#repeat1968 — Public Fediverse posts

Finally Friday Reads: Project 2025 Plan to Destroy America is Offical

“I’m pretty sure all the Military Brass are impressed that the Secretary of War had his own personal makeup room built in the Pentagon. John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Most of us knew that Project 2025 would be the basis of policy. Republicans have wanted an Imperial Presidency for some time. Republicans have elected at least 3 useful idiots as President with the goal of destroying American democracy in mind. It’s why we have a huge deficit, and spending has been concentrated on the rich who can pay-to-play to get massive tax cuts and huge government subsidies.

There are examples in every state they control. Here in Louisiana, the damage from oil extraction and affiliated chemical industries has created massive damage, and just at the precise time that the EPA has been fully filleted. Not only has nothing real been done to abate the chemical spill that happened earlier this summer after a poorly managed plant that exploded in Roseland, a primarily black community, but it has not been fully abated. The actions behind the removal of LSU’s premier Lake Maurapas researcher have become clearer. Today, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released this important research. “Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ Is More Deadly Than Previously Imagined. New research shows that the industrial pollution—and the risk to human health—on Louisiana’s Cancer Alley have been significantly underestimated.

On an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, communities exist alongside some 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical production plants. Since the 1980s, the area has been known as Cancer Alley.

These plants process about 25% of the U.S.’s petrochemical products, Peter DeCarlo, PhD, associate professor in Environmental Health and Engineering, said in the July 2 episode of Public Health On Call—with many of the byproducts and emissions winding up in nearby communities’ air, water, and soil.

Residents of these communities suffer the effects of extreme air pollution, including increased rates and risks of maternal, reproductive, and newborn health harms; respiratory illnesses; and cancer. One area has the highest risk of cancer from industrial air pollution in the U.S.—more than seven times the national average.

But new research from DeCarlo, Keeve Nachman, PhD ’06, MHS ’01, professor in Environmental Health and Engineering, and their teams shows that the pollution—and the risk to human health—has been significantly underestimated.

In this Q&A, adapted from that podcast episode, DeCarlo and Nachman discuss their work measuring levels of pollutants in Louisiana and explain what these conclusions mean for how the U.S. should regulate carcinogens.

We may be drowning in toxic chemicals, but other states and cities are experiencing ICE Raids that resemble SS maneuvers. Additionally, we have new threats. Since the reality on the ground has embarrassed the Trump plan to send the military to “wartorn” Portland to defuse his imagined war on the ground, he’s come up with an alternative plan. This is from ABC News. “Leavitt says Trump exploring cutting aid to Portland.”White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump is exploring plans to cut federal funding to Portland due to what she said was a rise in “Antifa” related incidents.”

“We will not fund states that allow anarchy,” she told reporters.

Antifa is not a group, but rather a political philosophy or movement. The term comes from the longer “anti-fascist” and is used as a catchall for groups that oppose the concept of authoritarianism, neo-Nazism and white supremacy.

If you want to sum it up, try this hypothesis for size. Republicans are willing to let all of us starve and die as long as they can get paid for enabling modern-day Robber Barons.

About six months into this reign of terror, murder, and destruction, I’m still not certain the legacy media is getting the bigger picture.  However, yesterday, an announcement by Trump made them perk their ears once more. Will it be enough? This is from the AP. “Trump no longer distancing himself from Project 2025 as he uses the shutdown to further pursue its goals.”

President Donald Trump is openly embracing the conservative blueprint he desperately tried to distance himself from during the 2024 campaign, as one of its architects works to use the government shutdown to accelerate his goals of slashing the size of the federal workforce and punishing Democratic states.

In a post on his Truth Social site Thursday morning, Trump announced he would be meeting with his budget chief, “Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.”

The comments represented a dramatic about-face for Trump, who spent much of last year denouncing Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s massive proposed overhaul of the federal government, which was drafted by many of his longtime allies and current and former administration officials.

You may recall that the implication of this document was central to the Democratic Party campaign. Kamala Harris made it a focal point of the convention and other speeches.

Top Trump campaign leaders spent much of 2024 livid at The Heritage Foundation for publishing a book full of unpopular proposals that Democrats tried to pin on the campaign to warn a second Trump term would be too extreme.

While many of the policies outlined in its 900-plus pages aligned closely with the agenda that Trump was proposing — particularly on curbing immigration and dismantling certain federal agencies — others called for action Trump had never discussed, like banning pornography, or Trump’s team was actively trying to avoid, like withdrawing approval for abortion medication.

Trump repeatedly insisted he knew nothing about the group or who was behind it, despite his close ties with many of its authors. They included John McEntee, his former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, and Paul Dans, former chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump insisted in July 2024. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Trump’s campaign chiefs were equally critical.

“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” wrote Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita in a campaign memo. They added, “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.”

Trump has since gone on to stock his second administration with its authors, including Vought, “border czar” Tom Homan, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller and Brendan Carr, who wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission and now chairs the panel.

Heritage did not respond to a request for comment Thursday. But Dans, the project’s former director, said it’s been “exciting” to see so much of what was laid out in the book put into action.

“It’s gratifying. We’re very proud of the work that was done for this express purpose: to have a doer like President Trump ready to roll on Day One,” said Dans, who is currently running for Senate against Lindsey Graham in South Carolina.

It was frequently averred that Stephen Miller was central to all plans for the project’s implementation. Only a few public intellectuals continued to warn of the plan and steps taken, while Yam Tit still shrugged off any implication that he was following the plan’s blueprint during the first six months.  Well, that curtain has dropped.

AXIOS sums this evolution up neatly.  “Trump charts path to total control amid government shutdown.’ This is reported by Zachary Basu.

President Trump is seizing on the government shutdown as an “unprecedented opportunity” to consolidate control in the Oval Office, accelerating a trend toward unchecked power.

Why it matters: Many Democrats see the shutdown as a necessary evil to halt — or at least slow — Trump’s steamrolling of democratic norms and independent institutions. So far, the standoff is only emboldening the White House.

Zoom in: Trump said he met Thursday with White House budget chief Russ Vought to discuss what “Democrat agencies” should get cuts, casting the shutdown as a chance to shrink a federal workforce Trump has long viewed as hostile.

• Goading Democrats, Trump flaunted Vought’s role in Project 2025 (“he of PROJECT 2025 Fame”) — the hard-right blueprint for expanding executive power that Trump disavowed on the campaign trail after it became a political liability.
• For Vought, the shutdown offers a unique opening: a live test of theories he has spent years refining on how to weaken Congress, purge the bureaucracy and concentrate power in the presidency.

Already, Vought has announced the termination of nearly $8 billion in funding for clean-energy projects in 16 states, all of which voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and have Democratic senators.

• He also has frozen $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects, a thinly veiled shot at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).
• Legal challenges are inevitable: Congress controls the power of the purse, and federal officials privately have warned that Vought’s plans for mass firings during the shutdown may violate appropriations law.

The big picture: As Axios has documented, the shutdown is only one front in Trump’s broader campaign of consolidation.

• Military: In an unprecedented partisan address this week, Trump told more than 800 generals and admirals to prepare for a “war” against domestic “enemies,” urging them to treat America’s cities as “training grounds.”
• Academia: The administration is asking universities to sign a 10-point “compact” that would grant preferential access to federal funding if schools agree to freeze tuition, protect conservative speech, apply strict definitions of gender, limit international students and other Trump priorities.
• Rule of law: Days after Trump publicly pressured Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge his political enemies, the Justice Department indicted former FBI director James Comey. Other Trump foes, including New York Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), are under investigation.
• Civil society: FBI director Kash Patel severed ties with the Anti-Defamation League on Thursday, accusing the Jewish civil rights group of “functioning like a terrorist organization” after MAGA activists discovered that Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA was listed in its now-removed “Glossary of Extremism and Hate.” Trump also has urged the Justice Department to investigate Democratic megadonor George Soros’ Open Society Foundations as part of a crackdown on liberal groups following Kirk’s assassination.
• Corporate America: Trump demanded last week that Microsoft fire its head of global affairs, Lisa Monaco, because she served in the Biden administration — a reminder that even corporate giants aren’t immune from political retaliation. Trump had previously called on Intel’s CEO to resign over alleged ties to China, but backed off after the U.S. government took a 10% equity stake in the chip-maker.

More at the link.

MSNBC’s Maddow Blog has this analysis.  As usual, Steve Benen has the led.  “Trump picks a convenient time to change his tune about the Project 2025 agenda. Remember last year when Trump feigned ignorance about the right-wing governing blueprint? A year later, the president no longer bothers with the pretense.”

As the second full day of the latest government shutdown got underway, Donald Trump published an odd message to his social media platform, which raised plenty of eyebrows throughout the political world.

“I have a meeting today with [White House Budget Director] Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat [sic] Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” the president wrote.

We don’t yet know what transpired at that meeting, but Trump’s weird phrasing was itself notable. For example, there are no federal departments or offices that should be called “Democrat Agencies.” There are only American agencies, which do work on behalf of the American people and which are currently led, at least in part, by Trump’s own appointees.

Similarly, the idea that federal agencies deserve to be condemned as “a political SCAM” is every bit as bizarre as it sounds. We’re talking about offices, some of which have been around for many years, that were created by Congress. Their existence is reinforced in federal law, which the president is required to enforce.

As for the possibility that Trump and the far-right head of his Office of Management and Budget might “permanently” weaken departments that the White House no longer likes, it’s worth keeping in mind that such efforts might very well be illegal.

But let’s also not brush past that other phrase: Vought, the president wrote, is “of PROJECT 2025 Fame.” As The Associated Press summarized:

President Donald Trump is openly embracing the conservative blueprint he desperately tried to distance himself from during the 2024 campaign, as one of its architects works to use the government shutdown to accelerate his goals of slashing the size of the federal workforce and punishing Democratic states.

For those who might benefit from a refresher, throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump realized that the Project 2025 agenda was so radical and unpopular that he treated is as radioactive. “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” the Republican said over the summer about the blueprint largely written by members of his own team. He added, “I have nothing to do with them.”

Here’s some analysis from Time Magazine‘s Editorial Fellow Connor Greene. “Trump Is No Longer Denying Support for Project 2025: What to Know.”

President Donald Trump has changed his tune on the conservative policy plan Project 2025 after actively distancing himself from it for months during his reelection campaign.

Trump announced on Thursday that he would be meeting with Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, “he of PROJECT 2025 Fame,” to decide which “Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.”

The post marks a significant shift from the President’s past disavowals of the unpopular right-wing policy blueprint, which was created by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation ahead of the 2024 election. “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it,” Trump said in a debate last year with former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Despite Trump’s repeated insistence that he didn’t know anything about Project 2025, however, he had close ties with a number of its authors, several of whom have served in his Administrations—including Vought. And since he returned to the White House in January his second Administration has taken steps to implement a number of the proposals detailed in the over 900-page document.

Now, amid the government shutdown, Trump is moving to further fulfill Project 2025’s goals of reducing the federal workforce and extending his executive powers—and, it appears, openly embracing the plan.

The big question sis what does this mean for the shutdown and the country?

Despite his criticisms of Project 2025, many of the Trump Administration’s actions since he returned to office have mirrored aspects of the blueprint. An analysis by TIME in January found that nearly two-thirds of Trump’s early executive actions reflected—in whole or in part—proposals in Project 2025.

Among the parts of the plan that Trump has carried out is its recommendation to aggressively reduce the size and scope of the federal government.

Trump and hisDepartment of Government Efficiency moved quickly to cut more than 200,000 federal employees, though some of the layoffs have since been held up in the courts after being challenged by lawsuits. His Administration has also looked to slash federal funding through various freezes, clawbacks, cuts, and recissions.

Trump has announced plans to execute still more cuts amid the government shutdown. In the leadup to the deadline to fund the government this week, the White House directed agencies to prepare for mass firings in the event that Congress couldn’t reach a deal, rather than furloughing those not deemed essential as in past shutdowns.

The Administration has additionally used the shutdown to cancel $8 billion in green energy projects in Democratic-led states, withhold $18 billion in transportation projects in New York City, and pause $2.1 billion in infrastructure projects in Chicago.

Here’s a just a bit of the latest information on Russell Voight. This startling headline is from Politico. “Thune warns Democrats about Russ Vought: ‘We don’t control what he’s going to do’  The Senate majority leader spoke out as some Republicans express qualms about the White House slash-and-burn campaign.”  The reporter for this piece is Jourdain Carney.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune isn’t endorsing the slash-and-burn campaign White House budget director Russ Vought has planned for the federal government during the pending shutdown.

But he says Democrats have no one to blame for it but themselves.

“This is the risk of shutting down the government and handing the keys to Russ Vought,” the Senate majority leader said in an exclusive interview Wednesday in the Capitol, adding that “there should have been an expectation” among Democrats that Vought’s Office of Management and Budget could broadly target government workers and programs in a shutdown.

Thune spoke on the same day that several Republicans aired discomfort with Vought’s moves after the shutdown went into effect. Rep. Mike Lawler of New York spoke out against his decision to hold up major transportation projects in his state, while Reps. Blake Moore of Utah and Brian Babin of Texas spoke up on a private House GOP call with Vought raising qualms about potential mass layoffs.

Vought’s actions also risk being a distraction for Republicans, who have sought to stick to a simple message putting the onus on Democrats to reopen the government. Pressed on whether Vought was muddying the waters, Thune said, “The only thing I would say about that is yes, and we don’t control what he’s going to do.”

The White House has made no secret that its strategy is to inflict maximum political pressure on Democrats to try to get them to reopen the government. Vought warned ahead of the start of the shutdown that OMB would take aggressive steps beyond typical furloughs, where employees are brought back to work after the government reopens.

The budget office directed agencies in a memo first reported by POLITICO last week to put together plans for reductions-in-force — or firings — of federal employees. Vought himself told House Republicans during the Wednesday call that those firings would start in a “day or two.”

“I can’t control that,” Thune said about decisions made by OMB. “But the Democrats ought to think long and hard about keeping this thing going for a long time, because it won’t be without consequence, I’m sure.”

This final suggested read is from Mother Jones. “Russ Vought Is Trump’s Shutdown Hero. His Neighbors Think His Work Is “Abhorrent.” The people living near Trump’s “grim reaper” of government cuts have put up signs letting him know they stand with federal workers.” This is reported by Isabela Dias.

On Thursday night, President Donald Trump shared a music video on Truth Social. In it, an AI-generated Russ Vought—Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and a Project 2025 mastermind—is the grim reaper, carrying a scythe along a hallway lined with portraits of Democratic leaders. Vought, the video’s soundtrack explains, “wields the pen, the funds, and the brain” to enforce the president’s plans to axe federal workers.

“Everyone still remembers when he said he wanted to cause maximum trauma to federal workers,” the neighbor said. “And that’s hard to forget.”

Most of Vought’s neighbors I talked to for this article declined to speak on the record or asked to remain anonymous. Some said they didn’t want to create a rift in an otherwise cordial neighborhood, while others worried about retribution or negative repercussions from their employers.

“I just wish he would have gotten to know us,” Hunter said. “We consider ourselves good Americans, we have good values. And I don’t think he’s been interested in getting to know any of us, in hearing if we might have a difference of opinion.”

Last week, Vought sent around a memo blaming Democrats’ “insane demands” for the imminent lapse in funding and instructing agency heads to start making plans to cut non-mandatory programs “not consistent with the President’s priorities” and “use this opportunity to consider Reduction in Force.” Appearing on Fox Business, Vought claimed an “authority to make permanent change to the bureaucracy here in government” during the shutdown.

He has since announced pauses to funding for infrastructure projects in New York—home state of House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York), who called Vought a “malignant political hack”—and slowdowns in clean energy projects in several blue states.

Vought, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah said on Fox News, “has been dreaming about and preparing for his moment since puberty.”

AsIwrote in a profile of Vought from 2024, the bespectacled official spent years as a Washington insider and government bureaucrat before becoming the architect of a supersized second Trump presidency.

An avowed Christian nationalist and dedicated America First warrior, he once described the job of OMB director as the “keeper of ‘commander’s intent” and criticized the federal bureaucracy for standing in the way of the president’s agenda. During Trump’s first term, Vought tried to implement an executive order that would have made it easier for political appointees to fire career civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists. Now, he’s getting to realize his vision while earning points with the president.

See what’s in the cards for us?  Read them and weep.  The Voight cartoons are from The Nation. They have a primar on Vought that you really should read. “Project 2025: Vought’s Your Problem? Not too bad to be true.”  Steve Brodner is the artist and his cartoons have descriptions of their design.  Go see the rest!

I’ve been a little late today, I’m sorry. I woke up late last night in a lot of pain and took some acetaminophen for relief. In my mind I was seeing it as some sort of ritual to defang Trump’s war on Health Care. I also got a call from youngest with my first grandson. Aiden, like his mémé is quite verbal.  I really worked on this piece because I wanted to get as many sources as I could on this abomination and put my time in it than usual. I was researching stuff like the researcher I am. I am vorasciously reading up on this and I suggest you do too.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?

#Repeat1968 #DestructionOfFederalAgencies #governmentShutdown2025m #JohnBuss #LousianaSCancerAlley #PeoplePower #Project25 #RussVought #StevenBrodner

Finally Friday Reads: We have a Kakistocracy* coming. Let’s not keep it!

“Make America Garbage Again,” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

After sleeping through last week, I have finally decided that PTSD has kicked in, and I’m in survival mode.  At least I woke up to find the word that best describes what we’re watching unfold.  From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

*kakistocracy  noun

kak·​is·​toc·​ra·​cy ˌkakə̇ˈstäkrəsē

plural kakistocracies

:government by the worst people

Greek kakistos (superlative of kakos bad) + English -cracy

The Cambridge Dictionary is more blunt. It evidently was coined sometime in the 17th century.  Now we know how far we’re going to fall back.

A government that is ruled by the least suitable, able, or experienced people in a state or country:   Who rules in a kakistocracy?   We are living in a new era of kakistocracy.

  Fewer examples:

• Kakistocracies are governments ruled by the stupid and ignorant.
• What we have here is the world’s only kakistocracy.
• The total lack of integrity of the administration is proof that we now live in a kakistocracy.

 

This is what we will have after January 20,2025, which is, ironically enough, not only the inauguration of the first felon to ever hold office but also the holiday celebrating Martin Luther King.  Somewhere, the Greek Muses have entered the realm of Greek Tragedy.  All we need is a chorus.

I turned to some TV news last night to watch the faces of the political class chatter about the proposed cabinet members with the look of teenagers stuck in a summer camp horror film. Yes, this all does feel like a very bad movie or dream that you want to be over when you awaken. However, it is more like the idea of the tyranny of the masses that Alexis de Tocqueville dreamed of while writing his book Democracy in America. He was very afraid of the unwashed masses, and now we know why.

The greatest danger Tocqueville saw was that public opinion would become an all-powerful force, and that the majority could tyrannize unpopular minorities and marginal individuals. In Volume 1, Part 2, Chapter 7, “Of the Omnipotence of the Majority in the United States and Its Effects,” he lays out his argument with a variety of well-chosen constitutional, historical, and sociological examples.

I love that last part because it comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a history class curriculum prepared for teachers on the topic.  Quick, go read it or get your copy of the book before both are banned and defunded. It’s an independent agency, like the Fed, and we’ll see how long into the kakistocracy that remains to be true for both.  I imagine I would never get grants to be funded as I did in 1982 to bring Kate Millet and Betty Friedan to Omaha and funds to expand our Women’s Festival to include black women presenters. That was even during the Reagan years.  He must have been damned woke or completely asleep, drooling on the Resolute desk to miss that opportunity.

“Matt is the man selected to hide all the criming, appropriate.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Okay, so let me really depress you now with some headlines. This is from Public Notice‘s Lisa Needham.  “Trump moves to burn down the rule of law. His cabinet nominations are obscene and augur dark days to come.”  And you thought I was being a bummer!

When the sordid history of the second Trump administration is written, should we all survive that long, it will be difficult to sort out which of his early cabinet picks were the most atrocious. And while handing over control of the military to a weekend Fox News host or putting an anti-vax creep in charge of America’s top public health agency are really bad, it will be hard to sink lower than Matt Gaetz being nominated as the nation’s top law enforcement official.

Let’s pretend, for just a moment, that Gaetz isn’t just being given this job because he’s a lib-triggering Trump crony and evaluate him on the merits. Gaetz’s legal experience, such as it is, seems to consist of a stint at a small firm in Florida, Anchors Garden, where he worked after graduating from law school in 2007. The firm currently has only nine attorneys, and Gaetz devotes precisely one line to the experience in his self-servingly weird House bio, saying, “Prior to serving in Congress, Matt worked as an attorney in Northwest Florida with the Keefe, Anchors & Gordon law firm, where he advocated for a more open and transparent government.”

Advocating for a more open and transparent government sounds pretty important, right? But while the firm does have a government affairs and public records practice, when Mother Jones did a deep dive into Gaetz’s experience there, what they turned up instead was that he working on things like debt collection and representing a homeowners’ association over a dispute about a beach volleyball net. It isn’t even entirely clear when Gaetz stopped working at the firm. His House bio skips ahead to his 2010 election to the Florida House, and his legal work is never mentioned again.

This is not the biography of someone you would hire to be an assistant district attorney in a mid-size American city, much less the head of the entire Department of Justice.

Compare Gaetz to Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general pick during his previous term. Sure, Sessions was so racist that he couldn’t get confirmed as a judge. But he also spent 12 years as the US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama and two years as the Alabama attorney general before being elected to four consecutive Senate terms. During his time in the Senate, he served on the Senate Judiciary Committee, becoming its ranking member in 2009. Sessions was a repulsive and retrograde choice for AG, but he wasn’t a demonstrably unqualified one.

That’s a sunny note to start your weekend on. Wait, there’s more!  If you want to see real pearl-clutching, you must go to WAPO or NYT.  But they’re a  little too late for me.  Here’s something from The Bulwark. I’ve suddenly gone all in for the alt-press like I did in 1970 when I started writing for Omaha’s underground Newspaper, The Aardvark, to write terrible things about Richard Nixon. “Gaetz Begins Lobbying Lawmakers, Hoping He Hasn’t Burned All the Bridges/ The congressman and his team are trying to convince Senators to overlook a potentially damning ethics report and his history of political histrionics.” This analysis is coauthored by Mark Caputo and Joe Perticone.

Though Trump has made a slew of controversial picks (the latest being Thursday’s nomination of anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services), Gaetz stands out as a singularly polarizing figure because of the investigations into his conduct, the accusations against him, and his strained personal relationship with fellow Republican members of Congress he has torched, including allies of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whose ouster he masterminded.

“We have 53 senators and we might not have 50 votes to confirm right now. It’s really up in the air,” said a member of Trump’s team briefed on its preliminary vote-counting. “Gaetz can be a real asshole. But he can be a great guy. The senators need to see the great guy and kind of hear the asshole apologize and tell them why all this stuff about sex crimes isn’t true.”

The push to confirm Gaetz is the latest test of his ability to survive crises that would have ruined any other politician. It also will provide an early indication of Trump’s ability to bend the Senate to his will. The president-elect has quickly moved to force votes on high-profile nominees that no other person in his position would have dared put forward. And as a fallback, he is pressuring incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune into giving him the right to bypass the Senate to make temporary appointments.

Doing so would get Trump’s cabinet in place. But it could come at a political cost if it perceived that the president is jamming through highly-controversial nominees. On Thursday, ABC reported that the woman at the center of the sex-crimes case had told House investigators that Gaetz had paid to have sex with her in 2017 when she was a minor. Gaetz was also allegedly implicated in paying other women for sex, which he has denied, and in illicit drug use.

The succession of nominations and reporting left Republican senators in an uncomfortable spot. Some, including those on the Senate Judiciary Committee—which would first vote on Gaetz’s nomination—said they wanted to see the House ethics report into Gaetz.

A quick look at several of the appointments finds quite a few rapists and serial adulterers. Trump obviously wants mini-mes.  The BBC has this list up to date and is waiting for more. “Who has joined Trump’s team so far?”  Some of the appointees are not getting sanguine coverage.’

This article is specific to Gaetz and was written by North American Correspondent Anthony Zurcher. “Trump picking Gaetz to head justice sends shockwaves – and a strong message.”

Donald Trump’s nomination of congressman Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general has arrived like a thunderclap in Washington.

Of all the president-elect’s picks for his administration so far, this is easily the most controversial – and sends a clear message that Trump intends to shake up the establishment when he returns to power.

The shockwaves were still being felt on Thursday morning as focus shifted to a looming fight in the Senate over his nomination.

Trump is assembling his team before he begins his term on 20 January, and his choice of defence secretary, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, and intelligence chief, former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, have also raised eyebrows.

But it is Gaetz making most headlines. The Florida firebrand is perhaps best known for spearheading the effort to unseat then-Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy last year. But he has a history of being a flamethrower in the staid halls of Congress.

In 2018, he brought a right-wing Holocaust denier to the State of the Union, and later tried to expel two fathers who lost children in a mass shooting from a hearing after they objected to a claim he made about gun control.

His bombastic approach means he has no shortage of enemies, including within his own party. And so Trump’s choice of Gaetz for this crucial role is a signal to those Republicans, too – his second administration will be staffed by loyalists who he trusts to enact his agenda, conventional political opinion be damned.

Gasps were heard during a meeting of Republican lawmakers when the nomination for America’s top US prosecutor was announced, Axios reported, citing sources in the room.

Republican congressman Mike Simpson of Idaho reportedly responded with an expletive.

“I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general,” Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said. “This one was not on my bingo card.”

Gaetz is playing Rocky and is already running up and down the Capitol stairs trying to find the few people that like him.  But even the New York Post is taking on the RFK appointment to HHS.  I know, I can’t believe  I’m doing this.   It’s even it’s Editorial Board.  “Putting RFK Jr. in charge of health breaks the first rule of medicine.”

The overriding rule of medicine is: First, do no harm.

We’re certain installing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services breaks this rule.

Maybe he’s sworn to focus narrowly on areas where he clearly can help — inspiring Americans to embrace healthier diets and more exercise, etc.

I wonder where eating roadkill and fish laded with mercury comes into that equation?

But wait! There are reasons to question every one of his appointments.  This is from The Guardian.  “Trump defense secretary nominee involved in 2017 sexual assault investigation, no charges filed – report.”

Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who Donald Trump nominated to be defense secretary, was involved in a sexual assault investigation in California seven years ago, but no charges were filed against him, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

The incident happened in 2017 at a hotel and golf course in the city of Monterey, but there were few details of how Hegseth was involved, or what happened. Here’s more, from the Chronicle:

In a brief statement late Thursday, the city manager’s office in Monterey confirmed the sexual assault investigation, but provided few details.

The city said the incident was reported to have happened between almost midnight on Oct. 7, 2017, and 7 a.m. the next morning at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa on Del Monte Golf Course, less than a mile from Monterey Bay and across Highway 1 from the Naval Postgraduate School.

“The Monterey Police Department investigated an alleged sexual assault at 1 Old Golf Course Road,” the city said. It said the victim’s name was confidential and that the alleged assault was reported on Oct. 12, 2017. The city said no weapons were involved, but that there was a report of “contusions to right thigh.”

The city declined to release the police report, saying it was exempt from public disclosure, and said it would not make any further remarks on the probe.

The Monterey County District Attorney’s Office did not reply to a request for comment late Thursday, but an online database indicated no criminal charges had been filed against Hegseth in that county.

Vanity Fair reports that news of the allegation sent Trump’s transition team scrambling over the past few days:

Donald Trump’s transition team scrambled Thursday after Trump’s incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles was presented with an allegation that former Fox & Friends cohost Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to be Defense Secretary, had engaged in sexual misconduct. According to two sources, Wiles was briefed Wednesday night about an allegation that Hegseth had acted inappropriately with a woman. One of the sources said the alleged incident took place in Monterey, California in 2017.

According to the transition source, the allegation is serious enough that Wiles and Trump’s lawyers spoke to Hegseth about it on Thursday. A source with knowledge of the meeting said that Hegseth said the allegation stemmed from a consensual encounter and characterized the episode as he-said, she-said.

On Thursday evening, Hegseth’s lawyer Timothy Parlatore said: “This allegation was already investigated by the Monterey police department and they found no evidence for it.”

Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung said: “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration. Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.”

That guy puts the sleaze in sleazy.  Plus, he was investigated for war crimes and would be in charge of dealing with war criminals. This is from Time Magazine. “Pete Hegseth’s Role in Trump’s Controversial Pardons of Men Accused of War Crimes.”

President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement that he would nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense in his second term has already stirred controversy.

Hegseth, a military veteran, staunch defender of Trump’s “America First” agenda, and an outspoken critic of what he calls the military’s “woke” culture, has built a career around challenging the military establishment. He held an influential role in advocating for Trump to intervene on behalf of service members in three cases involving war crime accusations in 2019—cases that divided the military and ignited fierce debates over the limits of executive power and military accountability.

Now, if he is confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense, Hegseth will oversee 1.3 million active-duty service members and manage military strategy at a time of global instability, raising questions about how his past approach towards accused war criminals will impact his military leadership and discipline.

During Trump’s first term in office, Hegseth lobbied for the pardons of Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance and Army Major Mathew Golsteyn, and pushed to support Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, each of whom were facing charges or convictions related to alleged war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth’s advocacy on behalf of the three service members appeared to pay off: in Nov. 2019, Trump granted pardons to Lorance and Golsteyn, and reversed a demotion of Gallagher, citing Hegseth and Fox News when he tweeted about his decision to review one of the cases.

Hegseth’s vocal defense of these men as victims of overzealous prosecution raised eyebrows in the military community, where such interventions by civilians are seen by some as a threat to the integrity of the justice system. “These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice,” Hegseth said on Fox & Friends in May 2019. “They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors.”

Lorance had been convicted by a military court in 2013 for the murder of two Afghan men during a military operation in 2012 in which he ordered his soldiers to open fire on a group of unarmed Afghan civilians he suspected of being insurgents. Lorance served six years of a 19-year sentence before Trump, after lobbying from Hegseth and others, granted him a pardon in Nov. 2019, arguing that he was unfairly targeted by military prosecutors and that his actions were justified in a combat environment where split-second decisions were often necessary for survival.

This is from Military.com. ‘He’s Going to Have to Explain It’: Surprise Defense Secretary Pick’s History Takes Center Stage.”

He has repeatedly called to ban women from serving in combat roles in the military.

He advocated extensively to gain pardons for troops accused and convicted of war crimes.

And he was one of a dozen troops turned away from serving on the National Guard mission to defend the Capitol, allegedly over tattoos that are popular with neo-Nazi and far-right groups.

Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s surprise pick to be the next defense secretary, has an extensive history of combat in the culture wars that have been brewing over the military for the past decade.

Prior to Trump’s announcement Tuesday evening that he was nominating Hegseth, the National Guard veteran was most known as a co-host on the weekend edition of “Fox and Friends,” one of Trump’s favorite TV shows. But in choosing Hegseth, Trump landed on a defense secretary nominee with a record of public statements that line up with the promises Trump made on the campaign trail to root out alleged “wokeness” within the military.

Senators from both parties tasked with considering his nomination responded Wednesday by saying that they have a lot of questions about Hegseth’s history and those past statements, but broadly insisted they were reserving judgment.

“I’m going to have to visit with him about those remarks,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, the Senate’s first female combat veteran who was rumored to be in the running for Trump’s defense secretary, told reporters Wednesday when asked about Hegseth’s opposition to women in combat.

“Even a staff member of mine, she is an infantry officer. She’s back in Iowa now. She is a tumble. So he’s going to have to explain it,” Ernst added, though she did not answer when Military.com asked whether she would vote against Hegseth over the issue.

So, this is basically a band of misfits and less than mediocre wipipo.   But I’ll just let Muse tell it like it is.  Yes, there are a lot of f-bombs in the lyrics!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

#Repeat1968 #JohnBuss #MattGaetzWeirdo #PeteHegsethWeirdoSexualAssaulter #RFKJrWeirdo #TrumpSCabinetPicksBandOfMisfits #WeAreFuckingFucked

“The End Times are nigh. The Prodigal Son returns to Madison Square Garden.” John Buss @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I was lucky that working with students last night interfered with any attempt to turn on the Fascist Rally at the World’s Most Famous Arena. This wasn’t exactly Ali against Frazier or Holyfield vs Lewis. This was more like #DonOld vs the Majority of the country. The opening bouts were lame.

My short take on this is it was basically a Crazy Old Cult Leader warming his brood up for the Ultimate Kool-Aid moment.  Unfortunately, we previewed that on January 6, so I hope that law enforcement agencies are prepared. The Ultimate Chaos Agent is making his play for a coup

This brings me to this dangerous conspiracy theory making the rounds.  To think, I was simply walking the dog around the block!  I got told a conspiracy theory by a short-order cook at a local bar who has said crazy things before, so I thought I’d look into it to prove him wrong.   His favorite spiel is that the right wing and the left wing are the same, and the government is corrupt. Which is partially correct.  Look at Jill Stein and Robert Kennedy hooked up with the Fascists and Putin. If you take populism to its furthest corners of the right and the left, they eventually bump butts with each other.  However, the left wing and the right in the United States do not wield the same power, and they are not of equal size.  There’s no real leftist power in this country. The billionaire class has been funding the extreme right-wing for decades now, and it shows. Polls on issues show that most Americans agree on the major things.  The problem is that the political system does not play towards consensus.

This guy insisted the DOD is sneaking a policy to Congress to approve the use of military force on civilians. Now, if DJT was in power, I believe he’d try that, although it would take a lot more than a policy of the DOD or an act of Congress to amend the Constitution.  Even when I came back to show him the actual act to show him it says nothing of the kind, he insisted he’d read it, and that’s what he said. But when I invested it, I thought, wow, that looks like the will of the Ultimate Chaos Agent!

This link leads to DOD DIRECTIVE 5240.01 (DOD INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCE-RELATED ACTIVITIES, AND DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE COMPONENT, ASSISTANCE TO LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES AND OTHER CIVIL AUTHORITIES.) It’s short, and the language is easy to comprehend. So, I did some research, and now I think it’s important enough of the conspiracy theory in light of the Prepare for War rally in Madison Square. Here’s what I found with a little dank rabbit hole exploring.  “Far-Right Suggests Military Just Authorized Lethal Force Against Americans Ahead of the Election. It Didn’t.  As Trump warns about an “enemy from within,” a Defense Department directive set off a firestorm on alt-tech social media. But the Insurrection Act is the real threat, experts say.”  This is from a Blog Called The War Horse and it’s written by Sonner Kehrt.

Just as former president Donald Trump told Fox News  last week that he wanted to use the U.S. military to “handle” what he called the “enemy from within” on Election Day, an obscure military policy was beginning to make the rounds on social media platforms favored by the far right.

The focus? Department of Defense Directive 5240.01.

The 22-page document governs military intelligence activities and is among more than a thousand different policies that outline Defense Department procedures.

The Pentagon updated it at the end of September. Although military policies are routinely updated and reissued, the timing of this one—just six weeks before the election and the same day Hurricane Helene slammed into the Southeast—struck right-wing misinformation merchants as suspicious.

They latched onto a new reference in the updated directive—“lethal force”—and soon were falsely claiming that the change means Kamala Harris had authorized the military to kill civilians if there is unrest after the election.

That’s flat-out not true, the Pentagon and experts on military policy told The War Horse.

“The provisions in [the directive] are not new, and do not authorize the Secretary of Defense to use lethal force against U.S. citizens, contrary to rumors and rhetoric circulating on social media,” Sue Gough, a Department of Defense spokesperson, said Wednesday night.

But as Trump doubles down on his “enemy from within” rhetoric, DOD Directive 5240.01 continues to gain traction among his supporters as ostensible proof that Harris, not Trump, wants to use the military against American citizens.

By early last week, “5240.01” began to spike on alt-tech platforms such as Rumble, 4chan, and Telegram, as well as on more mainstream platforms like X, according to an analysis by The War Horse and UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center.

On Ron Paul’s Liberty Report, a YouTube show, the former Texas congressman told viewers that the policy meant that the country is now a “police state.” Republican Maryland congressman Andy Harris told Newsmax host Chris Salcedo last Wednesday that he was concerned the Defense Department was pushing through policies without congressional oversight.

“This is exactly what the Democrats said Trump would do. And they’re doing it,” he said. “This means that after an election, they could declare national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.”

Former Trump national security adviser and retired Army Lieutenant Gen. Michael Flynn tweeted the policy update out to his 1.7 million followers, just as he shared the week before a video suggesting the military had manipulated the weather to focus Hurricane Helene’s deadly fury on Republican voters in the South.

“Republican election fraud season is in full swing.” John Buss, @repeat1968

I really see this as a way to ensure their well-armed militia shows up at the local courthouse or state house well-armed when the vote count starts meaningfully leaning towards a Harris/Walz Administration.  The ACLU has had this policy firmly in its FOIA grip since 1982.  The documents are out there with no commentary or urgent lawsuits filed.  You would think they’d be interested.

The Center for Informed Policy at the University of Washington is more interested in those conspiracy theories. “Rumors rapidly spreading about reissued Department of Defense Directive 5240.01” explains the right wing’s angst on this one in its 2024 U.S. ELECTIONS RAPID RESEARCH BLOG.

Key Takeaways

• Early last week, rumors started to spread between multiple social media platforms and across political communities online about a recently reissued Department of Defense Directive 5240.01 that documents procedures when there is a potential use of lethal force.
• Some online communities have speculated that the directive’s changes are timed with the upcoming election, with some suggesting without evidence that the intent behind the change is that the government is planning to use force against Americans.
• The viral spread could be exploiting a data void – a situation where there is no reliable information about a topic in search results — given there are no published fact-checks or traditional journalist coverage of the directive’s changes.

Just Security calls it “Much Ado About Nothing.” Oddly enough, this was an article my neighborhood weirdo was about to show me when he read the title and then suddenly closed it, and just as I said oh, Just Security is a reliable source.  They conclude with this, which is similar to a thought in The War Horse. That’s the real danger is the Insurrection Act that Trump used to go after George Floyd Protestors with the National Guard. His stated goal was to support local law enforcement in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., on May 30, 2020.  You probably will remember this culminating with the upside-down bible event. The ACLU is very interested in that event.

To be sure, there are good reasons to be concerned about the federal government’s power to use the armed forces domestically against Americans, but the new language in Directive 5240.01 is not one of them. The Insurrection Act represents a far greater danger. It gives the president broad discretion to use the military as a domestic police force and contains virtually no safeguards to prevent abuse. The Brennan Center for Justice, where we work, has put forward a comprehensive proposal for reforming the Insurrection Act, and a bipartisan group of former national security officials convened by the American Law Institute has similarly called for Insurrection Act reform. Those who are currently sounding the alarm about Directive 5240.01 would do well to refocus their energies on that critical task.

I just messaged it off to one of the MSNBC Anchors I chat with on occasion, so I’m about to see if I can get someone serious journalism on it with the hope of getting rid of the data void.

So, before I tackle the main event, I have one more nerdy article to suggest.  This is about the odds makers.  This is from Good Authority. The analysis is provided by Josh Clinton. “Poll results depend on pollster choices as much as voters’ decisions. Simple changes in how to weight a single poll can move the Harris-Trump margin 8 points.”

There is no end of scrutiny of the 2024 election polls – who is ahead, who is behind, how much the polls will miss the election outcome, etc., etc. These questions have become even more pressing because the presidential race seems to be a toss-up. Every percentage point for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump matters.

But here’s the big problem that no one talks about very much: Simple and defensible decisions by pollsters can drastically change the reported margin between Harris and Trump. I’ll show that the margin can change by as much as eight points. Reasonable decisions produce a margin that ranges from Harris +0.9% to Harris +8%.

This reality highlights that we ask far too much of polls. Ultimately, it’s hard to know how much poll numbers reflect the decisions of voters – or the decisions of pollsters.

The 4 key questions for pollsters

After poll data are collected, pollsters must assess whether they need to adjust or “weight” the data to address the very real possibility that the people who took the poll differ from those who did not. This involves answering four questions:

1.   Do respondents match the electorate demographically in terms of sex, age, education, race, etc.? (This was a problem in 2016.)

2.   Do respondents match the electorate politically after the sample is adjusted by demographic factors? (This was the problem in 2020.)

3.   Which respondents will vote?

4.   Should the pollster trust the data?

To show how the answers to these questions can affect poll results, I use a national survey conducted from October 7 – 14, 2024. The sample included 1,924 self-reported registered voters drawn from an online, high-quality panel commonly used in academic and commercial work.

After dropping the respondents who said they were not sure who they would vote for (3.2%) and those with missing demographics, the unweighted data give Harris a 6 percentage point lead – 51.6 % to 45.5% – among the remaining 1,718 respondents.

You may read more details about those factors at the link.  I try not to put my students to sleep during statistics lectures, so I certainly won’t do it to you.  The reporting and clips on the Madison Square Garden Rally kept me up most of the night. I felt like the child in grade school watching the teacher thread the film through those blue projectors only to see things my Dad didn’t want to remember about World War 2. I don’t know about you, but my school district did not hold back on the World War 2 experience. One of my high school teachers wrote a book on his experience as a prisoner taken during the Battle of the Bulge.  I was surrounded by friends’ parents and my parents’ friends who were Veterans.  We watched the films of the 1936 Olympics and heroes like Jesse Owens and, of course, all the Hitler and Mussolini public speeches. If you were like little me, I couldn’t understand who could fall for any of that.

I also saw films of the United States turning away Jewish people in ships fleeing Europe and films of the internment of Japanese-Americans. All of these seemed surreal to me at the ripe old age of 11.

Now, I know more. Now I can identify people that just love to goosestep with whom I would not share the location of any modern day Anne Frank.

Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon

CNN Analyst Stephen Collinson has this analysis. “Trump unveils the most extreme closing argument in modern presidential history.”  The MAGA movement is about hating and eliminating everyone who isn’t like them.

Donald Trump anchored his bid to win a second White House term next week on searing anti-migrant fear at a rally at Madison Square Garden, doubling down on his promise for a massive deportation program on Day 1 to reverse an “immigrant invasion.”

As the ex-president’s allies defend him against Democratic claims he is a “fascist” and an authoritarian in waiting, based in part on warnings by his ex-chief of staff John Kelly, Trump on Sunday delivered a screed that may augur the most extreme presidency in modern history if he beats Democratic nominee Kamala Harris on November 5.

“The United States is an occupied country,” Trump said, as Democrats projected messages on the exterior of the storied New York City arena, reading “Trump is Unhinged” and “Trump praised Hitler.”

The huge rally was billed as the launch of the final stage of Trump’s bid to pull off one of the greatest comebacks in American political history after trying to overturn the result of the last election and leaving office in disgrace in 2021. Before he spoke, some of the ex-president’s top supporters flung race-based and vulgar rhetoric. Former congressional candidate David Rem called Harris the “antichrist” and “the devil,” while others lashed out at Hillary Clinton, “illegals” and homeless people. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

This is from Politico. The analysis is by Andrew Howard. “Fallout spreads from racist rhetoric at Trump’s MSG rally. “What you saw last night is a divisive America. That’s race-baiting. It’s all the things that we were doing in the ‘30s and ‘40s,” former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said Monday.”

Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally Sunday evening was supposed to provide his closing argument against Kamala Harris. Instead, Trump and his supporters are being forced to answer for hateful and racist rhetoric delivered from the podium Sunday night with just eight days left in the campaign.

The comments, while reminiscent of many made by Trump in the campaign’s final weeks, were made by a comedian early in the night’s schedule and were supposed to be jokes. Now, they are dominating the news cycle and putting Trump’s campaign on the backfoot with just under a week until the election.

Longtime Trump adviser Peter Navarro is calling the comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, “the biggest, stupidest asshole that ever came down the comedy pike” after he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of hot garbage” during his often-vulgar opening set.

And Trump’s opponents are using the rally as proof of the former president’s divisiveness, going as far as likening the rhetoric from Sunday’s rally to the sinister 1939 Nazi rally that took place in the same venue.

“My reaction is that was a combination of 1933 Germany, 1939 Madison Square Garden last night,” former Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Monday morning. “What you saw last night is a divisive America. That’s race baiting. It’s all the things that we were doing in the ‘30s and ‘40s.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.), called Sunday night’s event a “hate rally.”

“This was not just a presidential rally, this was not just a campaign rally. I think it’s important for people to understand these are mini January 6 rallies, these are mini Stop the Steal rallies,” she said on “Morning Joe.”

Florida GOP Rep. Byron Donalds blamed the media for the backlash surrounding Sunday’s rally during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday, saying the media is too focused on “fear-mongering” and not “the facts and the substance.”

“So to the New York Daily News, is it a racist rally if you have a Black man from Florida who’s originally from New York speaking at the rally? I don’t think so,” Donalds said. Still, Donalds distanced himself from Hinchcliffe’s comments.

“I didn’t agree with what the comedian said. None of us did,” Donalds said. “When it came out, we were all like, ‘Wait what? Who? Did that get out? No, no, no.’ Nobody agreed with that. Nobody.”

Last night, Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott, up for reelection this year in a state heavily populated with Puerto Ricans, wrote on social media that the “joke bombed for a reason,” and “Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans!”

Yet another Floridian, GOP Rep. María Elvira Salazar, was also quick to condemn the comedian. “This rhetoric does not reflect GOP values,” she wrote in a post on X Sunday evening.

Early Monday morning, the Harris campaign was quick to jump in, highlighting headlines in 17 newspapers, eight clips from TV shows, and 29 other statements from politicians, celebrities and journalists.

Famous Puerto Ricans rushed to bolster Harris, including pop-phenom Bad Bunny, along with Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin.

Hinchcliffe’s backlash-inducing comments were not limited to Puerto Rico. The comedian also made a crude remark about “carving watermelons” after seeing a Black man in the audience. Another opener, businessman Grant Cardone, likened Harris’ advisers to “pimp handlers.”

And Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who has shaped many of Trump’s immigration policies, said Americans are having their jobs “looted and stolen from them” and sent to foreign countries.

I always turn to Historian Heather Cox Richardson for the final thoughts.

I stand corrected. I thought this year’s October surprise was the reality that Trump’s mental state had slipped so badly he could not campaign in any coherent way.

It turns out that the 2024 October surprise was the Trump campaign’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, a rally so extreme that Republicans running for office have been denouncing it all over social media tonight.

There was never any question that this rally was going to be anything but an attempt to inflame Trump’s base. The plan for a rally at Madison Square Garden itself deliberately evoked its predecessor: a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. About 18,000 people showed up for that “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.

Like that earlier event, Trump’s rally was supposed to demonstrate power and inspire his base to violence.

Apparently in anticipation of the rally, Trump on Friday night replaced his signature blue suit and red tie with the black and gold of the neofascist Proud Boys. That extremist group was central to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and has been rebuilding to support Trump again in 2024.

On Saturday the Trump campaign released a list of 29 people set to be on the stage at the rally. Notably, the list was all MAGA Republicans, including vice presidential nominee Ohio senator J.D. Vance, House speaker Mike Johnson (LA), Representative Elise Stefanik (NY), Representative Byron Donalds (FL), Trump backer Elon Musk, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right-wing host Tucker Carlson, Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric, and Eric’s wife, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump.

Libbey Dean of NewsNation noted that none of the seven Republicans running in New York’s competitive House races were on the list. When asked why not, according to Dean, Trump senior advisor Jason Miller said: “The demand, the request for people to speak, is quite extensive.” Asked if the campaign had turned down anyone who asked to speak, Miller said no.

We could see the signs that he knew he probably wouldn’t win the minute Biden backed out. We could taste the panic in the air. We know his campaign is already spending more time in the Court trying to fuck with elections than with the ground game he delegated to Musk, who is out there basically running a personal game show with a million-dollar giveaway for attention.

Marc Elias and his team have been in court for the Harris/Walz campaign, which has been fighting Trump’s legal team that is  “flooding the zone” with lawsuits and election tricks.   #DonOld is clearly not physically or mentally capable of carrying on a campaign that requires giving cogent speeches and long hours. The only thing he excels at is creating chaos.  “Marc Elias, Voting Rights Attorney, joins Nicolle Wallace on Deadline White House with a look at the work that Trump allies and attorneys are doing ahead of the 2024 Election in order to create doubt and confusion which will enable Donald Trump to deny the results of the 2024 Election should he lose again. ”

Here are the arguments for the Ultimate Chaos Agent in the Wallace/Elias interview.

The question is, will creating chaos be enough to bring the Republic and the voting and judicial systems to their knees?  Can he knock out the Constitution, or will We the People knock him out on November 5th.  We need the KO. These things keep me awake at night with my stomach churning and jumping like a kid about to take his ACTs.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

https://skydancingblog.com/2024/10/28/mostly-monday-reads-squall-at-the-square/

#DonOld #Repeat1968 #electionFraud #Fascist #HeatherCoxRichardson #JohnBuss #MadisonSquareGardenTrumpRally #MAGARacists #MarcElias #OctoberSurprises #posseComitatus #TheUltimateChaosAgent #voterSuppression #WhiteChristianNationalists #Xenophobes

“The End Times are nigh. The Prodigal Son returns to Madison Square Garden.” John Buss @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I was lucky that working with students last night interfered with any attempt to turn on the Fascist Rally at the World’s Most Famous Arena. This wasn’t exactly Ali against Frazier or Holyfield vs Lewis. This was more like #DonOld vs the Majority of the country. The opening bouts were lame.

My short take on this is it was basically a Crazy Old Cult Leader warming his brood up for the Ultimate Kool-Aid moment.  Unfortunately, we previewed that on January 6, so I hope that law enforcement agencies are prepared. The Ultimate Chaos Agent is making his play for a coup

This brings me to this dangerous conspiracy theory making the rounds.  To think, I was simply walking the dog around the block!  I got told a conspiracy theory by a short-order cook at a local bar who has said crazy things before, so I thought I’d look into it to prove him wrong.   His favorite spiel is that the right wing and the left wing are the same, and the government is corrupt. Which is partially correct.  Look at Jill Stein and Robert Kennedy hooked up with the Fascists and Putin. If you take populism to its furthest corners of the right and the left, they eventually bump butts with each other.  However, the left wing and the right in the United States do not wield the same power, and they are not of equal size.  There’s no real leftist power in this country. The billionaire class has been funding the extreme right-wing for decades now, and it shows. Polls on issues show that most Americans agree on the major things.  The problem is that the political system does not play towards consensus.

This guy insisted the DOD is sneaking a policy to Congress to approve the use of military force on civilians. Now, if DJT was in power, I believe he’d try that, although it would take a lot more than a policy of the DOD or an act of Congress to amend the Constitution.  Even when I came back to show him the actual act to show him it says nothing of the kind, he insisted he’d read it, and that’s what he said. But when I invested it, I thought, wow, that looks like the will of the Ultimate Chaos Agent!

This link leads to DOD DIRECTIVE 5240.01 (DOD INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCE-RELATED ACTIVITIES, AND DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE COMPONENT, ASSISTANCE TO LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES AND OTHER CIVIL AUTHORITIES.) It’s short, and the language is easy to comprehend. So, I did some research, and now I think it’s important enough of the conspiracy theory in light of the Prepare for War rally in Madison Square. Here’s what I found with a little dank rabbit hole exploring.  “Far-Right Suggests Military Just Authorized Lethal Force Against Americans Ahead of the Election. It Didn’t.  As Trump warns about an “enemy from within,” a Defense Department directive set off a firestorm on alt-tech social media. But the Insurrection Act is the real threat, experts say.”  This is from a Blog Called The War Horse and it’s written by Sonner Kehrt.

Just as former president Donald Trump told Fox News  last week that he wanted to use the U.S. military to “handle” what he called the “enemy from within” on Election Day, an obscure military policy was beginning to make the rounds on social media platforms favored by the far right.

The focus? Department of Defense Directive 5240.01.

The 22-page document governs military intelligence activities and is among more than a thousand different policies that outline Defense Department procedures.

The Pentagon updated it at the end of September. Although military policies are routinely updated and reissued, the timing of this one—just six weeks before the election and the same day Hurricane Helene slammed into the Southeast—struck right-wing misinformation merchants as suspicious.

They latched onto a new reference in the updated directive—“lethal force”—and soon were falsely claiming that the change means Kamala Harris had authorized the military to kill civilians if there is unrest after the election.

That’s flat-out not true, the Pentagon and experts on military policy told The War Horse.

“The provisions in [the directive] are not new, and do not authorize the Secretary of Defense to use lethal force against U.S. citizens, contrary to rumors and rhetoric circulating on social media,” Sue Gough, a Department of Defense spokesperson, said Wednesday night.

But as Trump doubles down on his “enemy from within” rhetoric, DOD Directive 5240.01 continues to gain traction among his supporters as ostensible proof that Harris, not Trump, wants to use the military against American citizens.

By early last week, “5240.01” began to spike on alt-tech platforms such as Rumble, 4chan, and Telegram, as well as on more mainstream platforms like X, according to an analysis by The War Horse and UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center.

On Ron Paul’s Liberty Report, a YouTube show, the former Texas congressman told viewers that the policy meant that the country is now a “police state.” Republican Maryland congressman Andy Harris told Newsmax host Chris Salcedo last Wednesday that he was concerned the Defense Department was pushing through policies without congressional oversight.

“This is exactly what the Democrats said Trump would do. And they’re doing it,” he said. “This means that after an election, they could declare national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.”

Former Trump national security adviser and retired Army Lieutenant Gen. Michael Flynn tweeted the policy update out to his 1.7 million followers, just as he shared the week before a video suggesting the military had manipulated the weather to focus Hurricane Helene’s deadly fury on Republican voters in the South.

“Republican election fraud season is in full swing.” John Buss, @repeat1968

I really see this as a way to ensure their well-armed militia shows up at the local courthouse or state house well-armed when the vote count starts meaningfully leaning towards a Harris/Walz Administration.  The ACLU has had this policy firmly in its FOIA grip since 1982.  The documents are out there with no commentary or urgent lawsuits filed.  You would think they’d be interested.

The Center for Informed Policy at the University of Washington is more interested in those conspiracy theories. “Rumors rapidly spreading about reissued Department of Defense Directive 5240.01” explains the right wing’s angst on this one in its 2024 U.S. ELECTIONS RAPID RESEARCH BLOG.

Key Takeaways

• Early last week, rumors started to spread between multiple social media platforms and across political communities online about a recently reissued Department of Defense Directive 5240.01 that documents procedures when there is a potential use of lethal force.
• Some online communities have speculated that the directive’s changes are timed with the upcoming election, with some suggesting without evidence that the intent behind the change is that the government is planning to use force against Americans.
• The viral spread could be exploiting a data void – a situation where there is no reliable information about a topic in search results — given there are no published fact-checks or traditional journalist coverage of the directive’s changes.

Just Security calls it “Much Ado About Nothing.” Oddly enough, this was an article my neighborhood weirdo was about to show me when he read the title and then suddenly closed it, and just as I said oh, Just Security is a reliable source.  They conclude with this, which is similar to a thought in The War Horse. That’s the real danger is the Insurrection Act that Trump used to go after George Floyd Protestors with the National Guard. His stated goal was to support local law enforcement in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., on May 30, 2020.  You probably will remember this culminating with the upside-down bible event. The ACLU is very interested in that event.

To be sure, there are good reasons to be concerned about the federal government’s power to use the armed forces domestically against Americans, but the new language in Directive 5240.01 is not one of them. The Insurrection Act represents a far greater danger. It gives the president broad discretion to use the military as a domestic police force and contains virtually no safeguards to prevent abuse. The Brennan Center for Justice, where we work, has put forward a comprehensive proposal for reforming the Insurrection Act, and a bipartisan group of former national security officials convened by the American Law Institute has similarly called for Insurrection Act reform. Those who are currently sounding the alarm about Directive 5240.01 would do well to refocus their energies on that critical task.

I just messaged it off to one of the MSNBC Anchors I chat with on occasion, so I’m about to see if I can get someone serious journalism on it with the hope of getting rid of the data void.

So, before I tackle the main event, I have one more nerdy article to suggest.  This is about the odds makers.  This is from Good Authority. The analysis is provided by Josh Clinton. “Poll results depend on pollster choices as much as voters’ decisions. Simple changes in how to weight a single poll can move the Harris-Trump margin 8 points.”

There is no end of scrutiny of the 2024 election polls – who is ahead, who is behind, how much the polls will miss the election outcome, etc., etc. These questions have become even more pressing because the presidential race seems to be a toss-up. Every percentage point for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump matters.

But here’s the big problem that no one talks about very much: Simple and defensible decisions by pollsters can drastically change the reported margin between Harris and Trump. I’ll show that the margin can change by as much as eight points. Reasonable decisions produce a margin that ranges from Harris +0.9% to Harris +8%.

This reality highlights that we ask far too much of polls. Ultimately, it’s hard to know how much poll numbers reflect the decisions of voters – or the decisions of pollsters.

The 4 key questions for pollsters

After poll data are collected, pollsters must assess whether they need to adjust or “weight” the data to address the very real possibility that the people who took the poll differ from those who did not. This involves answering four questions:

1.   Do respondents match the electorate demographically in terms of sex, age, education, race, etc.? (This was a problem in 2016.)

2.   Do respondents match the electorate politically after the sample is adjusted by demographic factors? (This was the problem in 2020.)

3.   Which respondents will vote?

4.   Should the pollster trust the data?

To show how the answers to these questions can affect poll results, I use a national survey conducted from October 7 – 14, 2024. The sample included 1,924 self-reported registered voters drawn from an online, high-quality panel commonly used in academic and commercial work.

After dropping the respondents who said they were not sure who they would vote for (3.2%) and those with missing demographics, the unweighted data give Harris a 6 percentage point lead – 51.6 % to 45.5% – among the remaining 1,718 respondents.

You may read more details about those factors at the link.  I try not to put my students to sleep during statistics lectures, so I certainly won’t do it to you.  The reporting and clips on the Madison Square Garden Rally kept me up most of the night. I felt like the child in grade school watching the teacher thread the film through those blue projectors only to see things my Dad didn’t want to remember about World War 2. I don’t know about you, but my school district did not hold back on the World War 2 experience. One of my high school teachers wrote a book on his experience as a prisoner taken during the Battle of the Bulge.  I was surrounded by friends’ parents and my parents’ friends who were Veterans.  We watched the films of the 1936 Olympics and heroes like Jesse Owens and, of course, all the Hitler and Mussolini public speeches. If you were like little me, I couldn’t understand who could fall for any of that.

I also saw films of the United States turning away Jewish people in ships fleeing Europe and films of the internment of Japanese-Americans. All of these seemed surreal to me at the ripe old age of 11.

Now, I know more. Now I can identify people that just love to goosestep with whom I would not share the location of any modern day Anne Frank.

Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon

CNN Analyst Stephen Collinson has this analysis. “Trump unveils the most extreme closing argument in modern presidential history.”  The MAGA movement is about hating and eliminating everyone who isn’t like them.

Donald Trump anchored his bid to win a second White House term next week on searing anti-migrant fear at a rally at Madison Square Garden, doubling down on his promise for a massive deportation program on Day 1 to reverse an “immigrant invasion.”

As the ex-president’s allies defend him against Democratic claims he is a “fascist” and an authoritarian in waiting, based in part on warnings by his ex-chief of staff John Kelly, Trump on Sunday delivered a screed that may augur the most extreme presidency in modern history if he beats Democratic nominee Kamala Harris on November 5.

“The United States is an occupied country,” Trump said, as Democrats projected messages on the exterior of the storied New York City arena, reading “Trump is Unhinged” and “Trump praised Hitler.”

The huge rally was billed as the launch of the final stage of Trump’s bid to pull off one of the greatest comebacks in American political history after trying to overturn the result of the last election and leaving office in disgrace in 2021. Before he spoke, some of the ex-president’s top supporters flung race-based and vulgar rhetoric. Former congressional candidate David Rem called Harris the “antichrist” and “the devil,” while others lashed out at Hillary Clinton, “illegals” and homeless people. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

This is from Politico. The analysis is by Andrew Howard. “Fallout spreads from racist rhetoric at Trump’s MSG rally. “What you saw last night is a divisive America. That’s race-baiting. It’s all the things that we were doing in the ‘30s and ‘40s,” former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said Monday.”

Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally Sunday evening was supposed to provide his closing argument against Kamala Harris. Instead, Trump and his supporters are being forced to answer for hateful and racist rhetoric delivered from the podium Sunday night with just eight days left in the campaign.

The comments, while reminiscent of many made by Trump in the campaign’s final weeks, were made by a comedian early in the night’s schedule and were supposed to be jokes. Now, they are dominating the news cycle and putting Trump’s campaign on the backfoot with just under a week until the election.

Longtime Trump adviser Peter Navarro is calling the comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, “the biggest, stupidest asshole that ever came down the comedy pike” after he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of hot garbage” during his often-vulgar opening set.

And Trump’s opponents are using the rally as proof of the former president’s divisiveness, going as far as likening the rhetoric from Sunday’s rally to the sinister 1939 Nazi rally that took place in the same venue.

“My reaction is that was a combination of 1933 Germany, 1939 Madison Square Garden last night,” former Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Monday morning. “What you saw last night is a divisive America. That’s race baiting. It’s all the things that we were doing in the ‘30s and ‘40s.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.), called Sunday night’s event a “hate rally.”

“This was not just a presidential rally, this was not just a campaign rally. I think it’s important for people to understand these are mini January 6 rallies, these are mini Stop the Steal rallies,” she said on “Morning Joe.”

Florida GOP Rep. Byron Donalds blamed the media for the backlash surrounding Sunday’s rally during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday, saying the media is too focused on “fear-mongering” and not “the facts and the substance.”

“So to the New York Daily News, is it a racist rally if you have a Black man from Florida who’s originally from New York speaking at the rally? I don’t think so,” Donalds said. Still, Donalds distanced himself from Hinchcliffe’s comments.

“I didn’t agree with what the comedian said. None of us did,” Donalds said. “When it came out, we were all like, ‘Wait what? Who? Did that get out? No, no, no.’ Nobody agreed with that. Nobody.”

Last night, Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott, up for reelection this year in a state heavily populated with Puerto Ricans, wrote on social media that the “joke bombed for a reason,” and “Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans!”

Yet another Floridian, GOP Rep. María Elvira Salazar, was also quick to condemn the comedian. “This rhetoric does not reflect GOP values,” she wrote in a post on X Sunday evening.

Early Monday morning, the Harris campaign was quick to jump in, highlighting headlines in 17 newspapers, eight clips from TV shows, and 29 other statements from politicians, celebrities and journalists.

Famous Puerto Ricans rushed to bolster Harris, including pop-phenom Bad Bunny, along with Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin.

Hinchcliffe’s backlash-inducing comments were not limited to Puerto Rico. The comedian also made a crude remark about “carving watermelons” after seeing a Black man in the audience. Another opener, businessman Grant Cardone, likened Harris’ advisers to “pimp handlers.”

And Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who has shaped many of Trump’s immigration policies, said Americans are having their jobs “looted and stolen from them” and sent to foreign countries.

I always turn to Historian Heather Cox Richardson for the final thoughts.

I stand corrected. I thought this year’s October surprise was the reality that Trump’s mental state had slipped so badly he could not campaign in any coherent way.

It turns out that the 2024 October surprise was the Trump campaign’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, a rally so extreme that Republicans running for office have been denouncing it all over social media tonight.

There was never any question that this rally was going to be anything but an attempt to inflame Trump’s base. The plan for a rally at Madison Square Garden itself deliberately evoked its predecessor: a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. About 18,000 people showed up for that “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.

Like that earlier event, Trump’s rally was supposed to demonstrate power and inspire his base to violence.

Apparently in anticipation of the rally, Trump on Friday night replaced his signature blue suit and red tie with the black and gold of the neofascist Proud Boys. That extremist group was central to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and has been rebuilding to support Trump again in 2024.

On Saturday the Trump campaign released a list of 29 people set to be on the stage at the rally. Notably, the list was all MAGA Republicans, including vice presidential nominee Ohio senator J.D. Vance, House speaker Mike Johnson (LA), Representative Elise Stefanik (NY), Representative Byron Donalds (FL), Trump backer Elon Musk, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right-wing host Tucker Carlson, Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric, and Eric’s wife, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump.

Libbey Dean of NewsNation noted that none of the seven Republicans running in New York’s competitive House races were on the list. When asked why not, according to Dean, Trump senior advisor Jason Miller said: “The demand, the request for people to speak, is quite extensive.” Asked if the campaign had turned down anyone who asked to speak, Miller said no.

We could see the signs that he knew he probably wouldn’t win the minute Biden backed out. We could taste the panic in the air. We know his campaign is already spending more time in the Court trying to fuck with elections than with the ground game he delegated to Musk, who is out there basically running a personal game show with a million-dollar giveaway for attention.

Marc Elias and his team have been in court for the Harris/Walz campaign, which has been fighting Trump’s legal team that is  “flooding the zone” with lawsuits and election tricks.   #DonOld is clearly not physically or mentally capable of carrying on a campaign that requires giving cogent speeches and long hours. The only thing he excels at is creating chaos.  “Marc Elias, Voting Rights Attorney, joins Nicolle Wallace on Deadline White House with a look at the work that Trump allies and attorneys are doing ahead of the 2024 Election in order to create doubt and confusion which will enable Donald Trump to deny the results of the 2024 Election should he lose again. ”

Here are the arguments for the Ultimate Chaos Agent in the Wallace/Elias interview.

The question is, will creating chaos be enough to bring the Republic and the voting and judicial systems to their knees?  Can he knock out the Constitution, or will We the People knock him out on November 5th.  We need the KO. These things keep me awake at night with my stomach churning and jumping like a kid about to take his ACTs.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

https://skydancingblog.com/2024/10/28/mostly-monday-reads-squall-at-the-square/

#DonOld #Repeat1968 #electionFraud #Fascist #HeatherCoxRichardson #JohnBuss #MadisonSquareGardenTrumpRally #MAGARacists #MarcElias #OctoberSurprises #posseComitatus #TheUltimateChaosAgent #voterSuppression #WhiteChristianNationalists #Xenophobes

Finally Friday Reads: The Russian Limbaughs

“Trump’s Trickle Down,” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

No one should be surprised that Russia has gone deep into the MAGA end zone to influence the outcome of this election. Republican Congress members are among Putin’s most useful idiots. Russia has always been fond of trying to corrupt U.S. elections by using anything to turn us against each other. The DonOld’s political career trajectory shows how successful they have been recently. We will undoubtedly hear more about the Russian hoax from the dotard since his mind seems incapable of being cogent this election. However, this should get people thinking more.

Again, we must rely on independent media to hear the entire story. Lisa Needham of Public Notice has this succinct article today on the recent DOJ indictment of Tenet Media. “Russia’s useful idiots. The MAGA influencer ecosystem is even shadier than we thought.”

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice indicted two employees of RT, formerly Russia Today, a Russian state-run media outlet, for covertly shoveling millions of dollars at MAGA influencers happy to do Russia’s bidding.

This has led to the delightful specter of high-profile rightwing commentators loudly insisting they were too stupid to know that Russian money was behind the wildly exorbitant sums they received for producing content.

While watching Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson scramble is hilarious, the indictment is no joke.

Indeed, it confirms that Russia continues to manipulate American politics via willing right-wingers — the exact thing Trumpers have long insisted isn’t happening.

The indictment names Kostiantyn Kalashnikov, aka Kostya, and Elena Afanasyeva, aka Lena, as the RT employees who laundered close to $10 million through foreign shell companies, ultimately raining all that money down on an unnamed American media company, US Company-1, who then passed it along to unnamed commentators 1-6.

Though unnamed, the company and several commentators are easily discernible to anyone paying attention to the rightwing media grift. The company is most definitely Tenet Media, and its founders are most definitely Lauren Chen, who was also at BlazeTV until the indictment dropped and they fired her, and her husband, Liam Donovan.

And the commentators? Tenet’s ridiculous website describes them as “heterodox commentators” and “creators who question institutions that believe themselves to be above questioning.” That would be Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Lauren Southern, Matt Christiansen, and Tayler Hansen.

I watched some of these Russian-backed videos on the news yesterday. These guys are basically Russian Limbaughs but are pleading ignorance about their Russian Payroll Masters. This is from Mother Jones today. “Tenet Media Shutters After Being Accused of Taking $10 Million in Covert Kremlin Funding
Nothing to see here!” Senior Reporter Anna Merlan has the lede.

Tenet Media’s founders, Canadian conservative YouTuber Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, have not publicly commented on the allegations against Tenet. Nor has Canadian far-right activist Lauren Southern, a Tenet contributor who appeared in many of their videos. Other prominent contributors to the site, including far-right commentator Tim Pool, described themselves as “victims” in the Tenet scandal, who were unaware that employees of RT, the Russian state media entity, were secretly funding the company. Pool announced on Thursday that he has been contacted by federal investigators, writing, “The FBI believes I have information relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation and have requested a voluntary interview. I will be offering my assistance in this matter.”

The Daily Beast reported that Chen’s contract with Blaze TV, where she also made regular appearances, has been terminated. The company has also deleted her page on their website and wiped episodes of her podcast, “Pseudo-Intellectual,” from Spotify.

YouTube told NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny that it had deleted Tenet Media’s channel and four others operated by Chen in light of the indictment and “after careful review,” writing the steps were part of “ongoing efforts to combat coordinated influence operations.”

For now, Tenet Media’s Twitter profile, Instagram page, TikTok, and Rumble pages all remain online—though none have been updated since the indictment was announced.

You may remember that last April, a Republican Congressman complained his colleagues were spouting Russian Propaganda on the House floor. “GOP Rep. Mike Turner: Russian propaganda is ‘being uttered on the House floor.’ House Intelligence Chair Mike Turner on Sunday said several of his GOP colleagues have repeated Russian propaganda on the House floor.” It’s evident that Putin’s plan is succeeding and that Republicans are besotted with Russian talking points. The news story was reported by NBC News.

GOP Rep. Mike Turner said Sunday that Russian propaganda has taken hold among some of his House Republican colleagues and is even “being uttered on the House floor.”

“We see directly coming from Russia … communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” Turner, chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“There are members of Congress today who still incorrectly say that this conflict between Russia and Ukraine is over NATO, which of course it is not,” he added.

…

McCaul, a Texas Republican, told Puck News that he thinks “Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.”

Turner and McCaul each tied Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin, to other authoritarian leaders, including President Xi Jinping of China and Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea.

“[The propaganda] makes it more difficult for us to really see this as an authoritarian versus democracy battle, which is what it is,” Turner told CNN, adding, “President Xi of China, Vladimir Putin himself have identified as such.”

McCaul described explaining to colleagues that the threat of Russian propaganda is similar to threats made by other U.S. adversaries.

“I have to explain to them what’s at stake, why Ukraine is in our national security interest,” he said. “By the way, you don’t like Communist China? Well, guess what? They’re aligned [with Russia], along with the ayatollah [of Iran]. So when you explain it that way, they kind of start understanding it.”

The committee chairs’ remarks about Russian propaganda came as they spoke about the need for Congress to approve more military aid to Ukraine.

The snips I saw on news media yesterday were primarily Tim Pool screaming that Ukraine was our enemy and that we owed Russia an apology. He was pretty hysterical and shrieked a lot about our soldiers going there to die shortly. These are similar talking points made by Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz during funding discussions early this year. This incident makes it even more clear that we need to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to preserve NATO and our National Security.

I found the Tenet Media story the most disturbing this week, although what really caught my attention was the speech DonOld made to the Economic Club of New York. This is from Phillip Bump at the Washington Post. “Following Trump’s train of thought as it derails on a child care question. Trump sought out an applause line as if it were the sole exit in a flame-filled room.”  The audience is supposed to have knowledge in the fields of finance and economics. Their clapping was disturbing as he rattled on about childcare as if it were an abstract notion, and his take on tariffs is basically the opposite of reality. He rambled on with a series of incomplete sentences and just weirdness. Tariffs are a tax on consumers. Period. They caused the Great Depression. The folks in the room know better. They should say something.

I’m sure these folks are getting richer by every tick of the Wall Street clock and know we’re not in an economic disaster. They’re also aware that what’s driving the entire thing is record corporate profits, too. The last equity market highs were set just 7 days ago. But, hey, tax cuts for billionaires are where it’s at! Back to Phillip Bump.

On Thursday, his push to be elected for a second term as president brought him to the Economic Club of New York. The organization prides itself on its sober, informed assessments of the economic and political worlds, meaning that Trump was already somewhat disadvantaged. His politics are not predicated on his grasp of policy but on appeals to the politically disaffected. His descriptions of how things are working are much more effective with people who don’t know how things work.

But the question that tripped him up, the one that launched a thousand criticisms and not a few memes, was one focused on something that he should theoretically have had a grasp on: child care.

“If you win in November,” a panelist asked, “can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable and if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”

Here is Trump’s entire answer, verbatim.

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, uh, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio [(R-Fla.)] and my daughter, Ivanka, was so, uh, impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue.”
“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t — you know, it’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.”“But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.”
“Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have — I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time. Coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country — because I have to say with child care, I want to stay with childcare, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth.”
“But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.”
“We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about: Make America great again. We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question.”

I know I have a doctorate in Financial Economics, teach it at the graduate level, and have worked in the industry during the Dark Reagan years, but really, as just a mother with that issue back in the day, WTF? This is one of those questions that every working family deals with and knows the parameters. This man stumbled through because he undoubtedly had children but didn’t have to think of childcare because wives and wealth. The answer was buffoonish and completely unintelligible. Digby says it all here at Salon.”Donald Trump’s incoherence makes the media’s double standard hard to hide. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris curiously don’t get the same coverage.”

It seems like only yesterday that the elite media were extremely concerned that President Joe Biden had mistakenly referred to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico. In the course of an otherwise cogent discussion of foreign affairs, he’d made that mistake in passing but it caused a huge uproar and spawned yet another round of critical reporting about his age and mental capacities. No one in the press blew off the gaffe and the substance of his comments went virtually unreported.

That press conference came in the shadow of the Hur report, in which the special counsel made a gratuitous comment about Biden being an elderly man with a bad memory. From that moment on almost every story about Joe Biden was framed in terms of his advanced age and the question of whether he was up to the job. The drumbeat continued for months until Biden’s disastrous debate performance validated the narrative and it continued until the day he withdrew from the race. No one in the media cut Joe Biden any slack for his performance.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been speaking nonsense and spouting gibberish on the campaign trail and the media is covering for him by pretending that his verbal incontinence actually makes sense or by ignoring it altogether. Yes, there’s been some mordant chuckling in the media over his bizarre comments about “the late great Hannibal Lecter” and his meandering tales about electric boats and shark attacks. Those stories are all delivered with a twinkling eye-roll as if to say “Oh that wacky Trump, there he goes again” as if it’s just a funny little anecdote, apropos of nothing.

And it’s true that he’s always done this to some extent. His speeches and press conferences are surreal windows into his undisciplined, puerile mind. Despite his regular protestations that he’s “like, really smart,” he communicates at a 4th grade level (the lowest level of any of the past 15 presidents going back to Hoover) and uses the same handful of words and phrases over and over again to cover for the fact that he never really has any idea what he’s talking about.

But Trump’s getting worse and the press is failing to properly report it. Over the past couple of weeks, the problem has gotten more acute and there has been very little recognition of it. Because political reporters have normalized his unfit intellectual and emotional characteristics for so long they’re just continuing to cover him as if they are perfectly ordinary even though he is rapidly deteriorating,

The good news is here at CNBC. “Eighty-eight corporate leaders endorse Harris in new letter, including CEOs of Yelp, Box.”  Looks like some business leaders want their business to thrive and not just their personal portfolios.

I’m hoping BB will really get into the weeds on this one, but I had to put the news about the Sentencing Hearing that was supposed to happen on Monday. This is from CBS News, as reported by Graham Kates. “Judge delays sentencing in Trump’s New York criminal case, pushing decision past election.”  This is the hush money case in case you can’t keep them all straight like me.

A New York judge has delayed former President Donald Trump’s sentencing date in his criminal case for a second time, allowing Trump to wait until after the election to learn his fate after his conviction in his “hush money” case.

Trump had been scheduled to be sentenced in the case on Sept. 18. His attorneys asked on Aug. 14 for his sentencing to be pushed back until after the presidential election, arguing that a delay is necessary to resolve ongoing legal challenges to his conviction.

Justice Juan Merchan issued an order on Friday delaying sentencing until Nov. 26.

Merchan wrote that he made the decision “to avoid any appearance — however unwarranted — that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching Presidential election in which the Defendant is a candidate.”

“The Court is a fair, impartial, and apolitical institution,” he continued, adding that the postponement “should dispel any suggestion that the Court will have issued any decision or imposed sentence either to give an advantage to, or to create a disadvantage for, any political party and or any candidate for any office.”

Trump was convicted in May by a unanimous jury on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Prosecutors said Trump signed off on a scheme to hide reimbursements to a lawyer who wired a $130,000 “hush money” payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 presidential election. Trump denied the encounter and pleaded not guilty.

Merchan has wide leeway in determining Trump’s sentence. The charges carry a maximum sentence of up to four years in jail, but Merchan can also hand down a sentence that involves a variety of alternatives to incarceration, including probation. Most legal observers expect Trump to avoid jail time, given his status as a first-time offender and sentences handed down for the same crime in other cases.

Trump was originally scheduled to be sentenced on July 11, but that date was pushed back after he filed a motion seeking to set aside his conviction following a landmark Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity. The judge’s decision on that effort is expected on Sept. 16.

News on his federal election interference case also became available this week. This is from MSNBC, as reported by Jordan Rubin. “Judge Chutkan doesn’t find Judge Cannon’s ruling on Jack Smith’s appointment ‘particularly persuasive’ The judge in Trump’s D.C. case didn’t sound impressed with the Florida judge’s ruling. Ultimately, it may be the Supreme Court’s view that counts.”

Donald Trump’s federal election interference case is finally back in the trial court, where U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan held a hearing Thursday mainly to discuss how to proceed after the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. But the hearing also gave Chutkan an opportunity to criticize U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of Trump’s classified documents case on the grounds that special counsel Jack Smith was unlawfully appointed.

Chutkan didn’t sound impressed with Cannon’s July 15 ruling, which cited Justice Clarence Thomas’ solo concurring opinion in which he questioned Smith’s appointment just a couple of weeks earlier in the immunity decision. Chutkan said on Thursday, “You have an opinion filed by another district judge in another circuit which, frankly, this Court doesn’t find particularly persuasive.”

Still, the Republican presidential nominee’s legal team is pressing the issue in the Washington, D.C., case, alongside their immunity claims and other arguments. It makes sense for them to do so, even though there’s binding precedent in the D.C. Circuit that knocks down the unlawful appointment claim. While that precedent means that Trump is unlikely to prevail on the subject in Washington lower courts as he has in Florida (so far), it would be strange for the defense not to press the issue at this point, especially after a Supreme Court justice raised it.

Evidently, the defense team considers Justice Clarence Thomas to be part of its team. The Judge was not amused. We’ll probably hear more analysis today and over the weekend on both cases.

So, there is certainly a lot going on right now. One bit of good news since polling will start being a little more relevant now. I just tend to see if there’s a trend vs. just random variation, which is normal in every data series over time. Emerson College Polling released this today. ” September State Polling: California, Florida, Ohio, Texas.”

New Emerson College Polling/The Hill statewide polls find Donald Trump leading Kamala Harris by ten in Ohio, 53% to 43%, five in Florida, 50% to 45%, four in Texas, 50% to 46%, while Harris leads Trump in California 60% to 36%. Races in Florida and Texas are within the polls’ margin of error, while California and Ohio fall outside the polls’ margin of error.

Here’s the take from The Hill‘s Jared Gans. “New poll shows Florida, Texas within margin of error in Harris-Trump race.”

The results are a bit closer than what some other polling has found on the races but not completely out of sync with recent polls that have shown a tighter race in those states.

Not much independent polling from major institutions has been done on Texas and Florida since Harris became the Democratic nominee.

Winning either Florida, which Democrats had carried in 2008 and 2012 before the state voted for Trump twice in a row, or Texas, which Democrats have held increasing hopes about flipping blue in recent years, would be an uphill battle for Harris.

The forecast model from The Hill/Decision Desk HQ gives Trump an 83 percent chance of winning Texas and a 75 percent chance of winning Florida. But Florida is only rated as “lean Republican,” and some polls for both states have had Trump leading by single digits.

A Florida Atlantic University poll from last month had Trump’s lead in the Sunshine State at just 3 points, and a poll from two Texas universities had Trump leading in the Lone Star State by 5 points.

The Emerson poll showed Harris just behind Trump in favorability rating for the states. His net favorability rating was positive 2 points in both, while the vice president’s in both was negative 2 points.

I just think it’s good news that both Florida and Texas are at play. The Harris/Walz campaign is covering rural areas and all bases in these now in play states. This NPR article is important if you’re still following the Arlington Cemetary debacle. “Trump deputy campaign manager identified in Arlington National Cemetery dustup.”

The two staffers, according to a source with knowledge of the incident, are deputy campaign manager Justin Caporale and Michel Picard, a member of Trump’s advance team.

Caporale is a one time aide to former first lady Melania Trump who left the White House to work for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis before returning to the Trump campaign. He was also listed as the on-site contact and project manager for the Women for America First rally in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021 where Trump urged the crowd to “stop the steal” before some of them stormed the U.S. Capitol.

After Trump participated in a wreath laying ceremony on the third anniversary of the deadly bombing at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan that killed 13 U.S. service members, Trump visited Section 60 at the invitation of some family members and friends of the fallen soldiers.

ANC rules, that had been made clear to the Trump campaign in advance, say that only an official Arlington photographer can take pictures or film in Section 60. When an ANC employee tried to enforce the rules, she was verbally abused by the two Trump campaign operatives, according to a source with knowledge of the incident. Picard then pushed her out of the way according to two Pentagon officials.

I think the Trump campaign has basically let all the rabid dogs off their leashes and that the former “guard rails” have left the building. I imagine it’s going to get worse the closer we get to the election. I just hope the nation has had it with this nasty, incompetent, incoherent orange thing. Wow, this post is long! Have a great weekend!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

#DonOld #Repeat1968 #JohnBuss #RussianLimbaughs #TenetMediaAndRussianElectionInterference #TrumpBlatherNYEconomicsClub #TrumpTrials #TrumpSIncoherentSpeeches #Weirdo

“I know they wanted JFK Jr, but RFK Jr is a nice addition to the trump campaign.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

The Trumplican Party continues to devolve. I doubt my father would even recognize it if he were alive.  The latest example is the addition of RFK Jr., a conspiracy nut with habits that the word eccentric can’t even begin to describe.  This headline from The Wrap, written by Stephanie Kaloi, is something regular folks can’t wrap their head around. “RFK Jr.’s Daughter Says Dad Cut Off a Whale’s Head, Drove It 5 Hours Home. When they would accelerate, “whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy explained to Town & Country Magazine.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s daughter Kick Kennedy may or may not be spending time with Jennifer Lopez’s estranged husband Ben Affleck (as reported by Page Six), but she certainly spent time with Town & Country Magazine for a profile that has been resurfaced and made waves on social media, in which she shared an anecdote about her father and a dead whale that still checks out with what we know about the odd politician — especially when it comes to his love for dead animals.

When she was 6, her dad chopped off the head of a whale that washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Due to RFK Jr.’s love of studying animal skulls and skeletons, they then strapped the dead whale’s head to the car and spent five hours driving it to their home.

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kennedy said. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

RFK Jr. made headlines earlier this month when he shared the story of taking a dead bear that he found as roadkill, intent on saving it to eat, before ultimately dumping it in a bizarre prank in New York City’s Central Park. On Friday, the independent candidate dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Donald Trump.

RFK Jr. approached the Harris/Walz campaign, but they didn’t answer his calls. That’s just some American common sense with nothing to do with political savvy. What possible benefit could his addition add to a campaign?  But he’s just another (yawn) Maga Sideshow full of weirdos who generally wind up in trouble with the law, one way or another.  His J6 “gala” next month will undoubtedly highlight the number of criminals that actually might actually violate his terms of release.  Also, Rudy Guilliani will be there.  He is definitely on the Trumplican weirdo and felon list. This information popped up on Alternet, and I just had to share it.  “Trump’s ‘gala’ honoring ‘courage and sacrifice’ of J6 rioters may violate his terms of release” is written by Carl Gibson and answers my call out to all the parole officers in charge of these folks.

Convicted felon and 45th President of the United States Donald Trump is planning on hosting a gathering of other convicted felons next month. One legal expert is pointing out that the event may frustrate his efforts to remain a free man.

According to NJ.com, the ex-president is hosting a “J6 awards gala” at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club next month. Progressive group MeidasTouch reported that on September 5, Trump will be joined by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and MAGA influencer Anthony Raimondi at the event, where he is expected to personally address participants in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

…

However, if Trump follows through with the gala, it may complicate his own legal situation. According to attorney Tristan Snell – who prosecuted the former president over his sham Trump University while at the New York Attorney General’s office — New York state law would prohibit such an event given the expected guest list.

“Someone should alert Trump’s probation officer — because convicted felons are legally prohibited from associating with other felons,” he tweeted.

While Trump has been convicted by a jury on 34 class E felony counts, he won’t be sentenced until September 18. At that point, assuming the former president isn’t ordered to serve time behind bars (Judge Juan Merchan has the ability to sentence him to as much as 20 years in prison), he will then be issued a probation officer, who he will be required to check in with on a regular basis. This means the September 5 event will be legal, though it likely won’t help his case when he appears before Merchan less than two weeks later.

The former president narrowly dodged the ire of prosecutors at last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade pointed out that some of the convention’s attendees included indicted “fake electors,” and that Trump seen associating with them may have resulted in Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith and/or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis petitioning the court to incarcerate Trump prior to his trial for consorting with criminal defendants.

DonOld is facing new lawsuits from musicians who don’t want their music to be associated with MAGA craziness.  The first to take action was the son of Issa Hayes.  This is reported in the Daily Beast by Clay Walker. “Isaac Hayes Estate Marks Victory in Suit Against Trump.” The candidate and the campaign continue to act like laws don’t matter.

The estate of the late soul singer Isaac Hayes is moving forward in their lawsuit against Donald Trump for using a song co-written by the artist. “The Federal Court has granted our request for an Emergency Hearing to secure injunctive relief,” the late singer’s son, Isaac Hayes III, wrote on X Friday. According to Hayes III, Trump himself will have to appear in court in September. The lawsuit was originally filed earlier this month and sought $3 million for the former president’s campaign’s unauthorized use of “Hold On, I’m Coming,” a 1960s song originally performed by duo Sam & Dave, more than 100 times. Prior to the filing, the Trump campaign was asked to discontinue the use of the song, but things came to a head on August 10, the anniversary of the singer’s 2008 death, when Trump used it again at a Montana rally. “Donald Trump represents the worst in integrity and class with his disrespect and sexual abuse of Women and racist rhetoric. We will now deal with this very swiftly,” Hayes III wrote on X.

Next up in court is the band Foo Fighters. This is from The Hill. “Trump campaign disputes Foo Fighters claim song use was unauthorized.” Laura Sforza writes on the Foo Fight.

 A spokesperson for the Foo Fighters said in a statement to The Hill late Sunday the band did not give permission to the Trump campaign to use the song at a Friday campaign rally in Arizona. The spokesperson said any royalties the band earns off the song would be donated to Vice President Harris’s campaign.“Foo Fighters were not asked permission, and if they were they would not have granted it,” the spokesperson said.

However, the Trump campaign said it had permission to play the song.

“We have a license to play the song,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in an email to The Hill.

He also took to the social platform X to dispute the claim.

“It’s Times Like These facts matter, don’t be a Pretender. @foofighters,” he wrote, referring to two other songs by the band.

“My Hero” could be heard playing at Trump’s rally in Glendale on Friday as the former president introduced former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his campaign earlier in the day and threw his support behind Trump.

And there’s more in the Weirdos and Felons news. We have this from the LGBTQ Nation.  Seriously, we’ve gone way past the deplorable basket at this point.  “MAGA ex-GOP party chair calls gay lawmaker a “f*g” on social media. She called Pete Buttigieg a “weak little girl” in 2022, before she got indicted.” This is written by Alex Bollinger.

A former high-ranking state Republican official who has been indicted in an alleged conspiracy to steal the 2020 election used an anti-gay slur to describe a gay Democratic lawmaker.

Meshawn Maddock used to be the head of the Michigan Republican Party until shortly after she was charged in connection to a scheme to make Michigan’s votes go to Donald Trump in 2020 instead of President Joe Biden, who won the state. Now she is now using slurs on social media.

She was responding to a post on X from Michigan state Rep. Jason Morgan (D), who is an out gay lawmaker and the vice chair of the state’s Democratic Party. Morgan posted a picture of the Michigan congressional delegation at the DNC last Friday, where they were smiling and holding American flags.

“F*gs and hags,” Maddock responded. X responded by reducing the visibility of her post due to a potential violation of the platform’s Hateful Conduct policy. However, the post has not been deleted by the platform.

Stay Classy you god-fearing Christians you! I have to agree with this Op-Ed headline at The Hill.  “The right’s killjoy politics only fuel Harris’s momentum.”  It’s written by Svante Myrick.

It’s been a couple of days since I flew home after attending the Democratic National Convention. And at the risk of sounding corny, I think I could have done it without the plane. To attend that convention was to experience a sense of joy so powerful that it made you feel like you had wings.

My organization, People for the American Way, was very excited to bring to the convention posters designed especially for us by the artist Victoria Cassinova, which we felt represented the pride and hopefulness of this campaign.

The posters featured a portrait of Harris with the single word: “Freedom.”

We had fun posting them all over the city. We were thrilled to see lots of residents and convention-goers admiring them and taking pictures and selfies. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) shared hers on Instagram.

Then, on the third night of the convention, something sad happened. A group calling itself Artists for Kennedy and Trump defaced a wall of these Harris portraits.

Capturing themselves on video, the vandals spray-painted crimson streaks across the images, focusing on the portrait’s face and eyes. They used words like “war” to describe what they were doing.

It was an ugly but galvanizing reminder of what we’re up against in this race.

I — we — have had enough of creepy authoritarians trying to censor art, ban books and steal our joy.

Because while art does give joy, it also gives strength. It has always been a tool to challenge injustice and enforced conformity, to resist oppression and authoritarianism. That’s why dictators down through history have suppressed and banned art and even murdered artists.

It’s why artists and creators face an enormous threat today, not just from vandals roaming the streets of Chicago but from the deadly serious, powerful operatives behind Project 2025, who are intent on stigmatizing and suppressing vast numbers of artworks by calling them “pornography.”

I remember being shocked and stunned by Trump stalking Hillary on the debate stage and the lack of response to it by the debate’s moderators.  Now I think we know exactly how low they go, and as far as I can tell, there is no bottom. If they stage an insurrection and try to nullify votes, they’ll do anything, and we should all be prepared.  So, the Harris/DonOld debate with ABC is now in jeopardy.  I bet we all had this on our bingo card.  This is from Marianne Levine, who is writing for the Washington Post. “Trump suggests he might skip ABC debate with Harris. The Sept. 10 debate with ABC is the only one both campaigns have agreed to.”

Former president Donald Trump suggested Sunday evening that he might skip a Sept. 10 ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris (D), after agreeing earlier this month to participate.

“I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s (K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump asked in a social media post Sunday evening.

During a campaign stop Monday after visiting Arlington National Cemetery, Trump reiterated his criticism of ABC News, calling it “the single worst network for unfairness” and saying that ABC “really should be shut out.”

The Sept. 10 debate is the only one that both campaigns have officially committed to. Trump’s renewed questioning of the ABC News debate comes as Harris has increased her lead in national polls and is gaining ground in key swing states. As of Sunday, The Washington Post polling average has the vice president leading in Wisconsin by three percentage points, in Pennsylvania by two points and in Michigan by less than one point. Trump continues to lead in four Sun Belt swing states, but Harris has significantly narrowed the gap.

The latest rift between the campaigns is about the terms and conditions about how the debate would work. Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, said in a statement that the campaign has told ABC and other networks that “both candidates’ microphones should be live throughout the full broadcast.”

“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own,” Fallon said.

When asked by a reporter Monday about whether he wanted his microphone muted, Trump replied, “Doesn’t matter to me, I’d rather have it probably on.”

Jason Miller, senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said the campaign agreed to the “the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate,” referring to a June 27 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, before Biden ended his reelection campaign.

Oh, I officially quit the New York Times a while ago.  I would like to say that seeing the headline on a guest’s op-ed today reinforced my excellent decision. Here’s a brief statement: I agree with her.  I can’t say

more because I refuse to read it. Rich Lowry can bite his crank for  writing “Trump Can Win on Character.” RIFF NYT.  Rest in Fuckery and Failure.

Now, back to the normal news.  This is from Salon’s Charles R. Davis.  As the Vice President said, she’s been a prosecutor and knows his type. “”He’s now terrified of debating her”: Trump’s debate flip-flop is a sign Harris has him figured out. The former president suggested Sunday that he would not attend his scheduled Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris.”

Donald Trump is not feeling great. This year alone he’s been found liable by a jury for sexual assault, convicted by another jury on 34 felony counts of fraud, and shot at by a young registered Republican at a campaign rally, the one previously safe space where the president could comfortably rant and complain to certain applause. Then he had to spend a week at home watching Democrats pull off their convention without a hitch, just a month after an unprecedented switch at the top of the ticket.

The former president’s own campaign is publicly predicting that Vice President Kamala Harris will now surge in the polls (after already leading, nationally, by an average of about 3.6%). In a similar situation, the current president and his team decided it was time to debate, saying a televised contest would “reset” the race; the subsequent performance cost Joe Biden the Democratic nomination.

Perhaps that’s why Trump himself is doubting his own commitments.

“Why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump posted on social media Sunday night, complaining about an ABC News interview with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and panel discussion earlier that day, saying the former was “biased” and the latter full of “Trump Haters.” The Republican nominee filled the rest of his post with tedious name calling — “Crooked,” “Marxist” — and attacks on the insufficiently fawning journalists of ABC.

“They’ve got a lot o questions to answer!!!” Trump posted just after 10 p.m. Eastern. “Why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, CBS, and even CNN? Stay tuned!!!”

The former president already agreed to debate Harris on Sept. 10, which was originally slated to be the second of two televised confrontations with Biden. He did so after previously trying to pull out of the event when Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, initially claiming the debate was off because Biden was out of the race and then trying to move it to the friendlier waters of Fox News, a media platform that was forced to pay out $787 million after admitting that it cynically aired what its knew to be MAGA lies about the 2020 election.

This last read is from the New Republic‘s Michael Tomasky. “Finally, the Democrats Have Found Trump’s Achilles’ Heel: Ridicule Him. Kamala Harris gets it. Yes, we should fear Trump—but we should also mock him mercilessly because it drives him nuts.”

Donald Trump is in free fall. Read this description from Sunday’s Washington Post of how the GOP nominee spent last week: “[A]ides did not want a situation where he was watching the convention every night, getting angry, and then just golfing all day and stewing, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private interactions. Trump also had grown annoyed with the news coverage that depicted him as not working as hard as his opponent, one person who talked to him said.”

If you didn’t know that the article was about Trump and you just read it cold without knowledge of the context, you might think it was a description of parents trying to figure out how to handle an ungovernable four-year-old. So they convinced Trump to get out of Bedminster and hit the road, trading suck-ups with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In the past, Trump has called Kennedy the “dumbest member” of the Kennedy family and a “radical left lunatic.” Kennedy has called Trump a “terrible human being” and “probably a sociopath.”

Will RFK’s endorsement get Trump a few votes? It might. But these two unprincipled freakos deserve each other, and if it ever looks like RFK might matter, all Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have to do is say something like that.

Harris’s campaign so far has been a work of genius on several levels, but maybe the most ingenious stroke of all has been the decision to mock Trump—to present him not only as someone to fear but also to ridicule. Harris perfectly encapsulated this two-pronged attack in these memorable lines from her acceptance speech: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences—but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.… Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”

But the emphasis has been on ridicule (Tim Walz’s “weird” comment, Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s jab at Trump’s bone spurs, Barack Obama’s hilarious hand gesture when he was talking about Trump’s obsession with crowd size). It’s great on three levels. The first is that it must drive Trump nuts, and when he goes nuts, he says especially nutty things. Second, it’s arguably more persuasive to swing voters than calling Trump a fascist. Trump is a fascist, make no mistake. But he’s also ridiculous. Mocking him over his Hannibal Lecter obsession will stick in apolitical people’s minds far more strongly than warning about his plans to wreck the Justice Department, and in its way, it’s just as disqualifying. Do we really want a president who thinks an eater of human flesh, however fictional, was misunderstood?

And third and most of all: Sustained ridicule has the potential to reinforce the downward spiral Trump is now in. He probably likes it when we call him a fascist or authoritarian, because it expresses fear of him, and he aches to be feared. It acknowledges his power. This motivates him and makes him stronger.

Ridicule makes him weaker. Ridicule makes him small. Ridicule makes him desperate. He’ll try to respond with ridicule of his own, but he is not a clever man. He’s a stupid man. He has no wit. He has no sense of mischief. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t think beyond first reactions. These nicknames of his, which the press has made such a big deal of over the years—they’re nothing. They’re dick contests put into words. Little Marco, Sleepy Joe. There’s nothing remotely clever about any of them.

And now he reportedly thinks he’s come up with a great one in “Communist Kamala.” Well, it’s alliterative, I’ll give him that. But I doubt very much that it’ll play beyond the base. First of all, people under 40 barely know what a communist was. Even for older people who do know, is communism the specter it once was?

Brilliant!  When he goes low, we make fun of him and call him weird.  He becomes lethargic and fussy.  He says weird things and makes weird decisions.  That’s a daily event in Day Cares everywhere and evidently in not-so-posh Jersey Golf Clubs with Galas for Criminals.  This is getting fun.

Embrace the JOY!!!!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

https://skydancingblog.com/2024/08/26/mostly-monday-reads-the-weirdo-trifecta/

#2024ABCPresidentialDebate #2024PresidentialCampaign #Repeat1968 #DonOldWeirdo #J6FelonsGala #JDVanceWeirdo #JohnBuss #KamalaHarrisForThePeople #RFKJrWeirdo

Friday Reads: Twilight’s Last Gleaming

““No Mortal Man is Above the Law,” sayeth the Supremes. Enjoy your Independence Day; if the Conflicted Convicted Felon is elected, it’ll be our last.” John Buss, Repeat 1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Independence Day has always been my favorite holiday, and it’s my youngest daughter’s too. When we lived in the Quarter, we would always walk our 2 blonde labs to the Mississippi River Bank and watch the left and east bank boats launch a huge fireworks display.  Down here in the Bywater, it’s still the same short walk to the riverbank, but the Poland Avenue Wharf or the newest Crescent Park are the favorite places to go.  Cars always turn to our local NPR station for patriotic music and blast it loud. You can tell when it’s time for the display because all the bars and houses empty into the streets and head south to the banks of the Mississippi River. I have always wondered what past celebrations were like, but that’s a rabbit hole for another day.

I spent the pre-show hours with friends listening to his industrial band livestream their efforts while sitting in their driveway patio.  It seemed like a normal fourth.  While everyone headed to the river, I headed home to Temple to let her dig a burrow under me to hide from the noise. No displays for me in the last 10 years.  Just time at home in bed comforting Temple. The weird thing this year was the fireworks didn’t seem to bother her, and she spent most of the time spooning me.  Maybe she sensed that my fear was far greater than hers today.  It’s a thought.

Twilight’s last gleaming from last night at my neighbor’s driveway patio.

The swiftboating of the democratic candidate season has begun. My friend who owns the bar on the corner told me she’s hearing from others besides me who are looking for places to become expats.  Given the Le Pen elections, I’m researching the south of France right now, although they may soon have their counter-revolution.  Russia is happy about that one.  I’m sure they have high hopes for us.

If you haven’t seen this little speech, you really should. “Leader of the pro-Trump Project 2025 suggests there will be a new American Revolution.  Kevin Roberts said the revolution will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”  This is from the AP but sourced at Politico.

The leader of a conservative think tank orchestrating plans for a massive overhaul of the federal government in the event of a Republican presidential win said that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts made the comments Tuesday on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, adding that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back.”

Democrats are “apoplectic right now” because the right is winning, Roberts told former U.S. Rep. Dave Brat, one of the podcast’s guest hosts as Bannon is serving a four-month prison term. “And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Roberts’ remarks shed light on how a group that promises to have significant influence over a possible second term for former President Donald Trump is thinking about this moment in American politics. The Heritage Foundation is spearheading Project 2025, a sweeping road map for a new GOP administration that includes plans for dismantling aspects of the federal government and ousting thousands of civil servants in favor of Trump loyalists who will carry out a hard-right agenda without complaint.

His call for revolution and vague reference to violence also unnerved some Democrats who interpreted it as threatening.

“This is chilling,” former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson wrote on the social platform X. “Their idea of a second American Revolution is to undo the first one.”

James Singer, a spokesperson for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, pointed to this week’s Fourth of July holiday in an emailed statement.

“248 years ago tomorrow America declared independence from a tyrannical king, and now Donald Trump and his allies want to make him one at our expense,” Singer said, adding that Trump and his allies are ”dreaming of a violent revolution to destroy the very idea of America.”

Roberts, whose name Bannon recently floated to The New York Times as a potential chief of staff option for Trump, also said on the podcast that Republicans should be encouraged by the Supreme Court’s recent immunity ruling.

Bannon is in jail right now, serving time for contempt of Congress.  The New Republic‘s Parker Malloy has a good point here.  “Why Does the Media Insist on Helping Steve Bannon Act the Martyr? NBC and ABC snagged pre-prison interviews with the far-right globalist. But to what end? They became tools in his propaganda machine.”  The press just falls right in line by normalizing this behavior.

NBC News’s Vaughn Hillyard and ABC News’s Jonathan Karl recently made a journalistic misstep by interviewing Steve Bannon right before he reported to prison. This move, which might seem innocuous at first glance, actually elevates Bannon’s “political prisoner” narrative, a misleading storyline that does little but bolster the War Room host’s victim complex.

By interviewing Bannon just before he heads to prison, both NBC and ABC are essentially giving him a platform to paint himself as a martyr.

It allows Bannon to control the narrative. This plays directly into the hands of Bannon and his supporters, who are eager to cast any legal action against them as part of a broader conspiracy to silence dissent. It’s a classic tactic: position yourself as a victim to garner sympathy and rally support.

But Bannon is not going to prison for his political beliefs or his support for Donald Trump. He’s going to prison because he defied a congressional subpoena. By allowing Bannon to put some focus on his claims of political persecution, these interviews shift attention away from his actual misconduct and the legal consequences of that misconduct. This undermines the rule of law and gives credence to the idea that powerful individuals can evade accountability by crying foul.

Beyond that, it normalizes extremist rhetoric. In his interview with Karl, Bannon doubled down on his inflammatory language, discussing “retribution” and the need for investigations and potential imprisonments of political figures. Bannon listed former FBI Director James Comey, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and former Attorney General Bill Barr as people who should be “very worried” about prosecution under a second Trump administration. Bannon defended his use of the slogan “Victory or Death!” at the recent Turning Point Action convention and rolled his eyes at Karl for even asking him about his 2020 comments about beheading Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Also, from TNR is this headline about the black man running for governor on the insanity platform. “MAGA Gov Candidate’s Ugly, Hateful Rant: “Some Folks Need Killing!” Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina, has a long history of incendiary comments. But he may have topped himself this time.”

Mark Robinson, the extremist GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina, appeared to endorse political violence in a bizarre and extended rant he delivered on June 30 in a small-town church.

“Some folks need killing!” Robinson, the state’s lieutenant governor, shouted during a roughly half-hour-long speech in Lake Church in the tiny town of White Lake, in the southeast corner of the state. “It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!”

Robinson’s call for the “killing” of “some folks” came during an extended diatribe in which he attacked an extraordinary assortment of enemies. These ranged from “people who have evil intent” to “wicked people” to those doing things like “torturing and murdering and raping” to socialists and Communists. He also invoked those supposedly undermining America’s founding ideals and leftists allegedly persecuting conservatives by canceling them and doxxing them online.

In all this, Robinson appeared to endorse lethal violence against these unnamed enemies, particularly on the left, though he wasn’t exactly clear on which “folks” are the ones who “need killing.”

Robinson, a self-described “MAGA Republican,” has a long history of wildly radical and unhinged moments. He has linked homosexuality to pedophilia, called for the arrest of trans women, pushed hallucinogenic antisemitic conspiracy theories, endorsed the vile “birther” conspiracy about Barack Obama, described Michelle Obama as a man, hinted at the need to violently oppose federal law enforcement and the government, and posted memes mocking and denying the brutal, violent assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, among many other things.

My belief is he said the quiet part out loud. My governor isn’t calling for the death penalty for anyone who doesn’t fit the White Christian Nationalist mold or stays quiet, afraid, and hidden, but I do believe he’d do it if any other MAGA governor started the trend.  As JJ says, fear for people you love.  As to the swiftboating of Biden for a cold, let’s show you this oldie but goodie of just a smidgen of the swiftboating of Hillary. “Remember when Hillary Clinton had pneumonia and showed up anyway at a 9/11 memorial & media ripped her for that?”  (via @joannebamberg with Karolic Kuns and me in the amen corner.)

Even New York Magazine is in on it. “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden. The president’s mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters.”  Biden, meanwhile, is on a prove-them all full of a shit tour of duty.  Here’s another ‘nattering nabob of negatism’ NBC News. (With no apologies to rotten apple dead Spiro Agnew.)

 President Joe Biden will hold a rally Friday in Wisconsin and then sit for his first televised interview since his disastrous debate performance last week, events could be crucial in determining whether he can salvage his embattled candidacy.

The interview with anchor George Stephanopoulos of ABC News is shaping up to be one of the most high-stakes moments for a president or a candidate in many years. Democratic elected officials, donors and voters will be closely watching to see whether he can still deliver in an adversarial setting and turn in a performance worthy of being the party’s nominee to defeat Donald Trump this fall.

The interview will “air in its entirety as a primetime special” at 8 p.m. ET Friday, ABC said, adding that a “transcript of the unedited interview will be made available the same day.”

Before that, Biden is expected to speak this afternoon at a campaign rally in Madison, Wisconsin. At the rally, Biden will “underscore the stakes of this election for our democracy, our rights and freedoms, and our economy,” a campaign official said. Also speaking will be Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., among others.

The White House said the interview team from ABC “will be with us all day in Wisconsin” and able to cover the rally event and to observe the president as he participates in his schedule, and said it has “some flexibility” around the length of the sit-down but “no exact estimate” of the duration of the conversation.

Read the next paragraph, which I will not print here, and try not to bang your head against your desk, wall, or coffee table.  Law Professor Richard W. Painter is floating a Constitutional Amendment on X.

Const. Amend. 28: “The President and the judges of the United States courts including the Supreme Court, shall be bound by the criminal laws of the United States and also by financial disclosure and conflict of interest laws enacted by Congress.” So who votes against?

If you want a real shock, go see The Economist Cover Picture today with the heading “No way to Run a Country.”  The attached story is “Biden Must Withdraw.”   This is from a country where the General Election just kicked the Conservative PM (a hedge fund manager) and replaced him with a Human Rights Lawyer and member of the Labour Party.  Fourteen years of Conservative Rule has just been tossed for something different.  Of course, CNN has joined the swiftboating effort. This is from Dr. Sanjay Gupta at CNN. “It’s time for President Biden to undergo detailed cognitive and neurological testing and share his results.”

So, I have to share this one from the New York Times even though I’m about to cancel my subscription. “Biden Tells Governors He Needs More Sleep and Less Work at Night.  The president’s opening remark to a group of key Democratic leaders — that he was in the race to stay — chilled any talk of his withdrawal, participants said.”  The usual suspects, Reid J. Epstein and Maggie Haberman, reported it.

President Biden told a gathering of Democratic governors that he needs to get more sleep and work fewer hours, including curtailing events after 8 p.m., according to two people who participated in the meeting and several others briefed on his comments.

The remarks on Wednesday were a stark acknowledgment of fatigue from the 81-year-old president during a meeting intended to reassure more than two dozen of his most important supporters that he is still in command of his job and capable of mounting a robust campaign against former President Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Biden’s comments about needing more rest came shortly after The New York Times reported that current and former officials have noticed that the president’s lapses over the past few months have become more frequent and more pronounced.

But Mr. Biden told the governors, some of whom were at the White House while others participated virtually, that he was staying in the race.

He described his extensive foreign travel in the weeks before the debate, something that the White House and his allies have in recent days cited as the reason for his halting performance during the debate. Initially, Mr. Biden’s campaign blamed a cold, putting out word about midway through the debate amid a series of social media posts questioning why Mr. Biden was struggling.

Mr. Biden said that he told his staff he needed to get more sleep, multiple people familiar with what took place in the meeting said. He repeatedly referenced pushing too hard and not listening to his team about his schedule, and said he needed to work fewer hours and avoid events scheduled after 8 p.m., according to one of the people familiar with what took place at the meeting.

After Gov. Josh Green of Hawaii, a physician, asked Mr. Biden questions about the status of his health, Mr. Biden replied that his health was fine. “It’s just my brain,” he added, according to three people familiar with what took place — a remark that some in the room took as a joke, including Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, according to a person close to her. But at least one governor did not, and was puzzled by it.

Jen O’Malley Dillon, Mr. Biden’s campaign chair, who attended the meeting, said in a statement that he had said, “All kidding aside,” a recollection confirmed by another person briefed on the meeting. Ms. O’Malley Dillon added: “He was clearly making a joke.”

So, I fully admit to being depressed and worried.  I know that BB stopped her NYT subscription.  I hope John Buss doesn’t mind. I shared this bit he posted to his FaceBook about canceling his. I seriously worry about him in North Carolina, too.  None of us in the old Confederate States are safe right now.

This is from a poll taken in April and reported by the AP on May 1. “Half of US adults mistrust media coverage of 2024 elections, a poll finds. About half of Americans say they are extremely or very concerned that news organizations will report inaccuracies or misinformation during the election. According to a poll, 42% express worry that news outlets will use generative artificial intelligence to create stories. (AP Video: Serkan Gurbuz)”

I think it’s likely that if they redid that this month, they’d find a statistically significant increase in the number of people saying that.  However, I admit that I live in the Southern City that promptly surrendered when Captain David Farragut of the Union Navy bombed two forts and arrived at the port.  We are a haven for the GLBT community.  We also have a strong Jewish presence and are well known for being a place of refuge for many diasporas.  Our new governor hates us and wants to take away our city charter, which is the legal means by which we don’t become the rest of the state.  You have to wonder how many cities like ours will come under direct attack if MAGA either gets its way or doesn’t.

The only way out of this is to VOTE and get everyone you know to VOTE because our lives depend on it.

I really hope you got to enjoy a little celebration on Independence Day.  I’m still on board with ensuring liberty and justice for all.  I am also standing by the Biden/Harris ticket.  Again, you realize that I have had a lot of gripes in the past about Biden and what happened to Anita Hill. It is somewhat karmic that what is going on now is somewhat built in by the bad decision he, Teddy Kennedy, and John Kerry made about Clarence Thomas. Forty-eight percent of the Senate was against his confirmation. He should’ve been Borked.  That, unfortunately, is toxic water under the bridge of democracy, but we have what we have now, and it is what it is.  Remember the words of Benjamin Franklin and fight for it.  The Roberts Supreme Court just took down the republic.

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

–Benjamin Franklin’s response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
That time cannot decay
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
This little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A

#Repeat1968 #aRepublicIfYouCanKeepIt #CoupAttempt #democracy #IndependenceDay #insurrection #JohnBuss #LeonardCohen #MediaAndSwiftboating #Project2025 #Swiftboating

Trump’s theatrics intensified over the weekend. He was photographed at a car race with his entourage in tow. His co-conspirator and personal Valet is now carrying a large briefcase. Got me thinking what was inside… John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Just when I think that Donald’s supporters can’t be any more idiotic, the groupthink leads them to some next-level crazy.  Their latest efforts are wearing adult diapers outside their jeans and touting the masculinity of diaper-wearing by adult men.  Seriously, who thought this up?  Well, here’s one explanation by FirstPost explainers. “Oh, S**t! Why are Trump’s supporters wearing nappies to rallies?”

After Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen nicknamed him ‘Von ShitzInPantz’, the Republican candidate’s supporters are making diapers great again…or at least trying to. They are thronging rallies wearing nappies; some are donning T-shirts and holding placards with slogans like ‘Real Men Wear Diapers’ and ‘Diapers over Dems’

Just when you think US presidential elections can’t get more bizarre, they throw up a surprise. Donald Trump’s supporters do not disappoint. They are showing up at his rallies wearing nappies and shirts that read “Real Man Wear Diapers”.

But why?

Trump supporters, aka MAGAs, are responding to recent developments in the former president’s hush money trial case, where his lawyer Todd Blanche read out a string of offensive posts by his ex-lawyer Michael Cohen in the courtroom.

It’s not exactly on the same level as turning “Let’s Go Brandon” into Dark Brandon, is it? SkyNews reports that “Donald Trump supporters have started wearing nappies. They also have a new slogan: Real Men Wear Diapers.” Something tells me that not one of these folks was ever the cool kid or the nerdy kid in school.

The peculiar new craze began after Mr Trump was described as “Von ShitzInPantz”.

Michael Cohen, his former lawyer, said in a post on X last month: “Hey Von ShitzInPantz…your attacks of me stink of desperation. We are all hoping that you take the stand in your defence.”

He added, a couple of days later: “Oh… Von ShitzInPantz. Keep whining, crying and violating the gag order you petulant defendant!”

On Thursday, during Mr Trump’s hush money trial, the prosecution alleged he had further violated a gag order connected to the case.

On Tuesday, he was fined $9,000 (£7,100) and held in contempt by the judge for breaches of the same order.

But Mr Trump’s defence lawyer, Todd Blanche, said his client was the victim of attacks by both Mr Cohen and the media.

Mr Blanche also referred to comments from President Joe Biden, referring to Donald Trump experiencing “stormy weather”.

Since then, Trump supporters have apparently been trying to get back at Mr Cohen by wearing nappies and declaring that “real men” do the same.

If this is the best they can do to “own the libs,” then count me ROFLMAO.  Can you imagine what that kid in the red shirt would do if his mom made him do it for any other reason?   There are so many conspiracy theories out there that you just wonder if there’s a movement to drop Republican babies repeatedly on their heads.  This article from Salon is just eye-opening. “Who believes the most “taboo” conspiracy theories? It might not be who you think. White men with graduate degrees, a new study finds, are highly likely to hold especially noxious beliefs.”  Paul Rosenburg is the writer and provides some insight into the study.

Like Henry Ford before him, Elon Musk has emerged as America’s top conspiracy spreader. But he’s hardly alone. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the conspiracy-theory candidate for president, and as Paul Krugman observed last summer, was attracting “support from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley”:

Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter, has endorsed him, while some other prominent tech figures have been holding fund-raisers on his behalf. Elon Musk, who is in the process of destroying what Dorsey built, hosted him for a Twitter Spaces event.

Krugman didn’t focus on conspiracy theory as such but on something closely related: distrust of experts and skepticism about widely accepted facts. He described this tendency as the “brain rotting drug” of reflexive contrarianism, quoting economist Adam Ozimek.

That wasn’t exactly scientific, but a new paper entitled “The Status Foundations of Conspiracy Beliefs” by Saverio Roscigno, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine, is. Its most eye-catching finding is the discovery of “a cluster of graduate-degree-holding white men who display a penchant for conspiracy beliefs” that are “distinctively taboo.”

Specifically, Roscigno writes, “approximately a quarter of those who hold a graduate degree agree or strongly agree” that school shootings like those at Sandy Hook and Parkland “are false flag attacks perpetrated by the government,” which is “around twice the rate of those without graduate degrees.” Results are similar for the proposition that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust “has been exaggerated on purpose.”

These findings are striking for many reasons. Most obviously, they go against the common belief — long supported by research — that conspiracist beliefs are more common among lower-income and less-educated individuals. They also challenge the  formulation popularized by Joseph Uscinski that “conspiracy theories are for losers,” and should be understood as “alarm systems and coping mechanisms to help deal with foreign threat and domestic power centers” that “tend to resonate when groups are suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity.”

Von ShitzinPants, by @deAdder

What follows the introduction is an interview with Roscigno that is quite enlightening.  Follow the link to read more.

Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has laid out some important election messaging. “‘If Roe v. Wade can fall, anything can fall,’ says Jeffries in stressing importance of elections.”  This is reported by Nick Robertson at The Hill.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) emphasized the stakes of the 2024 election in a “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday, warning that much more than abortion rights are at risk if former President Trump gets a second term.

He told CBS’ Norah O’Donnell that reproductive freedom will be an “incredibly significant” issue in the race.

“And the extreme MAGA Republicans have set in motion the erosion of reproductive freedom,” he said. “We’re gonna fight for it with everything that we’ve got at our disposal.”

“If Roe v. Wade can fall, anything can fall,” he continued. “Social Security can fall. Medicare can fall. Voting rights can fall. And God help us all, but democracy itself can fall. If Roe v. Wade can fall, then anything can fall.”

Jeffries’ comments come as Democrats turn their sights on battleground states focusing on abortion rights arguments, as Arizona, Florida, Montana and others prepare for abortion rights ballot issues.

GOP state lawmakers in Arizona overturned a Civil War-era abortion restriction last week after multiple attempts and mass criticism from Democrats, while another strict abortion law went into effect in Florida on Wednesday.

But Jeffries also said that Democrats need to run on a positive message, in addition to warning about what Republicans could take away. He pointed to the gun safety regulation and investments in manufacturing as the “real results.”

However, most Americans still perceive the Biden economy as weaker than the economy under President Trump, according to polls, as the Biden campaign struggles to change the narrative.

The biggest problem is that many Americans believe completely untrue things. That last sentence shows just one.  Here’s another lie that Donald spins constantly.

"…crime in the United States has dramatically decreased — 73 percent, to be precise — over the last thirty years. 2023 saw the biggest national drop in murder rates ever recorded…"

Crime is not on the rise — so why do so many Americans think it is?https://t.co/wWEN8dwcTI

— Portia ♍️ McGonagal Same On 🐳 (@PortiaMcGonagal) May 6, 2024

Given that crime is a staple element of tabloid news, coverage of local tragedies, rather than seeming to occur at a distance, brings the specter of mayhem into communities that experience little or no crime. As Gideon Taffe of Media Matters reported in January 2023, Fox produced “a misleading narrative” about the United States being in the grip of a crime wave in 2022, devoted 11 percent of its reporting to the topic in advance of the midterm election. But that crime wave was “largely created by its own relentless coverage,” Taffe writes. “By focusing on racist stereotypes, smearing progressive prosecutors and pushing conspiracy theories, Fox made crime one of the biggest perceived ailments in the country and pushed far-right policy prescriptions ahead of the election.

The only sane policy responses, Fox hosts proclaimed, were those embraced by the Party of Trump. And these “draconian solutions” meant a return to policies forcibly ended in the courts as civil rights violations:

”Fox personalities began arguing for a return to “Broken Windows” policing, which involves aggressive enforcement and harsher sentences for lower level crimes. In reality, there is no evidence that this strategy works as a deterrent to reduce crime, and other heavy-handed policing tactics based on the broken windows theory have been found to significantly discriminate against Black Americans and other minority groups.

But as Taffe also pointed out, crime in the United States has dramatically decreased — 73 percent, to be precise — over the last thirty years. 2023 saw the biggest national drop in murder rates ever recorded (6 percent) and murders in cities dropped 12 percent. Yes, there are periodic crime spikes. (There was one during the pandemic). But overall, the trend is towards less crime.

The Atlantic’s crime reporter, Jeff Asher, pointed out that less crime doesn’t mean no crime. Yet “declining murder does not mean there were not thousands upon thousands of these tragedies this year,” he wrote on his Substack:

Nor does it mean that there was an acceptable level of gun violence, even in places seeing rapid declines. It simply means that the overall trend was extraordinarily positive and should be recognized as such.Detroit is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1966 and Baltimore and St Louis are on pace for the fewest murders in each city in nearly a decade. Other cities that saw huge increases in murder between 2020 and 2022, like Milwaukee, New Orleans and Houston, are seeing sizable declines in 2023. There are still cities like Memphis and Washington, DC, that are seeing increasing murders in 2023, but those cities are especially notable because they are the outliers this year, not the norm.

How can Jeffries and others get through the roar of Donald and Fox News(sic)  lies? Trump spent the weekend in Florida fundraising and propping up his propaganda machine while moaning about the unbearable whiteness of being. He just can’t get any breaks, can he? This is from the Washington Post. “After big weekend in Palm Beach, Trump returns to N.Y. courtroom.”

A donor luncheon at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate over the weekend provided the former president a chance to size up his potential 2024 running mates, several of whom were in attendance, and to escalate attacks on prosecutors in his four criminal cases. On Monday, he is back in a New York courtroom as a trial continues in one of those cases. Trump has been charged with falsifying records to cover up paying hush money to an adult-film actress during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Two potential VEEP candidates are not doing well in the media spotlight.  We all know now about poor Cricket’s demise at the hands of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.  Now, Tim Scott is looking worse all the time. This is from CNN. “‘A very chilling signal’: Ex-Trump DHS official reacts to Tim Scott’s answer about accepting election results

Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), a potential vice presidential pick for Donald Trump, refused to commit to saying he would accept the results of the 2024 presidential election. Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at the US Department of Homeland Security, says it is part of Scott’s audition to be Trump’s running mate.

Both display a worrying lack of character, much like Trump supporters show few signs of higher brain function.  It really gets to me after a while.  Last night, some crazy drunk guy emptied two clips near a Bed and Breakfast catering to the gay community where there was a courtyard full of partiers.  One of my neighbors found out that he was mad that his car broke down.  It was less than a block from me.  Thankfully, the police got him immediately, and no one was hurt. Two other shootings in the city were reported, but not this one.  I’m waiting for the rationale behind this, even though none exists.  Our governor and his legislature just removed all the civil rights gains we made in criminal law and policing here.   We also are now a state that no longer requires permits for any kind of gun ownership.

I heard the first round while sitting here at my desk.  I heard the second round of shots, and then there was the loud, short sound of a police siren.  Temple, eager for her last walk, and I stuck our heads out the door and saw that there were at least 10 police cars but no SWAT van, EMS, or Coroner.  The amazing number of blue lights made me tip-toe out of my gate and up to the bar on the corner.  I had a nice conversation with the two guards at the abandoned navy base and found out as much as I could.  I didn’t sleep well last night and am still slightly shaky as I write this.  The number of shots that came from each clip was beyond imagination.

Among all the other things we need, like access to proper healthcare, criminal justice reform, respect for differences, and such, we really need sensible gun laws.

And, ah, the burden of whiteness!!

Assholes

CNN – Black voters won a big victory in Louisiana. Some White voters said it violated their ‘personal dignity’https://t.co/y8guTSXoHk

— Lola Gayle (@LolaGayleC) May 6, 2024

In the current phase of the dispute, a three-judge trial judge panel sided with a group of 12 self-described “non-African American” voters who alleged that their “personal dignity” had been injured because the new map with two Black-majority districts “racially stigmatizes,” “racially stereotypes” and “racially maligns” them.

Their lawsuit said that the congressional plan amounted “to the application of affirmative action in redistricting, unseen in previous racial gerrymandering” cases and violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

Last week, the two Trump-appointed judges in the majority rejected arguments from the state that the lawmakers had other reasons besides race for drawing the plan the way they did. The state had pointed to the desires by state lawmakers to protect certain congressional incumbents.

I hope your week goes well. Mine is starting off a bit weird. All hugs are appreciated!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

It’s times like these you learn to live again
It’s times like these you give and give again
It’s times like these you learn to love again
It’s times like these time and time again

https://skydancingblog.com/2024/05/06/mostly-monday-reads-the-blinding-white/

#DeAdder #Repeat1968 #DiaperDonald #ItSTimesLikeThese #JohnBuss #MichaelDeAdder

The Supreme Court hears arguments on Trump’s immunity claim, John Buss, @repeat1968.

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I got the cutest picture of the granddaughters today. The girls were smiling and looking at each other with adoration. Both were pretty in pink. All I can think of is what kind of country they may inherit.

I watched and listened to trials and hearings that were so surreal that I was pretty sure we’d entered the Evil Spock Timeline. I remember when the Supreme Court protected everyone’s rights. Now, rights are confined to those who brought the men there and paid for their holidays. It was like watching a Skeleton Dance. Not one TV Lawyer could find anything constitutional about the show they put on yesterday. We all laughed at him when he said,‘ I Could … Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn’t Lose Any Voters’ Evidently, he can do worse than that, and the Supreme Court would make up something to cover his farty, diapered ass.

This is a must-read from Slate: “The Last Thing This Supreme Court Could Do to Shock Us  There will be no more self-soothing after this.” This is written by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern. 

For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.

For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.

 On Thursday, during oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the Republican-appointed justices shattered those illusions. This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear—brutally so. These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act. These justices fear that it is Trump’s prosecution for election subversion that will “destabilize” democracy, requiring them to read a brand-new principle of presidential immunity into a Constitution that guarantees nothing of the sort. They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power. They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.

However the court disposes of Trump v. U.S., the result will almost certainly be precisely what the former president craves: more delays, more hearings, more appeals—more of everything but justice. This was not a legitimate claim from the start, but a wild attempt by Trump’s attorneys to use his former role as chief executive of the United States to shield himself from the consequences of trying to turn the presidency into a dictatorship. After so much speculation that these reasonable, rational jurists would surely dispose of this ridiculous case quickly and easily, Thursday delivered a morass of bad-faith hand-wringing on the right about the apparently unbearable possibility that a president might no longer be allowed to wield his powers of office in pursuit of illegal ends. Just as bad, we heard a constant minimization of Jan. 6, for the second week in a row, as if the insurrection were ancient history, and history that has since been dramatically overblown, presumably for Democrats’ partisan aims.

All this with the husband of an insurrectionist sitting on the bench.   I heard Nicole Wallace give the best explanation of anything I’ve heard on why these men act out their grievances in court decisions last night.  Two of the guys that sit on the bench are sex pests and were publicly shown to be so.  Alito is just perpetually mad at everything but mostly at being branded a bigot because he has issues with women and gay people.  His hateful take on religion basically focuses on controlling the objects of his hatred.  Protecting his religious practice means he should get away with whatever. Nicole Wallace argued that they love Trump because they are all angry and aggrieved.  They identify with Trump because they feel they’re in a similar situation.  Civil rights are all about not letting white boys be white boys.  They all want absolute immunity.  we have to rely on Amy and John to be reasonable.  Amy’s line of questions actually gave me a bit of hope.

It’s a weird timeline for me to quote Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger. This is from the Bulwark. “ rump Melts Institutions, SCOTUS Edition. The Supreme Court’s no-win situation and the healthy liberalism we need.”

… reading the tea leaves of oral arguments is always an exercise in guesswork. Hopefully SCOTUS won’t be long in unveiling their opinion on the matter.

But one other thing is worth saying: It’s completely understandable that so many people’s first instinct was to roll their eyes at the Court’s apparent interest in using this case to trace out the complex contours of any newly explicit presidential right to official-act immunity—given the remarkable hubris of Trump’s bringing those arguments in the first place.

After all, here’s a guy who, during his second impeachment, explicitly arguedthat prosecuting an ex-president was the role of the criminal courts: “a president who left office is not in any way above the law,” his lawyers argued, “as the Constitution states he or she is like any other citizen and can be tried in a court of law.”

Now Trump articulates just the opposite position: No act that is “official” in form—which, his lawyers have had to admit during arguments, would include such acts as ordering the military to carry out a coup—can be criminally prosecuted after he leaves office unless he was first convicted in an impeachment trial for that conduct. How any president enjoying such expansive power could ever be impeached by a Congress he could apparently order murdered without consequence remains unclear.

It’s a ridiculous exercise, a transparent stalling tactic. For Team Trump, just getting the argument in front of SCOTUS was a victory in and of itself, further diminishing the odds of a jury getting to rule on Trump’s stolen-election charges before the November election. “Literally popping champagne right now,” one lawyer close to Trump told Rolling Stonewhen the court announced it would consider the immunity claim in February. This week, RS quoted another Trump source that it hardly matters what the court does now: “We already pulled off the heist.”

At the same time, no matter how transparent Trump’s run-out-the-clock motivations in bringing the petition to the Court, it’s true that the claims of presidential immunity at hand have never been litigated. The justices are highly unlikely to endorse Trump’s theory that every presidential act that is official “in form” is exempt from prosecution—but are some presidential acts immune? What is the line between a president acting in his capacity as president and acting in his capacity as a candidate or private citizen? And could it be true—as Trump’s lawyers have argued—that opening up too broad a swath of presidential actions to post-presidency prosecution could hamper a president’s ability to run the country effectively?

Evidently, Kavanaugh’s love of beer causes him to be delusional and totally out of it.

Kavanaugh: President Ford's pardon of Nixon, very controversial in the moment…. Now looked upon as one of the better decisions in presidential history I think by most people. pic.twitter.com/YaB0Px4v25

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 25, 2024

One last SCOTUS send-up and I’m changing the topic.   This is from Adam Sewer writing for The New Republic. ” The Trumpification of the Supreme Court. The conservative justices have shown they are ready to sacrifice any law or principle to save the former president.”

The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.

“How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer. “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act,” Sauer said after a brief exchange. “If it were an official act … he would have to be impeached and convicted.”

“That sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?” Kagan replied later.

The Democratic appointees on the bench sought to illustrate the inherent absurdity of this argument with other scenarios as well—Kagan got Sauer to admit that the president could share nuclear secrets, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented a scenario in which a president orders the military to assassinate a political rival. Sauer said that might qualify as an official act too. It was the only way to maintain the logic of his argument, which is that Trump is above the law

This Mike Luchovich cartoon is brutal and true.   shift to the other SCOTUS shit show this week.   N has “Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s oral arguments over emergency abortions.” Again, thank goodness my youngest daughter is in Denver, or who knows what her outcome may have been. Dr  Daughter is getting more colleagues in Washington State because of Idaho.  P gnant women are gestational containers there. Th s analysis is provided by Tierney Sneed and John Fritze.

In a Supreme Court hearing on the Biden administration’s challenge to aspects of Idaho’s strict abortion ban, US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar sought to appeal to conservative justices who just two years ago ruled that states should have the ability to prohibit the procedure.

The dispute, stemming from the Justice Department’s marquee response to the high court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, turns on whether federal mandates for hospital emergency room care override abortion bans that do not exempt situations where a woman’s health is in danger but her life is not yet threatened.

To prevail, the Biden administration will need the votes of two members of the court’s conservative bloc, and with Justice Brett Kavanaugh signaling sympathies toward Idaho, the case will likely come down to the votes of Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett. The two justices had tough questions for both sides of the case.

The court’s far-right wing, perhaps in an attempt to keep those two justices on their side, framed the case as a federal overreach into state power. The court’s liberals, meanwhile, focused on the grisly details of medical emergencies faced by pregnant woman that were not covered by the limited life-of-the-woman exemption in Idaho’s ban.

Follow the link to the list of take-aways.  While that craziness was going on in the District, we continued to be treated to the life and times of Tabloid targets and publishers.  Every time I tune into anything dealing with Trump, I feel like someone slipped me the brown acid.  H  can one malevolent man be so universally dangerous and disruptive? Especially one so incredibly stupid!  C  we have a debate on who is more genuinely evil?  A to or Trump? Thomas is a stooge. Kavanaugh is a wingman. Gorsuch certainly is in the running for evil, but not the way Alito does it. Robarts is out of his league and likely to go down in shame as history judges him the least effective Chief Justice ever

So, back to Pecker and the man who has to pay for sex coming and going. There’s been a whole of objecting accompanied by “sustained.”

recross: Trump cares about his family and so was worried about these types of stories, right?
objection
sustained
End of Pecker testimony

— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) April 26, 2024

JUST NOW: During his cross of Pecker, Trump's defense attorney, Emil Bove, has been repeatedly referring to Trump as "President Trump" when referencing periods of time when Trump was not in office.

The DA's office keeps objecting and Judge Merchan keeps sustaining those…

— Katie Phang (@KatiePhang) April 26, 2024

The prosecution needs to build a bridge for the jury into Trump's mind that establishes his intent

Pecker was a great witness for just that
 
I discussed that & what to expect when the next witness takes the stand @CNN @questCNN @OmarJimenez pic.twitter.com/ozKxHydNHS

— Norm Eisen (#TryingTrump out now!) (@NormEisen) April 26, 2024

More will be coming once the print journalists get their stories in.  I wish I could be Pollyanna and play the glad game, but I can only come up with the bad news. We get to see this continually, which is also the thing I’m glad about.  I m  feel like a total masochist every time I turn the TV on or read a magazine article, but just think how awful it would be if we didn’t know about this. I’m not sure what will become of Donald, but I’m certain that we still have time to make certain he doesn’t get back into the White House.  We have time to stop the MAGAdons that want to clone that agenda into every state and the U.S. Congress. We’ll see and read nothing else but propaganda if we don’t stop them now.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Guess who John Prine wrote this about?

https://skydancingblog.com/2024/04/26/funereal-friday-reads-life-as-a-dank-meme/

#PresidentialImmunity_ #Repeat1968 #EmergencyPregnancyHealthCare #JohnBuss #SCOTUS #TheCaravanOfFools #TheEvilTwinsDonaldAndAlito