#PELOSI CONGRESS LOST

[tomorrowusa]

Four years ago today (March 13th), then President Donald Trump got around to declaring a national state of emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic. The administration had been downplaying the danger to the United States for 51 days since the first US infection was confirmed on January 22nd.

From an ABC News article dated 25 February 2020...

CDC warns Americans of 'significant disruption' from coronavirus

Until now, health officials said they'd hoped to prevent community spread in the United States. But following community transmissions in Italy, Iran and South Korea, health officials believe the virus may not be able to be contained at the border and that Americans should prepare for a "significant disruption." This comes in contrast to statements from the Trump administration. Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said Tuesday the threat to the United States from coronavirus "remains low," despite the White House seeking $1.25 billion in emergency funding to combat the virus. Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, told CNBC’s Kelly Evans on “The Exchange” Tuesday evening, "We have contained the virus very well here in the U.S." [ ... ] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the request "long overdue and completely inadequate to the scale of this emergency." She also accused President Trump of leaving "critical positions in charge of managing pandemics at the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security vacant." "The president's most recent budget called for slashing funding for the Centers for Disease Control, which is on the front lines of this emergency. And now, he is compounding our vulnerabilities by seeking to ransack funds still needed to keep Ebola in check," Pelosi said in a statement Tuesday morning. "Our state and local governments need serious funding to be ready to respond effectively to any outbreak in the United States. The president should not be raiding money that Congress has appropriated for other life-or-death public health priorities." She added that lawmakers in the House of Representatives "will swiftly advance a strong, strategic funding package that fully addresses the scale and seriousness of this public health crisis." Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also called the Trump administration's request "too little too late." "That President Trump is trying to steal funds dedicated to fight Ebola -- which is still considered an epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- is indicative of his towering incompetence and further proof that he and his administration aren't taking the coronavirus crisis as seriously as they need to be," Schumer said in a statement.

A reminder that Trump had been leaving many positions vacant – part of a Republican strategy to undermine the federal government.

Here's a picture from that ABC piece from a nearly empty restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown. The screen displays a Trump tweet still downplaying COVID-19 with him seeming more concerned about the effect of the Dow Jones on his re-election bid.

People were not buying Trump's claims but they were buying PPE.

I took this picture at CVS on February 26th that year.

The stock market which Trump in his February tweet claimed looked "very good" was tanking on March 12th – the day before his state of emergency declaration.

Trump succeeded in sending the US economy into recession much faster than George W. Bush did at the end of his term – quite a feat!. (As an aside, every recession in the US since 1981 has been triggered by Republican presidents.)

Of course Trump never stopped trying to downplay the pandemic nor did he ever take responsibility for it. The US ended up with the highest per capita death rate of any technologically advanced country.

Precious time was lost while Trump dawdled. Orange on this map indicates COVID infections while red indicates COVID deaths. At the time Trump declared a state of emergency, the virus had already spread to 49 states.

The United States could have done far better and it certainly had the tools to do so.

The Obama administration had limited the number of US cases of Ebola to under one dozen during that pandemic in the 2010s. Based on their success, they compiled a guide on how the federal government could limit future pandemics.

Obama team left pandemic playbook for Trump administration, officials confirm

Of course Trump ignored it.

Unlike those boxes of nuclear secrets in Trump's bathroom, the Obama pandemic limitation document is not classified. Anybody can read it – even if Trump didn't. This copy comes from the Stanford University Libraries.

TOWARDS EPIDEMIC PREDICTION: FEDERAL EFFORTS AND OPPORTUNITIES IN OUTBREAK MODELING

Feel free to share this post with anybody who still feels nostalgic about the Trump White House years!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Joshua Keating at Vox:

Today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was back in a very familiar building. Not only was he making his fourth address to a joint session of Congress — breaking Winston Churchill’s record for foreign leaders — he’s also been a presence in the building’s halls since serving as a diplomat in the early 1980s. Since he made his first speech to Congress in 1996, Netanyahu has been almost as much a fixture of politics in America as in Israel.

Things felt different today. It’s not just that Netanyahu is a controversial figure, one who drew thousands of protesters onto the streets of Washington. That’s not new; Netanyahu’s 2011 speech to Congress was interrupted by a pro-Palestinian protester in the chamber. What is new is that he has become an increasingly marginalized one. Even a few weeks ago, when Netanyahu’s speech was announced, it had the makings of a marquee political event. Today, it was overshadowed by President Joe Biden’s highly anticipated Wednesday night speech to address his decision to drop out of the presidential election. Dozens of lawmakers — around half of Congress’s Democrats — skipped Netanyahu’s speech altogether.

Soon-to-retire Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin’s presence behind Netanyahu on the rostrum attested to how much of a partisan figure Netanyahu has become. Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate President Pro Tempore Patty Murray, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, one of whom would normally have been in that seat, all declined the role. Netanyahu, who has been Israel’s prime minister for 17 of the last 30 years, has done more than anyone to make support for the country an increasingly partisan issue in the United States, in part through actions like his speech to Congress in 2015. That time, he was invited by congressional Republicans to lobby against the Iran nuclear deal then being negotiated by the Obama administration in what was considered a remarkably partisan speech for a foreign leader. In today’s address, by contrast, Netanyahu made little news. It was a speech that gave little indication of a plan to end the war in Gaza, and likely undermined diplomatic efforts underway to do so. It was a notably defensive speech for Netanyahu, devoted more to refuting criticism of Israel than to charting a way forward out of the morass it has found itself in. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it “by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.”

What Netanyahu said — and what he’s doing

Netanyahu recounted the horrors of Hamas’s October 7 attacks and vowed to the families of hostages currently being held in Gaza that he “would not rest until all their loved ones are home.” Not all of those families may be inclined to take him at his word. Many of them are calling for the prime minister to accept a ceasefire deal to secure the hostages’ release, but today Netanyahu vowed that “Israel will fight until we destroy Hamas’s military capabilities and its rule in Gaza and bring all our hostages home,” adding, “That’s what total victory means and we will settle for nothing less.” Netanyahu also said, as he has in several previous remarks, that “[Israel] must retain overriding control [in Gaza] to ensure that Gaza never again poses a security threat to Israel” — a demand likely to be a nonstarter for any ceasefire deal. Despite that, Netanyahu has said in recent days that a ceasefire deal may be near, and the deal currently being negotiated is likely to be the focus of the prime minister’s meeting at the White House with Biden on Thursday. The Biden administration has tended not to respond directly to Netanyahu’s public statements on the deal, and this time was no exception. Asked if Netanyahu’s remarks made that deal less likely, a senior US administration official told reporters on Wednesday afternoon, “We were in the Situation Room doing some other stuff, so I have not seen the speech.”

[...]

How to lose friends and influence

Netanyahu praised President Biden for his “half a century of friendship to Israel” and noted that the president describes himself as a “proud Zionist.” But that only served to highlight the shrinking number of Democratic politicians who would publicly describe themselves that way. Polls have consistently shown a deep partisan divide opening up over sympathy toward Israel. He also thanked former president and current Republican nominee Donald Trump for actions in support of Israel during his presidency, including recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu will be traveling to Florida to meet with Trump (and possibly celebrate the birthday of his son, who lives in Miami). Still, while Trump has not exactly turned on Israel, he has clearly soured somewhat on Netanyahu, who he is still angry at for congratulating Biden on his election victory in 2020. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Trump posted a friendly letter from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on the day he announced the Netanyahu meeting.

Yesterday’s joint address to Congress from war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is further proof that his support is restricted to hard-line pro-Israeli supporters in the USA.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) had the right response to his grotesquely hateful speech with the “War Criminal” sign.

[deadpresidents]

Is there any truth to the claims that Obama pushed Biden to exit the race?

I think Obama was one of many voices within the Democratic Party that was urging President Biden to step aside. I think Biden takes anything coming from Obama more personally because they have a more complex relationship now than when Biden was Obama's Vice President. They had one of the closest personal relationships between a President and Vice President in American history during the Obama Administration, but there has been a change because Biden was hurt in 2016 when Obama basically made it clear that he believed Hillary Clinton was a better option to succeed him than Biden was.

Biden felt validated in 2020 when he was able to do what Hillary couldn't do and defeated Trump, and the Biden-Obama relationship has been more distant since then. I think it's also probably a weird dynamic for both of them because Obama was obviously the dominant figure throughout his Presidency and I imagine it's difficult for him to have the tables turned now that Biden is President. In the public events that they've done together during Biden's Presidency, Biden always seems overshadowed by Obama and I think that causes some friction, as well. There is a genuine personal friendship between Obama and Biden, but there's also a competitive dynamic to their relationship. Biden has wanted to be seen as his own man in the Presidency, and Obama has wanted to protect his legacy, which he believes is undoubtedly linked with Biden, especially since there's so much overlap with their respective White House staffs.

It's been pretty obvious from the reporting over the past week that President Biden is still having some difficulty coming to terms with the idea of not running for re-election. I've seen sources outright saying that the President is "pissed off". I don't think Obama was as big of an influence in getting Biden to step aside as some of the senior Congressional leaders, like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Jim Clyburn. It sounds like once Biden lost Pelosi, it became clear that things might get ugly if the President didn't make the decision to step aside on his own. Pelosi is still an enormously powerful figure in the party and a juggernaut when it comes to fundraising. If she was working behind-the-scenes against Biden, the President was probably on his way to losing the support of pretty much everybody in Congress -- that's how powerful Nancy Pelosi still is. I don't know how direct Obama was in those efforts, but the fact that many of Obama's closest political operators -- David Axelrod, David Plouffe, the Pod Save America crew (Favreau, Pfeiffer, Lovett, Vietor), etc. -- were making the argument on Obama's behalf was pretty clear to me.

[antoine-roquentin]

This series is shaping up to be about covert attempts by institutional power structures to undermine the health and safety of the international working class. The previous part, Part 4, is here. You can find a cool easter egg by seeing who the magazine in the bottom right image was delivered to.

The above is a dossier compiled by a right wing business intelligence group and purchased by the CIA not long after the events I’m about to share occurred. It is hosted on the CIA’s website for declassified files, the Reading Room. It was prepared by Fulton Lewis III, an outspoken supporter of the Rhodesian government and the son of a Hearst-sponsored anti-communist radio broadcaster, sort of the Tucker Carlson of the 40s and 50s. We don’t have the CIA’s own assessments because those are still classified.

When we last left the crew of the spaceship Ramparts, they were dealing with infiltration, incompetence, hedonism, an inability to secure funding, and the heady addiction of fame. Things were about to get worse as their own interpersonal disputes had come to the fore. Keating had seen his power at the magazine get whittled away as incentives in the form of shares for other backers became necessary. At the time, Hinckle counted among his friends Howard Gossage, an advertising whiz kid who helped popularize Marshall McLuhan and did the Sierra Club's first campaign. He frequently went to Gossage for advice. The two came up with a plan to push Keating into the 1966 Democratic primaries for the 11th district of California (later held by Leo Ryan, a CIA critic killed at Jonestown, and now held by Nancy Pelosi) as a way of reducing his influence on the day to day operations of Ramparts. In the midst of a meeting, they had two staff members slip away and come back with signs that said "Keating for Congress" and "Keating the people's choice".

By the start of 1966, however, the election bug had spread through the offices, both because it allowed Ramparts to make the news it reported on as salacious as possible, and because the Democratic Party had largely denied ballot access to anybody who was anti-Vietnam War. Bob Scheer, the foreign editor, ran in Oakland, and Stanley Sheinbaum, the Michigan State University professor who'd exposed the CIA's role on campus, ran in Santa Barbara. All gained 40-45% of the vote, mainly by cohering those opposed to the war. One thing in particular all three did was bring together the black vote (for instance, Julian Bond, mentioned previously in the series, campaigned for Scheer). Their campaigns were run by a coterie of Ramparts staffers, namely CPUSA member Carl Bloice as well as Berekeley lecturer Peter Collier, and were endorsed by a combination of black and Hollywood luminaries, for instance Dick Gregory, the civil rights activist and stand-up comedian, and Robert Vaughan, Napoleon Solo on the Man from Uncle and both a murderer and a victim on Columbo (see him argue about Vietnam on Firing Line with William Buckley here). Some of the opposition research on the three came directly from CIA files and was given to the establishment candidates by LBJ's press secretary Bill Moyers.

With the elections lost, Ramparts needed a new spin on things to bring back all the anti-electoral politics radicals. Fortunately, in nearby Oakland, a new group had just been founded called the Black Panther Party. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale like to portray their group as their own innovation, two upwardly mobile college kids shooting the shit late at night. The group they'd been part of prior to the BPP, the Maoist Revolutionary Action Movement, described them as "adventurists" for their desire to put theory to practice and finally organize in the community instead of just talking about it. Whatever the case, Newton learned from Robert Williams' Negroes with Guns that California law, influenced by white supremacist vigilanteism, allowed anyone to openly carry a weapon even in the presence of police. He went to Chinatown, bought copies of Mao's Little Red Book for cents, and sold them for dollars in Oakland as part of a course in organized self-defence, then used the money to buy shotguns and M-16s for use by graduates of the course. By February 1967, Ramparts staff writer Eldridge Cleaver had made contact at a speaking event for Malcolm X's widow Betty Shabazz, where the Black Panther Party founders and their cohort were the only ones armed. Cleaver invited them to the Ramparts offices for a sit down.

Remember the bit from the last part about Shabazz' bodyguards? That was Seale, Newton, and Co. Their arrival caused  Hinckle's police buddies to get worried, and they put out an APB and surrounded the building, much to Newton's consternation. Hinckle suggested they go out for a drink, but nobody was buying it. Newton stared down a cop, who undid his holster. Seale put his hand on Newton, who told him off. "Don't hold my hand, brother." Seale released it, because that was his shooting hand. Newton taunted the officer. "You got an itchy trigger finger?... OK, you big, fat, racist pig, draw your gun!" All the Ramparts' staffers who'd come to watch as well as the officers' backup got the hell out of Dodge. Eventually, even the officer backed down. It was the first time the BPP had ever gotten the police to back down. It brought admiration from the entire Ramparts staff, who soon made the magazine the semi-official outlet of the BPP. And it brought Cleaver into their fold. They appointed him spokesman/Minister of Information within weeks. The following is the only news footage from that day shot after the incident, the rest having been lost, with Scheer in the background at one point:

And that wasn't even the most shocking thing going on at Ramparts. This series has previously mentioned the National Student Association as a bunch of debate nerds who essentially trained to have public speaking and organizing on their resume for future employers. The thing about the NSA was, it was a CIA front, and generally suspected as such. In 1947, there was an implosion of student politics' international facing groups. Those who had seen the Soviets fight in the Second World War generally accepted their claims to want world peace on their face, while the groups aligned with the Catholic Church teamed up with disparate right wing WASPs and Jews to fight back. The CIA had taken these students (to note, these were largely men in their late 20s or early 30s, grad rather than undergrad) under their wing and organized them into a front group that could report back on invitational events held in Eastern Europe. In turn, the top echelons of the NSA had to be sworn into legal secrecy as a prerequisite of participation, with the reward being entry into the old boys network of politicians and bureaucrats which virtually guaranteed a job.  

The CIA fucked up. In 1965, the elected president of the NSA was Philip Sherburne. He was sworn into secrecy on the source of funding for their new HQ and general operations, as was normal for the group. But he disliked that they had only one source of funding, and he wanted the NSA to be independent. At the time, the grassroots in the organization who followed international politics and hewed to the left had managed to get some of their membership into power, but they had felt straitjacketed by the CIA's complete control of NSA finances. Many wanted to join in on the anti-war marches. Sherburne and others, spurred on by abrogation of Juan Bosch's regime in the Dominican Republic and the electoral fraud that brought the American-backed opposition to power, worked to find alternative sources of funding. They sent one an NSA man as part of the operation, but he got cold feet and worked with Sherburne to expose it. In response, the CIA had a number of top NSA men declared eligible for the draft in Vietnam. Bureaucratic fights ensued, involving the lives of students in America, Spain, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Finally, Sherburne went above the CIA's head to vice president Hubert Humprhey. In response, the CIA went and cut all of Sherburne's independent lines of funding. Unbenkownst to them, Sherburne had made a relatively radical student named Michael Wood his outside line to donors. He'd told Wood not to approach certain groups because they were backed by "certain government agencies". Wood had surmised that this meant the CIA and gone and picked up the only book out on the Agency: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas Ross. When he saw that the NSA's funding for 1966 had the same donor groups backed by the CIA, he realized Sherburne had lost and stole the files.

Twice the New York Times had published articles critical of the CIA in some form. In 1965, Texas congressman Wright Patman, initially elected on his support of the Bonus Army and ever a thorn in the establishment's side, had investigated 8 charitable foundations and found them to be CIA cutouts. The NYT had written an article on this as well as replies from the funded orgs (Encounter Magazine and the Congress for Cultural Freedom). In 1966, spurred by Ramparts' articles on MSU, NYT reporter Tom Wicker wrote of the allegations and added details of other botched operations around the world he'd heard from sources over the years. This brought the ire of the agency. In 1961, in response to details of the Bay of Pigs invasion being published in The Nation before it occurred, President Kennedy told his aides to bother him when details showed up in the New York Times because it otherwise did not matter. The CIA had actually worked hard to kill the very same story before the NYT could publish it so by the time the invasion failed, Kennedy apparently exclaimed that he wished more details had been published in the NYT so that the invasion would have been stopped. CIA agent Cord Meyer made the postscript of Part 3 of this series as the handler of much of the CIA's work through cutouts and allied groups like AFL-CIO, especially in in regards to  the effort to influence the media known as Operation Mockingbird. Meyer and his wife, Mary Pinchot, were next door neighbours to the Kennedy's before JFK became president. Pinchot divorced Meyer after their child was killed in a car accident in 1957. She moved in with her brother-in-law, Ben Bradlee, later of Pentagon Papers and Watergate fame and played by Tom Hanks in the Steven Spielberg film The Post. In 1961, James Jesus Angleton, head of counterintelligence at the CIA, tapped her phone and discovered she was in a sexual relationship with JFK, including visits at the White House. When Pinchot was murdered in October 1964 in what was termed a robbery (a black man was arrested but acquitted), a friend of the family heard (he said) about the murder on the radio and phoned Bradlee first and Meyer second. Bradlee went to go find her diary and found Angleton sitting in her house (his garage) reading it. They later destroyed it. After that, Meyer became an alcoholic and compiled an enemies list of the CIA that included the Vice President. He was already fearful of a leak and told his subordinates to go after NSA staff but did not determine who Sherburne had told until his wiretaps of Ramparts phone lines informed him.

Ramparts, of course, knew that they had been tapped and kept phone calls brief. Scheer phoned Judith Coburn of the Village Voice and asked for her discretion. Wanting to break into a field dominated by men, Coburn felt like she was being called by a rock star, but nonetheless found it absurd that Scheer believed his calls to be tapped. She knew the CIA to be involved in assassinations like Lumumba's and thought their dealings with a minor org like the NSA were absurd. Ultimately, she helped by confronting a number of figures on their work. Eventually, a young WASP Harvard undergraduate who was on retainer from Ramparts named Michael Ansara got the call. His blog about it is excellent reading, located here. I quote:

One evening in the cold months of early 1967, my phone rang. A strange voice, obviously from New York asked, “Is this Michael Ansara?”

“Yes.”

“This is Sol Stern from Ramparts. Bob Scheer says you are our man in Boston.”

“Well . . . OK.”

“Listen I need you to do some work for us right away. I cannot tell you what it is about. I am calling you from a phone booth. Will you do it?”

“Well, what kind of work and are you willing to pay me for it?”

“It is research into two Boston based foundations. We will pay you $500.” 500 dollars was a lot of money. I had no idea how to research foundations, but I thought, what the hell. I could really use the money.

“Sure. What exactly do you want me to do?”

“I can’t tell you anything more than to find everything you can on the Sidney & Esther Rabb Foundation and Independence Foundation. They are based in Boston. I will call you in several days. You cannot call me. You cannot tell anyone what you are doing. You cannot mention the name Ramparts. Can I count on you?”

“I guess so. Sure. Yes.”

Ansara knew a much older man, an economist and lawyer who had sway in the Democratic Party named George Sommaripa. Sommaripa suggested Ansara go to a guy he knew at the IRS. Ansara did, and was told that under no circumstances could he have access to the files on two CIA cutout foundations. Chastened, Ansara complained to Sommaripa, who'd gotten the IRS clerk his job. A few days later, Ansara went back. The IRS clerk told him he could have any box he wanted, provided he did not go past the 990 form on the cover. He went past for the first two foundations and found that money came from an anonymous donor and in equal amounts went right out to the NSA. Ultimately, he pulled the files for 110 foundations, every single known group that the CIA used. He would look at the incorporation files for the foundations, see a lawyers' name, and look him up. Every time, the lawyer was an OSS operative during WW2, the predecessor org of the CIA. One of the lawyers had founded a firm with Sommaripa, a man named David Bird. Ansara confronted Bird, and Bird did not even stop to hang up on Ansara before phoning a contact at the CIA.

Left to right: Hinckle, Stern, Scheer.

A major corroboration of the story came from three students in New York who were disgusted by American foreign policy in Latin America. One in particular, Fred Goff, had been sent to the Dominican Republic with Allard Lowenstein (part 3) to observe the election of the pro-American candidate over the anti-American one. Goff had discovered that a man that Lowenstein had said he trusted on the country was actually a CIA agent, Sacha Volman. Another, Michael Locker, had done a paper about the CIA based on the NYT articles. Together, they walked in the doors of the AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development and asked directly about the CIA, prompting a crashing sound and the institute's director, Thomas Kahn, planner of the 1963 March on Washington and the long-term romantic partner of Bayard Rustin, to scream at them.

The problem was when it came time to do the story. Sometimes, the researchers were paid by Ramparts. Other times, they received cheques from the Interchurch Center, a strange agency that serves as a front for charitable giving from the Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Reformed, Methodist, and United Churches in America. James Forman, mentioned in previous parts, once led a picket in favour of reparations from them. Ramparts staff demanded they talk to them by picking up pay phones that would ring at designated times, a dismal failure. Other times, Hinckle, Scheer, and Sol Stern would fly in, book rooms at the Algonquin, and order massive amounts of takeout and booze. 15 to 20 people would be in a hotel room trying to negotiate who would be writing the story by continent, or by year, or by foundation. At one point, Coburn broke into the NSA HQ and unwittingly stole the original deed to their land, where it remained undiscovered in Ramparts' files till the 2010s.

On New Year's Eve, 1966, Lowenstein was hanging out with the new members of the NSA leadership when he informed them that Ramparts was writing about their relationship with the CIA. "The usual sloppy Ramparts piece, lots of flash, little substance," he said. The CIA had known since at least Thanksgiving. A lower level NSA official who'd just been sworn in went to meet with Hinckle and Scheer. The duo, while nonchalantly throwing darts, offered the Ramparts donor list as an incentive to tell all, but he refused. Sherburne attempted to find counsel in a lawyer who'd once opposed the CIA's new Langley HQ on NIMBY grounds. Meyer had threatened the lawyer's brother, working in Bogota with USAID, but the lawyer persisted. Undaunted, Meyer got word to Douglass Cater, the first president of the NSA and now an advisor to LBJ. LBJ bumped it to Lowenstein and the CIA to develop a response, which was to hold a press conference with an article in Henry Luce's (the man, not the monkey) Time Magazine that this was all well known since the 1965 congressional hearings, that the money was not that impressive, that the Soviets had done much more, etc.

This could have killed Ramparts. The IRS was already looking for any sign of foreign influence as an excuse to shut down the magazine. It needed some sort of relationship with the establishment press in a way that would let it gain influence without keeping it from the areas it wanted to report on. At the very same time, both Time and the NYT were reporting on the survival of Ramparts: Keating had attempted a coup and lost a board vote 13-1, with Mitford and other backers providing anonymous quotes that while they disliked the "Animal Farm-ish" nature of the issue, they needed Ramparts to stave off a fascist dictatorship in America. Hinckle followed by setting up an astounding agreement with the New York Times and Washington Post: they would get full access to Ramparts' files on the CIA right now, before the White House could set up a press conference, in exchange for letting them run full page ads for days for their next issue.

The day the Times went to press, February 13, 1963, was termed by former CIA director Richard Helms in his memoirs as "one of my darkest days". The press pushed, smelling blood. President Johnson ordered a suspension and review of CIA funding for outside orgs. The CIA initially tried to find a way to blame a dead president, Truman, but realized that its own documentation on the program, written by Cord Meyer, claimed that then-director Allen Dulles did not have any responsibility to inform the president of what he had ordered. Switching tactics, they turned on their press weapon, known as the Mighty Wurlitzer, and claimed that the CIA would have been remiss to not conduct these operations. "I'm glad the CIA is immoral" was the headline of an article by Meyer's boss, Thomas Braden. He described $250 million a year the CIA believed to be spent by the Soviet Union on cultural subversion, to which a mere handful of dollars from the CIA could not compare. No evidence for the accusations was provided, of course. Finally, Helms pulled in a favour from Robert Kennedy and had him testify to the press that his brother had authorized the funding, carried over from the days of Eisenhower. 12 former NSA presidents (including Lowenstein) came out and said the relationship was above board. All had worked for the CIA at least once after they'd left the NSA, but that was not revealed in their letter.

The strategy was a half-success. All the foundations funded by the CIA fell apart and students around the world became suspicious of CIA infiltration. Much of what Ramparts found was investigated by Congress repeatedly over the next decade, culminating in the reforms that came out of the Church Committee, which Helms claimed in his memoirs was sparked by Ramparts and Watergate. Certainly press readership was high, and many stories were published in the NYT and WaPo confirming and furthering the work done. At the same time, the CIA escaped with only a few new rules on its behaviour. President Johnson was a paranoic and was more concerned about using the CIA as a tool against his domestic enemies. He authorized a much larger role for MHCHAOS in punishing his enemies (remember the cryptonyms? MH was the most illegal, as it meant the USA). Many of those fingered were considered liberals in good standing and were part of the labour movement, particularly AFL-CIO higher-ups. They fell in line with the rhetoric about communist subversion because they knew they'd be the ones punished if things went further.

Interestingly, a few months later, the NSA held a vote on integrating an anti-Vietnam War and anti-draft stance into its platform. Traditionally, the CIA had worked from the shadows to suppress these votes. This time, Allard Lowenstein whipped in favour of the anti- stance and it won. Lowenstein soon became a fixture in the anti-LBJ movement, leading the call to bring Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy into the Democratic presidential primaries. To a large extent, the organizations that were closed to the CIA had been products of decades-old relationships and worked in ways that nobody had bothered to improve. Within the CIA, a tension had always existed between bureaucrats with their own fiefdoms and up and comers with new ways of doing things. To a large extent, this scandal simply pushed the former out and made room for the latter, who would not do things like create financial records with the exact same dollar amounts going in and out, or act so bluntly when it came to manipulating staff. While the CIA may have suffered a little in the short term, it was an act of "creative destruction" that improved how the CIA did business. For Ramparts, on the other hand, things were going to get much worse now that they had drawn the ire of the intelligence community. While the magazine reached its peak distribution of 250,000 copies a month, it still did not bring in enough money to cover its expenses, and it was about to be faced with a much larger funding crisis: the Six Day War.

AFTER ALLEN DULLES RETIRED, the director bragged about the NSA operation. “We got everything we wanted. I think what we did was worth every penny. If we turned back the communists and made them milder and easier to live with, it was because we stopped them in certain areas, and the student area was one of them.”... Edward Garvey, who also worked at CIA headquarters, puts it more dramatically: “My God, did we finger people for the Shah?”... Stephen Robbins, despite his limited CIA involvement during his year as president, echoes Garvey’s concern: “It’s South Africa that keeps me up at night.”

[centrally-unplanned]

VOR: Nancy Pelosi as Dem caucus leader 2003-23, if you're not limiting it to heads of state.

A good question - its tough to answer because of the breadth, right? She gets points for being one of the people opposing the Iraq war in the buildup, but I guess that didn't work out, sigh. So overall I would say pretty good - so the point of a caucus leader, is almost to be the median, right? Its an execution job, not an ideology-shifting job, so its really all about the details of that execution.

I would say that the defining arc of her job has been decaying norms around governance and growing radicalism from the Republican party around tactics we can call "legislative terrorism" - something dems occasionally do too but 90%+ of this trend has imo been Republican led. I think this radicalism caught a lot of dems by surprise at first, and they failed to compensate & appreciate the threat. I would say a lot of Obama's first term, with his tenuous majorities in both houses, was underutilized, and once they lost it these tactics took their toll - but hard to blame Pelosi for that, she did the whole "100 Hours" plan of passing a spate of bills that all died in the Senate. Still, I think its fair to say, key dem strategist, by the time you get Merrick Garland being blocked from the Supreme Court the Dems had been dropping the ball and she is a part of that.

But that picked up heavily after that, particularly under Trump - I think she has positive VOR starting then in pushing the democrats into playing more serious hardball and being more practical on electoral politics. A lot of democrats to this day still hesitate on that, not understanding where you can compromise and where you can't (Secret Congress can get shit done). She knows and deserves credit for that.

So weaker first half, stronger second - I would give her a C+.

[madamspeaker]

Is there a bigger LGBTQ+ ally than Nancy Pelosi?

Think about it. She ran for office from a congressional district in San Francisco primarily to help do more in terms of funding and help for HIV/AIDS patients. Since then, she rose through the ranks of the U.S. House leadership, becoming Speaker in 2007 — arguably the most powerful and successful speaker in American history. During her entire career, she has always had the backs of LGBTQ+ people. Always. It’s hard to think of anyone in history who has done more for our community than Madame Speaker.

Celebrating Pride means not only celebrating queer history but those who made queer history happen. Pelosi no doubt has been a key ally in progressing LGBTQ+ rights. From marriage equality to anti-discrimination laws, she’s been a pivotal influencer.

“Well, my first Pride Parade as a member of Congress, we walked. And we got a lot of press because this was well over 35 years ago and not many members of Congress were in gay pride parades at that time,” Pelosi told The Advocate. “I got calls from all over, with people saying, ‘You stood with us.’ It meant so much for people beyond San Francisco, and the joy that I had marching with my constituents and taking pride. It was one of my first interactions as a member of Congress, and it was done in a very major way with the community that hardship attached to it. It wasn’t just pride, of course it came with the HIV/AIDS crisis.”

For Pelosi being so supportive and so vocal about her support for our community came with a price tag, though.

“I lost some friends over it. You know, people would say, ‘I'm not coming to your house if you're having gay people help with your cooking or anything,’ and I said, ‘Even if I don’t have anyone helping me with my cooking, I don’t want you to come.’”

Pelosi said that during this time, as she has always done, she hosted various groups of constituents in her home, and she wanted to send a particular message when she hosted one of those events. “I said to my friends in the gay community, stand with me at the food table, so when the guests are there, I want them to see both of us dipping into the dip with our chips at the same. It was small, but at the time, it was quite a big gesture.”

One big gesture that Pelosi helped support was when the AIDS Quilt was first displayed on the National Mall. I told Pelosi about my own experience of seeing it in October of 1987. I was running down the Mall, off to the side so no one would “assume” I was gay by being close to it. I stopped at one point and approached it, and saw the beauty, but also the tears that were being shed.

I jogged away, hid behind a nearby tree, and I began to sob.

“I get emotional every time I think about it,” Pelsoi shared.

She added that there were practical constraints with hosting something that size in that location.

“‘When the idea surfaced, I asserted myself arrogantly as a new member of Congress, not realizing what our limitations were. I just inserted myself to say that we should add the quilt on the Mall, and the Park Service said no, it's going to kill the grass,” she said.

Pelosi said that’s when legendary AIDS activist Cleve Jones, who conceived the AIDS quilt, offered an idea. “He said that he’d have our volunteers pick up the quilt every 20 minutes if that’s what was required to save the grass,” Pelso recalled. “And that’s what happened, and when the helicopters flew over the Mall with the beautiful quilt all spread out we knew we had something spectacular because it was not only beautiful, but it also told the stories of so many people who lost their loved ones to HIV AIDS.”

For this year, the pioneering lawmaker already has plans. Pelosi said that among other events, she will be attending theAnnual Pride Brunch in San Francisco. In its 26th year, the brunch is traditionally held on Pride Saturday, the day before the march, and benefits thePositive Resource Center or PRC, a non-profit organization that helps those affected by HIV/AIDS, substance use, or mental health issues.

“It used to be just some of us coming together for breakfast. And now it's turned into a big event, and really so much a part of the whole experience for us, and it benefits such a worthy cause,” she said.

Pelosi said that while Pride season is a wonderful time to be with family and friends and pay tribute to the community and its history, there was something more urgent on her mind.

“We need to make sure people understand that we have a chance, in this election, to pass the Equality Act. Again,” she explained.

She said that in a matter of months, the opportunity could exist to finally get this piece of legislation enacted into law.

“We need to vote. I know people hear that all the time, but for the community, it’s crucial. We need to make sure that Hakeem Jeffries will be Speaker of the House, and we hopefully hold the Senate and the White House, and then the path should be clear to make the Equality Act a reality.”

Pelosi pointed out that the Equality Act was one of four LGBTQ+ goals she set out to achieve when she first became Speaker.

“One was the hate crimes legislation. Two was to end discrimination in the workplace. Three was the repeal of don't ask, don't tell. And four was to codify gay marriage,” she explained. t While three out of four were won, one goal remains.

Under her leadership, the Equality Act was passed in the House in February of 2021, but failed to get the required 60 votes in the Senate. “We almost got it, but now we have a chance to make it happen, and that's what I think about as we go into Pride weekend, making that last goal a reality, finally.”

President Joe Biden awarded Pelosi the Presidential Medal of Freedom in May. Along with her was an ally in the fight against hate crimes.

“It was special for me, because Judy Shepard also received it, and she helped us pass the hate crimes legislation,” she said.

Pelosi knows that hate still exists, and in fact has become prominent because of the extreme right wing of the Republican Party.

“They are trying to stir up trouble, and it’s most unfortunate. So, when we talk about winning elections, it will help answer some of these problems, and stave off some of their negativism,” she said.

Pelosi explained that’s why she flies the trans flag at her offices.

“It’s a constant reminder that we have more to do. “I normally have a US American flag, a California flag, a San Francisco flag, and a rainbow flag but I also have a trans flag outside my office.”

That’s when I had an idea for Pelosi: “Might I suggest that you give Mrs. Alito a call and offer her some suggestions on what flags she should be flying?”

After a laugh, Pelosi responded, “That’s unbelievable, isn’t it? And that fact that he's not recusing himself from anything that has to do with January 6. Can you imagine?”

When it was time to say goodbye, Pelosi wished me a happy Pride. “I know I’ve said this before to you, but The Advocate has been very important to me over all these years. And, you have been so important in helping the community make progress since as far back as I can remember.”

Pelosi is too realistic, and perceptive, to understand the fight isn’t over.

“Progress has been made,” she said, “but you know as well as I do that there's still more work that needs to be done. Pride is one of my favorite times of the year, and one of the reasons is that the community has been an intellectual resource, an emotional resource, and a political resource just in every way. It's been a joy to work with, and I take great pride in that.”

[qqueenofhades]

Sorry I keep sending questions regarding the speaker of the house, but theoretically could the speaker be from the minority party? Obviously republicans aren’t going to vote for a democrat, but an article I was reading mentioned that democrats were all instructed to not miss a vote, so hypothetically if enough republicans didn’t show up, or if some republicans weren’t super opposed to a democrat, could a minority party member hold that office? I was curious if there’s a rule about it

The Speaker of the House can literally be anyone; it doesn't even have to be a member of the House (hence some of the speculation that the Loony Caucus would literally nominate Trump). They don't have to be from the majority party, though they usually are since the majority party will have the most votes. But Speaker and Majority Leader are two different roles (i.e. in the last Congress, Pelosi was Speaker and Steny Hoyer was majority leader), and the Speaker is supposed to represent the whole house.

Anyway, poor poor Qevin just lost the first ballot with almost 20 GOP defections, which is even more than the 9 predicted yesterday and to which I say LOLOLOLOLOLOL. That means Hakeem Jeffries, the new Democratic leader, will actually win the first ballot, but since he didn't get 218, he doesn't have enough votes to become Speaker either. It would be hilarious, if improbable, if just 5 Republicans defected, voted with the Dems, and helped him win the 2nd ballot. We can dream.

Anyway, now that Kevin has been served his ass on a hot turd sandwich, I have no idea how this goes. It's difficult to see how he gets back the 20 defectors, and more of them might vote against him in the second round since they saw he's vulnerable. Then, idk, shitshow? But of course Qevin moved into the Speaker's office yesterday, without knowing if he had the votes, so now he has to either squat in there without actually having won, or move back OUT.

I repeat: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

[mariacallous]

As Nancy Pelosi winds down her nearly two-decade tenure as the leader of House Democrats, including four terms as Speaker of the House, it is important to examine her time in leadership and learn from it.

In many respects, Speaker Pelosi has been one of the most powerful leaders ever to hold the gavel. In the political arena, her foes have used her as a bogeyman of liberal politics, pushing her image in campaign commercials, radio ads, and direct mail. While Republicans have vilified her because of her political views and the policies she has pushed to passage, they missed an opportunity to learn from a role model. Any politician, regardless of party or ideology, should look to Nancy Pelosi as a leader to emulate. You don’t need to be a San Francisco liberal to emulate her success in keeping House colleagues in line, raising huge sums of money for reelection, supporting candidates who will be team players, holding at bay resistance from within the ranks, and operating strategically with Senate leaders and presidents from the same or different parties.

She has kept in line a sometimes-fractured House Democratic Caucus. Over time, the diversity of that caucus has ranged from Blue Dog moderate Democrats like Ron Kind (Wisc.), former representative and now Republican Gene Taylor (Miss.), and Heath Shuler (N.C.), to the original members of the proudly progressive squad of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.). From the leadership elections held in advance of the 108th Congress (2003-2005), to what is now her final term as Speaker in the 117th Congress (2021-2023), she has never lost a leadership fight and rarely lost a legislative battle.

When Nancy Pelosi needed to find votes, they were found. When disagreements were waged within her caucus, they were settled. When she had room to let more moderate or more progressive members vote no on legislation they opposed, they voted no.

Her tenure by the numbers shows remarkable strength and power. At nearly 13,000 days in office, she is the second longest serving woman in the history of the U.S. House. She served as Democratic leader for 10 consecutive congresses (108th-117th), a tenure that will fall about a year short of Sam Rayburn’s record of just over 21 years. When the 118th Congress is sworn in in January, she will be the fifth longest serving Speaker of the House of Representatives in history. And, over the past 20 years, she raised over $1 billion dollars for Democrats’ electoral efforts.

She has overseen the passage of landmark legislation as Speaker, from the Affordable Care Act to legislation that saved the American economy—twice—at the start of the Great Recession and the recession associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. And in the darkest days of House history—the assassination attempts of Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) and Steve Scalise (R-La.) and the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021—she stood resolutely with Democratic and Republican colleagues condemning such violence, not as a leader of the Democratic Party, but as a Congressional leader.

Whether you agree with her politics or not, it is undeniable that she has been a remarkably effective House leader. That success has come as both House Minority Leader and as Speaker of the House. As Speaker, she has worked with a majority as large as 81 seats in November and December 2009 (258-177) and one as small as 6 seats from April to May 2021 (218-212). Some former rivals have admired her strength. Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich has said, “You could argue she’s been the strongest speaker in history. She has shown more capacity to organize and muscle, with really narrow margins, which I would’ve thought impossible.”

Her effectiveness, staying power, and liberal politics has made her a political target on the right. On January 6, as violent insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol, several were heard chanting “Where’s Nancy?” and video captured others making threats on her life. And recently a man broke into her San Francisco home allegedly planning to attack the Speaker, and violently assaulted her husband.

Whether Kevin McCarthy or someone else is the next Speaker of the House, the best path to success would be to become a conservative version of Nancy Pelosi. Some Republican leaders like Steve Scalise have managed civil relationships and/or strong working relationships with Democratic leaders like Steny Hoyer and even Speaker Pelosi. The same is true for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who by all accounts has a genuine respect for what Speaker Pelosi has accomplished. However, most other Republicans have forged a path of disdain and indignation for Pelosi rather than disagreement while learning by example. Failure to see her as a model for success will be the downfall of future Republican and Democratic leaders.

Several years ago, I moderated an event at which former Speaker Dennis Hastert spoke (prior to his legal troubles and downfall). He was asked what working with a president of the other party was like and he said he was always impressed with how President Clinton could compartmentalize politics, calling to negotiate budget matters on the same day the Senate was holding his impeachment trial. He said that Clinton knew that if he sulked about politics, it would be a barrier to his own success on policy. Unfortunately, gone are the days where many elected officials can disagree with their opponents on policy and politics, but respect and even admire them on process and procedure.

The U.S. House may never see another leader as capable and agile as Nancy Pelosi, but every Speaker from here forward should—above anything else—strive to replicate her leadership. Those who don’t will certainly be a footnote in a history in which Speaker Pelosi will forever be the lede.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday that Rep. Kevin McCarthy might need "a doctor," after losing so many Speakership votes.

"It's really sad. I don't even understand it," Pelosi told Politico reporter Meredith Lee Hill, summing up a day of failed ballots in McCarthy's bid to be speaker.

"Given any version of it. I think you would need a doctor or a psychiatrist," Pelosi added, per Hill.

As of Thursday, McCarthy had lost 11 consecutive votes in his attempt to become Speaker. This was even after he agreed to some procedural demands from rebelling Republicans who objected to his leadership.

Pelosi's team also sent out a fundraising email on Thursday evening following McCarthy's multiple failed votes. Insider saw a message from the "Nancy Pelosi for Congress" team, sent with the subject line: "RE: Kevin McCarthy."

"We're mere days into the new Republican House, and one thing has never been clearer: Republicans have already proven that they have no interest in governing For the People," the email from Pelosi's fundraising team received by Insider.

"While Democrats are unified and proud behind our new Leadership Team, ready to get to work protecting Americans' fundamental freedoms... Republicans have fallen into utter chaos – unable to even vote for a Speaker," the email continued. "I refuse to let Republicans' mayhem and extremist plans erase all of the incredible progress that Democrats have made."

NO LOVE LOST BETWEEN PELOSI AND MCCARTHY

There is no love lost between Pelosi and McCarthy. In July 2021, Pelosi called McCarthy a "moron" for criticizing the congressional mask mandate. Three days after Pelosi's July 2021 comments, McCarthy joked at a Republican fundraising event that it would be "hard not to hit" Pelosi with the Speaker's gavel if he were to take over her job.

Meanwhile, McCarthy has been accused by Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz — one of the key "Never Kevin" representatives — of squatting in Pelosi's former office, the Speaker's Suite, despite not having landed the job yet. The "Never Kevin" crew is led by right-wing Republicans who remain strongly opposed to McCarthy's leadership, and include outspoken members like Gaetz, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, and Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar.

McCarthy needs 218 votes to take the Speaker's gavel. As of Thursday, the congressman has failed to secure the votes a historic 11 times, with hardline members of the House Freedom Caucus still refusing to back him.

Representatives for McCarthy and Pelosi did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Michael Egan]

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 24, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 25, 2023

The Department of Homeland Security today issued a bulletin warning, “Lone offenders and small groups motivated by a range of ideological beliefs and personal grievances continue to pose a persistent and lethal threat to the Homeland.” Both domestic extremists and foreign terrorists are using online extremist messaging and calls for violence to motivate supporters to launch attacks. Individuals upset about the 2024 election and new laws or court decisions might attack “US critical infrastructure, faith-based institutions, individuals or events associated with the LGBTQIA+ community, schools, racial and ethnic minorities, and government facilities and personnel, including law enforcement.” The advisory is in force for six months. The announcement warned that a key factor in potential violence is “perceptions of the 2024 general election cycle,” a reference to disinformation suggesting that U.S. elections are rigged. This false allegation is a staple of former president Trump’s political messaging. That disinformation led to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, of course, although many of those who have stood trial for participating in that attack have expressed regret—at least in front of the judge. But not all of them. Today Judge Christopher Cooper noted that Richard “Bigo” Barnett had “not shown any acceptance of responsibility” for his actions before sentencing him to four and a half years in prison. Barnett is an Arkansas man who was convicted on eight counts for his participation in the attack, during which he was famously photographed with his foot on then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre informed reporters about the budget negotiations and averting default, calling it a “manufactured crisis.” She called out members of the far-right Freedom Caucus for referring to the full faith and credit of the United States as a hostage, and reiterated that it is the duty of every member of Congress to avert the default that will cost millions of jobs lost, devastate retirement accounts, and throw the United States—and the world—into a recession. “Let’s be clear about what Republicans are demanding in exchange for doing their job and preventing a default,” she said. “Earlier this year, they put forward an extreme package of devastating cuts that would slash…support for education, law enforcement, food assistance—the list goes on and on and on and on—by what now would be about 30 percent.” While Jean-Pierre didn’t say it, the Republicans’ insistence that spending is out of control does not reflect reality. In fact, discretionary spending has fallen more than 40% in the past 50 years as a percentage of gross domestic product, from 11% to 6.3%. What has driven rising deficits are the George W. Bush and Donald Trump tax cuts, which will have added $8 trillion and $1.7 trillion, respectively, to the debt by the end of the 2023 fiscal year. The U.S. is far below the average of the 37 other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental forum of democracies with market economies, in our tax levies. According to the Center for American Progress, if we taxed at the average OECD level, over ten years we would have an additional $26 trillion in revenue. If we taxed at the average of European Union nations, we would have an additional $36 trillion. What Jean-Pierre did say is that the Republicans’ demand for cuts in the name of fiscal responsibility and deficit reduction is belied by their protection of tax breaks skewed for the wealthy and corporations. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said those tax cuts would add $3.5 trillion to the debt over the next decade. As the credit rating of the United States totters, House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) repeatedly told reporters the debt ceiling crisis is not his fault. Indeed, he cannot corral the votes of members of the right-wing Freedom Caucus, who say they will not agree to raise the debt ceiling unless the Senate passes the extremist bill McCarthy got through the House by assuring party members that it was designed only to increase his bargaining power with Biden and that it would never become law. That passage is a nonstarter for Democrats and also for a number of vulnerable Republicans. And yet without it, McCarthy can’t get the votes he needs from the Freedom Caucus. And yet, the Republicans refuse to work with the Democrats, so the extremists can dictate what the House Republicans do. We’re right back to the same fight we saw over McCarthy’s speakership, where extremists held the trump cards. “We’re not going to default,” McCarthy insisted. In contrast, all the House Democrats have backed a discharge petition that would force a bill to increase the debt ceiling to the floor, but they need five Republicans to sign on to it. So far, no Republican has publicly stepped up. Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s announcement today that he is running for president was awkward. He made the announcement on Twitter, whose owner, Elon Musk, has said he supports DeSantis, but the technology didn’t work and Twitter crashed repeatedly, leaving DeSantis’s audience unimpressed. The campaign of rival Republican candidate Trump scoffed. A spokesperson said: “Glitchy. Tech issues. Uncomfortable silences. A complete failure to launch. And that’s just the candidate!” His commentary later in the day was even harsher. President Joe Biden also threw shade. His team tweeted: “This link works.” The link went to the Biden-Harris campaign donation site. On a more serious note, the president today used the one-year anniversary of the massacre at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and 2 teachers died and 17 more were injured, to call for gun safety measures. Since the Uvalde murders, Biden said, the U.S. has experienced 650 mass shootings and well over 40,000 deaths from gun violence. Guns are the top killers of children in the U.S. Biden called for a ban on AR-15-type firearms and high-capacity magazines, and for the establishment of universal background checks, national red-flag laws, required safe storage of firearms, and an end to the immunity from liability that gun manufacturers enjoy. He noted that these commonsense measures are popular. “To the families of the children and to the educators…we know that, one year later, it’s still so raw for you. A year of missed birthdays and holidays, school plays, soccer games, just that smile. A year of everyday joys gone forever. The bend in his smile. The perfect pitch of her laugh. “God bless those 21 blessed souls lost on this day in Uvalde,” Biden said. “And may God bless their families. We’re thinking of you.”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[bala5]

Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Taylor fighting before the House for HIV/AIDS funding when no one else would.

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Taylor Testifying Before the House Budget Committee on HIV-AIDS Funding in March 1990

Since her first day in Congress, combating HIV and AIDS has been a priority for Congresswoman Pelosi. Armed with the lessons of San Francisco’s model of community-based care, Congresswoman Pelosi worked to expand access to Medicaid for people living with HIV and secured billions of dollars for the Ryan White CARE program, the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP), the Minority HIV/AIDS Initiative and other research, care, treatment, prevention and search for a vaccine and cure initiatives vital to people living with or at risk for HIV/AIDS

Pelosi was an early supporter of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and its display on the National Mall; as well as its recent return to San Francisco. In 1989, Pelosi helped fight to create the HOPWA program to ensure stable, affordable housing for low-income people living with HIV/AIDS, and more recently secured record levels of HOPWA funding. Pelosi passed legislation designating San Francisco’s AIDS Memorial Grove as the only National Memorial in the United States dedicated to those lost to HIV/AIDS, survivors and activists. Internationally, Pelosi helped lead the effort to contribute to the Global Fund and worked with President Bush to create PEPFAR. Domestically, Pelosi has helped secure billions for HIV prevention, care, treatment and research. As a crowning achievement, Pelosi spearheaded the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which has provided significant benefits for those with HIV/AIDS. Most recently, Pelosi secured $600,000 for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation to provide mental health & substance use services for long-term survivors of HIV/AIDS.

[tomorrowusa]

REPUBLICANS IN DISARRAY!!!!11!!1!

Steve Scalise has withdrawn from the House Speaker race. Gym Jordan is back in the race despite the fact that he lost the last time the GOP caucus chose a candidate.

CNN spoke with GOP former Rep. Fred Upton. He basically said that he was relieved to be back in Michigan with his wife and grandkids these days.

House Republicans are meeting again on Friday afternoon. But a number of them have already stated that they would not support Gym Jordan for Speaker.

Journalist David Gregory told CNN that he expects Democrats to eventually jump in and try to work out a solution; the total GOP House shitstorm reflects badly on Congress as a whole and there's work to be done with multiple crises around the world and at home.

Republicans are simply unable to govern. At the heart of all this is Donald Trump having hijacked the party for his own purposes.

Don't let people spew bothsiderism to you about Democrats and Republicans in the House. Whether people agree with her or not, the House was infinitely better managed by Nancy Pelosi for eight years than it was by Kevin McCarthy for eight months.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dean Obeidallah at The Dean's Report:

It’s a “coup!” declared hysterical Republicans.  Were they talking about Donald Trump’s efforts after the 2020 election to overturn the election for which he’s currently facing criminal charges in both federal court and Fulton County, Ga?! Nope! What Republicans from JD Vance down were calling a “coup” was President Biden dropping out of the 2024 race. (I’m serious!)  Arkansas US Senator Tom Cotton wrote on X shortly after the news broke, “Joe Biden succumbed to a coup by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Hollywood donors, ignoring millions of Democratic primary votes.”  “The coup is complete,” wrote Trump loving Representative Paul Gosar from Arizona. That was followed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who also echoed the claim we witnessed a “coup” with Biden dropping out.

Talk of a coup even made it all the way to the top of the 2024 GOP presidential ticket when—in an interview that aired Monday--Fox News host Jesse Watters asked Trump and his running mate JD Vance, “Is it a coup against Joe Biden?” Vance responded point blank, “Yeah, I think it is.” Trump though—perhaps reflecting on what he did after the 2020 election—was uncharacteristically sheepish, offering Watters only this two word answer: “Sort of.”

Back on planet earth, we know that Biden made the decision to drop out for the same reason politicians have chosen to end their campaigns since time immemorial. As NBC News reported, in reaching his decision, Biden reviewed along with his family and top aides extensive polling data, including how Vice President Kamala Harris would fare in a potential matchup against Trump. It’s true Biden was not happy with the growing calls to drop out after his deeply troubling debate performance three weeks before. However, as NBC News noted At the end of it all, “Biden came grudgingly to accept that he could not sustain his campaign with poll numbers slipping, donors fleeing and party luminaries pushing him to exit.”

That led us to Sunday afternoon when Biden released a letter that informed the nation, “While it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.” (President Biden is addressing the nation on Wednesday night where we will find out even more of the details.) That’s not a coup. That is what American politics and democracy have long looked like. True, given it was a president dropping out only a little more than a hundred days from the election, it was both jarring and history making. But at the end, Biden made what he believed was the best choice for himself, his family, his party and his country.

[...] Trump attempted a coup in every sense of the word. Despite losing the 2020 election, he attempted to overturn the results to remain in power. That is why the federal indictment against Trump charging him with four felonies states, “Despite having lost, the Defendant [Trump] was determined to remain in power.”   To that end as the indictment continues, Trump “pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.” Trump’s “criminal scheme”--as the indictment describes--included replacing legally elected electors to the Electoral college with fake ones chosen by his campaign to deliver Trump the victory he didn’t actually win. Trump’s illegal plan also included preventing Congress on Jan 6 from certifying the legitimate votes cast for Joe Biden--despite Trump losing every court battle to invalidate these very votes. Then there was the brutal Jan 6 attack on our Capitol, which FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress was an act of “domestic terrorism.” As the Jan 6 House committee’s final report put it: “The central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed,” adding, “None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.”

Dean Obeidallah debunks the right-wing bad faith “coup” attacks against Joe Biden, and rightly points out that replacing Biden with Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee (before the nomination was formalized) is NOT a coup, but the Capitol Insurrection on January 6th, 2021 and Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results were most definitely one.

See Also:

The UnPopulist: Republicans' Bogus Claims that Democrats Acted Illicitly in Replacing Biden

[collapsedsquid]

In our new book, Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump, we draw on more than 250 interviews to reveal how Pelosi viewed impeachment — and aggressive oversight of Trump — as problematic for her majority and for Democrats politically. How, despite other Democrats fighting for her to do more, Pelosi worked behind the scenes to slow efforts to hold Trump accountable. We show how the speaker accustomed to steering her fractious caucus with an iron grip, lost control to a band of liberal Democrats, who whipped together an effective mutiny of members after Trump tried to leverage taxpayer dollars in Ukraine to secure his own reelection. The book details how Pelosi, in a bid to wrest back her authority, did an about-face, ultimately embracing impeachment — but only half-heartedly. Even Democrats privately say Pelosi undercut her own impeachment inquiry by prioritizing politics over fact-finding. In her eagerness to get impeachment done by Christmas so her frontliners could pivot to talking about legislation she viewed as necessary to protect Democrats’ majority, she put the probe on an artificially accelerated timeline that doomed it to failure before Democrats had made their strongest case against Trump to the nation. That meant sidelining investigative threads that could have exposed a fuller and more complete picture of Trump’s misdeeds.

[...]

Yet Pelosi’s process was all about speed. In an early meeting, she and her allies had persuaded caucus leaders to move quickly and focus on the Ukraine allegations, foregoing deep dives into other Trump misdeeds. That meant leaving behind probes and public hearings about Trump allegedly obstructing justice, profiting off the Oval Office, doling out pardons for political favors and paying off women alleging affairs with him during his 2016 campaign.

[...]

The Ukraine-only mandate had caused tension — and regret — with some top Democrats. Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, a former professor of constitutional law, had tried to warn Pelosi and her team that the Ukraine saga was too complex for the public to comprehend. That Democrats should expand their inquiry to include Trump’s violations of the Constitution’s prohibition of a president profiting off the Oval Office, which he thought voters could better digest. Others were concerned that the party was leaving serious Trump-related allegations on the cutting room floor — allegations that would paint a fuller picture of an unhinged and unethical man in the West Wing.

This piece trying to sell that Pelosi was wrong to be skeptical of impeachment but gotta say it’s not convincing me. Yeah man I’m sure that the republican moderates would have been convinced if you’d filled out a few more forms. Wonder what the general opinion on the impeachment is at this point

[xtruss]

House Chaos: Congress Becomes ‘Anti-China Theater’

— Ding Gang | January 04, 2023

Illustration: Chen Xia/Global Times

The difficult election for Speaker of the US House of Representatives is not a good thing for US-China relations.

The 118th Congress officially kicked off on Tuesday, and in the election for Speaker of the House of Representatives, Republican candidate Kevin McCarthy suffered a block. In the three rounds of voting that day, he failed to secure the 218 votes necessary to become a speaker.

The last such obstruction occurred in 1923, when it took nine ballots to elect a speaker.

This time round, it shows that US politics is still mired in a fierce struggle of "madness against madness." The drama that has been repeated and intensified in recent years in US politics is that the more intense the battle between the two parties, or among groups within a party, the more the "China threat" will become a topic of discussion, and the more anti-China proposals will be made. Some lawmakers will even use "China" to bargain under the table in order to secure the support of their opponents.

The reasoning is simple, because only through the topic of containing China is it possible for both parties to form a united front. This is not because China has really become the enemy that will destroy the US tomorrow morning, but because they can't reach a consensus on many US domestic problems, they can only use China to shift the subject. Therefore, the US Congress has become a highly rehearsed and staged "anti-China drama" theater.

An important factor affecting McCarthy's vote is that the Trump complex is still deeply influencing US politics. It was during Trump's administration that China-US relations turned from a slow climb to a sharp downward spiral. His policy toward China shows a strong and characteristic smell of "Madness." Some people in the Republican Party do not support McCarthy, thinking that McCarthy is not supportive enough of Trump, and is too soft on the Biden administration. They also accused the Biden administration of not having a strong enough policy to target China.

McCarthy said in July that he would lead a delegation to Taiwan after his election as Speaker of the House. He and Representative Mike Gallagher (R-Iowa), chairman of the newly formed Select Committee on China, co-authored an article on the Fox News Website in December with the headline, "We're in a Cold War with China. Here's How We Win It." But that's not strong enough.

Five Republican lawmakers have formed a small group to oppose McCarthy's election, including Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who calls himself a "libertarian populist," but observers have often described his views as far-right.

Gaetz tweeted that he cannot trust President Joe Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi's strategy toward China, accusing them of being too soft on China and that the US must have a national strategy to punish China.

As a result, the positioning of China as an enemy of the US has become a potential, unwritten "rule of survival" within the US Congress. Thus, the more the two parties fail to agree on key domestic issues, the more they will saber-rattle on China. We can see from the anti-China programs that have been introduced in the US Congress in recent years that some people have lost their rationality in dealing with the China issue.

The US House of Representatives continues to vote on Wednesday, but no matter who is elected, it is clear that the overall attitude of the US Congress toward China will become more assertive in the future, and the White House's flexibility on China-related issues will be squeezed. The political polarization within the US will continually make it difficult to ease relations between China and the US.

— The Author is a Senior Editor with People's Daily, and currently a senior fellow with the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China.

[90363462]

Nancy Pelosi Reflects On the Not-Quite-End of An Era

Pelosi Announces She Is Stepping Down From Leadership But Keeping Her House Seat

0 of 30 seconds, 

Nancy Pelosi Reflects On the Not-Quite-End of An Era

Ever since the election, Nancy Pelosi says, congressional Democrats have been begging her to remain as their leader. Of course, she knew what they were really doing: currying favor, just in case.

“Our members were just exploding my phone to stay,” she says, “which is a nice thing, because if I don’t stay, then they’ve gotten the points for saying ’stay,’ and if I do—“ she trailed off, laughing. No matter what she decided, they knew it would be in their interest to be on her good side going forward.

For two decades, it has been in every congressional Democrat’s interest to stay in Pelosi’s good graces. Since winning her first leadership position in 2001, she has ruled the House Democratic caucus with an iron fist and a velvet glove, keeping her fractious party in near-lockstep during historically tumultuous times. From the Iraq War to the financial crisis, through health-care reform and government shutdowns, through two presidential impeachments, a pandemic and an insurrection attempt, she has been a constant force and consummate operator. No national politician of her era can match her combination of legislative prowess, vote-counting savvy, negotiating skill, and fundraising ability.

Nancy Pelosi waves to colleagues while being nominated as the next Speaker of the House during a swearing in ceremony for the 110th Congress in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC., on Jan. 4, 2007.

Chip Somodevilla—Getty Images

Just after her speech, the 82-year-old House Speaker sat at a white-clothed table in a small, ornate room off the House floor known as the Board of Education, a hidden chamber where former Democratic Speaker Sam Rayburn used to hole up and relax. Then-vice president Harry Truman was playing cards with Rayburn here in 1945 when he learned that FDR had died and he would become President. One wall Rayburn had painted with a Texas seal; on two others, Pelosi recently added her own touches: a painting of the Golden Gate Bridge, and a tribute to women’s suffrage.

Pelosi was contemplating the not-quite-end of the era and struggling to unwrap a package of chocolate-chip cookies. “What was important to me was how we did in the election, because we were on a bad path,” she told a small group of reporters. “Storming the Capitol, really? And the reaction of Republicans, not taking a stand? And I knew we could win.”

Her party had just lost the House, weeks after a crazed intruder broke into her California home and bludgeoned her husband with a hammer. But it hardly felt as if Pelosi was giving up in defeat. In an election that history and many forecasters predicted would deliver a Republican wave, Democrats surprisingly held their own. The resulting GOP majority will be a narrow one, with the Senate remaining in Democrats’ hands.

The Oct. 28 attack on Paul Pelosi, the Speaker’s husband of 59 years, influenced her decision to remain in Congress, but not in the way many people thought. “It was not, ‘Oh, well, since they did that, I can’t even think of something else,’” she says. “No, it had the opposite effect. I couldn’t give them that satisfaction.”

Read More: Nancy Pelosi Doesn’t Care What You Think Of Her.

Nancy Pelosi at election headquarters on primary election night, on April 7, 1987.

Deanne Fitzmaurice—San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi stands behind President Barack Obama as he signs the Affordable Health Care for America Act during a ceremony with fellow Democrats in the East Room of the White House on March 23, 2010.

Win McNamee—Getty Images

She did it knowing there might be a political cost, and indeed there was. Republicans gained 63 seats in the House in the 2010 midterm elections, an election in which Pelosi was a central figure. Republicans made her the subject of millions of dollars’ worth of attack ads across the country, capitalizing on their base’s visceral loathing of her and giving Peosi unusual prominence for a congressional leader.

But Pelosi believed in gaining power not for its own sake but in order to do something with it. Obamacare is part of a legacy that includes two decades of liberal policy victories, from allowing gay people to serve openly in the military to the historic climate investments of this year’s Inflation Reduction Act. “This is a very difficult job,” she told us. “You have to really know how to be a legislator.”

These legislative successes were all the more remarkable for the era in which they came. Faced with unrelenting Republican opposition, she held together the diverse Democratic caucus and drove a hard bargain in negotiations across the aisle. After Donald Trump became president, she led her party back to power, becoming Speaker for the second time in 2019 in the middle of a government shutdown over border-wall funding. Pelosi refused to budge, and Trump soon capitulated. She would go on to impeach him twice while simultaneously negotiating with his Administration to secure trillions in COVID-19 relief funding.

Read More: Why Nancy Pelosi Is Going All In Against Trump.

Pelosi rejects the notion that she bears any blame for the toxic state of politics. “I don’t take any responsibility for what the Republicans have done to the Congress. This is not about gridlock,” she says. “This isn’t about some sort of equivalence between Democrats and Republicans. They are anti-science, anti-government, and that’s where they are.”

Mark Wilson—Getty Images (2); Chip Somodevilla—Getty Images; Jim Watson—Pool/AFP/Getty Images

Pelosi never groomed a successor, something for which she was often criticized. Ambitious Democrats languished for decades waiting for an opening in House leadership. She has often expressed the view that power is never given but must be taken by those who seek it. “I didn’t think that was the right approach, to anoint somebody,” she told us Thursday. “It’s really important for people to have the legitimacy that they were chosen by the members.”

A free-for-all appears unlikely. Pelosi’s longtime deputy Steny Hoyer, a fellow Marylander who has known her since they worked for the same Senator in 1963, announced Thursday that he would also stay in Congress but not in leadership. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the 52-year-old chair of the Democratic caucus, appears almost certain to win the minority leader position in the Democratic leadership elections scheduled for Nov. 30, becoming the first Black man to lead a party in Congress. The first woman Speaker, in passing the torch, will make history once again.

Pelosi intends to spend the next two years in valedictory mode. “My life ahead is full of thank-yous,” she says, to her constituents and all the others who have supported her over the years. She does not plan to serve on any committees and she does not want to serve as a sort of shadow speaker from the sidelines. “Thanksgiving is coming,” she says. “I have no intention of being the mother-in-law in the kitchen saying, ‘My son doesn’t like the stuffing that way, this is the way we make it in our family.’ They will have their vision. They will have their plan. It’s up to the caucus to decide which way they want to go.”

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Write to Molly Ball at molly.ball@time.com.

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