The legal noose is tightening around Donald Trump’s neck. Although we are still far from seeing the former commander-in-chief outfitted in a prison jumpsuit, Trump faces legal jeopardy on a variety of fronts related to his long history of corruption in the private sector and his malfeasance as President. And make no mistake: as Trump runs out of cards to play, the jeopardy becomes less and less of a political game he can spin in his favor. Things are getting serious.
Several recent developments have improved the odds that Trump will be brought to justice.
On July 1, the Trump Organization and its former Chief Financial Officer, Allen Weisselberg, were indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. for tax fraud, grand larceny, and conspiracy.
An independent investigation, which lasted for five months and included 179 witnesses and 74,000 pieces of evidence, has concluded that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed multiple women and established a "toxic, hostile, abusive" office culture rife with "intimidation" and "fear." Given that kind of "leadership," it should come as no surprise that Cuomo responded grossly inappropriately and defiantly, like some rabid hybrid of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. The asshole even had a video at the ready in which he used pictures of both President Barack Obama and George W. Bush hugging disaster victims in the aftermath of tragedy to show that powerful people hug other people and it's totally normal.
What he didn't have ready was a picture of some other high official who "during a hug, reached under Executive Assistant #1's blouse and grabbed her breast." Cuomo insisted Tuesday that all this behavior is just who he is. "I do banter with people," Cuomo said. "I try to put people at ease. I try to make them smile. I try to show my appreciation and friendship." Yes, nothing makes a work colleague smile like groping their breast.
[Originally posted at John Stohr's Editorial Board substack. Subscribe here.]
Some among us, liberals mostly, appear to believe that a federally enforced vaccine mandate would backfire. This is not unreasonable. After all, the authoritarian holdouts who are prolonging the covid pandemic in this country tell us time and again they will resist getting vaccinated because their individual rights and freedom demand it.
But a national mandate, or a patchwork of state and local mandates, as is usually the case in the United States, will have the opposite effect. I have no doubt about it. The authoritarians among us certainly seem exceptionally strong. After all, they are willing to die before "giving in." In fact, they are exceptionally frail and weak. They will cave almost instantly under the weight of the authority of government and civil society.
Back in 1966, James Meredith, the first black man to enroll as a student at the University of Mississippi, began a solitary march from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi. The Voting Rights Act had been passed the year before, but black voters were still being terrorized and intimidated. Meredith was engaged in a "March Against Fear." Then as now, fear was the tactic being used by racists to keep Negroes from voting. Homegrown terrorism. When Meredith crossed into Mississippi on that march, he was struck down by a man with a shotgun.
He survived. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leader visited him in the hospital and vowed to take up the march from where Meredith had fallen.
As America grapples with yet another surge of COVID-19 and the ongoing erosion of its democracy at the hands of the Republican Party, Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson is off getting tips from Europe's most successful anti-democratic leader, Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán:
We’re in Budapest all this week for Tucker Carlson Tonight and a documentary for Tucker Carlson Originals. Don’t miss our first show here starting tonight at 8pm ET on #FoxNews pic.twitter.com/avZLoc0fD0
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 2, 2021
Ron DeSantis’ executive order making it illegal for teachers to require kids in their classrooms to wear masks to protect the teacher and other kids in the class (and their families) isn’t about masks.
If it was about masks and their health potential, pro or con, he’d be discussing how to reduce the transmission of this deadly virus in Florida, which now accounts for more than 20% of all new Covid cases in America.
At the very least, he’d be showing for concern about the seven children currently fighting for their lives in the ICU at the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in Broward County. Instead, when asked about those children yesterday, he dumped a load of word-salad gibberish on the reporter who asked the question:<
“This has been a really negative thing throughout this whole thing, with some of these, quote, experts, some of the media, somebody can contract a highly transmissible airborne virus and they’re viewed as having done something wrong. That’s just not the way you do it.”
The details of a bipartisan infrastructure compromise have finally emerged, as Senate leaders like Chuck Schumer push for a vote on the bill that many Democrats see as a down payment on the kind of major spending and jobs package the country needs. As policy wonks and Senate staffers pore over details, it does not appear that much has changed from what we knew days before. But it's still important to understand where we started, and where we ended up.
The White House opened with a $2.6 trillion plan, including $111 billion for water with $45 billion for removing lead pipes; but then President Biden started a different track, carrying on negotiations with a group of what was originally a gang of ten senators from both parties. What emerged from that process was this substantially smaller bipartisan infrastructure framework (nicknamed the ‘BIF’), tailored to please conservative Democrats like Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin and a handful of Republican senators.
I’m betting that just about right now, with the COVID-19s Delta Variant causing a surge of hospitalizations and deaths, mostly among unvaccinated people, you might be asking yourself: Where in the world is Dr. Stella Immanuel, the Hydroxychloroquine lady? About a year ago the Houston, Texas-based Immanuel burst onto the national scene at a Washington D.C., press conference on the steps of the Supreme Court building. Organized by Tea Party Patriots – a group that called itself America’s Frontline Doctors, touted Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), the anti-malarial drug, as the answer to COVID. Immanuel, who gave a fiery speech at the event and was subsequently strongly praised by Donald Trump at his afternoon coronavirus press briefing. Now, Immanuel is back in the news with the filing of a $100 million defamation lawsuit against CNN and CNN anchor, Anderson Cooper.
According to Newsweek’s Cammy Pedroja, Immanuel’s claimed that, “in an effort to vilify, demonize and embarrass President [Donald] Trump, Cooper and CNN published a series of statements of fact about Dr. Immanuel that injured her reputation and exposed her to public hatred, contempt, ridicule, and financial injury."
— from Foreign Policy In Focus
It sounded frightening.
Israel’s president thundered it’s “a new kind of terrorism.” The prime minister threatened “strong action.” The Israeli ambassador demanded that state governments in the United States bring the perpetrators to court.
This wasn’t about a missile strike or a cyberattack. It was about ice cream.
Ben & Jerry’s had announced it would be ending production and sale of their treats in Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Israel’s response was extreme maybe, but not really surprising.
The California Correctional Center, a prison in the small Northern California town of Susanville, is closing.
I was pleased when I heard that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation would be shutting down one of its 35 state prisons, and rushed to tell my wife the news.
We both believe prisons do more harm than good and are a waste of taxpayer money.
She cheered, but then reminded me of something important. As in many small towns across the country, the prison industry is the bedrock of the local economy in Susanville, currently home to both California Correctional Center and High Desert State Prison.
This is a very serious question, even if I’m using a bit of clickbait here. I’m not out to get Dr. Fauci, who deserves some sort of Nobel Prize for trying to give straight information to the public, even as Donald Trump was doing everything he could to minimize the pandemic. But there is an important issue of both, our current failings in vaccinating the world, and a system that almost always allows those at the top to escape responsibility for their failures.
I have gone on at length before about the need to vaccinate the world. The spread of the Delta variant should make the point obvious to everyone. The more the virus spreads, the more it has opportunities to mutate.
We are actually fortunate with the Delta variant since it seems our vaccines are still effective in reducing the risk of infection and very effective in reducing the risk of severe illness or death. But this is just luck. If the pandemic spreads enough, we will see more mutations. It is entirely possible that a new strain will develop against which our vaccines provide us little or no protection.
The race for a vacant congressional seat in northeast Ohio was a fierce battle between status quo politics and calls for social transformation. In the end, when votes were counted Tuesday night, transactional business-as-usual had won by almost 6 percent. But the victory of a corporate Democrat over a progressive firebrand did nothing to resolve the wide and deep disparity of visions at the Democratic Party's base nationwide.
One of the candidates—Shontel Brown, the victor—sounded much like Hillary Clinton, who endorsed her two months ago. Meanwhile, Nina Turner dwelled on the kind of themes we always hear from Bernie Sanders, whose 2020 presidential campaign she served as a national co-chair. And while Brown trumpeted her lockstep loyalty to Joe Biden, her progressive opponent was advocating remedies for vast income inequality and the dominance of inordinate wealth over the political system. Often, during the last days of the campaign, I heard Turner refer to structural injustices of what she called "class and caste."
TRUMP III
PART III-A PREQUEL
TRUMP PSYCHIATRIC ISSUES AND THEIR EFFECTS ON HIS POST-PRESIDENTIAL POLITICAL TREMENS (ALSO KNOWN AS POLITICAL WITHDRAWAL DELIRIUM)
We begin here today as promised. No further organizational changes yet. But a couple of points to clear up first. In this series of "Volcano Blogs, all of them end with various Doris Day renditions of “Que Sera, Sera" as my metaphorical marking of a blogs close -- like pissing on a fire hydrant as a territorial blog marker. FYI Factoid: (Invisible segue here) Even if Kurt Cobain wasn’t your favorite vocalist, you’ve heard his song that begins: “Come on, people, now, Smile on your brother, Everybody get together, Try to love one another right now” -- And later in the song -- “Never met a wise man, If so, it’s a woman” -- And: “Just because you’re paranoid, Don’t mean they’re not after you” -- The song was inspired by Cobain's concerns for the mistreatment of Native Americans, and the name of the song is, wait for it, ... wait for it ... “TERRITORIAL PISSINGS.” In Cobain’s explanation of the song's unusual title, he said, and I quote, "In the animal kingdom, the male will often piss in certain areas to claim his territory. And I see macho men reacting towards sex and power in the same way. I’d like to see these lost souls strung up by their balls with pages of ‘Scum Manifesto’ stapled to their bodies.’” I can’t explain, “Scum Manifesto,” because I never read the book or saw the movie.* MY AFTERTHOUGHTS ON THIS ARE MUST READING FOR BOTH GENDERS -- IT COULD CHANGE YOUR LIVES IN EITHER DIRECTION.
The right's strategy on COVID-19 vaccines, as planned and executed by the Republican Party and Fox News, was a simple as it was sinister: sabotage President Joe Biden's rollout by sacrificing the bodies of their own supporters. If they could convince enough of their people to avoid the vaccine, they could keep COVID-19 transmission rates high and garner headlines from easily duped mainstream outlets declaring things like "Biden falls short" or "Biden fails to contain the virus." For a brief moment in early July, it seemed the plan was working, with a series of headlines that seemingly blamed Biden, flatly ignoring the growing partisan divide on vaccine uptake.
Then the delta variant, an extremely contagious and virulent strain of the virus, started tearing through red-state America, creating hot spot maps that neatly correlated to political maps showing rates of support for Donald Trump. There was no longer any denying that a Republican identity is the best predictor of anti-vaccine sentiment. Mainstream media started to pay attention to how much anti-vaccine sentiment was pouring out of Fox News and how popular Republican politicians like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia or Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky were discouraging vaccination. There was no more ignoring the link between Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis selling gear mocking Biden health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci and the soaring rates of COVID-19 in his state. The plan to sabotage the pandemic response and blame Biden was backfiring.
There is a civil war brewing within the Republican Party in Nevada. According to The Las Vegas Sun, tensions began to rise when members of the Clark County Republican Party (CCRP) expressed concern about the state party's director Michael McDonald who is accused of recruiting members of the far-right group The Proud Boys to run for public office.
The move was reportedly an effort to increase the extremist presence in the state's political party. On July 20, CCRP members held a meeting to select officers. However, that meeting was interrupted when individuals affiliated with The Proud Boys crashed it. The publication offered a clear depiction of how the scene erupted.
"It was an ugly scene with echoes of the Jan. 6 riot, except instead of Big Lie insurrectionists trying to take over the Capitol, they were trying to bully their way into a takeover of the county party's moderate leadership," the publication noted.
The House select committee on the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol, according to chairman Bennie Thompson, should “not be reluctant” to include on its witness list Republicans including the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan and others who have knowledge of or may have been implicated in the attack.
Those who would be requested to testify spoke with Donald Trump before, during and after the assault, attended strategy meetings and held rallies to promote the 6 January “Stop the Steal” event, and are accused by Democrats of conducting reconnaissance tours of the Capitol for groups of insurrectionists.
But committee members and legal scholars are grappling to find precedent.
“I don’t know what the precedent is, to be honest,” said Adam Schiff.
There is one.
A little over six months before I was born, the U.S. government began to ration the number of shoes Americans could buy. Three pairs of leather shoes per year. Per person. Max. A few months later, meat and cheese were rationed. Gasoline had been rationed much earlier. Wages and prices were frozen in an attempt to stem wartime inflation.
About eight months before I was born, the government lowered the draft age to eighteen where it remained until the government decided to end the draft entirely in 1973, a little over three weeks shy of my 30th birthday. That was a happy day, though I've had some occasions when I wondered if it was such a good idea to have an all-volunteer army that makes it harder to get American moms and dads to rise up in dissent against politicians keen to send American young people off to exotic places to be killed for spurious reasons. Or, as was the case with Iraq, for no real reason at all. The fact that our soldiers are all volunteers has tended to weaken arguments about going to war in ways that make the burden fall on a largely ignored slice of the American demographic. As one recent president so callously said about a soldier who died in combat: "They knew what they signed on for?" If memory serves, that same presidential former draft dodger also said, without a hint of irony, that people who don't want to fight for this country can leave.
The ongoing farce of Arizona's "fraudit" of 2020 ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona, is largely treated as a joke because the people behind it are prone to spouting such out-of-this-world conspiracy theories. But many smart people, people like Rick Hasen—legal scholar and expert in legislation, election law, and campaign finance; current chancellor's professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine School of Law; and the guy behind Election Law Blog—aren't laughing.
"I'm scared shitless," he told investigative journalist Jane Mayer for The New Yorker. The audit combined with a spate of new election laws stemming from the kind of theories underpinning this action go beyond anything we've seen out the extreme right before. "It's not just about voter suppression," he told Mayer. "What I'm really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count." This is happening, as Mayer exposes, through the efforts of longstanding conservative groups, groups that have posed as mainstream Republican organizations.
Breaking, alarming news:
Fox “News’” top-rated star Tucker Carlson is doing his show live this week from Budapest, Hungary, and heavily featuring Hungary’s president, Viktor Orbán. This is a very, very bad omen for the future of American democracy.
As I noted a few weeks ago, Steve Bannon proudly proclaimed that Hungary’s strongman Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was “Trump before Trump.” I’ve been keeping track of Orbán and Hungary for over 30 years — and you should, too:
In August of 1989, my best friend Jerry Schneiderman and I spent the better part of a week sitting in outdoor cafes on the Buda side of the Danube River, eating extraordinary (and cheap!) food, staying in a grand old hotel, and generally exploring Budapest.
We’ve become so inured to Donald Trump’s proto-fascism that we barely blink an eye when we learn that he tried to manipulate the 2020 election. Yet the most recent revelation should frighten every American to their core.
On Friday, the House oversight committee released notes of a 27 December telephone call from Trump to then acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, in which Trump told Rosen: “Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R congressmen.” The notes were taken by Richard Donoghue, Rosen’s deputy, who was also on the call.
The release of these notes has barely made a stir. The weekend news was filled with more immediate things – infrastructure! The Delta strain! Inflation! Wildfires! In light of everything else going on, Trump’s bizarre efforts in the last weeks of his presidency seem wearily irrelevant. Didn’t we already know how desperate he was?
The following remarks were presented as a lecture at the closing session of the 2021 Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institute of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, New School for Social Research.
" . . . historical processes are created and constantly interrupted by human initiative, by the initium man is insofar as he is an acting being. Hence it is not in the least superstitious, it is even a counsel of realism, to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable, to be prepared for and to expect 'miracles' in the political realm. And the more heavily the scales are weighted in favor of disaster, the more miraculous will the deed done in freedom appear . . . " —Hannah Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" (1961)
This summer, it seemed as if we Americans couldn’t wait to return to our traditional July 4th festivities. Haven’t we all been looking for something to celebrate? The church chimes in my community rang out battle hymns for about a week. The utility poles in my neighborhood were covered with “Hometown Hero” banners hanging proudly, sporting the smiling faces of uniformed local veterans from our wars. Fireworks went off for days, sparklers and cherry bombs and full-scale light shows filling the night sky.
But all the flag-waving, the homespun parades, the picnics and military bands, the flowery speeches and self-congratulatory messages can’t dispel a reality, a truth that’s right under our noses: all is not well with our military brothers and sisters. The starkest indicator of that is the rising number of them who are taking their own lives. A new report by Brown University’s Costs of War Project calculates that, in the post-9/11 era so far, four times as many veterans and active-duty military have committed suicide as died in war operations.
With a blinding flash and a deafening roar, the Atomic Age began over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, when an American B-29 bomber dropped the first nuclear weapon to be used in warfare.
Three days later, another U.S. plane dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. Those two explosions are the only times that atomic weapons have been used against civilian populations—so far. Japan surrendered just days after tens of thousands died in the two nuclear attacks, and World War II finally ended after six long and bloody years of conflict that began with the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. A world war that ended with nuclear fire soon became a “Cold War” as the United States and the Soviet Union increased their atomic arsenals to thousands of nuclear warheads on each side.
Millions saw the televised right-wing assault on the Capitol building on January 6. Now, apologists for the terrorist attack are facing a huge burden: How to paper over these violent actions by former President Donald Trump’s supporters, white evangelical Christians, QAnon followers, and white nationalist groups? The solution: Create multiple and competing narratives, the zanier the better. Insist that the riot was blown out of proportion by the left-leaning mainstream media. Criticize, and vote down, the formation of an independent bi-partisan investigative commission. Keep banging away on the It-Was-Antifa-And-Other-Leftists-Disguised-As-Trumpers who initiated the violence. Claim the demonstrators came with love in their hearts. Blame the assault on Nancy Pelosi. Mock the Capitol police officers; more than 140 of whom were assaulted. Accuse Democrats of milking the January 6 Capitol riot for political purposes.
And, when all else fails, claim victimhood. That’s the narrative brewing among Christian nationalists; jailed demonstrators are being treated unfairly.
Canada’s Trans Mountain pipeline is an environmental and human rights disaster. It transports tar sands, one of the world’s dirtiest fossil fuels, from Alberta to Vancouver, across the territories of Indigenous Peoples who have made their opposition to the pipeline clear. Its 85 spills to date have poisoned lands and waters. And the proposed Trans Mountain expansion would triple the flow of oil and substantially increase the risk of catastrophic spills, particularly in the fragile Burrard Inlet.
No one can call themselves a climate leader and support this pipeline. Yet that’s exactly what Chubb, the world’s largest publicly traded property and casualty insurer, is doing. Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg talks a big game on climate, but Chubb is still insuring Trans Mountain, driving catastrophic climate change and trampling the rights of Indigenous Peoples. When the current certificate of insurance expires on August 31, Greenberg has an opportunity to cut ties with the pipeline. And if he’s serious about being a climate leader, that’s exactly what he’ll do.
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