Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The fact that a criminal is still the favorite candidate of law enforcement around the country says something profoundly disturbing about our system:

Ever since Donald J. Trump issued a series of pardons and commutations as he left office, he and his allies have defended his administration’s vetting of clemency candidates, claiming they went through a vigorous screening process.

But the case of one of those convicts — a New York drug dealer and predatory lender named Jonathan Braun, who had a history of violence and faced an array of other legal problems — has stood out and raised doubts about how rigorous the vetting was.

On Tuesday, the police on Long Island arrested Mr. Braun after he allegedly punched his 75-year-old father-in-law in the head. Mr. Braun struck his father-in-law twice as he tried to protect his daughter from Mr. Braun, who was chasing after her while the couple had an argument in their home, according to the Nassau County District Attorney’s office.

Mr. Braun’s wife, according to court documents, told police that Mr. Braun had assaulted her twice in the past five weeks. On July 17, the court documents said, Mr. Braun threw his wife off a bed onto the floor, “causing her substantial pain and bruising her legs.”

Last week, on Aug. 12, Mr. Braun threw her to the floor and punched her in the head multiple times “causing her substantial pain, bruising” to her arms, legs and head and causing her to feel dizzy, the documents said.

[…]

Asked about the arrest, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said the former president “wants criminals to spend time behind bars.” She did not respond to a follow-up question about whether Mr. Trump regretted giving Mr. Braun clemency.

[…]

Mr. Braun was among a parade of convicts who used connections, money and influence to seek pardons from Mr. Trump, who ran an often ad hoc process for considering clemency requests, largely bypassing an established Justice Department system.

In the final months of the Trump administration, while Mr. Braun was in a federal prison in New York State, Mr. Braun’s family made contact with the father of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser, to try to get a commutation request before Mr. Trump. Mr. Kushner’s White House office ultimately drafted the language used in the news release to announce the commutation of Mr. Braun and others.

Kushner’s father is also a convicted felon so I guess this makes sense. Just a bunch of cons sticking together.

Apparently, Braun had a long history of violence and had been sued as a predatory lender. When Trump commuted his sentence he was supposed to be cooperating in a big predatory lending case that fell apart once he was set free.

It was just another day in the Law and Order president’s administration.

Oh my. https://t.co/tgScKn2nIx

— Wegner’s Groceries (@grocerieswegner) August 23, 2024

He’s always been bad. But he IS getting worse.

And just look at his running mate:

The difference is just staggering. pic.twitter.com/9JUXk5izDG

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) August 23, 2024

I thought the Ross Perot and Admiral Stockdale ticket was the worst I’d ever seen. This beats it.

In 2011 Obama humiliated Trump. In 2023 Trump posted Obama’s address & a Jan6er, Taylor Taranto, went there to kill him. What will Trump do now that Obama mocked his manhood?

On Friday Marcy Wheeler, @emptywheel, & Nicole Sandler talked how the Obama’s humiliated Trump & how he is responding following their speeches at the DNC.

Based on his calls into Fox & Newsmax after the end of Harris’ speech, it’s really getting under his skin. I’m loving it, but then again I’m a huge fan of the late night comedy hosts doing bits on Trump.

I also know that thatTrump really, really hates to be laughed at. When it happens to him his response is to say, “People are laughing at America!” (Hmm, I wonder what he said before he was President & associated himself with the country?)

Trump got back at people who laughed at him in 2011 with the classic, “I’ll show them!” and became President. But that wasn’t enough for him. He also did the rich person bully thing and sued people who challenged him.

What do bullies do to stop people from laughing at them?.They threaten to kill them. OR they have their henchmen threaten to kill them. There’s a reason he brings up Al Capone.

Trump will want to get retribution against the people who laughed at him. It’s what he does.

Marcy reminds people of Taylor Taranto, a Jan 6er who went to Obama’s DC neighborhood in July 2023 after Trump posted Obama’s address on Truth Social. (NBC reporter Ryan Reilly said that he still can’t believe the whole Taylor Taranto story (link to his Twitter thread. )

Prosecutors say man went to Obama’s DC neighborhood after Trump posted what he claimed was the Obamas’ address CNN July 7, 2023

He really wants people to fear and respect him. Like they do Kim Jung Un.

To make it personal, he tells his followers, they are laughing at you, not me!

As Marcy says later in the show, Trump will be pushing for political violence, but the media doesn’t feel it is their job to tell people how to respond to the threats. They just report it. The problem with that is that coverage only happens when the people getting threats tell the media. The media need to hear of the scale and scope of the threats so it registers. Like when the New York Court system Judicial Public Safety team briefed the media about all the threats Judge Engoron’s clerk got. Here is Lisa Rubin talking about the threats to Chris Hayes who FINALLY GOT IT.

Right now the owner of one of the big social media sites encourages threats of violence. That’s a problem. If Musk isn’t going to enforce his own TOS, we need to start reporting the people violating them to the entities that can take action. Like the FBI.

Here is the link to report people making threats.

Now this is the part of the post where I get mentally tired. I hear, “What’s the point? They won’t do anything about Trump. True. BUT, they ARE investigating threats from MAGA people to our elected representatives, election officials & workers. But they need to know about them.

Taylor Taranto’s threats came on Truth Social. The management at Truth Social cooperated with Law Enforcement to provide his information. This is a part of ALL social media Terms of Service. They SHOULD be removing the threats, but if they don’t, they STILL have to respond to a warrant from Law Enforcement. When we report violations to the social media sites, we also need to alert law enforcement.

I’ll do a post later about the men serving YEARS in prison for threatening election officials in Arizona. The DOJ sucks at PR so we need to tell people how to report & show them that not everyone gets away with the crimes, like Trump. NOTE: Taranto is currently in prison for threatening Obama and is awaiting trial.

Cross posted to Spocko’s Brain

If you want to get ahead in Republican politics you’ve got to grease Dear Leader’s palms:

Late last year, former President Donald Trump announced his endorsement of car dealership owner Bernie Moreno for Ohio’s Senate seat – elevating an untested candidate who’d never held public office over several other more prominent Republicans.

Two days later, Moreno’s campaign spent about $17,000 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, and then followed up by spending an additional $79,000 the next month – making him one of the Florida club’s top political spenders.

He wasn’t alone. With glitzy Mar-a-Lago fundraisers, stays at Trump’s hotels, and flights on the former president’s private jet, Republican candidates and political groups are on track to spend more on Trump’s businesses this year than any year since 2016, according to a CNN analysis of federal campaign finance data.

Trump himself has been the biggest spender, both this year and over the last decade. Between his three presidential campaigns, Trump and associated political groups have funneled more than $28 million in campaign donations to his businesses – helping convert the enthusiasm of his political supporters into personal profit.

Other Republicans have followed suit, spending millions at Trump’s properties in an apparent attempt to curry favor with the former president and signal their allegiance to him to GOP voters.

Some of the candidates who’ve spent the most money on Trump businesses in recent years have been new politicians who won the former president’s endorsement despite a lack of past electoral experience or success, including Moreno, former Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker and Arizona Senate hopeful Kari Lake.

If he loses I guess he’ll have to go back to shilling cheap consumer goods. Will anyone buy them?

If the Democrats thought that having Republicans speak at the convention might help persuade some Trump skeptical GOP voters to come over to the other side, it’s doubtful it worked, unfortunately. At least if those voters were watching on Fox:

Fox News did not air a second of the speeches from alienated GOP leaders and former Trump officials who endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris at this week’s Democratic National Convention.

The DNC speakers included former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who spoke in prime-time before Harris’ Thursday keynote; former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan; former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham; Olivia Troye, who served as a homeland security aide to former Vice President Mike Pence; and Mesa, Arizona, Mayor John Giles.

MSNBC and CNN treated those speeches as newsworthy, airing each of them in full, according to a Media Matters review of the networks’ convention coverage. But Fox hid the content of all of those speeches from their viewers, often displaying the video on screen without audio as the network’s on-air hosts and guests offered commentary.

It’s not hard to figure out why: Fox is a Trumpist propaganda organ that helped the former president purge the GOP of his critics and is working tirelessly to return him to the White House. 

Say what you will about MSNBC being a liberal version of Fox, they would not do something like this. If Democrats were speaking at the RNC, they would show them. In fact, it would be a big story. Fox is just shamelessly shilling for Trump and protecting the GOP.

@msnbc A look at two very different 2024 roll calls: RNC vs. DNC. #dnc #rnc #kamalaharris #donaldtrump #trump #joebiden #music #election2024 #chicago #news #politics ♬ original sound – MSNBC

The Nielsen ratings are rigged, of course:

Nielsen data showed that Harris’ well-received acceptance speech was watched by 29 million viewers across 15 networks.

The figure is 14% higher than for Trump’s speech, which scored 25.4 million viewers July 19. Harris also drew substantially more than the 24.6 million viewers who watched Joe Biden’s acceptance speech at the convention in 2020 and about the same as the 29.8 million viewers who tuned in to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Harris helped herself by keeping her speech to 37 minutes. Trump’s 90-minute-plus stem-winder went on well past midnight on the East Coast.

The speech caps a successful week for the Democratic National Convention, which topped the audience for the GOP’s gathering every night this week.

Poor Trumpie.

Extreme right meets extreme past

Did Republicans build a time machine out of a DeLorean? It seems they’re pining for the time of slavery (Alternet):

A prominent Republican group is citing one of the most reviled Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decisions in American history to justify its case that Vice President Kamala Harris should be deemed ineligible to run under the U.S. Constitution.

In an official resolution, the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) – a 90 year-old GOP-aligned organization that counted former President Ronald Reagan among its membership — took the position that Harris should not be allowed to hold the office of president, citing several “precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court cases.” Among the six cases the NFRA cited was the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of 1857, which is regarded as one of the worst SCOTUS decisions of all time, if not the worst ever.

“Several states, candidates, and major political parties have ignored this fundamental Presidential qualification, including candidates Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and Kamala Harris whose parents were not American citizens at the time of their birth,” the NFRA’s resolution read.

The resolution — which attorney Andrew Fleischman posted to the social media platform Bluesky — cited Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 5 of the Constitution, which pertains to only natural-born U.S. citizens being eligible to serve as president. The NFRA argued that the phrase “natural born citizen” is defined as “a person born on American soil of parents who are both citizens of the United States at the time of the child’s birth.”

However, as numerous Bluesky users observed, applying the NFRA’s interpretation of that clause would have made multiple U.S. presidents ineligible to hold office, including George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, among others. Dallas-based attorney Santiago Reich pointed out that because those presidents’ parents were born on land classified as British colonies at the time, they would not meet the standard the NFRA set to define natural-born citizenship.

One of the other SCOTUS decisions the NFRA cited in its resolution was the 1939 Perkins v. Elg case, which states: “A child born here of alien parentage becomes a citizen of the United States.” Reich called the NFRA “pretty f—ing bold” to cite a decision that undermines their core argument.

Other Bluesky users responding to Fleischman’s post further argued that the mere existence of the 13th Amendment (the abolition of slavery), the 14th Amendment (equal protection for formerly enslaved Americans) and the 19th Amendment (universal women’s suffrage) make the cases the NFRA cited in its resolution invalid.

“All of these cases except Perkins v. Elg have been abrogated or are completely unrelated,” one user wrote. “Dredd[sic] Scott was overturned entirely by the 14th and its text cannot be meaningfully cited for any reason whatsof—ingever.”

The Dred Scott case concerned a slave from Missouri who then lived in the free states of Illinois — which sided with the Union in the Civil War — and Wisconsin (which was initially a part of the Louisiana Territory that did not have slavery due to the 1820 Missouri Compromise). When Dred Scott sued for his freedom, the Supreme Court denied his petition stating that he lacked the standing to sue in federal court.

In the decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney asserted that Article III of the U.S. Constitution made it impossible for the descendants of slaves to have the rights of citizenship. The Supreme Court’s own website has since referred to Dred Scott v. Sandford as “a legal and practical mistake.”

Donald J. Trump is a legal and practical mistake too. Not that it matters when defending white Christian nationalists from having to share this country with people not like themselves.

A quick perusal of the NFRA document reveals it advocates the constitutional sheriff movement-adjacent “Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates,” “Holy Scripture,” and “natural and revealed laws of God” as the basis for governance. Oh, and the upholding of “natural societal order of submission to legitimate authority, parents and children, employers and employees, coaches and athletes, teachers and students, etc.” Guess who’s legitimate and natural and who’s not?

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

A memo went out Thursday night

An old speaker’s trick at the end introductory applause is to settle one’s hands on the sides of the podium to quiet an audience and signal time to begin speaking. When Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts tried that on Thursday night, the cheers seemed for a moment as if they might subside. But Democratic National Convention delegates packed to the rafters in Chicago’s United Center were not having it. The cheers swelled anew, and louder still. Overcome with emotion, Warren pulled back from the podium a half step and wiped away a tear.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wipes away tears as the crowd erupts in cheers for her as she takes the stage for her DNC speech. pic.twitter.com/mSTryxkqFn

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) August 22, 2024

Warren’s ovation was the loudest and longest of any speaker save for President Joe Biden’s hero’s welcome late Monday night, and Vice President Kamala Harris’s on Thursday as the Democrats’ presidential nominee. President Barack Obama’s matched Warren’s welcome in length but not in intensity. It was immediate and rapturous, as if springing from delegates’ hearts and souls. 

Joe Biden’s and Nancy Pelosi’s legacies will not be fully appreciated until historians weave together how their personal stories and battle scars, legislative accomplishments and deep political skills, built the country this generation’s children will inherit.

Nevertheless, what we witnessed in Chicago was not only a generational passing of the Democratic Party’s torch from Biden to Harris, but the passing of an entire generation of Democratic establishment, though they may not yet know it. 

The term netroots gained traction in the early aughts as a label for progressive bloggers and activists who found each other and built community on the Internet. The annual activist conference that became Netroots Nation sprang from that community in 2006. (Warren has been a regular speaker since before becoming senator from Massachusetts in 2013.) A running joke was that the Democratic establishment considered them “dirty hippies.” DFH is the family friendly acronym the community adopted for how establishment Democrats really saw the upstarts without saying so out loud, at least in public.

As brusque congressman and then Vermont senator and presidential candidate, independent Bernie Sanders championed their progressive policy goals. But Warren’s ovation reflects how firmly her warmer populism has taken root in the wider party and won Democrats’ hearts.

The DNC convention’s message was clear, US editor Betsy Reed writes this morning in The Guardian: “this is Harris’s party now.”

But is it?

Democratic Socialists of America candidate, former bartender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then 28, came from nowhere in 2018 to upset Rep. Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary in his Bronx and Queens district after outraising her 10-1. The veteran Crowley, leader of the local Democratic machine, was seen as possible next in line to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He’s gone. DNC delegates chanted A-O-C when she took the stage on Monday night.

Harris has moved left since arriving in Washington, but despite Donald Trump’s branding her far left, she is not. But if Warren’s stunning welcome was any indication, Harris may be lagging somewhat behind the party she now leads. If progressive politicos are DFHs, the United Center was filled to the brim with them on Thursday night.

This is no longer Sens. Chuck Schumer’s or Dick Durbin’s Democratic Party, nor even Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s. Did they get the memo?

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Wolf pups!

Recently, three healthy wolf pups and one adult from the Copper Creek pack were spotted playing together. Wolves are wild animals; like bears, elk, and other wild animals, they should be treated with respect.

Video from Mike Usalavage pic.twitter.com/xxqPtAJJDr

— Governor Jared Polis (@GovofCO) August 23, 2024

Listen to some of this wolf pup’s first howls from only a few weeks ago! A little warning: the pup is pretty loud for only being 4-weeks old! (1/7) pic.twitter.com/sPUntEHOdx

— Voyageurs Wolf Project (@VoyaWolfProject) May 19, 2021

When we visit dens, we try to count the number of pups in the den. However, we often cannot see all the way in the den so we set up trail cameras at the den to see how many pups are in it.

Sometimes the trail camera footage verifies our initial pup count and other times we realize how many pups we “missed”. E.g., when we visited this den a few weeks ago we counted 5 pups. When we checked our trail camera footage, we realized there were actually 8 pups!

There’s a lot of that pearl clutching on the right today. But I think every official in the Democratic party sent their thoughts and prayers right after it happened and now it’s passed through the memory hole. Isn’t that how this is supposed to work?