Skip to content

Month: March 2024

Another Great Whitebread Hope Crashes and Burns

Published by digby on March 29, 2024

Glenn Youngkin, lame duck:

No Virginia governor has come into office with a deeper dealmaking background than Glenn Youngkin, who as former co-chief executive of the Carlyle Group made a fortune acquiring and merging companies around the globe.

But as the Republican chief executive of a purple state, Youngkin has struggled to translate that business acumen into political success — or even economic development success, with the demise Wednesday of his much-touted plan to bring the Washington Wizards and Capitals to Alexandria.

While Youngkin and his group of financial experts had negotiated with team owner Ted Leonsis to cut what the governor called “the single largest economic development deal in Virginia’s history,” the governor was never able to work the same magic with members of the General Assembly who had to sign off on the $2 billion project.

The plan’s failure wipes out a significant legacy-making opportunity for a novice politician who burst onto the scene in 2021 and drew national attention as a fresh Republican face. In his first two years in office, Youngkin enjoyed state coffers overflowing with federal pandemic relief funds and a friendly GOP-controlled House of Delegates. But as the clock winds down on his four-year term, the governor has lost the legislature to Democrats and seen his priorities slip away.

“He’s a total lame duck right now,” said Robert Holsworth, a Richmond political analyst who has studied Virginia governors for decades. “He has shown tremendous political inexperience.”

[…]

Amid the national attention and appearances on Fox News and other right-wing media, Youngkin wobbled on the home front. His stoking of culture wars pleased the GOP base but sometimes fizzled as policy, such as abortive efforts to create a tip line for parents to complain about teachers and principals and a rewrite of state history standards that was widely criticized as racially insensitive and inaccurate.

[…]

Despite his success in the private sector, Youngkinas governor has had some noteworthy misses in the economic development realm. He failed to persuade the Biden administration to locate the new headquarters for the FBI in Virginia, with Maryland winning even though the agency itself favored a site in Springfield. And when Ford Motor Co. expressed interest in locating a major battery plant in Southside Virginia to supply electric vehicles, Youngkin himself blocked the deal, citing concern that the operation was a front for a Chinese manufacturer.

The plant went to Michigan instead; the Virginiasite, in a region desperate for jobs, remains unused.

Huh. So you can’t run government like a business after all? A successful businessman isn’t automatically great at politics? Who knew?

I am very glad to see that particular wannabe president sink into obscurity mostly because the Villagers touted him so heavily in 2021 as the Wonderful Moderate Republican Businessman Who Will Save Us All from the Democrats. They spent months pushing the narrative that his election proved that the Democrats were in big trouble and the GOP comeback was imminent (Thank God!) It turns out that he was a lousy politician and an incompetent Governor.

It’s not the first time that’s happened (Scott Walker, Tim Pawlenty, Tommy Thompson, Fred Thompson…. and more) and it would be nice if everyone ignored them when the next great Whitebread Hope comes along.

Extortionist-In-Chief

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 29, 2024

Some Friday messaging advice

Two bits about defining Trump caught my attention. You’d think the guy’s image is as set as can be with his friends and foes. What else is there to tell about the twice-impeached, yada-yada? But this is campaign season. The GOP was working “but her emails” all the way up to the election in 2016. Take the hint.

Joe Biden is running ads here in N.C. beginning with “Here’s the difference between me and Donald Trump…” In the wake of the Key Bridge collapse this week, Biden immediately pledged, “It’s my intention that federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge.” Full stop.

Brian Beutler reminds his Off Message readers that should Trump get reelected we can expect him to hold recovery funds hostage and to extort Maryland and Baltimore for favors:

Four years ago this week, it became clear that Donald Trump would husband emergency pandemic resources like ventilators and personal protective equipment for Republican-run states. Or rather, Trump made it clear. Blue-state leaders would get to see their residents die gasping for air unless they feigned fulsome praise for his pandemic response in public. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call,” he declared.

Three days ago this morning, an enormous cargo ship lost power and drifted into a pillar holding up the Francis Scott Key bridge, which collapsed instantly into the Patapsco River in Baltimore, MD. 

[…]

Already the contrast with Trump’s response to COVID-19, devoid as it was of common humanity, is stark. But its not just the contrast that looms large in my mind. It’s also the recognition that the Baltimore rescue might still be underway seven months from now when voters cast their ballots for president. And we know from Trump’s response to COVID, and to a number of other disasters that struck non-Republican states and territories during his single term, that if he inherits the effort to rebuild after this disaster, he will likely sabotage it or hold it hostage until the leaders of Baltimore and Maryland offer him political favors or concessions. It’s a reminder in microcosm of one of Trump’s most disqualifying abuses of power, and why it’s critical for real reporters to press him for a response to the Key bridge calamity—whether he intends to resume using federal disaster resources as a tool to extort his political enemies. 

So ask him. We’re waiting.

As of this writing, Trump has said nothing at all about the Key bridge collapse. And why would he? It can not after all be blamed on the Democratic mayor of Baltimore, or the Democratic governor of Maryland, or the Democratic president of the United States. The men killed in the accident were immigrants, rather than blue-collar white men. So as far as Trump is concerned, it merits no comment. No condolences to the families of the dead; no assurances to the affected communities that he intends to be their president, too. 

Left to his own devices, Trump will either continue to ignore the incident, or he’ll respond only when prompted by an ally in right-wing media. Extrapolating from his response to every other tragedy, he might assert monomaniacally that the accident simply wouldn’t have happened if he’d been president. He’ll almost certainly assert that if he were president, the bridge would be rebuilt in a matter of weeks instead of months, notwithstanding his famously abysmal failure to build anything of significance during his presidency. 

Then remind him that he built jack when he was president, you “nasty” reporter.

Anat Shenker-Osorio tells her fans that what’s important is not to remind voters who Trump is, but to hammer home what “Trump will do” to them if he returns to the Oval Office.

Better still, she recommends, is to pivot away from viewing this presidential election as a contest between two old men to a choice between two different futures for America.

We need to get off cruise control and learn new tricks if we expect to prevail this fall.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

More Than A Bridge Collapsed

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 29, 2024

The myths of demagogues collapsed too

Photo by NTSB (Public domain).

Lost amidst the tangle of steel and roadway that fell into the icy Patapsco River in Baltimore on Tuesday were eight men pursuing their American Dreams. Two were rescued. Crews pulled the bodies of two others from the water on Wednesday. Four others are presumed dead. Will Bunch considers who the victims were and what their lives meant:

From the day in the mid-2000s when a then-20-year-old Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval crossed the border into America, he never stopped working. The youngest of eight children, Suazo was fleeing numbing poverty and a dead-end career path in Azacualpa, a small rural village in the western mountains of Honduras.

The undocumented Suazo wound up in Greater Baltimore, a magnet for Central American refugees with its relatively cheap housing for the bustling Eastern Seaboard, a friendly climate toward migrants, and lots of opportunity. With American dreams of entrepreneurship, he took menial jobs like clearing brush, then launched a package delivery service, and when COVID-19 ended that, started working overnight construction for a Baltimore contractor, Brawner Brothers.

Suazo was described by friends and family as happy, outgoing, and tireless. He had to be. While supporting a wife and two kids, he was also sending $600 to $800 a month back to Azacualpa, enough to help family members buy a small hotel and even support youth soccer. In Baltimore, he was what his brother called “the fundamental pillar” for a growing number of relatives who made it to Maryland. Home from the grueling construction work at 5 a.m., he was out working again by noon, picking up extra dollars cleaning yards, painting houses, or landscaping.

New arrivals like Sandoval, Bunch explains (as though it’s not right before our eyes), “take some of the most dangerous jobs in America, with construction ranked ‘a high-hazard industry‘ by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration because of risks like falling or getting crushed under heavy equipment.” * They make up about a third of the construction workforce and more than half of those killed in falls.

You’ve seen such men, as have I here. Latino men, like Bunch says, landscaping, roofing, painting houses, repairing roadways, etc. Others, men and women, perhaps second-generation, speaking unaccented English, operate my favorite Mexcian restaurant just walking distance from the house.

When the Dali cargo ship demolished that bridge support on Tuesday, it also obliterated all the ridiculous lies and myths our demagogues have been spreading around immigration. There were no sex traffickers aboard the Key Bridge that night. Nobody was dealing fentanyl. They were not “animals,” but fathers and husbands like Suazo and Luna, whose wife occasionally showed up in her food truck to bring the men tacos and pupusas. They were filling potholes so their children could have an even better life.

These six workers who perished were not “poisoning the blood of our country,” they were replenishing it. This is a moment of clarity when we need to reject the national disease of xenophobia and restore our faith in the United States as a beacon for the best people like Suazo. They may have been born all over the continent, but when these men plunged into our waters on Tuesday, they died as Americans.

Xenophopbia is the other national epidemic. Driven in large part by status anxiety, clods like Trump and his imitators teach their minions to hate what they do not know, and what their families have forgotten. (We’re all immigrants here, even First Peoples if you look back far enough.) But it sells when you’ve got nothing else to offer to people who feel as if they’re hanging onto what little they have by the skin of their teeth or by their fingernails. George W. Bush once spoke of making the pie higher. Trump is peddling zero-sum America. Keep your brown hands off my pie!

Status anxiety breeds hatred. Ignorance fuels it. Ultimately, was there ever a time when strangers were welcome here?

Harbours open there doors to the young searching foreigner
Come to live in the light of the big L of liberty
Plains and open skies bill boards would advertise
Was it anything like that when you arrived
Dream boats carried the future to the heart of America
People were waiting in line for a place by the river

It was time when strangers were welcome here
Music would play they tell me the days were sweet and clear
It was a sweeter tune and there was so much room
That people could come from everywhere

* Heavy construction work was my gateway to engineering school. Ask me sometime about the hazards.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

RIP

Published by digby on March 28, 2024

Those of you who’ve been reading me for 20 years know how I have felt about Joe Lieberman.

I’ll just leave this here:

Trump And The Hush Money Case

Published by digby on March 28, 2024

Merchan hit him with a gag order. Not that he cares. But maybe someone should look into a straight jacket.

Update:

John Eastman Disbarred

Published by digby on March 28, 2024

The judges didn’t buy his defense of the coup attempt

David Kurtz at TPM:

With the Jan. 6 case against Donald Trump ground to a halt and the no real prospect of the Georgia RICO case against him reaching a verdict before November, yesterday’s ruling against Trump co-defendant John Eastman in California may be the closest we get to a taste of a Jan. 6 verdict before Election Day.

In recommending that Eastman be disbarred for his role in the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, a state judge issued a blistering ruling that treated the autocoup with the historic seriousness it deserves. It came after a full evidentiary record was developed over months and extensive legal argument, like a full-blown trial. Eastman plans to appeal, and ultimately the state Supreme Court will decide whether he’ll be disbarred, but in the meantime he is suspended from practicing law.

Some highlights from the 128-page ruling by state Judge Yvette Roland:

“Most of his misconduct occurred squarely within the course and scope of Eastman’s representation of President Trump and culminated with a shared plan to obstruct the lawful function of the government.”

“The evidence clearly and convincingly proves that Eastman and President Trump entered into an agreement to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress by unlawfully having Vice President Pence reject or delay the counting of electoral votes on January 6, 2021.”

In sum, Eastman exhibited gross negligence by making false statements about the 2020 election without conducting any meaningful investigation or verification of the information he was relying upon.

A bonus reference to Watergate figure Donald Segretti, whose own disbarment case in California was cited:

The scale and egregiousness of Eastman’s unethical actions far surpasses the misconduct at issue in Segretti. Unlike Segretti whose offenses occurred outside his role as an attorney, Eastman’s wrongdoing was committed directly in the course and scope of his representation of President Trump and the Trump Campaign. This is an important factor, as it constitutes a fundamental breach of an attorney’s core ethical duties. Additionally, while the Segretti court found compelling mitigation based on his expressed remorse and recognition of his wrongdoing, no such mitigating factor is present with Eastman.

A couple of years ago, as the bar proceedings against various Trump world figures were getting underway, I confess I grew impatient when my reporting team kept getting excited about this or that procedural development. Disbarment is weak tea for what we’re dealing with here, I would insist. And yet here we are with only the bar proceedings having provided anything like a modicum of accountability in a timely fashion.

It’s better than nothing …

The Shadow Presidency

Published by digby on March 28, 2024

Trump has “envoys” going around the world:

After an anti-corruption crusader unexpectedly won last year’s presidential election in Guatemala, democracy teetered on the edgein the Central American country. Amid law enforcementraids on election offices and threats of violence, the Biden administration worked feverishly to lay the groundwork for a peaceful transfer of power.

But not Richard Grenell, a former diplomat and intelligence official in Donald Trump’s administration, who arrived in Guatemala in January, days before the new president was to be sworn in — and threw his support behind aright-wing campaign to undermine the election.

Grenell met with a hard-line group that sued to block the inauguration. The group thanked him for his “visit and trust.”He defended Guatemalan officials who had seized ballot boxes in an effort to overturn a vote declared “free and fair” by the United States and international observers,and he attacked the U.S. State Department’s sanctions against hundreds of anti-democratic actors.

“They are trying to intimidate conservatives in Guatemala,” Grenell said in a television interview. “This is all wrapped into this kind of phony concern about democracy.”

Grenell’s intervention highlights the extraordinary role he has carved out in the three years since Trump left the White House. From Central America to Eastern Europe and beyond, Grenell has been acting as a kind of shadow secretary of state, meeting with far-right leaders and movements, pledging Trump’s support and, at times, working against the current administration’s policies.

It’s unusual for a former diplomatic official to continue meeting with foreign leaders and promoting the agenda of a presidential candidate on the world stage.Grenell’s globe-trotting has sparked deep concern among career national security officials and diplomats, who warn that he emboldens bad actors and jeopardizes U.S. interests in service of Trump’s personal agenda. In the process, Grenell is openly charting a foreign policy road map for a Republican presidential nominee who has found common cause with authoritarian leaders and threatened to blow up partnerships with democratic allies.

“I think Trump and Grenell would upend American leadership of the free world, from Truman on the left to Reagan on the right, and replace it with something much darker,” said Daniel Fried, who spent four decades in top State Department posts, including as an assistant secretary of state andadirector of the National Security Council. “It’s transactional. Democratic values are irrelevant, and it’s isolationist.”

[…]

His profile is rising in Trump’s MAGA movement, which hails him as a champion of the “America First” platform. Trump and his supporters view a second term as an opportunity to elevate his most loyal backers, who potentially would test traditional guardrails against abuse of executive power.

The former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., in an online chat with Grenell last month, touted his record as ambassador to Germany and called him a “top contender for secretary of state.”

“Your name comes up a lot in some very high levels. You’re in there with the base,” Trump Jr. said, adding that Grenell was “probably the only ambassador who spoke truth to power.”

Grenell calls himself a diplomat but acts as a rapid-response, war-room director, perpetually exalting Trump and trolling his political foes on social media and in interviews.

Grenell was nothing more than an internet troll when Trump lifted him into an ambassadorship and then Acting Director of National Intelligence. He was vert active in the coup attempt flying into Nevada to try to overturn the results. He is on par with Stephen Miller for sheer evil.

I don’t know what laws can be deployed to stop this unprecedented behavior but you would think there would be something you could do about a person who had a top security clearance as the Director of National Intelligence running around the world in opposition to the elected US Government. If there isn’t, there should be.

This person will be hugely important in a new Trump administration. Just think of it.

Criminal Minds

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 28, 2024

“That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind”

Back in my table-waiting days, a customer who had just signed his credit card receipt asked for the carbon copies (yes, that long ago). Noticing the quizzical look on my face, he explained it was because of reports of thieves dumpster-diving for credit card numbers. That never would have occurred to me, I told him.

“That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind,” the customer smiled.

On that, Ed Kilgore considers what steps Donald Trump took to steal the 2020 election. Several tactics he used four years ago are now “off the table.” But considering he would not admit defeat in 2020 and what he demonstrated he was capable of, what else might he try if he loses a 2024 reelection effort premised on keeping himself out of prison?

“Rolling Stone is reporting that the Biden campaign is examining a ‘comically long’ list of ‘nightmare scenarios’ that might develop. To be forewarned is to be forearmed, to a considerable extent,” Kilgore writes.

Trump won’t have the presidency this time, nor access to the Department of Justice or Department of Defense, nor to invoking the Insurrection Act.

“It’s easier to hold power than to seize it,” Kilgore advises. He runs through a list of tools Trump-the-challenger won’t have for turning an election loss into a stolen win.

Getting to the nub of it, Kilgore explains:

So what new election-coup tactics could Trump pursue in 2024? There is one terrifying possibility: the deployment of MAGA bravos to disrupt the casting or counting of Election Day votes in order to justify nondemocratic methods of determining the presidency. To put it another way, the more legislators and judges close off nefarious legal methods of subverting an adverse election result, the more Trump and his supporters may be tempted to resort to good old-fashioned ballot-box-stuffing violence. It would be immensely helpful to secure as many pledges against this lurch into open authoritarianism as possible among Republican elected officials and party leaders. And as an added safeguard, Joe Biden might want to win by a landslide.

Brynn Tannehill’s long Twitter thread considered what Trump and his MAGA allies might do to turn the U.S. into a Trumpistanian dictatorship if Trump gets elected. But my old customer reminds me that it’s not so easy for someone without a criminal mind to anticipate what Trump & Co. might cook up to seize dictatorial power after losing. The Biden-Harris “comically long” list of “nightmare scenarios” is likely not long enough.

They might have to hire former felons to thwart prospective felons.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.