That’s how I’m describing what will happen at the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. US Courthouse. The MSM headline won’t call them terrorists or mention the guns they will be carrying concealed. And the hostage isn’t Trump, it’s counter protestors, “Antifa”, journalists covering the event and law enforcement. They are focusing on some of same targets as January 6th. The Trump supporters are even busing their supporters in like they did on on January 6th. (It doesn’t look like Charlie Kirk is behind the buses this time, but has anyone talked to Ginni Thomas?) The other hostage is the American public and our sense of feeling safe at protests. When people are armed, deadly violence could happen at any second. It’s not a peaceful protest anymore, it’s a hostage situation. We KNOW that cops prepare for and treat armed people differently, especially those with a history of violence. When the media knows that there will be armed people there, THEY need to talk about this differently. And ask some different questions, like: Will the FBI be arresting people “left of boom” Monday? There should be arrests!
Uncategorized
I think we knew that a federal indictment of former president Donald Trump would elicit a collective primal scream from the right wing fever swamp and they have not disappointed. And in true Trump era fashion, the response from most elected Republicans has been a collective whine about “unfairness” and the “weaponization” of the “deep state.” Some have even gone so far as to at least hint around that it’s a nice little country we have here, be a shame if anything happened to it. I would expect nothing less. This is how they roll. There are a few dissenters from that party line. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney put out a statement saying that Trump “brought this on himself” and it’s “consistent with his other actions offensive to the national interest” which is true. Former Gov. Chris Christie said “these facts are devastating” which is also true. But these and a handful of others are outliers among GOP elected officials. One very significant former GOP official has come out swinging, however: There are a number of defenses out there.
Like Nazis stumping for him Meanwhile, he is still an ass: On Saturday and Sunday, a group of 15 to 20 protesters donned Nazi symbols and chanted antisemitic slurs along the North Alafaya Trail in Orlando. According to videos that quickly circulated across social media, the protesters gave Nazi salutes, yelled “White power!”, waved an anti-Biden banner and at one point got into a brawl with a driver. The protests have been met with disgust from Democrats and Republicans alike. However, DeSantis did not publicly condemn the marchers until Monday during a press conference, and then largely to deflect blame on to his political opponents. “So what I’m going to say is these people, these Democrats who are trying to use this as some type of political issue to try to smear me as if I had something to do with that, we’re not playing their game,” he said.
“plans for high-value-target killings by Prince’s mercenaries” Someone on Twitter in mid-May claimed that Erik Prince of Blackwater infamy had been indicted for arms trafficking in (of all places) Austria. I never saw any other mention of it until this morning. So, for those suffering a little Trump fatigue, apparently “the Elon Musk of the privatization of war” was indicted “with four other individuals in Austria on April 20 for exporting war materials without a license back in 2014 and 2015,” writes Ann Marlowe at The Bulwark: The indictment accuses Prince of using an aircraft-customizing company in which he then held a controlling interest, the Wiener Neustadt-based Airborne Technologies, to retrofit two American cropdusters that were then to be shipped illegally overseas. The charges overlap 2021 United Nations allegations that Prince had in 2019 violated the U.N. arms embargo on Libya in an aborted operation called Project Opus, financed by the United Arab Emirates to the tune of $80 million in support of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, head of one of the two perpetually contesting governments in Libya.
When it comes to campaigning, Democrats are conservatives Self-identified independent voters are not, not really, argues Alex Shephard at The New Republic. They are leaners, 49 percent of Americans per a recent Gallup poll. They lean toward one of the major parties or the other. They just eschew the branding. It’s not a new argument, but it’s fashionable. “By far the dominant U.S. party isn’t Democrats or Republicans,” wrote Mike Allen of Axios. “It’s: ‘I’ll shop around, thank you.’” Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz told TNR, “There’s a reluctance to openly identify oneself as a partisan and to say, come right out and say, ‘I think of myself as a Republican or a Democrat.’” Shephard explains: Self-described independents and leaners do have one thing in common. “Even among people who identify with a political party … the trend is in their disdain for the other party,” said Matt Grossmann, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, or IPPSR, and professor of political science at Michigan State University.
Stochastic terrorism and plausible deniability Once upon a time, Republicans wanted to learn to “speak like Newt.” Gingrich. These days, they might aspire to speak like Trump. Many have learned without a lot of trouble how to stoke stochastic terrorism with plausible deniability. Bill Kristol points to a Joe Klein article on how Trump’s close-up magic is done: He has a preternatural ability to bend the law to the point of breaking, but he never cracks it in two. He never says to the January 6 crowd: Go on down to the Capitol and overthrow the government. He says to the Proud Boys: “Stand back and stand by.” Stand Back absolves him of a truckload of evil intent. Stand By means: ignore the first part. He is a genius at the micro-laser-slicing of baloney, tip-toeing the rhetorical tightrope. And if you want to charge him with something that isn’t a flat-out doozy: advantage Trump. Don’t get cocky. Remember when they called Bill Clinton “Slick Willy”? He’s got nothin’ on Trump. He’s a master. And his followers will just brush off whatever he’s done. Because the facts don’t matter.
He had a reason for keeping those classified documents and it wasn’t for “show and tell” It’s true, as always, that Trump is such a psychological train wreck that it’s not hard to imagine that he stuffed classified documents into boxes on the regular without thinking about it because he’s a disorganized mess. But that’s just too easy. There are other aspects of Trump’s personality that make it much more likely that he was thinking about making some deals. This piece by Fintan O’Toole in the NYRB (subc. only) says it all: Secrets are a kind of currency. They can be hoarded, but if kept for too long they lose their value. Like all currencies, they must, sooner or later, be used in a transaction—sold to the highest bidder or bartered as a favor for which another favor will be returned. To see the full scale of Donald Trump’s betrayal of his country, it is necessary to start with this reality. He kept intelligence documents because, at some point, those secrets could be used in a transaction. What he was stockpiling were the materials of treason.
No. You’ll note in the previous post that his former lawyer says that a president has two years to decide what to return to the National Archives. Even if that were true it doesn’t mean that he gets to hold on to classified nuclear secrets and war plans and show them to people. Come on.
Bill Barr is a hack but he’s no longer a Trump hack, at least not in this case: Barr didn’t answer the question about Clinton but you will recall that he was the Attorney General during Trump’s term and he could have brought charges against her, and I have little doubt he would have if he thought they would stick. He knew they wouldn’t. Hopefully someone will press him on that since he seems very clear that Trump did commit crimes.
Remember January 6th! True to form, the former president set out to rally his foot soldiers by branding Thursday’s 37-count federal indictment against him, for his actions, as an attack on them. That is, to personalize it. “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way,” Donald Trump told the convention of Georgia Republicans in Columbus, Ga. on Saturday. Right. And I’m still waiting for Barack Obama’s jack-booted thugs to kick in my door and confiscate my guns, as I was promised over a decade ago. The indictment is “ridiculous and baseless,” the most “horrific” abuse of power “in the history of our country,” so “many people have said,” Trump droned. “The Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Injustice” has engaged in “vicious persecution,” a “travesty of justice.” Blah, blah, blah. “I will prevent World War III. … Without me, it will happen,” Trump told them.