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Pummel Away

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 11, 2024

Biden launches ad blitz after Arizona abortion ruling

“Donald Trump did this,” Team Biden declares.

Perhaps you’ve noticed. The Democratic president Donald “Now 88 Counts” Trump once called “Sleepy Joe” is hammering MAGA Republicans over their post-Roe revocation of women’s reproductive freedoms in state after state.

Biden “plans to pummel Trump on abortion” (Politico):

Joe Biden’s campaign plans to hammer Donald Trump for his role in erasing abortion rights largely by enlisting ordinary American women who have suffered from restrictions on the procedure, elevating their voices in place of the president’s own.

This approach was immediately on display this week in a Biden campaign video featuring the story of a Texas woman released after Trump announced he would defer to state-level abortion laws, some of which impose draconian limits on women and physicians. Biden himself made no appearance in the ad, except to deliver a standard campaign finance disclosure line.

As the reporters frame it, Biden is taking a back seat here because of his “complicated history” on abortion. This, rather than Politico conceding that women are their own best advocates for reproductive freedom. The power of women’s first-person accounts was clear in recent elections in Ohio and in Gov. Andy Beshear’s reelection campaign in Kentucky.

Biden advisers took particular note of an ad Beshear ran in the closing stages of his campaign featuring the testimonial of a woman, Hadley Duvall, who had been raped and impregnated by her stepfather when she was a child, and who would have been forced to carry the pregnancy to term under policies favored by Kentucky Republicans, including Beshear’s opponent.

Eric Hyers, a Democratic strategist who managed the Beshear campaign, said Duvall’s message had echoed across Kentucky, including in constituencies that do not ordinarily lean to the left.

“The voters who moved the most when hearing messages like Hadley’s were the opposite of the voters you might think,” Hyers said. “It was rural voters, male voters, older voters, Republican voters, non-college educated voters.”

Messaging expert Drew Westen (“The Political Brain”) has long insisted that the central issue in the national abortion debate is not choice or justice but freedom. It’s about whether, when (and with whom) to have a child. Republicans “believe every rapist has the right to choose who has their child. We believe that’s a family choice.” Duvall made that message as clear as a punch in the gut.

Working the eye

The national alarm over the Arizona Supreme Court’s reanimating the Arizona Territory’s 1864 abortion ban, Republicans and Trump himself are staggering and attempting to walk back their extremist positions. The Biden campaign means to keep them backed into a corner fending off blows (MSNBC):

President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign launched a paid media blitz about reproductive rights in Arizona on Thursday, two days after the state’s Supreme Court upheld a near-total abortion ban dating to 1864.

The seven-figure ad buy focuses on former President Donald Trump’s latest abortion stance, in which he again took credit for overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling because of the justices he appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and said states should decide abortion policy.

The move is part of a larger, more aggressive strategy to seize on Trump’s record on abortion, with the Biden team quickly mobilizing to respond on an issue it sees as the most motivating one for voters in November.

The Biden campaign released these ads before Tuesday’s ruling in Arizona.

This is exactly what Democrats need to be doing now: showing voters some fight. Trump won the fealty of his MAGA base by appealing to white Christian conservatives’ persecution complex and convincing them he was their champion. Now it’s Democrats’ turn. Post-Roe assaults on women’s reproductive freedoms means, as Hyers noted, that the audience for Democrats willing to fight back for them is far larger than Trump’s.

The famously teetotaling Trump and his MAGA allies are on their way to punch-drunk with the abortion backlash Democrats mean to exploit.

“This week, women across the state of Arizona are watching in horror as an abortion ban from 1864 with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of a woman will soon become the law of the land for Arizonans,” campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement Thursday. “This nightmare is only possible because of Donald Trump.”

Team Biden means to make Trump own it with their media buys and social media blitz.

As the late W.C. Fields might say, never give a sucker an even break.

UPDATE: Here’s another this morning.

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Cowards

Published by digby on April 10, 2024

The GOP establishment is pathetic:

A Pulitzer Prize-winning political photographer resigned Tuesday from the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation, blasting the group for cowardice in rejecting Trump critic Liz Cheney as the recipient of its top yearly award.

David Hume Kennerly claimed in a letter to fellow trustees that Cheney’s nomination for the Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service was nixed largely out of fear that Trump would retaliate against the organization if he’s reelected. Cheney, herself a trustee, was rejected three separate times, Kennerly wrote, as other potential honorees declined the award.

Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels will receive the 2024 medal in June, according to an email that Gleaves Whitney, the foundation’s executive director, sent to trustees Wednesday, after POLITICO broke news of Kennerly’s resignation.

Whitney said in a statement sent ahead of the Daniels announcement that the foundation’s executive committee, guided by legal counsel, believed it was not “prudent” to give the medal to Cheney given her flirtations with a presidential run.

Giving her the medal during the election cycle, Whitney said, “might be construed as a political statement and thus expose the Foundation to the legal risk of losing its nonprofit status with the IRS.”

Kennerly, who served as Ford’s White House photographer and is longtime foundation trustee, attacked that argument in his letter: “The historical irony was completely lost on you. Gerald Ford became president, in part, because Richard Nixon had ordered the development of an enemies list and demanded his underlings use the IRS against those listed.”

“If the foundation that bears the name of Gerald R. Ford won’t stand up to this real threat to our democracy,” he added, “who will?”

Kennerly is right:

A fellow board member, speaking on condition of anonymity to be candid, said the board was “really terrified” of losing their IRS tax-exempt status if they had given the award to Cheney. “They’re really, really, really concerned. It’s insanity,” the person said. It was Kennerly who first nominated her back in October, according to a second person familiar with the matter.

I’ll just add that Ford’s pardon of Nixon was the beginning of this descent into flagrant presidential impunity. Big mistake. Huge.

He’d Never Order A Hit On His Enemies

Published by digby on April 10, 2024

Would he? (Of course he would.)

Trump’s allies are trying to reassure the Supreme Court that if you give Trump total immunity he would never order an enemy to be killed as was posited in the appeals court hearing. And anyway, even if he did, nobody would carry it out. So it’s all good.

It is not:

As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear oral arguments in Donald Trump’s presidential immunity case, the former president’s allies are working to tamp down any concerns the justices might have about one of the more absurd and disconcerting arguments offered by any Trump lawyer ever: that a president would have to be impeached and convicted before he could be prosecuted if he were to, hypothetically, order the assassination of a political rival.

The America First Policy Institute, a think tank led by former top Trump advisers and allies, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court last month arguing that the justices should not consider this hypothetical in their decision, because the military would never follow such a command. “A president cannot order an elite military unit to kill a political rival,” says the brief, adding: “The military would not carry out a patently unlawful order from the president to kill non-military targets.” 

The organization’s brief was filed on behalf of former Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie, retired Lt. General Keith Kellogg, and retired Lt. General Jerry Boykin. Kellogg added in a press release that “my time with [former] President Trump allows me to state without equivocation, he would never issue or consider such an action.”

Unfortunately, according to Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, he as president did suggest to senior administration officials that they should order U.S. troops to open fire on some of his political enemies — namely, street protesters. 

“Can’t you just shoot them?” Trump asked, regarding Black Lives Matter demonstrators and others who were protesting around the White House in June 2020, according to Esper. “Just shoot them in the legs or something?” (Trump has denied this account.)

This wasn’t just some idle thought: Esper wrote in his memoir that he had to legitimately talk Trump down from the idea. “The good news — this wasn’t a difficult decision,” Esper wrote. “The bad news — I had to figure out a way to walk Trump back without creating the mess I was trying to avoid.”

Two sources, including a former senior Trump White House aide, who’ve spoken to the former president regarding his ideas about troops shooting civilians tell Rolling Stone that when Trump talks about this, he’s eager to wound — not kill — potential targets. Sometimes, he’s been reminded, including by government officials, that shooting someone in the leg can easily kill them, a point he usually dismissed outright.

Last year, Trump publicly stated that another political foe — former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who has denounced Trump as a “wannabe dictator” — deserves to be put to “DEATH.”

AFPI, for its part, has repeatedly argued that the president should designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorists and use military force to eliminate them. 

Trump has no limits. And he and his followers are now delirious with revolutionary zeal. Of course he would do it. And there is no guarantee that the military wouldn’t follow his orders. He’s going to make sure that the top brass are loyalists and there’s every reason to believe that the rank and file is full of Trumpers.

Also, he is a pathological liar and no one should ever ever take his word for anything.

Zelensky Says It Perfectly

Published by digby on April 10, 2024

The Hill reports:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Tuesday interview that he does not need “primitive” ideas from former President Trump on ways to resolve the war with Russia.

In an interview with Axel Springer media outlets, including Politico, Zelensky said he was open to hearing Trump’s proposals for the war, but, he said, “If the deal is that we just give up our territories, and that’s the idea behind it, then it’s a very primitive idea.”

“I need very strong arguments. I don’t need a fantastic idea. I need a real idea because people’s lives are at stake,” Zelensky added.

The interview comes after The Washington Post reported this weekend that Trump has privately said his plan to end the war in Ukraine would include pressuring the war-torn country to give up territory, including Crimea and the Donbas border region, to Russia.

That’s actually a nice way of putting it. The more precise word is “stupid.” I don’t know if Trump thinks he can just tell Ukraine what to do but I wouldn’t be surprised. He might even think they’ll happily go along with his brilliant “idea” (also called surrender) just because he’s got such huge hands that they can’t deny him anything he wants. In reality, his “plan” is nothing more than capitulation and a green light to Vladimir Putin to “do whatever the hell he wants” as Trump once said he would encourage.

Zelensky shows a lot more spine than most Republicans. Saying this publicly is risky what with the funding on the line and the Republicans shoving each other out of the way to lick Trump’s boots. But good for him. It’s refreshing to hear it.

The Arizona Ruling Is A BFD

Published by digby on April 10, 2024

Despite what many in the MSM are saying

There was quite a bit of punditry yesterday suggesting that despite the shock of the Arizona ruling reinstating a civil war era abortion ban the issue just doesn’t have salience to swing voters. The NY Times published this earlier today:

Sigh. They spoke with 3 voters, two of whom are Trump voters. So, whatever. The Washington Post had a much better analysis:

A near-total abortion ban slated to go into effect in the coming weeks in Arizona is expected to have a seismic impact on the politics of the battleground state, testing the limits of Republican support for abortion restrictions and putting the issue front and center in November’s election.

Arizona’s conservative Supreme Court on Tuesday revived a near-total ban on abortion, invoking an 1864 law that forbids the procedure except to save a mother’s life and punishes providers with prison time. The decision supersedes Arizona’s previous rule, which permitted abortions up to 15 weeks.

The developments in Arizona are part of a wave of state actions to reckon with the future of access to reproductive care after the U.S. Supreme Court, with a conservative majority installed during Donald Trump’s presidency, overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. While several states enacted abortion restrictions as a result of overturning Roe, protecting access to reproductive care has broadly been a winning issue for Democratic candidates and for ballot measures that protect abortion access in the elections since the 2022 ruling.

As a battleground state, there is a lot on the line in Arizona’s looming elections. President Biden is running for reelection after winning the state in 2020 by fewer than 11,000 votes, and the race for a Senate seat in the state could prove crucial in determining which party controls the body next year. The balance of the statehouse is at stake this election cycle, too, with Republicans holding a one-vote majority in each chamber.

Polls show that abortion is a motivating issue for Arizona voters.

Don’t kid yourself. It matters. Will it guarantee a victory? Of course not. But a whole lot of people, most of them women are furious about this bullshit.

Trump On Trial

Published by digby on April 10, 2024

It’s coming up on Monday. And he’s freaking out.

There’s been some talk lately about Donald Trump’s light campaign schedule compared to President Joe Biden’s who’s been visiting swing states constantly even as he’s handling some very thorny legislative and foreign policy problems. The contrast has been sharp. Trump is spending much more time on the golf course than holding rallies and even his appearances on friendly right wing media have been scarce. 

Judging by his Truth Social feed, it’s fair to say that he’s stressed and it’s not about the campaign: he’s obsessed with the criminal trial that’s set to start next Monday. I suspect he never thought it would get this far — he’s tried every trick in the book to delay the proceedings and nothing so far has worked so he’s getting frantic, posting things like this throughout the day:

It would seem that these outbursts serve as some sort of self-soothing exercise.

He’s also becoming downright morose, fatuously declaring that it will be his honor to be the “modern day Mandela” and whining endlessly about the judges in his cases lamenting at one point, “How many Corrupt, Biased, Crooked Joe Biden-‘Protection Agency’ New York Judges do I have to endure before somebody steps in?” (What — and who — exactly do you suppose he has in mind when he says “step in?”)

Trump’s latest attempt to delay the trial was dispatched by a NY appeals judge who was not moved by his lawyers argument that he has a first amendment right to publicly assail witnesses and the judge’s family members and refused to lift the gag order. Likewise, his appeal for a change of venue was also denied. There are still a couple of cards he can play by asking the full appeals court to hear his argument but that won’t stop the trial from starting on Monday.

The case is referred to in the press as “the hush money case” but that’s not really what the legal case is about. We all know that Donald Trump conspired with the publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, and his consiglieri Michael Cohen to keep a lid on any tales about his philandering during the presidential campaign by using what’s known as “catch and kill.” They would “buy” the rights and then not publish it — in other words they’d pay off the accuser. Early in the campaign they’d done just that with a former Playboy model named Karen McDougal who was paid $150,000 for her story.

This excellent recitation of the known facts in the case by David Corn reminds us that the adult film actress known as Stormy Daniels had approached various media back in 2011 with the story that she’s slept with Trump at a golf event four months after his son Baron was born. Cohen had managed to scare her off then but in the wake of the release of the Access Hollywood tape just before the election, in which Trump bragged about assaulting women, she resurfaced with her story and Cohen sprang into action.

He negotiated with Daniels’ lawyer and the National Inquirer to pay her $130,000 and sign a non-disclosure agreement at which point he took the deal to Trump. Trump expressed his concerns about how this would affect his campaign if it got out and agreed to the payment telling Cohen to arrange for it to be made with Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization CFO.

Finding a way to get the money was complicated. Cohen and Weisselberg bounced around a number of different ideas without coming up with any way to front the payment so Cohen put the money up himself with the understanding that he’d be paid back. Text messages and emails show that many people in the campaign were aware this was happening including campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and Trump’s personal assistant Hope Hicks, both of whom are on the witness list for the trial.

When the Daniels story hit in January of 2018 Cohen claimed that he had done the payoff completely on his own and Trump famously said he didn’t know anything about it.

Subsequent documents found by the FBI and Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani put the lie to that, revealing that Trump had reimbursed Cohen and the reimbursement appeared in the Trump Organizations financial records as a legitimate legal expense.

Cohen went to federal prison for campaign finance violations, tax evasion, making false statements to a bank, and lying to Congress on behalf of Trump in this case. Trump is referred to in his indictment as “Individual number 1” and it’s clear that he’s the beneficiary of all of Cohen’s actions to cover up the hush money scheme. Why the feds put Cohen behind bars but never pressed the case against Trump is one of those questions to which we’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer.

Everyone assumes that Cohen is going to be shredded on the stand because he’s a convicted liar but he’s also the only one who’s paid the price for Trump’s crimes, so it’s always possible the jury will see the unfairness of that. But as Corn points out, the case doesn’t rely on Cohen’s word alone. There is a long list of people who were involved in this scheme and there is a mountain of paper evidence to back up the charges.

The Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, does not characterize the case as a “hush money” case but rather a financial fraud crime undertaken to interfere in the 2016 election, a campaign finance violation, which raises the charges to felonies. When he announced the indictment he said:

This is the business capital of the world. We regularly do cases involving false business statements. The bedrock — in fact, the basis for business integrity and a well-functioning business marketplace — is true and accurate record-keeping. That’s the charge that’s brought here, falsifying New York State business records.”

We already have a judgement in civil court to the tune of 450 million or so that says Trump routinely falsifies his business records. This time he did it to hide a personal indiscretion and violated campaign finance laws on top of it and that’s a criminal offense. As the NY Times reported in this lengthy recent profile of Bragg, although legal experts pooh-poohed this case when it was first brought, there has subsequently been a change in that opinion since a federal judge refused to allow the case to move to federal court and the presiding judge is convinced that the case should go to trial.

I have no idea if a jury will find Trump guilty. But I do know that unless the full NY Appeals Court issues a last minute stay of the case to consider his latest bogus delaying tactic, the first criminal trial of a former president will begin next Monday and the defendant, Donald Trump, will be required to attend every day it is in session. It’s going to seriously interfere with his heavy golfing schedule but he has no choice.

He says he believes this will help him gain sympathy with the voters and will no doubt appear on the courthouse steps each day to whine and carp about the case. And every day people will be reminded of Donald Trump’s sordid past and his ongoing, overwhelming corruption and criminality. He certainly knows that which is why he’s worked so hard to delay the trial rather than take advantage of what he claims to be a great political advantage and fulfill his destiny as the Nelson Mandela of Mar-a-Lago. He’s worried and he should be.

Salon

Anticipate Stochastic Terrorism

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 10, 2024

Fool me twice, etc.

Electrical substation photo via Wikipedia.

“No one in law enforcement should be caught off guard if trouble breaks out before, during, or after the November presidential election,” Juliette Kayyem begins in The Atlantic.

It is not too soon for the Biden administration and the Department of Justice to start what-iffing a response, and to take seriously recommendations made by the January 6th Committee . It appears the administration means to get ahead of the next insurrection. “A show of readiness,” Kayyem writes, “can also deter people who might have learned the wrong lesson from the Capitol riot: that just a bit more violence might have changed the outcome of the 2020 election.” Because the most hardcore MAGA soldiers not already in jail (especially those with military training) will have learned from Jan. 6 how to do a coup and how not to.

Kayyem adds:

Any attempts to shore up the nation’s defenses against political violence might be misinterpreted—or intentionally misconstrued—by some of Trump’s supporters as an attempt by a Democratic administration to use federal power to interfere in the 2024 election. But the fact that everything Biden does at this stage will be seen through a politicized lens shouldn’t scare him into inaction.

If Trump and his supporters want to quibble with plans to protect election officials from external pressure during vote counts in Georgia and Wisconsin, or to protect members of Congress from rioters during the certification process, then they should do so out loud, before the election. But preparing for election turmoil shouldn’t be a partisan issue. The right keeps warning us of the potential for left-wing antifa violence; surely conservatives would want the executive branch to prevent it from affecting the vote certification if Trump wins. The best course is to lay out transparent plans to safeguard the electoral process no matter who is ultimately sworn in.

On one level, we all want to forget about the death and disruptions of COVID-19 pandemic that dominated 2020. It was a worldwide trauma. But people as committed as the Proud Boys and the Roger Stones and Christian nationalists will not go away. The figureheads will keep more distance from overt planning. But they may not need to do more than feed the desire of the fringe right for direct action. Trump, as Michael Cohen testified, knows well how to make his desires plain without stating them plainiy. His followers will take it upon themselves to give the Boss the violence he craves. Even MAGA judges know what the Boss wants:

In his sentencing memo Thursday, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney made it clear why he was letting Tyler Laube off lightly.

It wasn’t just because of what Laube did or didn’t do – the defendant had already confessed to beating a journalist at a 2017 Southern California rally and pleaded guilty to violating riot laws as part of a white supremacist gang. 

Laube deserved a light sentence, Carney said, because prosecutors should have focused on leftist groups. 

In a 22-page memo, Carney repeatedly said prosecutors have “ignored” violence committed by Antifa and instead focused on targeting people like Laube – Trump supporters and members of the far right.

Ninety miles away on the same day, USA Today reminds readers, ANTIFA members were on trial:

In San Diego, the last two defendants in the “San Diego 11” – members of Antifa charged with committing violence against Trump supporters in January 2021 – were sitting before a jury. Their nine co-defendants have already been sentenced, some of them to years in prison, for their crimes. 

Strongmen rise out of chaos, a friend noted yesterday. Provide enough chaos and people will demand one. It need not be as localized as the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Yes, some of these clowns are itching to “go to guns” with the left and the gummint. But direct confrontation and frontal assault may not be the only way to introduce chaos. For those unwilling to martyr themselves in a glorious shootout, attacks on utilities have already been field-tested and not all the terrorists prosecuted. 

Some of the perps in the N.C. substation attacks may have been trained at Fort Bragg,  
North Carolina and elsewhere.

We’ve looked at such attacks here, here, and here.

The FBI is still looking for the perps behind the Aug, 2023 Torrance, California substation attack. To my knowledge, the 2013 Metcalf, Calif. sniper attack on a substation remains unsolved. This is chaos on the cheap for armed RW reactionaries. The “how to” is in circulation. You know it is. 

Lucklily for us, Trump will not be in control of the executive branch on Jan. 6 next year, or on Inauguration Day, win or lose. Better that the Biden adminstration is braced for whatever comes.

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Juggling Chaos

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 10, 2024

Republicans in disarray

Republicans want desperately to control the national narrative around the presidential election. They need voters and the press focused on any number of subjects not-Donald Trump and his visible mental decay: an immigration “crisis,” inflation, the economy, Joe Biden’s age, sexual identity politics, election “fraud,” etc. It’s just that their MAGA base keeps spitting out the bit and Donald Trump cannot stay on his own message.

Trump’s campaign finance criminal trial in Manhattan begins on Monday despite his every effort to derail it. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-MAGA) threatens to oust yet another Republican speaker of the ungovernable House. GOP-controlled states keep tripling down on abortion restrictions. Arizona’s state Supreme Court just reactivated a Civil War abortion law.

The ruling, Washington Post reports, is “expected to have a seismic impact on the politics of the battleground state, testing the limits of Republican support for abortion restrictions and putting the issue front and center in November’s election.”

Whoops:

Arizona’s conservative Supreme Court on Tuesday revived a near-total ban on abortion, invoking an 1864 law that forbids the procedure except to save a mother’s life and punishes providers with prison time. The decision supersedes Arizona’s previous rule, which permitted abortions up to 15 weeks.

Arizonans are poised to consider the issue in November, now that the groups working to amend the state’s constitution to enshrine abortion rights — which include the ACLU of Arizona and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona — say that they have acquired enough signatures to establish a ballot measure, according to the Arizona Republic. Meanwhile, Republicans in the state are asking Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) and the Republican-led state legislature to come up with a solution.

The developments in Arizona are part of a wave of state actions to reckon with the future of access to reproductive care after the U.S. Supreme Court, with a conservative majority installed during Donald Trump’s presidency, overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. While several states enacted abortion restrictions as a result of overturning Roe, protecting access to reproductive care has broadly been a winning issue for Democratic candidates and for ballot measures that protect abortion access in the elections since the 2022 ruling.

Reproductive freedoms will be front and center in the national psyche, especially among women, between now and November. After Republican election losses and wins for reproductive freedoms in state after state post-Roe, this unpopular ruling is just what Republicans and Trump don’t need. Reproductive freedom guarantees are on the fall ballot or proposed in multiple states.

Trump’s bragging about ending Roe will be a centerpiece of Democrats’ campaigns across the country. It could even put Florida in play for Democrats. Trump’s attempt to leave abortion to the states and to back away from enacting a national abortion ban adds to the message confusion on the right. Republicans are trying to disclaim from their own positions. Women and men know that the fringe right won’t stop with abortion. Contraception access and IVF treatments will be next. Trump’s campaign is all over the place on these issues, Politico reports.

It is not helping that Trump is so discombobulated over the start of a criminal trial for the first time in his life. He’ll have to attend court each day where his criminality will be in the spotlight. He’ll try to play the victim, naturally. But it’s not exactly the campaign ad his party wants playing on repeat even if this jury fails to convict when another sent Trump fixer Michael Cohen to prison.

The propaganda arm of the GOP is no help either. Fox Business guest Mark Simone tells Larry Kudlow, “This issue does not hurt Donald Trump, he’s not against abortion. He’s actually okay with abortion, he wants that 15 week limit. Perfectly reasonable.” This Arizona decision will soon blow over. Letting states decide makes Trump the pro-choice candidate!

SIMONE: Yeah, it is to be pro-choice, states can decide. If you had to travel to another state to get an abortion, it’s not the worst thing in the world. Hopefully this is a very rare occurrence in your life, once in your life, maybe you would do it. Buying a bus ticket to go somewhere to get it is not worst thing in the world. 

That will play well with the majority of voters, won’t it?

If there’s an upside for the GOP, the fight to restore women’s freedoms takes the focus away from GOP efforts to rig the election for themselves in state after state.

Passing out in an hours-long line outside a polling station undersupplied with machines to vote on a single day in a Black precinct because the GOP outlawed anyone giving you water “is not the worst thing in the world” either, amirite? Hopefully your voting is very rare occurrence too.

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Jared Says His Multi-Billion Dollar Deals Aren’t A Conflict Of Interest

Published by digby on April 9, 2024

He’s right. It’s outright corruption.

This long expose of Jared Kushner’s corrupt foreign business dealings (NY Times gift link) will make you reach for the tequila. How are these people getting away with this stuff?

Jared Kushner’s investment fund is not especially large by global finance standards. But as he gets it fully up and running, each step is bringing with it ethical issues that would only grow if his father-in-law, Donald J. Trump, should win another term as president.

His $3 billion fund is financed almost entirely from overseas investors with whom he worked when he served as a senior adviser in the Trump White House. He has taken money from government wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as from Terry Gou, a founder of Foxconn, the Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer, whose role in Mr. Kushner’s firm has not been previously disclosed.

In total, 99 percent of the money placed with him by investors has come from foreign sources, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in late March.

Mr. Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, is collecting approximately $40 million a year in management fees from those investors even before any share of profits earned on investments. He has made 10 investments to date, totaling $1.2 billion, many of them in companies based abroad.

The investments include stakes in the Shlomo Group, an Israeli car-leasing and financing company; Dubizzle Group, a Dubai-based online real estate site; EGYM, a Munich-based electronic fitness company; Mosaic, a California-based solar lending site; and Zamp, an Abu Dhabi-backed fast food company that operates more than 1,000 restaurants in Brazil.

Other investments include two insurance businesses and a software company.

The foreign transactions — previously unseen in scale and speed for a former White House adviser — are bringing fresh scrutiny as Mr. Kushner’s father-in-law again seeks the White House and control over American foreign policy.

[…]

In a series of interviews, Mr. Kushner, 43, laid out new details of his effort to ramp up his firm. He also defended himself against the conflict-of-interest questions that have swirled around him since he left the White House and began soliciting investors.

“Following the laws and the rules is something we always do,” he said. “Perception, I’ve learned that from my time in politics, is important. But I can’t control what everyone is going to write or say about me.”

Mr. Kushner, the sole owner of the company, said he hoped to generate billions of dollars in additional returns for his investors and himself after helping to expand the companies he is investing in.

He has set up shop on the ninth floor of an office tower north of Miami. Its walls are filled with mementos from his time at the White House, including at least a dozen items signed by Mr. Trump, often with the words “Jared, Great Job. Thanks.”

Mr. Kushner has said he does not intend to return to the White House. But pressed on whether he would definitively rule out going back to government, he spoke instead about how happy he was in his life right now. He continues to offer advice to America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit set up by former Trump White House officials who are already preparing for a possible return to power.

Please click on that gift link up at the top to read the whole thing. It. Is. Stunning. And perhaps the most stunning thing about it is the crusade the Republicans launched against that piker Hunter Biden for his ancient and penny ante foreign dealings. I can’t for the life of me understand why the Democratic Senate hasn’t launched full bore investigations into what’s going on here. Even Republicans in the article acknowledge that nobody’s seen the scale and speed with which anyone has cashed in as Jared has done.

For some reason Trump and his family’s flagrant corruption has never interested people much which is astonishing. It’s unprecedented and happened right out in the open and it’s hardy even a scandal. And I’m sure that when he is finally defeated the Democrats will simply say that they want to turn the page and that will be that. It’s outrageous.