Month: June 2023

He’s going nowhere fast:

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has seen his approval rating fall dramatically two weeks after announcing his 2024 presidential bid.

According to online polling company Civiqs’ dynamic approval rating graph, DeSantis currently has a net approval rating of negative 19 points, with an average of 55 percent of respondents disapproving of him, compared with 36 percent who have a favorable view of the Republican.

The data shows DeSantis has a major unfavorable rating from those aged 18-34 (63 percent), women (62 percent), as well as African Americans (85 percent), and the Hispanic/Latino population (68 percent). [I wonder why]m,

In comparison, the Florida Governor’s overall approval and disapproval rating was tied at 47 percent in early December.

Around this time, suggestions that DeSantis should be the one to lead the GOP in 2024 were gaining momentum after many—including those in the Republican Party—blamed Donald Trump for the party’s poor midterm performance. A number of candidates endorsed by the former president lost their races in elections across the country.

In the subsequent months, DeSantis’ approval rating has fallen 19 points, with polls continuing to suggest that Trump is the overwhelming favorite to clinch the GOP presidential nomination in 2024 despite his continuing legal difficulties.

These include Trump pleading not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a historic first for a former president in New York and being found liable in a civil trial of sexually abusing former Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s.

DeSantis could take solace in the fact that Trump is currently recording a higher disapproval rating at 57 percent in Civiqs’ tracker, with the former president recording disapproval scores in the mid-50s for most of the year.

However, according to FiveThirtyEight’s collection of GOP primary polls, Trump has come out on top in all the most recent surveys dating back to March, with a recent Morning Consult poll published June 6 showing the former president 34 points ahead of the Florida Governor (56-22 percent).

The Morning Consult survey also showed that DeSantis is failing to chip into Trump’s lead in the polls since confirming he is running for president in a glitchy May 24 Twitter Space announcement.

DeSantis’ poll numbers have remained stagnant compared to the previous Morning Consult survey from May 20 (21 percent), and down from his high of 34 percent recorded in January.

The latest survey showed that a fourth of potential primary voters reported hearing something negative about DeSantis over the past week, the highest share since tracking began in late November.

His greatest liability is people getting to know him. That’s not a positive for a national politician.

One reason that it would be really great if he could crash and burn is that it might calm the “woke” jihad a little bit if people could see that it’s an electoral loser.

Yes, young men are becoming more right-wing https://t.co/qTcr7N4vN7 pic.twitter.com/Q92fLjxNdV

— Kevin Drum (@kdrum) June 7, 2023

The silver lining is the young women have become slightly more liberal during the same time period. Why? I think this is probably the best explanation:

Just remember kids. Many of the hated baby boomers were liberal at one time too.

We have news that the head of the DOJ counter-espionage department is asking the questions at this Florida Grand Jury which seems … odd. They questioned Tayler Budowich, former a spokesman for Trump now running one of his Super Pacs today, so who knows what it all means?

This informative piece by Andrew Weissman and Ryan Goodman sheds some light on what we might expect:

If special counsel Jack Smith hands down an indictment, we will be keeping an eye on many open issues that might indicate how strong a case the government believes it has. Here is what is on our checklist of things to note:

Retention vs. dissemination

Look to see whether the charges include not just illegal “retention” of national defense information, but also a separate allegation of “dissemination.” Both charges are violations of the Espionage Act and are central to U.S. national security law and protecting the country’s most sensitive secrets. But a dissemination case is particularly egregious, as an illegal retention case deals only with the risk of improper dissemination, not the actuality. To date, what is in the public record does not indicate that charges for dissemination are warranted, but an indictment may be revelatory.

Obstruction only

Examine whether Smith decides to jettison all Espionage Act-related offenses and charge only obstruction offenses. Such a slimmed-down approach could be aimed at differentiating the Trump prosecution from the apparent facts in the Biden and now-closed Pence investigations. All three involve improper possession of government documents, but only Trump’s case raises the issue of obstruction of justice.

Wild card: If the Justice Department alleges that Trump or his aides were involved in tampering with Mar-a-Lago video surveillance footage, that is as acute a form of obstruction of justice as the allegedly false June certification that represented that a diligent search for responsive documents had been performed and all such documents returned.

A “speaking indictment”

An indictment does not have to spell out the alleged facts; it just needs to track the legal elements of a criminal charge. However, to explain to the American public why this is a righteous case, this indictment could (and should) be what is known as a “speaking indictment” and lay out specific obstruction evidence, such as former White House counsel and personal Trump lawyers advising the former president to return the documents; Trump’s reported efforts to hide documents at Mar-a-Lago (and elsewhere); and any specific lies Trump told or caused to be told to the National Archives and Records Administration, the Justice Department and even his own lawyers.

Strength of the evidence

Prosecutors often use a speaking indictment to show the strength of their case, sometimes to provoke a guilty plea, other times to induce people to cooperate and, in this instance, to gain public support for such a historic indictment. Look to see whether the indictment references “hard” evidence — such as audio recordings and written documents (e.g. emails, letters, and contemporaneous notes) — evidence from firsthand witnesses, and even co-conspirators who might have admitted their guilt already (as in a plea agreement).

Information already made public suggests this may be an overwhelming case, but a speaking indictment should provide chapter and verse on any alleged obstructive conduct.

Content of classified information

We will be keeping a close eye for how highly sensitive the information in the government documents Trump kept was. What subjects do the documents concern — Iran’s missile program, possible war plans, a foreign country’s nuclear capabilities, U.S. intelligence on China, etc.? Do they reveal information about U.S. surveillance capabilities, sources and other intelligence methods?

Recall that there are various levels of classification, up to top secret, with subcategories for particularly sensitive information. The government sometimes deliberately avoids basing charges on the most sensitive documents, so as not to have to reveal those publicly in court. For the information to be publicly charged, the intelligence community will presumably need to have agreed to its use in open court.

In the weeds: If highly sensitive documents do appear, it may be because the intelligence community believes that information has already been compromised, because the information was highly sensitive at the time but has lost significance — or because the government is prepared to risk exposure of some highly sensitive information to secure a conviction in such a serious case.

Motive

Although the government need not usually prove why a defendant committed a crime, motive evidence can be powerful to a jury. It helps jurors understand why a defendant would engage in unlawful conduct, producing a persuasive narrative — and can foreclose routes for defense counsel to raise reasonable doubt. Evidence of especially crass or illicit motives can also shape how jurors consider the case.

Does the indictment allege Trump used the classified information as a means of settling scores with perceived enemies (e.g. the audiotape about a potential Iran attack and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley), had a narcissistic belief that laws simply do not apply to him in or out of office (Trump’s statement to Sean Hannity) or something even more pernicious, such as potentially using them to court financial favor (Saudi Arabia financial deals).

Of course, Trump could have several motives, and different ones for different documents. Does the special counsel spell out his theory?

Conspiracy

Will Trump be the sole defendant or will others be charged? There are several implications if the special counsel charges a conspiracy. First, a coordinated scheme would make this case more egregious than the average case in which the DOJ has pursued charges under these national security statutes. Second, charging others would raise the prospect of flipping them into government cooperators. Finally, conspiracy charges can expand the choice of venue where the government can try the case.

Venue

Look for where the DOJ files charges — the District of Columbia, Florida or New Jersey. What’s at stake in this decision is the jury pool, with Florida being the most favorable turf for Trump. The Justice Department, by contrast, is likely to want to bring the case in the District.

Several of the issues identified above implicate where the prosecutors can file the case. If the charges included conspiracy, illegal removal of government records from the White House or obstructive activity that occurred in the District, the prosecutors’ hand would be strengthened in claiming that the nation’s capital is the appropriate jurisdiction.

If the case were one solely of illegal retention, then Trump has the best argument that such charges must be brought in Florida (or wherever else he kept the documents).

Classified documents charges

As many legal experts have been saying for months, the potential criminal law violations at the heart of the case — including the three crimes alleged in the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago — do not require proof that the documents were classified.

However, several important national security crimes do address only classified documents — 18 USC 798 and 1924. Look for whether the special counsel brings such charges. If he does, it is a show of force implying that prosecutors have a strong hand and won’t blink in the face of Trump’s and his attorneys’ implausible claims of “declassification.”

Bedminster

Look for whether the alleged facts include documents at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J. The presence of documents at that location would probably drive a hole through some of Trump’s main public defenses — especially his claim that the National Archives-Government Accountability Office is responsible for having brought the classified records to Mar-a-Lago. If Trump is alleged to have personally handled documents at Bedminster, it’s difficult to conceive how his claims about how the documents were brought to Florida have any relevance.

A key question is how fast the case will move toward a trial and verdict. That will turn a lot on the particular judge assigned to the case. Many judges will want to permit the electorate to know the outcome of this criminal case before casting a vote. And, of course, to afford the defendant his day in court in advance of the election.

The case against Trump involves alleged violations of national security laws that are core to keeping national secrets and our country safe. To win public acceptance for such charges, the Justice Department should do everything possible to be transparent about its proof — and about why Trump is being treated the same way anyone else would be who had behaved this way.

It’s called the rule of law.

I have no idea if this is going to happen. Everyone seems to think it’s a slam dunk but you never know. Trump has a habit of slipping the noose. But as we await the news, one way or the other, this seems like a good guide.

Update: Lots and lots of rumors and some reporting that the DOJ told Trump that he’s likely to be indicted under the Espionage Act. This is from John Solomon, right winger with a direct line to Trump:

Smith’s prosecutorial team informed Trump’s legal team in recent days that the charges against the former president could include a violation of 18 U.S. Code Chapter 37 Section 793 that outlaws the “gathering, transmitting or losing” of national defense information. Other charges being considered involve alleged false statements and obstruction of justice, all claims the president and his team have robustly contested in public and in private.

Trump’s reaction:

Stay tuned.

I don’t know what to say about the following. The person speaking gobbledygook may have had a few too many White Claws.

My gosh there’s a lot here. Impossible to summarize all the batshit crazy in this interview. Just spend 5 minutes watching it.

pic.twitter.com/TgPkLp2ZZO

— Tron Carter (@TronCarterNLU) June 7, 2023

You hve to admit, defending the Saudi human rights record and giving them credit for their sportswashing is pretty bold.

Meanwhile, guess who else is going to benefit?

The surprising deal on Tuesday ending a civil war in the world of professional golf stands to produce benefits for former President Donald J. Trump’s family business by increasing the prospect of major tournaments continuing to be played at Trump-owned courses in the United States and perhaps abroad.

The outcome is the latest example of how the close relationship between Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and Saudi Arabia, whose sovereign wealth fund is the force behind the upheaval in the golf world, has proved beneficial to both sides even as it has prompted intense ethical scrutiny and political criticism.

Even as it has injected new money and competition into professional golf, Saudi Arabia has been accused of using its wealth to buff its global reputation and obscure its human rights record through sports. That campaign now seems to have yielded business opportunities and a higher profile in the golf world for Mr. Trump as he seeks another term in the White House.

Since the establishment of LIV Golf, the Saudi-funded breakaway professional golf circuit, Mr. Trump and his family have aligned themselves with LIV against the PGA Tour at a time when the golf establishment in the United States and Britain had moved to shut Trump courses out of major professional competitions, a trophy that the Trump family had long sought.

The turn away from Mr. Trump and his courses only accelerated after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Just days after the assault, P.G.A. of America announced it was canceling a planned 2022 tournament at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., which had been planned for years.

LIV soon became the Trump family’s ticket back into the rarefied world of global tournaments, with events last year at Bedminster and Trump National Doral, the family’s golf resort near Miami. This year LIV brought tournaments to three Trump courses, adding the Trump National Golf Club in Northern Virginia to the schedule.

The decision by professional golf in the United States to shun Mr. Trump had infuriated members of his family. Mr. Trump’s business had spent more than a decade buying up or developing golf courses around the world with the goal of hosting major tournaments, which help drive memberships by putting the courses in the spotlight and could confer a degree of sports-world legitimacy on Mr. Trump, an avid golfer.

Dating back to when Mr. Trump was in the White House, he and his family have had unusually close ties with Saudi Arabia and the royal family there. His first foreign trip as president was to Riyadh, where he received a lavish welcome.

Mr. Trump later downplayed the Saudi government’s role in the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist, and he defended while in office Saudi Arabia’s long-running military campaign in neighboring Yemen.

After Mr. Trump left office, that relationship continued in the form of a $2 billion commitment by the Public Investment Fund — led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler — to an investment fund set up by Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law. The Saudi fund also put $1 billion into a firm run by Steven Mnuchin, who had been Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary.

LIV Golf is backed by the same Saudi fund. The head of the fund, Yasir al-Rumayyan, an avid golfer who also took on the role overseeing LIV Golf, spent lavishly to recruit top professional players like Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka and big names like Phil Mickelson with $25 million purses and guaranteed contracts that sometimes amounted to $100 million or more.

But the new alliance between the PGA Tour and LIV will also only escalate questions about Mr. Trump and potential conflicts of interest, as he does business with foreign government entities while also running again for the White House.

Already, the Justice Department, as part of its investigation into the handling of classified documents by Mr. Trump, has subpoenaed the Trump Organization, seeking records pertaining to Mr. Trump’s dealings with LIV Golf.

Under the agreement announced Tuesday, Mr. al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, will join the board of the PGA Tour. Mr. al-Rumayyan also said on Tuesday that the Saudi investment fund is prepared to invest billions of dollars into the merged golf tournament effort.

On Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform and personal megaphone, he wrote: “Great news from LIV Golf. A big, beautiful, and glamorous deal for the wonderful world of golf.”

Mr. Trump’s son Eric Trump, in an interview on Tuesday, also welcomed the agreement, calling it “a wonderful thing for the game of golf,” adding that he expects tournaments to continue at Trump-owned courses once the merger is complete.

When asked if the Trump family had played a role in urging the PGA Tour and the wealth fund to join forces, Eric Trump declined to comment. But he did say that the family has developed close friends over many years in the golf world, including those associated with the PGA Tour and LIV.

The Trump family has sought to have more of its golf courses host LIV tournaments, including a club in Dubai and the Trump Turnberry golf resort in Scotland, venues it now hopes to see added in future years to a reunified golf industry.

This reflects the intense effort by the Trump family to bring events to its courses, including in Scotland, which the British Open, one of professional golf’s major tournaments, has repeatedly declined to do. While president, Mr. Trump enlisted the American ambassador to Britain to pressure the British government, unsuccessfully, to hold a tournament at Turnberry.

The payments from the LIV tournaments do not show up in Mr. Trump’s financial disclosure report, which he filed in May, suggesting that the fees are going directly to the individual golf clubs and are counted as part of their overall revenues. The Trump family has not said how much they are making from LIV.

“Look, it’s peanuts for me. This is peanuts,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with reporters last month at his golf club in Virginia during a LIV event, adding that “they pay a rental fee. They want to use my properties because they’re the best properties.”

In July, just before the first LIV tournament was played at Trump National Bedminster, Mr. Trump predicted that the rival golf tours would ultimately merge, and he suggested that players who stayed loyal to the PGA Tour were making a financial mistake.

“All of those golfers that remain ‘loyal’ to the very disloyal PGA, in all of its different forms, will pay a big price when the inevitable MERGER with LIV comes, and you get nothing but a big ‘thank you’ from PGA officials who are making Millions of Dollars a year,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social in July 2022. “If you don’t take the money now, you will get nothing after the merger takes place, and only say how smart the original signees were.”

In an interview last year at Trump National Doral, when the LIV tournament was taking place there, Mr. Trump added that he was confident the Saudis were going to win the dispute.

“You’re not going to beat these people,” Mr. Trump said in October. “These people have great spirit, they’re phenomenal people and they have unlimited money — unlimited.”

He never has a bad word to say about any human rights violators. And he just loves corrupt rich people who find themselves in the cross hairs of the American judicial system.

[…]

But his alliance with the Saudis holds some political risks for Mr. Trump as he campaigns to return to the White House.

The announcement of the LIV-PGA deal immediately generated protests from a group called 9/11 Families United, which has pushed for continued investigation into the origins of the 2001 terror attacks. The group called the efforts by Saudi Arabia to enter professional golf “sportswashing” as part of a plan to improve the country’s reputation related to human rights and allegations that there were links between the hijackers and the Saudi government.

The leaders of the PGA Tour, a spokesman for 9/11 Families United said in a statement, “appear to have become just more paid Saudi shills, taking billions of dollars to cleanse the Saudi reputation,” a claim that also brought demonstrators to Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster last year when the LIV tournament was being played there.

Trump basically defended the Saudis, saying “nobody has gotten to the bottom of 9/11 unfortunately…” Actually, the world got to bottom of it a long time ago and he knows it. It’s just that Saudi Arabia has so much money (which means they are very smart) and their leader MBS is a harsh, bloodthirsty dictator which he loves. And they put money in his pocket which is the best thing of all.

Now that the debt ceiling has been raised and all the smoke has cleared, it’s worthwhile to step back as assess the political fallout from the first major test of Kevin McCarthy’s speakership — and the clout of the House Freedom Caucus. I certainly didn’t think it would end with a whimper, not a bang, but that’s exactly what happened.

Considering how nuts the MAGA Republicans are, it was fair for most of us to assume they would hold McCarthy’s speakership hostage if he capitulated on any of their demands. After all, that was the whole point of the speakership battle back in January — they wanted the ability to dictate what bills would be voted out of the rules committee and come to the floor. And they guaranteed that by loading the committee with Freedom Caucus members and demanding that any one member could file a motion to vacate the Speaker’s chair and require Kevin McCarthy to endure another election.

As the negotiations proceeded (much to the chagrin of progressives who believed that it was a mistake to deal with government hijackers who were stating openly that they were willing to blow up the world economy) the Freedom Caucus members began to wail, led by their leader former president Donald Trump who appeared at a CNN town hall meeting and said:

I say to the Republicans out there — congressmen, senators — if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default … you might as well do it now, because you’ll do it later.

He added that defaulting was “really psychological more than anything else” and claimed that it could be nothing or maybe just a bad day or week. That’s a pretty big gamble and one that most experts believe would have been a daft one to take.

The Freedom Caucus didn’t listen to him and instead stood down and let McCarthy and Biden make a very unsatisfying deal from their perspective. In fact, it was a deal one might have expected from any House speaker playing a weak hand with a tiny majority, but not one you would think he would make if his right flank was as batshit crazy as they are. I assumed that in order to keep the country from going over the cliff, Kevin McCarthy would have to give up his speakership or, at the very least, face another painful round of votes, weakening him even further.

That did not happen. The Freedom Caucus members blew off some steam but one of their top members on the Rules Committee broke ranks and let the bill come to the floor and while most of them didn’t vote for it in the end it ended up with 2/3 of the Republicans voting for it. (Freedom Caucus member Lauren Boebert didn’t even vote saying she refused to even grant the “crap sandwich” her vote but video turned up later showing that she actually just missed it.)

As for the threat to de-throne McCarthy, a few made some noises but in the end they all seemed to agree that they didn’t need to send him to the political guillotine. At least not yet. The question is why?

Right after the deal was struck, The New Yorker published a report on how it all went down, focusing on Russell Vought, a big MAGA RINO-hunter and Freedom Caucus guru (profiled here in Salon a couple of weeks ago) and his plot to take down McCarthy if he compromised with Biden. It sounded as though he was pretty gobsmacked at the mild reaction among his acolytes, whom he had guided through the speaker battle in January with the expectation that they would be in the driver’s seat. He told the New Yorker, “There was a deal. If you want to go back on that, there are going to be consequences.”

I guess we are seeing what he meant by that and it’s hardly got anyone shaking in their boots. Yesterday, the House conservatives decided it was time to stand up to the speaker and play hardball so a dozen far right members voted against the procedural rule vote on the floor to show they were mad as hell and they weren’t going to take it anymore. The leadership was surprised and will have to regroup to bring up the bills again.

What were they voting on? The immensely important, vital legislation called the Save Our Gas Stoves Act and Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act. They really showed Kevin McCarthy who’s boss.

McCarthy lied, the rule died.

— Rep. Ken Buck (@RepKenBuck) June 6, 2023

The question really is, why are they so lame? We know that small rump faction has the power to do some real damage to McCarthy and the rest of the GOP leadership, which is the goal of Vought and others like Steve Bannon. Are they really just paper tigers after all?

The best analysis I’ve seen on this question is from MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in The Atlantic who noted a while back that House Republicans and the MAGA caucus in particular have actually lost interest in actual policy in favor of their crusade against democracy. After all, the fight over deficits, in particular, is extremely dull compared to dismantling the “deep state” and punishing their political enemies.

And it’s important to remember that their decades-long austerity campaigns were really just cover for culture war issues, racism in particular, as the notorious GOP strategist Lee Atwater confessed on his deathbed. Today, they’re no longer constrained by the need for dogwhistles or euphemisms so they don’t need to pretend they are concerned about government spending. The only fiscal issue they truly care about is ensuring that taxes for rich people are kept as low as possible and until they are once again in power they can rely on the courts to take care of rolling back regulations.

Right now, they’re really only interested in showy hearings and press conferences that will get them a hot hit on Newsmax or maybe Steve Bannon’s War Room. Here’s the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, who practically lives on Fox, insinuating that the FBI Director is going to be killed (or raped) in prison.

Faulkner: If Christopher Wray doesn’t turn over the document, is he going to go to prison?
Comer: That’s up to Christopher Wray… I wouldn't want to be held in contempt and end up in prison being the former head of the FBI. pic.twitter.com/sGLfRBCVAO

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 7, 2023

The document they’re talking about is some moldy old Burisma transcript from Rudy Giuliani’s bag of tricks.

What we know now is that Freedom Caucus and their MAGA compatriots aren’t interested in government at all. They are interested in partisan warfare, period. If Kevin McCarthy doesn’t get in the way of waging those battles he can cut as many deals as he wants. And McCarthy has no intention of doing that. He obviously knew from the beginning that if he gave them free rein to let their freak flags fly he would be perfectly safe.

Capitalism takes no prisoners

This is just breaking.

CNBC reports that after little more than a year, CNN CEO Chris Licht is leaving. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said executives Amy Entelis, Virginia Moseley, Eric Sherling and David Leavy will lead CNN until a replacement is found.

CNN announces Chris Licht's departure on air pic.twitter.com/Attt6UAlsN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 7, 2023

“Unfortunately, things did not work out the way we had hoped – and ultimately that’s on me. I take responsibility,” Zaslav said in a memo:

Licht drew heated criticism in recent weeks after the network hosted a town hall with Donald Trump that was packed with scores of the former president’s cheering fans. While the event drew 3.3 million viewers, CNN’s ratings plummeted afterward. Two days after the town hall, CNN’s prime-time viewership came in below right-wing outlet Newsmax, a much smaller network.

But it was an unflattering 15,000-word profile of Licht in The Atlantic – titled “Inside the Meltdown at CNN” – that might have sealed his fate. He apologized to staffers Monday morning, but top brass at CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, including CEO David Zaslav, weren’t happy with the article and the aftermath.

“The media has absolutely, I believe, learned its lesson,” regarding coverage of Donald Trump, Licht told The Atlantic‘s Tim Alberta. Licht was wrong about the media and about CNN.

“American journalism is dumber than most journalists, who often share my sense of absurdity about these practices. A major reason we have a practice less intelligent than its practitioners is the prestige that the View from Nowhere still claims…”

Dan Froomkin advised Licht’s coming successor a month ago about the emptiness of “the View from Nowhere” approach:

Licht has tried to make CNN neutral political territory, most notably by firing bold truth-tellers like Brian Stelter and John Harwood who minced no words when it came to calling out the tornado of lies spawned by Trump, Fox News, and the rest of the MAGA ecosystem.

Licht made it clear to the remaining CNN staffers that they should shove the contentious talk about Trump, in an attempt to appeal to more conservative voters; that they should not “take sides”.

[…]

Let’s be clear: Licht has to go. And his successor needs to learn the lesson he refused to learn.

It turns out The Market wasn’t buying the View from Nowhere. And journalism is poorer for still peddling what NYU associate professor of journalism Jay Rosen warned about in 2010:

When MSNBC suspends Keith Olbermann for donating without company permission to candidates he supports– that’s dumb. When NPR forbids its “news analysts” from expressing a view on matters they are empowered to analyze– that’s dumb. When reporters have to “launder” their views by putting them in the mouths of think tank experts: dumb. When editors at the Washington Post decline even to investigate whether the size of rallies on the Mall can be reliably estimated because they want to avoid charges of “leaning one way or the other,” as one of them recently put it, that is dumb. When CNN thinks that, because it’s not MSNBC and it’s not Fox, it’s the only the “real news network” on cable, CNN is being dumb about itself. 

In fact, American journalism is dumber than most journalists, who often share my sense of absurdity about these practices. A major reason we have a practice less intelligent than its practitioners is the prestige that the View from Nowhere still claims in American newsrooms. You asked me why I am derisive toward it. That’s why. 

“Champion the truth as boldly and enthusiastically as Fox spreads propaganda and disinformation!” Froomkin tweets this morning.

Newspapers that want to survive — those that aren’t owned by hedge funds — ought to pay heed to Licht’s fate.

How many moral panics in our lifetimes?

Five years ago Pride Month was not an issue. And now? Now trans panic is the Satanic ritual abuse panic for the early 21st century. Except the latter never really went away. But it is now joined and amplified by trans panic, fears of “grooming,” etc.

CBS News:

Protests outside a Glendale school district meeting turned violent as groups began several brawls as administrators discussed recognizing Pride Month, while the public debated gender and sexual identity studies.

Demonstrations outside of the Glendale Unified School District building stayed relatively civil throughout the day. However, scuffles between the around 200 protesters and counter-demonstrators began after 6 p.m. School administrators said many of the protesters did not have students in the district.

The city’s police department deployed around 50 officers to the meeting to prevent scuffles among the groups. After several brawls, officers ordered the protesters to disperse and threatened to use less-than-lethal force to break up the crowd. 

The attempts to de-escalate the crowd failed, prompting officers to arrest at least three people. They are accused of using pepper spray and obstruction.

Police formally asked the schoolboard to recess & have deployed barriers separating protesting groups pic.twitter.com/2dcxqkXKEr

— Brennan Murphy (@brenonade) June 7, 2023

“Erroneous information is being spread on social media” may have been a factor. A report from KTLA suggests the fight was over the school board adding “LGBTQ+ instruction” to the curriculum.

“We have absolutely no agenda,” said Glendale Unified Superintendent Vivian Ekchian. “We are not in the business of converting anyone’s child.”

But CBS and the Los Angeles Daily News report that it was not an agenda item, only recognition of Pride Month (CBS again):

Tensions boiled over inside the building as people debated LGBTQ+ issues during public comment. Gender and sexual identity curriculum were not on the agenda for the meeting. The only topic related to the LGBTQ+ community on the agenda was a declaration of support for Pride Month. The district has passed this declaration for the past five years.

The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education, however, “unanimously approved a resolution Tuesday encouraging all district schools to incorporate lessons on the LGBTQ+ community into their curriculum,” reports ABC7:

The resolution introduced by Board President Jackie Goldberg and Member Nick Melvoin served as the board’s official recognition of June as LGBTQ+ Pride Month — while also honoring October as LGBTQ+ History Month; Oct. 11 as National Coming Out Day; Nov. 20 as Transgender Day of Remembrance; March 31 as Transgender Day of Visibility; and April 12 as a Day of Silence honoring the contribution of the LGBTQ+ community.

It noted that research has suggested that 25% of high school-age students in the country identify as LGBTQ+, and youth identifying as LGBTQ+ are at a higher risk for experiencing homelessness, being victims of bullying, and attempting or dying by suicide, and national research indicates that mental health struggles and rates of suicidal thoughts have trended upward among LGBTQ+ youth in recent years.

“Every school district, including ours, must continue to take a stand in supporting our LGBTQ+ youth and ensuring that every student has the resources they need to thrive both academically and socio-emotionally as a valued member of their school community,” the resolution read, in part.

Guess them’s fightin’ words. Guess we’re going to see teachers and schools administrators accused of forcing children into subterranean chambers below schools that have none. There the innocent will be inducted into the dark arts of better skin care, fashion choices, and self-worth. We’ve seen this movie before. It did not work out well in the 1980s.

This conservative Republican, who describes himself as “anti-woke as you can get,” warns Ohio lawmakers that a bill to ban gender-affirming care for teenagers is appalling. He said he learned the complexities of the issue from raising a transgender son. (Reposted due to typo) pic.twitter.com/JsSTGOB68z

— David Heath (@davidhth) June 6, 2023

It’s heartbreaking. But you shouldn’t have to personally experience it to have some empathy for what these kids are going through. Treating children — any children — like pariahs and threatening them and their parents and doctors with jail is reprehensible.

And maybe this fellow should reassess his assumptions about “the woke” in general.

Apparently, he been busy testifying. The New York Times reported this afternoon that he’s has appeared before Jack Smith’s Grand Jury:

For months, people in Mr. Trump’s orbit have been puzzled by and wary about the low profile kept by Mr. Meadows in the investigations. As reports surfaced of one witness after another going into the grand jury or to be interviewed by federal investigators, Mr. Meadows has kept largely out of sight, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers believe he could be a significant witness in the inquiries.

Mr. Trump himself has at times asked aides questions about how Mr. Meadows is doing, according to a person familiar with the remarks.

Asked about the grand jury testimony, a lawyer for Mr. Meadows, George Terwilliger, said, “Without commenting on whether or not Mr. Meadows has testified before the grand jury or in any other proceeding, Mr. Meadows has maintained a commitment to tell the truth where he has a legal obligation to do so.”

Mr. Meadows was a polarizing figure at the White House among some of Mr. Trump’s aides, who saw him as a loose gatekeeper at best during a final year in which the former president moved aggressively to mold the government in his image.

Mr. Meadows was around for pivotal moments leading up to and after the 2020 election, as Mr. Trump plotted to try to stay in office and thwart Joseph R. Biden Jr. from being sworn in to succeed him. Some of them were described in hundreds of text messages that Mr. Meadows turned over to the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol before he decided to stop cooperating. Those texts served as a road map for House investigators.

But Mr. Meadows also has insight into efforts by the National Archives to retrieve roughly two dozen boxes of presidential material that officials had been told Mr. Trump took with him when he left the White House in January 2021. Mr. Meadows was one of Mr. Trump’s representatives to the archives, and he had some role in trying to discuss the matter with Mr. Trump, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Meadows is also now connected tangentially to a potentially vital piece of evidence that investigators uncovered in recent months: an audio recording of an interview that Mr. Trump gave to two people assisting Mr. Meadows in writing a memoir of his White House years.

Mr. Meadows did not attend the meeting, which took place in July 2021 at Mr. Trump’s club at Bedminster, N.J. During the meeting, Mr. Trump referred to a document he appeared to have in front of him and suggested that he should have declassified it but that he no longer could, since he was out of office.

That recording could undercut Mr. Trump’s claim that he believed he had declassified all material still held at his properties for months after he left office.

The lawyer says he has testified honestly “where he has a legal obligation to do so” which indicates to me that he probably claimed privileges. We may never know. But he did testify and it doesn’t sound like he reassured the boss that he didn’t give away the store. It’s just tea leaves but there is no witness with more first hand information than him. I would be surprised if he spilled his guts but the fact that he’s no longer on the inside in Trumpworld may indicate that he wasn’t completely uncooperative.

Alex Wagner did a whole segment on this a couple of weeks ago:

Update:

Also note Meadows' (smart) attorney George Terwilliger's statement to NYT:

“Mr. Meadows has maintained a commitment to tell the truth where he has a legal obligation to do so.”

That's consistent, to say the least, with DOJ giving immunity to overcome Fifth Amendment.

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) June 6, 2023

Immunity?

https://twitter.com/MichaelWarbur17/status/1666027889484021762?s=20

It’s very moving to go to the Normandy beaches and recall what happened there. We’re rapidly losing our collective memory of all that in America but it’s still very vivid in Europe.