Driving America into the ditch Donors were peeved over the bad publicity. In a House hearing on campus antisemitism last week, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) demanded university presidents from the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and MIT answer for antisemitic campus protests over the war in Gaza. Asked whether calling for genocide against Jews would violate codes of conduct, amount to bullying and harassment, and prompt expulsions, the administrators hedged. A video extract went viral. Michelle Goldberg responded, “If I’d seen only that excerpt from the hearing … I might have felt the same way.” The administrators “acquitted themselves poorly.” “But while it might seem hard to believe that there’s any context that could make the responses of the college presidents OK, watching the whole hearing at least makes them more understandable,” Goldberg added. “In the questioning before the now-infamous exchange, you can see the trap Stefanik laid.” But the trap was sprung. Over the weekend and under pressure from university donors, University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill and board chair Scott L.
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Follow the data Take good news where you find it. Politico: Special counsel Jack Smith has extracted data from the cell phone Donald Trump used while in the White House and plans to present evidence of his findings to a Washington, D.C. jury to demonstrate how Trump used the phone in the weeks during which he attempted to subvert the 2020 election. In a court filing Monday, Smith indicated that he plans to call an expert witness who extracted and reviewed data copied from Trump’s phone, as well as a phone used by another unidentified individual in Trump’s orbit. The data from Trump’s phone could reveal day-to-day details of his final weeks in office, including his daily movements, his Twitter habits and any other aides who had access to his accounts and devices. The data, for example, could help show whether Trump personally approved or sent a fateful tweet attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Today is the day the MAGA House plans to officially vote for an “impeachment inquiry” I know this will come as quite a shock, but the current U.S. Congress is the least productive congress in almost a hundred years. Not since the first years of the Great Depression under Herbert Hoover has the legislative branch been so ineffectual. This may seem surprising considering that the Republican majority has dominated the news from the moment it took the oath last January, but it has barely managed to do the one thing it’s supposed to do which is pass legislation. They certainly have been busy though. They started with an epic battle for the Speaker’s office that ended even before the year was up with the dramatic defenestration of that same Speaker for committing the cardinal sin of compromising with the Democratic Senate and White House to keep the government running. That took weeks of effort leaving little time for anything else. Then they had to hold “oversight” hearings to yell at administration figures and provoke fights with witnesses and there was the huge issue of the Senate dress code.
He’s right there. Why won’t they talk to him in public? Hunter Biden wants a public hearing for good reason! The Democrats are backing him: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., backed that call for a public hearing while speaking to reporters on Wednesday. She was one of multiple Democratic lawmakers to address Republicans’ impeachment inquiry of Biden, including Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who described in the investigation as “more like a what-is-it, not a whodunnit.” “I won’t even call it an investigation, I’ll call it an exercise in futility,” Ocasio-Cortez said about the Hunter Biden investigation, describing it as “groundless and unsubstantiated.” The New York congresswoman said there is more pressing business than Hunter Biden. “We need to do far more than worry about baseless investigations that are conducted more on podcasts than, frankly, on a grounding of evidence,” she said. Aaaaand, needless to say, Republicans are having a hissy fit: Lol. Here’s how that ended: Hunter Biden did the right thing.
An election year like no other If you hadn’t already had your mind blown by what these authoritarian MAGA monsters are capable of, all you had to do was observe the grotesque display that the Texas government put on this week. The despicable cruelty they dispensed upon a woman and her family enduring one of the worst crises of her life says it all. They didn’t care that she was carrying a fetus with anomalies so extreme that it would probably be stillborn or live for a very short time if it were brought to term. There was no hope. Nor did they care that her pregnancy was risky and dangerous to her and her ability to have more children in the future. Instead, they demanded that she endure the full length of that pregnancy anyway, no matter the price she and her family would have to pay and go through childbirth all in order to appease fundamentalist demands that essentially define pregnant women as incubators and nothing more. She finally had to flee to a civilized place that recognized her as a human being. This issue is not going away.
I suspect you haven’t heard about this. The only hysterical headlines are the ones that show Biden losing. Ok, so what about those battleground states everyone was shrieking about the other day based on one poll? Oh. And then there’s this: This is good too: I’m not saying these things mean any more than anything else going into the election year. We don’t know what is really going to motivate people next November. But there’s no reason to discount them either. Let’s just say that there is a lot of information out there and there’s no reason to fall into a doom spiral just because the media likes to play up the negative Biden stories. It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! If you’ve of a mind…
I am offering this thoughtful piece on the sexual violence of October 7th by Jill Filipovic with a gift link because I really want you to be able to read the whole thing. There’s so much sturm und drang around this topic that it’s hard to ever find clarity. This is one of the rare articles that provides it without pandering, excusing or obfuscating the reality. She discusses in detail how difficult it was to get reliable forensic evidence in the aftermath of the attack and explains why it was important, as a journalist, to wait for the facts. Reporting of sexual violence is war is always fraught and with all discussions of rape it’s important to be precise because so often the reflexive response is to dismiss it. But that’s not the whole story here: But soon after the attacks, the evidence started to come in, and it took the form that evidence of wartime rape often does: accounts from survivors of the attacks, emergency responders, medical personnel, those who examined the bodies and journalists who were permitted to see some attack footage.
He chose not to believe anyone who wouldn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. Ken Chesebro was one of those who were happy to give him what he wanted. And Trump listened: Former Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro has been talking to all kinds of legal inquiries andit seems there’s always something new for him to say. Here’s one of the latest: Before a group of supportive lawyers entered the Oval Office for a photo-op with then-President Donald Trump in December 2020, they were given a clear instruction, according to one attendee: Don’t get Trump’s hopes up about overturning the election. One attorney, Jim Troupis, toed the line. He’d just finished leading Trump’s failed election challenge in Wisconsin, and bluntly told the president it was over in that state. But when the conversation shifted to Arizona, attorney Kenneth Chesebro deviated from the plan. He told Trump he could still win – and explained how the “alternate electors” he helped assemble in Arizona and six other states gave Trump an opening to continue contesting the election until Congress certified the results on January 6, 2021.
“Wings Over the World.” That was the proclamation I quite thoughtfully had inscribed beneath my high school graduation yearbook photo. Because “Wings Over America” seemed a bit understated for how I truly felt about that band during those musically formative … Continue reading
America’s fascist, collaborationist past Russian meddling in the 2016 election will be a factor in Donald Trump’s trial on his (alleged) attempt to overturn the 2020 election. See, he had good reason to think 2020 might have been rigged (AP): To hear his lawyers tell it, Donald Trump was alarmed by Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, motivated as president to focus on cybersecurity and had a good-faith basis four years later to worry that foreign actors had again meddled in the race. But to federal prosecutors, 2016 is significant as the year that Trump spread misinformation about voter fraud and proved himself resistant to accepting the outcome of elections that might not go his way. But for now forget about the former Liar-in-Chief’s motivations and focus on Russia’s (in a moment). “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man. Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism” expands on her podcast‘s tale of U.S.