Walker is completely electable. …We’re fully behind him.”
McConnell declined to condemn or comment on Missouri’s Eric Greitens, whose ex-wife accuses him of abuse, and who has lambasted McConnell’s leadership. McConnell said the state’s voters would decide in the primary.
McConnell said it’s “important” that Trump-critic Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) defeat her Trump-backed GOP opponent and remain in the Senate.
While he supports one of Trump’s top critics, embattled Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), he indicated trying to save her would not be a top priority because she’s not in the Senate.
McConnell was unapologetic about his refusal to answer several questions or clarify past statements.
He said leadership isn’t about being popular, and that “I say many things I’m sure people don’t understand.”
Asked if the electorate has a right to know his position about handling Supreme Court nominees before they vote, he said, “I choose not to answer the question.”
He’s getting ready to take the reins — and run the country.
McConnell on polling showing a lack of support among Republicans for aid to Ukraine to take on Russia:
“If you look at the history of Russian behavior, it’s not unusual for Americans to be skeptical of any kind of foreign involvement.”
McConnell on calls for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ recusal: “I have total confidence” in all the justices to “make the decision themselves”
Asked whether he would hold hearings on Biden’s Supreme Court nominee if there’s an opening next year and Republicans hold the Senate, McConnell repeatedly declines to answer the question.
McConnell on moving from condemning Trump over Jan. 6 to saying he’ll absolutely support Trump if he’s the nominee in 2024:
“I think I have an obligation to support the nominee of my party…I don’t pick the Republican nominee for president.”
Mitch McConnell on extreme Republican midterm Senate candidates: “I’m pretty optimistic we’re going to have a fully electable nominee in every one of those [battleground] states.”
McConnell on whether Missouri GOP Senate candidate Eric Greitens is electable, despite the allegations against him:
“I think the voters in the Missouri primary will take all of that into account.”
McConnell says he has contributed to Liz Cheney but won’t be holding events for her, saying he’s focused on the Senate
McConnell: “We’re going to do everything we can do to push this administration into domestic energy production”
McConnell on what he would want to do if he leaves the Senate: “If I had the money, I’d love to own a baseball team.”
Mitch McConnell says he doesn’t hold a dark view about a polarized country, despite sounding the alarm after Jan. 6
Originally tweeted by Axios (@axios) on April 7, 2022.
You can just smell the insincerity in every breath.
The United States Postal Service and its customers have labored for years under the fiction that the government service authorized in the Constitution is an ordinary for-profit (or at least break-even) business. Congress had forced USPS to pre-fund decades of retirement benefits ahead of time. For once, Congress has acted in bipartisan fashion to fix what it broke.
USA Today explains what is in the USPS reform bill President Biden signed on Wednesday:
Under the law, the mandate that required the Postal Service to pay into future retiree health benefits will be dropped. Instead, retired postal employees will be required to enroll in Medicare.
In addition, the USPS must maintain a public dashboard tracking service performance and will report regularly on its “operations and financial condition,” according to a summary of the bill. It will also be able to create “non-postal services” in partnership with state and local government, like fishing licenses and subway passes, McConnell said.
The bill will save the Postal Service almost $50 billion over the next decade, according to Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Porter McConnell, co-founder of the Save the Post Office Coalition, commented on what happens next:
“The vast majority of the budget shortfall at USPS can be attributed to the pre-funding mandate that the bill eliminates,” McConnell said. “Eliminating it removes the biggest excuse for the service cuts and price hikes that postal customers have experienced since Louis DeJoy became Postmaster General. We have seen that austerity logic leads to short-sighted decision-making, and that leads to slower, more expensive mail for all of us.”
Regarding mail-in votes for future elections, O’Rourke said that, given no real evidence of widespread voter fraud via mail, voting by mail is more of a state legislative issue than a Postal Service one.
“I have full confidence the Postal Service can handle an election, could handle three or 4 million ballots,” O’Rourke said. “They proved they could do it the last time around.
“They deliver between 10 and 12 billion pieces (of mail) at Christmas,” he added. “Election is a day at the beach for those guys.”
Conservatives have sought to eliminate or privatize USPS for years. The service’s 600,000-plus employees (and their union) stand between privatizers and their profits.
Now to get rid of DeJoy.
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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.
Drone video recorded by Ukrainian forces during the occupation of Bucha, Ukraine shows a civilian fired upon by a pair of Russian armored vehicles:
The video shows a cyclist moving along a street in Bucha, dismounting and walking a bicycle around the corner onto a street occupied by Russian soldiers. As soon as the cyclist rounds the turn, a Russian armored vehicle fires several high-caliber rounds along the thoroughfare. A second armored vehicle fires two rounds in the direction of the cyclist. A plume of dust and smoke rises from the scene.
The video is aerial footage recorded by Ukraine’s military in early March when Russian forces still held the town. It has been independently verified by The New York Times.
Weeks later, after Russia withdrew from Bucha, a body in civilian clothes was filmed beside a bicycle in this precise location in a second video verified by The Times. The body, with one leg mangled, lies behind a concrete utility pillar that has collapsed from an apparent strike. The damage to the pillar is consistent with high-caliber ammunition. The person’s clothing — a dark blue top and lighter pants — matches the cyclist’s attire.
By now such atrocities are familiar. Russian strategy may be to terrorize civilians into submission. Andrew Exum, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East under Barack Obama, considers why discipline among Russian forces fell apart or was never there to start (The Atlantic). That may be more a factor behind war crimes than a formal strategy:
What we are seeing is likely something much more familiar, and much more universal: These sorts of crimes occur when military organizations are committed into combat without clear, achievable objectives, and without a professional noncommissioned-officer corps to enforce discipline within the ranks. They are what happens when military organizations are not held to account for their actions; when soldiers, after seeing the deaths of their friends in the face of unforeseen resistance, resort to savagery; and when the guardrails to prevent such a descent into inhumanity are absent.
In retrospect, looking back on two decades of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is remarkable how few crimes U.S. troops committed against civilian populations. Civilians in both countries suffered greatly, make no mistake, but the incidence of tactical units committing heinous crimes was lower, despite the duration of those wars, than that among Russian troops in a few weeks in Ukraine.
There are several reasons for that disparity. First, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps are mostly led, at the tactical level, by a professional noncommissioned-officer corps—something Russia’s army largely lacks. I asked a friend who led a brigade in Baghdad during the surge of 2007 why we did not see more war crimes then, despite the intensity of the combat. “That’s all down to the junior officers and noncommissioned officers who led the infantry platoons and squads,” he replied. “Those young men didn’t allow it.”
Not that American troops never commit war crimes. But when they do (and they have), professionalism instilled among even the lower ranks means there is a fair chance they will be prosecuted by the military justice system, as were Clint Lorance and Eddie Gallagher. They were turned in by their own men.
Some have claimed the Russian atrocities are born from Russian culture itself. But this is “inaccurate and perhaps even bigoted,” Exum says, arguing “Russia’s military culture and organization is to blame for the crimes in Ukraine.” That culture has persisted for decades through multiple Russian conflicts.
As disturbing as Lorance’s and Gallagher’s crimes is seeing Americans and a former chief executive cheer them on:
Our military’s culture of accountability took a blow when then-President Donald Trump pardoned both Lorance and Gallagher and was then cheered on by a morally loathsome minority of veterans and military fanboys who elected to side with Lorance and Gallagher against the many others in uniform who had testified against each man.
“Morally loathsome” recalls a phrase from 2016 used then to describe people who would drape themselves in American symbols while scorning American principles, who would hold aloft their pocket Constitutions while rejecting democracy, and who would call for public hangings of officials and casually traffic in “pre-genocide talk.”
How many still cheer on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin as the avatar of an authoritarian-led, white-Christian, one-party state they hope will overthrow the republic Benjamin Franklin warned we might not be able to keep?
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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.
And now Republicans are obstructing them
Joan McCarter at Daily Kos :
Judd Legum at Popular Information has another damning exclusive report demonstrating how deep into Russia the Koch conglomerate of intertwined corporate and political interests really is. He obtained an internal email from one the network’s influential nonprofits, Stand Together, that argues the U.S. needs to deliver a partial “victory” to Russia in Ukraine. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the Koch network’s corporate and nonprofit opposition to sanctions on Russia happened at the same time congressional Republicans began obstructing them.
Koch Industries, the multinational conglomerate run by right-wing billionaire Charles Koch, is uncharacteristically making national news this week by remaining one of few Western companies to continue operations in Russia. The Koch operation generally flies under the radar of traditional media—which works just fine for all concerned, they prefer a low profile—but after Legum’s newsletter broke the story, pressure built on Koch Industries to respond.
The Koch group was forced to issue a statement on March 16 explaining—and doubling down on—the decision to keep their operations in Russia going. That same day, the email Legum has uncovered was sent by the supposedly independent think-tank internally. That raises some serious questions about how dependent upon Koch Industries profits the supposedly nonprofit side of the operation is.
Dan Caldwell, Stand Together’s vice president of foreign policy, sent the email to the organization staff with a subject line, “An Update on Ukraine.” After a rhetorical denunciation of Russia for the invasion and of Putin, Caldwell launches into a condemnation of international sanctions on the Russian government and assistance to Ukraine. “[O]verly-broad sanctions rarely work as intended and often strengthen the authoritarian regimes,” Caldwell wrote. The organization, he said, only supports “aggressive and targeted sanctions against Russian leaders.” Meaning none of the money-making in Russia should be endangered, and its economy should be protected.
Caldwell argues that the harsh economic sanctions imposed by the European Union, individual countries, and the U.S. should be abandoned at the risk of escalating the war “into a larger conflict between a nuclear-armed Russia and the United States.”
“This is not to say the United States should do nothing,” Caldwell continues. No, the U.S. should be allowing the Russians to declare some kind of victory. “The United States should support diplomatic efforts to help end the war,” he wrote. “An outright victory by either Russia or Ukraine is increasingly unlikely and a diplomatic resolution is the path that best limits the bloodshed and minimizes the risk that the current war could escalate into a larger conflict.” Since Russia can’t have an “outright victory,” the U.S. needs to create a glide path for it to declare some kind of moral victory. Those diplomatic efforts, by the way, would likely involve ceding huge chunks of Ukraine to Putin, at the least. Russia would likely also demand the ouster of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and installation of a pro-Russia regime.
That’s all problematic from the standpoint of Ukraine’s future. More prosaically, it should be a problem for the Koch dark money “nonprofit” network. Caldwell explicitly tells Stand Together staff to read the statement from Koch Industries doubling down on the decision to stay in Russia, and reinforces the justification used by the commercial arm of the organization that halting business operations there would “do more harm than good.” It’s the same argument he’s making about sanctions: Basically, it’s all for the good of Russia, Ukraine, and world peace to let Russia overrun a sovereign nation and slaughter its people.
“Stand Together is a non-profit and, as a result, receives tax benefits from the federal government,” Legum explains. “Specifically, any money donated to Stand Together by Charles Koch (or others) is tax-deductible, and Stand Together itself does not have to pay income taxes. But, as a result, Stand Together’s resources cannot legally be deployed for the specific benefit of Koch Industries.” The tax-exempt Koch network think tank definitely appears to be promoting policies that would benefit Koch Industries’ economic interests.
Eight House Republicans voted against the revocation of Russia’s permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) status back on March 17, when the Koch groups were formulating their opposition to sanctions and economic punishment of Russia. That opposition has ballooned to the point that on Tuesday night, 63 House Republicans voted against a bipartisan resolution that expresses “unequivocal support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as an alliance founded on democratic principles.”
And now we have growing Republican refusal to punish Putin and to support liberal democracy. What started as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) having a similar fit over the human rights violations segment in the revocation of permanent normal trade relationship with Russia bill has grown into multiple problems with the legislation from unnamed senators—almost certainly Republicans—preventing the bill from having a quick vote in the Senate. At this point, it won’t be resolved before the Senate leaves for two weeks of recess.
The Koch money—a fortune built with the help of both Hitler and Stalin—has bankrolled Republicans for decades. Is it a coincidence that Republican opposition to further sanctions on Russia gelled following the Kochs doubling down on fighting them?
Narrator: It is not a coincidence.
My friend Eric Boehlert was in a tragic biking accident yesterday and died, You can read about it here.
Those of you who read this blog regularly are aware of his work which I’ve been featuring for the entire time I’ve been writing it. He was one of the most incisive, intelligent observers of politics and the media of his generation. He was also a generous, decent, kind human being — a mensch of the highest order.
We met over the years at various gatherings and he interviewed me for his book “Bloggers on the Bus” back in 2008. I considered him a friend and my world is a darker place without him in it.
It’s blatantly partisan and they don’t care:
Florida Republicans this spring insisted a contentious new election law curtailing access to ballot boxes was needed to prevent electoral fraud. It was not, they said, an attempt to gain a partisan advantage.
But a raft of internal emails and text messages obtained by POLITICO show the law was drafted with the help of the Republican Party of Florida’s top lawyer — and that a crackdown on mail-in ballot requests was seen as a way for the GOP to erase the edge that Democrats had in mail-in voting during the 2020 election. The messages undercut the consistent argument made by Republicans that the new law was about preventing future electoral fraud.
The law — labeled “Jim Crow 2.0” by some Democrats — was passed at the strong urging of RepublicanGov. Ron DeSantis, who signed the bill at an exclusive event aired by Fox News. It advanced even as local election officials, including Republicans, criticized the measure after running a trouble-free election in 2020. One official went so far as to call it “slap in the face” while one north Florida supervisor recently told DeSantis he was resigning at the end of this month in part to oppose “continuous changes” in election laws.
Florida was just one of several GOP-controlled states that enacted voting restrictions in the aftermath of former President Donald Trump’s loss and his unsubstantiated complaints about voter fraud, although it isn’t as restrictive as laws passed in Georgia and Texas. When debating the bill in the waning moments of this year’s legislative session, Republican Party of Florida chair and state Sen. Joe Gruters repeatedly said the bill would “make it as easy as possible to vote, and hard as possible to cheat.”
Yet in one remarkable text exchange obtained by POLITICO, Gruters and lead House sponsor state Rep. Blaise Ingoglia (R-Spring Hill) went back-and-forth over proposals to shorten how long mail-in ballot requests are valid.
Gruters defended a Senate proposal to cancel all existing mail-in ballot requests, saying that it would be “devastating” for Republicans to keep them valid heading into the 2022 election when DeSantis and other state GOP officials are up for reelection. More than 2.18 million Democrats used mail-in ballots compared to 1.5 million Republican voters during the 2020 election where Trump easily won Florida. Part of that was due to the ongoing pandemic, as Democrats strongly encouraged voters to change their habits nationwide.
“We cannot make up ground. Trump campaign spent 10 million. Could not cut down lead,” Gruters wrote to Ingoglia, who had been chair of the Republican Party of Florida before Gruters.
Gruters (R-Sarasota) also said it would hurt the GOP in non-partisan races, noting that “our school board member got killed” in a local race. Gruters this week filed legislation that would ask voters to make school board races partisan.
The final election bill did not include the Senate proposal to cancel all requests. Instead, lawmakers voted to grandfather in existing requests. But over the protests of Democrats, the Republican lawmakers still shortened the time the requests would remain valid from two election cycles to one.
When asked about his text messages, Gruters said “what I said in my text message was accurate. I think the failure to do a reset will have a detrimental impact going forward.”
It’s not enough that they win. They still have to cheat. It’s a matter of principle with them.
…. but why isn’t this a bigger part of the story?
I’m just asking.