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To Me!

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 7, 2024

Saith the king

“To Me!” cried Donald Trump, brandishing stacks of news clipping during his Manhattan criminal trial. His Republican supplicants rushed to their king dressed like him.

It is supreme irony how readily MAGA Republicans abandon their own heritage of freedom, of democratic self-rule, of the fundamentals of law dating from the Magna Carta, British common law, and William Blackstone. They’ve replaced it all with the Law of Trump. Their patriotism, like Trump’s business prowess, is a sham, disposable if power is on the line. And commitment to the principle of equal justice under law? As the expression goes: For my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law.

Half a dozen of his businesses have gone bankrupt, including casinos. Trump’s charitable foundation was a sham, dismantled, and its assets distributed to genuine charites. Trump University was judged a fraud, sued and shuttered. The Trump Organization is banned from doing business in the state of New York. Trump has been civilly judged for sexual assault. Last week, Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of business fraud.

Trump could (in theory) be in jail by the time of the Republican convention in July. He has three other federal cases pending and possibly more state and federal cases being assembled.

Trump’s greatest achievement in bankruptcy is the moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party.

Yet MAGA Republicans hope to re-elect the convicted leader of a crime syndicate to the White House. Now a felon, Trump cannot possess a gun. They want to hand him the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

That’s not all bankrupt Republicans want to hand him.

Trump promises in a second term to weaponize the Department of Justice to punish his enemies while, as is his M.O., claiming it is payback for what was done to hold Trump the Remorseless, like a commoner, accountable to the rule of law Republicans have abandoned like American democracy.

His lackeys in Congress now hope to restructure the law to enable their liege lord to escape further punishment:

In the wake of Donald Trump’s felony convictions, House Speaker Mike Johnson told his GOP conference this week that he has a “three-pronged approach” in mind to respond to the former president’s prosecutions. The first involves “the appropriations process” — Republicans want to defund prosecutors they don’t like — and another prong relates to “oversight,” which refers to another round of partisan, conspiratorial investigations.

But the Louisiana congressman also vowed this week to make use of “the legislative process, through bills that will be advancing through our committees and put it on the floor for passage.”

Axios provides more detail:

  • Conservatives want a floor vote on a bill that would allow current or former presidents to move any state case brought against them — such as the one in New York that resulted in Trump’s conviction — to federal court, according to multiple House Republican sources.
  • Meanwhile, Johnson told Republicans in a conference meeting Tuesday that the House GOP will target DOJ through attempts at increased oversight, funding cuts and other means, according to a source in the room.

Moving state cases to federal courts would enable Trump, if reelected, either to shut down his prosecutions or pardon himself if convicted. The president has no pardon power in state cases. Sneaky bastards.

Oh, and the hissy fits they’ll throw now that former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is headed to jail. Greg Sargent explains:

A judge just ordered longtime Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon to surrender to prison on July 1st after his conviction for defying the Jan. 6th committee’s subpoena. Not surprisingly, Trump and MAGA have already exploded in rage. Making this worse, Bannon is one of the leading pro-Trump figures calling on Trump to jail Democrats without cause if he wins the White House—and Bannon’s jail time will only fuel that mania. We talked to Eric Columbus, a lawyer who represented the Jan. 6th committee, about the alarming signals this sends about the perils of a second Trump presidency. Listen to this episode here.

Meantime, Bannon blustered like Baghdad Bob outside the courthouse on Thursday that his going to prison means MAGA is winning.

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Utterly Outrageous

Published by digby on June 6, 2024

Nobody comes close to Thomas but it’s noteworthy that the justices who’ve accepted the next highest amounts are Alito and Scalia. And you’ll notice that Kavanaugh only lists $100 but that’s only because his big “gift” was from an unknown benefactor who paid off hundreds of thousands in debts before he assumed the bench.

It’s quite a little club.

This is the definition of corruption. The man is taking millions of dollars in “gifts” which anyone with a brain can see are actually bribes.

Yes Virginia, They’re Coming For Birth Control

Published by digby on June 6, 2024

Those of us who’ve been writing about the right wing assault on women’s autonomy and reproductive rights for years have always said that contraception was on the menu. How can it not be? We know these people don’t actually care about babies or they wouldn’t be against helping poor mothers care for their children. They wouldn’t be trying to destroy public education and they wouldn’t insist on denying health care to kids and their families. No, their objections to abortion are all about misogyny and patriarchy. Allowing women to manage their own reproduction, whether through abortion or birth control, makes them more than gestation vessels and that makes them much more important than these people can allow.

As Ryan Cooper at the Prospect spells out. they mean it:

Unhinged conservative fanatics are building up momentum to ban the most common types of contraception, principally by lying that they actually induce abortions somehow, and they are finding success at the state and local level. As Lauren Weber reports at The Washington Post, Republicans in both Missouri and Louisiana recently blocked pro-contraception bills by lying that they cause abortions. A right-wing Idaho think tank is urging the state to ban the morning-after pill and IUDs by claiming, falsely, that they are “abortifacients.”

Iowa’s Republican government has already ended subsidies for emergency contraception for victims of sexual assault. And among the victories of the so-called Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF)—the most important right-wing legal group, which has won 15 Supreme Court cases since 2011—is Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which ended the requirement for employer-based insurance to cover contraception.

Even as these events transpire, sundry GOP elites are nonetheless insisting that nuh-uh, we definitely aren’t coming for your birth control pills, pinky swear. A National Republican Senatorial Committee memo recently urged GOP senators to express their support for contraception. Axios reports the memo “tells its candidates to highlight their support for a bill introduced by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) that aims to increase the availability of birth control options.” Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) put out a statement claiming, “There is no threat to access to contraception.”

But then on Wednesday, those same Senate Republicans filibustered a pro-contraception bill. This contradictory stance naturally required some excuses. “It’s a phony vote because contraception to my knowledge is not illegal. It’s not unavailable,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX). Britt lobbed overheated claims that the bill would require schools to hand out condoms to schoolchildren.

As Cooper points out the Republican Senators really don’t want to take the heat for denying birth control access. Why should they? They have the courts to do that for them:

In his concurrence in the Dobbs decision, Clarence Thomas took aim at Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized contraceptive use among married couples. Since Roe relied on substantive due process, “we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” he wrote, referring to decisions that legalized gay sex and marriage. ADF leader Alan Sears told The New Yorker that outright banning the pill was a reach goal. “It may be that the day will come when people say the birth-control pill was a mistake,” he said.

This is how the modern conservative policy apparatus functions. Crazed extremists decide on a terrible goal, legal spear-carriers recruit candidates for (often fraudulent) lawsuits, momentum builds, and eventually partisan hacks on the bench give their rubber stamp of approval. What was deranged lunacy five years ago is settled law today. Thomas’s opinion was a signal to ADF to gear up this process again.

This is absolutely correct. They have a strategy and it’s working. Contraception is definitely on their agenda because even if there are Republicans who don’t think it’s politically wise, they are unwilling to buck their rabid base in which the religious right is heavily represented. Even Trump won’t buck them.

And the die is cast in any case. The right has put five far right Catholic extremists on the court. This is their agenda too.

They’re Nervous About His Revenge Plans

Published by digby on June 6, 2024

They know it just doesn’t sound right for a president to sound like a cheap mob boss

Fox ran this:

That is a lie. Trump is most definitely saying that he wants revenge against his enemies. And they have now ginned up a whole rationale for doing it. He and his henchmen, which includes many national elected officials, is that they have to wreak vengeance in order to stop the cycle of revenge. It’s a dizzying, gaslight but it’s broken out all over the GOP.

But something seems to have occurred to some people at Fox, including Sean Hannity, that this might not be the best idea. But Trump is having none of it:

Of course he’s going to get revenge.

Let’s go to the other tape[s} shall we?

How about this, from this week?

If you think Trump doesn’t understand the stakes, think again:

Trump’s Conviction Hurts Him With The Right Voters

Published by digby on June 6, 2024

In the NY Times post-verdict survey of 2,000 people they’d surveyed before there was a perceptible shift toward Biden. It was only a couple of points but what’s meaningful about it is who shifted. Nate Cohn wrote:

Perhaps not surprisingly, the swings were relatively pronounced among young, nonwhite, less engaged and low-turnout voters. In fact, 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s previous supporters who are Black now say they back Mr. Biden.

Only 2% of non-Black swing voters shifted to Biden. Apparently, Trump’s racist belief that Black voters would like him more because he’s a convicted criminal may not be such a great idea after all.

Dan Pfeiffer writes:

This comports with my most optimistic take on this election. Trump’s lead is very fragile because it depends on people who disagree with him on most issues, don’t particularly like him, and have a history of voting for Democrats, including Joe Biden.

The defining characteristic of the persuadable voter universe is their disdain for politics and their abstention from political news. While the conviction was the biggest news event in the 2024 campaign, large swathes of the electorate saw little to no coverage of the verdict. In this era, you have to actively seek out the news. It is no longer fed to you via social media IV. In fact, Meta is actively suppressing political news as they try to pivot away from politics.

According to Data for Progress:

Notably, as of the time this poll was fielded between May 31 and June 1, only 37% of swing voters said they had heard, seen, or read “a lot” about Trump being convicted, compared with 61% of likely voters overall. 

Democrats have an imperative to keep Trump’s verdict in the headlines and relate it to the larger story we are telling about why Trump is the wrong choice. We absolutely cannot let the felony conviction of the potential next President get memory-holed like so many of Trump’s previous transgressions.  

I agree with this. In order to penetrate the minds of swing voters who are tuned out, apathetic and pessimistic you have to repeat things over and over again. Convicted felon Donald Trump understands this and it works.

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Going Off The Rails

Published by digby on June 6, 2024

I linked to this in passing in an earlier post but I thought you should be able to read the whole thing with a gift link. These Republicans have worked themselves into a frenzy, the likes of which I haven’t seen since Benghazi and “her emails.” It’s pretty shocking.

An excerpt:

The intensity of anger and open desire for using the criminal justice system against Democrats after the verdict surpasses anything seen before in Mr. Trump’s tumultuous years in national politics. What is different now is the range of Republicans who are saying retaliation is necessary and who are no longer cloaking their intent with euphemisms.

Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to Mr. Trump who still helps guide his thinking on policy, blared out a directive on Fox News after a jury found Mr. Trump guilty of falsifying financial records to cover up a 2016 campaign hush-money payment to a porn actress. Mr. Miller posed a series of questions to Republicans at every level, including local district attorneys. “Is every House committee controlled by Republicans using its subpoena power in every way it needs to right now?” he demanded. “Is every Republican D.A. starting every investigation they need to right now?”“Every facet of Republican Party politics and power has to be used right now to go toe-to-toe with Marxism and beat these Communists,” Mr. Miller said, using the catchall slurs Trump allies routinely use against Democrats.

Stephen K. Bannon, the former chief strategist to Mr. Trump, said in a text message to The New York Times on Tuesday that now was the moment for obscure Republican prosecutors around the country to make a name for themselves by prosecuting Democrats.

Mr. Bannon was convicted in a federal prosecution for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena in the Jan. 6 investigation, and faces trial in September in a New York state court — before the same judge who oversaw Mr. Trump’s trial — in a charity fraud case. “There are dozens of ambitious backbencher state attorneys general and district attorneys who need to ‘seize the day’ and own this moment in history,” Mr. Bannon wrote.

And Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee who is in contention to be Mr. Trump’s running mate, wrote on X that President Biden was “a demented man propped up by wicked & deranged people” and it was now time to “fight fire with fire” — using flame emojis to represent the fire.

Read the whole thing and then ask yourself how anyone could worry about Biden’s age in light of this insanity.

They have completely abandoned any pretense of caring about the rule of law. It’s amazing:

Among those calling for eye-for-an-eye prosecutions is John C. Yoo, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor best known as the author of once-secret Bush administration legal memos declaring that the president can lawfully violate legal limits on torturing detainees and wiretapping without warrants.

“In order to prevent the case against Trump from assuming a permanent place in the American political system, Republicans will have to bring charges against Democratic officers, even presidents,” Professor Yoo wrote in an essay published by The National Review.

He added: “Only retaliation in kind can produce the deterrence necessary to enforce a political version of mutual assured destruction; without the threat of prosecution of their own leaders, Democrats will continue to charge future Republican presidents without restraint.”

I’m afraid that if the Supreme Court is similarly afflicted with Fox News brain rot, we could easily see the immunity argument upheld. They will say it’s to “to spare the country” the tit-for-tat this is promising.

We really are going off the rails. For real.

Scattered Thoughts On D-Day Anniversary

Published by digby on June 6, 2024

I posted my D-Day piece yesterday if you missed it. Biden also drew a line between then and now in his speech today.

Biden’s speech was very good but naturally the cable nets gave it short shrift. The Hunter Biden trial is much more important apparently. Here’s the whole thing in its entirety if you have the time to give it a listen:

Pick Your Fighter

Published by digby on June 6, 2024

Trump’s short list

Axios reports:

Former President Trump has requested financial and other documents from eight potential VP picks as he formalizes his vetting, an official tells Axios…

Sen. J.D. Vance (Ohio)
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum
Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.)
Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.)
Ben Carson, former HUD Secretary
Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.)
Rep. Byron Donalds (Fla.)
Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.)

Between the lines: We’re told the list, reported earlier by Politico and others, is very much subject to change.

Kristi’s dog murder did her in.

I’ve been high on Burgum because of the “central casting” factor. The guys looks like he could be on the three dollar bill. He’s also a billionaire businessman which could be a potent selling point for the rubes who think Trump is a great businessman. And he’s proven himself a to be a totally shameless sycophant.

I suspect Vance and Cotton are the two Trump would really like to have on the ballot because they’re monumental assholes . The three Black choices make me think they’re just there to prove how much he wants to appeal to Black voters by putting a Black man on the ballot. I’ll be surprised if he pulls the trigger on that because as he said on the Apprentice, he doubts that white people will accept it. (He wouldn’t…)

Update:


Apparently Burgum has a “hot wife.”

[H]e may also have something else going for him: his wife, Kathryn Burgum. “Trump likes people who are rich and have hot wives,” a source not associated with Trump’s campaign but closely following the vetting process for potential VP picks told Politico.

Hatred Never Dies

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 6, 2024

Racists emboldened

Guess by whom?

The father of a Baraboo High School graduate forcibly pulled the district superintendent away from his daughter as she crossed the stage to receive a congratulatory handshake during the school’s graduation ceremony Friday.

The man, who is not being named to protect his daughter’s identity, ran onto the stage just after the girl had been handed her diploma and began working her way down a line of school officials shaking hands.

Before she could get to district Superintendent Rainey Briggs, the man, wearing a white polo shirt and baseball cap, grabbed Briggs by his right arm and pushed him away.

“That’s my daughter,” the man can be heard saying in video of the ceremony by TV43 Baraboo.

Briggs can be heard telling the man, “You better get up off me man. Get away from me bro” as staff working the graduation and three Baraboo police officers including the school resource officer intervened. At one point, a voice can be heard saying, “I don’t want her touching him.”

Police escorted the man out of the school following the incident.

School Board President Kevin Vodak, board members Gwynne Peterson, Katie Kalish and Amy DeLong, and Baraboo High School Principal Steve Considine shared the stage with Briggs. The man did not interact with any of them but only confronted Briggs.

In a statement, district spokesperson Hailey Wagner said a disorderly conduct charge for the man was referred to the Sauk County District Attorney’s Office.

“We would like to emphasize that the safety and well-being of our students, staff, and community members is a top priority,” the statement said.

Friday’s graduation ceremony came during a particularly fraught time in the district. A large group of residents, including a former district teacher who worked in the district prior to Briggs’ tenure, have voiced numerous complaints against Briggs, other administrators and the School Board.

A group is attempting a recall election of the school board president. The Black man assaulted is the district superintendent.

David Cay Johnston:

Racism lives in this Wisconsin town, where a father stormed the graduation stage to ensure his daughter didn’t shake hands with the school superintendent, who is black. Two years ago, graduates to the same school posed for a heil Hitler photo. What’s most troubling is that the others on stage didn’t rush to defend the superintendent, though police and others in the audience did.

Somebody tagged a restaurant near here with a large red swastika and upside-down pitchfork:

Arriving to work Tuesday morning, an Avenue M employee saw a large red swastika and upside-down pitchfork painted on the storefront facing Merrimon Avenue, and sent a photo to Tony Creed, co-owner of the restaurant, around 7:45 a.m.

By the time Ralph Lonow, the other owner of the restaurant, received the photo around 10 a.m. and an Asheville police officer called to inform him about the graffiti, most of the symbol had already been removed by a nearby café owner, he said.

“That’s just testament to how great this neighborhood is,” Lonow said, referring to the removed paint.

David Moritz, a neighbor whose father is a Holocaust survivor,

stood out front of the restaurant for a couple hours, waving the flag of Israel. About an hour in, a brown sedan drove by, and a driver called out “stay right there, I’ll be back to get you,” Moritz said.

A little later, a masked person ran toward him and another flag holder, he said. The assailant threw items at him, including an egg that broke on his shirt. While he was being chased off, Moritz said the masked person vocalized threats.

I spotted the men but had no idea why they were there with flags until this morning. Hate has no season.

“It’s no longer an isolated incident,” said Rochelle Reich, the executive director of Congregation Beth Israel. “It’s now a pattern.”

Listen, this kind of race and ethnic hatred may never die but it can be buried. We can make it so socially unacceptable that racists dare not voice it in public. That they feel emboldened to do so now, and redouble their efforts to subjugate women, is a product not only of social changes that produced MAGA and Trump, but of our own post-Civil Rights era complacency.

It’s not enough to narrowly beat them at the ballot box. Trump, MAGA, and resurgent fascism must be refuted overwhelmingly this fall. What are you going to do about it?

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80 Years Later

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 6, 2024

We’re still fighting fascism

Gen. George Patton autograph my late FIL picked up during the war.

June 6 is my parents’ anniversary. As a Boomer, I remember the date first for that. My father was too young for WWII. But my late father-in-law was not. He arrived in Europe after the D-Day invasion, but fighting as an infantryman and a scout for the 100th Infantry Division marked him for life. His shelves were filled with books on the war, on Hitler and the Nazis. As a young man, how could the rest of his life compare with that experience? But he rarely discussed the fighting.

 
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In his things after he died, we found a Bronze Star Ken never mentioned. I discovered the Pentagon gave them out like party favors to soldiers who’d been in theater a decade or so after the war. So it was not something he’d brag about. He valued another medal more.

We brought him to a Democratic fundraiser dinner once where Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia was the featured speaker. (You remember him. He lost three limbs in Vietnam.) They’d invited veterans. Our table was full of men Ken’s age. On his jacket, Ken wore his Combat Infantryman Badge earned for being “personally present, under fire, and engaging the enemy in ground forces combat.”

During the meal, a head suddenly popped in next to mine. It was Cleland, working the room from his wheelchair with his one arm. Cleland looked at Ken across the table and said, “I see that CIB, brother. You know what it’s all about.”

Old men teared up around the table.

Eighty years later, Europe still remembers the soldiers who liberated their countries from fascism. They are literally a dying breed.

President Joe Biden was in Normandy to deliver a speech today in remembrance. Had Biden’s 2024 opponent won in 2020, any speech he were forced to give would be a cold, empty atrocity. Just thinking about it makes me want to puke.

Like the women still fighting to restore the rights the Axis of Trump took from them, I can’t believe we still have to fight this fascist shit.

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