All The Bad Guys

I don't believe in any of that junk, but there's a strong feeling that a karmic thing is going on here.

After all the elections we've meddled in over the last many decades, are we're getting a little taste of our own medicine?

Or are we just now finding out about it?

Or can we really claim there's been no meddling?

What about when a candidate invites that meddling?

Like when Reagan went to the Iranians behind everybody's back to fuck Carter in 1980?

Or when Nixon sent Kissinger to Paris to fuck up the peace talks with Vietnam in 1968?

Or when Trump told Russia to go ahead and hack the DNC's email accounts in 2016 - and he did it live on the air during a televised debate?

Or whatever every POTUS has probably done (since at least Teddy Roosevelt) to project American power, and get things to turn out the way we wanted?

?

Biden on foreign election meddling: ‘All the bad guys are rooting for Trump’

President Biden said in a new interview there is evidence China is meddling in the upcoming U.S. election, quipping that “all the bad guys” are rooting for former President Trump in November’s race.

“There is evidence that meddling is going on,” Biden told Time magazine in an interview published Tuesday, declining to go into greater detail.

When a reporter interjected to say it sounded as if China was meddling, Biden said China “would have an interest in meddling.”

“Everybody, all the bad guys are rooting for Trump, man. Not a joke,” he added.

Biden earlier in the interview, conducted May 28, recounted how foreign leaders frequently tell him it’s important for him to win reelection to protect democracy in the U.S. and abroad.

The president’s comments come after Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in April, following a three-day trip to China, that there were signs Beijing was attempting to influence and potentially interfere in the upcoming U.S. election.

CNN reported that Biden warned Chinese President Xi Jinping during a November meeting in San Francisco not to interfere in the 2024 elections.

Taiwanese groups earlier this year outlined a major disinformation campaign employed by Chinese actors during the island nation’s national elections, which concluded in January and delivered a blow to Beijing with the victory of a pro-U.S. candidate.

The alleged tactics from Chinese actors involved using generative artificial intelligence to manipulate videos and sow discord in Taiwan, including by completely distorting the words of at least one U.S. member of Congress, raising concerns about the risks in the U.S. election.

Foreign efforts to influence U.S. elections would not be new. Federal officials concluded Russia interfered in the 2016 election between Trump and then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

The National Intelligence Council released a report in March 2021 that found Russia and Iran carried out efforts to influence the 2020 presidential election. Russia, the report stated, sought to denigrate Biden’s candidacy, while Iran sought to sow division and undercut Trump’s prospects.

The same report found China “considered but did not deploy” influence efforts in the 2020 election.

Kinda Satisfying

Today's Reddit

Social media is chock-full of good news tonight.

George Santos ends comeback bid for Congress after raising no money
byu/Original_Dogmeat innottheonion

Slippage

For somebody who's supposed to be one of the smart guys, Elon Musk has been behaving very stupidly.

First off - for the record:

• He didn't start payPal
• He didn't start Tesla
• He didn't start SpaceX

He's been pretty astute at spotting promising companies &/or concepts and exploiting their potential - I'll absolutely give him that much - but he's no Leo da Vinci.

Elmo is a rich legacy puke, born into wealth, who loves the idea that he's gifted and capable beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. He's not, and it seems we're seeing the latest example of the My Pillow Effect, where some self-styled titan of industry - who's actually just gotten crazy stupid lucky - starts thinking he's bulletproof and decides his superior intellect is needed to "straighten out the government", only to be shown he's not the super genius he desperately needs us to think he he is.

Would-be Tesla buyers snub company as Musk's reputation dips

SAN FRANCISCO/LONDON, April 1 (Reuters) - The ranks of would-be Tesla buyers in the United States are shrinking, according to a survey by market intelligence firm Caliber, which attributed the drop in part to CEO Elon Musk's polarizing persona.

While Tesla continued to post strong sales growth last year, helped by aggressive price cuts, the electric-vehicle maker is expected to report weak quarterly sales, opens new tab as early as Tuesday.

Caliber's "consideration score" for Tesla, provided exclusively to Reuters, fell to 31% in February, less than half its high of 70% in November 2021 when it started tracking consumer interest in the brand.

Tesla's consideration score fell 8 percentage points from January alone even as Caliber's scores for Mercedes (MBGn.DE), opens new tab, BMW (BMWG.DE), opens new tab and Audi, which produce gas as well as EV models, inched up during that same period, reaching 44-47%.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. Musk in the past has blamed high-interest rates for curbing consumer demand for big ticket items like cars.

Caliber cited strong associations between Tesla's reputation and that of Musk for the scores.
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"It's very likely that Musk himself is contributing to the reputational downfall," Caliber CEO Shahar Silbershatz told Reuters, saying his company's survey shows 83% of Americans connect Musk with Tesla.

Reuters spoke to five marketing, polling and car experts who said controversies surrounding Musk's increasingly right-wing politics and public statements are weighing on Tesla's brand and demand.

"It is hard enough to win sales without getting into politics," said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

Economic fears, the lack of affordable new models and rising competition from cheaper rivals like China's BYD have also been cited by Wall Street analysts as putting pressure on Tesla.
Overall electric vehicle sales in the U.S. are forecast to increase 15% in the first quarter of this year, according to estimates by researcher Cox Automotive. Tesla sales are projected to increase by 3%.

"The EV slowdown is shaping up to be a Tesla slowdown," Cox analyst Stephanie Valdez Streaty said during a conference call Thursday.

New car registrations for Teslas in California- their biggest market in the U.S. - posted their first drop in over three years in the fourth quarter of 2023 even as EV sales rose overall.
At least five analysts cut Tesla's target price last month, saying the automaker could post disappointing first-quarter delivery results. Tesla shares are down nearly 30% year to date.
Musk's outsized personality benefited Tesla as he promoted tackling climate change by reimagining cars as stylish, electric computers on wheels that could beat gasoline guzzlers in looks, performance and handling.

Tesla achieved breakneck annual sales growth for more than a decade.

COURTED CONTROVERSY

In recent years, the billionaire courted controversy with comments and actions including his embrace of the Republican party and endorsement of anti-semitic comments on X. Musk has denied being anti-semitic.

When asked by an investor during a January 2023 conference call if his political comments were hurting Tesla's brand and sales, Musk said he was "reasonably popular," referring to his then 127 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter.

"Whether you hate me, like me or are indifferent, do you want the best car, or do you not want the best car?" Musk said at another event in November.

Brand valuation consultancy Brand Finance found Tesla's reputation fell in 2023, in the United States, the Netherlands, France, United Kingdom, and Australia. Tesla's reputation did not suffer in China, where access to news on the company and its CEO may have been limited, and Germany.

In the U.S., a survey by consumer analytics firm CivicScience, shown exclusively to Reuters found that 42% of respondents had an unfavorable view of Musk in February, up from 34% in April 2022 when Musk disclosed his stake in Twitter.

"A modest but growing number of EV shoppers are increasingly put off by Elon Musk's behavior and politics and are now finding viable alternatives to Tesla in the marketplace," Ed Kim, president of California-based consultancy AutoPacific said.

That group includes Jonny Page, a London-based consultant who works with climate-focused startups and will purchase an EV this summer. It will not be a Tesla.

Page, 36, said his decision is partly because of concerns over Tesla safety but mostly about Musk's "unhinged" behavior. "I don't want to put a single penny in that man's pockets," Page said.

"I CAN'T GO BACK TO GAS"

Tesla's reputation is still sterling with many.

Market researcher S&P Mobility shows Tesla has the highest loyalty among major car brands, with 68% of owners choosing another Tesla when they bought a new car last year.

Christian Cook, a Tesla Model 3 owner in Texas who identified as leaning right, said Musk's actions made no difference and that he was "becoming numb to the shenanigans."

Kat Beyer, a climate activist in Wisconsin, said she wanted to avoid Tesla because of Musk's support for Republicans, but wound up buying a Model Y last year because of a lack of EVs with reliable charging infrastructure.

"It's hard to drive the car associated with him," Beyer said. "But I can't go back to gas."

Poor Rudy

Look, if you can blow tens of thousands each month on your condo, and Netflix, and Audible, and Uber - you can pay what you owe to Rube and Shay.

Fuckin' deadbeat.

Creditors demand Rudy Giuliani sell his $3.5 million Florida condo to pay debts

Creditors want to force Rudy Giuliani to sell his $3.5 million Florida condo to help pay his significant debts, according to a court document filed on Friday.

The former New York City mayor filed for bankruptcy protection in December, citing myriad unpaid debts including a $148 million payment to two Georgia election poll workers who he falsely claimed had tampered with the 2020 election ballots while he was serving as a lawyer for former President Donald Trump.

In response to Friday’s filing, Giuliani’s counsel said the request to sell the Florida condo is “extremely premature.”

“The case is still in its infancy,” said Heath Berger, partner at Berger, Fischoff, Shumer, Wexler & Goodman, LLP, who is representing Giuliani in his bankruptcy litigation.

Giuliani has argued that he does not have the funds to pay his debts, the Friday court filing said: “According to the Debtor’s counsel, ‘there’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.’”

Giuliani’s primary income comes from Social Security payments and money from his Individual Retirement Account, Berger told CNBC.

But the court document cited various expenses Giuliani pays now to maintain his lifestyle.

For example, Giuliani spends tens of thousands of dollars a month to maintain his Florida condo. In January, according to the document, he also racked up more than $26,200 in credit card payments on 60 Amazon transactions, with charges for Netflix, Prime Video, Kindle, Audible, Paramount+, Uber rides and more.

“Unfortunately, like everybody else, that’s like a debit card for him,” Berger said. “We don’t believe that there’s anything out of the ordinary, outside of normal living expenses.”

"Normal living expenses"? $26,200 in a month - and that's just Rudy's lifestyle, so we have to give the prick a pass?

What about the lifestyle of your victims, asshole? 

Creditors see his real estate assets as fair game to recoup what is owed. They said his “pre-war co-op” apartment on New York City’s Upper East Side is exempt since it is his primary residence.

However, the document said, Giuliani spends “approximately 20-30% of his time in Florida” and therefore creditors claimed the $3.5 million condo must be sold.

“It is merely a matter of when, not if, the Debtor will have to sell the Florida Condo in order to distribute the proceeds thereof to creditors,” the filing said.

But Giuliani is in the process of selling the Manhattan apartment and is looking to relocate to his Florida residence full-time, Berger said.

“The Manhattan property is more expensive to maintain. It’s worth more so there’ll be a greater distribution to creditors from the sale of that property,” Berger told CNBC.

Berger added that payments related to his divorce “will be coming to a conclusion ... within the next year or so.”

Creditors also demanded that Giuliani secure homeowners insurance for his Florida and New York City residences since they are his two most valuable assets and “if anything were to happen to either of them, such loss would be a significant impediment to creditor recoveries.”

Giuliani has claimed he cannot afford the insurance, the court document said.

The former Trump adviser has faced a slew of legal woes for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election results, all of which have helped land him in bankruptcy court. His bankruptcy filing from December estimated that he has between $1 million and $10 million worth of assets and nearly $152 million to pay off, including what is owed to the IRS and law firms.

Today's Tweext

"And BTW - Stormy wasn't lying."

HAHA
President Biden’s re-election campaign has more followers on Truth Social than Donald Trump’s campaign after just 2 days on the platform. pic.twitter.com/oY1X1qfJvW

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) October 18, 2023

Karma's A Thing

I prefer "what goes around comes around" because it's more appropriately random - effects that are not cause-dependent.

But when it lines up so nicely, and boomerangs almost perfectly - well - these clowns got slapped in the face with their own dick, and that's just good old-fashioned poetic justice.

Angry Christians storm Utah Capitol after parent uses school district’s book policy to remove Bible over ‘vulgarity and violence’

Over one hundred Bible-toting parents and children joined Republican lawmakers at the Utah state Capitol this Wednesday to protest a school district’s decision to remove the bible from elementary and middle school libraries, the Associated Press reported.

Earlier this month, a Utah school district committee designed to flag books that contain sexual content determined that the Bible would be allowed in high school libraries but not in elementary and middle school libraries within the district after someone objected to the book’s contents. When asked by KSL.com if the anonymous challenge to the Bible, which was originally brought in December of 2022, was a serious attempt to have the Bible removed or just an activist taking advantage of the district’s policy to make a statement, Davis School District director of communication Christopher Williams said district officials treat all challenges the same.

Williams said the district decided to only make the book available to high schoolers “based on age appropriateness due to vulgarity or violence.”

Protesters this Wednesday held signs reading, “The Bible is the original textbook” and “Remove porn, not the Bible,” with one parent saying that districts should definitely remove books with problematic material, but the Bible should be exempt.

“We love the Bible. We love God. And we need God in our nation,” Karlee Vincent said.

Last year, the Utah Legislature approved a bill that conservatives said would weed out pornographic material from K-12 libraries and classrooms. The Bible is known to contain graphic violence and sexual content, such as murder, incest, beheadings, sexual violence and genocide.

As the AP points out, the anonymous challenge to the Bible was likely a protest move by someone looking to expose the perceived hypocrisy of laws that police the content of school books.

“The Bible removal is the highest-profile effort to remove a book from a school in Utah since the Legislature passed a law requiring school districts to create new pathways for residents to challenge ‘sensitive materials’ and used a statute-based definition on pornography to define them,” the AP’s report stated.

It's The Karma, Stupid

It's really fun to watch asshole Republicans when they start to realize that their asshole-ish-ness on one issue can keep them from being assholes on another issue down the road.

Thanks, Obama! The hilarious reason why a judge just blocked Wyoming’s abortion ban
Republicans just got a painful reminder that political stunts can backfire.

On Wednesday, a judge in the deep-red state of Wyoming temporarily blocked a state law that would make performing nearly any abortion in that state a felony. She relied on a 2012 amendment to the state constitution that was intended to spite then-President Barack Obama.

Obama’s early years in office were marred by a scorched-earth political campaign Republicans wielded to try to thwart what became the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare’s opponents warned of a “government takeover of health care” that would strip many Americans of their ability to make their own health decisions.

Many of these allegations were downright ludicrous, such as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R) false claim that Obama’s health bill would require “my baby with Down Syndrome ... to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’ whether they are worthy of health care.”

These attacks did not succeed. The bill became law, and Obamacare is popular now that it has been in full effect for nearly a decade without anyone being forced to stand before a death panel. But there is at least one lasting legacy of these attempts to characterize the Affordable Care Act as an attack on patients’ right to decide whether and when to seek health treatments.

In many states, opponents of Obamacare effectively took the GOP’s talking points and turned them into state constitutional amendments protecting patients’ ability to obtain health care that the government might not want them to have. Wyoming’s amendment, for example, provides that “each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.”

According to Quinn Yeargain, a law professor at Widener University, similar amendments are on the books in several other states.

It remains to be seen whether the highest courts in these states, some of which are extremely conservative, will ultimately agree that these anti-Obamacare amendments prohibit abortion bans. And, in at least some cases, the amendments contain language that could mitigate their impact. Wyoming’s amendment, for example, also provides that, under certain circumstances, the state legislature may “determine reasonable and necessary restrictions on the rights granted” by the health care amendment.

But abortion advocates have had two early successes: the Wyoming judge’s order temporarily blocking that state’s abortion ban, and a similar decision by a trial judge in Ohio.

The Wyoming abortion rights litigation, briefly explained
Wyoming district court Judge Melissa Owens’s Wednesday decision temporarily halting her state’s abortion ban is the second time she intervened to prevent this ban from going into effect. Wyoming’s abortion ban is quite strict, although it does provide exceptions for rape, incest, or when either a pregnant patient or the fetus has certain medical conditions.

Last summer, shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade, an array of patients, doctors, and nonprofit groups brought a suit arguing that Wyoming’s abortion ban violated the state’s constitutional provision protecting each adult’s right to individual health care decisions. That case is known as Johnson v. Wyoming.

Judge Owens handed down a decision in August halting the law. Among other things, she rejected the state’s argument that the health care amendment was “only adopted to push back against the Affordable Care Act,” and should not be construed to protect abortion rights.

Regardless of the political circumstances that led to this amendment being written into the state constitution, Owens reasoned that the amendment “unambiguously provides competent Wyoming citizens with the right to make their own health care decisions,” and she was bound by that unambiguous text. “A court,” she wrote, “is not at liberty to assume that the Wyoming voters who adopted” the amendment “did not understand the force of language in the provision.”

Just as significantly, Owens construed the amendment to give people in Wyoming a “fundamental right” to make their own health care decisions, including the decision to seek an abortion. This designation matters because fundamental rights can only be abridged when the state seeks to advance a “compelling state interest” and when it uses the “least intrusive” means to do so.

Thus, even though the amendment permits the state legislature to impose “reasonable and necessary restrictions” on individual’s health choices, Owens concluded that Wyoming’s broad ban on abortion access sweeps too far because it intrudes into pregnant patients’ health care decisions even when a “fetus has a genetic abnormality that is incompatible with life.” (The state has since amended its law to permit abortions when “there is a substantial likelihood that the unborn baby has a lethal fetal anomaly,” a change that could undermine Owens’s legal reasoning.)

There is precedent for Owens’s conclusion that this Wyoming health care amendment establishes a fundamental right that the legislature may only abridge under very limited circumstances, even though that same amendment gives the legislature some authority to enact laws. The US Constitution’s 14th Amendment has long been construed to protect many fundamental rights, such as the right to marry or the right to choose your own sexual partners. But the 14th Amendment also contains language permitting Congress to enforce its provisions “by appropriate legislation.”

Nevertheless, the fact that the 14th Amendment permits Congress to enact laws it deems “appropriate” typically does not permit Congress to abridge the fundamental rights it guarantees.

In response to Owens’s August decision blocking the state’s abortion ban, the state legislature enacted a new law decreeing that abortion “is not health care” and thus is not protected by the state constitution. Owens’s Wednesday order blocked that law as well, declaring that “the legislature cannot make an end run around” around a constitutional amendment, and that it is up to the courts to decide whether abortion meets the state constitution’s definition of “health care.”

Yet, while the state legislature appears eager to restore the state’s abortion ban, the Wyoming Supreme Court has thus far resisted the urge to rush in and overrule Owens. Last December, after a case reached the state Supreme Court that it could have used to reject Judge Owens’s reading of the state constitution, Wyoming’s justices chose instead not to decide that case. That left Owens’s August order in effect.

So, while there are plausible legal arguments on either side of this dispute, there appears to be a real chance that the state’s highest court will agree with Owens if and when they weigh in on whether the state constitution protects abortion. If the state Supreme Court shared the legislature’s view that abortion must be banned in Wyoming, it could have intervened last winter.

Could anti-Obamacare amendments protect abortion rights in other states?
At least one other state court, in Ohio, relied on that state’s anti-Obamacare amendment in an opinion temporarily blocking a law that bans nearly all abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy. That 2022 decision, in a case known as Preterm-Cleveland v. Yost, argued that a few provisions of the state constitution, including the state’s health care amendment, work together to protect abortion rights.

Last December, a state appeals court decided that the trial court’s order in Preterm-Cleveland may remain in effect, at least for now.

Ohio’s amendment provides that no state law “shall prohibit the purchase or sale of health care or health insurance.” Nor may it “impose a penalty or fine for the sale or purchase of health care or health insurance.” Thus, as long as a patient seeking an abortion pays for that treatment, the Ohio amendment appears to provide very robust protection to abortion rights.

Like the Wyoming amendment, Ohio’s permits the legislature to enact some restrictions on the right to purchase health care but the Ohio amendment uses less expansive language to describe when such restrictions are allowed — though one provision of the Ohio amendment does permit state laws that are “calculated to deter fraud or punish wrongdoing in the health care industry.” An abortion opponent would no doubt argue that abortions are themselves a form of “wrongdoing.”

In any event, the Ohio Supreme Court has a 4-3 Republican majority. So there’s no guarantee that the state’s justices will agree with the trial court’s ruling and allow abortion to remain legal in Ohio.

(Until recently, the swing vote on the Ohio Supreme Court was held by Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a relatively moderate Republican. But O’Connor recently retired and the Court’s new majority hasn’t developed much of a record. So it is difficult for a lawyer to assess with certainty how it is likely to rule on a case like Preterm-Cleveland.)

But what about other states that enacted health care amendments as a statement of defiance against Obamacare? The short answer is that a lawsuit seeking to protect abortion rights in these states would turn on the same questions that are in play in Wyoming and Ohio: What does the state’s health care amendment actually say? And who controls the state Supreme Court?

Alabama’s amendment, for example, is unlikely to help abortion advocates very much, even setting aside the fact that Alabama’s Supreme Court is dominated by Republicans. That’s because Alabama’s amendment primarily prohibits the state from requiring “any person, employer, or health care provider to participate in any health care system.” That language cannot reasonably be construed to protect abortion rights.

Other states, including Arizona, Missouri, and Oklahoma, enacted similar amendments preventing the state government from compelling individuals to “participate in any health care system.” These amendments are also unlikely to help proponents of abortion rights.

So this largely forgotten legacy of a failed Republican effort to spite Obamacare is only likely to matter in a very small number of states. And it may not even have a lasting impact in Wyoming and Ohio, depending on how their state Supreme Courts rule on whether the state constitution protects abortion.

For the moment, however, the Obama-era amendments writing anti-Obamacare talking points into two state constitutions have proved to be a thorn in the side of Republicans who hope to ban abortions. Let that be a lesson that a state constitution is a foolish thing to change for the sake of a political stunt.

Behold A God Who Bleeds

No matter the topic, there's either a song or a Star Trek episode about it. Always.

Charles Blow

Gods Don’t Bleed. Trump Is Bleeding.

I wrote in 2019 that Donald Trump ascended to folk hero status among the people who liked him, which meant that his lying, corruption, sexism and grift not only did not damage him, they added to his legend.

The folk hero is transcendent. He defies convention and defies gravity — in Trump’s case, political and cultural gravity. He overcomes the impossible, wins the improbable, evades authority.

He was a classic trickster figure, common in folklore.

For instance, for a Black child growing up in the American South, Stack-O-Lee (or, among other variations, Stagger Lee, as we pronounced it) was a folk hero. “Stack” Lee Shelton was a Black man, a pimp, who in 1895 shot another man dead for snatching his hat. The story became the subject of so-called murder ballads. Shelton bolstered his legend when, after being released from prison, he killed another man during a robbery.

This man, this figure, who negotiated the space between slavery and freedom, between criminal and hero, “came to personify the collective feeling of blacks at the bottom of society, and it was in this sense that Stagolee became a symbol of the Black community,” as Cecil Brown wrote in his book “Stagolee Shot Billy.”

Writing in Mother Jones in 2011, Joe Kloc described how Stack-O-Lee became a hero in Southern Black society by unapologetically breaking its rules. The murders he committed “only serve to illustrate the injustices of southern society,” Kloc wrote. “For all the myth surrounding him, there is something very rational about Stack-O-Lee’s character: Why follow some of society’s rules when so many others work against you?”

This is why I so instinctively understood Trump’s appeal and heroizing.

Years, decades, of twisted propaganda had turned working-class white people into a victimized class. These white people saw themselves as the new Negro, in a turned-tables alternate reality. Society’s rules threatened to — or, had already begun to — work against them.

Trump, the trickster and rule-breaker, emerges as an amalgamation of their anxieties and rebellion. He was a politician, but to them, above politics. The Donald was approaching deity. His followers embraced a cultish zealotry.

But things have changed.

Trump’s announcement of a third run for the White House landed with a thud. High-profile Republicans have refused to sign on as early endorsers. Trump himself is cloistered at Mar-a-Lago, having not held a single public campaign event since his announcement. In fact, he has been reduced to the low and laughable position of personally hawking digital trading cards of himself. (Trump has always seen his die-hard supporters as customers to whom he could sell a product, whether a candidacy or a card.)

And a recent poll showed that Republican and Republican-leaning voters, at least at this point, prefer Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to Trump by double digits.

So, what happened? In short, God bled. And once you see God bleed, you can no longer believe that someone is God.

It is impossible to overstate how damaging the results of the midterms were, not just to Republicans, but to Trump himself.

For years, Trump had been able to blame losses or defeats on other people, or even recast them as victories.

Even though the Robert Mueller report was damning in many ways and went out of its way not to exonerate Trump, the fact that no charges were brought against Trump left him with the opening to claim total vindication.

He wasn’t disgraced as much as a victim of a politically motivated plot. Impeachment, he told his supporters, driven by my political enemies, had twice failed to remove me. He wasn’t the most flawed president, but the most resilient.

When Trump lost in 2020, he blamed corruption and a stolen election. That, of course, was another lie. According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history,” and “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Nevertheless, Republican state legislatures across the country used Trump’s election fraud lie as a rationale to “fix” election systems that weren’t broken, to implement even more oppressive voting restrictions.

But there was an unintended consequence: By boasting about making their electoral processes more secure, Republicans took away whatever latitude they had to lie about elections being stolen when they lost.

And, in the midterms, they lost some major races, including in states that had implemented the most regressive voter laws, like Georgia and Arizona, where Democrats handily dispatched Trump’s anointed candidates. There was no way to wiggle out of the devastating truth of the cycle: The Trump brand was too tarnished and toxic to win in many battleground states. He was no longer able to defy political gravity.

At the same time, Trump’s legal losses are mounting as multiple investigations close in on him. The man many had compared to Teflon is beginning to appear more like fly paper.

Where some Republicans once saw invincibility, they now sense weakness and injury. And in the pack mentality of politics, this is the moment that they are most likely to turn on him.

Oops Again, Republicans

Hoping this is another sign that Republicans have badly over-reached, and that the ladies are coming out to show these idiots what happens when you fuck over half the population.

Judge who denied Florida teen an abortion citing grades loses reelection

A state judge who, in a highly publicized case, denied a 17-year-old an abortion in part because of her grades lost his election in a Florida primary on Tuesday.

Jared Smith, who was appointed to Florida’s 13th Circuit Court by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in 2019, narrowly lost his nonpartisan primary against attorney Nancy Jacobs.

Jacobs received roughly 51.9 percent of the vote, beating Smith by about 3.7 percentage points, or roughly 7,900 votes.

Smith had ruled in January that the 17-year-old, who was kept anonymous in court documents, could not receive an abortion, citing her grades. An appeals court overturned the ruling.

“While she claimed that her grades were ‘Bs’ during her testimony, her GPA is currently 2.0,” Smith ruled. “Clearly, a ‘B’ average would not equate to a 2.0 GPA.”

Florida is one of six states that require both parental notification and consent for minors to obtain abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The teen had asked the court to waive the requirement.

Under Florida law, a judge can waive parental consent if it finds by “clear and convincing evidence” that the minor is “sufficiently mature” to decide to have an abortion. In considering those requests, judges are required to assess factors like the minor’s age, overall intelligence and emotional stability.

The statute has led to multiple high-profile cases, including one earlier this month in which a Florida appeals court ruled a 16-year-old did not demonstrate she met the maturity requirement to circumvent the parental notification and consent requirements.


Smith received an array of endorsements in the primary race, including former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez (R), the Tampa Bay Times’s editorial board and multiple retired judges who served on the circuit.

Democrats have hoped the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to an abortion in June will help energize voters in this year’s midterm elections and avoid steep losses for the party as it seeks to maintain control of Congress.

Voters in Kansas, a traditionally red state, rejected a ballot question earlier this month that would remove abortion rights from the state constitution.

As voters headed to the polls in Florida on Tuesday and defeated Smith in his circuit court race, New York’s simultaneous primary showed another sign of the potential impact of the abortion ruling.

Pat Ryan (D), who made supporting abortion rights a cornerstone of his campaign, defeated Marc Molinaro (R) in the state’s 19th Congressional District, a bellwether district that voted for former President Obama in 2012, former President Trump in 2016 and President Biden in 2020.

Comin' Back To Bite Ya

When the tailor-made pandering bullshit comes back around and kicks you right in the balls, because the election you were so sure you'd rigged adequately in your favor didn't turn out the way you needed it to.

They put this shit into the law because they believed they'd never be out of power, and they could turn that law in any direction they deemed necessary to punish dissent. Prove me wrong.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Citizen Trump may have broken a law that President Trump made a felony

There are not many people who know exactly why FBI agents searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday. The FBI knows, certainly, and the former president and his attorneys probably have a good sense as well, given that they saw the search warrant. Everyone else is operating on what’s been revealed by Trump’s team and public reporting: The FBI search was largely or entirely a function of the investigation into Trump’s retention of documents after leaving the White House.

We know that he did, by his own admission. This year, a number of boxes of material were turned over to the National Archives. Included in that material were some that were classified. On Monday, the FBI removed another dozen boxes, with speculation rampant that more of that material was similarly restricted.

If Trump is found to have violated federal law in removing and retaining classified documents without authorization, he could be convicted of a felony punishable by five years in prison. And that conviction would be a felony carrying that punishment because of a law signed by President Donald Trump.

Trump’s 2016 campaign was intertwined with a similar question. His Democratic opponent, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, had been found to have operated a private email server that she used for official business — including, the FBI determined, some that was classified. Trump and his allies pushed for Clinton to face criminal charges but in July 2016, FBI Director James B. Comey announced that the FBI wouldn’t seek an indictment. Trump was furious, but he won anyway.

During his first year in office, a central tool used for surveillance by the intelligence community — Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act — was set to expire. Shortly before it did, Congress passed an extension of the authority for another five years.

But that didn’t come without turmoil. Trump came into office angry at the intelligence community for revealing to reporters that it believed Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. He excoriated intelligence agencies on Twitter — and continued to do so as the contours of the investigation into that interference became clear.

On the day that the House was set to vote on the reauthorization, Trump complained on Twitter:

“House votes on controversial FISA ACT today.” This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?

The tweet freaked out advocates of the extension. A few hours later, he tweeted his support and it passed. On Jan. 18, 2018, he signed it into law.

What became law was S. 139. It had been introduced by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) as the Rapid DNA Act of 2017. But sometimes Congress hollows out existing legislation and replaces it entirely with other legislation to move the process forward more quickly. So S. 139 was replaced with H.R. 4478, which extended Section 702 for another five years.

It also had a stipulation editing 18 U.S. Code §1924. It originally read:

Whoever, being an officer, employee, contractor, or consultant of the United States, and, by virtue of his office, employment, position, or contract, becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, knowingly removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.

With Trump’s signing S. 139 into law, that became: “ … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than five years, or both.” And with that, it became a felony.

You can see how Trump absconding with classified material to Mar-a-Lago would facially violate the law as articulated. So Trump’s allies have already been offering a rationalization: He had declassified everything he took to Mar-a-Lago.

In an interview on Fox News Tuesday night, former Trump administration official Kash Patel made this case.

“What I can tell you definitively is that President Trump was a transparency president,” Patel said when asked if there was any classified material at Trump’s Florida estate. “And time and time again … we tried to get all of it out. And President Trump, on multiple occasions at the White House, declassified whole sets of documents. Including — I remind you and your audience that around October of 2020, he issued a statement from the White House declassifying every document related to not just the Russiagate scandal, but also the Hillary Clinton email scandal.”

Trump did, in fact, order the wholesale declassification of a number of documents related to those investigations, including on the day before he left office. At that point, though, the order was to declassify documents that had been cleared by the FBI a few days prior.

In an interview with Breitbart in May (at the time reports about classified material at Mar-a-Lago first emerged), Patel made a slightly different argument.

“Trump declassified whole sets of materials in anticipation of leaving government that he thought the American public should have the right to read themselves,” he said. “The White House counsel failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings, but that doesn’t mean the information wasn’t declassified.”

In other words, Trump declassified a bunch of stuff, even if there isn’t record of it. This obviously is very convenient — but also not completely ridiculous.

In 2017, on the day after he fired Comey, Trump welcomed senior Russian officials into the Oval Office for a meeting. During that discussion, he revealed to them classified information. That report spurred an unexpected defense as articulated by Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho) and others: The president has full authority to declassify things and can, in essence, do so on the fly. Fact-checkers considered this idea … and determined it to be largely accurate.

We’re trudging toward a very gray area here, clearly, but it is conceivable that Trump’s defense against his potential possession of classified material at Mar-a-Lago may be that he declassified it while still president, even if no formal record of the declassification was made. This introduces a slew of other questions, since that material would now presumably be publicly available in some form.

“The president has unilateral authority to declassify documents — anything in government,” Patel told Breitbart. “He exercised it here in full.”

Patel was one of the administration’s most loyal defenders during Trump’s presidency. As a staffer to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), Patel was intimately involved in the congressman’s fervent effort to push back against the investigation into Russian interference. Nunes was also a critic of Clinton’s handling of her email server, suggesting at one point in 2016 that he hoped “the irresponsible handling of classified information documented by the FBI will be considered if any of these individuals currently possesses a security clearance or applies for one in the future.”

H.R. 4478, the legislation that became S. 139 and which escalated the punishment for the retention of classified material, was introduced in the House by Nunes.

Overheard

Poor poor pitiful Matt Gaetz.

He could soon be entering

a whole new phase of his career -

role-playing as a 17-year-old girl

for the boys in Cell Block D.

The Daddy State Slips - A Little

Interesting how Mitch McConnell first comes out with that ridiculous sound bite about "corporations oughta stay outa politics", and then a day later, he flips a U turn like a drunk comin' up on a check point on New Year's Eve.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion: Republicans’ unexpected rupture with corporate America

Republicans learned a valuable lesson this past week: There’s more to capitalism than tax cuts.

Turns out successful capitalists also need to keep their customers happy.

For a long time, the Republican Party had what it believed was a tacit deal with corporate America. Companies donated enormous sums to GOP campaigns and aligned groups, and in exchange, Republicans delivered tax cuts: on corporate profits, capital gains, estates. Whatever other agenda items Republicans pursued — on immigration, civil rights or anything else — corporate America would generally keep its mouth shut. So long as the tax cuts kept flowing, the only “speech” that corporations engaged in came from their wallets, which in turn were fattened by those tax cuts.

An un-virtuous cycle, if you will.

But recently, something funny happened. Democrats, having achieved unified control of government, are threatening to reverse the major corporate tax cut Republicans passed in 2017. Yet corporate America is criticizing Republicans, and for something unrelated: legislation in Georgia, Texas and other states that threatens to strip Americans of their voting rights.

Republicans are furious that corporations appear so ungrateful.

“I found it completely discouraging to find a bunch of corporate CEOs getting in the middle of politics,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) whined Monday. He fumed on Tuesday that his “warning, if you will, to corporate America is to stay out of politics.” Then he hastened to add: “I’m not talking about political contributions.”

McConnell wasn’t the only politico suggesting that companies should butt out of politics (except when it comes to contributions, of course) if they wanted to continue reaping fiscal benefits. Georgia legislators were more explicit about what corporations need to do to keep the tax-cut gravy train rolling.

Last week, the Georgia House of Representatives voted to revoke a break on fuel taxes that benefits Atlanta-based Delta Airlines, which had criticized the state’s recent voting law. House Speaker David Ralston (R) explained: “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand. You gotta keep that in mind sometimes.” Apparently — shockingly! — this tax break had not been based on some abstract notion of public welfare or good governance or economy-boosting policy but, rather, a perceived quid pro quo. (Georgia’s Senate adjourned before taking up the legislation.)

There are a couple of takeaways here.

One is that what had recently been an extremely anodyne stance for companies to embrace — that voting is good — is now, somehow, construed as worthy of political retaliation. This says more about how far out on a limb Republicans are, not corporations. Despite spin that they are promoting “election integrity,” GOP legislators in dozens of states have introduced bills that include potent weapons for disenfranchising voters.

Georgia’s law, for instance, allows political appointees to seize control of election planning and ballot counting from local officials whenever those political appointees see fit. Had this law been in place last year, it might have enabled the GOP to overturn the results of the presidential election, and to find those “11,780 votes” Donald Trump was seeking. Even Georgia’s Republican lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, acknowledged the provision was “the fallout from the 10 weeks of misinformation that flew in from former president Donald Trump,” rather than any attempt at genuinely improving election functioning.

Second, for the most part, these corporations aren’t criticizing anti-voter bills out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re doing so because speaking up is good for the bottom line. They’ve crunched the numbers and determined that promoting voting rights is more financially valuable than whatever they stand to gain from slightly lower tax rates.

Among those at risk of disenfranchisement, after all, are these companies’ customers and employees. And it’s not such a great business move to endorse attempts to take away your customers’ and employees’ civil rights; even staying neutral on the issue — as some companies tried to do before the Georgia law passed — can alienate consumers who are either direct victims of the law or allies of those victims. Similar dynamics emerged after Republicans pursued other divisive laws in recent years (such as North Carolina’s “bathroom bill”).

This is, in fact, how capitalism works: Customers get to ditch you if they’re unhappy with your brand. Republican officials are now trying to show just how valuable their own side’s purchasing power is by urging supporters to boycott companies that criticize voting restrictions. They’ve struggled so far; shortly after Trump asked followers to boycott Coca-Cola products, for instance, an adviser tweeted a photo showing Trump with what appeared to be a Diet Coke on his desk.

Hard to blame Republicans too much for having difficulty with the concept of voting with your feet, though. As their approach in Georgia shows, they’re accustomed to getting to pick and choose which votes count.

Getting Up With Fleas

WaPo Letters to the Editor 

Jan. 27, 2020 at 5:12 p.m. EST

I was braced for Dana Milbank’s usual snark, as he seems to have taken Maureen Dowd’s place in our national conversation, but his Jan. 24 Impeachment Diary column, “Roberts comes face-to-face with the mess he made,” was spot on and not for yuks.

Mr. Milbank is right about the legacy of Citizens United, but I wonder if the chief justice has a more basic problem. Sitting there while the president’s counsel spins lie after lie — and not saying a word about it — may be the death blow to the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

The chief justice’s passive acceptance of obvious lies does not show him to be a neutral arbiter. It instead shows to those who might come before him in his day job that bad-faith arguments are acceptable rhetoric. In calling out some of those lies, and Republicans’ abdication of their credibility in accepting them, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) was intemperate!

So let’s scold the parties “in equal terms.” Hogwash. The chief justice’s fake neutrality may well neuter the Constitution.

Bill Kalish, Alexandria VA

Here's Milbank's piece:

There is justice in John Roberts being forced to preside silently over the impeachment trial of President Trump, hour after hour, day after tedious day.

The chief justice of the United States, as presiding officer, doesn’t speak often, and when he does, the words are usually scripted and perfunctory:

• “The Senate will convene as a court of impeachment.”
• “The chaplain will lead us in prayer."
• “The sergeant at arms will deliver the proclamation.”
• “The majority leader is recognized.”

Otherwise, he sits and watches. He rests his chin in his hand. He stares straight ahead. He sits back and interlocks his fingers. He plays with his pen. He takes his reading glasses off and puts them on again. He starts to write something, then puts his pen back down. He roots around in his briefcase for something - anything? - to occupy him.

Roberts’s captivity is entirely fitting: He is forced to witness, with his own eyes, the mess he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court have made of the U.S. political system. As representatives of all three branches of government attend this unhappy family reunion, the living consequences of the Roberts Court’s decisions, and their corrosive effect on democracy, are plain to see.

Ten years to the day before Trump’s impeachment trial began, the Supreme Court released its Citizens United decision, plunging the country into the era of super PACs and unlimited, unregulated, secret campaign money from billionaires and foreign interests. Citizens United, and the resulting rise of the super PAC, led directly to this impeachment. The two Rudy Giuliani associates engaged in key abuses — the ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the attempts to force Ukraine’s president to announce investigations into Trump’s political opponents — gained access to Trump by funneling money from a Ukrainian oligarch to the president’s super PAC.

The Roberts Court’s decisions led to this moment in indirect ways, as well. The court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County gutted the Voting Rights Act and spurred a new wave of voter suppression. The decision in 2014′s McCutcheon further surrendered campaign finance to the wealthiest. The 2018 Janus decisionhobbled the ability of labor unions to counter wealthy donors, while the 2019 Rucho ruling blessed partisan gerrymandering, expanding anti-democratic tendencies.

The consequences? Falling confidence in government, and a growing perception that Washington had become a “swamp” corrupted by political money, fueled Trump’s victory. The Republican Party, weakened by the new dominance of outside money, couldn’t stop Trump’s hostile takeover of the party or the takeover of the congressional GOP ranks by far-right candidates. The new dominance of ideologically extreme outside groups and donors led lawmakers on both sides to give their patrons what they wanted: conflict over collaboration and purity at the cost of paralysis. The various decisions also suppress the influence of poorer and non-white Americans and extend the electoral power of Republicans in disproportion to the popular vote.

Certainly, the Supreme Court didn’t create all these problems, but its rulings have worsened the pathologies — uncompromising views, mindless partisanship and vitriol — visible in this impeachment trial. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), no doubt recognizing that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is helping to preserve his party’s Senate majority, has devoted much of his career to extending conservatives’ advantage in the judiciary.

He effectively stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing for nearly a year to consider President Barack Obama’s eminently qualified nominee, Merrick Garland, to fill a vacancy. And, expanding on earlier transgressions by Democrats, he blew up generations of Senate procedures and precedents requiring the body to operate by consensus so that he could confirm more Trump judicial appointees.

It’s a symbiotic relationship. On the day the impeachment trial opened, the Roberts Court rejected a plea by Democrats to expedite its consideration of the latest legal attempt by Republicans to kill Obamacare. The court sided with Republicans who opposed an immediate Supreme Court review because the GOP feared the ruling could hurt it if the decision came before the 2020 election.

Roberts had been warned about this sort of thing. The late Justice John Paul Stevens, in his Citizens United dissent, wrote: “Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the Court has advanced the cause of self-government today.”

Justice Stephen Breyer, in his McCutcheon dissent, warned that the new campaign finance system would be “incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy.”

Now, we are in a crisis of democratic legitimacy: A president who has plainly abused his office and broken the law, a legislature too paralyzed to do anything about it — and a chief justice coming face to face with the system he broke.

Aside from the slight whiff of Both Sides - which of course is an absolute shibboleth for Press Poodles - I can get next to it.

What Goes Around

The universe wears a karmic smile today.

Imagine a World Series game where the crowd has turned out to root root root for the home team, and they don't just boo when POTUS is introduced - they chant "LOCK HIM UP. LOCK HIM UP."

Then imagine the owners of the Washington Nationals preemptively asking the White House not to put them in the position of having to decline an invitation from POTUS to join him at the game.

Any given POTUS gets too much credit when things are good. And sometimes, when things are bad they get blamed too much.

You know things ain't right when POTUS is such a colossal fuckup that not even a baseball game comes away without the guy leaving a giant shit stain on it.

Sssssss

That loud hissing sound we hear is either the air going out of the Daddy State balloon - finally - or it's the growing problem of snakes in the snake pit, as they escalate their attacks on each other.

And now that I stop and think about it for moment, those two things always go together.

Ronnie Reagan would not approve on either count.

WaPo:

Republican senators clashed with one another and confronted Vice President Pence inside a private luncheon on Thursday, as anger hit a boiling point over the longest government shutdown in history.

“This is your fault,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) at one point, according to two Republicans who attended the lunch and witnessed the exchange.

“Are you suggesting I’m enjoying this?” McConnell snapped back, according to the people who attended the lunch.

Johnson spokesman Ben Voelkel confirmed the confrontation. He said Johnson was expressing frustration with the day’s proceedings — votes on dueling plans to reopen the government, both of which failed to advance.

The people who attended the lunch spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a closed-door session. Aides to McConnell, citing regular policy on GOP lunches, declined to comment on the gathering.

- and -

The outbursts highlighted the toll the shutdown has taken on Republican lawmakers, who are dealing with growing concerns from constituents and blame from Democrats, all while facing pressure from conservatives to stand with Trump in his demand for money to build a wall on the border with Mexico.

- and -

“Nobody was blaming the president,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), speaking about the lunch to reporters afterward. “But there was a lot of frustration expressed about the situation we find ourselves in.”

Repubs are staring their political doom in the face and they can't bring themselves to admit that they - along with the incredibly shitty hurtful policies they've been pimping - comprise their main problem.

They can't figure out how to unhitch themselves from a very unpopular president without going against a constituency they believe is vital to their staying in power. But if they continue pandering to a shrinking group of zealous gullible rubes, they're on their way out anyway.

Most of us can see that 45* has not remade the GOP in his image so much as he is a near-perfect reflection of what the GOP has been evolving into for 30 or 40 years. Congress Critters are finally beginning to acknowledge that, as it becomes clearer to more and more people just how venal and cynically ambitious these clowns are.

And guys like Wilbur Ross and Larry Kudlow and Kevin Hassett (et al) aren't helping.

BTW, that stoopid idea about hostages borrowing money to "tide them over"?  C'mon - you're going to fuck with these people - threatening their livelihoods and their credit ratings and their plans for the future - and then you're going to charge them interest when you're basically loaning them their own fucking money?

Seriously - what the fuck is wrong with you assholes that you'd be looking to profit from this mess?