After the jokes at D.C.’s “nerd prom” last night, SNL’s Colin Jost got serious.
I remember decency. Sort of.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Joe Biden’s sharpest barb at the White House Correspondents’ dinner was about him running against a six year old.
The Guardian this morning uses a few more words for characterizing the “former factory worker” who rose from obscurity to serve as North Carolina’s Republican lieutenant governor. Mark Robinson is his party’s candidate for governor this November. It might be news that Republicans selected a Black candidate to run against state Attorney General Josh Stein. But if Donald Trump is a six year-old, it’s less clear how one might describe Robinson:
Born into poverty and working in a furniture factory while attending college, Robinson quit his job and dropped out of school to begin speaking at conservative events. (Robinson, if he wins, would be the first North Carolina governor without a college degree elected since 1937.)
Robinson beat a host of competitors for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in 2020, winning about a third of the primary vote. He faced the state representative Yvonne Holley, an African American Democrat from Raleigh. Holley’s campaign focused on North Carolina’s urban territory while largely ignoring rural areas of the state, while Robinson barnstormed through each of the state’s 100 counties. He won narrowly but outperformed Trump’s margin over Biden by about 100,000 votes.
That’s not headline news. Democrat Roy Cooper outperformed both Trump and Biden to win the governorship. That’s how state elections here roll. State voters have a moderate streak and a history of ticket-splitting when it comes to local vs. national races. Republicans find in Robinson a candidate “who could not be easily accused of bigotry.” On his face (literally), Robinson appeared to provide Republicans with some cover against such accusations, “until people began to pay attention to what he said,” the Guardian reports.
Such as?
Robinson has shared conspiracist comments about the moon landing and 9/11. He has attacked the idea of women in positions of leadership. His swipes at Black culture and public figures are talk-radio fodder, describing Barack Obama as a “worthless anti-American atheist” and suggesting Michelle Obama is a man.
“Half of black Democrats don’t realize they are slaves and don’t know who their masters are. The other half don’t care,” he wrote in one Facebook post. He described the movie Black Panther in another as the product of “an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic marxist”, and wrote: “How can this trash, that was only created to pull the shekels out of your schvartze pockets, invoke any pride?”, using a derogatory Yiddish word to refer to Black people.
While the literati celebrating themselves last night in Washington, D.C. aimed (mostly) good-natured jokes at each other last night, Robinson isn’t joking.
The antisemitism of that comment is not singular. He has repeated common antisemitic tropes about Jewish banking, posted Hitler quotes on Facebook and suggested the Holocaust was a hoax. “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered,” wrote Robinson, with scare quotes around the figure.
Robinson’s Democratic opponent, Stein, could be the rapidly growing state’s first Jewish governor.
The two present a sharp contrast in policy, temperament and experience. After graduating from both Harvard Law and the Harvard Kennedy school of government, Stein managed John Edwards’ successful Senate campaign. Stein then served in the statehouse before winning the attorney general’s race in 2016, becoming the first Jewish person elected to statewide office in North Carolina.
Stein, 57, is running as a conventional center-left Democrat. At a stump speech in pastoral Scotland county near the South Carolina line, Stein focused on fighting the opioid-addiction epidemic, the state’s backlog of untested rape kits, clean drinking water and early childhood education. But he had some words about Robinson’s rhetoric.
“The voters of North Carolina have an unbelievably stark choice before them this November, between two competing visions,” Stein said in an interview. “Mine is forward and it’s inclusive. It’s about tapping the potential of every person so that they have a chance to succeed where we have a thriving economy, safe neighborhoods, strong schools.
What’s more, if the controversy over North Carolina’s infamous “bathroom bill” (HB 2) is any indicator, electing Robinson could be an economic hit for the Tar Heel State. The Associated Press estimated the law could cost the state “upward of $3.7 billion in sports/entertainment and business revenue over the next 12 years,” the Washington Post reported in 2017. Forbes in November 2016 estimated the state had “flushed away” perhaps “$630 million in lost business in the bill’s first eight months in effect. It helped cost Gov. Pat McCrory (R) reelection.
It’s not an economy voters might want to turn over to Robinson. The firmly anti-abortion Robinson’s finances have been in the headlines lately while Stein’s have not.
In one of Robinson’s three bankruptcy filings, reporters discovered that he had failed to file income taxes between 1998 and 2002. Questions have been raised about personal expenses charged to campaign funds from the 2020 race.
His wife shuttered a nutrition non-profit after a conservative blogger began to raise questions about the Robinson family’s financial dependence on government contracts. Reporters later learned that the North Carolina department of health and human services is investigating the firm for questionable accounting.
[…]
Robinson acknowledged in 2022 paying for an abortion for his wife 33 years earlier.
The question is whether Robinson’s full-throated anti-abortion stance hinders not just his own candidacy but that of Trump. Planned Parenthood plans to double its spending in North Carolina, to $10m, with an eye on defending the governorship and ending a veto-proof Republican legislative majority. Trump, meanwhile, has backed away from publicly endorsing the most extreme abortion bans.
No guarantees, but Trump and his 88 criminal charges and Robinson with his past statements and business history could bring out the moderate in North Carolina’s electorate this November.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Charlie Pierce was right. In his usual understated way.
Lest you think the Republican rot started with Donald Trump, as early as 2013, Charlie Pierce attributed the spreading madness (mockingly) to prion disease. Even then, Pierce suggested Republicans ate the monkey brains back during the Reagan administration:
OCTOBER 04, 2013, 5:00am
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else.
In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress — or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress — a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party’s 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.
We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.
We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn’t seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation’s insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up the the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson’s account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.
We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.
This is what they came to Washington to do — to break the government of the United States. It doesn’t matter any more whether they’re doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party’s mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address in which government “was” the problem, through Bill Clinton’s ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being “over,” through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find “common ground” and a “Third Way.” Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country’s higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
Pierce lamented lamentables like Reps. Gohmert and Bachmann sitting on the future Trump-branded side of the aisle. But in the fullness of time we got a larger set of whackadoodles.
COVID-19 was late to the party. The prion infection was ubiquitous among G.O.P. lowlights before 2020.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for some reason thought it worth air time to interview former Trump attorney general, Bill Barr. She asked why after Trump smeared him, he still supports Trump for president in 2024. After endorsing Trump, Trump mocked Barr for it. And Barr? He shrugs it off.
Collins: Just to be clear, you’re voting for someone who you believe tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, that can’t even achieve his own policies, that lied about the election, who is facing 88 criminal counts
Barr: The answer the question is yes.
In a Friday promo spot for his special “MisinfoNation: The Trump Faithful” (Sunday at 8 p.m.), CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan played a clip of a woman of the MAGA persuasion insisting that God is referenced throughout the Constitution (not true). She thinks the reporter is dissing her by questioning it. R-E-A-D it, she insists, and pulls it out her cell phone to prove it to him. Guess what?
It’s prion disease, isn’t it? Unless they’re all lizard people.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
The country’s taking crazy pills.
Back in table-waiting days when the evening’s business and customers got weird, we’d run out the back door to check the night sky. What was it? The full moon? I did the same online this morning (the sun is up). The full moon was the 23rd.
Maybe that’s when these bits that popped up first thing were crafted. People need to let off steam.
Bette Midler’s on the job.
Notice the name of Denver Riggleman’s podcast: Coalition of the Sane. Then there’s the Lev Parnas story.
It’s not just that Trumpublicans are trying to transport the entire country into Alice’s Looking Glass World. They’re working both sides of the mirror as it suits them, as if no one will notice.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes did.
So did Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times:
It was a farce befitting the absurdity of the situation. Trump has asked the Supreme Court if he is, in effect, a king. And at least four members of the court, among them the so-called originalists, have said, in essence, that they’ll have to think about it.
Those of a certain vintage may remember an old bit by comedian Jack Benny whose comic persona was a penny-pincher. A robber points a gun and demands, “Your money or your life.” Benny hesitates and insists, “I’m thinking it over.”
I recalled that line as I shook my head during Thursday’s oral arguments. Trump’s attorneys at the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday demanded, “Your country or Trump!” At least four of the justices are thinking it over.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
During MSNBC’s evening coverage of Thursday morning’s arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Trump v. United States case of presidential immunity, Ari Melber summed up his feelings (and mine) with a quote from Zoolander (2001): “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”
On Wednesday, the court considered how many organs a pregnant woman, septic and hemorrhaging, must risk losing before a doctor in Idaho could save her life and provide an abortion without risking jail. On Thursday, the Roberts court spun head-of-a-pin hypotheticals about whether a president can assassinate rivals or stage a coup with no consequences if it were alleged to be part of his/her official duties. We are that far down the MAGA rabbit hole.
Chris Hayes noted that in real time during oral arguments:
Everyone, including the justices who agreed to hear this farcical presidential immunity case, knew Team Trump’s arguments were a joke. At least, that’s what we assumed. Team Trump was not expecting to win. Putting off the start of special prosecutor Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 case against Donald Trump until after the November election was the point. But the court’s conservative wing played along, aiding and abetting Trump’s delaying tactic. Justices Thomas and Alito are looking to retire soon. They have no intention of allowing a Democrat in the White House over the next four years to pick their replacements.
What’s more, with Team Trump hammering the point that if Trump is not judged immune from prosecution upon leaving office, they promise subsequent presidents (Biden and other Democrats) will not be either. It’s not a theoretical point. It is an explicit threat Trump himself has already made.
Indeed, Justice Alito raised that as a point in favor of granting presidential immunity: “Now, if a — an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”
That the Jan. 6 sacking of the U.S. Capitol inspired by a president has already destabilized our democracy seems not to have registered with Alito. Rather than enforcing the rule of law to guard against a recurrence, Alito’s answer seems to be to allow presidents to crime with abandon. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern characterized Alito’s position on immunity at Slate as, “Don’t make me hit you again.”
Thus Melber’s, “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”
The D.C. Circuit’s February detailed, “cross-ideological decision should have been summarily affirmed by SCOTUS within days,” write the pair. Before yesterday, the pair figured that “when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6.” Thursday’s arguments “shattered those illusions.”
When Micheal R. Dreeben, Counselor to the Special Counsel, tried to focus on “the charges in this case,” Justice Alito jumped in to divert the discussion to abstract principles.
When the court’s liberal justices tried to return focus to the facts of the Trump case in interrogating the defense, the conservatives intervened to pivot to matters not at hand, such as whether the president has the power to pardon himself, or else to debate [Gorsuch, transcript pg. 18] how to segregate a president’s private actions (prosecutable) from “official conduct that may or may not enjoy some immunity.” Never to consider what Trump actually did. For her part, Justice Barrett ran through a list of Trump actions that his attorney agreed were indeed private and prosecutable. Game, set, match?
Not so fast. Chief Justice Roberts then suggested the case might be less complex if potentially official acts were expunged from the indictment. That is, if the case were remanded back to the lower court for further refining.
“[D]rawing that line would require months of hearings and appeals, pushing any trial into 2025 or beyond,” write Lithwick and Stern. “The president who tried to steal the most recent election is running in the next one, which is happening in mere months.”
The court’s right wing is running interference for Trumpism and signaled it openly. If they weren’t they would have let the lower court’s ruling stand, they conclude:
Five justices sent the message, loud and clear, that they are far more worried about Trump’s prosecution at the hands of the deep-state DOJ than about his alleged crimes, which were barely mentioned. This trial will almost certainly face yet more delays. These delays might mean that its subject could win back the presidency in the meantime and render the trial moot. But the court has now signaled that nothing he did was all that serious and that the danger he may pose is not worth reining in. The real threats they see are the ones Trump himself shouts from the rooftops: witch hunts and partisan Biden prosecutors. These men have picked their team. The rest hardly matters.
It was not a good day for the rule of law. We’ll have to wait until nearly July to find out how not-good.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Joe Biden was not my first pick for president, but that’s how it goes. Remember: This is politics. If you want a soul mate, try Match dot com. Even then, ever had an argument with your spouse and stayed married? There you go.
President Biden has chalked up quite a record going into this November.
I hate flying. Hate it. If a desination is within 600 miles or so, I drive. It’s not worth the headache and expense to fly. By the time I drive to the airport (which, depending on the destination, could take 1-1/2 to 2 hours) with enough lead time to park, get cleared through security, and to the gate with time to spare, I’m already partway there if I just drove. The last time I got on a plane, I missed a 1 p.m. connection because of a weather delay, waited hours for the next flight out, then sat on the tarmac for another hour in the late afternoon during another weather delay. By the time I got to my hotel after 11 p.m. it was like 12+ hours from the time I left the house. I could have driven (with gas/food stops) in 10-1/2. For less.
Joe Biden’s administration means to address that customer-unfriendly experience.
Even Fox News is impressed.
Matt Stoller provides a short list that goes beyond infrastructure.
Not bad, old man.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Two things, both from The Atlantic.
If you are one of those people who cannot look at Stephen Miller without seeing him in a black uniform with a red armband, consider, he’ll have company if things ever come to that.
Adam Serwer on Wednesday pointedly called out wannabe goose-steppers in the U.S. Senate, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, both Republicans, of course.
“Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint,” Serwer begins:
On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.” Last week, Cotton posted on X, “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.” He later deleted the post and reworded it so that it did not sound quite so explicitly like a demand for aspiring vigilantes to lynch protesters.
But you know what he meant, just as the MAGA mob on Jan. 6 knew what Donald Trump meant by “fight like hell.”
The calls from Cotton and Hawley to deploy the National Guard are not about anyone’s safety—many of the pro-Palestinian protesters, against whom the might of the U.S. military would be aimed, are Jewish. As the historian Kevin Kruse notes, sending the National Guard to campuses facing Vietnam War protests led to students being killed, including some who had nothing to do with the protests, rather than to anyone being safer. The most likely outcome based on past precedent would be an escalation to serious violence. Which might be the idea.
See “But you know what he meant” above. When Trump began his presidency with his “American carnage” speech, he wasn’t describing reality but revealing his innermost desires.
Today at The Atlantic, George Packer laments what I’ve noticed for decades: a lack of learning curve on the protesty left. Commenting on those same student protesters, Packer writes:
In other ways, the current crisis brings a strong sense of déjà vu: the chants, the teach-ins, the nonnegotiable demands, the self-conscious building of separate communities, the revolutionary costumes, the embrace of oppressed identities by elite students, the tactic of escalating to incite a reaction that mobilizes a critical mass of students. It’s as if campus-protest politics has been stuck in an era of prolonged stagnation since the late 1960s. Why can’t students imagine doing it some other way?
I’ve wondered that since the 1970s. I wrote in a September 2005 column for the local paper:
Friends I describe as all-natural, vegetarian chain smokers have attended protest rallies since college. It’s a kind of hobby. They are probably in Washington right now, marching against the war in Iraq. Sometimes they would invite me along to protest [your favorite liberal cause here], promising it would be fun.
Sure. I can think of lots of things more fun than protesting foreign wars and abuses of power. Or listening to impassioned speeches with rhetoric so threadbare that you can close your eyes and imagine yourself at any street rally since 1966.
This weekend major U.S. cities will see protests against the conflict in Iraq. The usual cast of characters will be massing in Washington: squads of pall bearers with mock coffins, Grim Reapers, pets in drag, and clowns for peace.
Friends, would you please consider doing something effective for a change? If you like playing dress-up, there’s the Society for Creative Anachronism. For fun, rent a Jackie Chan film. We’ve watched you get arrested earning your merit badges in civil disobedience long enough to figure out that what’s really arrested is your political development.
It’s not that your issues aren’t worthwhile. Most are. And sure, protesting can be cathartic and promote a sense of solidarity with your tribe. You go home feeling better about the issues. But wouldn’t you rather go home having done something with half a chance of resolving them? If you want to effect change, you have to influence political leaders and win the hearts and minds of American voters.
Face it, America is not swayed by mass die-ins dramatizing the loss of life caused by war. Or by coeds dressed as “corporate whores” to satirize conglomerates prostituting after Defense Department dollars. Or by indoctrinating children through activist puppet dramas with all the subtlety of temperance plays.
How do I know? Because you’ve been staging these sideshows for decades and the red states keep getting redder. These are time-tested wastes of your energies and talents, public curiosities, local color on the news at six. I’d rather go bowling.
Packer chalks up the calcified format of these protests to the evolution of the post-liberal university since the 1960s.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) is still investigating the 2020 fake electors scheme “to keep Unindicted Coconspirator 1 in office.” But as of Wednesday, she’s charged 18 people associated with the plot with felony counts of conspiracy, fraud and forgery. The indictment caps off a year-long investigation into the fraudulent slate of Donald Trump electors sent to Congress after Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes. Similar schemes played out in Michigan, Georgia and Nevada.
Redacted in the indictment are seven names of individuals living outside Arizona. The Washington Post, however, identifies them as some of Trump’s closest allies and advisers:
Those indicted include former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman and Christina Bobb, top campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn and former campaign aide Mike Roman. They are accused of allegedly aiding an unsuccessful strategy to award the state’s electoral votes to Trump instead of Biden after the 2020 election. Also charged are the Republicans who signed paperwork on Dec. 14, 2020, that falsely purported Trump was the rightful winner, including former state party chair Kelli Ward, state Sens. Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern, and Tyler Bowyer, a GOP national committeeman and chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, the campaign arm of the pro-Trump conservative group Turning Point USA.
Trump himself remains unindicted in Arizona for now.
The effort was aided by Trump, the indictment said, who “himself was unwilling to accept that he had lost the election.” While the charges focus on the elector strategy, the indictment spells out various ways that Trump and his allies sought to pressure state and local officials to “encourage them to change” the election results. Trump allies initially put pressure on members of the Phoenix-area Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, the indictment said. When it became clear that the GOP-led board would not alter the results, pressure was placed on members of the state legislature — namely then-House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) — who heard from Trump and other allies.
When that effort failed, Trump sought to appeal to then-Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R), who ignored a call from Trump while certifying the state’s election results. That day, the indictment notes, Trump berated Ducey on social media for certifying the results.
The Post notes that this is the second round of charges so far for “Meadows, Giuliani, Ellis, Eastman and Roman, who were all indicted alongside Trump in Georgia last year. Ellis pleaded guilty in October to illegally conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia and has been cooperating with prosecutors.”
Notable omissions include Kenneth Chesebro, one of the progenitors of the elector strategy with Eastman. In October, he pleaded guilty in Georgia to one felony count of “conspiracy to commit filing false documents.” Also missing from the indictment is lawyer Sidney Powell. She pleaded guilty in Georgia to “six misdemeanors accusing her of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties.” One may surmise that Chesebro’s and Powell’s cooperation in the Arizona investigation kept them out of Wednesday’s indictment.
Trump is a Republican candidate for president again in 2024, even while on trial in New York and with criminal trials pending in three other jurisdictions. He is not running for president. He is running to keep from spending the rest of his life on trial or in jail. Trump is betting on the presidency empowering him to shut down federal investigations into himself and to exact revenge on his enemies. (Republicans like their twofers.)
This morning, Trump’s attorneys will argue before the U.S. Supreme Court that the president is and must be immune from prosecution for his actions in office. They do not expect to win. Their goal is to keep Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 case from going to trial before the November election. Trump is charged with “conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.”
“We already pulled off the heist,” a source close to Trump told Rolling Stone. They were “literally popping champagne” when the court agreed to take the case in February and delayed hearing it until today. Do not expect a ruling from the conservative court until late June/early July. Beginning a trial before November is unlikely but not impossible.
The addition of charges in Arizona for which Trump, if elected, cannot issue pardons, will increase pressure on the newly indicted and re-indicted to cooperate with authorities in return for reduced charges. Trump’s deodorant will need to file for overtime. For which, by the way, millions of workers will soon be eligible thanks to a new rule issued by Biden’s Department of Labor on Tuesday.
Also Tuesday, Republican voters in Pennsylvania’s closed primary signaled their exhaustion with Trump by handing 16.6% of their votes to Nikki Haley who suspended her race after Super Tuesday (March 5). Trump sits in a New York courtroom while President Biden campaigns there and racks up union endorsements.
It’s going to be a long, hot summer for Team MAGA while Dark Brandon keeps cool in his aviators.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Good heavens, this garbled mess from RNC co-chair Lara Trump.
“We now have the ability at the RNC not just to have poll watchers… but people who can physically handle the ballots… So there was a moratorium for about 40 years on the RNC actually training people to work in these polling locations and the tabulation centers where the mail-in ballots come in. And last year, the judge who implemented that passed away, so that was lifted.”
“Poll observers are NEVER permitted to touch ballots,” tweets exasperated Democratic election protection attorney Marc Elias. “She is suggesting the RNC will infiltrate election offices.”
Observers physically handling ballots is BS, as Elias points out. But she’s just getting started on the wrongness.
First, some terminology. Poll watchers or observers are citizens pre-approved to be present inside a polling location as observers during voting. At most (at least in my state), they may bring to the attention of the chief judge any observed infractions or misapplication of voting rules, and that’s all. They are to sit quietly. No interactions with voters, verbal or physical. Poll workers are citizens approved and hired to administaer the actual election, issue ballots, check IDs, etc. Poll greeters or electioneers are political operatives who may interact with voters only outside the polling location’s marked electioneering boundaries.
The “moratorium” Lara Trump mentions was a standing court order enforcing a 1982 consent decree between the RNC and DNC. It limited the RNC, its agents’ and employees’ ability to engage in “ballot security” efforts without prior court approval. The RNC sued to get the decree rescinded after the election of Barack Obama. Third Circuit Appeals Court Judge Joseph Greenaway in his ruling noted, “the District Court has never prevented the RNC from implementing a voter fraud prevention program that the RNC has submitted for preclearance, at least in part, because the RNC has never submitted any voter fraud prevention program for preclearance.”
The RNC was never prohibited from appointing poll watchers, and did. Among other requirements, the RNC was probibited from engaging in a through g above. Observing vote counting has always been allowed, to my knowledge. I’ve watched mailed-in ballots be approved plenty of times.
I don’t have time to bird dog all of this, but per Wikpedia, Greenaway, 66, retired in 2023. He is still alive. District Court Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise issued the original 1982 ruling. He died in office in 2015, not last year. U.S. District Court Judge John Michael Vazquez (still alive) allowed the consent decree to expire in December 2017. Debevoise expiring had nothing to do with it.
Like her father-in-law, Lara Trump is way out of her depth.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Projection. Long has the left used that term to describe conservative accusations against the left. When Republicans allege the left commits some infraction against, what — Decency? Patriotism? Rule of law? Election integrity? — then likely they themselves are secretly or more subtly doing the same.
Inoculation is the underlying purpose. Loudly and often accuse your opponent of misbehavior in which you engage so that if ever caught in the act you can both-sides the affair. “Well, they do it too.”
Fake news is another Donald Trump effort at inverting reality. Trump, authoritarian-in-training, has long attempted bending reality to his will. His inauguration crowd was not more bigly than Barack Obama’s? Photographs prove it? Fake news! His team would present “alternative facts” they knew were untrue but were the Trump-approved version of history. Period!
Now on trial on criminal charges in Manhattan, Trump has summoned the MAGA cult, as he did on Jan. 6, 2021, to come by the thousands to protest unfairness like you’ve never seen. Only a handful of pro-Trump protesters answered the call on Monday.
Ah, but that is fake news! Time to invert reality again.
Trump on Tuesday repeated his summons when supporters failed to show up for the second day of his trial. They were out there, Trump insisted, but complained that “for blocks , you can’t get near this courthouse.” By the thousands MAGA cultists were kept away from the courthouse by a massive police cordon!
Reporter Vaughn Hillyard captured what Tuesday actually looked like outside the New York courthouse.
Inside the courthouse, what testimony by David Pecker, former publisher of The National Enquirer, revealed is that Trump and Pecker conspired in 2016 both to suppress stories harmful to Trump and to publish fabricated stories harmful to his primary opponents.
From The New York Times:
Prosecutors called it the “Trump Tower conspiracy,” arguing that Mr. Pecker, Mr. Trump and Michael D. Cohen, who was then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, hatched a plot at the meeting to conceal sex scandals looming over Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Their effort led Mr. Pecker’s tabloids to buy and bury two damaging stories about Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen purchased the silence of a porn star, a deal at the heart of the case against the former president.
Trump asked Pecker and his tabloids “to help the campaign,” to “catch and kill” stories harmful to Trump’s political fortunes. That was the suppress-the-truth part of the conspiracy. Then came the damage-opponents part:
The tabloid, for example, ran stories about Mr. Trump’s primary opponents, including Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. The prosecutors illustrated the point for jurors, posting several lurid headlines on screens: “Donald Trump Blasts Ted Cruz’s Dad for Photo with J.F.K. Assassin,” “Bungling Surgeon Ben Carson left Sponge in Patient’s Brain!” and, in a moment of ironic foreshadowing, “Ted Cruz Shamed by Porn Star.”
Stories Pecker fabricated on Trump’s behalf are, in Trump’s parlance, fake news. Trump’s fake news claims are, in Pee Wee Herman’s schoolyard vernacular, a case of he who smelt it, dealt it.
That is the supreme irony of what we have learned so far in the Trump trial. The man who popularized “fake news” for discrediting unfavorable stories, the man who insists on bending reality to his will, was himself complicit in creating and disseminating phony stories. Trump was accusing opponents of exactly what he and his confederates were engaged in.
That fact didn’t escape notice by comedian Trae Crowder, the “Liberal Redneck”:
I do think it’s kind of poetic that while [Trump] was out in public popularizing the concept of fake news, at that same time, behind the scenes he had a full fake news team making fake news arrangements with Big Fake News in an effort to fake as much news as possible. Just kind of sums him up, I think.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.