Europe's Little Trumps Get Thumped

Europe's "Little Trumps", Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, Polish right-wing ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Slovenian PM Janez Jansa, are all facing revolts at home as hopefully they are headed towards suffering the same political fate as The Former Guy™ and Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

A right-wing populist wave in Eastern Europe, lifted by Donald J. Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, has not crashed as a result of his defeat last November. But it has collided with a serious obstacle: Its leaders are not very popular.

After winning elections by railing against widely disliked elites, right-wing populists on Europe’s formerly communist eastern flank, it turns out, are themselves not much liked. That is due in large part to unpopular coronavirus lockdowns, and, like other leaders no matter their political complexion, their stumbling responses to the health crisis. But they are also under pressure from growing fatigue with their divisive tactics.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban is being countered by an uncharacteristically united opposition. In Poland, the deeply conservative government has made an abrupt shift to the left in economic policy to win back support. And in Slovenia, the hard-right governing party of the Trump-loving prime minister is slumping disastrously in the polls.

Slovenia’s leader, Janez Jansa, who made international headlines by congratulating Mr. Trump on his “victory” in November and is a self-declared scourge of liberal, or what he calls communist, elites, is perhaps the most at risk of the region’s unpopular populists.

Propelled by nationalist promises to bar asylum seekers from the Middle East and “ensure the survival of the Slovenian nation,” Mr. Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party won the most votes in a 2018 election. Last year, a new coalition government led by the party had an approval rating of 65 percent.

This has since plunged to 26 percent and Mr. Jansa is so unpopular that allies are jumping ship. Street protests against him have attracted as many as tens of thousands of people, huge turnouts in a normally placid Alpine nation with a population of just two million.

Mr. Jansa has staggered on, narrowly surviving a no-confidence vote in Parliament and a recent impeachment attempt by opposition legislators and defectors from his coalition.

But he has been so weakened “he does not have the power to do anything” other than curse foes on Twitter, said Ziga Turk, a university professor and cabinet minister in an earlier government headed by Mr. Jansa, who quit the governing party in 2019.


An admirer of Hungary’s Mr. Orban, Mr. Jansa has sought to bring the news media to heel, as nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland have largely succeeded in doing, at least with television.

But the only television station that consistently supports him, a bombastic and partly Hungarian-funded outfit called Nova24TV, has so few viewers — less than one percent of the television audience on most days — that it does not even figure in ratings charts.

Slavoj Zizek, a celebrity philosopher and self-declared “moderately conservative Marxist” — one of the few Slovenians well-known outside the country, along with Melania Trump — said it was too early to write off leaders like Mr. Jansa, Mr. Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski of Poland, whose three countries he described as a “new axis of evil.”

Nationalist populists, he said, have rarely won popularity contests. Their most important asset, he said, has been the disarray of their opponents, many of whom the philosopher sees as too focused on “excessive moralism” and issues that do not interest most voters instead of addressing economic concerns.

“The impotence of the left is terrifying,” Mr. Zizek said.

 

The same problem as always: the fractured left can't get it together against the unified right, but the right has become fractured again, and that is giving the left hope.

 

We'll see if it's enough.

Anatomy Of An Illness

America barely escaped COVID-19 being an order of magnitude worse as The Former Guy was so worried about the disease becoming his bete noir that he nearly scrapped the federal response entirely and left 100% of the work to dealing with infected Americans to the states. WaPo's new book on the early days of COVID-19 reveals Trump's response was just as horrible as I imagined.

“Testing is killing me!” Trump reportedly exclaimed in a phone call to then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on March 18, yelling so loudly that Azar’s aides overheard every word. “I’m going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?”

“Uh, do you mean Jared?” Azar responded, citing the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Just five days earlier, Kushner had vowed to take charge of a national testing strategy with the help of the private sector, Abutaleb and Paletta write.

Trump countered that the U.S. government never should have become involved in testing, arguing with his health secretary over why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was seeking to track infections at all. “This was gross incompetence to let CDC develop a test,” Trump reportedly said as he berated Azar.

Public health experts contend it was inadequate testing that allowed the novel coronavirus to spread largely undetected across the United States in early 2020, making contact tracing and isolation all but impossible in the early days of the outbreak and fueling the first staggering wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

Trump’s rages frequently distracted senior officials and slowed the national response, the authors found, with the president touting his hunches and eventually turning to handpicked advisers including the radiologist Scott Atlas, who had no infectious-disease or public health experience. But the book also depicts the president as ineffectual and out of touch while his health and national security officials tried to manage the worsening outbreak.

Despite his famous reality TV catchphrase “You’re fired,” Trump proved markedly ineffective at removing staffers during the pandemic, Abutaleb and Paletta write, boxed in by deputies who worried about political fallout and the implications of undermining public health.

For instance, Trump repeatedly told his aides in February to fire a senior State Department official who allowed 14 coronavirus-infected Americans on the Diamond Princess cruise ship to return home. The decision “doubles my numbers overnight,” the president complained to Azar, as the number of official U.S. coronavirus cases rose to 28.

But senior officials balked at firing the diplomat, and Trump and then-acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney eventually “gave up,” Abutaleb and Paletta write, adding that the official’s decision to bring the sick Americans back to the United States may have saved their lives, given there were no later flights they could take.

Trump also would call for firing Robert Kadlec, the HHS emergency preparedness chief who signed off on the Diamond Princess evacuation. Later, he would push to replace Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn when the agency chief refused to expedite vaccine approvals before the election and deferred to career FDA officials instead.

Both men would stay on for the duration of Trump’s presidency, along with Anthony S. Fauci — the longtime infectious-disease expert who became a top target of Trump and his allies but whose public popularity helped insulate him. Rather than fire Fauci, White House officials increasingly tuned out the advice from him and other top health officials, the book says, with Trump instead leaning on Kushner, an array of economic advisers and other trusted allies who lacked infectious-disease expertise.

Trump’s top deputies adopted a similar strategy of issuing threats or isolating their rivals, undermining efforts to manage the outbreak, Abutaleb and Paletta write.

Kadlec, who had overseen the purchase of 600 million masks, took the plan in late March to Kushner — who exploded in anger, throwing his pen against the wall in frustration when he learned the masks would not arrive until June.

“You f---ing moron,” Kushner reportedly said. “We’ll all be dead by June.”

Mark Meadows, whom Trump abruptly installed as White House chief of staff with little warning to Mulvaney, also berated Kadlec as the federal government struggled to distribute a new antiviral treatment called remdesivir, whose use the FDA had just authorized.

“I’m going to fire your a-- if you can’t fix this!” Meadows reportedly yelled at Kadlec in a surprise phone call as the remdesivir rollout sputtered when scarce supplies were wrongly delivered to hospitals without eligible patients or appropriate refrigeration and the White House’s hopes for positive headlines slipped away.

“That was what the response had turned into: a toxic environment in which no matter where you turned, someone was ready to rip your head off or threatening to fire you,” Abutaleb and Paletta write.

 

I know the term "kakistocracy" gets tossed around a lot when referring to the Trump regime, government by the least suitable individuals, and yet here we are with reams and mountains and terabytes of evidence affirming that for four years we trudged through that flaming manure pile and we barely made it out as a democratic nation.

And notice that all the major Trump villains were present: Jared Kushner, Mark Meadows, Mick Mulvaney. The worst possible chief executive hired the worst possible people to run the show.

Last Call For Sleeping With The Enemy

Time to remind everyone of the Oliver Willis Unified Punditry Kayfabe Theory: it's all pro-wrestling, the heels and the faces are all buddies, and the corporations write the scripts months in advance for consumption, as NY Times reporter Ben Smith talks to his "white supremacist but only on TV and radio" buddy Tucker Carlson.

Last month, I texted Tucker Carlson to ask him a question that was on my mind: “Did you get vaccinated?”

“When was the last time you had sex with your wife and in what position?” he replied. “We can trade intimate details.”

Then we argued back and forth about vaccines, and he ended the conversation with a friendly invitation to return to his show. “Always a good time.”

One question you may be asking, if you are a New York Times reader, is: Why are you exchanging texts with Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host who recently described the media at large as “cringing animals who are not worthy of respect”?

And if you are a Tucker Carlson viewer, you may also be asking: How can the guy who tells you every night that the media is lying be texting with the enemy?

The answer is one of Washington’s open secrets. Mr. Carlson, a proud traitor to the elite political class, spends his time when he’s not denouncing the liberal media trading gossip with them. He’s the go-to guy for sometimes-unflattering stories about Donald J. Trump and for coverage of the internal politics of Fox News (not to mention stories about Mr. Carlson himself). I won’t talk here about any off-the-record conversations I may have had with him. But 16 other journalists (none from The Times; it would put my colleagues in a weird position if I asked them) told me on background that he has been, as three of them put it, “a great source.”

“In Trump’s Washington, Tucker Carlson is a primary supersecret source,” the media writer and Trump chronicler Michael Wolff writes in his forthcoming collection of essays, “Too Famous.” Mr. Wolff, who thanked Mr. Carlson in the acknowledgments of his 2018 book, “Fire and Fury,” explained, “I know this because I know what he has told me, and I can track his exquisite, too-good-not-to-be-true gossip through unsourced reports and as it often emerges into accepted wisdom.”

Mr. Carlson was particularly well positioned to be a source about the Trump administration. His Fox platform, where in May he had a nightly average of three million viewers, made him someone who mattered to Mr. Trump, a close follower of television ratings. He has a former reporter’s eye for detail and anecdote, and his observations can be detected in the lurid tales of Mr. Trump’s chaotic court and Fox’s own tumultuous internal politics.

A coming book by the Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” includes a moment in which Mr. Carlson sends Mr. Trump’s calls to voice mail after the first presidential debate last fall, when he was criticized for repeatedly interrupting Joe Biden. When Mr. Trump finally reaches the Fox host, the book describes, verbatim, an exchange between the two men that casts Mr. Carlson in a flattering light. (“Everyone says I did a good job,” Mr. Trump tells Mr. Carlson. “I don’t know who told you that was good,” Mr. Carlson says. “It was not good.”) Mr. Bender declined to comment on the sourcing that allowed him to so precisely reconstruct a conversation between the two men.

And Brian Stelter, the host of the CNN program “Reliable Sources,” told me that “you can see Tucker’s fingerprints all over the hardcover” edition of his 2020 book “Hoax,” which excoriates Fox News for amplifying Mr. Trump’s falsehoods. He said that he “couldn’t stomach” talking to Mr. Carlson, who has grown ever more hard-line, for the updated paperback version that was just released.

Mr. Carlson was born to a world of insiders and story shapers, and makes no secret of it. His father was a reporter in Los Angeles and San Diego before Ronald Reagan appointed him director of the Voice of America, and the son grew up with a generation of elite Washington journalists. “I’ve always lived around people who are wielding authority, around the ruling class,” he said in a 2018 interview. A former New York Observer media writer, Sridhar Pappu, recalled to me that when he first traveled to Washington to cover the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in the early 2000s, it was Mr. Carlson who asked him, “Do you have an invitation to Tammy’s?” referring to the annual brunch for media insiders co-hosted by Tammy Haddad, the well-connected former MSNBC producer.

Mr. Carlson has said he turned against his fellow elites after the 2008 financial crisis. His political shift also transformed his long journeyman’s career as a magazine writer and MSNBC conservative, and made him Fox’s leading tribune of the pro-Trump masses.

But his decades of Washington relationships have produced a tiresome conversation among Mr. Carlson’s old friends about what he really stands for, whether he’s really a racist or whether he cynically plays one on TV. Who knows, and what does it matter anyway? Mr. Carlson’s recent fixations include suggesting that the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection was, in fact, a provocation staged by the F.B.I. and that making children wear masks is abuse. The Anti-Defamation League recently called for him to be fired from Fox News for warning that Democrats are plotting to “replace” the current electorate with “more obedient voters, from the third world.” The Pentagon rebuked him for a sexist riff on women in the military.

And then there are his stated views on the media. “I just can’t overstate how disgusted I am,” he told the Fox-owned sports media site Outkick in April. “The media is basically Praetorian Guard for the ruling class, the bodyguards for Jeff Bezos. That’s the opposite of what we should have. I really hate them for it, I’ll be honest.”

 

The answer of course is "since nobody really knows what Carlson is thinking, and that he's just a media cypher, does it matter when he's here to play a role, and that he plays it better than anyone else?"

 

That's letting him off too easily, but the media ecosystem isn't meant to punish obvious assholes like Carlson. He's played the game expertly and he continues being handsomely rewarded for doing so. The point is to hate the guy, but to recognize that he runs his little sick high school clique.

 

America is full of assholes like that.

 

Most of the time, they win and keep on winning.

 

That's the problem, of course.

The Separation Of Church And Hate

US Catholic Bishops, ignoring Pope Francis's warnings, are considering denying Pro-choice politicians in the US the rite of communion, up to and including President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States, flouting a warning from the Vatican, have overwhelmingly voted to draft guidance on the sacrament of the Eucharist, advancing a political push by conservative bishops to deny President Biden communion because of his support of abortion rights.

The decision, made public on Friday afternoon, is aimed at the nation’s second Catholic president, perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief since Jimmy Carter, and exposes bitter divisions in American Catholicism. It capped three days of contentious debate at a virtual June meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The measure was approved by a vote of 73 percent in favor and 24 percent opposed.

The Eucharist, or holy communion, is one of the most sacred rituals in Christianity, and bishops have grown worried in recent years about declining Mass attendance and misunderstanding of the importance of the sacrament to Catholic life.

But the move to target a president, who regularly attends Mass and has spent a lifetime steeped in Christian rituals and practices, is striking coming from leaders of the president’s own faith, particularly after many conservative Catholics turned a blind eye to the sexual improprieties of former President Donald J. Trump because they supported his political agenda. It reveals a uniquely American Catholicism increasingly at odds with Rome.

The action is the latest sign of how the nation’s bitter political divisions are shaping religious life. Christians across denominations are facing similar divides. Earlier this week at the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Nashville, a more moderate majority narrowly headed off a takeover attempt by a hard-right movement.

The text of the proposal itself has not been written and would ultimately require approval by a two-thirds majority vote. The proposed outline, earlier reported by America Magazine, said it would “include the theological foundation for the Church’s discipline concerning the reception of Holy Communion and a special call for those Catholics who are cultural, political, or parochial leaders to witness the faith.”

Some conservatives want to use such a statement as theological justification to deny communion to Mr. Biden and Catholic politicians like him who support abortion rights.

The decision immediately drew criticism from 60 Catholic Democrats in Congress, who urged the bishops “to not move forward and deny this most holy of all sacraments” and who challenged the bishops by outlining their own commitment to “making real the basic principles that are at the heart of Catholic social teaching.”

Asked about the bishops’ decision at a vaccination event on Friday, Mr. Biden said it was “a private matter and I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

 

Joe Biden has more faith than I do in the Church and in the church, that is 100% true and i freely admit it. But there are a good five dozen Democratic Catholics in Congress, and for the Church to basically target them for political views, well, that seems...

...actually that's completely in character for the history of the Roman Catholic church over the centuries, now isn't it?

The Big Lie, Con't

The Trump Insurrection Tour continues across the nation as The Former Guy™ can't stop fleecing his cultists, and the events are becoming a hotbed of possible violence drawing more and more fever-eyed fanatics out of the woodwork, as he continues to spread the Big Lie.

For a few hours last weekend, thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters came together in a field under the blazing Wisconsin sun to live in an alternate reality where the former president was still in office — or would soon return.

Clad in red MAGA hats and holding “Trump 2021” signs, they cheered in approval as Mike Lindell, the MyPillow creator-turned-conspiracy peddler, introduced “our real president.” Then Trump appeared via Jumbotron to repeat the lie that has become his central talking point since losing to Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes: “The election was rigged.”

Lindell later promised the audience that Trump would soon be reinstated into the presidency, a prospect for which there is no legal or constitutional method.

In the nearly five months since Trump’s presidency ended, similar scenes have unfolded in hotel ballrooms and other venues across the country. Attorney Lin Wood has told crowds that Trump is still president, while former national security adviser Michael Flynn went even further at a Dallas event by calling for a Myanmar-style military coup in the U.S. At the same conference, former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell suggested Trump could simply be reinstated and a new Inauguration Day set.

Taken together, the gatherings have gelled into a convention circuit of delusion centered on the false premise that the election was stolen. Lindell and others use the events to deepen their bond with legions of followers who eschew the mainstream press and live within a conservative echo chamber of talk radio and social media. In these forums, “evidence” of fraud is never fact-checked, leaving many followers genuinely convinced that Biden shouldn’t be president.

“We know that Biden’s a fraudulent president, and we want to be part of the movement to get him out,” said Donna Plechacek, 61, who traveled from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, with her sister for the event. “I know that they cheated the election. I have no doubt about that. The proof is there.”

State election officials, international observers, Trump’s own attorney general and dozens of judges — including many Trump appointed — have found no verifiable evidence of mass election fraud. Indeed, Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called the election “the most secure in American history” and concluded there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

But Plechacek is not alone. A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that two-thirds of Republicans, 66%, think Biden’s victory was not legitimate, while CNN found in April that 70% of Republicans do not think Biden won enough votes to be president. Half, 50%, said there is solid evidence to support that claim.

They are people like Deb Tulenchik and Galen Carlson from Pequot Lakes, Minnesota, who recalled the shock they felt after the election as Trump’s early election night lead faded as additional ballots were counted.

Thanks to the country’s polarization, many Trump supporters didn’t know anyone who voted for Biden and only saw Trump-Pence signs lining the roadways as they drove around their neighborhoods. Carlson, 61, said he went to bed believing Trump won. He didn’t heed warnings that mail-in votes take longer to count, so early returns would likely skew toward Trump, who urged his supporters to vote in person and not by mail.

“I was asleep early cause it looked like it was going to be a done deal. And then when we woke up I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

“Disbelief,” echoed Tulenchik, 63.

Trump spent months girding himself against possible defeat, insisting he could only lose if there was massive fraud. It’s a lie he’s sure to repeat as he steps up his public schedule in the coming weeks.

But the narrative was already resonating under the beating sun at the Wisconsin MAGA rally, where attendees came decked out in Trump gear, including plenty of shirts declaring, “Trump Won!”

 

The violence is coming. The only question is how widespread and how awful it will be, and how many people will be hurt or killed. No, I don't actually expect a full-fledged civil war at this point, but I do expect deadly political terrorism this summer that will quickly become a national nightmare.

 

The longer it takes for Trump to face indictments, the more he can foment insurrection and precipitate violence around the country. The plan is to make it impossible to indict him, because it will kick off a national terrorist movement, even if democracy, or what's left of it, is utterly destroyed in the process.

So far it's working.

Last Call For Meathead Matt's #MeToo Moment, Con't

Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz is almost certainly going to be indicted soon on sexual assault charges for his escapades involving underage girls, and a wingman, Joel Greenberg, already flipping on him to avoid the worst federal tax fraud charges, but now the question is rapidly evolving into just how many other Florida Republicans Gaetz and Greenberg take down with them.

 

Since federal prosecutors obtained the cooperation of GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz's once close-ally in May, sources tell ABC News the ongoing investigation, which includes sex trafficking allegations involving Gaetz, has engulfed the tight-knit Central Florida political scene as prosecutors continue their investigation of the Florida congressman.

Former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, who reached a plea deal last month, has been assisting federal agents in the sprawling probe that has recently revved up its focus on alleged corruption and fraud stemming from Greenberg's time in office and beyond, multiple sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

The former tax collector pleaded guilty in May to a host of crimes including charges of stalking, identity theft, wire fraud and conspiracy to bribe a public official, as well as a sex trafficking charge. Greenberg is prepared to hand over evidence and testimony that could implicate Gaetz and others, sources told ABC News.

Sources told ABC News that prosecutors believe a decision about whether or not to bring charges against Gaetz could come as early as July.

Sources said the probe into the congressman has ramped up in recent weeks. Investigators have started interviewing more women who were allegedly introduced to Gaetz through Greenberg, who last month pleaded guilty to sex trafficking a 17-year-old girl -- who later went on to work in pornography -- and introducing her to other "adult men." Since May, a new round of target letters and subpoenas in the wide-ranging investigation have been sent out, ABC News has learned.

Another avenue investigators have been focusing on recently, according to sources, are contracts that Greenberg handed out through the tax office totaling more than $1.5 million, which an independent audit late last year described as "unnecessary" and "considered to be a waste of taxpayer dollars," according to documents in the forensic audit of the tax office obtained by ABC News through a public records request.

Sources told ABC News that investigators have reached out to Keith Ingersoll, whose firm KI Consulting had a $48,000 contract with the tax office that ran between January 2017 and September 2020. The audit found that there was "no evidence of work product" by Ingersoll's group despite the multi-year contract and staff at the tax office being "unaware what this group did."

Ingersoll's attorney did not respond to multiple requests for comment from ABC News.

 

So the feds appear to suspect that Greenberg's massive multi million-dollar tax fraud scheme -- which he's already plead guilty to, mind you --was in fact used to pay underage girls for sex for multiple Republicans in Central Florida, not just Matt Gaetz. And let's not forget, this girls were 100% victimized by adults here. They are not the villains. They deserve justice. They were used and abused, and Gaetz and his asshole bros need to pay for a good, long time.

I suspect things are going to get very bad, very quickly for Gaetz and a lot of the GOP when the indictments start raining down like a Florida thunderstorm. I should only be so lucky if this all ends up pointing to Gov. Ron DeSantis, too.

Stay tuned, folks.

The COVID Catastrophe Continues

With news that COVID-19 appeared in the US as early as December 2019, Beijing is now all but accusing the Biden administration of covering up America being part of the international "multiple origins" of the virus, and is demanding that the global medical community focus on America's part in spreading the virus globally.

 

A senior Chinese epidemiologist said the United States should be the priority in the next phase of investigations into the origin of COVID-19 after a study showed the disease could have been circulating there as early as December 2019, state media said on Thursday.

The study, published this week by the U.S. National Institutes for Health (NIH), showed that at least seven people in five U.S. states were infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, weeks before the United States reported its first official cases.

A China-World Health Organization (WHO) joint study published in March said COVID-19 most likely originated in the country's wildlife trade, with the virus passing into humans from bats via an intermediary species.

But Beijing has promoted the theory that COVID-19 entered China from overseas via contaminated frozen food, while a number of foreign politicians are also calling for more investigations into the possibility it leaked from a laboratory.

Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told state-owned tabloid the Global Times that attention should shift to the United States, which was slow to test people in the early stages of the outbreak, and is also the home of many biological laboratories.

"All bio-weapons related subjects that the country has should be subject to scrutiny," he was quoted as saying.

Commenting on the U.S. study on Wednesday, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said it was now "obvious" the COVID-19 outbreak had "multiple origins" and that other countries should co-operate with the WHO.

 

It's nonsense of course, it just means that the virus got across from China weeks earlier than originally caught, which we knew last year. On the other hand, Trump's response to the virus was so incompetent that the US can't really say that it wasn't part of the problem of global spread of the virus...and let's remember that so far it's killed over 600,000 Americans.

 

On top of all that, tens of millions of American refused to get vaccinated. China doesn't really have to do much of anything if this is a bio-weapon that got loose, because our own ignorance will kill millions over the next few years as the virus continues to mutate into more lethal strains. 

China has all the reason it needs to blame the US. We elected Trump, after all. Why wouldn't some believe them?

The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has finally come around to a compromise with his fellow Democrats on voting rights and election protection, in a package that he believes is fair, bipartisan, and historic.

The Senate GOP on Thursday took a big, huge steaming crap all over it and vowed to vote against it to a person.

 

Senate Republicans spent months praising Joe Manchin for his insistence on cross-party compromise. Next week they will almost surely end his hopes for a bipartisan deal on elections.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he believed all 50 Republicans would oppose Sen. Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) slimmed-down elections compromise, which focuses on expanding early voting and ending partisan gerrymandering in federal elections. And it’s not clear there’s a single Republican vote to even begin debate on the matter, potentially dooming Manchin's proposals before they can even make it into the bill.

Both Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said they would likely oppose a procedural vote next week that would bring Democrats’ massive elections reform bill to the Senate floor. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that the Senate could amend the bill to adopt Manchin’s changes. But Romney said supporting that strategy “doesn’t make a lot of sense to me" and Murkowski said “Joe hasn’t briefed me on any of this.”

“It needs to be blocked,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who praised Manchin last week for “saving our country” in encouraging bipartisanship. “I’m not optimistic that they could make enough changes to that to make it a fair bill. It would usurp the rights of the states.”

The apparent blanket Republican opposition to bringing Democrats’ legislation to the floor and potentially amending it — as the Senate’s swingiest vote desires — moves the voting rights debate to a new phase. Schumer told Democrats at a Thursday caucus meeting that the vote on the elections bill will be Tuesday, June 22, according to a source familiar with the meeting. That bill will need 60 votes to proceed over a filibuster.

Manchin had long sought an approach that had input from Republicans and one that he could support, but it’s become apparent there is no road to a bipartisan compromise on election legislation. He said his opposition wasn’t just because there was no GOP support, but also because Democrats’ changes to help publicly finance elections, for example, went too far for him.

“They got confused thinking ‘the only reason you’re against it is because there’s no Republicans.’ That’s not it at all. I think it should be bipartisan. I think it’s a dangerous thing to do something that monumental” on party lines, Manchin said on Wednesday after he rolled out some of his changes. “The other thing is there were some things, being a former secretary of state and governor, that just didn’t make sense."

Murkowski has joined Manchin on a proposal to re-up the Voting Rights Act, but that legislation will wait until the fall. And that leaves Congress in a deadlock, infuriating progressives.

Manchin is also among a group of Democrats opposed to gutting the filibuster to install elections law changes, leaving no partisan road map either in a 50-50 Senate where Democrats would need every single vote to make changes on party lines. That group of filibuster-repeal skeptics may shrink after next week’s vote on the so-called For the People Act, with several Democrats saying the GOP’s rejection of that bill could change their minds.

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who has led the GOP opposition to the elections bill because of its federalized approach to state elections, said “every one of us works for opportunities to work with Sen. Manchin.” But he added that when “Stacey Abrams immediately endorsed Sen. Manchin’s proposal, it became the Stacey Abram’s substitute, not the Joe Manchin substitute.”

 

Understand that there is no package of federal election reforms that the GOP will vote for, because Republican will lose elections they cannot rig. Republicans don't want more people to vote. They want voting to be strictly limited to rich white folk who can afford to take the time off to go vote, and white senior citizens who have all the free time they need to vote Republican.

Everyone else can suffer in line for 10 hours.

To his credit, Manchin keeps proving time and time again that there is no compromise his Republican friends will accept. To his detriment, he seems to not have actually learned anything from wasting America's time proving something the rest of us already knew.

Where do we go from here? Well, like the January 6th commission, it'll get blocked next week, and we have nothing. Republicans won't be made to pay a price, because they can freely manipulate who can vote so that they don't have to.

I don't know what else Manchin wants, and since he'll never change his mind on the filibuster (and if he does miraculously, then all the power goes to Kyrsten Sinema who will play the same game) so at this point, I don't know what else we can do except watch our Republic get wiped out in 2022 and 2024 and permanent GOP control is phased in.

But hey, Manchin kept his morals, right?

StupidiNews!

• After passing both the House and Senate this week, President Biden has signed into law legislation declaring Juneteenth as a national federal holiday, meaning federal employees will have today off.
• An hour-long blackout suffered by global web services provider Akamai interrupted business for multiple US airlines and Australian banks, among other corporations early Thursday.
  
• Peru's judicial electoral board says that full results of this month's presidential elections could take weeks as Pedro Castillo claimed victory, while opponent Keiko Fujimori refuses concession.
• Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party leader Edwin Poots is facing a possible collapse of government as a power sharing agreement with Sinn Fein has come unraveled.
• Ohio Republicans are close to eliminating municipal broadband in the state with a budget amendment that would make public broadband illegal for 98% of residents.
  

Last Call For A Supremely Historic Day

First, the good news: in a 7-2 ruling, the US Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act by dismissing Texas's challenge to the healthcare law.

 

The Supreme Court saved the Affordable Care Act yet again on Thursday, tossing out a Republican lawsuit that sought to overturn former president Barack Obama’s signature legislation.

The 7–2 decision brought together the court’s liberal wing and several of its more conservative members, including the two newest justices confirmed under former president Donald Trump, Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh.

The majority concluded that Texas and the other Republican state attorneys general who sued lacked standing to bring the case at all, a ruling that brought the yearslong fight to an end without delving into the substance of the latest challenge to the healthcare law. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the opinion, which was also joined by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.

The ACA’s many provisions that transformed the US healthcare system will remain intact — including insurers being blocked from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions, regulated individual insurance markets, and an expansion of Medicaid plans to millions of people with low incomes.

To establish standing, a party has to show that they suffer an injury traceable to the issue at hand. The Texas lawsuit centered on the individual mandate portion of Obamacare, a tax on people who decline to purchase health insurance, which did not directly affect state governments at all. The Republican states tried to get around this by arguing that encouraging people to sign up for health insurance causes extra paperwork costs for states as an employer. “Those forms don’t produce themselves,” then–Texas solicitor general Kyle Hawkins argued before the Supreme Court in November.

The court wasn’t having it. During last year’s hearing, Justice Elena Kagan said the Texas argument would “explode” standing doctrine

The Republican states tried to argue that the individual mandate penalty — despite being $0 — increased their financial burden by driving more people to join state medical insurance programs. But the court forcefully rejected that argument.

“Neither logic nor evidence suggests that an unenforceable mandate will cause state residents to enroll in valuable benefits programs that they would otherwise forgo,” says the decision.

The justices ruled that granting standing in a case like this would essentially give the courts a blank check to overturn legislation. “It would threaten to grant unelected judges a general authority to conduct oversight of decisions of the elected branches of Government,” says the ruling.

 

Texas's argument was simply that the federal government trying to get states to do things was inherently harmful to the states, which is the equivalent of a ten-year-old saying sending them to bedtime causes them irreparable harm and that kids should be allowed to sue to stay up as long as they want. It would have been the end of These United States™ effectively.

Two justices, Alito and Gorsuch, ignored the standing question and agreed with the Texas argument that the entire ACA was rendered unconstitutional in 2017 over the SCOTUS ruling that ended the individual mandate four years ago.  But not even Clarence Thomas bought that argument, neither did Kavanaugh, Barrett, or Roberts.

But in the other major ruling handed down Thursday, the court found unanimously, 9-0, that the city of Philadelphia could not force a Catholic adoption agency to screen same-sex couples as foster care providers.

The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously ruled that Philadelphia may not bar a Catholic agency that refused to work with same-sex couples from screening potential foster parents.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for six members of the court, said that since the city allowed exceptions to its policies for some other agencies it must also do so in this instance. The Catholic agency, he wrote, “seeks only an accommodation that will allow it to continue serving the children of Philadelphia in a manner consistent with its religious beliefs; it does not seek to impose those beliefs on anyone else.”

The decision, in the latest clash between anti-discrimination principles and claims of conscience, was a setback for gay rights and further evidence that religious groups almost always prevail in the current court.

Philadelphia stopped placements with the agency, Catholic Social Services, after a 2018 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer described its policy against placing children with same-sex couples. The agency and several foster parents sued the city, saying the decision violated their First Amendment rights to religious freedom and free speech.

Lawyers for the city said the case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, No. 19-123, was an easy one. When the government hires independent contractors like the Catholic agency, they said, it acts on its own behalf and can include provisions barring discrimination in its contracts.

Lawyers for the agency responded that it merely wanted to continue work that it had been doing for centuries, adding that no gay couple had ever applied to it. If one had, they said, the couple would have been referred to another agency.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, ruled against the agency. The city was entitled to require compliance with its nondiscrimination policies, the count said.

The case was broadly similar to that of a Colorado baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

In 2018, the Supreme Court refused to decide the central issue in that case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission: whether businesses may claim exemptions from anti-discrimination laws on religious grounds. It ruled instead that the baker had been mistreated by members of the state’s civil rights commission who had expressed hostility toward religion.

The foster care agency relied on the Colorado decision, arguing that it too had been subjected to hostility based on anti-religious prejudice. The city responded that the agency was not entitled to rewrite government contracts to eliminate anti-discrimination clauses.

 

The Roberts Court has made it very clear over the last several years that religious freedom trumps legal equality, and that government entities must always accommodate an organization's religious beliefs to deny services, employment, or recognition on the basis of sexual orientation. It is still a very loud reminder that both federal law and legal precedent still finds LGBTQ people to be permanently second-class citizens if their existence serves to harm the religious beliefs of others.

It's repugnant, but it will not change in my lifetime. It is the "separate, but equal" doctrine for the 21st century.

 

But Democrats didn't excite people, so we ended up with Trump packing the courts.

No Longer A Householder Name

Indicted former Ohio GOP House Speaker Larry Householder, charged on several federal counts related to bribery involving billions in grift to an energy company SuperPAC slush fund, has finally been expelled from the Ohio state House by a 75-21 vote. All but one Democrat voted to expel him, along with a majority of Republicans.

Lawmakers in the GOP-controlled Ohio House removed Rep. Larry Householder from the chamber, ousting the former leader in a 75-21 vote Wednesday.

After a brilliant political comeback to lead the Ohio House of Representatives, Householder leaves his beloved chamber under the cloud of a federal indictment for the second time.

Householder maintains his innocence: "They say the truth will set you free. I look forward to it."

Householder's now-former colleagues utilized a little-used provision in the Ohio Constitution that allows lawmakers to police their own for disorderly conduct. The last legislator removed in this way was Hamilton County Rep. John P. Slough in 1857 for punching another representative.

Even getting the resolution to the floor for a vote was a monumental effort that eked by with one vote. Ultimately, he was removed by 42 fellow Republicans and 33 Democrats. One Democrat, Rep. Joe Miller of Amherst, and 20 Republicans opposed the resolution.

The expulsion came after months of inaction and Householder steadfastly refusing to resign despite the pleas of top Republicans and Democrats.

"This has been going on long enough," said Rep. Mark Fraizer, R-Newark. "It is time for this to come to a conclusion."

Timeline:The rise and fall of Ohio Rep. Larry Householder

Householder, 62, of Glenford, was arrested last July in connection with the state's largest bribery scheme. Householder is accused of orchestrating a nearly $61 million operation to win control of the Ohio House, pass a $1 billion bailout for two nuclear plants in northern Ohio and defend that law against a ballot initiative to block it.

Householder has pleaded not guilty to the offense. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

 

I expect the federal case against Householder will result in conviction, if it's bad enough to be brought during the Trump era, it must have been egregious.  Having said that, let's remember that every single Ohio state House Republican who voted along with Householder to run this billion-dollar bailout scheme was re-elected in 2020. Every single one of them. The voters don't care, and I expect if Householder isn't convicted and jailed before the 2022 primary, he'll be on the ballot and will win.

We'll see how the trial plays out, but I fully expect that Householder will be back in the Ohio state House, and sooner than people think.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

In something of a major miracle, the US Senate just passed Democratic Sen. Ed Markey's resolution on making Juneteenth a federal public holiday, with avowed racist GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin finally dropping his opposition to the bill.

The Senate unanimously passed a resolution on Tuesday establishing June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a US holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. 

The legislation has gained momentum since the massive Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd last year and the Democrats' takeover of the White House and Congress. 

But Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson blocked the bill in 2020, saying that the day off for federal employees would cost US taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Johnson dropped his objection this week despite his concerns, paving the way for the bill's passage in the Senate. 

"Although I strongly support celebrating Emancipation, I objected to the cost and lack of debate," said Johnson in a statement. "While it still seems strange that having taxpayers provide federal employees paid time off is now required to celebrate the end of slavery, it is clear that there is no appetite in Congress to further discuss the matter." 

The measure needs to pass the House and be signed by President Joe Biden to become law.
On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger announced in Galveston, Texas, the end of slavery in accordance with President Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. 

In 1980, Juneteenth became a Texas state holiday. In the decades since, every state but South Dakota came to officially commemorate Juneteenth, but only a handful of states observe it as a paid holiday.

 

I suspect many businesses will treat it much like Dr. King's birthday or the day after Thanksgiving: nice if your employer can give it to you off, but for the most part, it'll be ignored and most of us will be at work that particular day in favor of a "real" holiday like July 4th, or worse, given a choice of one of the two (I totally expect some tech company to announce that you can have your choice of one of the two holidays off in the very near future).

The measure should pass the House, although it won't be unanimous. You can bet the usual suspects will not vote yes, although I do expect the wiser ones will merely abstain.

Last Call For Putin On The Ritz, Con't

As President Biden meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, you may still be wondering what the Former Guy ™ said to Putin in Helsinki in 2019, and how House Democrats were very eager to get to the bottom of Trump and Putin's conversations without any witnesses (well, a translator who House Democrats definitely wanted to talk to).

But that was then and this is now, and now we're getting well and solidly into the "We're looking forward, not backward" phase of a Democratic administration that completely refuses to hold its predecessor to account, guaranteeing an even worse administration later this decade.

Ahead of President Joe Biden’s meeting Wednesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, congressional Democrats said they are no longer seeking records of former President Donald Trump’s private meetings with the Russian leader, despite previous concerns Trump tried to conceal details of their conversations.

"The Biden administration is looking forward, not back," said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., whose panel once considered subpoenaing Trump’s interpreter to testify about his July 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Finland, where only an American interpreter was also present.

From 2017 to 2019, amid former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, Democrats raised questions about Trump’s conversations with Putin, especially after Trump said in Helsinki, standing next to Putin, that he believed his 2017 denial of election interference, over the findings of U.S. intelligence.

Similar questions were raised after the disclosure of an unplanned conversation with Putin during a G-20 dinner in Osaka, Japan, in June 2019 during which Trump was not accompanied by an interpreter.

He had told reporters beforehand that his private discussions with Putin were "none of your business."

In 2019, the Washington Post reported that the former president went to "extraordinary lengths" to conceal details of his conversations with Putin, leaving some subordinates without a clear record of the world leaders’ interactions.

Rep. Tom Malinowksi, D-N.J., a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who served as an assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration, said details about Trump and Putin’s conversations are "historically very interesting," but less relevant given that Trump "is not shaping US policy towards Russia or anything else."

"At the time, my concern was not so much that the former president and Putin had agreed ... to do something not in our interest, because President Trump would have to tell somebody that," Malinowski said. "It was more the signal that it sent to Putin that Trump wanted to confide in him above his own team."

Foreign policy analysts ABC News spoke with ahead of Biden’s meeting with Putin in Geneva largely downplayed concerns about Trump and Putin’s conversations, and their impact on Wednesday's summit.

"You’d like to have it, but I don’t think it matters much," Ian Bremmer, a political scientist and president of the Eurasia Group, who first reported Trump and Putin’s second meeting at the G-20 in 2017, told ABC News.

 

And there we are. "Don't think it matters much."

 

We made this mistake with Obama and Dubya and got Trump. We barely escaped Trump with Biden, and noe Biden is making the same "forward, not backward" mistake.

 

 Our next GOP tyrant will be far, far worse than Trump.

The Big Lie, Con't

Donald Trump tried to pressure both Bill Barr and his eventual Attorney General replacement, Jeffrey Rosen, into declaring the 2020 presidential election fraudulent, thus justifying whatever actions Trump then took to remain in power.

 

New emails from Justice Department and White House officials show how President Donald Trump's allies pressured then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to consider false and outlandish allegations that the 2020 election had been stolen at the same time that Rosen was being elevated to lead the Justice Department in December 2020. 

The emails show how Trump's White House assistant, chief of staff and other allies pressured the Justice Department to investigate claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election -- and how Trump directed allies to push Rosen to join the legal effort to challenge the election result, according to a batch of emails released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday. 

The documents also offer a window into how Rosen dealt with the political pressure coming from the White House. 

Trump's campaign to pressure the Justice Department was occurring as he was replacing Attorney General William Barr -- who had publicly said there wasn't evidence of widespread voter fraud -- with Rosen, the emails show. 

On December 14 at 4:57 p.m., Trump's assistant sent Rosen and DOJ official Richard Donoghue a document claiming to show voter fraud in Antrim County, Michigan. An aide to Donoghue forwarded the document to the US Attorneys for the Eastern and Western Districts in Michigan. Less than an hour later, Trump tweeted that Barr would be leaving the Justice Department just before Christmas, elevating both Rosen and Donoghue to the top spots at DOJ. 

The emails also provide new detail into how Mark Meadows, then-White House chief of staff, directed Rosen to have then-Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark -- who reportedly urged Trump to make him acting attorney general instead of Rosen -- investigate voter fraud issues in Georgia before the US attorney there resigned in January. 

Amid the pressure, Rosen said he refused to speak to Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani about his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.  

When Meadows sought to have Rosen arrange an FBI meeting with a Giuliani ally pushing a conspiracy theory that Italy was using military technology and satellites to somehow change votes to Joe Biden, Rosen said he would not help Giuliani. 

"I flatly refused, said I would not be giving any special treatment to Giuliani or any of his 'witnesses,' and re-affirmed yet again that I will not talk to Giuliani about any of this," Rosen wrote to Donoghue.

The new emails provide additional detail to reports earlier this month from CNN, The New York Times and others on Meadows' emails to Rosen after the election, which revealed how the top White House aide had urged the Justice Department to take action for Trump's benefit. The emails included a list of complaints about voting procedures in New Mexico, alleged "anomalies" in a Georgia county and the claims about Italian satellites. 

 

Needless to say, the House Oversight Committee would very, very much like to talk to Jeffrey Rosen, Bill Donoghue, Mark Meadows, Jeffrey Clark, and a whole boatload of other people, and I expect the subpoenas to fly fast and furious.

Now, whether or not the Biden White House will step in and block the subpoenas in order to protect the Executive branch, well...

That'll be the next fight, yes?

 

 

The GOP's Race To The Bottom In Schools

A well-funded, multi-billion dollar, organized right-wing assault on school boards across the country is under way this summer, and the goal is to enrage liberal white parents in wealthy suburban school districts that the demonic specter of CRITICAL RACE THEORY is going to indoctrinate precious Conner and Madison into hating white people or something.

A booby-trapped billboard. A list of demands. A conservative media frenzy.

Jeff Porter, superintendent of a wealthy suburban school district in Maine, had no idea that his community was about to become part of a national battle when in the summer of 2020 a father began accusing the district of trying to “indoctrinate” his children by teaching critical race theory.

To Porter, the issue was straightforward: The district had denounced white supremacy in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police, but did not teach critical race theory, the academic study of racism’s pervasive impact.

But the parent, Shawn McBreairty, grew increasingly disgruntled and soon connected with No Left Turn in Education, a rapidly growing national group that supports parents as they fight against lessons on systemic racism. That action turned a heated conflict with the school board into one that soon drew national attention, mobilized by a new, increasingly coordinated movement with the backing of major conservative organizations and media outlets.

It’s a movement that has amped up grassroots parental organizing around the country, bringing the lens and stakes of national politics — along with the playbook of seasoned GOP activists — to school boards.

“I was very naïve at the beginning of the year,” Porter said. “I thought it was a concerned parent who had taken it a little too far. I didn't understand this until recently, but these were tactics from national organizations to discredit the entire district.”

McBreairty became Maine’s chapter leader for No Left Turn last summer. He has since put up a billboard-size sign of a school board member’s face on his lawn and said it was surrounded by rat traps to prevent theft. “This is a war with the left,” McBreairty said in an email to NBC News, “and in war, tactics and strategy can become blurry.” The fight has only escalated, and it shows no sign of slowing.

Conflicts like this are playing out in cities and towns across the country, amid the rise of at least 165 local and national groups that aim to disrupt lessons on race and gender, according to an NBC News analysis of media reports and organizations’ promotional materials. Reinforced by conservative think tanks, law firms and activist parents, these groups have found allies in families frustrated over Covid-19 restrictions in schools and have weaponized the right’s opposition to critical race theory, turning it into a political rallying point.

While the efforts vary, they share strategies of disruption, publicity and mobilization. The groups swarm school board meetings, inundate districts with time-consuming public records requests and file lawsuits and federal complaints alleging discrimination against white students. They have become media darlings in conservative circles and made the debate over critical race theory a national issue.

Virtually all school districts insist they are not teaching critical race theory, but many activists and parents have begun using it as a catch-all term to refer to what schools often call equity programs, teaching about racism or LGBTQ-inclusive policies.

Now, conservative activists are setting their sights on ousting as many school board members as they can, and local Republican Parties have vowed to help, viewing the revolt against critical race theory as akin to the tea party wave from a decade ago.

Activists and parents have launched 50 recall efforts this year aimed at unseating 126 school board members, according to a new report from Ballotpedia, a website that tracks U.S. politics and elections. Most of those recalls — which already surpass the record for a single year — started as objections to Covid-19 restrictions, but five of the most recently launched campaigns, including a particularly contentious fight in Loudoun County, Virginia, include concerns about critical race theory.

And, in a new development this year, rather than targeting a single member, these efforts often target multiple members or entire school boards, according to Abbey Smith, a researcher at Ballotpedia.

 

Parents were already furious at school boards over COVID last year. Now they'll be looking for heads to roll, and the GOP has given them a target-rich environment.  And remember, the ultimate goal here is to get rid of the notion that equality should exist at all...and maybe public schools shouldn't exist, either.

We're well on our way down that path now, but unless Democrats get in gear, we're not going to have schools much longer. You don't need history, math, and science to work at the Amazon warehouse, but without it, you may never work anywhere else.

Education will be one more thing reserved for the "deserving", either those who have the luxury of homeschooling, or private schooling. Public education for the masses is something Republicans have wanted gone for a long time now, and they've found one of their strongest attacks yet.

Underestimate this at your own peril, and you'd better be checking on school boards where you and yours live, because I guarantee you these guys are out there, waiting to pounce on and destroy any voice that tells kids anything other than the strong should rule the weak by force.

The time to get involved in local politics was 2008, folks.