Look who’s complaining about partisan manipultion of the courts: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vented his displeasure Monday after two Democratic-appointed federal judges reversed their decisions to retire in what appear to be efforts to stop President-elect Trump from nominating their successors. McConnell called the unusual decisions to forgo retirement following Trump’s sweeping victory last month a “partisan” gambit that would undermine the integrity of federal courts. “They rolled the dice that a Democrat could replace them, and now that he won’t, they’re changing their plans to keep a Republican from doing it,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. You cannot make this shit up. McConnell is the guy who held open a lifetime appointment Supreme Court seat until Trump could fill it and then rushed through another one so that he could again allow Trump to fill it. Shamelessness is their superpower.
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Brian Beutler’s newsletter today proposes the idea that in light of the Hunter Biden pardon statement, in which Biden alluded to serious prosecutorial abuses in the case, that Biden needs to tell everything they know about Trump’s and the Republicans’ abuses before he leaves office. He writes: We don’t know what these Democrats chose to leave buried. But the Hunter Biden saga, culminating in his Sunday pardon, and his father’s accompanying statement justifying the decision, all suggest the party still fails to grasp the importance of sunlight, accountability, and clear communication. The election is over and they lost, but now the question is whether they will cede all power to the GOP in six weeks without doing everything they still can to inform and protect the country Between the lines, it’s clear Biden knows quite a lot that never made big splashy headlines.
Like Trump’s loyalty is a one-way street. So is hypocrisy where the press is concerned. Kevin Kruse, the Princeton historian, caught my attention Monday night when he posted the cancellation of his Washington Post subscription. Kruse posted a screenshot of the Post’s landing page making the Hunter Biden pardon out to be the biggest national story since Nov. 5. In disgust, Kruse threw up his hands and hit “cancel. “ The Post’s front page caught me by surprise because I was otherwise tied up with North Carolina Republicans trying to cancel 60,000 votes, including those of several friends. More on that in a minute. Marcy Wheeler has an explanation for the blanket coverage of a non-story: How Jeff Bezos Smothered Pete Hegseth News because Hunter Biden Was Pardoned of Already Declined Charges Author/journalist Mikel Jollet replied that the focus perfectly encapsulated what’s wrong with American journalism: Is it a story? Sure. But every newspaper in America devoting front page headlines to Hunter fucking Biden while Trump appoints a cabal of rapists, racists and con-men to positions of enormous power is MADNESS.
Would you buy a used covert operation from this man? Frank Figliuzzi, former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence and national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC, flagged this on the hellsite. (Yes, I still monitor.): Kash Patel’s knees are scabbed from making obeisance to Donald Trump. And he’s got a fanatic’s zeal (check the eyes) for punishing Trump’s enemies. Which is why Trump wants to make him director of the FBI next year. Hettena points out at SpyTalk just how cavalierly Kash Patel operates in the security sphere: On October 30, 2020, President Trump signed off on a mission to have SEAL Team Six rescue Philip Walton, a 27-year-old American who gunmen had abducted from his farm in the West African nation of Niger, near the border with Nigeria. The kidnappers had hustled Walton across the border to Nigeria and were demanding a $1 million ransom. In their book Only I Can Fix It, journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported that the plan called for the SEALs to parachute into northern Nigeria and move three miles on foot to reach the compound where Walton was being held.
Here is that thread: 1. Of all the deceptive sales techniques the U.S. government has used on the American people, one of them—the Social Security Act—gets far too little attention. Buckle up because this is a wild ride. 2. In 1935, the American people were sold a bill of goods. They were told, “Pay into this system, and it’ll be YOUR money for retirement.” Sounds great, right? 3. But here’s where it gets juicy, in a really ugly way. Two years later, when the Supreme Court was considering the constitutionality of the Social Security Act, the government did a complete 180. 4. The government—through Assistant Attorney General Robert Jackson—argued in essence, “Oh no, this isn’t YOUR money at all. This is a TAX, and we can do whatever we want with it.” Classic bait and switch. 5. Let’s not forget the ruling in Helvering v.
Looks like it. In fact the Senators don’t seem to even be slightly concerned about the imminent firing of Christopher Wray for no good reason. It’s all good: As the Senate returned Monday evening from the holiday recess, Republican senators voiced little to no concern over Donald Trump’s corrupt plan to fire FBI Director Chris Wray and showed no signs of being ready to torpedo Kash Patel’s presumptive nomination as Wray’s replacement. Even GOP senators who might be expected to sound some feeble caution – Thom Tillis (R-NC), Joni Ernst (R-IA), and Susan Collins (R-ME) – offered no reservations and expressed confidence in Patel’s prospects for confirmation. Garret Graff, author of “The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War” and “Watergate: A New History” wrote this in the NY Times: To understand the full scope of the damage Mr. Patel could inflict, you have to understand how uniquely powerful and dangerous the F.B.I. can be — and why a Patel directorship would probably corrupt and bend the institution for decades, even if he served only a few years.
There is a coup underway in South Korea and we don’t know at this writing if it’s going to succeed or not. The right wing would-be dictator President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law and the parliament immediately convened and countermanded it which means it cannot hold under the law. The military and police are on the scene and nobody knows what will come next. After the election here I was thinking about misogyny (I wonder why) and how it affects politics and today I was reminded of this. It’s a story in the BBC from a couple of years ago about the South Korean elections: His fingers relentlessly tap the keyboard as he replies to dozens of their messages at his desk in the centre of a busy campaign office for one of South Korea’s main presidential candidates, Yoon Suk-yeol. “Nearly 90% of men in their twenties are anti-feminist or do not support feminism,” he tells me. South Korea has one of the worst women’s rights records in the developed world. And yet it is disgruntled young men who have been the focus of this country’s presidential election. Many do not see feminism as a fight for equality.
Trump is an ass Part DLXXXIV: According to the Trump-friendly cable news channel, Trudeau’s visit to Trump’s Florida home had the Canadian playing timid defense. Trump’s threat to impose sweeping tariffs on imports from Canada, the Fox report suggested, prompted a complaint from Trudeau that such a move would “kill the Canadian economy completely.” Trump offered that maybe Canada could just become a U.S. state, which prompted Trudeau to “laugh nervously,” Fox reported. That part’s probably accurate. When a leader who has repeatedly expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin starts coveting your nation’s land, it’s fair to be a bit worried. Trump’s suggestion to Trudeau was that he could become governor of this new state of Canada. When someone else present suggested that this would mean adding a state that would probably vote Democratic, Trump submitted that Canada could be annexed as two states: one conservative, one liberal. Coming from the guy who offerened to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland, I wouldn’t laugh too hard. Orange Julius Caesar is feeling his oats.
Rolling Stone reports that Trump is NOT HAPPY that he’s not getting to wet his beak on some of the cash that’s been rolling in to an affiliated superpac. (Obviously, he IS wetting his beak with all the others.) “It’s my fucking money!” the 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner privately vented in October, referring to an alleged sum in the tens of millions of dollars, a source with direct knowledge of the matter tells Rolling Stone. Trump wasn’t talking about a business deal. Rather, he’s been grumbling about money donated to a think tank his former staffers and allies founded in 2021 to “advance the America First agenda.” For several months now, according to three people with knowledge of the situation, the former president has complained to an array of confidants and Republicans about the millions raised by the America First Policy Institute, a MAGAfied think tank launched near the start of his post-presidency.
Trump is certainly the most vindictive of all people in political life but he is not alone. Most of Trump’s picks have expressed a thirst for vengeance as well, including the failed AG nominee and Kash Patel, (I wrote about him here.) [T]here are at least eight other Trump choices for senior government posts who have made clear their desire to get rid of, target and even prosecute the undesirables, from attorney general to secretary of state to staffers set to work in the White House. […] Gaetz’s replacement as the pick for attorney general, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi (R), made similar if less-pitched comments last year on Fox News. She said that when Trump reclaimed office, “you know what’s going to happen: The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated. Because the deep state, last — first term for President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows. “But now, they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated, and the House needs to be cleaned out.