#Jesse Duquette The Daily Don

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jesse Duquette, The Daily Don

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The Trump indictment.

         On a day of non-stop coverage of the indictment of Donald J. Trump, less is more.

         Here are the facts that matter:

The people of the State of New York filed this Indictment against Donald Trump.

The indictment alleges 34 felony counts of falsification of business records.

The Manhattan District Attorney separately released this Statement of Facts. If you have time, read the 13-page document in full. It sets forth the essential facts and legal theories for everything that will transpire in the case of People of New York v. Donald Trump.

Important allegations in the Statement of Facts include the following:

         From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant [Trump] orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant's electoral prospects. In order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York.

         [Michael Cohen] who then worked for the Trump Organization as Special Counsel to [Trump] covertly paid $130,000 to an adult film actress shortly before the election to prevent her from publicizing a sexual encounter with the Defendant. [Michael Cohen] made the $130,000 payment through a shell corporation he set up and funded at a bank in Manhattan. This payment was illegal, and [Cohen] has since pleaded guilty to making an illegal campaign contribution . . . .

         In a conversation captured in an audio recording in approximately September 2016 concerning Woman 1's account, the [Trump] and [Cohen] discussed how to obtain the rights to Woman 1's account from AMI and how to reimburse AMI for its payment.

         [Trump] directed [Cohen] to delay making a payment to Woman 2 as long as possible. He instructed Lawyer A that if they could delay the payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public.

During a 58-minute appearance before Judge Juan Merchan, Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges in the indictment.

Judge Merchan declined to impose a gag order, although he cautioned the parties to exercise restraint in making out-of-court statements. Trump promptly disregarded the judge's cautionary warning by making incendiary statements during an evening speech at Mar-a-Lago.

Judge Merchan set the next hearing in the case for December 2, 2023.

Discussion of the indictment.

         The indictment alleges financial crimes were committed to protect Trump's presidential prospects. The cover-up was part of a broad ranging “catch-and-kill” strategy that continued into Trump's first months as president.

         The indictment has provoked a torrent of criticism by legal commentators. Most of the criticism hinges on the fact that the underlying offenses of financial fraud are typically charged as misdemeanors. Here, they are charged as felonies. To leverage misdemeanors into felonies, New York must prove that Trump intended to commit other crimes.

         Alvin Bragg identified those other crimes during a news conference, which include:

tax fraud,

facilitating false statements by the National Enquirer's parent company (AMI),

violation of state election laws, and

violation of federal election laws.

         Most commentators focus on the difficulty of proving the last two crimes—violations of federal and state election laws. For example, one of my favorite legal commentators, Ian Millhiser, has annoyed me greatly with this article in Vox, The dubious legal theory at the heart of the Trump indictment, explained.

         Millhiser's analysis is as good as it gets—but I disagree. At the core of Millhiser's criticism is this:

Bragg has evidence that Trump acted to cover up a federal crime, but it is not clear that Bragg is allowed to point to a federal crime in order to charge Trump under the New York state law.

         Millhiser suggests that Bragg must prove a federal crime to prevail. Not true, entirely. Bragg can rely on uncharged state crimes—including violations of New York election laws and income tax violations, as Bragg said in his news conference. Moreover, as Millhiser concedes above, "it is not clear" whether an uncharged federal crime will suffice. The relevant New York statute says that a person is guilty of a felony under state law

when he commits the crime of falsifying business records [and has] the intent to commit another crime . . . .

         The New York statute refers generally to "another crime," not a "state crime" or a federal crime. Just "another crime." Millhiser says that ambiguity might get Trump off the hook. I doubt it. The statute is plain on its face. Trump will undoubtedly make Millhiser's argument, but I believe Trump will lose the argument.

         Okay, that's as deep as I will examine the legal issues. The issues are more complicated than I have described above, and there are other worrisome defenses (including the timing of the payments—all of which occurred after Trump took office).

Despite my disagreement with Millhiser, his analysis is excellent and cannot be easily dismissed. If you are interested in a deep dive into the alleged weaknesses of Bragg's case, Millhiser's article is an excellent resource. See also Mark Joseph Stern in Slate, Donald Trump indictment is not the slam-dunk case Democrats wanted.

         Although two of my favorite legal commentators are raising red flags, I think Bragg can convince the judge that the false financial records were part of a broad-ranging "catch-and-kill" strategy designed to violate state and federal election and tax laws. That should be enough to get the case to the jury.

Trump cannot appeal any pre-trial rulings, which means that if the judge denies the expected motions to dismiss, the trial will take place in the spring of 2024. By then, Trump should be defending two federal indictments and one from Georgia.

Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter

[muddypolitics]

The Daily Don

[yasbxxgie]

[originallandlockedmariner]

Social Distancing Mask - Guaranteed To Repel

“...  So I've been struggling to find a way to put such a terrible tragedy into some kind of context. It's hard. But 250,000 deaths (in the U.S.) is about five times the number of U.S. troops killed in combat in Vietnam. It's nearly five times the number of Americans who died in combat in World War I. And it's getting close to the 291,000 Americans who perished in four years of fighting during World War II.”

[brooklynmuseum]

Don’t let a pandemic stand in the way of your voice being heard! This election season, a majority of Americans are eligible to vote by mail. Many states have deadlines to request mail-in ballots less than two weeks before Election Day, but the Postal Service recommends that voters request mail-in ballots by October 19 to ensure that ballots are returned on time. 

Head to vote.org today for everything you need to prepare!

Images by: Jesse Duquette / The Daily Don ⇨ Mark Alice Durant ⇨ Muna Malik ⇨ Kamrooz Aram and ⇨ Ken Lum and Paul Farber / Monument Lab  for Plany Your Vote and Vote.org 

[tattooed-alchemist]

One of the things that helps me get through each day is @TheDailyDon a once-per-day political cartoon from illustrator Jesse Duquette.  A collection of the images got released as a book, and now the Seattle Public Library will have it because I asked them to add it.

When this book arrives and I check it out, I’m going to take it over to my elderly parents’ house and look at it with my mom, because she’s really enjoyed some of the cartoons I’ve shared with her over the past months.

[quimbys]

Image from “The Daily Don: All The News That Fits Into Tiny, Tiny Hands” by Jesse Duquette. Don't miss Jesse Duquette here this Saturday, Free Comic Book Day, May 4th at 7pm! More info at quimbys.com #Quimbys #QuimbysBookstore #QuimbysBookstoreChicago #thedailydon #jesseduquette @the.daily.don #virginiawoolf (at Quimby's Bookstore) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bw7dWrhA5rj/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=88xhlc5loaky

[fidelseyeglasses]

From artist Jesse Duquette's great Instagram page: “The Daily Don All The News That Fits Into Tiny, Tiny Hands”. ---> https://www.instagram.com/the.daily.don/

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jesse Duquette, The Daily Don :: [Scott Horton]

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On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, November 22, former president Trump hosted the antisemitic artist Ye, also known as Kanye West, for dinner at a public table at Mar-a-Lago along with political operative Karen Giorno, who was the Trump campaign’s 2016 state director in Florida. Ye brought with him 24-year-old far-right white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Fuentes attended the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in its wake, he committed to moving the Republican Party farther to the right. Fuentes has openly admired Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is currently making war on Russia’s neighbor Ukraine. A Holocaust denier, Fuentes is associated with America’s neo-Nazis. In February 2020, Fuentes launched the America First Political Action Conference to compete from the right with the Conservative Political Action Conference. In May 2021, on a livestream, Fuentes said: “My job…is to keep pushing things further. We, because nobody else will, have to push the envelope. And we’re gonna get called names. We’re gonna get called racist, sexist, antisemitic, bigoted, whatever.… When the party is where we are two years later, we’re not gonna get the credit for the ideas that become popular. But that’s okay. That’s our job. We are the right-wing flank of the Republican Party. And if we didn’t exist, the Republican Party would be falling backwards all the time.” Fuentes and his “America First” followers, called “Groypers” after a cartoon amphibian (I’m not kidding), backed Trump’s lies that he had actually won the 2020 election. At a rally shortly after the election, Fuentes told his followers to “storm every state capitol until Jan. 20, 2021, until President Trump is inaugurated for four more years.” Fuentes and Groypers were at the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, and at least seven of them have been charged with federal crimes for their association with that attack. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol subpoenaed Fuentes himself. Accounts of the dinner suggest that Trump and Fuentes hit it off, with Trump allegedly saying, “I like this guy, he gets me,” after Fuentes urged Trump to speak freely off the cuff rather than reading teleprompters and trying to appear presidential as his handlers advise. But Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2024 just days ago, and being seen publicly with far-right white supremacist Fuentes—in addition to Ye—indicates his embrace of the far right. His team told NBC’s Marc Caputo that the dinner was a “f**king nightmare.” Trump tried to distance himself from the meeting by saying he didn’t know who Fuentes was, and that he was just trying to help Ye out by giving the “seriously troubled” man advice, but observers noted that he did not distance himself from Fuentes’s positions. Republican lawmakers have been silent about Trump’s apparent open embrace of the far right, illustrating the growing power of that far right in the Republican Party. Representatives Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have affiliated themselves with Fuentes, and while their appearances with him at the America First Political Action Conference last February drew condemnation from Republican leader Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), now McCarthy desperately needs the votes of far-right Republicans to make him speaker of the House. To get that support, he has been promising to deliver their wish list—including an investigation into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter—and appears willing to accept Fuentes and his followers into the party, exactly as Fuentes hoped. Today, after the news of Trump’s dinner and the thundering silence that followed it, conservative anti-Trumper Bill Kristol tweeted: “Aren’t there five decent Republicans in the House who will announce they won’t vote for anyone for Speaker who doesn’t denounce their party’s current leader, Donald Trump, for consorting with the repulsive neo-Nazi Fuentes?” So far, at least, the answer is no.

[Heather Cox Richardson :: Letters From An American]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jesse Duquette, The Daily Don   ::  [Scott Horton]

* * * *

How Murdoch steamrolled Tucker

LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV ::  APR 25, 2023

Rupert Murdoch is 92 years old, and everyone just finished making fun of his brief engagement to conservative radio host Lesley Ann Smith, the ex-wife of California railroad heir John B. Huntington.  The engagement lasted just two weeks.  Murdoch has been married four times, the last time to Jerry Hall, model and ex-wife of Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger.  That marriage lasted six years.  Murdoch reportedly told Hall he was divorcing her in an email.

Murdoch’s marital history is particularly interesting when you consider his recent divorce from Fox host Tucker Carlson.  That’s the way I think of Carlson’s departure from his seven-year career at Fox.  When Rupert decides it’s over, it’s over.  Here’s an excerpt from his email to his former wife: “Jerry, sadly I’ve decided to call an end to our marriage,” The Guardian reported. “We have certainly had some good times, but I have much to do.”

You get that?  It was good while it lasted, six years with those cameras flashing at the world’s wealthiest media-mogul with his supermodel on his arm, but now he was finished.  Moving on.  Busy man.

You don’t want to get on the bad side of Rupert Murdoch.  You don’t even want to be on his good side, because as his marriages and latest engagement prove, once he decides it’s time to pull the ripcord, you’re in the wind.

It’s been the same with his business empire.  It’s easy to forget that Murdoch was once just an Australian newspaper owner with big eyes to get off that gigantic island-continent and make his way in the wider world.  His first big move, way back in the 60’s, was to expand into Great Britain, buying the News of the World and the Sun.  Next was New York City, where he established a beachhead in 1976 by buying New York Magazine and the Village Voice in a hostile takeover.  I wrote about that battle for the late-lamented New Times magazine, and I have to say that I watched slack jawed as Murdoch steamrolled Clay Felker, the magazine genius who had created New York Magazine and then combined it with the downtown alternative paper I had worked for, the Voice.  Murdoch charmed, threatened, and walked over or past the board of New York Magazine, getting one after another of them on his side until he was able to, in a single sweep of paperwork and investment banking magic, make Felker’s mini-empire his.  The New York Post was next, followed by his purchase of the prestigious London broadsheet, The Times.

He became an American citizen in 1985 and set out on another buying spree, this time buying Twentieth Century Fox.  He used the Fox brand to buy up a small television network, Metromedia, which he transformed into the Fox channel.  In the early 90’s, the Fox channel began carrying original programing.  Then he formed the British broadcasting company, BSkyB.  In 1996, Murdoch started Fox News on cable, and in 2007, his holding company, News Corporation, bought the Wall Street Journal, which he had coveted since the days when he took over New York Magazine.

If you owned anything that published in print, made movies for the big screen, or broadcast shows on network or cable television, you were a target.  Murdoch hit more than he missed.  By last year, he was worth $21.7 billion and was the world’s 31st wealthiest man.  

Fox News became a cash cow for the Murdoch empire, taking in about $12 billion a year in recent years.  It’s money Murdoch earned by feeding a ravenous horde of conservative viewers a steady diet of right-wing red meat around the clock.  Fox News long ago ceased being a real news network and simply went into the business of raw propaganda with its wink-and-a-nod motto, “Fair and Balanced.”

Tucker Carlson became one of the channel’s biggest revenue generators with his nightly spew of conspiracy theories, racist garbage like “the great replacement theory,” paeons to authoritarianism with his worship of Hungary’s Victor Orban – Carlson even took his show there for an entire week in 2021, and produced a rabidly antisemitic documentary on the country last year called “Hungary vs. Soros: Fight for Civilization.”

All of this was fine and dandy for Rupert Murdoch as long as Tucker kept the bucks coming.  Carlson warmly embraced Trump’s Big Lie, beginning when Trump lost the election in 2020.  The Big Lie was a feature of his show almost nightly for the next two-plus years.  Carlson’s show featured many of the right-wing loons who made the allegations against Dominion Voting Systems that were defamatory – Rudolph Giuliani, Sidney Powell and many others.  Tucker sat there and listened to them spew their lies night after night, nodding and giving his patented look of puzzled curiosity.  But asking questions and looking puzzled wasn’t a defense when Dominion sued for defamation.  That lawsuit ended up costing Murdoch a whole lot of money, $787.5 million to be exact, when Fox News settled the suit without a court fight last week.

There has been a ton of speculation about why Carlson was fired yesterday morning, much of it settling on emails written by Carlson that were revealed by the Dominion suit.  Many of his emails were embarrassing to the network, and thus to Murdoch, as Carlson wrote repeatedly that he didn’t believe a word of the garbage he was putting out on his show about the Big Lie that Trump won the election.

The L.A. Times reported yesterday that sources inside Fox say that Murdoch himself was upset by some of Carlson’s emails that were not released by the Dominion lawsuit because they didn’t bear on its defamation claim.  These emails instead gave an insight into what Carlson thought about Fox management, according to the L.A. Times.

“Fox management” is one man:  Rupert Murdoch.  Carlson is said to have written some nasty stuff about lesser Fox figures such as CEO Suzanne Scott.  Murdoch doesn’t care about Suzanne Scott.  He doesn’t care if Tucker Carlson thinks Scott is incompetent or unlikable.  What Rupert Murdoch cares about is being considered a Big Man Media Mogul and making money.

The Dominion lawsuit, much of it caused by the statements made on Carlson’s nightly show, brought Murdoch low in the eyes of his Big Man Media Mogul contemporaries, the guys – and they’re almost all guys – who show up every year at Herbert Allen’s Sun Valley Conference of media Big Men.  It’s a kind of summer camp in the mountains of Idaho for media moguls, among whom Murdoch was arguably the biggest.  Herbert Allen is the CEO of the investment bank, Allen & Company.  Murdoch goes way back with Herbert Allen and his investment bank.  He and his company handled Murdoch’s takeover of New York Magazine way back in 1976.  Murdoch doesn’t like it when you do something that lowers him in the eyes of “Herbie” Allen, as he is called, or any of the other media Big Men.

And he especially doesn’t like it when he can put a name on a loss of $787.5 million.  That name is Tucker Carlson, who thought that he was a Big Man because of the adoring hordes who watched his show every night and the millions he was paid for attracting them.  But he wasn’t a Big Man.  He was a worker bee in the sprawling Murdoch media empire, and now he’s a worker bee who got squashed by the Murdoch steamroller, as so many have been squashed before him.

Murdoch still owns the Fox empire.  Tucker Carlson owns his trust fund check as an heir to Swanson Frozen Foods, however much he managed to put away when he was riding high in the 8 o’clock slot on Fox News, and whatever he can squeeze out of Fox in his so-called exit package.  And he owns the stack of bills that are piling up from lawyers representing him in the sexual harassment lawsuit filed by former Fox producer Abby Grossman, because there is no doubt that in firing him, Rupert Murdoch severed Fox from Carlson in the Grossman lawsuit and is no longer paying his legal bills.

I often see businessmen like Murdoch referred to in the press as killers.  But Murdoch isn’t a killer.  He’s a taker.  He sees something he thinks he wants, like a magazine or a newspaper or a studio or a network, and he takes it and then he takes all the money it brings in.

Murdoch paid the legal fees for his four ex-wives, but he wasn’t married to Tucker Carlson.  Murdoch was once his employer, and he was happy to take the money Tucker earned for him, but he’s a busy man, and he moved on.

[Lucian Truscott Newsletter]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Daily Don]

* * * *

“A nation that isn't broken, but simply unfinished.”  ::  May 25, 2023

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

MAY 25, 2023

         Eighteen days after the January 6th attack, twenty-two-year-old Amanda Gorman stood on the recently embattled steps of the Capitol. The eyes of the world upon her. In a moment of grace and healing, the young poet addressed the nation’s fresh wounds and uncertain future. She said:

We've braved the belly of the beast,

we've learned that quiet isn't always peace.

And the norms and notions of what just is

isn't always justice.

And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it,

somehow we do it. Somehow we've weathered

and witnessed a nation that isn't broken, but simply unfinished.

[¶]

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:

that even as we grieved, we grew;

that even as we hurt, we hoped;

that even as we tired, we tried;

that we'll forever be tied together victorious,

not because we will never again know defeat

but because we will never again sow division.

         The full text of Amanda Gorman’s poem is here: The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman (poetry.com). A video of Amanda reciting her poem at the Inauguration is here: 'The Hill We Climb' - YouTube. The poem is now available in book form at your local independent bookstore (which can be located at IndieBound.org).

         Two days before Ron DeSantis announced his bid for the presidency, a school parent in Miami-Dade, Florida, filed a one-page form alleging that “The Hill We Climb” is “not educational" and contains "hate messages." It is doubtful that the complaining parent read the poem. The parent incorrectly claimed that The Hill We Climb was written by Oprah Winfrey. But under the fascist scheme established by Ron DeSantis, the ignorant and spiteful allegation of a single parent is sufficient to banish a book to the purgatory of endless “reviews” by the “Florida Thought Police.”

         That is the Florida that Ron DeSantis has created. And that is the America he seeks to create. DeSantis’s campaign merchandise touts that he will “Make America Florida.” Most Americans do not want their states to resemble the hellish landscape that DeSantis envisions for Florida—or America.

         It takes effort to recall the damage and division that DeSantis has sowed in Florida. Fortunately, the Washington Post reminded us of that carnage on the day of his announcement. See Washington Post, 10 things to know about Ron DeSantis as he joins 2024 presidential race. (This article is accessible to everyone.)

         Democracy Docket has published a review of DeSantis’s anti-democratic voter legislation. See Democracy Docket, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Record on Voting Rights.

         DeSantis’s abortion policies are so extreme that he tries to avoid discussing abortion when appearing before supporters. See NYTimes, DeSantis Avoids Talk of Abortion Ban on the Trail. (“On the trail, his remarks about the ban are usually limited to a single line in his roughly 45-minute stump speech.”)

         DeSantis’s campaign launch on Twitter with Elon Musk was so bad that it became a joke and internet meme before the event ended. The “live” event on Twitter was “audio only” in an age when video dominates. Even then, the audio repeatedly dropped and froze, causing Musk to bail on the original event and open a “new” Twitter space to host the event. #DeSaster went viral before Musk mercifully ended the debacle. See Forbes, ‘#DeSaster’: DeSantis Roasted Over Botched Twitter Campaign Launch—By Trump, Biden And Others.

         Worse, a DeSantis supporter published an op-ed in the NYTimes entitled, Not Dead Yet. As fans of Monty Python immediately recognized, the reference to “Not Dead Yet” is an unfortunate allusion to someone who has a very short life expectancy (measured in minutes). If that is the best his supporters can say in defense of DeSantis, his campaign will be short-lived.

         While DeSantis invites mockery and derision in nearly everything he does, his candidacy is no laughing matter. He has denied tens of millions of Floridians fundamental human rights, including reproductive liberty, the right to vote in free and fair elections, freedom of expression and thought, safety from gun violence, and freedom from government-sponsored discrimination.

         Let’s hope that DeSantis’s disastrous campaign weakens both DeSantis and Trump. While Democrats cannot rely on Republicans to defeat themselves, we should recognize the leading GOP candidates are wounded, desperate, and unlikeable. Democrats have their own challenges, as is the case with every presidential candidate. Let’s not dwell on our challenges; instead, tell our fellow Americans the truth about our opponents—including their inability (and lack of desire) to connect with their fellow citizens on a human level.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Daily Don :: Jesse Duquette

* * * *

Juneteenth was designated a federal holiday on June 17, 2021, and is celebrated on June 19th each year (or on the nearest Friday or Monday if it falls on a weekend). At a time when America’s history of the enslavement of Black people is being stripped from curriculums across the nation, the holiday takes on a special urgency. It reminds us that—like virtually every tenet of the canon of American history—the facts are more complicated, messy, and disappointing than expected. So, too, with Juneteenth.

         In its simplest telling, Juneteenth is the day when General Order No. 3 was published in Texas, informing enslaved persons and their masters that the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery in secessionist states two-and-a-half years earlier. But as with the Emancipation Proclamation, the promise of “the end of slavery” outran the reality. See generally, Washington Post, Thousands queue to see the Emancipation Proclamation and General Order No. 3. (This article is accessible to everyone.)

         The Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery only in secessionist states—but not (a) in the slave states that remained loyal to the Union or (b) in those portions of secessionist states under the control of the Union Army. As a result, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, it left nearly half a million people in their enslaved condition.

         And when General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 on June 19, 1865, declaring that enslaved persons in Texas were freed by virtue of the Emancipation Proclamation, the “freedom” recognized by the order was not the same freedom enjoyed by American citizens. General Order Number 3 read as follows:

         The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.

              The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

         By order of Major General Granger

           Although General Order Number 3 declares that enslaved persons and their masters have “absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property,” the next paragraph effectively advises the formerly enslaved people that they are indentured servants who were “advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages.” Thus began the long, fitful pursuit for “absolute equality” of the people who learned of their freedom on June 19th, 1865.

         More than a century-and-a-half later, that long, fitful pursuit continues. While much progress has been made, we are living through a retrograde moment in which discussing the truth of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War amendments is banned in dozens of states. Juneteenth celebrates a day on which tens of thousands of enslaved people in Texas learned they were free, but it reminds us that the promise of “absolute equality of personal rights” for the descendants of the formerly enslaved people remains unfulfilled today.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

@moms4liberty is what happens when a customer complaint makes a wish upon a burning cross to become a political movement and starts wanting to speak with all the managers.

[The Daily Don]

* * * *

"Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise - the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence.

Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer."  

- Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

[thanks to whiskey river]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Capitalism: trickling down bootstraps since the Industrial Revolution.

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 6, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

DEC 7, 2023

In the Washington Post today, Marianne LeVine, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Josh Dawsey reported that the Trump camp is eager to get people to stop focusing on Trump’s authoritarian talk, noting that Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says the presidential candidate was just joking when he said he would be a dictator on the first day of a return to the White House. While the Republican base appears to like Trump’s threats against the people they have come to hate, two Trump advisers told the reporters that “recent stories about his plans for a second term are not viewed as helpful for the general election.”

Republicans have also moved quickly to cut ties with Florida Republican Party chair Christian Ziegler, who is under police investigation for rape. Ziegler’s wife, Bridget Ziegler, co-founded Moms for Liberty, an organization that has focused on removing from schools books that they find objectionable, generally books by or about racial or ethnic minorities or LGBTQ+ people. Often Moms for Liberty members have implied, or even claimed, that those trying to protect school libraries are sexual predators or “groomers.” Ziegler herself has been active in shaping anti-LGBTQ+ policies in the state.

But the police and court documents about the case revealed that the Zieglers and the woman Ziegler allegedly raped had participated in a three-way sexual relationship in the past. The rape allegedly occurred after they had set up another encounter that Bridget could not make. The woman then canceled, telling Ziegler “I was mainly in it for her.” He went to her home anyway.

The story of a key anti-LGBTQ+ activist engaging in same-sex activity as part of a threesome sent Moms for Liberty hurrying to say that Bridget Ziegler was no longer on their board (although both Zieglers were still on their advisory board) and purge her name from their website. And though no charges have yet been filed, Florida governor Ron DeSantis has called on Christian Ziegler to resign from his position at the head of the state Republican Party. 

The Zieglers helped to tie the Republican Party to Moms for Liberty shortly after the organization formed in January 2021, and DeSantis was very much on board, apparently seeing their message of taking the war against “woke” to the schools as a political winner. But, as Amanda Marcotte pointed out in Salon, the 2022 midterms revealed that most voters did not like the extremism of that group and that it was a political liability. 

The fact that DeSantis is dropping his former ally Ziegler so fast suggests that DeSantis is eager to divorce himself from both the story and from the extremism of Moms for Liberty. 

The Trump Republicans took another hit today as well, when a grand jury in the state of Nevada charged six people who falsely posed as electors in 2020 in order to file fake electoral votes for Trump to replace the state’s real votes for now-President Joe Biden. The six Republicans charged with filing false documents include the chair and the vice chair of the Nevada Republican Party. If convicted, they face up to nine years in prison and $15,000 in fines. 

Nevada is the third state to charge the fake electors with crimes. Georgia and Michigan have also done so. 

Ten fake electors in Wisconsin today settled a civil lawsuit over their own participation in Trump’s false-elector scheme. The settlement involved correcting the historical record. The ten agreed to withdraw their paperwork with the false information, explain in writing to the federal offices that the filings had been “part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results,” and acknowledge that Biden won the 2020 election. Going forward, they agreed never again to serve as presidential electors in an election in which Trump is running. 

But while there are signs that even leading Republicans recognize that the extremism of the Trump Republicans is unpopular in the country, Trump Republicans are tightening their hold on Congress. Today former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced that he will resign from Congress at the end of this month. Far-right MAGA Republicans ousted McCarthy from the speaker’s chair in October.

Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC), a McCarthy ally who took over as acting House speaker after McCarthy’s removal, announced yesterday that he had changed his plans from earlier this year and will not run for reelection.    

While hardly moderates—both refused to work with Democrats either to pass legislation or to elect a speaker—they appear to be ceding ground to the MAGA Republicans. 

Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone reported today that one of those MAGA Republicans, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), spoke freely Tuesday night at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., at a celebration for the National Association of Christian Lawmakers. Although the address was being livestreamed, Johnson apparently believed he was speaking privately. He told the audience that the Lord called him to be “a new Moses.”

Johnson, an evangelical Christian, told the audience that the U.S. is “engaged in a battle between worldviews” and “a great struggle for the future of the Republic.” He said he believed far-right Christians would prevail. 

The influence of Trump is also evident in the Senate, where there is broad, bipartisan support for supplemental funding for Ukraine, but where Republicans are refusing to pass such a measure without attaching to it an immigration package that overrides current law, replacing it with Trump’s immigration plans. Such plans could not pass on their own, as Democrats would stop them in the Senate. But by attaching them to a bill that is imperative for national security, Republicans hope to force Biden into it.

Democrats have repeatedly called for new immigration legislation, but their refusal to remake immigration policy as the hard-right wants has made Republicans balk. Now Democrats are still offering to negotiate a reasonable package, but as Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) said earlier this week: “I think there’s a misunderstanding on the part of Senator Schumer and some of our Democratic friends…. This is not a traditional negotiation, where we expect to come up with a bipartisan compromise on the border. This is a price that has to be paid in order to get the supplemental.”

In a speech this afternoon—just a day after Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) finally permitted the Senate to fill 425 senior positions in the U.S. military and while he is still preventing 11 top-level positions from being filled—President Biden called it “stunning that we’ve gotten to this point…. Republicans in Congress…are willing to give [Russian president Vladimir] Putin the greatest gift he could hope for and abandon our global leadership not just to Ukraine, but beyond that.” 

“If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there,” Biden warned. “It’s important to see the long run here. He’s going to keep going. He’s made that pretty clear. If Putin attacks a NATO Ally—if he keeps going and then he attacks a NATO Ally—well, we’ve committed as a NATO member that we’d defend every inch of NATO territory. Then we’ll have something that we don’t seek and that we don’t have today: American troops fighting Russian troops—American troops fighting Russian troops if he moves into other parts of NATO. 

“Make no mistake: Today’s vote is going to be long remembered. And history is going to judge harshly those who turn their back on freedom’s cause.”

“Extreme Republicans are playing chicken with our national security, holding Ukraine’s funding hostage to their extreme partisan border policies,” he said. 

Biden reiterated that he and the Democrats are eager to pass new immigration legislation, but “Republicans think they can get everything they want without any bipartisan compromise.  That’s not the answer.... And now they’re willing to literally kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield and damage our national security in the process.” He begged Republicans to get past partisan divisions and step up to “our responsibilities as a leading nation in the world.” 

Hours later, Senate Republicans voted against the supplemental aid package.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[The Daily Don]  :: [Jesse Duquette]

* * * * *

I wanted to close by reporting on an incident in Nikki Haley’s campaign that should give us hope going into 2024.

         Haley made a campaign stop in New Hampshire this week. She opened her speech by telling a trans-phobic “joke” directed at the short-lived campaign by Bud Light to use a trans spokesperson. The details of the joke don’t matter. The point is that when Nikki Haley attempted to make fun of a trans person while in New Hampshire, no one in the crowd laughed. Not one person. And the crowd included lots of Republicans. See The Daily Beast, 2024 GOP Presidential Candidate Nikki Haley's Anti-Trans Dylan Mulvaney Rhetoric Falls Flat in New Hampshire.

         Haley lives in a Republican bubble in the South where it is still acceptable to mock trans people. She wrongly assumed that everyone in America shared her crass and insensitive views about the acceptability of mocking trans people. She won’t make that mistake again—which is good for Haley and America. Just as Ron DeSantis stops talking about six-week abortion bans when he leaves Florida, Haley is learning that most Americans do not share the GOP hatred toward trans people that is endemic in the red southern states.

         The Republican “platform” for 2024 is based on hate, grievance, and fear. It sells in a narrow swath of gerrymandered Southern states—but not in most other places. The arrogance and hubris of Haley in assuming she could tell a trans-phobic joke in New Hampshire tell us that Republicans don’t understand how unpopular and narrow their platform is. It is already too late for them to switch courses.

         As always, we cannot rely on Republicans to defeat themselves. But Haley’s complete lack of awareness of the mood of voters outside of South Carolina is a sign of GOP weakness heading into 2024. We have every reason to be hopeful but no reason to be complacent!

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[The Daily Don] :: If GOP polling means anything, I guess being an inadequate sex pest is a feature not a flaw.

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 10, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 11, 2023

This morning, federal prosecutors charged Representative George Santos (R-NY) with seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives, and one count of stealing public funds. The charges are tied to his campaign fundraising and unemployment fraud; prosecutors say he received about $25,000 in unemployment insurance benefits during 2020 and 2021, during the worst of the pandemic, when he was, in fact, making about $120,000 a year.

Santos pleaded not guilty and was released on $500,000 bail and immediately began to fundraise off his arrest.

This is another embarrassment for the Republicans. House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House, has championed Santos in ads as “the next generation of Republican leadership.” And today, while the House Republicans were in the midst of a press conference about their plan to crack down on unemployment fraud, news broke that one of their own has been charged with it. Ironically, Santos is a co-sponsor of the bill.

With the news about Santos this morning and the news last night of former president Trump’s liability for sexual abuse and defamation, the release this morning of a report from the House Judiciary Committee, led by Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), looked as if it was designed to be a distraction.

The report insisted that “that Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails were real”—by which the Republicans meant to say that the idea there was something incriminating on them was real—rather than possibly Russian disinformation, as a letter from former intelligence officials said when the story first broke. The report promised to prove that “senior intelligence community officials and the Biden campaign worked to mislead American voters.”

But the report was a bizarre effort. Despite the breathless allegations in it, the 65-page document seems to prove that the former intelligence officials who said the news story about the laptop had the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation effort believed what they were saying and went through the proper channels at the Central Intelligence Agency to clear their statement. The person who did appear to be trying to make a political statement was Trump’s loyalist director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe.

Journalist Marcy Wheeler carefully broke the report down piece by piece on Twitter (linked below if anyone’s interested), but she was one of the few media figures even to bother to mention it. Jordan is well known for crafting propaganda for right-wing media; perhaps that was his intention here.

A press conference the House Oversight Committee also held this morning got more attention than Jordan’s report, but it, too, was a fizzle. The committee announced the conference on Monday, May 8, when committee chair Representative James Comer (R-KY) promised supporters to unleash “judgment day” on the Biden White House. Republican members of the committee have made much of what they call “the Biden family’s influence peddling enterprise,” but today’s conference revealed nothing new: Biden’s son and brother and their associates worked with private companies that received about $10 million in investment from China and Romania. There is no evidence that those payments were illegal.

The “Biden family” is the term the right-wing Republicans are using to make it sound as if the president was part of the business dealings of his son Hunter and brother James, but they have turned up no evidence that President Joe Biden was part of their businesses or received any money in relation to them. Further, without evidence that the payments were illegal—and the Republicans have not charged that they were—they are relying on innuendo to smear the president.

The top Democrat on the committee, Jamie Raskin (D-MD), said that “there’s a lot of innuendo and a lot of gossip taking place and much of it is recycled from prior claims.”

When asked about the lack of evidence tying President Biden to corruption, Oversight Committee chair Representative James Comer (R-KY) said, “I don’t think anyone in America…would think that it’s just a coincidence that nine Biden family members have received money…. We believe that the president has been involved in this from the very beginning.” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) was clearer. He told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo, "You have to infer what's happening here...you're not gonna get necessarily hard proof."

The headline on a New York Times story about the report was hardly what Comer had hoped. It read: “House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden.”

Indeed, in the Washington Post, Philip Bump wrote, “The wider House Oversight’s net, the more often it catches Trump.” He noted that the Biden family doesn’t, in fact, have a family business. But, of course, the Trump family does have a business, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) estimates that Trump’s businesses made as much as $160 million when he was president. That doesn’t include the money his children—who, unlike Hunter Biden, were members of the administration—raked in both during his term and afterward, like the $2 billion investment a Saudi fund overseen by Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman made in Jared Kushner’s new private equity firm shortly after he left the White House.

In more substantive news, data released today from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that inflation is continuing to slow down. April marked the tenth month in a row of slower price increases for an annual pace slightly under 5%. Housing prices were the biggest contributor to that inflation.

Biden was in a Republican-held New York state district today, at SUNY Westchester Community College, to warn about the dangers of the Republican threats to crash the economy by refusing to lift the debt ceiling. He had won that district in 2020, and the Republican who took the seat there in 2022, Mike Lawler, won by less than a percentage point. Biden made it a point to distinguish, yet again, between extremist MAGA Republicans and reasonable Republicans, calling Lawler one of the latter.

As Jonathan Lemire, Lauren Egan, and Danielle Muoio Dunn wrote in Politico, it seems Biden is hoping to break the Republican phalanx against raising the debt ceiling by reaching out to Republicans whose reelection is in doubt, although Lawler said Biden told him he was not there to pressure him. The journalists noted that the White House recently called out the toll that McCarthy’s recent bill would take on the 18 congressional districts that Biden won and where Republicans were elected in 2022.

Today, Biden emphasized the enormous costs of the cuts the Republicans insist they require before they will permit a raising of the debt ceiling, including, Biden emphasized, 30,000 federal law enforcement officers: “11,000 FBI agents, 2,000 Border agents, DEA agents, and so on.”

He warned that the Republican plan will also cut veterans’ benefits and noted that the Republicans keep calling him a liar when he identifies cuts they are demanding. While the vagueness in their language enables them to insist they would not cut particular programs, Biden pointed out that the math doesn’t add up without huge cuts. Anything they intend to protect, they would have identified in writing. Until that happens, the necessary math says that we should assume everything is on the table.

If they don’t get those cuts, they say, they will crash the economy, costing 8 million Americans their jobs, according to Moody’s Analytics.

“This is a manufactured crisis,” Biden said. “And there’s no question about America’s ability to pay its bills. America has the strongest economy in the world, and we should be cutting spending and lowering the deficit without a needless crisis, in a responsible way.”

In contrast, former president Trump tonight pushed the country toward default, ignoring that his own massive tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations sent the deficit skyrocketing and that Congress raised the debt ceiling without conditions three times during his term to cover those shortfalls. “I say to the Republicans out there, Congressmen, Senators: if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default...Democrats will absolutely cave,” he said.

Trump was speaking at what CNN billed as a “Town Hall” in front of a crowd of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents, but the event quickly turned into a Trump rally. Trump played to the audience, which laughed at his attacks on E. Jean Carroll and cheered on the constant stream of lies that are by now a set performance. He steamrolled journalist Kaitlan Collins, who tried but could not counter his stream of lies.  When he finished, the audience gave him a standing ovation.

A CNN media personality told Daily Beast media reporter Justin Baragona, “It is so bad. I was cautiously optimistic despite the criticism. It is awful. It’s a Trump infomercial. We’re going to get crushed.” A senior Trump advisor told senior NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Garrett Haake that the campaign team “is thrilled with how the night went.” The person called the event a “home run” and said “when the lefts melting down, we know it was a good day.”  

Maybe. But according to legal analyst Andrew Weissman, Trump’s embrace of the January 6 rioters and promise to pardon them if he’s reelected feeds a potential case against him. He made similarly revealing comments about his theft and retention of documents marked classified. It was that very kind of indiscretion that enabled Carroll’s lawyers to beat him in court.

More important, though, while Trump’s base will love his performance, watching his lies and cruelty while his supporters laugh and cheer him on will remind voters of exactly what they worked so hard to reject in 2020. A Biden campaign advisor told NBC News White House correspondent Mike Memoli: “Weeks worth of damning content in one hour….  It was quite efficient." It might turn out that, as journalist Ana Navarro-Cárdenas tweeted, “[Joe Biden] is the winner of tonight’s town-hall.”

As Biden tweeted after the performance: “It’s simple, folks. Do you want four more years of that?”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON