President Biden has announced an order forgiving more student loans. It hasn’t been easy since the right wing Supremes knocked down his big initiative, but they’ve kept at it, chipping away, bringing relief to many people’s debt burden. They say they aren’t done yet.
The wingnuts are having their usual fit about anything that might benefit people other than the rich and the fascist, caterwauling that it’s not fair to other Americans who didn’t take out loans or who paid them back already. Why shouldn’t they get a break too?
Guess what?
They’re special people who deserve it, we know that. The American people should be proud to subsidize them — they’re all millionaires, of course. Those scofflaws who haven’t paid back their student loans need to be taught a lesson.
it does not matter how many times he has been caught not telling the truth, Trump can always count on the press to carry his water. https://t.co/T5mdw6QVqQ
Arizona Republicans refused to vote on a bill to repeal the state’s extreme abortion ban Wednesday, a day after Republicans—including President Donald Trump—attempted to distance themselves from the decision.
State Rep. Matt Gress (R) moved Wednesday to bring a Democratic bill repealing the ban, which outlaws all abortions except to save the life of the mother, to a House vote. Before a vote could be called, Rep. David Livingston motioned for a recess and all Republicans in the House—including Gress—voted to table the proceedings.
Democrats in the House chanted “Shame!” at their Republican counterparts as voting rapidly came to a close.
In a livestream after the session ended, Rep. Analise Ortiz (D) said Republicans moved to recess so they “would not have to be on the record voting to repeal the abortion ban.”
Looks like Donald Trump picked the wrong week to quit snorting Adderall (ABC News):
There are multiple Jeremy Rosenbergs in New York City, as former President Donald Trump’s attorneys found out Tuesday after they sent a subpoena to the wrong one.
Last month, Trump’s attorneys in his criminal hush money case [Ed: falsifying business records, to be correct] in Manhattan sought to subpoena the Jeremy Rosenberg who was a supervising investigator in the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
Instead, according to court filings revealed Tuesday, the subpoena went to another Jeremy Rosenberg living in an $8 million Brooklyn home.
A crack team of attorneys Trump has there, and I mean that crack. It’s led by one Todd Blanche.
“I don’t have any files for you,” the apparently bemused Brooklynite wrote back, according to a filing from the former president’s legal team.
He added: “PS – The phone number you provided was disconnected.
“PPS – I’m keeping the fifteen dollars,” he added, referencing the money Mr Trump’s lawyers had sent him to help pay for sending the documents.
(I once got onto the chain-mail list of a Republican state senator(?) from Alabama. She only relented after I wrote back that, no, I couldn’t send her that chicken recipe she liked so much. I was not the Tom Sullivan she thought I was. Former Colorado governor, John Hickenlooper, called me by accident twice in a week in September 2019 thinking I was Colorado state Rep. Tom Sullivan. It happens.)
Still, Trump’s attorneys were clueless even after that snarky reply:
Mr Blanche had complained earlier this week that the man that he believed the former investigator Mr Rosenberg had displayed a “flippant and dismissive approach” to his subpoena “despite ample experience with the criminal justice system that should have instilled in him respect for this process and a criminal defendant’s rights”.
But in fact, Mr Trump’s lawyers had simply served court papers on the wrong man, prosecutor Matthew Colangelo wrote.
“The people believe the defendant has served the incorrect person,” Mr Colangelo said in a court filing.
Give Donald Trump the nuclear codes and he’ll attack the wrong country.
Biden launches ad blitz after Arizona abortion ruling
“Donald Trump did this,” Team Biden declares.
Perhaps you’ve noticed. The Democratic president Donald “Now 88 Counts” Trump once called “Sleepy Joe” is hammering MAGA Republicans over their post-Roe revocation of women’s reproductive freedoms in state after state.
Biden “plans to pummel Trump on abortion” (Politico):
Joe Biden’s campaign plans to hammer Donald Trump for his role in erasing abortion rights largely by enlisting ordinary American women who have suffered from restrictions on the procedure, elevating their voices in place of the president’s own.
This approach was immediately on display this week in a Biden campaign video featuring the story of a Texas woman released after Trump announced he would defer to state-level abortion laws, some of which impose draconian limits on women and physicians. Biden himself made no appearance in the ad, except to deliver a standard campaign finance disclosure line.
As the reporters frame it, Biden is taking a back seat here because of his “complicated history” on abortion. This, rather than Politico conceding that women are their own best advocates for reproductive freedom. The power of women’s first-person accounts was clear in recent elections in Ohio and in Gov. Andy Beshear’s reelection campaign in Kentucky.
Biden advisers took particular note of an ad Beshear ran in the closing stages of his campaign featuring the testimonial of a woman, Hadley Duvall, who had been raped and impregnated by her stepfather when she was a child, and who would have been forced to carry the pregnancy to term under policies favored by Kentucky Republicans, including Beshear’s opponent.
Eric Hyers, a Democratic strategist who managed the Beshear campaign, said Duvall’s message had echoed across Kentucky, including in constituencies that do not ordinarily lean to the left.
“The voters who moved the most when hearing messages like Hadley’s were the opposite of the voters you might think,” Hyers said. “It was rural voters, male voters, older voters, Republican voters, non-college educated voters.”
Messaging expert Drew Westen (“The Political Brain”) has long insisted that the central issue in the national abortion debate is not choice or justice but freedom. It’s about whether, when (and with whom) to have a child. Republicans “believe every rapist has the right to choose who has their child. We believe that’s a family choice.” Duvall made that message as clear as a punch in the gut.
Working the eye
The national alarm over the Arizona Supreme Court’s reanimating the Arizona Territory’s 1864 abortion ban, Republicans and Trump himself are staggering and attempting to walk back their extremist positions. The Biden campaign means to keep them backed into a corner fending off blows (MSNBC):
President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign launched a paid media blitz about reproductive rights in Arizona on Thursday, two days after the state’s Supreme Court upheld a near-total abortion ban dating to 1864.
The seven-figure ad buy focuses on former President Donald Trump’s latest abortion stance, in which he again took credit for overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling because of the justices he appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and said states should decide abortion policy.
The move is part of a larger, more aggressive strategy to seize on Trump’s record on abortion, with the Biden team quickly mobilizing to respond on an issue it sees as the most motivating one for voters in November.
The Biden campaign released these ads before Tuesday’s ruling in Arizona.
This is a painful story that so many families around America now know too well: Amanda was denied the medical care she needed, and it nearly took her life.
More than 1 in 3 women in America now lives under an abortion ban, with more on the way.
This is exactly what Democrats need to be doing now: showing voters some fight. Trump won the fealty of his MAGA base by appealing to white Christian conservatives’ persecution complex and convincing them he was their champion. Now it’s Democrats’ turn. Post-Roe assaults on women’s reproductive freedoms means, as Hyers noted, that the audience for Democrats willing to fight back for them is far larger than Trump’s.
The famously teetotaling Trump and his MAGA allies are on their way to punch-drunk with the abortion backlash Democrats mean to exploit.
“This week, women across the state of Arizona are watching in horror as an abortion ban from 1864 with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of a woman will soon become the law of the land for Arizonans,” campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement Thursday. “This nightmare is only possible because of Donald Trump.”
Team Biden means to make Trump own it with their media buys and social media blitz.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning political photographer resigned Tuesday from the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation, blasting the group for cowardice in rejecting Trump critic Liz Cheney as the recipient of its top yearly award.
David Hume Kennerly claimed in a letter to fellow trustees that Cheney’s nomination for the Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service was nixed largely out of fear that Trump would retaliate against the organization if he’s reelected. Cheney, herself a trustee, was rejected three separate times, Kennerly wrote, as other potential honorees declined the award.
Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels will receive the 2024 medal in June, according to an email that Gleaves Whitney, the foundation’s executive director, sent to trustees Wednesday, after POLITICO broke news of Kennerly’s resignation.
Whitney said in a statement sent ahead of the Daniels announcement that the foundation’s executive committee, guided by legal counsel, believed it was not “prudent” to give the medal to Cheney given her flirtations with a presidential run.
Giving her the medal during the election cycle, Whitney said, “might be construed as a political statement and thus expose the Foundation to the legal risk of losing its nonprofit status with the IRS.”
Kennerly, who served as Ford’s White House photographer and is longtime foundation trustee, attacked that argument in his letter: “The historical irony was completely lost on you. Gerald Ford became president, in part, because Richard Nixon had ordered the development of an enemies list and demanded his underlings use the IRS against those listed.”
“If the foundation that bears the name of Gerald R. Ford won’t stand up to this real threat to our democracy,” he added, “who will?”
Kennerly is right:
A fellow board member, speaking on condition of anonymity to be candid, said the board was “really terrified” of losing their IRS tax-exempt status if they had given the award to Cheney. “They’re really, really, really concerned. It’s insanity,” the person said. It was Kennerly who first nominated her back in October, according to a second person familiar with the matter.
I’ll just add that Ford’s pardon of Nixon was the beginning of this descent into flagrant presidential impunity. Big mistake. Huge.
Trump’s allies are trying to reassure the Supreme Court that if you give Trump total immunity he would never order an enemy to be killed as was posited in the appeals court hearing. And anyway, even if he did, nobody would carry it out. So it’s all good.
As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear oral arguments in Donald Trump’s presidential immunity case, the former president’s allies are working to tamp down any concerns the justices might have about one of the more absurd and disconcerting arguments offered by any Trump lawyer ever: that a president would have to be impeached and convicted before he could be prosecuted if he were to, hypothetically, order the assassination of a political rival.
The America First Policy Institute, a think tank led by former top Trump advisers and allies, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court last month arguing that the justices should not consider this hypothetical in their decision, because the military would never follow such a command. “A president cannot order an elite military unit to kill a political rival,” says the brief, adding: “The military would not carry out a patently unlawful order from the president to kill non-military targets.”
The organization’s brief was filed on behalf of former Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie, retired Lt. General Keith Kellogg, and retired Lt. General Jerry Boykin. Kellogg added in a press release that “my time with [former] President Trump allows me to state without equivocation, he would never issue or consider such an action.”
Unfortunately, according to Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, he as president did suggest to senior administration officials that they should order U.S. troops to open fire on some of his political enemies — namely, street protesters.
“Can’t you just shoot them?” Trump asked, regarding Black Lives Matter demonstrators and others who were protesting around the White House in June 2020, according to Esper. “Just shoot them in the legs or something?” (Trump has denied this account.)
This wasn’t just some idle thought: Esper wrote in his memoir that he had to legitimately talk Trump down from the idea. “The good news — this wasn’t a difficult decision,” Esper wrote. “The bad news — I had to figure out a way to walk Trump back without creating the mess I was trying to avoid.”
Two sources, including a former senior Trump White House aide, who’ve spoken to the former president regarding his ideas about troops shooting civilians tell Rolling Stone that when Trump talks about this, he’s eager to wound — not kill — potential targets. Sometimes, he’s been reminded, including by government officials, that shooting someone in the leg can easily kill them, a point he usually dismissed outright.
Last year, Trump publicly stated that another political foe — former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who has denounced Trump as a “wannabe dictator” — deserves to be put to “DEATH.”
AFPI, for its part, has repeatedly argued that the president should designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorists and use military force to eliminate them.
Trump has no limits. And he and his followers are now delirious with revolutionary zeal. Of course he would do it. And there is no guarantee that the military wouldn’t follow his orders. He’s going to make sure that the top brass are loyalists and there’s every reason to believe that the rank and file is full of Trumpers.
Also, he is a pathological liar and no one should ever ever take his word for anything.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Tuesday interview that he does not need “primitive” ideas from former President Trump on ways to resolve the war with Russia.
In an interview with Axel Springer media outlets, including Politico, Zelensky said he was open to hearing Trump’s proposals for the war, but, he said, “If the deal is that we just give up our territories, and that’s the idea behind it, then it’s a very primitive idea.”
“I need very strong arguments. I don’t need a fantastic idea. I need a real idea because people’s lives are at stake,” Zelensky added.
The interview comes after The Washington Post reported this weekend that Trump has privately said his plan to end the war in Ukraine would include pressuring the war-torn country to give up territory, including Crimea and the Donbas border region, to Russia.
That’s actually a nice way of putting it. The more precise word is “stupid.” I don’t know if Trump thinks he can just tell Ukraine what to do but I wouldn’t be surprised. He might even think they’ll happily go along with his brilliant “idea” (also called surrender) just because he’s got such huge hands that they can’t deny him anything he wants. In reality, his “plan” is nothing more than capitulation and a green light to Vladimir Putin to “do whatever the hell he wants” as Trump once said he would encourage.
Zelensky shows a lot more spine than most Republicans. Saying this publicly is risky what with the funding on the line and the Republicans shoving each other out of the way to lick Trump’s boots. But good for him. It’s refreshing to hear it.
There was quite a bit of punditry yesterday suggesting that despite the shock of the Arizona ruling reinstating a civil war era abortion ban the issue just doesn’t have salience to swing voters. The NY Times published this earlier today:
Sigh. They spoke with 3 voters, two of whom are Trump voters. So, whatever. The Washington Post had a much better analysis:
A near-total abortion ban slated to go into effect in the coming weeks in Arizona is expected to have a seismic impact on the politics of the battleground state, testing the limits of Republican support for abortion restrictions and putting the issue front and center in November’s election.
Arizona’s conservative Supreme Court on Tuesday revived a near-total ban on abortion, invoking an 1864 law that forbids the procedure except to save a mother’s life and punishes providers with prison time. The decision supersedes Arizona’s previous rule, which permitted abortions up to 15 weeks.
The developments in Arizona are part of a wave of state actions to reckon with the future of access to reproductive care after the U.S. Supreme Court, with a conservative majority installed during Donald Trump’s presidency, overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. While several states enacted abortion restrictions as a result of overturning Roe, protecting access to reproductive care has broadly been a winning issue for Democratic candidates and for ballot measures that protect abortion access in the elections since the 2022 ruling.
As a battleground state, there is a lot on the line in Arizona’s looming elections. President Biden is running for reelection after winning the state in 2020 by fewer than 11,000 votes, and the race for a Senate seat in the state could prove crucial in determining which party controls the body next year. The balance of the statehouse is at stake this election cycle, too, with Republicans holding a one-vote majority in each chamber.
Polls show that abortion is a motivating issue for Arizona voters.
Don’t kid yourself. It matters. Will it guarantee a victory? Of course not. But a whole lot of people, most of them women are furious about this bullshit.
There’s been some talk lately about Donald Trump’s light campaign schedule compared to President Joe Biden’s who’s been visiting swing states constantly even as he’s handling some very thorny legislative and foreign policy problems. The contrast has been sharp. Trump is spending much more time on the golf course than holding rallies and even his appearances on friendly right wing media have been scarce.
Judging by his Truth Social feed, it’s fair to say that he’s stressed and it’s not about the campaign: he’s obsessed with the criminal trial that’s set to start next Monday. I suspect he never thought it would get this far — he’s tried every trick in the book to delay the proceedings and nothing so far has worked so he’s getting frantic, posting things like this throughout the day:
It would seem that these outbursts serve as some sort of self-soothing exercise.
He’s also becoming downright morose, fatuously declaring that it will be his honor to be the “modern day Mandela” and whining endlessly about the judges in his cases lamenting at one point, “How many Corrupt, Biased, Crooked Joe Biden-‘Protection Agency’ New York Judges do I have to endure before somebody steps in?” (What — and who — exactly do you suppose he has in mind when he says “step in?”)
Trump’s latest attempt to delay the trial was dispatched by a NY appeals judge who was not moved by his lawyers argument that he has a first amendment right to publicly assail witnesses and the judge’s family members and refused to lift the gag order. Likewise, his appeal for a change of venue was also denied. There are still a couple of cards he can play by asking the full appeals court to hear his argument but that won’t stop the trial from starting on Monday.
The case is referred to in the press as “the hush money case” but that’s not really what the legal case is about. We all know that Donald Trump conspired with the publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, and his consiglieri Michael Cohen to keep a lid on any tales about his philandering during the presidential campaign by using what’s known as “catch and kill.” They would “buy” the rights and then not publish it — in other words they’d pay off the accuser. Early in the campaign they’d done just that with a former Playboy model named Karen McDougal who was paid $150,000 for her story.
This excellent recitation of the known facts in the case by David Corn reminds us that the adult film actress known as Stormy Daniels had approached various media back in 2011 with the story that she’s slept with Trump at a golf event four months after his son Baron was born. Cohen had managed to scare her off then but in the wake of the release of the Access Hollywood tape just before the election, in which Trump bragged about assaulting women, she resurfaced with her story and Cohen sprang into action.
He negotiated with Daniels’ lawyer and the National Inquirer to pay her $130,000 and sign a non-disclosure agreement at which point he took the deal to Trump. Trump expressed his concerns about how this would affect his campaign if it got out and agreed to the payment telling Cohen to arrange for it to be made with Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization CFO.
Finding a way to get the money was complicated. Cohen and Weisselberg bounced around a number of different ideas without coming up with any way to front the payment so Cohen put the money up himself with the understanding that he’d be paid back. Text messages and emails show that many people in the campaign were aware this was happening including campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and Trump’s personal assistant Hope Hicks, both of whom are on the witness list for the trial.
When the Daniels story hit in January of 2018 Cohen claimed that he had done the payoff completely on his own and Trump famously said he didn’t know anything about it.
Subsequent documents found by the FBI and Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani put the lie to that, revealing that Trump had reimbursed Cohen and the reimbursement appeared in the Trump Organizations financial records as a legitimate legal expense.
Cohen went to federal prison for campaign finance violations, tax evasion, making false statements to a bank, and lying to Congress on behalf of Trump in this case. Trump is referred to in his indictment as “Individual number 1” and it’s clear that he’s the beneficiary of all of Cohen’s actions to cover up the hush money scheme. Why the feds put Cohen behind bars but never pressed the case against Trump is one of those questions to which we’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer.
Everyone assumes that Cohen is going to be shredded on the stand because he’s a convicted liar but he’s also the only one who’s paid the price for Trump’s crimes, so it’s always possible the jury will see the unfairness of that. But as Corn points out, the case doesn’t rely on Cohen’s word alone. There is a long list of people who were involved in this scheme and there is a mountain of paper evidence to back up the charges.
The Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, does not characterize the case as a “hush money” case but rather a financial fraud crime undertaken to interfere in the 2016 election, a campaign finance violation, which raises the charges to felonies. When he announced the indictment he said:
This is the business capital of the world. We regularly do cases involving false business statements. The bedrock — in fact, the basis for business integrity and a well-functioning business marketplace — is true and accurate record-keeping. That’s the charge that’s brought here, falsifying New York State business records.”
We already have a judgement in civil court to the tune of 450 million or so that says Trump routinely falsifies his business records. This time he did it to hide a personal indiscretion and violated campaign finance laws on top of it and that’s a criminal offense. As the NY Times reported in this lengthy recent profile of Bragg, although legal experts pooh-poohed this case when it was first brought, there has subsequently been a change in that opinion since a federal judge refused to allow the case to move to federal court and the presiding judge is convinced that the case should go to trial.
I have no idea if a jury will find Trump guilty. But I do know that unless the full NY Appeals Court issues a last minute stay of the case to consider his latest bogus delaying tactic, the first criminal trial of a former president will begin next Monday and the defendant, Donald Trump, will be required to attend every day it is in session. It’s going to seriously interfere with his heavy golfing schedule but he has no choice.
He says he believes this will help him gain sympathy with the voters and will no doubt appear on the courthouse steps each day to whine and carp about the case. And every day people will be reminded of Donald Trump’s sordid past and his ongoing, overwhelming corruption and criminality. He certainly knows that which is why he’s worked so hard to delay the trial rather than take advantage of what he claims to be a great political advantage and fulfill his destiny as the Nelson Mandela of Mar-a-Lago. He’s worried and he should be.
