It turned out to be a vape pen Our new Christian Nationalist Commander Mike Johnson has released all the January 6th footage which shows not every minute of the insurrection was violent, thus proving that there was no violence at all. Or at least that’s what the right wingers seem to think. Here’s an example of how it’s going: As expected, new conspiracies are being launched based on the J6 footage released by Speaker Mike Johnson, each one crazier than the next. The hottest one making the rounds claims that someone in a MAGA hat is flashing a police badge inside the Capitol. This feeds the conspiracy that J6 was orchestrated by FBI agents dressed as Trump supporters, advanced by several Members of Congress. Just this past week, Rep. Clay Higgins claimed that busses of FBI agents disguised as Trump supporters came in “ghost busses.” And now, a US Senator gets in on the action: The new conspiracy, latched onto this morning by Utah Senator Mike Lee and several others, is that one of the J6ers inside the Capitol must be holding an FBI badge because, I guess, it supposedly looks like a badge.
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California Gov. Gavin Newson is sending a warning shot at Florida’s Ron DeSantis over abortion ahead of their anticipated clash on Fox News later this month. On Sunday, Newsom is debuting a new TV ad that accuses the Republican governor and presidential candidate of pushing policies that criminalize women and doctors who pursue abortions after six weeks. The ad, narrated by Newsom, shows pictures of a woman and a doctor under a “Wanted” sign and states that their possible arrest is “by order of Governor Ron DeSantis.” DeSantis signed Florida’s six-week abortion ban into law this year, upending his state’s status as an abortion haven in the South as he sought to boost his conservative bonafides in the presidential primary. Democrats, meanwhile, have capitalized politically since the Supreme Court overturned abortion protections, with anger on the left fueling better-than-expected results at the ballot box.
Kicking the 14th Amendment down the road Whistling past a graveyard. Tiptoeing through a minefield. Neither the courts nor election officials nor Congress want to touch ruling Donald Trump ineligible to serve as president. Colorado Politics: A Denver judge on Friday found Donald Trump remains eligible for the state’s 2024 presidential ballot even though he engaged in an insurrection, joining courts elsewhere that have rejected attempts to disqualify the leading Republican candidate. District Court Judge Sarah B. Wallace determined the provision of the 14th Amendment barring insurrectionists from holding office does not apply to presidents and, therefore, does not disqualify Trump. “While the Court agrees that there are persuasive arguments on both sides, the Court holds that the absence of the President from the list of positions to which the Amendment applies combined with the fact that Section Three specifies that the disqualifying oath is one to ‘support’ the Constitution whereas the Presidential oath is to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution,” Wallace wrote.
Fight the wind or ride the balloon Thomas P.M. Barnett’s “The Pentagon’s New Map” (2004) outlined how the sources of conflict in the world are concentrated in the non-integrating “gap” areas under cultural stress and disconnected from the broader economy. As in Barnett’s past work, “America’s New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse” (2023) looks to a future worth creating. The cultural stress in the U.S. these days, Barnett tells James Fallows on his podcast this week, is connected to America “losing its whiteness.” But that’s more connected to climate change than Americans of the Baby Boom generation care to admit. Fallows writes: Barnett is crystal-clear about climate change as a central driver of world politics, economics, and strategic tensions. And he emphasizes two related aspects of particular importance to the United States. —One is climate’s role as driver of migrations—mainly south-to-north around the world, since that’s more feasible than east-west migration across the broad oceans.
If she can do it there, she can do it anywhere Greg Sargent on the latest accomplishments of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer: Few Democrats would deny that the party must win back working people. Yet one of the party’s long-term conundrums is whether they can pursue ambitious efforts to combat climate change without threatening those very workers’ wages or jobs. In coming days, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is set to sign a package of bills that would transition the state to 100 percent clean electricity by 2040. The bills — which also include robust provisions for workers — are among the most ambitious efforts undertaken by any state to move toward a carbon-free future in a manner that is actively good for working people. Significantly, Democrats are testing this approach in a swing state in the heart of the industrial Midwest. […] Climate action tends to expose cracks in the Democratic coalition precisely because it aggravates existing tensions between the goals and interests of environmentalists and workers.
Not that some of us didn’t see it coming… Over the past few years people have argued over whether or not Trump and his movement were fascist. (I came down on the side of yes, quite some time ago..) But others made the point that the word has a specific meaning and Trump didn’t necessarily fit it perfectly. Tom Nichols, Never Trump conservative, was one of those people. In this piece he correctly describes him as a lazy, narcissistic, gadfly who doesn’t really care about anything but himself. He points out that he “had only two consistent issues: hatred of immigrants and love for foreign autocrats.” He writes: “Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill” He warned that the indiscriminate use of the word word could blind us to the time when it might actually become accurate. He says that time has come: For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric.
Don’t let them forget Trump or shirk who they’ve become Following up on the post below, here’s a great piece by Brian Beutler from his excellent newsletter Off Message. He recaps the infuriatingly terrible media response to Trump’s “vermin” comments, proving just how inured they’ve become to his escalating extremism. He notes that the outcry from regular people finally jolted them out of their reflexive “that old Trumps says the darndest things” reaction. But what do we do? But the question now—as days turn into weeks, and fresh stories vie for our attention—is whether this will be a passing kerfuffle, or one Republicans, as long as they support Trump, can never live down. Reporters have no shortage of Trump outrage porn to cover, and if Democrats can’t differentiate the vermin libel as something that transcends his more typical offenses, it will fade like most of the others. That’s the main source of my small misgivings over the couch-fainting, pearl-clutching way liberals have responded to it. “Ack, Hitler said that!” True enough, he did.
This man is demented — and the audience cheers Back when he was running against Clinton he used to say she belonged in jail and she was crook and that she didn’t “have the strength and stamina” to be president. It wasn’tsubtle by any means. But this … this is beyond grotesque. And his audience loves it. Meanwhile, speaking of stupid: Fine. Everything is fine.
You think Trump doesn’t mean you? What Sinclair Lewis did say in It Can’t Happen Here: “But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.” The more familiar quote misattributed to Lewis was just years ahead of its time. Whatever. The truth of it seems increasingly evident. Wrapped in the flag? ☑ Carrying a cross? ☑
The Speaker of the House has called an early recess for the Thanksgiving break because his Republicans members were so punchy from all the infighting and name-calling that they allowed a continuing budget resolution with no budget cuts to pass, mostly with Democratic votes, and couldn’t even work up a good old-fashioned cry. There are a few die hards who are still shaking their fists on the Capitol steps vowing never to let it happen again but nobody has the energy to cheer them on at this point: Their obsession with “individual spending bills” instead of omnibus legislation doesn’t really seem like the greatest idea at the moment since they can’t even get their own draconian spending bills to the floor much less pass them. So I’m not sure why they thought a government shutdown was going to shake anything loose. Not that it really matters. They have not done any actual legislating since this congress convened nearly a year ago so why start now? America is tired too — tired of their inane, infantile, behavior. And people are no doubt grateful to be spared any more of it for the next week or so.