“High-minded claims that we are not a democracy surreptitiously fuse republic with minority rule rather than popular government,” wrote George Thomas in 2020. The Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions at Claremont McKenna College was discussing how “we’re a republic, not a democracy” has morphed from campus conservative pedantry to a Republican ruling philosophy.
“Enabling sustained minority rule at the national level is not a feature of our constitutional design, but a perversion of it,” Thomas argued. “Routine minority rule is neither desirable nor sustainable, and makes it difficult to characterize the country as either a democracy or a republic.”
When it comes to perverting constitutional design, Republicans in this century have demonstrated a serious knack for it. Consider Ohio’s special election today drafted to change how Ohio has amended its constitution for over a century. It’s not just sustained minority rule at the national level that should concern Americans.
State Issue 1, which Ohio voters will decide in a special election Tuesday, looks harmless enough. But don’t be fooled: It is a brazen attempt to keep a majority of Ohioans from enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution. Anyone who believes in reproductive privacy — or in democracy itself — must vote no.
Presently, voters can approve a proposed amendment to the Ohio constitution with a simple majority vote. If Issue 1 is approved, future amendments would fail unless they received a 60 percent supermajority. Anyone trying to get a proposed amendment on the ballot would also have to gather more signatures and generally jump through more hoops.
But of course the hoops are the point, just as Republican efforts to make it more difficult to cast a ballot at all. When you don’t have the majority on your side, rewrite the rules. They do. Ohio Republicans even perverted a state rule banning August special elections. The Ohio Supreme Court narrowly allowed this one.
Ohio’s abortion-rights-enshrining amendment up for a vote in November is wildly popular. Three averaged polls indicate “Ohioans support the abortion amendment by an average of 57 percent to 24 percent (with 20 percent undecided),” reports FiveThirtyEight. So the gerrymandered state legislature arranged for today’s special election to “make it far more difficult for citizens groups” to pass it or, “say, an anti-gerrymandering amendment.”
Democracy? Republicans just aren’t into it. Anywhere. Much less citizen initiatives that bypass conservative state legislative gatekeepers. That’s what today’s Issue 1 is about.
It’s also part of a widespread pattern of Republicans making it harder to get initiatives on the ballot in the first place. Since 2017, at least 16 states — Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming — have proposed increasing the number of signatures needed to qualify a ballot initiative or, like Issue 1, adding new requirements that those signatures come from specific jurisdictions, like counties or congressional districts.
Measures such as Issue 1 that would raise the voting threshold for passage of citizen initiatives have done poorly with voters.
Robinson again:
The Republicans behind Issue 1 tried for a while to pretend the measure was about good government or some such, but Ohioans understood what was going on: an attempt by a fervent antiabortion minority to impose its views on a pro-choice majority.
But this proxy fight over abortion is about more. For the GOP, the ratchet turns but one way, toward more control for their white-Christian base and less freedom of choice for the multicultural American majority, including women. Democracy? Republicans just aren’t into it. Donald Trump might all-caps it: A REPUBLIC FOR REPUBLICANS!
In a debate ahead of the vote, state Rep. Allison Russo, D-Upper Arlington, claimed that if the state’s abortion ban stands the ratchet would turn again. Access to contraception would go next.
Mike Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life, called the claim absurd, saying, “No reasonable person is talking about banning the use of contraceptives. Let’s be clear about this and stop the fear-mongering.”
Frank LaRose, the Republican Ohio secretary of state, concurred, “No reasonable person is talking about banning the use of contraceptives.”
The denials bring to mind what the Cyclops said about who had put out his eye: No reasonable person!
William Friedkin, the Oscar-winning director behind The French Connection and The Exorcist who was one of the most admired directors to emerge from a wave of brilliant filmmakers who made their mark in the 1970s, died Monday. He was 87.
Friedkin died in Los Angeles, his wife, former producer and studio head Sherry Lansing, said.
His pictures, which also included 1977’s Sorcerer, 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A. and 2006’s Bug, were marked by an exceptional visual eye, a willingness to take what might have been a genre subject and treat it with high seriousness and a sense of how sound could add a subterranean layer of dread, mystery and dissonance to his stories — a haunted and haunting quality that lifted his visceral works into another realm, conveying a preternatural sense of “fear and paranoia, both old friends of mine,” as he said in his 2013 memoir, The Friedkin Connection.
Fear and paranoia. I’m not a religious person, but I distinctly remember jumping out of my seat and shouting “JESUS CHRIST!” about a dozen times the first time I saw The Exorcist.
It truly freaked me out, affecting me on a primal level like no other film I’d seen; to this day the very thought of sitting through it again makes me recoil. I remember feeling anger toward the filmmaker for triggering months of nightmares and lingering heebie-jeebies.
I was still in high school; I didn’t know from auteur theory or what a two-shot was…but I’d been to two world’s fairs and a rodeo and could sense that there was “something” about the atmosphere, the immersive nature of this film that raised the bar for horror tropes; there was a cinematic alchemist at the helm (“how did he do that to me?!”).
More from the Hollywood Reporter obit:
He was part of a brilliant generation of filmmakers who upended the studio system, making movies that were provocative, individualistic and anti-authoritarian. Several of its members at one time joined forces to create The Directors Company in an attempt to give themselves the independence they cherished, though internal disagreements led to its dissolution, not long after they had collectively turned down Star Wars.
About that “brilliant generation”…I “discovered” Friedkin’s 1971 crime drama masterpiece The French Connection, as well as the work of many of his contemporaries in a sort of ass-backward way-as I recounted in a 2017 piece about the death of the neighborhood theater:
Some of my fondest memories of the movie-going experience involve neighborhood theaters; particularly during a 3-year period of my life (1979-1982) when I was living in San Francisco. But I need to back up for a moment. I had moved to the Bay Area from Fairbanks, Alaska, which was not the ideal environment for a movie buff. At the time I moved from Fairbanks, there were only two single-screen movie theaters in town. To add insult to injury, we were usually several months behind the Lower 48 on first-run features (it took us nearly a year to even get Star Wars).
Keep in mind, there was no cable service in the market, and VCRs were a still a few years down the road. There were occasional midnight movie screenings at the University of Alaska, and the odd B-movie gem on late night TV (which we had to watch in real time, with 500 commercials to suffer through)…but that was it. Sometimes, I’d gather up a coterie of my culture vulture pals for the 260-mile drive to Anchorage, where there were more theaters for us to dip our beaks into.
Consequently, due to the lack of venues, I was reading more about movies, than watching them. I remember poring over back issues of The New Yorker at the public library, soaking up Penelope Gilliat and Pauline Kael; but it seemed requisite to live in NYC (or L.A.) to catch all these cool art-house and foreign movies they were raving about (most of those films just didn’t make it out up to the frozen tundra). And so it was that I “missed” a lot of 60s and 70s cinema.
Needless to say, when I moved to San Francisco, which had a plethora of fabulous neighborhood theaters in 1979, I quickly set about making up the deficit. While I had a lot of favorite haunts (The Surf, The Balboa, The Castro, and the Red Victorian loom large in my memory), there were two venerable (if a tad dodgy) downtown venues in particular where I spent an unhealthy amount of time in the dank and the dark with snoring bums who used the auditoriums as a $2 flop: The Roxie and The Strand.
That’s because they were “repertory” houses; meaning they played older films (frequently double and triple bills, usually curated by some kind of theme). That 3 years I spent in the dark was my film school; that’s how I got caught up with Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Terrence Malick, Woody Allen, Sidney Lumet, Peter Bogdanovich, Werner Herzog, Ken Russell, Lindsay Anderson, Wim Wenders, Michael Ritchie, Brian De Palma, etc.
I have probably seen The French Connection 25 times; if I happen to stumble across it while channel-surfing, I will inevitably get sucked in for a taste of Friedkin’s masterful direction, Ernest Tidyman’s crackling dialog (adapted from Robin Moore’s book), Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider’s indelible performances, or a jolt of adrenaline:
Gerald B. Greenburg picked up a well-deserved Oscar for that brilliant editing. Statues were also handed out to Friedkin for Best Director, producer Philip D’Antoni for Best Picture, Hackman for Best Actor (Scheider was nominated, but did not win for Best Supporting Actor), and Tidyman for Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.
Just as his films were uncompromising and “in your face”, when it came to speaking his mind, Friedkin was certainly no shrinking violet. I found his irascibility endearing-like the sampling in this tribute Tweet posted today:
there will never be another William Friedkin — he was the definition of an iconoclast, told it like it was and was decidedly stubborn down to the bitter end
he leaves behind a career of great films, even a few bonafide masterpieces, but also a lot of perfect interviews
Don’t hold back. Tell us how you really feel, Bill! Irascible …and irreplaceable.
In addition to the obvious “must-sees” The Exorcist (if you dare) and The French Connection, here are a few more Freidkin recommendations for movie night:
The Boys in the Band – Friedkin’s groundbreaking 1970 film adaptation of Mart Crowley’s off-Broadway play centers on a group of gay friends who have gathered to celebrate a birthday, and as the booze starts to flow, the fur begins to fly. It may not seem as “bold” or “daring” as perceived over 50 years ago (and many contemporary viewers will undoubtedly find certain stereotypes of the time to be problematic), but what the narrative reveals about human nature is universal and timeless.
It’s one of the best American dramas of the 1970s; a wicked verbal jousting match delivered by a crackerjack acting ensemble so finely tuned that you could set a metronome to the performances (Crowley adapted the screenplay). The production is also unique for enlisting the entire original stage cast to recreate their roles onscreen. Warning: Burt Bacharach’s “The Look of Love” will be playing in your head for days on end.
Sorcerer – The time is ripe for a re-appraisal of Friedkin’s 1977 action-adventure, which was greeted with indifference by audiences and critics at the time. Maybe it was the incongruous title, which likely led many to assume it would be in the vein of his previous film (and huge box-office hit), The Exorcist. Then again, it was tough for any other film to garner attention in the immediate wake of Star Wars.
At any rate, it’s an expertly directed, terrifically acted update of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic 1953 nail-biter, The Wages of Fear (I say “update” in deference to Friedkin, who bristles at the term “remake” in a “letter from the director” included with the Blu-ray I own).
Roy Scheider heads a superb international cast as a desperate American on the lam in South America, who signs up for a job transporting a truckload of nitroglycerin through rough terrain. Walon Green wrote the screenplay, and Tangerine Dream provides a memorable soundtrack.
Killer Joe– This 2012 film is a blackly funny and deliriously nasty piece of late-career work from Friedkin. Jim Thompson meets Sam Shepherd (with a whiff of Tennessee Williams) in this dysfunctional trailer trash-strewn tale of avarice, perversion and murder-for-hire, adapted for the screen by Tracy Letts from his own play. While the noir tropes in the narrative holds few surprises, the squeamish are forewarned that the then-76 year-old Friedkin still had a formidable ability to startle unsuspecting viewers; proving you’re never too old to earn an NC-17 rating. How startling? The real litmus test occurs during the film’s climactic scene, which is so Grand Guignol that (depending on your sense of humor) you’ll either cringe and cover your eyes…or laugh yourself sick. (Full review)
To Live and Die in L.A. – Essentially a remake of The French Connection (updated for the 80s), Friedkin’s fast-moving, tough-as-nails 1985 neo noir ignites the senses on every level: visual, aural and visceral.
Leads William Peterson (as an obsessed treasury agent) and Willem Dafoe (as his criminal nemesis) rip up the screen with star-making performances (both were relative unknowns). While the narrative adheres to familiar “cop on the edge” tropes, there’s an undercurrent of weirdness throughout that makes this a truly unique genre entry (“The stars are God’s eyes!” Peterson’s girlfriend shrieks at him at one point, for no apparent reason). Friedkin co-adapted the screenplay with source novel author Gerald Petievich.
Friedkin’s hard-boiled L.A. story is painted in dusky orange, vivid reds and stark blacks; an ugly/beautiful noir Hell rendered by the late great cinematographer Robby Müller (who worked extensively with Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch). The icing on the cake is Wang Chung’s ace soundtrack, woven seamlessly into the narrative by Friedkin and editor M. Scott Smith. This sequence alone is worth the price of admission (not to mention a masterclass in editing…if not counterfeiting):
I don’t know quite what to make of all this but I’ll just throw it out there for you to mull over:
Apparently, quite a few people think the indictments are simultaneously trying to stop Trump while also upholding the rule of law and defending democracy. I’m pretty sure that prosecutors trying to stop the Trump campaign would not be in keeping with either of those two things. I guess some people are confused.
People may decide they don’t want an indicted criminal suspect for president but nobody is trying to stop him from running or stop anyone from voting for him. Are they suggesting that he shouldn’t be prosecuted because he is running for president even if there is evidence against him?
This distinction between MAGA Republicans and Non-MAGA Republicans is not particularly useful at this point. If you are willing to vote for Trump then I fail to see the difference.
Yep. 68% think Biden is illegitimate based upon nothing but bullshit from Donald Trump and his henchmen. That’s the ballgame.
More Democrats than Independents or Republicans are concerned about both. That certainly says something, I’m not sure what.
The US is going to hell is a lovely sentiment from someone who wants to be president. Kicking a sports team that represents America, especially a women’s sports team, when it’s down is especially thoughtful. You can certainly understand why 38% of Americans are just gaga over this man.
A prominent conservative writer, lionized by Silicon Valley billionaires and a U.S. senator, used a pen name for years to write for white supremacist publications and was a formative voice during the rise of the racist “alt-right,” according to a new HuffPost investigation.
Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.
A decade later, writing under his real name, Hanania has ensconced himself in the national mainstream media, writing op-eds in the country’s biggest papers, bending the ears of some of the world’s wealthiest men and lecturing at prestigious universities, all while keeping his past white supremacist writings under wraps.
HuffPost connected Hanania to his “Richard Hoste” persona by analyzing leaked data from an online comment-hosting service that showed him using three of his email addresses to create usernames on white supremacist sites. A racist blog maintained by Hoste was also registered to an address in Hanania’s hometown. And HuffPost found biographical information shared by Hoste that aligned with Hanania’s own life.
Hanania did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story, made via phone, email and direct messages on social media.
The 37-year-old has been published by The New York Times and The Washington Post. He delivered a lecture to the Yale Federalist Society and was interviewed by the Harvard College Economics Review. He appeared twice on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News’ former prime-time juggernaut. He was a recent guest on a podcast hosted by the CEO of Substack, the $650 million publishing platform where Hanania has nearly 20,000 subscribers.
Hanania has his own podcast, too, interviewing the likes of Steven Pinker, the famous Harvard cognitive psychologist, and Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer. Another billionaire, Elon Musk, reads Hanania’s articles and replies approvingly to his tweets. A third billionaire, Peter Thiel, provided a blurb to promote Hanania’s book, “The Origins of Woke,” which HarperCollins plans to publish this September. In October, Hanania is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Stanford.
Meanwhile, rich benefactors, some of whose identities are unknown, have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a think tank run by Hanania. The think tank doles out cash to conservative academics, and produces political studies that are cited across right-wing media.
Hanania’s rise into mainstream conservative and even more centrist circles did not necessarily occur because he abandoned some of the noxious arguments he made under the pseudonym “Richard Hoste.” Although he’s moderated his words to some extent, Hanania still makes explicitly racist statements under his real name. He maintains a creepy obsession with so-called race science, arguing that Black people are inherently more prone to violent crime than white people. He often writes in support of a well-known racist and a Holocaust denier. And he once said that if he owned Twitter — the platform that catapulted him to some celebrity — he wouldn’t let “feminists, trans activists or socialists” post there. “Why would I?” he asked. “They’re wrong about everything and bad for society.”
Richard Hanania’s story may hint at a concerning shift in mainstream American conservatism. A little over a decade ago, he felt compelled to hide his racist views behind a pseudonym. In 2023, Hanania is a right-wing star, championed by some of the country’s wealthiest men, even as he’s sounding more and more like his former white supremacist nom de plume: Richard Hoste.
Is there really much difference between this guy and JD Vance (a fan, by the way)? Or Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters? Or Elon Musk for that matter? This cohort of tech-bro neo-fascists are a rising power center and they are supported by a ton of money. They aren’t exactly trying to hide their intentions.
Read the whole story. It’s quite chilling, especially that fact that he’s been feted by some very powerful mainstream institutions and embraced by celebrity “contrarians” who seem to always like the cut of a glib authoritarian’s jib for some reason.
Unindicted co-conspirator John Eastman gave an interview last week in which he discussed all the reason why the country is going to hell (transgender youth and ergonomic chairs are at the top of the list) and explained how that gave Trump the right to ignore the constitution. It’s worth reading in full to get a good sense of just how batshit this guy really is.
There’s a lot of atmospherics in this interview, a lot of bookshelf-lined tweedy gentility mixed with complaints about OSHA regulations and Drag Queen story hours. But the central bit comes just over half way through the interview when Eastman gets into the core justification and purpose for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and overthrow the constitutional order itself. He invokes the Declaration of Independence and says quite clearly that yes, we were trying to overthrow the government and argues that they were justified because of the sheer existential threat America was under because of the election of Joe Biden.
January 6th conspirators have spent more than two years claiming either that nothing really happened at all in the weeks leading up to January 6th or that it was just a peaceful protest that got a bit out of hand or that they were just making a good faith effort to follow the legal process. Eastman cuts through all of this and makes clear they were trying to overthrow (“abolish”) the government; they were justified in doing so; and the warrant for their actions is none other than the Declaration of Independence itself.
“Our Founders lay this case out,” says Eastman. “There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable, tolerable while they remain tolerable. At some point abuses become so intolerable that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.”
“So that’s the question,” he tells Klingenstein. “Have the abuses or the threat of abuses become so intolerable that we have to be willing to push back?”
The answer for Eastman is clearly yes, and that’s his justification for his and his associates extraordinary actions.
Let’s dig in for a moment to what this means, because it’s a framework of thought or discourse that was central to many controversies in the first decades of the American Republic. The Declaration of Independence has no legal force under American law. It’s not a legal document. It’s a public explanation of a political decision: to break the colonies’ allegiance to Great Britain and form a new country. But it contains a number of claims and principles that became and remain central to American political life.
The one Eastman invokes here is the right to overthrow governments. The claim is that governments have no legitimacy or authority beyond their ability to serve the governed. Governments shouldn’t be overthrown over minor or transitory concerns. But when they become truly oppressive people have a right to get rid of them and start over. This may seem commonsensical to us. But that’s because we live a couple centuries downstream of these events and ideas. Governments at least in theory are justified by how they serve their populations rather than countries being essentially owned by the kings or nobilities which rule them.
But this is a highly protean idea. Who gets to decide? Indeed this question came up again and again over the next century each time the young republic faced a major political crisis, whether it was in the late 1790s, toward the end of the War of 1812, in 1832–33 or finally during the American Civil War. If one side didn’t get its way and wanted out what better authority to cite than the Declaration of Independence? There is an obvious difference, but American political leaders needed a language to describe it. What they came up with is straightforward. It’s the difference between a constitutional or legal right and a revolutionary one. Abraham Lincoln was doing no more than stating a commonplace when he said this on the eve of the Civil War in his first inaugural address (emphasis added): “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”
In other words, yes, you have a revolutionary right to overthrow the government if you really think its abuses have gotten that intractable and grave. But the government has an equal right to stop you, to defend itself or, as we see today, put you on trial if you fail. The American revolutionaries of 1776 knew full well that they were committing treason against the British monarchy. If they lost they would all hang. They accepted that. They didn’t claim that George III had no choice but to let them go.
From the beginning the Trump/Eastman coup plotters have tried to wrap their efforts in legal processes and procedures. It was their dissimulating shield to hide the reality of their coup plot and if needed give them legal immunity from the consequences. The leaders of the secession movement tried the same thing in 1861.
In a way I admire Eastman for coming clean. I don’t know whether he sees the writing on the wall and figures he might as well lay his argument out there or whether his grad school political theory pretensions and pride got the better of him and led him to state openly this indefensible truth. Either way he’s done it and not in any way that’s retrievable as a slip of the tongue. They knew it was a coup and they justified it to themselves in those terms. He just told us. They believed they were justified in trying to overthrow the government, whether because of OSHA chair size regulations or drag queens or, more broadly, because the common herd of us don’t understand the country’s “founding principles” the way Eastman and his weirdo clique do. But they did it. He just admitted it. And now they’re going to face the consequences.
Trump was knowingly trying to overthrow the government as well but for completely different reasons. He does not care about OSHA or drag queens. He cares about Donald Trump, period and is so narcissistic and psychologically damaged that he simply could not live with the fact that he lost. He did what he did to save face, period.
But Eastman did have a bigger project and he wasn’t the only one. I’m reminded of Bill Barr who made many of the same arguments about the country being in such grave, existential danger from “the left” that it required extraordinary means to save it. (He backed down when it came to it but he was motivated by many of the same ideas as Eastman.) Tucker Carlson is pushing the same ideas, although he is really little more than a snake oil salesman in it for the money. Even the pathetic Ron DeSantis is in that arena.
This is Fox News brain rot in full effect. They have become convinced that interracial couples in Cheerio commercials and a genderless Mr Potatohead represent the greatest threat America has ever known. And when John Eastman got the chance to leverage presidential power to stop these assaults on all he holds dear, he went for it.
Their favorite white nationalist dictator shows how it’s done:
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was sentenced to 19 additional years in a prison colony for extremism-related charges.
Russian state media reported the sentence, which was announced by Judge Andrei Suvorov on Friday. The opposition leader was found guilty of creating and participating in an extremist community, financing extremist activities, organizing an extremist community, making public calls for extremist activity, and involving minors in dangerous activities, TASS reported. The former technical director of Navalny’s YouTube channel, Daniel Kholodny, was found guilty of similar charges and sentenced to eight years in a penal colony, though of a less severe variety than Navalny’s.
Navalny’s sentence was just one year shy of what state prosecutors were seeking for the ailing dissident, whose case has become a cause celebre for advocates for political prisoners worldwide. He was first sentenced to under three years when first returning to Russia from Germany in January 2021, then he was sentenced to an additional nine years after protests in support of him.
From the whining and wailing and rending of garments from the Republicans you’d think this is what is happening to Donald Trump. But he’s living comfortably in his gaudy beach club and flying around on his private 747 while Navalny is in jail, frail and starving and forced to share a cell with prisoners who are contagious with disease. They are literally killing him slowly. He says he knows he will die in prison and he is only 47 years old.
Trump should count his lucky stars that his future isn’t in the hands of his good pal Vlad.
I’m sorry, this still isn’t an unequivocal acknowledgement of reality:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Sunday rejected Donald Trump’s claim that he was the true winner of the 2020 presidential election in his most forceful comments to date on the matter.
“Whoever puts their hand on the Bible on Jan. 20 every four years is the winner,” DeSantis told NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns in his first broadcast network interview since he launched his presidential campaign.
DeSantis continued to discuss all the ways he believed the previous presidential election was not perfect. But pressed further, he clearly stated that Trump lost.
“But respectfully, you did not clearly answer that question,” Burns said. “And if you can’t give a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on whether or not he lost —”
“No, of course he lost,” DeSantis said, adding, “Joe Biden’s the president.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL): "Of course he lost."
NBC News' Dasha Burns: “Trump lost the 2020 election?”
DeSantis: "Joe Biden's the president. But the issue is, I think what people in the media and elsewhere, they want to act like somehow this was just like the perfect election. pic.twitter.com/hzL7oNKCrz
The Strong Storms warning is a new one on me. “! There is a likely risk of severe weather today. Stay aware and be prepared.”
From CNN’s 5 Things newsletter this morning (not online at this hour):
Extreme weather
More than 120 million people in the Eastern US are at risk of severe thunderstorms today, while heat waves in the South continue their record streaks. The worst of the storms are expected to impact a zone stretching from northern Alabama to southern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charlotte, Washington, DC, Atlanta and Raleigh. The area is under enhanced risk, level 3 out of 5, for severe storms, forecasters said. Meanwhile, excessive heat warnings remain in effect “for the foreseeable future” across the southern part of the country, from southeast California into Florida, the National Weather Service said. And in Phoenix, Arizona, officials are trying a unique approach to reduce the temperature of pavement using a form of sunscreen, but for roads.
Don’t forget to unplug your electronics. A guy who lived up near the ridge where Blue Ridge Parkway runs once related that that was standard practice when lightning was in the area. Except that one time when he said ball lighting came through the living room wall, skittered across the floor, and vanished when it hit the plug of his stereo where it lay on the floor. Stereo goes POOF!
Not that he won’t send out his bargain-basement attorneys to sell us a dead parrot (New York Times):
Appearing on five television networks Sunday morning, a lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump argued that his actions in the effort to overturn the 2020 election fell short of crimes and were merely “aspirational.”
The remarks from his lawyer, John F. Lauro, came as Mr. Trump was blanketing his social media platform, Truth Social, with posts suggesting that his legal team was going to seek the recusal of Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, the federal judge overseeing the case, and try to move his trial out of Washington.
Trump’s efforts to pressure his vice president and state elections officials into overturning the 2020 election results were merely aspirational. And the “Norwegian Blue” is just resting.
Trump did not “direct Vice President Pence to do anything,” Lauro told CNN’s “State of the Union.” “He asked him in an aspirational way,” Lauro said. “Asking is not action. It’s core free speech.”
Mr. Lauro used the same defense on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” when asked about Mr. Trump’s now-infamous call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. During that call, President Trump pressured Mr. Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” to win the state and suggested that Mr. Raffensperger could face criminal repercussions if he did not.
“That was an aspirational ask,” Mr. Lauro said.
Like the hoodlum’s “aspirational” demand in Jack Benny’s classic “Your Money or Your Life” bit.
Lauro did not appear on five Sunday talking-heads shows to make a legal defense of Trump, but a political one. The amount of evidence piled up against Trump both by the January 6th Committee investigation and by special prosecutor Jack Smith’s is daunting. The Raffensperger tape is devastating. Pence’s inevitable testimony and contemporaneous notes will be tough to refute. Jurors may have to suppress laughter if Trump’s lawyers attempt to sell them on Trump’s clear demands being merely aspirational.
Team Trump might have better luck selling dead parrots. But with a client like Donald Trump, putting on a defense as blustery and clownish as their client may be the best they’ve got as well as what Trump will demand — that they warp reality to suit him. They don’t dare put the Man of 30,000 Lies on the witness stand.
Republicans argue that Joe Biden at 80 is too old for the presidency. Their 2024 frontrunner and very stable genius is just three years younger and proving that the miles have not treated him well. Trump never fully matured. And these days he’s looking more and more like a toddler.
