TrumpReich in action

[maestrob]

Swift Ruling Tests Trump’s Tactic of Running Out the Clock

The former president has leveraged the slow judicial process in the past to thwart congressional oversight, but the Jan. 6 case may be different.


By Charlie Savage
Nov. 10, 2021

WASHINGTON — On the surface, a judge’s ruling on Tuesday night that Congress can obtain Trump White House files related to the Jan. 6 riot seemed to echo another high-profile ruling in November 2019. In the earlier matter, a judge said a former White House counsel must testify about then-President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation.

In both cases, Democratic-controlled House oversight committees issued subpoenas, Mr. Trump sought to stonewall those efforts by invoking constitutional secrecy powers, and Obama-appointed Federal District Court judges — to liberal cheers — ruled against him. Each ruling even made the same catchy declaration: “presidents are not kings.”

But there was a big difference: The White House counsel case two years ago had chewed up three and a half months by the time Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a 120-page opinion to end its first stage. Just 23 days elapsed between Mr. Trump’s filing of the Jan. 6 papers lawsuit and Judge Tanya Chutkan’s ruling against him.

The case, which raises novel issues about the scope of executive privilege when asserted by a former president, is not over: Mr. Trump is asking an appeals court to overturn Judge Chutkan’s ruling and, in the interim, to block the National Archives from giving Congress the first set of files on Friday. The litigation appears destined to reach the Supreme Court, which Mr. Trump reshaped with three appointments.

But if the rapid pace set by Judge Chutkan continues, it would mark a significant change from how lawsuits over congressional subpoenas went during the Trump era.

The slow pace of such litigation worked to the clear advantage of Mr. Trump, who vowed to defy “all” congressional oversight subpoenas after Democrats took the House in the 2018 midterm. He frequently lost in court, but only after delays that ran out the clock on any chance that such efforts would uncover information before the 2020 election.

So alongside the substantive issues about executive privilege, one key question now is whether Mr. Trump can again tie the matter up in the courts long enough that even a Supreme Court ruling against him would come too late for the special committee in the House that is seeking the Trump White House documents for its investigation into the Jan. 6 riot.

Specifically, the Jan. 6 committee has demanded detailed records about Mr. Trump’s every movement and meeting on the day of the assault, when Mr. Trump led a “Stop the Steal” rally and his supporters then sacked the Capitol in an attempt to block Congress from certifying Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory.

The chairman of the committee, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, has said he wants to wrap up by “early spring.” In that case, the committee would need access to the files it has subpoenaed by late winter for that information to be part of any report.

Legally, the committee could continue working through the rest of 2022. If Republicans retake the House in the midterm election, the inquiry would very likely end.

What happens next in the Jan. 6 White House files case may turn on the inclinations of whichever three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit are randomly assigned to the panel that will hear Mr. Trump’s appeal.

Of the court’s 11 full-time judges, seven are Democratic appointees — including Judge Jackson, whom Mr. Biden elevated earlier this year — and four are Republican appointees, including three named by Mr. Trump. The circuit also has five “senior status” judges who are semiretired but sometimes get assigned to panels; four of those five are Republican appointees.

If the D.C. Circuit declines, as Judge Chutkan did, to issue a preliminary injunction, Mr. Trump will presumably immediately appeal to the Supreme Court via its so-called shadow docket, by which the justices can swiftly decide emergency matters without full briefs and arguments.

If a stay is granted at either level, the question would shift to whether the D.C. Circuit panel echoes Judge Chutkan’s decision to move quickly in light of the circumstances, or throttles back to the slower pace it tended to follow on such cases when Mr. Trump was president.

Notably, in another Trump-era case, involving access to financial papers held by his accounting firm, Mazars USA, the Federal District Court judge assigned to that matter, Amit Mehta, was sensitive to the timing implications and took less than a month after the case was filed in April 2019 to hand down his opinion that Congress could get the records.

But a D.C. Circuit panel took about five more months before reaching that same result — a nominal win for Congress — in October 2019. Mr. Trump then appealed to the Supreme Court, which waited until July 2020 to send the case back down to Judge Mehta to start the litigation over again using different standards.

Separately, House Democrats have introduced legislation in response to the Trump presidency that would, among many other things, speed up lawsuits to enforce congressional subpoenas for executive branch information. Two people familiar with the matter said House Democratic leaders have indicated they plan to hold a floor vote on that bill before the end of 2021, though no date has been set; its prospects in the Senate are unclear.

A related important difference in secrecy disputes between the Trump era and the Jan. 6 White House papers case is that when Mr. Trump was president, his administration controlled the executive branch files Congress wanted to see.

Today, President Biden has refused to join Mr. Trump in invoking executive privilege, instead instructing the National Archives to give Congress the files unless a court orders otherwise. As a result, when it comes to government files, the default has flipped from secrecy to disclosure.

During the phase of the lawsuit before Judge Chutkan, she signaled that she was averse to judicial delay. During arguments last week, she rejected a suggestion by a lawyer for Mr. Trump that she examine each document before deciding whether executive privilege applied.


“I don’t see any language in the statute or any case that convinces me that where a previous president disagrees with the incumbent’s assertion of privilege, that the court is required to get involved and do a document-by-document review,” she said, adding:

“Wouldn’t that always mean that the process of turning over these records, where the incumbent has no objection, would slow to a snail’s pace? And wouldn’t that be an intrusion by this branch into the executive and legislative branch functions?”

Justin Clark, the lawyer for Mr. Trump, responded that he did not think it would be an “unbearable burden” for the judiciary to review each disputed document to make sure that the Constitution was being followed.

The Biden administration’s control of the archival records left by the Trump administration does not, of course, extend to the information inside the heads of the former Trump aides and loyalists whom the Jan. 6 committee wants to testify. Mr. Trump has instructed them not to cooperate with the committee’s subpoenas.

Among those who defied the committee’s subpoenas is Stephen K. Bannon, a Trump ally who worked in the White House until August 2017. The House on Oct. 21 declared him in contempt of Congress and asked the Justice Department to prosecute him.

Any such charges are unlikely to result in swift testimony by Mr. Bannon. In addition to the questions over executive privilege, his case raises a novel twist since he was not an executive branch official at the time of the conversations with the president that lawmakers want to ask about.

Three weeks have passed since that referral and the Justice Department has made no decision about whether to proceed with such a legal process. At a news conference on Monday, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland declined to provide any update.

“This is a criminal matter,” he said. “It’s an ongoing examination of the referral and, as you know, the Justice Department doesn’t comment on those. We evaluate these in the normal way we do — facts and the law, and applying the principles of prosecution.”

Before Mr. Biden appointed him attorney general in March, Mr. Garland had served as a judge on the D.C. Circuit for 24 years.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/us/p ... actic.html

[Rach3]

From AxiosAm today, quoting from Jonathan Karl's new book about Jan.6 and interview with Trump:


Jonathan Karl: "Were you worried about him (Pence) during that siege? Were you worried about his safety?"

Trump: "No, I thought he was well-protected, and I had heard that he was in good shape. No. Because I had heard he was in very good shape. But, but, no, I think — "
Karl: "Because you heard those chants — that was terrible. I mean — "

Trump: "He could have — well, the people were very angry."

Karl: "They were saying 'hang Mike Pence.'"
Trump: "Because it's common sense, Jon. It's common sense that you're supposed to protect. How can you — if you know a vote is fraudulent, right? — how can you pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress? How can you do that? And I'm telling you: 50/50, it's right down the middle for the top constitutional scholars when I speak to them. Anybody I spoke to — almost all of them at least pretty much agree, and some very much agree with me — because he's passing on a vote that he knows is fraudulent. How can you pass a vote that you know is fraudulent? Now, when I spoke to him, I really talked about all of the fraudulent things that happened during the election. I didn't talk about the main point, which is the legislatures did not approve — five states. The legislatures did not approve all of those changes that made the difference between a very easy win for me in the states, or a loss that was very close, because the losses were all very close."

[maestrob]

Court Issues Brief Hold on Release of Trump Files in Jan. 6 Inquiry

Congress had been set to receive the first batch of Trump White House files from the National Archives on Friday, a move that the former president had fought.

By Charlie Savage and Luke Broadwater
Nov. 11, 2021

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court issued a short-term injunction on Thursday blocking the National Archives from turning over to Congress documents from the Trump White House related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a day before the House committee investigating the attack was set to receive the first batch.

The move, by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, will preserve the status quo while lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump, Congress and the Biden administration submit briefs over the next two weeks. The briefs will address whether the court should further block any transfer of papers as the litigants turn to arguing over the merits of the case, which raises novel issues about an ex-president’s executive privilege powers. The court will then hold arguments on Nov. 30.

The Jan. 6 committee has demanded detailed records about Mr. Trump’s movements and meetings on the day of the assault, when Mr. Trump led a “Stop the Steal” rally and his supporters then stormed the Capitol in an attempt to block Congress from certifying President Biden’s Electoral College victory.

Mr. Trump has invoked executive privilege over the first set of archival materials from his White House. But Mr. Biden has declined to echo that assertion, instead instructing the National Archives to turn over those materials on Friday if there were no court order to do otherwise.

The order came as the committee threatened to consider contempt proceedings against Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, for refusing to comply with its subpoena. Through his lawyer, Mr. Meadows said he felt “duty bound” to follow Mr. Trump’s instructions to defy the committee’s demands for records and testimony, citing executive privilege.

The committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, said Mr. Meadows had “no valid legal basis” for not submitting to questioning. He noted Mr. Meadows had previously told the committee that he was searching for documents to comply with its records request.

Mr. Meadows is the third ally of Mr. Trump to refuse to cooperate. The House has already voted to hold Stephen K. Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress and said it would consider action against Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department lawyer who participated in Mr. Trump’s frenzied efforts to undermine the election with false claims of widespread fraud.

In recent weeks, some members of the committee have grown increasingly frustrated that Mr. Meadows has not sat for an interview with investigators, even though the committee’s leaders said he was “engaging” with the panel.

“Our patience with those who may or may not be seeking simply to delay is running out,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the committee. “We won’t hesitate to move forward with a criminal contempt if we reach the conclusion that any party is not engaging in good faith.”

The related lawsuit over whether the committee can gain access to Trump White House records traces back to last month, when Mr. Trump sued the National Archives and Congress in an attempt to block their disclosure.

Earlier this week, a Federal District Court judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, rejected Mr. Trump’s challenge — and declined as well a request by Mr. Trump’s lawyer that she nevertheless block the National Archives from turning over the files while the former president pursued an appeal of her ruling.

Mr. Trump’s legal team then asked the appeals court for the brief pause, while proposing an expedited schedule for briefing on whether the court should issue a lengthier injunction during the appeal. Lawyers for Congress and the Justice Department, which is representing the National Archives, took no position on the request for the brief pause.

The request for the short-term injunction was randomly assigned to three judges: Patricia A. Millett, Robert L. Wilkins and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The first two were appointed by President Barack Obama; Judge Jackson was appointed by President Biden.

While president, Mr. Trump used the slow pace of litigation to run out the clock on congressional oversight subpoenas. But Judge Chutkan has moved quickly, disposing of the district court stage 23 days after the case was filed.

The appeals court now appears to be throttling back the pace.

In asking for the short-term injunction while the court considered the preliminary issue, the Trump legal team had proposed wrapping up briefings by early next week and was silent on whether there ought to be oral arguments. But in a brief unsigned opinion, the appellate panel decided to take more time to work through it — allowing more time for written briefs and scheduling arguments for the end of November.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/us/p ... ary-6.html

[Rach3]

ALL GOP voters ( sorry, but yes, including your GOP friends and/or family members ) enabled these criminal acts:

From AxiosPM tonight:

" As the coronavirus ripped across the country in early 2020, members of the Trump administration repeatedly interfered with the CDC's efforts to get the word out and protect the public, six current and former health officials told congressional investigators. One of the agency's former top experts, Nancy Messonnier, said she was reprimanded by then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar for saying the virus's spread was inevitable. Other officials described how the White House curtailed the CDC's media requests and pressured the agency to present more optimistic messaging in weekly reports. The information sheds new light on how the Trump administration undermined those in government who were best equipped to manage the nation's response during the pandemic's critical early stages."

[Rach3]

Of course, a little late CYA Messonnier !

[Rach3]

More for your GOP friends to chew on, shamelessly no doubt.From the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina:

The Editorial Board
Sat, November 13, 2021

Many people thought a congressional run by N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore was all but certain in 2022.

His fellow lawmakers certainly did. In fact, they conveniently drew an incumbent-free, Republican-heavy congressional district centered around his home in Cleveland County.

But then came Madison Cawthorn.

The freshman representative from Western North Carolina thwarted Moore’s plans Thursday when he announced his decision to change congressional districts. Cawthorn will run in the newly created 13th Congressional District instead of the 14th Congressional District, which state lawmakers had drawn with him as the lone incumbent. Hours later, Moore officially squashed rumors of a 2022 run, saying he plans to seek re-election as speaker next year instead.


NC House Speaker Tim Moore won’t run for Congress, seeking another term as speaker

Though he didn’t mention Moore by name, Cawthorn said when announcing the switch that he feared that another “establishment, go-along-to-get-along Republican” would prevail in the 13th district if he didn’t run there.

You heard that right.

Tim Moore — yes, that Tim Moore, a conservative stalwart who even went on a “Stop the Steal” field trip to Pennsylvania — is now considered an establishment Republican.

That says a lot about what the Republican Party has become, especially here in North Carolina, where Trumpism is threatening to become the norm. The irony is that Moore and his fellow Republicans are the ones who got us — and themselves — here. Too many of them stood by and watched while extremists like Cawthorn lied and fear-mongered their way into power. They could have stopped it, but too often went along with it instead, particularly when they thought it could get them more money, more endorsements and more votes.

Turns out that unconditional loyalty isn’t as politically productive as Republicans thought it would be. Obviously, they have yet to learn what others have long known: people like Cawthorn aren’t loyal to anyone but themselves.

It might even be funny if it wasn’t so maddening. Republicans got pretty creative when they tailored Moore’s designer district, effectively disenfranchising large swaths of voters and double-bunking several incumbents in order to do so. They had the gall to insult voters’ intelligence by calling the process “unbiased” and the maps “fair,” not caring how transparent the whole thing was. Now, Moore isn’t even running in said district — or any district — and we may still be left with their unfair maps, although lawsuits are pending.

It’s markedly less funny, however, that even Tim Moore doesn’t seem to be Republican enough for a Republican primary anymore. Moore, one of the most powerful men in state government, has served in the General Assembly since Cawthorn was in elementary school. He’s always been pretty popular with his party; after all, you don’t have to appeal to voters across the aisle if you’ve gerrymandered yourself into a legislative majority.

Yet he seems to be admitting that, despite representing parts of Western North Carolina for nearly two decades, even he may not have enough support there to defeat a 26-year-old conspiracy theorist who regularly undermines the integrity of elections and has been accused multiple times of sexual misconduct.

Apparently Republicans do have to bear the consequences of their own actions every once in a while, but it’s only sweet until you remember how much it stings. Moore and his party deserve what they’ve gotten, but they’re not the only ones paying the price. Moore sacrificed voters for his political ambitions, and in the end, no one won — not even him.

[maestrob]

Menace Enters the Republican Mainstream

Threats of violence have become commonplace among a significant part of the party, as historians and those who study democracy warn of a dark shift in American politics.

By Lisa Lerer and Astead W. Herndon
Nov. 12, 2021

At a conservative rally in western Idaho last month, a young man stepped up to a microphone to ask when he could start killing Democrats.

“When do we get to use the guns?” he said as the audience applauded. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” The local state representative, a Republican, later called it a “fair” question.

In Ohio, the leading candidate in the Republican primary for Senate blasted out a video urging Republicans to resist the “tyranny” of a federal government that pushed them to wear masks and take F.D.A.-authorized vaccines.

“When the Gestapo show up at your front door,” the candidate, Josh Mandel, a grandson of Holocaust survivors, said in the video in September, “you know what to do.”

And in Congress, violent threats against lawmakers are on track to double this year. Republicans who break party ranks and defy former President Donald J. Trump have come to expect insults, invective and death threats — often stoked by their own colleagues and conservative activists, who have denounced them as traitors.

From congressional offices to community meeting rooms, threats of violence are becoming commonplace among a significant segment of the Republican Party. Ten months after rioters attacked the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, and after four years of a president who often spoke in violent terms about his adversaries, right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable in opposition to those who dislodged him from power.

In Washington, where decorum and civility are still given lip service, violent or threatening language still remains uncommon, if not unheard-of, among lawmakers who spend a great deal of time in the same building. But among the most fervent conservatives, who play an outsize role in primary contests and provide the party with its activist energy, the belief that the country is at a crossroads that could require armed confrontation is no longer limited to the fringe.

Political violence has been part of the American story since the founding of the country, often entwined with racial politics and erupting in periods of great change: More than 70 brawls, duels and other violent incidents embroiled members of Congress from 1830 to 1860 alone. And elements of the left have contributed to the confrontational tenor of the country’s current politics, though Democratic leaders routinely condemn violence and violent imagery.

But historians and those who study democracy say what has changed has been the embrace of violent speech by a sizable portion of one party, including some of its loudest voices inside government and most influential voices outside.

In effect, they warn, the Republican Party is mainstreaming menace as a political tool.

Omar Wasow, a political scientist at Pomona College who studies protests and race, drew a contrast between the current climate and earlier periods of turbulence and strife, like the 1960s or the run-up to the Civil War.

“What’s different about almost all those other events is that now, there’s a partisan divide around the legitimacy of our political system,” he said. “The elite endorsement of political violence from factions of the Republican Party is distinct for me from what we saw in the 1960s. Then, you didn’t have — from a president on down — politicians calling citizens to engage in violent resistance.”


From his earliest campaigning to the final moments of his presidency, Mr. Trump’s political image has incorporated the possibility of violence. He encouraged attendees at his rallies to “knock the hell” out of protesters, praised a lawmaker who body-slammed a reporter, and in a recent interview defended rioters who clamored to “hang Mike Pence.”

Yet even with the former president largely out of the public eye and after a deadly attack on the Capitol where rioters tried to overturn the presidential election, the Republican acceptance of violence has only spread. Polling indicates that 30 percent of Republicans, and 40 percent of people who “most trust” far-right news sources, believe that “true patriots” may have to resort to violence to “save” the country — a statement that gets far less support among Democrats and independents.

Such views, routinely expressed in warlike or revolutionary terms, are often intertwined with white racial resentments and evangelical Christian religious fervor — two potent sources of fuel for the G.O.P. during the Trump era — as the most animated Republican voters increasingly see themselves as participants in a struggle, if not a kind of holy war, to preserve their idea of American culture and their place in society.

Notably few Republican leaders have spoken out against violent language or behavior since Jan. 6, suggesting with their silent acquiescence that doing so would put them at odds with a significant share of their party’s voters. When the Idaho man asked about “killing” political opponents at an event hosted by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Mr. Kirk said he must “denounce” the question but went on to discuss at what point political violence could be justified.

In that vacuum, the coarsening of Republican messaging has continued: Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, this week tweeted an anime video altered to show him killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and swinging two swords at Mr. Biden.

Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the left-leaning group New America who has studied political violence, said there was a connection between such actions and the growing view among Americans that politics is a struggle between enemies.

“When you start dehumanizing political opponents, or really anybody, it becomes a lot easier to inflict violence on them,” Dr. Drutman said.

“I have a hard time seeing how we have a peaceful 2024 election after everything that’s happened now,” he added. “I don’t see the rhetoric turning down, I don’t see the conflicts going away. I really do think it’s hard to see how it gets better before it gets worse.”

Democrats are seeking Mr. Gosar’s censure, arguing that “depictions of violence can foment actual violence and jeopardize the safety of elected officials.”

The ranking G.O.P. lawmakers, Senator Mitch McConnell and Representative Kevin McCarthy, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Mr. McCarthy, who initially condemned the Jan. 6 attack and said “violence is never a legitimate form of protest,” more recently has joked about hitting Nancy Pelosi in the head with a gavel if he were to replace her as speaker. Like nearly all of the members of his caucus, Mr. McCarthy has said nothing about Mr. Gosar’s video.

For his part, Mr. Gosar suggested that critics were overly thin-skinned, insisting that the video was an allegory for a debate over immigration policy. He was slaying “the policy monster of open borders,” not Ms. Ocasio-Cortez or Mr. Biden, his office said. “It is a symbolic cartoon. It is not real life.”

Carlos Curbelo, a Republican former congressman from Florida who is a critic of Mr. Trump, said Republicans needed to take a stronger approach against violent language and intimidation tactics.

“I do think the problem is more acute among Republicans because there are a handful of Republican officials who have no limits,” he said. “Your country and your integrity should be more important to you than your re-election.”

The increasing violence of Republican speech has been accompanied by a willingness of G.O.P. leaders to follow Mr. Trump’s lead and shrug off allegations of domestic violence that once would have been considered disqualifying for political candidates in either party.

Herschel Walker, the former professional football player running for Senate in Georgia, is accused of repeatedly threatening his ex-wife’s life, but won Mr. Trump’s endorsement and appears to be consolidating party support behind his candidacy. Mr. Trump also backed the Ohio congressional campaign of Max Miller, who faces allegations of violence from his ex-girlfriend, the former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham. Mr. Miller has sued Ms. Grisham for defamation.


And Sean Parnell, a Senate candidate in Pennsylvania who was endorsed by Mr. Trump, appeared in court this week in a custody fight in which his estranged wife accuses him of choking her and physically harming their children. He denies it.

There is little indication that the party has paid a political price for its increasingly violent tone.

Even after corporations and donors vowed to withhold donations to the G.O.P. in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack, Republicans out-raised Democrats this year. And they outperformed expectations in the elections this month, capturing the Virginia governorship, winning a host of upset victories in suburban contests and making a surprisingly strong showing in New Jersey.

Yet violent talk has tipped over into actual violence in ways big and small. School board members and public health officials have faced a wave of threats, prompting hundreds to leave their posts. A recent investigation by Reuters documented nearly 800 intimidating messages to election officials in 12 states.

And threats against members of Congress have jumped by 107 percent compared with the same period in 2020, according to the Capitol Police. Lawmakers have been harassed at airports, targeted at their homes and had family members threatened. Some have spent tens of thousands on personal security.

“You don’t understand how awful it is and how scary it is until you’re in it,” said Representative Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who praised a Republican colleague, Representative Fred Upton, for publicly sharing some of the threats he received after voting to approve the infrastructure bill. (Mr. Upton’s office did not respond to requests for comment.) “But not telling people that this violence isn’t OK makes people think it is OK.”

Ms. Dingell, who said she was threatened by men with assault weapons outside her home last year after she was denounced by Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show, shared a small sample of what she said were hundreds of profanity-laden threats she has received.

“They ought to try you for treason,” one caller screamed in a lengthy, graphic voice mail message. “I hope your family dies in front of you. I pray to God that if you’ve got any children, they die in your face.”

Bradford Fitch, president of the Congressional Management Foundation, which advises lawmakers on issues like running their offices and communicating with constituents, said he now urged members not to hold open public meetings, an American tradition dating back to the colonies, because of security concerns. Politics, he said, had become “too raw and radioactive.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea right now,” Mr. Fitch said. “I hope we can get to a point where we can advise members of Congress that it’s safe to have a town-hall meeting.”


But even at right-wing gatherings of the like-minded, there is a shared assumption that political confrontation could escalate into violence.

At a Virginia rally last month for conservative supporters of Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor, the urgency of a call to arms was conveyed right from the opening prayer. The speaker warned of the looming threat of “communist atheists.”

“Heavenly Father, we come before you tonight,” said Joshua Pratt, a conservative activist. “Your children are in a battle, and we need your help.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/us/p ... toric.html

[Rach3]

From WAPO today:

Opinion: A newly disclosed memo reveals Trump’s plot to turn the military into his personal goon squad

By Max Boot
Columnist
Today at 8:00 a.m. EST



I want to apologize to Mark T. Esper, former president Donald Trump’s fourth and second-to-last defense secretary. I may have been too harsh on the man who became known as “Yesper” for accommodating Trump. As I noted in March: “He did not vocally protest pardons for war criminals, the use of the defense budget to build a border wall or the withdrawal of troops from Germany.” But now that we have seen fresh evidence of how much Trump and his henchmen loathed Esper, he is rising in my estimation.

That evidence comes courtesy of ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, who has unearthed a memorandum from Johnny McEntee, Trump’s director of presidential personnel, listing 14 reasons for ousting Esper. That document was dated Oct. 19, 2020. Three weeks later Esper was fired by a Trump tweet.

The very premise of McEntee’s memo was both sinister and ludicrous — a 30-year-old of no professional or intellectual distinction, whose path to power was carrying Trump’s bags, was making the case for getting rid of a senior Cabinet officer for insufficient loyalty to the president. This revealing and chilling document deserves to be read not as a historical curiosity but as a terrible portent of what could be in store if Trump wins another term. He appears determined to turn the military into his personal goon squad.

One of McEntee’s first complaints was that Esper had “approved the promotion of Lt. Col. [Alexander] Vindman, the start [sic] witness in the sham impeachment inquiry, who told Congress that the President’s call with Ukraine ‘undermined U.S. national security.’” No one has challenged the veracity of Vindman’s testimony, which was delivered under oath. Yet Trump, acting through McEntee, seemed intent on carrying out what Vindman described in a Post op-ed as “a campaign of bullying, intimidation and retaliation” for daring to tell the truth.

The next item in the indictment of Esper: “Publicly opposed the President’s direction to utilize American force to put down riots just outside the White House.” This was a reference to Esper’s brave decision in June 2020 to resist Trump’s desires to deploy active-duty troops to suppress Black Lives Matter protests.

Esper acted after he and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been lured by Trump into a bizarre photo op in Lafayette Square, which been cleared by force of peaceful protesters. Milley subsequently apologized and reminded military personnel that they are pledged to defend the Constitution, including “the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.”

This was presumably what sparked another of McEntee’s grievances against Esper: “Has failed to exercise oversight of the Joint Staff.”

McEntee further indicted Esper for acting to remove a symbol of racism and sedition — the Confederate flag — from military installations.

He was upset, moreover, that the defense secretary had ruled out attacks “on cultural sites in Iran if the conflict escalated, despite the President wanting to keep that option open.” Attacking cultural sites would have been a war crime — but, according to McEntee, Esper should have been willing to commit a war crime at Trump’s direction.

McEntee also criticized Esper for spending too much time focused on competition with Russia. Left unstated was that Trump seems to hero-worship Russian President Vladimir Putin, who helped him win the 2016 election.

Esper’s other transgressions of Trumpism included insufficient support for Trump’s capricious and discriminatory “transgender ban”; contradicting “the President in SEAL Eddie Gallagher’s case” (Trump reversed Gallagher’s demotion despite accusations he had committed war crimes); and dissenting from “the President’s decision to withdraw troops from Germany.” (McEntee gave a new Pentagon appointee working for Esper’s replacement, Christopher Miller, an isolationist to-do list that consisted of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Germany.)

The most damning and telling grievance against Esper was near the bottom of this pathetic document: “When he assumed his role, he vowed to be apolitical.” Normally being apolitical is a sine qua non for leading the armed forces. That’s why President Biden chose retired Gen. Lloyd Austin as defense secretary and President Barack Obama decided to keep Republican Robert M. Gates in the post. But Trump tried to destroy the professional, apolitical ethos of the armed forces — and if given the opportunity, he will almost certainly do so again.

Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker recounted in their book “I Alone Can Fix It” Milley’s well-grounded worries after the election about Trump’s mounting a coup. “They may try, but they’re not going to f---ing succeed,” the general reportedly told a friend. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with guns.”

Well, the next time around, Trump would want to ensure that the “guys with guns” are on his side. If he wins a second term, Trump’s next defense secretary (Johnny McEntee perhaps?) would almost certainly be somebody more devoted to him than to the Constitution. For anyone concerned about the future of U.S. democracy, that should be a cause of considerable alarm at a time when Trump and Biden are running almost neck and neck in polling matchups.

[maestrob]

Wisconsin Republicans Push to Take Over the State’s Elections

Led by Senator Ron Johnson, G.O.P. officials want to eliminate a bipartisan elections agency — and maybe send its members to jail.

By Reid J. Epstein
Nov. 19, 2021
Updated 7:17 a.m. ET

Republicans in Wisconsin are engaged in an all-out assault on the state’s election system, building off their attempts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential race by pressing to give themselves full control over voting in the state.

The Republican effort — broader and more forceful than that in any other state where allies of former President Donald J. Trump are trying to overhaul elections — takes direct aim at the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, an agency Republicans created half a decade ago that has been under attack since the chaotic aftermath of last year’s election.

The firestorm picked up late last month after a long-awaited report on the 2020 results that was ordered by Republican state legislators found no evidence of fraud but made dozens of suggestions for the election commission and the G.O.P.-led Legislature, turbocharging Republican demands for more control of elections.

Then the Trump-aligned sheriff of Racine County, the state’s fifth most populous county, recommended felony charges against five of the six members of the election commission for guidance they had given to municipal clerks early in the pandemic. The Republican majority leader of the State Senate later seemed to give a green light to that proposal, saying that “prosecutors around the state” should determine whether to bring charges.

And last week, Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, said that G.O.P. state lawmakers should unilaterally assert control of federal elections, claiming that they had the authority to do so even if Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, stood in their way — an extraordinary legal argument debunked by a 1932 Supreme Court decision and a 1964 ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court. His suggestion was nonetheless echoed by Michael Gableman, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice who is conducting the Legislature’s election inquiry.

Republican control of Wisconsin elections is necessary, Mr. Johnson said in an interview on Wednesday, because he believes Democrats cheat.

“Do I expect Democrats to follow the rules?” said the senator, who over the past year has promoted fringe theories on topics like the Capitol riot and Covid vaccines. “Unfortunately, I probably don’t expect them to follow the rules. And other people don’t either, and that’s the problem.”

The uproar over election administration in Wisconsin — where the last two presidential contests have been decided by fewer than 23,000 votes each — is heightened by the state’s deep divisions and its pivotal place in American politics.

Some top Republican officials in Wisconsin privately acknowledge that their colleagues are playing to the party’s base by calling for state election officials to be charged with felonies or for their authority to be usurped by lawmakers.

Adding to the uncertainty, Mr. Johnson’s proposal has not yet been written into legislation in Madison. Mr. Evers has vowed to stop it.

“The outrageous statements and ideas Wisconsin Republicans have embraced aren’t about making our elections stronger, they’re about making it more difficult for people to participate in the democratic process,” Mr. Evers said Thursday. The G.O.P.’s election proposals, he added, “are nothing more than a partisan power grab.”

Yet there is no guarantee that the Republican push will fall short legally or politically. The party’s lawmakers in other states have made similar moves to gain more control over election apparatus. And since the G.O.P. won control of the Wisconsin Legislature in 2010, the state has served as an incubator for conservative ideas exported to other places.

“In Wisconsin we’re heading toward a showdown over the meaning of the clause that says state legislatures should set the time, manner and place of elections,” said Kevin J. Kennedy, who spent 34 years as Wisconsin’s chief election officer before Republicans eliminated his agency and replaced it with the elections commission in 2016. “If not in Wisconsin, in some other state they’re going to push this and try to get a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on this.”

Next year, Wisconsin will host critical elections for Mr. Johnson’s Senate seat and for statewide offices, including the governor. Rebecca Kleefisch, the leading Republican in the race to challenge Mr. Evers, is running on a platform of eliminating the state election commission. (On Monday, she filed a lawsuit against the agency asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to declare that the commission’s guidance violates state law.)

The Republican anger at the Wisconsin Elections Commission, a body of three Democrats and three Republicans that G.O.P. lawmakers created in part to eliminate the investigatory powers of its predecessor agency, comes nearly 20 months after commissioners issued guidance to local election clerks on how to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

Republicans have seized in particular on a March 2020 commission vote lifting a rule that required special voting deputies — trained and dispatched by municipal clerks’ offices — to visit nursing homes twice before issuing absentee ballots to residents. The special voting deputies, like most other visitors, were barred from entering nursing homes early in the pandemic, and the commission reasoned that there was not enough time before the April primary election to require them to be turned away before mailing absentee ballots.

The vote was relatively uncontroversial at the time: No lawsuits from Republicans or anyone else challenged the guidance. The procedure remained in place for the general election in November.

But after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won Wisconsin by 20,682 votes out of 3.3 million cast, Republicans began making evidence-free claims of fraudulent votes cast from nursing homes across the state. Sheriff Christopher Schmaling of Racine County said the five state election commissioners who had voted to allow clerks to mail absentee ballots to nursing homes without the visit by special voting deputies — as is prescribed by state law — should face felony charges for election fraud and misconduct in office.

Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly, who represents Racine County, quickly concurred, saying that the five commissioners — including his own appointee to the panel — should “probably” face felony charges.

The commissioners have insisted they broke no laws.

Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who is the commission’s chairwoman, said she had no regrets about making voting easier during the pandemic and added that “even my Republican colleagues” were afraid about the future of fair elections in the state.

“We did everything we could during the pandemic to help people vote,” she said.

Mr. Johnson — a two-term senator who said he would announce a decision on whether to seek re-election “in the next few weeks” — is lobbying Republican state legislators, with whom he met last week at the State Capitol, to take over federal elections.

“The State Legislature has to reassert its constitutional role, assert its constitutional responsibility, to set the times, place and manner of the election, not continue to outsource it through the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” Mr. Johnson said. “The Constitution never mentions a governor.”

Mr. Johnson acknowledged that his proposal could leave the state with dueling sets of election regulations, one from the Wisconsin Elections Commission and another from the Legislature.

“I suppose some counties will handle it one way and other counties will handle it another,” he said.

Even if Republican lawmakers adopted Mr. Johnson’s proposal, it would apply only to federal elections, not those for state office.

Mr. Vos told reporters in Madison he had not studied whether Wisconsin legislators could take control of federal elections without the governor’s input. Devin LeMahieu, a Republican who is the State Senate majority leader, has expressed doubts about Mr. Johnson’s legal theory.

The state’s grass-roots conservatives remain angry about Mr. Biden’s victory and the failure of Republicans to undertake an Arizona-style review of ballots cast in Wisconsin last year. At least 10 Republican state lawmakers have called for the resignation of Meagan Wolfe, the commission’s nonpartisan administrator, or of the election commissioners, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

If Ms. Wolfe were to resign, her replacement would require a majority vote of the evenly split commission. If it could not reach agreement in 45 days, the State Senate, controlled by Republicans, would choose.

“The current director of W.E.C. needs to step down,” State Senator Duey Stroebel, a Republican who sits on his chamber’s elections committee, said in an interview. “Maybe we give it another try with the W.E.C., but this administrator has proved to be incompetent and not always willing to follow the law.”

Ms. Wolfe said on Thursday that Republicans’ goal was “to pressure nonpartisan election administrators like me into resigning or vacating the election space so we can be replaced by political actors who can be convinced to carry out a partisan mission.”

At the same time, some Wisconsin Republicans continue to challenge the 2020 outcome.


On Wednesday, Timothy S. Ramthun, a Republican member of the State Assembly, formally proposed decertifying Wisconsin’s election results, reclaiming the state’s “10 fraudulent electoral ballots” cast for Mr. Biden and conducting “a full forensic physical and cyber audit” of the election.

Anticipating Mr. Ramthun’s proposal, the Legislature’s lawyers issued a report on Nov. 1 stating that there was “no mechanism” under the law to reverse a certified election.

“I invite you to see it from the eyes of the people,” Mr. Ramthun wrote to fellow legislators, urging them to correct “the most egregious injustice we have seen in our time.”

The next day, Mr. Trump publicly congratulated Mr. Ramthun.

Wisconsin Democrats, exasperated and locked out of power in the Legislature, have been left to issue increasingly dire warnings.

“If this was some kind of Hollywood farce or a madcap political comedy, you would say that’s not credible even for a fake show,” said Kelda Roys, a Democratic state senator. “There’s real consequences to this. It’s designed to take away the guardrails to our democracy that keep us fair and free.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/us/p ... ction.html

[Rach3]

Boycott everything Wisconsin.

In addition to vermin in the State legislature, Wisconsin's beloved Green Bay Packers have a lying, anti-vax QB.

[Rach3]

The politics of menace/NYT 11/22

For years in Congress, the unofficial rule of receiving death threats was to avoid talking about them. That seems to have changed.

As the House debated last week whether to censure Paul Gosar, a far-right congressman from Arizona, for posting an altered anime video depicting him killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive from New York, something unusual happened. Speaking one after the other, lawmakers delivered candid and raw confessionals about the frequency with which they, too, had received violent threats.

Nikema Williams, a freshman Democrat from Georgia, described how strange it felt to drop off her child at kindergarten flanked by security officers. Jackie Walorski, a veteran Republican from Indiana, disclosed that an activist had recently tried to run her over with his car.

“The threat of actual violence against members of Congress is real, and it is growing,” said Ted Deutch of Florida, a Democrat who leads the House Ethics Committee. “Now more than ever, many of us fear for our physical safety.”

I’ve covered Congress for more than three years, and those lawmakers’ testimonials struck me as evidence of the extent to which the rising threat of political violence has loomed over American politics since the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters.But the Republican response to Gosar’s eventual censure was just as striking: Party leaders in the House pointedly refused to condemn the video, and their rank and file nearly unanimously closed ranks around Gosar. A dozen or so Republicans huddled in solidarity around him as he was censured.

The vote was intended to showcase accountability for political violence. Instead, it revealed a more worrying trend: a growing tolerance in the Republican Party for the menacing, incendiary rhetoric increasingly espoused by its loudest voices. It was a preview of what could become the new status quo in Washington.


The timeline that culminated in Gosar’s censure began when he posted the video this month. A crudely edited work, it depicted him slashing Ocasio-Cortez’s neck and swinging swords at President Biden.

Gosar, who has allied himself with white nationalists, refused to apologize. He insisted the video was meant to depict a “symbolic” policy battle over immigration.

But it was clear that the shadow of the January attack on the Capitol hung over last week’s proceedings. Democrats warned that Gosar’s comments could be perceived as the same kind of call to arms made by Donald Trump on Jan. 6 when he encouraged his supporters at a rally to march on Congress and “fight like hell.”

And while Gosar’s video was the most provocative display of violence amplified by a sitting member of Congress, it was just the latest example of Republican lawmakers using viciously suggestive language.

In the days and weeks before the riot, Trump’s closest allies in the House, including Gosar, used bellicose, inflammatory rhetoric to encourage their followers to fight against Biden’s victory. They falsely suggested that Trump was the victim of an attempted “coup” and cast Jan. 6 as the party’s “1776 moment.”

While politically motivated violence targeting lawmakers — in both parties — is not a new phenomenon, the Capitol Police say they have seen a rapid uptick in violent threats and messages over the past five years, as Trump’s style of politics became mainstream. A spokesman declined to break down the threats by party, but a review of court records indicates that both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have been targeted.


Democrats stripped Gosar of his posts on two House committees. But his exile might not last long. Republicans are already vowing political retribution if they take back the House.

Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, told reporters that he would return Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican whom Democrats also booted off committees for violent comments, to their panel assignments if Republicans take back the majority in 2023. And McCarthy reiterated that Republicans would consider kicking some Democrats out of their committee seats.

Shortly after he was censured, Gosar retweeted his original violent video, and Trump rolled out a fresh endorsement of him.


The act of congressional censure is meant to cast a shadow of disgrace over a lawmaker for politicians and voters alike to see. Instead, by rallying around Gosar, Republican leaders conveyed their implicit support, even as they publicly but vaguely denounced violence.

Those ramifications will stretch beyond Gosar’s political standing.

“This is not about me. This is not about Representative Gosar,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the House floor. “This is about what we are willing to accept.”

[Rach3]

Per the Cedar Rpaids,Iowa Gazette today , another example of how and why the Iowa GOP is one of Iowa’s top health hazards :

"While some lawmakers have resisted a prohibition against using cellphones or other hand-held devices while driving on the grounds that it’s a personal freedom issue, Stephan Bayens, commissioner of the Iowa Department of Public Safety, said public safety benefits trump the individual rights concern. The volume of injuries and deaths associated with distracted driving is a major problem, he said, and the current law that makes texting while driving a primary offense is too hard to enforce…..Sen. Waylon Brown, R-Osage, chair of the Iowa Senate Transportation Committee, previously indicated he was working with proponents to get legislation passed in 2022. But Iowa House Speaker Pat Grassley, R-New Hartford, said his majority GOP caucus members had concerns over the enforcement and personal freedom aspects of banning drivers from using hand-held devices.”

[maestrob]

The angriest person in the room is always the one losing the argument.

[Rach3]

“A Southern chapter of the right-wing parents advocacy group Moms of Liberty is protesting teaching the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in school because they claim aspects of his work traumatize students. The group further alleged that teaching children anything about the civil rights movement should be banned.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tennessee-gr ... 00057.html

[Rach3]

Here come GOP Brown Shirts:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/02/politics ... index.html

[maestrob]

So will DeSantis send his troops to guard the White House against a possible coup if another mob descends on Washington in 2024?

Chill in spine begone!

Never forget.

[Rach3]

From Axios today:

Donald Trump's social media startup announced $1 billion in new investment in its effort to become publicly traded via a blank check company, Axios Pro Rata author Dan Primack reports.

Between the lines: The investors weren't identified, which is highly unusual for this sort of transaction.

What to watch: Trump Media & Technology Group hasn't named a CEO. The former president is listed as chairman. No products have launched.

[Rach3]

More GOP filth:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-congressma ... 07888.html

[Rach3]

From Axios today:


Conservatives are building their own apps, phones, cryptocurrencies and publishing houses to circumvent the mainstream tech and media ecosystem, Axios' Sara Fischer and Dan Primack report.

Why it matters: Many of these efforts couldn't exist without the backing of major corporate figures and billionaires who are eager to push back against "censorship" and "cancel culture."
It's unclear whether demand will match supply:

Rumble, a conservative alternative to YouTube, agreed to go public at an implied $2.1 billion valuation via a SPAC merger. The SPAC is sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm led by billionaire and Trump fundraiser Howard Lutnick.

Donald Trump's fledgling social media company, Truth Social, also plans to go public via SPAC, and said Saturday it has secured $1 billion in financing. The SPAC is trading at a market value of $1.6 billion, down from its $4.5 billion peak in late October.

Gettr, a social app launched by ex-Trump aide Jason Miller, hasn't disclosed all of its investors. But Miller has said one of the app's funders is the family foundation of Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui.

Aside from social networks, conservatives are pushing to create alternatives to other tech tools and communication platforms:

Book publishing: Trump allies launched a book publishing house called Winning Team Publishing, run by Don Jr. and former Trump campaign aide Sergio Gor. The imprint will publish the ex-president's first book, a coffee table photo book.

Cloud storage: Trump's social media company will be hosted online by RightForge, an internet infrastructure company that courts conservatives. As Axios' Margaret Harding McGill notes, relying on a conservative web hosting service could head off issues Parler faced when its web services were yanked following the Capitol siege.

Crypto: A new cryptocurrency called "Magacoin" has already caught the attention of high-profile conservatives, per The Guardian.

Phones: A young Bitcoin entrepreneur is marketing an "uncensored" Freedom Phone to conservatives.

Reality check: While politicians seem eager to find new, unregulated outlets, download data from Apptopia (graphic above) shows consumers aren't sprinting to the alternatives.


(Rach3: Trump's first " book" a photo book makes sense since he does not read. Should also appeal to many of his supporters who dont read.)

[Rach3]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/michigan-cou ... 00465.html

[maestrob]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/michigan-cou ... 00465.html

Yep.

This is happening to election officials too, and many are resigning and being replaced by Trumpist partisans.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf principle doesn't seem to apply here.

Never forget.

[Rach3]

In case you ever plan to visit Wisconsin, or buy anything from here, remember a majority of its voters elected Johnson.


Rolling Stone

Ron Johnson Insists Mouthwash Can Kill Coronavirus. A Mouthwash Company Disagrees
Ryan Bort
Thu, December 9, 2021, 10:15 AM
Republican opposition to the two most sensible and ways to mitigate the spread of Covid-19, vaccines and masks, has led lawmakers to recommend a variety of quack treatments for the disease that has killed nearly a million Americans. There’s ivermectin. There’s hydroxychloroquine. There’s, as Trump floated last spring, injecting oneself with bleach or bringing a very powerful “light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) has been at the forefront of prescribing bogus Covid cures, so much so that YouTube suspended his account in June for pushing Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, neither of which are proven treatments. Johnson was undeterred, though, and at a town hall on Wednesday he suggested a new remedy, one that could have saved countless lives if the medical community had been aware of it last spring.

“Standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus,” he said.


Johnson quote-tweeted the audio clip with a link to a study showing that mouthwash does a “modest” job a lowering the viral load in saliva. It does not, of course, have any bearing on the inhalation of the disease, which is how most people are infected.

The Washington Post spoke to a few experts who debunked the idea that mouthwash can prevent or treat Covid in any meaningful way. Raymond Niaura, the interim chair of the epidemiology department at New York University, suggested using it in tandem with the vaccine. “That way, one would be at reduced risk for infection and have good smelling breath,” he wrote.

Listerine has also done what it can to tamp down speculation that mouthwash is a Covid cure. The company’s website has an entire page dedicated to explaining that “the current available data is not sufficient to support a conclusion that the use of LISTERINE mouthwash is helpful against the COVID-19 virus,” adding that Listerine is “a company firmly rooted in science.”

Listerine likely feels the need to go out of its way to implore people not to use mouthwash to treat an infectious disease because when ostensibly reputable quacks like Johnson say things like he did on Wednesday, people stand to take it seriously and abuse the product. It’s probably not a good idea to ingest large quantities of Listerine, but it probably isn’t going to send you to the hospital. The same isn’t true of other miracle cures that have been carelessly pushed by Republicans. Several people were hospitalized after poisoning themselves with Ivermectin earlier this year. Trump spouting off about hydroxychloroquine last year came as one man died after ingesting chloroquine phosphate, thinking it would protect him against the disease.

It should go without saying that Trump, Johnson, and other Republican lawmakers are conspiracy theorists, not doctors, and their advice for how to treat Covid is no more reputable than what people are pushing on Facebook. In fact, that’s probably where they’re getting it. They’re conveniently able to escape any accountability for the health of their constituents by noting that, despite giving out medical advice and knowing full well it’s going to be heeded, they’re not medical professionals.

“I’m just here to present ideas,” Trump said last spring in suggesting disinfectant or infusing the body with a tremendous light.

[maestrob]

Now in Your Inbox: Political Misinformation

One of the most powerful communication tools available to politicians teems with unfounded claims and largely escapes notice.

By Maggie Astor
Dec. 13, 2021
Updated 8:34 a.m. ET

A few weeks ago, Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, falsely claimed that the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda, a $1.75 trillion bill to battle climate change and extend the nation’s social safety net, would include Medicare for all.

It doesn’t, and never has. But few noticed Mr. Crenshaw’s lie because he didn’t say it on Facebook, or on Fox News. Instead, he sent the false message directly to the inboxes of his constituents and supporters in a fund-raising email.

Lawmakers’ statements on social media and cable news are now routinely fact-checked and scrutinized. But email — one of the most powerful communication tools available to politicians, reaching up to hundreds of thousands of people — teems with unfounded claims and largely escapes notice.

The New York Times signed up in August for the campaign lists of the 390 senators and representatives running for re-election in 2022 whose websites offered that option, and read more than 2,500 emails from those campaigns to track how widely false and misleading statements were being used to help fill political coffers.

Both parties delivered heaps of hyperbole in their emails. One Republican, for instance, declared that Democrats wanted to establish a “one-party socialist state,” while a Democrat suggested that the party’s Jan. 6 inquiry was at imminent risk because the G.O.P. “could force the whole investigation to end early.”

But Republicans included misinformation far more often: in about 15 percent of their messages, compared with about 2 percent for Democrats. In addition, multiple Republicans often spread the same unfounded claims, whereas Democrats rarely repeated one another’s.

At least eight Republican lawmakers sent fund-raising emails containing a brazen distortion of a potential settlement with migrants separated from their families during the Trump administration. One of them, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, falsely claimed that President Biden was “giving every illegal immigrant that comes into our country $450,000.”

Those claims were grounded in news that the Justice Department was negotiating payments to settle lawsuits filed on behalf of immigrant families whom the Trump administration had separated, some of whom have not been reunited. But the payments, which are not final and could end up being smaller, would be limited to that small fraction of migrants.

The relatively small number of false statements from Democrats were mostly about abortion. For instance, an email from Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York said the Mississippi law before the Supreme Court was “nearly identical to the one in Texas, banning abortions after 6 weeks,” but Mississippi’s law bans abortion after 15 weeks and does not include the vigilante enforcement mechanism that is a defining characteristic of Texas’ law.

A spokeswoman for Ms. Maloney called the inaccuracy an “honest mistake” and said the campaign would check future emails more carefully.

Campaign representatives for Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Crenshaw did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Republican House and Senate campaign committees also did not respond to a request for comment.

Politicians have exaggerated and dissembled since time immemorial, including in their email dispatches. But the volume, the baldness and the reach of the false claims have increased.

The emails reviewed by The Times illuminate how ubiquitous misinformation has become among Republicans, fueled in large part by former President Donald J. Trump. And the misinformation is not coming only, or even primarily, from the handful who get national attention for it.

The people behind campaign emails have “realized the more extreme the claim, the better the response,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster. “The more that it elicits red-hot anger, the more likely people donate. And it just contributes to the perversion of our democratic process. It contributes to the incivility and indecency of political behavior.”

The messages also underscore how, for all the efforts to compel platforms like Facebook and Twitter to address falsehoods, many of the same claims are flowing through other powerful channels with little notice.


For fact checkers and other watchdogs, “it’s hard to know what it is that politicians are saying directly to individual supporters in their inboxes,” said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.

“And politicians know that,” she said. “Politicians and the consulting firms behind them, they know that this kind of messaging is not monitored to the same extent, so they can be more carefree with what they’re saying.”


Email is a crucial tool in political fund-raising because it costs campaigns almost nothing and can be extremely effective: When campaigns invest in it, it routinely accounts for a majority of their online fund-raising. Supporters are bombarded — sometimes daily — with messages meant to make them angry, because strategists know anger motivates voters.

In many cases, candidates used anger-inducing misinformation directly in their requests for a donation. For instance, after his false claim about payments to immigrants, Mr. Kennedy — who began the email by declaring himself “mad as a murder hornet” — included a link labeled “RUSH $500 TO STOP ILLEGAL PAYMENTS!”

“I’m watching Joe Biden pay illegals to come into our country, and it’s all being paid for by raising YOUR taxes,” he wrote. “We can’t let Biden pass out hundreds of thousands of dollars to every Tom, Dick and Harry that wants to come into our country illegally.”

Several other Republicans, including Representative Vern Buchanan of Florida, also claimed that the payments would go to all undocumented immigrants. Others, including Senator Todd Young of Indiana, tucked the context inside emails with misleading subject lines such as “BREAKING: Biden wants to pay illegal immigrants $450,000 each for breaking our laws.”

Of 28 emails that included the $450,000 figure, only eight contextualized it accurately.

Campaign representatives for Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Young did not respond to requests for comment.

Another common line was that the Justice Department was targeting parents as “domestic terrorists” for challenging the teaching of critical race theory, an advanced academic framework that conservatives are using as shorthand for how some curriculums cover race and racism — or, alternatively, for challenging pandemic-related restrictions.

“Parents are simply protesting a radical curriculum in public schools, and Biden wants the parents labeled terrorists,” read an email from Representative Jake LaTurner of Kansas. “Will you consider donating now to help us fight back against this disgusting abuse of power?”


This misinformation — echoed in emails from Mr. Crenshaw, Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Young, Representative Jim Hagedorn of Minnesota and Representative Elise Stefanik of New York — emerged after Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a memorandum on Oct. 4 directing the F.B.I. to address threats against school personnel and school board members. (Some opponents of curriculums and pandemic protocols have sent death threats, vandalized homes and otherwise acted menacingly.) The memo explicitly distinguished between dissent and threats, and did not call anyone a domestic terrorist. The Republican narrative conflates it with a letter the National School Boards Association, an independent group, sent to the Justice Department a few days earlier.

Representatives for Ms. Stefanik and Mr. Hagedorn said the association had “coordinated” with the Biden administration on the letter, citing recent news reports. Those reports say the school boards association discussed the letter with the administration and, at the administration’s request, added details about the threats; they do not show the Justice Department endorsing the “terrorist” label or criminalizing nonviolent opposition to curriculums.

Campaign representatives for Mr. Crenshaw, Mr. Kennedy, Mr. LaTurner and Mr. Young did not respond to requests for comment.

Combating misinformation in emails is difficult both because of the private nature of the medium and because its targets are predisposed to believe it — though Emily Thorson, a political scientist at Syracuse, noted that the fact that the recipients were likely to already be staunch partisans reduced the chances of misinformation reaching people whose views would be changed by it.

Professor Thorson said what concerned her more was that — unlike much of the misinformation on social media — these claims came from people with authority and were being spread repetitively. That is how lies that the 2020 election was rigged gained traction: not “because of random videos on Facebook but because it was a coherent message echoed by a lot of elites,” she said. “Those are the ones that we need to be most worried about.”

Mr. Luntz, the Republican pollster, runs frequent focus groups with voters and said they tended to accept misinformation uncritically.

“It may be a fund-raising pitch, but very often people look at it as a campaign pitch,” he said. “They think of it as context, they think of it as information — they don’t necessarily see this as fund-raising, even though that’s what it is. And so misleading them in an attempt to divide them from their money is pure evil, because you’re taking advantage of people who just don’t know the difference.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/us/p ... 20Politics

[Rach3]

NYT Morning newsletter today:

American politics these days can often seem fairly normal. President Biden has had both big accomplishments and big setbacks in his first year, as is typical. In Congress, members are haggling over bills and passing some of them. At the Supreme Court, justices are hearing cases. Daily media coverage tends to reflect this apparent sense of political normalcy.

But American politics today is not really normal. It may instead be in the midst of a radical shift away from the democratic rules and traditions that have guided the country for a very long time.

An anti-democratic movement, inspired by Donald Trump but much larger than him, is making significant progress, as my colleague Charles Homans has reported. In the states that decide modern presidential elections, this movement has already changed some laws and ousted election officials, with the aim of overturning future results. It has justified the changes with blatantly false statements claiming that Biden did not really win the 2020 election.

The movement has encountered surprisingly little opposition. Most leading Republican politicians have either looked the other way or supported the anti-democratic movement. In the House, Republicans ousted Liz Cheney from a leadership position because she called out Trump’s lies.

The pushback within the Republican Party has been so weak that about 60 percent of Republican adults now tell pollsters that they believe the 2020 election was stolen — a view that’s simply wrong.

Most Democratic officials, for their part, have been focused on issues other than election security, like Covid-19 and the economy. It’s true that congressional Democrats have tried to pass a new voting rights bill, only to be stymied by Republican opposition and the filibuster. But these Democratic efforts have been sprawling and unfocused. They have included proposals — on voter-ID rules and mail-in ballots, for example — that are almost certainly less important than a federal law to block the overturning of elections, as The Times’s Nate Cohn has explained.

All of which has created a remarkable possibility: In the 2024 presidential election, Republican officials in at least one state may overturn a legitimate election result, citing fraud that does not exist, and award the state’s electoral votes to the Republican nominee. Trump tried to use this tactic in 2020, but local officials rebuffed him.

Since then, his supporters have launched a campaign — with the Orwellian name “Stop the Steal” — to ensure success next time. Steve Bannon has played a central role, using his podcast to encourage Trump supporters to take over positions in election administration, ProPublica has explained.

“This is a five-alarm fire,” Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, who presided over the 2020 vote count there, told The Times. “If people in general, leaders and citizens, aren’t taking this as the most important issue of our time and acting accordingly, then we may not be able to ensure democracy prevails again in ’24.”

Barton Gellman, who wrote a recent Atlantic magazine article about the movement, told Terry Gross of NPR last week, “This is, I believe, a democratic emergency, and that without very strong and systematic pushback from protectors of democracy, we’re going to lose something that we can’t afford to lose about the way we run elections.”

Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, notes that the movement is bigger than Trump. “I think things have now moved to the point that many Republican Party officials and elected officeholders are self-starters,” she told Thomas Edsall of Times Opinion.


In plain sight

The main battlegrounds are swing states where Republicans control the state legislature, like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Republicans control these legislatures because of both gerrymandered districts and Democratic weakness outside of major metro areas. (One way Democrats can push back against the anti-democratic movement: Make a bigger effort to win working-class votes.) The Constitution lets state legislatures set the rules for choosing presidential electors.

“None of this is happening behind closed doors,” Jamelle Bouie, a Times columnist, recently wrote. “We are headed for a crisis of some sort. When it comes, we can be shocked that it is actually happening, but we shouldn’t be surprised.”

Here is an overview of recent developments:

Arizona. Republican legislators have passed a law taking away authority over election lawsuits from the secretary of state, who’s now a Democrat, and giving it to the attorney general, a Republican. Legislators are debating another bill that would allow them to revoke election certification “by majority vote at any time before the presidential inauguration.”

Georgia. Last year, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, helped stop Trump’s attempts to reverse the result. State legislators in Georgia have since weakened his powers, and a Trump-backed candidate is running to replace Raffensperger next year. Republicans have also passed a law that gives a commission they control the power to remove local election officials.

Michigan. Kristina Karamo, a Trump-endorsed candidate who has repeated the lie that the 2020 elections were fraudulent, is running for secretary of state, the office that oversees elections. (Republican candidates are running on similar messages in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere, according to ABC News.)

Pennsylvania. Republicans are trying to amend the state’s Constitution to make the secretary of state an elected position, rather than one that the governor appoints. Pennsylvania is also one of the states where Trump allies — like Stephen Lindemuth, who attended the Jan. 6 rally that turned into an attack on Congress — have won local races to oversee elections.

Wisconsin. Senator Ron Johnson is urging the Republican-controlled Legislature to take full control of federal elections. Doing so could remove the governor, currently a Democrat, from the process, and weaken the bipartisan state elections commission.

What’s next?

The new anti-democratic movement may still fail. This year, for example, Republican legislators in seven states proposed bills that would have given partisan officials a direct ability to change election results. None of the bills passed.

Arguably the most important figures on this issue are Republican officials and voters who believe in democracy and are uncomfortable with using raw political power to overturn an election result.

Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official, has helped to start the Renew America Movement, which supports candidates — of either party — running against Trump-backed Republicans. It is active in congressional races but does not have enough resources to compete in the state contests that often determine election procedures, Taylor told The Times.

Gellman, the Atlantic writer, argues that Democrats and independents — as well as journalists — can make a difference by paying more attention. “Grass-roots organizers who are in support of democratic institutions,” he said on NPR, “could be doing what the Republicans are doing at the precinct and the county and the state level in terms of organizing to control election authorities to ensure that they remain nonpartisan or neutral.”

[maestrob]

Your Pocketbook Is Ruled by This Agency, and It’s in the Middle of a Huge Fight

Dec. 14, 2021

Jelena McWilliams, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s board of directors and an opponent of stronger merger oversight, could effectively run out the clock on President Biden’s first term.

By Mehrsa Baradaran and Jeremy Kress

Ms. Baradaran and Mr. Kress are professors of law with expertise in banking law.

The last time you walked into a branch of your bank, you might have noticed a sign bearing the official seal of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the government agency that regulates and insures thousands of depository institutions. What you may have not realized, however, is that there is a bitter partisan battle brewing for control of the F.D.I.C. that may determine whether your bank survives, whether a financial crisis wipes out your savings and whether presidential elections matter for financial policymaking.

The fracas erupted last week when the three Democratic members of the F.D.I.C.’s five-member board of directors voted to request public feedback on the agency’s approach to analyzing bank mergers. The F.D.I.C. chairwoman, Jelena McWilliams — the lone Republican on the board and an opponent of stronger merger oversight — objected that the vote was invalid and refused to recognize the majority’s action. (One of the board’s five seats is temporarily empty.)

On its surface, this fight is ostensibly about bank consolidation. On this score, the Democratic directors have a strong case. The mission of the F.D.I.C. since its founding in 1933 has been to protect American communities and taxpayers from the risks of concentrated power and financial instability inherent in the business of banking. Robust antimonopoly rules were embedded in the F.D.I.C.’s founding legislation and acts of Congress passed in the 1950s and 1960s.

For a time, these laws succeeded in creating a safe and profitable banking system. But they were so successful that policymakers largely stopped worrying about the risks of behemoth banks and welcomed dozens of megamergers in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The 2008 financial crisis was a vivid reminder that excessive concentration in the banking sector can lead to financial ruin. Perversely, the “too big to fail” banks that helped cause the crisis emerged from it even larger and more interconnected than before.

The decades-long trend toward consolidation only accelerated after the crisis. Today, just six bank holding companies control more than 52 percent of the assets in the U.S. banking system. As a result of so many banks disappearing, nearly 80 percent of local banking markets are now considered uncompetitive by the Department of Justice.

This drastic consolidation of the banking sector harms American consumers. When a bank merges with a competitor, it becomes harder for customers to obtain mortgages or car loans. Consumers also earn less interest in their savings accounts and pay higher transaction fees after banks consolidate. At the same time, mergers frequently lead to branch closures, especially in low- and moderate-income communities. That is why the F.D.I.C.’s Democratic board members want to strengthen bank merger oversight, which is consistent with President Biden’s executive order in July urging government agencies to crack down on consolidation throughout the economy.

Beneath the surface, however, this battle is about much more than bank mergers: It is actually a fight over the White House’s entire economic agenda.

The White House and its financial regulatory appointees have laid out ambitious goals. They want to write new rules to protect the financial system from the economic risks posed by climate change. They plan to intensify oversight of cryptocurrencies and financial technologies. And they aim to complete a long-overdue rewrite of rules requiring banks to lend in underserved communities.

The problem is that Ms. McWilliams’s term as the F.D.I.C. chairwoman extends until June 2023. If she is able to unilaterally block initiatives by the three Democratic board members, the F.D.I.C. is likely to grind to a halt for the next 18 months. Given that the process of adopting rules often takes a year or more, she could effectively run out the clock on Mr. Biden’s first term.

Fortunately, the law is on the Democrats’ side. The Federal Deposit Insurance Act vests the management of the F.D.I.C. in its board of directors, not its chair. The F.D.I.C.’s bylaws liken the chair’s role to that of a corporation’s chief executive — someone who manages the organization’s day-to-day operations but cannot override or block an order of the board of directors.

As for Ms. McWilliams’s claim that the Democrats’ bank merger vote was invalid? The bylaws expressly authorize a majority of the board of directors to circulate and vote on a proposal in writing — a standard practice that the Democrats used in this case. So her attempt to stymie the three Democratic board members is not only undemocratic but also unlawful.

With the F.D.I.C. board at loggerheads, what happens next? We suggest one of two paths forward. First, the Democratic directors could sue Ms. McWilliams, seeking a court order compelling her to recognize the Democrats’ bank merger initiative as a valid act of the F.D.I.C. Alternatively, Mr. Biden could remove her from the chair position for cause.

But we hope that it does not come to this. We urge Ms. McWilliams to reconsider her position and defer to the F.D.I.C.’s Democratic majority. If she does not back down, however, the Democrats must continue to fight. The fate of President Biden’s economic agenda depends on it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/opin ... ation.html

[Rach3]

Proud Boys on the move:

https://tinyurl.com/2p8b4cht

[Rach3]

Ask your GOP friends how proud they can be of their party ; or just tell them to pack sand.

From Kansas City Star today:

" Former MO GOP chair subpoenaed in Capitol riot probe is new attorney for Olathe Proud Boy.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot says Ed Martin, former chairman of the Missouri Republican Party, was a leader of the “Stop the Steal” movement."

[Rach3]

From TheWhyAxis today, new poll for your GOP friends:

1 in 6 committed Republicans would support a violent pro-Trump coup
New estimates on partisan support for political violence

Christopher Ingraham
Dec 16


The Republican party is descending into fanaticism.

Experts and observers — myself among them — have noted with alarm the growing acceptance of authoritarianism and political violence in the mainstream Republican party. In the past year alone, we’ve seen:

Trump loyalists attacking and overrunning the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to disrupt ballot-counting;
Leaders in the GOP defending the insurrectionists and stonewalling the investigation into the attack;
Election workers across the country resigning or seeking protection due to threats and intimidation from Trump supporters;
The embrace of violent, dehumanizing rhetoric by Republican voters and officials;
Enthusiastic Republican endorsement of the vigilantism of Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two people during a chaotic protest against police violence in Wisconsin and successfully claimed self-defense at trial;
Numerous surveys showing an alarming willingness among Republicans to endorse violence for political ends.

On that last point, some of those surveys have been subject to criticism that they overstate support for political violence in general. People may simply be expressing the depth of their partisanship, for instance, and telling an anonymous web form that you’re okay with violently overthrowing the opposition doesn’t necessarily mean a person is willing to go out into the street to do just that.

So a group of academic political scientists with Bright Line Watch, a watchdog that measures public attitudes toward democracy, recently ran a survey experiment attempting to suss out support for political violence in its most narrow and concrete form. They polled support for specific acts of aggression and violence, like reinstating Donald Trump via a violent coup. They tailored response options in order to more accurately differentiate between people who actively support violence and those who are simply ambivalent about it. And they also screened respondents based on their attentiveness to the survey, as inattentive survey responders appear to endorse violence at an unusually high rate, suggesting they’re just clicking through rapidly and saying “yes” to everything.

The end result is a measurement for partisan support for political violence that is about as narrow and strict as one could hope for. And the results are still incredibly terrifying.

We’ll start with the basics: across the board, Republicans are much more likely to endorse political violence than Democrats. Roughly 1-in-7 Republicans say it’s okay to send “threatening and intimidating messages” to leaders of the Democratic party. Just 6 percent of Democrats endorse doing this to Republican leaders. About 6 percent of Republicans say violence will be justified if their party loses the 2024 election, compared to around 3 percent of Democrats. And more than one in ten Republicans say “the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency,” which is poli-sci speak for “I would support a literal violent coup.”

One in ten Republicans may not seem like a big number. But there are about 260 million adults in the U.S., and 47 percent of them identify with or lean toward the Republican party, according to Gallup. That means you’re looking at somewhere upward of 10 million willing to go along with a violent coup. If you’re a would-be authoritarian leader, those are the brown shits and foot soldiers who will intimidate your opposition and take to the streets at your command.

Consider also that it only took a few thousand Trumpist lunatics to storm the Capitol in January. “Even small numbers of people who encourage or engage in violence can have dangerous and destabilizing effects on our political system,” the report’s authors write.

Alas, it gets even worse. Bright Line Watch looked at how responses to the questions of violence differed with the strength of respondents’ partisanship — are people who more strongly identify with a party more likely to endorse violence on that party’s behalf? Among Democrats the answer is an emphatic “no.” There was basically no difference between support for violent measures among “strong” and “not strong” Democratic partisans. In fact, on a couple of questions about explicitly non-violent forms of political mischief, like committing non-violent felonies and misdemeanors in support of your cause, support was lowest among the most committed Democrats. Strongly associating oneself with the party, in other words, has a moderating effect on one’s willingness to break the law in support of your political goals.

Among Republicans, however, the very opposite is true.

Just two percent of those who don’t consider themselves strong Republicans said that violence would be justified in the event of a GOP loss in 2024. Among the strongest GOP partisans, that number jumped to nearly 10 percent. And among the strongest partisans, support for violently reinstating Trump as president — doing a coup, in other words — was more than three times higher (17 percent) than it was among the least committed (5 percent).

The Republican party, in other words, has a radicalizing, destabilizing effect on its members, making them more likely to endorse explicit acts of violence in order to achieve its political objectives.The survey presents the clearest picture yet of the intellectual and moral corruption of the modern Republican party, something with absolutely no parallel on the Democratic side of the aisle. It’s a party in thrall to an autocratic buffoon who encourages the basest, most violent instincts of his supporters. It’s almost funny — imagine selling your political soul to a guy who congratulates himself for passing a test of basic cognitive function!

But unfortunately, autocratic buffoons have a surprisingly good track record when it comes to grifting their way into power. Often, all it takes is a few million people willing commit violent acts on behalf of their dear leader.

[maestrob]

But unfortunately, autocratic buffoons have a surprisingly good track record when it comes to grifting their way into power. Often, all it takes is a few million people willing commit violent acts on behalf of their dear leader.

Chill in spine begone!

<no response>

[Rach3]

More Alt.Right judicial frat boys in action, endangering people:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/10/politics ... index.html

[Rach3]

In Iowa alone.Per Iowa Public Radio tonight:


Six Sioux City students have been charged with harassment for making threats to their schools on social media. The Sioux City Police Department says none of the threats were legitimate, but were intended to cause alarm among students. School officials made parents aware of national school shooting threats Thursday, following posts on the app TikTok encouraging school violence across the country. The students have been taken out of their respective schools for investigation.

Two hospitals in Cedar Rapids have postponed all elective surgeries that had been scheduled “through Christmas” due to a rising number of COVID-19 patients. St. Luke’s and Mercy Hospitals issued a joint statement saying there’s been a marked increase in patients with COVID-19 who require inpatient care in the last few weeks. The hospitals say their staffs are physically and emotionally exhausted as this fourth wave of the disease hits. The hospitals’ joint statement ended by urging people to get vaccinated, wear a mask in public and avoid large gatherings.

[Rach3]

From Yahoo News today:

DC police officer Michael Fanone was beaten unconscious by rioters at the Capitol on January 6.

He resigned Monday and will leave the department on December 31, The Washington Post reported.

Fanone, who made extensive media appearances, is due to join CNN as an on-air contributor in 2022.

The DC Metropolitan Police police officer beaten by Capitol rioters resigned on Monday, The Washington Post reported.

He is due to take up a new job at CNN as an on-air contributor.

Michael Fanone was knocked unconscious and badly injured in the attack at the Capitol and later appeared on cable news shows to warn of what he called the threat to democracy posed by people like the rioters.

Fanone, who says he now suffers with PTSD, recounted the attack in detail during his testimony in July before Congress' January 6 commission.

He said he was "grabbed, beaten, tased, all while being called a traitor to my country."

He said his badge and equipment were stolen and he heard his attackers shout: "Kill him with his own gun."

A still from Fanone's bodycam, included by the Justice Department in court filings, showed Fanone being mobbed by men. The circled man, Thomas Sibick, is accused of attacking Fanone and stealing his badge.

In one memorable appearance not long after January 6, Fanone discussed the rioters who helped protect him when others wanted to harm him, giving them the message: "Thank you, but --- you for being there."

On Monday, Fanone told The Post he resigned and would become a contributor for CNN on law-enforcement issues in the new year.

Brain Stelter, CNN's chief media correspondent, tweeted Monday that the network had confirmed the appointment.

Fanone's appearances in Congress and on cable news drew scorn from his colleagues, he told The Post.

"Clearly there are some members of our department who feel their oath is to Donald Trump and not to the Constitution," Fanone said.
"I no longer felt like I could trust my fellow officers and decided it was time to make a change."

Fanone, who has been a police officer for two decades, returned to limited duty for the first time in September after several months of absence, The Post said. His last day as a police officer is due to be December 31.

Fanone said that on his return he was assigned to a division that analyzes statistics, ignoring his preference to work at a training academy.

Fanone said that on his return he was assigned to a division that analyzes statistics, ignoring his preference to work at a training academy.

He told the Post that he felt his commanders were trying to hide him from colleagues who disapproved of his media profile. Fanone told the newspaper there are now only two current DC police officers he counts as friends.

[Rach3]

From Yahoo News today:


Politico
‘The guy should be fired on the spot’: Fauci rebukes Fox News host over violent rhetoric

Quint Forgey
Tue, December 21, 2021, 8:32 AM

Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, on Tuesday called on Fox News to fire host Jesse Watters for targeting him with violent rhetoric at a conservative conference earlier this week.

“That’s awful that he said that. And he’s going to go, very likely, unaccountable,” Fauci told CNN of Watters’ remarks. “I mean, whatever network he’s on is not going to do anything for him. I mean, that’s crazy. The guy should be fired on the spot.”

Speaking on Monday at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference, Watters encouraged attendees to rhetorically “ambush” Fauci with dubious questions about the National Institutes of Health allegedly funding “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“Now you go in for the kill shot. The kill shot? With an ambush? Deadly. Because he doesn’t see it coming,” Watters said.

Fauci — who is President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and has served for 37 years as director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — on Tuesday described Watters’ remarks as “horrible.”

“The only thing that I have ever done throughout these two years is to encourage people to practice good public health practices: to get vaccinated, to be careful in public settings, to wear a mask,” Fauci said. “And for that, you have some guy out there saying that people should be giving me a kill shot to ambush me? I mean, what kind of craziness is there in society these days?”

Fox News declined to comment on the record on whether it endorses Watters’ remarks or plans to take disciplinary action against him. Fox News also did not respond to a request for comment on Fauci’s critique of the network.

Fox News hosts, as well as Republican congressional lawmakers, have repeatedly targeted Fauci throughout the coronavirus pandemic with inflammatory and personal attacks. Lara Logan, a Fox News personality and host on its streaming service, compared him to the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele earlier this month.

In response to those remarks, Fauci rebuked Fox News for not taking disciplinary action against Logan, telling MSNBC: “What I find striking … is how she gets no discipline whatsoever from the Fox network — how they can let her say that with no comment and no disciplinary action. I’m astounded by that.”

[maestrob]

Bring back the Fairness Doctrine.

Never forget.

[Rach3]

The latest from Missery ( Missouri) per Kansas City Star today:


States have billions of federal COVID relief aid to spend. Some haven’t spent a dollar.
Republican-controlled governments — Missouri, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Nebraska & South Dakota — haven’t used American Rescue Plan funds.


---------------

Missouri trooper released fugitive because of act blocking federal gun laws, DOJ says.
The Department of Justice said Tuesday the Second Amendment Preservation Act “poses a clear and substantial threat to public safety.” ( Rach3:The Missouri Act prohibits State law enforcement from enforcing certain Federal gun laws. Probably try Federal voting laws not. )


-----------------

A Cole County judge on Wednesday rejected Jackson County’s attempt to reverse his ruling that threw out several state disease-control regulations, sending pandemic responses across Missouri into disarray. Judge Daniel Green ruled the county, along with St. Louis County and three other local health departments, did not have the right to step into the case, which was originally a lawsuit filed by a St. Louis-area resident, a restaurant owner and a church against the state’s Department of Health and Senior Services.

Green’s original Nov. 22 ruling goes into effect Wednesday. He sided with the plaintiffs and tossed several state regulations that delegate power to local health departments to issue a wide range of orders. He called them unconstitutional and “naked lawmaking by bureaucrats.

All pending Motions to Intervene denied,” a court docket entry posted Wednesday said. The decision not to allow the counties, which had not been parties to the original case, to intervene marked a victory for Attorney General Eric Schmitt. His office represented the health department in defending the regulations but refused DHSS director Donald Kauerauf’s request to appeal the ruling.


It leaves intact the ruling, which Schmitt has embarked on a campaign to enforce. A Republican running for U.S. Senate, the attorney general this month sent letters threatening legal action to health departments and school districts across the state, demanding they drop COVID mitigation measures.

Others have taken up his cause. They include parents angry over school COVID rules, a police officer who threatened a St. Louis-area school bus driver over a mask policy and Missouri State Treasurer Scott Fitzpatrick, who told school districts he would not approve bond sales to finance capital improvements if they did not comply with Schmitt’s demands.

It was not immediately clear whether the counties had any other legal recourse to challenge the ruling, which is expected to affect how health departments may respond to other diseases, such as tuberculosis and meningitis.

In response to Schmitt’s threats, several health departments across mostly-rural parts of Missouri have halted COVID response work, dropping contact tracing or requirements that those exposed to an infected person go into quarantine. Several school districts, too, have dropped masking requirements for the next semester, though state law gives school boards the ability to implement their own rules.

Attorneys for Jackson and St. Louis counties argued it led to “chaos” across public health in Missouri. “It bears noting that General Schmitt’s attack on local public health authorities and school districts, using this Court’s Judgment as his sword, has taken place against a backdrop of soaring numbers of COVID-19 cases and a surge in hospitalizations in Missouri,” they wrote in a Tuesday court filing. “The stakes in this case are high.” They were joined in their challenge of the ruling by health officials in Livingston, Cooper and Jefferson counties. Stephen Jeffery, attorney for those three departments, wrote in a separate filing that Green’s November ruling was vague, creating “confusion and significant uncertainty concerning which local health orders and regulations are valid and which are not.” Schmitt took the same position as the plaintiffs who sued DHSS in opposing the counties’ efforts to intervene, arguing that the counties stepped into the case too late and that only his office had the authority to decide whether or not to appeal. “Political subdivisions and local health officials are not second-chair attorneys general,” state solicitor general Dean John Sauer wrote. “Only the Attorney General has the final authority to accept or reject the judgment here.” The plaintiffs accused Jackson and St. Louis counties of promoting “doom and gloom” and called their warnings of disease spread “transparent puffery and hysteria.” They contended the counties only wanted to appeal the ruling after the county executives unsuccessfully attempted to get local legislatures to reinstate mask mandates earlier this year in the face of rising hospitalizations and the Omicron variant.

Read more at: https://www.kansascity.com/news/politic ... rylink=cpy

[Rach3]

Business Insider
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott – who has been opposed to vaccine mandates – is now asking for federal help with COVID-19 testing and treatment
Sarah Al-Arshani
Sun, January 2, 2022, 6:07 PM

As of Sunday, Texas recorded over 10,000 new COVID-19 cases.

Gov. Greg Abbott said he asked for federal support to testing sites on Friday.

This comes after Abbott worked to block vaccine mandates.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has long been opposed to COVID-19 vaccine mandates as well as other preventive measures, said that his state has requested federal help for testing sites.

"Detecting COVID-19 and preventing COVID-related hospitalizations are critical to our fight against this virus," Abbott said.

In a press release on Friday, Abbott said the state requested "resources for federally-supported testing locations and medical personnel and additional federal allocations of monoclonal antibodies."

Abbott said he requested support for testing sites in Bexar, Cameron, Dallas, Harris, Hidalgo, and Tarrant counties because of their high positivity rates and hospitalization.

Bexar, Dallas, Harris, and Tarrant counties are in the top 25 of all US counties for COVID-19 confirmed cases, according to Johns Hopkins University's coronavirus resource center.

According to state data, there were 10,892 new cases across Texas as of Sunday. As of December 29, the state had a 26.49% test positivity rate, and over 5,500 COVID-19 hospitalizations.

Abbott also said the state requested additional medical personnel for urban areas as well as supplies of several monoclonal antibody treatments.

Last week, the Texas Department of State Health Services announced the state had run out of sotrovimab, the monoclonal antibody effective against the Omicron variant. In a tweet, Abbott criticized President Joe Biden for not fulfilling a pledge to support states with their COVID-19 response and accused him of "hoarding the anti-body therapeutic drugs & denying states independent access to that medical treatment."

In his press release, Abbot said: "While the Biden administration has cut supplies of monoclonal antibody treatments and testing kits when they are needed most, the State of Texas is urging the federal government to step up in this fight and provide the resources necessary to help protect Texans."

Back in October, Abbott issued an executive order that barred any Texas entity, including private businesses, from issuing COVID-19 vaccine mandates. That ban came after Biden announced plans to require private businesses with more than 100 employees to require COVID-19 vaccination or weekly testing.

"In yet another instance of federal government overreach, the Biden Administration is now bullying many private entities into imposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, causing workforce disruptions that threaten Texas's continued recovery from the COVID-19 disaster," Abbott said in the order at the time.

Additionally, on Friday, a federal judge ruled to halt Biden's mask and vaccine mandate as conditions for funding for Head Start programs, KVUE reported.

Following the ruling Abbot said': "Texas just beat Biden again."

Insider was unable to reach Abbott's office at the time of publication.

[maestrob]

Can't change the spots on a leopard.

The governor should follow the calling of his name and retire QUICKLY to a monastery.

[Rach3]

Ted Cruz floats Biden impeachment if GOP takes back House


Edmund DeMarche,Yahoo News
Mon, January 3, 2022, 11:49 PM

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said in an interview Monday that it is likely that Republicans will win back the House in 2022, and said if they do, they will probably consider impeaching President Biden.

Cruz appeared on "Verdict with Ted Cruz," his podcast, and said Democrats "weaponized impeachment" during the Trump administration for partisan purposes, according to the Washington Times.

"One of the real disadvantages of doing that is the more you weaponized it and turn it into a partisan cudgel, you know what’s good for the goose is good for the gander," he said.

He reposted an interview where he put the odds of Republicans taking back the House at 90-10 and 50-50 about taking back the evenly split Senate.

Last September, four House Republicans filed impeachment articles against Biden over his handling of the southern border and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

"I filed articles of impeachment against @POTUS based on what I believe to be clear violations of his duties," Rep. Bob Gibbs of Ohio posted on Twitter after filing the impeachment articles. "There are dynamics in Congress preventing this from being debated….”

[Rach3]

Iowa's GOPReich in action.From Des Moines Register today:

New cases continue to spike

The number of Iowans testing positive for coronavirus spiked over the weekend, but COVID-19 hospitalizations dipped.

A total of 17,773 positive tests were recorded in Iowa over the previous seven days, the Iowa Department of Public Health reported on Monday. That was up 37% from the 12,952 recorded in the seven days before Friday.

As of Monday:

• Hospitalizations: 768
• Statewide 14-day positivity rate: 13.5%
• Total deaths: 7,858

Central Iowa hospitals and clinics took out a full-page ad in Sunday's Register to say they were "overwhelmed" and to plead with Iowans to get vaccinated and to use precautions like social distancing, hand washing and wearing a mask.


GOP plans new vaccine legislation for start of session

Lawmakers officially return to work next Monday to start the next legislative session, but they're already announcing new legislation.

In plans announced today, Iowa House Republicans would prevent businesses from asking about or maintaining records of a person's medical treatment status, including vaccinations. Iowa Senate Republicans have also expressed interest in vaccine legislation.

Their bill would additionally prohibit businesses from hiring or firing someone based on their vaccination status. It would also ban denying goods and services, providing incentives or "segregation or discrimination" based on that status.

[barney]

Frankly, this baffles me. In Australia we've had just over 2000 deaths ascribed to COVID since the pandemic began in early 2020. In Iowa 7500 deaths in a fortnight (or maybe that's the total too; not quite clear)! Why can't people learn such a simple lesson as vaccinating. American focus on individualm and rights is a double-edged sword. It has brought world-changing benefits, and has been used to justify extreme selfishness and stupidity.

In most countries we recognise that we're in this together, and have communal responsibilities. I know most CMGers believe this too. But when you don't believe it, Iowa is the result. Are Australians smarter than Americans? I don't believe so at all. But fewer of us are stupid (at least in this one arena).

[Rach3]

Frankly, this baffles me. In Australia we've had just over 2000 deaths ascribed to COVID since the pandemic began in early 2020. In Iowa 7500 deaths in a fortnight (or maybe that's the total too; not quite clear)!…

Are Australians smarter than Americans? I don't believe so at all. But fewer of us are stupid (at least in this one arena).

The 7500 is total since 2020, but appalling for a State whose population is 3.3M.

The available evidence could support a conclusion Australians are smarter than Americans.

[Rach3]

I was disappointed, however, to learn the Australian Open has given tennis star Novak Djokovich a medical exemption from vaccination, rather than telling him to pack sand.

[Rach3]

From Cedar Rapids Gazette today:

"Iowa’s Senate president opened the legislative session Monday with an attack on the media and claims of a “sinister agenda” to normalize deviant behavior against children.

The Legislature is expected to focus on plans for tax cuts and reforms to unemployment law, but Republican Senate President Jake Chapman used his opening speech to challenge lawmakers to take a stand.

“It has become increasingly evident that we live in a world in which many, including our media, wish to confuse, misguide and deceive us, calling good evil and evil good,” he said.
He followed with a claim that there is a “sinister agenda occurring right before our eyes.”
“The attack on our children is no longer hidden,” he said. “Those who wish to normalize sexually deviant behavior against our children, including pedophilia and incest, are pushing this movement more than ever before.”

Chapman has earlier called for jailing educators who provide what he considers obscene material to children, and he supports banning some books from schools. There has been a move in Iowa and across the country to increase control over what books are available to children, and Chapman made clear those efforts would be a priority during the legislative session, saying “some teachers are disguising sexually obscene material as desired subject matter and profess it has artistic and literary value.”

“Nobody, regardless of their race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or occupation has the right to expose children to obscene material,” Chapman said."

(Rach3: Sieg Heil ! )

[maestrob]

Farenheit 451, maybe?

Any Ray Bradbury fans here??

[jserraglio]

“Nobody, regardless of their race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or occupation has the right to expose children to obscene material,” Chapman said."

Guess that leaves out the Bible then.

[Rach3]

Borowitz reports on Fauci's response to the GOP Senators', ie. mob thugs , attacks on him today:

Fauci Defends Calling G.O.P. Senator a Moron: “I’m Just Following the Science”

Fauci said that he does not use the word “moron” capriciously, but only after extensive scientific experimentation proves that it applies.

Fauci Says Nausea and Headaches Are Symptoms of Talking to Rand Paul

The virologist disclosed that he had taken part in a clinical study that required him to converse with the senator several times in a one-year period.

[Rach3]

" Forged documents declaring Donald Trump and Mike Pence the real winners of the 2020 elections in Arizona and Michigan were sent to the National Archives, Politico reports.

During the aftermath of Election Day last year as Trump, his team and his supporters pushed a false narrative of widespread voter fraud, the National Archives received fake certificates of ascertainment identifying those state's appointed electors as designated votes for the former president and vice president, according to the Politico article published Monday.

The Arizona document, dated Dec. 7, 2020, lists the names of 11 electors voting for the Republican candidates while the state's actual 11 electors cast their votes on Dec. 14 for now-President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

The National Archives sent the forgery to Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs to alert her to the document and telling her it was being rejected, per Politico .... "

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/fak ... 58143.html

[Rach3]

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, was caught on tape muttering “what a moron” after a Republican senator demanded that he provide members of Congress with a financial disclosure that is already publicly available.

During a Tuesday hearing of the Senate health committee, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) questioned Fauci about his salary and personal investments.

“As the highest-paid employee in the entire federal government, yes or no, would you be willing to submit to Congress and the public a financial disclosure that includes your past and current investments?” Marshall asked.


Visibly perplexed, Fauci informed Marshall that his personal finances have been public for decades, as required by law.

“The Big Tech giants are doing an incredible job of keeping it from being public,” Marshall fired back. “We’ll continue to look for it. Where would we find it?”

“All you have to do is ask for it!” Fauci replied. “You’re so misinformed, it’s extraordinary.”

Marshall then launched into a rant about how Fauci has access to privileged information and that there is “an air of appearance that maybe some shenanigans are going on.”

Fauci grew increasingly agitated.

“Senator, what are you talking about?” he asked. “My financial disclosures are public knowledge and have been so. You are getting amazingly wrong information.”

“Our office cannot find them.” Marshall said. “Where would they be if they’re public knowledge?”

Again, Fauci told him that the documents are accessible to anyone. All a person has to do is request them, as Center for Public Integrity investigative reporter Liz Essley Whyte did in 2020.


The testy exchange ended with a sheepish Marshall saying that he and his team look forward to reviewing the documents.

As committee Chair Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) called on the next senator for their round of questioning, a hot mic caught Fauci ridiculing Marshall.

“What a moron,” Fauci said. “Jesus Christ.”

https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-caught-hot ... p_catchall

(Rach3: Good for Fauci,standing up to GOP thugs like Marshall, Paul, the rest.)

[barney]

Fauci may have been intemperate, but he was absolutely spot on.

[Rach3]

Fauci may have been intemperate, but he was absolutely spot on.

GOP Sen.Marshall was suggesting Fauci has been financially profiting from the pandemic, a claim widely circulating on alt.Right sites.This just after Sen.Paul in the same hearing claimed Fauci has been trying to silence Covid experts who disagree with Fauci and blaming Fauci for the whole pandemic, claims by Paul which have led to death threats against Fauci and his family, as will Marshall's.

Fauci was not intemperate. The GOP leadership who allows these 2 crackpot "Senators" to remain in the Senate is the intemperate one.