Month: May 2022

So much for being a straight shooter

There is growing panic among Republicans that Kathy Barnette is going to win the GOP nomination for Senate and she is even more batshit crazy than Marjorie Taylor Green. They are doing everything in their power to tank the more-MAGA-than-Trump wingnut.

Trump himself finally weighed in. He has endorsed her rival Dr. Oz. And he sounds like a tremulous old lady, scared to death of his own voters who are favoring her:

“Kathy Barnette will never be able to win the General Election against the Radical Left Democrats,” former President Donald Trump said on social media on Thursday. “She has many things in her past which have not been properly explained or vetted, but if she is able to do so, she will have a wonderful future in the Republican Party—and I will be behind her all the way.”

“She can’t win, but if she gets the nomination I’ll be with her all the way so you insane MAGAs don’t have to worry. I’ll support your choice. Please don’t hurt me.”

Trump’s accomplices in the hot seat

Back in December of 2020, according to notes taken by then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donohue, Donald Trump tried to pressure Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to falsely assert that the presidential election had been corrupt and illegal even though the Justice Department had found no evidence of voter fraud. Donohue’s notes said Trump told them, “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.” The “R” is shorthand for —well, you know what for. Trump had a plan — and he had accomplices.

Rosen refused to play ball and one of those “R congressmen,” Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, had lined up a replacement for him, a relatively obscure DOJ official named Jeffrey Clark who was ready and willing to carry out the plan. Clark allegedly attempted to coerce Rosen to sending a letter to Georgia election officials claiming that DOJ had identified “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election,” telling Rosen that Trump was about to fire him but Clark would refuse to take the job if Rosen sent the letter. Rosen didn’t comply, and the White House counsel’s office finally told Trump that if he followed through on his plan to fire Rosen and install Clark as acting AG, the entire top level of the Justice Department would walk out. Even Trump could grasp that that wouldn’t go well, so he backed off that plan and moved on to the next one.Advertisement:

According to the interim report on the Jan. 6 insurrection by the Senate Judiciary Committee, it was Scott Perry — who was involved in strategy meetings at the White House, along with other members of the House Freedom Caucus — who introduced Jeffrey Clark to Trump. He also took it upon himself to call Donohue, the no. 2 official at the Department of Justice, and demand that he investigate debunked election fraud allegations in Pennsylvania, effectively reading him the riot act for not pursuing all these ludicrous claims. (I can’t imagine it’s common for congressmen to harangue leading law enforcement officials and importune them to lie. Maybe under the Trump administration it happened all the time.)

Perry, who is a retired general, is now chairman of the Freedom Caucus and one of the five Republican congressmen subpoenaed on Thursday by the House Jan. 6 select committee. His response was as measured and dignified as one might expect:Advertisement:

That they leaked their latest charade to the media ahead of contacting targeted members is proof once again that this political witch hunt is about fabricating headlines and distracting Americans from their abysmal record of running America into the ground.

It doesn’t sound as if he’s going to cooperate, does it? Whether or not the committee will hold him and the other members in contempt, as they have done with former Trump staffers Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows, is unclear. It’s interesting to note that Perry’s comrade in coup-plotting, the aforementioned Jeffrey Clark, was threatened with contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the committee and after much wrangling he finally showed up — only to pleaded the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times during his deposition. Clark was obviously concerned that he could be held criminally liable for something. He’s a lawyer, after all.

Former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark finally showed up before the Jan. 6 committee — and took the Fifth more than 100 times. Is he the only one who understands how serious this is?

The other members of Congress subpoenaed were Reps. Mo Brooks of Alabama, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Jim Jordan of Ohio and Kevin McCarthy of California, the current minority leader and aspiring speaker. Brooks, of course, is most famous for giving a big speech at the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in which he said it was time to “take names and kick ass.” According to a former McCarthy staffer Ryan O’Toole, Brooks could be heard cheering on the mob from inside the Capitol during the insurrection.

Brooks and Biggs were name-checked by rally organizer Ali Alexander as having been part of the planning for that day, and Biggs was involved in the White House strategizing and also attempted to persuade state legislators to overturn election results. Jim Jordan famously can’t remember how many times he spoke to Trump on Jan. 6, but since the committee may already know that, I imagine they’d like to know what he and the president talked about. Similarly, they are no doubt interested in hearing more about McCarthy’s conversations with the president and how much he knew about House members plotting with the White House to overturn the election. McCarthy’s loose-lipped phone recordings have shone some light on that, but the committee would almost certainly like to hear more about Trump’s supposed admission that he bore “some responsibility” for what happened that day.

Will any of these people show up to testify? If they don’t, will the committee recommend they be held in contempt of Congress and will the congress then refer them to the Department of Justice? That’s anyone’s guess. When asked what would happen if they refuse to show up before public hearings begin in June, committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said:

We would present at the June hearing what we found in the investigation. I would hope that those members who have been identified as having information will come forward. If they don’t then we get to present the findings of our investigation — without their response.

It appears committee members believe they have ample evidence of what these people did to help plot and carry out the attempted coup. They have heard from more than 1,000 witnesses and obtained more than 100,000 documents. They think they can make the case without the testimony of any of these people, but believe they needed to make the gesture, to allow Perry and other accused renegades to give their side of the story.Advertisement:

We know that White House chief of staff Mark Meadows exchanged text exchanges with more than 40 current and former GOP members of Congress during the period between the November election and the Jan. 6 attack. Some of these members were actively involved in the coup plotting, and 147 Republican members voted to overturn the election results just hours after the Jan. 6 insurrection. They are all implicated in the coup attempt, every last one of them.

Whether or not the Department of Justice will ever bring charges against anyone is still unclear. If an investigation is underway, it has been completely buttoned up. But nobody should believe that it cannot happen. During the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, 69 government officials were charged with crimes and 48 were found guilty, including the former attorney general, the White House chief of staff, a White House domestic affairs adviser, the White House Counsel, the Secretary of Commerce and various others, mostly on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury. It can happen. It appears that Jeffrey Clark, who took the Fifth more than 100 times, may be the only Trump co-conspirator who understands that.

Salon

We’ve got show LAWS coming at you.

Raw Story:

After Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) suggested that a federal abortion ban was possible, a reporter asked Scalise if he supported stripping women’s rights nationwide.

“I hope that the ruling comes out soon and I hope it’s the ruling that was leaked,” Scalise replied. “But if you think about where we are, we’re a party who defends life and we would celebrate a ruling that allows elected leaders to defend life and debate in open public what those laws should be in every state and in Washington.”

“Clearly, we will move day one if we get the majority on the Born-Alive Act so states like New York can’t murder a baby born outside the womb and call it abortion,” he added.

Gee, that sounds terrible which must be why it’s outlawed in every state already.

But they seem to think passing laws against crimes that are already illegal and which nobody is doing are a real political winner.

Former President George W. Bush must have thought so since he signed a similarly redundant “born-alive” bill in 2003.

Democrats could do this. And they wouldn’t be proposing to outlaw practices that are already illegal if they make these Republicans vote on rape and incest exemptions, banning birth control, preventing women from crossing state lines to obtain abortion etc. These are all live issues on the GOP agenda. They should be forced to take a stand.

Meanwhile, the cowardly Republicans will play their voters for suckers and pretend they’re doing something even though they aren’t. They’re leaving the real dirty work “up to the states.”

The grift goes on

As Donald J. Trump aims to retake his throne, he’s preparing to pocket large fees as … a motivational speaker?

Axios:

What’s happening: At events hosted by an outfit called the American Freedom Tour, Trump is whipping up arena-sized crowds resembling his campaign rallies.

• • It’s privately run — and, according to organizers, it’s driving huge audience interest.
  • Trump stands to benefit on both ends. He headlines a rally-type event with a third party footing the bill, and stands to gets a hefty payout for his time.
  • AFT’s founder, Chris Widener, told Axios that “most all of our speakers get paid an honorarium for the event,” but he declined to name Trump’s fee.
  • A Trump spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Is a motivational speaker supposed to come out and whine and complain about how unfair everyone is to him, and the country and the world is all “going to hell” without him charge? https://t.co/PYCvNnOZKJ

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 13, 2022

Trump is gong to tell the same “Sir” stories and “a lot of people say” anecdotes he’s told for years. He’ll complain at each stop that his reelection was stolen and that no politician in American history has been treated worse, not even Lincoln.

There. Saved you the $9 to watch him on a TV screen from the Satellite room.

Widener said AFT is a business venture, not a political one.

• • “The American Freedom Tour is not a Republican-aligned event or a Trump-aligned operation,” he said. But “both President Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are incredible speakers and we are happy to have them on our tour.”
  • The tour’s message, he said, is “Faith, Family, Finances and Freedom.”

Unless you are a woman. Your freedom is forfeit courtesy of Trump’s three SCOTUS picks.

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“I considered [The Handmaid’s Tale] too far-fetched”

Margaret Atwood considers her dystopian novel in light of Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. She’d imagined a future United States as a theocratic dictatorship configured around 17th-century New England Puritanism. But she’d stopped writing several times “because I considered it too far-fetched.” She explains in The Atlantic:

In the fictional theocracy of Gilead, women had very few rights, as in 17th-century New England. The Bible was cherry-picked, with the cherries being interpreted literally. Based on the reproductive arrangements in Genesis—specifically, those of the family of Jacob—the wives of high-ranking patriarchs could have female slaves, or “handmaids,” and those wives could tell their husbands to have children by the handmaids and then claim the children as theirs.

That’s the problem with dystopian fiction as well as satire such as Idiocracy. Sometimes reality catches up with you. If as Alito suggests, any notion of liberty not “deeply rooted” in our “history and tradition” is open for reconsideration if not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution, why not question government by consent of the governed? The nation’s conservative minority is reconsidering that as I write this.

“Women could neither consent nor withhold consent, because they could not vote,” Attwood reminds. Women received representation “only by proxy, through their fathers or husbands.” The original document “does not mention women at all.” Alito’s reasoning sees no problem with that.

Is an acorn an oak tree?

Consider negative and positive rights. For the sake of expedience, the definiton in Wikipedia:

Under the theory of positive and negative rights, a negative right is a right not to be subjected to an action of another person or group such as a government, usually occurring in the form of abuse or coercion. Negative rights exist unless someone acts to negate them. A positive right is a right to be subjected to an action of another person or group. 

While the right to abstain from giving birth as been at issue, Atwood writes, “The other side of that coin is the power of the state to prevent you from reproducing.” During the period of forced sterilizations (mostly of women), that was a thing.

Thus a “deeply rooted” tradition is that women’s reproductive organs do not belong to the women who possess them. They belong only to the state.

Wait, you say: It’s not about the organs; it’s about the babies. Which raises some questions. Is an acorn an oak tree? Is a hen’s egg a chicken? When does a fertilized human egg become a full human being or person? “Our” traditions—let’s say those of the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the early Christians—have vacillated on this subject. At “conception”? At “heartbeat”? At “quickening?” The hard line of today’s anti-abortion activists is at “conception,” which is now supposed to be the moment at which a cluster of cells becomes “ensouled.” But any such judgment depends on a religious belief—namely, the belief in souls. Not everyone shares such a belief. But all, it appears, now risk being subjected to laws formulated by those who do. That which is a sin within a certain set of religious beliefs is to be made a crime for all.

The negative-right prohibiting Congress from establishing a state religion finds itself in jeopardy under five justices’ “originalist” conception of the First Amendment. And from a religious movement intent on imposing its beliefs on everyone else, Gilead-style.

The Alito opinion purports to be based on America’s Constitution. But it relies on English jurisprudence from the 17th century, a time when a belief in witchcraft caused the death of many innocent people. The Salem witchcraft trials were trials—they had judges and juries—but they accepted “spectral evidence,” in the belief that a witch could send her double, or specter, out into the world to do mischief. Thus, if you were sound asleep in bed, with many witnesses, but someone reported you supposedly doing sinister things to a cow several miles away, you were guilty of witchcraft. You had no way of proving otherwise.

Atwood imagined a future United States that had reverted to its 17th century self. So does Samuel Alito.

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They are being targeted from all angles

Technology has made reading easy for both students and book lovers of all ages. Unfortunately, it’s also made it easy for book banners on the right:

E-reader apps that became a lifeline for students during the pandemic are now in the crossfire of a culture war raging over books in schools and public libraries.

In several states, apps and the companies that run them have been targeted by conservative parents who have pushed schools and public libraries to shut down their digital programs, which let users download and read books on their smartphones, tablets or laptops. 

Some parents want the apps banned for their children, or even for all students. And they’re getting results.

A school superintendent in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, pulled his system’s e-reader offline for a week last month, cutting access for 40,000 students, after a parent searched the Epic library available on her kindergartener’s laptop and found books supporting gay pride. 

In a rural county northwest of Austin, Texas, county officials cut off access to the OverDrive digital library that local residents had used for a decade to find books to read for pleasure, prompting a federal lawsuit against the county. 

And on the east coast of Florida, the Brevard County school system removed the Epic app from its computer system, saying it didn’t want kids to have access to material that their own school librarians had not vetted. 

“Over 20 years, there’s not really been any history of a sustained challenge like this to our public library service,” said Steve Potash, founder and CEO of OverDrive, which has been a gateway to e-books for two decades through apps such as Libby and Sora. 

OverDrive, based in Cleveland, is used by 75,000 libraries and other institutions, including prisons and militaries in 100 countries, Potash said. In every case, he said, the local librarians hand-pick which titles are available to area residents or students. 

“Individuals who are not supporters of materials with certain diverse voices — probably without reading the material — are creating an alarm,” he said. “We stand with and trust librarians and the professionals.” 

The fact that it’s now so easy to pull the plug on thousands of book titles is itself a revelation to some users of e-reader apps, which have become part of the basic digital infrastructure at many schools and public libraries. People use the apps to find e-books available to borrow, and then read them either in the same app or download them to another, such as Amazon’s Kindle. 

E-reader apps haven’t replaced printed books, which schools and libraries often still buy because they own the paper versions whereas e-books are licensed from publishers for a set period of time. But schools and libraries sign up with apps such as Epic, Hoopla and OverDrive because readers say that they like the convenience of e-books and teachers get more options for assignments — especially during pandemic-related school closures. 

The apps often market themselves to schools and libraries as a way to quickly diversify their digital shelves, especially after racial justice protests in spring 2020 drew attention to the lack of diversity in many traditional institutions. 

But convenience is a double-edged sword. In years past, a parent might not have been able to find out what’s in a library collection, giving students a certain measure of freedom to roam the stacks. Now, they can easily search digital collections for books with content they object to and ask school administrators to censor or limit access with a few mouse clicks. 

“The terrifying thing is that they can be censored with the flip of a switch, without due process, without evaluating the substance of the claims,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association. 

That’s how we roll, I’m afraid. All it takes is one person with a complaint and that’s that — teacher is fired, kid is expelled, library is shut down. It’s scary.

Both are doctors who just don’t care if people die

I’m sure you remember this moment:

Here we have Senator Dr. Rand Paul today:

“There is no scientific evidence that boosters are valuable.”

— Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), cosplaying as a COVID expert, introduces a resolution to end all vaccine and mask mandates for Senate pages. pic.twitter.com/V2bkDGGpy9

— The Recount (@therecount) May 12, 2022

Some people, even on their side, find this medical disinformation to be problematic:

The CDC found that a COVID-19 booster shot was 90% effective at preventing hospitalizations when omicron was the dominant variant. https://t.co/OsZqflcChC

— The Recount (@therecount) May 12, 2022

I guess the Drs Paul believe that “first, do no harm” thing is a socialist plot too.

… and it’s not CRT and Mr Potatohead either

There is a culture war. But the GOP may not have the battlefield they sought:

The poll asked Americans to rate how six different policy areas factor into their congressional vote choice. On each of these six issues, at least 2 in 3 say it is very or extremely important to them that their chosen candidate shares their views. Looking at just those who rate these policies as extremely important finds a fairly even distribution among abortion (35%), immigration (33%), gun control (32%), economic policy (31%), and health care (30%). Tax policy (24%) is seen as extremely important by slightly fewer people than the other five areas. Compared to a Monmouth pre-election poll taken in August 2018, immigration, gun control and tax policy are nominally less important than they were in the last midterm. Abortion is a few points higher in extreme importance than 2018, while health care is significantly less important. Economic policy has seen no change.

The similar shifts in the importance of these policies for the entire population masks some larger partisan movements. For example, the drop in immigration policy’s importance since the last midterm is driven mainly by Democrats (23% extremely important, down from 37% in 2018) while the drop in health care policy’s importance is driven mainly by Republicans (18%, down from 37%). The importance of economic policy declined a few points among Republicans and Democrats but actually increased slightly among independents.

The importance of abortion policy in the current midterms compared with four years ago has shifted the most among Democrats. Nearly half (48%) of Democrats say a candidate’s alignment with their views on abortion is extremely important to their vote, which is up from 31% who said the same in 2018. Abortion’s importance is slightly higher among independents than it was four years ago (31%, compared with 27% in 2018). Among Republicans, however, there has actually been a decline in seeing abortion policy as an extremely important factor in their vote choice (29%, down from 36% in 2018). Of note, the importance of abortion in the congressional vote has gone up by six points among women (43% extremely important now) and by three points among men (27% now) since 2018.

And Republicans see the danger. If you want proof, here’s the King of the Weasels himself making it crystal clear:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) argues Roe v. Wade being overturned won’t be that bad:

“Angry leftists, many of whom are pretty ignorant and don’t even know what overturning Roe means, I think a month afterwards are gonna be surprised — ‘Wait, nothing about my life changed.’” pic.twitter.com/GATZKcVG26

— The Recount (@therecount) May 9, 2022

And Senator “Baby Parts” has some words as well:

Overturning Roe v. Wade would not ban abortion. It would send the decision back to your state.

— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) May 11, 2022

Blackburn sponsors the “Life Begins at Conception Act” which would ban abortion nationwide “at all stages of life, including from the moment of fertilization.”

Call me crazy but these people don’t sound very confident that they have the public behind their crusade for forced childbirth. And they don’t.

But if he didn’t use email I’m pretty sure it’s fine

I don’t know what they found in those boxes at Mar-a-lago but if I had to guess it was correspondence between him and foreign leaders. He really valued those love letters from Kim Jong Un. But they do seem to be taking this seriously, so who knows? Maybe he stole all the US intel on Vladimir Putin.

Federal prosecutors have begun a grand jury investigation into whether classified White House documents that ended up at former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida home were mishandled, according to two people briefed on the matter.

The intensifying inquiry suggests that the Justice Department is examining the role of Mr. Trump and other officials in his White House in their handling of sensitive materials during the final stages of his administration.

In recent days, the Justice Department has taken a series of steps showing that its investigation has progressed beyond the preliminary stages. Prosecutors issued a subpoena to the National Archives and Records Administration to obtain the boxes of classified documents, according to the two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

The authorities have also made interview requests to people who worked in the White House in the final days of Mr. Trump’s presidency, according to one of the people.

The investigation is focused on the discovery by the National Archives in January that at the end of Mr. Trump’s term he had taken to his home at the Mar-a-Lago resort 15 boxes from the White House that contained government documents, mementos, gifts and letters.

After the boxes were returned to the National Archives, its archivists found documents containing “items marked as classified national security information,” the agency told Congress in February. In April, it was reported that federal authorities were in the preliminary stages of investigating the handling of the classified documents.

On the other hand, this is probably another dead end:

Charges are rarely brought in investigations into the handling of classified documents. But the Justice Department typically conducts them to determine whether any highly sensitive information may have been exposed so the intelligence community can take measures to protect sources and methods.

If you can’t kill endangered species why should we allow abortion?

That seems to be the twisted logic of some of our super smart elected leaders:

[S]omehow Montana senator Steve Daines doesn’t seem to understand why anyone would be griping about the catastrophic, dystopian situation that is about to befall women in the U.S. In fact, Daines appears to think he’s figured out a huge “gotcha” when it comes to liberals who want to ensure women have control of their own bodies: that “the left” cares more about the eggs of certain reptiles and birds than it does about human women’s eggs. Seriously.

Speaking on the Senate floor Tuesday, Daines opined: “If you were to take or destroy the eggs of a sea turtle—now I said the eggs, not the hatchlings that’s also a penalty but the eggs—the criminal penalties are severe: up to a $100,000 fine and a year in prison. Now why? Why do we have laws in place that protect the eggs of a sea turtle or the eggs of eagles? Because, when you destroy an egg, you’re killing a preborn baby sea turtle or preborn baby eagle. Yet when it comes to a preborn human baby, rather than a sea turtle, that baby will be stripped of all protections in all 50 states, under the Democrats’ bill that we’ll be voting on tomorrow. Is that what the America the left wants?” (Daines was referring to the Women’s Health Protection Act, legislation that would codify the constitutional right to an abortion into federal law, which the Senate failed to pass on Wednesday.)

Curiously, at no point in this speech lamenting that human women have too many rights compared to reptiles and birds, did Daines—who actually loves killing living things—acknowledge that humans do not lay eggs, that human embryos stay inside the mother until they are born, and that people are not endangered species. Nor did he get into the details of “the America” that he wants, wherein the victims of incest and rape would be forced to give birth to their attacker’s child.

Daines on Abortion: Why do we have laws in place to protect the eggs of a sea turtle or the eggs of eagles… pic.twitter.com/yr0dM7aaAs

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 10, 2022

These GOP men think they’re being very clever with this stuff. I doubt that women (other than far-right abortion fanatics) think it’s quite as clever as they do.