People will be free. Even if we vote ourselves into bondage, there's always a kernel of dissent - a small group who won't knuckle under - who won't be fooled, and who will eventually bring the others around.
When the size of that kernel is potentially half of your population, you'd best be paying attention.
I'll say it again: Women will save us from ourselves - if we can figure out how to get the fuck outa their way.
The story of Iran’s Mahsa Amini uprising told through its most iconic images
It was a movement that began with the death of a young Iranian woman from a small Kurdish town. Over the next year, it spread on social media and captured the attention of the world.
This is the story of Iran’s uprising through its most memorable images. 1 Mahsa Amini’s death
On Sept. 13, 2022, Mahsa Amini was visiting her brother in Tehran just days before her 23rd birthday when she was stopped and taken away by the country’s infamous “morality police,” for allegedly violating the country’s strict dress code for women.
Within hours, Amini lay in a coma in a hospital bed, with Iranian police claiming that she had suffered a heart attack. Her family said she was beaten. The image of her shared on social media shook the country.
Three days later, she died.
2 Removing the headscarf
The protests began on Sept. 16, the day Amini died, with crowds gathering outside the Tehran hospital where she spent her final days.
As she was laid to rest in her hometown of Saqqez the following day, women took off their headscarves in protest. They chanted “woman, life, freedom” — a slogan that would soon be heard across the country.
translated: Mazniha's flag ✌️👏 in Sari, 29 September; Burning scarf ceremony! #Mehsa_Amini #MehsaAmini
Some women took off their headscarves, waving them in the air or setting them on fire. Others cut their hair in public, openly defying the morality police.
Universities became hubs of protest as young people became leaders of the movement. Campuses were raided by security forces. The government cut off the internet. Some students were detained or forced to abandon their studies.
When Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, visited one university in an attempt to calm protests, he was greeted by angry students yelling “get lost.”
Students at Al-Zahra University—an all female uni in Iran—shout in protest upon President Ebrahim Raisi’s visit:
In one clip, a group of young women can be seen singing the song “Baraye,” which became an anthem giving voice to protesters’ grievances and received a Grammy award for Best Song for Social Change. 5 Remembering Amini
In late October thousands of people made their way to Amini’s grave to mark the 40th day after her death — known as a “chehellom,” an especially important moment in the Iranian Shiite funerary tradition.
A photo of a young woman standing on a car without a headscarf became an iconic image.
6 Taking the protest to sports
Acts of protest weren’t confined to Iran. A number of Iranian athletes appeared to support the uprising on the world stage. Climber Elnaz Rekabi took part in a competition in South Korea without wearing a headscarf — mandatory for all women representing the country abroad.
Concerns for Rekabi’s welfare grew after a stilted message posted on her Instagram account claimed she was unintentionally not wearing a headscarf. She later returned home to crowds of supporters.
In November, members of Iran’s men’s soccer team at the World Cup refused to sing the national anthem during their first match against England, widely interpreted as a gesture of solidarity with the protesters back home.
Sardar Azmoun, a forward on the team, has been the most vocal champion of the uprising. “I don’t care if I’m sacked,” Azmoun wrote in a since-deleted post on Instagram last September. “Shame on you for killing people so easily. Viva Iranian women.” He later issued an apology on Instagram.
When the team was eliminated from the competition, protesters at home erupted in celebration over what they viewed as a symbolic defeat for the Islamic Republic.
translated: At the funeral of Javad Heydari, one of the victims of the murder protests #مهسا_امینی , his sister cuts her hair at her brother's grave.
As the death toll rose during protests, a video shared on social media showed a woman cutting her hair over the grave of her brother, Javad Heydari, who was killed during the demonstrations. The gesture is found in ancient Persian literature as a sign of protest, anger or grief.
Women around the world, from members of the Iranian diaspora to politicians and celebrities, cut their hair in solidarity.
And BTW - "morality police"? How in the blue-eyed buck naked fuck does that make sense to somebody?
On the surface, it seems odd that Republicans express a need for their candidates to have a certain purity, but when it's painfully obvious they don't (eg: Trump), they just kinda make believe that he's pure, or that "he's a flawed man, but forgiven", or they insist on that purity, but not in a virginal way. ie: they want somebody who fucks, but only if that fucking is under official sanction of the church and civil law - and then, strictly heterosexual. Unless you're Lindsey Graham - or they need to take you down by implying something may be "wrong" with your sex life.
They preach a hard-n-fast moral code, but then practice situational ethics. And then they bitch about how nobody has any principles anymore, looking the other way when their own guys screw the proverbial pooch, and then they pat themselves on the back for being charitable and inclusive and forgiving.
Gosh - it's almost as if they don't want us to be able stand on any solid ground that we can really count on.
"Every time we call it a game, you call it a business. And every time we call it a business, you say it's just a game."
Tim Scott’s girlfriend
The unmarried Republican presidential candidate doesn’t like talking about his new relationship very much. But he is talking about it.
In June, as Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) began to get a little momentum in the presidential primary, a person working on behalf of one of Scott’s Republican opponents messaged me, asking to chat.
“Have you seen the video,” he asked over the phone, conspiratorially, “where he says he has a girlfriend?”
The video in question was from a May event organized by the news website Axios, where the interviewer asked the South Carolina senator about the possibility of becoming the first bachelor president since the 19th century. “I probably have more time, more energy and more latitude to do the job,” he replies. And then the senator adds — quickly, as an aside: “My girlfriend wants to see me when I come home.”
The Republican operative who called me wasn’t sure said girlfriend existed. He suggested I look into it. He followed up on our conversation with an email that included a dossier of Scott’s known personal relationships. “No fingerprints,” he said.
Scott’s romantic endeavors aren’t a scandal so much as they are a mystery. At 57, he’s never been married and rarely talks about girlfriends past or present. Late last year, as Scott was ramping up his run for president, I asked Jennifer DeCasper, his close friend and campaign manager, about the status of his dating life. “It’s nonexistent,” she said.
Now, Scott was suggesting otherwise. And the timing of that revelation seemed a bit convenient.
“He has staked so much on his personal story, character and faith,” said the operative, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity because, well, that’s how people kick dirt around in this business. “He’s running as America’s pastor, so to speak, as he courts evangelicals in Iowa, and I think a lot of folks may wonder about his lack of a family.”
It seemed like a not-terribly-original attempt to stir up gossip among conservative voters about how an unmarried Republican candidate might be weird about women, or to raise questions about his sexuality within the party’s stubbornly homophobic factions. (And let’s just get this out of the way: This is not a wink-wink story that uses “single” in place of “gay.” Despite the retrograde assumptions people still like to make about wifeless men of a certain age, there really is nothing to suggest that Scott is anything other than a confirmed bachelor in the most literal sense of the phrase.)
I wasn’t interested in laundering innuendos for this Republican operative. At the same time, the whole exchange left me intrigued about how voter interest (or lack thereof) in Scott’s love life (or lack thereof) might illuminate the politics of marriage, family and masculinity in today’s GOP. Donald Trump scrambled the values of the “family values” party to such a degree that the base kept loving him despite the “locker-room talk” about grabbing women and the allegation — which Trump denies — that he had cheated on his third wife with a porn star.
And yet, for all the conventional wisdom that went out the door when Trump walked in, a long-held belief persists: that the absence of a wife and kids would make voters uneasy, especially the kind who vote in Republican primaries. Was that still true?
There is a legitimate public interest in the partner of any would-be president. A first lady in waiting is typically a close confidante whose values reflect on, and influence, a potential leader of the free world. If Scott and his mystery woman were still in the get-to-know-you phase, voters might feel the right to get to know her, too. Plus, a new relationship can be strange to navigate under ordinary circumstances, so what’s it like when one of the people is running for president?
I decided that, yes, I would try to figure out whether Tim Scott has a girlfriend.
But I would also investigate a deeper question: Does anybody care?
On a Tuesday morning in mid-August, Scott sat on an outdoor stage at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, discussing his thoughts on policies that allow parents to direct public funds to private schools (he’s for it) and China “spying on our kids” via TikTok (he’s against). While he spoke, DeCasper, his campaign manager, stood at the back of the crowd in a campaign T-shirt.
“Do you work for Tim Scott?” asked an 88-year-old man in a short-sleeved checkered button-up and a National Rifle Association cap.
The man was Max Hagen, a self-described “Fairaholic” who claimed to have shaken every president’s hand since Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“How come he doesn’t bring his wife and kids with him like all the other candidates do?” Hagen asked.
“Well,” DeCasper said, “that’s because he’s single.”
“He’s single?”
“He has a very lovely girlfriend.”
“How come he doesn’t bring her around?”
Frankly, the whole interaction was a bit on-the-nose. I had come to Iowa to try to get an idea of what people thought of his being a bachelor. DeCasper, who previously served as Scott’s chief of staff, had told me last year that, yes, there were times in his career when Scott had fretted about “the optics” of not having a spouse. More recently, however, she had told her boss not to worry about it. “Honey, it’s two-thousand-whatever, you’re fine,” she recalled saying to Scott. She had told me something similar last fall: “That’s old-school,” she’d said about needing a spouse to run for president. “We don’t operate that way anymore.”
It’s true that remaining single deep into adulthood is not as unusual as it used to be. In 1980, only 6 percent of 40-year-olds had never been married, according to Pew Research; in 2021, it was 25 percent. In politics, however, a family tableau remains core to “the optics.” The Republican primary field includes a conservative variety pack of Wife Guys — such as Ron DeSantis, who reportedly changed the way he pronounced his last name to the way his wife, Casey, preferred saying it, and Mike Pence, who reportedly won’t eat alone with a woman unless his wife, Karen, is also present. And although there have been unmarried candidates for president over the years — including the other Republican senator from South Carolina, Lindsey O. Graham, in 2015 — you would have to go all the way back to Grover Cleveland, in 1884, to find a bachelor who won. (Cleveland married two years later.) Before that, there was James Buchanan, who stayed single after winning in 1856. And yeah, it was a thing.
“An Old Bachelor is at most but a half man,” wrote the New York Evening Post in an editorial about Buchanan. “How can such a person make more than a half-President?”
Fast-forward to two-thousand-whatever. Despite an evolving understanding of gender — or, more likely, because of it — Republicans have made defining “masculinity” a part of their political playbook. This includes promoting some pretty old-school ideas about marriage.
“Men are meant to be husbands, to form the virtues of a husband in their souls,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote in his book “Manhood.”
Before Trump, when Tim Miller was working in opposition research on the Republican side, finding a sex scandal used to be an effective way to topple an opponent. It may say something about our current political moment that Scott’s opponents might see an opportunity to damage him with a sexless scandal.
“What might be salient with Republican voters is not that he isn’t a perfect family man,” Miller told me, “but that he might not have the macho womanizing strength of the MAGA god-king.”
Scott’s current mission is to impress a particular subset of Republicans: the ones who will be participating in the Iowa caucuses early next year. What do they think of the idea of an unmarried, childless commander in chief?
“I think 10 or 20 years ago, people had a kind of romance with the first family,” said Bob Vander Plaats, the head of the Family Leader, a social conservative organization in Iowa. “But I think our country is at the point where being married isn’t the top qualifier. It probably doesn’t make the Top 50.”
Scott’s unmarriedness isn’t the only thing that distinguishes him from other Republicans who are trying to rise in the party. He is not a perpetually aggrieved, rhetorically aggressive culture-warrior type. He’s also a Black man who has spoken out against whitewashing America’s racial history and has experienced being stopped by the police frequently for offenses such as, as he put it in 2016, “driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood.”
At the same time, Scott does not believe there is systemic racism in America today, and lately he has been talking a lot about “backing the blue,” locking up violent criminals, securing the southern border and implementing a federal ban on abortions after the 15th week of a pregnancy, “at a minimum.”
When I asked Steve Deace, a conservative talk-show host from Iowa, about how Scott’s marital status plays into everything, Deace predicted that Republican voters aren’t going to evaluate the candidate on that factor alone — but that it could work against him if he doesn’t measure up in other ways.
“In the end, someone who is unmarried, hasn’t been part of a meaningful conservative fight and was on the wrong side of virtually every flash point in the last cycle just won’t pass muster,” he said. “If he were polling in double digits in November, there would be a super PAC running ads in Iowa pointing this stuff out.” (Scott is polling at 9 percent in the state, per an August poll by the respected Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer.)
For now, many of the Republicans checking out Scott at the Iowa fair didn’t really seem to specifically care that Scott was single.
“What matters to me is that he’s in favor of putting the family unit back together,” said Brian Heck, 60. “I’d be more worried about him having a bunch of illegitimate kids than having no kids.”
A Republican voter is worried about a black man having a bunch of illegitimate kids.
Is that just too fucking perfect or what?
“I wouldn’t want someone to bring their children to the White House. That’s no place for them,” said Connie Hoksbergen, 57.
“I think it will just be less distracting,” said Greg Pollak, a pastor from Altoona, noting the drama that has lately swirled around presidential offspring. “It seems like the family have been a problem these past several years. I could even see it being an advantage.”
Scott’s parents didn’t have a marriage worth aspiring to. In his memoir, “America: A Redemption Story,” Scott writes that his father was a mercurial man who suffered mental trauma while serving in Vietnam, and whose drinking and tirades drove his mother — along with Scott and his older brother — out of the house.
As a teenager, Scott found a father figure in a man named John Moniz, the owner of a Chick-fil-A franchise, who mentored Scott and taught him about conservative values. Scott was a charmer, even back then, according to Brian Moniz, John’s son and Scott’s friend since childhood. Scott and the younger Moniz used to spend a lot of time hanging around the mall and flirting with girls.
“He’s always had a way with the ladies,” Moniz said.
I’ve seen Scott flirt. It was 2012, and we were having lunch at Clyde’s in downtown Washington. A waitress came up and put her hand on his freshly shaved (and perspiring) head.
“I think you’re hot,” she told him. “I can feel your heat from over here.”
“Most people say I’m hot,” Scott said. “I agree.”
A few days after that, I asked Scott whether he was still a virgin.
The question wasn’t quite as prurient as it might sound. I had been assigned to write an article about Scott, then a freshman member of Congress, for National Journal. In my research, I’d found a 1995 interview he’d done with the Charleston Post and Courier in which he’d discussed speaking to students about the importance of abstinence until marriage. “Talking to teens and college students about sexual purity is a hot ticket for me because I’m single,” Scott, then a 30-year-old city councilman, had told the paper. “I know what it means to struggle on the issue of sex. But it’s worth the wait.” Seventeen years later, he was still unmarried, and sex education was a political issue, so it seemed fair to ask whether the congressman — who, according to the same article, once drove a Nissan with a bumper sticker that said “True Love Waits” — practiced what he preached.
“Not as well as I did then,” he said, adding that he still believed sex before marriage was a “sin” and that he wished “we all had more patience.”
Around the time that article ran in National Journal, The Washington Post reported that Scott had taken the general manager of a Charleston lingerie store called Bits of Lace on a trip to an exclusive resort. Less than a year later, anonymous sources told a gossip blog that the two had broken up.
Since then, Scott has occasionally hinted at past and present girlfriends while never mentioning anyone by name, which only led to questions like this from CNN’s Dana Bash in 2017:
“What gives?” she asked about his unmarried status.
Scott then surprised Bash by offering an otherwise unreported tidbit: that he had once been engaged.
“I didn’t know that,” Bash said, to which Scott offered a deadpan reply: “Shhh, don’t tell anyone.”
Apparently nobody told Brian Moniz, the childhood friend.
“No, I don’t think he’s ever been engaged,” he said when I spoke to him in August.
As for any current girlfriend, Moniz said: “I am not aware of anyone at this time.”
Playing things close to the vest doesn’t necessarily play well with everyone. A few weeks ago, Axios reported that Scott’s privacy about his personal life was an issue with conservative donors who might otherwise consider backing his candidacy. “The joke has always been that he is secretly gay or something,” the unnamed operative told me. “I don’t really buy that. But he’s got an interesting history.” The dossier he’d sent included details about Scott having owned property and shared a jet ski with male friends.
Scott is not gay, DeCasper told me, and nobody who knows him suggested otherwise. But the rumor mill is lazy, and the “joke” about the senator’s sexuality still gets repeated. Early last year, for example, Matt Schlapp, the head of the Conservative Political Action Conference, asked me whom I thought Trump might choose as his 2024 running mate. When I mentioned Scott, Schlapp replied: “You think he picks a gay vice president?” (Incidentally, Schlapp, who is married with five kids, was later accused of unwanted groping by a male staffer on Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign. He has denied the allegations.)
According to Moniz, Scott’s bachelorhood is a simple case of being married to his job.
“It’s been a challenge, mainly for the females in his life over the years,” Moniz said. “They get put on the back burner. Women have hung around for a while, and they realize they’re not going to be the top priority right now.”
Bobby Harrell, who has been friends with Scott since the two served together in the South Carolina State House, told me that Scott talked often about how much he admired Harrell’s 44-year marriage and “wished for something like it someday.” In 2018, Scott told Politico that he wanted to have six(!) children once he found “Mrs. Right.”
“Every time my wife talks to him,” Al Jenkins, a longtime friend and current staffer, told me in 2020, “she says, ‘Who is she, and when are we going to meet her?’”
Now, three years later, I had the same questions. Six friends I spoke with said they didn’t know about a woman in his life. Others never returned my calls. The campaign, of course, was well aware that I was trying to get to the bottom of Scott’s love life. They were polite, but not exactly eager to spill.
Finally, with one debate out of the way and the end of summer approaching, Scott’s campaign did agree to make the principal available for a brief interview on the subject.
And so, two weeks ago, I flew to South Carolina to ask a 57-year-old presidential candidate whether he had a girlfriend.
“If I had my druthers, we wouldn’t be doing this,” Scott said.
We were sitting at a conference table at the DoubleTree hotel in North Charleston. Scott was looking sharp in a blue suit with no tie. His head was freshly shaved. A security guard stood sentry outside the door, and Scott was flanked by three different spokespeople. The whole thing felt a little like a one-man news conference, or perhaps a deposition. He came armed with talking points about how American voters cared about their own families, not about his family.
“I have been very protective of my family and my loved ones,” he told me. “I signed up for this. If we make it, she will be signing up for it as well, but at least then she’ll know what she’s getting into. But until then, the only conversation I’m going to have about her in any form or fashion is right now.”
For months, Scott explained, a friend from church had been trying to set him up with a woman the friend knew. Scott had told him that he wasn’t ready for a relationship. Then, late last year, the friend texted Scott the woman’s photo.
“You know what?” Scott recalled telling his friend after seeing the picture. “I’ve prayed on it. Tell me about her again?”
He got the woman’s number. They started talking, hitting it off with discussions about God and using a phone app to do a Bible study together. Scott said he loved her laugh. They had dinner at a downtown Charleston restaurant. She got the steak, he got the swordfish, and they shared even though, as Scott would later learn, she didn’t care for swordfish. They played pickleball, and Scott was embarrassed to find out that he was the “weak man on the court.”
He wouldn’t tell me her name, and the campaign declined to make her available to chat, even off the record. Technically I can’t verify that she exists, except to note that for a presidential campaign to essentially reverse-catfish America would be insane. (By way of corroboration, DeCasper offered that she’s personally hung out with her at the zoo.)
Scott said he had theories about why other campaigns might want to draw attention to his being single. It’s just a way to “sow seeds of doubt” about his campaign, he said, a way “to say that, ‘That guy isn’t one of us.’”
“It’s like a different form of discrimination or bias,” Scott said. “You can’t say I’m Black, because that would be terrible, so find something else that you can attack.”
Throwing himself into work was always kind of a defense mechanism, he said — a response to watching his parents’ marriage blow up when he was a child. “For me, it was the defining moment of my entire life,” he said. “It creates scar tissue. One thing you can do when that happens is run away or run toward something else. And I ran toward purpose.”
What, other than a photo and some prayerful reflection, might have made Scott decide to run toward a relationship at the same time as he’s running, harder than ever, toward his life’s purpose? A cynic would note that, when a person sets out to run for president, nearly everything they do in the lead-up to the election is done with a campaign in mind, and perhaps Scott thought finding a partner would help his candidacy.
As the interview came to a close, I half expected the door to the conference room to swing open, and for the mystery woman to waltz in for a dramatic reveal.
Then again, Scott isn’t the reality TV guy in the race.
“I can’t imagine dragging her onto the campaign trail unless I have the intention of marrying her,” he said. “I hope that happens, to be honest with you.”
He paused.
“I guess I should be careful about how I say that,” Scott said, with a sheepish grin. “Strike that comment.”
He laughed. His relationship and campaign were both new. It’s hard to know, this early, if any of this is real.
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.
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.”
SERIES 2 EPISODE 34: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:43) SPECIAL COMMENT:
Judge Aileen Cannon! You have unsuspected depth! Trump’s novice judicial appointee has shocked Trump World by issuing a gag order not only limiting what he can say and when he can say it during his prosecution and trial for stealing top secret documents, but also limiting when he and his lawyers can see the war plans and other classified information he stole. Cannon’s ruling is almost everything Smith asked for. Any evidence marked classified? Trump can’t discuss it publicly. The evidence marked classified that Trump has lied about and said he DE-classified? Trump can’t discuss THAT publicly. The evidence marked classified that has become public knowledge without being officially de-classified? Trump can’t discuss THAT publicly. If he wants to listen to any of the classified audio it has to be on a hardline headset on a computer that has no internet or network connection! And she also has ruled co-defendant Walt Nauta cannot have access to any of the material, so that's one less chance of a pro-Trump leak. It's stunning.
Also, the Illegal Impeachment Inquiry Trump is stage-managing from behind the scenes is going shockingly badly. It's morphed into the GOP-In-Crisis; in fact, into the GOP in Open Revolt. McCarthy accused Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida of conspiring with Democrat Eric Swalwell of California to get Swalwell placed back on the Intelligence Committee. McCarthy even posits that THAT is a front for something else, saying of Gaetz quote “this is really about an ethics complaint.” Gaetz came back last night and said “This is an abject lie from a sad and pathetic man who lies to hold on to power,” and Congressman you’ll have to be more SPECIFIC than that and USE McCarthy’s name in that statement because otherwise it could be about anybody in your party.
Also: the McCarthy FBI whistleblower about Hunter Biden? A DIFFERENT FBI whistleblower has implied that the other one is lying. And Hunter Biden just sued a former Trump aide for illegally accessing the laptop.
And then there's the other media shoe dropping. A month ago Kristen Welker was one of a dozen reporters who took a meal with three Trump goons. Today, Welker will pre-destroy her career as host of "Meet The Press" to get a sit-down with Trump. The Executive Producer of her show - who didn't make the cut to join the Countdown staff 20 years ago - actually says of this garish soulless nonjournalistic stunt “We are in the business of covering politics. It’s not our job to pick and choose the leaders. The American people get to do that. And so our job is to make sure that the American people understand who the people in power are, what they stand for, and what they plan to do.”
It's not our job to STOP the arsonists, it's just our job to give equal coverage to the firefighters AND the arsonists.
B-Block (26:54) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS:
Mitt Romney's going to retire at the end of his Senate term. I wonder if anyone will notice. My GOD they're treating this like Daniel Webster leaving the Senate in 1850. In fact, Mitt Romney is one of the dumbest, least perceptive people ever in public service - a man so dim that it wasn't until after January 6th that he realized smart colleagues like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley might not actually think Trump had won but were just LYING FOR PERSONAL GAIN AT AMERICA'S COST. And for me, nothing will erase from my memory the day I awoke to find that Mitt had tweeted about me, complained about me, and as Tommy Vietor replied "It’s long past time to break ground on a Both Sides museum in Washington, DC. This comparison of the President of the United States to Keith Olbermann MUST be preserved for future generations." But it what Mitt was complaining ABOUT that will always resonate: that I had despoiled American politics by calling Trump a terrorist.
Three months later Mitt was a virtual hostage inside the Capitol, pinned there by... Trump's terrorists.
A good salesman can make himself sound smarter and more knowledgeable than he actually is. (I've known this for quite a while, but I never gave it a name. So thanks, NYT)
The ability to do that is a skill that has to be mastered in order to play at the upper levels. And just as with any other skill or power, it can be abused and misused to less than honorable ends. With power comes responsibility, and all like that there.
The Articulate Ignorance of Vivek Ramaswamy
As our nation continues its march to 2024, a year that will feature not only a presidential election but also potentially four criminal trials of the Republican front-runner, I’ve been thinking about the political and cultural power of leadership. How much do leaders matter, really? What role does corrupt political leadership play in degrading not just a government but the culture itself?
Let’s talk today about the specific way in which poor leadership transforms civic ignorance from a problem into a crisis — a crisis that can have catastrophic effects on the nation and, ultimately, the world.
Civic ignorance is a very old American problem. If you spend five seconds researching what Americans know about their own history and their own government, you’ll uncover an avalanche of troubling research, much of it dating back decades. As Samuel Goldman detailed two years ago, as far back as 1943, 77 percent of Americans knew essentially nothing about the Bill of Rights, and in 1952 only 19 percent could name the three branches of government.
That number rose to a still dispiriting 38 percent in 2011, a year in which almost twice as many Americans knew that Randy Jackson was a judge on “American Idol” as knew that John Roberts was the chief justice of the United States. A 2018 survey found that most Americans couldn’t pass the U.S. Citizenship Test. Among other failings, most respondents couldn’t identify which nations the United States fought in World War II and didn’t know how many justices sat on the Supreme Court.
Civic ignorance isn’t confined to U.S. history or the Constitution. Voters are also wildly ignorant about one another. A 2015 survey found that Democrats believe Republicans are far older, far wealthier and more Southern than they truly are. Republicans believe Democrats are far more atheist, Black and gay than the numbers indicate.
But I don’t share these statistics to write yet another story bemoaning public ignorance. Instead, I’m sharing these statistics to make a different argument: that the combination of civic ignorance, corrupt leadership and partisan animosity means that the chickens are finally coming home to roost. We’re finally truly feeling the consequences of having a public disconnected from political reality.
Simply put, civic ignorance was a serious but manageable problem, as long as our leader class and key institutions still broadly, if imperfectly, cared about truth and knowledge — and as long as our citizens cared about the opinions of that leader class and those institutions.
Consider, for example, one of the most consequential gaffes in presidential debate history. In October 1976, the Republican Gerald Ford, who was then the president, told a debate audience, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
The statement wasn’t just wrong, it was wildly wrong. Of course there was Soviet domination of Eastern Europe — a domination that was violently reaffirmed in the 1956 crackdown in Hungary and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. The best defense that Ford’s team could muster was the national security adviser Brent Scowcroft’s argument that “I think what the president was trying to say is that we do not recognize Soviet domination of Europe.”
In a close election with Jimmy Carter, the gaffe was a big deal. As the political scientist Larry Sabato later wrote, the press “pounced” and “wrote of little else for days afterward.” As a result, “a public initially convinced that Ford had won the debate soon turned overwhelmingly against him.” Note the process: Ford made a mistake, even his own team recognized the mistake and tried to offer a plausible alternative meaning, and then press coverage of the mistake made an impression on the public.
Now let’s fast-forward to the present moment. Instead of offering a plausible explanation for their mistakes — much less apologizing — all too many politicians deny that they’ve made any mistakes at all. They double down. They triple down. They claim that the fact-checking process itself is biased, the press is against them and they are the real truth tellers.
I bring this up not just because of the obvious example of Donald Trump and many of his most devoted followers in Congress but also because of the surprising success of his cunning imitator Vivek Ramaswamy. If you watched the first Republican debate last week or if you’ve listened to more than five minutes of Ramaswamy’s commentary, you’ll immediately note that he is exceptionally articulate but also woefully ignorant, or feigning ignorance, about public affairs. Despite his confident delivery, a great deal of what he says makes no sense whatsoever.
As The Times has documented in detail, Ramaswamy is prone to denying his own words. But his problem is greater than simple dishonesty. Take his response to the question of whether Mike Pence did the right thing when he certified the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021. Ramaswamy claims that in exchange for certification, he would have pushed for a new federal law to mandate single-day voting, paper ballots and voter identification. Hang on. Who would write the bill? How would it pass a Democratic House and a practically tied Senate? Who would be president during the intervening weeks or months?
It’s a crazy, illegal, unworkable idea on every level. But that kind of fantastical thinking is par for the course for Ramaswamy. This year, for instance, he told Don Lemon on CNN, “Black people secured their freedoms after the Civil War — it is a historical fact, Don, just study it — only after their Second Amendment rights were secured.”
Wait. What?
While there are certainly Black Americans who used weapons to defend themselves in isolated instances, the movement that finally ended Jim Crow rested on a philosophy of nonviolence, not the exercise of Second Amendment rights. The notion is utterly absurd. If anything, armed Black protesters such as the Black Panthers triggered cries for stronger gun control laws, not looser ones. Indeed, there is such a long record of racist gun laws that it’s far more accurate to say that Black Americans secured greater freedom in spite of a racist Second Amendment consensus, not because of gun rights.
Ramaswamy’s rhetoric is littered with these moments. He’s a very smart man, blessed with superior communication skills, yet he constantly exposes his ignorance, his cynicism or both. He says he’ll “freeze” the lines of control in the Ukraine war (permitting Russia to keep the ground it’s captured), refuse to admit Ukraine to NATO and persuade Russia to end its alliance with China. He says he’ll agree to defend Taiwan only until 2028, when there is more domestic chip manufacturing capacity here in the States. He says he’ll likely fire at least half the federal work force and will get away with it because he believes civil service protections are unconstitutional.
The questions almost ask themselves. How will he ensure that Russia severs its relationship with China? How will he maintain stability with a weakened Ukraine and a NATO alliance that just watched its most powerful partner capitulate to Russia? How will Taiwan respond during its countdown to inevitable invasion? And putting aside for a moment the constitutional questions, his pledge to terminate half the federal work force carries massive, obvious perils, beginning with the question of what to do with more than a million largely middle- and high-income workers who are now suddenly unemployed. How will they be taken care of? What will this gargantuan job dislocation do to the economy?
Ramaswamy’s bizarre solutions angered his debate opponents in Milwaukee, leading Nikki Haley to dismantle him on live television in an exchange that would have ended previous presidential campaigns. But the modern G.O.P. deemed him one of the night’s winners. A Washington Post/FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll found that 26 percent of respondents believed Ramaswamy won, compared with just 15 percent who believed Haley won.
The bottom line is this: When a political class still broadly believes in policing dishonesty, the nation can manage the negative effects of widespread civic ignorance. When the political class corrects itself, the people will tend to follow. But when key members of the political class abandon any pretense of knowledge or truth, a poorly informed public is simply unequipped to hold them to account.
And when you combine ignorance with unrelenting partisan hostility, the challenge grows all the greater. After all, it’s not as though members of the political class didn’t try to challenge Trump. But since that challenge came mostly from people Trump supporters loathe, such as Democratic politicians, members of the media and a few Trump-skeptical or Never Trump writers and politicians, their minds were closed. Because of the enormous amount of public ignorance, voters often didn’t know that Trump was lying or making fantastically unrealistic promises, and they shut out every voice that could tell them the truth.
In hindsight, I should have seen all this coming. I can remember feeling a sense of disquiet during the Tea Party revolution. Republican candidates were pledging to do things they simply could not do, such as repealing Obamacare without holding the presidency and Congress or, alternatively, veto-proof congressional majorities. Then, when they failed to do the thing they could never do in the first place, their voters felt betrayed.
There is always a problem of politicians overpromising. Matthew Yglesias recently reminded me of the frustrating way in which the 2020 Democratic primary contest was sidetracked by a series of arguments over phenomenally ambitious and frankly unrealistic policy proposals on taxes and health care. But there is a difference between this kind of routine political overpromising and the systematic mendacity of the Trump years.
A democracy needs an informed public and a basically honest political class. It can muddle through without one or the other, but when it loses both, the democratic experiment is in peril. A public that knows little except that it despises its opponents will be vulnerable to even the most bizarre conspiracy theories, as we saw after the 2020 election. And when leaders ruthlessly exploit that ignorance and animosity, the Republic can fracture. How long can we endure the consequences of millions of Americans believing the most fantastical lies?
"Entitlement" is popularly taken to mean some uncomplimentary things. Republicans like to use that word to shit on people who've worked their entire lives making other people rich, and end up just squeaking by on a small stipend from Social Security, and hoping they don't get sick enough to need more than the bare minimum of coverage provided by Medicare.
In that case, "entitlement" means exactly what it implies. ie: people are in fact entitled to the rewards after a lifetime of effort. Because they fucking earned it.
What we less often apply that word to is the behavior of over-privileged assholes like Lauren Boebert, who do shitty inconsiderate things, and then threaten people with "Don't you know who I am? I have friends who can make your puny little life even more miserable than assholes like me have made it already."
Entitlement is when some dick acts like a dick, and then pretends to be the victim when they get called on it.
Rep. Lauren Boebert booted from ‘Beetlejuice’ musical for disturbance
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) was ejected from the musical “Beetlejuice” in Denver this week after she was accused of vaping, singing, recording the show and being disruptive during the performance.
An incident report obtained by the Colorado Sun says that two patrons were reprimanded and then escorted from the premises for “causing a disturbance” during the musical Sunday night at the city-owned Buell Theatre. The incident report, which does not name the people involved, says the patrons were “issued a warning” during intermission after three complaints were made by other patrons about their behavior.
Keeping up with politics is easy with The 5-Minute Fix Newsletter, in your inbox weekdays. Surveillance footage from the theater published by KUSA, an NBC affiliate in Denver, appears to show Boebert and a man being escorted from their seats. In the hall, Boebert is seen rebuking an usher, at one point giving him the middle finger.
As they were being escorted from the premises, according to the incident report, the pair made statements such as: “Do you know who I am?” and “I am on the board” and “I will be contacting the mayor.” Officers with the Denver Police Department responded to the incident and stayed in the lobby until the pair left the venue, the report says.
Drew Sexton, Boebert’s campaign manager, confirmed to The Washington Post that the congresswoman was escorted out of the performance, but he disputed the alleged behavior cited by the venue.
“I can confirm the stunning and salacious rumors: in her personal time, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert is indeed a supporter of the performing arts (gasp!) and, to the dismay of a select few, enthusiastically enjoyed a weekend performance of Beetlejuice,” he said in a statement. Sexton noted that the Denver Post, the first to report the story, has reviewed the show as “zany,” “outrageous” and a “lusty riot.”
Sexton denied that Boebert was vaping during “Beetlejuice,” saying that heavy fog machines and electronic cigarettes were used during the show, so there might have been “a misunderstanding from someone sitting near her.”
Boebert said on X, formerly Twitter, that she “did thoroughly enjoy the AMAZING Beetlejuice at the Buell Theatre and I plead guilty to laughing and singing too loud!”
“Everyone should go see it if you get the chance this week and please let me know how it ends!” she wrote.
Denver Police Sgt. David Abeyta told The Post that the venue’s private security handled the situation, “so we actually never had any interaction with that incident.”
“It was resolved before we got involved,” he said.
Brian Kitts, director of marketing and communications for Denver Arts and Venues, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday morning. Kitts told the Denver Gazette that Boebert and her guest were booted after “numerous complaints” from fellow patrons about inappropriate behavior.
Before she came to Congress in 2020, Boebert was arrested or summoned at least four times, according to the Denver Post. Boebert, who represents a rural and heavily conservative part of western Colorado, was reelected last year after a recount confirmed she had won the closer-than-expected election. Her Democratic challenger, Adam Frisch, had argued that Boebert’s controversial comments and reputation as a firebrand Republican — she compared the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol to 1776, when the United States declared its independence — were a distraction for her district. She won by 546 votes.
Frisch is challenging Boebert again for her seat in 2024.
“Beetlejuice,” a Broadway adaptation of the 1988 Tim Burton film, is showing at the Buell Theatre until Sept. 17. The venue cautions that the musical “contains strong language, mature references, and a lot of the crazy, inappropriate stuff you would expect from a deranged demon.”
On Sunday, staff received three complaints about the couple sitting in Row E of the orchestra section, the report says. Multiple officials waited until the pair returned to their seats to give them a warning.
“I informed them that our usher team had noticed vaping and also that they were causing a disturbance for the area with noise, singing, using their cellphone, and that they need to be respectful to their neighbors,” an official wrote in the report. “Since, there was already multiple complaints, I informed the patrons that if there was another issue that they would be asked to leave.”
That’s when Boebert and her guest became “argumentative,” saying that “they were in concert with everyone around them,” the report says. Five minutes later, theater officials got another report that the pair were being loud and recording the performance, according to the report. That’s when officials told Boebert and the man to leave.
“They told me they would not leave,” a venue official wrote. “I told them that they need to leave the theatre and if they do not, they will be trespassing. The patrons said they would not leave. I told them I would [be] going to get Denver Police. They said go get them.”
Minutes later, Boebert and her guest left. After they exited the theater, Boebert was seen twirling on the promenade while holding the man’s hand, according to surveillance video.
The man did not appear to be her husband, and his identity is unclear. Boebert announced in May that she was filing for divorce from her husband of two decades. Her husband reportedly threatened their neighbors last year in what authorities described as a neighborhood disturbance. No arrests were made in that case.
Sexton, the Boebert campaign manager, told The Post that Boebert appreciates the venue’s strict enforcement of its no-photo policy. The congresswoman “strongly encourages everyone to go see Beetlejuice.” encourages people to see “Beetlejuice,” he added. “But with a gentle reminder to leave their phones outside of the venue.”
