That is all.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
No sleep for the vindictive
What was I saying about saboteurs?
Trump’s plans for getting even. (Axios):
Republicans’ impeachment probe of President Biden is unraveling because of a lack of evidence — but their work could become the basis for federal investigations and even prosecutions of the Biden family if Donald Trump wins re-election, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: Trump has vowed retribution against his enemies if he wins in November. House Republicans have struggled to show Biden has done anything illegal, but people close to Trump are still plotting to use the Justice Department against Biden and his family.
- A source close to the Trump campaign said that “everything you have seen from the Biden DOJ,” in terms of the charges against Trump, “you can expect to see from the Trump DOJ.”
- One Trump ally argued that there is precedent for a second Trump administration to investigate and prosecute the Bidens: the current federal charges against Trump.
Reality check: Those charges stem from allegations that Trump led a conspiracy to try to overturn the 2020 election, and that he illegally kept classified documents and then schemed to conceal that he’d taken them.
- Biden was found to have some classified documents from his vice presidency, but cooperated with authorities in returning them.
- The special counsel who investigated Biden’s case, a former Trump appointee to the Justice Department, decided not to prosecute.
Driving the news: House Republicans have alleged that Biden should be impeached because he illicitly benefitted from lucrative foreign deals arranged by his son Hunter.
- Despite their difficulty proving that, Trump has said he thinks Biden should be prosecuted anyway — because Trump is being prosecuted now.
- “By weaponizing the DOJ against his Political Opponent, ME, Joe has opened a giant Pandora’s Box,” Trump posted on Truth Social in January.
- House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said in a fundraising email last month that “when President Trump returns to the White House, it’s critical the new leadership at the DOJ have everything they need to prosecute the Biden Crime Family and deliver swift justice.”
- Comer also said on Fox News recently that if Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department won’t accept criminal referrals from House Republicans, “then maybe a Donald Trump Department of Justice will.”
Ther’s more at the link, but you get the gist.
They’ll find a ham sandwich to prosecute even if they have to bake the bread, slaughter the pig, grow the lettuce, and assemble the sandwich. It’s who they are. It will be the most productive work the GOP has done in years.
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Teeing up a Trump election in the House
You think the skies will go dark for four minutes today? How about for four years or permanently?
For your Robert F. KennedyJr.-leaning friends. RFK Jr.’s New York director hates Democrats and Joe Biden so much that she dreams of seeing the 2024 presidential election decided for Trump in a GOP-led House.
Whether or not this plan is far-fetched, it reflects nihilism masquerading as progress. Not unlike making America great again by demolishing the republic and replacing it with a Gileadish autocracy. How d’ya like that, libs?
Somewhere in my dusty memory is a plot line in which someone plans their own suicide to look like a murder and configures the evidence to implicate a former lover(?). To hate someone that much….
* What happens when you’re running out of the hotel to chase an eclipse.
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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
This is one of the stunning moments I will never forget:
He wanted to keep his numbers down…
Trump says he made over $50 million and maybe he did. But I think I’d wait for the fundraising reports to come in before treating that as a confirmed number. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but he tends to exaggerate a little bit.
On the other hand, those crooked gazzilionaires really might have added a zero to their checks when they heard this:
Donald Trump promised to keep billionaires’ taxes low at a fundraising dinner Saturday night in Palm Beach, Fla., held at the home of billionaire John Paulson.
A Trump campaign official told NBC News that the former president “spoke on the need to win back the White House so we can turn our country around, focusing on key issues including unleashing energy production, securing our southern border, reducing inflation, extending the Trump Tax Cuts, eliminating Joe Biden’s insane [electric vehicle] mandate, protecting Israel, and avoiding global war.” NBC News requested to have a reporter present at the fundraiser, but the campaign refused.
[…]
Some billionaires who abandoned Trump in the wake of Jan. 6 and who supported his opponents in the primary have come crawling back to the former president in hopes of keeping their tax burden low.
Billionaire investor Nelson Peltz — who apologized after Jan. 6 for supporting Trump, telling CNBC, “I’m sorry I did that” — recently hosted a breakfast at his Palm Beach mansion attended by Trump and several other billionaires, including Steve Wynn and Elon Musk, according to The Washington Post. Oracle’s Larry Ellison is also considering cutting Trump’s campaign a check, while billionaire heirs Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein told the Financial Times that they intend to donate to the former president’s campaign.
“While Donald Trump has been busy awarding himself golf trophies at Mar-a-Lago and palling around with billionaires, Joe Biden has been crisscrossing the nation connecting with voters and outlining his vision to grow our economy from the bottom up and the middle out,” Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime
He means it. He said this earlier:
Biden has a response:
He’s not going to find it
Trump told a rally audience last week that he would be coming up with a policy on abortion in the next week. (And yes, everyone made the same joke about “infrastructure week and health care reform in two weeks” joke when he did it.) But he does have to come up with something because his own people are waiting for the magic words he’s been promising that will put this whole thing to rest. Unfortunately for him, it’s not possible:
Former President Donald Trump is vowing to solve the abortion dilemma that has dogged Republican candidates since the fall of Roe v. Wade with his singular dealmaking acumen.
The presumptive Republican nominee, who has pledged to make a statement on abortion this week, has said for months that if elected he would “come together with all groups” and “negotiate something” that would “make both sides happy,” suggesting that “15 weeks seems to be a number that people are agreeing at.”
“We’ll end up with peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years,” he said.
The tactic has drawn praise from conservatives including Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former counselor, who called it “a reasonable conversation starter.”
“It reflects consensus,” she said of a 15- or 16-week ban, citing her own firm’s polling. “People recognize that the lack of compromise, moderation and reasonableness is on the side of the professional, political left, and the Democrats.”
But Trump, who has blasted other Republicans for speaking “inarticulately” on abortion, is running headlong into the same problem the rest of the party has encountered: There is almost certainly no deal the opposing sides of the abortion wars would accept.
“You’re getting the worst of both worlds” by pitching a 15-week ban, said a GOP political strategist who has worked on several presidential campaigns, including Trump’s failed 2020 bid. “Pro-life groups still aren’t going to be happy, and you’re still supporting a nationwide limit that Democrats will attack,” said the strategist, granted anonymity to speak critically about the former president’s rhetoric.
I’m not sure where Kellyanne gets the idea that there’s consensus on the 15 week ban but …. there isn’t. Good luck with trying to sell a national ban in the swing states that still have abortion rights.
Good luck with this. Trump instinctively understands that this is a dangerous issue for him but there’s no way out.
It’s even more ghastly when you read the whole thing.
I just thought I’d put this up as we go into the final week before the 2016 Stormy Daniels election fraud case begins on the 15th.
Think about what he said and the fact that dozens of other women have accused him of the same thing and that he’s even been held liable for defamation and sexual assault for over 90 million dollars. The man is a reprehensible reprobate on a level we’ve never encountered in presidential politics — and we’ve had some real beauts when it comes to womanizing. This man is truly disgusting.
He’s a tried and true Trumper and I’m sure he believes that Ukraine is responsible for election interference rather than Russia. That’s what Putin told Trump and now half the GOP (at least) believes it. I seriously doubt he meant to say Russia, considering Trump’s fealty to Vladimir Putin. He didn’t misspeak.
Some Republicans know otherwise. But will they have the nerve to defy Dear Leader? I’m not so sure:
Some sobering-up music
From Jason Statler (LOLGOP) at the I Know How Much You Care substack:
Historian Thomas Zimmer, who puts out the Democracy Americana newsletter and co-hosts the “Is This Democracy” podcast, has been writing and talking extensively about the significance of Project 2025. This week on my earlyworm podcast “How are you feeling about democracy?” he told me the two main goals of Project 2025:
That diagnosis is we were not ready in 2016/17. We didn’t have the plans. We didn’t have the expertise and we didn’t have the personnel. And this must not happen again, right?
The two big lessons they have drawn from this experience is a) we need to have more of this planning operation beforehand. We need to have our plans ready. We need to have the personnel ready. But also b) we need to purge everyone who put the brakes on what we wanted to do the last time around
Thomas and I had a great conversation about how much of this is coming from Trump and how much of this is the GOP establishment trying to define MAGA to make sure they get what they want out of Trump, whose first presidency failed to transform anything but the federal judiciary. That’s a lot! But not enough for the primal forces of nature behind America’s right wing.
You should read Zimmer’s three-part series on Project 2025. And you should also read the Foreword of Project 2025’s report on pages 33-49, as he recommends.
But if you aren’t going to do any of that, just read one sentence of Project 2025. In fact, you already did. It’s the title of this post:
But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning.
I keep hearing Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts) saying, “Yes, of course they’re serious… ”
How serious? Statler adds, “But don’t believe me or Trump. Believe the entire Republican establishment.”
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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Counterrevolution? Counter what?
The U.S. is still processing the Civil War and its aftermath over 150 years later. When I arrived from the Midwest as a kid, southerners still tossed around yankee as a slur. Israel hasn’t had even a century to process the Holocaust and isn’t done. Now Israelis have to process Oct. 7. I’m not optimistic where this will go near term:
Six months after Oct. 7, Israelis are struggling to recover their bearings, their core, their belief that Jews are safe in Israel.
In Israel’s south and north, more than 120,000 people have been evacuated, their neighborhoods transformed into front lines. The homes sit empty, toys still scattered in front yards.
In the southern kibbutzim, where 3,000 Hamas-led fighters launched a surprise assault on that indelible Saturday morning, the residents return not to live but to serve as guides for visitors from abroad. They give heart-rending tours, recounting how 1,200 people were slaughtered and 253 hostages were dragged into Gaza, according to Israeli government figures.
Evacuees fear that their communities are becoming places frozen in time and loss. They worry that if no solution is found for them — if security is not restored along the borders they share with their enemies — the rest of the country will remain exposed, in a permanent state of existential danger.
Existential danger is going around, real and imagined. Donald Trump is hyping “stranger danger” at every rally and speech. Scary, scary brown people are coming! Diseased animals! They kill the women and rape the men!
The song is as familiar as the intractable animosities:
There is nationwide support for the military’s punishing war against Hamas, which has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says most of the dead are women and children.
The images from Gaza — of shattered cities, families killed together in their homes, malnourished children — do not often appear on the nightly news here. Most of the world thinks Israel has gone too far. Most Israelis don’t think they’ve gone far enough.
Here in the U.S., we worry that Trump is the real danger, and gun culture has gone too far. His cult wants to go further and, like him, rejoices “in the suffering of those they hate and fear.” They are at war too.
Trump, by the way, shared an article that dismisses concerns about his lack of character and values (via Meidas Touch):
“We shouldn’t much care whether our commander-in-chief is a real conservative, whether he is a role model for children or says lots of silly things, or whether he is modest or dignified. What we should care about is whether he knows we are in a war, knows who the enemy is, and knows how to win. Trump does.
Hint: You are the enemy.
Trump’s shared article also turns the fear that voters have of Trump becoming “another Hitler” or a “dictator” into a positive “reason for hope.” The writer says Trump’s enemies “rightly fear” what he and his party will accomplish, calling it a “counterrevolution.” Kind of sounds like an insurrection:
“His enemies hate him with an indescribable fierceness. “Another Hitler,” they say, “elect him and he will be a dictator.” We should take this hysteria as reason for hope. The America-haters rightly fear that he and his party are on the threshold of a successful counterrevolution.”
I’m confused by this America-hater thing. The American Revolution birthed a democratic republic on this continent. And a Trump counterrevolution would do … what exactly? Or have they even thought that far ahead?
It’s all very exhausting.
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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.