Jonathan Chait’s observation here is right on: There is an enduring pattern in American conservatism in which the right first develops a paranoid interpretation of the liberal Establishment, and then reverse engineers its own version of the monster it has imagined. Conservatives convinced themselves that the mainstream media and universities were mere propaganda organs, then created institutions like the Heritage Foundation and Fox News, warped reflections of their own overheated critique. The January 6 insurrection was, of course, in the mind of its participants, a “response” to the imagined vote-fraud conspiracy and its antifa/BLM shock troops. John Durham’s investigation is a classic episode in this tradition. The American right first convinced itself that Robert Mueller and the deep state, using the cover of dispassionate professionalism, had launched a partisan witch hunt to smear Donald Trump. In response, it created a right-wing mirror image, as fervently partisan and unhinged as they believed their enemies to be. I would say the “weaponization committee” is the Bizarro Worldversion of the January 6th Committee too.
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Trump has gotten away with criminal and corrupt behavior his whole life, largely because the authorities just couldn’t ever be bothered with taking the risk of doing anything about it. That remains true today: Days before then-President Donald Trump left the White House, federal prosecutors in New York discussed whether to potentially charge Trump with campaign finance crimes once he was out of office, according to a new book from CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig. Prosecutors from the Southern District of New York developed significant evidence against Trump when they charged his former attorney Michael Cohen in 2018 over a hush money scheme paying two women claiming affairs with Trump, including adult film star Stormy Daniels, Honig writes. But prosecutors did not consider charging Trump at the time because of longstanding Justice Department guidance that a sitting president cannot be indicted. With Trump about to leave office in January 2021, however, Audrey Strauss, the acting US attorney, held multiple discussions with a small group of prosecutors to discuss its evidence against Trump.
Take a deep breath Anand Giridharadas suggests (not in so many words) that if we want to defeat nascent fascism the left needs to get over itself: We need to build a movement like we never have before: attractive, fun, substantive, visionary, tomorrow-oriented, rooted in people’s lives, open-armed, fiery, merciful. A movement that understands the emotion and psychology and anxiety that are at the heart of politics. The right gets this; the left largely doesn’t. We need a new movement that does. A movement that isn’t tedious and hairsplitting and gatekeeping and purist and more interested in petty internal beefing than outward expansion. We need a small-e evangelical movement more interested in finding converts than heretics. If you’ve read “The Persuaders,” the roots of this post are obvious. The left needs to focus more on building critical mass than on criticism. A movement with a tribal language and that finds a dark cloud in every silver lining isn’t inviting. A real movement doesn’t erect barriers to entry. A movement that has a sense of humor.
This is the new GOP establishment House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made good on his promise this week to exact revenge on Democrats for denying committee assignments to far-right extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Paul Gosar, R-Az. He booted two California congressmen, Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, from the Select Committee on Intelligence. AS Speaker, McCarthy has the power to make this move unilaterally. But he is also proposing to kick Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Relations Committee, which will require a vote of the full House. The cycle of revenge has officially begun. It should be noted that the removal of Greene and Gosar, both of whom have addressed white nationalist gatherings and publicly advocated for the deaths of Democratic officials, was decided by a bipartisan vote by the full House. But that was an earlier, more innocent time. A golden era when death threats against Democratic colleagues were considered bad form by at least a handful of Republicans. It was all the way back in 2021, a lifetime ago.
The best thing Biden ever did was to refuse to give Trump the customary ex-president security clearance: He said creating a new health care plan would be “so easy” too….
I’ve been writing and saying on various radio shows and podcasts over the past few months that even in his weakened state, at this point in the cycle (granted way too early to make any serious predictions) Trump is still the most likely nominee for the GOP nomination. There are reasons for this that have little to do with his popularity (which is still pretty strong in the base.) It’s a structural problem for the GOP which they refuse to deal with. This piece in the Daily Beast spells it out well: If you’re one of the millions of Americans who want desperately for the country to move on from Donald Trump and his toxic brand of politics, I’ve got some bad news—he’s the odds-on favorite to be the 2024 Republican nominee for president. I don’t make the rules here (and I’m not happy about it either), but the numbers don’t lie. In the latest poll from the polling firm Morning Consult, Trump is winning 49 percent of the GOP field, which gives him a 19 percentage point lead over his nearest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Susan Glasser at the New Yorker also takes a look at the GOP field and her observation about Pompeo is especially tart: Most, like the former Vice-President, take the route of simply avoiding unpleasant facts from the Trump years that do not fit with the story they want to tell. Which pretty much sums up the state of Republican discourse headed into the 2024 election cycle. At least Pence admits that January 6th happened, and that it was wrong. In the latest example of the genre, Pompeo’s new memoir, “Never Give an Inch,” published this week, manages more or less to skip the catastrophic ending to the Trump Presidency, aside from offhand references to January 6th as “the mayhem at the Capitol” that “the Left wants to exploit for political advantage.” This is known, in my household, as “pulling a Kayleigh”—a feat of political contortion Peter and I have named in honor of Kayleigh McEnany, the Trump press secretary who managed to publish an entire 2021 memoir, “For Such a Time as This: My Faith Journey Through the White House and Beyond,” that never so much as mentions the insurrection at the Capitol.
During Trump’s final days it was reported that he and Bill Barr were speeding up federal executions to kill as many people as possible before he left office. (I wrote about it here.)He and Bill Barr had gleefully reinstated the federal death penalty and were afraid they’d leave some possible victims alive if they didn’t move quickly. By 9:27 p.m. Bernard was dead. In that moment, he became the ninth of 13 people executed in the final six months of the Trump administration — more federal executions than in the previous 10 administrations combined. Of the 13, six were put to death after Trump lost the election, his Justice Department accelerating the schedule to ensure they would die before the incoming administration could intercede. Before Trump, there had been only three federal executions since 1963; in January 2021, Trump oversaw three executions during a single four-day stretch Two years before that stretch, Trump had signed perhaps the lone broadly popular major initiative of his presidency: a bipartisan criminal-justice reform bill. By 2020, however, his political calculus had changed.
Your heart is in your throat watching these incredible animal rescues. But it restores your faith in the human animal to see it
Braço do MP que fiscaliza as Forças Armadas não deu nem o primeiro passo para pedir punições pelo 8 de janeiro.
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