Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

He made their political motives clear

Trump’s lawyer Kenneth Chesebro wrote some things down that he probably shouldn’t written:

On Dec. 24, 2020, Kenneth Chesebro and other lawyers fighting to reverse President Donald J. Trump’s election defeat were debating whether to file litigation contesting Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in Wisconsin, a key swing state.

Mr. Chesebro argued there was little doubt that the litigation would fail in court — he put the odds of winning at “1 percent” — as Mr. Trump continued to push his baseless claims of widespread fraud, according to emails reviewed by The New York Times.

But the “relevant analysis,” Mr. Chesebro argued, “is political.”

The emails have new significance because Mr. Chesebro is scheduled to be one of the first two of Mr. Trump’s 18 co-defendants to go on trial this month on charges brought by the district attorney’s office in Fulton County, Ga. The indictment accused Mr. Chesebro of conspiring to create slates of so-called fake electors pledged to Mr. Trump in several states that Mr. Biden had won.

Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers have argued that his work was shielded by the First Amendment and that he “acted within his capacity as a lawyer.” They have called for his case to be dismissed, saying he was merely “researching and finding precedents in order to form a legal opinion, which was then supplied to his client, the Trump campaign.”

Scott R. Grubman, a lawyer for Mr. Chesebro, said lawyers often argue for positions that are not widely held. “For example, any lawyer who has ever filed a pleading challenging existing Supreme Court precedent falls within this category,” he said. “Maybe a long shot, but far from criminal. In fact, it’s how the law changes over time.”

Mr. Trump has also signaled that one of his possible defenses is that he was simply acting on the advice of his lawyers.

But Mr. Chesebro’s emails could undercut any effort to show that the lawyers were focused solely on legal strategies. Rather than considering just the law and the facts of the case, Mr. Chesebro made clear he was considering politics and was well aware of how the Trump campaign’s legal filings could be used as ammunition for Republicans’ efforts to overturn the results when Congress met to certify the Electoral College outcome on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Just getting this on file means that on Jan. 6, the court will either have ruled on the merits or, vastly more likely, will have appeared to dodge again,” Mr. Chesebro wrote in the email chain. He added that a lack of action by the Supreme Court would feed “the impression that the courts lacked the courage to fairly and timely consider these complaints, and justifying a political argument on Jan. 6 that none of the electoral votes from the states with regard to which the judicial process has failed should be counted.”

Of the chances of success, Mr. Chesebro estimated the “odds the court would grant effective relief before Jan. 6, I’d say only 1 percent.” But he wrote the filing has “possible political value.”

Mr. Chesebro wrote that it was “hard to have enormous optimism about what will happen on Jan. 6, but a lot can happen in the 13 days left until then, and I think having as many states under review both judicially and in state legislatures as possible is ideal.”

He said the legal filings could produce a “political payoff” to bolster the argument that “there should at least be extended debate in Congress about election irregularities in each state.” He added that “the public should come away from this believing that the election in Wisconsin was likely rigged, and stolen by Biden and Harris, who were not legitimately elected.”

Responding to the email chain was John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who has also been charged in the Georgia election case. Mr. Eastman said he believed the legal arguments were “rock solid” but the odds of success were “not based on the legal merits, but an assessment of the justices’ spines. And I understand that there is a heated fight underway.”

This is the real smoking gun, to me:

Mr. Chesebro responded: “I particularly agree that getting this on file gives more ammo to the justices fighting for the court to intervene. I think the odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”

The promise that January 6th “will be wild” was seen as a way to intimidate the US Supreme Court. Wow. And we still have to wonder where Eastman was getting his “inside information” on the Court. He was good friends with the Thomases …

I’m sure Jack Smith has all these emails as well as the Fulton County DA. Whether they can tie Trump into it is unknown but remember, Trump sent the “will be wild” email right after that raucous meeting at the White House featuring the Overstock.com guy.

Joe Biden went to Israel today and spoke from experience

Joe Biden urged Israel not to repeat “mistakes” the US made after 9/11 as he made a statement during his visit to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, 18 October, following Hamas’ attack earlier this month.

The US president told people not to be “consumed” by rage as he compared the attacks to the events of September 11 in the US.

“After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes,” he added.

Mr Biden’s statement came as he announced a new $100m aid package to Gaza after a hospital explosion that is feared to have killed hundreds of people on Tuesday.

I suspect the right wingers will have a fit about this because American presidents are never allowed to admit to mistakes. On the other hand, they must be confused because Trump is hostile to Netanyahu and they’ve recently been programmed to be against war in the Middle East (what they now call “forever wars” no matter what the circumstances.) So, we’ll see.

How kind of him to give democrats such a great campaign Ad https://t.co/1Iw0pBIdHE

— Olivia Julianna 🗳 (@0liviajulianna) October 18, 2023

And they see it as a selling point.

Tom Cole, by the way, is frequently mentioned as a possible speaker candidate.

Jim Jordan is the heir to the Gingrich Revolution.

Another day, another clusterf***k in the US House of Representatives. After days of behind the scenes haggling (and reports of strong-arming) Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio said he was ready to call for a vote to make him the new Speaker of the House. The word on Tuesday morning was that they believed they had commitments for the necessary votes and the worst case scenario would be defections in the single digits, which were being rationalized as protest votes that would fall away on a second ballot. As it turned out Jordan lost 20 votes and after originally calling for another vote in the afternoon they postponed until Wednesday morning.

By the time you read this that vote might have taken place already or perhaps Jordan has seen the writing on the wall and dropped out. The rumors are that serious discussions of making the “acting” Speaker Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina a temporary Speaker with full powers to get the House through the appropriations process although nobody seems to know exactly how that would work. Some congressmen are even calling for Kevin McCarthy to be reinstated, which would be the perfect coda to this absurd brouhaha.

One of the main objections to Jim Jordan is that he’s too ideologically extreme and will hurt the Republicans’ chances of maintaining the majority in 2024. There are 18 House members who were elected in those districts that Biden won and it’s assumed they will be in danger if a full-blown MAGA wingnut becomes Speaker of the House. Some of those members voted for Jordan on Tuesday so they aren’t convinced but the Democrats are making it clear that they see this as an opportunity. Jim Jordan’s record is as far right as it gets and he’s joined at the hip with Donald Trump who is as toxic as ever in those districts.

But the idea that Jordan would be a departure from all the alleged statesmen who previously served as Republican Speakers and that the maelstrom that’s engulfed this congress since they took over is competely unprecedented isn’t true. In fact, Jordan and the rest of the House GOP rebels are following in a recent tradition.

Back in the 1980s the Reagan Revolution brought into the Republican House caucus a group of backbench bomb throwers led by an obscure Georgia congressman named Newt Gingrich. He was very adept at getting attention from the nascent right wing media represented in those early days by talk radio. He first came to national notice when he maneuvered to oust the then Speaker of the House over an ethics complaint. He said at the time, “I’ll just keep pounding and pounding on his ethics. There comes a point where it comes together and the media takes off on it, or it dies. What I really want is to get some people with subpoenas poking around.” (That Gingrich himself had a very similar ethics problem made it a “chef’s kiss” of a political gambit and secured his place in the GOP as a bold, risk taker. )The Speaker in that case was a Democrat and was hastily replaced by another Democrat but that was the play that started it all and led us to where we are today.

Gingrich started his climb into the leadership right away and by 1994 he was not only the undisputed leader of the House Republicans, he was the undisputed leader of the Republican party. When he led them to their massive win in that midterm election, there was talk in the political media that he was going to be a co-President with Bill Clinton and might have to run against him in 1996 for the good of the country.

He and his accomplices reveled in the tales of small state corruption and lurid sexual misdeeds of Arkansas’ gothic political culture and launched the practice of non-stop tabloid House investigations that continues to this day. Their smashmouth rhetoric, the crude character assasination was not unprecedented in American politics but the modern conservative movement under Newt Gingrich took it mainstream.

But the old “live by the sword, die by the sword” trope came back to bite him in 1997 when an insurgent group of 20 or so Representatives from the Gingrich class of 94 felt that he had betrayed their principles and they recruited the Speaker’s top lieutenants to go to him with an ultimatum that he was to step down or they would remove him by parliamentary maneuver. Unfortunately for them, the top lieutenants were a bunch of Keystone Kops and began fighting among themselves only to have the plot leaked to the press before any action could be taken. Gingrich survived but it was clear he was hanging on by a thread.

When his predictions of a massive gain in the 98 midterms turned to dust, he knew he no longer had the support of the caucus and he resigned. At the time half the men in Washington were being exposed as philanderers, and Gingrich was among them, as was the man who maneuvered behind the scenes to edge out his more likely successor, Bob Livingston of Louisiana. They finally settled on a little known member of the leadership Illinois Congressman Dennis Hastert who went on to become the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House. It was only later that it was discovered that he had been paying off a former student to keep quiet about his molestation of boys when he was a wrestling coach, which landed him 15 months in jail.

When Hastert left he was succeeded by Ohio Rep. John Boehner, one of the original Gingrich coup plotters. As we all know, Boehner was eventually forced out by Tea Party back benchers, Jim Jordan among them. His successor Paul Ryan found himself being jeered at townhalls and rallies and left after two years to be followed by Kevin McCarthy who was just ousted in a parliamentary maneuver much like the one with which the Keystone Kop coup plotters were supposed to threaten Gingrich in 1997.

Jim Jordan is certainly an extremist whose legislative record is non-existent and whose entire career in congress has been devoted to nothing but culture war issues, Fox News hits, insurrection and character assasination. But he’s not unique. (He even has a wrestling coach molestation scandal in his background.) In fact, he is the natural heir to the Gingrich revolution. And there are plenty more just like him.

Salon

Update:

Jordan lost his second vote by more than the first one. Back to the drawing board.

And a way out of cynicism

Polling has been bad for years. Traditional models seem to be failing. Too many focus on horse-race politics. But why?

Dan Pfeiffer this morning:

Despite historically high turnout in the last several elections, people are disconnected from politics, angry at politicians, and distrustful that the political process can make an iota of difference in their lives. To be fair, Americans have always had some cynicism about politics and a distrust of government dating back to dumping tea in the Boston Harbor. But the levels of discontent are unprecedented and happening across the political spectrum.

Pfeiffer is commenting on a Pew survey that came out in September. Is it any good? Who knows? But its findings may be instructive for Democrats in 2024, Pfeiffer believes:

• Can Democrats run on saving democracy when people are so down on our political system? The common explanation for our surprising success in 2022 is that Democrats upended expectations by centering the election on the threat Republicans posed to democracy. I think the story is more complicated, but Democrats are planning to make saving democracy a central part of the 2024 campaign. I am not arguing that this is the wrong decision. Democracy is at stake. Still, we must factor the distrust and disillusionment into our messaging — otherwise, we will become the defenders of a broken, corrupt political system.
• How do we talk about Democratic accomplishments? The primary theory for President Biden’s high levels of disapproval on economic issues is that voters are largely unaware of his major accomplishments. And therefore, educating them about those accomplishments is a strategic priority. How we talk about those accomplishments must start from a place that acknowledges the high level of distrust in the federal government. Some of Biden’s biggest accomplishments have yet to go into effect. This distrust creates a hurdle for convincing people that these policies will really deliver for them.
• What’s the best message against Trump? Given the close election, it’s fair to say that the Democrats’ anti-Trump message was not as effective as we thought it would be in 2020. In a moment when the public is livid at politicians, we have to be careful not to inadvertently help Trump with a message that makes him seem even more like an anti-politician.

That last bit is good advice. Trump’s brand is rule-breaking. Even if his instincts are criminal.

But Joe Biden has instincts too. Not for what Americans tell pollsters they believe about this country, but for what they want to believe about it. He may not deliver his message as skillfully as Michael Douglas in Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin’s The American President (1995), or as endearingly as Kevin Kline in Ivan Reitman’s Dave (1993), or bring people to tears the way Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) does singing “La Marseillaise” in Casablanca (1942), but Biden’s throwback, almost corny optimisim about the country he’s spent his life serving feels authentic. When he says he’s not kidding, he’s not kidding.

Americans love a redemption story. They’ll soon be watching Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Miracle on 34th Street (1946) and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (in all its incarnations) for they’ve lost count of how many times. Even at our most cynical, we want to believe things will work out, and that people can change for the better.

Democrats running on redeeming democracy will feel more authentic if Biden is their messenger, and if their message is more aspirational than confrontational, although they need both. Under Trump, under McCarthy, under Jordan, all MAGA Republicans offer America is more fear, decay and hate, chaos and carnage. Republicans cannot lead, do not lead. Look how far Obama got with Hope. Underneath the cynicism, Americans still want to believe. In spite of all he’s suffered, so does Joe.

No, Kevin, Republicans did this

Please append this to Digby’s Tuesday post, The Most Fatuous Spin In World History.

Former speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) spun like a top yesterday after Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) lost his first vote for Speaker of the House by 20 Republican votes one week after Republicans gave McCarthy the boot and stopped the House cold amidst an international crisis.

McCarthy: “Every single Democrat voted to stop one branch of government. They created this mess with eight Republicans. Every single Democrat did this.”

McCarthy was referring to the vote last week that ousted him as speaker.

Um, Short Attention Span Theater, Kevin.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) reminds Republicans that the reason they, McCarthy, Jordan, and the country are in this mess (and why McCarthy is out of a job) dates from a January vote by Republicans only (here). McCarthy himself set the stage for his ouster by caving to his MAGA lunatics’ demand for a rule change that would allow only one member of Congress to bring a “motion to vacate” and force a vote on removing the speaker.

One did. Matt Gaetz did. And here we are.

.@AOC on the GOP blaming Democrats for their own dysfunction: “Democrats tried to save Republicans from themselves. There was this entire rule that allowed for one member of the House to kick out the Speaker… Every single Democrat voted against this rule… They didn’t listen.” pic.twitter.com/fOSSqUeAVA

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) October 17, 2023

They think it’s perfectly normal

This is the way wingnuts used to sound back in the dark ages when I was growing up. I guess it’s what they mean by “making American great again.”

In August, reporter Yanqi Xu heard her name called from a stage in Philadelphia for a national award recognizing Our Dirty Water, her series examining Nebraska’s high nitrate levels and their potential connection to childhood cancer.

Weeks later, she published a piece looking at the environmental impact of Pillen Family Farms,  Gov. Jim Pillen’s company. She found that 16 Pillen hog farms have recorded nitrate levels higher than 50 parts per million – five times higher than is considered safe to drink. One farm recorded a reading of 445 parts per million. 

Yanqi combed through hundreds of government records to find that a dozen Pillen operations violated state regulations. Employees at one farm constructed a PVC pipe to drain pig waste into a freshwater channel.

Four days after we published that story, Governor Jim Pillen called into KFAB radio from a trade mission in Japan. He touted Nebraska’s historical support for immigrants, saying “We are the most welcoming state in the country.”

Then the governor was asked to comment on Yanqi’s work.

“Number one, I didn’t read it. And I won’t,” Pillen said. “Number two, all you got to do is look at the author. The author is from communist China. What more do you need to know?”

Clearly, he is a no-nothing bigot. Here’s the rest of the story from her newspaper’s editor:

Yanqi Xu (pronounced “Yen-chee Shu”) did grow up in China, in Guangzhou. She left for Beijing, where she studied English and international journalism. 

She then left everything she had ever known. She moved to the United States. She wanted to pursue American-style journalism. 

She earned her masters degree at my alma mater, the University of Missouri-Columbia. She got a crash course in the power of government transparency while working at the National Freedom of Information Coalition. She anchored for a radio station. She began using data to find and tell revelatory stories at the National Institute for Computer Assisted-Reporting and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. She eventually joined North Carolina Policy Watch, that state’s chapter of States Newsroom, which also launched Nebraska Examiner.

Then she joined us at Flatwater Free Press almost exactly two years ago now, and wasted no time becoming a key reporter – for us, and for Nebraska. 

Her work speaks for itself. 

Yanqi sniffed out the larger story behind a recall effort in Alvo. She examined overtime in the prison system to discover employees doubling their salary by working 100-hour weeks. She analyzed the attendance records of the Nebraska Board of Parole, finding that the full board showed up together to hearings 37 percent of the time. (They started showing up for hearings far more in the year after her story ran.) 

She has done all of this while pursuing a second master’s degree, this time in analytics. And she is far more than even the impressive sum of her stories.

Yanqi loves live music. She hated the Nebraska wind when she moved here, though she said this week that she’s growing used to it. She works late. She didn’t get to see her parents back in China for three years during COVID-19, until she could finally visit last December.

She’s whip smart. She’s pit bull stubborn. She’s a courageous reporter, a remarkable reporter.  

She’s remarkable, period. 

She is the American dream. And this governor is a piece of shit.

Will Mike Pence or Tim Scott drop out first?

Scott’s Super-Pac pulls ads:

The super PAC supporting Tim Scott’s presidential bid is canceling most of its remaining TV spending, reversing course after reserving $40 million in ads for him ahead of the Iowa caucuses.

The retreat from TV is the latest sign of how dire the primary has become for a candidate who once anticipated outside help from big donors — but who is now polling in low single digits and hasn’t yet qualified for the third debate.

Pence reports a dismal fund-raising haul:

Former Vice President Mike Pence is reportedly facing an “existential cash squeeze” that could bring an end to his 2024 run for the White House.

Pence’s campaign told NBC News that filings due at the Federal Election Commission by the end of Sunday will reflect some $620,000 in debt, and that Pence has resorted to putting $150,000 in personal funds to the low-polling effort. While the GOP candidate raised $3.3 million in the third quarter and has $1.2 million cash on hand, NBC notes that taking on debt “has long been a sign of presidential campaigns in trouble—and potentially on the verge of ending.” …

Amid his discouraging fundraising, Pence has decided to skip the GOP-run Nevada caucuses and instead file for the state-run primary—a so-called “beauty contest” that won’t award any delegates involved in selecting the party’s nominee. “We’ll probably have to be a little bit more selective in where we invest resources, and that was the basis of that,” he said on Friday. “But we love Nevada and we look forward to tell our story there in the primary.” 

Scott’Super Pac tells it like it is:

“We are doing what would be obvious in the business world but will mystify politicos — we aren’t going to waste our money when the electorate isn’t focused or ready for a Trump alternative,” wrote Rob Collins, co-chair of the super PAC, who said the “Never-Trump field” is going to be “wasting money this fall” trying to undermine Trump’s current lead.

Haley and DeSantis may make it to Iowa and the gadflies will hang on as long as they can still get attention. But it’s over. In fact, it was over before it began.

Republican voters want this:

Trump on deportations: If you’re a communist, Marxist, or fascist.. other than people who are already here of which many are in the Biden Administration, you’re disqualified. We’d like to get them out too. Maybe we’re work on that next pic.twitter.com/w5LbxkFy4T

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 16, 2023

Paul Krugman thinks we dodged that bullet but nobody’s noticed

Krugman ‘s newsletter today lays out the data:

Until quite recently there was a near consensus among forecasters that the U.S. economy was headed for a recession. In fact, it’s been exactly one year since Bloomberg declared that, according to its models, the probability of a recession by October 2023 — that is, now — was 100 percent.

Oops.

OK, it’s possible — barely — that a recession has begun but isn’t in the data yet. Economists of a certain age remember that for much of 2008 some commentators denied that there was a recession underway, but the official business cycle chronology now says that the worst slump since the 1930s began in December 2007. That said, warning indicators like the Sahm rule, which looks at the unemployment rate compared with its previous low, were flashing red by the summer of 2008, in a way they aren’t now:

And forecasters, most of whom were very gloomy at the beginning of this year, have been backing off, with slightly fewer than half in a recent survey still predicting recession. My visceral reaction on seeing that headline was to say “Uh-oh” — given the track record of economic prediction, an optimistic consensus may be a reason to worry — but the truth is that the case for a soft landing, which I debated with Peter Coy a few weeks ago, keeps getting stronger.

The most important reason for optimism is that an ever-widening range of indicators suggest that the conventional wisdom — that we needed a recession to bring inflation under control — was wrong. Instead, we seem close to returning to the Federal Reserve’s inflation target without paying much of a price at all.

To see what I mean, here’s the Fed’s normal measure of underlying inflation, the “core” personal consumption expenditures deflator (try saying that six times fast) — that is, excluding volatile food and energy prices — measured over the past three and six months:

And since the traditional core inflation measure has seemed inadequate in the highly disrupted post-Covid world, here’s a more elaborate statistical measure from the New York Fed:

These measures suggest that underlying inflation is already most of the way back to the Fed’s target of 2 percent, and falling fast. The war on inflation looks almost over, and we won.

Now, if you say that, you get some hysterical pushback, much of it politically motivated: A key part of the Republican case against President Biden is the claim that he is responsible for runaway inflation, and partisans aren’t willing to let go of that argument. I’ve had some, well, interesting correspondence lately — for example, emails saying that by highlighting data suggesting that the inflation surge is over I’m a worse propagandist than Joseph Goebbels. Whatever.

Anyway, to the extent that there’s a real argument here, it involves the widespread use by economists of measures that attempt to extract underlying trends from the noise. Never mind these fancy numbers, say the critics; the prices real people actually pay are still soaring.

The truth, however, is nearly the opposite. At this point, U.S. inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index is largely driven by prices people don’t pay — owners’ equivalent rent, an “imputed” estimate of what homeowners would be paying if they were renting their houses. An alternative measure, the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, which doesn’t include this imputation, shows inflation roughly down to target:

There are many other indicators suggesting that inflation is quickly coming under control. Wage growth is slowing rapidly, reducing fears of a wage-price spiral:

And business expectations of future inflation, which are a much better predictor than consumer expectations, are also way down:

One final point about the inflation news: Earlier this year, many economists, while acknowledging that inflation was falling without any visible cost in higher unemployment, insisted that the last mile — getting inflation from, say, 3 percent to 2 percent — would be much harder. But underlying inflation has by many measures already covered much of that last mile, without the predicted pain.

So fears that we needed a recession to control inflation seem increasingly unfounded.

The question now is whether we’ll get a recession anyway.

The big reason for concern is the fact that the interest rates we think matter most for the real economy have soared since the Fed began hiking to fight inflation:

If you had told me two years ago that interest rates would soar like this, I would have predicted a nasty recession with spiking unemployment. But in fact job growth, and probably G.D.P. growth, have just kept chugging along.

The problem for economic analysts is that there are two possible reasons the recession dog hasn’t barked. One is that we’re seeing fundamental economic change — that new investment opportunities have increased r-star, so that the economy can handle high interest rates indefinitely. The other is that there are, as Milton Friedman claimed, “long and variable lags” in the effects of monetary policy, and high rates will eventually break something major.

Which story is right? Honestly, I have no idea. My inbox is full of analysts inspecting the entrails of business data, seeking omens for the near-term future. Some of them may know what they’re doing, but which ones?

What I think we can say is that because a recession, if it happens, will be a stumble rather than something we actually need, that recession probably won’t be either deep or long.

For the economic news this year has been remarkably good, although many people refuse to believe it.

Nobody does it like MyKev

Kevin McCarthy claims Democrats “created this mess,” prompting even a Fox News reporter to push back pic.twitter.com/mh3hdeUeKr

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 17, 2023

As I write this, Jordan just lost the Speaker vote by 20 Republican votes and he’s planning to go for another one. McCarthy’s insistence that this is all Democrats fault for refusing to vote for a fascist insurrectionist Republican for Speaker when he couldn’t even corral all the Republicans is pathetic. I’m sure he’s convinced millions of MAGA cult members that this is the problem because they have no idea how anything actually works. But please. There has to be at least a few Republicans left out there who realize that this is the stupidest thing he’s ever said. Right?