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Month: February 2023

Tell me why: A therapeutic mixtape

Published by Dennis Hartley on February 14, 2023

In a 2016 piece about the mass shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, I wrote:

But there is something about [Orlando] that screams “Last call for sane discourse and positive action!” on multiple fronts. This incident is akin to a perfect Hollywood pitch, writ large by fate and circumstance; incorporating nearly every sociopolitical causality that has been quantified and/or debated over by criminologists, psychologists, legal analysts, legislators, anti-gun activists, pro-gun activists, left-wingers, right-wingers, centrists, clerics, journalists and pundits in the wake of every such incident since Charles Whitman perched atop the clock tower at the University of Texas and picked off nearly 50 victims (14 dead and 32 wounded) over a 90-minute period. That incident occurred in 1966; 50 years ago this August. Not an auspicious golden anniversary for our country. 50 years of this madness. And it’s still not the appropriate time to discuss? What…too soon?

All I can say is, if this “worst mass shooting in U.S. history” (which is saying a lot) isn’t the perfect catalyst for prompting meaningful public dialogue and positive action steps once and for all regarding homophobia, Islamophobia, domestic violence, the proliferation of hate crimes, legal assault weapons, universal background checks, mental health care (did I leave anything out?), then WTF will it take?

Well, that didn’t take:

Morning dawned Tuesday on East Lansing to a rattled Michigan State University campus hours after a mass shooting left three dead and five others critically injured.

An alert was sent at 8:31 p.m. Monday, telling students to “run, hide, fight” with a report of shots fired at Berkey Hall and at the MSU Union.

Two people were killed at Berkey Hall, said university Interim Deputy Police Chief Chris Rozman. The gunman then moved to the MSU Union, where another was killed.

Students were told to shelter in place as authorities searched for the gunman. The 43-year-old suspect was Anthony McRae, Rozman said at a news conference Tuesday. McRae was found off campus early Tuesday before he could be arrested; he had died from what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. […]

McRae was not affiliated with the university, and authorities didn’t know early Tuesday why he came to MSU.

“We have absolutely no idea what the motive was,” Rozman said.

“Absolutely no idea” indeed. As in, I have absolutely no idea why our legislators cannot seem to take even one tiny infinitesimal step forward on enacting sensible gun reform.

OK…I have some idea:

And today, Michigan’s governor (as any decent and compassionate leader reflexively does) has donned the mantle of Consoler-in-Chief:

It appears the governor and I are of like mind:

Saddest of all, the MSU shootings occurred on the eve of a grim anniversary:

You remember Parkland, right? In my review of the 2020 documentary After Parkland, I wrote:

So where are we at today, in the two years since a gunman opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at Stoneman Douglas High, killing 17 people and wounding 17 others in just 6 minutes? According to a 2019 AP story, a report issued in February of last year by a student journalism project “…concluded that  1,149 children and teenagers died from a shooting in the year since the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School,” citing that the stats cover “school shootings, domestic violence cases, drug homicides and by stray bullets”. Mind you, nearly another year has passed since that report was released. […]

The most powerful moments [in After Parkland] are in the beginning, which contains a collage of real-time cell phone audio of the Parkland incident. The chilling sounds of automatic gunfire and students screaming in pain and terror brought to mind Martin Luther King’s quote ”Wait has always meant never ”. If every lawmaker was locked in chambers and forced to listen to that audio on a continuous loop until they passed sensible gun reform, perhaps they would all finally reach their breaking point.

You know what “they” say-we all have a breaking point. When it comes to this particular topic, I have to say, I think that I may have finally reached mine. I’ve written about this so many times, in the wake of so many horrible mass shootings, that I’ve lost count. I’m out of words. There are no Scrabble tiles left in the bag, and I’m stuck with a “Q” and a “Z”. Game over. Oh waiter-check, please. The end. Finis. I have no mouth, and I must scream.

Something else “they” say…music soothes the savage beast. Not that this 10-song playlist that I have assembled will necessarily assuage the grief, provide the answers that we seek, or shed any new light on the subject-but sometimes, when words fail, music speaks.

As the late great Harry Chapin tells his audience in the clip I’ve included below: “Here’s a song that I could probably talk about for two weeks. But I’m not going to burden you, and hopefully the story and the words will tell it the way it should be.” What Harry said.

“Family Snapshot” – Peter Gabriel

“Friend of Mine” – Jonathan & Stephen Cohen (Columbine survivors)

“Guns Guns Guns” – The Guess Who

https://youtu.be/ZDLlVJ-XdK8

“I Don’t Like Mondays” – The Boomtown Rats

“Jeremy” – Pearl Jam

“Melt the Guns” – XTC

“Psycho Killer” – The Talking Heads

“Saturday Night Special” – Lynyrd Skynyrd

“Sniper” – Harry Chapin

“Ticking” – Elton John

More reviews at Den of Cinema

—Dennis Hartley

Oh Nikki you’re so fine

Published by digby on February 14, 2023

But you don’t blow anyone’s mind

Stumping for Rubio in 2016

JV Last at the Triad (subsc. only —) says that Nikki Haley would be “fine” as president and I’m not going to argue because I don’t think she would be fine at all. She’s a creature of the Republican party and it is a toxic, neo-fascist institution that taints anyone who seeks to represent it. Sorry, that’s just how it is.

And Last makes that case for me when he discusses why Haley has no chance in hell:

The problem is that, as Sarah explained this morning, there is no constituency for Nikki Haley within the Republican party.

A Nikki Haley candidacy is premised on the idea that she is Not Trump. The theory behind this is that the Republican electorate’s preferences in 2024 can be divided into “Trump” and “Not Trump” lanes and that if Haley can win the “Not Trump” primary and then consolidate those voters, then she can win a head-to-head matchup against Big Orange.

But I want to put this in bold:

There is no “Not Trump” lane.

Let me explain.

The DeSantis challenge to Trump isn’t that Meatball Ron is “Not Trump”—it’s that he’s “Trump Plus.” The DeSantis electoral proposition is that he will give you everything Trump does—all of the fighting, the illiberalism, the culture war, the lib owning, the news cycle domination, the mean tweets.

The only difference is that DeSantis is more electorally viable.

In other words, Trump and DeSantis are fighting over the same 85 percent of the Republican electorate.

Nikki Haley and anyone else who jumps in trying to be Not Trump is fighting over the remaining 15 percent.

In The Bulwark’s 2024 primary poll last month we ran three ballot tests:

Two-way: DeSantis 52 percent, Trump 30 percent, undecided 15 percent, and 3 percent saying they would not vote if those were the only two options.

Three-way: DeSantis 44 percent, Trump 28 percent, a generic “other candidate” 10 percent, and 17 percent undecided.

Ten-way: DeSantis 39 percent, Trump 28 percent, Mike Pence 9 percent, Nikki Haley and Liz Cheney 4 percent, five other candidates at 1 percent, and 13 percent undecided.

If we wanted absolute, lock-stock-barrel proof, we’d need a fourth ballot test that put Trump and Haley head-to-head. But I think we can intuit with a fairly high degree of confidence that if we ran it we’d get a result close to:

  • Trump 70 percent
  • Haley < 20 percent
  • 10 percent undecided

Or to come at this from a ranked-choice perspective and ask yourself: Among DeSantis voters, who is their second choice going to be?

Eventually someone will poll this question, but I can tell you the answer already: Overwhelmingly, it’s going to be Trump. Not Haley or Scott or Pence or anyone positioned as a Not Trump.

2. What Is “The Trump Lane”?

In order to be a contender to win the Republican nomination, you must live in the Trump lane. What does that mean?

I submit to you that at this moment, the Overton Window has moved quite a lot. To be in the Trump lane today, requires five checked boxes:

-You must agree to support him in the general election should he be the nominee, obviously.

-You must stipulate that he was a good and successful president.

-You must contend that Trump’s defeat in 2020 was, at the least, highly irregular and the result of nefarious forces unfairly tilting the playing field.

-You must performatively hate not only Democrats and the media, but also large swaths of America—especially the “coastal elites” who live in metro areas. You must publicly regard them as inauthentic Americans.

-You must make hurting these inauthentic Americans your highest priority, in both rhetoric and policy prescriptions.

That’s the Trump lane. And it’s no good to tick only one or two of those boxes. You have to hit all five just to ante up.

Now here are political postures which will do nothing to endear a candidate to the 85 percent of R voters in the Trump lane:

-Touting a record of economic growth.

-Arguing in favor of free enterprise.

-Being an absolutist on free speech, even for your political opponents.

-Advocating for a robust foreign policy that places America in a position of global leadership.

The corollary is that if someone is going to contend for the Republican nomination, they’ll have to come from the Trump lane.

I’m not sure who that could be. Kristi Noem, maybe? I could see a non-political celeb diving in and scrambling the Trump lane. Someone like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens.

But that’s the pathway I’d be keeping my eye on. The rest of these pols—Haley, Pence, Scott, Pompeo, Christie, Sununu, Hogan, whomever—are non-factors except in how they might alter the dynamics around the actual contenders.

They’re not running to win. They’re running for the tertiary benefits of candidacy.

I think the jury is still out on DeSantis. He’s just a name to a lot of Republicans. In fact, there are a good number who can’t tell the difference between him and George Santos.

QOTD: Steve Scalise

Published by digby on February 14, 2023

Steve Scalise:

“The president, for a few weeks now, has been falsely saying that there are people that want to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. And it’s been inaccurate for a long time — and you saw last night when he tried to pin it on us,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., told NBC News one day after Biden’s speech to Congress. “I just hope he stops going around the country telling that falsehood because there’s no truth to it.

“We want to strengthen Social Security by ending a lot of those government checks to people staying at home rather than going to work,” Scalise said, endorsing work requirements for benefits.

Right. All those disabled cancer patients and old people need to get a job, amirite???

Runaway Train

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 14, 2023

High on pentane

Controlled chemical burn, East Palestine, Ohio following train derailment. (Source: WOIO)

Seems I remember a “60 Minutes”(?) story sometime in the wake of Se[tember 11 on the vulnerability of U.S. chemical plants to terrorist attacks. Critics branded Bush Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s proposed security upgrades “toothless.”

“There are a lot of ways to skin a cat, and we’re going to let chemical operators figure out the right way, as long as the cat gets skinned,” Chertoff said.

So. Whatever happened with that?

Meantime, hazardous chemicals transported by rail seem to be having a bad 2023 so far (Newsweek):

On February 3, a tanker train derailed in the Ohio town of East Palestine, near the state border with Pennsylvania. The crash led to multiple explosions and chemical leaks, prompting the governors of both states to issue evacuation notices for the town and its surrounding areas. Controlled burns of the vinyl chloride from the train’s tanks were initiated, with residents warned that the air could be flooded with dangerous gases like phosgene and hydrogen chloride.

The fiery crash was one of more than a dozen train derailments reported in the U.S. this year, only 1 1/2 months in. Another wreck, on January 19, also occurred in Ohio, with several train cars stretching over miles derailing between the towns of Trinway and Adam’s Mill, according to the Times Recorder. It was considerably less destructive than the one in East Palestine, as the cars were empty, though cleanup efforts were projected to last for a week.

Derailment chemical spills are not as frequent as mass shootings, thank goodness, but still.

I’m reminded of another South Carolina derailment years ago, this one involving a tanker carrying ethylene oxide. It is used in small quantities in hospitals to sterilize instruments that cannot tolerate autoclave temperatures. It sterilizes effectively because it kills … basically everything. It’s not only toxic and carcinogenic, but explosive:

A site adjacent to a factory where my firm did some design/construct work sold EtO. Another engineer who’d had business there said one of his contacts had doodled out on his blotter how large a crater the explosion would cause if one of their EtO railcars blew up. Um, large.

Some years later, there was a derailment near Liberty, SC (IIRC). The state environmental agency’s press office statement over the radio said one of the overturned tank cars was leaking caustic soda, but that was contained. Another car, she said haltingly, contained “eth-yl-ene ox-ide.”

“I’m not sure what the properties of that are,” she went on, “but as a precuation they have ordered an evacuation of people living within a quarter of a mile.”

Maybe Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas can get on that.

(Dibromochloropane, cholorinated benzenes)
I went walking in the wasted city
(Two, nitropropane, pentrochlorophenol)
Started thinking about entropy
(Benzotricholoride, strontium chromate)
Smelled the wind from the ruined river
(One, two, dibromo, three, chloropropane)
Went home to watch TV

Are there no workhouses?

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 14, 2023

GOP wants to “fix” Social Security

Republicans are still fuming at President Biden’s calling them out in his State of the Union Address for wanting to unravel Social Security and Medicare. They insist he stop spreading lies about what they clearly want to do.

Social Security privatization is another “zombie idea” that should have died long ago, yet continues shambling along, New York Times economist Paul Krugman told Ari Berman Monday on his MSNBC show, “The Beat.” Yet there is former Vice President Mike Pence resurrecting an idea floated in 2005 by then-President George Bush (and soundly defeated in the court of public opinion). Bush meant to turn a portion of people’s Social Security over to Wall Street (and more of it later).

“You have to be really naive not to know that what [President Joe] Biden said is true,” Krugman said. “Rick Scott, former chair of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee was foolish enough to actually put it on paper that we’re [the GOP] going to sunset Social Security and Medicare within five years. But everyone knows that he’s actually speaking for what a lot of Republicans would like to do, what Republicans have been trying to do for 40 years.”

You have to pretend that history never happened to claim otherwise, Krugman continued.

The economy exists “for people’s lives,” Krugman insisted. The programs’ impact on the economy is probably neutral. But the bottom line is that “Medicare, Social Security, and increasingly now Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, they’re all part of the fabric of American life. Americans, to the extent that they can hope to have a decent, dignified retirement, is because they know that Medicare and Social Security are going to be there.”

Suggesting that they go on the chopping block every five years introduces “massive uncertainty.” Even without enacting anything, “you’ve degraded the quality of people’s lives.” Who cares what it does to the GDP? You’ve made America a bleaker place.

Republicans hope to turn federal retirement insurance “into a giant 401k,” and make people’s retirement another profit center for Wall Street. For those who have them, 401k plans are at risk of market crashes, Krugman reminds viewers. But those retirement investors are people earning enough to divert income each paycheck above and beyond federal withholding.

Washington politicians simply don’t understand that that’s not how most Americans live, Krugman explained.

“For most people, Social Security is their retirement plan. There are relatively few Americans that have much besides that,” Krugman said. A few may have some savings, but Social Security is “the bedrock.”

Sure (me, not Krugman), put even more of people’s retirement, people living paycheck to paycheck, into the hands of Wall Street speculators. Put American seniors living on Social Security alone one market dip away from eating dogfood.

That’s Republicans’ plan for “saving” Social Security and greasing the palms of their investor-donors.

SILENCE!

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo provides a quick summary of other Republicans’ designs on the country’s thin social safety net:

It’s not just that Republicans have been pushing for cutting or phasing out Social Security and Medicare for decades. They are now demanding that President Biden agree not to say what their policy is. The demand amounts to this: despite the fact that Republicans have been demanding cuts and a phase out for decades and despite the fact they will continue to do so after the current burst of media attention abates, Biden must stop telling voters about this because Republicans have momentarily agreed to deny what their policy is. Indeed, what’s especially weird is how many Republicans can’t help restating their demand for cuts even while denying their demands for cuts.

There are so many examples of this it’s hard to know where to start. But since you have to start somewhere I’ve begun a list of quotes supporting cuts from Republican members who now claim they’ve never supporting cutting Social Security.

Have other examples? Send me them.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Johnson denies President Biden’s claim that Republicans want to cut Social Security. But after saying this he then called Social Security a “legalized Ponzi scheme” and says that Congress should no longer automatically pay Social Security benefits each year but rather decide each year whether to pay them and how much the benefit should be. “That doesn’t mean putting on the chopping block,” Johnson told local radio. “That doesn’t mean cutting Social Security. But it does mean prioritizing lower priority spending.”

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT): Mike Lee also denies President Biden’s claim that Republicans want to cut Social Security. But running for Senate in 2010 he told supporters: “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it.”

Are there no workhouses?

Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA): Steve Scalise also denies President Biden’s claims that Republicans want to cut Social Security: But just late last year Scalise support the proposed budget of the Republican Study Committee which, according to Politico, “rais[es] the eligibility ages for each program, along with withholding payments for individuals who retire early or had a certain income, and privatized funding for Social Security to lower income taxes.” After the State of the Union, Scalise said Biden’s claims have been “inaccurate for a long time,” by which he presumably means ten weeks. But even while insisting the President was lying he endorsed yet more cuts. “We want to strengthen Social Security by ending a lot of those government checks to people staying at home rather than going to work.”

Senator Rick Scott (R-FL): In his official agenda for 2022 Republican Senate candidate Scott proposed sunsetting (i.e., ending) every federal program, including Social Security and Medicare, after five years.

Into their tender mercies, you should commend your old age.

“Woke” Banking?

Published by digby on February 13, 2023

What the hell is this?

 Gov. Ron DeSantis and legislative leaders are targeting so-called “woke banking” with newly proposed legislation that would aim to “stop companies from playing politics with Floridians’ money.”

Environmental Social Governance (ESG) has become a popular GOP talking point in states like Texas and Florida. ESG investments were banned on the state level last year. On Monday, the governor announced new enhanced legislative proposals against them.DeSantis, legislative leaders roll out plan to prohibit ‘woke banking’ in Florida

Supporters say ESG is a way for institutions to avoid investing in companies that back policies that could negatively impact the environment and the people who live in those communities.

But critics like the governor and house speaker Paul Renner say ESG investing does more harm than good.

“The biggest thing that ESG represents is a total hijacking of democracy,” Florida House Speaker Paul Renner said.

The proposal also enhances protections against discrimination of customers for political religious or social beliefs and prohibits the use of social credit scores.

House minority leader Rep. Fentrice Driskell points to potential financial impacts.

“I am concerned this could be a poor financial decision,” she said. “This is a governor who’s so focused on ‘WOKE’ that he is asleep at the wheel.”

But companies that refuse to make a wedding cake for gay people or pay for abortion coverage in health care policies are well within their rights?

Of course they are.

I would imagine that most businesses will decide how to deal with by looking at the bottom line. I don’t know how that’s going to work but they’re going to be faced with some choices.

Update: This seems to be one of the complaints the details of which are very sketchy and fishy as hell.

If the right wing Congress can’t do it, the the right wing Courts will

Published by digby on February 13, 2023

I mentioned this before but in case you missed it, this write up of the judicial assault on Social Security is worth reading:

During his passionate and very focused 2023 State of the Union address on Tuesday night, February 7, President Joe Biden slammed Republicans for their efforts to “sunset” Social Security and Medicare. Biden was referring specifically to a proposal by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida), who has called for dramatic changes to the way in which those programs are funded. Instead of perpetual funding, Scott has called for Social Security and Medicare to “sunset” in five years.

The Florida senator’s exact words were: “In my plan, I suggested the following: All federal legislation sunsets in five years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.”

But in an article published by Slate on February 9, journalist Mark Joseph Stern emphasizes that Republicans have a tool other than Congress for attacking Social Security and Medicare: the federal courts.

Stern explains, “Recently, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals crafted a theory that would empower courts to strike down mandatory spending on federal programs, compelling Congress to either reappropriate the money or let the programs die. This radical and anti-democratic reading of the Constitution would threaten Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the Affordable Care Act, unemployment benefits, child nutrition assistance, and so much more. Democrats and Republicans would be foolish to ignore the rebellion against federal spending that’s brewing in the 5th Circuit.”

The Slate reporter notes that the “conservative assault on entitlement programs” came up during “litigation against” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency created in 2010 during President Barack Obama’s first term. Judge Cory Wilson and two other Donald Trump-appointed federal judges, Stern points out, “revoked the CFPB’s ability to issue or enforce any regulations.”

“You might wonder: What does this skirmish over a small financial agency have to do with hundreds of billions of dollars in annual entitlement spending?” Stern argues. “The answer: everything. In her concurrence, [Judge Edith] Jones took pains to clarify that her reasoning was not limited to the CFPB. Jones announced that all “appropriations to the executive must be temporally bound.’

Seven Fifth Circuit judges, according to the journalist “have now endorsed the notion that courts must strike down appropriations that allow ‘perpetual funding’ of government agencies or programs.”

“If their view becomes the law of the land,” Stern warns, “it will empower courts to abolish trillions of dollars in entitlement spending. Why? Because today two-thirds of annual federal spending is ‘mandatory’ — including some of our nation’s most beloved social safety net programs…. Elected Republicans may have backed away from slashing Social Security and Medicare, likely because it would be incredibly unpopular. But the firebrands they put on the bench are entirely unaccountable to the voters, and their campaign to write Scott’s ideas into the Constitution cannot be stopped by any election.”

Trump the outsider… again?

Published by digby on February 13, 2023

Sure, why not?

I’ve been saying this for awhile and I think it becomes truer every day. Despite the fact that he is an ex-president Trump’s path to the nomination is the same one he had in 2016: the anti-establishment outsider, especially in light of the party elites pushing Ron DeSantis.

JV Last at the Bulwark takes a look at the lay of the land:

I have some Deep Thoughts on Ron DeSantis for later this week, but I want to start by asking you to consider a parallel: Is he Scott Walker or George W. Bush?

I don’t mean on the merits or as an ideological figure. I’m talking exclusively about DeSantis’s political position at this moment in the primary. Is he a rocket about to take off? Or is he the stalking horse for the entire spectrum of the Republican party / Conservatism Inc.—from the think tanks to the donors to the grifter class?

The reason this question is interesting is because there’s evidence to support both views.

Nate Cohn has done a deep dive on the data and concluded that DeSantis is definitely not Walker; but may not quite be W.

Here’s Cohn:

[A]t least at the beginning of the race, Mr. DeSantis is no Scott Walker. He would start the campaign in a very different and far stronger position, even if there is still no way to know whether he “has what it takes” to succeed against former President Donald J. Trump.

What sets Mr. DeSantis apart from Mr. Walker? To be blunt: how many people already say they want him to be president.

In this narrow but important respect, Mr. DeSantis has a lot more in common with Barack Obama or Ronald Reagan than Mr. Walker or the other promising first-time candidates who did not live up to high hopes in recent years, like Kamala Harris, Rick Perry or the retired general Wesley Clark.

Here’s a graph Cohn put together that prompts all sorts of questions:

Now go and read the whole thing.

I have thoughts.

When you look at this list you can divvy up the candidates into two classes: Political rock stars and party war horses.

The Rock Stars: Candidates with immense political talent who were pushed upward by support from voters, who projected their hopes and aspirations onto them. Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama.

The Party War Horses: These were candidates whose primary asset was a unified party structure that pulled them upward—often against the tide of popular preference. That’s Bush, Clinton, and Giuliani.

Here’s where it gets interesting: Of the three Rock Stars, only Obama captured the nomination.²

Of the Party War Horses, only Giuliani failed to win the nomination.

Clearly, if you have a choice between grassroots support and a hammerlock on the party infrastructure, it’s better to have the unified apparatus.

Or at least it was better to have the unified apparatus.

One of the clear trends of the last several years is that “The Party Decides” is no longer a maxim that’s universally true. It wasn’t true in the Republican primary of 2016 or the Democratic primary of 2020.³ It hasn’t been true in most of the Republican senatorial and gubernatorial races of the last six years.

Past performance is not indication of future gains, obviously. Maybe the pendulum has swung back and the unified Republican/conservative elites will be able to pull DeSantis across the line.

But that’s the central question for the Republican primary. And by coincidence, it gives Trump an obvious line of attack: Even though he’s the former president the Swamp the party elites are still arrayed against him and trying to impose their will on Republican voters.

You can see the argument, yes? Donald Trump is fighting for YOU. Meatball Ron is Mitch McConnell’s stalking horse.

Or at least, that’s what I’d be arguing if I were running Trump’s campaign.

You can’t be new twice, but you can be anti-establishment forever.

Yep.And that’s where he’s going. I don’t think it can win him the general election but it almost certainly is at least a veto point in the primary.

DeSantis the hypocrite

Published by digby on February 13, 2023

Trump has a new nickname for Ron DeSantis: Meatball Ron, which is a lot more like it. I’m not sure what it means but it sounds more insulting than Ron DeSanctimonious which is just a little bit too “elitist” for the cult.

Meatball Ron is starting to take some incoming:

As Gov. Ron DeSantis prepared for an election night party in downtown Tampa last year, city officials received a surprising — and politically sensitive — request.

The Republican governor’s campaign wanted weapons banned from his victory celebration at the city-run Tampa Convention Center, a city official said in emails obtained by The Washington Post. And the campaign suggested that the city take responsibility for the firearms ban, the official said — not the governor, who has been a vocal supporter of gun rights.

“DeSantis/his campaign will not tell their attendees they are not permitted to carry because of the political optics,” Chase Finch, the convention center’s safety and security manager, said in an Oct. 28 email to other city officials about the request, which was conveyed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), a state police agency led by a DeSantis appointee.

Finch further explained that because of “Republicans largely being in support of 2A,” referring to the Second Amendment, “Basically it sounds like they want us to say it’s our policy to disallow firearms within the event space if anyone asks.”

In a statement sent after this story published, FDLE said the agency determines on its own whether to prohibit weapons at events. “FDLE did not request the venue restrict weapons at the direction of the Governor or campaign. Security decisions are made by FDLE,” agency spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger said.

Tampa Convention Center officials ultimately rejected the request to ban weapons. State law allows concealed firearms to be brought inside the public facility unless the renter insists on a gun-free event. On election night, the campaign did require guests to pass through metal detectors, Finch said.

I don’t know if this was a Democrat who leaked this or a Trump supporter but either way it’s a potent line of attack against Ron DeSantis, heroic culture warrior.

What about Jared?

Published by digby on February 13, 2023

Trump and Kushner’s cozy relationship with the Saudis is the real corruption scandal

Last week featured the first of what promises to be many public hearings about President Biden’s son Hunter, whom the new GOP House majority vows to investigate for the next two years. Going after what they all now casually call “The Biden Crime Family” is their number one priority.

That first hearing was about a now infamous New York Post story about the exceedingly weird “discovery” of Hunter Biden’s laptop that Twitter initially suppressed only to allow back on the website just 24 hours later. This incident has become evidence, if you want to call it that, that proves Twitter was working on behalf of the Biden campaign and its alleged allies in the woke FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) to cover up the Bidens’ corruption.

That hearing fizzled out, however, when it was pointed out that virtually everyone in politics, most especially Trump and his administration, were constantly asking Twitter to remove tweets they didn’t want widely seen. In the case of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Twitter made the decision itself. As it happened, the Biden campaign did seek to keep the nude pictures of Hunter which had been found on the laptop off the website, just as Trump had requested that Twitter remove a tweet from Chrissy Teigen in which the model called Trump a “p*ssy *ss b**ch.”

One of the goals of the GOP is to get Joe Biden to break down emotionally over Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

But this was just the opening salvo.

The committee plans to throw up a smoke screen on this Hunter Biden pseudo-scandal so thick that the public will eventually believe there must be something to it even though they have no idea what it’s really all about. This is a patented GOP tactic that they honed to perfection with Bill and Hillary Clinton over many years and which contributed mightily to the “email” scandal that brought her down in 2016. They will never stop pushing this as long as Joe Biden is in office. As I have mentioned before, because they know that Biden is extraordinarily sentimental about his children and they see him as a doddering old fool, I think one of the goals of the GOP is to get Joe Biden to break down emotionally over Hunter Biden’s laptop.

None of this is to say that Hunter Biden didn’t engage in a series of business deals that created the appearance of a conflict of interest, some of which coincided in some cases with his well-documented history of substance use disorder. As the New York Times reported in this thorough investigation of the whole story, it’s clear that he made quite a bit of money mainly trading on his famous father’s name. But there is no evidence that Joe Biden was involved in any of Hunter’s business dealings and, in fact, behaved in some ways that conflicted with Hunter’s financial interests.

As the Times reported, a prosecutor who was named by Donald Trump has been looking into Hunter’s business dealings and apparently homed in on two criminal violations, both of which took place while Hunter was grappling with his drug addiction. One is for failure to file tax returns in two years (he has subsequently paid the tax owed) and lying on a form to purchase a gun by saying he didn’t use drugs when he did. The Senate Oversight Committee looked into all this and reported that there is no there, there as well.

On the other hand, if you want to see an example of the kind of corruption Republicans are implying that Biden and his son engaged in, you need to look no further than Donald Trump and Jared Kushner.

Keeping in mind that Trump never divested his business and openly encouraged foreign interests to curry favor by spending vast sums at his hotels and resorts while he was president, the latest revelations about how he and Kushner sold out American interests to Saudi Arabia are truly shocking. Trump certainely made millions as president, but the deals he and Kushner struck for the post-presidency were massively lucrative. The Washington Post dropped a new story on Kushner’s relationship with the Saudi crown prince this past weekend that sheds new light on how he and his father-in-law cashed in. The article lays out how both these men were in financial binds as they left the White House due to some bad deals and Trump’s brand being severely tarnished:

The day after leaving the White House, Kushner created a company that he transformed months later into a private equity firm with $2 billion from a sovereign wealth fund chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Kushner’s firm structured those funds in such a way that it did not have to disclose the source, according to previously unreported details of Securities and Exchange Commission forms reviewed by The Washington Post. His business used a commonly employed strategy that allows many equity firms to avoid transparency about funding sources, experts said.

A year after his presidency, Trump’s golf courses began hosting tournaments for the Saudi fund-backed LIV Golf. Separately, the former president’s family company, the Trump Organization,secured an agreement with a Saudi real estate company that plans to build a Trump hotel as part of a $4 billion golf resort in Oman.

The substantial investments by the Saudis in enterprises that benefited both mencame after they cultivated close ties with Mohammed while Trump was in office — helping the crown prince’s standing by scheduling Trump’s first presidential trip to Saudi Arabia, backing him amid numerous international crises and meeting with him repeatedly in D.C. and the kingdom, including on a finaltrip Kushner took to Saudi Arabia on the eve of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.

The article traces Kushner’s push for a ‘special relationship” with Saudi Arabia to the earliest days of the presidency and shows how he worked it assiduously throughout the term, up until the very final days. The quid pro quos are laid out in the story but frankly, we don’t know how much information Kushner was sharing on his private line to the crown prince over the years. There was certainly plenty of suspicion about that — recall that Trump had to personally order that Kushner be given a top security clearance.

We are talking about billion-dollar agreements here, not some penny-ante deals from five years ago that were never consummated, as in the Biden case. And this is still happening as we speak — while Trump is running for president again.

The Chairman of the House Oversight Committee appeared on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” and was asked about all of this:

Kushner has never answered any questions about this $2 billion Saudi deal with any authority, whether legal or congressional. Trump hasn’t answered any questions about the LIV golf agreement with Saudi Arabia either and what they both did goes far beyond “influence peddling.” There is ample evidence that Trump and Kushner both sold out their country’s interests for personal gain. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there aren’t any nude pictures or emails involved — so I’d guess the American people probably aren’t going to hear much about it.

Salon