Month: May 2022

How McConnell personally enabled massacre after massacre

The Washington Post takes a look at how we got here:

Mitch McConnell was just finishing up his first term as the junior senator from Kentucky when a mass shooting rocked his hometown of Louisville.

On Sept. 14, 1989, a disgruntled employee entered the Standard Gravure printing plant in downtown Louisville and, armed with an AK-47 and other guns, killed eight and wounded 12 others before taking his own life — in what remains the deadliest mass shooting in the state’s history.

At the time, mass shootings had not yet become the staple of American life that they are now, and McConnell said he was “deeply disturbed,” declaring, “We must take action to stop such vicious crimes.”

But he also added: “We need to be careful about legislating in the middle of a crisis.” And in the days and weeks after, he did not join others in calling for a ban on assault weapons like the AK-47 used by the shooter.

The Standard Gravure massacre provided an early glimpse of how McConnell — now the Republican Senate minority leader — would handle mass shootings and their aftermath over the next three decades, consistently working to delay, obstruct or prevent most major gun-control legislation from passing Congress.

McConnell would go on to follow a similar playbook time and time again during his seven terms in Congress, offering vague promises of action, often without any specifics, only to be followed by no action or incremental measures that avoided new gun regulations. As a Republican leader, he also helped dissuade his conference — as after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. — from supporting gun legislation and, as majority leader, refused to bring up significant gun-control measures for a vote.

Now, the latest devastating and high-profile mass shootings — a massacre Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., that left 19 students and two teachers dead, just 10 days after a racist slaughter at Buffalo supermarket that killed 10 — have thrust Congress back into a fiery debate over what, if anything, lawmakers can do to curb gun violence.

On Thursday, McConnell told CNN that he had encouraged Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) to reach out to Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) — who made gun control a personal project after Sandy Hook — to begin discussing what bipartisan measures might be possible.

But many Democrats and anti-gun advocates remain skeptical, predicting that McConnell and his fellow Republicans are poised to obstruct any consequential gun-violence-prevention bills yet again.

“If there’s any one individual in the United States to blame for our inability to put things in place to prevent gun violence, it’s Mitch McConnell,” said Peter Ambler, the executive director of Giffords, a group devoted to fighting gun violence. “McConnell understands he’s hostage to that extreme base that just doesn’t tolerate any departure from any of their views.”

Many Republicans say that McConnell is less a singular obstacle than a savvy leader who is able to his read his conference and make decisions that help his senators and protect them politically. “McConnell knows where his members stand and makes the tough calls to protect their interests,” a senior Republican aide said, explaining McConnell’s overall motivations in addressing gun violence and gun legislation.

McConnell declined to comment.

In 1990, the year after the Standard Gravure shooting, McConnell was up for reelection and found himself in a close race with Democrat Harvey Sloane, then the Jefferson County judge executive and a former Louisville mayor, who had called for banning assault weapons.

In 2013, following Sandy Hook, Sloane recounted in Louisville’s Courier-Journal newspaper that as his race with McConnell tightened in the final stretch, McConnell and the National Rifle Association “blistered the state falsely as to how this ban would eventually take away ‘your hunting gun and the hand pistol you need for personal protection.’ ”

McConnell defeated Sloane by five percentage points and, in his second term in the Senate, went on to vote against both the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act in 1993 and the Federal Assault Weapons Ban in 1994.

“Mitch is really Machiavellian,” Sloane said in an interview with The Washington Post last week. “He’s single-handedly held up any kind of gun legislation that’s meaningful.”

He has been called the gravedigger of democracy. He’s also the gravedigger of …. thousands of Americans.

You know who I’m talking about

Waaaaaaah! Durham struck out and Trump is having a good old-fashioned cry.

The problem here is that for his cultists, every time he loses (which is constantly), it just proves how rigged it is.

Fox News was very upset:

Right-wing media and Trump allies had hoped that the Sussmann case would be the centerpiece of Durham’s investigation into Robert Mueller’s probe of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. (And pushed misleading claims about Durham’s investigation in the process.) Throughout the two-week trial, prosecutors argued that Sussmann had “a license to lie” in a last-minute effort by the Clinton campaign to tip the election with false claims about Trump-Russia collusion.

The jury, however, rejected the prosecution’s argument and apparently accepted the defense’s claims that Durham was basically trying to turn one brief meeting into a “giant political conspiracy theory.” Needless to say, Fox News was not pleased with the verdict and went right into spin mode.

At the top of the midday panel show Outnumbered, reporter David Spunt quickly tied Sussmann’s acquittal to the political makeup of the Washington, D.C., jury pool.

“We spoke to several legal experts—Jonathan Turley, Andrew McCarthy, Jim Trusty—all on Fox News who said they would not be shocked if Michael Sussman was acquitted simply because you have a D.C. jury,” he declared, referencing a number of conservative legal analysts the network has hosted to discuss the trial.

At the same time, Spunt and anchor Harris Faulkner attempted to find a silver lining for conservatives by asserting that Durham’s investigation shows that Democrats were indeed trying to “take down” Trump with false claims.

“At the end, Special Counsel John Durham team is saying they can paint the picture the highest level of the Hillary Clinton campaign were involved in an effort to take down Donald Trump’s campaign with bogus information,” Spunt said.

“If nothing else comes away from all of this, you can’t erase what we now know about that. You can’t take that fact away,” Faulkner responded, adding: “If nothing else, we have learned how tight the connections were between the people leading the FBI investigation and the Hillary Clinton campaign.”

Former Trump spokesperson turned Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany, meanwhile, continued to blame the jury and its supposed bias for not buying what Durham’s team was selling.

“The D.C. jury pool, this is an area of the country where 76 percent of people in the District of Columbia are registered Democrat,” she declared. “A third of that jury pool had strong feelings about the election and prosecutors were frustrated that they would not get a fair shake here. I think this does raise questions on how fair a shake you will be given in D.C. with a jury pool that does go in one direction.”

Fox News contributor Joe Concha went even further than his colleagues in railing against the jury.

“The fact that this jury was going to be sympathetic and friendly to Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer is not surprising. Especially when that jury had Clinton donors on it,” he exclaimed. “I’m telling you, our faith in institutions just took another big hit. This is a whole bowl of wrong. Very frustrating to see.”

Concha concluded: “You have a man who peddled a lie. A lie that he was going there as a concerned citizen. Then he charges the Clinton campaign for that visit to his friend James Baker. What else do you need? This jury was pretty dispositioned to have a not guilty verdict. And here we are again, another black eye for the justice system!”

It’s just so very, very stupid

What did these parents think? That their 3 year old would see this flash card in the middle of a collage and “turn gay?” The stupid is running very strongly these days:

A Wake County Public School System preschool teacher has resigned after she was accused of using flash cards depicting a pregnant man, according to the district.

The district did not release the name of the teacher, but said it had removed the materials from the school. A May 27 news release from North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore, R-Cleveland, said the teacher used the cards in a preschool class at Ballentine Elementary School in Fuquay-Varina.

“The district is concerned to learn of the inappropriate instructional resource found in a preschool classroom,” Wake County Public School System spokesperson Lisa Luten wrote in an email to WRAL News.

Luten also confirmed that extra security is at the school today after backlash against the use of the flash cards.

Moore said state Rep. Erin Paré, R-Wake, received an email from a concerned constituent about the flashcards. Paré then contacted Ballentine Elementary Principal Lutashia Dove, according to Moore.

“An initial review determined that flash cards were not tied to the district’s Pre-K curriculum, did not complement, enrich or extend the curriculum and were used without the principal’s review, knowledge and/or approval,” Luten wrote.

Moore claims Dove would not have known about the flash cards if not for the information from Paré.

WRAL News found the cards, called Progress Pride Flag Rainbow Families, online. The description reads, “These gorgeous custom-designed illustrations celebrate LGBT2SQ+ Families of diverse races, ages, sexualities, genders, and abilities.”

Paré told WRAL News she thought Wake County Public School System handled the response well.

“The response by the principal at Ballentine Elementary School was professional, swift, responsible and appropriate,” Paré wrote in an email. “She showed excellent leadership.”

Paré did not say on whether she thought the teacher resigning was the correct course of action.

The teacher’s resignation comes as North Carolina Senate lawmakers continue to hold hearings on the “Parents Bill of Rights,” a GOP-backed bill that some are calling the state’s version of a Florida law that critics refer to as “Don’t Say Gay” legislation.

North Carolina House Bill 755 would ban any mention of sexual orientation or gender identity from the curriculum in kindergarten through third grade.

Under the bill, schools would have to notify parents if a student asks to use a different name or different pronouns to describe themselves. They would also have to let parents know if a student is seeing an in-school counselor, or if there’s any change in a student’s mental, physical or emotional wellbeing.

WRAL news also asked Paré whether she believes North Carolina lawmakers should still consider HB 755 or whether this past week is an indication that school systems will act accordingly in the future.

“I do believe this incident caught the attention of all involved including parents of school-aged children all over the state,” Paré wrote. “Although I believe the vast majority of teachers would not use unapproved, age-inappropriate tools in the classroom, this incident brings awareness to the fact that it can happen and parental involvement in a child’s education is of the utmost importance.”

WRAL News spoke with Jackie Milazzo, who has a 3-year-old son in the the special education preschool class of the teacher who resigned. Milazzo said the children are ages 3-4 in the class. She said the district initially reached out to parents on May 27.

“Especially with the class this is used in, many of these kids do not yet have the verbal capabilities to tell us if something inappropriate was really happening in the classroom, and we are forced to rely on our trust with the school and the teacher,” Milazzo said.

Milazzo said she started to search Google if there was any mention of what happened. She said she came across a news article with pictures of the flash cards.

“Immediately, I felt relief like, ‘This is it? This is what we’re making a big deal about?'” Milazzo said.

Milazzo said the cards were part of a collage in the school’s art center. She reacted to the news that her son’s teacher resigned.

“It’s devastating,” Milazzo said. “She is one of the most remarkable teachers I have ever met.”

Milazzo said parents were crying and hugging each other upon hearing about the resignation.

“It’s just such a loss for our community,” Milazzo said.

It’s ridiculous. For some, (the DeVos faction) this is just another skirmish in their long war against public education. They don’t like teachers, in particular because it is an educated profession, majority female, unionized, government employee, workforce. They might as well be satan, . They hate secular society and they can’t stand taxes being used to educate the children of the non-elite and destroying public schools has long been their goal. They want churches to do the educating as they did in the middle ages.

But for others, this is yet another moral panic that seems to happen every few years, primed by the right wing media, to keep their people both outraged and empowered. Running teachers out of the profession gives them both.

“You know what? It is actually.”

This review of some recent books about the impending American crack-up is bracing but important to read anyway. I don’t know if it’s as apocalyptic as some say but there’s something very scary going on.

In the summer of 2015, America caught a glimpse of how its future could unfold. The US military conducted a routine exercise in the south that triggered a cascade of conspiracy theories, particularly in Texas. Some believed the manoeuvre was the precursor to a Chinese invasion; others thought it would coincide with a massive asteroid strike. The exercise, called Jade Helm 15, stood for “homeland eradication of local militants”, according to one of the right’s dark fantasy sites. Greg Abbot, Texas’s Republican governor, took these ravings seriously. He ensured that the 1,200 federal troops were closely monitored by the armed Texas National Guard. In that bizarre episode, which took place a year before Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for president, we see the germs of an American break-up.

As with any warning of impending civil war, the very mention of another American one sounds impossibly alarmist — like persistent warnings from chief Vitalstatistix in the Asterix comic series that the sky was about to fall on Gaulish heads. America’s dissolution has often been mispredicted. Yet a clutch of recent books make an alarmingly persuasive case that the warning lights are flashing redder than at any point since 1861. The French philosopher Voltaire once said: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

As the University of California’s Barbara Walter shows in her bracing manual, How Civil Wars Start, US democracy today is checking all the wrong boxes. Even before Trump triumphed in the 2016 presidential election, political analysts were warning about the erosion of democracy and drift towards autocracy. The paralysing divisions caused by Trump’s failed putsch of January 6, 2021, has sent it into dangerous new territory. Polls show that most Republicans believe, without evidence, that the election was stolen by Democrats backed by the so-called “deep state”, the Chinese government, rigged Venezuelan voting machines, or a feverish combination thereof.

In This Will Not Pass, a book by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, Joe Biden is quoted telling a senior Democrat: “I certainly hope [my presidency] works out. If it doesn’t I’m not sure we’re going to have a country.” That a US president could utter something so apocalyptic without raising too many eyebrows shows how routine such dread has become.

In 1990, the CIA correctly forecast that Yugoslavia would break up within two years because its politics was hardening into ethnic factions. In 2022, America’s two parties are increasingly sorted along racial and identity lines. Republicans are white, small town and rural — the party now holds just one truly urban congressional district in New York’s Staten Island. Democrats are now almost entirely urban and multi-ethnic. The habits of a normal democracy in which the losing party forms a loyal opposition are vanishing. More than a third of Republicans and Democrats today believe violence is justified to achieve their political ends, compared with less than a tenth apiece in 2017, the year Trump took office. His rhetoric opened the floodgates to separatist feelings. When one party loses, its voters feel as though their America is being occupied by a foreign power. America, Walter points out, has become “a factionalised anocracy” — the halfway state between autocracy and democracy — that is “quickly approaching the open insurgency stage”.

Violence stalks America’s political language. As Stephen Marche, a Canadian novelist, writes in The Next Civil War, a richly imagined jeremiad about America’s coming disunion, the country “is one spectacular act of violence away from a national crisis”.

How did America reach this pass? Take your pick of grim milestones — Newt Gingrich’s scorched earth approach to his term as polarising speaker of the House of Representatives in the 1990s, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling that handed the 2000 election to George W Bush, America’s unhinged response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the FBI’s fateful probe into Hillary Clinton’s almost comically trivial emails, Democrats attributing Trump’s win to Vladimir Putin, Trump’s attempt to uproot every guardrail within reach, or Congress’s failure to unite on the need to punish a violent assault on itself. America’s democratic backsliding is like Ernest Hemingway’s famous observation on going bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.” Burns and Martin provide a diligently researched and often illuminating chronicle of America’s recent political degeneration.

The discussion of the Martin and Burns book, which I read over the weekend, is predictable both-sides claptrap, coming from a couple of Village Kewl Kidz who blame Biden for being responsive to progressives when he won and engaging in what they superciliously call “identity politics Rubik’s Cube.” Their book is pretty useless as analysis.

[…]

More seriously, the number of rightwing militias in the US has exploded in recent years. White supremacist sentiment has also penetrated US law enforcement agencies, says Walter. The numbers of armed potential insurgents is a multiple of the left insurgent groups, such as the Black Panthers, and Symbionese Liberation Army, that caused such panic in the early 1970s.

How would a 21st century US civil war actually happen? Nothing like the first time. Unlike the 1860s, when America was neatly split between the slave-owning confederates and the north, today’s separatist geography is marbled. Unlike then, America’s armed forces today cannot be outgunned. Even in a country that, uniquely, has more privately owned guns than people (at more than 400mn), many of which are military-grade, it would be no contest. Yet America, of all countries, knows that asymmetric warfare is unwinnable. Think of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Think, also, of how America was born — its revolutionary army lost almost every encounter with Britain’s vastly better equipped redcoats. Yet, with the help of the French, America’s guerrilla forces prevailed. Now substitute today’s federal army for the redcoats. Armies have a terrible record of pacifying restive populations. Every casualty breeds 10 more rebels. “They will slip in and out of the shadows, communicating on message boards and encrypted networks,” writes Walter. “They will meet in small groups in vacuum-repair shops along retail strips. In desert clearings along Arizona’s border, in public parks in southern California, or in the snowy woods of Michigan, where they will train to fight.”

[…]

None of the writers offer a simple antidote for America’s continued democratic slide. Their remedies — find ways of making multi-ethnic democracy work, get money out of politics, teach civics to American children — have the air of wishful afterthoughts, rather than serious game plans. Though Canadian, Marche is poignantly aware of the degree to which global liberty rides on what happens to America. In spite of its inaugural hypocrisies, no other nation was founded on the creed that it could live with — and indeed thrive on — fundamental differences between strangers.

Marche concludes with these stirring words: “It would be a lie, an evil lie, to say that the American experiment did not give the world a glorious and transcendent vision of human beings: worth affirming in their differences, vital in their contradiction. That is still a vision of human existence worth fighting for.” Yet the warning signs have become impossible to ignore.

At the end of their book, Burns and Martin quote Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s former prime minister, on America’s tendency to self-soothe with familiar homilies. They are no longer helpful. “You know that great line that you hear all the time: ‘This is not us. This is not America’?” Turnbull asks. “You know what? It is actually.”

Republicans just don’t like it

Bolts magazine, which is doing a great job uncovering the democratic atrocities coming out of local and state governments has a new one. Republicans in South Dakota don’t like Medicaid. So they’re underhandedly overturning the will of the voters. It’s so bad even some Republicans balked at what they’re doing:

When South Dakota organizers began gathering signatures to put Medicaid expansion on the ballot in 2022, their goal seemed very achievable—they needed to win just 50 percent of the vote in the next general election. Since 2018, ballot measures to expand Medicaid met that threshold in conservative Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Utah—victories that qualified hundreds of thousands of people for public health insurance.

Healthcare advocates pursued a ballot initiative to get around their Republican-run legislature, which has refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act for the past decade. But state Republicans have responded by rushing to change the election’s rules.

The legislature placed a constitutional amendment on the state’s June 7 primary ballot that would make it far harder for future ballot initiatives to succeed, starting with the Medicaid measure that is scheduled on Nov. 8. 

Amendment C, if adopted next week by the smaller pool of voters who decide primaries, would set a higher threshold for future ballot measures that involve spending more than $10 million over a period of five years—something that expanding Medicaid would inevitably do. Such ballot measures would need to gain the approval of 60 percent of voters, up from 50 percent. 

The GOP’s bid to thwart the Medicaid initiative in South Dakota adds to a series of moves by the party to weaken direct democracy. In many states that Republicans dominate, progressive organizers have successfully appealed to voters with measures like Medicaid expansion that conservative legislatures have blocked, triggering intense backlash by Republican politicians against procedures of direct democracy that they are failing to control. In Idaho and Utah, the GOP’s new restrictions on ballot initiatives also closely followed Medicaid referendums.

The erosion of direct democracy resonates deeply in South Dakota, which was the first state in the nation to set-up a popular initiative process. Inspired by Progressive Era demands for new checks on politicians, the state’s 1898 reform empowered ordinary citizens to initiate ballot initiatives and it has been used expansively ever since. 

Just over the past decade, South Dakotans have approved initiatives to raise the minimum wage, create an independent ethics commission, and legalize cannabis.

Republican politicians have responded by gradually restricting the initiative process. In 2016, voters adopted the South Dakota Accountability and Anti-Corruption Act, which set new ethics rules and created a system for public financing of political campaigns. Republican politicians repealed the measure, arguing that voters didn’t understand what was in it when they passed it.

The legislature then crafted two measures to make it harder for voters to initiate initiatives. The first would have required all constitutional amendments to receive 55 percent of the vote to be ratified, but South Dakotans rejected the proposal in 2018. They passed the second, which requires constitutional amendments to only relate to a “single subject.” Most states with ballot initiatives have such requirements, but there is tremendous variation in how this language gets interpreted. Some state supreme courts apply it broadly and only rarely hold that a proposal violates it, while others apply it much more stringently, routinely striking down proposals.

South Dakotans quickly learned that their supreme court, made up entirely of GOP appointees, would interpret the new requirement strictly. After voters approved legalizing marijuana in 2020, Republican Governor Kristi Noem challenged the constitutionality of the measure, and the state’s high court struck it down for encompassing more than one subject in November.

State Republicans further escalated their war on popular initiatives last year with a law that increases the font size of ballot petitions while requiring that the entire text fit on one page. This has made the organizing effort to gather signatures far less practical. 

South Dakota advocates still managed to qualify an initiative to expand Medicaid, which would provide coverage to tens of thousands of low-income South Dakotans, for the November ballot.

But those same advocates have had to turn their attention to fighting next week’s Amendment C, the measure that increases the threshold for initiatives. Dakotans for Health, a group organizing for Medicaid, opposes the measure. Other groups have also come out against it, including the South Dakota Municipal League, several major health systems, and the state chamber of commerce.

Some Republicans have explicitly acknowledged that they scheduled Amendment C for the June ballot to stall November’s Medicaid expansion proposal.

Conservative anti-tax groups, including Americans for Prosperity, the organization founded by the Koch brothers, have fueled the campaign on behalf of Amendment C. And GOP leaders like Noem are focusing on making the case that Amendment C would forestall tax hikes. 

Despite the GOP’s dominance in this legislature, the state Senate barely approved scheduling Amendment C for the June ballot; it only passed the chamber on a narrow 18 to 17 vote, with many Republicans balking at the proposal. Republican Senator Mike Diedrich said he backed the goal of Amendment C but opposed placing it on the ballot in June. As KELO-TV reported, Diedrich argued that it was “bad faith to cut off the process” that the ballot organizers “entered into in good faith” and was “unfair to the people who are following the laws.”

It’s bad faith to thwart the will of the people. But at least he sees the element of cheating that’s going on. Not that it makes a difference. Their compatriots won. And they know they will all benefit from it. These little blips of conscience don’t add up to much.

Canada shows the way

The Canadian government has introduced legislation that would put a freeze on importing, buying or selling handguns.

“We are capping the number of handguns in this country,” said the prime minister, Justin Trudeau. The regulations to halt the growth of personally owned handguns is expected to be enacted this autumn.

“It will be illegal to buy, sell, transfer or import handguns anywhere in Canada,” the prime minister said.

Canada already has plans to ban 1,500 types of military-style firearms and offer a mandatory buyback programme that will begin at the end of the year.

Trudeau said if someone really wanted to keep their assault weapon it would be made completely inoperable.

Canada had already expanded background checks ahead of this total ban. Trudeau has long had plans to enact tougher gun laws but the introduction of the new measure comes after mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, NY, this month.

Bill Blair, minister of emergency preparedness, said Canada was “very different from the United States”. “In Canada, gun ownership is a privilege, not a right,” he said. “This is a principle that differentiates ourselves from many other countries in the world, notably our colleagues and friends to the south. In Canada, guns are only intended to be used for hunting and sport purposes.”

Canada has had far fewer mass shootings than the US in part because of a lack of easy access to guns, though the US population also is far larger than Canada’s.

Blair said guns were often smuggled in illegally from the US, which he noted had one of the largest small arms arsenals in the world.

The Canadian government plans to fight gun smuggling and trafficking by increasing criminal penalties, providing more tools to investigate firearms crimes and strengthening border measures.

Trudeau said increased funding already helped border officials double the amount of smuggled guns confiscated at the US border. His government also said the bill would allow for the removal of gun licences from people involved in acts of domestic violence or criminal harassment such as stalking.

The bill would create a new “red flag” law allowing courts to require that people considered a danger to themselves or others surrender their firearms to police. The government said the measure would guard the safety of those applying through the process – often women in danger of domestic abuse – by protecting their identities.

Rifle magazines would be permanently altered so they can never hold more than five rounds, and the bill will ban the sale and transfer of large-capacity magazines.

“Canada can teach us a lot,” tweeted Bruce Heyman, a former US ambassador to Canada under the Obama administration.

Trudeau said his government recognised that the vast majority of Canadians who owned guns were responsible, but the level of gun violence was “unacceptable”. “This is a concrete and real national measure toward keeping Canadians safe,” Trudeau said.

If there is one country in the world that is most like the US it has to be Canada, right? But somehow they have the ability to deal with violence and we don’t. They say it’s because gun ownership there is a privilege not a right but in the US it wasn’t an individual right until 2008.

In America we are held hostage by a highly financed, very powerful right wing that is simply ungovernable. I don’t know what to do about that.

Michael Sussman is acquitted

If you follow Marcy Wheeler, you knew this was probably a foregone conclusion because John Durham’s endless investigation was ridiculous from the start and this ridiculous case was a mess:

A federal jury found Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for Democrats including the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign,not guilty of lying to the FBI when he brought them allegations against Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential race.

Tuesday’s verdict was a major setback for Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed during the Trump administration and has spent three years probing whether the federal agents who investigated the 2016 Trump campaign committed wrongdoing.

Sussmann was the first person charged by Durham to go to trial. Another person charged in the investigation is due to face a jury later this year.

The Sussmann jury began deliberating Friday, weighing the testimony of current and former FBI officials, former Clinton campaign advisers, and technology experts. In closing arguments, prosecutors told the jury that Sussmann thought he had “a license to lie” to the FBI at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign. Sussmann’s defense lawyers countered that the case against Sussmann was built on a “political conspiracy theory.”

Over two weeks of testimony, the case rehashed some of the bitter controversies from the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton presidential contest. Sussmann was charged with a single count of lying to the FBI when he delivered allegations of a secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which is based in Russia. Specifically, Durham alleged that Sussmann claimed he did not bring the information to the FBI on behalf of any client, when he allegedly did so on behalf of two clients: the Clinton campaign and a tech executive, Rodney Joffe.

The jury ultimately rejected those claims, apparently swayed by the argument from Sussmann’s lawyer, Sean Berkowitz, who said the prosecution was tryingto turn a brief 30-minute meeting more than five years ago into a “giant political conspiracy theory.”

Jurors were tasked with answering a fairly simple legal and factual question — whether Sussmann lied about his client and whether that lie was relevant to the FBI investigation. Prosecutors argued Sussmann’s lie was just one part of a larger scheme by Clinton loyalists to use the FBI and news reporters to launch a damaging, last-minute revelation against Trump that would tip the election to Clinton.

“You can see what the plan was,” Assistant Special Counsel Andrew DeFilippis told jurors in D.C. federal court. “It was to create an October surprise by giving information both to the media and to the FBI to get the media to write that there was an FBI investigation.”

Despite the trial’s frequent references to Clinton, Trump and other political figures, the prosecutor insisted that “this case is not about politics, it’s not about conspiracy, it’s about the truth.” Sussmann lied, DeFilippis said, because if he’d told the FBI that he was acting on behalf of Clinton, the FBI was less likely to consider his evidence or open an investigation.

The FBI investigated the Alfa Bank allegations and decided they were unfounded.

“While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service,” Durham said in a statement. “I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case.”

Prosecutors showed the jury emails, law-firm billing records and even a Staples receipt for thumb drives to tie Sussmann to the Clinton campaign. But Berkowitz said much of the witness testimony showed that the Clinton campaign did not want the Alfa Bank allegations taken to the FBI, because they preferred to see a news story about the issue and feared an investigation might complicate or delay such stories.

“There is a difference,” Berkowitz said, “between having a client, and doing something on their behalf.”

He ridiculed prosecutors for painting as nefarious efforts to dig up damaging information about Trump for a campaign.

“Opposition research is not illegal,” he said, adding that if it was, “the jails of Washington, D.C., would be teeming over.”

Berkowitz readily conceded that Sussmann talked to reporters as part of his job, including journalists for The Washington Post and Reuters. He said prosecutors brought the case because they suffered from “tunnel vision” over news articles in Slate and the New York Times that appeared on Oct. 31, 2016, and — he argued — had little impact on the campaign.

“That’s the story? That’s the leak? That’s the conspiracy? Please,” Berkowitz said.

The key witness of the trial was James Baker, who was the FBI’s top lawyer when he met with Sussmann on Sept. 19, 2016. Baker told the jury he was “100 percent confident” that Sussmann insisted to him he was not acting on behalf of a client and that if he had known, he would have handled the conversation differently and perhaps not even agreed to the meeting at all.

Since Sussmann did not testify, Baker gave the only direct witness account of the conversation. Sussmann’s lawyers repeatedly challenged Baker’s credibility, noting that in one earlier interview, Baker said Sussmann was representing cybersecurity clients; in another, he seemed to say he didn’t remember that part of the talk. In response to questions on the witness stand, he said he couldn’t remember 116 times, according to Berkowitz.

Baker, who now works for Twitter, testified that Sussmann told him a major newspaper — he later learned it was the New York Times — was preparing to write about the allegations. That apparently worried Baker, whosaid he knew a news story would probably cause any suspicious communications to stop, so he wanted the FBI to be able to investigate before an article appeared. Prosecutors say it was Sussmann himself who had provided the allegations about Trump information to the Times.

The jury did their work very quickly, too. They deliberated for four hours on Friday, came back this morning, asked for a couple of exhibits, one of which was a taxi receipt showing that Sussman did not bill the Clinton campaign, deliberated for two more hours and that was that.

If anything this case may have revived interest in that Alfa Bank story which has always been very strange and, if anything, the FBI bungled its investigation of it. I doubt anything will ever come of it but it will certainly be one of history’s more intriguing footnotes when all is said and done.

Trump must be fuming today. I’m sure he’ll be claiming the Deep State rigged the jury.

Drink some all-natural crude. Fossil fuels are actually good for you.

“It’s not that carbon emissions aren’t increasing, or aren’t warming the world, but look, you’re doing fine right now, right? So, we’ll be just fine!”

So writes Nitish Pahwa in a snarky Slate posting on next-gen climate denial:

If you are concerned about our warming world, you should know who Alex Epstein is. The libertarian intellectual, who’s presented himself as the “next generation in energy thought,” has long hammered at a thesis that’s the next big thing in climate denial: Fossil fuels are not leading to an uninhabitable Earth but have actually improved Earth’s natural and built habitats, and contributed to “human flourishing.” Because of this, the unfettered development of oil and gas and coal is a “moral” imperative; if you oppose this “irrefutable” fact, you’re a genocidal, racist, anti-human, and anti-science fool who would rather have billions of people slip into poverty and/or die for the benefit of “nature,” which, Epstein argues, kills more humans on its own than any climate effects do. It’s a set of ideas he’s boosted for the past two decades through work with the Ayn Rand Institute, the Cato Institute, and his own “for-profit” think tank, the Center for Industrial Progress.

If that last sentence does not clue you in to the Dinesh D’Souza-level intellectual dishonesty to come, you’ve not been paying attention.

Trust Epstein, writes Pahwa. He’s every bit as concerned as you are about the environment:

But he’s also really worried about how our “knowledge system”—big newspapers, prominent scientists, the United Nations—distorts scientific findings and exaggerates climate-related warnings and predictions, which is why he pals around with conspiracy theorists like Lauren Boebert, Dennis Prager, Scott Adams, and Candace Owens. By the way, as much as Epstein respects the Koch brothers, his ideology would never be influenced by their dark money network, even though he’s worked for decades at multiple institutions financially supported by the oil and policy magnates. Plus, he wants to debate opponents in good faith and is opposed to “ad hominem” attacks, which is why he refers to climate-concerned politicians as “fascists” and “monsters” while mobilizing his supporters to demand the termination of journalists who perform factual analyses of his oeuvre.

There’s more, of course. Anyway, be forwarned. I’d not heard of the guy before. Maybe Trump will invite him to speak at a MAGA rally.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.

Successes and failures in crossover voting

The impulse is understandable. Some Democrats and unaffiliated voters in states allowing crossover voting in primaries hope to help Republicans usher the likes of Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene back into obscurity. Greene, she of “gazpacho police” and “peach tree dish” meat fame, is neither an attractive spokesperson for the GOP or for her alma mater, the University of Georgia.

Next door in North Carolina, Republicans and Democrats think the same about Rep. Madison Cawthorn. The voluble freshman felt he’d been sent to Congress more to own the libs than to bring home the bacon. Cawthorn generated embarrassing headlines as much for carrying guns in airports as for rhetorically shooting himself (and his party) in the foot.

The Associated Press this morning reviews the impacts of crossover voting on these and other races so far in the 2022 primary season. The practice is legal in dozens of states. Many have primaries scheduled in coming months.

Former president Donald Trump hopes his candidate will unseat Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney who refused to validate his stolen election lie and voted to impeach him after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Trump opponents there are asking Democrats to cross over on Aug. 16 and protect her.

“I don’t know I’ll do it again because of how I felt afterward. I just felt icky,” said Diane Murray, a 54-year-old Georgia Democrat who voted a GOP primary ballot last week. She aimed to help keep a Trump “election denier” from defeating Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger:

Raffensperger, a conservative who refused to support the former president’s direct calls to overturn the 2020 election, probably would not have won the May 24 Republican primary without people like Murray.

An Associated Press analysis of early voting records from data firm L2 found that more than 37,000 people who voted in Georgia’s Democratic primary two years ago cast ballots in last week’s Republican primary, an unusually high number of so-called crossover voters. Even taking into account the limited sample of early votes, the data reveal that crossover voters were consequential in defeating Trump’s hand-picked candidates for secretary of state and, to a lesser extent, governor.

Non-Republicans who voted against Greene were disappointed. She won her 14th District Republican Primary by over 50 points.

In Cawthorn’s primary:

As was the case in Georgia, the AP found a sizable percentage of Republican early ballots were cast by voters who participated in the Democratic primary two years ago. Specifically, more than 14% of the 38,000 early or absentee votes cast in the Cawthorn race — more than 5,400 voters — came from a Democratic 2020 primary voter.

Cawthorn lost his primary by fewer than 1,500 votes.

That 14% figure on 38,000 votes is highly misleading. Republicans “bat last,” I like to say. Meaning, they tend to vote more on Election Day than early. After canvass, 88,223 voters had cast ballots in the crowded NC-11 Republican primary. That crossover voting cut Cawthorn’s tenure short is doubtful. Plenty of Republicans had had enough of his antics.

Any decision to cross over is a personal one. But remember, there are many Democrats who need votes to advance. Voting in the opposing primary means you have no voice in that choice.

Every vote counts. Ask Republicans in NC House District 115.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.

(And btw, listening to Henry Kissinger is always a bad idea)

The historian and defender of democracy has some thoughts:

Some observers of the Russo-Ukrainian war seem to think that its greatest danger is that Ukraine will win, or win too quickly, and that this will be uncomfortable for Putin, and that we should care. 

            This is a deeply perverse way of seeing things.  Putin has chosen to fight a war of aggression and destruction in Ukraine.  Wherever Russia controls Ukrainian territory, Russians commit genocidal crimes against citizens of Ukraine, including mass rape, mass killing, and mass deportation.  A democracy is defending itself against an autocracy, and the fate of democracies hangs in the balance.  The Russian hydrocarbon oligarchy is giving us a foretaste of cataclysm that awaits if we do not free ourselves from oil and gas.  Russia blockades the Black Sea and halts food exports, threatening to spread death by starvation to tens of millions of people this year.  Those are the kinds of things we should be worrying about, not Putin’s self-image.

            Yet there is an even more basic problem with this reasoning, which arises from a false understanding of how power in Russia works. 

            The Russian media and political system is designed to keep Putin in power regardless of what happens in the outside world.  Russian politics takes place within a closed information environment which Putin himself designed and which Putin himself runs.  He does not need our help in the real world to craft reassuring fictions for Russians.  He has been doing this for twenty years without our help. 

            Ukrainians understand this, which is one reason that they become irritated when we suggest that they concede territory or victory to Russia because of a concern about Putin’s internal state.  They know that this is not only unjust but pointless.  What matters in Russian politics is not Putin’s feelings nor battlefield realities but the ability of the Putin regime to change the story for Russian media consumers.  It is senseless, as the Ukrainians understand, to sentence real people of real territories to suffer and die for the sake of Russian narratives that do not even depend upon the real world.

            What happens if Putin decides that he is losing in Ukraine?  He will act to protect himself by declaring victory and changing the subject.  He does not need an off ramp in the real world, because that is not where his power rests.  All he needs to do is change the story in Russia’s virtual world, as he has been doing for decades.  This is just a matter of setting the agenda in a meeting.  In virtual reality there is always an escape route, and for this reason Putin cannot be “cornered.”  (Neither, for that matter, can the actual Russian army in actual Ukraine.  When Russian units are defeated, they just cross back into Russia). 

            Putin’s power is coterminous with his ability to change the subject on Russian television.  He does this all the time.  Think about how the war began.  Until late February of this year, the entire Russian media was clamoring that an invasion of Ukraine was unthinkable and that all the evidence was just warmongering by the CIA.  Russians believed that, or pretended to.  Then, once Russia did in fact invade Ukraine, war was presented as inevitable and righteous.  Now Russians believe this, or pretend to.  In 2015, when Russia’s last invasion of Ukraine failed to meet all of its objectives, the Russian media changed the subject from one day to the next from Ukraine to Syria.  This is simply how Russia is ruled: invasions and storytelling about invasions.  If the invasion doesn’t work out, the story changes.

            If defeated in reality, Putin will declare victory on television, and Russians will believe him, or pretend that they believe him.  He will find a new subject on which to fasten their attention.  This is the Kremlin’s problem, not ours.  These are internal Russian mechanisms in which outside actors are essentially irrelevant.  It makes no sense to create an “off-ramp” in the real world, when all Putin needs is an “off-ramp” in his virtual world.  It will be built by propagandists from pixels, and we are not needed for that.  Indeed, there is something more than a little humiliating in Western leaders offering themselves as unpaid and unneeded interns for Russian television channels.

            The odd thing is that Western leaders know all of this, or should.  Given plenty of time to reflect after Russia’s last invasion of Ukraine in 2014, we have become aware of the primary role that political fiction plays in Russian life.  Everyone who matters in public discussions ought to be aware that Putin governs in media rather than reality.  Just three months ago, we all just watched as Putin changed the story from “war unthinkable” to “war inevitable.”  And yet, for some reason, some Western leaders ignore this basic structural fact of Russian politics when they advocate appeasement.

             To be sure, Putin might err, in this war or in some other one.  He might wait too long to declare victory in the virtual world.  In that case he loses power, and someone else takes over the television networks.  We cannot save him from such a misjudgment.  It will happen sooner or later.  It is possible that power in Russia will change hands during this war; we will know that has happened when the Russian media landscape changes.  Regardless of whether Putin falls during this war or later, his power over media will be complete until the moment when it ceases.  There is no interval where our actions in the real world will be decisive. 

            Now let’s think of what we are asking of the Ukrainians when we speak of conceding Ukrainian territory for the sake of giving Putin an “off-ramp.”  We are asking the people who are the victims of a genocidal war to comfort the perpetrator.  We are expecting Ukrainians, who know that Russian politics is all about fiction, to make sacrifices in the world where their families and friends live and die.  We are asking Ukrainians to sentence their own people to ethnic cleansing in order to make life slightly easier for Russian television producers whose genocidal hate speech is one cause of the atrocities. 

As Ukrainians keep trying to tell us, clichés of “cornering” and “off-ramps” will make the war last longer, by distracting from the simple necessity of Russian defeat.

            When we start the story from Putin’s psychic needs and run it through our own misunderstanding of Russian politics, we push Ukrainian democracy to the side.  Rather than acting like allied democracies, we behave like amateur therapists for a dictator.  We are no good at that.  We are directing our empathy towards a dictator who will only exploit it to continue a war, and away from a people who must win that war to end it. 

            Appeasement of Russia distracts us from the people who really are cornered: the Ukrainians.  They are facing extermination as a people, and that is why they fight. President Volodymyr Zelens’kyi actually does need a way to end this war, because he does not govern by fiction, because he is an elected leader, and because he feels responsible for his people.  Unlike Putin, Zelensky cannot simply change the subject.  He has to bring his people along.  At this point, Ukrainians by huge majorities believe that the war has to be won, and are unwilling to concede territory.  Unlike Putin, Zelens’kyi will have to make a case, referring to what is actually happening on the ground.  He therefore really does need help, both to win the war as quickly as possible, and in giving  Ukrainians a sense of a post-war future. 

            All reasonable people want this war to end.  That means thinking more about the Ukrainian people, and worrying less about problems that Putin does not in fact have.

I’m getting a very bad feeling about this…