How would you know what’s in the backpack? Does this mean anyone with a backpack is shot on sight? Or is it that if the border patrol seizes someone with a backpack and finds fentanyl that they summarily execute them?
This is psycho talk and its common in this Republican primary campaign. The people cheer and shout with unbridled glee at the notion of killing immigrants and invading Mexico.
Former President Donald Trump, who has previously called for building a wall along the southern border and giving drug dealers the death penalty, has also proposed creating a naval blockade of Mexico to prevent drugs like illicit fentanyl from entering the U.S. His leading opponent in the 2024 GOP nomination race, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, promised last week to use “deadly force” against anyone caught smuggling drugs across the border.
On Capitol Hill, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) and John Kennedy (R., La.) have both voiced support for military operations in Mexico. Sen. J.D. Vance (R., Ohio) said in a recent interview on NBC that cartels should be considered terrorist organizations, meriting a military response. And Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R., Texas) and Mike Waltz (R., Fla.) have sponsored a bill that would formally declare war on the cartels—meaning the military would be authorized to drop bombs on cartel targets.
In an NBC poll taken in late June, sending troops to the border to stop drugs was the single best-liked of 11 GOP proposals tested with Republican primary voters.
There’s just one little problem:
Doris Meissner, who served as the top immigration official under the Clinton administration, said the Republican proposals are problematic because deploying the U.S. military on domestic soil to perform law-enforcement functions is illegal, and performing military operations in Mexico without the explicit cooperation of the Mexican government would be an act of war against a sovereign country.
I’m pretty sure that if the Republicans win back the White House we are going to see the limits of their alleged pacifism. It’s unnatural for them. They are positively yearning for a war.
“We are certainly working on scenarios,” Joly said in French during an interview with a Montreal radio station Wednesday.
Joly added that Ottawa’s close political and economic ties to the U.S. means that “we must certainly prepare several scenarios.”
She suggested Canada has a game plan in mind but wouldn’t get into details.
I wouldn’t. But it’s nice to know someone in charge is thinking ahead. Too bad it’s not happening south of the 49th parallel. Just warning speeches from scholars but no preparations.
The U.S. embassy in Ottawa declined comment.
“What would have been extremely far-fetched scenarios maybe 10 years ago, today are not impossible anymore,” Thomas Juneau, a national security professor at the University of Ottawa, said in an understatement.
NDP foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson said it’s only logical that Ottawa plan for an aggressive Washington. She said Canada would benefit from stronger ties with other allies, even if it ends up remaining on good terms with the U.S.
“Donald Trump is a scourge on democracy across the world,” she said. “Frankly, Canada better have a plan for a decline in American democracy.”
Trump 2024: A Scourge on Democracy
Fitting campaign slogan. If only it fit on a ball cap.
Joe Biden has hosted two Summit for Democracy meetings with leaders from other nations. Maybe he should be meeting with Democratic governors.
As of Friday at 5pm ET, Hurricane Hilary was a large Category 4 storm, with peak sustained winds of 130 miles per hour. Its center was located about 325 miles south-southwest of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and it was moving northwest at 12 mph.
A turn to the north and increase in forward speed is expected over the next 24-36 hours.
The storm’s winds are expected to slow on Saturday as it moves over cooler ocean waters. However, a faster forward speed may limit the magnitude of this trend, and wind speed changes would not diminish the potentially dire flood threat.
Threat level: A highly unusual weather pattern is evolving across the country, with links to human-caused climate change, that will help propel the formidable storm — by then in a less formidable state, rapidly northward into the typically dry Southwest during the next four days.
“Extras” will not get scale.
Breaking Bad
Maui last week:
So basically the entire island is on fire. Somehow where I am, the driest part of the island, has been so far spared.
This is Lahaina town, the popular tourist town on the island. (Not my video.) Apartments and stores have burned down. pic.twitter.com/msvj6lPgIg
Canadian officials ordered the evacuation of the Northwest Territories' capital of Yellowknife and several smaller communities as a massive wildfire threatened the town of Hay River overnight https://t.co/5I7mZHkMvppic.twitter.com/wST8oe1YEf
The team at Roger Williams Park Zoo is elated to announce the birth of a baby sloth! The adorable newborn is born to mom Fiona and dad Westley and is currently resting comfortably while staying close to mom. The incredible staff of zookeepers and veterinarians are maintaining a watchful eye over the mother and baby, ensuring their well-being as they bond behind the scenes. With the assistance of the mother’s affection, daily monitoring, and supplemental feeding from the keepers, the little one is steadily growing and gaining strength.
This birth holds great significance for the Zoo and the global sloth population. The Zoo is an active participant in the Linne’s Two-Toed Sloth Species Survival Plan, which prioritizes breeding to guarantee the survival of the species.
The young sloth is yet to be named, but more updates will be coming soon, so stay tuned!
Trump just posted this to Truth Social, and it’s alarming. He makes no sense at all. His words are garbled and slurred, his hair is mussed. He’s swaying, blinking excessively, and sweating. It’s actually frightening. Does he need medical help? pic.twitter.com/bVG6fs3k8D
Biden has always had a stutter and sometimes sounded garbled even when he was young. But this is something else. It isn’t just slurred and garbled, it’s completely incoherent. (Not to mention that he’s going full-on Flock of Seagulls with the hair.)
Does Elon Musk know that his precious Republicans are waging a war against electric cars? They are…
Electric vehicle drivers in Texas have started to get some bad news in the mail.
Starting in September, they’ll have to pay the state an extra $200 each year to register their climate-friendly cars and trucks. And if they want to buy a new EV, that will cost $400 upfront.
State lawmakers imposed the new fee on EVs this spring to replace gasoline taxes lost to the switch to battery-powered vehicles. Supporters say it ensures every driver pays their fair share. But the fee is nearly double what an average driver would pay in taxes at the pump, according to consumer advocates.
Those moves have some EV advocates fuming — and will create new barriers to one of President Joe Biden’s signature climate policies.
Unchanged since 1991, Texas’ gas tax is one of the cheapest in the country. Now, its new EV fees are among the most expensive. That’s no accident, experts and advocates say. A growing number of mostly Republican-led states are adding speed bumps to electric vehicles — from new taxes on drivers using charging stations, to limits on how automakers sell EVs, to registration fees that critics call punitive.
Musk, the stable genius moved his plant from California to Texas.
I don’t know what to say about this nihilism. It’s going to kill us all.
Impeachment is on the way because it’s an election year and Republicans want to harm Joe Biden with a massive smear. They aren’t trying to hide it.
Representative Matt Gaetz has finally said the quiet part out loud: Republicans don’t have enough evidence to impeach and convict Joe Biden. They just want to make him look bad enough that he loses the 2024 election.
Republicans have insisted for months that Biden is guilty of corruption and influence peddling overseas, despite producing no actual evidence. Many in the GOP, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, are starting to suggest opening an impeachment inquiry into Biden so that they can access more information and witnesses that will supposedly lead them to the truth.
But Gaetz said that Republicans should go straight to impeachment proceedings, not just an inquiry. “The purpose of that impeachment, from my standpoint, is not to force a vote that loses,” he said during a Twitter Space on Monday night. “It’s to put on a trial in the Senate, and by the way, not for the sake of conviction.”
“There’s no conviction and removal of Joe Biden coming on impeachment. I know that. You know that,” Gaetz said, although he blamed that on the Senate being controlled by Democrats, not the utter lack of proof.
Gaetz argued that Republicans should impeach Biden in order to put him on trial. But “the jury is the American people.”
“If we had the Senate as the stage and the platform for James Comer to put on his evidence and advance this impeachment, it will not result in a conviction,” Gaetz said, referring to the chair of the House Oversight Committee, who has been leading the charge against Biden.
“But the true verdict can still be rendered by the American people.”
Republicans are reportedly planning to open an impeachment inquiry into Biden in the fall. McCarthy insisted that such an inquiry would not be for political purposes, a pointed dig at the president, whom Republicans accuse of weaponizing the government to go after Donald Trump.
Shamelessness is too mild a term. They’ve now just embraced sociopathy.
There was a time not long ago when a Republican congressman said something like this and he lost his bid for the speakership it was considered so out of line. Recall:
Today it’s a given that impeachment is just another GOP political weapon — and a useful tool to deliver on Trump’s demands for payback. They don’t even try to hide it.
Ron DeSantis comes from a long line of failed Great Whitebread Hopes
I should probably be ashamed to admit this but my favorite part of any presidential election season is the Republican primaries, especially the debates. Since they rarely have an incumbent president running (because they have only had three Republican presidents in the last 35 years) it’s usually a free for all that features some very eccentric fringe characters as well as the precipitous fall of at least one highly touted conservative hero that everyone in the political establishment assumed was a shoo-in just months before.
I think back to 1992 which featured what we all thought was a completely beyond-the-pale Pat Buchanan speech at the RNC that the late great Molly Ivins famously quipped “sounded better in the original German.”(That speech now sounds like virtually every GOP candidate running for any office.) In 2008 the open primary swoon offered up the excitement of yet another Hollywood actor/Republican politician in Senator Fred Thompson who had the entire political press corps in a swoon, convinced that he was the next Ronald Reagan. Like so many others, he quickly flamed out on the trail, showing himself to be a bad retail candidate once he had to mingle with the polloi in Iowa and New Hampshire.
2012 featured yet another presumed savior in Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota (who weirdly opened nearly every appearance with a quip about his “red-hot, smokin’ wife”)and convinced the establishment that he was the perfect candidate to win over Democratic moderates who were believed to be dying to vote for a midwestern Republican governor for some reason. His ads were awesome:
He dropped out after coming in third in Iowa.
Nothing can beat the 2016 GOP presidential primaries for sheer spectacle. (I actually did 22 podcasts about that crazy race.)That was, of course, because of Donald Trump. There were several serious contenders in that campaign, from former Gov. Jeb! Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio, both of Florida to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. But nobody came close to the hype about yet another midwestern Governor, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker who was presumed to have a magic touch because he’d beaten a recall attempt a couple of years before. He was backed by the mighty Koch brothers who had been instrumental in his rise in Wisconsin and had amassed a massive war chest.
Unfortunately it turned out once again that a colorless automaton wasn’t quite the winning personality everyone was looking for. He lost his front runner status almost as soon as he announced his campaign and steadily declined in the polls as more people began to get to know him. His debate performances were the final nails in his coffin. After the first one he dropped below 5 percent and in the second he was a cipher. He dropped out not long after when he finally went below 1 percent.
In fairness, those debates were dominated by Donald Trump’s wild performances and nobody fared very well against him. But Walker was unique in that he had run through many millions and didn’t even make it to Iowa. As I wrote here in Salon at the time:
The sad fact is that Walker has been the most overrated politician in the country based largely upon the Republicans’ quixotic desire to find a leader who can put a respectable face on its increasingly disreputable base — and the media’s odd willingness to not believe what their eyes were telling them: that Walker was a terrible candidate. Like Pawlenty and Thompson before him, he may have looked good on a PowerPoint presentation, but in reality he showed few signs of life on the debate stage or on the stump.
Hmmm. Does that remind you of someone by any chance? Yes, I thought it might.
This year’s GOP savior was supposed to be Florida Gov.Ron DeSantis, the anti-woke crusader who managed to win big in his re-election race in 2022. He’s been getting tons of press ever since he launched a culture war offensive the likes of which we hadn’t seen since Alabama’s George Wallace in the 1960s. Trying desperately to get to Donald Trump’s right in a quixotic attempt to appeal to the hard core Trump followers without ever criticizing Trump himself, he created the persona of a Cyborg in a stacked heel boot, relentlessly stomping on “woke” wherever he found it.
But no one can pry Trump’s devoted base away from him. The only hope anyone ever had was to try to lure away everyone else in the party and get all the GOP leaning independents. It was never a very likely possibility but at least it made some logical sense. DeSantis’ strategy has been a massive flop and like Walker before him, he has wilted like a week-old bag of butter lettuce once he had to perform.
After several campaign shake-ups and a so-far unsuccessful attempt to change the message the conventional wisdom is that he has one more chance to turn things around. If he performs well in the debate next week, maybe he can regain some momentum. The problem is that he’s not a very good debater:
The NY Times reported on Thursday that DeSantis’ Never Back Down Super PAC has some ideas on how he can improve his performance and they posted them online. The debate strategy memo was created by the political consulting firm of Axiom Strategies owned by Jeff Roe, the Super Pac’s chief strategist.
The Times reports:
The document outlines a strategy framed around Roger Ailes’ “Orchestra Pit media theory,” which proposes that headlines won’t be achieved by getting bogged down in policy discussions, but by creating viral moments through directed attacks, emotional statements, and clippable quotes. […]
“There are four basic must-dos,” one of the memos urges Mr. DeSantis, whom the document refers to as “GRD.”
“1. Attack Joe Biden and the media 3-5 times. 2. State GRD’s positive vision 2-3 times. 3. Hammer Vivek Ramaswamy in a response. 4. Defend Donald Trump in absentia in response to a Chris Christie attack.”
I get the idea that he must attack Joe Biden and the media, that’s standard stuff, but he’s going to have to dig deep for a “positive vision” because that’s really off brand. Sadly, defending Donald Trump is very much on brand which is one of the main reasons why Trump is going to win the nomination going away. Some of the most pugnacious Republicans are mewling kittens when it comes to him.
But professional strategists are telling him to”Hammer Vivek Ramaswamy” and it’s not a joke? Apparently not. They even gave him a nickname: Fake Vivek’ Or ‘Vivek the Fake.’” Is attacking someone nobody’s every heard of supposed to make him look strong? It’s an exact replay of DeSantis’ fellow Floridian Marco Rubio’s 2016 strategy of attacking Christie in New Hampshire instead of going after Trump in the hopes of winnowing the field. How did that work out for him?
I have to admit I’m looking forward to watching these Republicans once again demonstrate their fecklessness for the whole country to see. There’s a reason why they have only had one popular vote since 1988 but they never change course. It makes sense that Donald Trump was able to come in and sweep the GOP primary voters off their feet because the establishment keeps hyping these alleged superstars who turn out to be insufferable duds.
If the big donors and party establishment wanted to get Trump off the stage, maybe they should have come up with a new formula. This one has never worked, not once.
Really looking for the apologies from the [!!!] CNN TV lawyers who swore up and down that Alex Jones would never tie the crime scene to Trump. https://t.co/v06GE7rIda
Now that everyone's talking about how Kenneth Chesebro, architect of Trump's fake electors plot, was at the Capitol with Alex Jones on Jan 6, let's think about how bad that is. Because Jones was used for a strategic purpose in the Capitol attack. And Chesebro was watching. 1/ pic.twitter.com/10uSA7BqbY
Trump and Shinzō Abe. Photo 2017 via Wikipedia (CC BY 4.0).
Neighbors shared champaign* out in the street when after several day news outlets finally called the 2020 election for Joe Biden. They weren’t celebrating Biden’s victory. It was a “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” moment. America was done with Donald Trump. The problem was Donald Trump was not done with America.
Nearly three years later, the country is still attempting to clean up behind Trump even as he continues to trash the place. And getting special treatment while doing it.
Fred and Mary Anne never gave little Donny a time out. They farmed out disciplining Little Lord Flauntleroy at 13 to a military academy. Too late, of course. Never in the field of bad parenting was such political carnage foisted on so many by so few.
The 77-year-old brat continues to receive special treatment to this day, explains Dahlia Lithwick:
The irony is lost on nobody that most of the conspiracies of which Trump now stands accused involve variations on speech acts that included threats and intimidation, lies, and bullying—the same actions he takes up with increasingly reckless zeal on social media against the machinery of the justice system itself. And the same things that make him uniquely dangerous with every winking post about a witness, prosecutor, or judge make him all but impossible to silence: He’s a larger-than-life political figure with millions of paranoid followers, of which some subsection will do anything he asks.
Any of us would be cooling our heels in the slammer already. Not him.
Donald Trump knows this. The courts know this. The judges who will likely tolerate ever more transgressive incitement from the former president not only know it but are likely the most obvious, agonizing targets. Judge Aileen Cannon, bless her heart, was resoundingly scolded by a federal appeals court last winter for treating a former president as different from any other criminal defendant. The irony is that the same former president is de facto going to be allowed to go much further than any other criminal defendant in his other three criminal trials precisely because, at least when it comes to the First Amendment, he is like no other criminal defendant in history.
Legal scholars Christopher Robertson and Russell M. Gold wish “that our clients received the advantages that prosecutors are giving Trump.” After charging in each of his first three cases, “his lawyers negotiated dates when he could submit to authorities for processing,” they write:
Most criminal defendants are just arrested and taken to jail, where they may sit for months or even years while they await trial, unless they plead guilty. Three-quarters of federal criminal defendants are locked up to await trial.
Trump asked for a delay in his classified documents trial. He got it. Because he’s special.
Prosecutors charged Air Force reservist Jack Teixeira in June 2023 for disseminating classified information of the sort Trump retained and concealed (allegedly). Citing Trump, Teixeira requested similar treatment. Instead, he’s sitting in jail pending trial.
Indeed, defendants in courts across the country plead guilty to crimes even if they are innocent, in part because pleading guilty gets them home sooner. For some defendants, the pretrial detention is longer than their actual punishment will be, so pleading guilty resolves the case with credit for time served. But the stain of a conviction stays on their record forever.
The scholars point out other ways in which Trump receives special treatment. It’s not so much that U.S. justice treats Trump better that’s the problem in their view, but that it treats ordinary defendants so much worse. It’s like the criticism of racial disparities in assigning the death penalty more to Black murderers than to whites. If (big IF) death is ever a just sentence, then the injustice lies in white defendants not receiving it. But I digress.
Adam Gopnik argues at The New Yorker that there is a movement afoot to paint Trump’s indictments as “a strike of one discrete class against another, with “élite” Americans bent on settling a score with Trump and, through him, with his long-neglected supporters. The educated élite is out to get a tribune of the volk.”
That’s absurd, Gopnik writes. “Trump is a billionaire supported by billionaires.” He may enjoy support among hoi polloi, but insistence that support for Trump falls along class lines is incorrect. Fractures in the English Civil War, Jonathan Healey explains, “ran right down the middle of both ‘classes,’ with some supposed members of the bourgeoisie being staunch Royalists, and some in the aristocracy being the most open to anti-monarchical ideas—and, eventually, actions.” The war was “a clash of ideologies, as often as not between members of the same class.”
Our present culture wars represent …
a conflict between coalitions, each of which envelops the privileged and the underprivileged, the high-status and the status-threatened, the wealthy and the poor. It’s a conflict about values and beliefs, in which both sides—and, more important, each person—determine their own views and are responsible for their own choices. In the end, it is a fight, Lincoln’s fight, perpetual in American history, between those who actually believe in liberal democratic institutions and those who don’t.
That abstraction is difficult to reconcile with the fears of members of the Fulton County grand jurors that Trump and his supporters now target online and in person. And with the fears and increased security that judges attempting work out justice American-style must endure from the accused and his supporters, the wealthy and the poor. Trump issues transparent threats, plays golf, and thumbs his nose at us all as he awaits the arrival of justice that his wealth and privilege has forestalled his entire life. It’s not a sure thing that it will find him.
The problem is not just that the system treats Trump better than ordinary defendants, but that it treats the rest of us so much worse.
