Skip to content

Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Who’s the senile one?

Published by digby on September 16, 2023

With the ongoing hysteria over Biden’s age, it’s long past time to look more closely at Trump’s mental gyrations which are much more indicative of a disordered mind which, along with his massive psychological defects, is getting worse every day. Here are some examples from this weekend alone.

Watch this whole thing to see him try in vain to pretend he didn’t stumble and becomes even more incoherent. It’s pathetic.

 

You know people have told him that isn’t true and the press has certainly covered this as a gaffe. It’s not the only way to express this concept. He could say that you have to show ID to get on an airplane, for instance. But he persists in saying that you have to show ID to buy food which is simply ridiculous. Why? It’s not normal to keep repeating a lie but to keep repeating lies that are totally unnecessary is a little bit crazy. I think he just doesn’t remember that it isn’t true.

How about this?

It was a slip, of course. Anyone can make one. But if it were Joe Biden they’d say he didn’t know what year it was.

My point is that Trump should be much more careful about going after Biden for his verbal stumbles. People think Trump is just a liar, which of course he is, the greatest the world has ever known. But he’s also full of delusions and strange verbal tics that are not normal cognitive functions. He has had them for a long time but we’ve excused it because some of it is just because he’s very ignorant and some of it is because he’s a sloppy thinker. But going after Joe Biden for cognitive impairment opens him up to much more scrutiny and the press should be much more aggressive in pressing him on it.

Someone needs to ask him if he really thinks that you need ID to buy a loaf of bread. And I’d love to hear someone confront him on the WWII comment. He’ll have to either deny it, when it on tape for everyone to see or he’ll have to admit he misspoke which he seem incapable of doing. Yes, it’s a gotcha question but that’s what they’re doing with Biden and it’s only fair that this 77 year old man falls under exactly the same scrutiny. You can be sure that if he didn’t trowel on the bronze make-up and dye his hair people would be much less impressed with his alleged “vitality.” Close your eyes and he sounds like an old man at the end of the bar ranting with his buddies about kids these days.

This Kristen Welker interview tomorrow on Meet the Press looks to be the exact opposite of that as far as we can tell so far. More on that tomorrow.

Stickin’ with the union

Published by digby on September 16, 2023

Gallup:

Labor unions continue to enjoy high support in the U.S., with 67% of Americans approving of them, similar to the elevated level seen in recent years after more than a decade of rising support. Mirroring this trend, Americans have gradually become more likely than a decade ago to want unions’ influence to strengthen and to believe unions benefit various aspects of business and the economy.

In contrast to the incremental changes seen in U.S. adults’ support of unions over time, the new poll documents an unprecedented uptick since the prior measure, in 2018, in perceptions that unions in the country will become stronger in the future than they are today. A third of Americans (34%) believe this today, compared with 19% five years ago and no more than 25% at any time in the trend since 1999.

Union Approval Steady Near Recent High Point

The 67% of Americans who approve of labor unions today is down slightly from 71% a year ago but marks the fifth straight year this reading has exceeded its long-term average of 62%.

Here’s Trump, ignorant as always:

Trying to stop the manufacture of EVs is ridiculous which seems to be what he wants. It’s happening. But then this is someone who says windmills cause cancer so when it comes to anything more complicated than rank racism and payoffs it’s best to ignore him.

There are many issues involved in the strike that have nothing to do with the emerging electric car market. But it is one of the issues. I can ‘t vouch for this analysis by Axios and I’m pretty sure that they lean toward management but as a simple overview I think it manages to lay out the complexities reasonably well:

A big sticking point in contract talks between Detroit automakers and the United Auto Workers union is the popular assertion that it takes fewer workers to manufacture electric vehicles (EVs) than conventional cars.

In fact, the opposite may be true: Researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University recently found that EVs require more labor hours, primarily to produce battery cells.

Today, those cells are manufactured mostly in Asia. Yet a slew of companies are shifting production to the U.S. to take advantage of new tax incentives — though the resulting jobs will likely be non-unionized and lower-paying.

Why it matters: The EV transition is fraught with risks for both auto workers and Detroit’s big three manufacturers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.

For UAW members, it’s the risk that good-paying union jobs building engines, transmissions and exhaust systems will disappear.

For auto companies, it’s the risk that they’ll fall further behind Tesla and other non-unionized rivals that already have a significant labor cost advantage.

The big picture: EVs have fewer moving parts than gas-powered vehicles, with no engines, transmissions or exhaust systems.

That makes them easier to maintain and — according to some industry experts — simpler to build.

Even Ford CEO James Farley says so: Last November, he bluntly asserted that EVs will require 40% less labor to produce than traditional cars.

To preserve jobs, Farley said, Ford will need to build more EV components in-house — similar to the way founder Henry Ford operated nearly 100 years ago.

For example, Ford workers at a former transmission plant near Detroit are now making EV motors and transaxles, while workers at another parts facility are assembling battery packs.

The intrigue: Manufacturing battery pack cells is the most labor-intensive part of EV production, according to Turner Cotterman, a McKinsey consultant who worked on the Carnegie-Mellon study.

Yes, but: Even as cell production shifts to the U.S., that labor will likely be done by non-union workers at factories co-owned by foreign battery partners, and they’ll make less money than workers at traditional powertrain factories.

For example, battery cell factories under construction in Kentucky and Tennessee and co-owned by Ford and Korea’s SK On just started hiring workers for $21-$29 per hour, compared to the $28-$35 union workers earn making engines and transmissions at Ford’s existing plants.

A GM battery plant co-owned with another Korean company, LG Energy Solution, opened in Ohio in 2022 with a starting wage of $16.50 an hour, and a promised rise to $20 after seven years.

What’s happening: The UAW successfully organized employees at the Ohio plant, called Ultium Cells, last December, making it the country’s first unionized battery cell factory.

But the two sides still have to negotiate a contract.

GM and Ford insist these new battery plants aren’t covered by the national bargaining agreements for existing autoworkers because they are technically owned by separate companies.

I think we can agree that this is about more than China stealing jobs and the unions know it. There’s a reason the UAW president said another Trump presidency would be a disaster.

Meanwhile:

A word of advice

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 16, 2023

Get the new booster

https://x.com/AnalyticsEqv/status/1702334226727911484?s=20

My friend DocDawg (@AnalyticsEqv) runs a small biotech lab in the Research Triangle and keeps track of things like local wastewater assays for SARS-CoV-2 (above). Have a gander. “This isn’t an ‘uptick,’ it’s a tsunami,” he believes.

“Do yourself a favor and wear an N95 in crowded indoor conditions.“

But you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the COVID-19 blows. Several friends have been down with repeat bouts of COVID in the last few weeks. Mild cases, fortunately, but DocDawg believes, “Each reinfection (even mild) increases your risk of Long COVID disability.” Long Covid, he writes caustically, is “the disability whose name must not be spoken b/c fighting it requires infection control, which Dems fear would lose them elections.”

I’m back to wearing a mask in stores, although few others do.

COVID-19 boosts risks of health problems 2 years later, giant study of veterans says

FWIW: My neighborhood CVS pharmacy closed early the other day due to a “staffing shortage.” A friend reported finding her dry cleaners closed one day this week because of a “staffing shortage.”

We’re four hours west of Durham. And where you are?

Adapt or die

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 16, 2023

Technological change is a bumpy road

The United Auto Workers are on strike against the Big Three (Washington Post):

UAW Ford workers say they are striking because they are not making enough money to support their families or their futures.

“We have our limits too,” said Kevin Ewald, a Ford employee who has worked at the company for nearly three decades. He wants his newer colleagues to be paid more for doing “bone-breaking” work.

UAW workers began striking just after midnight Friday morning after failing to reach a deal with the Big Three autoworkers, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis.

The union demanded 36 percent wage increases for workers over four years, saying that wages have not kept up with inflation. Full-time workers make about $18 to $32 an hour while CEOs at the Big Three companies each made more than $20 million in overallcompensation last year, figures the union used to justify its demands for higher worker wages. The UAW also wants an end to tiered employment system, which means that newer workers get lower pay and have worse benefits. The companies countered that they are offering bigger wage increases than they have in years but can’t meet all of the union’s demands and stay viable.

Auto manufacturers “still making most of their money from gasoline-driven cars” are trying to retool for making electric vehicles while trying to compete against Tesla and foreign EV makers, reports The New York Times:

Under pressure from government officials and changing consumer demand, Ford, G.M. and Stellantis are investing billions to retool their sprawling operations to build electric vehicles, which are critical to addressing climate change. But they are making little if any profit on those vehicles while Tesla, which dominates electric car sales, is profitable and growing fast.

Ford said in July that its electric vehicle business would lose $4.5 billion this year. If the union got all the increases in pay, pensions and other benefits it is seeking, the company said, its workers’ total compensation would be twice as much as Tesla’s employees.

Union demands would force Ford to scrap its investments in electric vehicles, Jim Farley, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview on Friday. “We want to actually have a conversation about a sustainable future,” he said, “not one that forces us to choose between going out of business and rewarding our workers.”

For workers, the biggest concern is that electric vehicles have far fewer parts than gasoline models and will render many jobs obsolete. Plants that make mufflers, catalytic converters, fuel injectors and other components that electric cars don’t need will have to be overhauled or shut down.

I don’t trust modern corporations as far as I can throw them, having worked inside and for a slew of them as clients. The financialization of the economy has dehumanized it even more than it once was. That employees who were once “personnel” are now “human resources” is a subtle hint of the shift not just in investments but in attitudes. Financialization turned millions of homes into bundled assets for investors and turned millions of families out into the streets when rapacious investors’ house of cards collapsed. We, you, they are inputs in the annual profit calculation. Cogs in the machine.

This is nothing new. Watch Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), nearly a century old. Watch CEO Tim Gurner insist in the last week that workers need to feel some pain to remind them who’s in charge. (He has since apologized for making comments that were “deeply insensitive to employees, tradies and families.” He did not apologized for how he thinks about them.)

Even so, technological change is a bumpy road for both employers and workers. Internal combustion engines are on their way out like CDs, cassettes, and 8-track tapes before them. And CRT TVs, DVDs, VHS tapes, and Blockbuster. Gasoline-powered engines will in time be a niche product like vinyl records for audiophiles.

I entered engineering at the transition from board drafting to rudimentary 2D AutoCAD and got out when the field was full 3D. Designers and employees had to retool and adapt. (I lucked into a specialty involving finite element analysis and never learned CAD.) There was a yearly “Homecoming Job Fair” I attended here for years out of curiosity. Men who made their livings for decades as tool and die makers in the textile and furniture industries found themselves having to retool their skills. They had to learn to program CNC machines (if they could get into a program at the local community college) for making aerospace parts or else settle for call center work.

Which is to say I have no idea how the UAW and automakers will navigate this transition and this contract negotiation. There will be pain enough to go around, and hopefully less on the beleaguered working class.

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on September 15, 2023

Earlier this month, officials from Cedar Breaks National Monument in Utah shared a post highlighting the unique behavior of one of the region’s most adorable and little-known species — the American pika.

These tiny animals, a diminutive species related to rabbits, spend their days in rocky outcrops at higher altitudes, where they forage for their favorite food: wildflowers.

But pikas don’t just nibble as they go.

To ensure they have food enough to last them through the frigid winter, during which fresh flowers are in short supply, pikas get to gathering and preserving colorful bouquets when there are plenty to be found.

“[Pikas] do not hibernate and will collect wildflowers and grasses in the summertime and lay them out on the rocks in the sun to dry them,” the Park Service wrote. “They do that so their food does not go moldy during the winter. These are called ‘haystacks’ and they are stored in their dens [until] wintertime.”

Because pikas are so small and swift, capturing their flower-gathering behavior on camera can be quite tricky to say the least.

But late last month, while on a hike in the wilderness of Colorado, photographer Charles Haupert found himself faced with the perfect opportunity.

In the distance, a little pika was about to go to work as the animal world’s most adorable florist.

For Haupert, it came as a lucky break.

“I’ve seen them collecting flowers before, but never have been quick enough on the draw [with my camera] to get it in action,” Haupert told The Dodo. “They are always on the move.”

But this day was different. Haupert’s camera was at the ready.

As Haupert looked on, the pika hopped about a floral patch among the rocks, gathering flowers in her mouth as she went.

“Overall, they are pretty cute,” Haupert said.

Once the pika had collected as much as her little jaws could carry, she set off with her haul.

“[She] headed down the mountain, over larger boulders, to hide what was picked,” Haupert said.

On the way, she would pause just long enough for him to take her photo.

“They then disappear pretty quick,” Haupert said. “You can hear them chirp, but sometimes they are tough to see.”

And just like that, the pika and her floral bounty darted out of sight.

From the DoDo

Sick, sick, sick

Published by digby on September 15, 2023

Irresponsible isn’t the word for it. It’s medical malpractice and will cause untold suffering and death among Florida’s vulnerable populations. The state is full of old, white Republicans who watch Fox, some of whom are going to believe this and get very sick and possibly die. And there are plenty of others who will hear this from the state Surgeon General and believe him too.

Ron DeSantis is no better than Donald Trump and in this instance is actually worse. We must fervently hope that this campaign will have destroyed his political career. The grotesque bad judgement (or cynical calculation) in hiring this quack to be the surgeon general of the state totally disqualifies him from ever having lives in his hands again.

Kristi Noem has very poor taste

Published by digby on September 15, 2023

Why do I have the feeling that Marge Greene leaked this story to the Daily Mail?

A rising Republican star tipped by many to be Donald Trump‘s running mate should he win the presidential nomination has been involved in a clandestine affair for years, multiple sources tell DailyMail.com.

Married South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, 51 – who stresses her belief in ‘family values’ – and Trump advisor Corey Lewandowski, who is also married, began carrying on in 2019, if not before.

Now news of the relationship threatens to wreck Noem’s chances of joining Trump’s ticket in a potential rematch with President Joe Biden.

Glamorous Noem – who served four terms as her state’s only member of the US House of Representatives – won the governorship in 2018 promising to uphold the wholesome family values that she said South Dakotans have ‘long embraced’.

Defending ‘traditional marriage’, which she defined as ‘a special, God-given union between one man and one woman’, was particularly important to her.

It was the foundation for her beliefs, policy priorities and the ideals she lives by, said Noem, who has a son and two daughters with her husband Bryon who she married in 1992.

She has long been linked with Lewandowski, 49, who has been pushing hard for Trump to add her to his ticket.

‘He may not be very smart, but it takes big balls to lobby to have your mistress named one of the most powerful people in the country,’ one GOP operative told DailyMail.com. 

The far-right website American Greatness claimed in 2021 the two had been romantically involved, although it gave no details.

At the time she scornfully dismissed the story as ‘total garbage and a disgusting lie’, and said she loved her husband and was ‘proud of the God-fearing family’ they had raised, and the story quickly died.

But a DailyMail.com investigation has uncovered extensive evidence of the couple’s romantic relationship: Dozens of trips that mixed business with pleasure, flights on donors’ private planes, and stays at luxury resorts where their intimacy was observed and noted.

I won’t bore you with any more of the evidence but it is voluminous .

Apparently, this back in 2021 wasn’t really enough to split up the two lovebirds:

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) is cutting off ties with Corey Lewandowski, an aide to former President Trump who was also advising her, following allegations that he sexually harassed a GOP donor at a charity event in Las Vegas last weekend. 

Lewandowski had advised Noem as she saw her star rise from governor to national Republican star, fueling speculation she could make a run for the White House in 2024. Lewandowski helped introduce her to GOP movers and shakers and traveled with her across the country.

“Corey was always a volunteer, never paid a dime (campaign or official). He will not be advising the Governor in regard to the campaign or official office,” said Noem’s communications director, Ian Fury.

The announcement is the latest fallout from a report this week that Lewandowski harassed Republican donor Trashelle Odom. Odom in a statement to Politico accused Lewandowski of grabbing her behind, making inappropriate sexual remarks and following her throughout the Las Vegas event. 

“He repeatedly touched me inappropriately, said vile and disgusting things to me, stalked me, and made me feel violated and fearful,” Odom said in her statement Wednesday. 

Since the allegations were made public, Lewandowski was also removed from his role overseeing Trump’s super PAC. 

He traveled to South Dakota with Trump last week.

I honestly don’t think this will impact her prospects to be VP. Why would it? Trump has been found liable for sexual assault in a court of law and is credibly accused of assaulting dozens of women. Maybe there’s a double standard for women but if I had to guess, a Republican woman like Noem will be equally exempt from the normal condemnation. She’s a star. In fact, it might just be the thing that vaults her into the VP slot. She and Trump are two peas in a pod.

Payback

Published by digby on September 15, 2023

“They did it to me. Had they not done it to me…you wouldn’t have it being done to them.”

He’s posted this before on Truth Social. But now he’s on tape saying the same thing. It’s revenge, pure and simple. Unfortunately, at least half the country thinks that’s perfectly normal.

MAGA down the rabbit hole

Published by digby on September 15, 2023

Greg Sargent calls it the “MAGA doom loop” :

For almost three years now, Republicans have defended or embraced Donald Trump’s authoritarianism — from lies about his 2020 loss to inciting an insurrection — which backfired as Americans proved unexpectedly eager to vote in defense of democracy in the 2022 elections as well as in contests this year.

But Republicans aren’t giving up — they’re going even further. To an unappreciated degree, they have responded to these electoral losses with even more flagrantly anti-democratic maneuvers all around the country.

The pattern is becoming clear: Even as voters are mobilizing to protect democracy at the ballot box, Republicans are redoubling their commitment to the former president’s anti-majoritarian mode of politics. And this, in turn, is motivating voters even more.

Call it the “MAGA doom loop.” It’s playing out in state after state.

Let’s start with Michigan, where Trump’s decisive loss in 2020 led MAGA loyalists to reshape the state Republican Party around devotion to the “big lie.” Then Democrats resoundingly captured full control of the state’s government in the 2022 midterms, in which election-deniers across the country lost races up and down the ticket.

Now, the Michigan GOP is in shambles. Just this month, the chairman again called for scrutiny of supposed 2020 fraud, prompting infighting over debunked conspiracy theories. And as the New York Times reports, the party’s descent into MAGA mania is alienating donors, draining volunteer enthusiasm and driving away swing voters. All of that will further dim Trump’s 2024 chances in this crucial battleground state.

Or take Wisconsin. The GOP-controlled state legislature is threatening to impeach state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz, who won her seat earlier this year by 11 points, handing liberals a majority. Democrats ran ads about protecting democracy to boost Protasiewicz, arguing that her ascent would thwart attempts to overrule the state’s 2024 outcome.

Given that this message already proved successful with Democrats andswing voters, it’s all the more striking that Republicans want to respond with impeachment. Rather than causing introspection, their landslide election loss has them dredging up comments that Protasiewicz made about abortion and gerrymandered maps during her campaign — a concern dismissed by a nonpartisan state panel — as grounds for removal.

But that absurdity aside, Democrats will surely be able to use those MAGA-approved tactics to mobilize voters against Trump and Republicans in 2024. “The threat to overturn an election through impeachment pushes MAGA attacks on democracy to the top of voters’ minds,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me.

Then there’s North Carolina, where the GOP legislature is attempting to strip Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s control over the State Board of Elections and to pass new voting restrictions. Oddly, Trump won the state in 2020, yet Republicans — who maintain supermajority control of both state chambers — justify these moves by insisting that voting was dubious anyway, apparently consumed by continued MAGA preoccupations with Trump’s defeat.

This weird disconnect has persuaded North Carolina Democrats that Republicans are worried about the sheer closeness of Trump’s 2020 margin (just over one point), leading the GOP to limit voting by Democratic-leaning constituencies.

“They know North Carolina is getting bluer and more college educated,” Morgan Jackson, a Democratic consultant in the state, said of Republicans. Trump is still heavily favored there, but Democrats can highlight these anti-democratic moves to try to hasten that evolution. “Nothing motivates our voters more,” Jackson told me.

And in Ohio, after watching numerous pro-choice ballot measures pass last cycle, state Republicans recently pushed a referendum to raise the threshold for amending the state constitution to 60 percent of votes. The tactic was rejected by a decisive majority, suffering a crushing 14-point defeat.

While Trump is still very likely to win Ohio in 2024, the dizzying MAGA doom loop can work against Republican priorities even in red states.

As former Ohio Democratic Party Chair David Pepper shows in his book “Laboratories of Autocracy,” states have a long history of such anti-democratic retrenchment. What’s remarkable now is how they’re forging ahead even as Americans are getting more accustomed to voting in democracy’s defense.

A new analysis by Nate Cohn of the New York Times sheds some light here. Despite President Biden’s unpopularity, recent Times polling shows his surprising resilience in swing states — and Cohn suggests this partly reflects backlash against MAGA-fied state parties in these places. By embracing Trump’s efforts to nullify his loss, they are only reminding voters that democracy is once again in peril, including whether their own votes will be counted next time.

All of this syncs up with what political science tells us: Issues become salient for voters when elites talk about them a lot. That has certainly been the case with democracy and that will surely continue next year. Big events — such as Trump’s prosecution for Jan. 6, 2021-related offenses and the GOP’s continued devotion despite those criminal charges — will only reinforce what’s at stake.

“As long as the MAGA-Trump faction remains a threat to free and fair elections, a consequential slice of the electorate will continue to vote on this issue,” political scientist Lee Drutman told me.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the MAGA doom loop might keep on working its magic — all the way through 2024.

I agree with this. They aren’t going anywhere. They are going to double down.

It’s not business, Joe. It’s strictly personal.

Published by digby on September 15, 2023

On Thursday morning NBC News reported that the FBI has created a stand-alone unit to investigate all the threats being made against FBI agents and Federal Prosecutors investigating Hunter Biden. You will be forgive for thinking that this must mean there has been a spate of left wing terrorism we haven’t heard about but, in fact, the threats are coming from right wingers who are convinced that these federal officials have been too soft on the younger Biden. Apparently, there has been “a dramatic uptick in threats against FBI agents that has coincided with attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department by congressional Republicans and former President Donald Trump.”

And let’s not forget the right wing media which has been hammering this for months, and in the process encouraging their febrile audience to believe that everything coming out of the FBI and the Justice Department is being manipulated by the White House and the career FBI officials and prosecutors are all Democratic operatives. It is the only way they can explain the fact that their Dear Leader, Donald Trump, has been credibly accused of more crimes, corruption and malfeasance than any president in American history. If they were to admit that all these law enforcement personnel and judicial officers have had ample reason to believe that Trump is guilty, they would have to admit that they are blithering fools.

You would think that they would feel just a bit chagrined however, to learn yesterday that Hunter Biden has now been indicted on three federal felony charges for lying on a form to obtain a gun and is on the verge of going to trial to potentially face many years in prison if he is convicted. After all, they have been demanding that Hunter Biden be charged with a crime and now he has been. But no. It’s not good enough. Not good enough at all. Let’s just say that this news is unlikely to result in fewer threats against the FBI and the prosecutors. Let’s hope they are all well protected.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer said that it’s a “small start” but is fit to be tied that they’ve only charged a crime that no one can say had anything to do with Joe Biden. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz quipped, “Getting Hunter Biden on the gun charge is like getting Jeffrey Dahmer on littering.” They want the Special Counsel to indict Hunter Biden on all the crimes they’ve fabricated in their fever dreams, particularly the fantasies about President Joe Biden running an international influence peddling operation and human trafficking ring.

It doesn’t appear that Weiss is going to do that, largely because there is no evidence of any such thing. But most legal observers believe that the Special Counsel may be on the verge of indicting Hunter Biden on the tax charges he previously pleaded guilty to, in which he admitted that he had filed his taxes late for two years. (He has paid them in full.) And that too will leave the right wingers unsatisfied. They suspect that Hunter Biden’s taxes are a treasure trove of evidence that he and his supposedly senile father are criminal masterminds if only someone will look hard enough to find it. If it weren’t for the alleged “two-tiered justice system” it would be happening.

In other words, their preposterous crusade to have Hunter Biden and Joe Biden put behind bars in order to prove that Donald Trump is an innocent man isn’t going anywhere.

The sad truth of the matter is that in this case there really is a two-tiered system — Hunter Biden’s alleged crimes would never be prosecuted if he weren’t the president’s son. Filing taxes late in and of themselves is usually a civil crime, as demonstrated by the DOJ’s treatment of Trump crony Roger Stone. And virtually no one with a clean criminal record who never even shot the gun or used it in commission of a crime (he only had it for about 11 days) would ever see the inside of a courtroom. According to the NYT even Weiss confided that no other American would not be prosecuted on the evidence against Hunter.

Mr. Weiss told an associate that he preferred not to bring any charges, even misdemeanors, against Mr. Biden because the average American would not be prosecuted for similar offenses. (A senior law enforcement official forcefully denied the account.)

But then the politics kicked in:

Earlier this year, The Times found, Mr. Weiss appeared willing to forgo any prosecution of Mr. Biden at all, and his office came close to agreeing to end the investigation without requiring a guilty plea on any charges. But the correspondence reveals that his position, relayed through his staff, changed in the spring, around the time a pair of I.R.S. officials on the case accused the Justice Department of hamstringing the investigation. Mr. Weiss suddenly demanded that Mr. Biden plead guilty to committing tax offenses.

Ah yes, the vaunted whistle blowers who claim that the Justice Department stopped them from getting at the truth about Joe and Hunter’s suspected nefarious criminal tax crimes. This claim has been denied by the DOJ, Weiss and others who were present at the meetings the whistle blowers say proved their allegations.

Despite the political pressure to throw the book at Biden, Weiss’s office didn’t really have the goods so they settled on a plea deal which blew up in the courtroom on the day it was to be settled. That agreement had Biden pleading guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges (those late filings) and agreeing to a so-called “diversion” program in which he agreed to never try to purchase a gun again and would not use any controlled substance or drink alcohol for two years. But the judge called into question the constitutionality of the diversion terms and it also became clear that while Biden’s lawyers had logically assumed that this agreement represented the conclusion of the case, the prosecution had decided they weren’t closing it after all.

So now, irony of ironies, Hunter Biden is facing a felony gun charge in federal court and right wingers who insist that the right to bear arms is so unfettered that even terrorists can’t be denied their constitutional right to own them are cheering it on.

As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes likes to say, after seeing these charges he’s decided not to vote for Hunter Biden for president or any other office which is exactly the point. Hunter Biden is not running for anything so there’s really no need for all this hype and according to a 538 analysis of the polling, all the nervousness that it’s going to hurt the president politically is overblown. Mainly it’s serving the purpose of hurting Joe Biden personally which is part of the plan.

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said the other day, she wants to make the impeachment inquiry “long and excruciatingly painful for Joe Biden” so I’m sure nothing makes her and her fellow GOP sadists happier than for his troubled surviving son to be put through the legal wringer. If they could make it bad enough for Hunter to crack under pressure and lose his sobriety, it would make their year. It doesn’t even have to have any political purpose. They just want to see Joe Biden suffer.

Salon