Today Show (12/15):
A new commercial from the Dutch mail-order pharmacy Doc Morris has left the internet in tears by showing the reason behind a grandfather’s drive to get in shape for Christmas with his family.
Also, get in shape for 2024. There’s much work to do.
Merry Christmas!
This charming song and arresting video by local artist Lord Stryrofoam is a holiday tradition in our household.
Eyes get misty.
More tuneful cuts here via YouTube music including a snappy Kate Bush cover.
Merry Christmas!
It’s one of the best Christmas songs, IMHO.
Enjoy your Christmas Eve everyone!
A rare article that discusses Donald Trump’s overall vulnerability going into 2024. We all know this, of course, but it’s good to see the media discussing this instead of focusing on him as some sort of juggernaut. He may have a full-blown cult behind him but they do not make up a majority. A significant number of Republicans are leery of him too. He’ll win the nomination easily but all that will do is give him permission to really let his freak flag fly.
As Trump and his rivals enter the 2024 election, there are at least three signs of trouble for the front-running former president.
Here are some of the things that can and will happen to Trump as he pursues the presidency again.
Adverse court rulings
The potential of legal trouble is all around Trump, and could pop up any time.
This past Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court stunned the political world by ruling Trump is ineligible for public office because of the insurrection by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.
The decision could conceivably keep Trump off the ballot in Colorado – inspiring other states to follow suit – but Trump attorneys are confident the Supreme Court will reverse the disqualification ruling.
In the meantime, Trump, his lawyers, and his campaign team must prepare for the possibility of as many as four criminal trials in a campaign year.
Two trials – one in Washington, D.C., and the other in Atlanta, Ga. – involved efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election. There is also a New York state case about hush money payments and a Florida federal case about classified documents.
The D.C. trial was scheduled for March, but is on hold because of pre-trial motions.
The Trump legal team is seeking to delay all of the criminal trials until after Election Day on Nov. 5, and for good reason: A criminal conviction would transform the presidential race.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll this month reported that “some 31% of Republican respondents said they would not vote for Trump if he was convicted of a felony crime by a jury.”
There is also a potentially damaging civil trial looming against the former president.
A second defamation trial for writer E. Jean Carroll, who won a $5 million judgement against Trump in May, is scheduled to start Jan. 15 – the same day as the Iowa caucuses, the start of the Republican nominating process.
Falling poll numbers; rising rivals
Trump’s GOP rivals warn that his continued legal woes will eventually wear out voters who might start to consider alternatives.
Trump’s rhetoric has also escalated, including describing political opponents as “vermin,” saying migrants have “poisoned” Americans; and threatening to prosecute political opponents.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who is moving up in New Hampshire primary polls, says voters want to move beyond the turmoil of the Trump era.
“Chaos does follow him,” Haley told Fox News this week.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is banking on a strong showing in Iowa, has also said he would avoid the “chaos” of the Trump years.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is betting his long-shot candidacy on New Hampshire, is Trump’s most outspoken critic on the campaign trail. He says Trump’s legal problems and divisive rhetoric already render him unfit for public office.
Bad voter reaction
The ultimate bad sign for Trump would come from voters.
If Trump underperforms in the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15, and DeSantis does better than expected, that will embolden opponents.
If Haley defeats Trump in the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 23, that could totally change the race. Haley also has high hopes in her home state of South Carolina, which holds its Republican primary on Feb. 24.
If Haley does well in Iowa and wins in New Hampshire, “momentum will swing heavily in her favor pre-South Carolina,” said Lara Brown, a political scientist and author of “Jockeying for the American Presidency: The Political Opportunism of Aspirants.”
In that case, Brown said, “both DeSantis and Christie likely will drop out.”
As they walk through a political minefield, Trump and his campaign aides said they are counting on a huge haul of delegates on March 5, the day of “Super Tuesday” primaries in more than a dozen states.
They hope to have enough delegates to clinch the nomination after a March 19 set of big-state primaries that include Florida and Ohio.
Even if he does that – criminal trials still loom.
If Trump is tried and convicted before the start of the Republican convention on July 15, his nomination could conceivably be challenged on the floor.
“Is one of our major parties going to nominate a convicted felon for president of the United States?” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres.
“I don’t know and neither does anyone else,” he said. “We haven’t faced this kind of thing before.”
Don’t let anyone tell you that Trump is invulnerable. It’s always possible that enough Americans will decide that they would rather have a criminal imbecile for president to eke out another win. This country is in that much trouble. Biden is an old man which is apparently the worst thing you can be — even worse than being a deviant cretin. But I still doubt it.
Merry Christmas!
Trump’s on record saying that he’ll continue to say that immigrants from shithole countries are “poisoning the blood of America” and it’s worth taking a closer look at his specific claims. Not that there’s any truth in that statement whatsoever. But what exactly is he referring to?
The NY Times did a fact check which is characteristically too euphemistic and polite but it does show that Trump’s lies are worse than ever.
WHAT WAS SAID
“I read an article recently in a paper … about a man who runs a mental institution in South America, and by the way they’re coming from all over the world. They’re coming from Africa, from Asia, all over, but this happened to be in South America. And he was sitting, the picture was — sitting, reading a newspaper, sort of leisurely, and they were asking him, what are you doing? He goes, I was very busy all my life. I was very proud. I worked 24 hours a day. I was so busy all the time. But now I’m in this mental institution — where he’s been for years — and I’m in the mental institution and I worked very hard on my patients but now we don’t have any patients. They’ve all been brought to the United States.”
— during a rally in Nevada this monthThis lacks evidence. Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed that immigrants crossing the border are coming from “mental institutions” and jails. This particular story would seem to offer specific facts behind that assertion, but there is no evidence that such a report exists.
The New York Times could not find any such news account from the start of Mr. Biden’s tenure in January 2021 to March, when Mr. Trump told the same story at a Texas rally.
The Trump campaign did not respond when repeatedly asked about the source of this claim. But pressed this year by CNN for factual support for the tale, the campaign provided links that did not corroborate it.
Likewise, there is no support for Mr. Trump’s broader claim that countries are “dumping” their prisoners and psychiatric patients in the United States.
“We are unaware of any effort by any country or other jurisdiction to empty its mental-health institutions or its jails and prisons to send people with mental-health issues or criminals to the U.S.,” Michelle Mittelstadt, a spokeswoman for the nonpartisan research organization Migration Policy Institute, said in an email.
The claim evokes elements of a mass exodus that occurred more than 40 years ago in Cuba, Ms. Mittelstadt noted: the Mariel boatlift of 1980. Some 125,000 people fled to the United States, including inmates from jails and patients from mental health institutions freed by the Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
“But there has been no present-day effort by any country, to our knowledge, or any credible reporting by media or others that anything of the like is taking place,” Ms. Mittelstadt said.
Of course he’s referring to the Mariel boat lift. He remembers it like it was yesterday. Just like he remembers that Japan was shipping all its cars to the US back in the 1980. Nothing has changed for Trump in the last 40 years.
There’s more:
WHAT WAS SAID
“They’ve allowed, I believe, 15 million people into the country from all of these different places like jails, mental institutions, and wait till you see what’s going to happen with all those people.”
— during a rally in October in New HampshireThis lacks evidence. Setting aside the baseless suggestion that all undocumented immigrants entering the country are coming from jails and mental institutions, Mr. Trump’s estimate of 15 million is not supported by the data.
Customs and Border Protection data shows that U.S. officials recorded nearly eight million encounters at its borders from February 2021, the first full month of Mr. Biden’s presidency, to October 2023.
But even then, “encounter does not mean admittance,” Tom Wong, an associate professor of political science and director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California, San Diego, said in an email. “In fact, most encounters lead to expulsions.”
For example, C.B.P. data shows that about 2.5 million expulsions occurred under Title 42, a health rule that used the coronavirus as grounds for turning back immigrants illegally crossing the border, from February 2021 until the policy ended in May.
The number of encounters also are based on events, not people, and therefore could include the same person more than once.
The exact number of people who have entered the country without authorization is hard to pin down because there are also “gotaways” — people who crossed into the country illegally and evaded authorities.
But the federal, observational estimates of such people also would not support Mr. Trump’s claim. The secretary of homeland security, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, estimated at a recent hearing that there had been more than 600,000 gotaways in fiscal year 2023, which ended in September. That is also the estimate for fiscal year 2022, according to an inspector general report. And there were more than 391,300 in fiscal year 2021, which began in October 2020 under Mr. Trump and ended in September 2021 under Mr. Biden.
In terms of migrants with criminal records, officials encountered nearly 45,000 at ports of entry since the start of fiscal year 2021. Between ports of entry in that period, officials encountered another 40,000 noncitizens with criminal records.
While Mr. Trump in this instance claimed the country had allowed 15 million migrants to enter, he has at other times predicted that would be the total figure by the end of Mr. Biden’s term. That would be larger than the estimated total population of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States — about 10.5 million in 2021, according to the Pew Research Center.
WHAT WAS SAID
“In the past three years, Biden has spent over $1 billion to put up illegal aliens in hotels, some of the most luxurious hotels in the country. Meanwhile, we have 33,000 homeless American veterans. Can you believe it?”
— during a rally in November in New HampshireThis needs context. Mr. Trump’s figure of homeless veterans refers to a 2022 estimate by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That number includes about 19,500 veterans who were in shelters when the count was conducted. And both the 2022 estimate and a new tally for 2023 — which reported nearly 35,600 homeless veterans — are actually down slightly from when Mr. Trump was in office, continuing an overall downward trend since 2009.
As for migrant housing, Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracted in 2021 with a nonprofit group to house border arrivals at a handful of hotels in Texas and Arizona, as a 2022 homeland security inspector general report details. The contract totaled more than $130 million and ended in 2022. The Trump administration also turned to hotels in 2020 to hold migrant children and families before expelling them.
The Biden administration has not directly spent $1 billion to place immigrants in hotels. But cities are indeed facing steep costs for sheltering and caring for border arrivals — including through hotels. The Trump campaign did not indicate where Mr. Trump had obtained the $1 billion figure, but it is possible he was referring to a federal initiative that provides funding to local governments and nongovernment groups to help offset those costs.
The program was in fact first authorized through 2019 legislation signed by Mr. Trump. While it allows nonfederal entities to seek grants for housing migrants in hotels and motels, it is not exclusive to that. Congress provided the program $110 million in fiscal year 2021 and $150 million in fiscal year 2022.
Lawmakers recently replaced the initiative with a new shelter and services program. For fiscal year 2023, officials earmarked $425 million for the old program and $363.8 million for the new one.
All told, the federal government has allocated about $1 billion since fiscal year 2021, which includes the last few months under the Trump administration, toward local efforts to feed and shelter migrants around the country — not only hotel expenses.
While FEMA discloses recipients of the funding, it does not say how much each grant is used specifically on hotel costs.
WHAT WAS SAID
“We cannot forget that the same people that attacked Israel are right now pouring in at levels that nobody can believe into our beautiful U.S.A. through our totally open border.”
— during a rally in Iowa in OctoberThis lacks evidence. Mr. Trump offered no evidence that people affiliated with Hamas, the militant group that staged a brutal assault on Israel in early October, are “pouring” into the country at record levels. And experts say they are unaware of data that would support that contention.
If the former president’s statement was meant to convey that terrorists more generally are “pouring in” at the border, he could be referring to the rising number of encounters at the southern border with people on a terrorism watch list. The list includes known and suspected terrorists as well as people affiliated with them.
A total of 169 noncitizens on that list tried to illegally enter the United States at the southern border in fiscal year 2023, which ended in September, up from three in fiscal year 2020, according to C.B.P. statistics.
Still, it is unclear what that says about the terrorism threat, said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. There is no record of a terrorist attack being committed on American soil by an immigrant who crossed the southern border illegally. (In 2008, three brothers who had come to the United States illegally years earlier as children, from Yugoslavia, were convicted of conspiring to kill American soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey.)
Apprehended individuals on the list are supposed to remain in government custody as they await removal proceedings, Mr. Nowrasteh said.
You will note that many of these issues were present during his term. The only reason things got substantially better at the border in his last year is because the whole world was locked down with a deadly pandemic.
This toxic rhetoric is so clearly designed to gin up this issue once again. The right loves it because they are racists and being allowed to spew their hate gives them a major thrill. But everyone else needs to keep their heads and recognize that this long term problem waxes and wanes and start thinking about the future as climate change exacerbates it. Crude xenophobia and rounding up people to put them in camps isn’t going to solve anything.
Climate change is the big enchilada and, in my humble opinion, should be at the top of the agenda for anyone under the age of 40. All the things they care about are going to be subsumed by this issue in any case.
Merry Christmas!
This video from 1987 has been making the rounds. It’s hilarious. And it’s so him:
Liars gonna lie:
He’s always got some excuse.
Heather Cox Richardson remembered Saturday as the date in 1783 when General George Washington stood before the Confederation Congress, meeting in the senate chamber of the Maryland State House, and resigned his wartime commission. “Negotiators had signed the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War on September 3, 1783.” The defeated British had pulled their final troops from New York City.
Most likely Richardson relied on fake news accounts. Important details are missing.
It was in fact “the largest audience to ever witness a general’s address, period, both in person and around the globe,” a Washington aide later insisted.
But lefty historians transcribed mainstream media accounts of the speech:
“The great events on which my resignation depended having at length taken place; I have now the honor of offering my sincere Congratulations to Congress and of presenting myself before them to surrender into their hands the trust committed to me, and to claim the indulgence of retiring from the Service of my Country,” he told the members of Congress.
Fake News! Washington never resigned. He claimed that the Treaty of Paris was a fraud. In fact, he’d beaten the British Army so soundly that he’d accepted their unconditional surrender at Appomattox and performed a traditional sword dance in celebration.
“Nobody knows more about defeating the British Empire,” Washington bellowed. “Not since Alexander….”
“Happy in the confirmation of our Independence and Sovereignty, and pleased with the opportunity afforded the United States of becoming a respectable Nation, I resign with satisfaction the Appointment I accepted with diffidence.”
Do your research! Only a shithole Nation would ask him to step aside, Washington actually said. “Annoint me or you won’t have a country anymore.”
A yooge crowd of Make America George Again groupies and Sovereign Citizens outside the State House chanted, “Stop the Steal!” and clashed with Annapolis police.
“Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of Action; and bidding an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.”
Propaganda! Many people say Washington never took orders, he gave them. Not directly, of course. He spoke in a kind of code. His closest aides — big, strong men — knew the code and accepted Dear Leader’s direction eagerly with tears in their eyes.
True facts: King George III was so impressed with the size of the Continental Army and with Washington’s manliness that he’d dispatched a series of love letters after the war calling him, among other things, “Your Excellency,” and recommending he lead the new country in perpetuity. No way did Washington retire to Marth-a-Lago.
More librul indoctrination, I’m telling ya.
Is this a joke?
Clarence Thomas: The Best and Most Incorruptible Supreme Court Justice in U.S. History
This Friday encomium to Clarence Thomas, is it Steven Calabresi’s or The Volokh Conspiracy’s idea of a joke?
Justice Thomas’s brilliance, and commitment to originalism shine through in all of his opinions. He is more consistent, steady, and reliable than any other justice on the Supreme Court. He almost never follows precedent, but he always follows the original public meaning of the text of the Constitution. He is the very best justice out of 116 to have ever served on the U.S. Supreme Court better even than my old boss Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Thomas not only talks about the importance of being an originalist; he practices originalism in every majority opinion, concurrence, or dissent that he writes.
That’s some bad-ass weed.
Left wing bias, and a disinclination to read Justice Thomas’s opinions, has so skewed our public perception of him that no-one realizes what former Second Circuit Chief Judge Ralph Winter once told me is true: “Clarence Thomas is quite simply a genius.” Moreover, Justice Thomas has such a clear body of rules, which he consistently follows in case after case over 32 years on the bench that it is as obvious as the day is long that he is incorruptible in every sense of that word. Justice Thomas would never “bend” the law to please Justice Scalia, his closest friend; his wife Ginni Thomas, who is active as she has every right to be in politics, or his good and close friend; the Koch brothers; Texas billionaire Harlan Crow; or anyone else. Clarence Thomas cannot be “bought.” He is completely and utterly incorruptible as anyone who takes the time to read the opinions, which he produces prolifically can plainly see.
Why shouldn’t Clarence Thomas accept (and not declare) expensive gifts and luxury vacations from billionaires?
If Congress had adjusted for inflation the salary that Supreme Court justices made in 1969 at the end of the Warren Court, Justice Thomas would be being paid $500,000 a year, and he would not need to rely as much as he has on gifts from wealthy friends.
When was the last time Reason argued for cost-of-living adjustments? No matter. Thomas the Destitute is due what’s his.
Clarence Thomas grew up dirt poor as is made clear in his superb autobiography My Grandfather’s Son. He has devoted his entire professional life as a lawyer to serving in government jobs in which he has been grossly underpaid. Under these circumstances, Thomas, who again is incorruptible, as his 32 years of judicial opinions all show, has every right to accept gifts from wealthy friends.
It’s his friggin’ right, dammit! Like women’s right to bodily autonomy … except not.
So was this post by Calabresi (8/10/2023) a joke too?
Trump Is Disqualified from Being on Any Election Ballots
Don’t bother looking. A month later Professor Calabresi (Northwestern University) made “an extraordinary about-face” (New York Times, 9/18/2023):
In a letter to The Wall Street Journal, he said he had been persuaded by an opinion article in that newspaper that the provision — Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — did not apply to Mr. Trump.
That would be the “Trump is not an officer of the United States” (and the presidency not an office under the Constitution) argument soundly rejected by the Colorado Supreme Court last week.
“Let me be clear,” Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale, said [in September] on his podcast. “This is a genuinely stupid argument.”
But self-serving, so what of it? (There’s more than rum in that eggnog, ya think?)
Oh, what goodies will Justice Thomas and the the Federalist Society find under their trees tomorrow morning? A little coke … I mean Koch?
I wrote about this the other day but it’s nice that the NY Times is putting this information into wider circulation. I hope they don’t just leave it at that. It’s evidence of Trump’s naturally fascistic personality and more people should know about it. It informs all his recent Nazi rhetoric:
In 2020, President Donald J. Trump gave a campaign speech in Minnesota railing against refugees and criticizing protests for racial justice. Toward the end, he wrapped up with standard lines from his stump speech and praise for the state’s pioneer lineage.
Then, Mr. Trump stopped to address his crowd of Minnesota supporters with an aside seeming to invoke a theory of genetic superiority.
“You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?” Mr. Trump told the audience. “The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”
Mr. Trump’s mention of the racehorse theory — the idea adapted from horse breeding that good bloodlines produce superior offspring — reflected a focus on bloodlines and genetics that Mr. Trump has had for decades, and one that has received renewed attention and scrutiny in his third bid for president.
In recent months, Mr. Trump has drawn widespread criticism for asserting that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase that he said first in a right-wing media interview and has in the last week repeated on the campaign trail.
As with the speech in 2020, Mr. Trump’s remarks have been criticized by historians, Jewish groups and liberals, who said his language recalled the ideology of eugenics promulgated by Nazis in Germany and white supremacists in America.
In a radio interview on Friday, Mr. Trump again defended his use of the phrase “poisoning the blood.” He dismissed criticism that his language echoed Nazi ideology by saying he was “not a student of Hitler” and that his statement used “blood” in crucially different ways, though he did not elaborate.
But much as news articles, biographers and books about his presidency have documented Mr. Trump’s long interest in Adolf Hitler, they have also shown that Mr. Trump has frequently turned to the language of genetics as he discusses the superiority of himself and others.
Mr. Trump was talking publicly about his belief that genetics determined a person’s success in life as early as 1988, when he told Oprah Winfrey that a person had “to have the right genes” in order to achieve great fortune.
He would connect those views to the racehorse theory in a CNN interview with Larry King in 2007.
“You can absolutely be taught things. Absolutely. You can get a lot better,” Mr. Trump told Mr. King. “But there is something. You know, the racehorse theory, there is something to the genes. And I mean, when I say something, I mean a lot.”
Three years later, he would tell CNN that he was a “gene believer,” explaining that “when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse” and likening his “gene pool” to that of successful thoroughbreds.
Michael D’Antonio, who wrote a biography of Mr. Trump in 2015, has credited this view to Mr. Trump’s father. Mr. D’Antonio told PBS’s “Frontline” in a 2017 documentary that members of the Trump family believed that “there are superior people, and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”
In 2019, Mr. D’Antonio told The New York Times that Mr. Trump had said that a person’s genes at birth were a determining factor in their future, more so than anything they learned later.
The former president has not just promoted his own “good genes,” but has repeatedly lauded those of British business leaders, Christian evangelical leaders, a top campaign adviser and the American industrialist Henry Ford.
[…]
In Friday’s radio interview, the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Trump to explain his use of the phrase, pressing him multiple times to respond to those who were outraged that the phrase resembled statements made by Hitler in his hate-filled manifesto, “Mein Kampf.”
The former president said he had no racist intentions behind the statement. Then, he added, “I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works.”
Mr. Trump has long had a documented interest in Hitler. A table by his bed once had a copy of Hitler speeches called “My New Order,” a gift from a friend that Ivana Trump, his first wife, said she had seen him occasionally leafing through.
He once asked his White House chief of staff why he lacked generals like those who reported to Hitler, calling those military leaders “totally loyal” to the Nazi dictator, according to a book on the Trump presidency by Peter Baker, a New York Times reporter, and Susan Glasser.
On another occasion, he told the same aide that “well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” according to Michael C. Bender, a journalist who is now a New York Times reporter, in a 2021 book about Mr. Trump.
The former president has denied making both comments. On Friday, he continued his defense by pointing out that his phrase — “poisoning the blood” — differed from passages in “Mein Kampf” in which Hitler uses “poison” and “blood” to lay out his views on how outsiders were ruining Aryan racial purity.
“They say that he said something about blood,” Mr. Trump said. “He didn’t say it the way I said it, either. By the way, it’s a very different kind of a statement.” He did not explain the distinction.
As Sam Seder quipped yesterday on Majority Report (in Trump’s voice) “I didn’t copy Hitler, he copied me!”
Trump is an admirer of Hitler. of course he is. He admires all tyrants and dictators.All the way back in the 1980s he said this about the fall of the Soviet Union:
“What you will see there soon is a revolution; the signs are all there with the demonstrations and picketing. Russia is out of control and the leadership knows it. That’s my problem with [former Soviet President Mikhail] Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.”
Tiananmen Square:
“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak…as being spit on by the rest of the world.”
You think the guy who takes pride in his “good German blood” doesn’t admire Hitler? Please.
Happy Hollandaise, folks. If things go right, we may be rid of this monster in our political lives in less than a year.