huh… i wonder what could have changed between 1960 and 1970 
ohhhh. now i see…
socialism!
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May 7, 2023 (Sunday)
Spring has arrived here in all its glory, and it feels like a celebration is in order.
Taking the night off. Will be back at it tomorrow.
[Photo, “Garland,” by Peter Ralston.]
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May 8, 2023 (Monday)
The man authorities have identified as the shooter who murdered eight people and wounded at least seven others at a mall in Allen, Texas, on Saturday, Mauricio Garcia, appears to have been a white supremacist. He sported Nazi tattoos and wore a patch on his vest that said “RWDS,” which stands for “Right Wing Death Squad.” (Hispanic-Americans often identify as white, and as scholar of white power movements Kathleen Belew noted on Twitter, today’s militant right holds together largely because of their interest “in hurting vulnerable communities, antisemitism, anti-Islam, anti-trans, misogynist violence.”)
A search by Aric Toler of the Netherlands-based investigative journalism group Bellingcat turned up what appears to be Garcia’s social media account on an unmoderated Russian site. In his postings, he wrote: “A lot of the stuff going on in f*cking clown world. You better believe their wouldn’t be we’ll convert your children drag queen story hour loser’s running around loose. No [Jewish-controlled government] communist or liberal fake news media under Hitlers watch”.
Garcia had been dismissed from the Army for mental-health reasons three months after entering the service, but the reference to “drag queen story hour losers” reflects the relationship between the rhetoric of the modern-day Republican Party and his self-declared membership in a RWDS.
Beginning in the 1980s, Republican leaders found voters to support their “supply-side” economics, which cut taxes and regulations to concentrate wealth so investors could bolster growth, by turning their base against “liberals.” Calling those who opposed their policies “socialists” out to rig the system to redistribute wealth to minorities and women, they began the process of forging a base that considered itself the only real Americans. That process continued over the decades as right-wing media reinforced the idea. Still, though, leaders focused on their economic policies, especially tax cuts, and emphasized culture wars primarily to turn out voters.
Trump turned that formula on its head, playing directly to the base. He offered its members the anti-Black, anti-immigrant, and antiabortion measures it craved, in exchange for utter commitment to his leadership. His drive for authoritarianism dovetailed with a religious movement to create a new ideology for the Republican Party, one that explicitly rejects democracy.
That argument, articulated most clearly by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, is that the secular principles of liberal democracy—equality before the law, free speech, freedom to go to church or not, academic inquiry, a free press, immigration, companies that can make decisions based on markets rather than morality—destroy virtue by tearing down the sexual and religious guardrails of traditional society. In order to bring that virtue back, right-wing thinkers argue, the government must defend religion and self-sacrifice (although it’s hard to miss that they’re looking for other people to make those sacrifices, not themselves).
Last week, on May 4 and 5, the Conservative Political Action Conference met in Budapest for the second time, and once again, Orbán delivered the keynote address. The theme was the uniting of the radical right across national boundaries. “Come back, Mr President,” Orbán said of Trump’s 2024 presidential bid. “Make America great again and bring us peace.” Orbán claimed his suppression of LGBTQ+ rights, academic freedom, and the media is a model for the world.
Plenty of the people there from the U.S. seemed to agree. “Hungary,” Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) said, “is a beacon.”
In a recorded message, Trump said conservatives were “freedom-loving patriots” who are “fighting against barbarians.” “We believe in tradition, the rule of law, freedom of speech and a God-given dignity of every human life. These are ideas that bind together our movement,” he said. He called for the audience to “stand together to defend our borders, our Judeo-Christian values, our identity and our way of life.”
While conference organizers were celebrating Hungary as the only truly free country in Europe, they were taking advantage of Hungary’s suppression of the media to permit only hand-picked journalists to cover the event. Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake said that “truth-tellers and peacemakers” were being destroyed by “fake news,” as they call every journalist who criticizes them.
Jacob Heilbrunn of the National Interest was one of those barred from the conference. He watched from his hotel room and wrote in Politico, “Throughout, the idea was clear: Liberalism is synonymous with tyranny.”
This ideology is behind the right-wing attacks on immigrants, LGBTQ Americans, the media, reproductive rights, and education. Florida, led by governor Ron DeSantis, has been out front on these issues, but other Republican-dominated states are following suit. Eager to stay at the head of the “movement,” Trump recently claimed that universities are “dominated by marxist maniacs & lunatics” and vowed to bring them under control of the radical right. “He will impose real standards on American colleges and universities,” his website says, “to include defending the American tradition and Western civilization.”
That formulation is also what enables the very people who are taking away others’ rights to claim that they are the ones being persecuted. The reference to right-wing death squads on Garcia’s vest refers to former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose goons murdered thousands of political opponents, often by tossing them from helicopters. Since the 2016 Trump campaign, modern right-wing activists in the U.S. wear T-shirts offering “free helicopter rides,” and saying “Pinochet did nothing wrong.”
These ideas are embraced only by a minority in the United States, but that minority is working hard to cement its power by gaming the system. Election lawyer Marc Elias recently warned that “we cannot out-organize voter suppression” and that the myth that we can “minimizes the real world effects of repeated, targeted suppression laws. It shifts the burden from the suppressors to the voters. It suggests that victims of voter suppression simply need to be better ‘organized.’”
He notes that Ohio, Arkansas, South Dakota, Idaho, and Florida have all passed voter suppression laws this year and that the new laws put in place after 2020 have worked. Minority and youth voting have dropped significantly. Since 2008, Black voting in states dominated by Democrats has increased by 1.8 points; in Republican-dominated states it has dropped by four points. In Georgia, Black participation rates dropped from 47.8% to 43.2% between 2018 and 2022. Hispanic participation dropped from 27.6% to 25.1%, and the youth vote dropped from 33% to 26%.
Voter suppression is not “campaign tactics,” Elias warns. It is “the illegal and immoral deprivation of constitutional rights.”
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the first and the last parts always struck me as contradictory
i realized now it’s because i’ve always interpreted “god given” as meaning “innate”. the christian fascists instead believe it’s only given to some - probably their twisted reading of “chosen people” - meaning their perceived enemies lack human dignity… and thus are barbarians, inhuman, etc
which is pretty scary when you think about it, and explains why rwds can be a thing 
that is… stark.
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May 9, 2023 (Tuesday)
President Biden spoke to reporters today after his meeting with House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) about raising the debt ceiling. “I just finished, I thought, a productive meeting with the congressional leadership about the path forward to make sure America does not default—I emphasize does not default on its debt for the first time in history,” he began. “And I’m pleased but not surprised to hear [the] Republican minority leader of the United States Senate saying…at our meeting that the United States is not going to default. It never has, and it never will. And he’s absolutely correct.” The teams will continue to meet before the principals reconvene on Friday.
Biden went on to lay out the differences between his plan and that of the Republicans under McCarthy. He began by warning that a default would create a “significant recession,” devastating retirement accounts and increasing the cost of borrowing. He quoted Moody’s Analytics that nearly 8 million Americans would lose their jobs and added that our international reputation would be ruined.
“Default is not an option,” he repeated. “America is not a deadbeat nation. We pay our bills.” Congress avoided default three times under Trump “without once—not one time—creating a crisis, rattling the markets, or undermining the unshakable trust the world has in America’s commitment to paying its bills.” Biden noted that Trump drove the debt up significantly and that in his own first two years he had reduced the debt by an unprecedented $1.7 trillion.
He reiterated that he is happy to negotiate over the budget, which entails future spending, but not over raising the debt ceiling, which enables the government to pay for bills already incurred.
Then Biden laid out the differences between his budget proposal and the newly released guidelines offered by the House Republicans. He noted that his budget has $3 trillion in cuts that the House Republicans oppose because they end benefits for corporations and the wealthy. His budget saves the country $200 billion by permitting Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, and cuts $30 billion in tax subsidies for oil companies—which, he noted, made $200 billion in profits last year.
His budget also funds the Internal Revenue Service to enable it to stop tax cheats; the Congressional Budget Office says that will raise $200 billion. Biden also wants to increase the number of inspectors general in the government to watch how money is spent, citing estimates that each dollar spent on inspectors general saves $10 in wasteful spending. The Republican plan would cut all of these measures, making suspect their claim that they want to address the deficit.
He added that he wants the wealthiest Americans and corporations to “start to pay some of their fair share.”
In contrast, the House Republicans have called for cuts, without specifying where they would come from. Biden noted that the general cut McCarthy claims to support will hurt Americans badly, and the math simply doesn’t work on his insistence that he won’t cut popular programs. He also pointed out that McCarthy is disingenuous when he says Biden refused to meet with him for 97 days. Biden reminded listeners that he told McCarthy they could meet when McCarthy came up with a plan. Five days after he did so, Biden invited him to a meeting.
In questions from the press, Biden noted that lawmakers, including Republican lawmakers, don’t want the government to default on its obligations. He also suggested he is considering invoking the Fourteenth Amendment, which declares the national debt inviolable, but worries that invoking it to solve this manufactured crisis will involve lengthy litigation. Finally, after reminding a reporter that McCarthy has not actually offered a specific plan but rather made a general call for cuts without saying where, he offered the favorable sign that all the lawmakers “agreed that…defaulting on the debt is off the table.”
Also today, a jury in New York reached a decision in the civil case brought against former president Donald Trump for rape, sexual abuse, and defamation. After just three hours of deliberations, the jury found him not liable for rape, but liable for sexual assault and defamation. It awarded accuser E. Jean Carroll $5 million in damages.
It is a dramatic vindication of Carroll, and it complicates Trump’s run for the presidency in the 2024 election. In his deposition he reaffirmed his words in the Access Hollywood tape about how stars can sexually assault women. While his base supporters will not care about this verdict, lots of women will, and it raises the issue of the many other women who have accused him of assault. In Just Security, Ryan Goodman and Norman L. Eisen reminded readers that “Americans generally consider sexual assault incompatible with serving in elected office or positions of public trust.”
Also, strikingly, at the end of the trial, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan advised the jurors not to identify themselves—“not now and not for a long time”—out of concerns for their safety. National security analyst Juliette Kayyem reported the judge’s warning and noted that “Trump’s strongest legacy will always be violence as an extension of our democratic processes.” Legal analyst Joyce White Vance added, “It’s a remarkable thing when jurors have to be cautioned that revealing their identities could put them at risk…when the defendant was the former president of the United States.”
Should Trump get the Republican nomination—and right now he is the frontrunner—the Republican Party will have nominated for the presidency a man a jury found liable for sexual assault and defamation, and against whose followers a judge had to warn a jury to take precautions.
It’s not a great look.
Also today, Mark Morales, Evan Perez, and Gregory Krieg of CNN reported that federal prosecutors have filed criminal charges against Representative George Santos (R-NY), famous for the lies he told in his 2022 campaign for election. The charges are sealed, but we should learn more soon: Santos is expected in court as soon as tomorrow.
His troubles complicate matters for McCarthy, who badly needs Santos’s vote to hold his slim majority. If Santos has to resign, it seems likely that angry voters in Santos’s district will turn back to a Democratic representative. There is nothing in the House rules that prevent Santos from participating in debates and votes while under indictment. Indeed, he could continue to serve even after a conviction, but McCarthy told the CNN reporters that anyone found guilty of a crime should resign.
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Lock him up.
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THIS is insane.
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i get the point generally, though not for the current gop. you don’t want a successful prosecution on a unjust law to stop that person from running to overturn that law
( now if only the same logic applied to the voters )
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May 10, 2023 (Wednesday)
This morning, federal prosecutors charged Representative George Santos (R-NY) with seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives, and one count of stealing public funds. The charges are tied to his campaign fundraising and unemployment fraud; prosecutors say he received about $25,000 in unemployment insurance benefits during 2020 and 2021, during the worst of the pandemic, when he was, in fact, making about $120,000 a year.
Santos pleaded not guilty and was released on $500,000 bail and immediately began to fundraise off his arrest.
This is another embarrassment for the Republicans. House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House, has championed Santos in ads as “the next generation of Republican leadership.” And today, while the House Republicans were in the midst of a press conference about their plan to crack down on unemployment fraud, news broke that one of their own has been charged with it. Ironically, Santos is a co-sponsor of the bill.
With the news about Santos this morning and the news last night of former president Trump’s liability for sexual abuse and defamation, the release this morning of a report from the House Judiciary Committee, led by Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), looked as if it was designed to be a distraction.
The report insisted that “that Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails were real”—by which the Republicans meant to say that the idea there was something incriminating on them was real—rather than possibly Russian disinformation, as a letter from former intelligence officials said when the story first broke. The report promised to prove that “senior intelligence community officials and the Biden campaign worked to mislead American voters.”
But the report was a bizarre effort. Despite the breathless allegations in it, the 65-page document seems to prove that the former intelligence officials who said the news story about the laptop had the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation effort believed what they were saying and went through the proper channels at the Central Intelligence Agency to clear their statement. The person who did appear to be trying to make a political statement was Trump’s loyalist director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe.
Journalist Marcy Wheeler carefully broke the report down piece by piece on Twitter (linked below if anyone’s interested), but she was one of the few media figures even to bother to mention it. Jordan is well known for crafting propaganda for right-wing media; perhaps that was his intention here.
A press conference the House Oversight Committee also held this morning got more attention than Jordan’s report, but it, too, was a fizzle. The committee announced the conference on Monday, May 8, when committee chair Representative James Comer (R-KY) promised supporters to unleash “judgment day” on the Biden White House. Republican members of the committee have made much of what they call “the Biden family’s influence peddling enterprise,” but today’s conference revealed nothing new: Biden’s son and brother and their associates worked with private companies that received about $10 million in investment from China and Romania. There is no evidence that those payments were illegal.
The “Biden family” is the term the right-wing Republicans are using to make it sound as if the president was part of the business dealings of his son Hunter and brother James, but they have turned up no evidence that President Joe Biden was part of their businesses or received any money in relation to them. Further, without evidence that the payments were illegal—and the Republicans have not charged that they were—they are relying on innuendo to smear the president.
The top Democrat on the committee, Jamie Raskin (D-MD), said that “there’s a lot of innuendo and a lot of gossip taking place and much of it is recycled from prior claims.”
When asked about the lack of evidence tying President Biden to corruption, Oversight Committee chair Representative James Comer (R-KY) said, “I don’t think anyone in America…would think that it’s just a coincidence that nine Biden family members have received money…. We believe that the president has been involved in this from the very beginning.” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) was clearer. He told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo, “You have to infer what’s happening here…you’re not gonna get necessarily hard proof.”
The headline on a New York Times story about the report was hardly what Comer had hoped. It read: “House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden.”
Indeed, in the Washington Post, Philip Bump wrote, “The wider House Oversight’s net, the more often it catches Trump.” He noted that the Biden family doesn’t, in fact, have a family business. But, of course, the Trump family does have a business, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) estimates that Trump’s businesses made as much as $160 million when he was president. That doesn’t include the money his children—who, unlike Hunter Biden, were members of the administration—raked in both during his term and afterward, like the $2 billion investment a Saudi fund overseen by Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman made in Jared Kushner’s new private equity firm shortly after he left the White House.
In more substantive news, data released today from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that inflation is continuing to slow down. April marked the tenth month in a row of slower price increases for an annual pace slightly under 5%. Housing prices were the biggest contributor to that inflation.
Biden was in a Republican-held New York state district today, at SUNY Westchester Community College, to warn about the dangers of the Republican threats to crash the economy by refusing to lift the debt ceiling. He had won that district in 2020, and the Republican who took the seat there in 2022, Mike Lawler, won by less than a percentage point. Biden made it a point to distinguish, yet again, between extremist MAGA Republicans and reasonable Republicans, calling Lawler one of the latter.
As Jonathan Lemire, Lauren Egan, and Danielle Muoio Dunn wrote in Politico, it seems Biden is hoping to break the Republican phalanx against raising the debt ceiling by reaching out to Republicans whose reelection is in doubt, although Lawler said Biden told him he was not there to pressure him. The journalists noted that the White House recently called out the toll that McCarthy’s recent bill would take on the 18 congressional districts that Biden won and where Republicans were elected in 2022.
Today, Biden emphasized the enormous costs of the cuts the Republicans insist they require before they will permit a raising of the debt ceiling, including, Biden emphasized, 30,000 federal law enforcement officers: “11,000 FBI agents, 2,000 Border agents, DEA agents, and so on.”
He warned that the Republican plan will also cut veterans’ benefits and noted that the Republicans keep calling him a liar when he identifies cuts they are demanding. While the vagueness in their language enables them to insist they would not cut particular programs, Biden pointed out that the math doesn’t add up without huge cuts. Anything they intend to protect, they would have identified in writing. Until that happens, the necessary math says that we should assume everything is on the table.
If they don’t get those cuts, they say, they will crash the economy, costing 8 million Americans their jobs, according to Moody’s Analytics.
“This is a manufactured crisis,” Biden said. “And there’s no question about America’s ability to pay its bills. America has the strongest economy in the world, and we should be cutting spending and lowering the deficit without a needless crisis, in a responsible way.”
In contrast, former president Trump tonight pushed the country toward default, ignoring that his own massive tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations sent the deficit skyrocketing and that Congress raised the debt ceiling without conditions three times during his term to cover those shortfalls. “I say to the Republicans out there, Congressmen, Senators: if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default…Democrats will absolutely cave,” he said.”
Trump was speaking at what CNN billed as a “Town Hall” in front of a crowd of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents, but the event quickly turned into a Trump rally. Trump played to the audience, which laughed at his attacks on E. Jean Carroll and cheered on the constant stream of lies that are by now a set performance. He steamrolled journalist Kaitlan Collins, who tried but could not counter his stream of lies. When he finished, the audience gave him a standing ovation.
A CNN media personality told Daily Beast media reporter Justin Baragona, “It is so bad. I was cautiously optimistic despite the criticism. It is awful. It’s a Trump infomercial. We’re going to get crushed.” A senior Trump advisor told senior NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Garrett Haake that the campaign team “is thrilled with how the night went.” The person called the event a “home run” and said “when the lefts melting down, we know it was a good day.”
Maybe. But according to legal analyst Andrew Weissman, Trump’s embrace of the January 6 rioters and promise to pardon them if he’s reelected feeds a potential case against him. He made similarly revealing comments about his theft and retention of documents marked classified. It was that very kind of indiscretion that enabled Carroll’s lawyers to beat him in court.
More important, though, while Trump’s base will love his performance, watching his lies and cruelty while his supporters laugh and cheer him on will remind voters of exactly what they worked so hard to reject in 2020. A Biden campaign advisor told NBC News White House correspondent Mike Memoli: “Weeks worth of damning content in one hour…. It was quite efficient." It might turn out that, as journalist Ana Navarro-Cárdenas tweeted, “[Joe Biden] is the winner of tonight’s town-hall.”
As Biden tweeted after the performance: “It’s simple, folks. Do you want four more years of that?”
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May 11, 2023 (Thursday)
At 11:59 p.m. tonight, the COVID-19 public health emergency ends by order of the Department of Health and Human Services. Today, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre noted that more than 270 million Americans have received at least one shot of COVID-19 vaccine and the U.S. has been the largest single donor of vaccines to the global community, sharing nearly 700 million doses with 117 countries.
The end of the declared pandemic shifts dealing with COVID away from an emergency status but it does not mean the end of public health concerns about the illness. Vaccines and treatments will still be widely available and, at least in the short term, at little to no cost, while the administration will continue to research long COVID and to help those experiencing it. What will change immediately is the emergency waivers that expanded Medicaid and Medicare telehealth coverage during the worst of the crisis, as well as certain reporting requirements.
The other thing that will change is that the emergency health authority the Trump administration put in place in March 2020 to turn migrants back at the border will end. That authority is known as Title 42, and it can be invoked to keep out illness. Title 42 will end along with the public health emergency, and the normal, congressionally passed, system of immigration laws will once again be the law of the land. Those laws are known as Title 8.
Republicans have demanded the continuation of Title 42 as a general immigration measure to keep out migrants, since it overrides the law that individuals are allowed to request asylum in the U.S. Although immigration has been central to the U.S. since the beginning, far-right Republicans now adhere to what is known as the “great replacement theory,” the idea that immigration will destroy a nation’s culture and identity (a theory Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán used with great success to cement his power). But Title 42 is an emergency public health authority, and if the emergency is over, the rule doesn’t apply.
President Biden sent an immigration bill to Congress on his first day in office to modernize and fund immigration processes during a time of unprecedented global migration, and the Biden administration has continued to beg Congress to pass new legislation that will adequately fund border enforcement and immigration courts—which currently have backlogs of more than 1.6 million people whose cases take an average of five years to get decided—and provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants including the “Dreamers” who were brought to the U.S. as children and have known no other home.
No such measure has passed, as Republicans refuse to accept any bill that allows for a path to citizenship, even for the Dreamers, and Democrats, who would like to expand immigration, refuse at the very least to agree to any bill without that provision in it. Today the House Republicans passed a bill that would fund the border wall that Trump demanded (and last night claimed to have finished) and significantly harden the border with new agents and more restrictive policies. Two Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the measure. Biden said he would veto the bill if it came to him because it “does very little to actually increase border security while doing a great deal to trample on the Nation’s core values and international obligations.”
On February 2, 2021, less than two weeks into his term, Biden signed Executive Order 14010 to create a regional framework to address migration by addressing its root causes. The Biden administration says its “approach to border management is grounded in this strategy—expanding legal pathways while increasing consequences for illegal pathways, which helps maintain safe, orderly, and humane border processing.”
Vice President Kamala Harris took the lead in the “diplomatic efforts to address root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras,” and in July 2021 she released a report on strategies to slow migration from the region. In June 2022, at the 9th Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, the administration helped to bring to reality a long-standing realization among many countries that migration must be addressed on a regional level rather than with patchwork attempts by individual nations. The U.S. worked to get 21 governments to sign on to “a comprehensive response to irregular migration and forced displacement in the Western Hemisphere,” known as the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection.
In an interview today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken emphasized the regional scope of immigration measures, noting Mexico’s commitment to take 1,000 people a day from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba, as well as new rules that migrants cannot apply for asylum in the U.S. if they have not applied for it in other countries they have traveled through, with the hope of building a “shared sense of responsibility…across the hemisphere.” The administration is also backing 100 brick-and-mortar regional processing centers to enable migrants to determine if they are eligible for admission to the U.S. before they leave their home countries.
It is not entirely clear what the long-term effects of the return to normal immigration law will be. In the short term, it is likely that there will be a surge as human smugglers tell hopeful migrants that the border is now open. At a press conference today, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas tried to undercut them: “I want to be very clear,” he said. “Our borders are not open. People who cross our border unlawfully and without a legal basis to remain will be promptly processed and removed.”
Still, expecting a surge, the administration has moved personnel to the border, including more than 1,400 Department of Homeland Security staff, 1,000 processing coordinators, and an additional 1,500 troops. They have moved $332 million to communities near the border to help them handle an influx of migrants.
The return to enforcement of Title 8 will likely not, itself, be a big shock to the system. Between October 2022 and March 2023, only about 40% of migrants were processed under Title 42, and that number has continued to drop. Most were already being processed under Title 8.
Having more effect was the implementation of a new application system for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua in January, directing them to apply for an admission interview on their phones and permitting 30,000 a month to enter the U.S. for two years if they pass a background check and have an eligible sponsor. A similar system had been in place for migrants from Venezuela since October.
An attempt to cross into the U.S. illegally would shut off that option, though, and in the weeks after the policy went into effect, migration from those regions dropped by more than 90%. Those trying to use the app say it is broken and hard to use; the administration counters by saying officers need more resources to handle the volume of calls.
Yesterday, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who chartered a plane to fly unsuspecting migrants who were legally in the U.S. to Martha’s Vineyard last fall, signed a measure to rid the state of undocumented immigrants entirely. “This is something that is the responsibility of Joe Biden,” he said. “This is a responsibility that he has defaulted on really from day one of his presidency. Obviously if we had a different administration it would be a lot easier to actually deal with the problem at its source.”
“We are…a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws,” Mayorkas said today. “We are doing everything possible to enforce those laws in a safe, orderly, and humane way. We are working with countries throughout the region, addressing a regional challenge with regional solutions. We again, yet again, call on Congress to pass desperately needed immigration reform and deliver the resources, clear authorities, and [modernized] processes that we need.”
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May 12, 2023 (Friday)
For all the predictions about what would happen when the Title 42 emergency health authority that prohibited most immigration ended just before midnight yesterday, the reality turned out to be pretty…unremarkable. According to Rachel Treisman, Stephania Corpi, and Emily Olson of NPR, the southern border was not chaotic after midnight last night. Instead there was “a relative sense of calm, if also uncertainty.” The number of crossings remained steady.
Juan Montes, Alicia A. Caldwell, and Michelle Hackman of the Wall Street Journal suggested that, in fact, crossings dropped when the emergency rule ended and the normal regulations, known as Title 8, resumed. Migrants had rushed to get to the U.S. before the rules changed, the journalists said. They also noted that the relative calm may not last, as the Biden administration is getting criticism in the U.S. from both those who want easier immigration policies and those who want harsher ones.
The Biden administration has generally barred migrants crossing illegally from requesting asylum, and those deported to their country of origin will face a five-year ban on re-entry. Trying to enter the country again could bring criminal charges. The administration is trying to push asylum requests to an online application, although those trying to use it insist it is hard to use (the administration counters that it is understaffed and so appointments are hard to get). The administration maintains it wants to open up legal pathways to immigration while cracking down on unauthorized crossings.
The American Civil Liberties Union and immigrant rights organizations have sued the administration over the new restrictions, saying the restrictions on asylum are illegal; the ACLU successfully sued the Trump administration with a similar argument.
From the far right, today former Trump advisor Stephen Miller took to Twitter to announce that his organization had just filed a lawsuit “to shut down Biden’s plan to flood America with illegal aliens by the millions.” He called it a “dire, dire hour for the United States of America.” Miller is an adherent of the “great replacement theory,” a white nationalist belief that nonwhite immigration threatens the traditional culture of the nation.
In Congress, House Republicans have indicated they want to add the immigration bill they passed yesterday to harden the border, including funding to build Trump’s border wall, to their demands for passage of a measure to raise the debt ceiling. Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) today said, “Every day that the President continues to dilly dally, in my mind, the price goes up, not down.… You want a debt ceiling increase? You want to go fund the operations of government? Then fix the damn border, Mr. President.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported today that if the debt ceiling is not raised, there is “a significant risk that at some point in the first two weeks of June, the government will no longer be able to pay all of its obligations.”
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May 13, 2023 (Saturday)
On the day before Mother’s Day, I usually post about the origins of the holiday in the 1870s, when Boston reformer Julia Ward Howe decided she would create a “Mothers’ Day” to bring women together to end war. Tonight, though, I have just come from the wedding of our fabulous producer for the Now & Then podcast, where almost the whole team gathered to celebrate, and am thinking about family and how often it has nothing to do with blood and everything to do with chance and affinity.
And that made me reach back a bit farther this year, to a piece I wrote a few years ago about another kind of family….
Those of us who are truly lucky have more than one mother. They are the cool aunts, the elderly ladies, the family friends, even the mentors who whip us into shape. By my count, I’ve had at least eight mothers. One of the most important was Sally Adams Bascom Augenstern.
Mrs. A., a widow who had played cutthroat bridge with my grandmother in the 1950s, lived near my family in Maine in the summer. I began vacuuming and weeding and painting for her when I was about 12, but it wasn’t long before my time at her house stopped being a job. She was bossy, demanding, sharp as a tack…and funny and thoughtful, and she remembered most of the century. She would sit in her rocking chair by the sunny window in the kitchen, shelling peas and telling me stories while I washed the floor with a hand sponge to spin out the time.
Sally (not Sarah) Bascom was born on December 25, 1903. (That made her almost a full year older than Millard Robinson, a local fisherman who seemed ancient; she loathed that age gap.) She was the oldest of six children and spent her youth taking care of the younger ones. When I once asked her what was the most important historical event in her lifetime, this woman who had lived through the Depression and both world wars answered without hesitation: “the washing machine.” It had freed her and her mother from constant laundry. She could finally have some leisure time, which she spent listening to the radio and driving in cars with boys. Because her mother always needed her at home, it was not she, but all her younger siblings, who went to college. By the time Mrs. A. was an adult, she was certain she wanted no part of motherhood.
Mrs. A. never forgave her sister for driving her Model T through a field. She saved aluminum foil not because of WWII, but because of WWI. She supported herself and refused to marry until she met an older man who offered to take her traveling; they had a quickie wedding and set off for Banff, where they looked at mountains and watched the bears pilfer trash.
She destroyed her knees playing tennis, so she would weed the garden by staggering to a lawn chair set up there. She loved snapdragons and nicotiana, veronica and irises and wild roses. After Mr. Augenstern died, she drove herself to and from Florida once a year in a giant old Cadillac with “Arrive Alive” on the license plate holder; she drove like a bat out of hell. She played bridge with terrifying intensity. And she always refused to be seen in public unless she was in a dress with her hair pinned up and her pearls on.
Mrs. A. laughed at me when I fell in love with history and tried to tell her that people changed the world because of their beliefs. “Follow the money, Heather,” said the woman whose income depended on her knowledge of the stock market. “Don’t pay attention to what they say; pay attention to who’s getting the money.” I listened. And then I learned as I watched her lose my grandmother’s generation and then work to make friends with my mother’s generation. And when they, too, died, she set out, in her eighties, to make friends with my generation. Every day was a new day.
Mrs. A. left me her linens, her gardening coat, and this photo of her and her siblings: Frances (who died young), Phyllis, Carlton, Guy, and Nathan. She also left me ideas about how to approach both history and life. I’ve never met a woman more determined never to be a mother, but I’m pretty sure that plan was one of the few things at which she failed.
Thinking of her, and all the wonderful women like her who mother with or without the title, on this Mother’s Day.
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May 14, 2023 (Sunday)
Lots going on today, but I have been on the road and my battery is down to a tiny sliver of red. Headed for bed to recharge and will be back at it with a will tomorrow.
The good news is that Buddy has far more time to play with his camera when I’m away. Here is his newest sunrise, taken sometime this week in the wee hours while I was typing in New York City. His office definitely beats mine.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
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May 15, 2023 (Monday)
On Saturday, May 13th, President Joe Biden spoke to the graduating class at Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C. In his speech about “excellence, leadership, and truth and service,” Biden singled out white supremacy “as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland.”
Biden called for Americans to reject political extremism and violence, and to protect fundamental rights and freedoms for women to choose and for transgender children to be free. He called for affordable healthcare and housing and the right to raise your family and retire with dignity. He urged the graduates to “stand with leaders of your generation who give voice to the people, demanding action on gun violence,” and to stand “against books being banned and Black history being erased…. To stand up for the best in us.”
While Biden based his remarks on former president Trump’s declaration after the August 2017 Unite the Right Rally that “there are very fine people on both sides,” there were plenty of examples from just this week that he could have used.
Last night, Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo broke the story that the digital director for right-wing representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) appears to be Wade Searle, a devoted follower of white supremacist leader Nick Fuentes. Fuentes has openly embraced Nazism and Russian president Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism, and he is one of those to whom the alt-right Groypers look up.
Although Fuentes calls the Groypers “Christian conservatives,” historian of the far right in the U.S. Nicole Hemmer told Walker: “The Groypers are essentially the equivalent of neo-Nazis…. They are attached to violent events like Jan. 6. Nick Fuentes, as sort of the organizer of the Groypers, expresses Holocaust denialism, white supremacy, white nationalism, pretty strong anti-women bigotry, he calls for a kind of return to Twelfth Century Catholicism. They’re an extremist group that is OK with violence.”
Walker has also identified an intern in Gosar’s office as another Fuentes follower.
A February study by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that conducts independent research on religion, culture, and public policy, found that the so-called Christian nationalism at the heart of those like Fuentes is closely linked with a willingness to commit violence to make the U.S. a white Christian nation. The PRRI poll showed that nearly 20% of those who sympathize with Christian nationalism agreed they were “willing to fight” to take the nation back to what they incorrectly believe it always was.
Maria Cramer of the New York Times noted yesterday that while no one actually knows much about Daniel Penny, a white man who was recently charged with choking Jordan Neely, a homeless Black man, to death on a subway in New York, right-wing politicians and supporters have rallied around Penny. They seem to see him as a symbol of a powerful man who took matters into his own hands to restore order—although the events that led to the choking are still unclear—much as they lionized Kyle Rittenhouse after he killed two people and wounded another at a Black Lives Matter rally in 2020. Florida governor Ron DeSantis tweeted: “We must defeat the Soros-Funded DAs, stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets for law abiding citizens.”
Historian Thomas Zimmer explained the danger: “All strands of the Right—leading Republicans, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base, the donor class—are openly and aggressively embracing rightwing vigilante violence,” he wrote. “This sends a clear message: It encourages white militants to use whatever force they please to “fight back” against anything and anyone associated with ‘the Left’ by protecting and glorifying those who have engaged in vigilante violence—call it the Kyle Rittenhouse dogma.”
In Washington this weekend, about 150 masked members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front marched toward the U.S. Capitol, chanting, “life, liberty, victory.”
Professor of journalism at New York University Jay Rosen noted on MSNBC on May 11, the day after CNN gave Trump the space to hold what amounted to a political rally, that journalists could better cover this moment in our history by focusing not on the horse race strategy, but on the consequences for the country if Trump wins again. How will American life change? Who will benefit? Who will suffer? He says the question should be “not the odds, but the stakes” as a principle for better campaign coverage.
A lawsuit filed today in New York by Noelle Dunphy, a woman who says Trump ally Rudy Giuliani hired her in January 2019 to manage his media presence, documents the sordid world she observed in her two years working for Giuliani. He promised her a salary of $1 million a year but said he couldn’t pay her until his divorce was final and, ultimately, paid her only small amounts of cash. In her account, he seemed to become obsessed with her, forcing her into sex and trying to dominate her. She is suing Giuliani, his companies, and 10 unidentified individuals over “unlawful abuses of power, wide-ranging sexual assault and harassment, wage theft, and other misconduct” and is asking for $10 million in compensation and damages.
The story of her time with Giuliani, whom she describes as a chronically alcoholic sexual abuser prone to racist and sexist outbursts, is bad enough—and she claims to have recordings—but her other allegations are politically incendiary. She claims to have heard Giuliani say that he was selling presidential pardons for $2 million a pop, splitting the proceeds with Trump, and that Giuliani told her on February 7, 2019, ”about a plan that had been prepared for if Trump lost the 2020 election." Specifically, Giuliani told Ms. Dunphy that Trump’s team would claim that there was ‘voter fraud’ and that Trump had actually won the election…. That same day, Giuliani had Ms. Dunphy sit in on a speakerphone conversation about a potential business opportunity involving a $72 billion dollar gas deal in China.”
Also of note is her claim that, since part of her job was managing emails, Giuliani gave her access to his email account. The system stored at least 23,000 emails on her own personal computer, including “privileged, confidential, and highly sensitive” emails from, to, or concerning Trump, his children Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump; Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; Trump’s lawyers and advisors; media figures including Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson; and so on.
There are a number of stories in the news today that wrap up long-standing issues. John Durham, the special counsel picked by Trump loyalist attorney general William Barr to undermine the FBI investigation into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election, released a report today finding fault with the categorization of the FBI’s initial investigation into the Russia attempt to swing the 2016 election to Trump.
Representative George Santos (R-NY) has pleaded guilty to charges of theft in Brazil, but insists he is not guilty of the federal charges against him for financial crimes. He says he will not resign from Congress.
As predicted by everyone who correctly attributed the high cost of eggs late last year to the deadly avian flu and price gouging, there are now so many eggs on the market that the wholesale price is $0.94 a dozen, down from $5.46 a dozen six months ago.
The number of migrants at the southern border has dropped 50% since the end of the pandemic restriction known as Title 42 on May 11.
And finally, Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Oversight Committee, yesterday told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo that the committee has lost track of a top witness to alleged wrongdoing by the Biden family. “Well, unfortunately, we can’t track down the informant,” Comer said. “We’re hopeful that the informant is still there. The whistleblower knows the informant. The whistleblower is very credible.”
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…and yet, the headlines are all about sex.
ヽ(`Д´)ﾉ︵ ┻━┻
What a shithow. This is wrong on so many levels.
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Well, yeah!
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May 16, 2023 (Tuesday)
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has been on a tour of visits with European leaders. On May 13 he met with Pope Francis, who offered help finding the Ukrainian children kidnapped by the Russians and returning them to Ukraine, and with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The next day he met with German chancellor Olaf Scholz before flying to France to meet with President Emmanuel Macron. On Monday, Zelensky made a surprise visit to the United Kingdom, where he met with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
The European Parliament and the Foundation of the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen awarded the Ukrainian people and Zelensky the Charlemagne Prize “for their fight for freedom and democracy against the unjustified Russian war of aggression. This award underscores the fact that Ukraine is part of Europe and that its people and its government—headed by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—support and defend European values, and therefore deserve encouragement to enter swiftly into accession negotiations with the European Union.”
Leaks linked to Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira have revealed a dynamic landscape. On the basis of those leaks, on May 13 the Washington Post reported that Zelensky’s calm public demeanor is different from his private positions, which have called for a much more aggressive stance toward Russia. On May 14 the Washington Post reported on a leaked document revealing that Yevgeniy Prigozhin had offered in January to tell Ukraine where Russian forces were positioned if it would pull back from the front in Bakhmut, where Prigozhin’s Wagner Group mercenaries were getting pounded.
On Sunday, as Zelensky was receiving promises of more European support, Ukraine said it had captured more than ten key Russian positions near Bakhmut. Last week, Germany announced its largest aid package to Ukraine since the war began—a package of nearly $3 billion—and U.S. Abrams tanks arrived in Germany ahead of schedule for training Ukrainian troops. Rumors are swirling about the health of Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko, one of Putin’s key allies, who has not been seen recently and has skipped important public events.
In July, leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will gather in Vilnius, Lithuania, to discuss strengthening the organization’s defenses against Russia, and the relationship of NATO to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and the European Council have been hosting peace talks between Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia and President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan after Russian peacekeepers have become ineffective. And U.S. Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources Richard Verma is currently on a trip to Poland, Moldova, and Romania to “emphasize the United States’ commitment to our European Allies and partners, Transatlantic security, and our shared democratic values” even as Russia seeks to destabilize Moldova.
Elections in Turkey have produced a runoff between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his main challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Kilicdaroglu has promised to move Turkey closer to Europe than would Erdogan, who has swung toward Russia and authoritarianism. Turkey is a member of NATO, and Erodgan has ruled it for two decades, eroding its democracy. Opponents of Erdogan have coalesced behind Kilicdaroglu, who is popular enough that he managed to get within striking distance of Erdogan despite the leader’s attempt to rig the vote.
Expert on Turkish foreign policy and fellow at the Brookings Institution Asli Aydintasbas told Jared Malsin and Elvan Kivilcim of the Wall Street Journal: “A Turkey that tilts a little more toward Europe or NATO, even if it’s not a full pivot, that would be a huge change for the global balance of power, particularly with Russia’s war on Ukraine.”
U.S. senior officials are in Detroit this week for one of a series of meetings of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, a group of 21 countries with nearly 40 percent of the global population— almost 3 billion people— and nearly 50 percent of global trade. APEC members account for more than 60 percent of U.S. goods exports and seven of our top ten overall trading partners.
Hosting APEC this year was supposed to show “U.S. economic leadership and multilateralism in the Indo-Pacific and highlight the direct impact of international economic engagement on prosperity here in the United States,” an illustration of the Biden administration’s outreach in the Indo-Pacific.
But just as Biden’s attempts to counter Russia and China and shore up democracy globally are bearing fruit, he has to cut short his visit to Australia and Papua New Guinea, where he was scheduled to travel after this weekend’s meeting of the Group of Seven (G7) in Hiroshima, Japan. The G7 is a forum of the leaders of France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Italy, and Canada, along with the European Union, to discuss economic and governmental policies. The debt ceiling crisis is forcing Biden to come home early rather than continue to strengthen ties in the region.
Today, more than 140 leaders of the biggest U.S. companies published an open letter to the president and congressional leaders “to emphasize the potentially disastrous consequences of a failure by the federal government to meet its obligations.” They noted that when the government approached a default in 2011 under similar circumstances, the U.S. lost its AAA bond rating (which it has never regained), the stock market lost 17% of its value for more than a year, and “Moody’s reported that the heightened uncertainty from this crisis resulted in 1.2 million fewer jobs, a 0.7 percentage point higher unemployment rate, and a $180 billion smaller economy than it otherwise would have—dire impacts that occurred without an actual default.”
House Republicans, led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), are refusing to raise the debt ceiling, which is a limit to how much money the Treasury can raise to pay existing obligations, in order to extract budget cuts they cannot get through the normal process of legislation. While Republicans claim to be concerned about spending, it is notable that they have flat-out refused to help reduce the deficit by closing tax loopholes that would raise $40 billion. They also refuse to consider any measure that would raise taxes, focusing solely on spending cuts.
Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity, a group funded by billionaire Charles Koch, has rolled out an ad campaign putting pressure on Biden and Democratic senators in the battleground states of Arizona, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin to give in to Republican demands rather than insist on the same clean debt ceiling Congress passed three times under Trump.
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Current media coverage here in Europe indicates that the chances for the opposition are small.
Kılıçdaroğlu would have to win the votes of a far-right corner, who demands a strong stance on the rights of the Kurdish population - from which, in turn, comes an important part of Kılıçdaroğlu’s base. It is a loose-loose situation.
Just for the record, I listened to some experts who are usually not alarmists. They agreed that there would be a real danger of internal conflicts developing into a civil war if Erdoğan would now start to crack down on the opposition with methods he has used in the past, like arrests.
[Edit for diacritics.]
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Running into expats in Bangkok and Saigon, it’s amazing to me how many of them ask if I read her stuff, and who clearly get their news summary from her.
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