it’s got to be difficult for them to keep their stories straight…
Former President Trump’s legal team suggested Tuesday that even a president directing SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent would be an action barred from prosecution given a former executive’s broad immunity to criminal prosecution.
IOKIYAR, of course. Silly wabbit…
Imagine if Trump wins this case. That seems sure to help him in November’s election. How much is anyone’s guess.
I could imagine a normal-adjacent person use the phrase “narrowly escaped”.
I don’t think he knows this phrase.
I think he genuinely believes he nearly escaped.
Jeez.
If only, Donnie, if only.
This should be explicitly disqualifying. Add it to the list for the voting rights and election modernization act for 2025.
Why, o, why do you hate FREEZE PEACH!!! /s
I don’t know, it feels like there’s something wrong about requiring candidates to accept the result of an election whether it ends up being fair or not. The problem with the Republicans is that they’re making up that things are unfair against them, but for instance Gore probably shouldn’t have accepted that Bush beat him.
Like this, maybe?
He just got confused with his undead friend, Rudy.
That’s not what I’m saying. Pre-emtively stating they won’t accept the results if they lose means they aren’t actually running for election in a democracy - they are fascists, plain and simple. We have legal recourse for challenging election results and guard rails that prevent those challenges from interfering with the transition of power.
That’s not “technically” what they are saying, though. They say they won’t accept the results if the election was “unfair.” Of course, their definition of fair starts and ends with “we win.” Any other outcome is patently unfair, obviously. But stating it that way, once again, gives them some level of deniability. It’s a damn tiny fig leaf, but that’s what it is.
That’s not what they were asked, though. And there’s not much fig leaf to that fig leaf when they are stating before the election that it’s stolen.
Of course. Il Douche was pulling this shit before the last election. They have to repeat his lines to show fealty. It just gives them a response to the question in friendly interviews, which are the only kind they will do. Never said it was honest. Hell, they don’t respect honesty at all. Just another way to lie so that the media won’t actually call them on it.
I guess what I’m proposing is that we implement Poppers Paradox of Intolerance as policy. If we let people who state that they oppose democracy take elected office, we’re complicit in fostering fascism. Enough is enough.
May 22, 2024 (Wednesday)
Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) called out his Republican colleagues on the floor of the House today for offering “stunts instead of solutions, extremism over bipartisanship.” It’s a shame, he said, because the Republicans’ narrow majority “could have given us a chance to work together in a bipartisan way.” Instead, Republicans have caved to their most extreme members, who have been “skipping their real jobs to take day trips up to New York to try to undermine Donald Trump’s criminal trial.”
McGovern suggested that perhaps they were trying “to distract from the fact that their candidate for president has been indicted more times than he’s been elected” and “is on trial for covering up hush money payments to a porn star for political gain not to mention three other criminal felony prosecutions.”
Representative Jerry Carl (R-AL), the temporary chair at the time, rebuked McGovern, who noted that the fact that the former president is in a court of law is the truth. Just last week, McGovern pointed out, a Republican member of the House was not admonished when he complained about “the former president of the United States being hauled into court day after day with a sham trial.”
Carl reminded McGovern that members “must avoid personalities in debates.”
McGovern replied: “[A]t some point, it’s time for this body to recognize that there is no precedent for this situation. We have a presumptive nominee for president facing 88 felony counts, and we’re being prevented from even acknowledging it. These are not alternative facts. These are real facts. A candidate for president of the United States is on trial for sending a hush money payment to a porn star to avoid a sex scandal during his 2016 campaign and then fraudulently disguising those payments in violation of the law. He’s also charged with conspiring to overturn the election. He’s also charged with stealing classified information, and a jury has already found him liable for rape in a civil court. And yet, in this Republican-controlled house, it’s okay to talk about the trial, but you have to call it a sham.”
Representative Erin Houchin (R-IN) demanded McGovern’s words be stricken from the record. The chair agreed to do so, saying that “it is a breach of order to refer to the candidate in terms personally offensive, whether by actually accusing or merely insulting.” Republicans banned McGovern from speaking on the floor for the rest of the day. McGovern observed: “You can only talk about the trial on the House Floor if you’re using it to defend Donald Trump.”
It was curious timing for extremists to silence a Massachusetts lawmaker.
In 1836, Democratic lawmakers in the House of Representatives passed a resolution to table, or put aside without action or discussion, all petitions relating to slavery. Repeatedly thereafter, former president John Quincy Adams, now representing Massachusetts in the House, rose to read a petition and was silenced. But the First Amendment protects the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances—King George III had pointedly rejected the colonists’ 1775 Olive Branch Petition trying to avoid war, and the framers of the new government wanted to be clear that people had a right to be heard—and people in the North increasingly understood the silencing of those who were determined to stop debate over slavery as an attack on their constitutional rights.
The House got rid of the “gag rule” in 1844, but just twelve years later, on May 22, 1856—exactly 168 years ago today—South Carolina representative Preston Brooks beat Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner nearly to death on the floor of the Senate after Sumner criticized southern enslavers, particularly Brooks’s relative South Carolina senator Andrew Butler.
The gist of Sumner’s speech was that a small minority of men were trying to impose their will on the majority of the American people by forcing enslavement on the territory of Kansas, much as enslavers like Butler forced themselves on the women they enslaved. Sumner’s speech was insulting, but beating him into a welter of blood while he sat at his Senate desk for representing his constituents suggested that enslavers would tolerate no dissent.
Jodi Kantor, Aric Toler, and Julie Tate tonight broke the story in the New York Times that the upside-down U.S. flag associated with the January 6 insurrectionists was not the only anti-American flag Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito displayed. In at least July and September 2023, over his beach house in New Jersey there flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag like the one carried by January 6 rioters. This banner is also known as the “Pine Tree flag,” but it is not the same one currently under consideration to become Maine’s state flag.
This flag represents the idea that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. As Ishaan Jhaveri of Columbia University’s Tow Center in the Graduate School of Journalism explained in 2021, in the days of the American Revolution, the flag “was meant to symbolize the right of armed revolution in the face of tyranny.”
But in 2013 the flag was the symbol of a group working to put Christians into public office to create a government based on their ideology. In 2015, those trying to stop the Supreme Court from legalizing gay marriage flew the flag; in 2016, supporters of the militias that occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge did so, too. In 2017 the flag was behind Trump when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and in 2020, those opposed to Covid shutdowns carried it.
More recently, the January 6 rioters carried it, and so have neo-Nazis. It is the same flag that House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) displays outside of his congressional office. Scholar of religion Bradley Onishi noted: “It’s a flag symbolizing Christian revolution. It’s used by extremists.”
These extremists appear to have turned to Trump, who is, as McGovern pointed out, facing 88 felony counts and is currently on trial for paying off a sex partner in order to prevent voters from hearing about their encounter and then violating the law to hide the payments, because they believe he will crash through the laws and bureaucracy that are designed to protect the democratic institutions that would stop them from seizing power.
And now it turns out that a flag representing the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, that the people should engage in armed revolution against tyranny, and that the United States should be a nation based in Christian theology has been flying over the home of Justice Alito, who is supposed to be defending the United States Constitution impartially. Alito wrote the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion.
Election columnist Laura Bassett of The Cut wrote: “The [A]lito flag story does not teach me anything new about his politics but it does reveal how confident he is that nobody can do anything about him.”
There is indeed a sense of power and entitlement coming from MAGA Republicans as they impose new limits on their fellow Americans and call those constraints freedom. Lori Rozsa of the Washington Post today noted that Florida governor Ron DeSantis is rewriting the history of the summer of 1964, made famous as Black and white organizers fanned out in Mississippi to register Black Americans to vote, by launching his own, new “Freedom Summer.” From May 27 through September 2, bridges in the state are prohibited from displaying rainbow colors for Pride Month in June, orange for National Gun Awareness Month, or yellow for Women’s Equality Day. The only colors they can display are red, white, and blue.
“Thanks to the leadership of Gov[ernor] Ron DeSantis,” Florida Department of Transportation secretary Jared Perdue wrote on X, “Florida continues to be the freest state in the nation.”
The hypocrisy is just overwhelming with these absolute asshats. But their base eats it up. This timeline. I hate it.
At least you’re still free to do so.
May 23, 2024 (Thursday)
It turns out that Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito is not the only one flying an “Appeal to Heaven” flag. Leonard Leo, the man behind the extremist takeover of the American judiciary, also flew that flag at his home on Mount Desert Island in Maine.
So now we have the Appeal to Heaven flag, which represents the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, that the people should engage in armed revolution against tyranny, and that the United States should be a nation based in Christian theology, in front of the office of House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and over the houses of Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito and the architect of the right-wing theocratic takeover of the federal courts, Leonard Leo.
Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech of June 16, 1858, is often described as defining the difference between the North, based on the idea of free labor, and the South, based on enslaved labor, and the idea that one or the other must prevail.
But the speech is much more than a simple depiction of the conflict between freedom and slavery. It details a long-standing plan to destroy American democracy.
Lincoln outlined the steps that the United States had taken away from freedom toward tyranny, and noted:
“[W]hen we see a lot of framed timbers…which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance—and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house… we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.”
Lincoln did not choose the names of his workmen at random. Stephen was Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, who had popularized the idea that local voters should be able to decide whether their territory would permit slavery, no matter what the majority of Americans wanted; Franklin was Franklin Pierce, who had presided over the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting enslavement to move into the western territories; Roger was Roger Taney, chief justice of the Supreme Court that decided Dred Scott v. Sandford, saying that Congress could not keep slavery out of the territories; and James was President James Buchanan, who urged Americans to accept the judgment of the Supreme Court. By spreading enslavement westward, that judgment would create new slave states that would work with the southern slave states to make slavery national.
Together, Lincoln said, these four workmen had constructed an edifice to support human enslavement, an edifice working against the nation’s dedication to freedom established by the Declaration of Independence. "A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved,” he said. “I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
Today the Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP. After the 2020 census, when it was clear that a South Carolina district was becoming competitive, the Republican-dominated legislature moved the district lines to cut Black voters out and move white voters in, thereby guaranteeing Democrats would lose. Voting rights advocates sued, saying that moving around voters on the basis of race violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. A federal district court agreed.
Today, by a vote of 6–3, the Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s decision and signed off on the new South Carolina congressional map that dilutes Black votes. It approved the map because, it said, the gerrymander was politically, rather than racially, motivated. And, it said, “as far as the Federal Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting.”
From now on, as Mark Joseph Stern noted in Slate, it will be virtually impossible for Black voters to prove that lawmakers targeted their race rather than their politics when redistricting, and partisan gerrymandering has just gotten the Supreme Court’s approval (previously, as Stern noted, the court had said federal courts could not intervene even if partisan gerrymandering violates the Constitution; today they said it does not violate the Constitution). Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) said: “Today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision…is further affirmation that this Court has chosen to disenfranchise Black voters and rob us of our fundamental access to the ballot box. Equitable representation is the hallmark of a healthy democracy and in this case, the Supreme Court is attempting to steer the country back to a dark place in our history.”
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the Supreme Court has no power to redraw district maps at all. As Stern noted, Thomas places the blame for what he sees as judicial overreach on the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. After that decision, Thomas says, the court invented powers to remedy the problem. If Brown invited overreach, all the landmark voting decisions of the 1960s did, too.
And so, almost exactly 70 years after the Supreme Court unanimously decided Brown v. Board, it appears that the framed timbers designed to reverse the expansion of minority rights are falling into place.
But in 2024, those of us eager to protect the idea of human equality outlined in the Declaration of Independence have an advantage that Lincoln’s generation did not. “James”—James Buchanan, who cheerfully backed the Dred Scott decision—is not in the White House.
Instead of sympathizing with the extremists, as Buchanan did, President Joe Biden has worked to undermine the sense of grievance that has permitted them to amass power. In the 1850s the federal government had few ways to weaken the ties of ordinary people to the state leaders who were determined to spread the institution of slavery that had made them enormously wealthy, but the modern administrative state has given Biden more options.
The administration has used the power of the federal government to begin to unwind the trickle-down economy that between 1981 and 2021 transferred $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of the US to the top 1%, hollowing out the middle class. The result has been solid economic growth of 5.7% in 2021, 1.9% in 2022, and 2.5% in 2023.
The unemployment rate has been at record lows of under 4% for more than two years, the strongest run since the 1960s. Inflation is not rising; it is falling and is now at 3.4%, higher than the Federal Reserve’s preferred mark of 2% but down significantly from its high of 9.1% in June 2022, just after the worst of the pandemic eased. At 4.5% growth over 2023, wage growth outpaced inflation, meaning that although prices have risen, workers have come out ahead. The S&P stock market index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
In the 1930s, under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, federal investment in the impoverished South quieted much of the region’s opposition to the federal government. Limiting crops in exchange for subsidies both brought higher prices and helped to repair damaged soil, new labor regulations got children out of factories and raised workers’ pay, and the government brought electricity and health care to places private industry wouldn’t go.
Biden appears to be aiming for the same result, but he might be stymied by a news system that has many Americans not just unaware of the good economic news, but believing the opposite. Lauren Aratani of The Guardian reported earlier this week on an exclusive Harris poll showing that 56% of Americans believe incorrectly that the U.S. is in a recession. Those following the stock market are slightly more informed: 49% of them think the S&P stock market index is down for the year. Almost half of those polled—49%—think unemployment is at a 50-year high. Seventy-two percent think inflation is increasing. Fifty-eight percent of those polled blame Biden for mismanaging an economy that is in fact the strongest in the world.
Tempting as it is to blame the media for its relentless focus on bad news rather than good, a study from NBC News at the end of April showed that those who follow national newspapers and media swing heavily to Biden, while those who either don’t follow politics or get their news from YouTube and social media favor Trump or Robert Kennedy Jr.
Those sources seem unlikely to explain that Leonard, Sam, Clarence, Mike, and Donald have been swinging hammers.
This one I understand. A lot of people misunderstand this as meaning that prices are increasing. And they are. Of course they are. They almost always are. A little inflation is normal. But if you ask people in a survey, “Do you think inflation is increasing or decreasing,” many of them are going to think you’re asking them if prices are increasing, and they’re going to say yes. Even if you ask them, “Do you think inflation is getting worse or better,” many are likely to still interpret that question as “Are prices going up or down?”
This one I do not understand at all. I don’t see how people can think this. Not that many people, anyway. That’s just bizarre. I don’t see how anyone can look around and think that unemployment is at a 50 year high. Part of the reason wages have outpaced inflation is because of low unemployment. I don’t get it.
