Village Idocy, Or The Hit Dog Hollers

NY Times columnist Bret Stephens goes full white nationalist in his latest piece, screaming Trumpian dog whistles at rock concert loudness after last week's debates in Miami.

In this week’s Democratic debates, it wasn’t just individual candidates who presented themselves to the public. It was also the party itself. What conclusions should ordinary people draw about what Democrats stand for, other than a thunderous repudiation of Donald Trump, and how they see America, other than as a land of unscrupulous profiteers and hapless victims?

Here’s what: a party that makes too many Americans feel like strangers in their own country. A party that puts more of its faith, and invests most of its efforts, in them instead of us.

They speak Spanish. We don’t. They are not U.S. citizens or legal residents. We are. They broke the rules to get into this country. We didn’t. They pay few or no taxes. We already pay most of those taxes. They willingly got themselves into debt. We’re asked to write it off. They don’t pay the premiums for private health insurance. We’re supposed to give up ours in exchange for some V.A.-type nightmare. They didn’t start enterprises that create employment and drive innovation. We’re expected to join the candidates in demonizing the job-creators, breaking up their businesses and taxing them to the hilt.

This is full-on Trump rally racism that could have been written by Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon or Sean Hannity.  What prompted this tirade?

Sen. Kamala Harris daring to stand up to former VP Joe Biden.

Throughout the debates, I kept wondering if any of the leading candidates would speak to Americans beyond the Democratic base. But Joe Biden seemed too feeble, oratorically and intellectually, to buck the self-defeating trend. Pete Buttigieg was, as always, fluent, knowledgeable and sincere. But his big moment — a mea culpa for a racially charged policing incident in South Bend — felt like another well-mannered white guy desperate to put his wokeness on display.

Harris, meanwhile, came across as Barack Obama in reverse, especially with her scurrilous attack on Biden for the sin of having had a functional political relationship with two former segregationist senators in the 1970s. This was portrayed as a clever debate move but it will come to haunt her.

Obama’s political genius was to emphasize what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, authors of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind,” have called “common-humanity identity politics”— he made you feel comfortable no matter the color of your skin. Harris’s approach, by contrast, is “common-enemy identity politics.” Making white Americans feel racially on trial for views they may have held in the past on crime, busing and similar subjects is not going to help the Democrats.

None of this means that Democrats can’t win in 2020. The economy could take a bad turn. Or Trump could outdo himself in loathsomeness. But the Democratic Party we saw this week did even less to appeal beyond its base than the president. And at least his message is that he’s on their — make that our — side.

Democrats!  Don't you dare make white voters uncomfortable or they'll vote for Trump so that you suffer!

Of course, that's true.  Stephens's message is clear and he is correct.  White voters will vote for Trump just to hurt those people.

2014 and 2016 showed us that.  Black Lives Matter showed us that.  Barack Obama saying "If I had a son he'd look like Trayvon Martin" infuriated millions of white voters.

We have to turn out more than they do in 2020.  Period.

Trump Gets Walled Off

A federal judge has issued a permanent injunction against the Trump regime, blocking use of military funds for Trump's border wall vanity project.

U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam issued the permanent injunction in a California federal court after initially ruling last month to temporarily halt the administration’s use of military funds for the border wall.

President Trump declared a national emergency earlier this year in order to divert roughly $6 billion in Defense Department funds toward border wall construction. Friday's ruling blocks the administration from using $2.5 billion in military funds for a border wall.

The injunction halts border wall construction at different sites in New Mexico, California, Arizona and Texas, expanding Gilliam's previous ruling.

Gilliam, an Obama appointee, made the ruling on the military funds in a lawsuit brought forward by several groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Sierra Club, challenging the diversion of the military funds under the scope of the national emergency order.

The Trump administration had argued that the use of the military funds was lawful under the scope of the national emergency, as the need for the funding was "unforeseen." And the lawyers claimed that if they are unable to award the federal dollars to contractors by the end of the fiscal year, they may lose the funding.

In his ruling Friday, Gilliam wrote that the administration lawyers "present no new evidence or argument for why the court should depart from its prior decision, and it will not."

"Because no new factual or legal arguments persuade the court that its analysis in the preliminary injunction order was wrong, [the groups’] likelihood of success on the merits has ripened into actual success," the ruling reads.

The judge also found that the groups suing to block use of military funds for the wall would suffer "irreparable harm" over border wall construction because it "will harm their ability to recreate in and otherwise enjoy public land along the border."

This was always going to head to the Supreme Court, but at least in the meanwhile Trump won't be able to build a couple of miles of "wall" and then claim that he's already done it and that he has to be allowed to finish.

Well, I take that back, HE'LL DO THAT ANYWAY.

The RIse Of Birtherism 2.0

You can tell Kamala Harris did well in the debate earlier this week because of the vile and near-instant counter-attack on her race by trolls, bots, and of course, Trump's dipstick racist son.

Kamala Harris broke out from the other nine Democrats onstage during the second Democratic presidential primary debate on Thursday, calling on her personal experiences of racial injustice as a black woman.

“As the only black person on this stage, I would like to speak on the issue of race,” Harris said.

That’s when she was attacked on Twitter by a conservative provocateur for not being an “American black.” It’s a play straight out of the racist birther playbook used against Barack Obama when he ran for president a decade earlier. This time, though, those kinds of allegations don’t have to circulate for years on obscure right-wing forums before they reach a mainstream audience. On Thursday night, spammers and even one of President Trump’s sons spread the attack to millions of people within hours.

Harris, 54, was born in Oakland, California to a father from Jamaica and a mother from India. She spoke of her experience growing up black in the debate, recalling a story about neighbors who wouldn’t let their children play with Harris and her sister because of the color of their skin.

The attacks on Harris’s background started Thursday when Ali Alexander tweeted she is not an “American black.”

“She is half Indian and half Jamaican,” Alexander wrote. “I'm so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history. It's disgusting. Now using it for debate time at #DemDebate2? These are my people not her people. Freaking disgusting.”

Alexander’s claim was picked up by Donald Trump Jr., who tweeted it to his nearly 3.6 million followers.

“Is this true?” Trump Jr. wrote. “Wow.”

Trump Jr., who later deleted his tweet, wasn’t the only one using Alexander’s tweet to question Harris’s ethnicity.

Harris’s team denounced the comment as racist. “This is the same type of racist attacks his father used to attack Barack Obama. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now,” a Harris spokesperson told The Daily Beast.
More Twitter users copied and pasted Alexander’s message verbatim and tweeted it as their own, according to screenshots posted by writer Caroline Orr. Some of those accounts, like “@prebs_73,” have copy-pasted other popular right-wing tweets verbatim. Other accounts with right-wing references in their usernames and biographies piled on, accusing Harris of not being black.

“Ummmmm @KamalaHarris you are NOT BLACK. you are Indian and Jamaican,” wrote a Twitter user with a cross emoji, the word “CONSERVATIVE,” a red “X” emoji (a right-wing Twitter trope), and three stars (a QAnon symbol) in their username.

Some of these racist attacks incorrectly claim that Harris was born in Canada (and therefore not eligible for the presidency) on top of the attacks on her race and of course, the laeft-wing Sanders attacks of "Kamala is a cop" that the right has picked up.

It's the same thing as 2008, with the same goal as 2016: to depress black turnout and drive black voters away from caring enough to vote.

And yes, Trump's family is immediately jumping in on this.

Last Call For The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Rhode Island Congressman Ted Kennedy III is the latest blue-state, safe-district Democrat to openly support an impeachment inquiry, as the push to change America's mind continues.

Congressman Joe Kennedy III announced Friday he now supports opening an impeachment inquiry against President Trump, becoming one of the most high-profile House Democrats yet to break with Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the charged question.

Kennedy, D-Mass., revealed his change of heart during a taping of WPRI 12’s Newsmakers. He said he saw no other choice based on the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, arguing the report clearly shows Trump committed obstruction of justice.

“Times have changed and I think Congress has to begin those impeachment proceedings,” Kennedy said during the interview.

“I know it’s divisive, I know there are strong feelings about this, but I believe that when you have a president that’s willfully broken the law repeatedly to try to evade justice for various illegal acts, Congress has to hold him accountable,” he said.

A White House spokesperson offered no response on the record to Kennedy’s comments.

Pelosi has spent months warning House Democrats that impeachment proceedings are a treacherous political path that could strengthen Trump in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. But she has faced increasing resistance from the party’s left flank. Congressman David Cicilline, D-R.I., has already come out in support of an impeachment inquiry.

Kennedy said Pelosi is right about the politics, but added, “I’m not sure it matters. … It’s time to step up and execute the oath we swore to take — to protect the Constitution and protect the country.” He also said he hadn’t told Pelosi about his position yet. 

The trick here is of course that there are no Democrats going from the position to open an impeachment query back to "well, no, Trump has to get away from this."  Eventually it will reach critical mass.

I hope, anyway.  All of Joe's arguments are correct.

Why #MeToo Doesn't Work On Trump

You can't splatter a pig with mud and expect the pig to be upset about it, after all.  Accusations of sexual assault against Donald Trump by over a dozen women simply doesn't matter.

“What was she, like, the 28th or something?” one former White House official pondered to me. In a separate conversation, another offered a different guess: “Twenty-two? Twenty-three?”

They were talking about E. Jean Carroll, the longtime Elle advice columnist who, for the first time last week, publicly accused Donald Trump of assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room more than 20 years ago. And what they were trying to do was locate the latest number of women who have accused the president of sexual misconduct. (The answer: at least 22.)

For these former officials, the apparently incalculable magnitude of this number did not cause them to reconsider Trump’s every denial of the varied allegations—to wonder, for example, about the likelihood that 22 or 23 or 28 women were all lying in their stories of harassment, groping, unwanted kissing, and, in Carroll’s case, sexual assault.

Rather, for them, the increase in the number of women seemed to mirror the increase in their indifference. Another accusation, they seemed to say, was like another dollop of numbing cream. “I didn’t read it,” the second former official told me, referring to Carroll’s written account in New York, which was an excerpt from her forthcoming book. “We’re just kind of numb to it all at this point.”

One current White House official said that “the only thing” that “caught my eye” was Trump’s dismissal of Carroll’s claim. Speaking to reporters from The Hill on Monday, the president addressed her allegation from behind the Resolute desk: “I’ll say it with great respect: No. 1, she’s not my type. No. 2, it never happened. It never happened, okay?”

“Like, what are you gonna do?” the official said. “This is the guy you got.”

Only one of the half-dozen officials I spoke to, who currently work in or have worked in the White House and on the Trump campaign, had read Carroll’s essay, and none agreed to go on the record with their comments. Taken together, the officials’ quick willingness to dismiss the allegation, not to mention their disinterest in learning more, reflects several of the defining factors of the Trump administration: an under-siege mentality, distrust in the press, and an unwavering loyalty to the president they’ve aligned themselves with. But there’s another reason their assessment is noteworthy. The private reactions of Trump’s top allies reveal how, inside the president’s orbit, the gravity of words such as sexual assaultno longer seems to register. And that attitude—call it a collective shrug—could inform how the government responds to sexual-misconduct claims for, potentially, the next six years.

If you can't get the country to respond to sexual assault by the man in the Oval Office (and no, don't bring up Bill Clinton, because there was a response to him and it was impeachment) then nobody's going to care. Sexual assault is now 100% okay if you're powerful enough.

I know that's always been true, but having that confirmed is pretty grim.

Certainly House Democrats don't seem to care about rectifying it.

The Mask Slips Once Again

And this time, it's Trump's boss, Vladimir Putin, who lets slip the truth about where he is taking America.

Vladimir Putin has trumpeted the growth of national populist movements in Europe and America, crowing that liberalism is spent as an ideological force.

In an FT interview in the Kremlin on the eve of the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, the Russian president said “the liberal idea” had “outlived its purpose” as the public turned against immigration, open borders and multiculturalism.

Mr Putin’s evisceration of liberalism — the dominant western ideology since the end of the second world war in 1945 — chimes with anti-establishment leaders from US president Donald Trump to Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and the Brexit insurgency in the UK.

“[Liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades,” he said.

Mr Putin branded Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than 1m refugees to Germany, mainly from war-ravaged Syria, as a “cardinal mistake”. But he praised Donald Trump for trying to stop the flow of migrants and drugs from Mexico.

“This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. That migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected.”

He added: “Every crime must have its punishment. The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.” 

Normally, I'd be happy to see a Russian autocrat gangster like Putin get his comeuppance from an American president putting Putin's cynical proto-fascism into the dumpster, but our own leaders are also autocrat gangsters, and they like what they see in Putin's philosophy, a country of one-third of a billion people ruled by a handful of petty tyrants.

Putin sees a world where countries cower from might and the strong rule all.

In 2019, he's not wrong.

StupidiNews!

• Several House Democrats voted with most Republicans to easily pass the Senate GOP version of border security legislation 305-102 after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reversed course on the bill.
• Republicans are calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice John Roberts after Thursday's 5-4 decision to block a Census citizenship question, Donald Trump says he may delay the 2020 Census.
• Apple design chief and iPhone engineer Jony Ive is leaving Apple to form his own firm, Apple says Ive will continue to work on the company's designs for now.
• Putative UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he's keeping open the option to suspend Parliament if there's no deal on Brexit by October 31.
• Twitter says it will apply warning labels to tweets in the "public interest" that violate its terms and conditions, a policy that appears to be a direct warning to Donald Trump.

Last Call For A Supreme Split

The final day of the 2018-2019 SCOTUS term landed with three massive decisions, and it was largely a wash.  First, Chief Justice Roberts ruled in a 5-4 split that the federal courts have no business whatsoever dealing with state gerrymandering issues, giving a massive, permanent structural win to Republicans.

In a 5-4 decision along traditional conservative-liberal ideological lines, the Supreme Court ruled that partisan redistricting is a political question — not reviewable by federal courts — and that those courts can't judge if extreme gerrymandering violates the Constitution.

The ruling puts the onus on the legislative branch, and on individual states, to police redistricting efforts.

"We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts," Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the conservative majority. "Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions."

Roberts noted that excessive partisanship in the drawing of districts does lead to results that "reasonably seem unjust," but he said that does not mean it is the court's responsibility to find a solution.

Now just two years away from the redrawing of new districts at the start of the next decade, legislators in states that have control of all levels of governments after the 2020 election may feel emboldened by the ruling, said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Law School.

"We are in Mad Max territory now; there are no rules," Levitt said. "I think you'll see more legislators in more states [where there is unilateral control] taking up the mantle of extreme partisan aggression against people who disagree with them."

Republicans now have unlimited authority to redraw districts as they see fit.  Expect states like NC, Florida, Texas, Ohio and Wisconsin to redraw districts concentrating black voters into one or two districts, and leaving all other districts majority white and Republican. 

The prime result of this ruling, combined with demographics, could very well mean a permanent GOP Congress as state legislatures will simply keep themselves in power.

Democrats will try to keep up in states like Florida and Illinois, but I would suspect that entire states could become one-party affairs.

The good news:  Republicans won't be able to use the 2020 Census to force citizenship questions on everyone.

Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court's liberal justices, saying the administration did not provide adequate justification for the question.

The reason provided by the White House seem "contrived", the justices wrote in a 5-4 ruling.

The White House argued the question would help protect minority voters.

But the Census Bureau's own experts say it would lead to a major undercount.

Though the ruling deals a blow to the Trump administration, the complicated decision does not bar the question for either its language or the underlying premise.

Instead, by sending the case back to a lower court, Justice Roberts left open the possibility that the Trump administration could provide the necessary justification to add a question on citizenship to the census.

This battle will be back again before the court next June.  Count on it.

But don't get pulled over by cops though.  Not even your blood is safe from police search and seizure.

The Supreme Court has ruled that police may, without a warrant, order blood drawn from an unconscious person suspected of driving under the influence of alcohol.

The Fourth Amendment generally requires police to obtain a warrant for a blood draw. But in a 5-4 vote on Thursday, the court upheld a Wisconsin law that says people driving on a public road have impliedly consented to having their blood drawn if police suspect them of driving under the influence. It also said that "exigent circumstances" permit police to obtain a blood sample without a warrant.

Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer and Brett Kavanaugh joined Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority vote.

The decision conflicts with previous court rulings in which the justices ruled that a blood draw is a significant bodily intrusion into a person's privacy and that there are less intrusive ways of enforcing drunken driving laws against unconscious motorists — getting a warrant, for instance, which in these tech-savvy days can be done relatively easily and quickly.

In 2013, for instance, the high court ruled that police violated the Constitution when they ordered a nonconsensual blood draw without a warrant in a routine DUI case. The vote then was 5-4, but two of the justices in that majority, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, are no longer on the court.

A court that can rule the state has a right to your bodily fluids can rob you of consent for a lot of things, guys.

It's not a good day for America.

Not at all.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Her name is Marshae Jones.

In 2018 she was five months pregnant in Birmingham, Alabama and was shot in the stomach with another woman during a fight over the child's father.  The fetus died as a result.  A grand jury refused to indict the shooter because of the state's castle laws concerning self-defense, but now Jones is being charged with manslaughter in the death of her own unborn baby.

A woman whose unborn baby was killed in a 2018 Pleasant Grove shooting has now been indicted in the death. 

Marshae Jones, a 27-year-old Birmingham woman, was indicted by a Jefferson County grand jury on a manslaughter charge. She was taken into custody on Wednesday. 

Though Jones didn’t fire the shots that killed her unborn baby girl, authorities say she initiated the dispute that led to the gunfire. Police initially charged 23-year-old Ebony Jemison with manslaughter, but the charge against Jemison was dismissed after the grand jury failed to indict her. 

The shooting happened about noon on Dec. 4, 2018, outside Dollar General on Park Road. Officers were dispatched to the scene on a report of someone shot but arrived to find the shooting victim – later identified as Jones - had been picked up and driven to Fairfield. Police and paramedics then found the Jones at a Fairfield convenience store.
From Fairfield Jones was taken to UAB Hospital. She was five months pregnant and was shot in the stomach. The unborn baby did not survive the shooting. 

“The investigation showed that the only true victim in this was the unborn baby,’’ Pleasant Grove police Lt. Danny Reid said at the time of the shooting. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.”

For the crime of being shot, Masrhae Jones is looking at up to 20 years in prison.  Not the person who actually shot her, but the woman who was shot.  Even without Alabama's awful abortion law, the legal notion that a woman can be charged with felony manslaughter for the death of a fetus is utterly insane, and the only possible societal reason to do that is to selectively use the law to incarcerate women of color and black women in particular.

This is repugnant.  It's precisely what people said would happen with this stupid notion that fetuses have the same rights as people, that miscarriages and injuries would become reasons to lock women up for decades for the crime of getting pregnant and failing to deliver a child.

This is what these ghouls want, women scared and pliant and existing only to reproduce or go to prison, non-citizens who fear their own goddamn wombs.

I hate this nonsense.

The Silence Of The Gun Nuts

In the end, the malevolent evil that came to silence right-wing NRA gun nut Dana Loesch and her stochastic terrorism broadcasts at NRATV were not the Democrats or the media or the Clintons or the gun safety advocates, but her own employers pulling the plug because of all the legal trouble they are drowning in.

The National Rifle Association has shut down production at NRATV. 

The N.R.A. on Tuesday also severed all business with its estranged advertising firm, Ackerman McQueen, which operates NRATV, the N.R.A.’s live broadcasting media arm, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times. 

While NRATV may continue to air past content, its live broadcasting will end and its on-air personalities — Ackerman employees who included Dana Loesch — will no longer be the public faces of the N.R.A. It remained unclear whether the N.R.A. might try to hire some of those employees, but there was no indication it was negotiating to do so. 

The move comes amid a flurry of lawsuits between the N.R.A. and Ackerman, and increasing acrimony that surfaced after two prominent N.R.A. board members first criticized NRATV in an article in The Times in March. The separation had become inevitable: The two sides said last month that they were ending their three-decade-plus partnership. 

“Many members expressed concern about the messaging on NRATV becoming too far removed from our core mission: defending the Second Amendment,” Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.’s longtime chief executive, wrote in a message to members that was expected to be sent out by Wednesday. “So, after careful consideration, I am announcing that starting today, we are undergoing a significant change in our communications strategy. We are no longer airing ‘live TV’ programming.” 

In a notice to Ackerman’s chief executive, Revan McQueen, sent Tuesday night, the N.R.A. said it “regrets that a longstanding, formerly productive relationship comes to an end in this fashion.” 

Ackerman, in its own statement, said it was “not surprised that the N.R.A. is unwilling to honor its agreement to end our contract and our long-standing relationship in an orderly and amicable manner.”

I think when the full story of the NRA's collapse comes out, it's going to be a key moment for the dismantling of the Trump regime.  I think they're going to talk, they're going to absolutely say they tok Russian money to help Donald Trump, and that they did it with Trump's blessing.

Dana Loesch and her hateful little band of gun-toting terrorists will land on their feet somewhere, but God I'd love for her to be indicted.

StupidiNews!

• In a 20-3 vote the Senate Health Committee has moved a bill to the full Senate that would lower drug prices, protect Americans from surprise ER bills, and raise the national smoking age to 21.
• Iran says it cannot save the 2015 UN nuclear deal without pressure from the EU, Russia and China on the Trump regime.
• Donald Trump is doubling down on the notion that he can fire Fed Chairman Jerome Powell at will, but analysts say doing so could touch off a massive market selloff.
• Donald Trump also plans to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan and Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of this year's G20 summit in Japan.
• Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are warning that Chinese tariffs will cost the video game console industry $350 million a year and could put thousands of game industry employees out of work.

Last Call For Another #MeToo Moment, If Anyone Noticed

I talked about the accusations of author E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump over the weekend.  Carroll has accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a bathroom of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in 1996.  As I said, only the Washington Post even bothered to put the accusation on the front page.  As a result, half of America was unaware the story even happened, because it wasn't reported.

In an excerpt of her memoir published Friday, Carroll wrote that Trump assaulted her in a department store dressing room in the mid-’90s. Trump denied the accusation, saying in one statement that he had never met Carroll (a photograph included in the story showed otherwise) and in a later interview claimed she was “not my type.”

The accusation generated significant coverage. But in a news cycle already saturated with other stories, including tensions with Iran, it got relatively short shrift in newspapers like The New York Times and on Sunday morning talk shows.

“The day that [Carroll’s allegation] dropped it felt like it was very much a part of the conversation on Twitter,” Shani Hilton, deputy managing editor for news at the Los Angeles Times, told CNN on Sunday. “It was really blowing up ― I mean all day long … Two days later, it kind of feels like it’s faded away.”

In a HuffPost/YouGov survey conducted Friday night and Saturday, just 11% of Americans said they’d heard a lot about Carroll’s allegations. About half those polled, 53%, hadn’t heard anything at all. (Because survey respondents tend to be more politically engaged, these numbers are, if anything, probably a little high.)

For the sake of comparison, polling this year found that respondents had heard more about the renewed debate over the Hyde Amendment, the mass shooting in Virginia Beach, the new Alabama abortion law, the release of the Mueller report, the blackface controversy involving Virginia’s governor and the end of the government shutdown.

“In the case of Trump, the sheer number of sexual misconduct allegations seems to have had a desensitizing effect,” Vox’s Anna North wrote, “with the press and the public beginning to treat an account of sexual assault by the US commander-in-chief as simply business as usual.”

That ― along with the general stability of Trump’s ratings ― may help to explain why views have changed so little since Trump’s time on the campaign trail.

Trump sexually assaulting women is now the new normal.  It's no longer news.  And America no longer cares.  More people heard about Joe Biden's Hyde Amendment flip.  More people heard about the Virginia Beach shooting (another news item category we've become 100% desensitized towards).

Trump simply normalizes his evil, and our broken media shrugs and plays along.

The Hunter And The Hunted, Con't

A couple of weeks ago I noted that California GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter was already facing indictment on campaign fraud and embezzlement.  He won re-election in 2018 because he was able to paint his Democratic opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, as a Muslim terrorist and ended up winning by 9,000 votes.

Earlier this month Hunter's wife plead guilty to conspiracy with her husband to misuse campaign funds in order to cooperate with the feds.  And now the other shoe has dropped: Hunter allegedly spent those campaign funds on multiple affairs with mistresses...among other things.

Embattled Rep. Duncan Hunter used campaign funds to pay for extramarital affairs with lobbyists and congressional staffers, prosecutors in California alleged in a court filing Monday. 

The salacious revelation joins a host of other charges levied against the California Republican, who pleaded not guilty last year on counts of wire fraud, falsifying records and campaign finance violations. 

Hunter's wife Margaret, who also faced federal charges, pleaded guilty earlier this month and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Rep. Hunter has denied the previous allegations against him. 

The filing, submitted as part of a series of motions by California prosecutors on evidence they hope to use in a trial scheduled to begin in September, provides detailed accounts of five different affairs, including one with a woman who worked in Hunter's congressional office. 

According to the filing, Hunter and the unnamed staffer "occasionally spent nights together at his office" and went on dates funded by campaign cash. One night, at a Washington, DC, bar known for indoor mini golf, Hunter spent $202 in campaign funds for drinks and snacks, the filing says. 

Prosecutors describe another affair, with a lobbyist, that included a rendezvous at a ski resort near Lake Tahoe, paid for in large part by campaign funds. 

Hunter also went on a "'double date' road trip" with the lobbyist and another couple, which included another congressman. He spent $905 in campaign funds on a hotel bar tab and the room he shared with the woman, the filing says.

Oh, but it gets worse.

Another mystery in the case remains unresolved. At the end of the filing, prosecutors mentioned a mysterious “clearly non-work related activity during (Duncan Hunter’s) get-togethers with his close personal friends.” 

The document didn’t disclose what exactly that “potentially sensitive evidence” is because prosecutors said doing so “runs the risk of improperly tainting the jury pool before the trial begins.”

Duncan's been a naughty boy with taxpayer money.

Stay tuned.

Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

It looks like Oregon Republicans and their white supremacist terrorist allies have won, as terrified Oregon Democrats are apparently now folding on the climate change cap and trade bill that set off this mess in the first place.

Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney said on Tuesday morning that the climate change bill at the center of Republicans’ walkout lacks the votes necessary to pass, because not enough Democrats support it.

"House Bill 2020 does not have the votes on the Senate floor,” Courtney, D-Salem, said after Democrats assembled on the floor Tuesday. “That will not change.” He then ticked off a lengthy list of pending policy and budget bills that he said have bipartisan support.

Senate Republicans fled the state last week to block a vote on the carbon capping plan. Courtney appeared to be laying groundwork for Republicans to return, but it was not immediately clear that Republicans would agree to return to vote on other bills. Oregon lawmakers face a June 30 deadline to wrap up work under the state Constitution.

Sen. Cliff Bentz, R-Ontario, said as of around 10 a.m., he had not yet heard of Courtney’s announcement. However, he said there would be a lot of concern about a possible head fake by Democrats, and a variety of procedural issues that would have to be addressed before Republicans would likely agree to come back to the Capitol.

Democrats also took time to react to Courtney’s statement Tuesday. Two hours after Courtney’s statement, Gov. Kate Brown issued a statement in which she appeared to acknowledge the bill was dead.

“Senate Republicans have blocked a bill that provides a better future for our state and for our children, and the tactics they employed to do so are not just unacceptable, but dangerous,” Brown said, adding that Republicans were “moving us dangerously close to the self-serving stalemate in Washington, DC.”

“It’s now up to Republicans to prove me wrong," Brown said. "Are they against climate change legislation or are they against democracy? If they are not back by Wednesday afternoon, we will know the answer.”

Brown declared on Monday that she would not negotiate with Republicans until they returned to Oregon.

House Speaker Tina Kotek, of Portland, weighed in on Twitter just before noon Tuesday, saying of Courtney’s statement that the climate bill was dead, “I believe him.” 

“This has been a dark week for the integrity of the Legislature,” Kotek wrote. “Senate Rs have been threatening our democratic institution and subverting the will of Oregon voters who know we need to act now. Their walkout has come at immense cost to our institution and potentially the planet.”

It's entirely possible that this is a fakeout to trick Republicans into showing back up and then getting steamrolled.  If so, it's both ballsy and stupid, but it might just work.

But if it's not a fakeout, then Republicans just proved political terrorism and threatening violence against Democrats works. Expect Republicans in other blue states to start reacting to Democratic legislation in the same way.

If Republicans realize that they can use the open threat of violence and the repressive power of government to keep Democrats from ever passing any legislation at all, even in states where Democrats have a supermajority plus the Governor's office as with Oregon, then we've lost our small-d democracy, representative or otherwise, permanently.

There's plenty of evidence that the problem here is personal and not systemic, and that Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney has completely lost control of the chamber and that Oregon Senate Republicans are taking full advantage.

But why should Oregon Republicans not pull this stunt every time the Democrats want to pass a bill?  They're already playing the victim card here, saying that being linked to domestic terrorists like the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers in the state is an insult so grave that it means they'll never return, and never allow another vote.

So what happens if one party is willing to break a functioning government beyond repair?  What is the other party prepared to do in order to restore that government?

We've asked this question before in the past, and the answer has never been without a great cost to the country.

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