#Steve Benen

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Steve Benen

By any fair measure, Justice Clarence Thomas was already one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most controversial members, even before this year got underway. But in recent months, the far-right jurist has faced a series of ethics questions that he and his allies have struggled to answer.

Over the last three months, ProPublica has taken the lead on exposing Thomas’ unusual and previously undisclosed ties to a Republican megadonor. Over the weekend, The New York Times took the story considerably further.

At the heart of the story is an organization with a name that’s probably unfamiliar to most Americans, but which counts among its members an exclusive group of powerful and wealthy elites:

“On Oct. 15, 1991, Clarence Thomas secured his seat on the Supreme Court, a narrow victory after a bruising confirmation fight that left him isolated and disillusioned. Within months, the new Justice enjoyed a far-warmer acceptance to a second exclusive club: the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, named for the Gilded Age author whose rags-to-riches novels represented an aspirational version of Justice Thomas’s own bootstraps origin story.”

According to the Times’ account, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, it was quite a pairing, as the Supreme Court Justice found a home alongside “a cluster of extraordinarily wealthy, largely conservative members who lionized him.”

The non-profit organization, which awards scholarships and promotes members’ “economic opportunity” ideals, has benefited from the association with Thomas. From the article:

“While he has never held an official leadership position, in some ways he has become the association’s leading light. He has granted it unusual access to the Supreme Court, where every year he presides over the group’s signature event: a ceremony in the courtroom at which he places Horatio Alger medals around the necks of new lifetime members. One entrepreneur called it “the closest thing to being knighted in the United States.””

Just so we’re clear, when the Times mentioned “the courtroom,” it was referring specifically to the Supreme Court’s interior chamber where Justices sit and hear oral arguments.

“The association has used access to the court ceremony and related events in the annual gathering to raise money for scholarships and other programming, according to fund-raising records reviewed by The Times,” the report added.

As for Thomas, he’s received benefits of his own, beyond simply enjoying the camaraderie of like-minded allies who were eager to celebrate him. The Times’ account highlighted the degree to which the Justices’ associations with the association’s members “brought him proximity to a lifestyle of unimaginable material privilege.”

The result was relationships in which Thomas’ Horatio Alger friends “have welcomed him at their vacation retreats, arranged V.I.P. access to sporting events and invited him to their lavish parties.”

Remember, over the last few months, the Supreme Court Justices’ principal problem was his relationship with Texas billionaire Harlan Crow, and the generosity the GOP megadonor has shown Thomas. But what the Times appears to have uncovered is a similar problem multiplied several times: Thomas “has received benefits — many of them previously unreported — from a broader cohort of wealthy and powerful friends,” thanks to his connections established through the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans.

Among the benefits: In 2016, an HBO film brought Anita Hill’s allegations against Thomas back to the fore. Soon after, a documentary titled “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” designed to defend the Justice, was released.

It was financed in part by Thomas’ Horatio Alger pals.

The Justice has not yet responded to the allegations raised by the Times.

[louhastings]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[dumbestthingiveeverheard]

Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard: 8/1/2023

Fifth Place: Asa Hutchinson

Despite being the only Republican running for President who I have any respect for, people need to face a rather important fact: Asa Hutchinson is not going to be President. Since the start of the 2024 race, it has been obvious that if Donald Trump entered he was going to be the nomination--and Trump has entered. This was demonstrated perfectly when Hutchinson was on CNN last night and we saw this graphic:

He couldn't even break half of one percent in any of the eight groups listed--seriously think about that.

Fourth Place: Laura Ingraham

Can we just admit that Fox News is a neo-Nazi network at this point? For fuck sake, last night brought us yet another example of a host pushing the horribly racist Great Replacement theory, with Ingraham saying:

Now, this is what Democrats have always wanted though, isn't it? An open border that would help usher in a new America. And this is what we're getting: Millions upon millions of illegals who fanned out across America with their free cell phones and dubious intentions.

I don't even know what to say about this outside of--well, this is the same thing Fox has been doing for years, and it seems like barley anybody, including the people whose job it is to monitor the right for things like this, barley notice it anymore. Media Matters barley took notice and from the looks of it no other media watchdog even mentioned it, it takes something especially offensive--like Greg's recent comments on the Holocaust--to even cause people to notice that Fox is engaging in the same rhetoric that actual fascists do.

Third Place: Steve Benen

MSNBC is easily the best out of the three cable news networks, but even they sometimes fall into the trap of not framing the story correctly. For example, Steve Benen's article on the website ran the headline "Dems slam Justice Alito’s latest claim as ‘stunningly wrong.’" However, this headline should make it a point to note that it's not merely the Democrats "slamming" Alito for saying Congress has no authority to regulate the Supreme Court, but it is them pointing out that what he said was, in fact, incorrect. This would be like claiming a teacher "slammed" a student who incorrectly answered a question on a test--except the student was also one of the nine most powerful people in the country.

Second Place: Michelle Goldberg

Her column "The Radicalization of the Young Right" falls into the typical liberal trap of having nostalgia for the terrible conservatives of the past because maybe they weren't as bad as those on the right today. The article sees her giving the benefit of the doubt to Nate Hochman, the DeSantis campaign staffer who was fired for putting fascist symbols into campaign ads, by writing:

Though the video’s imagery is clearly fascist — the sonnenrad, or sunwheel, is flanked by two rows of marching soldiers — Hochman has said that he didn’t know what the symbol meant. Given that he is Jewish, I’m inclined to believe that rather than being a covert Nazi, Hochman is simply a callow young man immersed in a milieu in which fascist idioms are so commonplace they can be picked up inadvertently. 

And honestly, who here hasn't accidentally put a fascist symbol into a video? (Or made their crossword puzzle look like a fascist symbol on the first day of a Jewish holiday?)

As Hochman clearly recognized, these days, young reactionaries find their inspiration not in the adolescent superman fantasies of Ayn Rand but in the nihilistic Joker energy of 4chan.

And how exactly are those two things different? Ayn Rand wrote stories about how everything was bad in mainstream society and those on the sidelines need to take over and get rid of all of those who disagree, and that's the motto of the modern right-wing. Of course, Ayn Rand was never a source of inspiration for reactionaries, who were primarily conservative, because Rand was not one--William Buckley, the person behind the post-World War Two conservative movement, even hated Ayn Rand and pushed her out of his new right.

Winner: John O'Connor

It's not everyday you see somebody attempt to defend Richard Nixon, but O'Connor did just that in his Townhall column "How Watergate Journalism Sowed the Seeds of Today’s Toxic Division." Even ignoring the silliness of the claim that Bob Woodward, a registered Republican, would do something like take down a sitting Republican President, and that The Washington Post would use Watergate as nothing more than an attempt to take down Nixon but wouldn't release most of the information on it until after the 1972 Presidential Election (George McGovern changing running mates was covered far more than Watergate during 1972) is nonsensical, but O'Connor is here to tell us what really happened:

But what was so patently false about the Washington Post Watergate journalism?  From the first days of the burglary arrests of June 17, 1972, the Post knew facts strongly showing that this had not been a White House campaign operation but, rather, was a small part of a widespread, long-lasting CIA program of surveilling prostitutes and their Johns.  Inveigling seeming White House approval from lower aides, the CIA hoped to gain a get out-of-jail-free card if later exposed.

And the fact that the organization which did this was called the Committee to Re-Elect the President is--what, a really bad coincidence? For those curious, O'Connor shows no evidence for this claim--instead he just spends the rest of the column insulting Mark Felt and modern journalism.

John O'Connor, you've said the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

[porterdavis]

The number of people in the Republican’s [Trump] orbit who’ve been convicted of crimes in recent years is so great, The Washington Post once described it as the “remarkable universe of criminality“ surrounding the former president.

That was five years ago. It’s even more remarkable now:

Donald Trump was charged, convicted, and is awaiting sentencing.

Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison.

Trump’s former campaign vice chairman, Rick Gates, was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison.

Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison.

Trump’s former adviser and former campaign aide, Roger Stone, was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison.

Trump’s former adviser and former White House aide Peter Navarro, was charged, convicted, and is currently in prison.

Trump’s former campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison.

The Trump Organization’s former CFO, Allen Weisselberg, was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison.

Trump’s former White House national security advisor, Michael Flynn, was charged and convicted.

Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, was charged with wire fraud and money laundering, in addition to a conviction in a contempt case similar to Navarro’s. He’s currently awaiting sentencing.

Though he was later acquitted at trial, Trump’s former inaugural committee chair, Tom Barrack, was charged with illegally lobbying Trump on behalf of a foreign government. (Elliot Broidy was the vice chair of Trump’s inaugural committee, and he found himself at the center of multiple controversies, and also pled guilty to federal charges related to illegal lobbying.)

Two lawyers associated with Trump’s post-defeat efforts, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, have pleaded guilty to election-related crimes.

And did I mention that former president’s business was itself found guilty of tax fraud? Because it was.

This does not include the fact that a jury held Trump liable for sexual abuse in a civil case.

By Steve Benen

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

“Ali Velshi breaks down the goals and origins of Project 2025, a radical, far-right plan to purge and restructure the U.S. government if the Republican party wins the 2024 election, including dismantling the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of Education, among others, and placing federal agencies directly under the president’s control. Foreign Policy Senior Correspondent, Michael Hirsh, and MSNBC Political Contributor and author of "The Impostors," Steve Benen, join Ali Velshi to discuss what makes the agenda so uniquely dangerous, the role of the Heritage Foundation in shaping the project’s policies, and the imminent threat it poses to democracy.”

[kp777]

by Tim Karr

Common Dreams

Nov. 16, 2023

Democracy suffers when a commercial media system showcases fascist demagogues for profit.

There is no bottom for MAGA’s top man. At a speech delivered on Veterans Day, Donald Trump used rhetoric nearly identical to that used by Adolf Hitler 80 years earlier.

Rather than honoring veterans as one might expect of a political speech on this day, Trump used the occasion to label his adversaries “vermin” — promising that, if elected, he would use his power to “root out” all his political enemies.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake found the parallels: Hitler frequently used vermin references to justify the murder of Jews and others across Europe, while “Trump has used it more broadly to suggest that his opponents are subhuman” and deserve punishment.

Without calling themselves to account for the damage they've done, media executives will never quit their Trump habit

Parroting Hitler should not be considered normal behavior in any election cycle. But the media have grown used to covering Trump’s extremism as if it’s standard political fare. This time, though, some journalists rightly saw his Veterans Day speech as very dangerous.

“It’s important to emphasize that Trump’s rhetorical excesses are not new. To know anything about the Republican is to know that he, on a nearly daily basis, finds new and needlessly provocative ways to shock, offend, insult, and degrade,” wrote Steve Benen for MSNBC.

What is new, however, is the growing number of reporters and commentators being more explicit in their use of the term “fascist” to describe Trump’s beliefs — and “dictatorship” to describe what his return to power would represent for the future of U.S. democracy.

The media aren’t sounding these sorts of alarms enough, according to Margaret Sullivan, who wrote about the mounting evidence that Trump is indeed a fascist. “The press generally is not doing an adequate job of communicating those realities,” she said. “Instead, journalists have emphasized Joe Biden’s age and Trump’s ‘freewheeling’ style. They blame the public’s attitudes on ‘polarization,’ as if they themselves have no role.”

Sullivan urges more members of the press to report on the dark prospect of a second Trump presidency. They should “ask voters directly whether they are comfortable with [Trump’s] plans, and report on that. Display these stories prominently, and then do it again soon,” she wrote.

The ‘F’ word

Sullivan is right, of course. The media need to report more on the rise of fascism in America, and they also need to reflect on their role in enabling this. For decades the former president has capitalized on the media’s obsessive attention to paint an alternative vision of himself — one in which he features not as a twice-impeached, criminally indicted sexual abuser who sought to overthrow a democratic election that he lost, but as a decisive and winning strongman, the only person with the power and charisma to make America great again.

Media execs have played along with Trump’s charade, aware that his tele-presence is a boon for ratings and revenues. In 2016, then-CBS CEO Les Moonves said that devoting so much airtime to then-candidate Trump “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” At the time, Moonves was praising Trump for the bumper crop of political-ad dollars brought in during the contentious 2016 election, but he was not alone.

Former media executive Jeff Zucker has arguably done more than any single person to burnish the 21st-century caricature of Donald Trump. While an executive at NBC, he greenlit The Apprentice, which remade Trump from a bankruptcy-spawning loser into a boardroom genius with impeccable business savvy.

When Trump entered the political fray in 2015, he did so with an Apprentice tailwind. Zucker, who by then had transitioned to the top job at CNN, trained the network’s cameras on his celebrity candidate while denying equal time to Trump’s Republican opponents. Ratings were also Zucker’s rationale for keeping Trump center stage in 2016.

The media chose Trump in 2016 well before most Republican voters had a chance to vote for any of the other GOP candidates in the race.

And it didn’t end there. In 2020, Mathias Döpfner, head of German media giant Axel Springer, sent a message asking the company’s executives if they wanted to “get together for an hour on the morning on Nov. 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America?” Döpfner justified this question by praising the Trump administration for supporting issues, like corporate tax breaks and reining in big tech, that benefitted Axel Springer.

The profit incentive

If you’re noticing a pattern, it's this: Democracy suffers when a commercial media system showcases fascist demagogues for profit.

That seems obvious enough, but it’s worth repeating: News media companies rely on ratings and related advertising revenues to survive. In other words, the news business is about putting on a show that will draw the largest numbers of viewers. And Trump — like Hitler and Mussolini before him — is a camera-ready showman.

More important matters like correcting Trump’s many falsehoods or reporting on the troubling consequences of a second Trump presidency are secondary for those who just want to draw more attention to their primetime offerings.

Former executives, like Moonves and Zucker (who for a variety of unsavory reasons have since left their companies), and existing ones, like Döpfner, were saying that as long as Trump’s autocratic extremism makes them richer, there’s no need to worry about the consequences. Never mind that, if elected, he’d likely use his power to undermine media freedom and silence dissenting voices.

The commercial U.S. media system needs to undergo deep reckoning for accommodating the rise of Trumpism. This atonement should be reflected in a shift in the ways large outlets report on Trump, but also by recognizing the commercial incentives that drive media to lead with the Trump Show, damn the far-right repercussions.

Without calling themselves to account for the damage they've done, media executives will never quit their Trump habit — not in 2024, nor at any point after.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Steve Benen at MSNBC's MaddowBlog:

As brutal as Donald Trump’s family-separation policy was during his presidency, the Republican hasn’t ruled out a sequel in a possible second term. In fact, as recently as Friday, the GOP nominee’s running mate, JD Vance, also hedged on whether to expect another round of family separations if voters return Trump to power. But in case that weren’t quite enough, it was something the Republican presidential hopeful said a day later that was every bit as jarring. As USA Today’s Rex Huppke noted in his latest column:

[At his weekend rally in Wisconsin, Trump brought up his sadistic plan to deport millions of immigrants, and he spun a dizzyingly dishonest tale about immigrants: “In Colorado they’re so brazen they’re taking over sections of the state. And you know, getting them out will be a bloody story.”]

[...] But it was the use of the word “bloody” that stood out. As a Washington Post analysis explained, “It’s a pledge not just of the cruelty of ostracism or subjugation. It’s a promise that the purported dangers of immigrants will be met with force, with cracked skulls or — as Trump reportedly suggested while serving as president — gunfire.” What’s more, let’s not lose sight of the larger pattern. Trump has targeted migrants with dehumanizing rhetoric that echoes Hitler — complaining about migrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” and insisting that migrants are “not humans” — all while promising to create militarized mass deportations and detention camps if voters reward him with a second term. He has even talked about putting migrants into a ring to fight for Americans’ entertainment.

Donald Trump’s 2nd term will feature a much crueler deportation agenda. Vote Kamala Harris to prevent such a nightmare scenario from happening.

[contemplatingoutlander]

Trump and his cronies have been claiming that Bill Clinton kept some tapes of interviews for a possible biography in his sock drawer after he left office. However, in a 2012 decision, the court determined that the tapes were Clinton’s personal property. In other words, they were NOT top secret classified documents like Trump took when he left office. Here’s the story:

Writing for the Maddow blog, [Steve] Benen recalled that while serving as president, Clinton frequently spoke with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tylor Branch, resulting in several tapes that were perhaps to be used as part of a memoir or biography. At one point, however, those tapes were stored in a sock drawer. [...] “[U]nmentioned by Trump’s defenders who began raising the issue of the sock drawer case last month is that Jackson’s ruling explicitly states that the Presidential Records Act distinguishes presidential records from ‘personal records,’ defined as documents that are ‘purely private or nonpublic character,'" CBS News reported.

Benen explained that the major difference is that Trump didn't merely take tapes of his conversations with a reporter, he took classified documents involving the nuclear capabilities of a foreign country as well as documents that were such a high level of classification that only Cabinet-level or higher could view them.

Benen explained, the two can hardly be compared.

[oldguardleatherdog]

Laura Loomer: A 9/11 Truther at the 9/11 Anniversary Service - Trump's Special Guest

Because of course he did.

Here's Steve Benen at Maddowblog today:

For those unfamiliar with [Laura] Loomer, she’s a right-wing activist, a radical conspiracy theorist and a failed Republican congressional candidate...

She’s so extreme that even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — by some measures, Congress’ most unhinged member — has described Loomer as “mentally unstable” and “poisonous.”

[Yesterday] Trump attended a Sept. 11 remembrance and brought Loomer along — despite the fact the radical activist has pushed false conspiracy theories about the terrorist attacks having been “an inside job.”

In theory, it seems utterly bonkers that a major-party candidate for the nation’s highest office would bring a 9/11 truther to a 9/11 commemoration. In practice, Trump did it anyway, assuming he’d get away with it.

At a news conference, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries condemned Trump’s choice of company, calling the decision “shocking, irresponsible, and offensive.” The New York Democrat said the former president’s actions “should shock the conscience of all decent Americans.” [Emphasis added ]

Res ipsa loquitur.

[whitesinhistory]

April 19, 2024

In contemporary politics, Republican governance, especially at the state level, is increasingly invested in rolling back child-labor safeguards.

It’s been difficult to keep up with the number of Republican efforts in recent years to roll back child labor laws. The Guardian reportedin the fall that GOP policymakers at the state level “have led efforts to roll back child labor protections, with bills introduced in at least 16 states.”

To be sure, not all of the measures are identical. In some states, Republicans want to scrap age verification requirements for employers. In other states, they want minors to be able to serve alcohol. A Washington Post report last year noted some state GOP officials also eyed proposals to allow kids as young as 14 to “work certain jobs in meatpacking plants and shield businesses from civil liability if a child laborer is sickened.”

article by By Steve Benen

[plethoraworldatlas]

For far too long, media execs have played along with Donald Trump’s strongman charade, aware that his tele-presence is a boon for ratings and revenues. Now, U.S. democracy is reaping what they have sown.

At a speech delivered on Veterans Day, Trump used rhetoric nearly identical to that used by Adolf Hitler 80 years earlier.

Rather than honoring veterans as one might expect of a political speech on this day, Trump used the occasion to label his adversaries “vermin” — promising that, if elected, he would use his power to “root out” all his political enemies.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake found the parallels: Hitler frequently used vermin references to justify the murder of Jews and others across Europe, while “Trump has used it more broadly to suggest that his opponents are subhuman” and deserve punishment.

Parroting Hitler should not be considered normal behavior in any U.S. election cycle. But the media have grown used to covering Trump’s extremism as if it’s standard political fare. This time, though, some journalists rightly saw his Veterans Day speech as very dangerous.

“It’s important to emphasize that Trump’s rhetorical excesses are not new. To know anything about the Republican is to know that he, on a nearly daily basis, finds new and needlessly provocative ways to shock, offend, insult, and degrade,” wrote Steve Benen for MSNBC.

What is new, however, is the growing number of reporters and commentators being more explicit in their use of the term “fascist” to describe Trump’s beliefs — and “dictatorship” to describe what his return to power would represent for the future of U.S. democracy.

The media aren’t sounding these sorts of alarms enough, according to Margaret Sullivan, who wrote about the mounting evidence that Trump is indeed a fascist. “The press generally is not doing an adequate job of communicating those realities,” she said. “Instead, journalists have emphasized Joe Biden’s age and Trump’s ‘freewheeling’ style. They blame the public’s attitudes on ‘polarization,’ as if they themselves have no role.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Steve Benen

As the current Congress got underway, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy assured his members that he’d honor something called the “72-hour rule” — an informal commitment that assured Representatives that they’d have a few days to read legislation before it reached the floor for a vote.

With a dangerous debt ceiling deadline looming, and time running out, there was some speculation that House Republican leaders would simply waive the rule and advance the bipartisan “Fiscal Responsibility Act” faster. McCarthy, for good or ill, stuck to the policy.

Apparently, for some, that’s not quite good enough. For example, Republican Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, a House Freedom Caucus member, told reporters yesterday that he considers it an “insult” to only have a few days to read the bill.

The South Carolina Republican — perhaps best known for misspelling “marital law” while pushing the Trump White House to deploy the military to nullify the 2020 election — took the same message to Fox News, arguing, “It’s like the Pelosi days. You gotta pass it before you read it.” Norman added, “[W]e ought to have a lot more time” than 72 hours.

First, the fact that Republicans continue to screw up an innocuous 2010 quote from then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi remains disappointing.

Second, let’s not forget that the Fiscal Responsibility Act is only 99 pages. “War and Peace” it is not. What’s more, we’re talking about double-spaced pages, with a large font, generous margins, and a modest number of words per page.

Even a slow reader could get through this bill pretty easily in an afternoon.

Rep. Ted Lieu had a little fun at his far-right colleague’s expense. “Let’s do some math,” the California Democrat wrote on Twitter. “If GOP Rep Ralph Norman works 8 hours a day, that’s 24 hours over 3 days to read 99 pages. That comes out to reading a little over 4 pages every hour. And these are double spaced text pages. Alternatively, he can have AI summarize the bill for him in 1 [minute].”

Evidently, despite his complaints, the South Carolinian has apparently read enough of the bipartisan deal to know he doesn’t like it: Norman condemned the agreement as “insanity” a few hours after it was announced.

[nodynasty4us]

McCarthy claims to want a balanced budget, while simultaneously claiming that he doesn’t want to take steps that would move the budget towards being balanced. It’s a bit like someone saying they’re determined to lose weight, while quickly adding that he has no interest in eating less or exercising, all while making vague references to wasteful calories he's reluctant to identify.

Steve Benen at MSNBC

[macwantspeace]

Not mentioned, but relevant: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by three million in 2016. So Steve Benen reminds us that it's the swing-a-ling states. >But a Politico report from the holiday weekend touched on a detail that’s worth keeping in mind as the data makes the rounds.

Because of Republicans’ advantage in the Electoral College, a race that Harris leads nationally by between 2 and 4 percentage points, on average, is the equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth, and it’s set to be decided in a smaller-than-usual number of states.