Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

“One of the great renewable resources”

“You can’t keep a good homicidal maniac down” is an essential trope from slasher films. In the zombie genre, the lingering question of, “How long can they last?” persists alongside the infectious, shambling dead.

Given the Outrage Industrial Complex extant since the 1980s, the same uncertainties apply to MAGA. How long can people addicted to daily outrage keep going before burning out?

“What used to rule the day on the American right was ‘owning the libs.’ But now they are owning one another,” writes Peter Wehner in The Atlantic. How long can political meth addicts maintain before finally, beset by paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations, they crash and/or devour each other?

With Dominion’s massive defamation settlement against Fox News, with Tucker Carlson’s ouster from the network, and with looming legal accountability for Donald Trump, perhaps MAGA’s collapse is, if not as imminent as that Fani Willis indictment, on the horizon.

Wehner writes:

It is a lesson nearly as old as time itself: Those whose passions are inflamed—and Trump supporters are nothing if not perennially inflamed—are drawn to destruction. “Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in a half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years,” the 18th-century conservative statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke warned.

Lack of restraint is the essence of the Trump movement. Shattering guardrails is what they find thrilling. But what MAGA adherents forget is that those guardrails exist to protect not only others, but also ourselves from excess, self-indulgence, and self-harm. There’s a reason that temperance—self-mastery, the capacity to moderate inordinate desires, balance that produces internal harmony—is one of the four cardinal virtues.

The extremism, aggression, and lack of restraint in MAGA world are spreading rather than receding. They are becoming more rather than less indiscriminate. Those who are part of that movement, and certainly those who lead it, act as if they’re invincible, as if the rules don’t apply to them, as if they can say anything and get away with anything. That has certainly been true of Trump, and it is often true of those who have patterned themselves after Trump, which is to say, virtually the entire Republican Party.

But it goes even beyond this. MAGA world directs its ridicule at those who exercise temperance, who embrace restraint, and who ask themselves what they should do rather than what they can get away with. Those who reject the ethic of Thrasymachus—the cynical Sophist in Plato’s Republic who believes might makes right and injustice is better than justice—are dismissed as weak and delicate. The denizens of MAGA world not only relish discarding guardrails; they scorn those who abide by them.

Toothlessness and destitution await as the buzz loses its kick. “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children,” wrote Jacques Mallet du Pan in 1793, whom Wehner quotes in French. Our charge, Wehner advises, is to contain the damage.

Isn’t that every Democratic president’s inheritance after each spasm of Republican plunder? In fact, the GOP counts on it. Let ” weak and delicate” Democrats “who ask themselves what they should do” repair the damage so the plunder might begin anew after four years or eight.

As P.J. O’Rourke once said, “Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.”

This truly shows that DeSantis is not ready for prime time. He sounds confused at best and shifty at worst. I’m not sure what he believes but whatever it is he’s communicating it very poorly:

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that it’s in the world’s interest for a cease-fire to be negotiated in Ukraine.

DeSantis made the comments during a wide-ranging interview with Nikkei Asia on Tuesday while the Florida governor is in Japan on an international trade mission.

In the interview, DeSantis warned that an extended war is possible in Ukraine.

“You don’t want to end up in like a [Battle of] Verdun situation, where you just have mass casualties, mass expense and end up with a stalemate,” DeSantis said. “It’s in everybody’s interest to try to get to a place where we can have a cease-fire.”

DeSantis also called out Europe, and Germany in particular, for allegedly not doing enough to help Ukraine.

“The Europeans really need to do more [on Ukraine]. I mean, this is their continent. The U.S. has provided security for them. And yes, Poland – there’s some that are doing stuff, and that should be appreciated. But Germany, they’re not doing anything,” DeSantis said.

“We have foreign policy elites that do things without having a concrete objective in mind,” DeSantis added.

DeSantis’ comments come after he told Fox News that the United States shouldn’t become further involved in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

​”While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” DeSantis said.

He later told Fox Nation’s “Piers Morgan Uncensored” that the comments were “mischaracterized,” after criticism from Republicans, and called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” and “basically a gas station with a bunch of nuclear weapons.” 

“Well, I think it’s been mischaracterized. Obviously, Russia invaded that and that was wrong,” DeSantis said. “They invaded Crimea and took that in 2014. That was wrong. What I’m referring to is kinda where the fighting is going on now, which is that western border or eastern border reaching Donbas and then Crimea.”

DeSantis said that his earlier comments calling the war a “territorial dispute” were referring to “the conflict area” instead than expressing that “Russia had a right to that.”

“And so, if I should have made that more clear, I could have done it,” DeSantis said. “But I think the larger point is, OK, Russia is not showing the ability to take over Ukraine, to topple the government or certainly to threaten NATO. That’s a good thing. They’ve been weakened. You now have the fighting in those areas.” “If I could snap my fingers, I’d give it back to Ukraine 100 percent,” DeSantis added. “Russia did not have the right to go into Crimea or to go in February of 2022, and that should be clear.”

A cease-fire would be great. But at this point it would seal in Russia’s gains, which the Ukrainians, not the US, must decide is worthwhile. We are not in charge of those decisions. All we can do is help our allies, which includes Ukraine and all of Europe. It’s a moral imperative.

He’s trying to have it both ways (or all ways) and it’s incoherent. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine with the intention of either taking over the country outright or installing a puppet government beholden to him. He wanted to destroy their budding democracy and send a message to the rest of eastern Europe that he would take what he wanted. If DeSantis thinks this is ok, he should just say it out loud.

But even Trump won’t do that — he just says, “it wouldn’t have happened with me in charge” and promises to magically end the war the minute he re-elected. But it’s pretty clear that Trump believes Russia can do whatever it wants because Vladimir Putin is a big pal of his and he’s strong and manly and that’s what strong, manly leaders do. He thinks that by pouring vast, epic sums of money into the military industrial complex in America it will deter anyone from “messing” with America. And that’s because he’s monumentally stupid and thinks the US can simply watch the world burn while we carry on, self-contained and prosperous. As I said, he’s a moron. I doubt he’s ever read a book.

I don’t know if DeSantis agrees with all that. In fact, I have no idea what DeSantis thinks about foreign policy at all. But it’s clear that he’s not going to run from a position of principle. He doesn’t have any.

“I wanted to address my senators, Cruz and Cornyn.. I would like for them to know that what happened to me is a direct result of the policies they support. I nearly died on their watch and I may have been robbed of the opportunity to have children in the future” pic.twitter.com/rq8Rt0lmSa

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 26, 2023

That’s Texas. Here’s Oklahoma:

The molar pregnancy Jaci Statton had would never become a baby. It was cancerous, though.

At the last hospital in Oklahoma she went to during her ordeal last month, Statton says staff told her and her husband that she could not get a surgical abortion until she became much sicker.

“They were very sincere; they weren’t trying to be mean,” Statton, 25, says. “They said, ‘The best we can tell you to do is sit in the parking lot, and if anything else happens, we will be ready to help you. But we cannot touch you unless you are crashing in front of us or your blood pressure goes so high that you are fixing to have a heart attack.'”

Jaci Statton’s pregnancy ordeal began in late February. She’s a stay-at-home mom living near Shawnee in central Oklahoma. She and her husband, Dustin Statton, have three kids – two seven year olds and an eight year old. Dustin is an oil field technician, and they have a fishing guide business – she says she and her family go fishing every day.

After weeks of feeling terrible – nauseous and dizzy and weak – Statton had a sudden episode of heavy bleeding that sent her to the emergency room. At her OB-GYN the next day, she learned she had a type of molar pregnancy, in which some of the tissue is cancerous. Molar pregnancy happens when a fertilized egg has too many chromosomes. It does not develop into a viable fetus. It is usually a benign condition, but in about 15% of cases, like Jaci’s, it is cancerous. Her doctor told her she was at risk of hemorrhage and even death, but that she couldn’t get treated there.

The treatment for a patient in her condition is a dilation and curettage or D&C – an abortion procedure that clears pregnancy tissue from the uterus. Over the course of a week, again and again, she says doctors told her they could not care for her.

After a week of being transferred to three different Oklahoma hospitals, Statton says her doctors actually suggested she leave the state and go to a place where an abortion is legal.

She and Dustin ended up driving three hours to an abortion clinic in Kansas where she was able to get a D&C. She’s now facing another surgery to remove more cancerous tissue, and she may need chemotherapy. Mentally, she says, it’s been rough.

“I think something needs to be done” about Oklahoma’s abortion laws, Statton says. That feeling has prompted her to speak publicly about what she went through. “I don’t know how else to get attention, but this needs to change.”

Statton wants to try and ensure no one else has the same experience.

This is ridiculous:

Oklahoma has three overlapping abortion bans, with different and sometimes contradictory definitions and exceptions. A study published Tuesday along with a commentary in the Lancet medical journal shows hospitals all over Oklahoma are struggling to interpret the laws and create policies that comply with the state’s abortion bans. The resulting confusion is having dangerous consequences for women like Statton.

“Simulated patient” survey

In the study, the Center for Reproductive Rights, Oklahoma Call for Reproductive Justice and Physicians for Human Rights surveyed 34 hospitals around the state. Researchers found that most hospitals could not provide any information about their policies or procedures or explain what support would be provided to doctors who determine that an abortion is necessary to save a patient’s life.

To conduct the research, several young women called 34 hospitals in the state with a script, saying they were pregnant for the first time, trying to decide which Oklahoma hospital to go to for care, and wanting to understand the hospital’s policies and processes for providing abortions if pregnancy complications arose. “It’s called the ‘secret shopper’ methodology – we called it a ‘simulated patient’ methodology,” says Dr. Michele Heisler, professor at the University of Michigan and medical director of Physicians for Human Rights, who is one of the study’s authors.

“What we hadn’t anticipated is what we found – the confusion, the contradictory statements, the misinformation,” Heisler says. “Three of the 34 hospitals said they’d just never provide abortions,” for example, even though there are exceptions written into the laws. Four hospitals said doctors needed to go through an approval process to be able to provide a medically necessary abortion, and 14 hospitals provided unclear answers about whether there was such an approval process.

The Oklahoma State Board of Medical Licensure provided guidance in September for doctors in the state on how to navigate the abortion bans, but declined NPR’s interview request, citing ongoing litigation. Oklahomans for Life, an anti-abortion rights advocacy group, did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

“The woman’s body as an incubator”

Heisler warns that it can’t be said that this research shows definitively that Oklahoma hospitals do not have clear policies or guidance on how to apply these abortion laws, only that those policies were not available to the simulated patients who tried to get that information.

“I think one of the most frightening statements, which was at one of the hospitals, the person was trying to be reassuring and she said, ‘Oh, well, you know, in the case of a medical emergency, we would try to use the woman’s body as an incubator to just try to keep the pregnancy going as long as possible,'” Heisler says.

“Nobody should blame the hospitals,” she adds. “They’ve been put in an untenable situation.”

Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt pledged to sign “every piece of pro-life legislation that came across my desk.” He has kept that promise. One of the three Oklahoma abortion bans comes with criminal penalties including felony charges and up to five years in prison for anyone who administers, prescribes, or “advises” a woman on an abortion. The stakes for interpreting the laws correctly are high for doctors and hospitals.

One big issue is how to understand the exception for when someone’s life is in danger. The state Supreme Court ruled in late March that abortions must be allowed when a patient’s life is in danger even if there is no medical emergency. The state legislature is also considering new exceptions to the abortion ban, and more court challenges are underway.

The incident where the Stattons were told to wait in the parking lot until Jaci’s condition became life threatening happened two weeks before Oklahoma’s state Supreme Court weighed in to clarify exceptions to the state’s bans.

In case you are wondering, as I did, what a morlar pregnancy is:

A molar pregnancy is a rare complication of pregnancy. It involves unusual growth of cells called trophoblasts. These cells typically become the organ that feeds a growing fetus. That organ also is known as the placenta.

There are two types of molar pregnancy — complete molar pregnancy and partial molar pregnancy. In a complete molar pregnancy, the placental tissue swells and appears to form fluid-filled cysts. There is no fetus.

In a partial molar pregnancy, the placenta might have both regular and irregular tissue. There may be a fetus, but the fetus can’t survive. The fetus usually is miscarried early in the pregnancy.

A molar pregnancy can have serious complications, including a rare form of cancer. A molar pregnancy requires early treatment.

Keep in mind that the doctors who suggested the patient travel to another state could be prosecuted for doing that under some of these laws.

Don’t tell me the underlying motive behind lunacy like this doesn’t stem from misogyny. They just don’t value women’s lives. It’s obvious. After all, you can always find another incubator. Fetuses are precious human life.

We know how he thinks:

Former Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll, testifying in her defamation and battery case against former President Donald Trump, described being “almost too frightened to think” during what she alleges was an attack by Trump in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s.

Carroll, who brought the lawsuit in November, alleges that Trump defamed her in a 2022 Truth Social post by calling her allegations “a Hoax and a lie” and saying “This woman is not my type!” when he denied her claim that Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room.

She added a charge of battery under a recently adopted New York law that allows adult survivors of sexual abuse to sue their alleged attacker regardless of the statute of limitations.MORE: Trump ‘lunged at her,’ E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer tells jury in battery, defamation case

“‘Hey, you’re that advice lady,'” Carroll said Trump told her when the two ran into each other near the store entrance. “I said, ‘You’re that real estate tycoon,'” Carroll recalled.

“I’m an advice columnist and here’s Donald Trump asking for advice helping to buy a present,” Carroll said. “I was delighted to go to [look at] lingerie with him.”

At that point, the tone of their conversation was “very joshing,” Carroll said. “He was having a good time and so was I.”

Carroll told the jury that Trump led her into a dressing room under the guise of trying on some lingerie.

“That door has plagued me for years because I just walked into it,” she said. “He immediately shut the door and shoved me up against the wall and shoved me so hard my head banged.”

“Were you afraid while all this was happening?” Ferrara asked.

“I was almost too frightened to think if I was afraid or not. My whole reason for being alive at that moment was to get out of that room,” answered Carroll, who said that Trump then raped her.

“I’m here because Donald Trump raped me,” Carroll said at the start of her testimony. “And when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen. He lied and shattered my reputation. And I’m here to try and get my life back.”

Trump has denied all allegations that he raped Carroll or defamed her.

Asked later in her testimony how she felt about entering the dressing room, Carroll answered, “It was very stupid. I know people have been through a lot worse than this, but it left me, it left me unable to have a romantic life again.”

Carroll told the jury she has had no romantic relationship since she was allegedly assaulted by Trump.

“I tried to engage him. I laughed at his jokes. I found him charming. And what happened to me when I was flirting? I got into serious trouble,” she testified on the trial’s second day.

“I’m a happy person but I’m aware I’ve lost out on one of the glorious experiences of a human being,” she testified, saying that flirting with Trump “ended up as the worst decision of my life.”

Carroll also testified that her second husband, John Johnson, strangled her on three occasions. She said that the violence was not sexual, and that she did not call the police and did not sue him.

Carroll told the jury that she first met Trump in 1987 — but she struggled to pinpoint the year that she alleges he raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store.MORE: In deposition, Trump mistook rape accuser E. Jean Carroll for his 2nd wife

“When do you believe Donald Trump assaulted you?” her attorney, Mike Ferrara, asked Carroll during her testimony Wednesday.

“This question, the when, the when, the date, has been something I’ve constantly trying to pin down,” Carroll said.

At first she said she thought it was 1994 or 1995, but she said her friend Lisa Birnbach published an article about Trump for New York magazine in February 1996.

“Lisa never would have gone down to Mar-a-Lago … if she knew what Donald Trump had done to me,” Carroll said, leading her to believe the alleged attack occurred in 1996.

In her opening statement, Carroll attorney Shawn Crowley suggested the lack of specificity doesn’t matter.

“While Ms. Carroll doesn’t remember exactly when this happened, she remembers almost every detail of what happened, and her testimony alone will be enough for you to find Donald Trump liable in this case,” Crowley said.

The defense told the jury those details matter.

“She can’t tell you the date that she claims to have been raped. She can’t tell you the month that she claims to have been raped. She can’t tell you the season. She can’t even tell you the year that she claims to have been raped by Donald Trump,” defense attorney Joe Tacopina said during his opening statement.

Earlier Wednesday, the jury heard from the former general manager at the Bergdorf Goodman women’s store.

Cheryl Beal, who worked for the department store in the mid-1990s, testified regarding the store’s layout, including the sixth floor where lingerie, couture brands and designer sportswear were sold, and where Carroll said Trump raped her in a dressing room while few, if any, people were around.

“It wasn’t one of our busiest floors,” Beal said.

Before the jury entered the courtroom, Carroll’s attorney read aloud parts of two social media posts by Trump that she said violated the judge’s orders.

On Truth Social Wednesday morning, Trump posted that Carroll’s legal team is being “financed by a big political donor that they said didn’t exist, only to get caught lying about that.”

He also posted regarding Carroll, “She said there was a dress, using the ol’ Monica Lewinsky ‘stuff,’ then she didn’t want to produce it.”

Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said the posts violated the court’s orders against “comments about lawyers and one about DNA.”

“These are out-of-court comments obviously,” said defense attorney Joe Tacopina, but Judge Lewis Kaplan cut him off, saying, “…where for two years he refused to give a DNA sample, and now wants it in the case.”

“What you’re trying to do is to get away from a statement by your client, a public statement, that on the face of it seems entirely inappropriate,” Kaplan told Tacopina.

Tacopina said he would address the posts with Trump.

“I will speak to my client and ask him to refrain from any posts about this case,” Tacopina said.

Kaplan said he hoped the lawyer was successful.

“We’re getting into an area in which your client may or may not be tampering with a new source of potential liability, and I think you know what I mean,” Kaplan said.

It remains unclear if Trump will testify himself at any point. The judge demanded to know this week whether Trump will appear, telling the defense that it was time to “fish or cut bait.”

The trial is expected to last about five days. The nine-member jury of six men and three women is weighing Carroll’s defamation and battery claims and deciding potential monetary damages.

There is story after story of Trump cornering unsuspecting women against the wall and assaulting them. It seems perfectly believable to me that in this circumstance he went the whole way. He probably did it to others too.

He believes “they let you do it, you can do anything, whatever you want.” We heard it in his own words.

Let every American prove they “deserve” their government benefits

Rep. Kat Cammack on Fox Business proposes work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid pic.twitter.com/kvtoNGc4uL

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 26, 2023

Paul Waldman on the noxious insistence that poor people must prove they are worthy of government help:

I'm not joking when I say Democrats should demand that everyone who takes the mortgage interest deduction, has a 529 account, or takes advantage of the special treatment of capital gains should have to document their work hours to the govt to prove they aren't lazy bums

Democrats are going to cave on this with some "compromise" because they're cowards, even though every one of them knows work requirements don't encourage work. They're a tool to humiliate people and find excuses to take away their health coverage and food assistance.

And yes, this is one of those cases where the vile GOP position has an intuitive appeal to those who don't understand the policy. But you can't win that argument if you don't engage it, and Democrats are too cowardly to engage it.

Which is why this is a simple way to engage it: "Work requirements for government benefits? Okay. Tell me why people who use the special tax treatment of capital gains shouldn't have to document their work hours to prove they aren't taking advantage of those of us who work hard?"

The fact that under our system, income from work is taxed at a higher rate than income from investments is abominable. Make those who claim they value work defend it. Make them say "Rich heirs who don't work shouldn't have to pay taxes." Because that's what they believe.

Originally tweeted by Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) on April 26, 2023.

That is obviously what they believe. Rich heirs are deserving of all the government largesse they can get. As Trump famously said, “that makes me smart…”

Trump is right! The debates will be totally RIGGED against Trump.

Trump haters Neil Cavuto and Brett Baer “moderating” the first debate? What a joke! They’d be just as bad as Chris Wallace was! pic.twitter.com/zogF83g0d4

— Alex Bruesewitz 🇺🇸 (@alexbruesewitz) April 25, 2023

That legal genius Jeffrey Clark, the coup plotter shared this fatuous thought last night on twitter”

@alexbruesewitz is right.

And with me having recently said that Biden not wanting to debate other Dem presidential candidates like RFK Jr. is disgraceful, let me say that I think President Trump is differently situated than President Biden.

I want to be clear especially before I start hearing the specious point that Biden not wanting to debate is the same as Trump not wanting to debate in 2024. It’s NOT the same.

Sure, major Dem candidates like Biden would get more time speaking than lesser-known candidates.

Dem debates will not be affairs where the MSM will be totally neutral. A Jay Inslee or a Tom Steyer will get less time than Biden, which favors Joe.

But none of the Dem candidates & certainly not Biden will be *affirmatively targeted* by the mainstream media for destruction.

As a result, Biden not debating is borne of a total lack of willingness to expose himself to small “d” democratic competition and let the American people, instead of Dem superdelegates, decide on that party’s presidential candidate.

It is also borne of trying to shield the American people from seeing more evidence of Biden’s cognitive decline.

President Trump, however, will be *targeted* at any debate the mainstream media hosts. As sure as night follows day.

Just like Megyn Kelly, Chris Wallace, Lester Holt, and Hugh Hewitt, for instance, had their knives out for Trump in the 2016 and 2020 debates at various stages of those contests.

There is NO need for Trump to expose himself to more Nights of the Stubby Short Knives wielded by media munchkins starting in August 2023.

No need at all.

Originally tweeted by Jeff Clark (@JeffClarkUS) on April 25, 2023.

This is the caliber of deep thinkers Trump put in the Justice Department and wanted to make Acting Attorney General to carry out his coup. A slow 6th grader could do better than that.

Cleta Mitchell’s ready to make voting harder anyway

“Kind of big deal…” tweets Rick Wilson about Lauren Windsor’s latest Cleta Mitchell recording drop. The Trump attorney and Ginni Thomas ally is on public record (now) as saying she’s seen no proof that the 2020 election was hacked, at least via Dominion voting equipment.

“I’m ready for somebody to bring me the proof. And I haven’t had that,” she says.

Nothing yet on whether Mitchell still believes lots of dead people voted. “We’re going to be finding people have voted across state lines, voted in two states, illegal voting, noncitizens and that sort of thing,” she said after Donald Trump lost reelection in 2020. Mitchell was on Trump’s infamous “11,780 votes” call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. She’s been subpoenaed by both federal special counsel Jack Smith and by a Fulton County, Georgia grand jury over her efforts in support of Trump.

“The Left has manipulated the electoral systems to favor one side … theirs,” she wrote in a written presentation. “Our constitutional republic’s survival is at stake.” Among her objections is states instituting early voting:

Republicans have claimed that lax ID requirements — such as allowing college identification or mail voting where no ID is required — open the door for voter fraud. But they have produced no evidence of widespread fraud — and experts say that’s because it doesn’t happen.

EXCLUSIVE: At the RNC Spring Retreat, Cleta Mitchell, a Trump atty working to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, told donors she never saw any proof that there was voter fraud with the voting machines:

"I'm ready for somebody to bring me the proof. And I haven't had that." pic.twitter.com/hsmsPnzYME

— Lauren Windsor (@lawindsor) April 26, 2023

I’ve stated my opinion on hacked elections before:

For months after Ohio went for Bush in 2004, allegations flew that the election had been stolen there. People cited statistical anomalies found in studies and totals diverging from exit polls. Rumors flew of voting machines vulnerable to hacking. But that’s different from proving they were hacked. The distributed nature of America’s election system makes manipulation both difficult to pull off and to conceal. Too many people need to be involved.

Get back to me, I said, when you have a live perp who confesses and had the means, motive, and opportunity to do it. I’m still waiting.

Blaming the machines would be too simple, Mitchell complains. “It’s [Democrats have] changed the system. That’s what they’ve done over the last decade and we have to change it back.” That is, to making voting harder.

Meanwhile, over that last decade, they (Republicans) have further gerrymandered the U.S. House and state legislative districts across the country, enacted limitations on voter registration, absentee ballots and drop boxes, passed photo ID requirements that disproportionately impact Democratic voting groups, and more.

Republicans are very selective about what changes to the system they find acceptable where the free exercise of democracy and citizens choosing their own leaders are concerned.

Ethics rules are for lesser beings

Citing “separation of powers,” and all that, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts respectfully declines a request to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to address ethics issues with his court:

In an accompanying statement on ethics practices, all nine justices, under mounting pressure for more stringent reporting requirements at the court, insisted that the existing rules around gifts, travel and other financial disclosures are sufficient.

The chief justice wrote that such appearances before the committee were “exceedingly rare, as one might expect in light of separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence.”

Last week, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and chairman of the committee, invited the chief justice to appear after revelations of unreported gifts, travel and real estate deals between Justice Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire and Republican donor.

ProPublica opened that can of worms this month:

Justice Thomas had joined Mr. Crow on luxury trips for nearly 20 years, including flights on his private jet to an exclusive all-male retreat in Northern California, a vacation aboard his superyacht in Indonesia and stays at Mr. Crow’s 105-acre lakeside resort in the Adirondack Mountains. None appeared on the financial disclosure forms Justice Thomas filed each year.

Justice Thomas also failed to report a real estate deal with Mr. Crow. In 2014, a real estate company linked to Mr. Crow bought the house where Justice Thomas’s mother lives in Savannah, Georgia, along with two vacant lots along the same street. Mr. Crow paid $133,363 to the justice and his family for the property, according to records filed at Chatham County courthouse dated Oct. 15, 2014. The justice’s mother, Leola Williams, still lives in the home now owned by Mr. Crow.

Durbin delivered his invitation before Politico revealed on April 25 that nine days after receiving his 2017 lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch received an offer for land he co-owned in Granby, Colo. The buyer was the “chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s biggest law firms with a robust practice before the high court,” Politico reported:

He and his wife closed on the house a month later, paying $1.825 million, according to a deed in the county’s record system. Gorsuch, who held a 20 percent stake, reported making between $250,001 and $500,000 from the sale on his federal disclosure forms.

Gorsuch did not disclose the identity of the purchaser. That box was left blank.

Since then, Greenberg Traurig has been involved in at least 22 cases before or presented to the court, according to a POLITICO review of the court’s docket.

Roberts’ letter is also dated April 25, the same day as Politico’s 04:30 AM EDT report on the Gorsuch land deal. It’s not clear whether he would have read Politico’s reporting before dispatching his letter to Durbin, but one would like to think it might have given him pause to rethink his position if he had. Durbin might have asked about that timing, but now won’t have the chance pending a more compelling invitation from the Senate.

Appearance of impropriety, and all that? Not my concern, says Roberts.

Watchdog Fix the Court’s Gabe Roth responds:

Chief Justice Roberts’ statement is nowhere near an appropriate response to the ethical failures of the current Court.

After years of scandals and lapses, Americans had been seeking some reassurance that nine of the most powerful people in the country understood their responsibility to act above board, avoid corrupting influences and be honest in their dealings and disclosures.

No such comfort comes today.

Roberts here is demonstrating a profound ineptitude to rise to the occasion, and our country is worse for it.

We once worried about abuses of “the imperial presidency.” Those concerns have not abated, and have indeed grown more worrisome in the wake of Sept. 11 and Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election. Now we have to concern ourselves as well with an imperial Supreme Court.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes reacts, “A conservative justice could sit on the front steps of the court with a big BRIBE ME sign, accepting duffel bags of cash and you still wouldn’t have 16 GOP votes to impeach.”

What's unstated here is the current reality: unless you can get 67 votes in the senate justices can do quite literally anything they want. https://t.co/ZW84LpAG4l

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) April 26, 2023

But right now? A conservative justice could sit on the front steps of the court with a big BRIBE ME sign, accepting duffel bags of cash and you still wouldn't have 16 GOP votes to impeach.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) April 26, 2023

Neither does right wing chutzpah:

The ghost of the Confederacy hangs heavily over the Tennessee Legislature.

Justin Jones, one of two Black members expelled from the state’s House of Representatives in April 2023, had run afoul of House leadership before. In 2019, as a private citizen, he was arrested following his actions in protesting a bust in the state capitol honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and later Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

While the expulsion of Jones and his colleague, Justin J. Pearson, riveted the nation’s attention, a curious and related event in the Legislature’s other branch, the Tennessee Senate, passed nearly unnoticed.

On Feb. 3, 2023, two state senators issued a formal proclamation commemorating April 2023 as and encouraging “all Tennesseans to increase their knowledge of this momentous era in the history of this State.”

One of the signers is Senate Speaker Randy McNally, who is also the state’s lieutenant governor; the other is Sen. Mark Pody from Lebanon. Though not considered in legislative session and not listed on the Legislature’s website, the proclamation holds an official stature: It was issued on Senate stationery and stamped with the Tennessee state seal.

The proclamation’s wording closely follows that of a proclamation issued by Virginia’s Gov. Robert McDonnell in April 2010, with one striking exception. McDonnell’s proclamation in final form included a paragraph, inserted after protests to an earlier version, stating “that it is important for all Virginians to understand that the institution of slavery led to this war.”

The Tennessee proclamation, which includes eight introductory clauses celebrating “the cause of Southern liberty,” says nothing of slavery at all. Rather, it declares that Confederates conducted “a four-year heroic struggle for states’ rights, individual freedom, local government control, and a determined struggle for deeply held beliefs.”

These people are obsessed with racism and bigotry. They can’t think of anything else. It seems to be what gives their lives meaning.

If you have any question as to whether DeSantis is fit to be president of the United States, his decision to hire this man should answer it. He either did it because he actually believes that the COVID vaccines are dangerous, which makes him a moron or he did it out of a cynical desire to appeal to anti-vax voters. Either way, it was a disgraceful decision and should disqualify him from ever having higher office of any kind:

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo personally altered a state-driven study about Covid-19 vaccines last year to suggest that some doses pose a significantly higher health risk for young men than had been established by the broader medical community, according to a newly obtained document.

Ladapo’s changes, released as part of a public records request, presented the risks of cardiac death to be more severe than previous versions of the study. He later used the final document in October to bolster disputed claims that Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were dangerous to young men.

The surgeon general, a well-known Covid-19 vaccine skeptic, faced a backlash from the medical community after he made the assertions, which go against guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and American Academy of Pediatrics. But Ladapo’s statements aligned well with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ stance against mandatory Covid-19 vaccination.

Researchers with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and University of Florida, who viewed Ladapo’s edits on the study and have followed the issue closely, criticized the surgeon general for making the changes. One said it appears Ladapo altered the study out of political — not scientific — concerns.

“I think it’s a lie,” Matt Hitchings, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida, said of Ladapo’s assertion that the Covid-19 vaccine causes cardiac death in young men. “To say this — based on what we’ve seen, and how this analysis was made — it’s a lie.”

The newly released draft of the eight-page study, provided by the Florida Department of Health, indicates that it initially stated that there was no significant risk associated with the Covid-19 vaccines for young men. But “Dr. L’s Edits,” as the document is titled, reveal that Ladapo replaced that language to say that men between 18 and 39 years old are at high risk of heart illness from two Covid vaccines that use mRNA technology.

“Results from the stratified analysis for cardiac related death following vaccination suggests mRNA vaccination may be driving the increased risk in males, especially among males aged 18-39,” Ladapo wrote in the draft. “The risk associated with mRNA vaccination should be weighed against the risk associated with COVID-19 infection.”

In a statement to POLITICO, Ladapo said revisions and refinements are a normal part of assessing surveillance data and that he has the appropriate expertise and training to make those decisions.

“To say that I ‘removed an analysis’ for a particular outcome is an implicit denial of the fact that the public has been the recipient of biased data and interpretations since the beginning of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine campaign,” he said. “I have never been afraid of disagreement with peers or media.”

He also said that he determined the study was worthwhile since “the federal government and Big Pharma continue to misrepresent risks associated with these vaccines.”

The DeSantis administration referred questions to Florida’s Department of Health.

Ladapo, a Harvard-trained doctor who held professorships at UCLA and NYU, specializes in cardiovascular diseases and gained attention nationally during the pandemic after he authored op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today questioning the safety of Covid-19 vaccines and the effectiveness of mask-wearing and lockdowns.

He was also a supporter of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that former President Donald Trump often praised as a treatment for Covid. The FDA later withdrew emergency authorization for its use.

Ladapo was picked by DeSantis in September 2021 to become the state’s surgeon general as DeSantis waged war against President Joe Biden’s Covid-related restrictions and ordered the state to ban mask-wearing requirements in schools and employer-issued vaccine mandates.

This man may be a qualified cardiovascular doctor but he’s also got a terrible case of Fox News brain rot and should not be anywhere near patients, public health or anything else until he gets treatment for it.