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Get busy fighting or brace for democracy dying “A Red Alert for Voting Rights” is the Zoom call scheduled tomorrow by Carolina Forward. The topic is North Carolina politics. But the red alert is broader than that. Twitter followers of former Ohio state Democratic Party chair, David Pepper (“Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual for Every American“), know he’s been leaning hard into Ohio Republicans’ attempt to thwart a citizen initiative to secure abortion rights in the state constitution. The GOP-dominated legislature has scheduled an August special election to pass a constitutional amendment that would make it harder for citizens to pass their “Right to Reproductive Freedom” amendment in November.

Tom Nichols on how to deal with the threats: I made a joke on Twitter the other day that I thought deserved a better reception than it got. I was reading about Kari Lake bleating about how other Americans, if they wanted to “get” to Donald Trump, would have to “go through me” as well as “through 75 million Americans just like me … most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.” I said that Lake’s political career was like the origin story of Jonathan Matthias. I made that joke because I’m a nerd and I’m old. Matthias is the bad guy from the classic 1971 Charlton Heston movie The Omega Man,a postapocalyptic thriller in which almost everyone in the world is wiped out by a germ-warfare disaster. Heston has an antidote; the other survivors end up as light-sensitive ghouls that can go out only at night. Matthias (played by the legendary character actor Anthony Zerbe) was, before the plague, a blustery celebrity television newscaster, and he later uses his charisma to organize his fellow sorta-vampires into a cult built around hating Heston and all modern technology.

And right in the middle of all that was this: What???

I think we can almost certainly count on shenanigans from her. She’s obviously MAGA and it’s very bad luck that the case wound up back under her. Charlie Savage at the NY Times breaks down the possibilities: Last year, Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, briefly disrupted the documents investigation by issuing rulings favorable to him when he challenged the F.B.I.’s search of his Florida club and estate, Mar-a-Lago, before a conservative appeals court ruled that she never had legal authority to intervene. It remains to be seen how she will handle her second turn in the spotlight. The scope of her role before the trial also is unclear: She is not presiding over Mr. Trump’s initial hearing on Tuesday, and could refer some pretrial motions to a magistrate judge who works under her. But here is a closer look at how her decisions as the judge presiding over the trial — like on what can be included and excluded — could affect the case. Slowing the Calendar Mr. Trump has long pursued a strategy of trying to delay legal proceedings against him to run out the clock.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) pierced the Fox News bubble on Monday, pushing back on host Sean Hannity’s claims about President Joe Biden, mocking House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and ripping Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) over his treatment of migrants. Hannity tried to defend DeSantis, who has been shipping migrants around the country in what critics have ripped as a political stunt done to raise his profile as a 2024 presidential candidate. But Newsom wasn’t having it. “Why do you use people as pawns?” Newsom asked. “What faith tradition teaches you to treat human beings like this ― to belittle them, to demean them?” Hannity suggested a TV debate ― moderated by himself, of course ― between Newsom and DeSantis. “I’m all in, count on it,” Newsom said. “You would do a two-hour debate with Ron DeSantis?” Hannity said. “Make it three,” Newsom said. “Do it with one-day notice with no notes, I look forward to that.

I just thought you should know that the cult has other important business to attend to.

Yes Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned today. But if you were to watch right wing media you’d think it was Joe Biden who was facing a criminal trial. Don’t kid yourself. That story is happening right alongside Trump’s impending trial. Philip Bump takes you through it just so you know what they’re braying about if you happen to hear it: The news release went out on May 3 from the Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee. “Information provided by a whistleblower raises concerns that then-Vice President Biden allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national,” it alleged, quoting committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.). A letter from Comer and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) to the FBI, seeking the release of documentation of a June 2020 interview, wasn’t similarly hedged. The document, it claimed, “describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions.” Over the next month, Republicans pressed the FBI to release the form publicly. Comer threatened to hold FBI Director Christopher A.

These cases are not the same If anyone things that Trump is being treated less fairly than Pence and Biden they need to realize that Trump is not being prosecuted for any of the highly sensitive documents he gave back to the government, first on his own and then in response to the subpeona. He is only being charged for the documents they found later when they issued a warrant. Biden and Pence have given back all the documents, no subpoena and no warrant necessary. If they were indicted for retaining those documents they would be being held to a higher standard than Trump. Read this piece by Eric Levitz which shows that the DOJ has actually given Trump an easier time than anyone else who did what he did. He runs down all the reasons the Clinton, Biden and Pence cases and makes the same point I made above. He then cites a particular case of an average citizen: [I]t is helpful to contrast the DOJ’s treatment of Trump with its handling of Asia Janay Lavarello, a former civilian employee of the Defense Department. In 2020, Lavarello was on assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Manila, where she had been researching a classified thesis.

Many people seem offended by the very idea that banks can create money “out of nothing”, or that governments can finance their spending by creating money, rather than borrowing. They seem wedded to the idea that money must be a physical thing, and therefore it can’t be created “out of nothing”. This probably arises from … Continue reading "Money from Nothing"

In my latest piece for UnHerd, I reflect on Berlusconi’s legacy and on his influence on my own political identity, from my early dabbling in left-wing politics in the early Nineties and the tragic violence of the anti-G8 protests in 2001 to my disillusionment with the obsessive and myopic anti-Berlusconismo of the Italian left. Ultimately, for all his many …

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