Skip to content

Month: December 2022

Cassidy Hutchinson’s mirror test

Wow, this is something. These people were mobsters:

Cassidy Hutchinson sped out of Washington in the wee hours of the morning while Googling “Watergate” on her phone, frantically looking for some kind of guidance on how to be a whistleblower.

Until that moment, the former Donald Trump White House aide who would go on to be the star witness of the House Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, had remained “loyal” and “in the family,” as Trump-world insiders kept reminding her, according to transcripts of her testimony released Thursday.

She didn’t even know who was paying her own lawyer, but he made it clear that her job was to “protect the president.” And he kept dangling job opportunities and promising that she would be “taken care of” if she did her part, she ultimately told the committee.

But the night before she fled for her parent’s house in New Jersey, Hutchinson said she “had a mental breakdown” as the moral crisis she had been grappling with came to a head, pushing her to make a decision that would change the course of the investigation into the 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Hutchinson’s blockbuster testimony this summer became a key pillar of Jan. 6 Committee’s investigation. But new, never-before-seen transcripts of her interviews with investigators released Thursday offer a fresh portrait of a young, desperate woman torn between her conscience and some of the most powerful men in America.

“I was scared,” she told committee investigators last September in sworn testimony. “I almost felt like at points Donald Trump was looking over my shoulder.”

“I was scared. I almost felt like at points Donald Trump was looking over my shoulder.”

The transcripts, which come ahead of the release of the committee’s final report, offer an intimate look at the pressure Hutchinson says she felt from Trump-world to stay in line.

Unemployed and unable to afford a lawyer at the outset of the committee’s investigation, Hutchinson begged her estranged biological father for money on his doorstep one night, but he refused. Asking for his help, she said, was one of her only regrets. Her aunt and uncle — who she described as believers in QAnon, a conspiracy theory driven by Trump supporters — were more sympathetic, and even looked into refinancing their home to help, but that didn’t work out either.

So she reluctantly accepted when Trump insiders reached out to tell her not to worry, they would set her up with an attorney at no charge to her.

“I am completely indebted to these people. They will ruin my life, Mom, if I do anything that they don’t want me to do,” she said she told her mother at one point, according to the transcripts.

She was fully aware the help came with strings attached.

“It was this, like, battle inside my head where, like, 80 percent of me constantly felt like, ‘This is bad, this is bad, this is bad. I need to get out of this situation,'” she said. “But then there was 20 percent of me…where I was thinking, you know, like, ‘Cass, you’re overthinking this… Maybe they really do want to take care of you and they are trying to make this easy on you. Like, don’t be too cynical about this.’”

Her Trump-allied lawyer, Stefan Passantino, counseled her to say as little as possible to Jan. 6 committee investigators, she said. “We just want to focus on protecting the President. We all know you’re loyal. Let’s just get you in and out,” she said he told her, according to the transcripts.

On days when she was scheduled to be deposed, he would dangle job prospects. “We’re gonna get you a really good job in Trump world. You don’t need to apply other places. We’re gonna get you taken care of. We want to keep you in the family,” she said he told her.

“I want to make this clear to you: Stefan never told me to lie,” she told the committee. “He specifically told me, ‘I don’t want you to perjure yourself, but ‘I don’t recall’ isn’t perjury. They don’t know what you can and can’t recall.’” 

At first, Hutchinson did her part, as instructed, during two depositions. She felt like she had lied and felt bad about it, but tried to forget about it. “I just kind of compartmentalized any guilt that I had had and was just like, ‘let me just move on,’” she testified. 

But in April, the dam holding back her guilt burst. She was sitting in her Washington apartment and read a legal document that cited her testimony, which was replete with obfuscations, dodges and “I cannot recall” statements. She broke down.

“So I got in the car, and I drove up to New Jersey, because my parents live in New Jersey, and what does Cassidy do when she has problems…she doesn’t want to confront? I try to get out — I try to get out of here,” she later testified. 

She said she didn’t know much about Watergate at the time, but Wikipedia quickly educated her about Nixon White House whistleblowers like former Counsel John Dean and Alex Butterfield, the aide who had helped install — and then publicly reveal — Nixon’s taping system.

“It looked like he had a similar role and title to what I had in the White House. So I’m, in driving, sort of trying to read about him,” Hutchinson said.

She quickly ordered two copies of Butterfield’s book, co-authored by journalist Bob Woodward, and had them shipped to her parents’ house, where she devoured them.

“I read it once. Then I read it again, underlined. And then I read it a third time, and I went through and tabbed it,” she said. “He talked about a lot of the same things that I felt like I was experiencing…but he ended up doing the right thing.”

“And it was after I read this I was like, if I’m going to pass the mirror test for the rest of my life, I need to try to fix some of this,” she said, referring to the ability to look oneself in the mirror.

She back-channeled information to investigators to ensure they would ask her back for a third deposition.

When she met with them again, she was more forthcoming. Her Trump-world lawyer, Passantino, was not happy, she said, and began frantically calling his colleagues to do damage control. 

Passantino, who was deputy White House counsel under Trump, defended himself in a statement and said the Jan. 6 Committee never asked for his side of the story. He said he is taking a leave of absence from the law firm where he is a parter, Michael Best, which he said was not involved in Hutchinson’s defense, because he does not want to be a “distraction.”

“As with all my clients during my 30 years of practice, I represented Ms. Hutchinson honorably, ethically, and fully consistent with her sole interests as she communicated them to me. I believed Ms. Hutchinson was being truthful and cooperative with the Committee throughout the several interview sessions in which I represented her,” Passantino said. “It is not uncommon for clients to change lawyers because their interests or strategies change. It is also not uncommon for a third-party, including a political committee, to cover a client’s fees at the client’s request. External communications made on Ms. Hutchinson’s behalf while I was her counsel were made with her express authorization.”

Eventually, Hutchinson would get a new, independent pro bono lawyer, and break entirely from Trump world, revealing everything she knew, including about the incident where Trump allegedly put his hands on a Secret Service agent’s neck demanding he be taken to the Capitol on Jan. 6

“I’m about to be f—— nuked,” she said she told a committee staffer as she left that third meeting. 

“I’m really sorry,” the staffer replied, she said.

And then Hutchinson turned and walked out.

What a story. I will never understand why she worked for that orange miscreant in the first place. But when push came to shove she did the right thing. It’s just amazing how few of the others did the same.

This is mob stuff. The attorney who was representing her was really representing The Boss. She knew exactly what that meant. And instead of going along as she could have easily done, she decided to speak. Good for her. It may end up making the difference between Donald Trump becoming president again and Donald Trump … not becoming president again. (I don’t know whether he will pay a real price but for him not being able to wreak his revenge by beating Joe Biden in 2024 would be very painful.)

Hutchinson is in the history books. If I were her I’d keep a bodyguard around. There are people out there who will not forgive her for doing this. And that says a lot about where we are as a country,

If you’d like to throw a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking, you can do so below. Happy Hollandaise everyone!


A coincidence, I’m sure

Well, well, well:

The I.R.S. subjected both President Donald J. Trump’s predecessor and his successor to annual audits of their tax returns once they took office, spokespeople for Barack Obama and President Biden said on Wednesday, intensifying questions about how Mr. Trump escaped such scrutiny until Democrats in the House started inquiring.

Late Tuesday, a House committee revealed that the I.R.S. failed to audit Mr. Trump during his first two years in office despite a rule that states that “the individual tax returns for the president and the vice president are subject to mandatory review.” But its report left unclear whether that lapse reflected general dysfunction or whether Mr. Trump received special treatment.

The disclosure of routine audits of Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden during their time in office suggested that the agency’s treatment of Mr. Trump was an aberration.

How odd. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that Trump installed cronies at the top of the agency. Like this one, which I had forgotten about:

President Trump earlier this year asked Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, to prioritize a confirmation vote for his nominee to be the chief counsel of the Internal Revenue Service, indicating that it was a higher priority than voting on the nomination of William P. Barr as attorney general, a person familiar with the conversation said.

White House aides insisted for months that the confirmation of the nominee, Michael J. Desmond, a tax lawyer from Santa Barbara, Calif., was a top priority after passage of the tax bill in 2017.

But the request by Mr. Trump, made to Mr. McConnell on Feb. 5, raised questions about whether the president had other motivations. For months, the president has seethed over vows by congressional Democrats that they would move to obtain his tax returns from the I.R.S. And this week, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Representative Richard E. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts, formally asked the I.R.S. for six years of the returns, using an obscure provision in the tax code to do so.

On Thursday, asked if he would direct the I.R.S. not to disclose his tax returns, Mr. Trump said Democrats would have to talk to his lawyers.

“They’ll speak to my lawyers,” Mr. Trump said during remarks at the Oval Office. “They’ll speak to the attorney general.”

In July, when Mr. Desmond was first being considered by the Senate Finance Committee, Bloomberg reported that he had briefly advised the Trump Organization on tax issues before Mr. Trump took office. James Wilkinson, a spokesman for Mr. Desmond, told Bloomberg that Mr. Desmond had helped with “a discrete reporting matter for a subsidiary company that was resolved with no tax impact.”

In private practice, Mr. Desmond worked for a time alongside William Nelson and Sheri Dillon, who currently serve as tax counsels to the Trump Organization.

And, as we already know, he put a Beverly Hills tax accountant in charge of the agency after he wrote an op-ed urging Trump not to release his tax returns.

All these talking heads calling for the smelling salts over the release of Trump’s tax returns should STFU. This corrupt piece of work gamed the system at every turn and these documents should be in the public record. I don’t kid myself that any of his stalwart cultists will care. They agree that it’s smart for him to cheat on his taxes. After all, they keep sending the alleged billionaire their own hard earned cash so I don’t think they are too swift when it comes to money. But maybe this will penetrate for a few people who really don’t think super rich folks should game the system to the extent they end up paying no taxes at all. None of the rest of us get to do that.

Happy Hollandaise everybody!


There is something to be said for tradition

Once again, thanks so much for your support everyone. It makes me feel downright teary. I’m so, so very grateful and I will do my best to keep up the pace this next year as the chaos accelerates. Between the new House majority and the presidential election kicking into gear, it’s going to be lit. Get some rest while you can.

I still can’t believe I’ve been at this for 20 years. Where does the time go? But I’m proud to have kept up this funky old blogging tradition. I think it still has something to offer and apparently so do all these writers who are offering Substack subscriptions. It’s really just the newer version of what we do here.

But there is something to be said for the old format, I think. It’s free to anyone who stops by and depends upon readers’ voluntary support if they feel it’s worthwhile. I think it’s a nice tradition .


Watching Ukrainian president Zelensky speech last night brought home to me once again just how serious politics are even as they become more and more performative and crazy. Here was a man whose country is being bombarded daily, losing thousands of lives, dealing with the wanton destruction of their vital infrastructure all because a megalomaniac invaded their country, determined to take it from them. It’s the oldest story in the book but it’s shocking to see it in this day and age nonetheless. And yes, it’s particularly shocking to see it in Europe after the massive wars of the 20th century. If that didn’t end the bloodlust there, I guess nothing will.

Zelensky flew to Washington to thank Americans for their support and emphasize to lawmakers that Ukraine will need that support for the long haul. It was good to see the bicameral, bipartisan response to the speech and hopefully that will hold up. On a moral basis, I don’t think the US can turn its back on Ukraine, a country that is being assaulted without provocation and whose citizens are being subjected to torture, killing and mass destruction. On a real politik level, it’s clear that Russia is aggressively threatening the sovereignty of Ukraine, and the entire international order. Turning your back on such behavior has not worked out well.

Luckily, Marge Greene and her friends didn’t act out the way they did at Biden’s State of the Union. Greene didn’t attend while Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz sat sullenly throughout, But the pro-Putin MAGA right wingers made their thoughts known:

Like these fine fellows:

And this one:

And this one:

This is what we’re dealing with, folks. And I don’t see that it’s going to get better before it gets worse. They are immature, radical, nihilists and they can’t be stopped by putting our heads in the sand any more than Vladimir Putin can be stopped by legitimizing his invasion of a sovereign country. These are forces that have to be opposed.

We will do our best to keep up with all this. It sometimes takes a toll on your mental health to stay on top of things but that’s what Netflix and wine are for. 🙂 If you think it’s worthwhile to have progressive types combing the internet 7 days a week for political and cultural information and synthesizing it in short takes as well as longer analyses as we do here, then I’d be grateful for your support. This next year is going to be a doozy.

You can drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking by using the address on the left sidebar or hitting one of the buttons below. Happy Hollandaise everyone!


The GOP Senate minority is more powerful than the GOP House majority

So says former Republican Rich Galen, anyway:

Last week, U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy – who is struggling for his political life like a swimmer caught in an Atlantic Ocean rip tide – threatened Republican members of the Senate who voted in favor of the omnibus spending bill. He said, in effect, when Republicans take control of the House in January, they will make certain those Senators’ legislative priorities are pushed to the bottom of the stack.

Senate Republicans were not intimidated, and the procedural vote to proceed passed easily.

Some years ago, I was having lunch with a former member of the U.S. House, and the discussion drifted toward this business of bi-cameral equity. He started recounting a time when he needed to discuss an issue with one of his state’s U.S. Senators, so “I went over to the Senate side to meet with his chief of staff.”

I stopped him and said, “You know, that has never happened in reverse. A Senator has never, ever walked to the House side to meet with a Representative’s chief of staff.”
We had a good laugh about it, but it was true.

Another example:

When Newt Gingrich was Speaker, I worked out of the Republican National Committee building just off the Capitol compound. One day I was walking across the plaza and a Capitol Police officer stopped me and said I had to walk in the approved crosswalks.

When I got to the Speaker’s suite, I asked Newt when (and why) this new “walk to the rule” business had been implemented. He asked me what I was talking about, and I told him about the cop and the crosswalk.

He called out to his assistant to get the Sergeant-at-Arms on the phone and was told that a pedestrian had been clipped, but not injured, by a car walking across the Senate side of the Capitol plaza and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had ordered the crosswalk rules be enforced. Even on the House side.

Newt would have none of it and ordered the Capitol Police on the House half of the Plaza to revert to the status quo ante and allow people to cut across the plaza at will. Not only that, but he suggested that I reverse my trek, walk back across the plaza, and report whether his order had been implemented.

It had been.

The point is that Senators believe the only reason the House exists is for joint sessions when the Senate chamber isn’t large enough to handle the crowd. The notion of a member of the House – even the chair of a powerful committee – threatening even a junior Senator with retaliation is laughable.

The crosswalk story, which is true, indicates how jealously each side protects its prerogatives – even when they are controlled by the same party, which, in 2023, will not be the case.

Kevin McCarthy might be elected Speaker on January 3, but his majority will be slim. And, if he thinks his being Speaker will make Republican Senators come to heel, he will be disappointed. Again.

Let’s hear from the real speaker,shall we?

Mitch McConnell helps pass a nearly $2 TRILLION Onnimonster so that he can hand a $47 BILLION dollar check to Zelenskyy when he shows up in DC today.
But in my district, many families & seniors can’t afford food & many businesses are struggling bc of Biden policies.

For, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate to override the upcoming Republican majority and literally steal our responsibility in the House to appropriate spending for nearly half of our upcoming majority, just to help Biden & his retiring Senator friends,

this is a betrayal that can NOT be ignored and there must be action taken.

We, Republicans, as a national party need to have a serious talk about supporting any member of our party that betrays us in this manner.

Our southern border is being invaded so badly and

the American taxpayer’s dollars Mitch McConnell appropriated in this onnimonster only allows our money to help migrants into our country NOT keep them out.

El Paso just declared a state of emergency & has been over run by nearly 140,000 (that we know of) migrants since October!

But Mitch McConnell could not even negotiate with his dear friends Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden???

Especially since they have all served together for almost as long as I’ve been alive?

And Mitch had all the control bc they couldn’t get to 60 votes without him & Republicans.

The American taxpayers are literally paying to prop up many countries all over the world in foreign aid, but America is virtually crumbling before our eyes.

It’s like the American people are raped everyday at the hands of their own elected leaders.

Here is foreign aid in 2022👇

The disconnected & totally oblivious government leaders & sheltered media all live in a bubble & only talk to each other.

They’re so naive & ignorant they think my views are extreme but are totally blind and stupid to the fact that what I am saying is exactly how Americans feel.

Invading our land, destroying our economy, devaluing our dollar, killing our energy, destroying our own critical supplies, enslaving us in debt, harming our children, & castrating our independence while making us pay for it all, eventually won’t be tolerated.

Originally tweeted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) on December 21, 2022.

Marge is an expert on all this, you see. Sure she’s just in her first term and only became interested in politics when Trump came into office and she got into QAnon online. But she’s a powerhouse in the GOP now. Kevin will no doubt be relying on her to guide him on budgets and world affairs and everything else. She’s a very stable genius and she’s got this.

I don’t know how McConnell will respond to what is sure to be repeated insults but I don’t get the sense he’s too disturbed by it. His legacy as the gravedigger of democracy is already set. He got his court. He could not care less about Kevin McCarthy or Marge Green.

But get your popcorn ready. This is going to be quite the spectacle. Too bad about the country,

Happy Hollandaise, everyone! If you’d like to help keep the lights on here at Hullabaloo for another year you can do so below or use the address on the left sidebar. Thank you.


Your Amercia-first kleptocracy

Who are these people?

Representative-elect George Santos (image from his website).

Trumpism. MAGA. Not even GQP cult members would have predicted that making America great again meant turning it into a corrupt, third-world, white, Christian kleptocracy. (In the name of Jesus, amen.) But here we are.

Republicans, conservative Christians foremost, who elevated the Trump crime family to First Family helped elect an even bigger fraud to Congress on Long Island.

David Corn teases some of what we know (and don’t) about Brazilian-born Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.):

George Santos, the apparent GOP fabulist, went from $55K a year in 2020 to making between $3.5m-$11.5m in 2021 via a company he created that lasted less than a year—and he has put out vague/conflicting accounts of what this firm did. Apply the smell test.

Corn continues the tale at Mother Jones:

He had boasted of being an accomplished investor and financier who had worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Yet each firm noted it had no record of his employment there. He had said he graduated from Baruch College. The school said he had not. His personal finances seemed odd as well, and he had worked at a Florida company called Harbor City Capital that was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2021 of running a $17 million Ponzi scheme. Subsequently, he supposedly made at least $3.5 million from a mysterious company, called Devolder Organization LLC, that he started, that had no public profile, and that was dissolved soon after it was created. This marked a dramatic shift from his first run for Congress in 2020, when he reported earning $55,000 per year.

[…]

The Times article cast Santos as a modern-day Mr. Ripley who seemingly had manufactured a rags-to-riches public persona based on audacious lies. He was once arrested in Brazil for forging checks. He boasted he founded an animal rescue charity, but the outfit barely existed and was not registered with the IRS as a nonprofit. (The intended beneficiary of one of its events reported never receiving the funds from a fundraiser Santos’ group helped to organize.) Before the election, Santos said he owned a “Hamptons mansion” worth $10 million, but according to his financial disclosure filings he owned no real estate at the time. (He was then renting an apartment in Queens.) All the unsubstantiated claims have prompted questions about his financial and business dealings, including Devolder and his interactions with Harbor City and its principals.

Donald Trump built a career out of lies about being self-made (he “started out” with millions from Papa Fred), but give him credit, he’s got a knack for running decades worth of scams that are only lately beginning to catch up with him.

Santos? Not so skillful.

Corn offers much more about Santos’ involvement with Devolder and Harbor City. But the con does not end there. It begins with what he claims about his roots in Brazil.

“His whole life. Made up,” said incoming House Democratic leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, in calling Santos a “complete and utter fraud.”

The New York Times:

Hours before Mr. Jeffries spoke, The Forward, a Jewish publication based in New York City, reported that Mr. Santos, a Republican, may have misled voters about having Jewish ancestry, a claim he made on his website and in statements during his political campaign.

In his current biography, Mr. Santos says that his mother, Fatima Devolder, was born in Brazil to immigrants who “fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium, and again fled persecution during WWII.”

But according to The Forward — which cited information from myheritage.com, a genealogy website; Brazilian immigration cards; and databases of refugees — Ms. Devolder’s parents seemed to have been born in Brazil before World War II. CNN later published a similar report that also cited interviews with several genealogists.

Ms. Devolder died in 2016, according to an online obituary. Mr. Santos said in a 2020 interview that his family converted to Christianity in Brazil, and on Ms. Devolder’s Facebook page, which links to Mr. Santos’s, she regularly shared Christian imagery and had “liked” numerous Facebook pages associated with Brazil-based Christian organizations.

Mr. Santos’s campaign, his lawyer and a political consulting firm that had been fielding reporter inquiries did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If, as it appears, Santos has perpetrated a massive fraud against voters in his district, none of it will likely keep him from taking office. What may get him in legal hot water are any fraudulent statements on his financial disclosure. At a minimum, he enters Congress under an ethics investigation.

Corn elaborates:

On the financial disclosure form Santos filed in September 2022, he characterized Devolder in yet another way, calling it a “Capital intro consulting company.” He stated that he had earned $750,000 in salary and between $1 million $5 million in dividend income from Devolder in 2021 and the same amounts in 2022. This means he claimed he pulled in between $3.5 million and $11.5 million from a firm that existed less than a year, that produced no public signs of any work, not even a website, and that he has not described consistently. Santos also stated on his 2022 form that he had a checking account worth between $100,000 and $250,000 and a savings account worth between $1 million and $5 million. His 2020 financial disclosure form listed no such accounts and no such assets.

Somehow Santos went from making $55,000 per year in 2020 to lending his campaign $700,000 in 2022. That’s some Trump-level financifying.

This week we are learning from the ex-president’s tax returns how well Donald learned financifying from Papa Fred. Including how to dodge gift taxes. The Joint Committee on Taxation immediately spotted “dozens of red flags that it believed required further investigation,” the New York Times reports:

One involved transactions with his children. According to the tax data, Mr. Trump annually received tens of thousands of dollars in interest income from three of his grown children — Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric — money that stemmed from what his returns described as personal loans to them. The committee questioned whether the loans actually “were disguised gifts” to evade gift taxes and allow the children to write off interest payments to their father.

The 2018 Pulitzer-winnin investigation of the Trump Organization’s tax scheming shows where Donald learned it. In a few short years Donald has so infused the Republican Party with Himself that it seems to be incubating mini-Trumps like Santos.

Lies, fraud, and cheating are now de rigueur for the Republican Party, something to aspire to in a culture in which the only thing that matters is winning. It’s what Trump always meant by great.

If you’d like to support this old blog to keep the lights on for another year, you can do so using the address on the left sidebar or the buttons below. Thank you! And Happy Hollandaise, everybody.


You don’t say?

Transcript redactions are revealing

Former Trump White House aide Garrett Ziegler, left, before his J6 interview. Photo: Andrew Millman/CNN

The January 6th Committee did not release its final report on schedule Wednesday, as likely as not to keep from stealing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s spotlight. Zelensky met with President Joe Biden at the White House Wednesday and gave an impassioned request for more armaments before a joint meeting of Congress in prime time.

What the Committee did release were 34 transcripts of witness testimony. There were many invocations of the Fifth Amendment, some by household name witnesses and some by less well-known supporting characters in the Jan. 6 drama.

From her redoubt five hours ahead in Ireland, Marcy Wheeler has had time to review an interview with Peter Navarro aide, Garrett Ziegler. Ziegler is most infamous for being the White House worker who let Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn, and Patrick Byrne into the White House for their shouting-match meeting in the Oval Office on December 18, 2020. Team Conspiracy His transcript is the last on the list.

Ziegler’s many non-answers (Fifth Amendment), Wheeler believes, are themselves revealing about elements of the plot about which the Committee already has details. She offers a list:

The photo at the top suggests how pleased Ziegler was to cooperate with the investigation.

After answering the Committee’s questions in mid-July, Ziegler issued a profane and sexist rant on a livestream:

In the 27-minute livestream, Ziegler used vulgar and misogynistic language to attack Cassidy Hutchinson and Alyssa Farah Griffin, two women who worked for the Trump White House but have since publicly broken from the former President and cooperated with the January 6 panel.

He also accused the January 6 House select committee of being “anti-White,” without any evidence. (The nine-member panel is led by Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, who is Black.)

“They’re Bolsheviks,” Ziegler said in the stream, referring to the far-left communists who led the Soviet Union, “so, they probably do hate the American founders and most White people in general. This is a Bolshevistic anti-White campaign. If you can’t see that, your eyes are freaking closed. And so, they see me as a young Christian who they can try to basically scare, right?”

But not so unintimidated that he did not invoke the Fifth again and again. Not so Christian that he refrains from using language about women you can listen to for yourselves.

Wheeler continues:

Ziegler was — is — a kid, totally unqualified for the role he had at the White House, which it sounds like he didn’t do anyway, instead at least partly working for Trump’s reelection on the taxpayer dime. But he was also totally wired into most aspects of the coup attempt.

His role in all this is interesting for several more reasons. First, it appears that Ziegler did not turn over the “path to victory” email in response to his January 6 subpoena, which means for all the times he invoked the Fifth, he might still have exposure to obstruction charges.

He is represented by John Kiyonaga — a lawyer who has represented key assault defendants in January 6, including former Special Forces guy Jeffrey McKellop. In fact, prosecutors are considering charging McKellop in January for violating the protective order covering evidence on January 6 by sending evidence from jail to others.

And Ziegler published a copy of both the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” and the diary stolen from Ashley Biden.

There will be much more to come when the full report gets released today(?). With winter storm Elliot sending temperatures into the low single-digit range here by Christmas Eve morning, and into dangerous frostbite range across much of the country (with blizzards), there will be little else for a news junky to do but browse it. If the power just stays on.

If you’d like to support this old blog to keep the lights on for another year, you can do so using the address on the left sidebar or the buttons below. Thank you! And Happy Hollandaise, everybody.


The Worse Demons of Our Nature

In calling for passage of the Voting Rights Act, LBJ was summoning what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. He was asking – no, he was demanding – that we transcend bigotry and make good at last upon the promises we made to each other in declaring our nationhood and professing our love of liberty. The political process responded, as it should when big ideas come along, to ride the current of history.
Gerald Ford, speaking at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in 1997.

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
Donald Trump, announcing his run for president in 2015.

If progress sometimes depends on successfully appealing to “the better angels of our nature” of kindness, compassion and a sense of equality to extend rights, respect and aid to those less privileged, then regressive and oppressive forces often rely on the worse demons of our nature, appealing to fear, anxiety, greed, bigotry, jealousy, spite and the urge to domineer others. Unfortunately, for decades, U.S. conservatives and the Republican Party have stood for plutocracy and bigotry. Meanwhile, their authoritarian strain has grown stronger, to the point that a significant faction is threatening democracy itself in the United States. The most popular political figures for the conservative base are those who give them permission to deny reality and to behave awfully toward their fellow Americans.

Donald Trump remains a prime example. Although some conservatives and Republicans have tried to disown him, he’s no aberration, and instead acts firmly in the conservative tradition. (See the post linked above for more, and also for “conservative” versus “Republican”; this post will treat the terms pretty interchangeably unless the distinction matters.) Trump is just less stealthy and more likely to say the quiet parts out loud, lumbering and lashing out as the monster from the conservative id. A bully and a bullshitter, he heavily traffics in spite, and the conservative base loves him for it. He stands for power and privilege over merit, in many noxious flavors – plutocracy, bigotry, self-aggrandizement, political party over country, and authoritarianism over empiricism. He wants to be praised even when he does a poor job, wants his ass kissed at all times, and denies any reality he doesn’t like. A few key incidents exemplify his rotten character and the destructive traits he’s encouraged in his supporters, from the rabid fans to the more quietly complicit.

Trump’s 2015 announcement of his presidential run put his bigotry front and center, a longstanding personal trait and a central part of his appeal to his voters. Sean Spicer’s first press conference for Trump occurred shortly after Trump’s inauguration, which drew a much smaller crowd than Obama’s. Spicer aggressively lied to please Trump’s ego, falsely claiming that “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.” It was a bizarre performance. Trump wanted everyone to accept and repeat his obvious lie, kissing his ass as he was used to, and like other sycophants, Spicer was happy to feed Trump’s vanity. That spectacle was appalling enough on its own, but it’s particularly remarkable that Trump and Spicer apparently, delusionally, thought they could bully the press into playing along. (Afterward, Trump campaign strategist Kellyanne Conway infamously denied that Spicer was lying, but was instead offering “alternative facts.”) Anyone who wasn’t already alarmed by Trump and his cronies should have been by that incident. (Anyone who cheered it was troubling.)

In 2017, Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated Puerto Rico, causing billions of dollars in damage. The Trump administration’s response was underwhelming, but Trump bragged about what a “great job” he had done, sought praise, blithely compared the disaster’s death count to other disasters, and complained about any criticism. In 2019, Trump tweeted about Puerto Rico as if was another country instead of a territory of the United States, lied about the aid given to it, and fought against giving any more aid, even though it was sorely needed. In this case, Trump’s fixation on vanity over reality had more dire consequences than the Spicer press conference. The same was certainly true the Trump administration’s abysmal response to the global COVID-19 pandemic; a Lancet study released in February 2021 concluded that the U.S. could have avoided a staggering 40% of its COVID-19 deaths.

Conservatives and Republicans largely haven’t cared about Trump’s broken promises and lack of accomplishments, and signaled this attitude even before the election. A June 2016 article in The Washington Post found that “Many of Trump’s fans don’t actually think he will build a wall — and they don’t care if he doesn’t.” Trump’s aspirations, and anger directed at people they hated, were enough for them. Trump himself might have wanted a wall, but was too lazy to actually do the work to get one. (One that didn’t fall over or wasn’t easily scalable, anyway.) His supporters apparently – shockingly – haven’t even cared if Trump’s negligence and the conservative noise machine’s persistently anti-science, anti-vaccine messages have made them sick or even killed them. The data show that “pro-Trump counties continue to suffer far higher COVID death tolls.” When the Republican Party was first being called an “authoritarian death cult,” it might have been slight hyperbole, but sadly, the pandemic showed the label was dismayingly accurate. After seeing everything Trump and his administration did and failed to do, more Americans voted for him in 2020 than in 2016. The most accurate statement Trump has probably ever made was him bragging in 2016 that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters.”

One of the most telling incidents about Trump, conservatives and the Republican Party was the October 2016 leaking of the 2005 Access Hollywood tape with Trump bragging about his fame allowing him to sexually assault women and get away with it. (“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. . . . Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”) The tape should have sunk his campaign, and some conservatives and Republicans condemned Trump, but the majority of them (including some critics) still voted for him in 2016. (Conservative claims of higher moral values than their political opponents have always been bullshit, of course.) Trump apologized when the tape came out, but by November 2017, he started pretending that the tape was a fake and it wasn’t him. This is batshit crazy stuff (as several people pointed out), or more to the point, it’s authoritarian behavior – Trump once again telling those surrounding him that he wants them to kiss his ass, deny objective reality, and agree with a lie favoring him.

One of Trump’s favorite terms is “fake news” – which, of course, means true stories that Trump doesn’t like. It’s hard to quantify to what degree Trump’s fans believe him when he claims news is “fake,” just as it was hard to tell how many of Rush Limbaugh’s listeners believed the constant lies he told, or to what degree Fox News viewers or other heavy consumers of conservative media believe its coordinated propaganda. Many obviously do believe whatever lies they’re told, including lies about accurate reporting. But Trump, Limbaugh, and many other conservative figures have always sold both a sense of superiority and one of persecution to their followers; their pitch is that they’re much better than their chosen political opponents, who not only treat them terribly unfairly but are a grave threat to the righteous conservative faithful and thus the country. Limbaugh’s legacy wasn’t just lies, it was his nastiness, an approach that Ann Coulter, Trump, Tucker Carlson and countless conservative commentators and grifters have used for decades. When Trump calls something “fake news,” it’s not an empirical assessment of accuracy; it’s the assertion of an authoritarian leader. He’s not simply lying or bullshitting; he’s essentially saying “I know you hate these people and I do, too.” He’s giving his followers permission to hate others, and to reject reality. The professional conservative operatives know that Trump’s “fake news” attacks are bullshit, but view them as useful. Within the conservative base, some of them likely know deep down if not consciously that Trump is lying but don’t really care. He lets them pretend; he lets them wallow in gleeful spite. To quote a 2020 post:

The conservative base does not hate many of their fellow Americans because they believe false things. They believe false things because they hate many of their fellow Americans. This is one of many reasons conventional fact-checking does not work on them.

The white supremacist group the Proud Boys was excited after the first 2020 presidential debate when Trump wouldn’t outright condemn them and instead told them to “stand back and stand by.” They viewed it as an endorsement and encouragement. More mainstream Trump supporters hold less extreme views, but the core dynamic and Trump’s primary appeal remains similar: he encourages the worse demons of their nature, giving them permission to behave horribly toward their fellow Americans and to deny any realities they don’t like.

These dynamics became the most dangerous to date with Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him, and with the resulting insurrection attempt on January 6th, 2021. It’s not possible to discuss the insurrection in depth here (check out Digby’s extensive archives on the subject), but the House select committee hearings and other reports have established (among other things) that Trump planned to declare victory regardless of the election outcome long before his actual loss, plotted ways to overturn the election, knew that he had lost, collected roughly a quarter of billion dollars to fight the election results, encouraged his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol, approved of their violence, and didn’t care if people died, including his own vice president. (Of course, people did die as a result of the insurrection.) If ever the actions of a president were cause for removal from office and other consequences, this was it – trying by multiple means, including violence, to overturn a fair election. Likewise, if ever there was a political morality test “gimme,” this was it – condemn the insurrection, stand for democracy, put the country’s well-being above other interests, and hold the transgressors responsible. This was a moment for even hyperpartisan hacks to drop their habitual bullshit and heed the better angels of their nature.

Americans as a whole responded better than Republicans. A 2021 Monmouth poll found that 72% of respondents thought “riot” was an appropriate description of the January 6th events, and 56% thought that “insurrection” was appropriate. But 33% also felt it was a “legitimate protest.” That’s a minority, thankfully, but a significant, disturbing minority. Many conservative commentators have tried to downplay the extremism and danger of the insurrection. A December 2021 Washington Post/University of Maryland poll showed that Republicans as a whole likewise downplayed the violence and danger of the insurrection compared to their fellow Americans. Congressional Democrats impeached Donald Trump for a second time for his “incitement of insurrection,” but despite all the evidence, only 10 House Republicans voted for impeachment and 197 voted against. In the Senate, only 7 Republicans voted for conviction and 43 voted for acquittal, so the two-thirds majority required for conviction was not reached. As they often have for decades, Republicans put their party before their country. Adding to those damning actions, in early 2022, the Republican National Committee censured Republican U.S. Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the House’s January 6th committee, claiming that they had (emphasis added) “been destructive to the institution of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic.” (Some Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, did object to the censure.) Not content with that degree of Orwellian doublespeak, the RNC also declared that the January 6th insurrection represented “legitimate political discourse.” Trump loyalist and Republican Senator Josh Hawley defended the RNC, saying, “Listen, whatever you think about the RNC vote, it reflects the view of most Republican voters.” If so, we need to question if the majority of Republican voters support democracy and accountability for trying to overthrow it – and if the answer to the second part is “no,” then the answer to the first part is realistically “no” as well, despite any lip service to the contrary. The overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans have failed their country on both counts.

The recent midterm elections offered concerning developments, but also some bright spots. It bears mentioning that good people do exist who identify as conservatives, whether we call them due process conservatives or something else, even if they’re significantly outnumbered in the U.S. conservative movement and in the Republican Party. It’s heartening that in the midterm elections, Republican candidates who were election deniers, touting Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was somehow stolen from him, often did not do well. ‘Election deniers running for secretary of state were the election’s biggest losers,’ and election denial hurt the Republican Party overall. Those losses were aided by self-described conservatives and Republicans.

Still, it’s very troubling that the Republicans ran 291 election deniers, and 170 of them won. And roughly 70% or Republicans believe Trump’s Big Lie. A huge portion of one of America’s two major political parties believes a significant, dangerous falsehood (or pretends to). Republicans were building an “army” to overturn election results by “challeng[ing] voters at Democratic-majority polling places,” which in actual practice has often meant harassment. In Cochise County, Arizona, Republican officials refused to certify the 2022 midterm election results “despite no evidence of anything wrong with the count” simply because they didn’t like Democrats winning some top races. Interestingly, holding out had the potential to backfire on them, because if all 47,000 plus county votes were thrown out, some elections would flip to Democrats. Weeks later, the officials finally complied with a court order and certified the election. (The Republicans might still face criminal charges for their breach of duty.) This is sore loser behavior, childish, petulant, entitled and dangerous.

More alarming, as of May 2022, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, “nearly 400 [voter-]restrictive bills had been introduced in legislatures nationwide,” and the chief cause seems to be “white racial resentment.” And the conservative-dominated Supreme Court recently heard arguments for Moore v. Harper, a North Carolina gerrymandering case. Conservatives – backed by plenty of dark money – are pushing an “independent state legislature theory,” which means state legislatures could ignore state courts and their own state constitutions, allowing them to rig elections in their favor. It’s a batshit theory with “exceedingly thin” evidence, but the North Carolina state legislature is controlled by Republicans, so they think this will solidify their domination even further. They’re far from alone; Pennsylvania Republicans have worked to rig the courts to bypass judges who might uphold fair elections instead of favoring Republicans. Similarly, Republican candidate for Wisconsin governor, Tim Michels, vowed that if he won in the 2022 midterms, Republicans would “never lose another election.” Michels thankfully lost, but democracy itself shouldn’t be imperiled every election.

Conservative opposition to fair play is nothing new. To look just at this past decade, after Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, some Republicans discussed changing their approach, given that demographic trends did not favor them. Any such renouncing of the evils of plutocracy, bigotry or unfair play was thrown out, however, when a perfect storm of factors and an outdated, idiotic electoral system allowed Donald Trump to be elected president in 2016 over Hillary Clinton despite losing the popular vote. Republicans, who had engaged in unprecedented obstructionism in blocking judicial nominees under Obama, were happy to turn around and appoint as many conservative and far-right judges as they could, including stealing two supreme court seats. (They also came up with self-congratulatory, alternative realities of those events to justify their actions.)

This general, dishonorable approach is not likely to change, regardless of the Republican leadership. Now that Trump apparently cost Republicans victories in the midterms, some Republicans have suggested moving past him, but we’ve seen this dance before; they’re sure to embrace him again if he wins the nomination for 2024, or happily go with Ron DeSantis and his similarly awful policies and comparable cult of personality. (On the PBS NewsHour on 12/16/22, conservative commentator David Brooks cited a USA Today poll saying that, “by 2-1 margins, [Republican voters] want Trumpism, his approach, but they don’t want Donald Trump.” Notice Brooks trying to distance Trump from conservatism, too.) Trump is horrible, but he’s symptomatic of a much deeper rot in American conservatism and the Republican Party. If current trends continue, any candidate who promises power and sells spite is likely to do well.

If major Republican nominees for the 2024 elections aren’t reality-deniers, bigots or authoritarians, it’ll be a relief, albeit clearing an awfully low bar. Even when conservatives and Republicans don’t directly imperil democracy, when they get in power, unfortunately, things typically get much worse for the vast majority of Americans; the system is increasingly rigged against them. The George W. Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 primarily benefitted the most wealthy Americans, as intended, just as Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in the 1980s were. The Trump tax cuts were similarly plutocratic, funneling even more money to the wealthiest Americans to please rich donors. Contrary to Republican claims, the corporate tax cuts did not trickle down and the tax plan did not pay for itself; they just gave rich people more money. Conservative economic policies, whether they’re called supply-side, trickle-down, Reaganomics or something else, have never delivered, as decades of evidence show. It strains credulity to pretend that conservatives actually believe that their policies work for anyone other than the rich. (It also would be nice if mainstream political coverage more prominently covered the actual consequences of policies, considered the corruption angle, and didn’t pretend that conservatives really believe the bullshit they spout.) But on this subject and many others, conservatives and Republicans publicly deny reality. It’s rarely as blatant as denying an election, but it’s still harmful.

It’s not as if conservatives’ awful economic and fiscal policies are an outlier, either, or that their echo chamber is something new. In 2010, self-described libertarian Julian Sanchez wrote several posts bemoaning “epistemic closure” in conservative discourse, for example, sticking with Fox News and rejecting information from mainstream, credible outlets like The New York Times, even among supposed conservative elites. A few conservatives agreed with Sanchez whereas many others didn’t, and either didn’t really understand or truly engage with the critique. Sanchez’ take was welcome but utterly unsurprising for anyone who followed conservative media (including the blogosphere) in previous years. (For a more detailed look at conservative policies, see a 2018 post, “What’s to Be Done About Conservatives?”) Trump supporters merely continued the epistemic closure trend, living in “an alternative universe” and loving his rage and rejection of any media outlet he didn’t like.

So where do we go from here? Although it’s heartening that American democracy has survived the 2020 elections, the 2021 insurrection, and the 2022 midterm elections, it shouldn’t be at risk in every election. And the country’s well-being shouldn’t be imperiled every time conservatives gain power, even if they abide by election results. We can always expect conservatives to try to rebrand themselves as they’ve done frequently, and trying to call mainstream American conservatism “Trumpism” as if it’s some new aberration and not the continuation of past awfulness is just the latest example. The Democratic Party has plenty of problems we’ve discussed before and will again, but the Republican Party is almost completely toxic and corrupt, and now often explicitly antidemocratic. It needs to lose for about 20 years before its leaders consider changing their approach. Unfortunately, even that won’t be sufficient, because conservative billionaires, think tanks and dark money organizations are always playing a long game to make the U.S. more conservative, including overturning laws and principles that most citizens quite reasonably believe long settled. The conservative-dominated Supreme Court’s decision to ignore precedent and sound medical practice to overturn Roe v. Wade after nearly 50 years is the most glaring recent example, but it’s hardly the only one, nor is it likely to be the last one.

I’m not sure a conservatism exists that is truly beneficent, helping the majority of people, and better than other political philosophies, but it does seem that as an ideology, or as actually practiced by real people, conservatism has less harmful strains than the current ascendant one. The people critiqued in this post don’t need to be this horrible; it’s a choice. U.S. conservatism focuses on fighting for power and privilege; it believes in bullying to defeat merit, and sometimes democracy itself. It is almost always plutocratic, often bigoted, and sometimes authoritarian (which intertwines quite naturally and toxically with the first two). To reference two older posts, in terms of “The Four Types of Conservatives,” the Sober Adults are in ever shorter supply, and the Reckless Addicts, Proud Zealots, and Stealthy Extremists have even more power. Conjunctions of stupid, evil and crazy have become increasingly common. Meanwhile, liberals and other nonconservatives cannot directly fix conservatism or the Republican Party, either (despite occasional pundit whining that somehow they should). Conservatives have to do that themselves. In the meantime, it’s the job of everyone else to hold conservatives accountable, keep them out of power (through democratic means, naturally), and work for a fairer and more functional system.

This isn’t the cheeriest post, but hope still exists. The midterm election presented some encouraging results. And in August in conservative Kansas, 59% of voters “rejected a proposed state constitutional amendment . . . that would have said there was no right to an abortion in the state,” in a sharp rebuke of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The pandemic exposed how many workplace practices and other rules are bullshit, even if many labor and human rights fights still need to be won. It’s also easy to forget about some lasting social progress. Support for same-sex marriage now stands at 71%, up from a mere 27% in 1996. That is truly extraordinary. Some of that is the result of positive peer pressure, but it also shows how people’s fears can evaporate when they’re shown to be ridiculous, and how powerful it can be to recognize others’ humanity. Conservatives are attacking LGBTQ rights and need to be defeated, but U.S. society as a whole is increasingly not with them.

Abraham Lincoln ended his 1861 first inaugural address, after several states had seceded from the Union but before the Civil War officially started, on a conciliatory, optimistic note. He soon faced a more open and much more deadly conflict than we currently do. But it still seems that the best way to fight our worse demons as a nation is by investing in our better angels.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.


The ignorant leading the stupid

President Zelensky came to DC today to thank the US for support and make the case for why it should continue. For the most part, the American people and their leaders want to continue to help because most people are not morons who have no clue about history or any empathy for anyone but people exactly like them. But there are those who are. And they would be happy to see genocide in Ukraine at the hand of their great friends in Russia.

Apparently the right(and some members of the putative left) still believe that Vladimir Putin is a great guy who can do not wrong — mainly because he hates LGBTQ people, journalists and any political opposition. And needless to say they are fine with invading a sovereign country. In this one way they aren’t hypocrites. These are the same people who cheered the US invading Iraq, after all.

Anyway, meet your classy new leaders of the Republican party:

In light of what we’ve learned about his company and his daddy’s tax evasion, I think he might want to shut his piehole.

I don’t even know what to say about this one:

She has no idea what she’s talking about and neither does that ignoramus Don Jr. All of which would be fine if they weren’t hugely influential in the Republican Party. These are the voices of the base and the Trump cult. God help us if they get more power.

Oh my god:

If you’d like to support this old blog to keep the lights on for another year, you can do so using the address on the left sidebar or the buttons below. Thank you! And Happy Hollandaise, everybody.


Yes, they are still executing people in America

From The Nib

If you would like to see the perfect illustration of the divide in America, look at the state of capital punishment by Chris Geidner at Bolts Magazine. It says it all:

When Oregon Governor Kate Brown announced last week that she was commuting the death sentences of everyone on her state’s death row to life in prison without the possibility of parole, it was a landmark moment for the use of clemency in America. 

Her decision was the largest gubernatorial act of commuting people’s death sentences since 2003. Seventeen people who began the week under a sentence of death no longer face the prospect of the state killing them. 

“It’s certainly unacceptable to me that I would leave office without taking one final action to ensure that none of these individuals will be executed by the state,” Brown told NPR. Brown had, even before this step, established a legacy for her “historic use” of her clemency powers.

Over the years since the U.S. Supreme Court reauthorized the use of capital punishment in 1976 after a brief moratorium, only a handful of governors have taken similarly sweeping steps—most notably, Illinois Governor George Ryan, a Republican who in 2003 commuted the sentences of the 167 people on death row there. 

Brown’s mass clemency comes at a time where new death sentences and executions are at low levels nationwide. As the Death Penalty Information Center wrote in its year-end report, released this week, 2022 was the “[e]ighth consecutive year with fewer than 30 executions and 50 new death sentences.” There are 2,400 people on the nation’s death rows today, however, with blue California and red Florida leading the way.

But her actions also highlighted the stark partisan divide on the death penalty today, with two Americas drifting apart in their leaders’ willingness to carry out or block executions.

On the day Brown granted her clemency, Mississippi was preparing for the final execution in the United States this year. The state executed Thomas Loden Jr. on Wednesday, despite ongoing litigation against its lethal injection protocol. In all, 18 people were executed in the country this year, with Texas and Oklahoma carrying out five executions each. Arizona carried out three executions, Missouri and Alabama two each, and the final one in Mississippi. 

All six states that carried out executions this year are currently led by Republican governors.

Democratic executives have largely blocked executions. No sitting Democratic governor has overseen one; the last to do so was Virginia’s then-Governor Terry McAuliffe, who oversaw what became the state’s final execution, of William Morva, in 2017. McAuliffe later announced his opposition to the death penalty, and Democrats abolished it in 2021 shortly after taking control of the state government. In 2020, Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, commuted the sentences of the three people on Colorado’s death row while signing a bill abolishing the death penalty.

With Brown’s latest act of clemency, there are now 24 states that have no one on death row. 

That number came close to inching up to 25 on Tuesday. At the urging of Nevada’s Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak, the state’s Board of Pardons was set to consider a motion at its quarterly meeting to commute the death sentences of everyone on Nevada’s death row.

But Carson City Judge Jim Wilson on Monday blocked that item from the meeting’s agenda, ruling that the state had not given enough notice to victims’ families. Sisolak is set to be replaced in January by Republican Joe Lombardo, a sheriff who pledged to “reverse Sisolak’s soft-on-crime policies.”  

Sisolak acknowledged during Tuesday’s board meeting that there would be no vote on his proposal. “Placing this matter on the agenda was done as an act of grace, and with the understanding that the death penalty is fundamentally broken,” he said. “The administration of the death penalty is not fair and not equitable and cannot be corrected.”

District attorneys had rushed to ask courts to stop the commutations after Sisolak’s proposal. Wilson, the judge, is himself a former DA in Elko County. Nevada prosecutors have a lot of clout: Last year, state Democrats failed to repeal the death penalty despite running the legislature after a bill derailed in the state Senate, where multiple Democratic leaders have day jobs as prosecutors in Clark County, where the DA’s office is prone to seeking death sentences. Sisolak’s comments at the time also helped stall the bill. 

“The fact that prosecutors in Nevada once again took steps to ensure the government is able to execute people is of little surprise since they continue to use the threat of execution as a means of coercion in criminal prosecutions,” Athar Haseebullah, the executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, told Bolts.

“I am glad the governor made this most recent push for commutations, but the last four years provided Nevada leaders, including the vaunted Democratic trifecta, multiple opportunities to address this issue and we walk away on this issue four years later in the same predicament we were in four years ago,” Haseebullahhe added. 

The partisan divide is similarly complex in other states.

Read the whole thing to get the full flavor of the bloodthirsty nature of the capital punishment adherents. And pour yourself a drink before you read about all the botched executions that have been taking place over the past few years. You’re going to need it.

This is one of those issues that makes you just want to shut your mind off after a while. But you can’t. The majority of nations, including all of Europe, have abolished capital punishment but China, India, the United States, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Japan, and Taiwan are still carrying them out. Even Russia has had a moratorium on capital punishment and hasn’t handed down a death sentence or carried out an execution since 1996.

The most death sentences are handed down by China, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and … the United States. It is unconscionable.

Good for Kate Brown. And more power to those who are fighting the good fight on this issue.

Anyway … happy holidays, I guess???


Still crazy after all these years

Tim Miller attended the latest Turning Point USA wingnut gathering in Arizona. Let’s just say the fever has not broken:

It was meant to be lit. Maybe even based.  A celebratory jubilee replete with ground-shaking bass and enough lasers to achieve net-energy positive nuclear fusion. 

Such was the plan when MAGA-wing of the MAGA Party scheduled the second edition of Turning Point USA’s AMERICAFEST six weeks after the general election in Maricopa County—home to the most-MAGA slate of candidates in the entire nation. The plan was for the hottest influencers and most populist pols to take a victory lap following their expected midterm triumph to the cheers of 11,000 faithful. It was there in the gleaming Phoenix Convention Center that a hometown hero would bask in the spotlight(s) and ascend to the throne as the movement’s new queen. 

You know what they say about best laid plans. 

The midterm elections put a kink in AMERICAFEST’s party planning. A coronation was not on offer. There was nary a liberal tear to be sipped. So as I arrived in the valley of the sun on Saturday afternoon, what I was most curious to find out was how these right-wing political stars would grapple with that failure. 

The answer? They didn’t. 

AmFest navigated their electoral shellacking with neither weeping nor gnashing of teeth, but by undertaking a metamorphosis from political conference to tent revival for a GenZ God Squad that needed to be lifted up after a Fall of fails. 

Instead of reflecting upon what they might have done to bring about such an unexpected, ahistorical midterm face-plant—and strategizing on how they might change course next cycle—the MAGA movement’s leaders cloaked the audience in a warm blanket of their existential rightness amidst a world gone mad. 

As the conference’s chief memelord, Benny Johnson, told me Monday morning: A stage with “pyrotechnics” is not the place for boring lamentations or lessons from the types of candidates who performed better. “A guy like Mike DeWine would have a heart attack up there with all that firepower” he said, before imploring me to include that line in my dispatch (Note: Mike Dewine won by 25.6 points. Blake Masters lost by 5.) 

Most of the speeches reflected Benny’s proposed rhetorical posture: ignoring the midterms beyond vague acknowledgments that some attendees might be dispirited while focusing instead on three main categories of material:

(1) Megachurch-style Ted Talks about how woke ideology has turned America into a fallen Sodom and Gomorrah that requires missionaries in an existential battle against evil itself.

(2) Celebrating the areas in society where they believe conservatives are ascendant, such as comedy. 

(3) Harangues against the election thieves, particularly the host county’s municipal officials. 

In practice, that meant being treated to: 

A 20-minute speech entirely concerning the evils of preferred pronouns (by Matt Walsh, natch).

A competition for who could offer the most ostentatious praise to the gathering’s South African golden calf and his epic victory over Taylor Lorenz (on Twitter.)

Repeated ridicule of Sam Brinton, a non-binary deputy assistant secretary in the Energy Department who was fired recently after they were charged with felony theft.

A panel about how the American left are the spiritual successors to the Gnostic and Hermetic pagans and how they are on the cusp of either bringing Nazism to America or installing the devil in the kingdom of heaven.

Assorted treatises on how woke-ism is an assault on truth, followed by brazen lies about election theft and vaccine efficacy.

And speaker after speaker came back to one unifying message: The fight for MAGA values must continue, but believers should fear not—because the heathen Democrats are not really in charge, the man upstairs is. As such these foot soldiers were called to not concern themselves with worldly matters such as elections, but by engaging in a demographic competition of sorts by siring lots of children, getting a plot of land, and putting their faith in the Christian God. 

“The way we win is to do away with the World Economic Fund, Great Reset garbage. We buy land. We have lots of kids,” Johnson said. 

If you wanted to be generous, you could see this as the natural response of reactionary, but earnest, believers who see faith as their saving grace in the face of a culture that has gotten away from them.

That would be a fundamentally American response, actually, one with a tradition that dates back to before America was even a country so much as an unexplored land where settlers came so they might exercise their faith freely. And I’ll admit, there were a few moments where I saw somewhat heartening signs of this purity, such the break-out section on the “Blueprint for Masculinity” where a TPUSA leader beseeched attendees to be men of virtue who read to their kids and treat their wives with respect (Unmentioned: Herschel. But I’ll take what I can get.) 

And yet this generous assessment was often undermined on the main stage, as the lineup of Righteous Gemstones’ calls to give oneself over to God were often followed by ridiculing women as fat, or celebrating a scheme that used refugees as props in a big troll, or by flipping the bird at the “bastards” in the media. Most of what was on offer looked like a brand of Christian nationalism that’s thick with Christian iconography and thin on Jesus’s teaching. 

But regardless of whether this preaching was a real calling or a sacraligious scam, as a political matter, it was a bit beside the point. Because ostensibly the purpose of politicians and political advocates at a political gathering in a democratic nation is to gather support for an agenda that might appeal to their fellow man.

On that count the answers were shockingly spare. 

This conundrum was on display most clearly in the remarks of the weekend’s keynote speakers, Tucker Carlson and Kari Lake.

For Lake the question of how to deal with the midterm losses was made somewhat easier by the fact that in the gauzy, vaseline-coated fantasy world she inhabits her defeats didn’t happen. 

She began her remarks with this subtle declaration: “We won. We did win. Big.” After this she marveled over how there was not an empty seat in the house (my row had 11 unfilled chairs).

Lake proceeded to engage in a feud with “fake news” media members which was fake—in the literal sense— the mainstream press was not in attendance except for three or four reporters scattered throughout the hall. At multiple points Lake instructed the crowd to turn around and taunt a riser that she pretended was filled with media members—but actually was populated by unsuspecting regular attendees who wanted a higher vantage point to watch Lake from. Her speech also had a running schtick about how the media’s TV cameras’ red lights were turning off anytime she uttered a provocative election falsehood. But the only cameras on the stage were for the event’s house feed; and they never turned off.

After her most bawdy heckle of this non-existent foe—flipping the bird at the imaginary “bastards”—a middle school-aged girl looked at me typing on my computer, worried I might be one of the evildoers, and offered a sheepish grimace. She mouthed “you are not a reporter are you” before putting her hands over her face. Her expression gave me a sharp pang of sadness. 

Lake went on to dub herself a “proud election denying deplorable” cringily declaring that her pronouns are “I/Won” before getting into the same old song and dance that the Stop the Steal movement’s Fat Elvis has thrusted in our face for years now. “They have to outright steal elections . . . at 3am everything changed . . . highway robbery . . . free and fair elections is the issue of our time . . . sham . . . rigged . . . fraudsters . . . etc. etc. etc.” 

Her big reveal was to tell the audience that she is taking the Arizona election challenge all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. This was received with whooping and thundering applause. (Meanwhile here on earth, a lower court judge sanctioned Lake’s legal team for “furthering false narratives” and the morning after her speech 8 out of the campaign’s 10 legal claims were dismissed outright).

At a hotel bar after the speech, Lake’s team assured me that her hallucinatory claims about the “steal” are in fact genuine, which I find preposterous. But whether or not Kari Lake really believes her own nonsense is neither here nor there. What matters is that the performance she put on was convincing enough to win over many of the assembled. Many of those I spoke to told me that they believed she was robbed. The cheers for her attacks on Maricopa County election officials were raucous and she was mobbed by admirers in the VIP section of the Project Veritas after-party. I did encounter one glimmer of sanity in the form of a student who told me he thought she lost and this was all part of a PR strategy to ingratiate herself with Trump. (I am concerned that this astute young man has a one-way ticket to Cucktown!) 

Like many other speakers, Lake infused her delusions with Christian Nationalist bromides. The former kabbalah practitioner declared that “We are Americans and we bow to one king. That is our creator, God.” She went on, “We gotta bring back God, guys. I wanna bring someone else back too. I think you know who I’m talking about. Donald J. Trump.” 

I don’t know how many of these people there are. But I’d guess it’s in the millions and probably enough to affect the GOP primary if anyone decides to challenge Trump. These people may all say they like Ron DeSantis now, but wait until Trump corners him on this stuff. I’m not sure where they’ll go but at the very least they’ll split the party. This is where the activist base is and they have huge email lists and their own social media. Don’t assume they are fringe anymore.

If you’d like to support this old blog and keep the lights on for another year, you can do so using the address on the left sidebar or the buttons below. Thank you! And Happy Hollandaise, everybody.