Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

 This poll is giving everyone a heart attack today and driving all the news. The media is downright gleeful. Fun for them!

President Biden is trailing Donald J. Trump in five of the six most important battleground states one year before the 2024 election, suffering from enormous doubts about his age and deep dissatisfaction over his handling of the economy and a host of other issues, new polls by The New York Times and Siena College have found.

The results show Mr. Biden losing to Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of three to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, the poll found.

Margins are calculated using unrounded figures.

Nevada+10 rep

Georgia+6 rep

Arizona+5 rep

Michigan+5 rep

Pennsylvania+4 rep

Wisconsin+2 dem

Based on New York Times/Siena College polls of 3,662 registered voters from Oct. 22 to Nov. 3

Across the six battlegrounds — all of which Mr. Biden carried in 2020 — the president trails by an average of 48 to 44 percent.

Discontent pulsates throughout the Times/Siena poll, with a majority of voters saying Mr. Biden’s policies have personally hurt them. The survey also reveals the extent to which the multiracial and multigenerational coalition that elected Mr. Biden is fraying. Demographic groups that backed Mr. Biden by landslide margins in 2020 are now far more closely contested, as two-thirds of the electorate sees the country moving in the wrong direction.

Voters under 30 favor Mr. Biden by only a single percentage point, his lead among Hispanic voters is down to single digits and his advantage in urban areas is half of Mr. Trump’s edge in rural regions. And while women still favored Mr. Biden, men preferred Mr. Trump by twice as large a margin, reversing the gender advantage that had fueled so many Democratic gains in recent years.

Black voters — long a bulwark for Democrats and for Mr. Biden — are now registering 22 percent support in these states for Mr. Trump, a level unseen in presidential politics for a Republican in modern times.

Add it all together, and Mr. Trump leads by 10 points in Nevada, six in Georgia, five in Arizona, five in Michigan and four in Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden held a 2-point edge in Wisconsin.

In a remarkable sign of a gradual racial realignment between the two parties, the more diverse the swing state, the farther Mr. Biden was behind, and he led only in the whitest of the six.

As Paul Campos points put:

Now how and why is this happening? If we turn to another cyberpage of the Gray Lady we find a chatty cheerful conversation among four of its op-ed columnists, entitled “The Presidential Fantasy Draft,” with the sub-headline “Our 2024 options are terrible. Can we hope for more than Biden or Trump?”

The gist of this symposium is that Joe Biden is old and boring, and people — especially journalists needless to say — want somebody fresh and exciting to run against Trump, because somebody like Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom would obviously beat Trump easily (obviously). The evidence for this proposition is not presented, apparently because it’s too self-evident to require doing so.

Nor is there really any hint in this delightfully frivolous back and forth in this bien pensant salon that Trump might be “terrible” in some way that’s fundamentally different than the ways — old, boring — Joe Biden is “terrible.”

America is on the edge of installing a fascist dictatorship via a presidential election. This really shouldn’t be in any way controversial. I mean if you want to get all technical and pedantic you could say America is on the edge of installing an authoritarian dictatorship with a number of strikingly fascist-like features, so we don’t have to get into a stupid argument about whether Donald Trump actually meets the fascist minimum, whatever that might be defined to require.

And one reason this is about to happen is that our media elites simply refuse to acknowledge this extremely obvious fact. If they did, they couldn’t possibly hold chummy conversations among themselves about how Biden and Trump are both unsatisfactory options — a view I share if “unsatisfactory” in one case means “this pizza is slightly overcooked and therefore unsatisfactory,” while in the other case it means “this bubonic plague is an unsatisfactory disease.”

This poll shows that part of the problem is that people don’t know about Biden’s accomplishments. In fact, they are astonishingly uninformed about it and tend to be impressed when they do hear about it.

This is one good way of doing that. The contrast is super important. Apparently people have forgotten.

Then plan carefully

This horror story from Florida (where else?) should give anyone pause who lives alone away from relations “as 3 out of 5 Americans in their 80s do.” Or if you have a family member who does (Washington Post):

When Douglas Hulse pulled his Ford Mustang convertible into a Florida gas station three years ago, he looked so distressed that someone called 911.

An ambulance rushed him to Orlando Health South Seminole Hospital, where doctors said he had a stroke. At 80, the retired pilot who had flown famous passengers around the country could no longer care for himself.

[…]

A hospital can be liable if a patient is discharged into an unsafe environment. Because Hulse lived alone and the hospital officials saw no sign that he had family, that put them in a bind when his health didn’t improve. So they argued in court that he was no longer capable of making his own decisions and needed a guardian — a caretaker with enormous legal power.

Medicare “pays the hospital by diagnosis, not length of stay,” so when Hulse started costing the hospital money, they quickly washed their hands of him. The court assigned as Hulse’s guardian Dina Carlson, a 51-year-old former real estate agent, the Post reports.

The guardian a year later sold his home in an unadvertised sale to realtors in her neighborhood for $215,000. “A company called Harding Street Homes bought Hulse’s home and resold it a few months later for $347,000 — $132,000 more than Hulse got for it.”

“It’s unclear what efforts the hospital made to track down any relatives,” the Post reports. The guardian initially made none. Hulce’s niece in Pennsylvania had not heard from him in a while and could neither reach him nor find out where he’d gone. Only when she typed his name into Westlaw did she spot Hulce’s name in a guardianship case.

“If they just called me none of this would have happened,” she told the Post.

There’s much, much more, including a state and Washington Post investigation:

The inspector general’s office, lacking the investigative power of law enforcement, including the ability to subpoena bank records, pushed for a criminal investigation. It urged law enforcement to look into the handling of Hulse home and two others Carlson sold with the same real estate agents, stressing it had found “probable cause” that Carlson and the real estate agents “engaged in a scheme to defraud.”

[…]

On March 16, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said its preliminary inquiry found “no evidence” to warrant a criminal investigation “at this time,” according to an email received in the FOIA request.

Advocates for the elderly say police and prosecutors often do not treat financial exploitation of elderly people seriously enough and are reluctant to sink time into cases where the only witness has dementia, if still alive.

Two days after the state declined to pursue a criminal investigation, Hulse died.

A spokesman for Orlando Health South Seminole Hospital “urged people to draw up a will or designate someone to make their health decisions and to note this in their medical file.”

Too little, too late for Hulse and his family.

The Florida Department of Elder Affairs, after being contacted by The Post, reprimanded Carlson for her failure to file timely reports. Her penalty: She must take eight more hours of classroom training.

I’m horrified. And on notice. Now you are.

Grabier than “Gollum reaching for the One Ring”

Filing for the 2024 elections in North Carolina opens in four weeks: at noon on Monday, Dec. 4.

Democrats are already in court fighting the usual tricksy maneuvers from the Republican legislature. State Republicans roll their eyes and complain bitterly that Democrats filing lawsuits is more of the same tiresome resistance to their gerrymandered majorities. Naturally, Democrats would not be expending campaign resources on court so often if the GOP was not so routinely engaged in voter disenfranchisement and power grabs.

Their latest is a doozy.

After Democrat Roy Cooper defeated incumbent Pat McCrory (of HB2 “bathroom bill” fame) in the 2016 election for governor, Republicans called a lame-duck session ostensibly to address hurricane relief. What they really had in mind was changing the composition of election boards and stripping the incoming governor of appointment powers before he could take office.

The New York Times Editorial Board called it a brazen power grab:

… Republican lawmakers introduced bills to, among other things, require State Senate confirmation of cabinet appointments; slash the number of employees who report to the governor to 300 from 1,500; and give Republicans greater clout on the Board of Elections, the body that sets the rules for North Carolina’s notoriously burdensome balloting.

The graboids are back, bigger and badder than ever now that they have supermajorities in both chambers thanks to Rep. Tricia Cotham. This time they hope to change the rules ahead of the 2024 election with bills the GOP passed over Cooper’s vetoes.

Senate Bill 512, said Cooper’s Oct. 10 press release, “takes away the Governor’s majority of appointees on important boards and commissions, including the Board of Transportation, the Commission for Public Health, and the Environmental Management Commission among others.” It clearly violates “the separation of powers established in the North Carolina Constitution.”

Cooper’s Oct 17 press release describes the second, Senate Bill 749 (the doozy), as another violation of the separation of powers:

The bill, which Governor Cooper vetoed, would establish an eight-member State Board and four-member county boards, with all members appointed by the General Assembly and an even partisan split. The current State Board has five members appointed by the Governor, with at least two members from each major political party, and has successfully implemented fair elections in each cycle.

NC Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore legislated an end to that “fair” nonsense. This time they hope the GOP majority won last year on the state Supreme Court will have their backs.

In 2018, the North Carolina Supreme Court rejected the attempt by legislative Republicans to create an eight-member, evenly divided State Board of Elections. Following that loss, Republicans tried to amend the Constitution to do the same thing, however it was rejected soundly by the voters with 61% of the vote.

“The deadlocks that will be created on these new Boards of Elections at the state and local levels likely will reduce early voting and create longer lines at the polls. It will also undermine fair elections and faith in our democracy by sending disputes to our highly partisan legislature and courts,” said Governor Cooper. “Both the Courts and the people have rejected this bad idea and the meaning of our Constitution doesn’t change just because the Supreme Court has new Justices.

Cooper’s court filing challenging Berger and Moore’s attempt to eviscerate the separation of powers does not use “power grab,” but it does get colorful (emphasis mine)

2. Showing flagrant disregard for these constitutional principles, the North Carolina General Assembly takes direct aim at established precedents and once again seeks to significantly interfere with the Governor’s constitutionally assigned executive branch duty of election law enforcement and to take much of that power for itself.
3. Like Gollum reaching for the One Ring, Legislative Defendants are possessed by the power it brings. When it comes to seizing control of the enforcement of the State’s election laws, neither the clear rulings of the Supreme Court, nor the overwhelming vote of the people, will deter them.
4. To be clear, nothing has changed since the last time Legislative Defendants tried—and failed—to cripple the State Board of Elections, except, of course, the composition of the Supreme Court. But Defendants Berger and Moore hope that is enough—that the new Court will discard the principle of stare decisis to give Legislative Defendants what they so desperately want.

What the NC GOP wants is to devolve all power over elections administration to Berger and Moore (or to Moore’s replacement as speaker; he’s expected to run for Congress in a district he just drew for himself). They’re counting on deadlocks in election boards the GOP-dominated legislature will appoint the way Trump means to pack executive branch agencies with loyalists if he wins the presidency. Cooper’s filing makes this clear. Senate Bill 749 (Session Law 2023-139) is a “Where’s Waldo” of graboids Berger and Moore.

If “for any reason”—including deadlock,” the eight-member state Board fails to elect a chair within 30 days of appointment, “either the President Pro Tempore of the Senate or the Speaker of the House of Representatives (depending on the year)” will. Berger or Moore.

“If for any reason”—including deadlock—“the position of Executive Director is not filled within 30 days . . . the position may be filled by legislative appointment.” Guess who?

If an Executive Director is not selected by January 10, 2024, Section 8.3 of Session Law 2023-139 permits the President Pro Tempore of the Senate to make the appointment. Berger again.

The same will hold in 100 counties. Three-and-two boards presently appointed by the governor, two members from each major party with the fifth matching the party of the incumbent governor, become two and two. The new law cuts the governor out of the loop: one each appointed by President Pro Tempore of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the minority leader of the Senate, and the minority leader of the
House of Representatives. Berger or Moore and two Democrats.

And should these four-four county Boards not elect a chair within 15 days of their first meeting or within 30 days of a vacancy, the position of chair may be filled by either the President Pro Tempore of the Senate or the Speaker of the House of Representatives, depending on the year. Berger or Moore again.

Section 8.2 of Session Law 2023-139 permits the President Pro Tempore of the Senate to fill the office of the chair of any county board of election that does not select a chair by January 10, 2024. By who else? Graboid Berger.

S 749 also sets up the potential for long lines for early voting, as Cooper explains in his August 24 statement:

Under Senate Bill 749, if the State Board were to deadlock on a county’s early voting plan – which is likely under a 4-4 split – then the plan reverts to just one early voting site in that county. That will result in long waits for the increasing number of North Carolinians who vote early.

Over 100,000 voted early here in 2020 at 16 early voting sites. Our early voting plan for the March 5 primary (11 sites) has already been approved by the local elections Board. I told a gathering last week that if the GOP tried that single-site business in my county next October-November, there would be a riot.

Then again, chaos is the plan.

Cooper’s filing reads like a slam-dunk case. Then again, who knows how far a stacked state Supreme Court will go to deliver for graboids Berger and Moore.

It’s not good

This guy is nuts and he’s leading a small army of nuts. We just have to hope that if he gets on the ballot that more right wing nuts than left wing nuts vote for him:

At an anti-vaccine conference in Georgia on Friday, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confirmed his commitment to the cause and spoke to his base about how he, as president, would serve the movement he built.

“I feel like I’ve come home today,” he said to a standing ovation, crediting the assembled audience with his candidacy.

He then laid out his vision for a Kennedy presidency, which would include telling the National Institutes of Health to take “a break” from studying infectious diseases, like Covid-19 and measles, and pivoting the agency to the study of chronic diseases, like diabetes and obesity. Kennedy has suggested without evidence that researchers and pharmaceutical companies are driven by profit to neglect such chronic conditions and invest in ineffective and even harmful treatments; he includes vaccines among them.

“I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, God bless you all,” Kennedy said. “Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”

I’m pretty sure that infectious diseases aren’t going to give us a break though.

I don’t know what makes loons like this tick but it’s dangerous as hell that one of the two major political parties embraces the kooks who believe this garbage.

Florida’s top public health official, a leading voice behind Gov. Ron DeSantis’ controversial pandemic approach, joined his boss on the campaign trail Wednesday for an unusual appearance that further blurred the lines between the Republican presidential candidate’s day job and his political aspirations.

Taking the stage to the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” — a campaign playlist staple — Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo conveyed his unease speaking before the New Hampshire crowd but said he was compelled to visit the first-in-the-nation GOP primary state to “support a man that I have a great deal of admiration for.”

“There’s no one, no one right now, who is running in this election who has the critical qualities that Gov. DeSantis has — the integrity, the courage, the intelligence,” Ladapo said.

While it’s perhaps not atypical for public officials to heap praise on their bosses, it is rare for a government employee to be a featured act at a high-profile political event. But DeSantis, one of the few candidates running for the GOP nomination who are also currently in office, has at times flouted the distinctions that separate candidates from their elected offices.

DeSantis routinely faces questions back home about the cost of state resources used to support his White House bid, including after state law enforcement agents were involved in a multi-vehicle accident while providing protective services during a fundraising trip to Tennessee. Before announcing his presidential campaign, DeSantis signed a law that shields disclosures related to his security and travel from Florida’s robust public records laws.

[…]

Advertised as a town hall on “medical freedom,” the event served as a platform for Ladapo and DeSantis to cast aspersions on measures taken to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus during the pandemic and to sow doubts about the Covid-19 vaccine — an area on which the Florida governor has attempted to distinguish himself from former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 GOP nod, whose administration helped develop the vaccine in record time.

Ladapo told the crowd he had “nothing against Mr. Trump.” DeSantis, though, put Trump’s pandemic record on blast.

DeSantis vowed to overhaul the nation’s health regulators and disease response agencies if elected president, noting that he had championed laws in Florida to prevent pandemic-related restrictions in the future.

“We’re going to do a lot of different things right off the bat,” DeSantis said. “It’s going to change the way the federal government is going to be able to approach anything like this in the future.”

Ladapo recounted how he was plucked by DeSantis from UCLA, where he had ruffled feathers by penning op-eds increasingly critical of how governments were responding to the spread of the coronavirus and controversially pushing unproven Covid-19 treatments. DeSantis, who once celebrated the coronavirus vaccine’s arrival, appointed Ladapo as Florida’s surgeon general in the fall of 2021, putting him in charge of the state department of health just as he was cooling on the shots.

Together, DeSantis and Ladapo have continued to push against the medical consensus on coronavirus vaccines, with Florida the only state to officially recommend young men and children not get the mRNA shot. A document obtained by Politico showed Ladapo had altered a state analysis to remove comments that contradicted his assertion that the mRNA vaccine may be driving an added risk of cardiac-related death in men between ages 18 to 39.

In another outlier position, Ladapo this September advised Floridians not to get another dose of the vaccine after the federal government approved a new formula to improve immunity to recent strands of the coronavirus, similar to its method for annual flu shots.

Ahead of that announcement, with DeSantis videoconferencing via Zoom amid a campaign blitz, Ladapo helped lead a digital forum hosted by the governor’s office featuring the slogan “No way FDA.”

Though a state event, DeSantis introduced himself as though he was speaking to a national audience, saying, “I’m Gov. Ron DeSantis from Florida.”

This is mainstream GOP.

But this looks promising

Simon Rosenberg, who called the red trickle in 2022, wrote this on twitter:

As folks ready their election takes for Tuesday night, it’s important to check in on the big advantages Congressional Dems have opened up in recent months. Perhaps most important polling data out there right now.

Tuesday is off-year election day and because the Virginia Governor’s race overly excites the beltway press we’ll all be watching to see how the Great Whitebread hope Glenn Youngkin does. His race doesn’t really mean anything nationally but they will say it is a bellweather despite their huge miss in 2022. And whether or not this discontent with the GOP congress transaltes to other races is unknown. But it’s not good for them. And with MAGA MIke in charge it’s probably going to get worse.

He knows how to fail

When Mike Johnson tried to start a law school it didn’t go well:

In February 2012, Mike Johnson sent an aide on an urgent mission at the college where he had been working to open a law school: Locate a study that he believed would provethe project was financially possible.

For more than a year, Johnson — the dean of the not-yet-opened law school — had been telling donors and the public that the institution, which would focus on training Christian attorneys in northwest Louisiana, was not only achievable, but inevitable.

“From a pure feasibility standpoint,” Johnson, then 38, told the local Town Talk newspaper in 2010 after becoming dean, “I’m not sure how this can fail because … it looks like the perfect storm for our law school.”

But he had still not actually seen a feasibility study commissioned by the parent school, Louisiana College,a private Southern Baptist college in Pineville, La., now known as Louisiana Christian University.

The aide soon returned with disturbing news: The study had been buried in a filing cabinet. And it was all but useless.

Six months later, in August 2012, Johnson resigned as dean of the new school, which never opened even though the college spent $5 million to buy and renovate a Shreveport headquarters, among other expenses detailed in local media accounts.

The feasibility study was a “hodgepodge collection of papers,” with “nothing in existence” related to the need for the new law school, market studies, or “funding sources and prospects,” Johnson wrote the following year, describing the episode in what he called a “confidential memorandum” responding to questions from the Louisiana College Board of Trustees

Johnson’s April 2013 memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post, reveals how he navigated a previous executive management experience as he takes over a much larger organization, the U.S. House of Representatives, and becomes second in line to the presidency. The memo suggests that Johnson encouraged and agreed to lead what he later described as a sparsely researched effort that collapsed soon after he left.

The new speaker’s congressional biography makes no mention of his tenure as dean of the never-opened law school.Before winning election to the Louisiana legislature in 2015, and Congress a year later, Johnson mainly worked as a litigator for conservative causes, once remarking that his profession was “legal ministry.” He has also taught college courses, according to his House financial disclosures.

A spokesman for Johnson did not respond to a request for comment about the failed law school. Several others involved in the effort said Johnson had worked hard to make the project a reality and was not to blame for its failure.

The 2013 memo suggests, however, that when given a leadership opportunity, Johnson oversold his project’s prospects and failed to divulge key problems until after he left the job. In the memo, he blamed others for the problems,writing that the project collapsed because of larger issues at Louisiana College. He also faulted administrators for failing to send him the feasibility study, and said that a crisis involving the college’s accreditation agency undercut his effort to have the law school win operational approval.

“The ordeal created a real hardship for me and my family,” Johnson wrote, saying that he resigned “with great sadness and only as a last resort.”

Joe Aguillard, the president of Louisiana College,later offered an alternative explanation of events — pinningthe blame for the law school’s failure on Johnson, according to a memo written at the time by another board member, Heath Veuleman. Aguillard said that Johnson’s resignation was a selfish decision to pursue a “dream job,” according to the memo,which was obtained by The Post.Aguillard also blamed Johnson’s resignation “for the Law School’s present delays in opening its doors.” After leaving the school, Johnson said in a memo that he had accepted a job at a conservative legal institute in the Dallas area.

Veuleman wrote that Johnsonhad denied these allegations and said in an interview with The Post that the college’s financial and management turmoil made Johnson conclude that he “couldn’t be dean. He was constantly being usurped. … I remember phone calls in which Mike would say, ‘I can’t keep doing this.’”

Aguillard said in a brief phone conversation that he was hospitalized and could not give an interview. His wife, Judy Aguillard, later texted that “my husband loves Mike and mentored him. They are very close.”

Johnson had raised hopes in Shreveport that his project could be transformative for Louisiana’s third biggest city by bringing in its first law school. Today, civic leaders say that whoever was responsible for the failed effort, it was a significant missed opportunity.

He was the leader. And he was clearly unable to get the job done. Maybe he’s learned something since then. If so, I’d guess he’s learned how to grift off the wingnuts even better.

It just doesn’t get any better than this:

The law school was to be named for Paul Pressler III, a retired Texas judge and leader of the Southern Baptist Convention who, after the school’s collapse, was accused in a lawsuit and court affidavits of sexual misconduct or assault by multiple men, including some who said they were underage at the time of the alleged activity.Tim Johnson, who was executive vice president of Louisiana College at the time of the law school’s launch, said there was pushback about making Pressler the namesake due to his “ultraconservative” biblical views, but that the assault allegations were unknown at the time.

Pressler’s lawyer, Ted Tredennick, said the 93-year-old was unable to respond directly due to dementia but rejected the assault allegations on his behalf. “He denied those allegations categorically when they were first made 20 years ago; he has continuously and consistently denied them since; he would deny them today if he were able.” A trial in the lawsuit has been delayed but is expected early next year.

Here’s a good example of his leadership skills:

Gabriel Little, who was in charge of the capital campaign, said Johnson led an impressive effort to recruit faculty, create a curriculum, and present a proposal to win certification from the American Bar Association.

“He put together one heck of a presentation for accreditation” by the ABA, Little said.

But as Johnson prepared to do that, he later wrote in his memorandum to trustees, he learned that Louisiana College had run into a roadblock in its own effort to bolster its accreditation statusfrom the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Johnson wrote that the college’s problem with accreditation meant hecould not win ABA approvalfor the law school.

Around the same time, the college faced other struggles. As it moved in a more conservative theological direction, its leaders seized on doctrinal disputes within the Southern Baptist convention to discredit critics, sparking protests by students and some faculty.

Rondall Reynoso, a previous head of the college’s art department, said a culture of fear pervaded the campus — to the point that he stopped using his work computer because of concern that he was being surveilled.

“It was an inquisition-type atmosphere, almost,” Reynoso said, attributing the unrest to what he called the undue influence of the Southern Baptist Convention.

A spokeswoman for Louisiana Christian University, as the school is now known, said no one currently in leadership was serving at the time of the failed law school. The new administration, which took over in 2015, “has worked to address previous deficiencies,” the spokeswoman said, resulting in a 2021 review that affirmed the university’s accreditation “with zero findings of noncompliance.”

Johnson wrote in his memo that the “unrest” on campus was shocking, but others said he should have been well aware of the turmoil from news reports about threats to the college’s accreditation.

“By the time Johnson gets involved, the problems are well-known, but they’re dismissed by hardcore conservatives as a liberal attack,” Reynoso said.

At the same time, concern grew at the college about millions of dollars of deferred maintenance at the Pineville campus, raising questions about plans to spend money to start the law school and other projects.

Johnson wrote in his confidential memorandum that Louisiana College’s conflicts undercut his plans and he had “no choice” but to delay the ABA filing. In addition, he needed to provide information from the law school feasibility study to win over the ABA.

The problem was that he had never seen the study, notwithstanding his bold statement more than a year earlier that the school’s feasibility was beyond question.

He’d heard about the feasibility study but hadn’t seen it. He asked for it bu they just didn’t get it to him. What could he do? Well, he quit:

“… when the law school struggled to raise funds, along with the accreditation issues, “Mike probably saw that it was going to be a long time to do it, if it ever got done, and he was a bright young man and just chose to pursue another path.”

Admitting nothing he covered his ass and moved on.

On Aug. 15, 2012, Mike Johnson wrote Aguillard a letter of resignation. He said that developments “beyond our control” had affected his ability to run the school, citing the college’s accreditation problems that had made it difficult to raise funds and recruit students and faculty.

“Our hands are currently tied,” Johnson wrote, adding that he needed to look out for his family.

Privately, Johnson worked with the college on a public relations strategy to cast the resignation in the best possible light, according to internal documents reviewed by The Post.

The talking points included, “Minimize publicity on Mike’s resignation and keep all necessary messaging brief, positive and consistent,” and “Do not concede law school, but maintain it as a temporarily delayed and scaled-down future project.”

That didn’t happen. The law school never opened. Johnson, meanwhile, was elected as a state representative and then in 2016 to the U.S. House, followed by his elevation last month to the speakership.

It sounds as though the new speaker has the skills to run the House like Trump ran the Trump Organization. Great.

And listen

Michelle Goldberg on “the argument.” It’s not an easy topic and she does a very good job of sorting it out:

Last week, the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law sent a letter to nearly 200 college presidents urging them to investigate campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine for potential violations of federal and state laws against providing material support to terrorism. As evidence for these very serious accusations, the ADL and the Brandeis center offered only the student group’s own strident rhetoric, including a sentence in its online tool kit, which praised Hamas’s attacks on Israel and said: “We must act as part of this movement. All of our efforts continue the work and resistance of the Palestinians on the ground.”

Under the direction of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has also ordered state universities to shut chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. Citing the same tool kit, DeSantis said, “That is material support to terrorism, and that is not going to be tolerated in the state of Florida, and it should not be tolerated in these United States of America.” Virginia’s Republican attorney general has opened an investigation into American Muslims for Palestine, a national group that, according to the ADL, helps coordinate the activities of Students for Justice in Palestine, “for potentially violating Virginia’s charitable solicitation laws, including benefiting or providing support to terrorist organizations.” Several Republicans, including Donald Trump, have called for revoking the visas of pro-Palestinian student activists.

Ever since Hamas’s slaughter and mass kidnapping of Israelis on Oct. 7, there has been mounting fear and fury over the mistreatment of Jews at American colleges and universities. The Homeland Security, Justice and Education Departments are all taking steps to combat campus antisemitism. Congressional resolutions have condemned it. But while plenty of pro-Palestinian students have behaved in appalling ways, many also feel besieged, and for good reason.

For Palestinian and Muslim students, the invocation of terrorism law is especially frightening. Attempts to curtail anti-Zionist activism are not new; about 35 states have laws targeting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. But now advocates for Palestinian rights describe a new level of repression. “The ADL is calling for the mass violation of students’ rights in a manner that’s reminiscent of the post 9/11 environment, but with a more intensely Palestinian twist,” said Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at the civil rights organization Palestine Legal. She predicts that if federal and state governments follow through on the ADL’s demands, Palestinian activists will be subjected to an increase in surveillance, infiltration and investigation, even though their groups “pose zero threat and have done nothing but engage in speech 100 percent protected by the First Amendment.”

Columbia University’s Rashid Khalidi, a pre-eminent historian of Palestinian history, readily acknowledged a rash of recent antisemitic incidents on college campuses. But he drew a distinction between interpersonal harassment and an institutional crackdown. “Both sides have feelings of being victimized,” he told me, but the forces arrayed against them are not the same. “The Patriot Act may be mobilized to shut down speech” deemed supportive of Palestinian terrorism. “That’s the difference.”

No one should underestimate how awful the campus climate is for many Jewish students, who’ve experienced a surge in violence and abuse. At Cornell, an engineering student was arrested after threatening to shoot up a kosher dining hall and calling for Jews to be raped and murdered. Demonstrators at a rally in support of Palestinians assaulted Jewish counterprotesters at Tulane; one student had his nose broken. In October, Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean of at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote an opinion essay headlined, “Nothing Has Prepared Me for the Antisemitism I See on College Campuses Now.” In it, he told of a student who insisted that she would feel safe on campus only if the school got “rid of the Zionists.”

This hostile environment stems, at least in part, from the nearly vaunted role played by the Palestinian cause in the left’s understanding of global dispossession. Because America helps underwrite Israel’s military occupation, Palestinians are often viewed as singular symbols of imperialist oppression. For decades, radical Black activists in America have seen, in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, a mirror of their own subjugation, and that identification was supercharged during America’s 2020 racial justice protests, when a mural of George Floyd appeared in Gaza City. In some social justice circles, then, support for Israel is viewed as something akin to support for the K.K.K.

This contempt for Zionism has only accelerated with the pulverizing bombing of Gaza and its thousands of civilian casualties. And too often, on hothouse campuses full of young people with half-formed ideas and poor impulse control, anti-Zionism segues into hatred directed at Jews.

For some Jews on campus, the vituperation against Zionism has been particularly disorienting because, for years now, they’ve been trained in exquisite sensitivity to identity-based slights.

Not all Jews identify with the state of Israel, of course, and activists from Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow have led protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. But many Jews see their relationship with Israel as an essential part of their Jewishness, and even some fierce critics of Israel’s government were shaken by the widespread demonization of the country so soon after Hamas’s atrocities. When they say that the campus climate makes them feel unsafe — a rhetorical trump card in other contexts — they expect official action.

On Wednesday, the presidents of several Israeli universities wrote a letter to their international colleagues calling on them to accord Jewish and Israeli students and faculty members “the same respect and protections as any other minority.” Citing principles of safety and inclusivity, the letter said, “Just as it would be unthinkable for an academic institution to extend free speech protections to groups targeting other protected classes, so too should demonstrations that call for our destruction and glorify violence against Jews be explicitly prohibited and condemned.”

But this demand for protection can collide with the First Amendment rights of Zionism’s critics, and with academic freedom more broadly. “I wouldn’t compare this with the internment of the Japanese Americans in World War II, but the point I’m making is that there are times when people get really upset about what’s happening in the world and do things that are unwise at best and really harmful to people and democracy at worst,” said Kenneth Stern, director of Bard College’s Center for the Study of Hate and author of “The Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate.”

Stern occupies a unique position in this profoundly polarizing debate. He’s a liberal Zionist and an expert on antisemitism, as well as a committed civil libertarian who critiques the way mainstream Jewish groups wield institutional power to try to silence pro-Palestinian voices.

As he describes in his book, in 1982, he resigned from the left-wing National Lawyers Guild rather than face what felt like a purge for refusing to sign onto a strictly pro-Palestinian line. Years later, he became the in-house antisemitism expert at the American Jewish Committee, but eventually left in part over concern that, in its ardent defense of Israel on college campuses, the group was forsaking a commitment to academic freedom. He helped draft an internationally adopted definition of antisemitism that includes some forms of anti-Zionism. He’s also inveighed, in opinion essays, congressional testimony and in his 2020 book, against the use of that definition, put out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016, to traduce the free speech of Israel’s critics.

“The complexity of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict should make it an ideal subject to teach critical thinking and how to have difficult discussions,” writes Stern. “Instead, it is being used as a toxin that threatens the entire academic enterprise.”

As with the conflict between Israel and Palestine more broadly, there’s plenty of blame to go around. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a libertarian-leaning free speech organization, shared data with me showing that, since 2002, there have been more attempts made to de-platform pro-Palestinian campus speakers than pro-Israel ones. But attempts to shut down pro-Israel speakers, by disinviting or disrupting them, are more likely to be successful.

Both sides, then, have credible stories to tell about being censored and intimidated. The difference is where that intimidation is coming from. For supporters of Israel, it largely comes from peers and, in some cases, professors. For supporters of Palestine, it comes from powerful outside institutions, including the state.

There is little reason to think that the pressure brought to bear by these outside institutions is making Jewish students any safer. One result of the denunciatory mood that overtook many progressive spaces toward the tail end of the Trump years was to give reactionary ideas a rebellious frisson. You could see this in the little subculture of New York scenesters who adopted the trappings of conservative Catholicism as a rebuke to liberalism, but also in more significant cultural phenomena, like the popularity of the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast and the right-wing radicalization of Elon Musk. Among young people, the appeal of right-wing heterodoxy was limited by the fact that relatively few want to give up either a commitment to human equality or premarital sex. Anti-Zionist activism, by contrast, offers something that’s been missing from left-wing politics for years: the chance to stand up for the downtrodden and scandalize elites.

“By trying to censor anti-Israel remarks, it becomes more, not less, difficult to tackle both antisemitism and anti-Israel dogma,” Stern writes in his book. “The campus debate is changed from one of exposing bigotry to one of protecting free speech, and the last thing pro-Israel advocates need is a reputation for censoring, rather than refuting, their opponents.”

Of course, Israel’s partisans already have that reputation. “What can you say about what settlers are doing in the West Bank?” asked Khalidi. “What can you say about ethnic cleansing in 1948,” the year of Israel’s founding? “How can you defend any of those things? They don’t have an argument. They have to shut down debate.” Those who disagree with him might try to prove him wrong.

On Friday afternoon, New York County Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron expanded his gag order in the Trump Organization fraud case. He made clear again that, in essence, he would not stand for any more of Trump’s or his lawyers’ attempts at intimidation via social media or verbal diarrhea:

“The threat of, and actual, violence resulting from heated political rhetoric is well-documented,” Engoron wrote. “Since the commencement of this bench trial, my chambers have been inundated with hundreds of harassing and threatening phone calls, voicemails, emails, letters, and packages. The First Amendment right of defendants and their attorneys to comment on my staff is far and away outweighed by the need to protect them from threats and physical harm.”

On Oct. 3, 2023, Engoron imposed a gag order narrowly barring Trump from making statements about his staff after he smeared the judge’s law clerk on Truth Social. The order did not prevent Trump from making any statements about the judge or New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the lawsuit threatening the former president’s business empire.

Trump has attacked both the judge and the attorney general via social media repeatedly since that time, without violating the terms of the gag order.

“As I have made clear, as the Judge in this case and the trier of fact, the gag order does not apply to me,” Engoron wrote. “However, I will not tolerate, under any circumstances, remarks about my court staff.”

Engoron already has twice sanctioned Donald Trump, fining him a total of $15,000 for violations.

Don’t play chicken with these children. Get “serious.”

One more time, this is how the Party of Trump rolls:

1. Find the line
2. Step over it
3. Dare anyone to push you back
4. If no one does, that’s the new line
5. Repeat

A Bigger We keeps winning

The last four minutes of this Giridharadas dialogue mentioned on Friday is worth four of your minutes. The left must stop playing defense. We’re winning fights that matter.

We are endeavoring to do a really cool thing in this country, which is to build a country made of the world, a country made of all the other countries…. We are trying to build a country where every kind of person from every last village on this planet can come here and realize more of their potential than they would have wherever they came from. We don’t live up to it a lot, but it is an awesome pursuit.

Tell the story of what we’re fighting for.