Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, privately heaped praise on a major religious-rights group for fighting efforts to reform the nation’s highest court — efforts sparked, in large part, by her husband’s ethical lapses.
Thomas expressed her appreciation in an email sent to Kelly Shackelford, an influential litigator whose clients have won cases at the Supreme Court. Shackelford runs the First Liberty Institute, a $25 million-a-year organization that describes itself as “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.”
Shackelford read Thomas’ email aloud on a July 31 private call with his group’s top donors.
Thomas wrote that First Liberty’s opposition to court-reform proposals gave a boost to certain judges. According to Shackelford, Thomas wrote in all caps: “YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH.”
Shackelford said he saw Thomas’ support as evidence that judges, who “can’t go out into the political sphere and fight,” were thankful for First Liberty’s work to block Supreme Court reform. “It’s neat that, you know, those of you on the call are a part of protecting the future of our court, and they really appreciate it,” he said.
These many “judges” she speaks of must be the corrupt wingnuts on the Supreme Court since all other judges already have to adhere to an ethics code. Only her husband and his cronies aren’t subject to one.
It’s interesting that a religious liberty organization is weighing in on this. I guess Jesus was in favor of judicial corruption.
You’d think that Ginni would keep a low profile since she’s been exposed as a right wing provocateur and coup plotter. Then again, why? Nothing will ever come of it. She’s teflon and so is her husband. They do what they want. It’s yet another sad illustration of the fact that our system requires people of integrity to run it and if they fail, it requires people of integrity to police it. It’s not working out.
This Frontline feature on Clarence and Ginni is worth watching if you haven’t seen it:
Just hours after the assassination attempt against Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, high-profile allies of the ex-president began promoting unfounded conspiracy theories and blaming President Joe Biden and Democrats, without evidence, for causing the horrific attack. Trump and his surrogates have continued nonstopever since with this coordinated messaging, which security experts have told me could provoke retaliatory violence from pro-Trump extremists. In late August, backers of Project 2025 joined the effort pushing this dangerous propaganda.
On Aug. 29, podcast host Monica Crowley interviewed Trump and proposed without evidence that he may have been targeted for murder from within the Biden administration.
“The more we see what happened that day, the more suspicious it all looks,” said Crowley, a former Trump administration spokesperson and a credited contributor on the Project 2025 policy tome detailing a hard-right agenda for a second Trump presidency. “Does it look increasingly to you like this was a suspicious—maybe even inside job?”
“Well, it’s strange,” Trump replied. Then he speculated about the deceased gunman’s father hiring “the most expensive lawyer” and suggested a partisan conspiracy involving former Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann and Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias. Weissmann quickly denounced Trump’s comments as false on social media. A spokesperson for Elias Law Group told me that no one from the firm has had any involvement in any aspect of the case.
Trump further claimed in the podcast interview, first reported by Media Matters for America, that the FBI had failed to gather evidence from the gunman’s cellphone. That’s untrue: FBI Director Christopher Wray and other FBI officials have spoken publicly about the bureau’s extensive investigation into the gunman’s background and activity, including his various digital communications.
Trump and Crowley then riffed about the JFK assassination, with Crowley reiterating the baseless conspiracy theory about the attack on Trump: “You were shot five or six weeks ago, and the imperial media, the regime, they’ve all buried it. They don’t want anybody talking about it, which also lends credence to this idea that this is very suspicious and could have been an inside job.”
“Yeah, true,” Trump interjected. “They don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Of course not,” she said.
“Tells you bad things,” Trump said, starting to draw a connection with the broader conspiracy theory at the core of his campaign.
This will be an article of faith before the election. There’s no way Trump can accept that it was just some young would-be mass shooter Republican kid. It has to be a conspiracy.
We all know old guys like him and the women who love them. There are a lot of them. And plenty of young ones too. His condescending appeal that he’s “done more for the Blacks” than any other president makes my head explode. What is he, Lady Bountiful distributing some leftovers from the castle kitchen to the peasants?
He’s a racist and a misogynist and a raging xenophobe. We know tht, of course, but it’s good to be reminded.
Donald Trump is pressuring Republicans to shut down the government at the end of this month if Congress doesn’t pass a GOP-backed proposal to establish new election rules nationwide.
Trump has called on Republicans in Congress to link funding the government with the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to vote — in a bid to target non-citizen voting, which is already illegal. And House Republican leaders are considering adopting the strategy and picking a fight with Democrats.
The deadline to fund the government is Sept. 30. The GOP-led House and Democratic-led Senate have to agree on how to move forward in order to prevent a shutdown, and Democrats have decried the SAVE Act as a poison pill.
“I would shut down the government in a heartbeat if they don’t get it,” Trump said on the “Monica Crowley Show” last week.
“It should be in the bill. And if it’s not in the bill, you want to close it up,” he said. “So I’m not there but, you know, I have influence.”
He oversaw the longest shutdown in history when he was president and learned absolutely nothing.
This is being pushed from the inside by Freedom Caucus types led by Chip Roy of Texas who thinks this is some kind of magic bullet that will help them keep the House. Apparently, they think that the country will turn on the Democrats once they learn that they are refusing to pass a bill making it illegal for undocumented migrants to vote — even though it’s already illegal. Trump, of course, thinks this will strengthen his case that the election was stolen which is all he cares about.
I don’t think they’re going to shut down in the middle of an election. It’s risky and they don’t have time to play games down in Washington when control of the House is so precarious. But you never know. They’re just that nuts.
Trump kitsch is the worst American politics has ever produced, by far. From golden statues to t-shirts to murals and beyond it is the most gawdawful dreck ever made. Books will be written about it, graduate theses will be based on it. In fact there should be a museum dedicated to it someday, just so we don’t ever forget it.
This latest painting may be the worst:
MAGA artist says he just won the election for Trump with his new painting: “500 years from now, that is going to be the new Mona Lisa. The painting that the world speaks of. Because this painting is going to change the course of this election.” pic.twitter.com/QnGFaSf8h2
Here it is. It’s called “We Did It Joe” depicting Biden in a dunce cap in the corner, a nuclear explosion and Kamala Harris wearing a hammer and sickle grinning maniacally while eating the innards of a bald eagle:
I’m just going to leave that there because the NY Times Nicholas Kristof tells me that I need to stop demeaning the Trump followers. It’s not nice.
One of the articles of faith about the 2020 election among the MAGA crowd is that Joe Biden couldn’t possibly have won the election because he “campaigned from his basement” and never spoke before the big crowds as Donald Trump did. Biden didn’t campaign from his basement, of course, but he did run a very non-traditional campaign because the whole country was under a modified lockdown due to the COVID 19 pandemic. Large indoor gatherings that did take place, such as the one Trump held in Tulsa during the summer were super-spreader events that ended up with many people getting sick and some dying. That fall, Donald Trump himself showed up at a presidential debate knowingly infected and he soon ended up in the hospital and came close to dying himself.
Unlike Trump, Biden followed the advice of the scientists and they found ways to campaign without exposing themselves and the public unnecessarily. Despite all that, Trump and the right wing media insisted that Biden must have cheated because he didn’t barnstorm all over the country.
So what are we to make of the fact that in this campaign Trump can barely rouse himself to leave his cushy surroundings at Mar-a-lago and is more likely to be found on the golf course than giving a speech or holding a rally. Sure, does that but at a much slower pace than he did in his first two campaigns. He’s doing some non-traditional media, appearing on podcasts and giving interviews over the phone or at Mar-a-lago and he’s appeared at some right wing media confabs and made a foray to a plant in Pennsylvania last week. But the events are few and far between compared to the past.
He even skipped the traditional labor day blitz that every presidential candidate does as the kick-off to the fall campaign. Even if they have nothing positive to say about unions, Republican candidates always take advantage of the fact that people have a day off and are waking up to the fact that the campaign has begun. They usually fly around to various venues and hold rallies or show up at the state fair, as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz did on Monday.
Trump did nothing. He didn’t hold even one public event and while UPI reported that he was to hold a video call with current and retired members of the United Auto Workers I can find no record of it happening. His only campaign event this whole week isn’t scheduled until Saturday in Wisconsin.
As mentioned, he is doing media but even that is far less energetic that what we’re used to seeing from him. Last night he did an obscure X interview show and seemed desultory and depressed. If it was anyone else I would have thought he’d popped a Xanax before he went on. And the rallies he is doing are boring rehashes of the same old tunes.
One could almost say that Trump is campaigning from his basement. The question is, why? He knows what it takes to campaign for president. It’s been his life’s work for the past decade.
I might guess that he’s still very spooked by the assassination attempt and is resistant to going before the public. I can’t say that I would blame him. It was a very close call and it would freak anyone out. (He would never admit that, of course.) Or maybe it’s just that his heart isn’t really in it now that he thinks the Supreme Court has given him a get-out-of-jail-free card with its immunity ruling.
It’s also possible that his age has caught up with him and he just doesn’t have the “strength and the stamina” to campaign properly anymore. It certainly appeared that way in the interview on X last night and the Moms for Liberty appearance a few days back. He has never looked so frail — and some of the things he is saying are simply delusional. For instance, at the Moms for Liberty gathering he made insane claims that schools are performing transgender surgery on kids:
Trump says, "Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days late with an operation."
I'll give CashApp $1000 to anyone that shows proof of a middle school or high school that operated on a child and changed their gender.pic.twitter.com/McG4wakYTz
Before Biden withdrew there was a lot of loose talk coming from the campaign that Democratic states like New Jersey and New Mexico were in play. That was always hype but they were extremely confident that they had the election in the bag. Today, not so much.
The Boston Globe reported that a top volunteer in New Hampshire had informed the staff that the campaign had determined that the state is no longer a battleground state. (That volunteer has been fired.)
And AdImpact, which tracks political advertising released some startling numbers on Monday:
Reservations in Presidential Battlegrounds#PAPol:🔵$70.8M🔴$70.6M#GAPol:🔵$39M🔴$38.7M#MIPol:🔵$55.2M🔴$6.6M#AZPol:🔵$34.9M🔴$9.9M#WIPol:🔵$33.1M🔴$3.5M#NCPol:🔵$26M🔴$2.8M#NVPol:🔵$19.5M🔴$1.4M Omaha market: 🔵$7M🔴$0
You will notice that the Trump campaign is only competing in Pennsylvania and Georgia. All the other swing states are apparently being left to their own devices. This is surprising to say the least. They do have less money to play with than the Democrats but you’d think they’d at least try to hedge their bets. But the consensus is that they have decided that if they can hold all their 2020 states they will put all their money on picking up those two states which will bring them to exactly 270. If they lose either one (or N. Carolina) that’s the ballgame.
Just as likely they’re really just planning on a post election legal challenge in any or all of those states, claiming that the Democrats stole the election. You can certainly bet they’ll do it in Pennsylvania and Georgia where they are already plotting with local officials. Trump himself has said repeatedly that “our primary focus is not to get out the vote, it is to make sure they don’t cheat.”
If they can find a way to throw the election to the House, as they wanted to do in 2020, they will win and I kind of suspect that Trump would actually prefer to do it that way. It’s the ultimate power play, to make the Democrats lose through a post-election ploy that’s engineered by Trump and his cronies. In his twisted mind, I think that would even validate his Big Lie.
All of this probably explains why Trump isn’t really bothering to campaign much. He’ll spend some time in Pennsylvania and Georgia and make some perfunctory stops in some of the other swing states just to keep it close enough to contest. He’ll keep doing right wing media, the purpose of which is as much to keep his followers charged up about the alleged stealing as anything else. But unless he wins those two big states, which he might, he’s really preparing for the post election Big Lie Part II. He’s old and tired and at this point I think he’d rather whine than win.
Michael Podhorzer offers a thread of observations on why unions are gaining public approval where other institutions are losing it:
You may have heard that public support for unions “has been increasing”—but you probably haven’t heard just how big a deal that is in the context of the last 15 years. Since the Great Recession, we’ve seen the credibility of, and approval for, just about every major institution plummet—yet we’ve seen support for unions substantially increase.
Why is this happening? I call it the “fuck yeah factor.” A lot of us who strongly support unions already have at least some agency in our working lives (like good pay and benefits, the ability to telecommute, and so on). We might read about a successful UAW strike and think, “Yay! Good for them!”
That’s not the experience of most working-class people in America, especially if they do not belong to a union. They and their peers often have little or no agency in their work life—unpredictable schedules, no paid leave, dangerous working conditions, and the ever present threat of being fired at will.
When they see other working-class people like them standing up to their bosses and winning, it’s a game-changer. They don’t think, “Yay! Good for them!” They think, “Fuck yeah! I want that too!”
The “fuck yeah” factor is exactly what scares plutocrats like Musk and Trump the most. It’s the seed of social proof that blossoms into meaningful solidarity and powerful collective action.
As Frederick Douglass famously said, “power concedes nothing without a demand” – and a true “demand” is much more than, say, a preference revealed on an issue poll.
Entrenched power will only respond to demands that are wielded by a countervailing power. For ordinary people, that means collective power.
To be clear, voting is an essential democratic freedom, but it’s not the collective power I’m talking about.
Voting is like going to a restaurant and choosing between entrees on the menu. Collective power is like sitting at the table deciding what’s on the menu.
The Great Recession taught America’s nuevo poor a valuable and painful lesson, one former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm cast bluntly at the DNC convention in 2012 in attacking Mitt Romney, Republicans’ presidential candidate:
He loves our cars so much, they have their own elevator. But the people who design, build, and sell those cars?
Well, in Romney’s world, the cars get the elevator; the workers get the shaft.
She didn’t have to tell them. They lived it. The contrast in 2024 is even starker, writes Podhorzer:
On one side: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris walking the picket line with striking UAW workers, and Harris launching her campaign in Milwaukee declaring her support for the freedom of working people to join unions. On the other side: Trump and Elon Musk gleefully cackling about firing striking workers, as Musk and other plutocratic Trump supporters hope for the Federalist Society (FedSoc) Supreme Court justices to declare the entire NLRB, if not collective bargaining itself, unconstitutional. As this post will show, their hostility to unions is a prerequisite for the success of their broader political project.
Unions are one of the two institutions left with equalizing power for ordinary people. The other is evangelical churches that have “taken over the Republican Party and fueled the MAGA movement.”
Podhorzer cautions:
If you (like many Americans) think Project 2025 is just a right-wing extremist fantasy that can never become law, think again. Many of its wishlist items have already been enacted in RTW states, such as banning abortion, eliminating DEI programs, and undermining the independence of our elections. Trump can try to distance himself from Project 2025 all he wants, but there’s no question that he and Vance are deeply linked with it, both in terms of personnel and ideology, and that Project 2025 is likely to serve as a playbook for a Trump-Vance administration.
Unions as democratic institutions help ordinary workers offset the power of the power-hungry. When they win against the growing strength of America’s oligarchs, unions “fuck yeah” inspire others to want some of that. Social proof. Not simply “what do people like me think?” but “what do people like me do?”
As in, “I’ll have what she’s having.” Americans love to see the little guy win against the powerful. And the powerful have won quite a lot in the 21st century. Unions are growing in public favor because they demonstrate we don’t have to live in a world of, by, and for plutocrats.
One of many famous quotes from the G.W. Bush administration was by National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. “No one could have imagined” an enemy using a plane as a missile and slamming it into our buildings, she told reporters. Except novelist Tom Clancy imagined a terrorist flying a passenger jet into the U.S. Capitol in “Debt of Honor” in 1994.
Rice later admitted to Congress that in fact people inside the government had imagined it, that “there were these reports in 1998 and 1999” she only learned about later. The Bush administration looked even worse when the President’s Daily Brief from 6 August 2001, headlined “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” was made public.
Signs are even clearer today that Donald J. Trump and his MAGA minions are determined to strike at the heart of the United States government should he win reelection and establish permanent minority rule where U.S. democracy once stood. He’s not only admitted wanting to use the levers of executive power to exact retribution against political enemies, Just Security documents he’s done it before “at least a dozen times.”
Trump has a history. He’s even more explicit today about weaponizing the Department of Justice and the military in a second term against any who dared hold him accountable for actual crimes.
Just Security admits it did not document similar efforts by the Biden administration for one simple reason: “because there is no evidence that he or anyone at the White House ever took similar actions.”
Don’t you dare
If we allow Trump to be reelected, we, all of us, have no excuse for saying no one could have imagined that the MAGA godfather would actually do what he said, and the authors of Project 2025 have put into print. Lists of prospective Trump II administration employees are being assembled even now. Their plan is to gut the U.S. Civil Service, replace experienced, dedicated public servants they’ve demonized for decades with people whose primary qualification is being MAGA loyalists. When Trump says jump, they’ll say (with tears in their eyes), “Sir, how high?”
His brain trust’s idea of making America great again is a place where life is poor, nasty, brutish, and short for everyone (in their view) not born to rule and plunder.
Donald Trump “has no conception or understanding of the concept of public service. He views public life and even the presidency as an opportunity to personally enrich himself, at the literal expense of the American people and the country as a whole.” He’ll emulate the autocrats he admires, arrest his enemies, loot and coopt public resources, maybe even raid the national treasury in the grand tradition of world’s most notorious autocrats. And he’ll do it under legal protections granted by the conservative Supreme Court majority he appointed in his first term. You have been warned.
Even the people who win the award will receive it and hustle back to their jobs before anyone has a chance to get to know them — and before elected officials ask for their spotlight back. Even their nominations feel modest. Never I did this, but we did this. Never look at me, but look at this work! Never a word about who these people are or where they come from or why it ever occurred to them to bother. Nothing to change the picture in your head when you hear the word “bureaucrat.” Nothing to arouse curiosity about them, or lead you to ask what they do, or why they do it.
They were the carrots in the third-grade play. Our elected officials — the kids who bludgeon the teachers for attention and wind up cast as the play’s lead — use them for their own narrow purposes. They take credit for the good they do. They blame them when things go wrong. The rest of us encourage this dubious behavior. We never ask: Why am I spending another minute of my life reading about and yapping about Donald Trump or Kamala Harris when I know nothing about the 2 million or so federal employees and their possibly lifesaving work that whoever is president will be expected to nurture, or at least not screw up? Even the Partnership seems to sense the futility in trying to present civil servants as characters with voices needing to be heard.
Geeks, essentially.
Lewis this week profiles Christopher Mark, who has spent his career in “the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States.” A former coal miner himself, he earned a Ph.D. in rock mechanics from Penn State and went to work for the U.S. Bureau of Mines.
“As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, the notorious communist.
Mark just wanted to keep miners safe. He solved problems for the fun and challenge of it, and the only place to solve problems like these was in government service. Is it any wonder the modern conservative and guys like Trump find such characters suspect?
Trump: We have the enemy outside which would be the very standard countries. We have the enemy from within. The people who go around indicting their political opponents, especially when their political opponent didn’t want to do it to them. I could’ve done it so easy. pic.twitter.com/kdG7LwNO5T
The long line there was the Special Counsel he had Bill Barr name to “investigate the investigators” — the Durham investigation. Like all the others they came to nothing because there was nothing.
He, on the other hand, tried to overturn an election and incited an insurrection and then stole a bunch of classified documents and refused to give them back.
The leader of House Republicans’ biggest super PAC told donors last month he needed $35 million more to compete with Democrats in the fall. Senate GOP campaign chair Steve Daines used his primetime speaking slot at the Republican convention to lament that massive spending from Democrats was keeping him awake at night. And his House GOP counterpart warned that their party’s challengers trailed Democratic incumbents by a collective $37 million at the end of June.
Republicans were already worried about a glaring financial gap even before Kamala Harris’ rise. Now, with the election just two months away, they found themselves in an even more dire position: Democrats have seen a flood of enthusiasm in recent weeks, they’re far outspending Republicans on air and their donors are more energized than ever — with campaign finance data showing a surge in grassroots fundraising in late July after President Joe Biden dropped out.
Panic is starting to set in.
“The only thing preventing us from having a great night in November is the massive financial disparity our party currently faces,” said Jason Thielman, the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “We are on a trajectory to win the majority, but unless something changes drastically in the next six weeks, we will lose winnable seats.”
Why in the world should they need money? Well. the guy at the top of the ticket is milking the donors for his own purposes.
Here’s one of them:
President Trump announces his NEW Digital Trading Cards- America First. Buy just 15 cards and get a piece of his “KNOCKOUT” Debate Suit. Buy just 75 cards or more and have a Gala Dinner with the President! Don't Miss Out! https://t.co/vrpHbxyrFGpic.twitter.com/TUYFLLD76f
He spends most of the campaign funds he receives on his own properties and legal fees. They have few offices or staff in most of the swing states. They aren’t making the huge ad buys everyone assumed they would.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee plan to transfer nearly $25 million to support down-ballot Democratic candidates in state and federal races this year, a significant boost to those efforts following record fundraising for her campaign this summer.
“If we want a future where every American’s rights are protected, not taken away; where the middle class is strengthened, not hollowed out; and a country where our democracy is preserved, not ripped apart, every race this November matters,” Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement Tuesday. “The Vice President believes that this race is about mobilizing the entire country, in races at every level, to fight for our freedoms and our economic opportunity.”
Big difference. Huge.
Trump cares about nothing but himself. They know this and yet they just can’t quit him.
