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Month: April 2023

An outbreak of common sense in rural Texas?

Published by digby on April 15, 2023

Even small rural towns balk at destroying libraries:

It isn’t every day that the ruminations of local bureaucrats in a small rural Texas county become national news. But when commissioners in Llano County — population 21,000 — voted Thursday to keep its three-branch library system open, the moment was closely monitored by the biggest news organizations in the country.

That’s because Llano County has become a national symbol of local right-wing censorship efforts after officials threatened to close its libraries entirely rather than allow offending materials to remain on shelves. Under intense scrutiny, the commission blinked. Its leader acknowledged feeling pressure from “social media” and “news media.”

The commissioners’ apparent reluctance for Llano to be seen as a locus of censorship points to an unexpected development: Skirmishes emanating from book bans at schools and libraries in red states and counties, once localized affairs, are becoming viral national sensations. And the American mainstream appears to be paying attention.

Like many other similar conflicts, this one was triggered by a single Llano resident, Bonnie Wallace, who objected in 2021 to library books she pronounced “pornographic filth.” A bunch were removed, including unobjectionable materials such as Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen” and Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”

The county also dissolved its libraries’ advisory board and reconstituted it with advocates of book removal, including Wallace herself. After other residents sued for the books’ return, a judge ordered the books placed back on the shelf, prompting the county to consider shutting the libraries pending the suit’s resolution.

At Thursday’s hearing, several of Llano’s self-designated commissars of book purging read explicit sex scenes from young adult books, but they went further, advocating for closure. One said: “I am for closing the library until we get this filth off the shelves.”

But one of the big surprises of these sagas has been outbreaks of resistance to book purges in the reddest places, and here again, some locals dissented. One said: “We have to be a community that values knowledge.” Another fretted: “We are all over the media, and this is making us look pretty bad as a community.” […]

National opinion isn’t cooperating with the censors. In the 2022 elections, many prominent culture-warring GOP candidates lost. (Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is an exception.) Polls show large percentages of parents are concerned about schools banning books and that Americans overwhelmingly reject bans based on teachings about history and race.

Therein lies a trap for the GOP. The activist base is demanding increasingly reactionary censorship measures, and officials such as DeSantis are obliging for 2024 primary purposes. Yet as these local far-right lurches attract attention, they taint the national GOP as extreme.

Democrats should take heed. Some still appear skittish about culture-war issues, as evidenced when Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told TPM’s Hunter Walker that “we want to stay above” censorship controversies, as if ignoring them would make them go away or is good politics.

But when the national spotlight falls on censorship, the right is exposed, the left is energized and moderates balk at seeing their communities controlled by a small band of extremists.

Democrats must speak to those resisting these outbreaks of hysteria in deep-red places such as Llano. In some of them, fundamental liberal values still endure. The way to respond to this wave of censorship isn’t to hope it burns out, but to flush it into the light and confront it head on.

It’s hard for me to believe that anyone with any judgment would vote for that orange cretin but there’s just something about him that makes people lose their common sense. It appears that they do have some vestige of common sense about other things — like the fact that shutting down the library system because some nutcase doesn’t like some of the books in it is ridiculous.

Maybe there’s some hope for the Republican party? I’ll try to keep an open mind but …

The NRA convention was lit

Published by digby on April 15, 2023

Just a couple of years ago the NRA was on the skids, overwhelmed with scandal and financial malfeasance. Apparently its members are fine with all that. Wayne LaPierre, who stole vast sums from the organization is still at the helm and he spoke to rapturous applause — as did a bunch of others.

Some highlights from Aaron Rupar. (You can subscribe to his substack here.)

Wayne LaPierre says at the NRA event that "gun hating politicians should never go to bed unafraid of what this association and all of our millions of members can do to their political careers" 😳

holy shit Pence is getting booed loudly at the NRA event

"We don't need gun control" — Pence at the NRA forum blames recent mass shooting on trans people and mental illness and tries to absolve guns

Pence calls for armed guards in every school in America

Pence calls for mass shooters to be put to death within months

the NRA forum is not especially pumped about Asa Hutchinson's veiled shots at Trump

DeSantis is doing a video message to the NRA forum instead of being there in person. Low energy.

lol not a single person claps when Nikki Haley's video message is announced

Tim Scott also has a video message that nobody is excited for

very normal stuff here

lol Kristi Noem is signing an executive order at the NRA forum

Chris Sununu's jabs at Trump (who he does not name) at the NRA forum are being met with complete silence

poor Jim can barely see over the lectern

Vivek Ramaswamy says he stands with Greg Abbott and supports a pardon for Daniel Perry

ok?

"We will shut down the FBI"

"You want China not to invade Taiwan? Here's something we can do. The NRA can open its branch next time in Taiwan" — Vivek

lol

conservative intros are so cringe lmao

Trump decries "the transgender cult" at the NRA forum

when your teleprompter text differs from what you really want to say

drink!

what could possibly go wrong?

"I don't know. They wanted me to put that in. I guess some people are happy with it. I don't know." — Trump, oozing sincere conviction

Trump calls for national concealed carry reciprocity

Trump: "Let's be very clear. The issue is not too many guns. The issue is too many thugs."

Trump is now displaying tweets showing him leading other Republican presidential contenders in the polls

Trump calls lifelong Republican Bill Barr a "RINO"

"I think we have to take it over. We have to take over management of our capital" — Trump on Washington DC

unvarnished fascism

Trump on school shootings at the NRA forum: "This is not a gun problem … this is a spiritual problem … I will also create a new tax credit to reimburse any teacher for the full cost of a concealed carry firearm and training … we want to arm some of these teachers."

Trump proposes a panel to investigate whether being trans and using cannabis cause mass shootings

Trump: "We have a Marxist revolution going on, and I think you're starting to see it"

Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on April 14, 2023.

They love him, they really love him.

Schmaht as a whip

Published by digby on April 15, 2023

What fresh hell is this?

On Saturday morning, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene launched into a creative explanation for how climate works, providing a graph on fossil fuels in an effort to prove her points.

“If you believe that today’s ‘climate change’ is caused by too much carbon, you have been fooled,” Greene wrote on Twitter. “We live on a spinning planet that rotates around a much bigger sun along with other planets and heavenly bodies rotating around the sun that all create gravitational pull on one another while our galaxy rotates and travels through the universe. Considering all of that, yes our climate will change, and it’s totally normal!”

She went on the extol the virtues of fossil fuels because they’re “natural.

This is the heir to the MAGA movement. She’s even dumber than Dear Leader.

By the way, the “troops on the ground” are marines guarding the American embassy. But whatever.

Texeira is anything but “antiwar” by the way. But he and Marge are definitely on the same page:

The people in the online spaces where Airman First Class Jack Teixeira spent his time and allegedly leaked highly classified documents had many things in common. In obscure game forums and private online chat rooms, his friends posted slurs against minority communities, Ukrainians and pretty much everyone else. 

Everyone, that is, except Russians.

Members of that small community, hosted on the social-media app Discord, admired President Vladimir Putin’s regime and its war on Ukraine. ..

As federal authorities began closing in, Airman Teixeira appears to have purged much of his online presence, but The Wall Street Journal attempted to reconstruct his activities from web archives. They reveal a young man with an intense interest in weapons and videogames—and the places where both converged. 

On the popular videogame platform Steam, he was in groups with names like “3rd Light Infantry Company” and “The Cobalt Brotherhood”—communities that brought people together where they could jointly play online games while at the same time trash-talking on voice-and-chat services like Discord. 

Handles associated with Airman Teixeira also had accounts on websites dedicated to collecting weapons and swapping tactical gear. From a young age, he nursed a fascination with history, especially the minutiae of weapons and armaments used in famous battles, a classmate recalled.

“He was just really into the whole, like, gun and war thing, more than, like, normal people were,” said Brooke Cleathero, 21, who said she attended history class with Airman Teixeira at Dighton-Rehoboth Regional High School. “He just wore a lot of camo.”

If he hadn’t run his little chat group and shared classified information he probably would have shot up that high school. To Marge that makes a hero.

Selling their souls to “a demonic force”

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 15, 2023

Directing shame outward

“One of the great ironies about 2016,” writes The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last, “is that Hillary Clinton was right,” if impolitic, in how she described a third of the GOP.

Over at The Atlantic, Peter Wehner writes about the attack of Trumpism we all witnessed last week by Republicans in the Tennessee House of Representatives. “[C]oming from a party whose sensibilities and racial attitudes are embodied by Donald Trump,” we should hardly have been surprised by their overreaction to Black activist members.

Memphis wasn’t exactly hospitable to Rev. Martin Luther King in March of 1968, either. The more things change, etc. MAGA Republicans want not only to roll back the 20th century, they want to roll back Reconstruction. Nullification is back, fof heaven’s sake.

Wehner suggests that the GOP knows it made a deal with “a demonic force” and is secretly ashamed:

The human mind’s capacity to rationalize such things is extraordinary, but not limitless. Some Republicans have the sense, even if it’s only in their quiet moments, that they have acted not only hypocritically but dishonorably. And it gnaws at them. They know they would eviscerate any Democrat who did a fraction of what Trump did. They therefore have to expend enormous psychological energy to keep from becoming sick with themselves for what they have become. Shame is a toxic emotion, and it often causes people to direct hostility outward rather than inward.

Tired from choosing to defend the indefensible, enraged at being called out, Trump’s supporters lash out. They desperately want to make critics of Trump the focus, forcing them to answer for their sins. Pointing to the misdeeds of their political foes allows Republicans to tell themselves, one another, and the rest of the world, See, we’re not so bad after all. They also catastrophize the threats posed by Democrats, because people will tolerate an awful lot of misconduct from their leaders if they’ve convinced themselves that the threat posed by the other side is existential.

That’s clear in the leaked audio of Tennessee GOP House members arguing with one another after the national and international recrimination they faced last week.

Wehner adds:

As we’ve seen in Tennessee, this frantic state of mind leads Republicans to preposterous places and to act in politically self-destructive ways. One of the two most important political parties in the world is dominated by people who are enraged, embittered, and anarchic.

Besides being reminded of their vulgar thirst for retaining power at all costs, what MAGA Republicans are enraged and embittered about is having their own deep insecurities resurface.

The spouse often stops for breakfast at the neighborhood McDonald’s. A local artist (who leans right, she says) recently brought in an old book to show another of the morning regulars. Wikipedia describes “God’s Man” as “a wordless novel by American artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985) published in 1929. In 139 captionless woodblock prints, it tells the Faustian story of an artist who signs away his soul for a magic paintbrush.”

Informed the next time that Lynd Ward was the son of the Reverend Harry F. Ward, the “first national chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),” the artist waved away the news with words like, “I don’t cotton to that.”

What is it like to go through life as a member of a traditionally privileged class, in a culture built on the bodies of Black men and women, perpetually insecure in the guilt of it, and hostile to anyone who reminds you?

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on April 14, 2023

Baby bears!

Just in time for spring break, two male Andean bear cubs named Sean and Ian are now on view at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZCBI) in Washington, D.C. Over the past few weeks, the animal care team has worked with the brothers to prepare them for the transition. Cubs Ian and Sean began exploring the yard in mid-March alongside their mother, 4-year-old Brienne. For the past four months, members of the public have joined animal care staff in observing the cubs play and explore via a live Andean Bear Cub Cam and follow along with their growth through online “cubdates.”

It’s worse than I thought

Published by digby on April 14, 2023

DeSantis family values:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has doubled down on the state’s restrictions against abortion services.

On Thursday, DeSantis announced that he signed the Heartbeat Protection Act into law, which will now require a woman to provide proof that the pregnancy was a result of rape, incest or human trafficking in order to receive an abortion up until 15 weeks of gestation.

Documentation can include a restraining order, police report, medical record or other evidence.

This restriction is an exception to the new law, which states that otherwise, abortions will be banned after six weeks unless done to save a pregnant person’s life.

“We are proud to support life and family in the state of Florida,” DeSantis, 44, said in a news release.

He’s supporting the family members who rape their daughters, that’s for sure. And any rape victim who doesn’t properly document her assault like a good little bureaucrat will just have to bear her rapists child. Paperwork is very important.

That’s what supporting life and family means in the state of Florida.

He has very little chance in a general election with this hard right agenda. It’s difficult to understand what he thinks he’s doing. It’s one thing to appeal to the base. But I think we expected him to be able to finesse this a bit better. He had a 15 week ban in hand that was working its way through the courts. He could have made up some babble about how it was important for it to go through the judicial process or something. The base would have bought it, at least for now. Rushing to get to Trump’s right on everything is simply not a winning strategy, particularly on this issue.

Back in the day Supreme Court justices lost their seats for taking money from “friends”

Published by digby on April 14, 2023

Today? Probably not.

There was a whole lot less money involved in the Fortas case.

Brian Beutler has this to say about Thomas:

​For decades, while posing as the Supreme Court’s everyman, Thomas has accepted lavish gifts, vacations, and private-jet flights, worth millions of dollars, from the Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. Then—in violation of federal law—he elected to conceal the financial relationship. We learned all of that thanks to the excellent reporting of Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica. And we know they have Thomas dead to rights, because he hasn’t denied any of it. Rather, he has sought to defend his behavior with what you might generously call lawyerly deception. Here’s the key part of the public statement he issued in response to the revelations:

Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over twenty-five years. As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them. Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.

I added the emphasis to identify the points of deceit. Reading his statement, you might imagine that when Thomas became a justice, he wondered what to do about his dear and generous friend Harlan who, while very rich, and very conservative, had no particular interest in the composition of the federal bench or what considerations enter the minds of Supreme Court justices when they interpret and make law.

But that’s not so. Twenty-five years ago, Thomas had already been a justice for several years, which means he only befriended Crow after becoming one of the most powerful officeholders in the world. We don’t know when Thomas sought guidance from his similarly lawless colleagues, or which jurists he sought it from, but we know he voluntarily disclosed these gifts until the Los Angeles Times first began reporting on this improper relationship in 2004, at which point the disclosures stopped. Then note the past-tense voice when he claims Crow “did not have business before the court.” That is conspicuously not the same as saying he “did not and does not have business before the court,” or “has never had business before the court.” We don’t know, because Thomas left too much unsaid, but at best this means Crow had no business before the court in or around 2004 when Thomas and his buddies on the bench all agreed he didn’t have to follow any rules.

A truer statement and timeline would have left a much different impression: That years after he became a justice, a right-wing influence peddler with a fortune and recurring business before the court befriended and began spending vast sums of money on him; that he disclosed these gifts for several more years before the press got wind of it, at which point he went looking for affirmation that it was OK to keep accepting the gifts without disclosing them.

This would be intolerable even if it were Thomas’s first offense, but his offenses are serial. His entanglement with Crow alone has seen straight up cash flow into his wife Ginni’s pockets and his own. As I was writing this we learned that Crow secretly paid above market value to purchase property from Thomas, parcels that included Thomas’s parents house, where they continued to maintain residence while Crow covered their property taxes.

Meanwhile, Ginni resides at the center of a sprawling network of right-wing activists who encouraged and participated in efforts to overthrow the government after the 2020 election. Knowing that her communications about the attempted coup might end up in the hands of investigators and the public, Thomas cast the sole dissenting vote against requiring disclosure of Trump administration records to the House January 6 Committee. No recusal. Her involvement, and his desire to cover it up, at least hinted at his awareness of, or even complicity in, an effort to overturn American democracy. It all could easily have formed the basis of a tidy impeachment inquiry. Instead, then as now, Democrats in Congress let it be. They contented themselves with impotent calls for Thomas to recuse himself in future insurrection cases, and for a statutory code of ethics to bind the justices going forward.

Democrats subsequently lost the House, removing impeachment as an option altogether. But that hasn’t left them powerless. They still have a significant bully pulpit. They could use it to insist (ineffectively, perhaps, but at real cost to Thomas and the GOP) that Thomas resign; that his defenders are complicit in selling the Court to right-wing billionaires; that a court that tolerates this cozy style of bribery and deception can not be trusted with as much power as it has. And they could back that up with a credible threat to investigate Thomas’s conduct more deeply, including through the use of subpoena power.

A few righteous House Democrats have indeed called on Thomas to resign, but the ones best positioned to make this a painful problem for Thomas and Republicans have all ducked. As alluded to earlier, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin’s first instinct was to pass the buck to John Roberts—”Chief Justice Roberts needs to take the important first step here as the chief justice of the Supreme Court, to restore the integrity of that court with a thorough and credible investigation of what happened with Justice Thomas,” Durbin said—while vaguely promising to “act.”  Initially, eight senators signed a letter to Roberts pressing him to relieve them of this hot potato. Subsequently, under wilting criticism, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee wrote to Roberts again, urging him (again) to investigate this issue himself but advising him that “the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing regarding the need to restore confidence in the Supreme Court’s ethical standards.” One hearing! On ‘Supreme Court Ethics!’ Maybe!

So, for now, a buck passed and a box checked.

We thus witnessed the perverse spectacle of Republicans feigning more outrage in defense of their poor, beleaguered friend Clarence Thomas, and his right to be corrupt, than Democrats directed at Thomas for the extent of his corruption. Republicans felt freer than they might have to treat Thomas as the victim of a smear campaign, because Democrats did not respond in proportion to the seriousness of the matter. Republicans would have you believe they’d be totally cool with George Soros sending Ketanji Brown Jackson to various beach resorts on his private planes (NB: they would lose every last ounce of their shit) because they didn’t have to worry about their opponents calling them liars, complicit in the corruption of the American government.

I’m not here to say the Republican approach of abusing its oversight powers and carpet bombing the discourse with sham investigations has been a huge winner. There is some value in choosing battles, and in being even vaguely competent. But I do admire one aspect of their ethos: The almost reflexive tic they’ve developed to call the things and people they don’t like “corrupt” and promise accountability. It is impossible to imagine Jim Jordan running interference for Donald Trump by, say, calling on the New York State Bar Association to censure Alvin Bragg; it is impossible to imagine Republicans trying to intimidate corporations and entities that don’t toe the right-wing line by petitioning various uninterested regulatory boards and calling it a day. They run straight at their enemies. It is, sadly, almost as hard to imagine Dick Durbin referring Clarence Thomas to the FBI or IRS for violating federal law, or issuing him a subpoena and promising to enforce it expeditiously.

Sadly, I agree. Nothing is going to happen to Thomas. They are just waiting for him to die. That’s how we deal with corrupt Supreme Court Justices and it’s one of the best arguments for term limits.

ICYMI

Published by digby on April 14, 2023

That’s his latest “policy” statement.

Trump Greene 2024?