Month: April 2024

He’s not going to find it

Trump told a rally audience last week that he would be coming up with a policy on abortion in the next week. (And yes, everyone made the same joke about “infrastructure week and health care reform in two weeks” joke when he did it.) But he does have to come up with something because his own people are waiting for the magic words he’s been promising that will put this whole thing to rest. Unfortunately for him, it’s not possible:

Former President Donald Trump is vowing to solve the abortion dilemma that has dogged Republican candidates since the fall of Roe v. Wade with his singular dealmaking acumen.

The presumptive Republican nominee, who has pledged to make a statement on abortion this week, has said for months that if elected he would “come together with all groups” and “negotiate something” that would “make both sides happy,” suggesting that “15 weeks seems to be a number that people are agreeing at.”

“We’ll end up with peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years,” he said.

The tactic has drawn praise from conservatives including Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former counselor, who called it “a reasonable conversation starter.”

“It reflects consensus,” she said of a 15- or 16-week ban, citing her own firm’s polling. “People recognize that the lack of compromise, moderation and reasonableness is on the side of the professional, political left, and the Democrats.”

But Trump, who has blasted other Republicans for speaking “inarticulately” on abortion, is running headlong into the same problem the rest of the party has encountered: There is almost certainly no deal the opposing sides of the abortion wars would accept.

“You’re getting the worst of both worlds” by pitching a 15-week ban, said a GOP political strategist who has worked on several presidential campaigns, including Trump’s failed 2020 bid. “Pro-life groups still aren’t going to be happy, and you’re still supporting a nationwide limit that Democrats will attack,” said the strategist, granted anonymity to speak critically about the former president’s rhetoric.

I’m not sure where Kellyanne gets the idea that there’s consensus on the 15 week ban but …. there isn’t. Good luck with trying to sell a national ban in the swing states that still have abortion rights.

Good luck with this. Trump instinctively understands that this is a dangerous issue for him but there’s no way out.

It’s even more ghastly when you read the whole thing.

I just thought I’d put this up as we go into the final week before the 2016 Stormy Daniels election fraud case begins on the 15th.

Think about what he said and the fact that dozens of other women have accused him of the same thing and that he’s even been held liable for defamation and sexual assault for over 90 million dollars. The man is a reprehensible reprobate on a level we’ve never encountered in presidential politics — and we’ve had some real beauts when it comes to womanizing. This man is truly disgusting.

RNC Chair Michael Whatley says the quiet part loud on Maria Bartiromo's show and portrays Ukraine as an "aggressive" adversary of the US pic.twitter.com/CS6B5tiK4h

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 7, 2024

He’s a tried and true Trumper and I’m sure he believes that Ukraine is responsible for election interference rather than Russia. That’s what Putin told Trump and now half the GOP (at least) believes it. I seriously doubt he meant to say Russia, considering Trump’s fealty to Vladimir Putin. He didn’t misspeak.

Some Republicans know otherwise. But will they have the nerve to defy Dear Leader? I’m not so sure:

.@RepMikeTurner tells @jaketapper it's "absolutely true" that Russian propaganda has "infected" a portion of the GOP base, calling out "anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor." pic.twitter.com/Jv4fAiCNf4

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) April 7, 2024

Some sobering-up music

From Jason Statler (LOLGOP) at the I Know How Much You Care substack:

Historian Thomas Zimmer, who puts out the Democracy Americana newsletter and co-hosts the “Is This Democracy” podcast, has been writing and talking extensively about the significance of Project 2025. This week on my earlyworm podcast “How are you feeling about democracy?” he told me the two main goals of Project 2025:

That diagnosis is we were not ready in 2016/17. We didn’t have the plans. We didn’t have the expertise and we didn’t have the personnel. And this must not happen again, right? 

The two big lessons they have drawn from this experience is a) we need to have more of this planning operation beforehand. We need to have our plans ready. We need to have the personnel ready. But also b) we need to purge everyone who put the brakes on what we wanted to do the last time around

Thomas and I had a great conversation about how much of this is coming from Trump and how much of this is the GOP establishment trying to define MAGA to make sure they get what they want out of Trump, whose first presidency failed to transform anything but the federal judiciary. That’s a lot! But not enough for the primal forces of nature behind America’s right wing.

You should read Zimmer’s three-part series on Project 2025. And you should also read the Foreword of Project 2025’s report on pages 33-49, as he recommends. 

But if you aren’t going to do any of that, just read one sentence of Project 2025. In fact, you already did. It’s the title of this post:

But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning.

I keep hearing Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts) saying, “Yes, of course they’re serious… ”

How serious? Statler adds, “But don’t believe me or Trump. Believe the entire Republican establishment.”

Americans' unending delusion that "this is not who we are" has made it not only impossible to see what is but what is to come. https://t.co/JO9v3Gpeg5

— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) April 7, 2024

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Counterrevolution? Counter what?

The U.S. is still processing the Civil War and its aftermath over 150 years later. When I arrived from the Midwest as a kid, southerners still tossed around yankee as a slur. Israel hasn’t had even a century to process the Holocaust and isn’t done. Now Israelis have to process Oct. 7. I’m not optimistic where this will go near term:

Six months after Oct. 7, Israelis are struggling to recover their bearings, their core, their belief that Jews are safe in Israel.

In Israel’s south and north, more than 120,000 people have been evacuated, their neighborhoods transformed into front lines. The homes sit empty, toys still scattered in front yards.

In the southern kibbutzim, where 3,000 Hamas-led fighters launched a surprise assault on that indelible Saturday morning, the residents return not to live but to serve as guides for visitors from abroad. They give heart-rending tours, recounting how 1,200 people were slaughtered and 253 hostages were dragged into Gaza, according to Israeli government figures.

Evacuees fear that their communities are becoming places frozen in time and loss. They worry that if no solution is found for them — if security is not restored along the borders they share with their enemies — the rest of the country will remain exposed, in a permanent state of existential danger.

Existential danger is going around, real and imagined. Donald Trump is hyping “stranger danger” at every rally and speech. Scary, scary brown people are coming! Diseased animals! They kill the women and rape the men!

The song is as familiar as the intractable animosities:

There is nationwide support for the military’s punishing war against Hamas, which has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says most of the dead are women and children.

The images from Gaza — of shattered cities, families killed together in their homes, malnourished children — do not often appear on the nightly news here. Most of the world thinks Israel has gone too far. Most Israelis don’t think they’ve gone far enough.

Here in the U.S., we worry that Trump is the real danger, and gun culture has gone too far. His cult wants to go further and, like him, rejoices “in the suffering of those they hate and fear.” They are at war too.

Trump, by the way, shared an article that dismisses concerns about his lack of character and values (via Meidas Touch):

“We shouldn’t much care whether our commander-in-chief is a real conservative, whether he is a role model for children or says lots of silly things, or whether he is modest or dignified. What we should care about is whether he knows we are in a war, knows who the enemy is, and knows how to win. Trump does.

Hint: You are the enemy.

Trump’s shared article also turns the fear that voters have of Trump becoming “another Hitler” or a “dictator” into a positive “reason for hope.” The writer says Trump’s enemies “rightly fear” what he and his party will accomplish, calling it a “counterrevolution.” Kind of sounds like an insurrection:

“His enemies hate him with an indescribable fierceness. “Another Hitler,” they say, “elect him and he will be a dictator.” We should take this hysteria as reason for hope. The America-haters rightly fear that he and his party are on the threshold of a successful counterrevolution.”

I’m confused by this America-hater thing. The American Revolution birthed a democratic republic on this continent. And a Trump counterrevolution would do … what exactly? Or have they even thought that far ahead?

It’s all very exhausting.

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Depending on your worldview, this coming Monday’s super-hyped solar eclipse may be interpreted as: a). A sign of the impending apocalypse, b). A sign that once in a blue moon, the moon blows in and obscures the sun, giving humanity the impression (for a few heart stopping moments) that the apocalypse has, in fact, arrived, or c). A dollar sign for event promoters, hoteliers, tow truck drivers, and people who sell cheap cardboard sunglasses.

I know. I’m a cynical bastard.

If the “Great North American Eclipse” forces people to tear themselves away from their 5 inch iPhone screen to gaze up at The Big Sky, and ponder the awesomeness and vastness of the cosmos (and most importantly, humankind’s relative insignificance in the grand scheme of things)…then I’m for it (I Googled “can you view the eclipse with a…” and right after “mirror”, “sunglasses” and “welding mask”, there it was- friggin’ “iPhone”).

Do me a favor. If you’re lucky enough to make it through the horrendous traffic and wriggle through the madding crowd to snag a perfect observation point in one of the areas that will experience totality…don’t view it through a 5-inch screen…LOOK at it! Utilize some form of eye protection, of course, but experience the ACTUAL PHENOMENON! Thanks.

After all, as Carl Sagan observed:

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

BTW, here’s evolutionary perspective on why we sophisticated, technically-advanced humanoids still get the tiniest little lizard brain-fueled twitch when Big Light Go Away:

With that in mind, please enjoy this special mixtape that I have assembled to accompany the solar system’s ultimate Laserium show (don’t worry-I didn’t forget the Floyd, man!).

The Rolling Stones- “2000 Light Years from Home”

Paul Weller- “Andromeda”

Tommy Keene- “Astronomy”

The Orb- “Backside of the Moon”

Kate Bush- “The Big Sky”

Soundgarden- “Black Hole Sun”

Pink Floyd- “Brain Damage/Eclipse”

Crosby, Stills, & Nash- “Dark Star”

The Ian Gillian Band- “Five Moons”

Moxy- “Moon Rider”

King Crimson- “Moonchild”

Nick Drake- “Pink Moon”

Elton John- “Rocket Man”

David Bowie- “Space Oddity”

Liz Phair- “Stars and Planets”

Yes- “Starship Trooper”

Bonnie Hayes- “Total Eclipse of the Heart”

The Church- “Under the Milky Way”

Paul McCartney & Wings- “Venus + Mars”

Gamma- “Voyager”

More reviews at Den of Cinema

— Dennis Hartley

Tom Nichols says it all

Trump’s making us all crazy and we have to resist:

The 2024 election has become a kind of waking nightmare in which many of us stare at Donald Trump as he unleashes some new attack on any number of targets: a judge’s daughter, immigrants, the rule of law, American national security, the Constitution. And we blink and shake our heads, stunned to think that many of our fellow citizens are eager to put this autocratic ignoramus back in the White House.

In a more normal time in American life, people had to leave politics for having a nanogram of Trump’s baggage. Think of the late Senator Thomas Eagleton, the 1972 Democratic vice-presidential pick who had to drop out of the race because he’d been treated for depression. The idea—how old-fashioned it seems now—was that America could not risk any possible mental-health issues not only in the president, but even in the person next in the line of succession. Today, however, we have a former president who exhibits all kinds of signs of a disordered personality—and yet the big worry among many voters (and too much of the media) is whether his opponent is missing a step because he’s roughly 42 months older than Trump.

All of this is enervating and exhausting. But that’s the point: Trump is succeeding because he is, to use Steve Bannon’s infamous expression, seeking to “flood the zone with shit.” Trump’s opponents are flummoxed by how he provokes one new outrage on top of another, and each time they believe he’s finally—finally—gone too far. Bombarding the public space with deranged statements and dangerous threats, however, is not a mistake; it’s a strategy.

By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil. His campaign’s goal is to turn voters into moral zombies who can no longer tell the difference between Stormy and Hunter or classified documents and personal laptops, who cannot parse what a “bloodbath” means, who no longer have the ability to be shocked when a political leader calls other human beings “animals” and “vermin.”

Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.

He points out that the polls show that it’s working, that millions are in a “fugue state called ‘undecided'” as if the past eight years never happened.

He acknowledges how hard it is to stay engaged. I feel that. Sometimes it makes me physically ill to watch him and seeing his cult followers and listening to what they say makes me profoundly depressed. I’m stunned that he’s still a threat after all we’ve seen. But Nichols is right:

But to ignore Trump is a mistake. To dismiss him as an incompetent clown is dangerous. Voters who care about democracy, who care about the future of freedom in America and around the world, must steel themselves to stay in the political process. We do not need to explode over every attempt to bait and troll us. Instead, we can let every one of his manic outbursts increase our resolve to speak clearly and plainly in defense of our system of government and our democratic culture—especially to family and friends who might be treading water in the ever-filling Trump septic pool.

…Think of how previous generations engaged with politics: by reading a newspaper, watching an hour of news, and talking with friends and neighbors and other citizens in their community. When I was a boy, Americans managed to confront immense questions of national importance without withdrawing into comfort zones and information silos.

Now we face an existential threat to our democracy. Perhaps we might think about how to revive the civic practices and sensibilities—especially staying informed without becoming overwhelmed or falling into despair—that got us through those earlier crises.

He adds this advice, which I think is good:

Many people assume that folks like me who write about politics are news junkies. They think we dive into the cable shows in the morning and lull ourselves to sleep at night with the latest podcasts. Yes, I pay more attention to the news (and to books about politics, and other sources) than do most people, and sometimes—during a crisis or a big event when I know I’ll have to write—I do, in fact, just stay glued to my TV and my laptop. But otherwise, that level of news consumption is not healthy. I don’t do it, and neither should you.

You might think that, come 5 p.m., I am immersed in cable news. (Hey, sometimes I’m on those shows, and sure, there are days when I watch for hours.) But let me put in a word here for indulging in regular mental breaks. In my case, as many of you know, that means vintage television: Although I enjoy catching up on the news over dinner, more often you’ll find me chuckling with my wife over the clipped, staccato dialogue of Adam-12 or having a laugh with a rerun of Cheers. (“Hey, what’s happening, Norm?” “Well, it’s a dog-eat-dog world, Sammy, and I’m wearing Milk-Bone underwear.”)

If you’re going to make it to November, stay up to date, but don’t forget to unplug now and then. (Reading The Atlantic regularly, of course, is a great way to stay informed.) Few of us are required to have instantaneous knowledge of the day’s events; we can catch up on the news in various ways once or twice a day. Give yourself a break. You’re going to need it.

I too am a news junkie but I do what he does. I’d lose my mind if I stayed glued to developments 24/7. I do write late at night three times a week but I always turn it off in the evening. I find that nordic noirs never fail to cheer me up. And I do this even though it’s my job to follow this stuff closely. Checking in once or twice a day is enough for any normal person. But everyone needs to stay engaged. We can’t let this monster win by turning us into moral zombies. We just can’t.

It’s still happening

If you wonder why so many Republicans are now backing Vladimir Putin and are hostile to Ukraine in its fight to remain a free sovereign country, you don’t have to look much farther than the fact that they are members of a cult that worships a man who seems to have an unusual affinity for Valdimir Putin. That certainly informs the cultists’ beliefs. But just as important is the right wing media’s eager dissemination of Russian talking points. Even some Republicans are becoming alarmed:

The most striking example came this week. In an interview with Puck News’s Julia Ioffe, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) — none other than the GOP chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee — flat-out said that Russian propaganda had “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.”

McCaul suggested conservative media was to blame.

“There are some more nighttime entertainment shows that seem to spin, like, I see the Russian propaganda in some of it — and it’s almost identical [to what they’re saying on Russian state television] — on our airwaves,” McCaul said.

He also cited “these people that read various conspiracy-theory outlets that are just not accurate, and they actually model Russian propaganda.”

Asked which Republicans specifically he was talking about, McCaul said it was “obvious,” before staff intervened and asked that the conversation go off the record.

These comments are the most significant to date, but they’re not the only ones.

A GOP impasse over additional funding for Ukraine’s defense against Russia — combined recently with Tucker Carlson’s deeply weird promotion of Russia and Trump’s comments about not defending NATO allies from Moscow — has apparently occasioned some self-reflection among Republicans about their colleagues and allies:

Former vice president Mike Pence, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and a top aide to Sen. Todd Young (R-Ill.) have warned their party against serving as apologists for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Recent presidential candidate Nikki Haley said Trump’s comments about not defending NATO allies, among others, “empower Putin.”

And Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) shot back at criticism from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) about Cornyn’s support for Ukraine, urging Paxton to “spend less time pushing Russian propaganda.”

Around the same time, former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said there is now “a Putin wing of the Republican Party.”

Of course, they’ve known about this for a long time, haven’t they?

House GOP leaders in 2016 privately joked about Trump being compromised by Russia, as later reported by The Washington Post.

The day after The Post broke the news that the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee, then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) quipped that perhaps Russia had gotten Democrats’ opposition research about Trump.

“There’s two people, I think, Putin pays,” McCarthy added, “[Rep. Dana] Rohrabacher and Trump.” (Rohrabacher was an openly pro-Russian Republican from California.)

Then-House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) quickly tried to steer the conversation in another direction and urged people to be discreet.

Trump managed to convince most of the country that there really wasn’t anything wrong with Russia helping his campaign because the Mueller investigation didn’t find that Trump directly conspired with them. The fact that one of his campaign managers, a man in hock to Russian oligarchs who had been working for Russian puppets for years, was handing campaign information to a Russian agent, never really penetrated because he managed to flood the zone with BS. It’s still one of the most shocking examples of campaign treachery in American history. And you can bet that it’s being repeated in dozens of different ways.

Half the world’s dictators are doing everything they can to get that half-wit back in power because they know that he’s completely incompetent and subject to flattery. Republicans know this too and they’re going along with it.

Rigging the election for Dear Leader

And Trump and his henchmen are lying about it:

Former President Donald Trump picked up a phone to pressure a Nebraska state senator to revive a winner-take-all system of awarding its Electoral College votes for president, sources told the Nebraska Examiner on Friday.

Trump, the sources said, called State Sen. Tom Brewer, who chairs the State Legislature’s Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee, and urged him to take action to get a winner-take-all bill up for debate in the waning days of the 2024 session.

Four working days remain in the 60-day session.

Brewer, the sources said, responded that it doesn’t work that way. The deadline is past to vote a bill out of a committee and get it passed this year. In addition, the Speaker of the Legislature on Friday said it’s also too late to amend a bill into another bill.

Trump then reportedly told Brewer, who is term-limited this year, that his political career was over.

Brewer, 65, is a decorated military veteran who represents Nebraska’s Sandhills area.

When asked about the call Friday evening, Chris LaCivita, the co-manager of the Trump campaign, said Trump “absolutely, 110% did not speak with anyone in the State of Nebraska in the last six weeks.”

Brewer, when asked about the call initially, told the Examiner that it was a private conversation and he would not comment. Later, when told a news story was going to be posted, the senator texted that he would deny there was a conversation.

Three state senators said they had heard the story of the call directly from Brewer. They spoke to the Examiner only on the condition that they not be named for fear of reprisals.

The call was the culmination of a weeklong pressure campaign by Republicans, fueled in large part on social media from a conservative talk show host, to persuade Nebraska lawmakers to throw out the state’s 33-year-old law to award electoral votes.

They’re all in on it:

Gov. Jim Pillen joined the arm-twisting effort Tuesday, calling on the officially nonpartisan Legislature to take up a bill to return to winner-take-all, which is the system used in 48 states. Trump followed that with a post on social media, praising Pillen.

“Governor Jim Pillen of Nebraska, a very smart and popular Governor, who has done some really great things, came out today with a very strong letter in support of returning Nebraska’s Electoral Votes to a Winner-Take-All System,” Trump said on social media platform Truth Social. “Most Nebraskans have wanted to go back to this system for a very long time, because it’s what 48 other States do – It’s what the Founders intended, and it’s right for Nebraska. Thank you Governor for your Bold leadership. Let’s hope the Senate does the right thing. Nebraskans, respectfully ask your Senators to support this Great Bill!”

They aren’t going to quit:

LaCivita, the Trump campaign manager, said the former president is still “100% committed” to getting Nebraska law changed, though the opportunity to do that during the regular 2024 session is “diminishing.”

“But a special session is a possibility,” he added. “It’s what a vast majority of Nebraskans support.”

I think it’s obvious LaCivita is lying. This is exactly what Trump has done in the past (Zelensky, Raffensperger etc.) and there is no reason to believe he didn’t do it this time since a whole bunch of people said the recipient of the threatening call told them about it right after it happened. That man is a coward for failing to come forward especially since he’s term limited out. But then Trump’s cult members are aggressive and sometimes dangerous so he knows that it’s risky if he wants to maintain the status in GOP circles that he has had. Nonetheless, this ex-marine is no longer a patriot no matter what he once did in the service.

Hopefully there will not be the appetite to hold a special session to fulfill Dear Leader’s rigging scheme.

I saw John Kasich, an MSNBC contributor, say last week that while he doesn’t agree with doing this so late in the game, it’s also true that Democrats changed the rules in 2020 so… both sides are wrong. You may recall that the reason states changed some election rules was to allow people the ability to vote during the deadly pandemic without killing themselves. They certainly didn’t change any of the electoral college rules which the Trump people did after the election and continue to attempt today. But hey… both sides, amirite?

I understand that we are supposed to respect people who are voting for Trump because it’s very rude not to. But how can anyone respect people who would vote for this?

How about this? Trump appeared on Hugh Hewitt’s show and said this:

HH: Now you have said you’ll debate him anywhere, anytime. Do you think he’ll agree to any debates?

DJT: Yeah, anywhere, anytime.

HH: Do you think he’ll agree?

DJT: I don’t think so, but I hope he does. I think what happened is you know that white stuff that they happened to find, which happened to be cocaine in the White House, I don’t know, I think something’s going on there, because I watched this State of the Union, and he was all jacked up at the beginning. By the end, he was fading fast. There’s something going on there. I want to debate. And I think debates, with him, at least, should be drug tested. I want a drug test.

HH: Mr. President, are you suggesting President Biden’s using cocaine?

DJT: I don’t know what he’s using, but that was not, hey, he was higher than a kite. And by the way, it was the worst, it was the worst address I’ve ever seen, the State of the Nation. I’ll tell you, State of the Union, that’s not State of the Union, because he doesn’t represent us properly. That, I can tell you. But he’s obviously, he’s being helped in some way, because most of the time, he looks like he’s falling asleep. And all of a sudden, he walked up there and did a poor job. But he was all jacked up.

As Dan Pfeiffer reported in his newsletter, the press ignored this to discuss Trump’s “policy” on Gaza (which was that Israel needs to “finish the war fast” because “they’re losing the PR War.”)

As Pfeiffer notes:

When it comes to Trump — and only Trump, the press has abandoned Roger Ailes’ “Orchestra Pit Theory of Politics,” As the former GOP consultant turned Fox News honcho/overall terrible human explained:

If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls into the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?

Trump delivers his speeches from the orchestra pit, but the press covers the rare moments he climbs out and gets back on stage.

The only “news” show to properly cover this heinous accusation was Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live:

Trump said in a recent interview that President Biden "was all jacked up at the beginning," but "by the end, he was fading fast."

It almost sounds like Donald Trump knows exactly what it feels like to be on cocaine

Roll Trump video

Watch

SNL = spot on pic.twitter.com/hIDxcJV64H

— RiotWomenn (@riotwomennn) April 7, 2024