Month: January 2023

So sad…

It appears that he’s not going to be able to wrap up the nomination the way he expected:

Advisers to Donald Trump have blanketed South Carolina Republican officials with pleading phone calls in recent weeks in an effort to drum up endorsements and attendees for the former president’s first campaign swing of the 2024 cycle next week.

But the appeals have run headlong into a complicated new reality: Many of the state’s lawmakers and political operatives, and even some of his previous supporters, are not ready to pick a presidential candidate.

After raising the debt limit for decades, Republicans in recent years have leveraged it to enact spending cuts while also threatening government default. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

They find themselves divided between their support for Trump, their desire for a competitive nomination fight in the state and their allegiance to two South Carolina natives, former governor Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott, who have taken steps to challenge Trump for the nomination. Both are said by people close to them to be seriously considering a bid, and Haley is expected to announce in the coming weeks, South Carolina operatives said.

The result foretells a Trump launch event in the early primary state — with an expected endorsement by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and a reaffirmation of support from Gov. Henry McMaster (R) — that positions the former president as a serious contender but stops short of demonstrating the dominance that he once enjoyed.

He’s going to have to earn it. If he was the stable genius he thinks he is he’d see this an opportunity to do what the cult loves to see him do: slice and dice his enemies. I have a feeling he’ll find himself.

This is how right wingers have fun

I have no words:

Body-camera footage and images of the night Breonna Taylor was killed in 2020 were shown in front of diners at a Kentucky restaurant this week during an event in which a GOP women’s group hosted one of the officers who fired into Taylor’s apartment, according to an NAACP chapter and accounts from patrons.

The Republican Women’s Club of South Central Kentucky held a dinner event Tuesday at Anna’s Greek Restaurant in Bowling Green, Ky., for Jonathan Mattingly, a former sergeant with the Louisville Metro Police Department who was among the officers who conducted the botched no-knock raid at Taylor’s Louisville apartment in search of her ex-boyfriend. Mattingly, who was one of the officers who fired into the 26-year-old Black woman’s apartment the night she died, was cleared of wrongdoing in an internal police investigation and retired in 2021 to become a conservative author and pundit.

Cayce Johnson, a Bowling Green resident who was dining at Anna’s on Tuesday, told The Washington Post that after Mattingly was introduced with “raucous applause” from the event’s attendees one floor above them, the former sergeant played a presentation featuring footage and images of the night Taylor was killed. After the lights were dimmed in the restaurant, diners who were not affiliated with the event could hear and see the graphic descriptions of Taylor’s killing, Johnson said.

“You could hear the gunshots in the footage,” Johnson, 34, said Saturday. “Our dinner was completely hijacked. We couldn’t hear ourselves at that point.” She added, “It makes me nauseous to think about now.”

Katelyn Jones, another Bowling Green resident dining at Anna’s, recounted her frustration in a Facebook post about how the group was featuring “one of the cops that killed Breonna Taylor there and had some kind of loud, tribute/rally to support him while we were eating.”

“It was extremely disrespectful disturbing and loud,” she wrote of the footage of the gunshots. “It was so loud and nobody wants to hear or see police footage, especially of the murder of an innocent Black woman while they are trying to enjoy their meal.”

Representatives with the Republican Women’s Club of South Central Kentucky did not immediately respond to The Post’s requests for comment early Saturday. The GOP group’s Facebook page was inaccessible Saturday morning. Before the event, the group said in a statement to Spectrum News in Louisville this week that it had invited Mattingly to speak at its event “to obtain a firsthand account” of what happened the night Taylor was killed.

“These events may be controversial; however, we believe Sgt. Mattingly has the right to share his experience,” the group said in a statement to Spectrum. “Other individuals with firsthand experience relating to this case are welcome to request an opportunity to speak to our organization as well.”

Mattingly, who did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment Saturday morning, wrote on Facebook that he enjoyed his time at the event, saying, “Food was amazing and staff was even better!” After Jones replied to his post by thanking him “for ruining my family’s and everyone else’s dinner,” Mattingly offered to pay for her family’s dinner and said he meant no harm in his presentation.

You have to be soulless and brain damaged to do something like this. “No harm?” The woman is dead and she was completely innocent. Does he enjoy reliving it with a bunch of trained seals celebrating her senseless murder?

This officer got off very lucky in not being held responsible for her death but the least we can expect is that he has regret for what happened and doesn’t go around celebrating it with what apparently are his fans — in a public place no less. It’s disgusting. But then, he’s now a “conservative pundit and author” so that’s just part of the job description.

I said to a young friend the other day that this might be the best job market they will ever experience and she looked at me like I was crazy. I get it. When you’re young the experiences you have had limit your understanding of what it’s like when things change. When you are old (like me) you’ve been through some stuff and you have a different outlook. This piece in the NY Times looks at the different ways the generations are experiencing the contraction in the tech sector:

When Lyft laid off 13 percent of its workers in November, Kelly Chang was shocked to find herself among the 700 people who lost their jobs at the San Francisco company.

“It seemed like tech companies had so much opportunity,” said Ms. Chang, 26. “If you got a job, you made it. It was a sustainable path.”

Brian Pulliam, on the other hand, brushed off the news that the crypto exchange Coinbase was eliminating his job. Ever since the 48-year-old engineer was laid off from his first job at the video game company Atari in 2003, he said, he has asked himself once a year: “If I were laid off, what would I do?”

The contrast between Ms. Chang’s and Mr. Pulliam’s reactions to their professional letdowns speaks to a generational divide that is becoming more clear as the tech industry, which expanded rapidly through the pandemic, swings toward mass layoffs.

Microsoft said this week that it planned to cut 10,000 jobs, or roughly 5 percent of its work force. And on Friday morning, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said it planned to cut 12,000 jobs, or about 6 percent of its total. Their cuts followed big layoffs at other tech companies like Meta, Amazon and Salesforce.

Millennials and Generation Z, born between 1981 and 2012, started tech careers during a decade-long expansion when jobs multiplied as fast as iPhone sales. The companies they joined were conquering the world and defying economic rules. And when they went to work at outfits that offered bus rides to the office and amenities like free food and laundry, they weren’t just taking on a new job — they were taking on a lifestyle. Few of them had experienced widespread layoffs.

Baby boomers and members of Generation X, born between 1946 and 1980, on the other hand, lived through the biggest contraction the industry has ever seen. The dot-com crash of the early 2000s eliminated more than one million jobs, emptying Silicon Valley’s Highway 101 of commuters as many companies folded overnight.

“It was a blood bath, and it went on for years,” said Jason DeMorrow, a software engineer who was laid off twice in 18 months and was out of work for more than six months. “As concerning as the current downturn is, and as much as I empathize with the people impacted, there’s no comparison.”

Tech’s generational divide is representative of a broader phenomenon. The year someone is born has a big influence on views about work and money. Early personal experiences strongly determine a person’s appetite for financial risk, according to a 2011 study by the economists Ulrike Malmendier of the University of California, Berkeley, and Stefan Nagel of the University of Chicago.

The study, which analyzed the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances from 1960 to 2007, found that people who came of age in the 1970s, when the stock market stagnated, were reluctant to invest in the early 1980s, when it roared. That trend reversed in the 1990s.

“Once you experience your first crash, things change,” Professor Nagel said. “You realize bad stuff happens and maybe you should be a bit more cautious.”

I came of age in the 70s and then experienced the hideous recession of the early 80s. It’s certainly colored my view of the job market which has always seemed cruel and capricious to me. My ciew is to take advantage when things are on the upswing but be prepared for when it crashes. Which it always does. By now I’ve been through way too many downturns to ever feel like it’s always going to be morning in America. On the other hand, morning always shows up at some point.

The right wing media is making a huge deal out of Chief of Staff Ron Klain’s resignation, insisting that it has something to do with the document pseudo-scandal. The mainstream media hasn’t gone there yet, merely juxtaposing the two events in ways that insinuate without saying it. As a matter of fact, Klain had said he was resigning some months back and then they agreed that he would stay on for a while longer. It has nothing to do with the documents.

And let’s be clear about something, if we’re going to compare Biden and Trump, take a look at the turnover, particularly how many of his top staff resigned under pressure, in the first two years of his administration:

Set out below is a list of the senior level departures from the executive office of the president since the beginning of the Trump administration (each of the 65 “A Team” positions is only counted once toward the turnover rate, thus, this chart only includes the first person to hold/depart a given position). Highlighted text indicates a position that went through multiple instances of turnover:

It’s not uncommon for Chiefs of staff to only do a couple of years because the job is an incredible burnout.And there have been plenty of resignations in the Biden administration, as per usual. But the level of turnover in the Trump administration was ridiculous with multiple corruption scandals among his top aides and in the cabinet. (Remember Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, Rick Perry and Ryan Zinke?) There were even domestic violence scandals fergawsakes.

But sure, Ron Klain resigning is a clear indication of a totally corrupt administration.

For those of you who remember the embarrassment of the Times coverage of the “Whitewater” scandal, it must seem like déjà vu all over again. It does to me. The paper’s editors are trying, and I mean really trying, to make the Biden classified documents issue a thing. And I mean a grave thing. The stage was ably set by the subject line of the email I received blasting out their latest deep dive on the story: “Inside Biden’s 68 days of silence.” It’s this like a Gabriel García Márquez homage? I mean good lord. Are we really doing this again? Of course we are. It’s how they roll.

I took the liberty of a short set of annotations.

That’s from Josh Marshall who does an excellent job of analyzing the rapidly escalating hysteria around Joe Biden’s classified documents. I, of course, remember Whitewater as I’m sure quite a few of you do too. What both Josh and I recognize is the febrile excitement and barely repressed, palpable glee among the press corps as they run with the story 24/7 despite the fact that there is no real “news” beyond the fact that some classified documents were found and a special prosecutor has been named in order that the DOJ not be criticized for being biased against Trump for naming one in a very different case. That’s it.

The “story” you see is 100% about the negative political implications for Joe Biden not the substance of the supposed crime. After all, Biden is the president and he has cooperated at every step of the way, unlike Trump. No, this is the most fun kind of investigation for the beltway press corp, the kind where you can wax on for hour after hour about the “optics” and the “trust” and the judgement” of a particular Democrat as a way to place them in the same category as Richard Nixon or Donald Trump. Think about “her emails.”

As Josh writes:

There’s simply not a lot of meat on this bone. But there’s so much appetite for the bone that doesn’t really seem to matter. It’s both an opportunity to curry a bit of bothsidesist favor since most mainstream media reporters primarily focus on how not to be accused of liberal bias. (I know them. This is true.) But perhaps even more than that there are the cinematic qualities, fateful decisions with unknown and potentially grave consequences into the future. The over-clever and perhaps naive belief that completely cooperating would create the impression of complete cooperation.

The bigs really, REALLY want this one.

There was a deadly shooting today in California. 10 people were killed and 10 more injured and the suspect is still at large. Normally there would be wall to wall coverage of that story at least for one day. On CNN this morning they covered it at the top of the news but could hardly wait to switch gears and blather on about Biden’s documents. As Josh says, they really REALLY want this one.

And if they think this will somehow give them credibility with the right, prove that they aren’t “fake news’ they have another thing coming. The right is playing them all the way down. And let’s face facts: they know it. They like playing the game too.

I mean, are they really serious about drawing comparisons between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on corruption? Well, yes they are. If you think this is bad just wait until the Hunter Biden investigation gets going. They will use this “scandal” as a jumping off point.

They have not changed.

Remember the fuss over a different one?

The twice-impeached, much-investigated instigator of the Jan. 6 insurrection was in North Carolina on Saturday for the memorial service of Ineitha Lynette Hardaway, a.k.a. “Diamond” of the right-wing political duo Diamond and Silk.

The memorial service at Fayetteville’s Crown Theater was not the political rally for himself that Donald Trump had hoped. Size matters to him. He didn’t get it.

The Fayetteville Observer reports that just over 150 people attended the event in the theater that holds 2,400. Donald Trump’s audience was smaller and the event took longer than he’d expected.

Still, the memorial service did resemble a Trump rally.

Yes, the pillow guy was at Hardaway’s funeral … to praise Donald Trump.

Trump’s eulogy had plenty of his usual shtick.

Those of a certain age will recall what a fuss Republicans and conservative pundits raised in 2002 over the memorial service for Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. He’d died in a plane crash along with his wife, Sheila Wellstone, his daughter, Marcia Wellstone, aides Will McLaughlin and Tom Lapic, family friend Mary McEvoy and the two pilots, Richard Conry and Michael Guess. The event was carried on CSPAN and broadcast over Minnesota Public Radio. Over 20,000 attended.

And, oh, the handwringing over the inappropriate politicalness of it all!

In studying the anatomy of a debacle, many critics have focused on the blunt-edged speech of Wellstone’s close friend Rick Kahn. But the event was designed from the start to be boisterous and, yes, political.

“The problem was the labeling,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. “The mistake was in labeling this as a memorial instead of a celebration of the lives of these individuals, which is what it was.”

She said people tuned in expecting a funeral and instead got a rally.

CNN reported:

Vin Weber, a former congressman from Minnesota, lambasted Democrats for what he called a “complete, total absolute sham.”

“To them, Wellstone’s death, apparently, was just another campaign event,” he told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Dave Ryan, a radio talk show host in Minneapolis, said the airwaves have been full of talk about the service, which featured speeches from Wellstone family members and friends who urged the crowd to remember Wellstone when they cast their votes next week.

“I guess the local stations here were swamped with phone calls from people who were angry because they had been sold a memorial service that had turned into a political rally,” Ryan said in an interview with CNN. “And I really thought that was kind of shameful. I really did.”

The early part of the service was done beautifully, former mayor of St. Paul mayor George Latimer told the Minneapolis Post in 2008. Then Kahn, Wellstone’s campaign manager, delivered a barnburner.

Six years later they were still talking about it.

Fifteen years later they were still talking about it.

That Hardaway’s memorial turned into a pathetically small Trump rally people will forget by tomorrow.

The evil genius of clown politics

George Santos (if that is his name) is more than a Strangelovian political farce. More than a Republican “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Bum.” Merely laughing at him, writes The Atlantic‘s David Graham, is missing the darker implications for our politics. Do not let your amusement, he warns, “eclipse the horror of such a candidate reaching office and the consequences for Congress and the American political system’s remaining shreds of repute.”

Yes, Santos (if that is his name) duped voters in his district. Yes, he ought to be investigated for laws he may have broken in running. But the fact of his being elected just two years after a violent insurrection instigated over bogus allegations of a stolen election adds an element of tragedy.

The fact that Santos (if that is his name) ran and won election to the U.S. House as an even phonier business success than Donald J. Trump — he of reality TV, of a bankrupt casino, of a fraudulent foundation, of a scam university, of alleged tax and bank fraud, of 30,000 lies, of “Stop the Steal,” and of uncounted cultish rallies — should leave us more unsettled than amused.

“Are you not entertained?” shouts Maximus (Russel Crowe) to the arena crowd after slaying multiple gladiators (and beheading the last). “Is this not why you are here?”

When politics is reduced to entertainment, solving serious social problems is left either to clowns or to “do-gooder” plutocrats answerable to no one. More likely than not, problems will be left to fester until gangrenous. And then?

Graham writes:

Jon Stewart, who in his previous guise as host of The Daily Show was both a lucid critic and a major catalyst of politics-as-entertainment, connected Santos to Trump in this respect this week. “The thing we have to be careful of, and I always caution myself on this and I ran into this trouble with Trump, is we cannot mistake absurdity for lack of danger, because it takes people with no shame to do shameful things,” he said.

Even if Santos is eventually forced out of office, as seems possible, treating him like a mere joke risks feeding a vicious cycle that will persist after his exit. When clowns get elected, it rightly lowers the esteem in which the public holds Congress; this, in turn, leads voters to be more apt to elect more clowns, which only produces a Congress even less worthy of respect. So go ahead, laugh at George Santos. But when your giggles peter out, don’t let your attention drift away.

The question remains of where Santos (if that is his name), “previously strapped for cash,” as Graham notes, “suddenly got the money to loan his campaign $700,000.”

One might postulate an Evil Genius behind our politics coming to this. Behind Trump. Behind Santos (if that is his name). Behind the 15 ballots it took to elect Kevin McCarthy as House speaker. Behind the hollowing out of popular sovereignty and the creeping global hunger for strongmen.

Even faux strongmen like Trump are spectacle enough to fill arenas with ardent crowds screaming like pro wrestling fans for the heads of their enemies. Trump’s mob attacked and filled the Capitol two years ago calling for men and women they view as heel politicians to be dragged out and hung.

If, somewhere in the shadows, there lurks an Evil Genius intent on ending the age of democracies, promoting clowns — Trump, Santos (if that is his name), Gaetz, Greene, Gosar, Boebert, Jordan — might be the way to go. Social media makes it easy. Reduce politics to bread and circuses. Make government a chaotic mockery until the leaderless call out for the iron will of a strongman to supplant the will of the people.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican of Florida, is auditioning for that role by engaging in human trafficking, academic censorship, ideological warfare, and voter suppression.

“Amid a rise in intolerance and fascism throughout the United States,” Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois offers an alternative. He is just one example of a democratic normalcy that lately seems almost vestigial.

Choose wisely.

(Video via Politico.)

It couldn’t have something to do with the Russia investigation, could it?

Many people have wondered if Trump’s document haul had to do with his desire to publish classified information about the Russia investigation. After all, he said he was going to do it. Here’s a scoop from Murray Waas about the Special Counsel investigation:

On the eve of Donald Trump’s last day in office as President, Trump sent a memo to his attorney general, and also the directors of National Intelligence and the CIA, directing them to declassify thousands of pages of highly classified government papers pertaining to the FBI’s investigation into the Russian Federation’s covert intervention into the 2016 US presidential election to help elect Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton.

But Trump was stymied in his efforts to make the records public, leading the outgoing president to rage to aides that the documents would never see the light of day.

Now, sources close to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation tell me that prosecutors have questioned at least three people about whether Trump’s frustrations may have been a motive in Trump taking at thousands of pages of presidential papers, a significant number of them classified, from the White House to Mar-A-Largo, in potential violation of federal law. One of these people was compelled to testify before a federal grand jury, the sources say.

The sources say that prosecutors appear to believe the episode may be central to determining Trump’s intent for his unauthorized removal from the White House of the papers.  Insight into the president’s frame of mind—his intent and motivation, are likely to be the foundational building blocks of any case that the special counsel considers seeking against Trump.

Towards that end, the Special Counsel has zeroed in on conversations and communications between the Justice Department, the White House counsel, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, other then-senior White House aides, and Trump, in the final days—and even the final hours of his presidency.

In his January 19, 2021. memo, entitled “Declassification of Certain Materials Related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation”, Trump ordered these records “be declassified to the maximum extent possible.”

Trump and his allies had promised that these documents would decisively and conclusively corroborate his thus-far baseless claims and conspiracy theories that the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies had spied on his 2016 presidential campaign with the intent to thwart his election, and failing that, to drive him from office on false evidence.

There’s quite a bit more at the link including the fact that Kash Patel implied in public statements that’s what it was and has been immunized by the prosecutors and so required to tell the truth. I suspect that’s why Trump is having a daily meltdown over Jack Smith, calling him a Nazi thug and a criminal. Somebody told him something about the Grand Jury investigation.

If you’re interested in following this story, Waas would be a good Substack sub. He’s got great contacts in this world and his stuff is always interesting.

This is why it’s not something you should want. We don’t know anything a out the Special Counsel in the Biden case except that Trump appointed him as US Attorney. And this is not reassuring:

At the Justice Department, Hur worked with Rosenstein on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the former deputy attorney general told CNN.

Hur “was my point person and he had biweekly meetings with Mueller’s team and then briefed me on the progress of the Russian special counsel investigation,” Rosenstein said. “So he has seen that firsthand and he knows that you need not to be influenced by politics and make decisions based on fact and the law and the Department of Justice policy, and I think we can count on Rob to do that.”

Rosenstein added: “Rob, like a lot of people I worked with at DOJ, believes it is important to engage in public service and feels a sense of responsibility. So it is hard to say ‘no’ when someone calls on you to do what you know is going to be a an unpleasant job.”

While serving as a top aide to Rosenstein, Hur also appeared at a Trump White House press conference in July 2017, touting the administration’s efforts to crack down on the notorious MS-13 gang. The appearance at the White House press briefing podium was unusual as DOJ generally seeks to keep a distance from the White House on matters that could be seen as political in nature.