Month: January 2023

If you have the self-control

A former federal official facing multiple criminal and civil investigations does not know when to shut it.

He has the right, but not the ability, to remain silent https://t.co/nXXEnB2hzB

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) January 24, 2023

Keep talking, pal. Fani’s listening (NPR):

A Georgia judge will soon decide what, if any, parts of a special grand jury report will be made public following an eight-month investigation into efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

The special purpose grand jury, which was dissolved earlier this month after completing its work, did not have indictment powers but could use gathered evidence and testimony to recommend that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis seek charges. Several people, ranging from Trump’s onetime personal attorney to Republicans who falsely claimed to be presidential electors, were informed they were targets of the investigation.

Jurors voted to release their report to the public, but the extremely rare nature of the special grand jury and limited legal authority have led to hurdles that could delay disclosure of the findings.

Is reflexive self-incrimination a (disordered) personality type? This guy below, for example. The viral video from 2019 is recirculating perhaps in response to recent shooting rampages in California:

He seems nice & stable… pic.twitter.com/0UJZqJ43Db

— ChudsOfTikTok 𓅜 🐀 (@ChudsOfTikTok) January 24, 2023

The gentleman in the video, Steven Connelly, has a history of being investigated, too. Connelly was out on bail in 2019 from a December 2018 Milwaukee arrest involving making threats. He had a criminal history from before that. But after the mass shootings in California over the last week, perhaps his behavior should give us pause:

According to a criminal complaint, neighbors told police Connelly was in the hallway of an apartment on North Murray Avenue on Dec. 11 yelling about shooting females.

“He threatened everybody in the building so they evacuated all of us,” a neighbor who didn’t want to be identified said that day.

When officers arrived, Connelly was holed up in his apartment claiming he had an AR style rifle pointed at the door, the complaint said.

“The defendant continued to yell about two females who he stated had drugged him and allowed 7,000 homosexuals (to) rape him; he wanted his revenge,” prosecutors wrote in the complaint. “He would kill all those involved with a machine gun and Liberals that were judging him. The defendant believed they (the police) were there to assault him and he would defend himself.”

Revenge may be behind the shootings in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, California. “Good thing it’s so hard for ppl like that to get AR15s,” one Twitter user said sarcastically. The Monterey Park shooter brought a “silenced” MAC-10.

It’s beginning to look as if the “very stable geniuses” among the guns-everywhere crowd are more intent on terrorizing the rest of us than in defending themselves.

Redistricting, partisan balance and voter turnout

U.S. House district lines will shift again in as many as a dozen states before the next general election. The fight, writes Ron Brownstein, resembles teams “changing the dimensions of the playing field even after the game is underway.” In the last two elections, both major parties managed thin five-seat majorities (CNN):

While it’s not likely that all of these states will ultimately draw new lines, a combination of state and federal lawsuits and shifts in the balance of power in state legislatures and courts virtually ensure that an unusually large number of districts may look different in 2024 than they did in 2022, with huge implications for control of the House. “It’s just trench warfare back and forth,” says Kelly Burton, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, the leading Democratic group involved in congressional redistricting.

The possibility that so many states could still reconfigure their House districts reflects the uncertainty looming over the political system as the Supreme Court considers momentous cases that will shape the future of voting rights challenges to congressional maps and the authority of state supreme courts to police partisan gerrymandering. “We are kind of all in a holding pattern until we determine what the Supreme Court does in those two cases,” said Nick Seabrook, a University of North Florida political scientist and author of two books on the history of gerrymandering.

Equally important, though, may be the growing determination of each party to scratch out every potential edge in the achingly tight battle for control of the House – an attitude that has encouraged both sides to fight in ways that neither even contemplated not too long ago. “What’s happened is politics has gotten more competitive and closer, and the stakes are higher for all these constituents, all the old norms have just eroded,” said former Republican Rep. Tom Davis, who served as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “There are no rules anymore … and might makes right.”

One of those “momentous cases” the U.S. Supreme Court will decide is from North Carolina: Moore v. Harper. The “independent state legislature theory,” Republicans posit, argues that courts may not review the legislature’s redistricting and election law decisions regarding federal elections even if the state’s constitution demands fair districts and equal voting access.

As I’ve noted before, Democrats and Republicans in North Carolina spent the teens litigating and relitigating the maps Republicans drew after the 2010 census. I voted in NC-10 in the 2016 primary and in NC-11 in November that year. In between, the district line flipped over my house from the ridgeline to the west to the ridgeline to my east. Voter confusion ensued locally and elsewhere.

Courts forced Republicans into accepting a balanced map drawn by a Special Master that allowed Democrats in 2022 to win seven of North Carolina’s 14 congressional seats. But for 2022 only (map at top). Democrats last November lost their majority in the state Supreme Court. The new GOP majority inevitably will rule on redrawn district lines the GOP-led general assembly could design to tip the balance 10-4 for Republicans in the state that went 50-49 for Trump in 2020.

Brownstein describes what that could look like:

[L]ocal observers expect the GOP legislature (which has already petitioned the new court to overturn its earlier rulings) to impose a map that puts the GOP in position to win at least 10, and maybe 11, seats. “The Republicans will go as extreme as they can,” said Michael Bitzer, chair of the politics department at Catawba College who writes a blog on North Carolina politics. “That would result in a swing of 4 seats to the Republicans in just this state.”

Then there is Ohio. A similar ideological shift in the state Supreme Court there could allow Republicans to expand their current 10-5 congressional split.

Kyle Kondik, managing editor for the Sabato’s Crystal Ball, projects Republicans could gain as many as six seats just from these two states.

Against those nearly certain gains for the GOP in the re-redistricting process, the largest group of Democratic opportunities revolves around lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act challenging Republican gerrymanders. If Democrats and civil rights groups win those cases, Louisiana, Georgia and Alabama would be required to create one more district each favoring a Black candidate, and Texas could be required to create three districts or more favoring minority candidates.

Lower courts have already ruled for the Democrats in the first three states. But the Georgia court did not order a new map, and in Alabama and Louisiana, the US Supreme Court blocked the lower court rulings and allowed the states to vote in 2022 under the disputed lines on the grounds that it was too close to the election to change them. Those rulings likely netted Republicans three seats in the 2022 election.

“Too close to the election” decisions have worked for Republicans before. Watch for them once again to butt state and federal mapping fights up against 2024 filing deadlines. For those wondering why North Carolina Democrats including Cheri Beasley fared more poorly than Democrats in other states last November, districting uncertainty (combined with Democrats’ fecklessness in recruiting) meant Democrats in 2022 left 14 of 50 state Senate seats and 30 of 120 state House seats uncontested. Democrats in those districts had no state legislative Democrats to turn out for.

Brownstein has a lot more to say.

Make it a double

About that “Weaponization Committee”…

The defeat of election deniers running for important statewide offices last fall suggested a nation edging away from seven years of Trumpism. But that trend will be tested in the next two years, with supercharged Republicans newly empowered to spout conspiracies, grievances, whataboutism, and lies from official, high-profile platforms.

The House Oversight Committee’s crammed investigations menu is perilous for President Joe Biden, from the Afghanistan withdrawal, the Southern border, and Hunter Biden’s activities to the recently discovered classified documents at Biden’s residences and a think tank once associated with him.

But beyond the political risk for Biden and his legacy, there is a larger danger for the country—specifically the Judiciary Committee’s new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. Jordan has long complained about the supposed persecution of conservatives by the FBI and other agencies. Now he’s claimed broad powers to do something about it—including mucking around in open investigations.

Is the government really picking on conservatives? Or, hear me out, did a defeated, twice-impeached president and some of his conservative allies maybe do something unconstitutional or illegal in trying to overturn the 2020 election by lying, scheming and attacking the Capitol? Or moving hundreds of top secret documents to Mar-a-Lago and then (unlike Biden) stonewalling for months to forestall handing them over? Maybe these things deserve federal attention. Right?

The tragedy is that, when it comes to Jim Jordan’s investigations, facts may not matter. What will matter, painfully so, is how shoveling paranoia and distortion into the news stream will further undermine trust in the U.S. government, its integrity, its motives, and its elections.

These fears are not overblown, says David Jolly, a former two-term congressman from Florida who left the GOP in 2018 and is now a political independent. Jolly co-chairs Facts First USA, a bipartisan rapid-response group founded by Democratic activist David Brock.

“Coming off Donald Trump’s stolen election fake narrative and the violent insurrection of January 6th, this subcommittee will stoke a toxic mix of insurrection themes. It will provide justification for Americans to feel they are under threat from their government,” Jolly said in a phone interview. The message to Second Amendment conservatives is that “you have a right to your weapons because one day the government’s going to come for you,” he added. “It gets into themes that are destabilizing.”

From my liberal standpoint, it’s hard to take conservative whining seriously. America has been structurally rigged since birth in favor of states that are sparsely populated, mostly with white people. Two senators apiece, whether a state has over 39 million people or under 600,000. Popular presidential votes that don’t count: Losers who can win—and they have, twice since 2000 alone. A Supreme Court far more conservative than the nation that must abide by its rulings gutting abortion rights, voting rights, gun safety laws, and political contribution limits.

Now House conservatives are going after the same federal government that has allowed them such disproportionate power.

The weaponization subcommittee was an element in negotiations that helped Kevin McCarthy win the speakership. Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), who didn’t vote for McCarthy until the twelfth of fifteen ballots, summed up the victory:’

With the rules agreement we negotiated, we will have a powerful Church-style committee to go after the weaponization of the federal government – the FBI, DOJ, DHS, and all the rest.

This is a victory for the Constitutional rights of all Americans.

I'm ready to get to work.

— Rep. Dan Bishop (@RepDanBishop) January 7, 2023

Note that Bishop, like others talking about this new subcommittee, invokes the mid-1970s committee chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), that examined allegations of intelligence abuses unearthed during the Senate Watergate investigation of President Richard Nixon. The panel had a lower-key leader, a bipartisan mission, and a much tamer formal title—the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.

But the results of its “thoughtful and careful investigative work” (in the words of the Senate Historical Office) were explosive: The Church committee identified “a wide range of intelligence abuses by federal agencies” under presidents of both parties in the Cold War period, and covert activities to discredit targets including anti-Vietnam War protesters and Martin Luther King Jr.

Our era is far more polarized and performative, and Jordan is one of its leading men. Former Republican Speaker John Boehner has described him as “a legislative terrorist,” and former Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi vetoed him as a member of the House January 6th Committee because he was an election objector close to Trump.

Another reason for alarm is the weaponization panel’s charge to dig into “ongoing criminal investigations.” This last-minute addition to its portfolio covers, for example, federal probes of the Capitol insurrection, Trump’s role in it, his many attempts to nullify the 2020 election, the hundreds of sensitive and top-secret documents he took to Mar-a-Lago in apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act, and the August 2021 FBI search that came after fourteen months of requests and a subpoena for the documents.

It’s galling that conservatives complain about all this as if the conduct were normal and the investigations abusive. As if Trump had done nothing wrong. As if the GOP itself had never “weaponized” the government (with its endless Benghazi investigation that McCarthy gloated had lowered Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers, for instance, or Trump-era Attorney General William Barr’s preemptive whitewash of the deeply damaging Mueller Report). As if the new panel itself—approved 222-211 on straight party lines—were not, as Amanda Carpenter writes, itself weaponizing the House.

Even if the Justice Department refuses to grant a single request for information about open investigations, Jordan’s anti-government offensive is frightening. As Jolly put it, “It’s about stoking the flames of government suspicion. It’s a drug they’re going to put out on the street for conservative media and conservative voters.”

And it’s a threat to all of us, especially given the historically close 2022 midterms in a historically divided nation. Jacob Rubashkin of Inside Elections writes that Republicans won their House majority by 6,670 votes in five races. And CNN analyst Harry Enten notes that neither party holds more than 52 percent of Senate seats, House seats, or governorships—which he says hasn’t happened since 1914, the first time all Senate elections were held by popular vote.

By 2024, most voters could be so scared or fed up that they’ll hand the GOP a massive defeat at the polls. But it’s also possible that more Americans will buy what Republicans are selling. It wouldn’t take too many more of them to create a genuine red wave, forcing America to stay on a path that leads ever further away from truth, trust, and a healthy democracy.

Or if they lose they could take up arms. It’s all bad.

Naturally, he was working for Russia

TPM unpacks the story:

The same FBI official accused of illegally working for a Russian oligarch also faces charges of concealing a $225,000 payment while he was working for the bureau, court papers say.

Per a Jan. 18 indictment, a D.C. federal grand jury charged Charles McGonigal, a former special agent in charge of the counterintelligence division at the FBI’s New York City field office, with nine counts relating to a scheme in which he allegedly took hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash from a former foreign intelligence official.

The indictment does not specify whether McGonigal did anything specifically in exchange for the money — he faces charges of concealment, false statements, and falsifying official records.

But the charging documents lay out a story in which McGonigal appears to have used the powers that came with his position — including to open criminal investigations — in a way that may have benefitted those paying him.

McGonigal was charged separately on Monday in Manhattan federal court with a scheme to violate U.S. sanctions on Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch. That scheme allegedly took place after McGonigal left his position at the FBI in 2018, and purportedly involved McGonigal trying to evade sanctions in order to work for Deripaska.

But if that’s shocking albeit vanilla post-retirement self-dealing, the allegations about what McGonigal did while high up in the apparatus of federal law enforcement are extremely spicy.

In August 2017, prosecutors said in the indictment, McGonigal met with an unnamed “Person A” and asked for money. At that point, McGonigal was still working for the FBI — he did not retire from the FBI until summer 2018.

Prosecutors say that “Person A” is a former employee of an “Albanian Intelligence Agency.”

The next month, McGonigal allegedly traveled to Albania with “Person A.” There, he purportedly met with the country’s Prime Minister and raised topics relating to the country’s oil business at the request of “Person A.” Prosecutors say that neither McGonigal nor the FBI paid for his lodgings in the country.

While on the trip, the indictment reads, McGonigal also traveled to Kosovo. He gave both a Kosovar politician and Albania’s prime minister “FBI paraphernalia” as gifts, prosecutors say.

After returning to the U.S., McGonigal didn’t disclose key details about the trip to the FBI, including who he traveled with, who he met with, and his trip to Kosovo.

McGonigal’s Albanian connections allegedly did not end there.

“Person A” allegedly gave McGonigal $80,000 in cash in October 2017 “in a parked car” outside a New York City restaurant. The FBI official purportedly received two more lump sums from the person at his New Jersey home, of $65,000 and $80,000.

He didn’t disclose these cash receipts, either, the government alleges.

After more travel in November 2017 to Austria and Albania, McGonigal allegedly began to discuss with a DOJ contact a “potential new criminal investigation” into an American lobbyist. The lobbyist, the indictment says, had recently registered to work for a political party other than that to which Albania’s prime minister belongs.

Throughout all this, McGonigal continued to stay in contact with Albania’s prime minister, prosecutors say. Prosecutors say that McGonigal continued to forward information about the “U.S. citizen lobbyist” to other FBI agents, and the bureau formally opened an investigation into the unnamed person in February 2018 “at defendant McGonigal’s request and upon his guidance.”

“Person A,” who allegedly gave McGonigal the cash payments and who accompanied him on his travel to Europe, was used as a confidential human source in the investigation, prosecutors say.

Prosecutors do not formally accuse McGonigal of bribery, or of opening the investigation in response to the money that he allegedly received from “Person A.” The relationship between “Person A” and Albania’s prime minister is left unclear in the indictment; what emerges is a picture of McGonigal, as an FBI official, receiving money from someone with ties to the Albanian government and then opening a criminal investigation into an American citizen lobbying for a political party that was not part of that government.

It’s a stunning picture, raising serious questions about how the probe was opened, and casting doubt on other decisions that McGonigal was in a position to be making while at the FBI. It’s extremely rare for law enforcement officials of his rank to face charges of this kind.

After departing the FBI in September 2018, McGonigal, Manhattan federal prosecutors say, signed on with Deripaska, the Russian oligarch who formerly operated as paymaster to Paul Manafort.

In that role, McGonigal allegedly agreed to investigate an oligarch rival of Deripaska’s in exchange for payment. A former New York court interpreter was also charged with McGonigal in that scheme.

Business Insider broke the story of the FBI’s investigation into one of its own back in September 2022. ABC reported that McGonigal was arrested at JFK airport on Saturday after returning from a trip to Sri Lanka

The wingnuts are constantly screaming about the “deep state” corruption but they never seem to see the Russia connection. In fact, they call it a hoax. Projection?

Come on, people…

John Amato caught a top Republican in an egregious lie over the weekend that nobody else seems to have noticed:

The incoming chairman of the House intelligence Committee tried to both-side election fraud deniers by lying about who went to the Supreme court to challenge the 2000 election results. Mike Turner said it was Al Gore today when it has always been George W. Bush.

Face The Nation host Margaret Brennan asked Turner if he had any concerns about the incredible number of election deniers joining his committee.

“Of the 26 Republican members on the committee, 19 of them denied the results of the 2020 election,” Brennan noted.

CBS then listed Turner’s treasonous colleagues.

“They all played critical roles in the former president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results. Do you have any concerns about working with these lawmakers?” she asked.

This forced Rep. Turner to try and both-sides the insurrection crowd with the Democratic party — so much so that he even lied about the 2000 election to do it.

“You know even on the Democrat side there’s been a number of people who objected to President Bush’s reelection and voted against certifying his election,:” Turner replied, refusing to address the question.

“I’m asking about you, your party and your colleagues,” Brennan said.

Then came the BIG LIE part infinity.

“There’s a long history of both sides having raised issues, including, you may recall, Al Gore taking President Bush’s election all the way to the Supreme Court,” Turner claimed.

Rep. Turner lied so severely he should be kicked off all TV networks forever and ever.

To refresh our memories.

On November 26, 2000, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris certified that Bush had won the election by a 537-vote margin. Gore then sued Harris because all of the recounts had not been completed when she certified the results. On December 8, 2000, the Florida Supreme Court sided with Gore, ordering that all statewide “undervote” ballots, or punch-card ballots that had been cast but not registered because of a problem called a “hanging chad,” needed to be recounted.

Bush immediately appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which ordered the recount halted on December 9, 2000 until it could hear arguments in the case.

It was George W, Bush’s refusal to abide by the Florida Supreme Court’s decision to keep counting the votes that led him to take it to the highest court. Not Al Gore.

Brennan was trying to cut off Turner and maybe didn’t hear his outright lie.

Rep. Turner stayed with his prepared talking points of “there are election deniers on both sides of at isle.”

Turner then rattled on about the voters electing these seditious creeps.

The CBS host characterized Rep.Turner as some sort of the centrist , which is supposed to make him, I guess, in this context not to be an election fraud denier or conspiracy theorist.

So why would Mike Turner severely gaslight people over the controversial SCOTUS-decided presidential election of 2000?

In a nutshell: the entire Republican Party is full of corrupt liars.

And let’s not forget that once the Supreme Court ruled in that case, Al Gore conceded and that was that. And his argument was much, much more righteous that Trump’s ever was since he won the popular vote and the difference was just 535 votes in one state not tens of thousands across several states. Oh, and by the way, nobody stormed the capitol on January 6th that year and ransacked it in a big giant temper tantrum, either.

Comparing “election deniers” of the two parties is completely ridiculous and the press should stop them in their tracks when they try it. But they won’t. I would guess that a majority of Americans believe that “both sides do it.”

The GOP field is forming

It’s begun. And just as we once assumed, it’s a tired re-run of 2020 with former president Donald Trump hopping from rally to rally repeating his boring recitation of the Big Lie and the perpetual “witchhunt” and “hoax” mantras. Only this time, the Republican presidential primary is starting early with what’s shaping up to be a crowded field. Whether any of Trump’s rivals will be able to knock him out remains to be seen — but there’s no doubt they think he’s weakened enough to chance it.

We’ve all been closely watching Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who hasn’t yet made any overt moves to run but is nonetheless clearly positioning himself to do it. At the moment he is the only serious contender who still holds office which gives him the opportunity to demonstrate his right-wing bonafides. And boy is he ever doing that.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the list of his aggressive authoritarian policies is already a mile long, each one designed to curry favor with the far right by provoking everyone else. Just last week he added to the pile by overseeing his hand-picked education curriculum watchdog’s denial of high school AP classes in African American history, saying that “the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.”  They will still be able to offer AP classes in European, Japanese and Chinese history, it’s just Black history that doesn’t have educational value in Florida. Can they be any more obvious?

DeSantis is running a very assertive, hard right Fox News-centric, culture war campaign. I suspect he and his advisers may believe that he can solidify the MAGA base and then move to more substantive issues like taxes and spending and foreign policy once he jumps into the fray. If that’s the case, he’s dreaming. This stuff may be red meat to the base but it’s four-alarm fires to the Democrats and they will make sure that every voter in America knows about it all. DeSantis’ hardcore extremism is way over the top even by Trump’s standards which always have an element of farcical bluster that allows people to think he might not be serious. DeSantis, on the other hand, doesn’t have a humorous bone in his body.

And now DeSantis has some serious competition getting ready to make the jump. Former Governor Nikki Haley, Trump’s first UN Ambassador, once promised she wouldn’t run if he was running. She appeared on Fox News last week and came as close as you can get without actually saying it:

“When you’re looking at a run for president, you look at two things. You first look at, does the current situation push for new leadership? The second question is, am I that person that could be that new leader, that, yes, we need to go in a new direction? And can I be that leader? Yes, I think I can be that leader…

“So, do I think I could be that leader? Yes. But we are still working through things, and we will figure it out. I have never lost a race. I said that then. I still say that now. I’m not going to lose now. But stay tuned.”

The question is whether proclaiming yourself a leader over and over again convinces anyone that you are one after you spent years sucking up to Donald Trump.

And speaking of Haley being Trump’s VP, yet another former Trumpie has emerged as a contender for the top spot, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He’s got a new book called “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love” coming out on Tuesday and among the spicy excerpts is one accusing Haley of conspiring with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump to replace Pompeo with her on the ticket in 2020. She claims it’s “lies and gossip to sell a book” but she’s obviously given up on any idea of being Trump’s VP this time if he wins the nomination because he’ll never forgive her for reneging on her pledge.

Pompeo’s book, from what’s been reported in the media so far, takes on Trump as well. He claims that Trump told him to “shut the hell up” about Chinese Premiere Xi Jin Ping during the early days of the COVID crisis because it would upset his trade deal. And he discusses Trump’s disastrous Helsinki press conference with Russian president Vladimir Putin:

To be clear, Trump’s language there was neither accurate nor helpful.To stand next to Putin and say that he believed Putin’s claims that he didn’t meddle in the U.S. election was very Trumpian. It was also a mistake. It lacked the depth to address the question that had come from the American reporter: “Do you hold Russia at all accountable for anything in particular?” Trump’s answer reflected his inability or refusal to separate the Russia Hoax from the fact that Russia had tried to sow chaos in the 2016 election. For Trump, every question about Russia and the elections was poisoned by the narrative of the Russia Hoax. 

It’s unclear from that if Pompeo agrees with Trump that the Russia Investigation was a “hoax” but I don’t think that will matter to Trump if he does. This is the kind of betrayal that will make him see red. But Pompeo does take a very hard line against Putin in his book apparently, which will put him at odds with a large portion of the MAGA base as well. The foreign policy fights in this primary campaign are going to be very interesting with the candidates all over the place.

And then there’s Trump, the only officially declared candidate. Sounding like a mob boss he made it obvious last week that he is ready to take off the gloves against DeSantis:

Trump today on Desantis: “I got him elected, pure and simple. And there was no reason to go wild about endorsing him .. So, now I hear he might want to run against me. So, we’ll handle that the way I handle things.” pic.twitter.com/rBBYyUtnNW

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 16, 2023

No one knows exactly what he has in mind but it no doubt involves a nasty nickname, insulting his wife, saying he fixed the 2018 election among other things. And he’ll attempt to dispatch the others in similar fashion.

He’s going to be making his first campaign appearance this week in South Carolina and according to the Washington Post, he’s having a rough time lining up endorsements. He’s got his homeboys, Senator Lindsey Graham and Governor Henry McMaster, but all the other Republican officials in the state are balking because there are two locals, Haley and Senator Tim Scott, who are thinking of jumping in the 2024 race. Trump doesn’t have the juice anymore to threaten them with retaliation for not bending the knee. So much for “clearing the field.”

It looks like Trump’s going to have to earn the nomination and it’s not going to be pretty. Once he gets over having his feeling hurt, I suspect he will relish the fight. It’s in his nature.

This piece in the NY Times about the boomer vote tracks with my instincts. First of all, the youngest boomers aren’t even 60 yet so not all of us are ancient. Biden, for instance is not a boomer. He’s older. Trump was born in the very first year of the baby boom so he’s at the very oldest edge.

The truth is that there were always a fair number in that large generation who were conservative. Not everyone was a hippie. And yes, some moved right as they aged. It seems to just happen with some people. But many, many boomers were and have, as I have, been very liberal their whole lives. And they’re still fighting the good fight.

Is it time to call the next election “the most important in American history”? Probably. It seems like it may involve a judgment on democracy itself. Americans with a lot of history will play a key role in determining its outcome.

And judging in part by November’s midterms, they may not play the role that older voters are usually assigned. We at Third Act, the group we helped form in 2021, think older Americans are beginning a turn in the progressive direction, a turn that will accelerate as time goes on.

A lot has been written about the impact of young voters in November’s contests, and rightly so. The enormous margins that Democrats ran up among voters under 30 let them squeak through in race after race. Progressives should be incredibly grateful that the next generation can see straight through Trumpism in a way too many of their elders can’t.

But there were also intriguing hints of what looked like a gray countercurrent that helped damp the expected red wave. Yes, older people by and large voted Republican, in keeping with what political scientists have long insisted: that we become more conservative as we age. But in the 63 most competitive congressional districts, the places where big money was spent on ads and where the margin in the House was decided, polling by AARP, an advocacy group for people over 50, found some fascinating numbers.

In early summer, Republicans had a sturdy lead among older voters in 50 of those districts, up 50 percent to 40 percent. Those had Republicans salivating. But on Election Day, voters over 65 actually broke for Democrats in those districts, 49 to 46.

That doesn’t surprise us at Third Act. We’re nonpartisan, but we’ve learned that demographic is far less settled than people sometimes suppose.

Some of the issues that benefited Democrats are obvious, of course. Republican messaging included calls for weakening Social Security and Medicare even though most older beneficiaries rely on Social Security for most of their income, and for an estimated 40 percent it’s all their retirement income. The cruelty of toying with people’s life support systems is matched only by its political foolishness. Among voters 65 and over, Social Security and Medicare were among the top concerns.

But something else happened, too. When the Supreme Court tossed out Roe v. Wade in early summer, most of the pictures were of young women protesting, appropriately, since it’s their lives that will be turned upside down. But people we know in their 60s and 70s felt a real psychic upheaval: A woman’s right to choose had been part of their mental furniture for five decades. And they’ve lived their entire lives in what they had imagined was a stable and working democracy.

The top concern to voters 65 and over, especially women, was “threats to democracy,” according to AARP. And exit polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that among women 50 and older, the court’s decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion had a major impact on which candidate they supported. Sixty-six percent of Black women said so, as did 61 percent of Hispanic women and 48 percent of white women. Voters who said the Supreme Court’s abortion decision was the single most important factor in their vote supported Democrats by a margin of 2 to 1.

Some of our members helped organize access to abortion before Roe was decided in 1973; they don’t want to go back. And it’s not only abortion: The Supreme Court also took on the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We helped win these fights once, turning out by the tens of millions to oppose the war in Vietnam or for the first Earth Day. And we can help win them again — we have the muscle memory of what organizing on a big scale feels like.

Hundreds of us from around the country converged on Nevada in the days before the midterm vote, because we determined — correctly, as it turned out — that it might be the place where control of the Senate would be decided. We may walk a tad slower door-to-door, but in this case slow and steady helped to win the race.

With the election past, Third Act is now digging into work on climate change — in particular targeting the big American banks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America) that are also the biggest lenders to the fossil fuel industry. On March 21 we’ll be cutting up bank credit cards and picketing bank branches across the country. We know that young people have been in the lead in this fight, because they’ll have to live with the world we’re creating. But as long as we’re still here, we’ll have to live with the knowledge of what we’re leaving behind, so we want to change it while we still can.

We recognize that this will require a sustained effort beyond the next election and the election after that. Numerous analysts and demographers do believe that coming demographic changes in the United States will generally favor Democrats. But complications abound. Partisan gerrymandering continues to favor Republicans, for instance, and at least five states that generally vote Dem

Not all old duffers are total assholes. At least not all the time…. 🙂

People think I’m over the top by calling Marjorie Taylor Greene the “shadow speaker.” I’m not:

Days after he won his gavel in a protracted fight with hard-right Republicans, Speaker Kevin McCarthy gushed to a friend about the ironclad bond he had developed with an unlikely ally in his battle for political survival, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

“I will never leave that woman,” Mr. McCarthy, a California Republican, told the friend, who described the private conversation on the condition of anonymity. “I will always take care of her.”

Such a declaration from Mr. McCarthy would have been unthinkable in 2021, when Ms. Greene first arrived on Capitol Hill in a swirl of controversy and provocation. A former QAnon follower who had routinely trafficked in conspiratorial, violent and bigoted statements, Ms. Greene was then widely seen as a dangerous liability to the party and a threat to the man who aspired to lead Republicans back to the majority — a person to be controlled and kept in check, not embraced.

But in the time since, a powerful alliance developed between Ms. Greene, the far-right rabble-rouser and acolyte of former President Donald J. Trump, and Mr. McCarthy, the affable fixture of the Washington establishment, according to interviews with 20 people with firsthand knowledge of the relationship, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it.

Their political union — a closer and more complex one than has previously been known — helps explain how Mr. McCarthy rose to power atop a party increasingly defined by its extremes, the lengths to which he will go to accommodate those forces, and how much influence Ms. Greene and the faction she represents have in defining the agenda of the new House Republican majority.

“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” Mr. McCarthy said. Both he and Ms. Greene agreed to brief interviews for this article. “When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”

It is a relationship born of political expediency but fueled by genuine camaraderie, and nurtured by one-on-one meetings as often as once a week, usually at a coffee table in Mr. McCarthy’s Capitol office, as well as a constant stream of text messages back and forth.

Mr. McCarthy has gone to unusual lengths to defend Ms. Greene, even dispatching his general counsel to spend hours on the phone trying to cajole senior executives at Twitter to reactivate her personal account after she was banned last year for violating the platform’s coronavirus misinformation policy.

Ms. Greene, in turn, has taken on an outsize role as a policy adviser to Mr. McCarthy, who has little in the way of a fixed ideology of his own and has come to regard the Georgia congresswoman as a vital proxy for the desires and demands of the right-wing base that increasingly drives his party. He has adopted her stances on opposing vaccine mandates and questioning funding for the war in Ukraine, and even her call to reinvestigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol to show what she has called “the other side of the story.”

Mr. McCarthy’s agenda, Ms. Greene said, “if he sticks to it, will easily vindicate me and prove I moved the conference to the right during my first two years when I served in the minority with no committees.”

“Shadow speaker” is over the top? Clearly not. She’s his policy adviser and controls a large faction of the House GOP caucus.

Here’s the Speaker’s new best friend just yesterday:

This morning, a senior Republican congressman went on TV and said Marjorie Taylor Greene could be allowed back on committees because she had 'matured', and wasn't pushing conspiracies anymore.

Moments later: https://t.co/w6jF35YwzP

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) January 22, 2023

He plans to primary Kyrsten Sinema

Washington Post:

Rep. Ruben Gallego announced he will run for the U.S. Senate in Arizona on Monday, setting up a potential three-way race in the battleground state in 2024 that poses a threat to independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s hold on the seat.

Gallego, a Marine veteran who has served in the House since 2015, announced his candidacy in a video in English and Spanish that stressed his military service and experience growing up as a first-generation American.

“The rich and the powerful, they don’t need more advocates,” Gallego said in the video, which shows him addressing veterans at Guadalupe American Legion Post 124. “It’s the people that are still trying to decide between groceries and utilities that need a fighter for them.”

We know where Kyrsten Sinema was over the last week and who she advocates for.

Here’s Gallego’s announcement.

Growing up poor, all I had was the American dream. It kept me going: as a kid sleeping on the floor, a student scrubbing toilets, a Marine losing brothers in Iraq.

Today, too many Arizonans see their dream slipping away. I’m running for the U.S. Senate to win it back for you! pic.twitter.com/ofUvUYRcTP

— Ruben Gallego (@RubenGallego) January 23, 2023

Three little words

“We all make mistakes,” James Fallows begins his newsletter. “People, organizations, countries. The best we can do is admit and face them. And hope that by learning from where we erred, we’ll avoid greater damage in the future.”

Yet half the country has internalized what Donald Trump mentor Roy Cohn taught him: Never admit mistakes. Always attack your accuser. Win no matter what. Gloat when you do. “Roy was a master of situational immorality,” author Sam Roberts said.

We view Donald Trump as the author of the Republicans’ descent into amorality. But often the slide is long before the edge of the cliff. Even while letting out a Wilhelm Scream, we will not admit to falling. Only losers admit mistakes. The powerful never do. It has become reflex.

Fallows examines how news outlets have failed to arrest their slide into scandal mongering. The press has failed to confront past mistakes and thus failed to correct them.

The relentless coverage of the “Red Wave” that never came, for example:

Pundits and much of the mainstream press spent most of 2022 describing Joe Biden’s unpopularity and the Democrats’ impending midterm wipeout. As it happened, Biden and the party nationwide did remarkably well.

On the morning after the election, conservative pundit Henry Olsen had an opinion column in the Washington Post headlined “I Was Wrong About the Midterms. Here’s What I Missed.”

Olsen writes in the opinion section. Seven weeks after the election the New York Times ran a story on how predictions went wrong. “The only mention of the paper’s own months-long role in fostering this impression was a three-word aside, in the 13th paragraph of a thousand-word story,” Fallows notes: “mainstream news organizations, including The Times … amplified the alarms being sounded about potential Democratic doom.”

Fallows offers examples of how the news “frames” reporting with opinion both in headlines and in the stories themselves.

“1. Not everything is a ‘partisan fight’,” he writes, citing reporting on Republican hostage-taking using the debt ceiling.

“2. Not everything is a ‘perceptions’ narrative,” Fallows continues, pointing out lazy phrases such as “a picture emerges,” “paints a picture” or “sure to raise questions.”

Finally, “3. Not all scandals are created equal.” Here Fallows reaches nearly three decades back to “things enormously hyped at the time, that look like misplaced investigative zeal in retrospect.” That is:

The Whitewater “scandal.” For chapter and verse why this was so crazy, see the late Eric Boehlert, with a very fine-grained analysis back in 2007; plus Eric Alterman at the same time; plus Gene Lyons, who lives in Arkansas and wrote a book called Fools for Scandal a decade earlier.

I will be amazed if more than 1% of today’s Americans could explain what this “scandal” was supposedly about. I barely can myself. But as these authors point out, it led domino-style to a zealot special prosecutor (Kenneth Starr, himself later disgraced), and to Paula Jones, and to Monica Lewinsky, and to impeachment. It tied up governance for years.

“But her emails” is from the last decade, as was Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi.

Fallows raises Whitewater as a classic example. Digby’s Saturday post featuring a scoop by Murray Waas reminded me how back in dial-up days (late 1990s) before the IPO, Salon featured more investigative journalism. Waas did extensive reporting on the shit-stirring Arkansas Project funded by right-wing mogul Richard Mellon Scaife, and on the corrupt Arkansas judge who became a star “false witness” in the Whitewater investigation.

While the mainstream press was scandal-mongering, the off-Broadway press was doing real digging into the right-wing conspiracy dogging the Clintons which, if it wasn’t vast, was well-organized and well-funded. But those stories (IIRC) barely penetrated what has become the stenography press. The media helped Republicans spin up the Whitewater scandal into impeachment like Rumplestiltskin spun straw into gold. Even today, as Fallows reminds us, few can explain what Whitewater was about, much less give you the backstory that Waas and others laid out in what was then the alternative press.

Few news outlets today will admit their role in ginning up Whitewater. Or in abetting George W. Bush’s propaganda campaign to lie the country into invading Iraq. Or in advertising the Republicans’ Benghazi tribunals. Or in turning “but her emails” into a key tool for delivering the country into the hands of the Master of MAGA. Or in carrying water for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign that led to Jan. 6. Nor have they corrected course.

And here we are.