Month: October 2023

Sarah Huckasanders honors her mentor with some idiotic corruption

Photo of the $19,029.25 lectern purchased by the Sanders administration in June. The expense was reimbursed by the Republican Party of Arkansas, according to records. #arpx #Arkansas #ARNews pic.twitter.com/mERP6QvHHP

— AR Democrat-Gazette (@ArkansasOnline) September 26, 2023

Here’s some good-old Arkansas gothic politics. I hadn’t allowed myself to hope that Sarah might find herself in the middle of one of these but it looks like she’s going to:

An anonymous former state employee came forward Friday claiming to have evidence that the Arkansas governor’s office doctored documents and unlawfully withheld financial records that should have been made public under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA.

Attorney Tom Mars, who is representing the whistleblower, sent a letter today to Sen. Jimmy Hickey (R-Texarkana) offering to have his client speak to auditors. Hickey yesterday requested that Legislative Audit, a nonpartisan agency independent from the executive branch, look into what’s come to be known as “podiumgate.”

The controversy concerns the $19,000 purchase of a lectern (or podium) by the governor’s office from an out-of-state events company earlier this year, as well as Gov. Sarah Sanders’ successful efforts to newly block access to certain governmental records.

Sanders recently pushed the state legislature to write a new exemption into the Arkansas FOIA in an attempt to prevent Matt Campbell, the Little Rock lawyer behind the Blue Hog Report blog, from accessing those records. Campbell’s FOIA requests uncovered the lectern purchase to begin with.

In the letter, Mars said his client can prove that someone in Sanders’ office altered documents that Campbell had requested through the Arkansas FOIA and that Sanders’ office pressured another government agency to withhold from the public documents that should have been made available.

His client is willing to give a statement to legislative auditors under oath, Mars said, and can provide documents for them to review.

“These documents will substantiate my client’s firsthand knowledge of how certain persons in the Governor’s Office, including the Governor’s Communications Director, interfered with the production of non-exempt FOIA documents TSS intended to produce to attorney Matt Campbell, to wit:

a) by altering a non-exempt document to give it a different meaning and directing TSS not to produce the unaltered original document to Mr. Campbell;

b) by withholding other non-exempt documents, including documents reflecting some of the Governor’s Amazon purchases;

c) by removing portions of non-exempt e-mail threads; and

d) by directing the TSS lawyer who was responsible for responding to the FOIA requests to deliver a “flash drive” to the Governor’s Office with TSS’s proposed responses and thereafter returning the sanitized version to TSS on a “flash drive” – all for the purpose of concealing that the Governor’s Office had altered an invoice from Beckett Events LLC and deliberately omitted from the production of responsive documents a number of documents that were not even arguably exempt from the FOIA or subject to any legal privilege.”

You can read Mars’ full letter here.

Mars, a former Arkansas State Police director under Sanders’ father, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, has become a loud critic of the Sanders administration. A bombastic social media presence, he’s also a high-profile attorney for college sports figures. He’s previously represented Arkansas parents who sued over the state’s prohibition on mask requirements in public schools.

Cortney Kennedy, chief counsel for the governor’s office, was sent a copy of Mars’ letter. Sanders spokeswoman Alexa Henning has not yet responded to an email seeking comment. Henning is the “Governor’s Communications Director” referenced in Mars’ letter.

Upon reading Mars’ letter about the anonymous whistleblower, Campbell said it “matches exactly what I have seen and what I’ve expected was happening from the start.”

Campbell’s quest to uncover documents about government spending, and his subsequent lawsuit when Arkansas State Police attorneys denied him access to those documents, drove the governor and her supporters to seek a rollback of Arkansas’s longstanding government transparency law earlier this month.

Meanwhile, Campbell said he plans to refile a lawsuit today against the state police. Campbell dropped his suit the night before a Sept. 14 court hearing after testing positive for covid.

These potential bombshells are just the latest in the ongoing saga over the outlandishly expensive lectern that Sanders bought under questionable circumstances.

On Thursday, Hickey requested an audit into the purchase of that $19,000 lectern, bought from Virginia Beckett, one of Sanders’ longstanding consultants and owner of D.C.-based Beckett Events LLC, which identifies itself as “a full service events management company.”

Hickey also wants an audit on records and information newly removed from public purview thanks to a change in the FOIA. Earlier this month, lawmakers voted to shield the governor’s travel- and security-related receipts and records in perpetuity. The new exemption to the FOIA is retroactive to June 2022, six months before Sanders took office.

The governor’s retroactive power to withhold what’s always been public information, combined with the controversial lectern purchase, bear looking into, Hickey said yesterday.

The lectern invoice from Beckett Events LLC blew up into a scandal on social media after Campbell uncovered a series of emails showing much internal confusion among state government employees tasked with processing the purchase. A government credit card limit had to be raised in order to cover the exorbitant price tag.

While the invoice was paid in June, the lectern didn’t arrive for months.

Fanning the flames was news that Beckett and her business partner, Hannah Stone, helped organize the Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., which was basically the pep rally for a rebellious rightwing horde to mob the U.S. Capitol.

Beckett’s and Stone’s presence in Paris in June, at the same time Sanders was there, ostensibly on state business, sparked speculation that the $19,000 paid not for a lectern, but for a European trip. (With the governor’s travel records now retroactively off the table for journalists and the public to review, it’s hard to know.)

Earlier this week, Sanders’ office allowed the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette to take pictures of the mysterious lectern, which turned out to be pretty basic. You can get the same thing online for a few thousand dollars, so the huge price tag Beckett Events LLC charged the state of Arkansas remains a mystery.

Yeah, I don’t think there’s a mystery do you?

This is MAGA ethos meeting the Arkansas political culture which, as those of us who followed the Clinton scandals are aware, is vicious and rancid to the core. Lol!

The GOP is actually devolving

After a day of campaigning, this is the message waiting for me outside my hotel room…#PrettyPatheticTryAgain#YouJustMadeMyCaseForMe pic.twitter.com/htbSumo58r

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) October 1, 2023

We’ve often noted that the GOP (and in some respects out culture in general) is suffering from a massive case of arrested development:

Former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign early Sunday left a birdcage and bird food in front of GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley’s hotel room door in Des Moines in reference to his new nickname for her, “Birdbrain,” per a photo shared with The Messenger.

The Trump campaign shared the photo early Sunday with The Messenger and later posted the picture on Twitter.

Trump debuted the moniker prior to Wednesday’s debate on his social media platform Truth Social. It’s unclear why he came up with that nickname in particular.

“MAGA, or I, will never go for Birdbrain Nikki Haley,” Trump wrote in the post. “Birdbrain doesn’t have the TALENT or TEMPERAMENT to do the job. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

“Strength and stamina” as he said about Hillary Clinton and now “talent and temperament” he’s always got a reason why a woman can’t be president doesn’t he?

Haley says it’s pathetic and she’s right. But then again, maybe she could have seen what a demented narcissist Trump was when she was working with him and extolling him as a great president. Did she believe that? If so, she has no judgement and is unqualified to be president. If she knew what he was and she praised him anyway then she is cynical and cowardly. Either way, Haley has already demonstrated that she had no character. Haven’t we had enough of that from GOP presidents?

Is McCarthy making deal with Democrats?

Rep. Matt Gaetz is planning to attempt to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy from the role this week after the House leader worked with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown on Saturday.

Speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union,” the Florida Republican said he intends to file a motion to vacate this week, which would force a vote on whether McCarthy will keep his job.

“Speaker McCarthy made an agreement with House conservatives in January and since then he’s been in brazen, repeated material breach of that agreement,” Gaetz said Sunday. “This agreement that he made with Democrats to really blow past a lot of the spending guardrails we set up is a last straw.”

e added, “I do intend to file a motion to vacate against Speaker McCarthy this week. I think we need to rip off the Band-Aid. I think we need to move on with new leadership that will be trustworthy.”

That promise from Gaetz is an escalation in the monthslong standoff between McCarthy and the right flank of his conference, which forced him to go through 15 rounds of votes in January to finally win the speaker’s gavel. As part of winning the top job in the House, McCarthy made a deal that would allow just one member to advance a motion to vacate. That deal has kept the California Republican walking a tight rope with his conference throughout the year as he tried to appease the right-wing of his caucus while also attempting to do the basic work of governing.

McCarthy’s response to Gaetz later on Sunday was straightforward, telling the Floridian to “bring it on.”

“That’s nothing new,” McCarthy said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

“Yes, I’ll survive. You know, this is personal with Matt. Matt voted against the most conservative ability to protect our border, secure our border. He’s more interested in securing TV interviews than doing something.”

90 Republicans voted against that continuing resolution yesterday. Assuming Democrats don’t come to McCarthy’s rescue, Gaetz only has to get 4 of them to vote to oust McCarthy.

I heard Rep. Debbie Dingel. D-Mi., say on TV yesterday that she was inclined to help McCarthy keep his seat if this happens. Oy. If they do it, they’d better extract some major concessions. MAJOR concessions.

“Never Seen Anything Like It”

It’s not clear if Matt Stoller’s brand has been tainted by his brief late-night association with Russell Brand a decade ago. Stoller has nonetheless plunged ahead with his blog, BIG, where he covers “the politics of monopoly power.”

Stoller reports — will wonders never cease? — that federal enforcement actions against monopolies is on the upswing:

Before the Biden administration, antitrust was mostly dead. It had picked up a bit under Trump, but mostly no one thought much about this area of law. And the reason was pretty simple. Nothing was happening. The FTC was using its authority to go after powerless actors, such as Uber drivers, church organists, bull semen traders, and ice skating teachers.

The changeover has been absolutely stark, and it’s accelerating. Many of my sources in the competition policy world are giving me the same message, which is that this is the most extraordinary month they have ever seen in antitrust.

There are the big fights, the cases against Google and Amazon, the suits against private equity and meat price-fixing. There is also smaller stuff, the behind-the-scenes institutional changes, like funding levels for antitrust enforcers and newly populist conservative nominees for regulatory agencies that could make a more assertive competition agenda part of a new bipartisan consensus. The rearguard opposition to change is immensely powerful, but the forces of the status quo are actually losing.

What’s also fascinating is that public interest and attention is going up, and that it matters. Practitioners in antitrust used to have to explain what they do, now they are being pestered with questions by friends and family. We’re also getting hints, ever-so-slight ones, that judges themselves are starting to think about corporate power.

If you’ve been gasping for a breath of fresh air in this political climate, take a big gulp of it (and some sanitizing sunshine) here:

September 12: The $2 trillion Google antitrust trial begins. This is the first major monopolization case to hit the courts in 25 years, since Microsoft in 1998. Google’s 90% market share in search has allowed it to control not only the gateway to the internet, but also the future of technological deployment, including generative AI. The key question at trial, which I laid out back in August, is as follows. Why does Google have this monopoly? Google argues it’s because it’s a great search engine, the government argues it’s because Google pays everyone who preloads search to block rivals from access to the market.

We set up a site, Big Tech on Trial, and hired reporter Yosef Weitzman to write a daily recap from the courtroom. The trial has generally gone well for the government, with good evidence that Google thwarted competition from small firms (Branch Technologies) and big ones (Microsoft and Apple), using payoffs. Google has scored some wins as well, so it’s hard to know the outcome. Interestingly, the judge in the case, Amit Mehta, started off by deferring to Google’s demands for secrecy. But we’ve been advocating for more openness, and our pressure worked.

On Friday, Judge Mehta actually demanded lawyers do more questioning in open court, and not closed session. He’s also going to be unsealing testimony, and he told both parties that “he wants Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s testimony next Monday to be as open as possible.” It’s rare to have a judge change his mind, but that seems to be happening. A bit.

Here are a couple more items from just September:

September 20: Attorney General Merrick Garland advocates against a $50 million cut to the Antitrust Division’s budget. This was a seemingly tiny but very significant moment in a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee this week. Republican Congressman Ken Buck asked Attorney General Merrick Garland about funding for the Antitrust Division. There has been an attempt to cut $50 million from the Division, which is an 18% cut. This cut is largely coming from Senate Democratic staff who are annoyed that antitrust enforcers are getting a boost. Garland explicitly said he wants this money to go to the Antitrust Division, which will make it much harder to deny the funding.

This funding matters. The Antitrust Division is smaller than it was in the 1970s, and without the extra funding, it will have to cut the amount of investigations and cases it can bring. It is these kinds of institutional levers, more money for agencies, and GOP commissioners who actually want to tackle monopolization, that can meet the increasing anger coming from the public.

September 21: FTC goes after Amazon executives personally for deception of customers involving canceling one’s Prime subscription, which internally Amazon officials returned to as the Iliad, referencing the Greek poem about the lengthy Trojan war. Charging individual executives is making waves among corporate lawyers, who are very angry that the FTC is now targeting individuals at large powerful firms, instead of its historical track record of targeting the powerless

Having recently read David Dayen’s chilling, pre-insurrection “Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power” (2020), it’s nice to see some pushback against the giants whose faith in competition is as hollow as our oligarchs’ support for our democratic republic.

The press ignores the “Banality of Crazy”

“Sometimes, you have to write when you’re angry,” Brian Klaas begins. Works for me.

Klaas also hates writing about Donald Trump. The orange train wreck gets too much free press as is. But sometimes you just gotta. The banality of evil in the Trump age has become the banality of crazy.

A Democratic congressman (Jamal Bowman) does something stupid in a rush to get from the Cannon Office Building to a snap vote in the House chambers and … what you’d expect to happen happens:

It’s telling that Republicans aren’t even slightly concerned about the absurdity of calling for Bowman’s expulsion while harboring enablers of Trump’s alleged criminality in their ranks. They know they’re pointing the camera away from themselves and at Dems. That’s the ball game. https://t.co/DctUVOzadF

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) October 1, 2023

Meanwhile, the leading Republican candidate for the presidency in 2024 is a man was “found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him, and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power.”

On top of that, the accused felon appears to be losing marbles he can’t afford to lose. Klaas is upset that the press still dances around saying so while issuing endless takes about why the incumbent president just three years older should drop out for being too old.

I posted on how insane the situation is on Saturday. Klaas covers much of the same Trump babbling, threats, and cruelty.

“The United States is not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election. It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed,” he wrote in The Atlantic.

Montage of 33 clips of the stupidest, most vile, insane, weirdest, addled dementia-ridden, psychotic statements made by Trump over the past two weeks. pic.twitter.com/iCbt5PtzBX

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 30, 2023

At The Garden of Forking Paths, Klaas asks:

What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is…crickets?

How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II (which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016.

On the political left, there has long been a steady drumbeat of admonishment on social media for those who highlight Trump’s awful rhetoric. Whenever I tweet about Trump’s dangerous language, there’s always the predictable refrain from someone who replies: “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”

The press, to an astonishing extent, has followed that admonishment. I looked at the New York Times for mention of Trump calling to execute shoplifters, or water the forests, or how he thinks an 82 year-old man getting his skull smashed in his own home by a lunatic with a hammer is hilarious. Nothing. I couldn’t find it.

The “Don’t Amplify Him” argument is not working. Trump will continue to radicalize supporters as he campaigns. How many more Cesar A. Sayocs are out there building pipe bombs or planning worse?

Those of us who follow politics closely know how nuts this situation is. But how many Americans who show up to vote for president once every four years do, Klaas asks. How many know Trump called for the execution of a four-star general? “Five percent? Less?”

The “Banality of Crazy”

There’s a puzzle at the heart of Trump news and it’s this: why doesn’t the press go FULL BLOCK CAPITALS when a leading presidential candidate, yet again, incites violence?

If Joe Biden called to execute shoplifters, do you think there’d be a big headline in the New York Times, or do you think you’d have to scroll well past the articles on pumpkin spice lattes and DogTV to find out about it?

We all know the answer.

When Joe Biden didn’t trip but nearly tripped last week, it was headline news. How absurd is that? A candidate who didn’t quite fall over is a bigger news story than a candidate calling to execute shoplifters? (For the record, roughly ten percent of the US population shoplifts, so millions would face potential execution under Trump’s proposal).

This is what I call the Banality of Crazy—and it’s warping the way that Americans think about politics in the Trump and post-Trump era.

“American journalists have become golden retrievers watching a tennis-ball launcher. Every time they start to chase one ball, a fresh one immediately explodes into view, prompting a new chase,” Klaas wrote in The Atlantic.

By breathlessly covering every minor gaffe by Joe Biden while ignoring unhinged incitements to violence by Trump, most voters never see the sides of Trump that should most worry them. This creates plausible deniability for voters, where they can say “He doesn’t seem too bad — both candidates are flawed, but I’m going with Trump.”

My view is this: if someone wants to vote for a cruel sociopathic authoritarian, they should do so without being able to pretend they don’t know what they’re supporting. There should be a social stigma for voting for Trump, because what he stands for is so far outside the bounds of acceptable democratic politics anywhere else in the world. But that can’t work unless everyone is aware of Trump’s increasingly violent, deranged insanity.

Instead, the press has succumbed to the numbing effect of the Banality of Crazy, once reporting on every single Trump tweet in early 2017 because it was unusual, but now ignoring even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world—precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.

Klaas provides a taxonomy of voters who support Trump with “decreasing levels of devotion,” basically:

• The MAGA Mob
• Vote Red Until I’m Dead
• Anti-Bidens
• Fence Sitters

This four-part breakdown also helps us understand why the Don’t Amplify Him or the Banality of Crazy approaches haven’t worked. Much of what Trump says and does is objectionable to the vast majority of Americans who are decent, compassionate people. But right now, it’s the MAGA Mob and the Vote Red Until I’m Dead folks who are getting a constant saline drip of Trumpism into their veins. It’s not changing their minds; it’s just solidifying their devotion.

Meanwhile, the persuadable voters are being given the chance to forget the horrible stuff Trump did that they once knew about, all while reading blaring headlines about how Biden is old. (Biden is three years older than Trump — but, and I can’t believe I need to say this, elevated age is not remotely the same as being an authoritarian fraudster, found liable for rape, who stole the government’s nuclear secrets and sought to overturn an election to stay in power by inciting a violent attack on the US Capitol).

The Trump trials may help erode his support, but their non-crazy structure and Trump avoiding tesifying may not highlight how insane this situation is. Or else his acceding to trial in a Fulton County courtroom is because he thinks he can manipulate live TV coverage to titilate and further enrage a follower or three to perpetrate violence in his name. We know that was his plan on Jan. 6. He’d do it again.

Klaas insists:

The press has an obligation to convey magnitude, not just novelty. Newspapers and TV channels have limited time and space to discuss political events. In a political world in which an authoritarian contender for the presidency is floating the idea of shoplifting executions and killing generals, maybe, just maybe it’s not worth the space or time to discuss a brief stumble or a dog bite?

Don’t hold your breath.

Update: Making Klaas’s point (and mine) about the press failing to expose voters to “the sides of Trump that should most worry them.” Behold this pair who don’t know who their governor is/was.

Two women at Trump rally in Iowa say they recently moved there from California. They were asked about the possibility of Gavin Newsom running for president. Both said they had never heard of Gavin Newsom so they can’t say. pic.twitter.com/oGMRTpPRiS

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 1, 2023