Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Paul Ryan on MAGA

Howie Klein (Down With Tyranny!) posts this morning on former speaker Paul Ryan’s interview from two weeks ago.

“The entertainers took over Congress,” Ryan told Teneo Insights [timestamp 2:10]. When “a handful of nihilists who go to Congress not to legislate but to be provocative entertainers, this is what happens.”

The Party of Trump was not amused, Howie observes:

Now remember, this is the guy who predicted that if Trump is the nominee, Republicans will lose next year. He predicted Biden would beat Trump and said he thinks “leaders should endeavor to be honest, ethical, moral people who try to set standards for themselves and lead by example across the country. Donald Trump doesn’t try to do any of that. He does the opposite, frankly. So I just don’t think he’s fit for the job here… Do you think those suburban voters like Donald Trump more since Jan. 6? I mean, good grief. They didn’t vote for him this last time, they’re not going to vote for him again.” Nor was he excited about the congressional Republicans: “It’s nihilism, is what it is. We look like fools. We look like we can’t govern.” In the video below, he also predicted that if Trump is the nominee– he will be– the GOP will lose House and Senate seats. He’s correct.

Mediaite published the video of Ryan slamming Trump again yesterday. Kevin Kajiwara asked Ryan how he thinks history will remember Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both Republicans whose political careers in the House of Representatives came to an end after they stood against the former president. Trump will go ballistic when he reads Ryan’s response:

Look, Trump’s not a conservative. He’s an authoritarian narcissist. So I think they basically called him out for that. He’s a populist, authoritarian narcissist. So historically speaking, all of his tendencies are basically where narcissism takes him, which is whatever makes him popular, makes him feel good at any given moment… He doesn’t think in classical liberal-conservative terms. He thinks in an authoritarian way. And he’s been able to get a big chunk of the Republican base to follow him because he’s the culture warrior.

And so I think Adam and Liz stepped out of the flow and called it out and, you know, paid for it. Paid for it with their careers. But I think, again, back to my earlier point, I don’t think he is really very good at these jobs unless you’re willing to lose these jobs. And there has to be some line, some principle that is so important to you that you’re just not going to cross so that when you’re brushing your teeth in the morning, look yourself in the mirror. You like what you see.

Mediaite adds:

Ryan has been on Fox Corporation’s board of directors since 2019. This has been a recurring point of contention for Trump, his allies, and Trump media backers like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson have accused Ryan of meddling behind the scenes.

Maybe yes, maybe no. But why not get well paid for doing it, eh?

Somewhere recently I read that once the war against the Axis powers was over, people all over France began claiming they were part of La Résistance against the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy régime. A national case of stolen valor. So it may be in this country once MAGA is no more.

Cheney and Kinzinger earned their plaudits for standing up to Donald Trump while they were still in office.

It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! We’re glad you came.

Martin Niemöller got it wrong

“First they came for the socialists,” etc. Per the Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia, Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller “sympathized with many Nazi ideas and supported radically right-wing political movements” in the 1920s and early 1930s. But once Hitler came to power and began interfering with the church, he became a critic. Niemöller spent WWII in Nazi prisons and concentration camps. He wrote “First they came for…” after the war.

Niemöller got it wrong. He was a man, after all.

First they come for the women.

First it was the Dobbs decision revoking half a century of women’s right to bodily autonomy. We’re throwing the abortion question back to the states, the court said. Let them decide.

Then came a string of ballot measures and laws passed protecting women’s rights. Ohio Republicans immediately declared the voters’ will was not binding on their gerrymandered legislative majority. They would revoke state courts’ jurisdiction over cases brought under the new constitutional amendment protecting reproductive rights.

Texas passed its highly restrictive abortion law while assuring the public that exceptions were built in to protect women’s lives. Then AG Ken Paxton, backed up by the state’s Supreme Court, proved that the exceptions were a sham.

The Arizona Supreme Court on Tuesday heard arguments in a case involving an 1864 law still on the books:

At stake in the case is the future of that Civl War-era law, which criminalized abortion by making it a felony punishable by two to five years in prison for anyone who performs or helps a woman obtain one. The law — which was codified again in 1901, and once again in 1913, after Arizona became a state — includes an exception to save the woman’s life.

A more recent law from March 2022 snapped into effect weeks after Roe was overturned banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The law makes exceptions for medical emergencies but not for rape or incest. 

Simmering in the background was the Texas case challenging women’s access to pharmaceutical abortion. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern write:

The Supreme Court agreed on Wednesday to consider a challenge to access to mifepristone, the first drug used in medication abortion, teeing up the most important dispute over reproductive rights since Roe v. Wade’s reversal in June of 2022. Based on the narrow scope of the issue the court ultimately agreed to hear, there is good reason to believe that a majority of justices will quash the case by deciding that the plaintiffs had no business suing in the first place. Such a decision, which will come down months before the 2024 election, will probably be hailed as proof of the high court’s sober moderation. It will, in reality, prove no such thing. Rather, that outcome would leave the smoking wreckage of abortion access post-Dobbs intact, while pushing off, for now, its most unhinged expansion by a court below. More dramatically, such a move would leave open the possibility that a future Republican president could ban abortion nationwide without enacting a single new law by exploiting the puritanical Comstock Act of 1873. If, while protecting access to medication abortion, SCOTUS opts to keep this loaded gun on the table, then the legality of abortion in all 50 states will very much be on the ballot next year.

Jessica Valenti writes at her Abortion, Every Day substack:

What’s most important to know is that SCOTUS will not be looking at the original challenge to FDA approval of the drug. Instead, they’ll review the 2016 and 2021 changes to restrictions around mifepristone, and whether or not the Alliance of Hippocratic Medicine (the anti-abortion group who brought the lawsuit) has standing. 

In short, the legality of mifepristone shouldn’t be at risk, but access and availability of the medication is. It’s a reduced scope than what the anti-abortion movement was hoping for, and as Chris Geidner writes at Law Dork, it represents “a best-case scenario for abortion rights supporters.”

Still, the restrictions they’re reviewing are meaningful ones—like tele-health access, the ability to receive abortion medication in the mail, and how far into pregnancy you can take the pills. (Right now it’s 10 weeks, these restrictions could put it at 7 weeks.)

“They’re ready to be cruel. They’re watching themselves be cruel,” Valenti told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Wednesday night. “They just don’t care.”

Niemöller got it wrong. First they come for the women.

And the extremists’ autocratic bent is about more than abortion.

“Government governs best that governs least,” conservatives intoned solemnly for decades. Until they gerrymandered themselves into legislative seats resistant to democracy. Now Republicans in control of state capitols are engaged on a war on blue cities. And universities. And women.

Republicans tolerated democracy so long as they felt it gave them a route to power and a smidgen of legitimacy. And now? They’ve abandoned democracy. A large swath of their party wants to elect Donald Trump again, a man whose rhetoric now echoes Hitler and Mussolini and who admires the world’s autocrats.

Remember the Russkies? Republicans spent the Cold War decades as the staunchest anti-Russia hawks. President Ronald Reagan, among the staunchest of them. And now? They want to be like them. They’re taking advice from Hungary’s autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban on abandoning Ukraine to Putin’s Russia.

We have a Holocaust Museum. Perhaps it’s time for a Hypocrisy Museum.

It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! We’re glad you came.

He chose not to believe anyone who wouldn’t tell him what he wanted to hear.

Ken Chesebro was one of those who were happy to give him what he wanted. And Trump listened:

Former Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro has been talking to all kinds of legal inquiries andit seems there’s always something new for him to say. Here’s one of the latest:

Before a group of supportive lawyers entered the Oval Office for a photo-op with then-President Donald Trump in December 2020, they were given a clear instruction, according to one attendee: Don’t get Trump’s hopes up about overturning the election.

One attorney, Jim Troupis, toed the line. He’d just finished leading Trump’s failed election challenge in Wisconsin, and bluntly told the president it was over in that state.

But when the conversation shifted to Arizona, attorney Kenneth Chesebro deviated from the plan. He told Trump he could still win – and explained how the “alternate electors” he helped assemble in Arizona and six other states gave Trump an opening to continue contesting the election until Congress certified the results on January 6, 2021.

Chesebro’s optimistic comments immediately created problems by apparently giving Trump renewed hope that he could still somehow stay in office. Former RNC chairman Reince Priebus left the meeting “extremely concerned” about the January 6 conversation. Priebus, a Wisconsin native who served as Trump’s first chief of staff, later warned Troupis and Chesebro not to tell anyone about what happened.

This dramatic account comes from Chesebro, who sat for an interview last week with Michigan state prosecutors investigating the fake electors plot. CNN has exclusively obtained audio of that interview, which includes previously unreported details about the pivotal Oval Office meeting.

The Michigan attorney general already charged the 16 Republican electors who cast sham ballots in Lansing, and CNN recently reported that the investigation is still ongoing. Fifteen of the electors pleaded not guilty; one got his charges dropped in a cooperation deal.

The “photo-op … gone south,” as Chesebro called the December 16, 2020, meeting, reveals a previously unknown instance of Trump hearing directly that he lost – which could factor into his federal election subversion trial. But it also highlights how others in Trump’s orbit leaned into his delusions and aided his quixotic effort to cling onto power…

“There was a conscious effort to deflect him from a sense of any possibility that he could pull out the election,” Chesebro told Michigan prosecutors about the thinking going into the meet-and-greet with Trump. “…Our marching orders were: Don’t say anything that makes him feel more positive than the beginning of the meeting.’”

I’s unclear who gave the so-called “marching orders” to the group of pro-Trump attorneys.

Nonetheless, Chesebro told Trump he could still prevail in Arizona. He also spelled out the basics of the fake electors scheme, where Trump supporters in seven critical states cast faux ballots and signed phony certificates claiming they were the rightful electors.

“I ended up explaining that Arizona was still hypothetically possible — because the alternate electors had voted,” Chesebro told Michigan state investigators, later adding that this made it “clear (to Trump) in a way that maybe it hadn’t been before, that we had until January 6 to win.”

“And that, you know, created a real problem,” Chesebro added.

A source told CNN that a visibly angry Priebus, who arranged the photo-op for his home-state delegation, intervened to shut down the conversation after he saw Chesebro whispering to Trump about election procedures.

So I guess Trump is going to have to say that he was just listening to “his attorney”, Kenneth Chesebro, who told him he could win and we’re supposed to believe that it makes sense that he chose to believe every other legal and election adviser (except Giuliani and Sidney Powell)didn’t know what they were talking about.

I’m sure the cult will buy it. They believe everything he says. But it doesn’t seem to me that a jury, having taken an oath and been instructed by a judge, will see that as being reasonable. After all, this is the man who had been running the most powerful country in the world for four years. How is it possible that some obscure guy named Chesebro would be considered the expert when the entire DOJ, the Judiciary and his own white house counsel’s office made it very, very clear that he had lost the election and should concede?

But it does show one thing, doesn’t it? Trump knew about the alternate electors plot in December, didn’t he? And he embraced it.

Happy Hollandaise everybody! If you’ve a mind to throw something in the old stocking….

I am offering this thoughtful piece on the sexual violence of October 7th by Jill Filipovic with a gift link because I really want you to be able to read the whole thing. There’s so much sturm und drang around this topic that it’s hard to ever find clarity. This is one of the rare articles that provides it without pandering, excusing or obfuscating the reality.

She discusses in detail how difficult it was to get reliable forensic evidence in the aftermath of the attack and explains why it was important, as a journalist, to wait for the facts. Reporting of sexual violence is war is always fraught and with all discussions of rape it’s important to be precise because so often the reflexive response is to dismiss it. But that’s not the whole story here:

But soon after the attacks, the evidence started to come in, and it took the form that evidence of wartime rape often does: accounts from survivors of the attacks, emergency responders, medical personnel, those who examined the bodies and journalists who were permitted to see some attack footage. Some of these accounts have been presented by organizations, including Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. A Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children has been established in Israel […]

But even as evidence mounted, so did disbelief. On social media, accounts often flood mentions of Hamas’s gendered violence with arguments that no such thing happened, often insisting that the allegations were invented by the Israeli government as a pretext for war, are simply too unsubstantiated to be believed or pale in comparison with Palestinian suffering. Some of these accounts may be bots; others have hundreds of thousands of followers. […]

Denials and deflections have come from people with vast reach. Some work at prominent magazines; others run popular podcasts, YouTube channels and websites. These denials have migrated into global leftist discourse and seem intended to sow doubt or prompt wholesale dismissal of the subject.

You may find this surprising in the age of MeToo. But I can testify to the fact that it is absolutely true. She asks why anyone would doubt that sexual violence is part of war. After all, it’s been the case since the beginning of time. And she wonders, “does anyone really believe that, were it not for rape claims, Israel’s campaign in Gaza would be any less brutal,  let alone nonexistent?”

But that misses the point. For many denialists, truth doesn’t seem to be the goal; a monopoly on righteousness is.

From the earliest days after Oct. 7, individual supporters of all sides have disseminated and fallen for distortions and blatant fabrications. This war comes at a time of minimal global trust and maximal ability to seek out evidence that supports whatever theory suits one’s political context.

Reporting on the attacks and the war also produced genuine confusion. Muddying the picture even more were claims later modified by reputable journalistic outlets, which has only propelled conspiracy mongering and denialism. Further, while much of the obfuscation has been stoked by bad actors — be they hostile foreign governments, right-wing bigots or cynical left-wing activists — those atrociously dishonest messages are then amplified and repeated, even by no doubt well-meaning people who simply sympathize with a brutalized population.

She makes the obvious point that while these horrors are often part of war, that doesn’t make it legitimate. Also:

Some of those who deny or question allegations of Oct. 7 sexual abuse argue not only that those abuses may not have happened but also that giving credence to these claims is, in effect, justifying Israel’s war in Gaza — a theory weakened by the fact that the Israeli incursion began well before stories of sexual violence made very many headlines. It’s a profoundly morally bankrupt position, one that demands silencing the truth to achieve a desired end. It’s a means of undermining stories of violence that has worked throughout the ages, as women have been told to keep quiet for the cause or encouraged not to ruin a good man’s life or written largely out of history as inconvenient or even deserving victims of the good guys.

It’s exhausting having to argue such an obvious point with the rabid hawks. It’s profoundly depressing to have to make the same argument to members of the left who have never, up until now, taken that stance.

The horrors of this war do not have to be either/or. One can both face the mountain of evidence of sexual violence on Oct. 7 and confront the staggering Palestinian death toll — people who were not mere collateral damage but individuals whose lives were brutally snatched away and many more who will carry this displacement and loss and trauma with them for the rest of their lives. One can seek to understand the context in which a group like Hamas comes to be and curb the impulse to recast openly misogynist fundamentalists into freedom fighters. One can hold deep contempt for this right-wing Israeli government and oppose this war with every bone in one’s body.

That is such an obvious point I can’t believe anyone has to say it out loud. But it must be said out loud, I guess. What I’m seeing unfold on social media on both sides, admittedly at least partly fueled by malicious propaganda and fake news bots, is a modern version of what unfolded after 9/11, when so many people lost their moorings and gave in to blood lust and vengeance.

There is no excuse for October 7th and there is no excuse for the massive slaughter taking place in Gaza. It’s not hard to acknowledge that, it really isn’t.

These excerpts don’t do the piece justice and I urge you to click on the gift link above to read the whole thing. It’s very nuanced and filled with important facts and analyses that need to be understood if we are to try to understand this horrific event without losing ourselves.

It’s that time, folks. If you like to throw something in the old stocking, I’d be grateful:

I suspect you haven’t heard about this. The only hysterical headlines are the ones that show Biden losing.

Biden leading/tied in 8 polls since late Nov (via 538):
49-48 Marist/NPR
43-43 Economist/YouGov
43-42 Morning Consult (last week)
42-41 Econ/YG (last week)
39-37 YouGov
37-35 Leger
44-42 Econ/YG (2 weeks ago)
43-42 Consult (2 weeks ago)
and Reuters = Biden +4 in battleground

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) December 13, 2023

Ok, so what about those battleground states everyone was shrieking about the other day based on one poll?

New Reuters/Ipsos poll finds a 4 point Biden lead in the 7 battleground states. Encouraging! https://t.co/9KCoxT6BsX

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) December 12, 2023

Oh.

And then there’s this:

Coach, I'm afraid the inflation rate is falling rapidly, and it fell last month. https://t.co/MFGPFOZLWf pic.twitter.com/zrF4k4P9Dh

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) December 13, 2023

Rents are declining. Groceries only grew by 1.7% in the past year, well below wages gains. Gas prices are down. Inflation only grew 0.1% last month. Stock market is near all time highs. Unemployment, uninsured at/near all time lows.

Congratulations everyone. https://t.co/IVPeXhh3dU

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) December 13, 2023

This is good too:

I’m not saying these things mean any more than anything else going into the election year. We don’t know what is really going to motivate people next November. But there’s no reason to discount them either. Let’s just say that there is a lot of information out there and there’s no reason to fall into a doom spiral just because the media likes to play up the negative Biden stories.

It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! If you’ve of a mind…

An election year like no other

If you hadn’t already had your mind blown by what these authoritarian MAGA monsters are capable of, all you had to do was observe the grotesque display that the Texas government put on this week. The despicable cruelty they dispensed upon a woman and her family enduring one of the worst crises of her life says it all. They didn’t care that she was carrying a fetus with anomalies so extreme that it would probably be stillborn or live for a very short time if it were brought to term. There was no hope. Nor did they care that her pregnancy was risky and dangerous to her and her ability to have more children in the future.

Instead, they demanded that she endure the full length of that pregnancy anyway, no matter the price she and her family would have to pay and go through childbirth all in order to appease fundamentalist demands that essentially define pregnant women as incubators and nothing more.

She finally had to flee to a civilized place that recognized her as a human being.

This issue is not going away. We have just seen a vivid example of how seriously these zealots take “exemptions.” It reminds me of something I wrote many years ago here on this blog about that issue (back when the Democrats were still saying that Roe was inviolable and it was important to meet the zealots half way.) I highlighted the comments of one anti-abortion extremist in South Dakota named Bill Napoli:

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.  

I wondered:

Do you suppose all these elements have to be present for it to be sufficiently psychologically damaging for her to be forced to bear her rapists child, or just some of them? I wonder if it would be ok if the woman wasn’t religious but she was a virgin who had been brutally, savagely raped and “sodomized as bad as you can make it?” Or if she were a virgin and religious but the brutal savage sodomy wasn’t “as bad” as it could have been?  

From the moment I saw that I realized that there would be no exceptions to their draconian bans. They would always find a way to say that the women didn’t qualify.

This fight isn’t over folks. They’ve now got it going on in all 50 states, which was something they always saw as a transitional move. There would be battles going on all over the place and they figured they would eventually move to a national ban down the road.

But they didn’t count on the backlash which has been overwhelming. But it’s going to take sustained effort to beat these people back. They are patient and they play the long game.

Well, we’ve been fighting that same good fight here at Hullabaloo for over 20 years now and we’re not going to stop now.

If you value the work we do here to expose the right’s ongoing assault on women’s rights I hope you will consider throwing some support this way as we go into this monumentally important election year. I think we are all going to need each other even more over this next year.

Thanks again for hanging in with me all this time. It’s the passion of my life and I know how lucky I am to be able to do it. It wouldn’t be possible without you, my faithful readers. It means the world to me.

cheers,
digby

If you have a mind to help us keep the light on for another year, you can do so below or at the snail mail address on the left.

And Happy Hollandaise everyone!

*keep scrolling for fresh opinions 😉

He’s right there. Why won’t they talk to him in public?

Hunter Biden: "I'm here today to make sure the House committee's illegitimate investigations of my family do not proceed on distortions, manipulated evidence, & lies. I'm here today to acknowledge I have made mistakes in my life & wasted opportunities…for that I am responsible" pic.twitter.com/Wmq4ltHGxL

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 13, 2023

Hunter Biden wants a public hearing for good reason!

Reschenthaler: The transparency argument is laughable

McGovern: When are the transcripts from the interviews going to be released to the public?

Reschenthaler: I don’t know pic.twitter.com/vNyn5NCQcq

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 12, 2023

The Democrats are backing him:

.@RepAOC @AOC: "The Committee issued a subpoena and Hunter Biden is here in an attempt to comply…It is the Committee that has rejected the terms that they themselves set out for compliance with that subpoena that is now preventing a public and due process from happening." pic.twitter.com/ArwI3GRgf1

— CSPAN (@cspan) December 13, 2023

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., backed that call for a public hearing while speaking to reporters on Wednesday. She was one of multiple Democratic lawmakers to address Republicans’ impeachment inquiry of Biden, including Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who described in the investigation as “more like a what-is-it, not a whodunnit.”

“I won’t even call it an investigation, I’ll call it an exercise in futility,” Ocasio-Cortez said about the Hunter Biden investigation, describing it as “groundless and unsubstantiated.”

The New York congresswoman said there is more pressing business than Hunter Biden.

“We need to do far more than worry about baseless investigations that are conducted more on podcasts than, frankly, on a grounding of evidence,” she said.

Aaaaand, needless to say, Republicans are having a hissy fit:

Jim Jordan big mad over Hunter. pic.twitter.com/m7z1vBl4Tt

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 13, 2023

Lol. Here’s how that ended:

Marjorie Taylor Greene tries to hijack the end of James Comer and Jim Jordan’s impromptu Hunter Biden press conference to berate the press for not asking about sex trafficking.

Comer and Jordan do not seem amused and Jordan cuts her off and walks away. pic.twitter.com/TcRpM1f6tQ

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) December 13, 2023

Hunter Biden did the right thing. He presented himself but refused to submit himself to their secret inquisition which they are guaranteed to mischaracterize as they’ve done all the others.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time, if you’re of a mind ….

Today is the day the MAGA House plans to officially vote for an “impeachment inquiry”

I know this will come as quite a shock, but the current U.S. Congress is the least productive congress in almost a hundred years. Not since the first years of the Great Depression under Herbert Hoover has the legislative branch been so ineffectual. This may seem surprising considering that the Republican majority has dominated the news from the moment it took the oath last January, but it has barely managed to do the one thing it’s supposed to do which is pass legislation. They certainly have been busy though.

They started with an epic battle for the Speaker’s office that ended even before the year was up with the dramatic defenestration of that same Speaker for committing the cardinal sin of compromising with the Democratic Senate and White House to keep the government running. That took weeks of effort leaving little time for anything else. Then they had to hold “oversight” hearings to yell at administration figures and provoke fights with witnesses and there was the huge issue of the Senate dress code. They also needed to get to the bottom of that UFO thing and it’s vitally important that they obtain Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs. They’ve got a lot on their plates.

But nothing has been more important than the investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter and the alleged corruption that supposedly took place among Biden family members when Biden was vice president and out of office. Today is the big day when they plan to vote for an official impeachment inquiry into these charges. Then they plan to recess and go home for the holidays. They’re all worn out.

The impeachment was inevitable. The leader of the GOP, Donald Trump, demanded it and when he says jump they start leap frogging over each other. And it’s put the new Speaker in what should be an extremely uncomfortable position, although it won’t be, because he’s totally shameless. Having even just recently been reported to have said that he didn’t think impeachment should be on the agenda, he has completely reversed course and has authorized this vote to launch a formal inquiry. That is in glaring contradiction with many statements he made arguing against the impeachments of Donald Trump:

When confronted with his blatant hypocrisy by Fox’s Bret Baier, he explained that this is totally different because that was a sham and this totally isn’t. Except, of course, it totally is.

There’s not been even one shred of evidence that ties Joe Biden into any corruption. In fact, it’s gotten so ludicrous that Oversight Committee Chair, James Comer has been out there waving around copies of checks from Hunter and Biden’s brother James that he says proves Biden was on the take when in reality they were loan repayments. Hunter’s supposedly nefarious checks were in the amount of $1380 a month for a car payment reimbursement. It’s become that absurd.

Tim Burchett, R-TN., appeared on CNN earlier this week to spread the salacious details that were included in the recent felony indictment of Hunter Biden for paying his taxes late and insisted that one of the proofs of his corruption was the fact that his only qualifications for the jobs he held were “hookers and crack cocaine” saying “the guy is bad news.” (In fact Hunter Biden was much more qualified than either Ivanka Trump or Jared Kushner who worked in the White House and then cashed in immediately to the tune of billions of dollars from foreign governments the minute they left the White House.)

I’m not going to go into all the reasons why the Ukraine business is completely nonsensical again. It’s ridiculous and even the Republicans must know it since they’re focusing more on silly things like Hunter paying back his father for covering his car payments for a few months. And while it looked for a while as if the so-called moderates were prepared to vote against the inquiry, the fact that the White House is not rushing to help the Republicans with this bogus inquiry has provided them with the lame excuse they’ve been looking for to appease the rabid MAGA horde so Speaker Johnson says that he’s pretty sure he has the votes. We’ll see later today if he is right. And we’ll also see whether those Republican House members who came from districts Biden won are as self-destructive as they appear to be.

Even Fox isn’t all in on this one:

After a year of investigating President Joe Biden, Chairman Comer has turned up zero evidence of presidential wrongdoing.

Even Fox News, which fell for Trump’s Big Lie and paid for it, isn’t falling for his lies, distortions, and deceptions:https://t.co/rkoYuAwI7a

— Oversight Committee Democrats (@OversightDems) December 13, 2023

This Biden impeachment is not popular. According to a new Morning Consult poll support for it has collapsed among Independents. (Needless to say, the vast majority of Democrats oppose it and a similar number of Republicans support it.) Apparently aware of this, Mike Johnson has been careful to hedge his bets saying, “We’re not going to prejudge the outcome of this because we can’t because again it’s not a political calculation.”

Nobody believes that. Certainly nobody should believe it:

Usually, when you're trying to smear someone, you never admit you're doing it. That's why it's called a 'whisper campaign'

Jim Jordan didn't get the memo

Here he is last summer openly saying they'll investigate Biden to try to help Trump win

Thank god these people are so inept pic.twitter.com/JiJd8ghYod

— Neil Lowenthal (@NeilLowenthal1) December 9, 2023

That’s the kind of public comments that cost former Speaker Kevin McCarthy his first shot at the job back in 2015. But these days, Republicans announcing they are using the tools of government to attack their enemies is considered smart politics among their voters so announcing it isn’t a problem.

Here’s the Chairman of the Oversight Committee, the man who is quarterbacking this Impeachment “inquiry” admitting that he had his mind made up months ago:

The man in charge of the House GOP impeachment, James Comer, told Newsmax “I would vote to impeach right now.”

*** IN AUGUST ***

These claims should be laughed out of the room by the Capitol Hill press corps. https://t.co/8f4lWyy87G pic.twitter.com/X8t4RTSDWF

— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) December 12, 2023

Some Democrats aren’t afraid to tell it like it is with these people. Jasmine Crockett of Texas had the Republicans calling for the smelling salts when she appeared on the Charlamagne The God podcast (you know how delicate they are) and told it like it is:

You know, when I sit there, the Oversight Committee is where all the drama is. This is where the impeachment inquiry is. And, you know, it’s insulting that we have idiots like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Jim Jordan. I mean, you just name all of the nonsense Republicans.

And they sit on this committee, and they sit there so high and mighty. And they talk noise constantly and they’re like, “Oh, the Biden crime family.” And I’m like, “I’m sorry. Have you met the Trumps?!”

It’s insulting to the American people that these kooks have hijacked the the American government with a tiny majority and instead of negotiating in good faith to fund the government or provide needed aid to Ukraine and other priorities, they’re about to put on another of their embarrassing little freak shows for the entertainment of the Fox News audience and Donald Trump. “Nonsense Republicans” is right.

Absolutely amazing. Speaker Mike Johnson four years ago *today*

"The Founding Fathers, the founders of this country, warned against single-party impeachments. And they had a very specific reason for warning us against that." pic.twitter.com/iWH9Wz0sFw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 13, 2023

Salon

It’s Happy Hollandaise time, if you’re of a mind ….

Follow the data

Take good news where you find it.

Politico:

Special counsel Jack Smith has extracted data from the cell phone Donald Trump used while in the White House and plans to present evidence of his findings to a Washington, D.C. jury to demonstrate how Trump used the phone in the weeks during which he attempted to subvert the 2020 election.

In a court filing Monday, Smith indicated that he plans to call an expert witness who extracted and reviewed data copied from Trump’s phone, as well as a phone used by another unidentified individual in Trump’s orbit.

The data from Trump’s phone could reveal day-to-day details of his final weeks in office, including his daily movements, his Twitter habits and any other aides who had access to his accounts and devices. The data, for example, could help show whether Trump personally approved or sent a fateful tweet attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

Expert 3 “specifically identified the periods of time during which the defendant’s phone was unlocked and the Twitter application was open on January 6.” 

CBS News had identified that other individual (“Individual 1” in the indictment) as former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Is it getting hot in there, Donald?

The filing is the latest glimpse into the extraordinary evidence Smith has amassed in his probe, including testimony from dozens of Trump’s closest aides and advisers, including former Vice President Mike Pence.

Prosecutors obtained a search warrant to access Trump’s Twitter data in January and ultimately obtained a massive cache of data culled from Trump’s account, including location data.

However, the prosecution filing stops short of claiming that the experts will be able to prove that activity on the phones directly involved Trump. Trump’s phones were routinely managed by others, including his social media manager, Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino.

CBS News adds background:

Internal White House records from Jan. 6 turned over to the now-defunct House select committee last year showed a gap in Trump’s official phone logs of seven hours and 37 minutes, including the period when the building was under assault, according to documents obtained by CBS News’ chief election & campaign correspondent Robert Costa and The Washington Post’s associate editor Bob Woodward.

Costa and Woodward reported last year that the lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes — from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. — on Jan. 6, 2021, meant that there was no record of the calls made during the height of the breach. 

Eleven pages of records were turned over by the National Archives last year to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack as part of the panel’s past investigation that included examining whether or not the former president used “burner phones” while in office. 

In response to Costa and Woodward’s reporting last year, Trump said, “I have no idea what a burner phone is. To the best of my knowledge, I have never even heard the term,” and a Trump spokesperson said at the time that Trump had nothing to do with the records and had assumed any and all of his phone calls were recorded and preserved.

John Bolton, his former national security adviser, asserted in an interview later — after CBS News and Washington Post reported that he recalled Trump using the term “burner phones” in several discussions — that Trump was aware of its meaning.

Counting on Trump for the truth is a fool’s errand. He only blurts out the truth by accident or as catnip for his cult. As with being a dictator in a second term. But only on Day 1, right?

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Driving America into the ditch

Donors were peeved over the bad publicity. In a House hearing on campus antisemitism last week, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) demanded university presidents from the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and MIT answer for antisemitic campus protests over the war in Gaza. Asked whether calling for genocide against Jews would violate codes of conduct, amount to bullying and harassment, and prompt expulsions, the administrators hedged. A video extract went viral.

Michelle Goldberg responded, “If I’d seen only that excerpt from the hearing … I might have felt the same way.” The administrators “acquitted themselves poorly.”

“But while it might seem hard to believe that there’s any context that could make the responses of the college presidents OK, watching the whole hearing at least makes them more understandable,” Goldberg added. “In the questioning before the now-infamous exchange, you can see the trap Stefanik laid.”

But the trap was sprung. Over the weekend and under pressure from university donors, University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill and board chair Scott L. Bok resigned.

No longer a university spokesman, Bok penned a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed in response. Inquirer columnist Will Bunch directed readers to one passage in particular.

“It’s the academic equivalent of Ike warning us about the military-industrial complex — and here it’s the undue influence of billionaire donors. Here’s the money shot .” (I’m using Bunch’s highlights):

On all these issues, universities need to be very careful of the influence of money, especially one like Penn, which has a business school with a brand larger than that of the university itself. And I say that as both a Wharton graduate and someone who understands that contributions play a critical role in everything from lifesaving medical research to scholarships for kids like I once was.

But donors should not be able to decide campus policies or determine what is taught, and for sure there should not be a hidden quota system that ensures privileged children a coveted place at elite schools.

For nearly all of the 19 years I served on Penn’s board, I felt like there was a very broad, largely unspoken consensus on the roles of the various university constituencies: the board, donors, alumni, faculty, and administration.

Once I concluded that this longtime consensus had evaporated, I determined that I should step off the board and leave it to others to find a new path forward.

“The culture wars can be brutal,” Bok added, recounting the “violent threats,” street confrontations, “robot-generated emails,” and more unpleasantness that came his way.

But let’s consider Bok’s remarks in the context of the 2024 elections. The Republican presidential frontrunner — himself an alleged billionaire — faces multiple felony trials, including for attempting the overthrow of the government. Donald Trump yearns to be a dictator, to “prosecute enemies and release insurrectionists, and sic troops on protesters,” Bunch writes, while claiming it’s Joe Biden who is the dictator.

“There hasn’t been this much projection since the golden age of drive-in movies,” Bunch insists.

Trump’s MAGA base yearns for a strongman and for retribution for wrongs real and imagined. Trump backers in billionaire-financed think tanks drool over the prospect of turning the entire federal bureaucracy into a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, if not of the billionaire class itself, led by a “Red Caesar.” The business class longs to finish shredding the social safety net and return the working class to neo-serfdom. The lot of them have already abandoned democracy in word and deed.

Bok has only gotten a foretaste of what’s in store when Movement Authoritarians drive the country into a ditch. Elon Musk’s Cybertruck illustrates.

And Happy Hollandaise everyone!