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Month: May 2022

The Inside Coup comes into focus

Published by digby on May 1, 2022

How they converged with the citizen insurrectionists

We know what Trump and his flunkies were planning to overturn the 2020 election. And the DOJ prosecutions are also showing how outside groups and militias were making plans for the insurrection. This is a good piece from the AP showing how members of congress were also plotting:

Rioters who smashed their way into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, succeeded — at least temporarily — in delaying the certification of Joe Biden’s election to the White House. Hours before, Rep. Jim Jordan had been trying to achieve the same thing.

Texting with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, a close ally and friend, at nearly midnight on Jan. 5, Jordan offered a legal rationale for what President Donald Trump was publicly demanding — that Vice President Mike Pence, in his ceremonial role presiding over the electoral count, somehow assert the authority to reject electors from Biden-won states.

Pence “should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all,” Jordan wrote. “I have pushed for this,” Meadows replied. “Not sure it is going to happen.”

The text exchange, in an April 22 court filing from the congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6 riot, is in a batch of startling evidence that shows the deep involvement of some House Republicans in Trump’s desperate attempt to stay in power. A review of the evidence finds new details about how, long before the attack on the Capitol unfolded, several GOP lawmakers were participating directly in Trump’s campaign to reverse the results of a free and fair election.

It’s a connection that members of the House Jan. 6 committee are making explicit as they prepare to launch public hearings in June. The Republicans plotting with Trump and the rioters who attacked the Capitol were aligned in their goals, if not the mob’s violent tactics, creating a convergence that nearly upended the nation’s peaceful transfer of power.

“It appears that a significant number of House members and a few senators had more than just a passing role in what went on,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, told The Associated Press last week.

Since launching its investigation last summer, the Jan. 6 panel has been slowly gaining new details about what lawmakers said and did in the weeks before the insurrection. Members have asked three GOP lawmakers — Jordan of Ohio, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California — to testify voluntarily. All have refused. Other lawmakers could be called in the coming days. So far, the Jan. 6 committee has refrained from issuing subpoenas to lawmakers, fearing the repercussions of such an extraordinary step. But the lack of cooperation from lawmakers hasn’t prevented the panel from obtaining new information about their actions.

The latest court document, submitted in response to a lawsuit from Meadows, contained excerpts from just a handful of the more than 930 interviews the Jan. 6 panel has conducted. It includes information on several high-level meetings nearly a dozen House Republicans attended where Trump’s allies flirted with ways to give him another term.

Among the ideas: naming fake slates of electors in seven swing states, declaring martial law and seizing voting machines. The efforts started in the weeks after The Associated Press declared Biden president-elect.

In early December 2020, several lawmakers attended a meeting in the White House counsel’s office where attorneys for the president advised them that a plan to put up an alternate slate of electors declaring Trump the winner was not “legally sound.” One lawmaker, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, pushed back on that position. So did GOP Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Louie Gohmert of Texas, according to testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former special assistant in the Trump White House.

Despite the warning from the counsel’s office, Trump’s allies moved forward. On Dec. 14, 2020, as rightly chosen Democratic electors in seven states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — met at their seat of state government to cast their votes, the fake electors gathered as well.

They declared themselves the rightful electors and submitted false Electoral College certificates declaring Trump the true winner of the presidential election in their states.Those certificates from the “alternate electors” were then sent to Congress, where they were ignored.

The majority of the lawmakers have since denied their involvement in these efforts.Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia testified in a hearing in April that she does not recall conversations she had with the White House or the texts she sent to Meadows about Trump invoking martial law.

Gohmert told AP he also does not recall being involved and that he is not sure he could be helpful to the committee’s investigation. Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia played down his actions, saying it is routine for members of the president’s party to be going in and out of the White House to speak about a number of topics. Hice is now running for secretary of state in Georgia, a position responsible for the state’s elections.

Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona didn’t deny his public efforts to challenge the election results but called recent reports about his deep involvement untrue. In a statement Saturday, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona reiterated his “serious” concerns about the 2020 election. “Discussions about the Electoral Count Act were appropriate, necessary and warranted,” he added. Requests for comment from the other lawmakers were not immediately returned.

Less than a week later after the early December meeting at the White House, another plan emerged. In a meeting with House Freedom Caucus members and Trump White House officials, the discussion turned to the decisive action they believed that Pence could take on Jan. 6. Those in attendance virtually and in-person, according to committee testimony, were Hice, Biggs, Gosar, Reps. Perry, Gaetz, Jordan, Gohmert, Mo Brooks of Alabama, Debbie Lesko of Arizona, and Greene, then a congresswoman-elect.

“What was the conversation like?” the committee asked Hutchinson, who was a frequent presence in the meetings that took place in December 2020 and January 2021. “They felt that he had the authority to, pardon me if my phrasing isn’t correct on this, but — send votes back to the States or the electors back to the states,” Hutchinson said, referring to Pence. When asked if any of the lawmakers disagreed with the idea that the vice president had such authority, Hutchinson said there was no objection from any of the Republican lawmakers.

In another meeting about Pence’s potential role, Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis were joined again by Perry and Jordan as well as Greene and Lauren Boebert, a Republican who had also just been elected to the House from Colorado.

Communication between lawmakers and the White House didn’t let up as Jan. 6 drew closer. The day after Christmas — more than two months after the election was called for Biden — Perry texted Meadows with a countdown. “11 days to 1/6 and 25 days to inauguration,” the text read. “We gotta get going!” Perry urged Meadows to call Jeffrey Clark, an assistant attorney general who championed Trump’s efforts to challenge the election results. Perry has acknowledged introducing Clark to Trump.

Clark clashed with Justice Department superiors over his plan to send a letter to Georgia and other battleground states questioning the election results and urging their state legislatures to investigate. It all culminated in a dramatic White House meeting at which Trump considered elevating Clark to attorney general, only to back down after top Justice Department officials made clear they would resign.

Pressure from lawmakers and the White House on the Justice Department is among several areas of inquiry in the Jan. 6 investigation. Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the panel from Maryland, has hinted there are more revelations to come. “As the mob smashed our windows, bloodied our police and stormed the Capitol, Trump and his accomplices plotted to destroy Biden’s majority in the electoral college and overthrow our constitutional order,” Raskin tweeted last week.

When the results of the panel’s investigation come out, Raskin predicted, “America will see how the coup and insurrection converged.”

And unfortunately, they will also see that there is no accountability, Republican voters are cheering them on for an encore and our cultural cynicism will grow even further.

This morning I watched a GOP pollster, Kristen Soltis Anderson, tell the CNN audience that voters don’t care about this assault on our democracy because they only care about their own lives. She told Brian Stelter that the media should be talking about so much and they should focus instead on immigration, crime and “making ends meet.” In other words, the Republican agenda.

I’m sure that Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy would like that too. But even if the media and the Democrats take this ridiculously patronizing advise, I hope they remember that Donald Trump won’t let 2020 go. It’s probably not a good idea to leave that field open to him.

Some good advice for Elon Musk

Published by digby on May 1, 2022

From a media critic

Margaret Sullivan has some ideas. I doubt he will listen:

As the would-be new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk has been touting his passion for free speech over the past week.

He’s also been showing his confusion, ignorance and utter lack of sophistication about how this prized concept really works.

“By ‘free speech,’ I mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law,” he tweeted a few days ago. “If people want free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”

Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Center at Columbia University, told me last week that Musk’s intentions may be good, but the reality is more complicated than he seems to think.

“It’s not just about turning up the free-speech dial, because there are always trade-offs,” Jaffer said. For example, if there are no limits on harassment and abusive speech, people — particularly women and members of minority groups who tend to be the targets — will leave the platform altogether.

“And that is not a win for free speech,” Jaffer said. “Nobody wants a platform on which anything goes.”

Even if viewed as generously as possible, Musk’s warped logic still falls into a common trap. He’s conflating First Amendment protections — which prohibit the United States government from swooping in to shut down speech via the courts — with the rules that a private company establishes to conduct its business. (Not to mention failing to take into account the laws of other countries where Twitter operates.)

Like newspaper publishers, social media platforms typically attempt to uphold at least some kind of standards for the content that appears under their brand. Unlike traditional publishers, of course, social media typically derives that content not from its staff but from its users, who nonetheless have to abide by the house policies — the equivalent of a restaurant’s “no shirt, no shoes, no service.” If they don’t, they risk being banned or seeing their posts removed.

These rules are, of necessity, far more restrictive than simply what’s protected by the Constitution. The Washington Post could publish nude photos and plentiful curse words if we wanted — there’s nothing legally stopping us. But its owners long ago decided that that kind of content would alienate too many readers and advertisers, so The Post judiciously chose to fashion itself as what became known as a “family newspaper.” That’s why Facebook, Twitter and other social-media organizations have similarly attempted to curtail pornography, misinformation and personal attacks. Through their rules and decisions, publishers are attempting to reflect what’s largely acceptable to those who use it; there is an underlying notion of meeting “community standards.”

Some Musk skeptics highlighted exactly this point last week, describing examples on Twitter of what the platform could become if his “allow all legal content” idea were fully carried out — videos of pets screaming while slowly being vivisected or of a journalist being beheaded, or a person walking on small animals in high heels, or someone being beaten to death or being skinned alive or executed by gunshot, with brain matter everywhere.

Later in the week, Musk again put his naivete on display, tweeting that former president Donald Trump’s flailing social-media start-up, Truth Social, came into being “because Twitter censored free speech.”

Well, not exactly, Elon. Twitter tossed Trump off the platform in January of last year, because of the reasonable fear that, after what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6, he would use the platform in the last days of his presidency to incite more violence. Twitter made his ban permanent — and not every free-speech advocate agrees that endless exile was the right decision. Trump responded by founding Truth Social, where he could dissemble and provoke at will.

Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, a nonprofit that defends free expression, believes that there may be better ways to foster free speech on Twitter. But they have little to do with the “anything goes” mentality that Musk has in mind.Advertisement

Nossel, the author of “Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All,” suggests three improvements. First, a more efficient process for hearing appeals from users who’ve been banned or had their content removed. The current system is often slow and opaque, she told me, and people should be able to learn quickly why the company acted as it did.

Second, Twitter could do more to protect users who are besieged with abuse from others on the platform. Faster response time to complaints would be a step in the right direction. Despite improvements in recent years, Twitter too often remains a place for harassment and abuse.

And third, Nossel suggested, Twitter could be much more transparent about how its algorithms work: “Why do people see what they see? What content is paid? What is amplified?” To his credit, Musk has talked about wanting to do this, but not nearly as much as he has talked about simply opening the spigot. Nossel rightly calls that “a very reductionist notion of free speech.”

As a Twitter aficionado myself — I’ve developed sources there, found out about breaking news, promoted my work, and met people who became close friends — I hope that Musk’s cockeyed ideas don’t get carried out.

If they do, almost everyone worthwhile will flee quickly, leaving the platform to the worst crazies and abusers. It’s hard to see that outcome as a lofty victory for free speech.

I’m betting the latter is going to happen but maybe that’s just a reflection of my dark mood. It’s hard to see how that immature little twit can possibly do anything but make everything worse.

The Billionaire Boys Club

Published by digby on May 1, 2022

They still rule our world

From the Washington Post:

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, attacked a publication owned by the world’s third richest man, Jeff Bezos, last month for reprinting a column published by the world’s 13th richest man, Mike Bloomberg.

The Bloomberg opinion article, posted by The Washington Post, asked whether Musk’s recent investment in Twitter would endanger freedom of speech. “WaPo always good for a laugh,” Musk wrote in a tweet, with smiling and crying emoji.

The jab underscored an unusual and consequential feature of the nation’s new digital public square: Technological change and the fortunes it created have given a vanishingly small club of massively wealthy individuals the ability to play arbiter, moderator and bankroller of not only the information that feeds the nation’s discourse but also the architecture that undergirds it.Advertisement

The information that courses over these networks is increasingly produced by publications controlled by fellow billionaires and other wealthy dynasties, who have filled the void of the collapsing profit-making journalism market with varying combinations of self-interest and altruism. It is a situation that has alarmed policy experts at both ends of the increasingly vicious ideological and partisan divides.

“This is almost becoming like junior high school for billionaires,” Brookings scholar Darrell M. West said of the new information magnates. “The issue is we are now very dependent on the personal whims of rich people, and there are very few checks and balances on them. They could lead us in a liberal, conservative or libertarian direction, and there is very little we can do about that.”

Read the whole thing if you can. It talks about Murdoch and Bloomberg and Gates and other billionaires who have a lot of interest in the information sphere and have put their money behind it. And it points out there are also people like Peter Thiel who are backing GOP candidates and bankrolling lawsuits to punish and destroy outlets they don’t approve of such as the one that took down Gawker.

Of course, rich people have always owned media in this country going all the way back to the beginning. There’s nothing new there. But the ability of social media to transmit disinformation and misinformation instantly to vast numbers of people seem to make it even more pernicious that these few rich, white men pretty much control the whole ecosystem.

And some of these boy billionaires really are immature assholes, Musk leading the pack:

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) posted a tweet Friday criticizing when “some billionaire with an ego problem unilaterally controls a massive communication platform and skews it,” Musk responded by suggesting the congresswoman had a romantic interest in him.

“Stop hitting on me, I’m really shy,” he tweeted.

Ocasio-Cortez replied, “I was talking about Zuckerberg but ok.”

He seems like a guy with some issues.

Hot dogs on a stick

Published by digby on May 1, 2022

Or something

I’m not sure this says what they think it says???

You can imagine that even if Russian people are not fully in support of the war that they hate the fact that these companies have pulled out of the country. People like their McDonalds. But it’s also probably the case that a whole lot of Russians are feeling the pull of nationalism.

Polling is unreliable in a repressive state so take this with a grain of salt, but I thought it was interesting:

Denis Volkov has been working to find out. He’s the director of the Levada Center, an independent polling firm in Russia.

As Morning Edition‘s Steve Inskeep notes, doing anything independently in Russia is tricky (the government has branded the firm a foreign agent), as is conducting polls on this topic — since the government prohibits calling the invasion a war, and dissenters are arrested.

The Levada Center stays within those parameters by asking whether people support the actions of the Russian military.

Volkov found that some 80% of respondents do support the military, but that group is by no means a monolith. He says about 50% have “definite support” without any qualms, but the other 30% have support with reservations. And he sees shock and anxiety across the entire group.

Volkov told Inskeep that he’s aware of the pitfalls with these polls, but they may still have valuable information to teach us.

“We must understand that polls show us not what people really think or really believe, but what they want to share,” he says.

Volkov says these polls are conducted face-to-face, and people are assured of anonymity. Still, he notes, the survey results reveal at least as much about what people are willing to say in public than about how they truly feel.

“We are measuring public attitudes that, more or less, coincide with how people will behave in public,” he adds.

He says the firm asks about peoples’ feelings, and is seeing that both groups — those who support and oppose the military’s actions — are anxious and afraid. He contrasts this to public opinion surrounding the annexation of Crimea in 2014, recalling that there were positive feelings and even “euphoria” at the time.

“This time, you do not see this euphoria,” Volkov says. “It’s rather that people understand that this is serious, that there is fighting. But at the same time, many say that they’re supporting and some people even say that they should support, because it’s international conflict and they have to support their government.”

Volkov adds that public opinion matters, even though the Russian government isn’t taking the public’s pulse in order to plan its next moves. He says officials are instead monitoring the situation to make sure that it’s “under control.”

And as Russia’s war in Ukraine continues, the U.S. and other Western allies are hitting it with more economic sanctions.

One-quarter of respondents say they already feel the effect of those sanctions, according to Volkov. People who are from disadvantaged groups are suffering the most, he adds, because they don’t have the resources to adapt.

On the other hand, Volkov says that people in big cities who are well-off and well-connected do have the resources, but are suffering “morally.”

By that, he means that those who were most connected to the outside world might have been less inclined to support Putin’s military operation, but now find themselves cut off from the West. That means they’re on conflicting sides — and feel the shunning of Russia most of all.

I think his insight that people say what they think they should say in public would be a wise thing for all pollsters and especially focus groups to keep in mind. I don’t think that phenomenon is confined to Russia.

The Speaker goes to Kiev

Published by digby on May 1, 2022

A strong display of support

Nancy Pelosi in 5 inch heels, with five members of the US Congress, walking the streets of Kiev to meet with President Zelensky.

Somebody asked why this was only a Democratic delegation and a wag replied that it’s because Republicans are a security risk.. badumpum.

ICYMI

Published by digby on May 1, 2022

which I’m sure you did …

I thought Biden was quite lively and pretty funny. Sometimes the old Irish charm comes out. And Noah is very sharp. But the whole thing is cringey mainly because showcasing the cozy relationship of the DC political and media establishment is always a bad look.

https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/1520596370553516032
https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/1520782305694031873

Hot or thirsty?

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 1, 2022

It could be another long, dry summer in the American West

Photo: National Park Service

Drink or sweat. Pick one:

Page, Arizona (CNN) Lake Powell, the country’s second-largest reservoir, is drying up.

The situation is critical: if water levels at the lake were to drop another 32 feet, all hydroelectricity production would be halted at the reservoir’s Glen Canyon Dam.

The West’s climate change-induced water crisis is now triggering a potential energy crisis for millions of people in the Southwest who rely on the dam as a power source. Over the past several years, the Glen Canyon Dam has lost about 16 percent of its capacity to generate power. The water levels at Lake Powell have dropped around 100 feet in the last three years.

Climate change is now

Very, very soon, people are going to feel the heat on climate change. Literally.

Bryan Hill runs the public power utility in Page, Arizona, where the federal dam is located, and likens the situation to judgment day.

“We’re knocking on the door of judgment day — judgment day being when we don’t have any water to give anybody.”

Forty percent of Page’s power comes from the Glen Canyon Dam. Without it, they’ll be forced to make up that electricity with fossil fuels like natural gas, which emits planet-warming gases and will exacerbate the West’s water crisis.

Loss of power at the dam would also mean higher energy costs for customers as the price of fossil fuels skyrockets.

“After about A.D. 1200, something very unpleasant happens,” says University of Colorado archaeologist Stephen Lekson of what caused the Anasazi to flee the region. “The wheels come off.”

We’re next.

Photo: National Park Service

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“Until the fight is done”

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 1, 2022

Speaker Nancy Pelosi pledges U.S. support to Ukraine in person

As Trevor Noah prepared to poke fun at Fox News, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a U.S. delegation met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for three hours. This video featuring Speaker Nancy Pelosi popped up this morning amidst clips from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner #WHCD.

“Our commitment is to be there for you until the fight is done,” Pelosi told the Ukrainian president. Pelosi is the highest-ranking U.S. government official to meet with Zelensky since Russia invaded the country in February.

Washington Post:

Pelosi walked the streets of Kyiv with several House Democratic lawmakers, including Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Gregory W. Meeks (N.Y.) and Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern (Mass.). The delegation, which met Zelensky on Saturday evening local time, later left Ukraine for Poland to meet with President Andrzej Duda. In Kyiv, Zelensky awarded Pelosi with the Order of Princess Olga, a decoration bestowed upon women who have made outstanding contributions to Ukraine. “Thank you for helping to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our state!” he wrote on Twitter.

In southeastern Ukraine, civilian evacuations from a steel plant in Mariupol that has been the last base for Ukrainian fighters in the besieged port city were expected to continue Sunday, after a group of about 20 women and children were allowed to leave under a cease-fire that began Saturday. Ukrainian officials think up to 1,000 people have taken shelter at the complex, which has been pummeled by Russian strikes in the Kremlin’s bid to secure Mariupol, an industrial center on the Sea of Azov that is seen as a strategic prize for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It’s hard to imagine those civilians leaving under a cease-fire without the world press shining a light on what is happening in Mariupol.

What the press does is important. If only they all took their responsibilities each day as seriously as Noah suggests.

Consider how insane the world is. Right now.

Unverified, but these days plausible.

On the Pelosi visit, Axios adds, “During the meeting, Zelensky conveyed the clear need for continued security, economic and humanitarian assistance from the U.S. and the congressional delegation assured him that additional American support is on its way, according to Pelosi’s office.”

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