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Month: April 2022

GDP drops

Published by digby on April 28, 2022

Should we panic?

According to Dean Baker, no. He seems pretty sanguine:

Trade and Inventories Cause Drop in GDP, Underlying Growth Healthy

A sharp increase in the trade deficit, along with a slower pace of inventory accumulation, lead to a 1.4 decline in first quarter GDP. These two factors subtracted 4.0 percentage points from the quarter’s growth. However, consumption and investment demand were both strong in the quarter, rising at 2.7 percent and 9.2 percent annual rates, respectively. As a result, final sales to domestic purchases, a category which excludes both inventories and the trade deficit, rose at 3.7 percent annual rate.

Inventories and the Trade Deficit

The sharp rise in the trade deficit is actually tied to a strong buildup in inventories. While inventory growth was a net negative in the first quarter, inventories actually grew at a very strong $158.7 billion annual rate. This was a negative in GDP because inventories grew at an even more rapid $193.2 billion annual rate in the fourth quarter. (Normal growth in a pre-pandemic year would be around $75 billion.)

Since a large share of the items that end up as inventories are imported, strong growth in inventories is usually associated with a large rise in imports, adding to the trade deficit. This relationship is even stronger if we look at non-farm inventories (most of our farm products are domestically produced), which rose at a $185.3 billion annual rate in the quarter.

Farm Inventories Continue Sixteen Year Decline

Farm inventories fell farm inventories fell at a $36.8 billion annual rate, continuing a decline that began in 2006. The current level of farm inventories is now just 53.0 percent of its level 16 years ago.

Consumption Grow at a 2.7 Percent Rate, as Shift to Services Continues

Consumption grew at a healthy 2.7 percent annual rate in the quarter, driven entirely by a 4.3 percent growth rate in services. Consumption of goods actually edged down at a 0.1 percent annual rate. This switch to services is reversing the sharp shift to goods caused by the pandemic. Even with the first quarter numbers, real consumption of goods is still 15.6 percent above its level in the fourth quarter of 2019, while service consumption is just 0.3 percent higher.

This shift will continue in the quarters ahead. In the first quarter, consumption of durable goods rose at a 4.1 percent annual rate, driven largely by a jump in car sales at the start of the quarter. Car sales slowed sharply in March. If the slower sales pace continues, this category will not be a major factor driving growth going forward. Consumption of non-durable goods actually fell at a 2.5 percent rate in the quarter.

The growth in services was broadly based across components. Interestingly, spending on restaurants and hotels did not rise at an especially rapid pace. Spending in this category rose at a modest 4.9 percent annual rate. This is not a big post-pandemic explosion, although omicron likely weakened January numbers.

Saving Rate Dips in Quarter

Consumption growth outstripped income growth, with the saving rate falling to 6.6 percent, down from 7.7 percent in Q4. This is somewhat below the 7.5 percent pre-pandemic average in the three years prior to the pandemic. One of the big questions going forward is the extent to which households will spend down savings accumulated during the pandemic. This drop in the saving rate could be a sign that they are spending out of recent savings, but the decline is still modest and may be reversed in future quarters.

Investment Growth Remains Strong

Investment rose at a 9.2 percent annual rate in the quarter. Structure investment edged downward at a 0.9 percent rate, but investment in intellectual products rose 8.1 percent, and equipment investment rose at a 15.3 percent rate. Compared with the fourth quarter of 2019 equipment investment is up 10.0 percent, while investment in intellectual products is up 16.5 percent. In contrast, investment in structures is down by 22.3 percent, as the pandemic has taken has taken a huge toll in this area.

Residential Investment Grows at a 2.1 Percent Rate

The first quarter’s growth rate was a hair below the 2.2 percent rate of the fourth quarter. It is 14.6 percent above the rate in the fourth quarter of 2019. It is unlikely that the Fed’s rate hikes will have an immediate effect in slowing construction, as the run-up in prices and supply chain issues have created a considerable backlog. (Housing starts are now running at close to a 1.8 million annual rate, while completions are near 1.3 million.)

Higher rates have already been a huge hit to mortgage refinancing. They also have slowed sales, which will be a dampening factor in consumer durables, as fewer people moving will mean fewer purchases of refrigerators and other household appliances.

Government Spending Was a Drag on Growth in the Quarter

All categories of government spending fell in the first quarter. The 2.7 percent rate of decline subtracted 0.48 percentage point from the quarter’s growth rate. This was the second consecutive drop for state and local spending, leaving it just 0.6 percent above the level in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Inflation Still on Upswing

The core PCE deflator rose at a 5.2 percent annual rate in quarter. It is now 4.6 percent above its year ago level. With countries across the globe seeing high inflation (the break even inflation rate on 10-year government bonds in Germany was higher than in the U.S. this week), it’s clear that this is not a problem specific to the U.S.

Overall – Underlying Growth Seems Healthy, but Swings in Trade Complicate the Picture

The story with consumption and investment looks mostly positive, as we see modest growth in the former and strong growth in the latter. We continue to see the needed switch from consumption of goods to services. The Fed’s rate hikes have collapsed mortgage refinancing and led to a large falloff in home sales. This will likely slow, or even reverse, the rate of house price rises. The overcoming of supply chain problems will slow in inflation across a wide range of goods.  

As he pointed out elsewhere, the housing prices, both sale and rental, are too high and people can’t afford them, especially with rising interest rates. But we are not in a bubble so the result is likely that prices are going to start to come down.

So, no panic. Unfortunately the shrieking freakout on cable news is likely to cement the notion that the economy is on the verge of collapse and make it more likely than ever that the Republicans will win the congress and begin their impeachment hearings on January 4th.

On fighting back

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 28, 2022

Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow speaks with Jonathan Capehart

Mallory McMorrow, she of the blistering counterattack against Republicans whipping up a blood libel against the left, has some advice:

“My hope is that there are a lot more people like me, who see what I did and say, ‘We have to stand up and fight back.’ Because this strategy is not going away,” she told me when I interviewed her Sunday. “This is the playbook … and we may get to a place where we’re out of time and we can’t afford to fight back.”

Since her speech, McMorrow said, many LGBTQ friends have told her they are exhausted by having to defend themselves against charges of pedophilia or grooming. “We can’t constantly ask the community that’s targeted to defend themselves. I am not marginalized, and it’s going to take a lot more people like me to take the hits,” she said. “If we keep taking the hits, people like me, we take away its power. We owe it to our neighbors and our friends who are just trying to live.”

What McMorrow did was textbook allyship. It was also a blueprint for Democrats who are accustomed to cowering in fear of Republican culture war attacks. Too many national Democrats are letting the incipient “groomer” charges go unchallenged or are assuming they’re too ridiculous to gain traction. They’re ridiculous, yes — but that doesn’t mean they can’t gain traction. (Have you seen today’s Republican Party?)

McMorrow is right to urge her party to “stand in our morals, stand in our values, stand for our families, and call it out for the absolute nonsense that it is.” This applies to any form of GOP bigotry. It’s not enough to, say, put up a black square on your Instagram feed and proclaim that Black Lives Matter. You can’t just talk about your beliefs. You have to act on them.

Please do. Republicans are “doubling and tripling down on this,” McMorrow warns. Don’t wait to push back until it’s too late. “We can’t afford that,” says McMorrow.

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Unusual name, Broeksmit

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 28, 2022

Nothing to see here, Part ∞

So, here’s a curiosity (NBC News):

A reputed federal informant and whistleblower who went missing after he was reported to have turned over a trove of secret files about Deutsche Bank was found dead at a Los Angeles school this week, a police official said Wednesday.

The body of Valentin Broeksmit, 46, was found Monday at Woodrow Wilson High School shortly before 7 a.m., Sgt. Rudy Perez of the Los Angeles School Police Department said in an email.

Records of the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner do not list a cause of death. Los Angeles Police Capt. Kenneth Cabrera told the Los Angeles Times that authorities do not suspect foul play.

Broeksmit was last seen driving a red Mini Cooper on the afternoon of April 6, 2021, on Riverside Drive and was later reported missing by relatives, Los Angeles police said.

His vehicle was found, the department said, but Broeksmit remained missing.

Perez said Wednesday that he appeared to be homeless.

According to a 2019 profile in The New York Times, Broeksmit was a musician and the son of a Deutsche Bank executive who died by suicide in 2014.

After his father’s death, Broeksmit gained access to his father’s email account and found hundreds of files related to the bank, including board meeting minutes, financial plans, spreadsheets and password-protected presentations, the newspaper reported.

The 2020 red Mini Cooper was found running with the keys in it, per another unsourced account. Odd vehicle for a homeless person.

Unusual name, Broeksmit. Where have I seen it before? In that NYT piece from 2019. And in this January 3, 2020 piece in Forensic News that begins (I fixed the broken Business Insider link):

Deutsche Bank’s loans to Donald Trump were underwritten by Russian state-owned VTB Bank, according to the whistleblower whose collection of thousands of bank documents and internal communications have captured the recent attention of federal investigators.

Val Broeksmit acquired the emails and files of his late father, Deutsche Bank executive William S. Broeksmit, after Broeksmit tragically took his own life in 2014.

Regular readers may remember that Hullabaloo drew a threat of a defamation lawsuit on August 28, 2019 from a Trump Organization attorney simply for repeating a “single-sourced and unconfirmed” report from MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell from the evening before about Russians something-something, Trump something-something, and Deutsche Bank. O’Donnell never said who his inside source was for his information. An FBI source just turned up dead.

And the Broeksmit name appeared here in 2014 in connection with other deaths and disappearances.

Wall Street Murder Mystery

Published by digby on February 6, 2014

Wall Street Murder Mystery

by digby

Via Dave Dayen and Gaius Publius we have a mystery, worthy of Hollywood:

The deaths began on Sunday, January 26. London police reported that William Broeksmit, a top executive at Deutsche Bank who had retired in 2013, had been found hanged in his home in the South Kensington section of London. The day after Broeksmit was pronounced dead, Eric Ben-Artzi, a former risk analyst turned whistleblower at Deutsche Bank, was scheduled to speak at Auburn University in Alabama on his allegations that Deutsche had hid $12 billion in losses during the financial crisis with the knowledge of senior executives. Two other whistleblowers have brought similar charges against Deutsche Bank.

Just two days after Broeksmit’s death, on Tuesday, January 28, a 39-year old American, Gabriel Magee, a Vice President at JPMorgan in London, plunged to his death from the roof of the 33-story European headquarters of JPMorgan in Canary Wharf. According to Magee’s LinkedIn profile, he was involved in “Technical architecture oversight for planning, development, and operation of systems for fixed income securities and interest rate derivatives.”

Magee’s parents, Bill and Nell Magee, are not buying the official story according to press reports and are planning to travel from the United States to London to get at the truth. One of their key issues, which should also trouble the police, is how an employee obtains access to the rooftop of one of the mostly highly secure buildings in London.

One day after Magee’s death, on Wednesday, January 29, 2014, 50-year old Michael (Mike) Dueker, the Chief Economist at Russell Investments, is said to have died from a 50-foot fall from a highway ramp down an embankment in Washington state. Again, suicide is being presented by media as the likely cause. … According to a report in the New York Times in November of last year, Russell Investments was one of a number of firms that received subpoenas from New York State regulators who are probing the potential for pay-to-play schemes involving pension funds based in New York. No allegations of wrongdoing have been made against Russell Investments in the matter.

Oh, and did I mention the missing Wall Street reporter?

The case of David Bird, the oil markets reporter who had worked at the Wall Street Journal for 20 years and vanished without a trace on the afternoon of January 11, has this in common with the other three tragedies: his work involves a commodities market – oil – which is under investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for possible manipulation. … Bird left his Long Hill, New Jersey home on that Saturday, telling his wife he was going for a walk. An intentional disappearance is incompatible with the fact that he left the house wearing a bright red jacket and without his life-sustaining medicine he was required to take daily as a result of a liver transplant.

As GP points out all this happened in one 18 day stretch. Could be coincidence, of course. Maybe it’s even probable. But it’s very intriguing.

Cuddle up of the couch, download the story and read the whole thing.

Bird’s body was found in the Passaic River months later. Accidental drowning, they said.

Pretty sketchy reporting on how Broeksmit’s body ended up at a high school. CBS News reports, “School police said that they had no video that shows him coming onto campus and are unsure how long he’d been on the campus.”

But a local outlet called the L.A. Taco adds these details:

A source who says they work at the school tells L.A. TACO:

“All the teachers were shocked when they quickly removed the body and admin told us to hold classes as usual.” At this point,  the faculty were under a mistaken belief that the body belonged to “a homeless man who died of natural causes.”

“We all thought it was ridiculous to have students on campus but once the kids were there, it was a done deal,” the sources continues. Once they learned the corpse belonged to a whistle blower in a Deutsche Bank corruption case involving Trump, they say, “It was even more odd that very little investigation was done and the entire area was quickly pressure washed.”

Here’s something odder. It comes from Twitter, so buyer beware. But here goes.

Per my Google Maps, 642 Moulton Ave. in L.A. seems to be a series of artists’ spaces. Might not be connected to the string below.

UPDATE from the Forensic News reporter:

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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.

Pence is no hero

Published by digby on April 27, 2022

He was just playing for time

Stevens is right. Anyone with a brain and a sense of integrity would not have needed to go ask Dan Quayle if it would be ok for his to steal the election. It was obvious that Trump lost. Pence knew he was off his rocker. But he waited to see which way the wind was blowing before taking his “heroic” stand. The man is an empty shell of a human being.

The Blueprint for democracy destruction

Published by digby on April 27, 2022

It’s staring us in the face

I’ve been writing and talking about former federal judge Michael Luttig’s hair being on fire about what being plotted for our future elections for a while, mostly based upon quotes from him in various stories. Luttig is a true blue rightwinger, not even a Never Trumper. (Apparently, he was the one who told McConnell you can’t impeach a president once he’s left office, giving him the argument for voting no.)

But to say he is freaking out is an understatement and I think it’s worthwhile to read his comments in full. He wrote this for CNN today:

Nearly a year and a half later, surprisingly few understand what January 6 was all about.Fewer still understand why former President Donald Trump and Republicans persist in their long-disproven claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Much less why they are obsessed about making the 2024 race a referendum on the “stolen” election of 2020, which even they know was not stolen.

January 6 was never about a stolen election or even about actual voting fraud. It was always and only about an election that Trump lost fair and square, under legislatively promulgated election rules in a handful of swing states that he and other Republicans contend were unlawfully changed by state election officials and state courts to expand the right and opportunity to vote, largely in response to the Covid pandemic.

The Republicans’ mystifying claim to this day that Trump did, or would have, received more votes than Joe Biden in 2020 were it not for actual voting fraud, is but the shiny object that Republicans have tauntingly and disingenuously dangled before the American public for almost a year and a half now to distract attention from their far more ambitious objective.

That objective is not somehow to rescind the 2020 election, as they would have us believe. That’s constitutionally impossible. Trump’s and the Republicans’ far more ambitious objective is to execute successfully in 2024 the very same plan they failed in executing in 2020 and to overturn the 2024 election if Trump or his anointed successor loses again in the next quadrennial contest.The last presidential election was a dry run for the next.

From long before Election Day 2020, Trump and Republicans planned to overturn the presidential election by exploiting the Electors and Elections Clauses of the Constitution, the Electoral College, the Electoral Count Act of 1877, and the 12th Amendment, if Trump lost the popular and Electoral College vote.The cornerstone of the plan was to have the Supreme Court embrace the little known “independent state legislature” doctrine, which, in turn, would pave the way for exploitation of the Electoral College process and the Electoral Count Act, and finally for Vice President Mike Pence to reject enough swing state electoral votes to overturn the election using Pence’s ceremonial power under the 12th Amendment and award the presidency to Donald Trump.Get our free weekly newsletter

The independent state legislature doctrine says that, under the Elections and the Electors Clauses of the Constitution, state legislatures possess plenary and exclusive power over the conduct of federal presidential elections and the selection of state presidential electors. Not even a state supreme court, let alone other state elections officials, can alter the legislatively written election rules or interfere with the appointment of state electors by the legislatures, under this theory.

The Supreme Court has never decided whether to embrace the independent state legislature doctrine. But then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in separate concurring opinions said they would embrace that doctrine in Bush v. Gore, 20 years earlier, and Republicans had every reason to believe there were at least five votes on the Supreme Court for the doctrine in November 2020, with Amy Coney Barrett having just been confirmed in the eleventh hour before the election.

Trump and the Republicans began executing this first stage of their plan months before November 3, by challenging as violative of the independent state legislature doctrine election rules relating to early- and late-voting, extensions of voting days and times, mail-in ballots, and other election law changes that Republicans contended had been unlawfully altered by state officials and state courts in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan.

These cases eventually wound their way to the Supreme Court in the fall of 2020, and by December, the Supreme Court had decided all of these cases, but only by orders, either disallowing federal court intervention to change an election rule that had been promulgated by a state legislature, allowing legislatively promulgated rules to be changed by state officials and state courts, or deadlocking 4-4, because Justice Barrett was not sworn in until after those cases were briefed and ready for decision by the Court. In none of these cases did the Supreme Court decide the all-important independent state legislature doctrine.

Thwarted by the Supreme Court’s indecision on that doctrine, Trump and the Republicans turned their efforts to the second stage of their plan, exploitation of the Electoral College and the Electoral Count Act.The Electoral College is the process by which Americans choose their presidents, a process that can lead to the election as president of a candidate who does not receive a majority of votes cast by the American voters. Republicans have grown increasingly wary of the Electoral College with the new census and political demographics of the nation’s shifting population.

The Electoral Count Act empowers Congress to decide the presidency in a host of circumstances where Congress determines that state electoral votes were not “regularly given” by electors who were “lawfully certified,” terms that are undefined and ambiguous. In this second stage of the plan, the Republicans needed to generate state-certified alternative slates of electors from swing states where Biden won the popular vote who would cast their electoral votes for Trump instead. Congress would then count the votes of these alternative electoral slates on January 6, rather than the votes of the certified electoral slates for Biden, and Trump would be declared the reelected president.The Republicans’ plan failed at this stage when they were unable to secure a single legitimate, alternative slate of electors from any state because the various state officials refused to officially certify these Trump-urged slates.

Thwarted by the Supreme Court in the first stage, foiled by their inability to come up with alternative state electoral slates in the second stage, and with time running out, Trump and the Republicans began executing the final option in their plan, which was to scare up illegitimate alternative electoral slates in various swing states to be transmitted to Congress. Whereupon, on January 6, Vice President Pence would count only the votes of the illegitimate electors from the swing states, and not the votes of the legitimate, certified electors that were cast for Biden, and declare Donald Trump’s reelection as President of the United States.

The entire house of cards collapsed at noon on January 6, when Pence refused to go along with the ill-conceived plan, correctly concluding that under the 12th Amendment he had no power to reject the votes that had been cast by the duly certified electors or to delay the count to give Republicans even more time to whip up alternative electoral slates.Pence declared Joe Biden the 46th President of the United States at 3:40 a.m. on Thursday, January 7, roughly 14 hours after rioters stormed the US Capitol, disrupting the Joint Session and preventing Congress from counting the Electoral College votes for president until late that night and into the following day, after the statutorily designated day for counting those votes.

Trump and his allies and supporters in Congress and the states began readying their failed 2020 plan to overturn the 2024 presidential election later that very same day and they have been unabashedly readying that plan ever since, in plain view to the American public. Today, they are already a long way toward recapturing the White House in 2024, whether Trump or another Republican candidate wins the election or not.Trump and Republicans are preparing to return to the Supreme Court, where this time they will likely win the independent state legislature doctrine, now that Amy Coney Barrett is on the Court and ready to vote. Barrett has not addressed the issue, but this turns on an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, and Barrett is firmly aligned on that method of constitutional interpretation with Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, all three of whom have written that they believe the doctrine is correct.

Only last month, in a case from North Carolina the Court declined to hear, Moore v. Harper, four Justices (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) said that the independent state legislature question is of exceptional importance to our national elections, the issue will continue to recur and the Court should decide the issue sooner rather than later before the next presidential election. This case involved congressional redistricting, but the independent state legislature doctrine is as applicable to redistricting as it is to presidential elections.

The Republicans are also in the throes of electing Trump-endorsed candidates to state legislative offices in key swing states, installing into office their favored state election officials who deny that Biden won the 2020 election, such as secretaries of state, electing sympathetic state court judges onto the state benches and grooming their preferred potential electors for ultimate selection by the party, all so they will be positioned to generate and transmit alternative electoral slates to Congress, if need be.Finally, they are furiously politicking to elect Trump supporters to the Senate and House, so they can overturn the election in Congress, as a last resort.

Forewarned is to be forearmed.Trump and the Republicans can only be stopped from stealing the 2024 election at this point if the Supreme Court rejects the independent state legislature doctrine (thus allowing state court enforcement of state constitutional limitations on legislatively enacted election rules and elector appointments) and Congress amends the Electoral Count Act to constrain Congress’ own power to reject state electoral votes and decide the presidency.

Although the Vice President will be a Democrat in 2024, both parties also need to enact federal legislation that expressly limits the vice president’s power to be coextensive with the power accorded the vice president in the 12th Amendment and confirm that it is largely ceremonial, as Pence construed it to be on January 6.

Vice President Kamala Harris would preside over the Joint Session in 2024. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have any idea who will be presiding after that, however. Thus, both parties have the incentive to clarify the vice president’s ceremonial role now.As it stands today, Trump, or his anointed successor, and the Republicans are poised, in their word, to “steal” from Democrats the presidential election in 2024 that they falsely claim the Democrats stole from them in 2020. But there is a difference between the falsely claimed “stolen” election of 2020 and what would be the stolen election of 2024. Unlike the Democrats’ theft claimed by Republicans, the Republicans’ theft would be in open defiance of the popular vote and thus the will of the American people: poetic, though tragic, irony for America’s democracy.

He’s speaking to the Supreme Court just as much as the public and the Republican Party. I don’t know if that majority has a conscience or intellectual integrity but if they do, this is the guy they may listen to.

The EU finally goes after Orban

Published by digby on April 27, 2022

It’s about time

Remember, Viktor Orban’s Hungary is the template for Tucker Carlson’s America. It’s crooked as hell:

Brussels sent a stern message to Hungary on Wednesday: fix your rule-of-law problems or risk losing EU money. How that message lands will reverberate across Europe.

For years, the EU has struggled to address the issue of democratic backsliding among its own members. One particular irritation has been Hungary, where civil liberties groups and international watchdogs say Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government has overseen a decade-long campaign to erode traditional checks and balances, strangle the media and dole out EU funds to friends and family. 

On Wednesday, the European Commission took its most serious step to date to try and change Orbán’s behavior, formally triggering a powerful new mechanism that could result in Hungary losing EU funds over rule-of-law violations — the first time the bloc has deployed the authority. 

In an internal note, seen by POLITICO, the Commission said “there are reasonable grounds” to conclude that structural issues in Hungary “are indicative of breaches of the principles of the rule of law.” 

The decision marks a significant moment for the EU. With its move, the EU has set a new precedent and sent a warning to other European countries facing problems handling EU funds and respecting democratic norms. How the ensuing process with Hungary unfolds will determine how that warning is received.

The Commission’s note ticked off a few of the issues it sees in Hungary: “systemic irregularities, deficiencies and weaknesses in public procurement procedures.” 

It cited an “unusually high percentage of contracts” awarded in single-bidder competitions and the funneling of contracts to “specific companies” that have grabbed large market shares as a result. These issues stretch back years, the note argued, citing audits going back to 2007.

The Commission also flagged “possible irregular auctioning of state-owned agricultural land” and pointed to “limitations to effective investigation and prosecution of alleged criminal activity.” 

The note summed up the Commission’s stance: “These issues and their repetition over time demonstrate a systemic inability, failure or unwillingness of the part of the Hungarian authorities to prevent decisions that are in breach of the applicable law.” 

The EU officially gained its budget-cutting powers in early 2021, after numerous countries decided the bloc’s existing tools were incapable of policing wayward members.

But a court battle and political considerations prompted the Commission to wait for over a year before formally triggering the authority, which allows the bloc to slash payouts to members when rule-of-law problems threaten the EU budget. 

Hungary has now become the test case for that authority.

The Commission had been seeding the ground for months to go after Hungary but repeatedly delayed the final signoff. Earlier this month, the Commission finally announced its intentions to trigger the mechanism, only two days after Orbán won a fourth consecutive term. On Wednesday, the EU commissioners met to give the official go-ahead. 

The formal kick-off heralds the beginning of a months-long process that could end with Hungary losing a significant amount of EU funds, with the decision ultimately up to the Council of the EU, composed of representatives from each country. 

The US apparently doesn’t have a mechanism to stop right wing corruption in our government so we’ll be able to see where this leads when they take full power and implement their plans. Should be interesting. They’re already dominating the media, after all, and it’s getting worse by the day.

The Problem

Published by digby on April 27, 2022

In a nutshell

It’s no wonder Fox News viewers died in vast numbers from COVID. They’re trying to kill our democracy the same way.

The Right is Actualy Losing the Culture War

Published by digby on April 27, 2022

If only the voting public — and the media — knew that

If you watch cable TV and read the political press you would think that the entire country is up in arms about the schools, with parents staging massive protests against what their kids are being taught. It’s not true:

By a 42 point margin, Americans back K-12 teaching on “the legacy of slavery and racism and how this history impacts our laws, institutions, and society to this day.” Presented with a brief definition of CRT, even Republicans overwhelmingly reject a ban.

https://murmuration.org/static/2022-Murmuration-Benchmark-Poll-Memo.pdf

Check out these results from the AP/NORC poll. (Forget the leading titles on the graphs.)

I know the only people who matter in America are Real American Trump voters, but this is ridiculous. On half those questions even a majority of them don’t agree. There is some contention on the trans bathroom issues and renaming schools between the two parties but not really that much. These are new issues that people are sorting through. But overall I think these issues are way overplayed.

Americans writ large aren’t calling for the fainting couch over teaching Black history and they don’t want to ban books in school. And although it isn’t asked I highly doubt that a majority of Americans think that gay teachers are “grooming” kids to become transgender. This is yet another ginned up culture war issue that the media always try to turn into a Big national Concern because they just can’t not take the bait.

The Coup Plot

Published by digby on April 27, 2022

It’s all out there

I’ve lost count of how many books have been published at this point about Donald Trump’s final days, but I’m glad that the staggered release of them has helped to keep the event fresh in people’s minds as each one offers up something that we didn’t know before. With the January 6th Committee selectively leaking information and the prospect of public hearings at some point in the near future, it’s still possible that the whole thing won’t be completely swept under the rug before the election in the fall.

A few days ago, Politico’s Kyle Cheney posted a useful overview of just some of what we have learned so far. We know that Trump went to great lengths in the days and weeks after the election to bully, coerce, strong arm and intimidate local and state officials in all the battleground states to illegally overturn the election results. He pushed the Department of Justice to declare the election results were tainted and only moved on when it became clear that they would all resign in protest if he installed a willing toady who would carry it out. And his legal team of fringe weirdos led by Rudy Giuliani descended upon courthouses in the targeted states with wild accusations of voter fraud that were all denied, many of them by judges Trump himself appointed.

Throughout this period, various conspiracy nuts, hucksters, crackpots and grifters were running in and out of the White House with ludicrous schemes, pushing conspiracy theories. On Tuesday, CNN published texts from one of them, an obscure congressman from Pennsylvania named Scott Perry, a former Army General like fellow weirdo Michael Flynn who was heavily involved in all aspects of the attempted coup. Among Perry’s texts were messages to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows accusing CIA director Gina Haspel of being in cahoots with “the Brits” to manipulate the voting machines and telling him the “DNI needs to be tasked to audit their overseas accounts at CIA – and their National Endowment for Democracy. ” (How many of these kooky Generals are there?)

When none of Giuliani’s legal claims came to fruition, Trump enlisted the help of a legal quack named John Eastman who devised a plan to have Republican-run states send alternate slates of electors and then have Vice President Mike Pence throw out the electoral votes from those states to dishonestly invoke the “contingent election process” which would result in Trump being elected because there are currently more GOP state delegations than Democratic ones.

And that’s just for starters.

January 6th Committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md, has said in recent days that “six of the most chilling words in U.S. history” were from Mike Pence, as first reported by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker in their book “I Alone Can Fix It.”

“I’m not getting in that car.”

Moments after Pence was whisked into an underground parking garage to escape the rioters and the Secret Service wanted to take him out of the building, he refused. The book quotes him saying this to Tim Giebels, his lead special agent:

“I’m not getting in the car, Tim. I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car.If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.”

According to the Washington Post, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short tried to say that he just didn’t want global adversaries to see the image of him driving away from the Capitol but that doesn’t explain why he would imply that he didn’t trust the Secret Service. At the same time, his national security adviser, Keith Kellogg, who was in the White House talking to a Secret Service agent named Tony Ornato who was so close to Trump that he had been given a White House adviser role, an unprecedented step for anyone from that agency, which is supposed to be non-partisan. Ornato said they were going to move Pence to Andrews Air Force base to which Kellog replied, “You can’t do that, Tony. Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.”Advertisement:

Raskin believes, and it seems pretty obvious, that they wanted to get him out of there so he couldn’t do that job, which was to oversee the certification of the electoral college votes.

If that doesn’t add up to an attempted coup, I don’t know what does.

The latest book, “This Will Pass” by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, has not been released yet and with the exception of a couple of previewed excerpts, they have been promoting the book by releasing audiotapes of the Republican leadership in the days after the January 6th insurrection. These recordings, which have been dribbled out on a daily basis are perversely damaging to the House Minority Leader and hopeful next Speaker, not because they show him backing the coup attempt but rather the opposite. In today’s GOP, if you are shown to have had the least bit of conscience and concern about what took place on January 6th, you are considered to be untrustworthy (or “untrustable” as McCarthy once famously said.)

These audio recordings of calls with House GOP leadership reveal McCarthy being horrified by Trump’s behavior to the point at which he even said “I’ve had it with this guy” and indicated that he thought Trump should resign rather than be impeached. He also had grave concerns about the behavior of members of his own caucus, even wishing that Twitter would ban some of them from posting.

Martin and Burns also report that late on January 6th Mitch McConnell said he was “exhilarated” because he assumed the insurrection meant the final ending of the Trump phenomenon. He told Martin that Trump “put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, it couldn’t have happened at a better time.” He even asked him if he’d heard anything about the 25th Amendment.

How this plays out politically is anyone’s guess but what it does show is that the GOP leadership knew exactly what Trump did that day and there was a moment in time when they thought it was the end of him — and they were happy about it.

That didn’t last, of course.

We don’t know if there will be any more details to come out in reporting or any more shoes to drop in the investigation or the upcoming hearings that will change the trajectory of the upcoming election. But there shouldn’t have to be. We know everything we need to know. There can be no more doubt in anyone’s mind who is paying attention that a coup was plotted and very nearly successful. The only question is if enough people care that American democracy is on life support to keep the people who planned it (or stood by while it was happening) from regaining power in spite of it.

Update —Oh my:

Salon

Republicans seem nice. Not.

Published by digby on April 27, 2022

I’m supposed to be empathetic toward these people?

The vast majority of Republicans believe that making racist, homophobic and antisemitic remarks is not a major problem for a political candidate. Quite a few of them are fine with sexual misconduct and domestic violence (which we already knew, of course, since they worship a man who brags in public about grabbing women by the pussy and has been credibly accused of sexual assault by dozens of women.)

I mean, they can’t be bothered to even pretend to care about being decent human beings anymore.