Animals opening their presents! Aaaaand kids opening their presents: Happy Hollandaise, folks. I know some of you like the Friday Night Soother more than anything else I do. If so … 🙂
Uncategorized
Wouldn’t you rather try Hopium? Many of us have them in our lives or in our families, people who over the Trump years slid from left to right. For some it was the terror and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. For others it began sooner than 2020. Most are unknowns, but they often follow better-knowns down the rabbit hole. Michelle Goldberg considers the phenomenon in light of an In These Times essay by Kathryn Joyce (“The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption“) and Jeff Sharlet (“The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War“) and with a little help from Naomi Klein’s “Doppelganger.” Goldberg writes: There have been plenty of high-profile defectors from the left in recent years, among them the comedian Russell Brand, the environmentalist-turned-conspiracy-theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the journalist Matt Taibbi, a onetime scourge of Wall Street, who was recently one of the winners of a $100,000 prize from the ultraconservative Young America’s Foundation.
And his cult will probably believe it. I don’t know how many of you are watching the Trump videos on his web site but almost all of them are terrifying. But among the atrocities are a few comic gems. This is one of them: Former President Donald Trump on Friday proposed building up to 10 futuristic “freedom cities” on federal land, part of a plan that the 2024 presidential contender said would “create a new American future” in a country that has “lost its boldness.” Commuters, meanwhile, could get around in flying cars, Trump said – an echo of “The Jetsons,” the classic cartoon about a family in a high-tech future society. Work to develop vertical takeoff and landing vehicles is already underway by major airlines, auto manufacturers and other companies, though widely seen as years away from reaching the market. “I want to ensure that America, not China, leads this revolution in air mobility,” Trump, who announced his third bid for the presidency in November, said in a four-minute video detailing his plan.
He manipulated the court’s norms to overturn Roe. And he’ll do it again whenever he chooses. This piece in the NY Times about the deliberations in the Dobbs decision is a barn burner. I’ve included a gift link so that you can read the whole thing, but here is how it opens. Alito is a beast, as are those in his thuggish crew: On Feb. 10 last year, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. showed his eight colleagues how he intended to uproot the constitutional right to abortion. At 11:16 a.m., his clerk circulated a 98-page draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. After a justice shares an opinion inside the court, other members scrutinize it. Those in the majority can request revisions, sometimes as the price of their votes, sweating sentences or even words. But this time, despite the document’s length, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote back just 10 minutes later to say that he would sign on to the opinion and had no changes, according to two people who reviewed the messages. The next morning, Justice Clarence Thomas added his name, then Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and days later, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. None requested a single alteration.
It’s a mess and it’s getting messier It appears that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s honeymoon is coming to an early conclusion. The Freedom Caucus is hopping mad that he allowed the Defense Authorization Bill to pass with Democratic votes, a big no-no signifying that the bill was obviously much too good. According to Puck’s Tara Palmieri, they accused Johnson of going behind their backs and using a “page ripped from the Boehner playbook” referring to the former speaker who, like Kevin McCarthy, was also chased out of the job for passing bills with Democrats. Palmieri reports that a senior GOP aide told her that “people are turning on Mike fast; he won’t make a decision” because he wouldn’t choose between two competing bills. And apparently it has finally occurred to them that his lack of experience and expertise might be a problem, quoting the same aide saying, “his operation is minor league compared to Kevin’s team. At least they knew what they were doing and how the place ran. Mike’s team has no idea what they’re doing, and it’s pissing people off.
What happened to all the missing secrets? You may remember Cassidy Hutchinson saying that Mark Meadows took a binder full of information about the Russia investigation home with him during her January 6 Committee testimony: According to transcripts released by the Jan. 6 committee last year, in closed-door testimony, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the committee she was “almost positive” the binder went home with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. “I don’t think that would have been something that he would have destroyed. It was not returned anywhere, and it never left our office to go internally anywhere. It stayed in our safe in the office safe most of the time,” Hutchinson said, adding that she realized the binder was no longer in the safe on her last day at the White House. CNN has new reporting on what went on and the enduring mystery of the missing binder continues.
Or is it just more hopium? I’m hoping to spread a little bit of hopium during this holiday season, not because I’m trying to blow smoke but because I’m honestly not as pessimistic about this coming election as a lot of people are. It’s not that I’m not extremely nervous. I know as well as you do that anything can happen and this political situation is extremely volatile. After all, just two years ago we had an attempted coup! But after having lived through some earlier panics that inform my feelings about this election, I’m just not ready to call for the hemlock. Yet. I know it will take hard work and close attention to what’s going on over the next year, but I do believe it’s possible. I’ll try to bring you analysis that I find as I scour the internet everyday that may at least give you some pause. JV Last of the Bulwark is a bit of a curmudgeon. Sometimes he is down right dark but I often find his analysis interesting. Today he discusses a conversation with economist Noah Smith about Biden’s chances in the election and why Smith believes he will win.
It appears that James Comer is quite the financial operator Roger Sollenberger at the Daily Beast broke a story about Comer’s shady financial dealings with his brother a couple of weeks ago. When confronted with it in a hearing by Florida Congressman Jared Moskowitz, he got so mad he lost control and called Moskowitz a smurf. Now the AP has filled in some more blanks on Comer’s finances: Rep. James Comer, a multimillionaire farmer, boasts of being one of the largest landholders near his rural Kentucky hometown, and he has meticulously documented nearly all of his landholdings on congressional financial disclosure documents – roughly 1,600 acres in all. But there are six acres that he bought in 2015 and co-owns with a longtime campaign contributor that he has treated differently, transferring his ownership to Farm Team Properties, a shell company he co-owns with his wife. Interviews and records reviewed by The Associated Press provide new insights into the financial deal, which risks undercutting the force of some of Comer’s central arguments in his impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden.
Let’s hope it goes better than it did 23 years ago The Republican party’s descent into post-ideological madness has been well documented over the years, here and elsewhere. Those of us who have been around a while started seeing it back in the 1980s when Newt Gingrich and his gang started to adopt scorched earth tactics to destroy their political opponents and it gained steam during the Clinton years with a tabloid strategy designed to titillate the electorate and offend the allegedly pious right wing Christians. But it shifted into something more dangerous in the 2000 election when they decided that there were no holds barred when it came to holding on to power. I was reminded of all that yesterday when this popped up in my social media feeds: I assume that you all know what went down in that case so I won’t belabor it. In a nutshell, when the Republicans pulled out every shady stop in a state run by the candidate’s brother to ensure that recounts were stopped so that his rival would never go ahead in the election, we should have known that our democracy was more fragile than we thought.
Paul Ryan on MAGA Howie Klein (Down With Tyranny!) posts this morning on former speaker Paul Ryan’s interview from two weeks ago. “The entertainers took over Congress,” Ryan told Teneo Insights [timestamp 2:10]. When “a handful of nihilists who go to Congress not to legislate but to be provocative entertainers, this is what happens.” The Party of Trump was not amused, Howie observes: Mediaite adds: Ryan has been on Fox Corporation’s board of directors since 2019. This has been a recurring point of contention for Trump, his allies, and Trump media backers like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson have accused Ryan of meddling behind the scenes. Maybe yes, maybe no. But why not get well paid for doing it, eh? Somewhere recently I read that once the war against the Axis powers was over, people all over France began claiming they were part of La Résistance against the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy régime. A national case of stolen valor. So it may be in this country once MAGA is no more. Cheney and Kinzinger earned their plaudits for standing up to Donald Trump while they were still in office.