#he wrote that letter to Biden himself right?

[tariah23]

Hm.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Steve Brodner

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 24, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 25, 2024

Tonight, President Joe Biden explained to the American people why he decided to refuse the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination and hand the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Speaking from the Oval Office from his seat behind the Resolute Desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, Biden recalled the nation’s history. He invoked Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence; George Washington, who “showed us presidents are not kings”; Abraham Lincoln, who “implored us to reject malice”; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who “inspired us to reject fear.”

And then he turned to himself. “I revere this office, but I love my country more,” he said. “It’s been the honor of my life to serve as your president.” But, he said, the defense of democracy is more important than any title, and democracy is “larger than any one of us.” We must unite to protect it. 

“In recent weeks, it has become clear to me that I need to unite my party in this critical endeavor,” he said. “I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future, all merited a second term. But nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition. So I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation. It’s the best way to unite our nation.”

There is “a time and a place for long years of experience in public life,” Biden said. “There’s also a time and a place for new voices, fresh voices, yes, younger voices. And that time and place is now.”

Biden reminded listeners that he is not leaving the presidency and will be continuing to use its power for the American people. In outlining what that means, he summed up his presidency. 

For the next six months, he said, he will “continue to lower costs for hard-working families [and] grow our economy. I will keep defending our personal freedoms and civil rights, from the right to vote to the right to choose. I will keep calling out hate and extremism, making it clear there is…no place in America for political violence or any violence ever, period. I’m going to keep speaking out to protect our kids from gun violence [and] our planet from [the] climate crisis.”

Biden reiterated his support for his Cancer Moonshot to end cancer—a personal cause for him since the 2015 death of his son Beau from brain cancer—and says he will fight for it, (although House Republicans have recently slashed funding for the program). He said he will call for reforming the Supreme Court “because this is critical to our democracy.”

He promised to continue “working to ensure America remains strong, secure and the leader of the free world,” and pointed out that he is “the first president of this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.” He promised to continue rallying a coalition of nations to stop Putin’s attempt to take over Ukraine, and vowed to continue to build the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). He reminded listeners that when he took office, the conventional wisdom was that China would inevitably surpass the United States, but that is no longer the case, and he said he would continue to strengthen allies and partners in the Pacific. 

Biden promised to continue to work to “end the war in Gaza, bring home all the hostages and bring peace and security to the Middle East and end this war,” as well as “to bring home Americans being unjustly detained all around the world.”

The president reminded people how far the nation has come since he took office on January 20, 2021, a day when, although he didn’t mention it tonight, he went directly to work after taking the oath of office. “On that day,” he recalled, “we…stood in a winter of peril and winter of possibilities.” The United States was “in the grip of the worst pandemic in the century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” But, Biden said, “We came together as Americans. We got through it. We emerged stronger, more prosperous and more secure.”

“Today we have the strongest economy in the world, creating nearly 16 million new jobs—a record. Wages are up, inflation continues to come down, the racial wealth gap is the lowest it’s been in 20 years. We are literally rebuilding our entire nation—urban, suburban and rural and tribal communities. Manufacturing has come back to America. We are leading the world again in chips and science and innovation. We finally beat Big Pharma after all these years to lower the cost of prescription drugs for seniors…. More people have health care today in America than ever before.” Biden noted that he signed the PACT Act to help millions of veterans and their families who were exposed to toxic materials, as well as the “most significant climate law…in the history of the world” and “the first major gun safety law in 30 years.”

The “violent crime rate is at a 50-year low,” he said, and “[b]order crossings are lower today than when the previous administration left office. I’ve kept my commitment to appoint the first Black woman to the Supreme Court of the United States of America. I also kept my commitment to have an administration that looks like America and [to] be a president for all Americans.”

Then Biden turned from his own record to the larger meaning of America.

“I ran for president four years ago because I believed…that the soul of America was at stake,” he said. “America is an idea. An idea stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant. It’s the most powerful idea in the history of the world.” 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he said. “We are all created equal, endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. We’ve never fully lived up to…this sacred idea—but we’ve never walked away from it either. And I do not believe the American people will walk away from it now.

“In just a few months, the American people will choose the course of America’s future. I made my choice…. “[O]ur great vice president, Kamala Harris… is experienced, she is tough, she is capable. She’s been an incredible partner to me and a leader for our country.

“Now the choice is up to you, the American people. When you make that choice, remember the words of Benjamin Franklin hanging on my wall here in the Oval Office, alongside the busts of Dr. [Martin Luther] King and Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez. When Ben Franklin was asked, as he emerged from the [constitutional] convention…, whether the founders [had] given America a monarchy or a republic, Franklin’s response was: ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’... Whether we keep our republic is now in your hands.” 

“My fellow Americans, it’s been the privilege of my life to serve this nation for over 50 years,” President Biden told the American people. “Nowhere else on Earth could a kid with a stutter from modest beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and in Claymont, Delaware, one day sit behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office as the president of the United States, but here I am.

“That’s what’s so special about America. We are a nation of promise and possibilities. Of dreamers and doers. Of ordinary Americans doing extraordinary things. I’ve given my heart and my soul to our nation, like so many others. And I’ve been blessed a million times in return with the love and support of the American people. I hope you have some idea how grateful I am to all of you.

The great thing about America is, here kings and dictators do not rule—the people do. History is in your hands. The power’s in your hands. The idea of America lies in your hands. You just have to keep faith—keep the faith—and remember who we are. We are the United States of America, and there is simply nothing, nothing beyond our capacity when we do it together. So let’s act together, [and] preserve our democracy. God bless you all and may God protect our troops. 

“Thank you.”

And with that, President Joe Biden followed the example of the nation’s first president, George Washington, who declined to run for a third term to demonstrate that the United States of America would not have a king, and of its second president, John Adams, who handed the power of the presidency over to his rival Thomas Jefferson and thus established the nation’s tradition of the peaceful transition of power. Like them, Biden gave up the pursuit of power for himself in order to demonstrate the importance of democracy. 

After the speech, the White House served ice cream to the Bidens and hundreds of White House staffers in the Rose Garden.

And when the evening was over, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden posted an image of a handwritten note on social media. It read: “To those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed, my heart is full of gratitude. Thank you for the trust you put in Joe—now it’s time to put that trust in Kamala.” 

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[tieflingkisser]

Citing Ethnic Cleansing, US Army Major Resigns Over Israel's Assault on Gaza

"As the descendant of European Jews, I was raised in a particularly unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing," wrote Maj. Harrison Mann.

An American Army officer on Monday described months of being increasingly disturbed by the images and news of Israel's U.S.-backed bombardment of Gaza, which culminated in his public resignation from his position at the Defense Intelligence Agency to avoid further complicity in Israel's "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians. Army Maj. Harrison Mann published his resignation letter on LinkedIn, saying he had distributed it internally on April 16 to announce his resignation from the agency. As an officer at the DIA, Mann said, he has been unable to escape the fact that his place of work "directly executes policy" for the Biden administration, including its "nearly unqualified support for the government of Israel, which has enabled and empowered the killing and starving of tens and thousands of innocent Palestinians." "My work here—however administrative or marginal it appeared—unquestionably contributed to that support," wrote Mann. He described wrestling with the question of whether he could continue working at the DIA, reasoning with himself that, "I don't make policy and it's not my place to question it." "However, at some point it became difficult to defend the outcomes of this particular policy," Mann wrote. "At some point—whatever the justification—you're either advancing a policy that advances the mass starvation of children, or you're not." At the time Mann sent his letter to his colleagues, Israel was conducting airstrikes and preparing its ground invasion of Rafah, the southern Gaza city that over 1 million Palestinians have been forcibly displaced to since October.

[...]

"As the descendant of European Jews, I was raised in a particularly unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing—my grandfather refused to ever purchase products manufactured in Germany—where the paramount importance of 'never again' and the inadequacy of 'just following orders' were oft repeated," wrote Mann. "But I also have hope that my grandfather would afford me some grace; that he would still be proud of me for stepping away from this war, however belatedly." Mann publicized his letter about six weeks after foreign affairs officer Annelle Sheline resigned from her position at the U.S. State Department, saying her work in the human rights realm in the Middle East had become "impossible" in light of Biden's material and political support for Israel's assault on Gaza. Education Department official Tariq Habash, a Palestinian American, also resigned in protest earlier this year, and a top official who oversaw arms transfers at the State Department, Josh Paul, stepped down in October, citing the Biden administration's decision to send more arms to Israel as the war began. In February, U.S. Air Force member Aaron Bushnell died after self-immolating in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., having said he was engaging "in an extreme act of protest" to avoid being complicit in genocide.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Amee Vanderpool at SHERO:

Donald Trump is now trying to claim that he knows nothing about the controversial conservative agenda that is meant to go into place on “Day One” of another Trump presidency. The extensive plan, which was developed by the prominent Trump supporting Heritage Foundation, lays out a blueprint for a complete overhaul of the federal government, detailing a strategy for immediately firing thousands of civil servants, expanding the executive powers of the president, halting all sales of the abortion pill, and much, much more. Although Trump has recently attempted to distance himself publicly from his own custom-made agenda, he has continued for months at his rallies to make dog whistle promises that include the main tenants of this conservative policy. [...]

Contrary to recent protests, Donald Trump also knows exactly who is behind Project 2025, because it was created by many of his most trusted allies and former advisors, who ultimately wrote the plan for him. The plan sets out four main policy aims to install an extreme, far-right agenda that includes: restoring the family as the center piece of American life; dismantling the administrative state; defending the nation's sovereignty and borders; and securing God-given individual rights to live freely. Look for Trump to manipulate the language of these basic tenants in his ongoing speeches, which are ultimately a signal to his support of the 2025 agenda. In January of 2018, just a year into his first term, the Heritage Foundation bragged that the Trump administration had “embraced nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations from the “Mandate for Leadership,” which ultimately became “Project 2025.” But the team that created the project is chock full of former Trump advisers, including director Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management while Trump was president. Russell Vought, who was the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump from July 2020 to January 2021, wrote a key chapter on future executive branch staffing for Project 2025, and also serves as the Republican National Committee’s 2024 platform policy director. The Heritage Foundation touts that “more than 350 leading conservatives” contributed to the plan, including many that would be hugely influential in Washington if Republicans take back the White House.

[...] In the last few weeks, the Biden Campaign has made a point to direct the public to the goals of the conservative plan — which is backed by more than 100 far right groups — to warn of the potential danger involved with a second Trump presidency. The increased concern over the far right agenda, which appeared to rise in tandem with Trump’s slight edge in the polls following the presidential debate, has now gone viral and is getting a lot of backlash. This has made it a little more difficult for the Republican Party to outwardly adopt Project 2025 as planned at the RNC this week. Most party platforms tend to average between 50- to 75-pages, according to historians. The Republican Party has issued a formal platform that is 16 pages long, and it makes extensive use of capital letters to somehow mirror Donald Trump’s own speaking and social media posting tone. Many of the concepts and directives seem intentionally vague, as if to be filled in by a more substantial, 900 page companion agenda that fleshes out the real intentions of the Republican Party under Trump’s continued leadership.

While it may have been the intention of RNC Director Russell Vought and other key Heritage Foundation members for the GOP to formally adopt Project 2025 at the convention this week, they might just keep the connection between the two agendas implied and forgo drawing more attention to the unpopular far right plan. Using the Project 2025 agenda as an Appendix to the Republican Platform put forth this year is the only thing that explains why anyone would put forth such a slapdash and incomprehensible official agenda like the one presented by the RNC this week. Despite Donald Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the substantial conservative opus generated by the Heritage Foundation that he has publicly praised and acknowledged in the past, nothing happens on a large scale within the GOP without Trump’s express consent. Moving forward we can expect the rhetoric to change slightly and become even more obfuscated, as Trump and JD Vance continue to sell Project 2025 under a more generic premise that they think distances them from the conservative manifesto.

DJT can claim to disavow Project 2025 all he wants, but a large part of it was influenced by Trump staffers.

See Also:

Public Notice: Project 2025 is the GOP platform

[beardedmrbean]

Sen. John Fetterman could land himself in trouble with voters after he doubled down on his claims that he is not a progressive Democrat, despite comments he made during his election campaign.

"I'm not a progressive, I'm just a regular Democrat," Fetterman said on X, formerly Twitter.

The statement was contradicted by the website's community notes feature, referencing tweets from Fetterman in 2016 and 2020 in which he clearly said he was a progressive.

Despite the contradiction, Fetterman has noticeably shifted away from the position upon which he narrowly defeated Donald Trump-endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz in the 2022 midterms.

Politicians such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent closely aligned with the left of the Democratic Party, have called for a ceasefire in Gaza, whereas Fetterman has said he supports the Israeli response to the attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas on October 7 "unequivocally," despite criticism that it has been too strong.

"I just think I'm a Democrat that is very committed to choice and other things. But with Israel, I'm going to be on the right side of that," Fetterman said.

The Pennsylvania senator's stance on Israel is a particular source of ire for many who consider themselves part of the progressive movement, largely younger voters.

A November 2021 poll by Pew Research recorded that 71 percent of the progressive left movement is made up of people aged 18 to 49.

It is young voters that favored Fetterman in his 2022 Senate race against Oz. According to an exit poll taken by Statista, 72 percent of voters aged 18-24 who answered said they voted for the Democrat. The figure was similar for voters aged 25 to 29, at 68 percent.

His position on Israel-Gaza could spell trouble among this voter demographic. According to a New York Times/Siena poll published on Tuesday, 45 percent of people aged 18 to 29 think President Joe Biden is "too supportive" of Israel. In the same age group, 46 percent of people who responded said they were supportive of Palestine, compared to 27 percent favoring Israel.

The same poll said that just 20 percent of all voters aged 18 to 29 believe Biden is handling the conflict well. Asked about the result on CNN on Tuesday, Fetterman said: "If you're getting your perspective on the world on TikTok, it's going to tend to be kinda warped."

He added: "Sometimes you may alienate some voters, but it is really most important to be on the right side on that. That's where I am at."

A total of 16 of his former campaign staffers wrote him an open letter, asking him to change his stance.

"It is not too late to change your stance and stand on the righteous side of history," it said.

An op-ed in news outlet PennLive was published in November by Mireille Rebeiz, Ph.D., chair of Middle East Studies and associate professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in which his position on the issue was labeled "disturbing" and saying he was "unworthy of my trust."

Fetterman has called for humanitarian aid to be sent to Gaza, but criticized pro-Palestinian protesters when they staged a demonstration outside a Jewish-owned store in Philadelphia in December, calling the gathering antisemitic.

Immigration is also a divisive issue in Congress, and Fetterman has made it clear he wants to work with Senate Republicans and says it is a "reasonable conversation" to have. The GOP has pushed for stricter measures along the southern border with Mexico.

"It's a reasonable conversation—until somebody can say there's an explanation on what we can do when 270,000 people are being encountered on the border, not including the ones, of course, that we don't know about," Fetterman said to NBC. "To put that in reference, that is essentially the size of Pittsburgh, the second-largest city in Pennsylvania."

His wife, Gisele Fetterman, arrived undocumented from Brazil as a 7-year-old and was an important part of his Senate campaign. Some accused him of throwing his wife under the bus because of his stance.

Newsweek has reached out to Fetterman via email through his Senate office for comment.

"Fetterman has never been progressive, but endorsing talks for tougher immigration laws when he's married to an incredible woman who was once an illegal immigrant and who kept his campaign alive while he was recovering from a stroke is actually sickening," said Alexandra Hunt, a former Democrat candidate for Pennsylvania's 3rd Congressional District.

The conversation around Fetterman has some such as left-leaning commentator Mehdi Hasan questioning if he is the "new Kyrsten Sinema," the Arizona senator who became an independent in 2022.

"Fetterman has been a pleasant surprise for his Republican colleagues and a thorn in the side of progressive Democrat," Hasan wrote in British news magazine The Spectator in December. He added: "One still has to wonder if he might follow in Sinema's footsteps and officially extricate himself from the two-party system."

Sinema cited a "deeply broken two-party system" as the reason she left the Democratic Party in 2022.

However, Heath Mayo, a conservative who founded the anti-Trump nonprofit Principles First, praised Fetterman.

"John Fetterman is testing a lot of new boundaries for the Democratic Party right now. Aggressively pro-Israel, pro-border security, anti-corruption in his own party[...]That's principled leadership and Dems should embrace it. He is speaking to a lot of us," Mayo said.

On X, Hasan said Fetterman's comments on him not being aligned with the progressive movement was "a total attack on the people who worked hard to elect him."

[newsource21]

It turns out that Republicans' concerns about the Biden administration's efforts to censor the news and information Americans see are well-founded.

In a stunning letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor content and then pushed harder after the company initially resisted the government's coercion.

In the letter released Monday, Zuckerberg said that "senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree."

Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook made changes to COVID-related content and that his team is responsible for the decision to do so. He also expressed regret for succumbing to government pressure to censor content.

"I believe the government pressure was wrong," Zuckerberg wrote, "and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today."

He said the company would react differently if it received similar pressure again: "I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction − and we're ready to push back if something like this happens again."

It's sad but not shocking that Joe Biden's White House pressured a major social media company to block Americans' access to information deemed by government censors as inappropriate. Stories about government interference with Facebook and Twitter, now known as X, have been swirling for some time.

But the fact that Zuckerberg has acknowledged years after the fact that the Biden-Harris administration repeatedly pressured the company to censor content, even jokes, during the pandemic is quite damning. The First Amendment protects the right to free speech for all Americans. The Biden administration trampled on that right by using the power of government to pressure a news and information platform to block or alter what Americans were permitted to see and read.

Zuckerberg's revelation also exposes an odd double standard about the relationship the White House has with tech companies. The Biden administration has sued Apple over its supposed monopoly on cellphones, filed a lawsuit against Amazon and launched antitrust investigations into Google, Meta and Microsoft. It seems hypocritical for Biden to sue Big Tech for alleged violations and then pressure Facebook to do his bidding.

What else are Republicans right about?

When something like Zuckerberg's letter becomes public, and an idea that Democrats have long claimed is petty and false turns out to be true, I wonder if the same thing could be happening about other important issues.

How many supposedly "baseless" Republican ideas are actually rooted in truth?

Trump vs. Trump:The former president is losing a winnable election. He has no one to blame but himself.

In fact, Zuckerberg pointed to one such issue in his letter Monday.

He said the FBI warned Meta about a “potential Russian disinformation operation” before the 2020 election involving the Biden family and Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company with ties to Hunter Biden, the president's son. After the warning, Facebook demoted, or suppressed, a New York Post news article about Hunter Biden's business entanglements.

“We sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply,” Zuckerberg wrote. “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

Zuckerberg said that Meta no longer demotes posts in the United States while waiting for fact-checkers to complete their work. Now that Vice President Kamala Harris has replaced Biden on the Democratic presidential ticket, the White House's record of censorship is her record. Will she pressure social media companies in the future to remove content that makes her look bad? Will Big Tech stand up against new censorship efforts, as Zuckerberg now promises to do?

Americans have a right to know.

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

By Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher

Donald J. Trump, who recently said he has “no regrets” about appointing the Supreme Court supermajority that overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion rights, declared on social media on Friday that his administration will be “great” for women’s “reproductive rights.”

Mr. Trump’s use of the specific phrase “reproductive rights” — the language used by abortion-rights advocates — appeared to be an effort by the former president to refashion himself as essentially supportive of abortion rights and as a political moderate on an issue that has the potential to be damaging to him in November.

“My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” he wrote on Friday morning on Truth Social, his social media platform.

At the Democratic National Convention, the end of Roe — and Mr. Trump’s professed pride in appointing the justices who eliminated it — was a central focus. Women told haunting, personal stories about the dangers they faced being denied abortions after the ruling was overturned, with pregnancies that were not viable and that threatened their own health.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who has been at ease discussing reproductive rights on behalf of the Biden-Harris administration, talked at length in her nomination acceptance speech on Thursday night about Mr. Trump’s role in curtailing those rights. She has framed Mr. Trump as a threat to “freedoms” — reproductive freedom and the freedom of economic mobility among them.

“I believe America cannot truly be prosperous unless Americans are fully able to make their own decisions about their own lives, especially on matters of heart and home,” Ms. Harris said. “But tonight, in America, too many women are not able to make those decisions. And let’s be clear about how we got here. Donald Trump handpicked members of the United States Supreme Court to take away reproductive freedom. And now he brags about it.”

She also described hearing painful stories around the country, adding, “This is what is happening in our country, because of Donald Trump. And understand, he is not done.”

Mr. Trump watched her speech and posted on Truth Social about it roughly 40 times, often writing in capital letters to criticize Ms. Harris’s remarks on abortion and other issues.

The Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe helped mobilize Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections, and Democrats believe it will do so again this year. Some 22 states have implemented bans on abortion at various stages of pregnancy since the end of Roe in 2022.

Mr. Trump recently told CBS News that he has “no regrets” about the Supreme Court justices he appointed who brought about the end of federal abortion protections.

Mr. Trump used to support abortion rights before declaring himself anti-abortion in 2011 when he was considering a Republican presidential campaign. He has appeared uncomfortable with how to discuss the issue of abortion ever since he officially became a Republican candidate in 2015. He ran hard to the right on the issue, trying to convince social conservatives that they could trust him. While social conservatives have applauded the end of Roe, his new language is not likely to please them.

“My advice: When you’re in a hole stop digging,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council and a social conservative who wanted tougher anti-abortion language in the Republican National Committee platform. “This week made clear, the D.N.C. has the corner on the abortion market. He is not only suppressing his own support, he is going to hurt the vast majority of Republican candidates who are 100 percent pro-life.”

He struggled for months this year during the Republican presidential primaries with how to discuss the issue, privately saying he “liked” a 16-week abortion ban as he considered what ground to stake out. Ultimately, he publicly said he supports returning the issue to states to decide, but has said he wouldn’t sign a federal abortion ban.

Democrats are skeptical of that statement, and believe if he wins another term he will be guided by conservatives seeking more restrictive measures on reproductive rights.

On Thursday night, hours before using the language employed by abortion-rights activists, Mr. Trump once again falsely claimed that “everyone” wanted Roe “terminated” and brought back to the states. In reality, Democrats forcefully opposed the move and lobbied against it.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to an email asking for clarification on why he was staking out new ground.

[bllsbailey]

NY Times: Hunter Biden Sought State Dept. Help for Burisma

Hunter Biden solicited help from the State Department in 2016 to land an energy project in Italy while his father, Joe Biden, was the sitting vice president in the Obama administration, the New York Times reported Tuesday night.

Hunter Biden sought the assistance from then-U.S. ambassador to Italy John R. Phillips on behalf of Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was a board member at the time, the Times reported.

The Times' report comes from a tranche of records finally released by the Biden administration shortly after Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race. The Times first filed its Freedom of Information Act request in June 2021. The Times then sued after eight months of inaction by the Biden administration.

The State Department told the Times that the release of batches of documents was coincidental with Joe Biden's announcement that he was exiting the race.

Included in the release of docs was Hunter Biden's letter to the ambassador, however the entire letter was redacted by the State Department, the Times said.

The White House told the Times that President Biden was unaware that his son reached out to the American embassy in Italy on behalf of Burisma.

Embassy officials were uneasy with such a request from the son of a sitting vice president, according to the report.

"I want to be careful about promising too much," wrote a Commerce Department official based in the U.S. Embassy in Rome, according to the report.

"This is a Ukrainian company and, purely to protect ourselves, [the U.S. government] should not be actively advocating with the government of Italy without the company going through the D.O.C. Advocacy Center," the official wrote, referring to a Department of Commerce program for U.S. companies seeking business with foreign governments, according to the Times.

Hunter Biden did not register as a lobbyist for Burisma under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Further, documents filed by special counsel David Weiss last week allege that Hunter Biden was hired by a Romanian businessman "to attempt to influence U.S. government agencies."

The Times' report will quickly get the attention of House Republicans, who have been on the trail of Hunter Biden's activities with foreign governments and businesses in order to enrich himself off his father's name, they allege.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., told Newsmax last week that Hunter Biden's Romanian connection would suggest a "potential bribe."

"What David Weiss, to his credit, has said in issuing this, is that this was a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act because Hunter Biden was getting paid by these foreign nationals in Romania to influence the Obama-Biden administration. I think this is the biggest political corruption scandal in the history of our lifetime," Comer said.

Mark Swanson ✉

Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.

© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

[cksmart-world]

SMART BOMB

The Completely Unnecessary News Analysis

By Christopher Smart

June 4, 2024

BONKERS OVER VERDICT — MIKE LEE WANTS PAYBACK

Utah's Sen. Mike Lee has had it with all the injustice done to his hero Donald Trump. The Biden White House just convicted Trump of 34 felonies for falsification of business records and Lee's not going to take it. The toady-for-life has joined with seven other trumpriots: Sens. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who will hold their collective breaths until all meaningful work in the U.S. Senate crawls to a stop. “The White House has made a mockery of the rule of law and fundamentally altered our politics in un-American ways,” they wrote in a letter sent by stork to the big judge in the sky. President Joe Biden and his minions have weaponized the legal system that led to 34 unanimous guilty verdicts issued by a jury of Trump's peers. “Those who turned our judicial system into a political cudgel must be held accountable.” Some hinted he may toilet-paper Jenny Wilson's house, since the Salt Lake County mayor is one of the only Democrats in Utah. But what about that thing where Trump could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Well, no more — and you know it's gotta be Biden's fault.

FLYING DRIVERLESS TAXIS, OH MY!

Here's a recent headline from the Deseret News: “Would you get on a flying taxi without a pilot?” (Expletive deleted) No! We're not kiddin' about this Wilson. They're coming and there's nothing we can do about it. And you thought The Jetsons — the animated futuristic comedy of the 1960s — where people got around in flying cars would never happen. Never say never. Still, if the driverless automobile taxis in San Francisco are any indicator, we could be in for some scary rides. The San Francisco autonomous taxis malfunctioned regularly causing massive traffic jams all over the city; they blocked streets impeding emergency vehicles; they drove through wet cement and generally scared the hell out of everyone. The California DMV finally suspended their use. But get this: An outfit called Project Alta says it will have operational air taxis in Salt Lake City in time for the 2034 Winter Olympics. (No site of the 2034 Games has not been selected, although Salt Lake City is in the running.) You're right Wilson, it does sound like pie in the sky. And what if the pie falls out of the sky? What's the polite way to say squashed bodies. Collateral damage? On a positive note, the sky taxis could be a perfect compliment to the proposed space-age “entertainment district” downtown — The Jetsons would love it.

LORDY, THEY'RE WEAPONIZING THE FLAG, TOO

No one in their right mind could possibly think that an upside-down American flag flying at the house of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito could mean he supports Jan. 6 rioters, election deniers or Donald Trump. So said Alito in a pretensious letter to Sens. Richard Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse regarding their plea to Chief Justice John Roberts that Alito be recused from the case of Trump v. United States. It's like this, Alito said, “My wife did it!” He asked her to take the flag down but she told him to stuff it. As to the “Appeal to Heaven” flag flown at his beach house, well, “My wife did that, too,” Alito said. (Both flags have been adopted by MAGA and election deniers.) Alito's wife, Marth-Ann, has First Amendment rights, too, he barked. And she's quite the battle axe so he doesn't like to mess with her. Dems observe that Alito clearly has the appearance of bias in favor of Trump and his claim of total immunity when he directed a mob to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6. Balderdash, Alito exclaimed. No reasonable person who is not motivated by politics or ideology could possibly think he's biased because he keeps his Christian Nationalist predilections to himself. Democrats have weaponized flags and other stuff, Alito said, like the free vacations he gets from billionaires. It totally sucks, right Martha-Ann.

Post script — That'a a wrap for another fun-filled week here at Smart Bomb where we keep track of presidential polling, so you don't have to. Well Wilson, Trump was found guilty of 34 class E felonies. Now, the BIG question: Will it help him or hurt him in the Nov. 5 election. Some pundits say it will give him a boost because it will energize his base. Within hours of the guilty verdict his campaign took in more than $60 million in contributions. But other observers say, not so fast — undecided voters might not want a convicted felon in the White House. Yes Wilson, that would make a good bumper sticker: Let's Put A Felon In The White House. It's funny how that works in a backwards kinda of way. Biden and Trump will square off in debate on June 27 and that could, according to Dan Balz of the Washington Post, bring into focus two questions undecided voters must ask themselves. One: Which candidate poses the bigger threat to the future of the country? Two: which candidate will make the lives of Americans better than they are today? On the other hand, if it turns into a WWE wrestling match, well who knows... Titan Trump with his signature bodyslam vs. Batman Biden and his sneaky snake chokehold. Get the popcorn, Louise, it's going to be The Thrilla in Atlanta.

Well shucks Wilson, poor old Martha-Ann Alito, she's been havin' a time of it and of course so has her Sammy Pooh. So the staff here at Smart Bomb is wondering if you and the guys in the band don't have a little something up your sleeve for the couple of the moment:

When a man loves a woman, Can't keep his mind on nothin' else, He'd change the world for the good thing he's found. If she is bad, he can't see it, She can do no wrong, Turn his back on his best friend if he put her down. When a man loves a woman, He'll spend his very last dime Tryin' to hold on to what he needs. He'd give up all his comforts And sleep out in the rain, If she said that's the way It ought to be. Well, this man loves you, woman. I gave you everything I have, Tryin' to hold on to your heartless love. Baby, please don't treat me bad. When a man loves a woman, Down deep in his soul, She can bring him such misery. If she is playin' him for a fool, He's the last one to know. Lovin' eyes can never see.

(When a Man Loves a Woman — Percy Sledge)

[ancestorsofjudah]

2 Kings 10: 1-6. "The Discernment."

Jehu, "In God's Name" does the smart thing- after he kills the King and Queen of Evil, he goes after their sons and all the members of the household and roots it all out. If we did this after all that 911 shit with the Republicans and Evangelicals, we would not be living in the bizarre world we live in today.

Does anyone remember what it was like? Dirty bombs, anthrax, tape your windows up, keep water and plenty of crystal meth handy JIC?

What about the Terror Scale?

This was all because of Republican religious shit. And we coasted right past it, thinking something new and wonderful would rise up through the Party and something not so bad would happen, and then the schmucks cheated Donald Trump into the White House and now our governemnt is hip deep in Crimes Against Humanity. Nothing changed did it? Because we didn't root it out.

When I discovered it was Dick Cheney, George Bush and Charles Mary who prompted the 911 attacks against us because of oil revenues and the Mormon obsession with Jews and the Holy Land, the whole thing was supposed to culminate in a land grab that ran across the Middle East right to straight into Israel, and remembered how hard those post 911 years were, I got very, very determined to rid the world of the Republicans. I hope you will agree they are not good for this world, and we will be just fine without them.

This was before I watched the Widows and saw the Family Research Council cheating in the 2016 Election and put my foot in the Republican's little Cock Ring, that's what they called it, their pedophile porn traffic circle.

When I started squealing on them, they tried throwing little boys with, like, two pubic hairs at me and I ran the other way as fast as I could, but many Republicans and their friends did not. And the police were not as agitated about any of this as you might think they should be. As Mitt Romney said on his Netflix documentary, "they'll never stop us, we all do it."

Well, MITT then all of you have to die. The police may not be interested in doing their jobs but do it they must. Human trafficking is a crime, and if you fuchk little kids, who you serve up like a Wendy's to your Republican Friends, it's automatically also a Crime Against Humanity, especially if elected officials and Cabinet Level Officials are involved.

So Joe Biden has his work cut out for him if he is himself, to remain out of trouble with the law as he cannot legally turn his back on his government when state sponsored sexual abuse of minors is involved. This makes the rest of the world wonder "what's next?" And what is next has to be good, and that starts with getting rid of the bad.

Ahab’s Family Killed

10 Now there were in Samaria seventy sons of the house of Ahab. So Jehu wrote letters and sent them to Samaria: to the officials of Jezreel,[a] to the elders and to the guardians of Ahab’s children. He said, 

2 “You have your master’s sons with you and you have chariots and horses, a fortified city and weapons. Now as soon as this letter reaches you, 

3 choose the best and most worthy of your master’s sons and set him on his father’s throne. Then fight for your master’s house.”

4 But they were terrified and said, “If two kings could not resist him, how can we?”

5 So the palace administrator, the city governor, the elders and the guardians sent this message to Jehu: “We are your servants and we will do anything you say. We will not appoint anyone as king; you do whatever you think best.”

6 Then Jehu wrote them a second letter, saying, “If you are on my side and will obey me, take the heads of your master’s sons and come to me in Jezreel by this time tomorrow.”

Jehu writes letters meaning he consults the Torah to determine a course of action against the residual members of the House of Ahab, the fraternity, a political party in ancient Israel that was rife with corruption. He insists one of its survivors take responsibility for the errors in judgement of the entire House, and they refuse. Jehu says "no deal".

Recall in a previous section, all "errors" perpetrated by the State have to be aired in public, they need to be laid bare, the Law must resume sounding its voice and the public has to pay heed. How often have we seen this happen? Not in my lifetime, not until Gaza, where the people of Israel stood their ground on what was clearly an highly orchestrated terrorist attack against them. Still the public, which has become very corrupt did not rally to their sides, even though this is what the Religion says must be done.

It is true we are all in shock over the conditions in Gaza, and they are going to get worse not better. This is because we are morbidly inconsistent about standards for human coexistence and quality of life and it has caught up with the people living in Israel and Gaza. Everyone living on this planet can be hurt and made happiest by the same things.

Because we allow ourselves to think certain persons deserve more of either than the rest life on earth is faltering when there is otherwise no reason it could not be prospering instead. Which will not happen until the Republicans, Vladimir Putin, Tehran, North Korea, Beijing, and most of the governments in Africa are forced to pass the ball to other players This is the course of action the Melachim states the world's competent leaders must pursue.

The Values in Gematria for the above verses are:

v. 1: Israel had Seventy Sons and now it seems Samaria had them also. Seventy has great significance in Judaism; we know who the Seventy sons of the Twelve Tribes of Israel are, but the Seventy Sons of Samaria are not named. Samaria means "the Agents of the Watch" and refer to the religious observances that keep a nation whole and unified through its religious practices.

As we have discovered this goes both ways. Certainly the Republicans and their religious practices have gnarled this planet up and make it sick right down into its gizzards, but there are others we can and should turn to instead.

The Value in Gematria is 11728, יא‎בזח, yabazah, "the brotherhood of God's spoils." There is no need for corruption or lies. There is enough wealth, food, and space to go around. How we choose to view this determines how difficult or scarce things really are.

Certainly pandering to the abortion girls, so illegal, does not readily provide us with the economics or logistics to equitably distribute wealth and resources to those in need, a disturbance in our way of governing we have yet to properly resolve. And the Torah, Gospels, and Quran inisist this is our way of tithing to God what is God's but we don't do it.

v. 2: The Letter is always Tav, the Hebrew Letter that stands for the Table. On top of the Table are all the accoutrements and blessings humanity has made in separate parts and separate places using many different hands but are enjoyed by all, all at once.

The Value in Gematria is 11279, יאבז‎ט, jabzt, ‎"that which discerns."

War is the opposing force of the Table.

v. 3-4: The Value in Gematria is 11137, יאאגז‎, yaagz, "God's strength is found in the Eye of the Fountain."

Two Kings are needed for a confrontation between the Seventy Customs, the Letters, and the rest of the world. One to learn them, one to understand and leglislate their importance. If these two aspects of cognitive reasoning fail, then the Entity has to step in directly, and that is what Jehu, the god of justice did.

v. 5: And then, everyone has to do what has to be done. The Value in Gematria is 15351, י״הג‎א, the tenth, “You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's” (Ex. 20:17).

Similarly you shall not deny your neighbor an equal chance to obtain and secure these things as their own private property.

v. 6: A Day Later is an important measurement of time in Judaism, it means all the progress and none of the trouble from the Day Before is present. Ie, on Day 2 we no longer experience the chaos of being a baby trapped in a droopy, shitty, runny diaper anymore because Day 1 is over. The same thing is true with adult life.

The Value in Gematria is 11623, יאו‎‎בג‎‎, yaobg, "to accept God's reproach to consent to God's lesson as a nation, as a people."

This is embodied in the Second Letter, gimel: Gimel. גמל The verb גמל (gamal) means to deal, or recompense in the sense of benefitting from. 

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 9, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 10, 2024

When President Joe Biden announced that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris on July 21—less than three weeks ago—the horizon for the 2024 presidential election suddenly shortened from years to about three months. That shift apparently flummoxed the Republicans, who briefly talked about suing to make sure that Biden, rather than Harris, was at the head of the Democratic ticket, even though the Democrats had not yet held their convention and Biden had not officially become the nominee when he stepped out of contention. Lately, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has suggested that Biden might suddenly, somehow, change his mind and upend the whole new ticket, although Biden himself has been strong in his public support for Harris and her vice-presidential running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and Democrats held a roll-call vote nominating Harris for the presidency.

The idea that presidential campaigns should drag on for years is a relatively new one. For well over a century, political conventions were dramatic affairs where political leaders hashed out who they thought was their party’s best standard-bearer, a process that almost always involved quiet deals and strategic conversations. Sometimes the outcome was pretty clear ahead of time, but there were often surprises. Famously, for example, Ohio representative James A. Garfield went to the 1880 Republican convention expecting to marshal votes for Ohio senator John Sherman—General William Tecumseh Sherman’s brother—only to find himself walking away with the nomination himself. 

As recently as 1952, the outcome of the Republican National Convention was not clear beforehand. Most observers thought the nomination would go to Ohio senator Robert Taft, the son of President William Howard Taft, but after a tremendous battle—including at least one fist fight—the nomination went to war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, who challenged Taft because of the senator's opposition to the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Taft supporters took that loss hard: Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. drove Eisenhower’s victory, prompting right-wing Republicans’ enduring hatred of what they called the “eastern establishment.” 

The 1960 presidential election ushered in a new era in politics. While Eisenhower had turned to advertising executives to help him appeal to voters, it was 1960 Democratic nominee Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy who was the first presidential candidate to turn to a public opinion pollster, Louis Harris, to help him adjust his message and his policies to polls. 

Political campaigns were modernizing from the inside to win elections, but as important in the long run was Theodore H. White’s best selling account of the campaign, The Making of the President 1960. White was a successful reporter, novelist, and nonfiction writer who, finding himself flush from a movie deal and out of work when Collier’s magazine went under, decided to follow the inside story of the 1960 presidential campaign. “I want to get at the real guts of the process of making an American president—what the mechanics, the mystique, the style, the pressures are with which an American who hopes to be our President must contend,” White wrote to Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN). 

White set out to follow the campaigns of the many primary candidates that year: Democrats Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, and John F. Kennedy and Republicans Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller. 

Before White’s book, political journalism picked up when politicians announced their candidacy, and focused on candidates’ public statements and position papers. White’s portrait welcomed ordinary people backstage to hear politicians reading crowds, fretting over their prospects, and adjusting their campaigns according to expert advice. In heroic, novelistic style, White told the tale of the struggle that lifted Kennedy to victory as the other candidates fell away, and his book spent 20 weeks at the top of the bestseller lists and won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

White’s book emphasized the long process of building a successful presidential race and the many advisors who made such building possible. In the modern world a presidential campaign lasted far longer than the few months after a convention. In his intimate portrait of that process, White radically transformed political journalism. As historian John E. Miller noted, journalists who had previously covered the public face of a candidacy “now sought to capture in minute detail the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the candidates and their strategy boards and to probe beneath the surface events of political campaigns to ascertain where the ‘real action’ lay.” 

For journalists, seeing the inside story of politics as a sort of business meant leaving behind the idea that political ideology mattered in presidential elections, a position that political scientists were also abandoning in 1960. It also meant getting that inside story by preserving the candidates’ goodwill, something we now call access journalism. Other journalists leapt to follow the trail White blazed, and by 1973 the pack of presidential journalists had become a story in its own right. White told journalist Timothy Crouse that he had come to regret that his new approach to presidential contests had turned presidential campaigns into a circus.

Over time, presidential campaigns began to use that circus as part of their own story, spinning polls, rallies, and press coverage to convince voters that their candidate was winning. But now the 2024 election seems to be challenging the habit of seeing a presidential campaign as a long, heroic sifting of advice and application of tactics, as well as the perceived need for access to campaign principals.

Yesterday, apparently chafing as the Harris-Walz campaign turns out huge crowds, Trump called reporters to his company’s Florida property, Mar-a-Lago. Those determined not to miss any twist of the campaign—and who had enough advance notice to make it to Florida—listened to him serve up his usual banquet of lies: that doctors and mothers are murdering babies after they’re born; everyone wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, no one died on January 6, 2021; he loves autocrats and they love him; and so on. The journalists there did not ask him about the recent bombshell report suggesting that Egypt poured $10 million into his 2016 campaign.

But, as conservative writer Tom Nichols of The Atlantic noted, Trump appears nonetheless to have gone entirely off the rails. He claimed that the crowd he drew on January 6 was bigger than those who gathered in 1963 to hear the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous I Have a Dream speech, and he told the fabricated story of surviving an emergency landing in a helicopter with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, a story that appears to have involved a different Black man, at a different time, and did not feature the conversation he recounted.*

As Nichols put it, “The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.”

But the media appears to be sliding away from Trump: today he angrily insisted he could prove that the dangerous helicopter trip actually occurred, leading New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman to note that “Mr. Trump has a history of claiming he will provide evidence to back up his claims but ultimately not doing so.” When asked to produce the flight records he claimed to have, Trump “responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice.”

In contrast, as presidential candidates, first Biden and now Harris have not appeared to bother with access journalism or courting established media. Instead, they have recalled an earlier time by turning directly to voters through social media and by articulating clear policies that support their dedication to the larger project of American democracy.

Yesterday, after journalists had begun to complain that they did not have enough access to Harris, she came to them directly on the tarmac at the Detroit airport and asked, “What’cha got?” All but one of their questions were about Trump and his comments; the one question that was not about Trump came when a journalist asked when Harris would sit down for an interview. 

*I corrected this sentence, which said the helicopter story was “entirely fabricated,” shortly after midnight on August 10, in light of a new story by Christopher Cadelago in Politico that says Nate Holden, a former city councilman and state senator from Los Angeles, says he was on a frightening helicopter ride with Trump at some point in the 1990s.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

WE'RE NOT GOING BACK

[masterofd1saster]

CJ current events 9feb23

Good

Four years after the death of a Green Beret veteran following an altercation in Iraq, two Marine Raiders were acquitted Wednesday on charges of involuntary manslaughter and negligent homicide.

The jury in the trial at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, convicted Gunnery Sgts. Josh Negron and Danny Draher of one charge: violation of a lawful general order, for drinking alcohol while deployed in Iraq.

The two Marines “never said that they didn’t drink,” Phillip Stackhouse, Draher’s civilian attorney and a Marine veteran, told Marine Corps Times on Thursday morning. In fact, Draher testified on the stand that both he and Negron had been drinking the night of the altercation with 45-year-old Army veteran and contractor Rick Rodriguez, according to Stackhouse.***

After the fight, Draher and Negron had left him with Gilmet, a corpsman.

The defense argued, contrary to testimony by some prosecution experts, that Rodriguez may not have died from injuries he sustained from the fight, and that Gilmet was a trusted, experienced corpsman. Stackhouse said that Gilmet testified, under immunity, that he carefully assessed Rodriguez and treated him to the best of his ability.*** https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2023/02/02/2-marines-found-not-guilty-of-homicide-in-green-beret-veterans-death/

+++

Wharton (1874), Vol 2 says

5. Homicide from Necessity in Defence of a Man's own Person or Property, or of the Persons or Property of others. § 1019. (a.) General nature of right. — A man may repel force by force in the defence of his person, habitation, or property, against one or many who manifestly intend and endeavor, by violence or surprise, to commit a known felony on either. In such a case he is not obliged to retreat, but may pursue his adversary till he find himself out of danger ; and if, in a conflict between them, he happen to kill, such killing is justifiable. The right of self-defence in cases of this kind is founded on the law of nature; and is not, nor can be, superseded by any law of society.*** But only as much force is to be used as is reasonably necessary in self-defence.***

+++

A jury decided on Thursday to give two Marine Raiders no legal punishment for drinking while deployed to Iraq, after a jury cleared them of homicide charges in connection with the death of a Green Beret veteran four years ago.

Gunnery Sgts. Josh Negron and Danny Draher also had faced charges of involuntary manslaughter, negligent homicide and dereliction in the performance of duties, but a jury of eight Marines found them not guilty on Wednesday night at a trial at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina.*** https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2023/02/02/2-marine-raiders-cleared-of-homicide-get-no-punishment-for-drinking/

***

good parody

Punxsutawney Phil Emerges From Burrow To Let Everyone Know There Are Some Documents Marked ‘Classified’ Down There

https://babylonbee.com/news/punxsutawney-phil-emerges-from-his-burrow-to-let-everyone-know-there-are-some-documents-marked-classified-down-there

***

I know!  Let’s prosecute the whistleblowers!

A revamped legal team representing Hunter Biden is taking the first steps in what appears to be a more aggressive approach to his defense, disseminating on Wednesday a batch of criminal referrals and cease-and-desist letters targeting some of his most vocal detractors.

Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, wrote to the Justice Department and the Delaware attorney general's office asking investigators to examine the conduct of several operatives who allegedly played a role in "accessing, copying, manipulating, and/or disseminating Mr. Biden's personal computer data," including Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and other supporters of former President Donald Trump.

"The actions described above more than merit a full investigation and, depending on the resulting facts, may merit prosecution under various statutes," Lowell said. "It is not a common thing for a private person and his counsel to seek someone else being investigated, but the actions and motives here require it."***

Law enforcement agencies are not obligated to act on such referrals, nor are they required to acknowledge them. Ted Goodman, a spokesperson for Giuliani, said the move "indicates just how devastating the texts and videos from Hunter's laptop truly are."

Lowell also wrote to the Internal Revenue Service requesting a probe into Garrett Ziegler, a former Trump White House aide who recently published a trove of emails allegedly tied to Hunter Biden. That letter challenges the tax-exempt status of Ziegler's organization, Marco Polo, which is filed as a 501(c)(3).***

Bryan Sullivan, a defamation lawyer retained by Hunter Biden, also sent a cease-and-desist letter to Fox News and Tucker Carlson, asking the network and its primetime host to retract and correct a report they ran about alleged rent payments Hunter Biden made to his father, which they have claimed as evidence that the president was more closely tied to his son's financial arrangements.***

Federal authorities in the Delaware U.S. attorney's office, led by U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump-era appointee, have been investigating Hunter Biden since 2018, ABC News has previously reported, but paused for several months ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

The probe spilled into public view in December 2020, shortly after Joe Biden secured the presidency, when Hunter Biden confirmed the probe into his "tax affairs." Prosecutors have since examined whether he paid adequate taxes on millions of dollars of his income, including money he made from multiple overseas business ventures.*** https://abcnews.go.com/US/hunter-biden-targets-alleged-chief-agitators-legal-counterattack/story

***

Nellie Bowles writes

→ Department of horrible ideas: State Democrats in Massachusetts want to offer prisoners reduced sentences for donating organs. Yes, I’m serious. In the new bill: If you, a prisoner, go under the knife to give up a kidney or some bone marrow, you could get up to a year of your prison sentence reduced. The lawmakers say the bill would “restore bodily autonomy.“

What in the free-market hell is this? https://www.thefp.com/p/tgif-99-spy-balloons

***

amusing toon 

https://www.gocomics.com/brewsterrockit/2023/02/03

***

Aint no picnic being a minority woman

DoJ has published Cristobal, N. (2022). Holoi ā nalo Wāhine ‘Ōiwi: Missing and Murdered Native Hawaiian Women and Girls Task Force Report (Part 1). Office of Hawaiian Affairs; Hawai‘i State Commission on the Status of Women: Honolulu, HI.  https://www.oha.org/wp-content/uploads/MMNHWG-Report_Web.pdf

***

No registration?

ROCHESTER — A 20-year-old Rochester man will serve 180 days in jail and up to 30 years of probation in a case involving the rape of two juvenile girls in Olmsted County.

Mohamed Bakari Shei appeared before District Judge Jacob Allen Monday, Jan. 30, 2023, for his sentencing hearing where multiple family members spoke about how Shei's actions affected them.

Shei was facing three different felony first-degree criminal conduct charges in two separate cases. His plea deal called for no prison time, a stay of adjudication and the dismissal of two out of three charges. If Shei completes his probation, all charges against him will be dismissed and will not be on his criminal record.***

Shei was 15 and 16 years old at the time of the sexual assaults and he was initially charged in juvenile court in 2019. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, his case was pushed back to the point that prosecutors would soon lose jurisdictional authority to prosecute the case.

Charges were dismissed against Shei in those cases but were soon refiled. Shei was then given a plea deal that included his stay of adjudication and no prison time in exchange for him not challenging certification in adult court, which allowed for his continued prosecution, according to Olmsted County Senior Attorney Thomas Gort.

Shei entered an Alford plea in December 2022, meaning that while he does not admit guilt, he admits that a jury would convict him based on the evidence.***

With good behavior, Shei will serve, at most, 116 days in the Olmsted County Adult Detention Center. His jail sentence will begin Feb. 13, 2023. Shei was also ordered to undergo a sex offender program and complete 200 hours of community service.

He will not be required to register as a sex offender.

According to court documents:

A female juvenile reported to a Rochester police investigator in April 2020 that Shei first raped her on Mother's Day in 2018 at a Rochester residence. The juvenile would have been around 9 years old on that date. Shei would have been around 16 years old.

Shei told her that he would give her money for a book fair at school or buy her toys, the juvenile told police.

A different juvenile told an RPD investigator in June 2021 that Shei had raped her several times at the same residence during the same time period.*** https://www.postbulletin.com/news/local/rochester-man-given-180-days-in-jail-for-raping-juvenile-females

***

George Will

What aspects of today’s behavior will cause posterity to look down on us when they look back at us? Which of our practices will cause future Americans to exclaim, as many of today’s Americans do regarding their predecessors, “How could they have been so benighted?” Here is one answer: Rikers Island.

Rikers is in New York City’s East River, which is not a river but a tidal estuary. And Rikers is not a normal jail — a place of brief confinements pending trials and sentencings. Because the criminal justice system has coagulated, and because methods for sorting the mentally ill from criminal recidivists are inadequate, and because many inmates are “dope sick” (suddenly separated from their narcotics), Rikers often is a long-term warehouse for an unmanageable conglomeration of unalike problems.

Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau begin their “Rikers: An Oral History” by citing a politician’s speech deploring the rampant drug use and violence among Rikers inmates who leave there “far worse than when they entered.” The speech was given in 1921.

A judge interviewed by Rayman and Blau: “I feel like I’m handing out a life sentence to these people, but I’m doing it thirty days at a time.” In Rikers slang, a “buck fifty” is a slashing to the face requiring 150 stitches. Weapons? Sharpened animal bones work. Or, a former inmate remembers: “Someone got stabbed with a broomstick on top of my bed. There was so much blood.” A former guard: “It’s a high-crime area. These guys are going to hurt each other, that’s what they do.” Guards “had fight clubs where they would bet on who [of two inmates pitted against each other] would win.” In an “Apache Line,” prisoners crawl on their knees between two lines of guards wielding batons. Unsurprisingly, some people “hang up” — Rikers argot for committing suicide. There were at least 30 inmate deaths in 2021-2022.***

Rikers is not an argument against mass incarceration: Most inmates there should be inmates somewhere. The Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman reports in City Journal that “of the roughly 5,200 pretrial detainees in DOC [Department of Corrections] custody as of mid-December, 29 percent faced homicide charges, and another 46 percent were there for rape, burglary, robbery, assault, or weapons offenses.”

And disregard irrelevant cant about “systemic racism.” Equity-mongers appalled by racial “disparities” should read Rafael A. Mangual in City Journal: Nationally, Black males are victims of gun homicides at a rate almost 10 times higher than White males. In New York City in 2021, 97 percent of shooting victims were Black or Hispanic.

Also in City Journal, criminal justice scholars Matt DeLisi and John Paul Wright report that the U.S. incarceration rate is the lowest since 1990. And that “only a small fraction of the victimizations and arrests that occur annually culminate in a prison sentence — partly because of the incapacity of criminal justice systems to process the magnitude of offending that occurs.” Only 54 percent of violent offenses result in prison confinement. The median time served for violent crimes is 2.4 years. Of 404,000 state prisoners released in 30 states, 68 percent recidivated within three years, 79 percent within six years.*** https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/03/rikers-island-jail-disgrace/

***

don’t leave your password sitting around?

Nathaniel Fick, the nation's top-ranking cybersecurity diplomat, said over the weekend that his personal Twitter account was hacked.

Fick, who serves as ambassador at large to the State Department's Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, revealed news of the hacking in a tweet from his personal Twitter Saturday evening, ostensibly when he regained access to the account. He called the incident one of the "perils of the job."*** https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/top-us-cybersecurity-diplomat-nathaniel-fick-twitter-hacked

***

Nice story

In early January, a man entered a Benedictine monastery in Arkansas and began smashing the altar with a sledgehammer.

He was about to begin breaking open the tabernacle where the consecrated bread is kept, but something stopped him in his tracks: a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Jerrid Farnam, 32, of Sallisaw, Oklahoma, was arrested for the crimes of property damage and theft committed at Subiaco Abbey in Subiaco, Arkansas, and is currently incarcerated awaiting trial.

Sheriff Jason Massey of the Logan County Sheriff’s Office told CNA that when they brought the suspect in he confessed to the crime. But, Farnam told the police, after he looked up and saw a statue of Mary, he couldn’t continue to break open the tabernacle as he had planned***

Massey said that one of the seven offenses Farnam was charged with was theft of property, a Class B felony, which is the highest classification of a felony in the state, he said.

“You can’t put a price on those relics. They’re 1,500 years old,” he said.

Farnam thought that Jesus’ bones were in the altar and that God was telling him to remove the bones, Massey told CNA. He added that Farnam has a history of substance abuse and was intoxicated during his arrest.***   https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/253568/police-say-church-vandal-was-about-to-break-into-tabernacle-until-he-saw-the-statue-of-mary

***

You have some reason for shooting him, right?

An Arizona rancher has been charged with first-degree murder and had his bail set at a whopping $1million for fatally shooting a Mexican citizen on his property.

George Alan Kelly, 73, was arrested following the January 30 fatal shooting of Gabriel Cuen-Butimea, 48, on his ranch in Kino Springs, just a mile and a half north of the US-Mexico border.

Authorities are still investigating the fatal shooting, with the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's chief deputy saying it does not appear that Kelly knew Cuen-Butimea ahead of the shooting.

But a friend of Kelly's told KOLD he has had issues with people on his property in the past, though he believes Kelly acted in the best faith.

Cuen-Butimea, meanwhile, has had a history of illegally crossing the US-Mexico border, according to federal court records, and was deported back to his home country multiple times — most recently in 2016.*** https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11720325/Arizona-rancher-73-charged-degree-murder-shooting-dead-Mexican-migrant.html

***

How did he walk?  I’m stumped.

Police in California have released video footage of a double amputee creeping up and knifing a man on the sidewalk, moments before he was shot and killed by cops.

Anthony Lowe Jr., a 36-year-old father-of-two, leaped out of his wheelchair at a gas station before stabbing a man in the torso, who was walking ahead of him in Huntington Park.

The victim ended up stumbling into a busy road in the moments after the attack, at which point the police were called to the scene.

The reason behind the attack is not yet clear, although Lowe's family have revealed he suffered from depression.***

Footage that was previously released saw Lowe walking with a knife in his hand, away from the police. The weapon has been described as a 12-inch butcher knife.

Three officers can then be seen trying to detain him as he hurriedly moved along the sidewalk.

At one point, Lowe turns towards the officers with their guns drawn, and raised the knife in what they perceived to be a threatening gesture or him possibly preparing to throw the object.*** https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11720729/Footage-double-amputee-carrying-12-inch-knife-stabbing-man-torso-walked-sidewalk.html

The family says it will sue.  They’ll probably lose because Anthony didn’t have, you know....

***

A little young?

A six-year-old boy who shot and wounded his teacher had constantly sworn at staff, chased students and tried to whip them with his belt, and once choked another teacher 'until she couldn't breathe', a lawyer has said.

The incidents were described in a notice sent to the Newport News school district by Diane Toscano, a lawyer for teacher Abby Zwerner.

She informed the district that Ms Zwerner intends to sue.

Ms Zwerner had just finished reading a story to her class who were about to head to an art lesson when the 6-year-old pulled out the handgun and shot her earlier this year.***

Two days before the shooting, the six-year-old allegedly 'slammed' Ms Zwerner's mobile phone and broke it, according to the claim notice.

He was given a one-day suspension, but when he returned to Ms Zwerner's class the following day, he pulled a 9mm handgun out of his pocket and shot her while she sat at a reading table, the notice says.

The document says that several hours before the shooting, at least three teachers and staff members warned school administrators they believed the boy had brought a gun to school.

His backpack was searched, but no gun was found, and administrators did not remove the boy from class, lock down the school or call police.

The claim notice says Ms Zwerner went to former assistant principal Ebony Parker's office at about 11.15am that day 'to advise her that the shooter seemed more 'off' than usual and was in a violent mood'.

It also says the boy had threatened to beat up a student and 'angrily stared down' the school security officer in the canteen.*** https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11720109/Boy-six-shot-teacher-allegedly-tried-choke-whipped-pupils.html

***

fair point

***As in every dystopian story, the characters in The Last of Us have no choice because their survival is always at stake.

Until well into the nineteenth century, this was the usual state of all human societies. People were forced to trust each other and forge social bonds to survive a dangerous world.

In his 2019 book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, Yale physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis writes, “For most of our history as a species, up until about two centuries ago, humans all lived on the edge of death.” This reality has radically shifted with the advent of modern technology, relative material abundance, stable governance, and social services, which have allowed people to live longer, more prosperous lives—while relying less on help or financial support from their communities.***

Last year I visited Malaysia, a developing country where the average income is only about $11,000 per year. Inequality is pervasive. I observed glittering skyscrapers three blocks away from residential wooden huts.

Housing is often makeshift and overcrowded, with many families living in small, cramped dwellings made of corrugated metal, wooden planks, and even cardboard. Many homes in the poorest areas have battered and worn-down cement flooring. No carpet, no hardwood, no ceramic tiles. Just cement.

And yet social capital is high. People in the community regularly drop by to socialize, offer support, and deliver food to one another. I witnessed a nine-year-old boy regularly check in on his elderly neighbors to feed their dogs, sweep their patio, and run their errands. In contrast, Americans have been slowly descending into dysfunction and alienation—a problem made worse by the decline of organized religion, the breakdown of the family, and, of course, the recent lockdowns.*** https://www.thefp.com/p/the-last-of-us-reveals-the-best-of

***

You Brits can EABOD - Eat a Box of Rocks.

ALSO BORN ON THIS DAY

1478

Thomas More

English humanist and statesman

Pious Catholic?  Check.  Stellar lawyer?  Check.  Martyr?  Fornicating A!

***Wed

Good column by  Shadi Hamid.

In 2022, Andrew Tate was the most googled person in the United States. He had managed to build a massive following online—especially among young men and on the far-right—with a potent mix of cultural criticism, self-help bravado, and the sort of unvarnished misogyny that is rare even among misogynists. Then, in December, he was arrested in Romania on sex-trafficking charges. Until the platform banned him, TikTok videos of Tate had been viewed more than 11 billion times.

But I had been interested in Tate for another reason: his religious identity.

In October, the British-American ex-kickboxer had converted to Islam. Known for his libertine lifestyle—including running a sex-cam business—he seemed an odd fit for the moral strictures of Islam. And he was.

Muslim reaction to Tate’s very public announcement of his conversion on the social media site Gettr was split: Some saw it as an opportunity to share the good word. Others were horrified, fearing Tate would re-popularize stereotypes about Islam subjugating women.

That difference of opinion mostly reflected differing politics. Like other minority communities, American Muslims, and especially young American Muslim men, had become increasingly divided between the “woke” and the “anti-woke.” The anti-woke, or “based,” were into Jordan Peterson. They were also into Andrew Tate, whose story, whose brand, had come to embody a defiant, wholesale rejection of the norms, habits, and beliefs of the progressive mainstream.

After Tate’s arrest, I braced myself for media coverage about his newfound faith. But it was like no one in the legacy press was even aware he had converted.

The Economist ran a profile of Tate that tried to answer the question on the minds of millions: Who is this guy? I was surprised (and relieved) to find that the profile made no mention of Tate’s religion. Ditto The Washington Post and The Guardian. With the exception of Muslim Twitter, I could barely find any mention of it at all.***

And what Andrew Tate is doing—emphasizing the politics of faith over spirituality—isn’t entirely novel. Religion is never just about religion, after all. As the Christian theologian William Cavanaugh argues in his 2009 book The Myth of Religious Violence, the decoupling of politics and faith is an “invention of the modern West.”***

As the culture continues to secularize, to become more detached from any underlying moral vision, right-wing intellectuals have responded by gravitating toward more demanding forms of Christianity, particularly Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholic integralism. Among the more prominent converts has been the conservative author Sohrab Ahmari, who grew up in a secular home in Iran, immigrated to the United States, and eventually embraced Catholicism, which Ahmari credits with imposing a “tremendous order and metaphysical direction” to his life. Like Islam, these religious orientations are perceived to be tougher, more masculine, more grounded in rules rather than sentiments. They order freedom by constraining it. They not only entail exacting rites and rituals; they are explicitly about not making concessions to secular modernity.

Some of these Christian culture warriors have come to view Islam as a resource and Muslims as allies in the long struggle against progressive cultural dominance. The conservative author Rod Dreher—who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in 2006, before it was cool—described his admiration in a post titled “Islam: ‘The Last Badass Religion.’”***

This tells us something about the all-consuming political divide in America today, which is less about politics than culture—which is to say, religion. After all, religion—or its absence—shapes our habits, norms, and attitudes. Secularization doesn’t make religion irrelevant; instead, it creates new ways of being “religious.”*** https://www.thefp.com/p/embracing-god-to-own-the-libs

***

Great friends

DENVER — A 12-year-old boy in a stolen car died in a shootout with the owner in west Denver on Sunday, police said.

The car's owner reported it stolen in the 8300-block of E. Northfield Blvd., and tracked it with an app to the intersection of West 12th Avenue and North Decatur Street, police said.

When the owner approached the car, he reported exchanging gunfire with at least one person inside, according to police.

A 12-year-old then drove the car to the 2900-block of W. 10th Ave., where officers found him with a gunshot wound, police said. It appeared that additional occupants inside the stolen car ran away when it stopped.*** https://www.9news.com/article/news/crime/12-year-old-killed-decatur-street-denver/73-e8c21545-42d6-458c-8f67-8695d7488fbc

more detail at https://twitter.com/DenverPolice/status/1623104895577624576/photo/1

***

Fought for those dirtbags?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Wednesday, February 8, 2023 

American Citizen Convicted of Providing Material Support to ISIS that Resulted in Death and Related Offenses

Defendant Became a Sniper and Weapons Instructor for the Foreign Terrorist Organization, and Fought in Multiple Battles in Syria

A federal jury yesterday convicted Ruslan Maratovich Asainov, 46, a U.S. citizen and former resident of Bay Ridge, New York, of all five counts of an indictment charging him with conspiracy to provide material support to ISIS; providing material support to ISIS in the form of personnel, training, expert advice and assistance; receipt of military-type training from ISIS; and obstruction of justice. The jury also found that the defendant’s provision of material support to ISIS resulted in the death of one or more persons. The verdict followed a two-week trial before U.S. District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis.

“Mr. Asainov, a US citizen, traveled abroad to kill and train others to kill on behalf of ISIS. Now, he is being held accountable,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew G. Olsen. “Part of the National Security Division’s core mission is to protect Americans from terrorist organizations who would do them harm and we will bring to justice all those who would try.”

“As proven at trial, Asainov was a member of ISIS who was so committed to the terrorist organization’s evil cause that he abandoned his young family here in Brooklyn, New York, to make an extraordinary journey to the battlefield in Syria where he became a lethal sniper and trained many others to kill their adversaries, and even after being captured still pledged his allegiance to ISIS’ murderous path,” said U.S. Attorney Breon Peace for the Eastern District of New York. “There is no place in a civilized world for the defendant’s bloody campaign of death and destruction. Today’s verdict in an American courtroom is a victory for our system of justice, and against ISIS and those like the defendant who are committed to murdering innocent people here in the United States and abroad.”

“The defendant in this case fought for ISIS and also trained many others how to kill for that terrorist organization,” said Assistant Director Robert R. Wells of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. “This verdict demonstrates the FBI and our partners will use all of our legally available tools to hold accountable anyone who assists ISIS or other terrorist groups.”

As proven at trial, between December 2013 and March 2019, Asainov provided and conspired to provide material support and resources in the form of personnel, including himself and others, training, and expert advice and assistance, to a foreign terrorist organization, namely ISIS, knowing that ISIS was a designated foreign terrorist organization that had engaged in terrorist activity and terrorism. Asainov also received military-type training from ISIS, in violation of federal law.

Asainov converted to Islam in 2009 and subsequently became increasingly interested in Islamic extremism. By the fall of 2013, he was consuming radical Islamic content online. He abruptly dropped out of classes at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in September 2013 and began making preparations to travel to Syria to wage violent jihad.

On Dec. 24, 2013, Asainov abandoned his wife and daughter in Brooklyn, and traveled on a one-way ticket from New York to Istanbul, Turkey, to obtain entry into Syria.

Over the course of approximately five years fighting on behalf of ISIS, Asainov fought in numerous battles against ISIS enemies, including engagements at Kobani; Tabqa; Raqqa; Dayr Az Zawr; up to and including ISIS’s last stand in Syria at Baghouz in March 2019. Asainov received training in how to use automatic rifles, machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. In Tabqa, in mid-2014, he volunteered to train as a sniper. Over time, Asainov became a sniper trainer or “emir” on behalf of ISIS, estimating that he taught nearly 100 students. A former U.S. Navy SEAL scout sniper testified that the defendant’s self-described sniper training course was consistent with what the former SEAL would expect to be taught in a sniper training program.

From Syria, the defendant attempted to recruit another individual to travel from the United States to Syria to fight for ISIS, and sought to obtain funds to purchase a scope for his rifle from the same person. The defendant also told his estranged spouse that he was fighting on behalf of ISIS, described by him in a recorded January 2015 voicemail as “the most atrocious terrorist organization in the world that ever existed.” Asainov’s wife testified that he sent her a photograph of three dead fighters, one of whom was wearing a patch that stated “Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham,” i.e., ISIS, in Arabic script.

Asainov was captured in Syria after ISIS’s last stand at Baghouz, near the Syria-Iraq border. Just before his capture, Asainov discarded his rifle and destroyed his cell phone.

Asainov admitted to agents from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force that he had fought in numerous battles on behalf of ISIS as a warrior and sniper, serving in several different katibas or ISIS fighting brigades. In recorded phone calls to his mother from facilities operated by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the defendant told her that he was carrying out Allah’s orders when he waged jihad and killed for ISIS, that he intended to return to waging jihad if released and that he would fight until he “meet[s] Allah,” i.e., until his death. In September 2020, staff at a BOP facility confiscated a makeshift ISIS flag affixed to Asainov’s cell wall. The defendant had filled in an 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper with black ink and Arabic writing in the design of the ISIS flag.

When sentenced, Asainov faces up to life in prison.*** https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/american-citizen-convicted-providing-material-support-isis-resulted-death-and-related

***

Can do a lot w/ zoning.

Sex on the wrong side of I-25: Colorado city sues swingers club, alleging zoning violation

Centennial is trying to close down what it says is a swingers club operating in this office building on South Yosemite Street, photographed on Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2023. The city says The Office is operating in a part of Centennial where sexually oriented businesses are not allowed to operate. (John Aguilar, The Denver Post)

They’ve been swinging in Centennial since the summer and now the city is suing to stop the sex.

This suburb of 107,000 southeast of Denver this week filed a lawsuit against the owner of The Office, a sex club that the city says is operating in a part of Centennial that does not permit sexually oriented businesses.

The suit alleges that rooms inside The Office are “equipped with items generally used only for the purposes of engaging in specified sexual activities,” including condoms, bondage devices and a specially outfitted chair with certain “rubber attachments” — a piece of furniture not found in a typical office setting, John Aguilar reports. https://www.denverpost.com/2023/02/08/centennial-sues-the-office-swingers-sexually-oriented-business-lawsuit/

*** 

JPII?

The FBI’s Richmond field office released an internal memo last month warning against “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology,” and claiming it “almost certainly presents new mitigation opportunities,” according to a document shared by an FBI whistleblower on Wednesday. Kyle Seraphin, who was a special agent at the bureau for six years before he was indefinitely suspended without pay in June 2022, published the document, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” on UncoverDC.com. “In making this assessment, FBI Richmond relied on the key assumption that [racially or ethnically motivated extremists] will continue to find [radical-traditionalist Catholic or RTC] ideology attractive and will continue to attempt to connect with RTC adherents, both virtually via social media and in-person at places of worship,” the document from January 23 states. It adds that “RTCs are typically categorized by the rejection of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) as a valid church council; disdain for most of the popes elected since Vatican II, particularly Pope Francis and Pope John Paul II; and frequent adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology. Radical-traditionalist Catholics compose a small minority of overall Roman Catholic adherents and are separate and distinct from ‘traditionalist Catholics’ who prefer the Traditional Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teachings and traditions, without the more extremist ideological beliefs and violent rhetoric.”***https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-internal-memo-warns-against-radical-traditionalist-catholic-ideology/

***

Why are the libraries contaminated?

BOULDER — Libraries in three Denver suburbs, and the city of Boulder, have undergone extended closures in the last six weeks after meth users lit up in public bathrooms, leaving in their wake a toxic drug residue that’s costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars to clean up.***

Boulder’s main branch reopened in January after a three-week shutdown necessitated by test results that revealed methamphetamine residue in bathroom exhaust vents above state health limits. The six impacted bathrooms remain sealed off in the building while remediation continues.

“I do not use the bathrooms in there — I make a point of it. It’s scary,” Currie said.

Following the closure in Boulder, libraries in Englewood, Littleton and Arvada also locked their doors due to methamphetamine contamination found in restrooms. The three suburban libraries have yet to re-open.

Tammy Brooke, a seven-year Boulder resident, said she was “disappointed” that use of the library was denied to everyone because a handful of people chose to get high in the building. But she said the closure is a symptom of the larger drug addiction scourge plaguing Colorado and the nation.

“There’s a problem and it needs to be addressed,” Brooke said, heading into the main branch on Arapahoe Avenue to check out books for her kids.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment tallied 749 overdose deaths due to methamphetamine use in 2021, up from 525 the year prior. There were 349 meth overdose deaths in Colorado in 2019.

The rise in meth-related deaths in the state tracks with overall drug use — and escalating overdose deaths — across several classes of illicit substances. At least 1,881 Coloradans died of drugs in 2021, the most recent year state health data is available, as fentanyl and methamphetamine continued pushing the state’s per-capita overdose rate to the highest level ever recorded.*** https://www.denverpost.com/2023/02/08/methamphetamine-library-closures-boulder-arvada-littleton-englewood/

***Thurs

Sad

https://www.reddit.com/r/tooktoomuch/comments/10wnx8b/computer_duster_on_the_bus/

If you legalize drugs what don’t you legalize?

***

I thought 8th Amendment prohibited that??

***

Hope you don’t mind a video

https://va.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_rppq592GnH1z7alf9_720.mp4

***

Don’t write like a motherloving academic!

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2023/02/09

***

Compare sentence to Texas

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Wednesday, February 8, 2023 Texas Man Pleads Guilty to 90 Federal Hate Crimes and Firearms Violations for August 2019 Mass Shooting at Walmart in El Paso, Texas

Defendant Admitted to Targeting Perceived Hispanic Immigrants, Killing 23 People and Injuring 22 Others

A Texas man who carried out the mass shooting at the Cielo Vista Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on Aug. 3, 2019, killing 23 people and injuring 22 more, pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court to a 90-count indictment, including 45 counts of violating the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act and 45 counts of using a firearm during and in relation to crimes of violence.*** https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/texas-man-pleads-guilty-90-federal-hate-crimes-and-firearms-violations-august-2019-mass

+++

The federal government will not seek the death penalty for the man accused of massacring 23 people in a hate crime at an El Paso Walmart in 2019, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.

“The United States of America hereby notifies the Court and Defendant PATRICK WOOD CRUSIUS that the Government will not seek the death penalty in the instant case,” prosecutors said in a one-sentence filing.*** https://www.texastribune.org/2023/01/17/el-paso-walmart-shooting-federal-death-penalty/

***

***The new House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government will call two former FBI agents who are expected to support GOP claims that the Bureau has become politicized.

"We have a government that now, I believe, is targeting the very people it is supposed to serve," Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said Tuesday. Jordan chairs both the House Judiciary Committee and the Weaponization subcommittee.

The former agents appearing Thursday are Nicole Parker, who left the bureau after believing it had become weaponized for political purposes, and Thomas Baker, who is expected to speak to the need for an independent bureau.*** https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fmr-fbi-agents-expected-pull-back-curtain-house-gop-begins-exploring-weaponization-government

***

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence....

A second Republican New Jersey council member was shot dead Wednesday, just a week after a first was gunned down outside her home.

Milford councilman Russell Heller, who also works as a supervisor at a utility company, was gunned down in a parking lot outside his office on Wednesday by a former employee. Last Wednesday, Sayreville councilwoman Eunice Dwumfour was killed by an unidentified gunman outside her home, in what police called a targeted attack. Heller’s killer was later found dead from a suspected self-inflicted gunshot wound.***

Heller was killed less than 15 miles from where Dwumfour was found dead in her SUV with multiple gunshot wounds. Her killer is still at large. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy (D.) attributed both deaths to "gun violence."*** https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/second-republican-new-jersey-councilman-shot-dead-within-a-week/

***

Lauren Southern is cool

https://youtu.be/bq-H2qMkiOE

So cool, she’s been banned from Airbnb.  Soooo cool, her parents have been banned from Airbnb.

***

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Unfit :: billboard project

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 3, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 04, 2024

Last night the Boston Globe published a leaked email from a top volunteer with the Trump campaign, former Massachusetts Republican Party vice chair Tom Mountain, telling volunteers that the Trump campaign “no longer thinks New Hampshire is winnable” and is “pulling back” from that important swing state. He urged volunteers to turn their attention instead to Pennsylvania. After the story dropped, the Trump campaign cut ties with Mountain. 

Stephen Collinson of CNN and Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Marianne LeVine of the Washington Post reported today that Trump’s team has given up on trying to get Trump to talk about the economy and other issues voters care about. The former president has decided to spend the rest of the campaign attacking Vice President Harris to destroy her popularity and drive voters away from her, rather than trying to attract them to himself. The Washington Post reporters noted that likely voters view Trump unfavorably and his team has concluded that while he can’t improve his own standing, he can damage hers. 

Collinson dubbed Trump’s plans a “feral political offensive.”

It is not clear that this will work. As Collinson notes, Harris has refused to get dragged into the gutter with Trump, and Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who studies focus groups, notes that voters appear to want to put the nastiness of the past several years behind them. Still, the media-tracking company AdImpact reported that between August 23 and August 29, 57% of the total television spending for political ads was on Republican attacks on Harris.

Trump also continues to demand that Republicans support his attempt to suppress voting. Having failed to pass any of the necessary appropriations bills before going on August recess, Congress will be in a rush when it comes back into session next week. It needs to fund the government before the end of the fiscal year on September 30 in order to prevent a partial shutdown. Last Thursday, Trump told right-wing podcast host Monica Crowley that he would “shut down the government in a heartbeat” unless the government funding package includes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act—which would give credence to the idea that noncitizens are voting in national elections despite the fact it is already illegal—and a bill restricting legal immigration.

Zeeshan Aleem of MSNBC today took public notice of Trump’s “deteriorating ability to clearly communicate.” His speeches “seem to be growing more discursive and difficult to comprehend by the day,” Aleem wrote. “Those speeches are making it hard, if not impossible, for people listening to them to understand what he wants to do with his power in office, and they’re reportedly turning off voters.” A reporter for The Guardian pointed out that attendees at Trump’s rallies are leaving as he rambles for nearly two hours, and complaining that he is “babbling.”

For his part, Trump says his wandering speech is deliberate. He calls it “the weave.” I’ll talk about, like, nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, and friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen.’”

Aleem notes that this less-focused, less-capable Trump would be exceptionally dangerous in office a second time. And yet, he was dangerous enough the first time. Today Adam Klasfeld and Ryan Goodman of Just Security released a study showing at least twelve times that Trump used the power of the presidency to retaliate against his political enemies. They note that there is no evidence that President Joe Biden or anyone else at the Biden White House ever took similar actions.  

John McCain’s son Jimmy today announced that he has switched his voter registration from Republican to Democrat and will work to elect Vice President Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz in 2024. The younger McCain enlisted in the Marine Corps at 17 and is now an intelligence officer in the 158th Infantry Regiment of the Arizona Army National Guard. He said he is speaking out because Trump’s conduct at Arlington National Cemetery was a “violation.” 

Last Friday, just before the long weekend, Trump announced that he would vote against a Florida ballot measure that would essentially enshrine in the Florida state constitution the abortion rights formerly protected by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. When Trump had bowed to popular support for abortion rights and expressed uneasiness at the state’s current six-week ban—a cutoff reached before most women know they’re pregnant—antiabortion activists launched fierce attacks on him. So, on Friday, Trump switched his position and announced he would vote against restoring access to abortion in Florida. 

That announcement has given wings to the Democrats’ messaging about Republicans’ determination to end abortion rights. It did not help the Republicans that more videos have been unearthed in which Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance said that “a childless elite” is ruling the country. He went on to excoriate this elite for what he claimed was their pride that they didn’t have children and that they had abortions, and said “they look down on people who invest their time and their future in their children. And that is a dangerous place to live as a country.” Even a right-wing Newsmax interviewer suggested that he was “painting this group with perhaps a broad brush?”

On October 1, in Louisiana, a law will go into effect that reclassified the drug misoprostol as a controlled dangerous substance. Misoprostol can be used for abortion. It is also used for routine reproductive care and during medical emergencies to treat postpartum hemorrhage. It is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medications, a list containing those medications that are the most effective and safe to meet a health care system’s most important needs. After antiabortion activists targeted the drug, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry signed a law reclassifying it as a controlled dangerous substance. The reclassification means that the drug will no longer be easily available on obstetric hemorrhage carts. 

“Take it off the carts?” one doctor said to Lorena O’Neil of the Louisiana Illuminator. “That’s death. That’s a matter of life or death.”

The Harris campaign said: “Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is the reason Louisiana women who are suffering from miscarriages or bleeding out after birth can no longer receive the critical care they would have received before Trump overturned Roe. Because of Trump, doctors are scrambling to find solutions to save their patients and are left at the whims of politicians who think they know better. Trump is proud of what he’s done. He brags about it. And if he wins, he will threaten to bring the crisis he created for Louisiana women to all 50 states.”

Vice President Harris’s campaign started its “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour today in Palm Beach, Florida, where it drove past the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago club. The bus will make at least 50 stops across the country. 

Pollster Tom Bonier today continued his examination of new registrants to vote. This time his focus was North Carolina. The pattern he has found across the country continues: “surges in registration are being driven by women.” In North Carolina, he writes, the number of registrants was almost 50% higher during the week of July 21 than in the same week in 2020, and the gender gap was +12 women, compared to +6 women in 2020. The new registrants were +6 Democratic, and 43% were younger than 30. 

The Harris-Walz campaign today joined the Democratic National Committee in announcing a transfer of nearly $25 million to support Democratic candidates in down-ballot state and federal races. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee will get $10 million each in hopes of supporting a Democratic majority in each chamber of Congress in the new administration. 

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the organization devoted to winning state legislatures, will receive $2.5 million. The Democratic Governors Association and the Democratic Attorneys General Association will get $1 million each. 

Finally, today, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction to stop the Trump campaign from playing the song he likes to dance to at his rallies: “Hold On, I’m Coming.” The estate of Isaac Hayes Jr., the artist who co-wrote the song, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Trump, his campaign, and a number of his allies, noting that they have never obtained a public performance license for the song although they have used it at least 133 times.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mariacallous]

In the summer of 1814, U.S. and British negotiators gathered in Ghent in the hopes of putting an end to the war that had begun two years earlier when England invaded the United States. The British, confident of victory, demanded major territorial concessions; when the U.S. delegation, led by John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, rebuffed those extortionate terms, the British proposed to redraw boundaries to include current gains, which contained parts of New England. News of the burning of Washington, which reached Europe in early October, tempted the Americans to concede.

Instead, they stalled, hoping for good news. That news soon arrived in the form of U.S. victories around Lake Champlain and in Baltimore. Just before Christmas, the British withdrew all demands and agreed to postpone the most contentious issues for future discussion. The Treaty of Ghent put an end to the era when U.S. sovereignty was threatened.

The moral of this story is that premature diplomacy during warfare is a mistake; the dynamism of the battlefield must be allowed to shape the conditions of negotiation. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has urged his colleagues in the Biden administration to “seize the moment” for diplomacy now that Ukraine has fought the Russian army “to a standstill.” But that’s the wrong metaphor; the Ukrainians first withstood the Russian onslaught and have since pushed it back. A diplomatic bid a month ago might have conceded Russian control of Kherson, a city Ukraine has since regained, just as an agreement in September 1814 would have lopped off a significant portion of New England. The moment will come for diplomacy; it’s not now.

In an earlier column on the letter progressive Democrats sent to U.S. President Joe Biden on Ukraine, I wrote of my reservations about the left’s antiwar case for diplomacy. The stronger argument, however, is on the right, or at least the non-left. This side correctly points out that while Ukraine’s interest in protecting its territorial integrity is unlimited, the West has many other concerns that it must hold in balance with its support of Ukraine. In an article in the National Interest, Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, recently listed the grave and long-term costs of the war: accelerated “deglobalization,” rising food and energy prices and the social and political unrest those spikes can provoke, nuclear instability, and, above all, the prospect of war between Russia and NATO, possibly including a Russian resort to nuclear weapons.

In a recent conversation, Kupchan told me that he was “in the minority that thinks we should entertain talks with the Russians.” The cost that most concerns him is the military one. “We haven’t,” he said, “found Putin’s red line.” Russian President Vladimir Putin was not risk-averse, as he had been thought to be. He might respond to what he regarded as a threat to his regime with a form of escalation, nuclear or otherwise, that would be calamitous for the West, whether or not the Ukrainians regarded it as a price worth paying. Kupchan’s brother Charles, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, has also made the case that “the Kremlin’s resort to a nuclear weapon becomes a realistic option should Russian forces face full expulsion from eastern Ukraine and Crimea.”

This turns the argument about diplomacy and timing upside-down, suggesting that the West needs to begin formulating a diplomatic endgame before the Ukrainians succeed so well on the battlefield that Putin pulls the world down upon himself—and us. That kind of reasoning is, of course, the whole point of nuclear blackmail. When I said as much to Cliff Kupchan, he pointed to the additional costs of the war, very much including the horrendous deaths of hundreds of Ukrainian children. Yet this is a cost that the Ukrainians themselves seem willing to bear.

That said, simply calling Putin’s bluff would be the height of madness. The Biden administration is acutely conscious of the problem of the red line; even as he authorized another $400 million in military hardware for Ukraine, the president refused to provide long-range drones that could hit targets inside Russia. The argument for diplomacy says, in effect, that Washington must restrain not only itself but Ukraine; if not, as the international relations scholar Emma Ashford recently wrote, “[I]t may find its carefully calibrated response to the war being overtaken by a dangerous fantasy of absolute victory.” Ashford takes a careful middle position, suggesting that while a negotiated solution “seems impossible today,” U.S. diplomats “should begin to raise—both publicly and to [their] partners—the difficult questions that such an approach would entail.”

That sounds reasonable—don’t try to push Ukraine into sitting down with Russia but do begin to prepare for discussions that you know are bound to come. But is it? I raised the issue with Stephen Sestanovich, a Russia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. Sestanovich said that even publicly airing possible end scenarios could sap Ukrainian will, the most precious commodity of all. “Yes, at some point you can sit down and talk to the Ukrainians about their future,” he said. “But you must have respect for how much harm you could do to them.” The analogy that occurred to Sestanovich was Winston Churchill’s refusal to consider Italian diplomatic feelers in May 1940 for fear that doing so would undermine British morale.

The reason that plans for a possible endgame should remain inside diplomats’ desks right now has to do not only with timing and tactics but with other kinds of costs that diplomatic realists tend to soft-pedal. The British realized after the War of 1812 that the United States was too strong and well-located to be retaken. Putin, however, would be emboldened by an agreement that granted him, for example, something a bit better than the status quo of 2014. In fact, he will remain a threat to his neighbors and to the West so long as he retains the capacity to do harm. Sestanovich suggests that if Ukraine continues to advance in the east and take back much of what it has lost, “the Russians will be in full panic mode” and Putin’s own rule will be threatened. That is, in effect, the best-case scenario for Ukrainian military success. (The worst-case scenario, of course, is that Putin lashes out against that threat.)

The question, at bottom, is: How much does it matter? So far, the United States and Europe—to a much greater degree—have concluded that halting Russian aggression in Ukraine is worth a good deal of sacrifice. The fact that the professed values of the West turn out to be real has obviously come as a shock to Putin; it has also come as a shock, if a very pleasant one, to many people in the West. But that will is hardly bottomless. Biden and his fellow leaders will not keep bearing the political and economic burden in order to achieve Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s maximal terms, which include Russian reparations and the return of every inch of Ukrainian territory.

The time will come when diplomats pull those plans out of their desks. But first we must see how much further, with our help, Ukraine can push back Putin’s advance. Doing so is in our interest as well as Ukraine’s.

[robertreich]

The End of Trump’s Fifth Avenue

“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters," Trump boasted in 2016.

Trump’s 5th Avenue principle is being tested as never before. So far, more than 214,000 Americans have died from Covid-19, one of the world’s highest death rates -- due in part to Trump initially downplaying its dangers, then refusing responsibility for it, promoting quack remedies for it, muzzling government experts on it, pushing states to reopen despite it, and discouraging people from wearing masks.

Yet some 40 percent of Americans have stuck by him nonetheless. They’ve remained loyal even after he turned the White House into a hotspot for the virus, even after he caught it himself, and even after asserting just days ago that it’s less lethal than the flu. A recent nonpartisan study concluded that Trump’s blatant disinformation has been the largest driver of COVID misinformation in the world.

They’ve stuck by him even as more than 11 million Americans have lost their jobs, 40 million risk eviction from their homes, 14 million have lost health insurance, and almost one out of five Americans with kids at home cannot afford to adequately feed their children.

They’ve stuck by him even though more Americans have sought unemployment benefits this year than voted for him in 2016, even after Trump cut off talks on economic relief, even though he’s pushing the Supreme Court to repeal the Affordable Care Act, causing 20 million more to lose health insurance.  

Trump is in effect standing in the middle of 5th Avenue, killing Americans.

Yet here we are, just a few weeks before the election, and his supporters still haven’t budged. The latest polls show him with 40% to 43% of voters, while Joe Biden has a bare majority.

The most egregious test of Trump’s 5th Avenue principle is still to come, when he tries to kill off American democracy. He’s counting on his supporters to keep him in power even after he loses the popular vote.

He’s ready to claim that mail-in ballots, made necessary by the pandemic, are rife with “fraud like you’ve never seen,” as he asserted during his debate with Biden -- although it’s been shown that Americans are more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud.

He’ll likely allege fraudulent election results in any Republican-led state which he loses by a small margin – such as Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin.

Then he’ll rely on the House of Representatives to put him over the top.

“We are going to be counting ballots for the next two years,” Trump warned at a recent Pennsylvania rally, noting “we have the advantage if we go back to Congress. I think it’s 26 to 22 or something because it’s counted one vote per state.”

He was referring to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, which provides that if state electors deadlock or can’t agree on a president, the decision goes to the House. There, each of the nation’s 50 states get one vote.

That means small Republican-dominated states like Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming (each with one House member, who’s a Republican) would have the same clout as large Democratic states like California (with 52 House members, 44 of whom are Democrats).

Trump does have the advantage right now: 26 state congressional delegations in the House are now controlled by Republicans, and 22 by Democrats. Two — Pennsylvania and Michigan — are essentially tied.

But he won’t necessarily retain that advantage. The decision would be made by lawmakers elected in November, who will be sworn in on January 3 -- three days before they’ll convene to decide the winner of the election.

Which is why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is focusing on races that could tip the balance of state delegations – not just in Pennsylvania and Michigan but any others within reach.

“It’s sad we have to have to plan this way,” she wrote in a letter to her colleagues last week, “but it’s what we must do to ensure the election is not stolen.”

Trump’s 5th Avenue principle has kept him in power despite deprivation and death that would have doomed the presidencies of anyone else. But as a former New Yorker he should know that 5th Avenue ends at the Harlem River at 142nd Street, and the end is near.  

[odinsblog]

…Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure proposal left out the entirety of the care proposal, offered nothing on immigration, and featured startlingly little on climate; a reconciliation bill was still almost two months out. And yet the reception featured no four-letter words and no accusations of cowardice. According to sources who were in the meeting, Sheyman was particularly obliging, raising his hand to personally congratulate the administration on the deal.

“This is the meeting for progressives and progressive advocacy organizations,” said one adviser close to the White House. “The bill doesn’t include a single one of his priorities, and yet the tone is incredibly civil, nobody is even saber-rattling.” Biden, meanwhile, was soon pledging not to veto the bipartisan package if it came to his desk without a reconciliation bill full of other Democratic climate priorities, threatening the absence of major environmental spending to come.

Criticism has been in surprisingly short supply during Biden’s first six months, from a left flank that’s been somewhere between docile and unctuous. D.C. progressive groups have lavished praise on Joe Biden as the next FDR, and when he’s indulged some un-FDR-like tendencies, they’ve continued lavishing. “The idea of Joe Biden being FDR 2.0 was just a message point without a body of work to back it up,” Murshed Zaheed, progressive political consultant and former political director of CREDO, told me. “They just desperately needed the folks who were fired up.”

The result has been a progressive flank that has been defanged in Bidenworld, unwilling to make public criticisms even as much of the legislative agenda has slipped away. Already, gun control, judicial reform, student debt relief, and much of health care and immigration reform have fallen by the wayside. Policing and criminal justice reform has bogged down in seemingly endless bipartisan negotiations, with Biden pushing no deadlines for action. Democrats have split on drug pricing, with moderates on the Hill chasing modest tweaks and progressives trying to go big to save hundreds of billions for additional fiscal spending. Tax reform, despite making it into the reconciliation bill, remains on the ropes. There’s no real plan to pass meaningful voting rights protection, which Biden admitted preemptive defeat on in a July speech. The PRO Act and some small percentage of immigration, like the $15 minimum wage before it, will be decided by the whims of the Senate parliamentarian. The president himself is one of the stronger remaining defenders of the filibuster. Yet the self-censorship and happy talk endure.

A DISEMPOWERED PROGRESSIVE FLANK during a Democratic administration is not a new phenomenon. One need look no further than President Biden’s former boss, President Obama, for precedent. Obama’s strategy to gag progressives relied on the asperity of his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, in a program former blogger Jane Hamsher once coined “the veal pen.” In a series of weekly meetings between progressive groups and administration officials called “Common Purpose,” Obama adviser Erik Smith, the White House comms team, and sometimes even Emanuel himself would impress upon progressive groups their duty not to criticize the White House’s priorities—on the bank bailouts, on health care—in the name of message discipline. This kept those groups in the veal pen, at risk of a cattle prod if they ventured out.

Occasionally, Emanuel would unleash his personal fury toward anyone even thinking of criticizing the Obama administration’s thoroughly unprogressive agenda, even though it directly contravened their own priorities. In one such meeting, Emanuel infamously called MoveOn “fucking retarded” for running radio ads against moderate Blue Dog Democrats who successfully downed progressive priorities in the health care package. Groups had to “earn their seat at that particular table by not bucking the White House,” as Hamsher wrote in 2009. Silence was the cost of access, and for at least a term and a half, it worked.

Read more: https://prospect.org/politics/how-joe-biden-defanged-the-left/