Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label death of democracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death of democracy. Show all posts

Friday, February 16, 2024

Navalny Is Dead

Here's a taste of what we'll be getting if we elect Trump again.

Trump himself might not survive long enough to see American Plutocracy in full flower, but the power behind him has already put in motion the next part of the plan.



Alexei Navalny, imprisoned Russian opposition leader, is dead at 47

He emerged as the most prominent antagonist of Russian President Vladimir Putin while exposing self-dealing at the country’s highest levels of power


Alexei Navalny, the steely Russian lawyer who exposed corruption, self-dealing and abuse of power by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies, sustaining a popular challenge to Putin for more than a decade despite constant pressure from the authorities and a near-fatal poisoning, died Feb. 16 in a Russian prison colony just above the Arctic Circle. He was 47.

His death at Kharp, in the Yamal-Nanets Autonomous Region, was announced by Russia’s prison service. Prison authorities said in a statement that Mr. Navalny “felt unwell” after a walk, “almost immediately losing consciousness,” and added that a medical team failed to resuscitate him.

Mr. Navalny had endured the country’s harshest prison conditions since December; the region is brutally cold. In August, his prison sentence was extended by 19 years on charges connected to his anti-corruption foundation. Supporters said the charges were politically motivated and part of a campaign by Putin to silence him.

Mr. Navalny emerged over the years as a singularly successful blogger, activist and opposition leader in Putin’s Russia, reaching a mass audience through online videos that detailed ruling-class corruption and lavish spending. He was handsome, articulate and charismatic — a natural politician in a country where there is virtually no competitive public politics.

His corruption investigations received tens of millions of views on YouTube, fueling widespread street protests in Russia and embarrassing the Kremlin. Authorities branded him as unpatriotic, declaring that Mr. Navalny was a tool for Western intelligence agencies, and sought to diminish his popularity among liberals and other oppositionists by noting that he had allied himself with ultranationalists early in his career.

While Mr. Navalny spent weeks in jail at various times, he largely stayed out of prison as authorities seemed uninterested in making him a martyr. That calculus seemed to have changed by August 2020, when he became gravely ill and went into a coma. Western officials said he had been poisoned by a Soviet-era nerve agent known as Novichok, which British authorities said had also been used in the 2018 poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a Russian former spy who was living in England.

While recuperating from the poisoning in Germany, Mr. Navalny partnered with the investigative journalism group Bellingcat to uncover evidence linking the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, to the attack. In a brazen act that was captured on film for the Oscar-winning 2022 documentary “Navalny,” he phoned one of the FSB perpetrators, posing as his superior making an after-action report, and fooled the officer into revealing that the operation was intended to kill Mr. Navalny through the application of Novichok to his underwear. The officer blamed its failure on the quick work of the plane pilot and paramedics.

The Kremlin denied involvement, with Putin joking about the attack during a news conference. “Who needs him?” he said of Mr. Navalny with a laugh.

After the attack, Mr. Navalny continued to goad the Kremlin. “His main resentment against me now is that he will go down in history as a poisoner,” he said of Putin. “There was Alexander the Liberator and Yaroslav the Wise. Now we’ll have Vladimir the Poisoner of Underpants.”

Facing certain arrest, Mr. Navalny returned to Moscow in January 2021, declining to remain in relative safety in Germany. He was taken into custody at the airport and sentenced to more than two years in prison, found to have violated parole conditions in a case that relied heavily on technicalities.

“Hundreds of thousands cannot be locked up,” he said in a courtroom speech. “More and more people will recognize this. And when they recognize this — and that moment will come — all of this will fall apart, because you cannot lock up the whole country.”

Mr. Navalny was sent to a penal colony east of Moscow, where he went on a three-week hunger strike to protest inadequate medical attention. In 2022, he was sentenced to nine years in a high-security prison after being convicted in a separate trial, where he was accused of allegedly misusing donations received by his anti-corruption foundation. Mr. Navalny and his team said the charges were fabricated to silence him and slammed the trials as a sham. He was later sentenced to an additional 19 years on “extremism” charges.

“I perfectly understand that, like many political prisoners, I am sitting on a life sentence,” he said on social media after the verdict. “Where life is measured by the term of my life or the term of life of this regime.”

His convictions and imprisonment were widely condemned in the West as a crude way to gag one of the Russian government’s few prominent critics. When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, Mr. Navalny spoke out against it in social media postings he passed from prison through his lawyer. That November, he tweeted that he had been placed in permanent solitary confinement with limited access to his family. “They’re doing it to keep me quiet,” he said.

Although Russia’s 1993 Constitution had created a democratic system and guaranteed personal rights, Putin slowly strangled political opposition after taking office in 2000. He used a combination of subterfuge, cash and coercion to silence the oligarchs, the news media and political adversaries, often putting his friends in positions of power and creating a personalized system of control that brooked no rivals. Some of those who challenged him ended up poisoned or shot to death.

Mr. Navalny developed a following by exposing corruption based on open sources and then summoning people to join him and contribute to his organization. He had extraordinary political intuition and was tireless in combating popular indifference and pessimism, becoming the only oppositionist in recent years to become known across Russia — even though state television controlled by the Kremlin all but ignored him.

His investigations, conducted through his organization the Anti-Corruption Foundation, brought to light the underside of the Putin era.

In a 2017 investigation, he revealed that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev had accumulated more than $1 billion worth of property, using a photo of the prime minister wearing a distinctive pair of Nike sneakers to unspool a web of companies and charities connected to him and his associates.

The next year, Mr. Navalny aired a 25-minute portrayal of a potentially corrupt association between a top Putin aide and one of Russia’s richest oligarchs, featuring a secret rendezvous on a luxury yacht with a call girl.

His most explosive investigation was released just after his return to Moscow in 2021. A two-hour video report titled “Putin’s Palace” revealed the construction of a Versailles-scale palace on the shores of the Black Sea, with its own casino and underground ice hockey rink. Mr. Navalny alleged that the palace was built for Putin through an opaque network of hidden financing.

The YouTube video was viewed more than 100 million times and fueled nationwide protests, occurring after hundreds of thousands of Mr. Navalny’s supporters had turned out across Russia to protest his arrest, braving subzero temperatures and the batons of riot police.

Mr. Navalny paid repeatedly and dearly for speaking out, as did members of his family. In 2014, he and his younger brother Oleg were convicted in a fraud trial that Kremlin critics said was politically motivated. His brother was imprisoned until 2018, while Mr. Navalny received a 3½-year suspended sentence.

The European Court of Human Rights later ruled that Mr. Navalny and his brother were unfairly convicted in the case, saying the Russian courts handed down decisions that were “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable.”

Mr. Navalny wanted to run for president in 2018 but was barred, and he was given a 30-day jail term the next year after calling for unauthorized protests against the disqualification of independent candidates for the Moscow city council. During that jail sentence, he became ill and thought he might have been poisoned. He also suffered a serious chemical burn to his right eye in 2017 after unknown assailants threw antiseptic dye at him on the street in front of his offices.

Mr. Navalny continued to speak out after his arrests, including through courtroom speeches and letters to his lawyers that were posted to social media. Condemning the war in Ukraine, he said that the conflict was started by a “group of crazy old men who don’t understand anything and don’t want to understand anything.”

But his efforts were hindered after the Anti-Corruption Foundation and an affiliated political group were effectively dismantled in 2021, when a Russian court classified them as “extremist.” That October, a prison commission designated Mr. Navalny himself an extremist and a terrorist. He was awarded the European Parliament’s annual human rights prize the same month, named in honor of Soviet physicist and rights activist Andrei Sakharov.

In December, Mr. Navalny’s family and friends were alarmed for several weeks when he could not be reached at the prison in the Vladimir region where he had been serving his sentence. On Dec. 25, his spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, announced that he had been found in the penal colony in the far north, was visited by a lawyer and “is doing well.” But Mr. Navalny had often complained during his years in prison that he was denied medical treatment for a series of ailments. He was confined for months at a time in solitary confinement.

His spirit of protest was undimmed. In January, he posted a long thread on social media calling on voters to all go to the polls together at noon in the upcoming elections to protest Putin. “This will be a nationwide protest against Putin, close to where you live,” he wrote. “It is accessible to everyone, everywhere. Millions of people will be able to participate. And tens of millions of people will be able to witness it.”

Alexei Anatolievich Navalny was born in Butyn, a military town near Moscow, on June 4, 1976. His father was a Red Army communications officer, and his mother was an economist and loyal communist.

The young Mr. Navalny often spent summers with grandparents in Ukraine but was told not to come in the spring of 1986, at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, which caused his entire paternal family to be evacuated and resettled, according to writer Julia Ioffe in the New Yorker. She quoted his mother as saying, “Alexey doesn’t talk about it very much, but Chernobyl had a very big influence on him.”

The Soviet authorities covered up the extent of the world’s worst nuclear accident from their own people and from the world.

Mr. Navalny graduated in 1998 with a law degree from Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow and, a few years later, received a master’s degree in finance from the Financial University Under the Government of the Russian Federation. His experience working in a real estate company in Moscow, he recalled, “taught me how things are done on the inside, how intermediary companies are built, how money is shuttled around.”

His early interest in politics began with the liberal democratic party Yabloko. He also joined Maria Gaidar — daughter of Yegor Gaidar, the foremost free-market economist of the Yeltsin era — in creating a reform movement, “Da!,” that captured the attention of many young people eager for open and free debate about the issues of the day.

In 2007, he began campaigning against corruption, frequently questioning shady transactions by the largest Russian companies and blogging about them. He bought a few company shares, then probed deals in which the companies were being looted, often in transactions involving strange intermediaries and disappearing cash. To draw greater attention to his campaign, he created an online forum where people could openly question government contracts.

As his reputation grew, he became the leading potential challenger to Putin. His views were populist, and liberal on economics. But his support increased most of all because of his vigorous challenge to the “crooks and thieves,” as he dubbed Putin’s party, United Russia.

In 2013 he ran for mayor of Moscow and came in second, with 27 percent of the vote. By 2018, he had created a network of offices across Russia and organized popular protests in dozens of cities over changes to government pension plans.

Mr. Navalny was again at the forefront of protests in Moscow the next year, when the authorities arbitrarily disqualified some 30 independent candidates for the city council. He championed a system of targeted voting for council candidates that depleted Putin’s support.

Survivors include his wife, the former Yulia Abrosinova, who was often seen standing alongside Mr. Navalny in his political campaigns against the system; two children, Daria and Zahar; and his parents, Anatoly and Lyudmila.

Over the years, Mr. Navalny drew admiration from many people who worried what might befall him.

“I have a lot of respect for what he’s doing, but I think they’ll arrest him,” a high-ranking employee at a state corporation that Mr. Navalny was investigating told Ioffe. “He’s taunting really big people and he’s doing it in an open way and showing them that he’s not afraid. In this country, people like that get crushed.”

They've come to believe
the absurdities
and are now primed to commit
the atrocities

Wednesday, February 07, 2024

A Letter

... to the editors at WaPo, from Alan Guttman in Hampton VA:


Opinion
The border bill shows the House is political theater

Regarding the Feb. 5 front-page article “Senate reveals border package”:

While Republican senators continue to work with their Democratic counterparts and President Biden to hammer out legislation to address issues around immigration and border security, more and more House Republicans are jumping on board former president Donald Trump’s ark toward injustice.

The convening of the House Homeland Security Committee to take up articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, along with the announcement from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) that a proposed Senate bill on immigration and border security would be “dead on arrival” in the House, is not political theater; it is insidious reality. These actions signal that many House Republicans have now chosen to follow the dictates of a U.S. citizen charged with 91 felonies rather than work with Mr. Biden, the only person who can sign their bills into law.

The former president’s harmful actions and inaction on Jan. 6, 2021, continue to fester within the same legislative body that was attacked on that day three years ago. Rather than doing his job and addressing the crisis at our southern border, Mr. Johnson has made clear his plans to essentially hold the House and the American people hostage at least until after the November election.

Mike Johnson is the latest in a string of malignantly incompetent GOP Speakers. And I lump him in with John Boehner and Paul Ryan, who seemed at the time to be trying to bring some regular order to a House that was rapidly degenerating into the Big Fuckin Mess it is now, because I think they both knew where it was headed, but they didn't get up on their hind legs and call it out.

And I think they were unable or unwilling to publicly criticize the rabble (then the Tea Party and now MAGA) because the establishment plutocrats were telling them to let it go, thinking the rubes were doing the work, and the fat cats would reap the rewards.

Even though more people are starting to recognize the danger, we could see the end of American democracy unless these next few election cycles go to the Blue side in a big way.

There's likely a thought that Trump has given us a taste of how bad the bad cop can be, and now it's time to send in the good cop - Nikki Haley.

Project Plutocracy is still on. Don't get cocky and start thinking it's all good, and we can go back to ignoring everything but our hobbies, funny animal videos, and our crazy friends on Instagram.

Democracy is not something we have
if it's not something we do

Thursday, September 28, 2023

The Problem


We're watching the process of a small minority taking power in a country where we've spent too much time patting ourselves on the back for being all big-time democratic, and not enough time making sure everybody understands that the whole fucking thing operates on the honor system.

In the various writings of the founders, they expressed fear that eventually, someone without honor would come along and use those writings as a guide book to pull down the republic and install himself as a new monarch.

This whole 'democratic republic' thing depends entirely on people behaving in an honorable way.

We make promises. We take an oath that says we'll honor the rulings of the courts, we'll honor the system of checks and balances, we'll conduct elections in an honorable way, and that we'll honor the outcomes of those elections. Honor.

Enter Donald Trump. And don't get me wrong here - this did not start when Trump came on the scene. He just recognized the opportunity to cash in on what many before him had laid the groundwork for.

There can't be anyone with a living thinking brain who believes the fairy tale that it's all good and peachy here in USAmerica Inc - that all you have to do is work hard, and play by the rules, and save your money, and you'll be livin' in high cotton before you know it - not with legacy admissions to the elite universities coupled with a totally unbalanced public school system, and militarized cops, and "right to work", and and and. This is not what meritocracy looks like.

We've got some bad problems with a system that becomes more corrupt and unfair with practically every passing day.

So there's a kernel of truth in what Trump and all the other dog-ass demagogues have been peddling. The problem is that Trump is in on the scam that was created by - and is now propagated by - people who seek to rule rather to serve. IOW, he's got priority #1 handled. ie: the rubes are completely buffaloed.

So there's been a hostile takeover of the GOP, and now we're seeing the next installment of the ongoing bloodless coup being fronted from a minority position by a guy who has no intention of ever doing anything that could ever be considered honorable.

And his minions are busy. They're always very busy.


The small group of House Republicans who might force a government shutdown

Roughly 10 lawmakers have at various times thwarted Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s proposals for both short- and long-term funding

Moments after a majority of House Republicans hammered out a plan to fund the government in the short and long term last week, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) stood up.

Throwing cold water on the discussion in a closed-door meeting in the basement of the Capitol, Gaetz defiantly declared that he and several other House Republicans remained staunchly against a short-term funding solution — and there were enough of them to block it. As frequently as they needed to.

Keeping up with politics is easy with The 5-Minute Fix Newsletter, in your inbox weekdays.
Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), who until then had been on the side of the holdouts, stepped up to counter Gaetz’s claim, saying this new stopgap proposal — known as a continuing resolution — had earned his support. For a moment, there was hope among leadership that maybe others could be swayed, too.

Roughly 10 Republicans have dug in on their opposition to any short-term funding deal, blocking the House majority from delivering a bill chock full of their legislative priorities to the Democratic-led Senate in hopes of negotiating a more conservative solution to avoid a government shutdown.

Combined, these hard-right holdouts represent about 2 percent of the U.S. population, but account for 100 percent of the votes halting plans of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)
to keep the government open. Variations of the group have thwarted McCarthy at every turn during the months-long fiscal fights, turning their distaste for how the House functions and McCarthy’s leadership into a multimedia sideshow of bullhorns, pithy tweets, declarations on the House floor, and live streams from the gym.

The confrontation has left the government only days away from shutting down — closing certain federal agencies, immobilizing several anti-poverty programs, and delaying paychecks to thousands of government employees as well as members of the military.

“If you care to reduce spending, if you care to close the border, then every single day you wait, you are taking away our opportunities for leverage there,” said Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), a McCarthy ally, stressing that the holdouts will be blamed if conservatives don’t get anything out of a shutdown. “It results in you being responsible for spending more money, you being responsible for the southern border being open, you being responsible for giving federal employees a paid holiday.”

Gaetz, who is McCarthy’s toughest critic, has been the most vocal of the group, quick with a quotable dig or a bombastic floor speech. Still, the small band of holdouts has no real leader or unifying worldview.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has remained a loyal McCarthy ally until recent spending disputes, has been largely alone in saying her support is solely contingent on funding for Ukraine being excluded from any stopgap bill. While House Republicans have offered a short-term bill with some broad funding cuts, some money for Ukraine is still included because a continuing resolution, by definition, is a continuation of existing funding.

To appease Greene, GOP leaders at one point floated removing Ukraine provisions from any short- or long-term funding measure. But Greene has balked, noting she had asked leadership to do this, but they did not take her demand seriously until she shockingly switched her vote last week to block a bill funding the Pentagon for a full year.

Asked if she would be open to voting for a CR if it didn’t include Ukraine funding, she said, “It depends on what’s in it.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speaks in opposition to funding for the war in Ukraine on the House steps of the Capitol on Tuesday. (Elizabeth Frantz/For The Washington Post)
A broader group of holdouts are just fed up with how the House functions. They blame leadership for following a decades-old formula to fund the government: Fail to pass 12 individual bills that fund a variety of government departments, then wait until the last minute to pass a short-term bill that keeps the government open long enough for both chambers to hash out a deal to pass a package of long-term spending bills, known as an omnibus.

“Lather, rinse, repeat. The Washington wash cycle,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus, who has opposed past CRs.

Congress has been unable to pass all 12 appropriations bills on time through each chamber since 1997, which many House conservatives consider a contributing factor to the federal government spending much more than it takes in, leading to the country’s ballooning debt.

That failure of process is why many of the holdouts insist they will never vote for any stopgap measure out of protest for the status quo. They blame McCarthy for continuing to follow the well-worn funding path, even though he is said to have promised otherwise earlier this year in his quest to gain the speaker’s gavel.

“I’ve been very consistent about opposing a CR,” Rep. Matthew M. Rosendale (R-Mont.) said. “It’s not the way to fund government. It simply extends [former House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi’s spending and Joe Biden’s policies. I voted against them for two years, so I’m not going to begin voting for them right now.”

House Democrats, along with a handful of Republicans who lost reelection last year, approved a $1.7 trillion funding package in December 2022 to keep the government open until Sept. 30 of this year. Many conservatives dislike a stopgap bill because it continues existing funding levels for a short time, meaning they would have to vote for levels they voted against last year.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who hasn’t voted for a CR since he took office in 2019, didn’t rule out voting for a CR, but said on Tuesday he couldn’t see himself supporting one “at this point.”

Reps. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) board an elevator after leaving a House Republicans meeting on Sept. 20. (Elizabeth Frantz/For The Washington Post)
Asked whether he’d rather vote for a CR or trigger a shutdown, he responded, “That’s kind of like saying, would I rather have a pencil stuck in my eye or in my ear?”

There is also a group of freshman Republicans — Reps. Eli Crane (Ariz.), Cory Mills (Fla.), Andrew Ogles (Tenn.) and Wesley Hunt (Tex.) — who have self-identified as “Never CR” voices, saying their constituents elected them last year to change how the process works.

“I’m opposed to it because, in principle, it’s what happens up here consistently,” Crane said. “Even as a freshman, I know that, right? It’s the old, ‘Oh, we’re going to do a CR.’ As if we haven’t had nine months to do what we’re supposed to do and pass the appropriation bills.”

Most of the holdouts have specifically called for the passage of all 12 long-term appropriations bills — but those lawmakers have also contributed to inhibiting that process. Roughly 20 holdouts initially blocked leadership from scheduling a vote on a procedural hurdle, known as the rule, to fund the Defense and Agriculture departments for a full year. Those bills eventually moved forward for debate on the House floor as part of a broader package Tuesday, in a win for Republican leaders.

Some in the “Never CR” group also intimate “never say never” when it comes to them possibly supporting a stopgap bill. But that support largely depends on the contours of a bill, and not all are on the same page of what those contours are.

Ogles said he would support a stopgap measure only when the House passes their remaining 11 appropriations bills, especially if they defund the Department of Justice’s investigation of former president Donald Trump — a provision that does not have the full support of the Republican conference.

“At the end of the day, leadership procrastinated and created a mess,” Ogles said. “Now we’ve got to find our way through it. And if that means staying [in Washington] a couple of extra weeks with a shutdown, that’s fine.”

Bishop said Wednesday he remains open to a short-term deal, but cautioned that he would need to see a clear path forward for House Republicans to pass an “acceptable package of appropriations bills.” Three Republicans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations and decisions, said that McCarthy chose to have the House focus on passing full-year funding bills this week in large part because it could show Bishop and possibly others that Republicans are committed to significantly curbing spending.

But not all holdouts agree.

For some like Gaetz — who, alongside holdouts Rosendale, Crane, and Rep. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), never voted for McCarthy in the speaker’s race in January — the opposition at times feels personal. Gaetz has threatened to trigger a vote to depose McCarthy as speaker if he relies on Democrats to help pass a CR, and several other holdouts have suggested they might support such a move.

McCarthy and his allies have denounced the holdouts — though not by name — for remaining so fervently against a CR that it undercuts their goal of passing year-long appropriations bills.

“It’d be concerning to me that there would be people in the Republican Party that will take the position of President Biden against what the rest of Americans want,” McCarthy said Tuesday. “I don’t understand how, at the end of the day, they would stay in that lane.”

But several far-right holdouts and others who support keeping the government open for at least a week or two at a time remain largely in agreement that their relentless pressure on Republican leaders has made it less likely that they’ll try to fund the government this way next year.

“Among Republicans, there are those who don’t think we should make a change to anything that happens up here,” Bishop said. “And I am going to cast every single vote to see to it that the direction changes. We’re going to change the way this institution functions, so far as I have any control of it.”

Democrats understand they're called to serve
Republicans believe they're entitled to rule

Thursday, September 21, 2023

Constitution vs Anti-Constitution

About this time next year, we'll have a pretty clear idea of how much longer our little experiment in democratic self-government might continue.

Keep in mind, we're always maybe one or two elections away from disaster, but 2024 is looking to be very decisive.







Friday, September 15, 2023

Press Poodles


Hunter Biden was indicted on a gun charge that practically no one is ever indicted on, and of course we're all patiently waiting for the NRA to come out forcefully in defense of his 2nd amendment rights.

The MAGApublicans in the House have forced Speaker McCarthy to declare (kinda) that he's opening an impeachment inquiry (of sorts), and WaPo puts up a headline like the whole thing is perfectly legit and by golly, "America has to get to the bottom of this. Harrumph."

The piece does mention that the Republicans haven't come up with anything of substance linking Joe Biden to any of the assumed shady dealings of his son, but it's not until the end of the 2nd paragraph, and it's pretty wimpy, inviting the inference that it's legit instead of being the usual dishonorable smear tactics bullshit that Republicans have been practicing for decades.

There's likely something that Hunter did that looks bad - and it's likely that some of his dealings have been less than full-on ethical, but IMHO, this is all spin - nothing more than the Benghazi crapola, where Republicans spent years slamming Hillary for the express purpose of damaging her politically.

And WaPo is delighted to report it out as if it's a real thing - which of course helps Republicans make it seem real enough to have a negative impact on the only candidate of the only party that's trying to make sure The Washington Fucking Post isn't subjected to the kind of mob violence Republicans have already engaged in.

ie: Jan6 of course, and that raid on The Marion County Record

It's like the Press Poodles desperately need to shoehorn everything into a framework of normality because that's how they learned it in school - and by Jove, that's how it has to be, cuz that's what's supposed to ensure my rightful place in the pantheon of great American journalists - as they purposefully ignore the fact that the rise of fascism depends heavily on people believing "it's not real - not really", or that someone else will ride to the rescue, or "the American people are fine and decent folk, and they won't allow this bad thing to happen."

The good Germans.


Double blows of inquiry and son’s indictment create tough stretch for Biden

Hunter Biden was charged two days after launch of impeachment process, creating political and personal challenges for the president


In just over 48 hours this week, President Biden faced a double-barreled onslaught of political and personal setbacks, as his son’s business dealings and personal struggles created new turbulence at a time when his advisers wanted to focus attention on the problems of former president Donald Trump and House Republicans.

Keeping up with politics is easy with The 5-Minute Fix Newsletter, in your inbox weekdays.
On Thursday, Biden’s son Hunter was indicted on charges of making false statements and illegally possessing a handgun, paving the way for a criminal trial that could unfold as Biden pursues reelection. That came two days after House Republicans opened a formal impeachment inquiry centered on whether the president benefited from his son’s business dealings,
although they have produced little, if any, evidence to that effect.

Neither the inquiry nor the indictment was unexpected, but the back-to-back developments underscored the challenges Biden faces as he runs for a second term. He faces no serious competition for the Democratic nomination, but some Democrats are growing increasingly concerned about his vulnerabilities, including his age, as polls show a tight race between him and Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination.

The legal and political clouds hanging over Hunter Biden now add to those troubles. “It’s always a concern,” former senator Doug Jones (D-Ala.), a Biden ally, said of Hunter Biden’s indictment. “It’s weighing on him and the entire family. The fact of the matter is, this president has made a point of letting the Justice Department do its work and not interfere. The chips will fall where they are going to fall.”

Trump’s criminal trials stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and his alleged mishandling of classified documents have largely overshadowed Biden’s challenges to this point. But an impeachment inquiry and the indictment of an immediate family member, especially in such rapid succession, represent a striking pair of setbacks for a president, a reality that may become more evident with the formal launch of proceedings in the courtroom and the Capitol.

Jones said he thinks the court case will end up with a favorable resolution for Hunter Biden. In the meantime, he predicted, the president will stay focused on selling his record to voters.

“It’s significant and it’s historic,” the former senator said of Biden’s accomplishments. “That’s what he’s going to be running on. I don’t think the American people are going to give a damn if a son has been charged with a gun offense.”

Some Republicans see more of a problem for the president.

“Biden has had a very difficult time gaining any sort of momentum as he heads into his re-election bid,” said Jesse Hunt, a Republican strategist and the former communications director at the Republican Governors Association. “This is another troubling development for him when voters already questioned his competence. It gives them yet another reason to look at him in a negative light.”

Hunter Biden’s indictment follows the collapse of a deal in which he would have pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax violations while admitting to illegal possession of the gun but not pleading guilty to that felony offense.

The deal probably would have allowed him to avoid jail time. Instead, Hunter Biden could now stand trial in the middle of his father’s reelection campaign, and it remains possible he will face additional indictments on tax charges.

Hunter Biden’s legal team argues that the plea deal collapsed because of pressure from right-wing Republicans who complained that the president’s son was getting off easy.

“As expected, prosecutors filed charges today that they deemed were not warranted just six weeks ago following a five-year investigation into this case,” Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, said in a statement. “The evidence in this matter has not changed in the last six weeks, but the law has and so has MAGA Republicans’ improper and partisan interference in this process.”

In the House, it is not clear whether the inquiry will lead to an actual impeachment of Biden. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) ordered the inquiry on his own authority when Republicans appeared to lack the votes in the full House to initiate the move.

Even so, such an inquiry is a rarity in American history. Three presidents have been impeached — Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and Trump, who suffered the indignity twice. None of them was convicted by the Senate, which acts as the jury in such cases.

Similarly, presidential relatives have caused problems before, but rarely in this way. “Having a son or daughter who gets into trouble is nothing new,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. “Billy Carter and Roger Clinton never really loomed large in the White House, whereas the Hunter Biden story is about trying to connect the link to dad.”

Billy Carter, President Jimmy Carter’s brother, faced a Senate investigation into alleged influence-peddling. Roger Clinton,Bill Clinton’s half brother, had drug problems and received a controversial pardon from his brother for a drug-related conviction.

Biden is known to worry deeply about his surviving son, who a few years ago was in the throes of a major drug addiction. Hunter Biden stayed at the White House for two weeks this summer, and most of the president’s aides avoid discussing his son’s troubles with the president, believing their contributions and ideas would not be welcome, even as they worry about the personal toll it is taking on him.

Hunter Biden stays close to his father amid probe

Senior aides to the president informed him of his son’s indictment shortly after it became public and less than an hour before he departed the White House on Thursday for an economics speech in Maryland, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Biden did not address the indictment on Thursday, and officials said there are no plans for the White House to do so, as they want to emphasize that the Justice Department’s case against Hunter Biden is independent.

But as a father, the president — whose other son, Beau, died of cancer in 2015 — is particularly sensitive to Hunter’s legal troubles. When Hunter Biden’s plea deal collapsed in July, the president was blindsided and frustrated, since he had believed his son’s legal troubles were largely behind him, according to people familiar with his reaction.

“The legal status of his son has got to be extremely painful for him, but he’s going to have to endure,” said former senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), who served with Biden in the Senate.

Both father and son have spoken about Hunter’s struggles with addiction, and the president has often related how proud he is of his son’s recovery.

Republicans have not presented any direct evidence indicating the president benefited from his son’s foreign business dealings, but many of the most conservative House Republicans had been pressuring McCarthy to formally open an impeachment inquiry. Some even said they would not support funding the government unless McCarthy acquiesced.

“They have no evidence, so they’re launching the next phase of their evidence-free goose chase simply to throw red meat to the right wing so they can continue baselessly attacking the president to play extreme politics,” Ian Sams, a White House spokesman, said in a statement.

But as in any inquiry, there are risks for the president. Congress is likely to have expanded authority to dig into Biden’s finances and could spend more resources investigating the president and his family.

“Going through an impeachment hearing is never a badge of honor,” Brinkley said. “It’s not something the president coveted or wants to happen, but it’s part and parcel of our new civil war going on between Democrats and Republicans.”

He added: “The weaponization of impeachment has now come to full blossom. It was always the fear of double impeachment of Trump that this day would happened. You don’t really need evidence to get an impeachment inquiry going — you just need the political will to do it. It’s just another manifestation of toxicity in our politics.”

Sunday, July 16, 2023

Still Fresh

7 years ago, SNL got it right.

We all knew it was true, but somehow too many of us assumed Trump couldn't possibly win. Hillary would take it, and we'd get to shit on her for four years, indulging ourselves in all the comfortable bitching:
  • Democrats don't know how to fight
  • they suck at messaging
  • they never do enough
  • they're lily-livered
  • and and and
It'll be the same ol' same ol', and the Press Poodles will enjoy another 4 years of pimping their Both Sides Horse Race bullshit while raking in billions selling lots and lots of ads for dick pills and panty liners, cuz Americans just love 'em some good old WWE-style political theater. And that's all it is, right?






They're coming for it all. If you think you're safe inside your own little bubble because you're the right color and you occupy a niche that fits in with the Daddy State's shitty plans, then you've got your head so far up your ass, even if you open your eyes, all you're gonna see is your own shit.

Stop getting suckered into thinking it'll be OK - we've got "the democracy" to protect us. The checks-n-balances will kick in and save us. No worries - let's go play some golf.

Democracy is not something we have unless it's something we do.

Get up off your ass and help.



Thursday, June 22, 2023

The Basic Dilemma

This is exactly the kind of dilemma Sun Tzu talked about.

It should be obvious that US politics is a sewer, better suited to the worst possible comments section on the worst possible website. It's fucking awful in way to many ways.

I don't think that's happened by accident, and I don't think the Dark Money Gang is even trying to hide their cards anymore.

We are being divided on purpose, and at the same time, we're being told that being divided is the real problem, and the solution is to go with a Third Party.

Bullshit. Standard Daddy State Divide-n-Conquer bullshit.

We can spend the time and effort it takes to sort through some of the shit and come to some basic conclusions about our approximate position on the old Left/Right spectrum, but an awful lot of people don't feel motivated for whatever reason, or they don't have the intellectual interest (or the mental horsepower) to do the work.

For my own bad self, I've been chided for being part of the problem - "our deeply divided nation" - because I try to pay some attention to what's going on, and I come down (mostly) on the progressive side of things. So plenty of people see me as way too partisan. And I'm betting that a majority of those people haven't stopped to think about the difference between ideology and partisanship, because then they'd have to make some kind of decision, which puts them right back into a position where they have to figure out what the issue is and where they stand on it, when what they really want is a sensible-sounding excuse not to engage at all.


So - dilemma.
  • If you do the responsible citizen-of-a-democracy thing and take a side, you risk being wrong, voting for the wrong guy, and made to look a fool - possibly in public
  • If you shun the process by hiding behind Both-Sides-ism, then you can self-congratulate because you're "too smart to fall for any of that politics stuff", but you've handed your right to self-determination to someone else
It may not feel right to be choosing the lesser of two evils, but why would you stand aside and let someone else choose the greater of those evils for you?

Keep choosing the lesser of the two evils, and over time, the "lesser of the two evils" starts to look more like what it is: The greater good.


Opinion
A No Labels candidate would likely throw the election to Trump

Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council and author of “The New Democrats and the Return to Power,” is an adjunct professor of graduate studies in government at Johns Hopkins University.
 
Craig Fuller is a longtime Republican strategist and served as assistant to President Ronald Reagan for Cabinet affairs and chief of staff to Vice President George H.W. Bush.

For most of our careers, the two of us have been on opposite sides of the political aisle. We regularly express our disagreements in a weekly point-counterpoint commentary on a digital platform in Maryland.

But we love our country more than we love our parties, and as we look ahead to the 2024 presidential election, we are in complete agreement: To save the American republic, former president Donald Trump must be defeated. And that’s why the centrist political organization No Labels must cease and desist from its effort to nominate a third-party candidate.

We agree on three points: (1) In a head-to-head general-election contest, Trump faces the same challenges to winning the popular vote as he has in the past, perhaps worse; (2) a moderate independent third-party candidate on the ballot gives Trump the best possible chance of winning reelection; and (3) with Trump saying he will seek reelection even if he is convicted of crimes, we can’t just hope that this threat will go away.

The coup that Trump and his cronies attempted after he lost the 2020 election represented the greatest threat to our democracy since the Civil War. That threat is ongoing. Trump is the Republican front-runner, and, at least so far, his indictments appear to have only intensified his support.

That might change as his legal troubles mount, but if he wins the GOP nomination for president, all Americans who believe in democracy must unite behind a single candidate to assure that Trump, in the words of then-Rep. Liz Cheney, “never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.”

Even a wounded Trump will be formidable in 2024. Four out of 5 of his voters in 2020 told exit pollers they voted mostly “for [their] candidate” rather than “against his opponent.” Because he has so many hardcore loyalists, his vote is unlikely to fall significantly below its 2016 and 2020 level, about 46 percent.

Dedicated Trump loyalists don’t represent a majority of the electorate. That’s why he has lost the popular vote in both his presidential runs and did not top 47 percent in either. As long as the anti-Trump vote is unified behind a single candidate, Trump is very unlikely to win, as Joe Biden demonstrated in 2020. And this would most likely be the case in a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024.

But a third-party candidate dramatically changes the equation. If he or she takes even a small part of the anti-Trump vote away from Biden, Trump is likely to be returned to the White House. That’s why the No Labels effort poses such a danger to our democracy.

In the five states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — most likely to decide the 2024 election in the electoral college, the numbers tell the story. Together, they have 73 electoral votes. In 2016, Trump narrowly won all of them. In 2020, Biden did.

In all five of these swing states, Biden’s razor-thin margins came from a massive anti-Trump vote. In all of them, at least 1 in 3 Biden voters said they voted mainly against Trump; in Wisconsin, that number was 38 percent; in Arizona (where No Labels has already secured a spot on the 2024 ballot) a whopping 45 percent.

Even a small drop-off from his 2020 anti-Trump vote would put President Biden in a precarious position in 2024. He has no margin for error. Just 44,000 votes out of more than 10 million cast in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin — less than half of 1 percent — were the difference between the Biden presidency and a tie in the electoral college that would have thrown the election to the House of Representatives.

Our calculations show that if a No Labels candidate had won just 3 percent of the popular vote in 2020, Trump would probably be sitting in the White House.

Given Biden’s current low approval rating, it’s not unreasonable to assume a No Labels candidate in 2024 could peel off at least 15 percent of the anti-Trump vote from the president. If that happened, and Trump’s base stayed with him, Trump would win all five swing states comfortably and return to the Oval Office.

Early polling shows Biden and Trump running neck and neck, and every indication is that Biden will again need a big anti-Trump vote. In an April Wall Street Journal poll, 11.5 percent of voters said they disapproved of the way both Biden and Trump handled the presidency. Biden led among those voters by 54 percent to 15 percent. That advantage translates to about 4.5 percent of the total vote, giving Biden that much of a head start in the race. He’s likely to need every bit of that to overcome the intensity of the pro-Trump vote.

If the No Labels organization concludes it wants to put a third-party candidate in the race, that candidate would almost certainly throw the 2024 election to Trump. We need voices from all sides saying, “Not now, No Labels. For the good of the country, cease this third-party effort now.”

Friday, April 07, 2023

SCOTUS Fuckery


Every judge, but especially every Justice of the US Supreme Court, is supposed to be very much aware of the need for the public to perceive impartiality on the part of the courts, and with avoiding even the appearance of being influenced by anything other than even-handed administration of the law.

A Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court should be the one who's most sharply attuned to those concerns, as he is the boss of the entire Article 3 Branch of our government.

Assoc Justice Clarence Thomas has been over the line on more than a couple of occasions in just the last few years. The antics of both he and his wife give the appearance that SCOTUS is - or is becoming - less than legit.

This has been going on for quite a while, so what am I to discern from the way Chief Justice Roberts seems to be doing nothing about it?

And also too: The Roberts court - with Roberts being the deciding vote - opened the flood gates with the Citizens United decision.


Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column




Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire

IN LATE JUNE 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef.

If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.

Thomas did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

In a statement, Crow acknowledged that he’d extended “hospitality” to the Thomases “over the years,” but said that Thomas never asked for any of it and it was “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.”

Through his largesse, Crow has gained a unique form of access, spending days in private with one of the most powerful people in the country. By accepting the trips, Thomas has broken long-standing norms for judges’ conduct, ethics experts and four current or retired federal judges said.

“It’s incomprehensible to me that someone would do this,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. When she was on the bench, Gertner said, she was so cautious about appearances that she wouldn’t mention her title when making dinner reservations: “It was a question of not wanting to use the office for anything other than what it was intended.”

Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in administrations of both parties, said Thomas “seems to have completely disregarded his higher ethical obligations.”

“When a justice’s lifestyle is being subsidized by the rich and famous, it absolutely corrodes public trust,” said Canter, now at the watchdog group CREW. “Quite frankly, it makes my heart sink.”

ProPublica uncovered the details of Thomas’ travel by drawing from flight records, internal documents distributed to Crow’s employees and interviews with dozens of people ranging from his superyacht’s staff to members of the secretive Bohemian Club to an Indonesian scuba diving instructor.

Federal judges sit in a unique position of public trust. They have lifetime tenure, a privilege intended to insulate them from the pressures and potential corruption of politics. A code of conduct for federal judges below the Supreme Court requires them to avoid even the “appearance of impropriety.” Members of the high court, Chief Justice John Roberts has written, “consult” that code for guidance. The Supreme Court is left almost entirely to police itself.

There are few restrictions on what gifts justices can accept. That’s in contrast to the other branches of government. Members of Congress are generally prohibited from taking gifts worth $50 or more and would need pre-approval from an ethics committee to take many of the trips Thomas has accepted from Crow.

Thomas’ approach to ethics has already attracted public attention. Last year, Thomas didn’t recuse himself from cases that touched on the involvement of his wife, Ginni, in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. While his decision generated outcry, it could not be appealed.

Crow met Thomas after he became a justice. The pair have become genuine friends, according to people who know both men. Over the years, some details of Crow’s relationship with the Thomases have emerged. In 2011, The New York Times reported on Crow’s generosity toward the justice. That same year, Politico revealed that Crow had given half a million dollars to a Tea Party group founded by Ginni Thomas, which also paid her a $120,000 salary. But the full scale of Crow’s benefactions has never been revealed.

Long an influential figure in pro-business conservative politics, Crow has spent millions on ideological efforts to shape the law and the judiciary. Crow and his firm have not had a case before the Supreme Court since Thomas joined it, though the court periodically hears major cases that directly impact the real estate industry. The details of his discussions with Thomas over the years remain unknown, and it is unclear if Crow has had any influence on the justice’s views.

In his statement, Crow said that he and his wife have never discussed a pending or lower court case with Thomas. “We have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue,” he added.

In Thomas’ public appearances over the years, he has presented himself as an everyman with modest tastes.

“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States,” Thomas said in a recent interview for a documentary about his life, which Crow helped finance.

“I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it,” Thomas said. “I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.”

“You Don’t Need to Worry About This — It’s All Covered”

CROW’S PRIVATE lakeside resort, Camp Topridge, sits in a remote corner of the Adirondacks in upstate New York. Closed off from the public by ornate wooden gates, the 105-acre property, once the summer retreat of the same heiress who built Mar-a-Lago, features an artificial waterfall and a great hall where Crow’s guests are served meals prepared by private chefs. Inside, there’s clear evidence of Crow and Thomas’ relationship: a painting of the two men at the resort, sitting outdoors smoking cigars alongside conservative political operatives. A statue of a Native American man, arms outstretched, stands at the center of the image, which is photographic in its clarity.

The painting captures a scene from around five years ago, said Sharif Tarabay, the artist who was commissioned by Crow to paint it. Thomas has been vacationing at Topridge virtually every summer for more than two decades, according to interviews with more than a dozen visitors and former resort staff, as well as records obtained by ProPublica. He has fished with a guide hired by Crow and danced at concerts put on by musicians Crow brought in. Thomas has slept at perhaps the resort’s most elegant accommodation, an opulent lodge overhanging Upper St. Regis Lake.

The mountainous area draws billionaires from across the globe. Rooms at a nearby hotel built by the Rockefellers start at $2,250 a night. Crow’s invitation-only resort is even more exclusive. Guests stay for free, enjoying Topridge’s more than 25 fireplaces, three boathouses, clay tennis court and batting cage, along with more eccentric features: a lifesize replica of the Harry Potter character Hagrid’s hut, bronze statues of gnomes and a 1950s-style soda fountain where Crow’s staff fixes milkshakes.

Crow’s access to the justice extends to anyone the businessman chooses to invite along. Thomas’ frequent vacations at Topridge have brought him into contact with corporate executives and political activists.

During just one trip in July 2017, Thomas’ fellow guests included executives at Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers, major Republican donors and one of the leaders of the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-business conservative think tank, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. The painting of Thomas at Topridge shows him in conversation with Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society leader regarded as an architect of the Supreme Court’s recent turn to the right.

In his statement to ProPublica, Crow said he is “unaware of any of our friends ever lobbying or seeking to influence Justice Thomas on any case, and I would never invite anyone who I believe had any intention of doing that.”

“These are gatherings of friends,” Crow said.

Crow has deep connections in conservative politics. The heir to a real estate fortune, Crow oversees his family’s business empire and recently named Marxism as his greatest fear. He was an early patron of the powerful anti-tax group Club for Growth and has been on the board of AEI for over 25 years. He also sits on the board of the Hoover Institution, another conservative think tank.

A major Republican donor for decades, Crow has given more than $10 million in publicly disclosed political contributions. He’s also given to groups that keep their donors secret — how much of this so-called dark money he’s given and to whom are not fully known. “I don’t disclose what I’m not required to disclose,” Crow once told the Times.

Crow has long supported efforts to move the judiciary to the right. He has donated to the Federalist Society and given millions of dollars to groups dedicated to tort reform and conservative jurisprudence. AEI and the Hoover Institution publish scholarship advancing conservative legal theories, and fellows at the think tanks occasionally file amicus briefs with the Supreme Court.

On the court since 1991, Thomas is a deeply conservative jurist known for his “originalism,” an approach that seeks to adhere to close readings of the text of the Constitution. While he has been resolute in this general approach, his views on specific matters have sometimes evolved. Recently, Thomas harshly criticized one of his own earlier opinions as he embraced a legal theory, newly popular on the right, that would limit government regulation. Small evolutions in a justice’s thinking or even select words used in an opinion can affect entire bodies of law, and shifts in Thomas’ views can be especially consequential. He’s taken unorthodox legal positions that have been adopted by the court’s majority years down the line.

Soon after Crow met Thomas three decades ago, he began lavishing the justice with gifts, including a $19,000 Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass, which Thomas disclosed. Recently, Crow gave Thomas a portrait of the justice and his wife, according to Tarabay, who painted it. Crow’s foundation also gave $105,000 to Yale Law School, Thomas’ alma mater, for the “Justice Thomas Portrait Fund,” tax filings show.

Crow said that he and his wife have funded a number of projects that celebrate Thomas. “We believe it is important to make sure as many people as possible learn about him, remember him and understand the ideals for which he stands,” he said.

To trace Thomas’ trips around the world on Crow’s superyacht, ProPublica spoke to more than 15 former yacht workers and tour guides and obtained records documenting the ship’s travels.

On the Indonesia trip in the summer of 2019, Thomas flew to the country on Crow’s jet, according to another passenger on the plane. Clarence and Ginni Thomas were traveling with Crow and his wife, Kathy. Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, decked out with motorboats and a giant inflatable rubber duck, met the travelers at a fishing town on the island of Flores.

Touring the Lesser Sunda Islands, the group made stops at Komodo National Park, home of the eponymous reptiles; at the volcanic lakes of Mount Kelimutu; and at Pantai Meko, a spit of pristine beach accessible only by boat. Another guest was Mark Paoletta, a friend of the Thomases then serving as the general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget in the administration of President Donald Trump.

Paoletta was bound by executive branch ethics rules at the time and told ProPublica that he discussed the trip with an ethics lawyer at his agency before accepting the Crows’ invitation. “Based on that counsel’s advice, I reimbursed Harlan for the costs,” Paoletta said in an email. He did not respond to a question about how much he paid Crow.

(Paoletta has long been a pugnacious defender of Thomas and recently testified before Congress against strengthening judicial ethics rules. “There is nothing wrong with ethics or recusals at the Supreme Court,” he said, adding, “To support any reform legislation right now would be to validate these vicious political attacks on the Supreme Court,” referring to criticism of Thomas and his wife.)

The Indonesia vacation wasn’t Thomas’ first time on the Michaela Rose. He went on a river day trip around Savannah, Georgia, and an extended cruise in New Zealand roughly a decade ago.

As a token of his appreciation, he gave one yacht worker a copy of his memoir. Thomas signed the book: “Thank you so much for all your hard work on our New Zealand adventure.”

Crow’s policy was that guests didn’t pay, former Michaela Rose staff said. “You don’t need to worry about this — it’s all covered,” one recalled the guests being told.

There’s evidence Thomas has taken even more trips on the superyacht. Crow often gave his guests custom polo shirts commemorating their vacations, according to staff. ProPublica found photographs of Thomas wearing at least two of those shirts. In one, he wears a blue polo shirt embroidered with the Michaela Rose’s logo and the words “March 2007” and “Greek Islands.”

Thomas didn’t report any of the trips ProPublica identified on his annual financial disclosures. Ethics experts said the law clearly requires disclosure for private jet flights and Thomas appears to have violated it.

Justices are generally required to publicly report all gifts worth more than $415, defined as “anything of value” that isn’t fully reimbursed. There are exceptions: If someone hosts a justice at their own property, free food and lodging don’t have to be disclosed. That would exempt dinner at a friend’s house. The exemption never applied to transportation, such as private jet flights, experts said, a fact that was made explicit in recently updated filing instructions for the judiciary.

Two ethics law experts told ProPublica that Thomas’ yacht cruises, a form of transportation, also required disclosure.

“If Justice Thomas received free travel on private planes and yachts, failure to report the gifts is a violation of the disclosure law,” said Kedric Payne, senior director for ethics at the nonprofit government watchdog Campaign Legal Center. (Thomas himself once reported receiving a private jet trip from Crow, on his disclosure for 1997.)

The experts said Thomas’ stays at Topridge may have required disclosure too, in part because Crow owns it not personally but through a company. Until recently, the judiciary’s ethics guidance didn’t explicitly address the ownership issue. The recent update to the filing instructions clarifies that disclosure is required for such stays.

How many times Thomas failed to disclose trips remains unclear. Flight records from the Federal Aviation Administration and FlightAware suggest he makes regular use of Crow’s plane. The jet often follows a pattern: from its home base in Dallas to Washington Dulles airport for a brief stop, then on to a destination Thomas is visiting and back again.

ProPublica identified five such trips in addition to the Indonesia vacation.

On July 7 last year, Crow’s jet made a 40-minute stop at Dulles and then flew to a small airport near Topridge, returning to Dulles six days later. Thomas was at the resort that week for his regular summer visit, according to a person who was there. Twice in recent years, the jet has followed the pattern when Thomas appeared at Crow’s properties in Dallas — once for the Jan. 4, 2018, swearing-in of Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho at Crow’s private library and again for a conservative think tank conference Crow hosted last May.

Thomas has even used the plane for a three-hour trip. On Feb. 11, 2016, the plane flew from Dallas to Dulles to New Haven, Connecticut, before flying back later that afternoon. ProPublica confirmed that Thomas was on the jet through Supreme Court security records obtained by the nonprofit Fix the Court, private jet data, a New Haven plane spotter and another person at the airport. There are no reports of Thomas making a public appearance that day, and the purpose of the trip remains unclear.

Jet charter companies told ProPublica that renting an equivalent plane for the New Haven trip could cost around $70,000.

On the weekend of Oct. 16, 2021, Crow’s jet repeated the pattern. That weekend, Thomas and Crow traveled to a Catholic cemetery in a bucolic suburb of New York City. They were there for the unveiling of a bronze statue of the justice’s beloved eighth grade teacher, a nun, according to Catholic Cemetery magazine.

As Thomas spoke from a lectern, the monument towered over him, standing 7 feet tall and weighing 1,800 pounds, its granite base inscribed with words his teacher once told him. Thomas told the nuns assembled before him, “This extraordinary statue is dedicated to you sisters.”

He also thanked the donors who paid for the statue: Harlan and Kathy Crow.

Tuesday, January 31, 2023

The Fuckery Within


Next time you hear someone bitch about how slowly the DOJ is moving, or what a no good rotten wimpy little milquetoast Merrick Garland has to be when it's been years and what the fuck is he doing and blah blah blah - when you hear that, remember, Garland has to deal with an obvious infestation of rats on the inside of every part of government.

Knowing these rats fucked with investigations and indictments all through Trump's term, and that way too many of them are still there, fucking with things - if for no other reason that to hide out waiting for their next opportunity to fuck things up. Knowing all that, there's no reason to wonder about what a fucking nightmare Garland's job has to be right now.

All that said - what the fuck, Mr Attorney General?


Rachel Maddow 01-30-2023