“My father, he’s very honest, he is who he is.”
Those two things are not the same. He is the most prolific liar in world history. But yes, he is who he is. Being shameless is not being honest although a lot of people do confuse the two things.
This show looks like … oh Dear God, why?
An old friend in a nearby town touched base the other day. As people do these days. we compared pandemic notes. He’d lost 12-15 people he knew to Covid, including a Fox-watching brother-in-law. None for me.
Neither he nor his wife nor me and mine had caught the crud. Other fully vaccinated friends have caught these highly contagious variants recently after letting their guards (and masks) down.
I’m still masking when going to shop indoors despite so few others doing so. Should any belligerent need to know, it’s a) force of habit, b) a fashion statement, or c) haven’t had a cold since 2019. Pick one.
Here’s another reason (Reuters):
Nearly 1 in 5 American adults who reported having COVID-19 in the past are still having symptoms of long COVID, according to survey data collected in the first two weeks of June, U.S. health officials said on Wednesday.
Overall, 1 in 13 adults in the United States have long COVID symptoms lasting for three months or more after first contracting the disease, and which they did not have before the infection, the data showed.
The data was collected from June 1-13 by the U.S. Census Bureau and analyzed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Long COVID symptoms range from fatigue, rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, cognitive difficulties, chronic pain, sensory abnormalities and muscle weakness. They can be debilitating and last for weeks or months after recovery from the initial infection.
Unless you’re into that sort of thing.
Similar findings are reported in a Lancet study. Fifty percent “in a large ongoing study still have one or more symptoms three months after becoming infected with the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2,” a Dutch study found:
Fatigue, shortness of breath, brain fog, and loss of smell are particularly common long-term effects of Covid-19. This is apparent from the studies mentioned above, but also the interim results of the RIVM’s study released on June 21st. For some, symptoms are relatively minor. For others, however, they can be disabling and life-altering.
Unless you’re into that sort of thing.
There’s more coming out from long-term studies (CNN):
Even the littlest children can experience long Covid, according to a large study, one of the first of its kind to include infants and toddlers.
The study published Wednesday in the journal The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health included 44,000 children in Denmark ranging in ages zero through 14 years old. Of the children, 11,000 had tested positive for Covid-19 between January 2020 and July 2021.
While symptoms associated with long Covid are general ailments children can experience even without Covid — headaches, mood swings, stomach problems and tiredness — the children in the study who had previously tested positive for Covid were more likely to experience at least one symptom for two months or more than the children who never tested positive for Covid.
The study also revealed that a third of children who had tested positive for Covid experienced at least one long-term symptom that was not present before testing positive.
Do them and yourselves a favor and stay vigilant.
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Easily forgotten is the time between the Watergate break-in in June 1972 and the Senate Watergate hearings beginning in May 1973: 11 months. Just for a “third-rate burglary.”
It should be no surprise that it took somewhat longer to pull together the House Jan. 6 hearings the country (well, some of it) is watching with fascination and horror. There were five perps originally arrested for the Watergate break-in. There were hundreds arrested in the wake of the Trump insurrection. Over 800 have been charged; hundreds more are being sought. There are potentially thousands of witnesses. Justice working its way up to the White House perps took time in 1972 and will take time now.
The Department of Justice is not, as the impatient believe, sitting on its heels (Washington Post):
Federal agents investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday dropped subpoenas on people in multiple locations, widening the probe of how political activists supporting President Donald Trump tried to use invalid electors to thwart Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.
Agents conducted court-authorized law enforcement activity Wednesday morning at different locations, FBI officials confirmed to The Washington Post. One was the home of Brad Carver, a Georgia lawyer who allegedly signed a document claiming to be a Trump elector. The other was the Virginia home of Thomas Lane, who worked on the Trump campaign’s efforts in Arizona and New Mexico. The FBI officials did not identify the people associated with those addresses, but public records list each of the locations as the home addresses of the men.
Among those who received a subpoena Wednesday was David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, who served as a Trump elector in that state, people familiar with the investigation said. Shafer’s lawyer declined to comment.
Separately, at least some of the would-be Trump electors in Michigan received subpoenas, according to a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. But it was not immediately clear whether that activity was related to a federal probe or a state-level criminal inquiry.
Like some of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, the delay in having agents appear at their doors may have given some involved in the false elector scheme false hope that none were coming. But we know: these things take time.
For others not suspected of involvement, agents want to know what they know.
“They wanted to know if I had talked to Giuliani,” said Patrick Gartland, an untappped Trump elector on the Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration, when the FBI appeared with a subpoena.
A federal judge on Wednesday delayed until December the trial of five Proud Boys on charges arising from the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol. The House panel does not plan to release transcripts of its interviews until public hearings conclude. That evidence could impact preparations for the trials for both prosecution and defense. Citing additional evidence generated by the hearings that needs review, Jan. 6 committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) announced on Wednesday additional hearings beyond this week would be delayed until July.
The wheels of justice, as the saying goes.
Marcy Wheeler has more background on the how long things take.
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11 year old rape victim, victimized by the courts:
A judge in Brazil denied an abortion to an 11-year-old who had been impregnated by rape, saying she didn’t want to enable a “homicide,” Newsweek reported on Monday. The young girl had reportedly been raped in her home earlier this year, and when she was taken to the hospital upon learning she was pregnant, a doctor at the University of Santa Catarina denied her an abortion because she was more than 22 weeks pregnant. The university hospital’s rules prohibit doctors from offering abortion care to someone past 20 weeks of pregnancy, without a court order.
Brazil notably criminalizes abortion and threatens abortion patients with one to three years in prison, and providers with one to four years. The country provides exceptions only for threats to the pregnant person’s life, when the fetus is deemed unviable, and, relevant to this case, if the pregnancy is the result of rape.
Joana Ribeiro Zimmer, the judge who refused to allow the 11-year-old girl to have an abortion, reportedly justified this decision by claiming if she allowed the abortion, she would fail to “[protect] the daughter,” referring to the 11-year-old’s unborn fetus, and would have been “subjecting her [the fetus] to a homicide.” Zimmer is now under investigation by Brazil’s Court of Justice, but the damage has been done: The child, who is already living with the trauma of surviving rape, now faces the added violation of forced pregnancy and the tremendous health risks associated with adolescent birth. Newsweek reports the girl is currently living in a shelter for women to protect her from her abuser/rapist at home.
As countries across Latin America and around the world take monumental steps to legalize abortion, this traumatic case offers a terrifying preview of post-Roe v. Wade America, with the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion rights imminent. Anti-abortion governors—who will soon decide whether their respective states ban abortion—and lawmakers are already bragging about the bans they’ll enact sans exceptions.
Of the dozens of states with pre-Roe abortion bans, trigger laws that will almost immediately ban abortion, or near-total bans, Guttmacher Institute’s research shows most lack exceptions for rape. Even prior to the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion reversing Roe, Jezebel reported on the phenomenon of rape exceptions recently disappearing from state abortion restrictions and bans.
In one of the more chilling interviews an anti-abortion politician has given on the issue, death penalty-supporting Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts—who plans to call his legislature to a special session once Roe falls to immediately ban abortion—insisted, repeatedly, that even if a pregnancy is the product of rape, “yes, they’re still babies.” The 11-year-old rape victim in Brazil is a baby, too, and harrowing cases like hers will surely be enabled in a post-Roe U.S.—what about these babies?
You know this will happen here eventually. It’s inevitable.
He is a total loon and stupid to boot. He’s completely useless — and yet:
Somebody needs to put this in an ad. It may be the only thing that can ensure he doesn’t win:
That’s the one thing that might sink him.
The hero of yesterday’s hearing:
Rusty Bowers said efforts by Trump’s backers have harmed the nation, undercut trust in elections and the right of people to vote their conscience.
“I just think it is horrendous. It’s terrible,” Bowers said. “The result of throwing the pebble in the pond, the reverberations across the pond, have, I think, been very destructive.”
Bowers said he has not watched the committee’s hearings, but did see some of the video clips showing the rampage at the Capitol. He said it sickened him watching people who supported Trump attacking police, including a man who had protested at the Arizona Capitol.
“I’m appalled at what I saw,” Bowers said, “I don’t mind their having these hearings. I don’t mind. I think it illuminates something we need to see big time, and take stock of ourselves. And I hope it would sober us.”
Bowers was one of five recipients of this year’s John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage award for his refusal to consider overturning the 2020 election results despite pressure from Trump and his supporters.
Great stuff. Truly inspiring. So how do we explain this?
But while Bowers said the efforts by Giuliani and other Trump backers have been hurtful, he does not levy any criticism on Trump directly and would support him if he were on the ballot.
“If he is the nominee, if he was up against Biden, I’d vote for him again,” Bowers said. “Simply because what he did the first time, before COVID, was so good for the county. In my view it was great.”
I wish I knew what they thought was so great about the criminal miscreant Trump’s administration that they are willing to endure harassment, threats, accusations of being a pedophile, certain chaos and repeated affronts to the constitution by voting for him again. It is morally incoherent. And yet they all say it. It’s maddening.
Look who agrees with Media Matters:
It’s unclear what, exactly, makes Banks and Jordan sacrosanct “main picks,” other than their close ties to Roberts’ prime-time colleagues Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, respectively. Last year, McCarthy selected five Republican members to sit on the committee: Banks, Jordan, Rodney Davis (R-IL), Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) and Troy Nehls (R-TX). Pelosi accepted Davis, Armstrong, and Nehls but rejected Banks and Jordan on the grounds that their support for Trump’s effort to overturn the election would compromise the investigation.
But McCarthy could have named replacements for them. Instead, he decided that his caucus would boycott the committee altogether, with news outlets reporting that this was a deliberate strategy to “make it seem like a one-sided, one-party witch hunt.”
Roberts may find those facts “fundamentally disingenuous” — but Trump himself is now making the same argument. Punchbowl News reported Wednesday that Trump had told the outlet that McCarthy erred by not selecting replacements for Banks and Jordan because now “the Republicans don’t have a voice.” The story quotes Trump saying:
“I think it would’ve been far better to have Republicans [on the panel]. [Jim Banks and Jim Jordan] were great. They were great and would’ve been great to have them. But when Pelosi wrongfully didn’t allow them, we should’ve picked other people. We have a lot of good people in the Republican Party.”
“Trump added there’s ‘not even a question’ that McCarthy should’ve put Republicans on the select committee,” Punchbowl News further reported.
It looks like somebody didn’t get the memo. Was it Roberts — or Trump?
This by Tom Nichols has the ring of truth:
As the January 6 hearings restarted today after the long weekend, I was thinking about the weird, psychotic fear that has overtaken millions of Americans. I include in those millions people who are near and dear to me, friends I have known for years who now seem to speak a different language, a kind of Fox-infused, Gish Galloping, “what-about” patois that makes no sense even if you slow it down or add punctuation.
Such conversations are just part of life in divided America now. We live in a democracy, and there’s no law (nor should there be) against the willing suffocation of one’s own brain cells with television and the internet. But living in an alternate reality is unhealthy—and dangerous, as I realized yet again while watching the January 6 committee hearings and listening to the stories of Republicans, such as Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and others, describing the threats and harassment they have received for doing their duty to the Constitution.
And the threats don’t stop with political figures; families are now in the crosshairs. Representative Adam Kinzinger, for example, tweeted Monday about a letter he received in which the writer threatened not only to kill him, but to kill his wife and infant son.
There have always been unstable people in America, and they have always done frightening things. But there seem to be a lot more of them now. Some of them are genuinely dangerous, but many more are just rage-drunk nihilists who will threaten any public figures targeted by their preferred television hosts or websites, regardless of party or policy.
The more I think about it—and I spent years researching such problems while writing a book about democracy—the more I think that such people are less angry than they are terrified.
Many of you will respond: Of course they’re terrified. They’re scared of demographic change, of cultural shifts, of being looked down upon for being older and uneducated in an increasingly young and educated world.
All true. But I think there’s more to it.
I think the Trump superfans are terrified of being wrong. I suspect they know that for many years they’ve made a terrible mistake—that Trump and his coterie took them to the cleaners and the cognitive dissonance is now rising to ear-splitting, chest-constricting levels. And so they will literally threaten to kill people like Kinzinger (among others) if that’s what it takes to silence the last feeble voice of reason inside themselves.
We know from studies (and from experience as human beings) that being wrong makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s an actual physiological sensation, and when compounded by humiliation, it becomes intolerable. The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason.
These outlets are eager to oblige. It’s not you, the hosts assure the viewers. It’s them. You made the right decisions years ago and no matter how much it now seems that you were fooled and conned, you are on the side of right and justice.
This therapy works for as long as the patient is glued to the television or computer screen. The moment someone like Bowers or Kinzinger or Liz Cheney appears and attacks the lie, the anxiety and embarrassment rise like reflux in the throat, and it must be stopped, even if it means threatening to kill the messenger.
No one who truly believes they are right threatens to hurt anyone for expressing a contrary view. The snarling threat of violence never comes from people who calmly believe they are in the right. It is always the instant resort of the bully who feels the hot flush of shame rising in the cheeks and the cold rock of fear dropping in the pit of the stomach.
In the film adaptation of the Cold War epic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré’s fictional British intelligence officer George Smiley describes his opposite number, the Soviet spymaster Karla. Smiley knows Karla can be beaten, he says, because Karla “is a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.”
What this means, I regret to say, is that there will be more threats, and more violence, because there will be more truth. It’s going to be a long summer.
I think we’ve all known people in our lives who simply cannot admit to being wrong. Nobody exemplifies that more than Donald Trump. And for many of them it’s because they know they are wrong but their egos won’t let them acknowledge it. It’s the ethos of the bully.
There is so much evidence emerging from the January 6th hearings that it’s sometimes hard to wrap your arms around what it all means. They are making a strong case that Donald Trump knew the election was legitimate yet spread the Big Lie that it was stolen anyway. He was also told that his scheme to have his vice president, Mike Pence, overturn the election was illegal and unconstitutional. The committee on Tuesday, during its fourth hearing, laid out how Trump was intimately involved in the pressure campaign to persuade Republican state officials to illegally change the legitimate results and “decertify” the will of the people. Future hearings will discuss the plot to corrupt the Department of Justice(DOJ) and incite the mob to intimidate the joint session of Congress and the vice president into overturning the election.
All roads lead to Trump and his henchmen.
It’s clear that there were many enablers around him — as even those who resisted internally didn’t publicly sound the alarm. Trump ordered the Republican National Committee to “help” with the “fake elector” scheme, knowing that there was no constitutionally valid alternative, which they were happy to do. Yet the so-called Team Normal surrounding Trump, who knew their leader was staging a coup, simply shrugged and backed away quietly. Lawyers in Trump’s orbit testified that they knew the “fake elector” scheme was illegal and unethical and simply washed their hands of it rather than step up to say something.
Nonetheless, there were Republican officials who did their duty and Tuesday’s hearings featured three of them.
Arizona’s Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers movingly testified to the intense pressure brought to bear on him to use his office to help Trump overturn the election in his state. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger talked about that famous phone call in which Trump asked him to “find” just enough votes for him to win and Gabriel Sterling, the Chief Operating Officer of Raffensperger’s office, spoke at length about how the accusations of fraud were disproved over and over again. Unlike most of the people around Trump (and many in the states), these were people who took their oaths of office seriously and refused to do Donald Trump’s bidding. Their testimony in that regard was very compelling.
Elected officials were harassed for failing to follow Trump’s orders to make him the winner of the 2020 election regardless of the legitimate election results.
Hovering over all these hearings, however, is the ongoing threat of political violence and that narrative is unfolding right along with the narrative of the coup plot itself. The violence was unleashed long before Jan. 6th and looking back it seems inevitable that it was leading to an insurrection. Tuesday’s hearing illustrated how that was felt by the individuals on the receiving end of those threats. Various officials relayed their experiences with threats and harassment at their homes and on their jobs, some of which is ongoing. Bowers’s gravely ill daughter and neighbors, for instance, were threatened and he still has video panel trucks running by his house and in his neighborhood calling him a pedophile and pervert. Raffensperger’s wife got what he called “sexualized” threats and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was intimidated at her home. These stories can be repeated all over the country as elected officials were harassed for failing to follow Trump’s orders to make him the winner of the 2020 election regardless of the legitimate election results.
But that was nothing compared to the horrors inflicted on innocent election workers who were targeted for allegedly cheating on behalf of Joe Biden. None suffered more than Fulton County election worker Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, both of whom gave testimony to the committee.
In his famous phone call to Raffensperger, Donald Trump called Freeman a “professional vote scammer and hustler.” His lawyer Rudy Giuliani told a Georgia legislative hearing that the two women were committing voter fraud, “surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine.” It turned out that the “USB ports” (the supposed tech expert meant USB drive) was actually a mint that Freeman passed to her daughter. This disgusting slander was all over right-wing media:
And where did that come from? It started in the far corners of the right-wing fever swamp and ended up on Fox News and in Donald Trump’s mouth.
Moss described how her life was turned upside down by what Trump and his followers did to them. Angry Trumpers tried to push through her grandmother’s front door saying they were there to make a citizen’s arrest. The FBI told Freeman she needed to leave her home because her life was in danger. Both of them are afraid to use their names in public and Moss has quit her job as an election worker along with everyone she worked with on the 2020 election. These women were hounded, harassed and threatened all because Donald Trump’s ego wouldn’t let him admit he lost the election and many of his followers have lost all common sense and common decency.
The violence of January 6th had been a long time coming, even before the election. We saw state houses taken over by armed militia “protesting” mask mandates. Public health officials were threatened at their homes. School board members were plagued with taunts of “we know how to find you” at public meetings. Many of these “protesters” are armed.
The RNC even called January 6th “legitimate political discourse.” The threat of political violence is now an everyday feature of right-wing political activism.
Trump didn’t create this phenomenon. He’s just the first president to openly endorse it and coerce the GOP establishment to fully embrace it. The violent rhetoric of the right-wing media was way ahead of him. Recall original gangster Rush Limbaugh who said decades ago now, “I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus — living fossils…. ” Or consider Ann Coulter when asked what was her biggest ethical dilemma said, “There was one time I had a shot at Clinton. I thought ‘Ann, that’s not going to help your career.'”
Violent rhetoric has been the coin of the realm in right-wing media since Trump was a Democrat. But it’s gone into overdrive since he came on the scene and his Big Lie and coup attempt were destined to end up with people getting hurt and killed.
We don’t yet know what the committee has uncovered about Trump’s knowledge of the various violent plots that were cooked up around January 6th. It’s possible he knew nothing of them. But that doesn’t absolve him of responsibility for the atmosphere he amplified during his time in office. He not only publicly modeled the bullying and authoritarian style of the mob boss, but he also encouraged his followers to use threats and intimidation to force political acquiescence over democratic means. Of course, they would resort to violence. That’s the whole point.
One of the features (not a bug) about Donald Trump’s Big Lie that Tuesday’s public hearing put on display is how eagerly Team Trump and the Kraken lawyers accepted and trafficked in conspiracy theories surrounding 2020 voting. Trump’s recorded conversation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) highlighted that, as well as Rudy Giuliani’s interactions with Arizona House Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers (R).
Bowers told the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that Giuliani alleged widespread voter fraud in Arizona. Pressed to present his evidence, Giuliani never did. Ever.
“In my recollection,” Bowers testified, Giuliani “said, ‘We have lots of theories we just don’t have the evidence.'”
Evidence-wise, in my experience what conspiracy theorists lack in quality they make up for in quantity. That their “evidence” cannot stand up to scrutiny is irrelevent. They know what they believe going in. They assemble volumes of evidence, no matter how flimsy, to support it. They are committed to none of it. Every piece is disposable once challenged. They simply move on to the next item from the pile. And it’s a tall pile. It’s all crap, but we are to be impressed with the quantity.
US District Judge David Carter determined in March that the plot by attorney John Eastman and Donald Trump was “a coup in search of a legal theory.” Much as the Bush II administration needed a legal rationale for torturing prisoners. They knew what they wanted to do. They just needed legal cover for doing it.
Clips of Trump’s recorded call played Tuesday during Raffensperger’s and Georgia elections official Gabriel Sterling’s testimony illustrated the behavior (NPR):
Trump raised the thoroughly debunked allegation that ballots were being transported in suitcases and that based on video footage they contained a minimum of 18,000 ballots all for Joe Biden.
Raffensperger confirmed that the U.S. Justice Department and the attorney general, as well as the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and his own office, had all found those claims to be false.
Even more importantly, he added, the Trump-appointed acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, Bobby Christine, had dismissed those claims early on.
Sterling said the objects captured on video were not suitcases or trunks, but standard ballot carriers that allow for seals to be added to prevent tampering.
And, he said, there’s “no physical way” that Trump or anyone could have known who those ballots were for. A Fulton County monitor (who the state required to be on-site due to its difficulty running elections during COVID) noted that approximately 8,900 total ballots were scanned from the time he left to the time he returned around about 1 a.m. — far less than the 18,000 that Trump had mentioned.
Trump told Raffensperger that “they dropped a lot of votes in there late at night.”
Raffensperger refuted that notion, saying he believed Trump was referring to the time at which various counties would upload their results.
“But the ballots had all been accepted … they had to be accepted, by state law, by 7 p.m.,” he said. “So there were no additional ballots accepted after 7 p.m.”
Trump claimed that roughly 5,000 dead people in Georgia voted.
The Trump administration claimed in its lawsuits that more than 10,000 dead people voted in Georgia, Raffensperger said — adding that neither of those numbers are accurate.
At the time that Raffensperger wrote his letter to Congress on Jan. 6, the state had found evidence of just two dead people having voted. They subsequently found two more.
“That’s one, two, three, four people — not 4,000,” he said. “But just a total of four, not 10,000, not 5,000.”
Debunk one wild allegation, push back on it, and conspiracy theorists will drop it and move on. “Well, what about this?”
Like Captain America getting his ass kicked, they can do this all day. And be just as deluded at the end of it.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
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