As a child of the 1960s, I hate sounding like a Cold Warrior here, but c’mon.
Moscow is gleeful. As gleeful as Stephen Miller pondering loading immigrants onto rail cars. As gleeful as a cheering MAGA rally at the idea of police shooting looters and brown-skinned migrants. Russian operatives had to get their hand dirty to help Donald Trump win election in 2016. Since then, MAGA Republicans have internalized Vladimir Putin’s thirst for the kind of chaos and insurrection that might tear apart the U.S.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is pleased to toss more fuel on the fire. The Supreme Court vacated an appeals court decision that allowed Texas to deny federal officials from accessing a portion of the Texas border with Mexico. In response, writes Jonathan Last:
… the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, responded that the Supreme Court’s order “allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America.” Which is a perfectly normal statement for an officer of the court to make, I guess?
It’s not clear what Texas Republicans think they are doing. Are they trying to trigger the libs? Or hurt Biden? Or help Trump? Whatever the case, what they are actually doing is putting in motion the most serious conflict between federal and state power since the integration standoff at Little Rock in 1954.
And Texas Republicans seem to think that such a constitutional crisis would be a good thing.
The post above from the Republican National Committee provoked this response from Seth Abramson:
Crazy that I even need to say this, but not a *scintilla*—not an iota, not a morsel, not a soupçon, not a scrap, not a particle, not a whit, not a pixel, not a bit—of the Trump-Russia collusion scandal has been debunked or proven a hoax, and in fact everything ever written about it in major media, New York Times-bestselling books like the Proof Trilogy and US intelligence reports has turned out to be correct. Donald Trump and his inner circle colluded with Russia in almost every way imaginable.
Now collusion is unnecessary. Like Trump lackeys knowing to do what Donald wants without his giving a direct order, the GOP is doing what the Russians want without needing any more reinforcement than Moscow cheering them on.
When Brittany Watts woke up at her Warren, Ohio, home on Sept. 22, 2023, she knew she was miscarrying.
Her 22-week-old fetus had been declared nonviable by doctors several days prior. Bleeding and in pain, she spent a total of 19 hours in the hospital over a span of two days, begging to be induced.
But an ethics group at Mercy Health – St. Joseph Warren Hospital had concerns about Ohio’s abortion laws and how they applied to Watts’ case, ultimately resulting in hours of delayed care.
Watts, frustrated with the lengthy wait times, said she left the hospital both days against medical advice. She said she miscarried alone in her own bathroom.
When Watts returned to Mercy Health for medical care following the miscarriage she says a nurse rubbed her back and told her everything would be okay before calling the police at the direction of the hospital’s risk management team and asking them to go to her home to find the fetus.
As Watts recovered in her hospital bed, officers from the Warren City Police Department searched her home. They eventually found the fetus, lodged in the traps of the toilet.
Watts was charged with abuse of a corpse – a felony charge that was ultimately dismissed earlier this month after an Ohio grand jury declined to indict her.
CBS News reviewed more than 600 pages of medical records as well as 911 transcripts and police records to understand what happened, and why Watts believes doctors, police and the state of Ohio failed her.
“I don’t want any other woman to go through what I had to go through,” Watts told CBS News in an exclusive interview.
Watts is a 34 year old medical receptionist who started leaking fluid 21 weeks into her pregnancy and it was determined that the fetus was not viable. Over the next four days she was tortured by the medical profession in her hometown because they couldn’t decide if they could induce her pregnancy to expel the non-viable fetus. It got worse and worse:
Watts arrived at Mercy Health – St. Joseph Warren Hospital at 8:28 a.m. local time. At 12:57 p.m., according to records, her doctor had requested an “inpatient consult to ethics.”
Records show that around the same time, a different doctor at the hospital examined Watts, and confirmed she had an abruption and premature rupture of membrane. Her white blood cell count was more than twice what it had been in the past, doctors said,and she needed immediate treatment before she found herself “on death’s door.”
“Because of this, mom is at great risk if she completely abruption in terms of hemorrhaging and dying. It does not make sense to me to wait till mom has bleeding to death before we deliver a nonviable pregnancy despite the fact that there is a heartbeat,” the doctor wrote.
He continued, “I feel we would be endangering the mother by waiting for hemorrhage and/or sepsis or her to stop to the fetal heartbeat.”
According to medical documents, staff at Mercy Health – St. Joseph Warren Hospital had also become concerned about Watts’ use of the phrase “abortion.”
A note from the clinical ethics committee consultation, issued around 3:30 p.m. local time, reads in part, “Extensive conversation with [REDACTED] re: staff concerns about Brittany’s verbalization to staff that she wishes to terminate the pregnancy and continues to mention she feels strongly that she is getting or consenting to an abortion. To clarify, ethics supports induction of this patient if it is the professional judgment of the physicians that Brittany is at high risk of bleeding and or serious infection that could lead to death. To be clear with Brittany, if induction occurs, there should be a well documented conversation with her (informed consent) that the procedure is only to prevent harm to her, and is not intended to terminate a potentially viable pregnancy.”
Ohio law bans abortions after 22 weeks, with exceptions for life-saving care. Watts, according to records, was 21 weeks and six days pregnant.
They took forever and didn’t tell her what was going on so Watts decided to go home and wait it out as is her right as a human being.
On Sept. 22, just before 6 a.m. local time, Watts said she felt something happening.
“I get up, and I go to the bathroom. I sit down on the toilet and I’m just, I’m doubled over. And then that’s when I hear ‘splash.'”
Watts looked down, and saw the toilet was filled to the brim with blood and tissue. She immediately began cleaning herself up – using disinfecting wipes and her shower to wash off the blood.
“I tried to make an appearance of the bathroom being clean. I grabbed a plunger because the toilet was kind of to the top,” she said. “I grabbed a bucket and I just tried to scoop out water and tissue and all the matter. And then I take the bucket outside and I dump the bucket.”
“All while thinking, ‘Wow, did that really just happen?’ in my mind. I’m like, ‘No, this is a dream. I’m dreaming.’ But it really happened. Like I’m really awake right now. This is really what life is like now.”
After cleaning up, Watts tried to go about her day. She went to a previously scheduled hair appointment, but as the hairdresser began perming her hair, she noticed Watts was uncomfortable and expressed concern for her health. Watts told her she was “just menstruating,” but the hairdresser insisted that she see a doctor and arranged a ride to the hospital.
When she arrived, Watts was given immediate medical attention. She was given an IV – dehydrated after losing so much blood.
“The nurse comes in and she’s rubbing my back and talking to me and saying, ‘Everything’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay,'” Watts said. “Little do I know, there’s a police officer that comes into the room a short time later. And I’m wondering, ‘Why is a police officer coming in here? I don’t recall doing anything wrong.’ And little do I know the nurse comforting me and saying that everything was gonna be okay was the one who called police.”
What a horrible person. She didn’t need to call the police. And, according to Watts she lied on top of it. I would guess she’s a right wing freak.
“She says the baby’s in her backyard in a bucket,” the nurse told the dispatcher. “And I need to have someone go find this baby or direct me on what I need to do.”
The nurse told the dispatcher she believed the bucket was near Watts’ trash.
“Oh, I’m going to be sick,” the dispatcher responded. “Did she say if the baby was alive or not?”
“She said she didn’t wanna look,” the nurse said. “She said she didn’t want the baby, and she didn’t look.”
Watts told CBS News she never said that she didn’t want her baby.
“I said I did not want to look. I never said I didn’t want my baby. I would have never said something like that. It just makes me so angry that somebody would put those type of words in my mouth to make me seem so callous. And so, so hateful.”
So the cops came to the house with a warrant. They looked at the bucket and didn’t find anything and then searched deeply into the toilet and came up with fetal remains. They arrested Watts for “abuse of a corpse” a felony that carries up to a year in prison.
Ohio law defines “abuse of a corpse” as the treating of a human corpse in a way that would outrage reasonable family or community sensibilities.
Her attorney says it’s a very rare charge and that she struggled to understand why police were involved at all given that the corpse in question was fetal remains.
“In the course of representing her, I was met time and time again with, ‘You can’t flush a fetus,'” Timko said. “And I would say, ‘What do you want her to do with it?’ To which there’s no response.”
Of course there is no response because what they really wanted was to punish her for failing to take her non-viable fetus to term, come what may.
Watts says the Warren City Prosecutor’s Office accused her in court of disregarding the fetus and simply going on about her day, citing her hair appointment.
“What do you want me to do in that situation?” Watts said, referring to the prosecutor’s argument. “Don’t you go about your day? I mean, yes, you seek medical attention, but miscarriages happen all the time. Whether you’re at home, whether you’re at work, whether you’re out in the general public, or at the store, you never know when things like this are going to happen. So who are you to say that I went on about my day? You don’t know what I did. You don’t know where I was. You just know that I went and got my hair done, but do you know where I was after that? No. You don’t.”
How dare they. She had a miscarriage and they do happen all the time. Apparently, a woman who has one is required to call the coroner, give a statement to the police, enter into a formal period of mourning and hold a full scale funeral every time they have one.
The Grand Jury declined to recommend indictment, thank God. But it should never, ever have come to that. These people are fanatics and there are millions of them all over the country who are searching for any way to punish pregnant women regardless of the circumstances. Of course miscarriages are now suspect. And birth control is on the agenda as well. They want as many women available for their ritual sacrifice as possible.
If they have to further undermine the democratic process to get that done, so be it:
Legislative efforts in Missouri and Mississippi are attempting to prevent voters from having a say over abortion rights, building on anti-abortion strategies seen in other states, including last year in Ohio.
Democrats and abortion rights advocates say the efforts are evidence that Republican lawmakers and abortion opponents are trying to undercut democratic processes meant to give voters a direct role in forming state laws.
“They’re scared of the people and their voices, so their response is to prevent their voices from being heard,” said Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund. “There’s nothing democratic about that, and it’s the same blueprint we’ve seen in Ohio and all these other states, again and again.”
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, voters in seven states have either protected abortion rights or defeated attempts to curtail them in statewide votes. Democrats have pledged to make the issue a central campaign topic this year for races up and down the ballot.
A proposal passed Wednesday by the Mississippi House would ban residents from placing abortion initiatives on the statewide ballot. Mississippi has among the toughest abortion restrictions in the country, with the procedure banned except to save the life of the woman or in cases of rape or incest.
In response to the bill, Democratic Rep. Cheikh Taylor said direct democracy “shouldn’t include terms and conditions.”
“Don’t let anyone tell you this is just about abortion,” Taylor said. “This is about a Republican Party who thinks they know what’s best for you better than you know what’s best for you. This is about control. So much for liberty and limited government.”
There is no better illustration of the authoritarian, Christian nationalist agenda of the GOP than this issue. And you’d better believe that giving this inch means they’ll take a mile. It won’t stop at abortion.
It’s not looking good for the little Palin wannabe
Lauren Boebert introduced herself to the new district she moved to to have an easier re-election and it didn’t go very well:
Representative Lauren Boebert did not receive the warm welcome she was hoping for after switching Colorado districts, with her rivals accusing her of being a “carpetbagger” during the first primary debate.
Boebert, who currently represents the Centennial State’s 3rd district, announced in December that she would run for election in the 4th district in 2024, instead. The decision comes after she was reelected in 2022 by such a narrow margin that the election nearly went to a recount. Her public image has taken a massive battering in recent months, as well.
The far-right congresswoman attempted to defend her decision during the debate Thursday night, saying she made the switch because she wanted a “fresh start” for her family.
“I am here to earn your vote. This is not a coronation,” she said. “The crops may be different in Colorado’s 4th District, but the values are not.”
But her opponents—and potential new constituents—were having none of it. In an informal straw poll, Boebert ranked fifth out of the eight candidates. While on stage, none of her opponents said they would support her if they ended up dropping out.
At one point, state Representative Mike Lynch asked Boebert, “Can you give the definition of ‘carpetbagger’ to me?”
The knives are out for her, that’s for sure. But the rest of the field is no picnic either.
But fortunately for her, she’s not alone in having a candidacy marred by controversy. Lynch resigned as state House minority leader earlier this week, after revelations that he was trying to hide a DUI arrest and gun charges from 2022.
Holtorf, who is an anti-abortion politician, recently admitted that he helped a girlfriend pay for an abortion. The procedure helped her “live her best life,” he said.
And another candidate, former state Senator Ted Harvey, launched a “scam PAC” in 2013 that spent 87 percent of the millions it raised on supposed operating expenses. In reality, the organization was set up so its leadership could make massive profits.
When the candidates were asked if they’d ever been arrested, the majority raised their hands. This is the GOP, folks. It’s little more than a criminal syndicate. No wonder they all love Donald Trump.
This is a test, folks. We are going to see if the MAGA propaganda machine is strong enough to overcome reality for a majority of the people. Trump is saying out loud that he wants the border issue to enhance his election chances. There is no mistaking it.
Meanwhile, some Republican members of the congress are saying that it’s a good deal and they should take it.
GOP Sen. Lankford calls out Rs who oppose border deal, noting they demanded it for $$. “Now it’s interesting a few months later, when we’re finally getting to the end they’re like ‘Oh just kidding, I actually don’t want a change in law because it’s a presidential election year.’” pic.twitter.com/YiUzHbnggu
The Oklahoma Republican party passed a "censure" resolution condemning their GOP Sen. James Lankford for the "crime" of ignoring Trump's orders and working with Democrats on a bill that would dramatically increase security at the border:
Republican front-runner Donald Trump said he wants to be held responsible for blocking a bipartisan border security billin the works in the Senateas President Biden seeks emergency authority to rein in a record surge of unauthorized border crossings.
“As the leader of our party, there is zero chance I will support this horrible open borders betrayal of America,” Trump told a rowdy crowd of supporters at a rally in Las Vegas on Saturday, ahead of the state’s presidential caucus on Feb. 8. “I’ll fight it all the way. A lot of the senators are trying to say, respectfully, they’re blaming it on me. I say, that’s okay. Please blame it on me. Please.”
Trump’s opposition follows Biden’s statement on Friday praising the deal and pledging to use its new authorities to “shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed” — a striking shift as he signaled openness to asylum restrictions and other enforcement measures that were previously unacceptable to Democrats.
“If given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law,” Biden said.
The increase in apprehensions at the southwest border has become a top-level policy challenge for the Biden administration and a core theme of Trump’s bid for a rematch this November. Biden’s management of the southern border and immigration is his worst-rated issue in polls, while survey respondents say they trust Trump more on the issue.
Trump said he opposed the bill because the presidential powers were unnecessary, echoing the position of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who on Saturday called the proposal “dead on arrival” in his chamber. “If Joe Biden truly wanted to secure the border, he doesn’t really need a bill,” Trump said in the Las Vegas speech. “I did it without a bill.”
But Trump has also acknowledged political motivations in seeking to block the bill to deny Biden another bipartisan legislative accomplishment.
“A Border Deal now would be another Gift to the Radical Left Democrats,” Trump said in a statement on Thursday. “They need it politically.”
Will the American people reward his craven, self-interested partisanship? It appears we are about to find out.
Meanwhile, it looks lie another “convoy” is headed to the border, led by Michael Flynn and some religious fanatics:
Like Jan 6, militant Christian supremacists seem to be the moving force behind the trucker convoy heading to the southern border. Michael Flynn seems to be in the mix too. 1/ https://t.co/U1T37RDKRopic.twitter.com/2zi7iiaMYV
A convoy of hundreds of people plans to head to the Texas border to stop migrants crossing into the country from Mexico.
The group, called “Take Our Border Back,” is organizing on Telegram and now has more than 1,600 followers.
One of the group’s organizers described them as “God’s army” in a planning call, according to Vice.
“This is a biblical, monumental moment that’s been put together by God,” one organizer said, per Vice.
Another said: “We are besieged on all sides by dark forces of evil.”
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God. It is time for the remnant to rise,” they said.
Pete Chambers, a lieutenant colonel organizing the group, has claimed he was a Green Beret. He explained the group’s plans while speaking to conspiracist Alex Jones on his Infowars show on Thursday.
“That’s what Green Berets do. Unconventional warfare is our bread and butter. Now we’re doing domestic internal defense,” Chambers said.
“What gets us to the enemy quickly is to find, fix, and finish, exploit, analyze, and disseminate,” Chambers said, referring to a military process. “That’s what we did in Syria when we took out ISIS really quick.”
He said the group would work with sympathetic members of law enforcement who he described as “constitutionally sound.”
The convoy is due to begin on Monday, starting at Virginia Beach, Virginia and three rallies will be held in San Ysidro, California, Yuma, Arizona, and Eagle Pass, Texas on February 3.
The group has sub-groups on Telegram for drivers and riders in those three states to coordinate rides.
The incel cosplaying among these people is going to get someone killed. All for that orange fool…
That’s where former federal judge Barbara Jones, the court-appointed special monitor in Donald Trump’s New York business fraud case, just planted a financial bombshell that legal experts say suggests Trump lied knowingly and repeatedly on his federal financial disclosures about a major loan that never existed—and may have evaded taxes on $48 million in income.
The detail came in a letter Jones filed on Friday to update New York Judge Arthur F. Engoron, first reported by The Messenger, on her efforts to get a full and clear accounting of the Trump Organization’s assets. The letter claims, yet again, that Trump and his company have filed statements containing inconsistencies and errors, but have been “cooperative” in the review process.
But Jones tucked a major revelation into footnote 6, writing that a massive chunk of debt Trump has claimed to owe one of his own companies for years apparently does not exist, and never did.
“When I inquired about this loan, I was informed that there are no loan agreements that memorialize the loan, but that it was a loan that was believed to be between Donald J. Trump, individually, and Chicago Unit Acquisition for $48 million,” Jones wrote, referencing the name of Trump’s LLC that held his debt.
“However, in recent discussions with the Trump Organization, it indicated that it has determined that this loan never existed—and thus that it would be removed from any upcoming forms submitted to the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) and would also be removed from subsequent versions of [corporate financial statements],” Jones wrote.
If true, that would essentially be an admission from the Trump Organization that all the financial disclosures Trump has filed with the federal government listed an entirely fictional debt worth tens of millions of dollars, which Trump claimed he personally owed to one of his own companies.
Asked to comment on Jones’ letter, Alan Garten, chief legal counsel for the Trump Organization, told The Daily Beast that her claim—that the company confessed to the loan never existing—was inaccurate and the loan did in fact exist.
“That’s one of many inaccuracies contained in the monitor’s letter, which we will be addressing with the court,” Garten said in a phone interview.
Moreover—in contradiction to the ex-president’s own statements about the mystery loan—Garten repeatedly insisted that the LLC actually owed the money to Trump. Asked to confirm the loan, Garten replied, “Yes, the loan existed,” specifying that it was “an internal loan” where Trump “leant money to the entity that he owns.”
Yet all of Trump’s financial disclosures, including his most recent amended version approved by the OGE last October, clearly state that it was Trump who owed Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC. He’s consistently listed his debt as more than $50 million, in the form of what’s known as “springing loan”—a loan with unfavorable terms to the borrower.
In fact, Trump confirmed this arrangement himself. In a 2016 interview with The New York Times, Trump claimed that he bought back this loan from “a group of banks several years ago.” Trump said that he’d chosen to keep the debt on his books, the Times reported, claiming that he pays interest on it to himself—despite the LLC’s “practically worthless” valuation.
“We don’t assess any value to it because we don’t care,” Trump said in the interview. “I have the mortgage. That is all there is. Very simple. I am the bank.”
The Daily Beast sent Jones an email asking if she would like to respond to Garten’s claims, but she did not immediately reply.
Jordan Libowitz, communications director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that, assuming the court filing is accurate, Trump would appear to have intentionally and repeatedly broken the law.
Sure looks that way. But we all know it’s just another witch hunt. The Deep State planted all that. He never said any such thing. Right MAGA?
The good news is that Hunter Biden is being prosecuted for paying his taxes (including all penalties) three years late. He could go to jail for 18 years. So it’s not like the Deep State is ignoring tax crimes. They have to make an example of somebody.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” Faulkner wrote in 1951. “Old times there are not forgotten,” wrote Daniel Decatur Emmett in “Dixie” a century earlier in 1859. “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” wrote somebody, but not likely Mark Twain.
We’ll come back to harbingers of re-appearing tyranny in a minute. Republicans in Missouri want to bring back “old time” dueling:
The Missouri Republican Civil War continues to escalate as a member of the Freedom Caucus faction has filed a proposed rule change to allow Senators to challenge an “offending senator to a duel.” #molegpic.twitter.com/ru9GcYCKBE
Sen. Nick Schroer (R-St. Charles County) is listed on the proposal, notes Fox 2 St. Louis:
Schroer’s office confirmed with FOX 2 that he was linked to the proposal, though he considers it a “draft rule change” that was distributed to members of the Senate “but not offered” and “never filed.”
According to the language of the paper proposal, senators could agree to engage in a duel if “a senator’s honor is impugned by another senator to the point that it is beyond repair and in order for the offended senator to gain satisfaction.”
The proposal also stated that an “offended senator shall send a written challenge to the offending senator” and those involved would agree to a “choice of weapons.” It also called for duels to take place “at the hour of high noon.”
I’ve written plenty about the rump faction of American royalists who while sporting flag lapel pins and waving pocket constitutions never really accepted the principles of the Declaration or aspirations for a more perfect union. They do not simply want to bring back dueling and feuds. They want to bring back feudalism.
The America Revolution was a defeat for feudalism. But it was only wounded and not written out of existence by the U.S. Constitution. The ages-long history of monarchy would not go quietly, nor the monarchists. Decades into the American experiment, they would attempt to unmake it. The Civil War was another defeat for feudalism. But once again, the Rumpists were only wounded. They rewrote their history and subverted the Civil War amendments for a hundred years. And now? They are back again. With a retribution.
On January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln rose before the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, to make a speech. Just 28 years old, Lincoln had begun to practice law and had political ambitions. But he was worried that his generation might not preserve the republic that the founders had handed to it for transmission to yet another generation. He took as his topic for that January evening, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.”
Lincoln saw trouble coming, but not from a foreign power, as other countries feared. The destruction of the United States, he warned, could come only from within. “If destruction be our lot,” he said, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
The trouble Lincoln perceived stemmed from the growing lawlessness in the country as men ignored the rule of law and acted on their passions, imposing their will on their neighbors through violence. He pointed specifically to two recent events: the 1836 lynching of free Black man Francis McIntosh in St. Louis, Missouri, and the 1837 murder of white abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy by a proslavery mob in Alton, Illinois.
But the problem of lawlessness was not limited to individual instances, he said. A public practice of ignoring the law eventually broke down all the guardrails designed to protect individuals, while lawbreakers, going unpunished, became convinced they were entitled to act without restraint. “Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane,” Lincoln said, “they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.”
The only way to guard against such destruction, LIncoln said, was to protect the rule of law on which the country was founded. “As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor…. Let reverence for the laws…become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”
Lincoln was quick to clarify that he was not saying all laws were good. Indeed, he said, bad laws should be challenged and repealed. But the underlying structure of the rule of law, based in the Constitution, could not be abandoned without losing democracy.
Lincoln didn’t stop there. He warned that the very success of the American republic threatened its continuation. “[M]en of ambition and talents” could no longer make their name by building the nation—that glory had already been won. Their ambition could not be served simply by preserving what those before them had created, so they would achieve distinction through destruction.
For such a man, Lincoln said, “Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” With no dangerous foreign power to turn people’s passions against, people would turn from the project of “establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty” and would instead turn against each other.
Lincoln reminded his audience that the torch of American democracy had been passed to them. The Founders had used their passions to create a system of laws, but the time for passion had passed, lest it tear the nation apart. The next generation must support democracy through “sober reason,” he said. He called for Americans to exercise “general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.”
“Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of its basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’”
What became known as the Lyceum Address is one of the earliest speeches of Lincoln’s to have been preserved, and at the time it established him as a rising politician and political thinker. But his recognition, in a time of religious fervor and moral crusades, that the law must prevail over individual passions reverberates far beyond the specific crises of the 1830s.
The panel of Republican candidates for CO-04, including Lauren Boebert, are asked who has been arrested and SIX of them raise their hands. They then high-five each other while the audience cheers. This is the MAGA GOP. https://t.co/euVyfG5Cf6
As Digby commented, the (T)rumpists “now believe that the law is what Trump says it is.” Trump has lived that belief his entire life. The snake oil salesman has convinced a significant faction of fellow citizens that they would be better off living under his dictatorship. Because freedom.
In his Letter to Henry L. Pierce and others (April 1859, two years in advance of the first shots on Fort Sumter), Lincoln wrote of the threat represented by the rejection by Democrats of his day of the principles of liberty and equality championed (imperfectly) by Thomas Jefferson:
The [Democrats] of to-day hold the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man’s right of property. Republicans, on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar.
I remember once being much amused at seeing two partially intoxicated men engage in a fight with their great-coats on, which fight, after a long, and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself out of his own coat, and into that of the other. If the two leading parties of this day are really identical with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have perfomed the same feat as the two drunken men.
Completing a transition that began under FDR, those positions reversed again in the 1960s. Now it is the Democrats “for both the man and the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar.” It is now Lincoln’s party that puts property ahead of others’ rights.
“the miners, and sappers–of returning despotism”
Lincoln continued:
But soberly, it is now no child’s play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation.
One would start with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but, nevertheless, he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society.
And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success.
Gaze again upon the Republican “miners, and sappers–of returning despotism” celebrating their violations of law in the clip above.
The violators of Jeffersonian principles agitate openly against them, Lincoln wrote in 1859:
One dashingly calls them “glittering generalities”; another bluntly calls them “self evident lies”; and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to “superior races.”
These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect–the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people. They are the van-guard–the miners, and sappers–of returning despotism.
We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.
This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
All honor to Jefferson–to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
History rhymes. Those harbingers will rewrite history again, as they did during Reconstruction, to make themselves, the enemies of liberty, its guarantors.
In an economics column headlined, “Falling inflation, rising growth give U.S. the world’s best recovery,” David Lynch (no, not that one) writes in the Washington Post:
Here, despite lingering consumer angst over inflation, the surprisingly strong economy is outperforming all of its major trading partners.
Since 2020, the United States has powered through a once-in-a-century pandemic, the highest inflation in 40 years and fallout from two foreign wars. Now, after posting faster annual growth last year than in 2022, the U.S. economy is quashing fears of a new recession while offering lessons for future crisis-fighting.
“The U.S. has really come out of this into a place of strength and is moving forward like covid never happened,” said Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist who now runs an eponymous consulting firm. “We earned this; it wasn’t just a fluke.”
It was no accident:
On Friday, President Biden hailed fresh government data showing that annual inflation over the second half of 2023 fell back to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. Coupled with Thursday’s news that the economy grew by 3.1 percent over the past 12 months, the Commerce Department report showed that the United States appears to have achieved an economic soft landing.
Former labor secretary Robert Reich hasn’t seen anything like it. Biden is moving the country toward “a more equitable economy”:
Biden is on the stump reminding Americans of the mess he inherited and the lemonade he made from Trump lemons.
“Just think back to the mess Donald Trump left this country in. A deadly pandemic, economic free fall, a violent insurrection,” Biden reminded voters in South Carolina.
Biden: "Just think back to the mess Donald Trump left this country in. A deadly pandemic, economic free fall, a violent insurrection. I promised to do everything in my power, I said at the time, to get us through one of the toughest periods in our history. And together, we are." pic.twitter.com/WSPUgAU99b
The strapping young man in the photo above is my grandfather Philip Kramer (in his late teens or early twenties, to my best estimation). He immigrated to America from Bialystok circa 1910. While the area is now part of the Republic of Poland, Bialystok “belonged” to the Russian Empire when he lived there (ergo, he was fluent in Russian, Polish, and Yiddish).
One of the reasons his family emigrated was to flee the state terror inflicted on Russia’s Jewish population by Czar Nicholas (the Bialystok pogram of 1906 was particularly nasty).
I suppose I have Czar Nicholas to thank for my existence. If my grandfather had never left Bialystok, he never would have met New York City born-and-raised Celia Mogerman (the daughter of Jewish German immigrants). Consequently, they never would have fallen in love, got married, and had their daughter Lillian, who never would have met and fallen in love with a young G.I. named Robert Hartley (a W.A.S.P. farm boy from Ohio) at a New York City U.S.O. Club. They, in turn, produced…me (otherwise, you’d just be staring at a blank page here).
Two lovebirds on their honeymoon, 1955
Obvious personal reasons aside, I’m thankful that Phil got out of Dodge well before Hitler’s army divisions rolled into Poland in 1939. Needless to say, the Jews of Bialystok fared no better under the Nazi regime than they did during the reign of the Czar. Far worse, actually.
So through luck and circumstance, Phil and Celie (flanking my mom in bottom row) enjoyed a wonderful life together, creating a quintessential American family. All three of their children did their part for the war effort. My uncle Irving (third from left in the top row) served in the USAAF (he was the radio operator on a B-25 crew that flew a number of missions over Germany). My Uncle Charles (not pictured) served in the U.S. Army (Pacific theater).
My mother (center above) was too young to enlist in the military, but served in the Civilian Defense Force. The photo was taken on a Brooklyn rooftop during the war (interestingly, it took intervention by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to nudge the recruitment of women).
Thankfully, the Kramer family survived the war. But sadly a great number of their relatives who had remained in Europe did not. And many of them were victims of the Holocaust.
That is why I am thinking about all of them on this Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Recently, my mother, who escaped Hungary as a young teen in 1943 as the Nazis were closing in, called me from her home in Jerusalem. She was quite agitated, asking why even Israel’s loyal friends seem to be promoting compromise on issues fundamental to its security. She begged me to speak to anyone and everyone I know, from community leaders to elected officials.
As the world marks Saturday, January 27, as the annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is clear that my mother needs no such day. The question the Jewish people must be asking is who will benefit from a day in January, 2024, designated to remember the Holocaust? […]
The United Nations, which at the initiative of its Israeli delegation designated the day back in 2005 to build Holocaust awareness and prevent further acts of genocide, now deploys the lessons of the Holocaust against the Jewish people. The U.N. has yet to condemn the explicitly and admittedly genocidal acts of Hamas against Israel on October 7 while its International Court of Justice is trying Israel for genocide in Gaza. If this is the result of remembering the Holocaust, we Jews would prefer they forgot about it. [,,,]
Everyday since Oct. 7, my mother is reminded of and haunted by the delusions of her grandparents and more than a dozen uncles and aunts who naively chose not to join her parents’ escape to Palestine as the Nazi menace spread, only to be turned to ashes in Auschwitz. She often muses aloud about how my father, of blessed memory, a Holocaust survivor, would process October 7th in Israel, October 8th in Harvard, and October 9th in the UN.
It’s not easy being a Jewish American right now, which is why I’ve been reticent to share my feelings on the Israeli-Hamas war (aside from my initial reflexive expression of abhorrence to the prospect of more death and destruction in the region, regardless of who propagates it).
From “Harold and Maude” (1971)
There has certainly been no shortage of historical dramas and documentaries about The Holocaust and the horror that was Nazi Germany from 1933-1945 (on television, stage, and screen). It’s even possible that “WW2 fatigue” is a thing at this point (particularly among post-boomers). But you know, there’s this funny thing about history. It’s cyclical.
For example, here’s how some fine folks were reacting this morning on X to posts that merely acknowledged this commemorative holiday:
Those are some of the nicest ones. But you get the gist.
One could surmise that the lessons of history haven’t quite sunk in with everyone (especially those who may be condemned to repeat it). So perhaps there cannot be enough historical dramas and documentaries reminding people about The Holocaust and the horror that was Nazi Germany from 1933-1945, nu? Or am I just overreacting to a few internet trolls and a current presidential hopeful who, when asked why he never condemned the Neo-Nazis who incited the violence in Charlottesville in 2017 (resulting in the death of peaceful counter-protestor Heather Heyer) -that there were/are “…very fine people on both sides”?
After carefully weighing all the historical evidence put before me, I can only conclude that…there were no fine Nazis in 1920 (the year the party was founded), no fine Nazis since 1920, nor are there likely to be any fine Nazis from now until the end of recorded time.
As for those who still insist there is no harm in casually co-opting the tenets of an evil ideology that would foist such a horror upon humanity, I won’t pretend to “pray for you” (while I lost many relatives in the Holocaust, I’m not “Jewish” in the religious sense, so I doubt my prayers would even “take”), but this old Hasidic proverb gives me hope:
“The virtue of angels is that they cannot deteriorate; their flaw is that they cannot improve. Humanity’s flaw is that we can deteriorate; but our virtue is that we can improve.”
Here’s hoping for some “improvement” going forward. That’s why it’s important to look backward sometimes at the lessons of history, so we remain aware of how we don’t want to be. Here are links to some films I’ve written about that might give us a good place to start:
