Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Capitol and DC Police officials testified before the Senate today about the January 6th terrorist attack on the US Capitol building, and GOP Sen. Ron Johnson did everything he could to try to deny that any of it could possibly have been related to Trump's white supremacist cultists, of which Ron Johnson is apparently a paying member.

Since the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, some of former president Donald Trump’s supporters have suggested it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Initially, the argument was that maybe this was the work of provocateurs like antifa trying to give Trump supporters a bad name. That died down as scores of Trump supporters were arrested in connection with the violence — with some bristling at the idea that their actions would be blamed on antifa — and as GOP leaders cautioned their colleagues against the theory. Then the argument was that the storming of the Capitol wasn’t really that bad: that it wasn’t the “insurrection” that some alleged. This also runs afoul of the actual evidence.

On Tuesday, as his colleagues were trying to get to the bottom of the problems with the response to the Capitol riot, one senator united both of these theories: Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).

Johnson recently spearheaded the effort to argue that the event wasn’t actually an armed insurrection. As he began his questioning Tuesday, he assured that what happened was indeed a tragedy. But then he spent most of his time planting seeds of doubt that the violence wasn’t actually the work of Trump supporters.

The seeds, though, rely upon very speculative evidence and a very suspect gardener.

Johnson’s argument revolved around the account of one man: J. Michael Waller. Waller wrote a piece last month that later ran in the Federalist in which he strongly suggested provocateurs were actually responsible for what happened.

It’s worth noting that Waller is a senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy, which is a hard-line right-wing think tank founded by former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney. If those names ring a bell, it’s because Gaffney and the Center for Security policy had been ostracized, even by mainstream Republicans, before finding new life with the rise of Trump. In 2009, Gaffney wrote a piece about then-President Barack Obama citing supposed "mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.”


This is the source of the information Johnson thought worth raising — quoting Waller at length — in a Senate hearing.

But even beyond the source, what Johnson cited was highly speculative. Among the things Waller argued for his theory:

• People “wearing Trump or MAGA hats backward and who did not fit in with the rest of the crowd in terms of their actions and demeanor, whom I presumed to be antifa or other leftist agitators.”
• Saying “the mood of the crowd was positive and festive.”
• Emphasizing that, actually, the Trump crowd was pro-police. “Many wore pro-police shirts or carried pro-police ‘Back the Blue’ flags.”
• Citing the families and physical characteristics of those gathered: “ … Some were indignant and contemptuous of Congress, but not one appeared angry or incited to riot. Many of the marchers were families with small children; many were elderly, overweight, or just plain tired or frail — traits not typically attributed to the riot-prone.”

Waller’s piece is rife with leading conclusions, most notably:

• A very few didn’t share the jovial, friendly, earnest demeanor of the great majority. Some obviously didn’t fit in.
• Among them were younger twentysomethings wearing new Trump or MAGA hats, often with the visor in the back, showing no enthusiasm and either looking at the ground, glowering, or holding out their phones with outstretched arms to make videos of as many faces as possible in the crowd.
• Some appeared awkward, the way someone’s body language inadvertently shows the world that he feel like he doesn’t fit in. A few seemed to be nursing a deep, churning rage.

If these people were provocateurs, in other words, they didn’t appear to try that hard to fit into the crowd for some reason. Waller draws numerous conclusions for which there is no real evidence in the arrest records of those who stormed the Capitol.

Waller has also in recent weeks floated the baseless idea that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) purposely allowed Capitol Police to be overrun.

Waller’s piece also relied upon the debunked idea that the preplanning of the attack points the finger elsewhere, saying it “bore the markings of an organized operation planned well in advance of the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress.” As has been discussed ad nauseam, preplanning doesn’t mean the riot wasn’t incited. Democrats have argued this incitement far predated Trump’s Jan. 6 speech to supporters who later stormed the Capitol, given Trump had long predicted a stolen election and regularly cited the prospect of violence by his supporters.

None of this nuance made its way into Johnson’s presentation.

“The last five pages is titled ‘Provocateurs Turn Unsuspecting Marchers into an Invading Mob.’ ” Johnson said toward the end. “So I’d really recommend everybody in the committee read this account. And I’ve asked that it be entered into the record.”

 

This of course is exactly how the Right-wing noise machine works: Crackpot white supremacist cultist writes a wildly speculative pile of crap, crap gets picked up by right-wing social media, and then by Republican lawmakers who introduce the "evidence" into official proceedings, where the media then writes about it as if it's worth considering because the GOP brought it up as official, on the record stuff.

I'm tired of it, and I'm actually glad Johnson faces Wisconsin voters in 2022, because he's the number one flip chance as far as I'm concerned.

 

Replaying The Texas Blues

Democrats came close in Texas, but fell short in a major way, particularly among Latino voters. According to the Texas Democratic party itself, the reason was simple: lack of door-knocking sunk the Dems in a COVID-19 restricted campaign.

Texas Democrats conceded that Republicans won the state's turnout battle in the 2020 election by staying in the field despite the coronavirus pandemic, while the state's Democrats relied on digital and more unreliable telephone contact with voters.

According to a post-election report provided in advance to NBC News, the party lost its "most powerful and competitive advantage" when it didn't dispatch volunteers to canvass in person, following the directive of Joe Biden's campaign after the pandemic hit.

"Our inability to campaign was really devastating for us, especially with our main base. Our main base is Latino voters, and they do not take well to mail and texting contact," Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa said.

The report, released Monday, found that even though Democrats turned out at higher rates than expected, so did Republican voters, who outperformed the higher Democratic turnout.

The party struggled to reach voters "for whom we did not have phone numbers, who are disproportionately young [and] rural," as well as people of color.

Despite early hopes that they could turn the state blue, Democrats didn't win any new congressional seats or flip the state House, and former President Donald Trump got higher vote shares than expected in heavily Hispanic counties.

The report did not find a Latino shift to Republicans and Trump; about two-thirds of the state's Hispanics continue to support Democrats.

"Many have interpreted this as 'Latinos voted for Trump,' but it's more accurate to say, 'Latinos who were already Republicans turned out more than Latino Democrats,'" said the report, assembled by Hudson Cavanaugh, the state party's director of data science.

Support for Trump increased significantly in mostly rural, majority Latino counties, accounting for an estimated 17,000 net votes, according to the report.

Latinos moved to Trump in the Rio Grande Valley and in some parts of the Texas Panhandle, although they also supported Democratic candidates lower on the ballot.

Republicans were able to make headway in the conservative state with rhetoric blasting the Democrats' progressive wing on police reform — reduced to "defunding the police" — and on moving away from fossil fuels, which the GOP emphasized could affect jobs in Texas.

 

That lack of face-to-face contact really hurt the Dems in fighting GOP disinformation, and they lost the state because of it.  Here's hoping that 2022 goes better, but with Texas gerrymandering by the GOP on the way, it may not matter much now that districts will be redrawn within an inch of their lives to favor Republicans.

 

That combined with voter suppression and states like Texas may be entirely out of reach...unless Dems can pass voting rights legislation, which the GOP will never allow in the Senate.

 

That means getting rid of the filibuster, and well, we've been down this road before.

 

A Taxing Explanation, Con't

Well, and just as I was resigning myself to the Supreme Court sitting on the Trump tax return decision for months or longer in order to protect him from prosecution, it seems SCOTUS has finally gotten around to doing the right thing.

 

The Supreme Court has cleared the way for prosecutors in New York City to receive eight years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns and other financial records as part of an ongoing investigation into possible tax, insurance and bank fraud in Trump’s business empire.

The high court’s decision to turn down Trump’s request for a stay of a grand jury subpoena advances a criminal probe by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. that appears to be one of the most serious of an array of legal threats Trump faces in his post-presidency.

The justices issued no explanation for the denial and no member of the court publicly noted any dissent.

Last July, the justices unanimously rejected Trump’s broad claims that he was absolutely immune from state and local criminal investigations while serving as president. However, the decision allowed Trump to pursue other arguments against a wide-ranging subpoena served on the Trump Organization in August 2019.

A federal appeals court rejected those arguments in October 2020, prompting Trump’s lawyers to make another run at the Supreme Court. An agreement with Vance put the subpoena fight on hold while the justices considered Trump’s request for a stay.

The precise contours of Vance’s investigation remain uncertain, but it appears to be centered on allegations from former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen that the firm manipulated real estate valuations in order to maximize collateral for loans and minimize real estate taxes. Cohen also claimed that Trump committed fraud in dealings with insurance companies. Trump and the Trump Organization have denied the allegations.

The decision is the first breakthrough for investigators in accessing Trump’s financial records after numerous attempts by House Democrats and debates among federal investigators who worked for special counsel Robert Mueller. The House has been pursuing Trump’s financial records from his accounting firm, Mazars USA, as well as a top Trump creditor, Deutsche Bank. But those cases have been tied up in courts for years, with no end in sight.

 

So finally Cyrus Vance and company can get around to running the numbers, and hopefully soon running a grand jury indictment on Trump.  I like it when I'm worried about what turns out to be pretty much nothing, and the right thing happens sooner rather than later.

It's a nice change of pace from the last four years.

And speaking of the last four years...

Donald Trump’s yearslong quest to prevent the public, Congress, or law-enforcement officials from seeing his tax statements came to a resounding end with a unanimous Supreme Court ruling. He did not take the defeat in stride. Instead, the former president released a statement that, even by Trumpian standards, brims with anger.

Trump’s response bears every hallmark of an authentically Trump-authored text, as opposed to the knockoff versions produced by his aides. It is meandering, filled with run-on sentences, gratuitous insults, and exclamation points. Trump’s position on the tax returns rests on a series of assertions, ranging from his false claim that Robert Mueller found “No Collusion” to his insistence that he actually won the 2020 election to his extremely ironic complaint that prosecutors targeting their political opponents is “fascism, not justice.” (Trump, of course, spent his presidency publicly demanding his Attorneys General investigate his political rivals.)

The statement does contain one unambiguously true point: “This is something which has never happened to a president before.” That’s correct, because every president for the past several decades has voluntarily released his financial information. Only Trump refused.

 

Trump literally accuses the Supreme Court of enabling a "fishing expedition" and blames Andrew Cuomo for all of this, calling it "fascism, not justice." Oh yes, and he still claims he won the election.

I swear, I know indictments aren't coming, the risk to Manhattan, the great probability of the NYPD fascists aiding and abetting attacks on the DA's office and outing jurors, Trump whipping up rage to foment another attack, but damn I want this asshole in supermax.

As Steve M. reminds us, lower your expectations drastically about this meaning anything.

Donald Trump is much worse than Nixon, and yet Trump's poll numbers never sunk to the mid-20s during his presidency, the way Nixon's did, even after two impeachments. Nixon was eventuslly regarded as the greatest living monster in American politics. Much of America still doesn't see Trump that way.

Many Americans assume that everyone in big business cooks the books. They think New York real estate is a tough, cutthroat enterprise, and that you have to work the angles to make money.

Many Americans won't understand what the crimes are. They'll be bored by the details. They won't see how they were harmed by what Trump did. Remember when The New York Times obtained Trump tax records and ran a massive story about the financial chicanery they revealed? Most of America yawned.

I'd love to see Trump go to prison. But I'd also love to see him become the national pariah that Nixon became, someone who's an embarrassment even to his party-mates. We're not there yet. And a long investigation into business crimes, followed by a trial focused on a complicated parsing of financial documents, won't get us there.

 

Trump made at least $1.6 billion while in office, according to ethics watchdog CREW. At least 40% of the country will cheer that news because that's how it's supposed to work, and Trump was at least an honest criminal because all politicians are crooks, and Trump won the game of who can win the most money off the political grift, the most American thing possible. He's a hero to a third of the country for exactly that reason.

I still don't think Trump will ever be indicted for anything.

Last Call For Surviving A Neera Miss

In the last few days Sen. Joe Manchin has come out against the nomination of Neera Tanden to lead the White House's budget office, and with Sens. Collins and Romney also coming out against, it looks like the former head of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank may have burned too many bridges on Twitter to get the job.

A Cabinet nominee not making it to the finish line is a story as old as Washington. In the past, nominees have been forced to withdraw because of things like hiring undocumented workers or a questionable business deal or an unwillingness to be as transparent about your past life as our modern politics demands. 

But with Neera Tanden's nomination by President Joe Biden to be the director of the Office of Management and Budget, we may be witnessing the first nominee derailed by Twitter.
On Friday, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin announced that he wouldn't support Tanden's nomination because of her past tweets savaging a number of Manchin's colleagues. 

"I have carefully reviewed Neera Tanden's public statements and tweets that were personally directed towards my colleagues on both sides of the aisle from Senator Sanders to Senator McConnell and others. I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget," said Manchin. "For this reason, I cannot support her nomination." 

Manchin's announcement imperiled Tanden's nomination, as Democrats control only 50 seats in the Senate. With Manchin against her, Tanden now needs at least one Republican senator to back her nomination for her to make it. And early Monday morning, the Republican considered one of the most likely to back her said she would not -- again because of Twitter. 

Here's Maine Sen. Susan Collins on her opposition to the Tanden nomination:  

Neera Tanden has neither the experience nor the temperament to lead this critical agency. Her past actions have demonstrated exactly the kind of animosity that President Biden has pledged to transcend. 

"In addition, Ms. Tanden's decision to delete more than a thousand tweets in the days before her nomination was announced raises concerns about her commitment to transparency." 

And on Monday, a statement from Sen. Mitt Romney's office made clear that he would be a "no" on the Tanden nomination, citing Twitter as the reason. 

"Senator Romney has been critical of extreme rhetoric from prior nominees, and this is consistent with that position," spokeswoman Arielle Mueller said. "He believes it's hard to return to comity and respect with a nominee who has issued a thousand mean tweets." 

While Tanden's chances are significantly less good than they were even 72 hours ago, the White House is insisting that they will continue to push for her to be confirmed. 

"Neera Tanden=accomplished policy expert, would be 1st Asian American woman to lead OMB, has lived experience having benefited from a number of federal programs as a kid, looking ahead to the committee votes this week and continuing to work toward her confirmation," tweeted White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Monday morning after the Collins statement came out.

 

Tanden leveled a LOT of attacks on Twitter against these same senators for blocking Obama-era initiatives and enabling Trump over the last four years, and frankly she made a lot of enemies. Republicans do that too and that kind of hard-nosed social media dexterity made Trump hires famous, the difference is she's of Indian descent and a woman and a liberal who fights back, which means she's just too mean to be hired.

Tanden ran a liberal think tank in the Trump era, meaning she's pretty good with numbers, but progressives hated her too.

For years, Tanden, Biden's pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, has feuded -- most frequently and famously on Twitter, where she is prolific and pointed -- with Sanders supporters. Those clashes have occasionally pitted her against personal allies of the Vermont senator and tapped into the left's frustrations with the internal practices of the liberal think tank she's led for nearly a decade.

By the time she was introduced by Biden on Tuesday, alongside other senior members of his economic team, Tanden's path to Senate confirmation already seemed in some peril -- but not because of dissent from the left. The pugilistic president of the Center for American Progress and longtime aide to Hillary Clinton has punched both ways during her long political career. Some Senate Republicans were quick to highlight her past attacks on the right as a reason they might oppose her confirmation.

 

Now she's both too liberal and not liberal enough, which seemingly only applies to women of color nominated to Democratic positions of power (see the entire year-plus long hatefest against Madam Vice President).  Tanden's most likely toast, but I'm upset to see this kind of petty nonsense going on against Biden's picks from both the left and the right.

However, if you think racism against Biden picks are limited to women, Republicans apparently want California AG Xavier Becerra gone from running the Department of Health and Human Services too.

Go figure.

The Banana Republicans Split

If Donald Trump does actually follow though on his threat to create his own party, nearly half of current Republicans would join him, according to a new USA Today/Suffolk poll from over the weekend.

If there's a civil war in the Republican Party, the voters who backed Donald Trump in November's election are ready to choose sides.

Behind Trump.

An exclusive Suffolk University/USA TODAY Poll finds Trump's support largely unshaken after his second impeachment trial in the Senate, this time on a charge of inciting an insurrection in the deadly assault on the Capitol Jan. 6.

By double digits, 46%-27%, those surveyed say they would abandon the GOP and join the Trump party if the former president decided to create one. The rest are undecided.

"We feel like Republicans don't fight enough for us, and we all see Donald Trump fighting for us as hard as he can, every single day," Brandon Keidl, 27, a Republican and small-business owner from Milwaukee, says in an interview after being polled. "But then you have establishment Republicans who just agree with establishment Democrats and everything, and they don't ever push back."

Half of those polled say the GOP should become "more loyal to Trump," even at the cost of losing support among establishment Republicans. One in five, 19%, say the party should become less loyal to Trump and more aligned with establishment Republicans.

The survey of 1,000 Trump voters, identified from 2020 polls, was taken by landline and cellphone last Monday through Friday. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

They express stronger loyalty to Trump the person (54%) than they did to the Republican Party that twice nominated him for the White House (34%).

 

If only a quarter to a third of Republicans would absolutely stay in the GOP if Trump made a third party, the term "absolute disaster" doesn't begin to cover it for national Never Trump Republicans. But as much as I'd love to see Republicans split their own vote and get destroyed by Democrats in any even remotely competitive House district, Senate race, or Governor's race, I can't imagine Trump would be allowed to do this because it would lead to a near total takeover of the government by Democrats.

But what Trump does have is leverage over his foes in the GOP, and that leverage is going to only grow stronger. he's still going to pick primary winners in just about every GOP race. That's good for Trump, and bad for the country.

We'll see how much damage the split causes, but it's getting increasingly untenable, and I expect sooner rather than later, the opposition to Trump will be removed completely.

America Goes Viral, And Goes To Mourn

The death toll from COVID-19 has now reached 500,000, an incomprehensible loss of life in any context. And 99.99% of those deaths were preventable, and failed to be prevented by the Trump regime. But it's the Biden administration's problem to fix, and fixing it they are...but thousands are dying daily in the meantime.

A nation numbed by misery and loss is confronting a number that still has the power to shock: 500,000.

Roughly one year since the first known death by the coronavirus in the United States, an unfathomable toll is nearing — the loss of half a million people.

No other country has counted so many deaths in the pandemic. More Americans have perished from Covid-19 than on the battlefields of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined.

The milestone comes at a hopeful moment: New virus cases are down sharply, deaths are slowing and vaccines are steadily being administered.

But there is concern about emerging variants of the virus, and it may be months before the pandemic is contained.

Each death has left untold numbers of mourners, a ripple effect of loss that has swept over towns and cities. Each death has left an empty space in communities across America: a bar stool where a regular used to sit, one side of a bed unslept in, a home kitchen without its cook.

The living find themselves amid vacant places once occupied by their spouses, parents, neighbors and friends — the nearly 500,000 coronavirus dead.

In Chicago, the Rev. Ezra Jones stands at his pulpit on Sundays, letting his eyes wander to the back row. That spot belonged to Moses Jones, his uncle, who liked to drive to church in his green Chevy Malibu, arrive early and chat everybody up before settling in to his seat by the door. He died of the coronavirus in April.

“I can still see him there,” said Mr. Jones, the pastor. “It never goes away.”

There is a street corner in Plano, Texas, that was occupied by Bob Manus, a veteran crossing guard who shepherded children to school for 16 years, until he fell ill in December.

In the Twin Cities of Minnesota, LiHong Burdick, 72, another victim of the coronavirus, is missing from the groups she cherished: one for playing bridge, another for mahjong and another for polishing her English.

At her empty townhouse, the holiday decorations are still up. There are cards lined on the mantel.

“You walk in and it smells like her,” said her son, Keith Bartram. “Seeing the chair she would sit in, the random things around the house, it’s definitely very surreal. I went over there yesterday and had a little bit of a breakdown. It’s hard to be in there, when it looks like she should be there, but she’s not.”

 

One in 670 Americans have died from the virus. If you don't personally know somebody who has, I guarantee you that you know multiple people who have lost a friend, co-worker, someone in their religious congregation or a loved one to the virus. It is up to us to remember them, to remember why they died, and to deal with those responsible.

We have to keep living for them.

StupidiNews!

• The FAA says it will inspect and possibly ground as many as two dozen Boeing 777 equipped with Pratt and Whitney PW4000 engines after a United Airlines flight lost an engine over the weekend.
• The Biden White House says it has opened communication with Iran over detained Americans as the US continues talks over getting Tehran to rejoin the 2017 nuclear deal.
• Protesters in Myanmar are calling for a general strike as demonstrations against the military coup earlier this month that ousted Aung San Suu Kyi continue.
• The Biden Administration says it continues to work with states and school districts to reopen schools to in-person learning by the end of April.
• The total value of Bitcoins around the world has now topped $1 trillion as the value of the cryptocurrency continues to skyrocket past the $56,000 mark from $29,000 earlier this year.
  

Last Call For Going Less Viral, Con't

Biden's first 30 days have helped to turn around America's dire COVID-19 issues, as cases, hospitalizations, and death rates are all down significantly from their post-New Year's peaks as vaccinations are ramping up.

Covid-19 hospitalizations in the United States are at the lowest level since early November, when a fall surge in cases and deaths was picking up steam, data showed Saturday. 

This comes as federal officials say they're pushing large shipments of vaccines to states this weekend, in part to make up for a backlog from winter storms -- and as public health experts push for faster inoculations before more-transmissible coronavirus variants get a better foothold. 

About 59,800 Covid-19 patients were in US hospitals on Friday -- down about 55% from a pandemic peak of more than 132,470 on January 6, according to The COVID Tracking Project. 

Friday's number is the first below 60,000 since November 9, when daily cases, hospitalizations and deaths were on a several-month incline through the holidays. 

Averages for daily new cases and deaths also have been declining for weeks after hitting all-time peaks around mid-January. Public health experts have been pressing for faster vaccinations, before more transmissible variants have a chance to spread, fearing they could reverse recent progress. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said an apparently more-transmissible variant first identified in the United Kingdom could be the dominant strain in the US by next month. 

"This is why we're telling people to not stop masking, not stop avoiding indoor social gatherings quite yet, because we don't really know what's going to happen with this variant," Dr. Megan Ranney, and emergency medicine physician with Rhode Island's Brown University, told CNN Saturday. 

"And we saw what happened last winter when we didn't take Covid seriously enough."
The national test positivity rate -- or the percentage of tests taken that turn out to be positive -- averaged about 4.8% over the last week as of early Saturday, according to The COVID Tracking Project. 

That's the first time the average has dropped below 5% since October, and it's far below a winter peak of about 13.6% near the start of January. 

The World Health Organization has recommended governments not reopen until the test positivity rate is 5% or lower for at least two weeks.

 

That's the good news.  The bad news is that we still have a long way to go. We're still well above the March and July peaks of the pandemic, we're still recording a half-million new cases a week, and we're still seeing 2,000 people a day die from the virus in America. There's a light at the end of the tunnel, but slacking off on masks and social distancing created the last three surges in cases, and my real fear is that Americans will ignore masking and we'll find ourselves in a fourth spike later this spring.

 

 

The numbers are getting better, but it will be months before we can get this under control still, and that depends largely on the UK strain and any other strains that could get loose in the country and reinfect.

 

Stay safe, stay masked, stay home.

Time For Duty Garland

Confirmation hearings for Biden's Attorney General pick, DC Appeals COurt Chief Justice Merrick Garland, begin this week, and Garland's opening statement is sure to cause lots of Republican wailing gnashing of teeth.

 

Merrick Garland, President Joe Biden’s nominee for attorney general, is pledging he’ll take the lead in prosecuting participants in the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“If confirmed, I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 -- a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government,” Garland said in an opening statement prepared for his confirmation hearing on Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Garland also signaled he’ll make decisions independently from Biden. “The president nominates the attorney general to be the lawyer -- not for any individual, but for the people of the United States,” he said in the brief prepared testimony of less than three pages.

Former President Donald Trump openly pressed his attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and William Barr, to protect him and his associates from prosecution and to go after his political enemies. Biden has said he’ll let his attorney general make the tough calls on touchy matters -- including pending investigations of his son, Hunter Biden, and inquiries touching on Trump.

“One of the most serious pieces of damage done by the last administration was the politicizing of the Justice Department,” Biden said at a CNN town hall in Milwaukee on Feb. 16. “Their prosecutorial decisions will be left to the Justice Department, not me.”

In the testimony released Saturday night, Garland indicated that, if confirmed, he’ll seek to restore policies and practices the department developed before the Trump administration, including those that the nominee said protect the agency “from partisan influence in law enforcement investigations,” those that “strictly regulate” communications with the White House and those that respect the professionalism of career employees.

Just getting a hearing for the cabinet post will be vindication for Garland almost five years after Senate Republicans blocked consideration of his nomination to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama. This time, Garland has bipartisan support and is expected to be confirmed.

The Jan. 6 insurrection has only added to a roster of politically charged issues that Garland will be asked about when he finally has his confirmation hearing.

Garland made no reference in the testimony to calls for him to consider criminal charges against Trump, a possibility that has been advanced not only by Democrats but also by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

After joining most Republicans in blocking the former president’s conviction in his second impeachment trial this month, McConnell took to the Senate floor to denounce Trump as “practically and morally responsible” for the riot and pointedly added that former presidents can be subject to criminal and civil litigation. Trump “didn’t get away with anything yet -- yet,” he said.

 

McConnell would love to see Trump prosecuted by the Justice Department, as he would suddenly have all the cover in the world to pretend he never said anything about Trump facing justice and to attack the "partisan witch hunt" along with the rest of the GOP.  In fact, all the Republicans would forget they said that Trump should face justice, and they'll all get away with it when it happens.

Luckily, Merrick Garland looks like he'll do that job that's required, not just the job to show up for, and yes, he'll be confirmed easily in the end.

And then, well, I'm still not confident of Trump indictments, but if anyone will do it, it's Garland.

Sunday Long Read: Thirty Pieces Of Silver Flair

As Trump's post-White House financial and criminal woes grow, now that he's no longer plopped like a tumor in the Oval Office, the people that work for him are more than happy to share their stories of his gross imposition among the little people of his paper empire. Jessica Sidman at the Washingtonian got a hold of some real doozy stories in this week's Sunday Long Read and the people that gravitated towards Trump are even more awful than he is, it turns out.

Everyone knew Table 72 belonged to the President. The round booth in the middle of the Trump Hotel’s mezzanine was impossible to miss. It didn’t matter how many Congress members were clamoring for a reservation at the steakhouse or whether some tourist tried to slip a manager some cash (which they definitely did). No one sat at Trump’s table except the President, his children, and, occasionally, an approved member of his inner circle like Rudy Giuliani or Mike Pence.

In practical terms, the restaurant wanted to avoid the horror of turning away the leader of the free world if he happened to show up on a whim. But the seat also developed a kind of mystique. Sure, it may now be a relic in an underperforming venue. But for those four epic years, it was a carefully curated prop in the Trump Show.

And when the star appeared, you had to stick to the script. A “Standard Operating Procedure” document, recently obtained by Washingtonian, outlined step by step exactly what to do and what to say anytime Trump dined at BLT Prime, the hotel restaurant.

As soon as Trump was seated, the server had to “discreetly present” a mini bottle of Purell hand sanitizer. (This applied long before Covid, mind you.) Next, cue dialogue: “Good (time of day) Mr. President. Would you like your Diet Coke with or without ice?” the server was instructed to recite. A polished tray with chilled bottles and highball glasses was already prepared for either response. Directions for pouring the soda were detailed in a process no fewer than seven steps long—and illustrated with four photo exhibits. The beverage had to be opened in front of the germophobe commander in chief, “never beforehand.” The server was to hold a longneck-bottle opener by the lower third of the handle in one hand and the Diet Coke, also by the lower third, in the other. Once poured, the drink had to be placed at the President’s right-hand side. “Repeat until POTUS departs.”

Trump always had the same thing: shrimp cocktail, well-done steak, and fries (plus sometimes apple pie or chocolate cake for dessert). Popovers—make it a double for the President—had to be served within two minutes and the crustaceans “immediately.” The manual instructed the server to open mini glass bottles of Heinz ketchup in front of Trump, taking care to ensure he could hear the seal make the “pop” sound.

Garnishes were a no-no. Melania Trump once sent back a Dover sole because it was dressed with parsley and chives, says former executive chef Bill Williamson, who worked at the restaurant until the start of the pandemic. Trump himself never returned a plate, but if he was disappointed, you can bet the complaint would travel down the ranks. Like the time the President questioned why his dining companion had a bigger steak. The restaurant already special-ordered super-sized shrimp just for him and no one else. Next time, they’d better beef up the beef.

“It was the same steak. Both well done. Maybe it was a half ounce bigger or something, I don’t know,” says Williamson, who had previously run the kitchens of DC staples Birch & Barley and the Riggsby. The chef had always prepared a bone-in rib eye or filet mignon for Trump. After Steakgate, he switched to a 40-ounce tomahawk. Trump would never again gripe that he didn’t have the greatest, hugest, most beautiful steak.

One more thing. Don’t forget the snacks. A tray of junk food needed to be available for every Trump visit: Lay’s potato chips (specifically, sour cream and onion), Milky Way, Snickers, Nature Valley Granola Bars, Tic Tacs, gummy bears, Chips Ahoy, Oreos, Nutter Butters, Tootsie Rolls, chocolate-covered raisins, and Pop-Secret.

The whole SOP reads like a pop star’s rider, which is apt for a place that served as center stage for the Trump drama and its entire cast of characters. Now, though, the Washington hotel is in the process of figuring out its next act. In 2019, the Trump Organization started trying to unload it for a reported $500 million—a number that industry pros reportedly balked at even before Covid devastated the hospitality world. Between the pandemic, Trump’s defeat, and the fallout from the US Capitol attack, the hotel’s cachet has plummeted since then. A financial disclosure released at the end of Trump’s presidency shows that the property took a 63-percent hit to its revenue in 2020.

If the hotel is ultimately sold, the new owner would likely start from scratch. And for the people who popped the ketchup and bussed the ungarnished plates, that means their jobs would be done. Well done.

But hey, it was a wild ride while it lasted!

Now veterans of the place are opening up about what it was really like behind the curtains of “America’s Living Room,” where right-wing operatives were treated like celebrities and political power determined the seating chart. If you weren’t in the business of Making America Great Again, well, sweetheart, you quickly learned to fake it. Working for the Trump hotel meant putting on a performance every night—right down to the gummy bears and popcorn.

Imagine this carbuncle on the scrotum of America being the leader of the free world, wolfing down burnt-to-hell steaks and junk food and Diet Coke all the time. Don't feel too bad for the employees though.

 
The upper echelon of hotel management portrayed themselves as true Trump believers, but the majority of those who fed and cleaned up after the right-wing clientele were ambivalent at best. They clocked in because the place paid well. Really well. Michel Rivera, a former bartender at the lobby bar, says he pulled in more than $100,000 a year with tips (at least $30K more than he made at the Hay-Adams). He says it’s the best-paying job he’s had in his 25-year career, with generous health benefits to boot—a comment echoed by many other ex-employees.

“People would literally come up to me and give me $100 bills and be like, ‘You must be the best bartender in the world if you work here!’ ” Rivera says. “A group of three or four guys would come up, have a round of drinks—I could easily sell them over $1,000. You don’t see that at too many bars.” One restaurant manager says she’s never worked anyplace else where guests would so often try to grease her palm “like the old Mafia days,” angling for proximity to power. “I’d have people try to palm me to get closer to someone’s table, if a politician was in, or try to sit at Trump’s table, which is a big no-no,” she says. “I declined, obviously. I would get fired if we moved someone to Trump’s table.”

 

They were there for the money and the fame too, which is exactly why a chief executive of the US owning hotels and restaurants is a bad idea. 

Everyone was in on it.

They always are.

Orange You Glad He's Back?

Like a particularly persistent brain parasite, Donald Trump has emerged, sticky and gravid, from his Florida lair and will return to the national stage at CPAC 2021 next weekend in all his Huttese infamy.

Donald Trump will be making his first post-presidential appearance at a conservative gathering in Florida next weekend.

Ian Walters, spokesman for the American Conservative Union, confirmed that Trump will be speaking at the group’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 28.

Trump is expected to use the speech to talk about the future of the Republican Party and the conservative moment, as well as to criticize President Joe Biden’s efforts to undo his immigration policies, according to a person who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the plans.

CPAC is being held this year in Orlando, Florida, and will feature a slew of former Trump administration officials and others who represent his wing of the GOP, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem.

Trump has been keeping a relatively low profile since he retired from the White House to Palm Beach, Florida, in January, but reemerged last week to conduct a series of phone-in interviews to commemorate the death of conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh.

Trump has a long history with CPAC, which played a key role in his emergence as a political force.

 

Last year at CPAC, Mick Mulvaney was telling conservatives that COVID was a hoax and the conference promptly turned into one of the first major Trump regime-caused super spreader events in the nation as several conference attendees got sick with COVID and passed it along because of course nobody worse masks.

This year, Trump will again spread his virus of hate and destruction.

The Day Hell Froze Over In Texas, Con't

When government is small enough to drown in a bathtub, the solution is always brutal, late-stage capitalist exploitation of those who can least afford it, and Texas's power grid disaster is no different.

Some Texans are facing yet another crisis: how to pay enormous electric bills.

The Texas power supplier Griddy, which sells unusual plans with prices tied to the spot price of power on the Texas grid, warned its customers over the weekend that their bills would rise significantly during the storm and that they should switch providers.

Some quickly looked into doing that but found the actual changeover of service wouldn’t happen for days.

Now customers say they never dreamed they’d be billed in the four figures for five days of service.

Karen Cosby said her cost is $5,000 for usage since Saturday at her 2,700-square-foot house in Rockwall.

DeAndre Upshaw of Dallas said the electric bill for his 900-square-foot, two-story townhouse was also $5,000.

Other customers on social media expressed frustration with similar bills from Griddy, the power supplier that told its 29,000 customers on Saturday, after spot electricity prices soared, to quickly shift out of its network and find a new supplier.

Those spot prices hit $9,000 per megawatt-hour. That means $9 for a kilowatt-hour that usually costs Cosby around 7 cents, and sometimes as little as 2 cents.

In Texas’ deregulated electricity market, Griddy and some other power suppliers charge customers wholesale variable rates per kilowatt-hour. The plans are relatively new. Most Texans pay fixed rates.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, set a cap of $9,000 per megawatt-hour as an incentive to electricity suppliers to add natural gas-fired generating capacity, said Jere Thompson, retired co-founder of Dallas-based Ambit Energy.

“We all believed it [hitting that cap] would happen in the summer with peak cooling demand, but the possibility was always sitting out there,” Thompson said. Prices might hit the cap for a few hours, but no one thought they would stay at the cap for this long.

The price per megawatt-hour reached $9,000 around 10 p.m. Sunday night and stayed there for much of Monday and all of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday morning, it fell to $35 and kept dropping. At 4 p.m., it was 85 cents.

Watching the events unfold was mesmerizing, Thompson said. The retail providers are the shock absorbers when prices rise, and those companies are going to be hurt.

Customers hit with these bills should know they “are not alone in their predicament,” said Andrew Barlow, a spokesman for the Texas Public Utility Commission.

Wholesale rate-based plans “can be tantalizing to consumers when the sales emphasis is placed on the possibility of very low rates during times of pleasant weather,” he said. “But they can be financially devastating when harsh hot or cold weather creates scarcity in the wholesale energy market.”

 

It's exactly the disaster capitalism that Republicans want. Cheap, deregulated versions of everything that you need and that government should safely provide and protect, for those who can afford the least, and when it inevitably fails, the rich get richer and the poor get destroyed.

 Everything Republican is Big Casino now, including power and water, and the house always wins. 

Everyone else always loses.

 

It's About Suppression, Con't

Georgia Republicans found out the hard way that Georgia isn't a red state, it's a purple state with decades of voter suppression where one-third of the population is Black, and current governor Brian Kemp knew exactly how to steal a close election against Stacey Abrams because he was Secretary of State. As a result, the GA GOP is introducing a massive new package of voter suppression measures targeting Black and brown voters to keep them from getting to the polls in 2022.

After Donald Trump failed to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, Republicans in the state’s legislature are doing everything they can to make it more difficult for Democrats to win the next one.

On Thursday, with almost no public notice, Georgia House Republicans introduced a 48-page bill to significantly change voting procedures in the state in a way that particularly targets Black voters in the Atlanta metro area. This followed similar moves by the state Senate earlier in the week.

The House bill, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Barry Fleming, chair of a newly created Special Committee on Election Integrity, limits the weekend early-voting period to only one Saturday before the election. Fleming claimed the provision will provide “uniformity” in voting hours across the state, but in practice it will take away voting opportunities for large, heavily Democratic counties in Atlanta, like DeKalb and Fulton, which held early voting on multiple weekends in the runup to the 2020 election when many Black voters turned out.

It specifically eliminates early voting on Sundays, when Black churches traditionally hold “Souls to the Polls” get-out-the-vote drives. The January 5 runoffs were the first time that Democrats outnumbered Republicans during in-person early voting, and Black voters constituted a third of early voters. In the November general election, Black voters used early voting on weekends at a higher rate than whites in 43 of 50 of the state’s largest counties. Black voters make up roughly 30 percent of Georgia’s electorate, but comprised 36.7 percent of Sunday voters in 2020 and 36.4 percent of voters on early voting days Fleming wants to eliminate, according to Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group founded by Stacey Abrams.

“This bill is Jim Crow with a suit and tie,” said Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia.

When North Carolina Republicans eliminated Sunday voting in 2013 after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals called it “as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times” and struck it down for targeting Black voters “with almost surgical precision.”

Republican leaders in Georgia notably stood up to Trump when he sought to overturn the presidential election results in the state, with GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger defending the integrity of the system by holding three recounts that found no evidence of fraud. But that hasn’t stopped Republicans in the legislature from introducing bill after bill to limit voting options after Georgia turned blue, and Black voters showed up in record numbers during the January runoff to elect two Democratic senators.

The proposed reduction in early voting times in Georgia seems likely to make already-long lines in the state worse. Voters in Atlanta waited up to 11 hours to vote during the November general election, and during the June primary, voters in predominantly white areas waited six minutes to vote while voters in areas predominantly of people of color waited 51 minutes to vote.

Other provisions of the bill would add a voter-ID requirement for mail-in ballots, give voters less time to request mail-in ballots and election officials less time to send them out, throw out ballots that are cast in the wrong precinct, and restrict the use of mail-in ballot drop boxes.

The proposals “would have devastating consequences for voting rights in Georgia,” wrote a coalition of 28 voting rights groups led by Fair Fight Action, “and the people of Georgia have been blindsided by its release.”

Democrats were angry that the House bill was released at 1:53 p.m. on Thursday before a 3 p.m. hearing. “None of the Democrats had anything to say about it,” said state Rep. Rhonda Burnough, a Democrat from south Atlanta. “The public, people of color, didn’t have any opportunity to review or give an opinion.”

“There’s nothing more important fundamentally than a person’s right and the privilege of voting,” says Calvin Smyre, dean of the House and a longtime civil rights activist. “Something like this requires a lot of vetting.”

 

The Republican answer to the marketplace of ideas is "keep Black people from voting because they vote Democratic." There's basically no better example of structural racism than Republican voter suppression in states with large Black populations. They do it, because they would lose without doing it.

It's that simple.

Black Votes Matter.

Last Call For Prince Of Darkness, Con't

Our old friend Erik Prince is back in the news, former Trump Miseducation minister Betsy DeVos's brother has been a very, very naughty boy.

Erik Prince, the former head of the security contractor Blackwater Worldwide and a prominent supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, violated a United Nations arms embargo on Libya by sending weapons to a militia commander who was attempting to overthrow the internationally backed government, according to U.N. investigators.

A confidential U.N. report obtained by The New York Times and delivered by investigators to the Security Council on Thursday reveals how Mr. Prince deployed a force of foreign mercenaries, armed with attack aircraft, gunboats and cyberwarfare capabilities, to eastern Libya at the height of a major battle in 2019.

As part of the operation, which the report said cost $80 million, the mercenaries also planned to form a hit squad that could track down and kill selected Libyan commanders.

Mr. Prince, a former Navy SEAL and the brother of Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s education secretary, became a symbol of the excesses of privatized American military force when his Blackwater contractors killed 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007.

In the past decade he has relaunched himself as an executive who strikes deals — sometimes for minerals, other times involving military force — in war-addled but resource-rich countries, mostly in Africa.

During the Trump administration, Mr. Prince was a generous donor and a staunch ally of the president, often in league with figures like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone as they sought to undermine Mr. Trump’s critics. And Mr. Prince came under scrutiny from the Trump-Russia inquiry over his meeting with a Russian banker in 2017.

Mr. Prince refused to cooperate with the U.N. inquiry; his lawyer did not respond to questions about the report. Last year the lawyer, Matthew L. Schwartz, told the Times that Mr. Prince “had nothing whatsoever” to do with military operations in Libya.

The report raises the question of whether Mr. Prince played on his ties to the Trump administration to pull off the Libya operation.

It describes how a friend and former partner of Mr. Prince traveled to Jordan to buy surplus, American-made Cobra helicopters from the Jordanian military — a sale that ordinarily would require American government permission, according to military experts. The friend, assured officials in Jordan that he had “clearances from everywhere” and his team’s work had been approved “at the highest level,” the report found.

But the Jordanians, unimpressed by those claims, stopped the sale, forcing the mercenaries to source new aircraft from South Africa.

A Western official, speaking to the Times on the condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to discuss confidential work, said the investigators had also obtained phone records showing that Mr. Prince’s friend and former partner made several calls to the main White House switchboard in late July 2019, after the mercenary operation ran into trouble.

The accusation that Mr. Prince violated the U.N.’s arms embargo on Libya exposes him to possible U.N. sanctions, including a travel ban and a freeze on his bank accounts and other assets — though such an outcome is uncertain.

Mr. Prince is not the only one to have been accused of violating the decade-old arms embargo on Libya. Rampant meddling by regional and global powers has fueled years of fighting, drawing mercenaries and other profiteers seeking riches from a war that has brought only death and misery to a great many Libyans.

The sheer breadth of evidence in the latest U.N. report — 121 pages of code names, cover stories, offshore bank accounts and secretive weapons transfers spanning eight countries, not to mention a brief appearance by a Hollywood friend of Mr. Prince — provides a glimpse into the secretive world of international mercenaries.

 

Let's be honest, the guy's actual job title is "James Bond Supervillain".  And if the UN has evidence of Prince violating Libya sanctions, then the US has it...and the Justice Department.

 

Have fun, Erik.

The Day Hell Froze Over In Texas, Con't

Dangerous deregulation and Republican greed resulted in a catastrophe in Texas as millions remains without power and water as more record low temperatures are headed for the Lone Star State, but the reality is things got so bad this week in Texas that the state's entire power grid almost completely collapsed, and would have been down for several months.

Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.

As millions of customers throughout the state begin to have power restored after days of massive blackouts, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which operates the power grid that covers most of the state, said Texas was dangerously close to a worst-case scenario: uncontrolled blackouts across the state.

The quick decision that grid operators made in the early hours of Monday morning to begin what was intended to be rolling blackouts — but lasted days for millions of Texans — occurred because operators were seeing warning signs that massive amounts of energy supply was dropping off the grid.

As natural gas fired plants, utility scale wind power and coal plants tripped offline due to the extreme cold brought by the winter storm, the amount of power supplied to the grid to be distributed across the state fell rapidly. At the same time, demand was increasing as consumers and businesses turned up the heat and stayed inside to avoid the weather.

“It needed to be addressed immediately," said Bill Magness, president of ERCOT. “It was seconds and minutes [from possible failure] given the amount of generation that was coming off the system.”

Grid operators had to act quickly to cut the amount of power distributed, Magness said, because if they had waited, “then what happens in that next minute might be that three more [power generation] units come offline, and then you’re sunk.”

Magness said on Wednesday that if operators had not acted in that moment, the state could have suffered blackouts that “could have occurred for months,” and left Texas in an “indeterminately long” crisis.

While generators rapidly dropped off the grid as the weather worsened, operators monitored the difference between the supply of power on the grid and the demand for that power. As supply dwindled and demand grew, the margin narrowed to more and more dangerous levels, forcing grid operators to enact emergency protocols to either increase supply or decrease demand.

The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.

If the grid had gone totally offline, the physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid could have taken months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software and information company headquartered in Austin.

“As chaotic as it was, the whole grid could’ve been in blackout,” she said. “ERCOT is getting a lot of heat, but the fact that it wasn’t worse is because of those grid operators.”

 

In other words, the rolling blackouts were needed to keep the grid from collapsing entirely, precisely because Texas cut itself off from the national power grid and didn't have the capacity to generate the power needed to keep the lights on for everyone.

Meanwhile, Texas Republicans are continuing to scream about "frozen windmills" when states that actually bother to weatherize their windmills, like Alaska, have no problems keeping them going. Texas's power infrastructure nearly imploded completely because of Republican misrule, and there's a good chance that the state's water infrastructure is now so critically damaged that Texans may be under boil advisories for weeks or months.

You voted for these Republicans, Texas.

You have the power to vote them out. And this is coming from a Kentucky Democrat.