Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

They’re saying he’s Jack Smith’s secret weapon

You’ve all no doubt heard that the Special Prosecutor has asked the Supreme Court to decide if Trump is immune from criminal charges and they agreed to decide whether to hear it by this week. Since that time, the appeals court did agree to hear it so there’s no way of knowing if that will affect the Supremes’ decision.

When the filing was revealed all the legal beagles on TV were atwitter about the fact that it was signed by a DOJ attorney who is apparently considered one of the super-duper legal heavyweights in the country. This piece in Vanity Fair suggests that he may be Smith’s secret weapon:

Borrowing from the Jaworski playbook, as well as the precedent set in the resulting landmark United States v. Nixon, special counsel Jack Smith has urged today’s Supreme Court to agree to resolve a vexing question of the Trump years and to do so as quickly as possible: Can a president stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, shoot someone dead, and be immune from criminal prosecution because the shooting occurred while he was president?

No, Smith didn’t frame his request so colloquially. However, he might have been justified in invoking Nixon’s infamous line, “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Instead, he asked the justices to decide a question that he called “central to our democracy”: whether Trump is “absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office.” Separately, the special counsel is seeking a resolution for a secondary question: whether Trump’s prior impeachment and acquittal over his failed attempt to remain in power after the events of January 6 insulates him from criminal prosecution.

[The words were likely written] by the special counsel’s secret weapon in this fast-track appeal: Michael Dreeben, a longtime former Justice Department official, served for decades in the Office for the Solicitor General, which is charged with representing the government before the Supreme Court. He’s the “counsel of record” in this case—the person who will most certainly argue this case if and when it’s officially added to the docket. His name caught me and many others by surprise—Dreeben is a person the justices pay close attention to, with more than 100 oral arguments under his belt for both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Dreeben is also a thorn in Trump’s side in a subtler way: As a member of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, he has been described as “the biggest brain in criminal law in the country”—whatever that means—and someone who can think several steps ahead. Indeed, Dreeben has most certainly already foreseen the practical effect of Trump continuing to insist presidents deserve king-like absolute immunity…

This is the fun part where we game the whole thing out:

As it happens, this flurry of activity in the courts, and that to come, isn’t the only development Smith and his office will have to play three-dimensional chess with. On the same day that Chutkan hit the pause button in the election subversion case, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a long-running dispute involving a trio of January 6 defendants who claim that the Justice Department overreached in prosecuting them for obstructing Congress. The reason these slow-moving cases matter, as Roger Parloff has written extensively over at Lawfare, is their overlap with two of Trump’s charges in DC—and because 300-plus people who were present at the Capitol siege have been charged under the same law.

Since the early days of the Justice Department’s probe of the insurrection, federal prosecutors have turned to a subsection of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002—enacted in the wake of the Enron scandal—that makes it a crime to impede an official government proceeding. Hundreds have been charged under it. But to the defendants, that law is merely a document-tampering statute that doesn’t apply to obstructing the joint session of Congress on January 6. Yet a coterie of trial judges across the political spectrum have rejected that argument; the only exception has been Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee who last year agreed that a charge of obstruction was only appropriate if it concerned “a record, a document, or other object” associated with the Capitol breach.

I won’t attempt to parse the language of 18 U.S.C. 1512(c)(2), the law being challenged, which criminalizes anyone who “corruptly … otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” But suffice it to say, a divided DC Circuit concluded that the language was unambiguous and covered the conduct of these three January 6 defendants. “Under the most natural reading of the statute, § 1512(c)(2) applies to all forms of corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding,” above and beyond simply document-tampering, wrote US Circuit Judge Florence Pan, a Joe Biden appointee.

If that weren’t head-spinning enough, Jack Smith isn’t the one overseeing these cases and the hundreds of other January 6 prosecutions that are similar to it—the Justice Department and the US Attorney’s Office in Washington are. As a result, in principle, he’s not directly involved with how Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar defends these prosecutions before the justices. As she put it in a brief urging the court to decline hearing these appeals: Even accepting that the law under attack is an evidence-tampering statute doesn’t help the defendants. “Preventing the Members of Congress from validating the state certificates thus constitutes evidence-focused obstruction,” Prelogar wrote.

Court observers are abuzz, if not outright skeptical, that a majority on the Supreme Court has any appetite for undermining hundreds of federal prosecutions, let alone ones against Trump. If there’s any comfort in this tangled web, it is that the justices have had very little tolerance for anything related to Trump’s disruption of the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. From rejecting his and Texas’s long-shot bid to overturn the election results in the states Biden won to siding with the January 6 committee to declining his intervention in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents dispute, their patience appears to be wearing thin. If that pattern holds, there’s a reasonable chance that a majority won’t let him get away with subverting what remains of our democracy.

I’ll confess that did make my head spin a little bit. (Maybe it’s time for me to take a walk and have a drink!) But it’s fascinating stuff even if I don’t actually have much faith in the Supreme Court to do the right thing. But you never know. The idea of overturning all the January 6th cases does seem a bit much.

Stay tuned. This is going to be one of the most momentous times in American judicial history. Let’s just hope it’s momentous in a good way for a change…

Happy Hollandaise, everyone!

Oh right. They only care about them in the womb

The right wants children to suffer. There’s no other way to interpret this:

In letters sent Monday to the governors of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Dakota and Texas, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra urged the states to take up more of the 400 options CMS has offered to ensure coverage. The options include allowing states to use enrollee information they have to auto-renew coverage.

HHS also issued new guidance for states Monday, including an option to give kids an additional 12 months to get on the rolls. That option is available through 2024, CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure told reporters.

Becerra also asked the states to remove barriers to Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollment for children no longer eligible for Medicaid, reduce call center times for families and expand their Medicaid programs if they haven’t already.

“Because all children deserve to have access to comprehensive health coverage, I urge you to ensure that no child in your state who still meets eligibility criteria for Medicaid or CHIP loses their health coverage due to ‘red tape’ or other avoidable reasons as all states ‘unwind’ from the Medicaid continuous enrollment provision that was in place during much of the COVID-19 public health emergency,” Becerra wrote.

According to HHS, the nine states are responsible for 60 percent of children’s coverage losses between March and September.

“State choices matter,” CMS Deputy Administrator Daniel Tsai said Monday. “States that have taken up the historic number of new policy flexibilities that CMS has put on the table are better able to protect kids’ coverage.”

According to new HHS data, the 10 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming — disenrolled more children than states that have expanded Medicaid combined. That’s partly because expansion states have taken up more CMS flexibilities than non-expansion states.

This is just disgraceful. The same people who are all for forcing women to go into labor and give birth against their will can’t be bothered to cover children with health care, even when they don’t have to pay for it.

The Biden administration is begging states to take the money to ensure that parents can take their kids to the doctor even if they aren’t rich. Begging. And they are being ignored while too many people who should know better are blaming them for failing to get it done.

This makes me see red. Medicaid and the S-CHIP programs are literal life savers for people who don’t have money to afford health insurance through any other means. It’s maddening.

Happy Hollandaise everyone:

He’s a very good German … er American:

“He was talking about the border. He was talking about people coming from other countries, coming from prisons. And they wanted to focus on all the Sunday shows, Lawrence, on the word he used, ‘poison’. He’s just trying to say we want to keep America, America. We want to build up the border and find out who’s coming in and out. And they tried to say that this language was the problem.”

Uhm, that’s exactly what the Nazis said. Hey, the Fuhrer is just trying to keep Germany German!

This is unAmerican garbage and it’s very dangerous. It isn’t just language. It’s ideology and it’s policy too and it’s not benign in the least. When you combine it with these threats against his domestic political rivals, you have a full blown fascist agenda:

Yikes.

Happy Hollandaise ????

Once again, thank you, thank you for your support this year. It means the world to me and I couldn’t be more grateful. This is a labor of love and it is certainly gratifying to know that people appreciate what we do here.

One thing we’re not is professional fact checkers. There are people with far greater resources at hand to do that. But that doesn’t mean we don’t check facts. I think one of the most important goals of political analysis has to be the ability to wade through all the spin and propaganda to get to the truth as best you can. It’s not easy. One of the things that’s changed dramatically in the past couple of decades is the way social media now bombards us with false information from every direction. On Facebook or Xitter or even any of the new ones we are getting fed certain news by an algorithm that thinks it knows what we want to see and it’s not always what we need to see. (In fact, it’s not always what we want to see either — except adorable animals.) It’s easy to get sucked into a vortex of despair or anger when this happens.

I hope that we can provide a little bit of an antidote to that here at Hullabaloo. All these years of daily blogging have honed our bullshit detectors to be pretty keen. They’re not perfect but when you work in this online world seven days a week you get good at spotting the BS and finding the news and information that at least rounds out our understanding of American politics and what’s happening in the wider world. That’s the hope anyway and we all try to get it right as much as we possibly can.

We’re going into the most important presidential campaign year of any of our lifetimes and that is not BS and it’s not hyperbole. We’ll be here, following the story as it unfolds every day of the week. And we’ll try very hard to go beyond the conventional wisdom and also sort through the chaos of social media and propaganda to synthesize what is happening and try to figure out what it all means.

If you care to help me keep the lights on here as we try to get through the year, I would be most grateful. It’s probably going to be a dark and tumultuous trip but together we’ll get there.

cheers,
digby

Happy Hollandaise, everyone!

From strategist Joe Trippi. If you have the time to listen to a podcast today at some point, I recommend you listen to this one. Is he right? Hell if I know. But there’s no reason to believe that everything he says is completely off base either.

Trippi was one of the few who called the red trickle in 2022. His podcasts are super interesting because he brings in the history and experience of his years as a political strategist. He may just be a hopium addict. It’s certainly possible. Biden’s numbers are unrelentingly awful and it’s terrifying, especially when you see Republicans rallying around Hitler 2.0. But this isn’t the first time someone has been in the doldrums at this stage in the campaign as Biden is and there are reasons why this is likely to turn around. And it’s not even counting on the fact that the opponent is probably going to be on trial during the campaign.

We’ll see. But with Republicans already measuring the drapes and Democrats throwing their aprons over their heads and running around in circles as usual, it seems to me that it’s important to see the other side to this.

Happy Hollandaise, everyone! If you’re in the mood to spread some cheer ….

He’s a natural

Donald Trump believes in eugenics. He really does. Of course his understanding of it is purely based upon his own belief in his superior genes and good “German blood.” He’s said it many times in public:

When he said during his first term that he didn’t understand why the US allowed people from “shit-hole countries” to emigrate to the US and suggested that we should encourage people from Norway to come instead, it wasn’t hard to figure out what he meant by that. His xenophobia never applied to white European immigrants. After all, he married two of them and they are the mothers of four of his five children. His problem is with people of different races.

If someone of a different race expresses devotion to him then of course he likes them. Think of Kim Jong Un whom he considers to be one of his greatest allies. But it’s a very individual thing. For the most part he believes that people from the “shit-hole” countries are genetically inferior to people like him with his good German blood.

Trump’s out campaigning in earnest now as the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary are just weeks away. And if anyone thought he was going to soft-peddle the “Hitleresque” rhetoric, they were way off base. His basic stump speech is all about banning immigration by those who don’t “share our ideology” (whatever he means by that) and rounding people up here in the US and putting them in camps.He’s not being subtle about who he’s talking about.

Trump: They’re poisoning the blood of country.. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world not just in South America… but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia pic.twitter.com/fv38EABo1a

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 16, 2023

This “blood poisoning” rhetoric is literally right out of Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf, in which he wrote, “all great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” By that Hitler meant the Jews were polluting the Aryan bloodstream (although he had a long list of others who were poisoning that good German blood as well) and Trump is talking about everyone except for white people and people of color who worship him personally. But they’re on the same wavelength. This is not an accident and Trump isn’t speaking off the cuff. It’s in his prepared speeches and he’s not taking it out. Why would he? It’s a big applause line and that’s how he knows it’s working.

It’s tempting to believe that Trump doesn’t actually know that he’s “parroting Adolph Hitler” as the White House charged after his latest tribute to the monstrous, genocidal maniac. After all, it’s pretty clear that he hasn’t read a book since he was in middle school (if then) and his knowledge of history is limited to a handful of WWII movies. But he doesn’t need to. Even if his personal Heinrich Himmler, Stephen Miller, wrote the words, it’s obvious from Trump’s casual conversation that he is in complete agreement with the fascist sentiments underlying “poisoning the blood of the country.” It’s fundamental to his beliefs about himself and his own superior genetic make-up.

Recall that one of the biggest controversies of his first two years came about because of his response to the protest march in Charlottesville Virginia. A group of alt-right men dressed in a sort of uniform of white polo shirts and khaki pants had gathered one night to protest the removal of a confederate statue. They marched around with tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil” which seemed extreme even for the Trump years. At a counter protest the next day one of the alt-right protesters drove though a crowd killing a woman. Trump was obviously irritated that the neo-Nazi group was being blamed for what happened and famously declared that “there were good people on both sides” suggesting that not all Nazis are bad people.

The “blood and soil” chant comes right out of the Third Reich and it’s also echoed in Trump’s repeated reference to “poisoning the blood of the country.” Wikipedia defines it as, “a nationalist slogan expressing Nazi Germany’s ideal of a racially defined national body (“Blood”) united with a settlement area (“Soil”). By it, rural and farm life forms are idealized as a counterweight to urban ones.”   Does that sound familiar at all?

Hitler also targeted “the enemy within” for persecution, imprisonment and death. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, those included:

Roma (Gypsies), people with disabilities, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and Afro-Germans. The Nazis also identified political dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and so-called asocials as enemies and security risks either because they consciously opposed the Nazi regime or some aspect of their behavior did not fit Nazi perceptions of social norms. They sought to eliminate domestic non-conformists and so-called racial threats through a perpetual self-purge of German society.

Here’s Trump over the week-end once again promising to purge America of undesirables. (They have persuaded him not to use the word vermin … for now.)

Trump says Americans who disagree with him politically are more dangerous than the authoritarian leaders of China, Russia, and North Korea pic.twitter.com/xxs5Go5BWM

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) December 18, 2023

His list also includes “communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections” and he has vowed to “expel,” “cast out”, “throw off”, “rout”, “evict” and “purge” his enemies. This is right out of the Nazi playbook.

Trump is always looking for a way to thrill his followers with a new outrage so it’s easy to say he’s just putting on a show. But I think he means it. He’s very bitter and angry at half of America for not loving him unconditionally and his thirst for revenge is overwhelming. It’s not about ideology, it’s personal. But the program that he’s contemplating as his instrument to pay back all those who’ve refused to bow and scrape before him is a full-on fascist agenda. And he knows it (the man watches a lot of TV.) He just believes it will work for him.

And he may be right, at least as far as the Republican base is concerned. They may not be aware of, or care about, the echoes of Hitler in his words but they like what they are hearing. According to a new poll by the Des Moines Register, “43% of likely Republican caucus goers to say they are more likely to support him.” Asked about his statement that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country” 42% say the same thing. And 43% say “it doesn’t matter that Trump said he would have ‘no choice’ but to lock up his political opponents.”

Back in the early days of the internet, there was a thing called Godwin’s Law which held that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches .” It was assumed to mean that the discussion had devolved into absurdity and should be abandoned when that happens. I fear that too many people may end up assuming that about these discussions as well. But the man who coined the adage, Mike Godwin, wrote a clarification a few years back, after the events in Charlottesville:

It still serves us as a tool to recognize specious comparisons to Nazism — but also, by contrast, to recognize comparisons that aren’t. And sometimes the comparisons can spot the earliest symptoms of horrific “attitudes, actions and language” well before our society falls prey to the full-blown disease.

Just because Trump’s first term didn’t result in the full flowering of Nazi America doesn’t mean that the signs weren’t there. He has been saying things for years that point inexorably to his underlying fascist worldview. And even more disturbing, the response he gets from his tens of millions of followers clearly shows that they share it.

The damned spot that won’t wash clean

A Threads post from Kurt Andersen (“Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History“) points out the lingering effects of tyranny (map above):

So interesting that the Germans in the part of Germany run by tyrants for most of the 20th century—Nazis for 12 years, Soviet-proxy communists for 45—are those now most supportive of the right-wing AfD party. Tragically, enduringly habituated to dislike democracy and outsiders.

It got me thinking how often we see U.S. maps reflecting politics and policies that carry traces of the Confederacy that died far longer ago than the Nazi and Soviet regimes.

The taint is not uniform over all issues and all states, clearly, but it persists.

Happy Hollandaise, you filthy animals!

“Don’t just vote. Run.”

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,” Jesus said from the cross.

American women like Allie Phillips, 28, will be less forgiving of politicians who know not what they do and those who do know and don’t care. Remember, first they come for the women.

In mid-October, the Guardian reported on Phillips’ confrontation early this year with her nonviable pregnancy and Tennessee’s abortion ban.

Allie Phillips thinks of herself as the ordinary neighbor nextdoor. She shops at the Walmart clearance rack. She posts TikTok videos of herself and her six-year-old daughter, Adalie, singing along to Taylor Swift and dancing the Wednesday Addams dance. Up until recently, the most political thing she’d ever done was vote, and only in presidential elections.

That was then. This is now.

Normally I peruse a lot of headlines before something grabs my attention, but this story via a rural organizing list did that first thing this morning. You need to see this story from Kathie C. Reilly at Elle:

Allie Phillips cried into the camera. Her face mask was pushed down around her chin, and tears streamed from her big blue eyes. It was March 7, 2023, and she was speaking to her more than 330,000 TikTok followers from an abortion clinic thousands of miles away from her home state of Tennessee. “I didn’t expect to have this update,” Phillips said into the camera, barely able to get out the words.

Two weeks earlier, at 19 weeks pregnant, doctors discovered that Phillips’ baby, whom she’d named Miley, was suffering from a multitude of fatal health issues and no longer compatible with life. Continuing the pregnancy put Phillips’ own life at risk, but her doctors couldn’t do anything because of Tennessee’s abortion ban. After researching out-of-state options, Phillips booked an appointment in New York City. When she arrived, an ultrasound at the clinic found that Miley had already died, a development that meant Phillips was at risk of going into sepsis, among a host of other serious health risks. Providers scheduled her for an emergency procedure. “It was very traumatic,” she says.

If you want to see her traumatic video, click on “camera” above. Phillips depended on Go Fund Me and her followers’ support to finance her trip to New York.

@.allie.phillips We all have a story to share. This is my story. #mileyrose #mileyslaw #mileyspurpose #allie4tn #clarksvilletn #abortionaccess #reproductivehealthcare #abortionrights #runningforoffice #runforsomething #tennesseehouseofrepresentatives #voteblue #abortionsareawomansright #protectroe #centerforreproductiverights #abortionlawsuit #tennessee ♬ original sound – Allie Phillips

https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a45866045/abortion-ban-allie-phillips-tennessee-campaign/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social-media&utm_campaign=socialflowTWELM

Phillips has a six-year-old daughter, Adalie, who was excited about being a big sister.

Back home in Tennessee, Phillips took off work and stayed in bed “debating if my life was worth living or not,” she says. “It felt like every ounce of happiness I had was ripped away.” Phillips found solace in an unlikely place: the comments section of her TikTok videos. “Knowing that my story was touching so many hearts made me feel like Miley didn’t pass in vain,” she explains.

Six months after going public with her abortion story, Phillips decided to run for the House of Representatives of District 75 in Tennessee. She announced her candidacy, where else, on TikTok. “It’s a way for me to accept what I went through and turn my pain into a purpose for other women,” she says.

Most politicians use TikTok to reach voters, but Phillips is taking her TikTok followers into politics. The 28-year-old is part of a wave of influencers using their personal stories and, well, their influence to run for office. Not only is Phillips a new brand of TikToker-turned-politician, she is also one of the first candidates in the post-Roe era to run for office after being denied an abortion in her home state. And, like any good influencer, she’s taking her followers along for the ride.

Reilly can relate:

It was hard for me to watch Phillips’ abortion videos on TikTok without crying. Her story reminded me of my own from four years ago. At 12 weeks pregnant, my baby boy tested positive for Trisomy 13, a chromosomal abnormality that results in severe physical abnormalities and mental disabilities. Given that my first pregnancy went smoothly, I was oblivious to any other possibility, until I saw him motionless on the ultrasound screen. I underwent a “dilation and curettage” procedure, otherwise known as a D&C, shortly after and spent the following weeks overwhelmed by grief. No pregnancy or loss is the same, but when I watched Phillips crying from the floor of the abortion clinic, I knew how she felt. I also knew she faced many more obstacles than I did.

Just as mine had, Phillips’ whole world crashed down around her after the procedure. It didn’t help that when she came home from New York, strangers online provided unsolicited advice. Some accused her of being a murderer, and still do to this day. Instead of letting it go, Phillips let her followers know about the trollish comments. “I wanted to share what it’s like when you publicly tell a story, what kind of backlash you get, what kind of hate you get, simply because I decided to make a healthcare decision for myself,” she says. “I [share] to make sure [other women] know they’re not alone in this process, that there’s just trolls on the internet and they’re going to come for you if you go public with anything.”

Phillips joined a three-state Center for Reproductive Rights lawsuit against the state of Tennessee. After the story broke about the Ohio 10-year-old who was pregnant after a rape and had to leave the state for an abortion, Phillips decided to run for a state House seat Democrats have not held in over a decade. (Donald Trump won the district by 55% in 2020.) She realized “nobody is going to fight for our kids like us moms will.” 

Phillips’ opponent is a “pro-life” Republican is in his first term in a purple state House district because he ran unopposed. Not this time. She announced her candidacy in early October before Kate Cox’s abortion saga in Texas became national news.

The Texas Supreme Court decision that forced Cox to flee Texas to terminate her nonviable pregnancy, CNN reports, “laid bare the political reality facing Republicans as they seek to navigate between their conservative anti-abortion base and a general electorate more supportive of abortion rights. As red states implement a patchwork of new restrictions on the procedure with untested exceptions, real-world events continue to muddle their efforts to stick to and sell to voters an effective message on the issue.”

More of these stories will come to light before voting starts next fall. The axe is going to fall too on a lot of Republicans’ political careers.

Allie4tn.com

Happy Hollandaise, you filthy animals!

And none too soon

The Army will remove a Confederate memorial from Arlington this week and the wingnuts are having a hissy fit, as usual:

A woman representing the American South, standing atop a 32-foot pedestal, lords above most other monuments within America’s most revered resting place. It portrays, according to the cemetery’s website, a “mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.”

This month, 44 Republican lawmakers cautioned Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the first African American to hold the post, that the Pentagon would overstep its authority by removing the memorial, and they demanded that all efforts to do so stop until Congress works through next year’s appropriations bill. The memorial “commemorates reconciliation and national unity,” not the Confederacy per se, the group led by Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (Ga.) claimed.

The Army, which operates Arlington Cemetery, informed lawmakers Friday that it would proceed with the monument’s removal, officials told The Washington Post, because it was required by the end of the year to comply with a law to identify and remove assets that commemorate the Confederacy. A congressional commission had previously decided the memorial met the criteria for removal.The task will cost $3 million.

These officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. They said that out of an abundance of caution, security at the cemetery would be enhanced when the work begins in coming days.

Glenn Youngkin will put the monument somewhere in Virginia so all the Lost Cause fanatics can still go and pray in front of it or whatever it is they feel they need to do.

The Lost Cause movement, which recast rebel traitors as morally righteous warriors defending states’ rights and spread the false belief that slavery was benevolent, is evident in the memorial’s bronze panels. A weeping Black woman, described by cemetery historians as a stereotypical “mammy,” clutches the baby of a White officer, and a camp servant dutifully follows his enslaver toward battle.

The memorial’s Latin inscription directly references the idealized mythology of the Lost Cause, the cemetery’s historians say, further underscoring the deliberate historical distortion.

The marker was erected in 1914, part of a constellation of Confederate markers that rose throughout the early 1900s to cement the ideals of white supremacy as Black Americans demanded equal rights.

That context must be understood, said Ty Seidule, a retired Army general who was the vice chair of the congressional commission that recommended the monument’s removal from Arlington. While Republican lawmakers described the marker as an ode to reconciliation, it was installed in what was then a racially segregated cemetery and molded in celebration of an emerging racial police state in the South.

“It’s incredibly ironic the party of Lincoln is the one doing this,” said Seidule, a historian and visiting professor at Hamilton College, describing the GOP effort to stop the marker’sremoval. “It is the cruelest monument in the country because it is so clearly proslavery.”

These people can bellyache all they want but there is zero reason to keep such a grotesque celebration of white supremacy, installed at the height of the propaganda push to re-imagine the civil war as a righteous philosophical disagreement over states’ rights, anywhere near the national cemetery. In fact it’s disgraceful. As far as I’m concerned all the 20th century Lost Cause monuments can be melted down for scrap iron. It was nothing more than a political gambit to justify slavery and Jim Crow and there is no reason to valorize them.

Look at this thing:

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

This one is from Hussein Ibish in The Atlantic who notes that we are seeing a ton of polls that show Biden in deep trouble and that everyone is on tender hooks, praying that things turn around and quickly. His analysis, however, asserts that Trump is going to lose, full stop.

As he says, “Democrats, and any other sensible voters who oppose Trump, need to forcefully remind the American people about how disastrous he was as president and inform them of how much worse a second term would be. Thankfully, that is not a hard case to make.” He points out that Trump has many advantages, starting with his cult (my word not his.) And the tribal nature of politics dictates that most Republicans will vote Republicans no matter what. And then there’s the right wing propaganda machine, particularly Fox News which will help his press his case that he’s a victim of persecution by the “deep state.”

The electoral college advantage is obvious and Biden is old and has left some segments of the Democratic coalition dissatisfied so there’s that. However:

Trump’s flaws look far worse today than they did eight years ago. To take one example that should concern conservative voters: his behavior toward and views of service members. In the 2016 campaign, Trump’s attacks on Senator John McCain and on the Gold Star Khan family were bad enough. Now we have a litany of testimonies that he expressed contempt and disgust for wounded veterans—demanding that he not be seen in public with them—and that he debased fallen soldiers, describing them as “suckers” and marveling, “What was in it for them?” According to an Atlantic report, when he was scheduled to visit a World War I–era American cemetery in France in 2018, Trump complained, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” Trump has always posed as a patriot, but he has proved himself unpatriotic, anti-military, and ignorant of the meaning of sacrifice.

Similarly, in 2016, Trump’s campaign was briefly rocked by the Access Hollywood videotape in which he boasted about grabbing women by the genitalia. He survived, in large part because many voters chose to accept his comments as “locker room” bluster. Several women accused him of sexual misconduct, but Trump fended off their allegations too. Now he has been held civilly liable by a New York jury for sexually abusing the advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996. A federal judge has said that the jury concluded that what Trump did to Carroll was rape in the common sense of the term. Some Americans will shrug that off, but many won’t be able to.

Trump hopes that his legal troubles will prove a boon to his campaign, allowing him to paint both law enforcement and the judicial system as part of a massive conspiracy against him. He has even requested that his federal trial regarding efforts to overturn the 2020-election results be televised. That’s unlikely, but the more airtime these prosecutions get, the better. Among Republicans, Trump’s polling has improved since his indictments, but many other Americans simply won’t be impressed, inspired, or persuaded by someone who faces 91 felony counts, in addition to civil cases. Trump already has been found liable for fraud and sexual abuse in New York. To that may well be added a criminal conviction at the federal level. Even if none of the trials has concluded by next fall, much of the evidence that prosecutors have accumulated is already in the public record and will be powerful fodder for anti-Trump attack ads. And Democrats will benefit from the attention Trump draws to the election-subversion cases. Even many of Trump’s most ardent supporters are tired of relitigating 2020; voters would prefer to focus on the future, not the past.

On top of all this, Trump has a strong record of electoral losses, with his 2016 upset, which apparently surprised even him, as the lone exception. His party suffered the standard midterm defeat in 2018. Then he lost the 2020 election. Then Republicans lost control of the Senate after Georgia’s runoff in early 2021. Then his party was denied the standard midterm victory in 2022, barely eking out a four-vote House majority thanks in large part to his own handpicked, election-denying candidates, almost all of whom lost in competitive races. There is no obvious reason that 2024 should constitute a sudden break from this pattern of MAGA defeat.

Presidential elections are usually decided by a relatively small group of swing voters in six or seven swing states. The most important are independent voters and suburban voters, two groups that appear to have turned away from Trump since 2016. He hasn’t done anything to win them back since 2020, instead running in recent months on a platform that’s more radical, extreme, and openly authoritarian than ever (except on the issue of abortion, where he is less extreme than his Republican-primary competitors). With Trump promising vengeance, retribution, and dictatorship, at least on “day one,” as he recently told Sean Hannity, will these swing voters be wooed back into his camp? Are Americans so fed up that they will want to elect someone who has advocated for the “termination” of the Constitution in order to keep himself in power?

Recent polling suggests that Biden is in real trouble, including with a number of core Democratic constituencies, which is leading many Democrats to yearn for a different candidate or to despair that Trump will be reelected. In fact, Biden has a strong record to run on. In his first two years, with a tiny House majority and only a tiebreaker in the Senate, he managed to pass more progressive, consequential economic legislation than, arguably, any president since Lyndon B. Johnson. Unemployment is low, and inflation is cooling. Perhaps the public has not fully felt these positive developments yet, but they will almost certainly have registered by next November.

Americans have reported to pollsters that although they believe that the economy is bad for others, they themselves feel economically secure. Biden should ask voters Ronald Reagan’s classic question: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? The answer can only be yes, given the dire situation the nation found itself in during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic (to say nothing of the general sense of chaos throughout Trump’s presidency). But Biden and Democrats need to make this case. Without prompting, voters might not readily remember how challenging a time 2020 was.

The abortion issue, opened up by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, has consistently played in Democrats’ favor, and that’s unlikely to change next November. If the Republican nominee were former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, women might not rally so powerfully to the Democratic side. But Trump claims responsibility for the decision overturning Roe by virtue of his Supreme Court appointees. That, plus Trump’s treatment of women, gives Biden a huge opportunity with female voters.

Biden’s pro-Israel policies during the ongoing war in Gaza might cost him support from Arab and Muslim Americans, but probably not enough for him to lose Michigan, for example, to Trump. Voters in those groups seem unlikely to support the author of the “Muslim ban,” who is threatening to reimpose similar restrictions, and the “Peace to Prosperity” Israeli-Palestinian proposal that invited Israel to annex 30 percent of the occupied West Bank. Some will stay home—a potential danger for Biden—but many will, perhaps reluctantly, turn out for him despite what they say now.

The 2024 election will be a referendum on democracy, with both candidates claiming to stand for freedom and American values. On this matter, Biden’s claims are obviously stronger: He has been governing as a traditional president, whereas Trump promises authoritarianism and openly says he wants to be dictator for a day to accomplish certain policies, namely restricting immigration. But what if his plans take more than a day? What if his one-day dictatorship extends to a year and then never ends? Americans know that strongmen don’t keep their promises.

Biden is old, but so is Trump. Biden has grown unpopular, but so has Trump. Biden has liabilities, but Trump’s are considerably worse. Biden has lost the backing of plenty of voters, but the results of the past few elections suggest that Trump has lost more. Meanwhile, Trump’s record as president and since—January 6, the devastating testimony from his former senior officials, the ongoing trials, and whatever additional self-inflicted wounds he delivers—will contrast very poorly with Biden’s track record and steady leadership. By November, enough Americans will surely understand that they aren’t voting for Biden over Trump so much as voting for the Constitution over a would-be authoritarian.

The case against Trump’s reelection is obvious and damning. As long as his opponents prosecute that case—and they will—Trump isn’t going to win.

I certainly hope he is right. I suspect he is for all the reasons he cites. But I don’t think we can count on that at all. There are so many variables, as you can see in his essay, that it’s clear anything could happen.

For me the one variable that seems most likely to hurt Trump’s chances beyond the generalized terror and specific fears about what he’s going to do: the trials. I just don’t think America is so far gone that it’s going to be ok with what the prosecution is going to lay out about his behavior leading up to January 6th. Sure his cult will stick with him no matter what. And who knows? Maybe a jury will feel that the crimes were proven beyond a reasonable doubt. But I have to believe that among those who aren’t inexplicably in his thrall, this whole event is going to be a sobering exercise. Is this really what it comes to?

Yeah, that all might be hopium. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t also true. At least I hope so… 🙂

Happy Hollandaise, everyone!