I hate Christie’s bullying bullshit but he seems to be willing to fight fire with fire and I’m glad to see a GOP bully give Trump some of his own medicine.
"what digby sez..."
Month: June 2023
Sure, why not?
This piece from Melissa Gira Grant at TNR is a real head scratcher. How can this have happened? Will it matter at all?
Long before the Supreme Court took up one of the last remaining cases it will decide this session—the 303 Creative v. Elenis case, concerning a Colorado web designer named Lorie Smith who refuses to make websites for same-sex weddings and seeks an exemption from anti-discrimination laws—there was a couple named Stewart and Mike. According to court filings from the plaintiff, Stewart contacted Smith in September 2016 about his wedding to Mike “early next year.” He wrote that they “would love some design work done for our invites, placenames etc. We might also stretch to a website.” Stewart included his phone number, email address, and the URL of his own website—he was a designer too, the site showed.
This week, I decided to call Stewart and ask him about his inquiry.
The Supreme Court is expected to deliver its opinion in a case in which Stewart plays a minor role, a case that could be, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor stated by way of a question at oral argument in December, “the first time in the Court’s history … [that] a commercial business open to the public, serving the public, that it could refuse to serve a customer based on race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation.” It took just a few minutes to reach him. I assumed at least some reporters over the years had contacted him about his website inquiry to 303 Creative—his contact information wasn’t redacted in the filing. But my call, he said, was “the very first time I’ve heard of it.”
Yes, that was his name, phone number, email address, and website on the inquiry form. But he never sent this form, he said, and at the time it was sent, he was married to a woman. “If somebody’s pulled my information, as some kind of supporting information or documentation, somebody’s falsified that,” Stewart explained. (Stewart’s last name is not included in the filing, so we will be referring to him by his first name throughout this story.)
“I wouldn’t want anybody to … make me a wedding website?” he continued, sounding a bit puzzled but good-natured about the whole thing. “I’m married, I have a child—I’m not really sure where that came from? But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document.”
Here is what we know—though, to be frank, I do not know what we have learned from this yearslong mystery, other than it looks like Smith and her attorneys have, perhaps unwittingly, invented a gay couple in need of a wedding website in a case in which they argue that same-sex marriages are “false.”
When Smith and her attorneys, the Christian right group Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, brought this case for the first time, it was to the United States District Court in Colorado in 2016, and they lost. Smith and ADF filed the case on September 20 of that year, asking the court to enjoin the state anti-discrimination law so that Smith could begin offering her wedding website design services to straight couples only. Up to this point, Smith had never designed any wedding website. (In fact, her website six months prior to the lawsuit being filed in 2016 does not include any of the Christian messaging that it did shortly afterward and today, archived versions of the site show.) The initial lawsuit did not mention the “Stewart” inquiry, which was submitted to Smith’s website on September 21, according to the date-stamp shown in later court filings, indicating that she received it the day after the suit was originally filed.
It is unclear exactly when—or if—the inquiry from “Stewart” was examined and verified in the course of this legal battle. (His phone number was, after all, right there.) In a motion filed by the defense on October 19, 2016, arguing that the case should be dismissed, they state that Smith has received no actual inquiries for services and therefore has suffered no injury. The following month, in its response, ADF did not mention the September 2016 “Stewart” inquiry to refute the defense’s claims. Rather, ADF merely stated that it was not necessary for Smith to have received an inquiry in order to challenge the law over her feared consequences of denying services to a same-sex couple.
Not until February 2017 did ADF include the text of the “Stewart” inquiry and argue its relevance to the case. “Notably, any claim that Lorie will never receive a request to create a custom website celebrating a same-sex ceremony is no longer legitimate because Lorie has received such a request,” the group wrote. “Even though she is not currently in the wedding industry, Lorie received an email inquiry on September 21, 2016.” Smith elaborated in a sworn statement that she “received a request through the ‘contact’ webpage on my website from a person named, ‘Stewart,’ reference number 9741406, to create graphic designs for invitations and other materials for a same-sex wedding (‘same-sex wedding request’).” She added that a “true and accurate copy” of the “same-sex wedding request” would be submitted with the statement. Why it took until possibly February 2017 to introduce the inquiry is not clear.
Whatever value the inquiry had, in September 2017, when the federal court ruled on the case, it seemed to dismiss it. The evidence presented as a whole, the ruling stated, did not allow the court to “determine the imminent likelihood that anyone, much less a same-sex couple, will request Plaintiff’s services.” Of the inquiry itself, the court said it was “too imprecise” and that “assuming it indicates a market for Plaintiff’s services, it is not clear that Stewart and Mike are a same-sex couple (as such names can be used by members of both sexes).”
ADF leapt on this. In response to its defeat, the group put out a press release claiming that “a federal judge ruled that Smith and her studio can’t sue to challenge a portion of Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act because a request sent to Smith by a couple, self-identified as ‘Stewart’ and ‘Mike,’ isn’t formal enough to prove that a same-sex couple has asked her to help them celebrate their wedding.” Their later appeal continued the theme, arguing that “according to Social Security Administration (SSA) data, only a nanoscopic number of women have been named Stewart or Mike since 1880. Lorie faces a 16 times greater chance of being struck by lightning than either name being female.”
All that may be true. But speedier, perhaps, than consulting SSA data would have been picking up the phone. According to Stewart, no one did until 2023, when I reached him.
“I’m not really sure where that came from,” he told me of the mysterious 2016 inquiry that used his name, email address, and cell phone number to request a wedding website for a same-sex marriage nearly a decade after he married a woman. He is a designer himself, something of a known quantity in design circles—he’s spoken at conferences and on podcasts, and has a “decent Twitter following,” he said. The design world is small. But not small enough, he said, that he had heard of Lorie Smith—not until her case was already before the Supreme Court, and the design community began discussing its potential fallout.
It didn’t make sense to him, he told me later via text message. Why would a web designer—as the website the inquiry referenced as his own made clear that he was—living in San Francisco, seek to hire someone in another state who has never built a wedding website, let alone a website for a same-sex wedding, to build his wedding website?
I don’t live inside Stewart’s computer—there’s a chance that he’s not telling me the whole story; that this is some elaborate prank he pulled years ago and doesn’t want to confess to now. But if he’s telling the truth—that this request was done completely without his knowledge—I don’t have any answers for him. None of this makes sense to me. And neither Lorie Smith nor ADF have responded to my inquiries. As late as 2020, ADF was maintaining that Stewart’s was a genuine inquiry. Speaking to “requests” for Smith’s services in a filing to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, their attorneys wrote, “Lorie already received one. A prospective customer named ‘Stewart’ contacted Lorie through her webpage, asking about custom graphics and a website to celebrate his wedding to his fiancé, ‘Mike.’”
Maybe it should not be a surprise, though, that this strange fake “request” popped up in a case in which the plaintiff’s main argument rested on the claim that someday, out there, a same-sex couple would want her to design a wedding website. The closest thing Smith had to an actual inquiry—the nonwedding of Stewart and Mike—arrived within 24 hours of her having filed a suit in which said inquiry would be potentially a helpful piece of supporting evidence. The inquiry floats through the filings only later, and still it remains. Despite the district court raising doubts about it representing a genuine inquiry from two men getting married—and the court didn’t even raise the real doubt that the couple does not exist—it is now part of the case history, a bit of fan fiction joining the other phantom gays the case invokes. ADF made no mention of Stewart and Mike specifically in their arguments before the Supreme Court this session, but they don’t need to: Their entire case, after all, is built around the idea of gay people doing something that they have not yet done, nor ever will do.
Despite its flimsiness, the “Stewart” inquiry remains there in the 303 Creative court filings submitted to the Supreme Court, part of a raft of exhibits including mock-ups of websites Smith claims she was prevented from making by Colorado’s law protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation. “I disagree with this, in the strongest possible terms,” Stewart told me. “I couldn’t disagree with her stance more.” And while he wants nothing to do with the spotlight of this case, he does want it to be known: He never asked for a website, let alone what may result.
Maybe this Stewart is a liar but it sure doesn’t sound like it. The fact that he was married to a woman at the time is verifiable.
I guess the Supreme Court is now entertaining cases about things that could hypothetically happen in the future. Good to know.
Irrelevant guy says what?
He had his chance back in 2016 and he hung in there long enough to get his precious tax cuts. In the process he helped to Now he is nothing.
As Dave Weigel quipped on twitter:
Actually, they hate him with a passion. Even when Trump tried to thank him for being such a good stooge the crowd booed.
Ryan, by the way, is a Fox news board member so he’s not exactly out of the Trump fluffing business even today.
Fox stars live in their own bubble of haters and bullies. And they get rewarded for it. Read this story about Jesse Watters, the latest juvenile Fox POS to get a big new job:
On a Friday morning in April, Fox News talk host Jesse Watters walked onstage to a room stuffed with hundreds of insurance executives and agents. Watters was the featured speaker at a breakfast for the Big “I” Legislative Conference, the signature annual event hosted by the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America, where he was invited to participate in an interview with the organization’s retiring president, Bob Rusbuldt.
Watters — who Fox News this week promoted to the all-important 8pm hour — began his interview with Rusbuldt at the Renaissance Washington hotel as expected. The gathered audience, which included a healthy contingent of conservatives, was excited to see Watters speak. But matters quickly took a turn, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity.
Watters, who has a history of making offensive remarks on Fox News, made a crude comment questioning the gender of Vice President Kamala Harris, the people said. The gross attempt at humor prompted some laughs, but also outrage.
Some executives, many of whom planned to attend a diversity and inclusion luncheon later in the day, squirmed in their seats as a wave of awkwardness washed over the audience. Others walked out of the room and conveyed to the trade association that they were appalled at the behavior exhibited by Watters.
“It was an epic meltdown afterward,” one of the people familiar with the matter told me. “The organization went into damage control.”
The chat between Watters and Rusbuldt, which continued on after the appalling remark, had immediate consequences. Rusbuldt, who was set to officially retire in August, apologized to those gathered at the diversity-focused luncheon later that day. But ultimately it was not enough to quell the outrage. He was later quietly sidelined from most duties at the insurance organization.
John Costello, the chairman of the association, condemned what transpired onstage with Watters: “The association acted quickly and decisively following the incident, and the interview session conducted at our event does not reflect the culture and values of the Big I,” Costello said in a statement.
When asked for comment on Wednesday, a Fox News spokesperson told me that Watters had “no recollection” of the events.
“In fact, the unscripted Q&A he participated in was well received with executives thanking him profusely afterward, enthusiastically taking photos, and presenting him with an award,” the network spokesperson said. “He was told it was one of the best talks they’ve ever held and never received feedback from the organization or his speaking agent after the event.”Regardless, the circumstances surrounding the event are representative of a larger phenomena occurring in America today.
On Fox News, and in the larger right-wing media universe, the degrading comments Watters was said to have spewed onstage are par for the course. The audience, which has become increasingly desensitized to the incendiary rhetoric in recent years, eats it up.
In fact, that affection for Watters and the brand of conservatism that he represents, is borne out in the numbers. Watters is one of Fox News’ highest-rated and most visible hosts, and largely why he was promoted this week to the prime time perch previously occupied by Tucker Carlson.
Outside the Fox News bubble, however, Watters and the divisive comments that he peddles for a living are far less popular. In fact, to those outside the right-wing media bubble, questioning the gender of the first female and Black vice president is seen as downright inappropriate and utterly reprehensible. And there are consequences for those who make such remarks.
The events that transpired after Watters’ appearance at the insurance breakfast underscores that split in society. “Jesse got promoted,” the person familiar with the matter said. “Bob essentially got fired.”
It is nothing more than bad manners to behave that way in front of a crowd of strangers. He could save it for his show or his neighborhood Nazi meeting. At an industry confab it’s completely out of line. Not that he cared or, apparently, even noticed.
Not everyone worships Florida, Governor. In fact, when you’re talking to people outside Florida you might want to keep in mind that they live in states that they are proud of and it sounds like you are saying they live in hellscapes compared to yours.
You no doubt noticed that this came from Trump’s superpac. Ouch.
SCOTUS rules
“The court holds that Harvard and UNC’s admissions programs violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment,” writes Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that colleges and universities must stop considering race in admissions, forcing institutions of higher education to look for new ways to achieve diverse student bodies.
In a 6-3 decision, the court struck down admissions plans at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest private and public colleges, respectively.
There’s not enough time to comment on this 237 pg. opinion by Chief Justice Roberts in cases involving affirmative action admissions at Harvard and UNC, but here’s Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog again:
1)The court says that it has “permitted race-based admissions only within the confines of narrow restrictions. University programs must comply with strict scrutiny, they may never use race as a stereotype or negative, and — at some point — they must end.”
2)The Harvard and UNC programs, Roberts writes, “however well intentioned and implemented in good faith,” “fail each of these criteria.”
3)Here’s the end of the Court’s opinion: “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”
“Sotomayor dissents, joined by Kagan and Jackson as it applies to the Harvard case. Jackson dissents in the UNC case, joined by SOtomayor and Kagan,” Howe writes.
Watch for commentary later. That is all.
Biden embraces ‘Bidenomics’ in Chicago address
You know the drill. Good news for Democrats is always bad news for Democrats somehow. No accomplishment goes untarnished in the both-sides press. The real question is whether the voting public will give President Joe Biden credit for improving their lives before the 2024 election. First, they’ll need to feel it.
John Cassidy reviews some of President Joe Biden’s economic highlights for The New Yorker:
In the Build Back Better economic plan that Biden laid out during his 2020 Presidential campaign, he promised to boost investment in American manufacturing and bring back jobs that had been offshored. After entering the White House, he didn’t get his entire economic agenda through Congress. But, taken together, the new spending, tax credits, and investment subsidies that were contained in the infrastructure bill, the chips Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act amount to an ambitious new industrial policy, which aspires to strengthen American high-tech manufacturing, make the green-energy transition a reality, and create well-paying jobs. Earlier this year, I argued that Biden’s industrial initiative would ultimately be seen as his most significant policy contribution.
Although this policy has run into skepticism in some quarters, there is evidence that it’s already having a big impact. In April, the Financial Times counted “more than 75 large-scale manufacturing announcements,” containing pledges to spend more than two hundred billion dollars combined, since the passage of the chips and Inflation Reduction acts. Foreign companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and LG Energy Solution, a South Korean producer of batteries for electric vehicles, have moved to secure their place in the vast U.S. market, as have big domestic corporations, like Intel and General Motors. These manufacturing announcements are continuing, and the surge in investment and construction has become visible in aggregate economic statistics. “Inflation-adjusted construction spending in the manufacturing industry has absolutely skyrocketed since June 2022, from $90 billion to $189 billion,” the economics writer Noah Smith pointed out earlier this month, on his Substack. “Factory construction spending more than doubled in one year, after being essentially constant for decades. And it perfectly lines up with the passage of the chips Act in July 2022 and the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022.”
Biden himself spoke in Chicago on Wednesday of ending the reign of trickle down economics that took hold during the Reagan administration. So long as the macro economy fed by tax cuts for the wealthy improved, as the business press measured it, the rest of America would benefit. But that didn’t happen. Instead, economic inequality grew to staggering heights not seen since the Gilded Age. Biden means to rebuild the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down.”
The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times (not approvingly) have dubbed Biden’s program of renewed public investment in American infrastructure “Bidenomics.” Biden now embraces the term.
Heather Cox Richardson writes:
Central to Biden’s vision is the idea that the prosperity of the United States rests on its working people, rather than its elites. In Chicago he emphasized his administration’s focus on training and education, as well as its emphasis on the trades and unions. He also emphasized economic competition, noting that business consolidation has stifled innovation, reduced wages, made supply chains vulnerable, and raised costs for consumers.
To reduce the deficit that has exploded in the past decades and to pay for new programs, Biden reiterated the need for fair taxes on the wealthy and corporations after decades of cuts. “Big Oil made $200 billion last year and got a…$30 billion tax break,” he said, while billionaires pay an average of 8% in taxes, less than “a schoolteacher, a firefighter, or a cop.” He called for “making the tax code fair for everyone, making the wealthy and the super-wealthy and big corporations begin to pay their fair share, without raising taxes at all on the middle class.”
“We’re not going to continue down the trickle-down path as long as I’m president,” Biden said. “This is the moment we are finally going to make a break…. Here’s the simple truth about trickle-down economics: It didn’t represent the best of American capitalism, let alone America. It represented a moment where we walked away… from… how this country was built…. Bidenomics is just another way of saying: Restore the American Dream because it worked before. It’s rooted in what’s always worked best in this country: investing in America, investing in Americans. Because when we invest in our people, we strengthen the middle class, we see the economy grow. That benefits all Americans. That’s the American Dream.”
But it is not the conservative dream. While some Republicans voted for Biden’s investments, many did not. Now they want to take credit for them. Watch them try.
The Charleston Post and Courier notes, “A routine press conference on a federal grant for Charleston’s bus system put Republican U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace on the defensive after Democrats pounced that she actually voted against the bill that made it happen.”
Richardson cites Republicans Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln who condemned an economy run for the benefit of robber barons.
In his New Nationalism speech, TR pointed back to his revered predecessor, Republican president Abraham Lincoln, who believed that the government must serve the interests of ordinary people rather than those of elite southern enslavers. When South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond told the Senate in 1858 that society was made up of “mudsills” overseen by their betters, who directed their labor and, gathering the wealth they produced, used it to advance the country, Lincoln was outraged.
Society moved forward not at the hands of a wealthy elite, he countered, but through the hard work of ordinary men who constantly innovated. A community based on the work and wisdom of farmers, he said in 1859, “will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.” In office, Lincoln turned the government from protecting enslavers to advancing the interests of workingmen, including government support for higher education.
The Republican Party of Lincoln and Roosevelt lost its way. Democrat FDR’s New deal built out the world’s strongest middle class until in the Reagan era the robber barons roared back.
“Bidenomics is simply a new word for a time-honored American idea,” Richardson concludes. A sound one. A popular one. An equitable one.
Now if only the voting public will take notice.
Update: Thank you, Rick.
And it was quite a plot…
Mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin planned to capture Russia’s military leadership as part of last weekend’s mutiny, Western officials said, and he accelerated his plans after the country’s domestic intelligence agency became aware of the plot.
The plot’s premature launch was among the factors that could explain its ultimate failure after 36 hours, when Prigozhin called off an armed march on Moscow that had initially faced little resistance.
Prigozhin originally intended to capture Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s general staff, during a visit to a southern region that borders Ukraine that the two were planning. But the Federal Security Service, or FSB, found out about the plan two days before it was to be executed, according to Western officials.
Gen. Viktor Zolotov, commander of the National Guard of Russia, a domestic military force that reports directly to President Vladimir Putin, also said authorities knew about Prigozhin’s intentions before he launched his attempt.
“Specific leaks about preparations for a rebellion that would begin between June 22-25 were leaked from Prigozhin’s camp,” Zolotov told state media on Tuesday.
Western intelligence agencies also found out early about the plans by Prigozhin, Putin’s former confidant, by analyzing electronic communications intercepts and satellite imagery, according to a person familiar with the findings. Western officials said they believe the original plot had a good chance of success but failed after the conspiracy was leaked, forcing Prigozhin to improvise an alternative plan.
Still, the intelligence raises questions about the extent of Putin’s authority after Moscow failed to prevent Wagner troops from marching almost all the way to Moscow despite the Kremlin’s knowledge of the conspiracy, people familiar with the matter said.
Prigozhin’s plot relied on his belief that a part of Russia’s armed forces would join the rebellion and turn against their own commanders, according to this intelligence. The preparations included amassing large amounts of ammunition, fuel and hardware including tanks, armored vehicles and sophisticated mobile air defenses days before the attack, according to Western intelligence findings.
Made aware of the leak, Prigozhin was then forced to act sooner than planned on Friday and managed to capture the southern Russian city of Rostov, a key command point for the invasion of Ukraine. The ease with which Wagner’s troops took the city of one million that is home to a large military airport suggests that some regular forces commanders could have been part of the plot, according to Western intelligence.
Western officials said they believe Prigozhin had communicated his intentions to senior military officers, possibly including Gen. Sergei Surovikin, commander of the Russian aerospace force. It couldn’t be determined whether Surovikin passed this information on to the FSB, or how the agency found out about Prigozhin’s plans.
I guess this explains why Putin came out swinging calling Prigozhin a traitor. What it doesn’t explain is why Prigozhin has apparently been forgiven and allowed to simply go into exile in Belarus to count all the money he no doubt has stashed in safe places around the globe,
It’s a cliche I know, but I would stay away from open windows if I were him.
Jeremy Scahill at the Intercept has a fascinating article today about a Swedish engineer who investigated the Nord Stream pipeline explosion:
Andersson is not a professional investigator or a journalist, and his voyage was not sponsored by a government. By training, he is an engineer with a master’s degree in engineering physics. He had a successful career at Volvo and Boeing and worked on advanced programs used by commercial and military aircraft, including U.S. military aircraft. He had followed the developments of the Nord Stream bombing carefully, but it was not until journalist Seymour Hersh published his bombshell story alleging that President Joe Biden had personally ordered the destruction of the pipelines that he became obsessed with the mystery. The expedition to the bombing site grew out of that passion. Andersson freely admits that he was motivated by a desire to prove that Hersh’s narrative was correct. What he found was quite different.
[…]
Andersson had never heard of Hersh, but when he saw journalists and commentators he admired on Twitter defending the 85-year-old reporter from the almost immediate deluge of attacks on his credibility by prominent media and political figures, as well as the denials from the White House, his gut instinct was that the right people were attacking Hersh. “I saw he had a lot of respect. I mean, this is a very experienced journalist, and he knows how to deal with sources, to evaluate his sources.” Andersson’s sense was that Hersh’s story was “probably true,” but he was mostly interested in the voluminous details contained in his report.
I think we know who those journalists and commentators were … And people like this fellow are placing their faith in the wrong people.
Though it was not his aim, Andersson’s research directly challenges Hersh’s details, as well as the narrative preferred by analysts who believe Russia carried out the bombing. In short, his findings bolster the case that Ukraine — or private actors — could be responsible for the attack. As for his confirmation bias in favor of Hersh’s narrative, the expedition changed his mind. “It’s not the main hypothesis anymore in my mind. In my main story, they were fairly primitive divers going in with a big slab of explosives. They dug in next to the pipelines and they placed them. There were four separate dives, but there was simplified logistics. It could have been a small boat, and they made a big mistake, and they ended up putting one bomb on the wrong pipe. That’s the story that is in my mind.”
He still thinks the US might have been in on it (there are reports that the US Intelligence agencies had knowledge that Ukraine was planning such an attack in advance) but he doesn’t buy that it was a highly professional military operation. If anything it appears that is was slapdash and amateurish.
Read the whole thing if you’re into the details. It’s pretty weedy. But the upshot is that the widely held belief in certain circles that the US Military did it isn’t backed by the facts. But certain people ran with it anyway because it fits a certain pro-Russia Anti-Ukraine narrative. This guy went to a lot of trouble to prove them right and came up empty.
