Month: May 2022

“I simply cannot any longer share in this bloody, witless and absolutely needless ignominy,”

This took guts:

A diplomat in Russia’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva quit his post on Monday, expressing shame over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and describing it as a crime against both countries.

Boris Bondarev, a counselor in the Russian mission since 2019 who described himself as a 20-year veteran of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, announced his resignation in an email sent to diplomats in Geneva on Monday. His resignation is the most high-profile gesture of protest so far made by a Russian diplomat over the war in Ukraine.

“For 20 years of my diplomatic career I have seen different turns of our foreign policy but never have I been so ashamed of my country as on Feb. 24 of this year,” Mr. Bondarev said, referring to the date that President Vladimir V. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine.

“The aggressive war unleashed by Putin against Ukraine and in fact against the entire Western world is not only a crime against the Ukrainian people but also, perhaps, the most serious crime against the people of Russia,” he added.

Diplomats in Geneva confirmed that they had received the email. Mr. Bondarev, reached by phone after responding to a message on his LinkedIn account, confirmed sending it to several dozen colleagues at other missions and said he had tendered his resignation Monday morning.

Mr. Bondarev, 41, is listed as a counselor in the Russian mission on the website of the United Nations; he sent The New York Times a copy of his diplomatic passport to confirm his identity.

Russia’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva said that its spokesperson was not immediately available, but that it would soon issue a statement.

Mr. Bondarev, who dealt with disarmament issues and was described by Western officials in Geneva as a mid-ranking diplomat, delivered a bitter denunciation of Russia’s leadership.

“Those who conceived this war want only one thing — to remain in power for ever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity,” he said in a statement attached to his email to diplomats. “To achieve that they are willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes.”

He added: “It’s been already three months since my government launched a bloody assault on Ukraine and it’s been very hard to keep my mind more or less sane when all about were losing theirs.”

He should have resigned three months ago, he said, when Russia invaded, but he had delayed because he had unfinished family business and “had to gather my resolve.”

Mr. Bondarev went on to deliver a stinging critique of Russia’s foreign service and its chief diplomat, Sergey V. Lavrov. The ministry had been his home, he said, but over the last 20 years the lies and unprofessionalism had reached levels that he described as “simply catastrophic.”

“Today the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not about diplomacy. It is all about warmongering, lies and hatred,” he wrote, and was contributing to Russia’s isolation.

Mr. Lavrov was “a good illustration of the degradation of this system,” Mr. Bondarev said. In 18 years, the Russian foreign minister had gone from being a professional and educated intellectual esteemed by colleagues to threatening the world with nuclear weapons.

“I simply cannot any longer share in this bloody, witless and absolutely needless ignominy,” Mr. Bondarev wrote.

He needs to stay away from open windows.

I would hope that those who insist upon defending the Russian invasion as a necessary strike against Nazism will listen to this man.

Subversion is the long game

The whole country has its eyes on Georgia this week in anticipation of the big Republican primary showdown between Gov. Brian Kemp and former President Donald Trump. Trump isn’t actually in the race, of course but he might as well be. He reportedly harangued former Sen. David Perdue to run in an effort to vanquish Trump’s hated enemy Kemp, who refused to help the then-president overturn the 2020 election.

Likewise, Trump has energetically endorsed Rep. Jody Hice to replace Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who famously released the recording of a phone call from Trump in which he asked Raffensperger to “find” the necessary votes to hand him the state’s electoral votes. The most recent polling has Raffensperger and Hice likely headed to a runoff — but Kemp is probably heading for a landslide victory. Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, is scheduled to show up at a rally for Kemp on Monday, in one of the biggest signs of a permanent Trump-Pence split. 

Trump is predicted to have at least one winner on the day: Former football star Herschel Walker will be the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Democrat Raphael Warnock. There are so many questions about Walker’s fitness that he is far from guaranteed to win in the fall. So Trump is looking at a possible 2022 shutout in the vital swing state of Georgia.

But so what? All that means is that Trump’s followers may love him but they don’t think they have to follow his recommendations for other offices. If it’s supposed to signal that the rest of the party will then reject his anti-democratic agenda, there is no evidence they have any intention of doing that.

Let’s face facts: They don’t want to. It’s their best (and perhaps only) path to victory.

Apparently, early voting is very heavy for the Georgia primary, and many in the media see that as proof that concerns over the vote-suppression legislation enacted by Republicans was overblown.

Voting is surging in Georgia despite Democratic claims that a new election law would make it harder to cast a ballot, via @amyegardner and @mrbrownsirhttps://t.co/btiJJOYakq

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) May 21, 2022

Perhaps the voters of Georgia have accepted that they have to jump through ridiculous hoops to exercise their right to vote and are determined not to let it stop them. That certainly doesn’t make it right, especially since there was no reason to enact any of those restrictions in the first place. It’s important to note that laws against mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes are only a small part of the assault on democracy Republicans have been conducting for the past year and a half. Those things are unfair, of course, but voters can at least overcome them with effort. The even more serious problem is election subversion.

In April of 2021, the New York Times’ Nate Cohn sounded the alarm:

Beyond any provisions on voting itself, the new Georgia election law risks making election subversion easier. It creates new avenues for partisan interference in election administration. This includes allowing the state elections board, now newly controlled by appointees of the Republican State Legislature, to appoint a single person to take control of typically bipartisan county election boards, which have important power over vote counting and voter eligibility.

The law also gives the Legislature the authority to appoint the chair of the state election board and two more of its five voting members, allowing it to appoint a majority of the board. It strips the secretary of state of the chair and a vote. Even without this law, there would still be a risk of election subversion: Election officials and administrators all over the country possess important powers, including certification of election results, that could be abused in pursuit of partisan gain.

This has been happening all over the country, but the media has been strangely lackadaisical about reporting it. So it’s hard to grasp just how successful Republicans have been at putting these new laws in place, or where the greatest threat of the next coup will come from. This past weekend, the New York Times ran an important front-page story pulling together all the threads of this story from across the nation. It’s very sobering.

Their report found that “at least 357 sitting Republican legislators in closely contested battleground states have used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election,” which adds up to 44% of all elected Republicans in state houses across the nine states where the election was the closest. The damning statistics keep coming: about 23% of Republican legislators “took steps to delay the vote count or overturn the election,” 11% supported sending alternate slates of Trump electors, 7% were in favor of “decertification” of the election after the fact (which is not possible) and 24% voted for “audits” of election results, to be conducted by blatantly partisan outside firms.

The Times notes that some Republicans have resisted all this, and that many of the craziest schemes have not been enacted. But their analysis concludes that in all the battleground states, groundwork has been laid for more robust interference with election results. It’s clear that this is now on the GOP agenda, and in close elections we will see Republicans seek the advantage through creating chaos and uncertainty, potentially creating circumstances that could invalidate or overturn the will of the voters:

In an interview with The Times, Mr. Trump acknowledged that in deciding whom to endorse in state legislative races, he is looking for candidates who want state legislatures to have a say in naming presidential electors — a position that could let politicians short-circuit the democratic process and override the popular vote.

Republicans in Pennsylvania just nominated a far-right extremist and 2020 election denier for governor, who promises that if elected he will make sure that the GOP-majority legislature has the final word on which candidate is certified as the winner of the state’s electoral votes. Unless the Congress gets off the dime and passes some reform to the Electoral Count Act, it seems more likely than not that some swing-state Republican governor is going to try this.

Back in 2000, Republicans first got a taste of how to use the levers of local political power, combined with a partisan Supreme Court majority, to declare themselves the winner in a close election. (The “independent state legislature doctrine” that underlies this plotting was first raised in Bush v. Gore by the conservative justices.) The GOP no longer has even the slightest concern about the legitimacy conferred by a popular-vote victory, since it’s only won one in the last 30 years.

Trump may have turbocharged the Republicans’ anti-democratic strategy with his Big Lie, but the party is smoothly adjusting itself to the idea that the norms and traditions that kept power-hungry politicians from exploiting the flaws in the system, for fear of the people losing faith in democracy, are no longer necessary. That stuff is for losers, and they simply don’t care about any of it anymore. 

They did make it harder to cast a ballot but perhaps the voters of Georgia have accepted that they have to jump through ridiculous hoops to exercise their right to vote and are determined not to let it stop them? That certainly doesn’t make it right, especially since there was no reason to do it in the first place. But it’s important to note that these laws against mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes as they’ve enacted in Georgia are only a small part of the assault on democracy the GOP has been conducting for the past year and a half. They are unfair but voters can at least overcome them with effort. The even more serious problem is election subversion.

In April of 2021, the NY Times’s Nate Cohn sounded the alarm, writing:

Beyond any provisions on voting itself, the new Georgia election law risks making election subversion easier. It creates new avenues for partisan interference in election administration. This includes allowing the state elections board, now newly controlled by appointees of the Republican State Legislature, to appoint a single person to take control of typically bipartisan county election boards, which have important power over vote counting and voter eligibility.

The law also gives the Legislature the authority to appoint the chair of the state election board and two more of its five voting members, allowing it to appoint a majority of the board. It strips the secretary of state of the chair and a vote. Even without this law, there would still be a risk of election subversion: Election officials and administrators all over the country possess important powers, including certification of election results, that could be abused in pursuit of partisan gain.

This has been happening all over the country but the news media has been strangely lackadaisical about reporting it so it’s hard to grasp just how successful they’ve been at putting these new laws into place and where the greatest threats of the next coup will come from. This past weekend, the NY Times did an important front page story pulling together all the threads of this story from across the nation. It’s very sobering.

They found that “at least 357 sitting Republican legislators in closely contested battleground states have used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election” which adds up to nearly half (44%) of all Republicans in state houses across the nine states where the election was the closest.

-23% of them “took steps to delay the vote count or overturn the election by supporting lawsuits or by signing letters to Congress or former Vice President Mike Pence.”

-11% of them supported sending alternate electors to overturn the election.

-7% were in favor of “decertification” of the election long after the fact.

-24% voted for an “audit” of the election results, what the Times calls a “gateway” to further actions.

The Times notes that there has been resistance from some Republicans and that many of their craziest schemes have not been enacted. But their analysis looks at all the battleground states and the groundwork has been laid. It’s clear that this is now on the GOP agenda and in the case of close elections we will see more of this by Republicans who see the advantage in creating chaos and uncertainty, potentially creating the circumstances that could overturn the will of the voters.

In an interview with The Times, Mr. Trump acknowledged that in deciding whom to endorse in state legislative races, he is looking for candidates who want state legislatures to have a say in naming presidential electors — a position that could let politicians short-circuit the democratic process and override the popular vote.

Republicans in Pennsylvania just nominated a far-right extremist and 2020 election denier for governor who promises that if he’s elected he will ensure that the GOP legislature will have the final word on which candidate the state will certify to have won the presidential election. Unless the US Congress gets off the dime and passes some kind of electoral count act reform, it seems more likely than not that he or some other swing state Republican governor is going to try this.

Back in 2000 Republicans first got a sense of how to use the levers of local political power combined with the help of a partisan Supreme Court majority to declare themselves the winner in a close election. (The “independent state legislature doctrine” that underlies this plotting was first raised in Bush v Gore by the far right justices.) The Party certainly no longer has even the slightest concern about the legitimacy conferred by a popular vote victory since they have only won one in the last 30 years.

Trump may have turbo-charged the Republican’s anti-democratic strategy with his Big Lie but it’s not hard to see that the Party is quite smoothly adjusting itself to the idea that the norms and traditions that kept power hungry politicians from exploiting the flaws in the system for fear of the people losing faith in democracy or looking illegitimate in their eyes are no longer necessary. They simply don’t care about any of that anymore.

Salon

Are Democrats bringing a butter knife to a gun fight?

If it’s Monday….

Where does anyone get such an impression? Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson pounds his head against the wall at “hapless” Democrats and this report from The Guardian:

The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol is expected to stage six public hearings in June on how Donald Trump and some allies broke the law as they sought to overturn the 2020 election results, according to sources familiar with the inquiry.

The hearings are set to be a pivotal political moment for the country as the panel aims to publicly outline the potentially unlawful schemes that tried to keep the former president in office despite his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden.

According to a draft schedule reviewed by the Guardian, the select committee intends to hold six hearings, with the first and last in prime time, where its lawyers will run through how Trump’s schemes took shape before the election and culminated with the Capitol attack.

Just a reminder. The U.S. Senate Watergate Committee investigating “a third-rate burglary” at a D.C. hotel held weeks’ worth of televised hearings in 1973 (Wikipedia):

The first weeks of the committee’s hearings were a national political and cultural event. They were broadcast live during the day on commercial television; at the start, CBS, NBC, and ABC covered them simultaneously, and then later on a rotation basis, while PBS replayed the hearings at night.^[8] Some 319 hours were broadcast overall, and 85% of U.S. households watched some portion of them.^[8] The audio feed also was broadcast, gavel-to-gavel, on scores of National Public Radio stations, making the hearings available to people in their cars and workplaces, and increased the profile of the fledgling broadcast organization.^[9]

Cable news today has to fill 24/7 worth of airtime. Why not provide them content, Democrats?

We’re talking here about a plot to overthrow the government supported by a violent insurrection, an assault on the U.S. Capitol in which people died. The perpetrators see their failed attempt as a rehearsal. Wilson is beside himself.

1/ SIX HEARINGS?

SIX?

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?https://t.co/7jMvnW4gBf

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 23, 2022

3/ This is like .05 Benghazis.

"Six hearings as we can be done! Yay!"

Come ON people. This is the big one. You know, the people who tried to OVERTHROW the government? WEEKS not DAYS.

Command the narrative.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 23, 2022

5/ You have to create a spectacle. You have to make people care. You have to have drama.

You have to drag and grind the people who tried to do this so long and so hard their knees bleed.

A coup attempt that goes unpunished is a training exercise.

FFS.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 23, 2022

7/ When the GOP takes power next year and hold *months* of hearings on Hunter Biden's fucking laptop, begins impeachment proceedings on Biden over "failing to secure duh border" and has months of show trials about Afghanistan or antifa, remind me how great six hearings sounds.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 23, 2022

9/ End for now. pic.twitter.com/fTe8alL55C

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 23, 2022

Democrats are playing for a good sportsmanship medal. The GOP is playing for keeps, Democrats. Did you think they were joking?

Michael Flynn led “Lock her up” chants at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

Flynn claimed “If I did a tenth of what she did, I would be in jail today.”

No you wouldn’t because you’re a criminal being protected by the criminal in the White House.pic.twitter.com/awsYAMy5Kb

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) May 7, 2020

Those “low-information voters” are not blind.

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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.

The common good is a casualty to zero-sum competitiveness

Shibboleth, says Websters, is “a word or saying used by adherents of a party, sect, or belief and usually regarded by others as empty of real meaning.” Freedom as used by many Americans has taken on that sense. It has become, as in the original Star Trek episode, a worship word to be spoken as a signifier of tribe, but stripped of meaning. One utters it and genuflects without thinking about why.

What freedom has become is license for radical individualism stripped of responsibility to the matrix of relationships that sustain it. It is the mask worn by market-based thinking to convince us that there is somehow moral content behind consumption. Consideration of the common good is secondary, if a consideration at all. The mask wars of the recent Covid pandemic were fought over whether personal freedom has any obligation to the common good that protects mine while protecting yours.

E.J. Dionne this morning invokes Heather McGhee’s sense that racism harms us all. It frame society as a zero-sum competition between individuals rather than a cooperative venture (Washington Post):

As McGhee told Vox’s Sean Illing, “The zero-sum story is the idea that there’s this massive dividing line between Black people and white people, that they’re on opposite teams, and that progress for people of color has to come at white people’s expense.”

Unions, say political scientists Paul Frymer and Jacob M. Grumbach, reduce tensions between members of different races. They are built on “selling and realizing the idea that workers, no matter their backgrounds, can move forward together.” Not in competition with one another. Aside from the worker-owner power dynamic, this idea threatens the framing of society as a competitive market and the feeling among owners that if workers have more power, they have less.

Neoliberalism works just like that, argues The New Republic‘s Win McCormack:

In an essay titled “Dewey’s Liberalism and Ours,” the political philosophy scholar Michael J. Sandel excavates a divergent form of liberalism developed early in the twentieth century, during the Progressive Era. Classical liberalism, as well as its leftist, modernized version, egalitarian liberalism, were concerned principally with individual rights—in the first case, with individual rights against the state, in the second, with an individual’s right to a decent life in the context of modern industrial civilization. John Dewey’s principal concern was not with rights, however, Sandel explains. His principal focus was on the creation of a democratic process within which individual character and creativity could flourish. Dewey’s philosophy was one of communitarian liberalism (in Sandel’s seemingly paradoxical phraseology), and at its core was the institution of the public school and the process of education for citizenship and democracy.

In Catherine Broom’s interpretation of Dewey’s pronouncements on education, the overriding purpose of schooling was to inculcate in students the desire and the ability to seek the common good for society as a whole. “The public good,” she writes in the abstract of her article, “is understood as an imagined and communal space in which goods valued by society become collectively owned and shared through respectful and open contestation and negotiation. The argument is then made that schools are both part of the public good as well as involved in the development of this concept in students, but that the ability of schools to do this is being damaged by new discourses…. neo-liberal ideology is eroding this democratic idea.”

Let’s not get lost in trying to define neoliberalism this morning, but accept the framing for now. The conception of society as a market has made the very idea of common good subversive. Public schools in this understanding do not exist to better society, the one that sustains personal freedoms. but to better one’s position against one’s neighbors. Education, then, is just another commodity to be consumed.

Jason Blakely in a 2017 Atlantic article argues:

… neoliberalism’s aspirations go way beyond merely propounding a competitive market ideology in the classroom. The proponents of neoliberalism, Blakely explains, have sought to turn school systems themselves into competitive marketplaces, following the neoliberal principle that when public institutions don’t resemble markets by offering a range of consumer choices, the consumer is not really a member of a free society. In education, the neoliberal goal has been to privatize public schools to the extent possible, or, alternatively, to create forms of consumer choice, such as vouchers, that will constrain the public schools. Blakely points out that the battle over school choice is only the latest episode in a decades-long global contest between two models of freedom, the first based on the principles of democracy, the other on a market-directed ideology. The latter is often unpopular with the public, requiring force to carry out its mandates, as was the case in Pinochet’s Chile. “Authoritarianism and market freedoms can and often do go together,” Blakely argues.

The United States is headed there now. Too few will notice so long as gas is cheap and store shelves stock baby food.

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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.

Nothing to see here. Just a former president of the United States sharing a social media post advocating or predicting civil war in the United States. No biggie.

Originally tweeted by George Conway🇺🇦 (@gtconway3d) on May 22, 2022.

I just have one small correction to Conway’s tweet. Trump isn’t just a former president. He is also the front runner for the GOP nomination in 2024.

It’s his doing as much as anyone’s

Apparently, Trump is a little worried about what he’s wrought. Not because it will hurt women of course. For him, that’s a feature not a bug. It’s because he thinks it might hurt his chances with suburban women (which also indicates he knows he lost the election because of that …)

Donald Trump is on the precipice of achieving the most lasting and impactful part of his presidential legacy, as the justices he put on the Supreme Court prepare to help overturn Roe v. Wade and cement the former president’s status as a hero to social conservatives. But for a man who rarely opens his mouth without talking about his own (real or alleged) achievements, Trump has been near-silent on abortion since it became clear Roe was going under.

Instead, Trump has been privately fretting about what the impending collapse of abortion rights will do for his own political prospects, telling those close to him that the issue could hurt him with “suburban women” should he try to retake the White House in 2024. “Suburban women have been a recurring concern for [former] President Trump, including during the 2020 campaign, when his smarter advisers were sounding the alarm to him about how he was losing suburbs. He is … worried women in the suburbs could punish him for this one day, [too],” said a person familiar with the matter.

In the weeks since a draft opinion to overturn Roe was revealed, Trump has barely talked about the issue during interviews, at political rallies, and in his social media posts. According to two sources familiar with the matter, this is indeed an intentional and calculated silence. In recent days, Trump has told some of his allies and counselors that “suburban women” and other key voting groups don’t like hearing about the issue, as they are simply more pro-choice than the mainstream of the Republican Party and conservative movement. He has also told several associates that if he went too hard now on the topic of overturning Roe, it would give his enemies the chance to “use it against” him — the strong implication being, according to the two sources, that if Trump ultimately runs for the White House again in 2024, it could be more a political liability than an asset.

And, naturally, Trump has recently solicited printouts of the latest polling on the subject, according to the two people familiar with the situation.

“‘Suburban women — some who voted for me — they don’t like it when we talk about it. That’s a problem sometimes [and that is] important to remember,’” Trump said at one small gathering earlier this month, the second source relayed.

There are, however, some conservative die-hards in Trump’s orbit who are personally trying to nudge him toward embracing — or at least firmly acknowledging — the anticipated victory, which would inevitably set the pro-choice movement back decades. “I encouraged him to go bigger on the life issue [following the leaked draft opinion],” said a third person, who said they’d spoken to Trump about this in the past two weeks. “He said [something like], ‘maybe,’ which sounded more like a ‘not now.’”

Trump has remained conspicuously reserved since Politico reported earlier this month that five conservative justices had agreed to an opinion overturning Roe. On Truth Social — his apparent social media home since being kicked off other major platforms after the Jan. 6 riot in Washington, D.C., last year — Trump has been busy “truthing” about 2020-election-conspiracy theories, the PGA tour, the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial, the Durham probe, Elon Musk’s “probably illegal purchase of a crummy phony account loaded company,” and Tuesday’s Republican primaries. But since the draft opinion leaked, not once in the roughly 120 posts Trump has made on Truth Social have his thumbs tapped out a post referencing abortion, according to a Rolling Stone review of his account.

I knew he was nervous about this. Normally he would be strutting around taking credit for his great victory. But his instincts are right. It will be a problem.

First, nobody believes he really cares about abortion. Second, he once said that there should be some punishment for women for having and abortion which is a huge no-no to say out loud at this stage of the strategy. Third, overturning Roe is wildly unpopular and he campaigned on putting judges on the court who do exactly what they are doing. Yes, they are going to hold him responsible — as they should.

Hateful creeps

This makes me want to throw up:

The following story was written and researched by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune.

Utah hunting guide Wade Lemon faces five years in state prison for the death of a Carbon County bear killed during a guided hunt on May 18, 2018.

But Lemon, a well-known guide didn’t pull the trigger — Donald Trump Jr. did, according to the Utah Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

Trump Jr. is not named in a recent filing against Lemon, but the DNR confirmed his identity as the person named in the felony complaint as Lemon’s “client” on the hunt. Prosecutors have indicated there was no evidence showing Trump Jr. would have known about the alleged baiting that went on during the hunt.

Without naming Trump Jr., Davis County Attorney Troy Rawlings said the hunter in the case “was actually a victim and a now a possible witness in a fraudulent scheme to lead the hunter to believe it was actually a legitimate Wild West hunting situation.”

The charges against Lemon from the Trump Jr. hunt were filed just before the four-year statute of limitations expired. The DNR initially investigated allegations of illegal bearbaiting on the hunt in 2018 and closed the case later that year.

On Sept. 3, 2020, The Utah Investigative Journalism Project requested files on closed investigations against Wade Lemon Hunting. The DNR provided files on cases dating back to 2009 except for the case on the 2018 Trump Jr. hunt. DNR had decided to reopen that case and denied the records request, stating the release would interfere with the now “open” investigation.

DNR turned the case over to the Utah Attorney General’s Office. Utah Attorney General Reyes has close ties to Trump, having campaigned for him and even flying to Nevada to investigate the election results after Trump’s defeat at the polls and signed on to a lawsuit claiming “unlawful election results.” The Attorney General’s Office reinvestigated the case for months, then handed it off to the Davis County Attorney’s Office to screen for filing of charges.

Documents show investigations into Lemon’s organization for the past decade — allegations of cruel and illegal big game baiting practices.

“Lots of quality time in the woods hanging out at 10,000 feet. #outdoors #weekend #adventure #cabin #utah,” reads a May 19, 2018 Instagram post from Trump Jr. The president’s son is decked out in camouflage standing casually at the edge of a cliff before a sweeping view of rolling forests, hills and plateaus. The post is tagged “Utah” and the caption reads “Great weekend in Utah with some good friends in the outdoors.”

Trump Jr. was in Utah to help launch Hunter Nation, a hunting advocacy group. That group would later launch its own super PAC, Hunter Nation Action, which spent $96,997 in ads against Democrats in the 2020 election, according to the campaign spending transparency site Open Secrets.

The organization formed in 2018 and was cofounded by Utahn Don Peay, the Utah campaign manager for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

“You will have to go a long way to find a bigger advocate for our hunting lifestyle, a more passionate hunter and conservationist than Don, Jr.,” reads a post Hunter Nation released in the fall of 2019 as part of a raffle for members to win a trip hunting elk in Utah with the president’s son.

“The opportunity to share a hunting camp with him is truly priceless,” the post reads.

There were no pictures of Don Jr.’s kills from his May 2018 trip to Utah on his social media feed, but DNR confirmed that over the course of two days the president’s son bagged two kills that many would consider once-in-a-lifetime hunts — a bear on May 18 and a cougar on May 19, 2018.

Charging documents allege Lemon’s outfitters illegally used bait on the bear shot by Trump Jr. According to the document, a witness identified Lemon and his employees during the hunt in May 2018 and was able to identify Lemon over radio traffic, giving instructions to his employees.

The illegal bait, “a pile of grain, oil and pastries” was discovered with a trail camera pointed right on it with “WLH” (for Wade Lemon Hunting) written on the side and with Lemon’s own telephone number, according to court documents. The charging documents also include evidence from a subordinate confirming Lemon had him place the bait in the location several weeks before the hunt.

Lemon was contacted by phone and said he was surprised by the charges related to the Trump Jr. hunt, saying, “As far as I knew everything was above board,” before ending the call.

A request for comment from The Trump Organization, where Trump Jr. is an executive vice president, was not returned.

Wait. Does Don Jr still have a job other than getting paid to make happy birthday Cameos for MAGA freaks? It seems like all he does is shoot his mouth off, kill animals and post on social media.

He and his brother are both a couple of sociopaths who like to kill animals but apparently they are such pampered little princes that they need people to find the poor creature for them and set up an easy kill so all they have to do is just pull the trigger and strut around like some primitive beast. It couldn’t be more disgusting.

You can read the whole thing to get a sense of what a revolting rich-boy scam this is. It’s just awful.

Good news for Australia

The country took a sharp left turn. It’s a matter of survival:

Victory belongs to Anthony Albanese, only the fourth Labor leader since World War Two to oust a Liberal prime minister, but the 2022 Australian election was primarily a rejection of Scott Morrison and the brand of politics he has come to personify.

A politics that denied, and sometimes even mocked, the seriousness of the climate crisis – as Treasurer, Morrison laughingly brandished a lump of coal in parliament.

A politics that many female voters especially found bloke-ish and boorish.

A politics that many Australians came to associate with truth-twisting and lying – such as when Morrison claimed that Emmanuel Macron had “sledged” the Australian people over the cancellation of a multi-billion dollar submarine contract, when it was obvious that the French president had mounted a highly personalised attack on a man he labelled a liar.

At a time when conservative politics down under has displayed some small-t Trumpian traits, historians may conclude that Australian voters evicted from office the country’s first post-truth prime minister.

Rather than pulling off Miracle 2.0 – on the night of his unexpected victory in 2019, this Pentecostal Christian declared that he believed in miracles – the departing Liberal leader may well have led his party into the wilderness

Tumbling down have come the walls of conservative citadels. Parliamentary seats where Liberals had for generations dominated now look like barren lands.

The shoreline of Sydney Harbour, which is home to the most expensive real estate on the continent, is a case in point. It has been overwhelmed by a “teal” wave, the colour adopted by the swathe of independents who have had such a transformative effect on the country’s political geography.

Remarkably, the Liberals no longer control any harbour-side seats that stretch from the Opera House to the ocean. These include Wentworth and Warringah, which were represented up until recently by two former Liberal prime ministers, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott.

It is akin to San Francisco, another great harbour city, losing all its Democrats.

Nor did the teal wave just wash over the Liberal ramparts of Sydney.

In Melbourne, the party looks to have lost the seat of Kooyong, which was once the fiefdom of Robert Menzies, Australia’s longest serving prime minister, and which had remained faithfully conservative since Australia became a federation in 1901.

The same electoral dynamics played out. A party that has become fixated in recent decades with attracting working class battlers in traditional Labor strongholds has lost touch with Tesla-driving professionals in blue-ribbon seats.

For the first time in more than a decade, the electric car nudged out the coal train.

The rise of the teal independents has shattered the main party duopoly in the major cities – urban Australia accounts for 86% of the country’s population.

So, too, have the Australian Greens, one of the hitherto under-reported stories of this election.

With votes still to be counted, the Greens are confident of achieving what they are calling a “greenslide” in Queensland.

That is a startling statement, because, if true, it would shatter the conventional wisdom of Australian politics: that green politics is anathema to the country’s “Deep North” state.

Labor’s phobia of alienating voters in this mining and resources hub has had a paralysing effect on its approach to climate change.

Here, then, the Greens have been beneficiaries of Labor’s timidity regarding emissions targets.

If parts of Queensland become “Greensland” then the ground has truly shifted beneath our feet.

How that’s going to work out is anyone’s guess:

The success of the Greens and the rise of the independents explains why the two major parties, the Liberals and Labor, slumped to a record-low primary vote (which is where voters record their first preference).

There was always a none-of-the above feel to the head-to-head between the main party leaders. That has been borne out in the results.

Anthony Albanese, then, has achieved an ambiguous victory. There was no great groundswell of support for Labor. Indeed, its primary vote was actually 2% down from 2019, a meagre 32%. Although he is certain to emerge as prime minister, we still do not know whether he will stand at the head of a Labor majority government.

My sense during the campaign was that the Labor leader never fully addressed his prime ministerial plausibility problem. His gaffes did not help (although I think the public became more critical of the press pack’s endless gotcha questions rather than his inability to always answer them).

Nonetheless, a politician who was better known for most of his career as a backroom fixer is now front of house, and will occupy the prime ministerial residence, The Lodge. This he will see as vindication of his “small target” campaign and his mantra of “safe change.” It will also justify his political shapeshifting, from a left-wing firebrand to a risk-averse pragmatist…

The federal election has made politics here greener, more feminine and, at a time of creeping Americanisation, more emphatically Australian.

Perhaps the overwhelming message from voters is that they want a different kind of politics. Certainly, 2022 will be remembered for its shock to the system result.

Shocks to the systems can go sideways, as we well know. Let’s hope this one doesn’t.

And criminals didn’t do it

A whole lot of the dead weren’t vaccinated:

For the second year in a row, Covid-19 was the leading cause of death for law enforcement officers in the United States, according to a report released on Tuesday by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.

A total of 458 officers died in the line of duty in the country last year, making it the deadliest year in more than 90 years and a 55 percent increase from 2020, according to preliminary data compiled by the organization. Of those, it found that 301 federal, state, tribal and local law enforcement officers had died because of Covid-19.

“It has been reported to NLEOMF that these officers have died due to direct exposure to the virus during the commission of their official duties,” the report said.

In the three decades before the pandemic, the organization’s annual tally of officers killed in the line of duty surpassed 200 only twice, in 2001 and 2007. The last time it went above 300 was in 1930.

In recent months, as local governments began implementing vaccine mandates for workers, some police officers and law enforcement unions have pushed back, threatening resignations and legal action.

In October, New York City’s largest police union sued over the city’s vaccine mandate. The Police Benevolent Association of New York said it opposed a vaccine mandate for officers that does not allow an option of being tested weekly instead of being vaccinated. A federal judge this week dismissed a lawsuit filed by several Los Angeles police officers who had sued over the city’s vaccine mandate.

I will just point out that police unions insist that their members be given immunity from the law in many cases because their job is inherently dangerous and they need special dispensation to kill when they feel endangered. And yet they allowed their members to refuse vaccines which killed far more of them than gunfire. I guess it makes sense if you believe that a big part of their job is killing innocent members of the public, whether with guns or a deadly virus. But I don’t think that’s really in the job description. Or it shouldn’t be.

And it will be even worse next time

I’ve been working my way through former SecDef Mark Esper’s memoirs, “A Sacred Oath.” You’ve probably heard about its one or two re-reveals of previously reported information. But the real interest of the book arises from a metaphor Esper uses a couple of times.

Esper compares the Pentagon to a soccer ball. There are rules about how it is to be handled. Break the rules – grip the ball with the fingers – and the ball will be briefly indented. But the rule-breaker cannot grip forever. Once released, the ball rapidly recovers its shape.

Esper details instances that support his soccer-ball analogy. EG in a spasm of irritation in December 2019 then-President Trump issued an order that all US forces be removed from Germany. Trump was egged on by his hot-tempered then-ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell.

Esper quotes Grenell about the troop withdrawal: “That will get their [Germany’s] attention.”

He then quotes himself: “Of course it will, and many other countries too, including Russia, but for all the wrong reasons.”

But an order is an order. So Esper agreed to a “comprehensive review … to look at our troop presence around the world,” including European Command. Obviously such a review would take a long time – and as it happened, Trump had left office before the review was completed.

Similar slow-dragging methods were used against Trump’s demand for a big military parade through the center of Washington.

On the evidence of his book, Esper is satisfied that his methods more or less worked. “Despite the friction in my relationship with Trump, I felt I was still able to manage the president and his worst instincts.” (369)

And here really is the crux of the book and its argument. Esper seems to have been a competent manager, moderately conservative, a loyal American. Trump offended him in many ways, but those offenses are presented as distractions from more important work.

As Esper writes: “[A]lthough many things he suggested ranged from appropriate to outlandish, none ever rose to a level that warranted consideration of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.” Esper situates this estimate before the “shoot them in the legs” comment of June 2020, but the estimate remains clearly his view throughout his service. As he writs on p. 5: “There was another major concern I had to factor in to the equation: ‘Who would replace me?'”

The book is intended to reassure: Yes, some excesses occurred, but they were managed and contained. Trump had some good instincts, Esper writes in more than one place, and they could be appealed to – and if not, the worst orders could be mitigated or delayed.

But here are the haunting questions left behind:

1) As I’ve written before, if Trump is returned to office, this time the velociraptors will know how the door handles work. He will bring with him more committed followers, who may defeat the methods of evasion and delay.

2) Passive resistance tactics only go so far. If Trump signs the paper exiting NATO – NATO is kaput, no matter how much DoD may wish to evade and delay. As Esper acknowledges, he could not protect the Vindman brothers from Trump’s retaliateion.

3) Esper describes himself as a man of “conventional” views. Except for the very, very rare Henry Kissinger, the senior levels of government are not staffed by highly imaginative people. Nor probably should they be. Keep the system working, that’s the job. But that natural bureaucratic propensity leaves the system vulnerable when it confronts a novel threat outside its expectation: like a corrupt, anti-constitutional president at the top of the machinery of state. Aside from delay, top managers didn’t know how to cope. So in their memoirs after the fact, they console themselves: the system worked on my watch, more or less. Or if it didn’t work, it can now be fixed, because surely after January 6, Trump and Trumpism must be finished. Americans would never stand for a repeat, would they?

All of which reminds me of something else I said often in the first weeks of the Trump presidency: “The sunny American confidence that everything will turn out all right it itself the greatest threat to everything turning out all right.”

Originally tweeted by David Frum (@davidfrum) on May 22, 2022.