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Lies and the lying liars

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 27, 2023

It’s the contagion, stupid

New York State Supreme Court judge Arthur Engoron ruled Tuesday that Donald J. Trump, the former U.S. president, is a liar. His Trump Organization is a lie. His claims about his wealth are lies. All of this is known. David Cay Johnston knew long before Trump ran for president. David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner of the New York Times won Pulitzers for exposing the Trump family’s corrupt and fraudulent practices in 2018. The Washington Post gave up counting Trump’s lies and misleading statements as president when they topped 30,000.

Sure, everyone lies occasionally. But Al Franken lampooned the right’s enthusiasm for lying in “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” (2003) before his stint as a U.S. senator. Lying as matter of course, as a political tactic, as a means of conducting oneself day to day was common before Trump. (Remember “death panels”?) Conspiracy theories built on smears and lies have been around for decades. But lying as a way to make a fortune at others’ expense seemed to become a contagion under Trump.

CNN reported in 2019:

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said he has “no obligation” to tell the truth to the media while acknowledging that he had not told the truth when asked earlier this year about his interactions with President Donald Trump.

Lewandowski was blunt about it, belligerent about it, perhaps proud of it.

An incident on Tuesday reinforced just how much lying with shameless abandon has become standard operating procedure on the right. President Biden went to Michigan to stand in solidarity with striking auto workers. He told them, “I marched a lot of UAW picket lines when I was a Senator since 1973. But I tell you what— first time I’ve ever done it as president.”

Benny Johnson, a right-wing media influencer with over 1.8 million followers on formerly Twitter, posted a clip of Biden misreporting “first time I’ve ever done it as president” as “first time I’ve ever done it in person.”

“He clearly says ‘As President’ but you knew that,” the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson posted of the lie.

BuzzFeed.com fired Johnson for plagiarsism in July 2014. The National Review snapped him up that September, telling the press Johnson had learned his lesson. The conservative Independent Journal Review hired him in 2015 but suspended Johnson and two others in 2017 after “publication of a conspiratorial article that suggested that former president Barack Obama might have influenced a federal judge in Hawaii to rule against President Trump’s revised travel ban.”

Johnson is now reportedly chief creative officer at Charlie Kirk‘s Turning Point USA.

The opposite of truth

Reuters reports this morning:

Elon Musk’s X, formerly called Twitter, disabled a feature that let users report misinformation about elections, a research organisation said on Wednesday, throwing fresh concern about false claims spreading just before major U.S. and Australian votes.

After introducing a feature in 2022 for users to report a post they considered misleading about politics, X in the past week removed the “politics” category from its drop-down menu in every jurisdiction but the European Union, said the researcher Reset.Tech Australia.

Adam Serwer comments at BlueSky, “The catalyst for the takeover was in part frustration that pre musk twitter was not a pliant conduit for right wing election misinformation .”

Speaker Kevin McCarthy, commenting on the Biden visit to Michigan, said, “President Biden just joined a picket line. Wait til he finds out autoworkers are picketing because he subsidized electric cars and sent their jobs overseas.”

“This is the opposite of the truth,” the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent replied. “One of the UAW’s core demands is that EV-related manufacturing workers should be folded into the Big Three/UAW contracts. Those jobs are here in the US. By contrast, Kevin McCarthy and Republicans oppose the policies that help create those jobs.”

Doesn’t matter. Lying is SOP on the right now.

The Trump rot

This is a contagion, a contagion in circulation before Trumpism, but one his example encouraged to spread as freely as his COVID-19 disinformation and Big Lie. In both instances, Americans died.

Let’s look back to August 2020:

Norman Eisen, impeachment counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, writes of the moment he realized just how corrupt the Republican defense of Donald Trump would be. His attorneys told the U.S. Senate, “In the Judiciary Committee . . . there were no rights for the president.” They claimed the president had been denied due process. It was a lie. In fact, Trump had stonewalled.

Eisen continues:

That was the moment I realized how dangerously deep the Trump rot went: The president’s lawyers could have defended him capably without stooping to this. Lawyers are not in place to repeat the excesses of their clients. And yet Trump had managed to finagle his team into an alarming display of mimicry. Falsehood was his stock in trade, and they were enthusiastic franchisees. Worse, the GOP-controlled Senate was all too ready to accept it.

People who live a lie, teach lies, and defend lies, find it very easy to lie.

The Real Fraudsters of Manhattan

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 27, 2023

“Donald Trump is no longer in business.”

Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club (via William L. Jones Jr. / Google)

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ruled Tuesday that the Trump Organization is guilty of a decade of systemic fraud. The evidence is so plain that edjudicating the facts at trial is unneeded. Engoron also revoked its state business licenses and ordered it dissolved (Washington Post):

A judge overseeing a $250 million lawsuit against Donald Trump ruled the former president and his company committed fraud by inflating his net worth in business transactions, narrowing the scope of what the state’s attorney general must prove at an upcoming civil trial.

New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron also ordered the cancellation of Trump business certificates and imposed sanctions on attorneys representing him, two of his adult children, two other company executives and the business for repeating arguments that failed multiple times previously and were called “borderline frivolous.”

Trump will appeal, of course. All the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Until someone informs him that his friends on the Roberts court have no jursdiction in a New York state civil case. Trump and his boys will digitally scream how unfair they’ve been treated. As predictably as the sunrise, they’re doing that already:

“Nothing like this has ever happened in our Country before. My Civil Rights have been violated, and some Appellate Court, whether Federal or State, must reverse this horrible, un-American decision. If they can do this to me, they can do this to YOU!”

Those who’ve spent a decade running a fraudulent business and overestimating its worth to the tune of billions know who YOU are.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has already won her case to secure monetrary damages against the Trump Organization. The trial set to start on October 2 now will be about how much the Trumps will pay. James is seeking $250 million.

The Guardian:

In pre-trial hearings before the ruling, Trump lawyer Christopher Kise told the judge that the former president is “an investment genius” and “probably one of the most successful real estate developers in the country”.

“President Trump is a master at finding value where others see nothing,” Kise told Engoron.

In his ruling, it is clear that Engoron sees things differently.

“In defendants’ word: rent-regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air; a disclaimer by one party casting responsibility on another party exonerates the other party’s lies,” Engoron wrote.

“This is a fantasy world, not a real world.”

David Cay Johnston has reported on Trump and his dealings for years. Trump is out of business, he explains bluntly:

Worse, the self-proclaimed multibillionaire may soon be personally bankrupt as a result, stripped of just about everything because for years he engaged in calculated bank fraud and insurance fraud by inflating the value of his properties, a judge ruled Tuesday.

His gaudy Trump Tower apartment, his golf courses, his Boeing 757 jet and even Mar-a-Lago could all be disposed of by a court-appointed monitor, leaving Trump with not much more than his pensions as a one term president and a television performer.

None of this is new to anyone who has watched Trump over the years:

In 2015 Trump claimed his net worth was north of $10 billion. When he became president, he asked if he could file his federally required financial disclosure statements without signing them under penalty of perjury. That request was denied. The statement Trump then filed, by my counting, showed a net worth of not much more than $1 billion, but was based on fantastical assertions of value.

News organizations, except DCReport, told their audiences next to nothing about how from June 2015 to January 2017 Trump’s claimed net worth fell by roughly 90 percent.

Trump’s chances of winning an appeal, Johnston estimates at “between zero and nothing.”

Creditors, any fines due the state because of the fraud, and taxes will be paid first from sales of Trump properties.

The various properties are likely to be sold at fire sale prices and certainly not for top dollar when liquidation begins, probably after all appeals are exhausted. 

Among these properties is the portion of Trump Tower that Trump still owns and leases to businesses as office and retail space; his own triplex apartment there; his golf courses; and Mar-a-Lago, the Florida mansion he bought in a corrupt mortgage deal decades ago. He also has deals to license his name on buildings and businesses, which similarly he can no longer operate and whose profits he must give up.

The fact that Trump assigned values two, four, ten times and more above their actual values indicates that once all of the priority bills are paid there will be little to nothing left for Trump.

Karma’s a bitch.

Why aren’t the Republicans alarmed about addled Trump?

Published by digby on September 26, 2023

JV Last at the Bulwark notes that while the Democrats are wringing their hands so violently over Joe Biden’s age that they’re rubbing the skin off of their palms, the Republicans don’t really seem to care all that much about the fact that their presumptive nominee is an addled criminal.

… Some Biden supporters are frustrated with this increasingly public agita and they often state that this frustration is premised on the fact that the media doesn’t mention Trump’s advanced age with the same urgency or concern as Biden’s. I don’t know if that stated critique gets at the heart of the frustration, though. Yes, Trump is also old, and sure, it would be nice for The Media to mention that from time to time. But the real exasperation simmering underneath goes something like this: 

SURE BIDEN IS OLD BUT THE OTHER CANDIDATE IS A FELONIOUS MANIAC WHO ATTEMPTED A COUP AND HAS SAID HE WANTS TO END THE CONSTITUTION AND ASSASSINATE HIS POLITICAL ENEMIES. WHY AREN’T MORE PEOPLE—REPUBLICANS, THE MEDIA, MY FATHER, ANYONE!!!!—PANICKING ABOUT THAT INSTEAD?!

That is the issue flummoxing me of late. 

The timeline for Trump is the same as it is for Biden. Now would be the time for a full-court press to prevent him from being nominated and yet . . . only Jack Smith seems to be making progress in that regard. 

Look at this screengrab from yesterday’s Drudge Report which offers a little taste of the American Carnage that Trump has planned.

Those headlines read like they are from a dystopian, authoritarian fantasy world, not the American democratic republic we grew up in. Shutting down media outlets. Killing disfavored generals. 

Any human of any ideological stripe who is capable of looking at that news rundown with the slightest discernment must concur that Trump needs to be stopped. Which is why it’s the absence of Trump panic in GOP discourse that is the outlier, not the reasonable ongoing discussion about the best course for President Biden coming from the left. 

Despite Trump’s disastrous track record and his scary stated plans, it is inarguable that the institutions/politicians/commentators in America’s center-right are more sanguine about a Trump nomination now than they were at this same time in 2016. There’s no Against Trump magazine cover coming. No “Based” Senators plotting convention coups. No new Stop Trump PACs on the horizon. There’s no Shep Smith or Chris Wallace on Fox trying to inject some truth into the madness. 

It is impossible to envision a David Ignatius of the MAGA movement, whoever that may be, penning a column calling on Trump to step aside. Hell, just yesterday on Fox there was a former GOP congressional candidate who called on Ron DeSantis to step aside so the party can unite behind Trump. 

The only movement against Trump that I can detect on the right is Chris Christie and a tiny number of lower-level former White House staffers who have seen the light. Even Trump’s leading primary opponents barely attack him! 

This leaves the same old Never Trumpers, not exactly credible messengers with the MAGA base, out here screaming our heads off while everyone else just acts like this is business as usual. 

I think these people can be divided into two groups. One of them is just waiting it out. As Mitch McConnell reportedly said after January 6th, something to the effect of “We don’t need to do anything the Democrats will take care of him for us.” Thanks a lot.

The other group thinks that Trump will still be better for them personally than Biden and they don’t want to get on his bad side by publicly saying anything.

Either way, they are unpatriotic cowards.

The beginning of the end of the Trump Org as we’ve known it?

Published by digby on September 26, 2023

Maybe they can reconstitute themselves in Russia.

About Trump’s glock

Published by digby on September 26, 2023

The New Republic has the back story and it’s much worse than we knew:

During a campaign trip to South Carolina, Donald Trump took some time to visit the gun store that sold weapons to the racist Jacksonville, Florida, mass shooter.

Trump visited Palmetto State Armory on Monday, where he admired a handgun engraved and decorated in his honor. He repeatedly said he wanted to buy a gun there—which would be a violation of federal law given his many indictments.

A lot of the media has focused on whether Trump actually purchased a gun and violated the law, but less attention has been paid to Trump’s decision to visit Palmetto State Armory, as opposed to any other gun store in South Carolina.

In late August, a white man opened fire in a Dollar General store in a predominantly Black Jacksonville neighborhood, killing three people, all of whom were Black. The shooter, who then killed himself, used a Glock handgun and an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, at least one of which was painted with a swastika. Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said the shooter “hated Black people” and acted alone.

At least one of the guns came from Palmetto State Armory, a store in Summerville, South Carolina. The Jacksonville sheriff’s office shared photos of the firearms used in the attack on its Facebook page. One of the guns is clearly engraved with the Palmetto State Armory logo. The shooter had also drawn swastikas on the gun.

When the Jacksonville shooting happened, Trump did not issue any statement on the tragedy. But you could argue that this campaign stop is a kind of tacit statement. He put the spotlight on Palmetto State Armory, praised its inventory, and tried to offer it business.

Palmetto State Armory has openly embraced far-right ideology. In 2020, it began marketing its products using imagery and language associated with the “boogaloo,” slang for racist violence and even a call for full-on race war. It has also come to mean war to topple the government.

The Jacksonville shooter shouldn’t have been able to buy the guns in the first place. He was held in Florida state custody in 2017 for mental health issues, disqualifying him from owning a gun under a statute called the Baker Act.

With so many eyeballs on Trump, Palmetto State Armory would never have gotten away with selling him a gun. But as Philadephia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch pointed out, the store “could sell an AR-15 to a young, mentally troubled white supremacist.”

Sick, sick, sick:

This is just demented.

I just don’t know what to say

Published by digby on September 26, 2023

Is this true? I don’t know. It’s just one poll. But it’s hard to believe that it’s even close. The party that stormed the Capitol and wants to elect the former president who plotted a coup and is under four felony indictments is less extreme than Joe Biden? Than the Democratic Party of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi? What?

This idea is a relic of the 40+ years of Republican and centrist Democrat hippie bashing. The reality of our changed circumstances hasn’t yet taken hold as conventional wisdom. Apparently, Americans still can’t see a bunch of white middle aged men and women dressed in red, white and blue worshiping an insane demagogue who wants to suspend the constitution as extreme.

Will the union stick with Biden?

Published by digby on September 26, 2023

They should

Biden went where no sitting president had gone before:

When former President Donald Trump visits Detroit on Wednesday, he’ll be looking to blunt criticisms from a United Auto Workers union leadership that has said a second term for him would be a “disaster” for workers.

Trump will bypass the second Republican presidential debate that day to instead visit striking autoworkers in Michigan, where he has looked to position himself as an ally of blue-collar workers by promising to raise wages and protect jobs if elected to a second term.

But union leaders say Trump’s record in the White House speaks for itself. Union leaders have said his first term was far from worker-friendly, citing unfavorable rulings from the nation’s top labor board and the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as unfulfilled promises of automotive jobs. While the United Auto Workers union has withheld an endorsement in the 2024 presidential race, its leadership has repeatedly rebuffed Trump.

Nevertheless, Trump plans to speak directly to a room of former and current union members. A Trump campaign radio ad released last week in Detroit and Toledo, Ohio, praised auto workers and said the former president has “always had their back.”

Not everyone thinks so. Despite Trump’s history of success in courting blue-collar workers in previous elections, union leaders say their members would do well to believe their own eyes.

“Just look who Trump put in the courts,” said Dave Green, the UAW regional director for Ohio and Indiana. “Look at his record with the labor relations board. He did nothing to support organized labor except lip service.”

The National Labor Relations Board, which enforces the country’s labor laws and oversees union elections, came under Republican control during the Trump administration for the first time since 2007. The board reversed several key Obama-era rulings that made it easier for small unions to organize, strengthened the bargaining rights of franchise workers and provided protection against anti-union measures for employees.

In 2017, the Trump-era board reversed a decision holding employers responsible for labor violations by subcontractors or franchisees. In 2019, the board gave a boost to companies that use contract labor, such as Lyft and Uber, by emphasizing “entrepreneurial opportunity” in determining a worker’s employment status, making organizing harder.

Mark McManus, president of the plumbers and pipefitters union, said in a statement last week that Trump “tried to gut” the labor relations board under his administration “to undo the safeguards that protect working families.” Michigan AFL-CIO President Ron Bieber told The Associated Press in an emailed statement that the board was stacked with “anti-worker appointees who trampled on collective bargaining rights.”

The union leaders also point to unfavorable U.S. Supreme Court rulings under a conservative majority that grew during Trump’s term. The nation’s high court has dealt a number of blows to unions, most recently ruling against unionized drivers who walked off the job with their trucks full of wet cement, allowing a civil suit against them to go forward.

In 2018, the court’s conservative majority overturned a decades-old pro-union decision involving fees paid by government workers. The justices in 2021 rejected a California regulation giving unions access to farm property so they could organize workers.

“If you’re appointing conservatives to the court, you’re often appointing people who relate to the preference for business or property owners or shareholders, more than the preference of stakeholders like workers,” said Peter Berg, a professor of labor relations at Michigan State University.

As president, Trump largely sat on the sidelines during a 40-day walkout at a General Motors plant in 2019.

A lot of union workers love Trump anyway, of course. The white ones anyway.

“President Trump has always been on the side of American workers,” his campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement.

Cheung responded to the criticisms from labor leaders with a long list of economic gains and policies from Trump’s time as president, ranging from the surging stock market to low unemployment. He cited Trump’s broad push to remove regulations and abandon or renegotiate trade deals as beneficial to American workers across a range of industries.

Union workers really care about the stock market. It’s a huge issue for them …

Job growth figures in the auto industry during Trump’s presidency contradict his claim that the industry thrived under his watch. The total number of auto manufacturing jobs in Michigan, which holds the most automotive jobs in the U.S., stayed even during Trump’s presidency.

In Ohio, the number of auto manufacturing jobs grew by fewer than 2,000 jobs during Trump’s four years in the White House. But Green, the UAW director, said some communities that had backed Trump in 2016 were abandoned by him. He pointed to Lordstown, Ohio, an area that Trump won by a significant margin in 2016 and where Green previously served as the local UAW president.

In 2017, during a visit to the region, Trump pledged that jobs there were “all coming back” and implored residents to stay put. A year later, General Motors announced the closure of its Lordstown plant, one of the largest employers in the area.

“The guy came to my community and flat out lied to everybody,” Green said last week. “Banks were closing, schools were shutting down. I wrote the guy two letters, and he didn’t even reply.”

AP VoteCast shows that in the 2020 presidential election, Trump was the choice of 62% of white voters without a college degree, whereas Biden won the vote of 37% in this group. Biden performed better than Trump did among union members, receiving 56% of union members’ votes in the 2020 election, compared with Trump’s 42%.

Anyone union member who votes for Trump is a sucker:

Donald Trump has admitted before that when he has a choice between union and nonunion labor for his construction projects, he’d go with nonunion labor. Just how often was that? A new report from the Electrical Workers (IBEW) reveals some figures about his dealings with IBEW contractors.

From the IBEW investigation:

A review of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s projects reveals that he hires union when project labor agreements or dominant market share forces him to. But more than 60% of his projects developed outside New York City and Atlantic City—which includes most of his recent projects—were built nonunion. When you exclude developments with project labor agreements, that number jumps to nearly 80% built nonunion.

Except for his own house.

Trump has developed or licensed his name to eight projects in Florida, for example. The only one using IBEW workers is his palatial home and private club in Palm Beach. “For everything he sold to other people, he went nonunion. But for his house, he went with us,” said IBEW Local 728 Business Manager Dan Svetlick. Svetlick says it’s something he’s seen with other billionaires like Trump. When it comes to their own homes or the homes of their family members, “They want that to last,” he said.

Here are 10 other key facts from the IBEW report:

1. According to analysis of lawsuits filed against him and his companies, when union contractors were hired, Trump developed a reputation for stiffing some, delaying payment to others and shorting workers on overtime and even minimum wage.

2. USA Today found 60 lawsuits against Trump for not paying his bills on time, including by a dishwasher in Florida, a New Jersey glass company, a carpet supplier, plumber, painters, 48 waiters, dozens of bartenders and a real estate broker.

3. Trump has been cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

4. Trump-associated properties and companies have filed for bankruptcy often: Trump Taj Mahal (1991), Trump Plaza and Trump Marina (1993), Trump World’s Fair and Casino (1999), Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts (2004) and Trump Entertainment Resorts (2009). In each of the bankruptcies, unpaid contractors were sent to the back of the line for repayment and often received only pennies on the dollar for what they were owed.

5. Lawyers who represented Trump in lawsuits for non-payment sued Trump for not paying them.

6. Since 1980, more than 200 mechanic’s liens have been filed against Trump properties for nonpayment.

7. According to former Trump Plaza President Jack O’Connell, Trump would negotiate the best price he could, but when it came time to pay the bills, Trump would say: “I’m going to pay you, but I’m going to pay you 75% of what we agreed to.” It was known as the “Trump discount,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

8. Trump continues to stonewall unionized casino and culinary employees looking for their first contract at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas.

9. Most of Trump’s recent projects have been in anti-union and “right to work” states. Where the law is different, his choices are different: “For every union-built development outside of New York and Atlantic City, Trump built nearly two nonunion, and if there is no PLA, Trump has hired union workers once for every four projects that go nonunion.”

10. Trump Tower, where he announced his presidential campaign, was built on a site cleared by undocumented immigrant laborers from Poland. A lawsuit was filed against Trump that dragged on for nearly two decades—he didn’t reach a settlement with the working people who did the job until 19 years later. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York wrote: “No records were kept, no Social Security or other taxes were withheld, and they were not paid in accordance with wage laws. They were told they would be paid $4.00 or in some cases $5.00 an hour for working 12-hour shifts seven days a week. In fact, they were paid irregularly and incompletely, sometimes with [the subcontractor’s] personal checks, which were returned by the bank for insufficient funds.” Employees complained to the press of working in “choking clouds of asbestos dust without protective equipment.” The District Court concluded that Trump “knew the Polish workers were working ‘off the books,’ that they were doing demolition work, that they were nonunion, that they were paid substandard wages with no overtime pay and that they were paid irregularly if at all.”

Donald Trump and the Republicans are not and have never been supportive of working class economic interests. They dazzle them with culture war nonsense while they’re stabbing them in the back. That any of these union workers would vote for a billionaire gadfly is absurd.

Trouble in paradise?

Published by digby on September 26, 2023

Are MyKevin and Marge heading for a divorce?

Her heart belongs to Donnie:

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s closely watched alliance with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is suddenly looking a little bit wobbly, as the Georgia hardliner has helped frustrate his efforts to pass a budget.

Greene announced on Sunday afternoon that she was a “HARD NO” on the rules package McCarthy is currently trying to advance, which would bring a suite of government spending bills to the floor, because it would mean “more money for Ukraine.” Cutting funding for the war-torn country has been a high priority for Greene, who told reporters last week that she was “just a no on any funding bill” containing support for Kyiv. McCarthy initially suggested he’d meet her demand, but reversed himself this weekend because removing the money would be “too difficult.”

Greene also told reporters last week she was planning to introduce an amendment that would strip the Justice Department of its ability to fund special counsel investigations, threatening to throw another kink into the budget effort. She announced it the same day former President Donald Trump urged Republicans to shut the government down unless the budget defunded Jack Smith’s investigations into him.

Greene’s closeness with leadership has cost her with conservative colleagues, factoring into the House Freedom Caucus’s decision to eject her from its membership. (Her office declined a request to comment.) Taking a stand now might be a way to win back a bit of hard-right credibility. Another way to think about what might be happening? Greene can almost always be counted on to align with Donald Trump. And now that he’s openly rooting for a shutdown unless Republicans “GET EVERYTHING,” she might just take the same attitude.

I don’t think Marge cares about her Freedom Caucus colleagues. She has higher ambitions, namely to be a senator or president herself. And right now she’s working as hard as she can to be on Trump’s VP shortlist.

I very much doubt Trump will pick Marge because she’s just not his kind of woman. If he chooses a woman for the ticket she must look a certain way and Marge isn’t it. I had thought it would be Kristi Noem but with the Lewandowski affair Trump might think it isn’t worth it. And Kari Lake, who looks close enough for government work, may be a little too crazy. Nikki Haley is obviously out now. So, I’m thinking Trump isn’t going to pick a woman after all. He never really wanted to do it anyway.

Democrats keep winning

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 26, 2023

“These aren’t just one-off election wins”

Photo: Chris McKeever (2008) via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

As Donald Trump gets crazier, as his Capitol Hill shock troops prove more dysfunctional, and as the noisy hostiles in MAGAstan grow more hostile, it’s reassuring to know that the country hasn’t gone completely mental.

Whatever 2024 presidential contest polling indicates a year out, Democrats continue to win the only polls that matter: vote counts. Reid J. Epstein reminds New York Times readers:

In special elections this year for state legislative offices, Democrats have exceeded Mr. Biden’s performance in the 2020 presidential election in 21 of 27 races, topping his showing by an average of seven percentage points, according to a study conducted by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the party’s campaign arm for state legislative races.

Those results, combined with an 11-point triumph for a liberal State Supreme Court candidate in Wisconsin this spring and a 14-point defeat of an Ohio ballot referendum this summer in a contest widely viewed as a proxy battle over abortion rights, run counter to months of public opinion polling that has found Mr. Biden to be deeply unpopular heading into his re-election bid next year.

Taken together, these results suggest that the favorable political environment for Democrats since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade has endured through much of 2023. Democratic officials have said since the summer of 2022, when the ruling came down, that abortion is both a powerful motivator for the party’s voters and the topic most likely to persuade moderate Republicans to vote for Democratic candidates.

Don’t let the media chaff “snow” you.

Last week, after Democrats won special elections to maintain control of the Pennsylvania House and flip a Republican-held seat in the New Hampshire House, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, emailed donors to say the results showed Mr. Biden’s political strength.

“These aren’t just one-off election wins,” she wrote. “They prove that our message is resonating with voters — and that we can’t write off any corner of the country.”

Crisis mode

Congress is still on a collision course with shutdown, reports the Associated Press:

With a government shutdown five days away, Congress is moving into crisis mode as Speaker Kevin McCarthy faces an insurgency from hard-right Republicans eager to slash spending even if it means curtailing federal services for millions of Americans.

There’s no clear path ahead as lawmakers return with tensions high and options limited. The House is expected to vote Tuesday evening on a package of bills to fund parts of the government, but it’s not at all clear that McCarthy has the support needed to move ahead.

But press accounts continue describing a government shutdown preciptated by Republicans as some kind of natural political disaster. Brian Beutler calls that out and believes it will not fool the public.

Watch this November’s state legislative elections closely, particularly in Virginia.

Grain alcohol and rain water

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 26, 2023

A “desperate effort at censorship”?

Donald J. Trump is one grain alcohol and rain water away from pulling a Browning machine gun out of his golf bag.

Facing 91 felony charges across multiple jurisdictions, Trump believes it violates his rights if he’s not allowed to issue threats, intimidate potential witnesses, and taint jury pools as he campaigns for president awaiting trial. His defense team alleges a “desperate effort at censorship” by federal prosecutors.

Can you hear His Indictedness whine from where you are?

Politico:

Donald Trump’s lawyers said Monday that a gag order proposed by prosecutors would unconstitutionally silence him during key months of the 2024 presidential campaign, urging a federal judge in Washington, D.C. to reject the proposed limits.

In a 25-page filing that mirrored some of Trump’s own heated political rhetoric, Trump’s attorneys said the former president’s attacks on potential witnesses, special counsel Jack Smith and even U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan herself are protected by the First Amendment and were not actual threats or incitement of attacks.

“The prosecution may not like President Trump’s entirely valid criticisms,” attorneys Gregory Singer, John Lauro and Todd Blanche wrote in the late-night filing, ”but neither it nor this court are the filter for what the public may hear.”

Meaning what? His Incitefulness is free to shout “FIRE” in any theater in the land? That’s Trump’s position. As if he cannot campaign for president without issuing threats and promising retribution against anyone who has or will cross him.

[Special prosecutor Jack] Smith’s team sought the gag order earlier this month, citing Trump’s recent inflammatory attacks on potential witnesses in his upcoming trial on charges related to his bid to subvert the 2020 election. They also cited his attacks on prosecutors and Chutkan, as well as on figures like Mike Pence, who is expected to be a key witness in the case.

Trump’s defense team argues that “the prosecution offers no evidence of any causal connection between [Trump’s] speech and the alleged unlawful acts of others.”

Marcy Wheeler reminds those who clearly need reminding that multiple prisoners convicted for their actions during the Jan. 6 insurrection “blamed Trump for their actions,” testimony the DOJ cited in its gag order request:

Lauro ignores the multiple cases, cited in prosecutors’ filing, where people told Trump directly that his incitement had ratcheted up threats against people like Jeff Duncan, Chris Krebs, and Ruby Freeman. He ignores prosecutors’ citation of Trump bragging about the way his followers respond to Trump.

As he acknowledged in a televised town hall on May 10, 2023, his supporters listen to him “like no one else.”

Perhaps more importantly, Lauro ignores something he has already ignored, in his reply to his own motion to recuse Tanya Chutkan.

As I noted, by filing a motion to recuse based off things Judge Chutkan said when January 6 defendants blamed Trump for their actions, Trump invited prosecutors to lay out the many more times defendants had done just that. Not only did prosecutors provide eight other examples where defendants already sentenced by Chutkan blamed Trump for their actions, DOJ laid out something that Robert Palmer said of his own actions on January 6: That he went to the Capitol “at the behest” of Trump and took action to prevent the certification of the vote because of the false claims Trump had made.

It’s an overused reference, but the defense’s defense has no clothes. The only people who cannot see Trump’s efforts to taint the jury pool and intimidate witnesses are those who refuse to see. We may be past the point where MAGA threats against anyone and everyone perceived as a Trump enemy are self-sustaining. But that does not mean Trump should be free to keep feeding the fire and putting his targets at risk of injury or death.

Meidas Touch has collected “27 Insane Things Trump Said He Will Do in a 2nd Term.” Many reflect Trump’s dictatorial vision for a United States of Trump. Here is just a selection:

1. He will arrest all homeless people across the country for “urban camping,” round them up and then “relocate them” to “tent cities” where they can be “rehabilitated. 4/18/23

2. Require every federal employee to take a new patriotism exam and they will be terminated if they refuse to take them or fail to pass. 4/14/23

5. He will have DOJ subpoena local DAs and their staff and remove them from office if he determines that they are failing to do their job to his satisfaction. 5/4/23

7. He will seize university endowments and also fine them millions of dollars if he determines the schools are marxist and/or discriminating against white people. 5/2/23

8. He will have DOJ investigate and prosecute General Milley for treason. 9/22/23

11. Any person convicted of selling drugs will get the death penalty. 11/15/22

12. Pardon convicted J6 inmates convicted of seditious conspiracy and assaulting police officers, with an apology from the US government. 9/1/22

13. Have DOJ investigate Comcast, NBC and MSNBC for treason and remove them from the public airwaves. 9/24/23

17. He would terminate the Constitution if he determined that fraud occurred during an election. 12/3/22

21. Fire 40,000 career civil servants on day one and replace them with “patriots” loyal to him. 7/22/22.

And while he’s busy saving the whales by demolishing wind turbines, Trump will require all citizens to change their underwear every half-hour.