HCR: Letters from an American III

[Go Bama]

August 16, 2022 (Tuesday)


This afternoon, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. Almost immediately, it will produce results. A 30% tax credit for energy-efficient windows, heat pumps, or newer models of appliances will lower people’s energy costs; the cost of drugs will be capped at $2,000 per year for people on Medicare; and health care premiums will fall for certain Americans. In the longer term, it will be easier for the country to switch to renewable energy, and wealthy Americans and corporations will bear more of the tax burden than they have paid since the 2017 Trump tax cuts.

“The Inflation Reduction Act is now law,” Biden tweeted, “Giving Medicare the power to negotiate lower prescription drug prices. Ensuring wealthy corporations pay their fair share in taxes. And taking the biggest step forward on climate in our history.”

“This is a BFD,” former President Barack Obama tweeted.

“Thanks, Obama,” Biden responded.

They can be forgiven their irreverence because this act is indeed a big deal. It is an astonishing cap to the legislation the Democrats have passed with their squeaky thin majority in Congress. They have passed the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and now this, the Inflation Reduction Act.

Since President Ronald Reagan told Americans, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Republicans have focused on proving that private enterprise is more efficient than government at providing the things Americans need. That argument has depended on preventing the government from legislating or addressing the things that people care about.

In his year and a half in office, Biden has demonstrated the opposite: that government can work. The measures that Democrats, and those Republicans who are willing to work across the aisle, have passed are enormously popular: lower medical costs, including a provision finalized today for over-the-counter hearing aids; bridge repair; broadband access; and investment in science.

“I feel like the media is having a hard time metabolizing the fact that this congress has been historically productive,” Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) mused. “And acknowledging the size of these accomplishments, and the degree of difficulty,—it’s just hard to do accurately without sounding a bit left leaning.”

Democrats are demonstrating that the government is working, but for their ideology to make sense, the current-day Republican Party needs chaos. Chaos is what it is currently delivering.

Trump has continued to throw out more excuses for his theft of classified documents, recently suggesting his former chief of staff Mark Meadows is at fault for failing to organize a system to send documents to the National Archives and Records Administration and then suggesting that he had withheld the documents because he didn’t trust the “partisan Democrat appointees” who were “releasing thousands of his White House documents to the January 6 Committee in spite of his lawyers’ claims of executive privilege.”

Maggie Haberman at the New York Timesbroke the news today that Trump’s White House counsel and deputy White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone and Patrick F. Philbin, have talked to the FBI in the last few months about the stolen documents. According to two witnesses, when Philbin tried to get him to return documents to the National Archives and Records Administration, Trump said, “It’s not theirs, it’s mine.”

Josh Campbell, CNN’s national security and law enforcement correspondent, said that Trump loyalists’ attacks on the FBI for its role in searching Mar-a-Lago for the classified documents Trump stole have taken a toll. “The head of the FBI Agents Association tells me threats against the bureau are ‘real’ and ‘imminent,’” Campbell tweeted. “The organization is demanding political leaders unequivocally denounce these attacks, insisting: ‘There is NO justification for targeting law enforcement in the United States.’”

In the search to figure out how and why the text messages from Secret Service members from the time around January 6, 2021, were purged, Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, who hid the destruction from Congress for more than a year, today refused to step down from the investigation. He also said that he would not provide the documents lawmakers wanted to see, or permit House committees to interview his colleagues.

And yet, Trump’s hold on the Republican Party is strong enough that his chosen candidate defeated Representative Liz Cheney in today’s Wyoming primary by about 34 points. Cheney voted with Trump more than 90% of the time during his term, but she took a stand against him after his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In a concession speech tonight, she told her supporters that two years ago she won the primary with 73% of the vote, and “could easily have done the same again. The path was clear. But it would have required that I go along with President Trump's lie about the 2020 election. It would have required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel a democratic system and attack the foundations of our Republic. That was a path I could not and would not take.”

She vowed to “do whatever it takes to ensure Donald Trump is never again anywhere near the Oval Office.”

Observers noted that the defeat of Cheney marks the passage of another establishment name from the ranks of Republican Party lawmakers. The Lincoln Project tweeted, “Tonight, the nation marks the end of the Republican Party. What remains shares the name and branding of the traditional GOP, but is in fact an authoritarian nationalist cult dedicated only to Donald Trump.”

 

[Go Bama]

August 17, 2022 (Wednesday)


“Last night, my father killed another political dynasty, and that’s the Cheneys. He first killed the Bushes, then he killed the Clintons. Last night he killed the Cheneys.” So Eric Trump, former president Donald Trump’s son, interpreted the primary loss by Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) last night.

He is not wrong that the Republican Party has now been captured by extremists who reject the principles associated with that party. Trump’s statement reflects the reality that today’s MAGA crowd rejects the ideology of Reagan’s Republican Party, which was based in the idea—if not the actual execution—that the government must not interfere with markets. Far from trying to free up markets, Trump and those like him, including Florida governor Ron DeSantis, have used the government to punish businesses that don’t support their political policies and to reward those that do.

Using the government to reward friends and punish enemies is the province of authoritarians like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who spoke earlier this month in Texas at the Conservative Political Action Conference. MAGAs’ support for such tactics fits, as they have rejected the fundamental principles of American democracy.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution established that Americans have a right to consent to the government under which we live and that we are equal before the law. But today’s MAGA movement is based on the Big Lie that former president Trump won the 2020 election, and its adherents are currently engaged in the attempt to make sure that they can rig elections going forward, establishing a one-party state whose leaders can do as they wish.

And at least part of what they appear to want is the establishment of a state religion that overrides the rights of LGBTQ Americans and takes away women’s rights. Indeed, their vision looks much like that of Orbán, who maintains that secular democracy must be replaced by what he calls “Christian democracy,” or “illiberal democracy.”

While Eric Trump might see this as a triumph, others do not. Edward Luce of the Financial Times observed today: “I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career. Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close.”

Shocking though that observation was, it was nothing compared to what came next. General Michael Hayden, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, retweeted Luce and commented: “I agree. And I was the CIA Director[.]”

That this movement has dangerous designs on our government got more confirmation today when Jordan Libowitz and Lauren White of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) reported that the Secret Service had notice of a specific threat against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi days before the January 6 attack on the Capitol but didn’t tell the Capitol Police until 5:55 on the afternoon of that day, after the attack had happened.

On December 31 a Parler user posted, “January 6 starts #1776 all over again…Fight for EVERYTHING,” and included Pelosi in a list of “enemies.” Later, the account was more specific about the attack. On the evening of January 6, the Secret Service sent the information along to the Capitol Police with a note: “Good afternoon, The US Secret Service is passing notification to the US Capitol Police regarding discovery of a social media threat directed toward Speaker Nancy Pelosi.”

The Secret Service is under scrutiny because its agents’ texts from the period around the attack were erased from their phones, the phones of Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli were wiped, and the Trump-appointed inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph Cuffari, neglected to tell Congress of the destruction of evidence for more than a year and has refused to make his staff available to testify about the matter.

But it is not clear that the MAGA attempt to take over the government will stay behind Trump. Today, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has recently been in the news for his defamation of the parents of a victim of the Sandy Hook shooting, announced on his show that he is switching his support to DeSantis. He was a staunch enough Trump supporter that he spoke at the January 5, 2021, rally in Washington, D.C., to fire up the crowd for the next day.

Almost on cue, Trump began to float the idea that he would release the surveillance tape of FBI agents recovering the stolen government documents from his Mar-a-Lago property in what seems to be an attempt to reclaim his base. The argument for releasing the tape is that his supporters will resent the federal officers milling around Trump’s property, feeding the idea he is a victim of political persecution. Other advisors warn that actually seeing just how many boxes of documents, including top secret documents, were recovered, will backfire.

“It’s one thing to read a bunch of numbers on an inventory list, it’s another to see law enforcement agents actually carrying a dozen-plus boxes out of President Trump’s home knowing they probably contain sensitive documents. I don’t see how that helps him,” a person close to Trump told Gabby Orr, Sara Murray, Kaitlan Collins and Katelyn Polantz of CNN. It would fit the usual Trump pattern for him simply to say he is going to release it to generate stories that keep him in the news.

Trump’s supporters’ willingness to find another candidate is likely, in part, a reflection of the legal trouble mounting for the former president.

Today, Trump campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani testified for six hours before a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, that is investigating Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Giuliani alleged vote rigging in Georgia even after his theories had been proven fake.

Prosecutors have told Giuliani he is a target of the investigation, meaning it is possible he will be indicted. Ken Frydman, Giuliani’s former press secretary, told CNN yesterday: “He knows he lied for his client, and he knows we all know…. I think, you know, at this point in his life, his goal is to die a free man.”

Tomorrow the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, will plead guilty to 15 felonies associated with conspiring to avoid payroll taxes on $1.7 million over 15 years by taking pay in the form of school tuition for his grandchildren, a free apartment, a car, and so on. The deal with the Manhattan district attorney’s office lets him off with fines and a minimum of 100 days in jail, a very light sentence. In exchange, Weisselberg will testify against the Trump Organization in its upcoming October trial for related offenses, though not against Trump himself.

This deal seriously weakens the Trump Organization’s legal position in the case but leaves Trump and his family untouched. If the case undercuts the Trump family’s business— its traditional financial base— family members might be hoping to cement a new financial base in the American political system.

 

[Go Bama]

August 18, 2022 (Thursday)

On this day in 1920, the Tennessee legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by the narrow vote of 50 to 49. A mirror of the Fifteenth Amendment protecting the right of Black men to vote, the new amendment read:

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

“Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Like the momentum for the Fifteenth Amendment, the push for rights for women had taken root during the Civil War, as women backed the United States armies with their money, buying bonds and paying taxes; with their loved ones, sending sons and husbands and fathers to the war front; with their labor, working in factories and fields, and taking over from men in the nursing and teaching professions; and even with their lives, spying and fighting for the Union. In the aftermath of the war, as the divided nation was rebuilt, many of them expected they would have a say in how it was reconstructed.

But to their dismay, the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly tied the right to vote to “males,” inserting that word into the Constitution for the first time.

Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, was outraged. The laws of the age gave control of her property and her children to her abusive husband, and while far from a rabble-rouser, she wanted the right to adjust those laws so they were fair. In this moment, it seemed the right the Founders had articulated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to consent to the government under which one lived—was to be denied to the very women who had helped preserve the country, while white male Confederates and now Black men both enjoyed that right.

“The Civil War came to an end, leaving the slave not only emancipated, but endowed with the full dignity of citizenship. The women of the North had greatly helped to open the door which admitted him to freedom and its safeguard, the ballot. Was this door to be shut in their face?” Howe wondered.

The next year, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, and six months later, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe founded the American Woman Suffrage Association.

The National Woman Suffrage Association wanted a larger reworking of gender roles in American society, drawing from the Seneca Falls Convention that Stanton had organized in 1848.

That convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, patterned explicitly on the Declaration of Independence, asserted that “all men and women are created equal” and that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” listing the many ways in which men had “fraudulently deprived [women] of their most sacred rights” and insisting that women receive “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”

While the National Woman Suffrage Association excluded men from its membership, the American Woman Suffrage Association made a point of including men equally, as well as Black woman suffragists, to indicate that they were interested in the universal right to vote, and only in that right, believing the rest of the rights their rivals demanded would come through voting.

The women’s suffrage movement had initial success in the western territories, both because lawmakers there were hoping to attract women for their male-heavy communities and because the same lawmakers were furious at the growing noise about Black voting. Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869, and lawmakers in Utah Territory followed suit in 1870, expecting that women would vote against polygamy there. When women in fact supported polygamy, Utah lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to take their vote away, and the movement for women’s suffrage in the West slowed dramatically.

Suffragists had hopes of being included in the Fifteenth Amendment, but when they were not, they decided to test their right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1872 election. According to its statement that anyone born in the U.S. was a citizen, they were certainly citizens and thus should be able to vote. In New York state, Susan B. Anthony voted successfully but was later tried and convicted—in an all-male courtroom in which she did not have the right to testify—for the crime of voting.

In Missouri, a voting registrar named Reese Happersett refused to permit suffragist Virginia Minor to register. Minor sued Happersett, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The justices handed down a unanimous decision in 1875, deciding that women were indeed citizens but that citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote.

This decision meant the fat was in the fire for Black Americans in the South, as it paved the way for white supremacists to keep them from the polls in 1876. But it was also a blow to suffragists, who recast their claims to voting by moving away from the idea that they had a human right to consent to their government, and toward the idea that they would be better and more principled voters than the Black men and immigrants who, under the law anyway, had the right to vote.

For the next two decades, the women’s suffrage movement drew its power from the many women’s organizations put together across the country by women of all races and backgrounds who came together to stop excessive drinking, clean up the sewage in city streets, protect children, stop lynching, and promote civil rights.

Black women like educator Mary Church Terrell and journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, publisher of the Woman’s Era, brought a broad lens to the movement from their work for civil rights, but they could not miss that Black women stood in between the movements for Black rights and women’s rights, a position scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would identify In the twentieth century as “intersectionality.”

In 1890 the two major suffrage associations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association and worked to change voting laws at the state level. Gradually, western states and territories permitted women to vote in certain elections, until by 1920, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, Arizona, Kansas, Alaska Territory, Montana, and Nevada, recognized women’s right to vote in at least some elections.

Suffragists recognized that action at the federal level would be more effective than a state-by-state strategy. The day before Democratic president Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated in 1913, they organized a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., that grabbed media attention. They continued civil disobedience to pressure Wilson into supporting their movement.

Still, it took another war effort, that of World War I, which the U.S. entered in 1917, to light a fire under the lawmakers whose votes would be necessary to get a suffrage amendment through Congress and send it off to the states for ratification. Wilson, finally on board as he faced a difficult midterm election in 1918, backed a constitutional amendment, asking congressmen: “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”

Congress passed the measure in a special session on June 4, 1919, and Tennessee’s ratification on this day in 1920 made it the law of the land. Twenty-six million American women had the right to vote in the 1920 presidential election.

Crucially, as the Black suffragists had known all too well when they found themselves caught between the drives for Black male voting and women’s suffrage, Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws meant that most Black women and women of color would remain unable to vote for another 45 years.

Yesterday the Department of Justice filed a friend of the court brief in the case of League of Women Voters v. Secretary of State of Florida alleging that “in the face of surging turnout in the 2020 election, the Florida Legislature responded by enacting provisions that impose disparate burdens on Black voters” when it imposed new voting restrictions.

A hundred years later, we are still fighting the same fights.

 

[Go Bama]

August 19, 2022 (Friday)

There was no immediately pressing news today, so I got playing around for tonight’s letter and fell down a bit of a rabbit hole in a field that isn’t my usual turf. Since it’s now 1:30 in the morning and I’m only half done, I’m going to post a picture and tackle it again tomorrow.

It definitely feels like late August here on the Maine coast....

[Photo by Buddy Poland.]

 

[Go Bama]

August 20, 2022 (Saturday)


Earlier this month, on August 2, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a Democratic delegation commanded headlines when they traveled to Taiwan, an independently governed East Asian country made up of 168 islands on which about 24 million people live, and which China claims. Since 1979 the U.S. has helped to maintain the defensive capabilities of the democratically governed area, although it has been vague about whether it would intervene if China attacks Taiwan.

Pelosi’s visit made her the highest-ranking U.S. politician to visit Taiwan since 1997, when Republican speaker Newt Gingrich visited the self-ruled island. Pelosi and a delegation of House Democrats who lead committees relevant to U.S. foreign relations—Gregory Meeks (NY), Mark Takano (CA), Suzan DelBene (WA), Raja Krishnamoorthi (IL), and Andy Kim (NJ)—visited Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, and Japan. Taiwan was added quietly.

Since then, another, bipartisan, congressional delegation has visited Taiwan. Senator Ed Markey (D-MA); Representatives John Garamendi (D-CA), Alan Lowenthal (D-CA), and Don Beyer (D-VA); and Delegate Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen (R–American Samoa) visited Taiwan earlier this week. Markey chairs the Senate Foreign Relations East Asia, Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Subcommittee, and Beyer is chair of the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee (JEC); the rest of the delegation represents people in or near the Pacific Ocean.

Before visiting Taiwan, Markey was in South Korea to talk about trade and technology, including the green technologies the U.S. is now funding through the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as “shared values and interests.”

There is a larger story behind these visits to Taiwan. Early this year, the Biden administration launched a new, comprehensive initiative in the Indo-Pacific. Beginning with the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, the U.S. began to work informally with the “Quad,” the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, consisting of the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan. In 2016, Japan introduced the concept of a free and open Indo-Pacific.

When former president Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he left the participants to continue without the U.S., which they did as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). He also left open the way for a free trade deal in the region dominated by China, called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, or RCEP, which went into effect on January 1, 2022.

This left the Biden administration with two politically poor choices: try to reestablish U.S. participation in the region through the CPTPP, which would have been hotly contested at home and thus unlikely to get through Congress, or let China dominate the region, with damaging long-term effects. So the administration found a third way.

After some complaints that the administration had focused its attention too closely on the Middle East and Europe, in February the Biden administration released a document outlining its “Indo-Pacific Strategy,” claiming that the U.S. is part of the Indo-Pacific region, which stretches from our Pacific coastline to the Indian Ocean. The area, the report says, “is home to more than half of the world’s people, nearly two-thirds of the world’s economy, and seven of the world’s largest militaries. More members of the U.S. military are based in the region than in any other outside the United States. It supports more than three million American jobs and is the source of nearly $900 billion in foreign direct investment in the United States. In the years ahead, as the region drives as much as two-thirds of global economic growth, its influence will only grow—as will its importance to the United States.”

The document notes the long history of the U.S. and the countries in the region, and it warns against the rising power of the People’s Republic of China there. The document promises to compete responsibly with China by balancing influence in the world, creating an environment in the region “that is maximally favorable to the United States, our allies and partners, and the interests and values we share.”

Continued in next post.

 

[Go Bama]

Continued from previous post.

Crucially, the document focuses not on the trade deals that made the TPP so unpopular, but on ideological ones, promoting “a free and open Indo-Pacific,” where countries “can make independent political choices free from coercion.” The U.S. will contribute to that atmosphere, the document says, “through investments in democratic institutions, a free press, and a vibrant civil society,” by strengthening partnerships within the region and outside it, such as the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The plan promises that the U.S. will invest in the region through diplomacy, education, and security.

In May, President Joe Biden hosted the U.S.–Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Special Summit in the U.S. for the first time “to re-affirm the United States’ enduring commitment to Southeast Asia and underscore the importance of U.S.-ASEAN cooperation in ensuring security, prosperity, and respect for human rights.” And the State Department announced that “[t]he United States has provided over $12.1 billion in development, economic, health, and security assistance to Southeast Asian allies and partners since 2002, as well as over $1.4 billion in humanitarian assistance.”

Also in May, in Japan, Biden and a dozen Indo-Pacific nations announced a new, loose economic bloc, one that Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has called “by any account the most significant international economic engagement that the United States has ever had in this region.” The bloc includes the U.S., India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, but not Taiwan. These countries represent about 40% of the global economy.

The new plan promised to streamline supply chains, back clean energy, fight corruption, and expand technology transfers. But with no guaranteed access to U.S. markets, there was uncertainty about how effective the administration’s calls for better labor and environmental standards would be.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken also traveled to the region in early August, making stops in Cambodia, where he attended the U.S.-ASEAN ministerial meeting, the East Asia Summit Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, and the ASEAN Regional Forum, and in the Philippines. Before leaving, he promised to “emphasize the United States’ commitment to ASEAN centrality and successful implementation of the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific” and to “address the COVID-19 pandemic, economic cooperation, the fight against climate change, the crisis in Burma, and Russia’s war in Ukraine.”

Chinese leaders warned the U.S. there would be “serious consequences” if Pelosi visited, and pundits suggested that she was reckless for going. But both Biden and Blinken made it clear that any potential visit would not mean any change in U.S. policy toward Taiwan, and 26 Republican lawmakers made a public statement praising the visit and noting that it has precedent.

Pelosi’s visit seemed to echo Biden and Blinken’s focus on world democracy. She championed Taiwan as a leading democracy, “a leader in peace, security and economic dynamism: with an entrepreneurial spirit, culture of innovation and technological prowess that are envies of the world.” She explicitly said her visit was intended to reaffirm “our shared interests [in]...advancing a free and open Indo-Pacific region.” “By traveling to Taiwan, we honor our commitment to democracy: reaffirming that the freedoms of Taiwan—and all democracies—must be respected.”

When Pelosi’s plane landed, China immediately announced live fire operations nearby and cut certain diplomatic communications with the U.S. But Director of the Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies Theresa Fallon noted that the Chinese blockade/live fire exercise “is likely to boomerang on Xi. This will…scare just about every other country in Asia,” she wrote on Twitter.

Yesterday, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, six months into the job, did his first television interview. Emphasizing that Pelosi’s visit was in keeping with longstanding history, he said, “We do not believe there should be a crisis in US-China relations over the visit—the peaceful visit—of the Speaker of the House of Representatives to Taiwan...it was a manufactured crisis by the government in Beijing. It was an overreaction.” Burns added that it is now “incumbent upon the government here in Beijing to convince the rest of the world that it will act peacefully in the future” and observed that “there's a lot of concern around the world that China has now become an agent of instability in the Taiwan Strait and that's not in anyone's interest.”

As drought, coronavirus lockdowns, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine hamstring the Chinese economy, China’s domination of the region seems wobbly. Apple is currently talking to Vietnam about making Apple Watches and MacBooks, moving production away from China. Vietnam already builds Apple products, but these new contracts would upgrade the Vietnamese technical sector in advance of what are expected to be more contracts.

This week, the EU and Indonesia launched their first ever joint naval exercise in the Arabian Sea, with an announcement that “[t]he EU and Indonesia are committed to a free, open, inclusive and rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region, underpinned by respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, democracy, rule of law, transparency, freedom of navigation and overflight, unimpeded lawful commerce, and peaceful resolution of disputes. They reaffirm the primacy of international law, including the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).”

The U.S. and Taiwan, which was not included in the earlier economic organization, will start formal trade talks in the fall.

 

[Tug Tide]

It’s good to see the majority of the international community giving China the middle finger

 

[Go Bama]

August 21, 2022 (Sunday)


On August 21, 1831, enslaved American Nat Turner led about 70 of his enslaved and free Black neighbors in a rebellion to awaken his white neighbors to the inherent brutality of slaveholding and the dangers it presented to their own safety. Turner and his friends traveled from house to house in their neighborhood in Southampton County, Virginia, freeing enslaved people and murdering about 60 of the white men, women, and children they encountered. Their goal, Turner later told an interviewer, was “to carry terror and devastation wherever we went.”

State militia put down the rebellion in a couple of days, and both the legal system and white vigilantes killed at least 200 Black Virginians, many of whom were not involved in Turner’s bid to end enslavement. Turner himself was captured in October, tried in November, sentenced to death, and hanged.

But white Virginians, and white folks in neighboring southern states, remained frightened. Turner had been, in their minds, a well-treated, educated enslaved man, who knew his Bible well and seemed the very last sort of person they would have expected to revolt. And so they responded to the rebellion in two ways. They turned against the idea that enslavement was a bad thing and instead began to argue that human enslavement was a positive good.

And states across the South passed laws making it a crime to teach enslaved Americans to read and write.

Denying enslaved Black Americans access to education exiled them from a place in the nation. The Framers had quite explicitly organized the United States not on the principles of religion or tradition, but rather on the principles of the Enlightenment: the idea that, by applying knowledge and reasoning to the natural world, men could figure out the best way to order society. Someone excluded from access to education could not participate in that national project. Instead, that person was read out of society, doomed to be controlled by leaders who marshaled propaganda and religion to defend their dominance.

In 1858, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond explained that society needed “a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill.”

But when they organized in the 1850s to push back against the efforts of elite enslavers like Hammond to take over the national government, members of the fledgling Republican Party recognized the importance of education. In 1859, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln explained that those who adhered to the “mud-sill” theory “assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible…. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous.”

Lincoln argued that workers were not simply drudges but rather were the heart of the economy. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” He tied the political vision of the Framers to this economic vision. In order to prosper, he argued, men needed “book-learning,” and he called for universal education. An educated community, he said, “will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.”

When they were in control of the federal government in the 1860s, Republicans passed the Land Grant College Act, funding public universities so that men without wealthy fathers might have access to higher education. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans also tried to use the federal government to fund public schools for poor Black and white Americans, dividing money up according to illiteracy rates.

But President Andrew Johnson vetoed that bill on the grounds that the federal government had no business protecting Black education; that process, he said, belonged to the states—which for the next century denied Black and Brown people equal access to schools, excluding them from full participation in American society and condemning them to menial labor.

Then, in 1954, after decades of pressure from Black and Brown Americans for equal access to public schools, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican governor of California, unanimously agreed that separate schools were inherently unequal, and thus unconstitutional. The federal government stepped in to make sure the states could not deny education to the children who lived within their boundaries.

And now, in 2022, we are in a new educational moment. Between January 2021 and January 2022, the legislatures of 35 states introduced 137 bills to keep students from learning about issues of race, LBGTQ+ issues, politics, and American history. More recently, the Republican-dominated legislature of Florida passed the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop WOKE) Act, tightly controlling how schools and employee training can talk about race or gender discrimination.

Republican-dominated legislatures and school districts are also purging books from school libraries and notifying parents each time a child checks out a book. Most of the books removed are by or about Black people, people of color, or LGBTQ+ individuals.

Both sets of laws are likely to result in teachers censoring themselves or leaving the profession out of concern they will inadvertently run afoul of the new laws, a disastrous outcome when the nation’s teaching profession is already in crisis. School districts facing catastrophic teacher shortages are trying to keep classrooms open by doubling up classes, cutting the school week down to four days, and permitting veterans without educational training to teach—all of which will likely hurt students trying to regain their educational footing after the worst of the pandemic.

This, in turn, adds weight to the move to divert public money from the public schools into private schools that are not overseen by state authorities. In Florida, the Republican-controlled legislature has dramatically expanded the state’s use of vouchers recently, arguing that tying money to students rather than schools expands parents’ choices while leaving unspoken that defunded public schools will be less and less attractive. In June, in Carson v. Makin, the Supreme Court expanded the voucher system to include religious schools, ruling that Maine, which provides vouchers in towns that don’t have public high schools, must allow those vouchers to go to religious schools as well as secular ones. Thus tax dollars will support religious schools.

In 2022, it seems worth remembering that in 1831, lawmakers afraid that Black Americans exposed to the ideas in books and schools would claim the equality that was their birthright under the Declaration of Independence made sure their Black neighbors could not get an education.

 

[Go Bama]

August 22, 2022 (Monday)


Today’s big news is an eye-popping $1.6 billion donation to a right-wing nonprofit organized in May 2020. This is the largest known single donation made to a political influence organization.

The money came from Barre Seid, a 90-year-old electronics company executive, and the new organization, Marble Freedom Trust, is controlled by Leonard A. Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society, who has been behind the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court. Leo has also been prominent in challenges to abortion rights, voting rights, climate change action, and so on. He announced in early 2020 that he was stepping back from the Federalist Society to remake politics at every level, but information about the massive grant and the new organization was broken today by Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times.

Marble is organized as a nonprofit, so when Seid gave it 100% of the stock in Tripp Lite, a privately held company that makes surge protectors and other electronic equipment, it could sell the stock without paying taxes. The arrangement also likely enabled Seid to avoid paying as much as $400 million in capital gains taxes on the stock. Law professor Ray Madoff of Boston College Law School, who specializes in philanthropic policy, told the New York Times: “These actions by the super wealthy are actually costing the American taxpayers to support the political spending of the wealthiest Americans.”

This massive donation is an example of so-called “dark money”: funds donated for political advocacy to nonprofits that do not have to disclose their donors. In the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) decision, the Supreme Court said that limiting the ability of corporations and other entities to advertise their political preferences violates their First Amendment right to free speech. This was a new interpretation: until the 1970s, the Supreme Court did not agree that companies had free speech protections.

Now, nonprofit organizations can receive unlimited donations from people, corporations, or other entities for political speech. They cannot collaborate directly with candidates or campaigns, but they can promote a candidate’s policies and attack opponents, all without identifying their donors.

“I've never seen a group of this magnitude before,” Robert Maguire of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) told Casey Tolan, Curt Devine, and Drew Griffin of CNN. “This is the kind of money that can help these political operatives and their allies start to move the needle on issues like reshaping the federal judiciary, making it more difficult to vote, a state-by-state campaign to remake election laws and lay the groundwork for undermining future elections.” Our campaign finance system, he said, gives “wealthy donors, whether they be corporations or individuals, access and influence over the system far greater than any regular American can ever imagine.”

It’s an interesting revelation at this particular juncture, when the Republican Party is splitting over former president Donald Trump. Today, a Colorado state senator switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party because he refuses to support the lie that Trump won the 2020 election. “I cannot continue to be a part of a political party that is okay with a violent attempt to overturn a free and fair election and continues to peddle claims that the 2020 election was stolen,” Kevin Priola wrote. “We need Democrats in charge because our planet and our democracy depend on it.” Priola has thrown in his lot with those Republicans like Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).

Priola has voted with Democrats in the past, although he voted with the Republicans 90% of the time. His switch will make it more difficult for Republicans to retake control of the Colorado Senate. Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, tweeted that he was proud to welcome Priola to the Democratic Party. “We are a broad tent party, always seeking good ideas from the left and right to move CO forward. Senator Priola is a strong leader on climate issues & will hopefully be even more effective on the Democratic side of the aisle.”

In contrast, Sean Paige, former spokesperson for the Colorado Republican Party, tweeted: “Kevin Priola a Democrat? Who knew, LOL? That’s been an open ‘secret’ at the Statehouse since I worked there. He’s beyond just a big phony; he’s a squirrely and calculating opportunist. But I’m glad, for his conscience, that he finally came out of the closet.”

The new extremist Republican Party is driving away voters in part by this very sort of chaos. This afternoon, Trump’s lawyers asked a federal judge to stop the FBI from looking at the documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago until a special master reviews them. But the filing appeared to have been less about the law than about asserting power over the Republican Party. While legal analyst Bradley Moss called it “just garbage” legally, it stated its political principle at the start: “President Donald J. Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary and in the 2024 General Election, should he decide to run.”

The motion reiterated the arguments he has made since the search warrant was carried out; Moss mused, “[t]he more I read Trump’s motion, the more I am completely confused and shocked he got three lawyers to risk their law licenses by filing this thing.”

Then, this evening, it turned out that the motion was likely intended to distract attention from a new story dropping from Maggie Haberman, Jodi Kantor, Adam Goldman and Ben Protess of the New York Times, who reported that Trump took more than 300 classified documents with him to Mar-a-Lago and that he went through the boxes himself in late 2021, meaning he was aware that he had taken classified documents out of the White House.

The National Archives and Records Administration recovered more than 150 classified documents in January 2022, including intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the FBI. Worried by the sheer number of those documents, the Department of Justice moved to get the rest. In June, Trump’s aides turned over a few dozen more, and Trump lawyer Christina Bobb signed a document asserting that, to the best of her knowledge, all the classified materials had been returned. They had not, of course, and on June 22 the Justice Department subpoenaed the security video tapes from the area, which showed people moving the documents. Hence the search warrant, which the FBI executed two weeks ago, finding yet more documents, including some in a closet in Trump’s office. Some had the highest possible level of classification. It remains unclear whether any U.S. documents remain at Mar-a-Lago.

Meanwhile, according to Andrew Desiderio of Politico, members of the Gang of Eight—the leaders of the House and Senate from each party, and the chairs and ranking members of the intelligence committees from both houses—want to know what was in those recovered files.

Finally, today, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that he will be retiring from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he has led since 1984, in December. Fauci has served seven presidents, and after his work on HIV/AIDS, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Nonetheless, today’s Republicans have tried to deflect blame for the nation’s poor response to the coronavirus pandemic from Trump to Fauci. After the announcement of the 81-year-old’s retirement, Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) said: “It’s good to know that with his retirement, Dr. Fauci will have ample time to appear before Congress and share under oath what he knew about the Wuhan lab, as well as the ever-changing guidance under his watch that resulted in wrongful mandates being imposed on Americans.”

 

[CrimsonNagus]

The new extremist Republican Party is driving away voters in part by this very sort of chaos.

I've seen her make similar statements this year but, where is she getting this idea? If so, why are Trump lovers winning primaries all over the place? From what I see and read in the media it appears that their voters are not phased at all and actually welcome and embrace this rhetoric and behavior.

 

[Go Bama]

I've seen her make similar statements tis year but, where is she getting this idea? If so, why are Trump lovers winning primaries all over the place? From what I see and read int he media it appears that their voters are not phased at all and actually welcome and embrace this rhetoric and behavior.

I don't think Heather is referring to the 30% who are cult members. She is referring to people who are long term Republicans and are part of the roughly 40% who actually determine elections.

Personally, I don't read too much into the primaries. There could well be a number of D's voting in R primaries to try and promote the candidate who is least likely to win in the general election. Herschel Walker comes to mind.

 

[Go Bama]

The comments in today's letters are interesting. In particular, one by someone whose username is lin.

Lin states he has made a chalk art painting on the street in front of Leonard Leo's house. This offended Leo who had the police call lin to have him remove the graffiti. Lin is not going to remove the graffiti, and he used chalk paint so the picture cannot be hosed away.

Sticking it to the man.

 

[Go Bama]

August 23, 2022 (Tuesday)


Early this morning, right-wing journalist John Solomon posted on his website a letter dated May 10 from Debra Steidel Wall, the acting archivist of the United States, to Evan Corcoran, a lawyer for former president Trump. Just why the Trump camp leaked the letter is unclear because it is a damning revelation of the extent of the stolen documents and Trump’s refusal to return them.

Wall was responding to Trump’s request that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) continue to withhold from the FBI the records NARA had recovered at that point from Mar-a-Lago. She noted that NARA had worked to recover those records throughout 2021 and, when they finally got them, “identified items marked as classified national security information, up to the level of Top Secret and including Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Program materials.”

These are highly secret and sensitive materials, and Trump wanted to delay review of them while he decided if he was going to assert executive privilege over them. Wall rejected that argument, pointing out that he could hardly keep them out of the hands of the current president.

“The question in this case is not a close one,” she wrote. “The Executive Branch here is seeking access to records belonging to, and in the custody of, the Federal Government itself, not only in order to investigate whether those records were handled in an unlawful manner but also, as the National Security Division explained, to ‘conduct an assessment of the potential damage resulting from the apparent manner in which these materials were stored and transported and take any necessary remedial steps.’ These reviews will be conducted by current government personnel who…are sensitive to executive concerns.”

This was no small cache of documents. In the boxes then at issue were more than 100 classified documents. They made up more than 700 pages of classified material. Since then, of course, the FBI has recovered yet more classified documents.

The New York Times reported last night that Trump resisted returning the documents, calling them “mine.”

Also in today’s news, a federal jury found Barry Croft and Adam Fox guilty of several crimes in the summer 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. The jury found Croft guilty of kidnapping conspiracy, conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, and possession of an unregistered destructive device. It found Fox guilty of kidnapping conspiracy and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.

The men were part of a plot to kidnap Whitmer at her summer home and to blow up a bridge that would stop rescuers from reaching her. They hoped to spark a second American Revolution.

In a federal court in Louisville, Kentucky, former detective Kelly Goodlett pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy. She admitted that she knew another officer’s statement that Breonna Taylor’s former boyfriend was receiving packages at Taylor’s house was false, and yet did not object when the officer put it in an application for a search warrant. That warrant sparked the March 2020 raid that left Ms. Taylor dead.

And in Tennessee a federal grand jury has indicted Republican former house speaker Glen Casada and his aide Cade Cothren on 20 counts of federal bribery, kickback, theft, wire fraud, and money laundering for a scheme that began in 2019.

The Biden administration is reasserting the rule of law in the United States.

 

[92tide]

August 23, 2022 (Tuesday)

The Biden administration is reasserting the rule of law in the United States.

this part seems to be bothering a lot of folks who spent the last few decades talking about the importance of the rule of law

 

[Go Bama]

August 24, 2022 (Wednesday)

Yesterday’s elections suggest that American voters are concerned about the past year’s radicalization of the Republican Party. In a special election for a seat in the House of Representatives in a New York state swing district, the 19th congressional district, Democrat Pat Ryan beat his Republican opponent. Pundits looked at the race as a bellwether (named for the wether, or castrated sheep, fitted with a bell to indicate where the flock was going), and most thought the Republican would win, as he was a strong candidate and the midterm election in a president’s first term usually goes to the opposite party.

Ryan’s opponent emphasized inflation and crime, but Ryan told Greg Sargent of the Washington Post: “We centered the concept of freedom…. When rights and freedoms are being taken away from people,” Ryan told Sargent, they “stand up and fight.” The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision of two months ago overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that protected abortion rights was a key sign of the erosion of freedom. Ryan told Sargent that “ripping away reproductive rights from tens of millions of people” was “visceral.”

So, too, are gun safety and threats to democracy. “There’s sort of this power grab of the far, far right,” Ryan told Sargent. “It’s just wildly out of step with where the vast majority of Americans are.”

This is the fourth special election since the Dobbs decision that has shown at least a two-point movement toward the Democrats. A referendum on preserving abortion rights in Kansas also went to those in favor of them.

Tom Bonier, who runs the political data firm TargetSmart, noted that women have outregistered men to vote since the Dobbs decision by large margins: 11 points in Ohio, for example. And a Pew poll released yesterday shows that 56% of voters say that the right to abortion is very important to them for their midterm votes, up from 46% before the Dobbs decision.

The trend is clear, but so is the reality that a number of states are operating under extreme Republican gerrymanders—some, like those in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Ohio, still in force although the state judges have said they are illegal—that will give Republicans a structural advantage.

Biden administration officials are currently touring the country to call attention to how the administration is “Building a Better America.” In 35 trips to 23 states, they will “make clear that the President and Congressional Democrats beat the special interests and delivered what was best for the American people.” They are emphasizing the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the gun safety law, and so on. They are urging Americans to unite not by party, but against the extremism on display in the leadership of the current Republican Party. “Every step of the way, Congressional Republicans sided with the special interests—pushing an extreme MAGA agenda that costs families.”

Since the 1980s, Republicans have argued for cutting public programs because they cost too much money, while also arguing that tax cuts for the wealthy would pay for themselves by expanding the economy, thus increasing tax revenues. It has never worked—when government computers showed that President Ronald Reagan’s first tax cut would explode the deficit, the budget director simply reprogrammed them—but that has not stopped the Republicans from passing repeated tax cuts for the wealthy, one as recently as December 2017.

Republicans have warned that the massive investment the Democrats have made in the country during Biden’s term would rack up enormous deficits. But, in fact, today the Office of Management and Budget forecast that this year’s budget deficit will decline by $1.7 trillion, the single largest drop in the deficit in U.S. history. (The record deficit was $3.13 trillion in 2020, during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic.) This number is simply a benchmark, and the deficit remains at $1.03 trillion, but it suggests that numbers are currently moving downward.

Today, Biden announced another key change in American policy, this time in education. The Department of Education will cancel up to $20,000 of student debt for Pell Grant recipients with loans held by the federal government and up to $10,000 for other borrowers. Pell Grants are targeted at low-income students. Individuals who make less than $125,000 a year or couples who make less than $250,000 a year are eligible. The current pause on federal student loan repayment will be extended once more, through the end of 2022, and the Education Department will try to negotiate a cap on repayments of 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income, down from the current 10%.

The Department of Education estimates that almost 90% of the relief in the measure will go to those earning less than $75,000 a year, and about 43 million borrowers will benefit from the plan.

Opponents of the plan worry that it will be inflationary and that it will not address the skyrocketing cost of four-year colleges. But its supporters worry that the education debt crisis locks people into poverty. They also note that there was very little objection to the forgiveness of 10.2 million Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans issued as of July 2022, with $72,500 being the average dollar amount forgiven.

The administration’s plan is a significant pushback to what has happened to education funding since the 1980s. After World War II, the U.S. funded higher education through a series of measures that increased college attendance while also keeping prices low. Beginning in the 1980s, that funding began to dry up and tuition prices rose to make up the difference.

A college education became crucial for a high-paying job, but wages didn’t rise along with the cost of tuition, so families turned to borrowing. Many of them choose the lowest monthly repayment amounts, and some put their loans on hold, meaning their debt balances grow far beyond what they originally borrowed. The shift to “high-tuition, high-aid” caused a “massive total volume of debt,” Assistant Professor of Economics Emily Cook of Tulane University told Jessica Dickler and Annie Nova of CNBC in May. Today, around 44 million Americans owe about $1.7 trillion of educational debt.

Because of the wealth gap between white and Black Americans—the average white family has ten times the wealth of the average Black family—more Black students borrow to finance their education.

Canceling a portion of student debt is a resumption of the older system, ended in the 1980s, under which the government funded cheaper education in the belief it was a social good. In his explanation of the plan, White House National Economic Council Director Bharat Ramamurti told reporters today that “87% of the dollars…are going to people making under $75,000 a year, and 0 dollars, 0%, are going to anybody making over $125,000 in individual income.” He told them it was “instructive” to compare this plan “to what the Republican tax bill did in 2017. It’s basically the reverse. Fifteen percent of the benefits went to people making under $75,000 a year, and 85% went to people making over $75,000 a year. And if you zoom in even more on that, people making over $250,000 a year got nearly half of the benefits of the GOP tax bill and are getting 0 dollars under our [plan].”

 

[Go Bama]

August 25, 2022 (Thursday)


Today, legal news about the former president and members of his team revealed a group of people who appear to have ignored the law.

The stories began with the release of the Department of Justice (DOJ) memo written for Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr arguing that Trump should not be charged with obstruction of justice over his attempts to shut down the Russia investigation despite his firing of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey, urging of witnesses not to “flip,” hints of pardons to those who stayed quiet, and so on. The memo seems clearly to have been a whitewash to justify Barr’s predetermined decision not to prosecute, illustrating the dangerous politicization of the DOJ.

The memo argued that because special counsel Robert Mueller did not find enough evidence to charge Trump with conspiring with Russia, there was no crime committed, and thus Trump could not be charged with obstruction. In fact, Mueller noted in the report that the investigation was hampered by the president’s allies who refused to cooperate. Andrew Weissman, a 20-year veteran of the Department of Justice who worked on the Mueller investigation, concluded: “Key ‘reasoning’ of…memo: if you successfully obstruct an investigation, you cannot be charged with obstruction as you were not charged with the crime under investigation. Future defendants will have a field day with this memo unless DOJ repudiates it soon.”

Harry Litman, former U.S. attorney and now legal affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times, noted that the principal author of the memo, Steven Engel, “is too good a lawyer not to have known what was going on. In a way, the most important words in the memo are the first 3: ‘at your request.’ This was a political mission.”

And then there is the attempt of Republican operatives to smear their opponents. Today, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York announced that two people have pleaded guilty to stealing the diary and other personal property of then-candidate Joe Biden’s daughter and selling it for $40,000 to James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. In the process, they transported the material across state lines and then, at the request of the person to whom they sold it, went back to get more. They pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property, and will cooperate with authorities.

The attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results is also in legal news.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is arguing in court that the judge should not let a grand jury question the senator “on all the topics” covered by its recent subpoena of his testimony in the investigation of the Trump campaign’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia. Graham argues that the Speech or Debate Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says that congress members “shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place,” means he cannot be questioned about his two phone calls to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger about throwing out mail-in ballots in that state.

For Graham’s argument to prevail, he will have to convince the court that his calls to Raffensperger were part of his legitimate congressional work, rather than part of the efforts of Trump’s campaign to overturn the election, actions outside the scope of Graham’s congressional duties.

Lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, who helped to invent the false electors plan to overturn the results of the 2020 election, is refusing to talk to the grand jury, arguing that he has an attorney-client relationship with the Trump campaign and saying the campaign had “instructed” him to maintain confidentiality. But Chesebro never received any payment, and it is unclear whether he was officially working for the campaign.

Meanwhile, Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis filed petitions today to require Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, Meadows ally James “Phil” Waldron, and Trump campaign advisor Boris Epshteyn to testify before the special grand jury next month.

Finally, the top secret documents Trump stole from the government: Today the DOJ submitted to the court a redacted version of the affidavit it used to obtain a search warrant for Trump’s Florida property Mar-a-Lago earlier this month. The judge has ordered the release of the document by noon tomorrow. Trump had publicly demanded the release of the affidavit but had not actually asked the court to release it. Instead, he has whipped up his followers against the FBI.

With these headlines from the Republican Party, and coming on the heels of a spectacular few months for the Democrats, the Biden administration came out today swinging against MAGA Republicans.

First, after a day of Republican congress members railing against yesterday’s educational loan forgiveness of up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for others, the White House tweeted a thread of those members alongside the amount of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) money those individuals were forgiven.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said: “For our government just to say ok your debt is completely forgiven.. it’s completely unfair.” Greene had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Vern Buchanan (R-FL) said: “Biden’s reckless, unilateral student loan giveaway is unfair to the 87 percent of Americans without student loan debt and those who played by the rules.” Buchanan had more than $2.3 million in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) said: “We do not need farmers and ranchers, small business owners, and teachers in Oklahoma paying the debts of Ivy League lawyers and doctors across the U.S.” Mullin had more than $1.4 million in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Kevin Hern (R-OK) said: “To recap, in the last two weeks, the ‘Party of the People’ has supercharged the IRS to go after working-class Americans, raised their taxes, and forced them to pay for other people's college degrees.” Hern had more than $1 million in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA) said: “Asking plumbers and carpenters to pay off the loans of Wall Street advisors and lawyers isn’t just unfair. It’s also bad policy.” Kelly had $987,237 in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said: Everyone knows that in a $60 Billion+ European land war, it's always the last $3 Billion that kicks in the door….” Gaetz had $482,321 in PPP loans forgiven.

Then Biden gave a barn-burning speech to the Democratic National Committee in Rockville, Maryland, clearly dividing the Republican Party between the MAGAs and mainstream Republicans. The MAGA philosophy is “semi-fascism,” he said, and we are seeing either its beginning or death knell.

“I want to be crystal clear about what’s on the ballot this year. Your right to choose is on the ballot this year. The Social Security you paid for from the time you had a job is on the ballot. The safety of our kids from gun violence is on the ballot…. The very survival of our planet is on the ballot. Your right to vote is on the ballot. Even…democracy.”

“The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security,” he said. “They’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace…political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.”

“This is why in this moment, those of you who love this country—Democrats, Independents, mainstream Republicans—we must be stronger,” he said.

 

[Go Bama]

August 26, 2022 (Friday)


The Department of Justice (DOJ) today released the redacted affidavit that persuaded a judge to agree to issue a search warrant for FBI agents to look for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, the property owned by the Trump Organization in Florida.

It was bad.

The affidavit explained to the judge the history behind the FBI’s request.

On February 9, 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration (what did I say about archivists?) told the DOJ that after seven months of negotiations, on January 18 it had received 15 boxes of material that former president Trump had held at Mar-a-Lago. Those boxes contained “highly classified documents,” including some at the very most secret level of our intelligence: those involving our spies and informants.

In those initial 15 boxes, FBI personnel found 184 classified documents. Sixty-seven were labeled CONFIDENTIAL, 92 were SECRET, 25 were TOP SECRET. Some were marked SCS, FISA, ORCON, NOFORN, and SI, the very highest levels of security, involving human intelligence, foreign surveillance, intelligence that cannot be shared with foreign governments, and intelligence that is compartmented to make sure no one has full knowledge of what is in it. The former president had made notes on “several” of the documents.

On June 8, 2022, a DOJ lawyer wrote to Trump’s lawyer to reiterate that Mar-a-Lago was not authorized to store classified information, and warned that the documents were not being handled properly. The DOJ lawyer asked that the material be secured in a single room at Mar-a-Lago “in their current condition until further notice.”

Trump’s lawyers told the DOJ that presidents have the absolute authority to declassify documents—this is not true, by the way—but did not assert he had done so.

The FBI opened a criminal investigation “to, among other things,” figure out how the classified records were taken from the White House and ended up at Mar-a-Lago, and to determine if other classified records might have been improperly taken and stored, and to figure out who might have taken and mishandled them.

They concluded that there was good reason to think that more classified records remained at Mar-a-Lago and that investigators would find evidence that Trump and his allies were obstructing the government’s effort to recover the material. The person who made the affidavit said they were a special agent with the FBI, “familiar with efforts used to unlawfully collect, retain, and disseminate sensitive government information, including classified N[ational] D[efense] I[nformation].” They swore that “there is probable cause to believe” that locations at Mar-a-Lago “contain evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed.”

The affidavit confirmed that the Department of Justice is “conducting a criminal investigation concerning the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces, as well as the unlawful concealment or removal of government records,” and asked for the affidavit to be sealed because “the items and information to be seized are relevant to an ongoing investigation and the FBI has not yet identified all potential criminal confederates nor located all evidence related to its investigation.”

Sidestepping Trump’s insistence that he could declassify whatever he wished when president, the affidavit specifies that the documents could cause damage even if they are not classified, and it notes that retaining “information related to the national defense” is illegal.

The information that Trump stole classified documents itself was eye-popping, and then that he refused to return them was astonishing. Now, the knowledge of the extent of it, and that it included information from our human sources, is stunning.

AND THIS WAS JUST THE AFFIDAVIT TO GET A SEARCH WARRANT TO GET MORE RETAINED DOCUMENTS… which the FBI did on August 8.

We still don’t know what was in those more recently recovered boxes.

Trump is in serious trouble…and so are the rest of us. This stolen and mishandled classified intelligence compromises our security. The best-case scenario is that it was never seen by anyone who knew what they were looking at. Even that would mean that our allies have every reason to be leery about sharing information with us again.

But that’s the best-case scenario. We have to wonder, who else now knows the secrets designed to keep Americans safe? Multiple news stories during Trump’s presidency noted that even then, Mar-a-Lago was notoriously insecure. And, unthinkable though it should be but sadly is not, what if secret documents have already been given or sold into the hands of foreign actors whose interests conflict with ours?

I have been writing today about Trump’s first impeachment and the hearings where Marie Yovanovitch, Fiona Hill, and Alexander Vindman, immigrants all, who served our nation faithfully and fully, risked—and ultimately lost—their jobs to warn us that Trump was willing to compromise our national security for his own interests.

“He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again,” House impeachment manager Adam Schiff warned the Senate. “You can’t trust [Trump] to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change and you know it.” Schiff begged them to say “enough.”

But they would not, and they did not, and here we are.

 

[Go Bama]

August 28, 2022 (Saturday)

In a speech Thursday night, President Joe Biden called out today’s MAGA Republicans for threatening “our personal rights and economic security…. They’re a threat to our very democracy.” When he referred to them as “semi-fascists,” he drew headlines, some of them disapproving.

A spokesperson for the Republican National Committee called the comment “despicable,” although Republicans have called Democrats “socialists” now for so long it passes as normal discourse. Just this week, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) called Democrats “radical left-wing lunatics, laptop liberals, and Marxist misfits.”

Biden’s calling out of today’s radical Republicans mirrors the moment on June 21, 1856, when Representative Anson Burlingame of Massachusetts, a member of the newly formed Republican Party, stood up in Congress to announce that northerners were willing to take to the battlefield to defend their way of life against the southerners who were trying to destroy it. Less than a month before, Burlingame's Massachusetts colleague Senator Charles Sumner had been brutally beaten by a southern representative for disparaging slavery, and Burlingame was sick and tired of buying sectional peace by letting southerners abuse the North. Enough, he said, was enough. The North was superior to the South in its morality, loyalty to the government, fidelity to the Constitution, and economy, and northerners were willing to defend their system, if necessary, with guns.

Burlingame’s “Defense of Massachusetts” speech marked the first time a prominent northerner had offered to fight to defend the northern way of life. Previously, southerners had been the ones threatening war and demanding concessions from the North to preserve the peace. He was willing to accept a battle, Burlingame explained, because what was at stake was the future of the nation. His speech invited a challenge to a duel.

Southerners championed their region as the one that had correctly developed the society envisioned by the Founders. In the South, a few very wealthy men controlled government and society, enslaving their neighbors. This system, its apologists asserted, was the highest form of human civilization. They opposed any attempt to restrict its spread. The South was superior to the North, enslavers insisted; it alone was patriotic, honored the Constitution, and understood economic growth. In the interests of union, northerners repeatedly ceded ground to enslavers and left their claim to superiority unchallenged.

At long last, the attack on Sumner inspired Burlingame to speak up for the North. The southern system was not superior, he thundered; it had dragged the nation backward. Slavery kept workers ignorant and godless while the northern system of freedom lifted workers up with schools and churches. Slavery feared innovation; freedom encouraged workers to try new ideas. Slavery kept the South mired in the past; freedom welcomed the modern world and pushed Americans into a new, thriving economy. And finally, when Sumner had spoken up against the tyranny of slavery, a southerner had clubbed him almost to death on the floor of the Senate.

Was ignorance, economic stagnation, and violence the true American system?

For his part, Burlingame preferred to throw his lot with education, morality, economic growth, and respect for government.

Burlingame had deliberately provoked the lawmaker who had beaten Sumner, Preston Brooks of South Carolina, and unable to resist any provocation, Brooks had challenged Burlingame to a duel. Brooks assumed all Yankees were cowards and figured that Burlingame would decline in embarrassment. But instead, Burlingame accepted with enthusiasm, choosing rifles as the dueling weapons. Burlingame, it turned out, was an expert marksman.

Burlingame also chose to duel in Canada, giving Brooks the opportunity to back out on the grounds that he felt unsafe traveling through the North after his beating of Sumner made him a hated man. The negotiations for the duel went on for months, but the duel never took place. Instead, Brooks, known as “Bully” Brooks, lost face as a man who was unwilling to risk his safety to avenge his honor, while Burlingame showed that northerners were eager to fight.

Forgotten now, Burlingame’s speech was once widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. It marked the moment when northerners shocked southerners by calling them out for what they were, and northerners rallied to Burlingame’s call.

President Biden’s Twitter account has recently been taken over by new White House's Deputy Director of Platforms Megan Coyne, who garnered attention when she ran the official New Jersey Twitter account with attitude, and it seems as if the administration is taking the new saltiness out for a spin. “All the talk about the deficit from the same folks that gave an unpaid-for $2 trillion tax cut to the wealthy and big corporations. It makes you laugh,” the account said tonight. “Under my Administration, the deficit is on track to come down by more than $1 trillion this year.”

 

[92tide]

glad to see president biden calling these freaks what they are. i hope he keeps doing and doubles down when they start whining about it

 

[Go Bama]

August 28, 2022 (Sunday)


As we turn to the autumn, a picture that captures the passing summer.

I’m sending my very best wishes to everyone starting the school year.

Guessing– heck, pretty sure we know– that it’s going to be a busy week, so let’s take a deep breath and take the night off.

[Photo “Red Chairs” by Nadia Povalinska]