I don’t know what to say about the following. The person speaking gobbledygook may have had a few too many White Claws. You hve to admit, defending the Saudi human rights record and giving them credit for their sportswashing is pretty bold. Meanwhile, guess who else is going to benefit? The surprising deal on Tuesday ending a civil war in the world of professional golf stands to produce benefits for former President Donald J. Trump’s family business by increasing the prospect of major tournaments continuing to be played at Trump-owned courses in the United States and perhaps abroad. The outcome is the latest example of how the close relationship between Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and Saudi Arabia, whose sovereign wealth fund is the force behind the upheaval in the golf world, has proved beneficial to both sides even as it has prompted intense ethical scrutiny and political criticism. Even as it has injected new money and competition into professional golf, Saudi Arabia has been accused of using its wealth to buff its global reputation and obscure its human rights record through sports.
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Can we just get on with it? We keep getting teased that Donald Trump will soon be wearing an ankle bracelet over charges in one or another of the criminal investigations pending against him. So far, nada. Seriously, are we going to have to go Ralph Kramden on Jack Smith’s Ed Norton? (A very old cultural reference, sorry.) Again Monday, nada. CBS News: Attorneys representing former President Donald Trump — John Rowley, James Trusty and Lindsey Halligan — met with special counsel Jack Smith and federal prosecutors at the Justice Department at around 10 a.m. Monday, according to two people familiar with the matter. The meeting took place weeks after Trump’s lawyers had requested a meeting with top federal law enforcement officials. The attorneys for the former president spent just under two hours inside the Main Justice building and declined to comment on their meeting as they left. Trump himself, increasingly anxious under his Swords of Dumbocles, is freaking out in all caps on Truth Social, as Digby noted Monday.
Careful where you point that thing It’s all fun and games until someone loses their beach house or their life’s savings (Axios): Insurability in an age of climate change is a 50-state problem. It’s just growing more actute in California, Florida, Texas, Colorado, Louisiana and New York “as insurers are being forced to re-assess their risk tolerance as climate change leads to more common and severe extreme weather events, says Steve Bowen, chief science officer at Gallagher Re.” Rates in Florida “are expected to rise about 43% to nearly $6,000 in 2023,” according to the Insurance Information Institute. No problem. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican state legislators will just madate that “woke” insurers offer coverage anyway. Because Florida is where capitalism goes to die.
You’ve got to be joking. Philip Bump unravels the looney tunes James Comer and Chuck Grassley jihad against Chris Wray for failing to “turn over” a document they’ve already seen. It’s a complicated story and it’s very, very stupid so take a deep breath: Over the course of 2019, President Donald Trump and his allies were focused on the electoral threat posed by former vice president Joe Biden, the candidate leading in polling for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani thought he had a useful angle to that end: an allegation from a former Ukrainian official that Biden had leveraged American funding to benefit a company for which Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, worked. That official, Viktor Shokin, met with Giuliani, then Trump’s attorney, to allege that the vice president had pressured Ukraine to fire him to block a probe into the energy company Burisma. The claim didn’t withstand scrutiny. Shokin’s ouster was a multinational effort predicated on the prosecutor’s failure to address corruption.
In case you were wondering about all the “leaks” we’ve been getting from the Mar-a-Lago case — and Trump’s lawyers screaming bloody murder that Jack Smith himself is doing the leaking , here’s an explainer from TPM: The short answer is that the sources of the flurry of stories we’ve seen are witnesses in the case or, more precisely, their lawyers. Trump World figures, in responding and reacting to some of the disclosures, have divulged some new information, too, but that’s been less revealing of the underlying facts than of potential defenses they might use and the public narrative they want to create. None of the big reveals about the MAL evidence from the last few weeks bear much sign of having come from Smith, the FBI, or DOJ more broadly. Kurt Eichenwald, the veteran investigative reporter, had a good thread on the dynamics: As a flood of details of the Trump MaraLago case come out, Trump, commentators etc say Smith’s team is leaking. As someone who has covered these kinds of cases many times, that is almost certainly not true.
In fact, it should be ready in two weeks Ah memories: “My first day in office, I am going to ask Congress to put a bill on my desk getting rid of this disastrous law and replacing it with reforms that expand choice, freedom, affordability,” said Trump on Oct. 25, 2016 a day after he St. Augustine speech, in Sanford, Florida. “You’re going to have such great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost. And it’s going to be so easy.” Fast forward to 2020: Trump began teasing his own replacement plan during his first presidential bid, five years ago. Back then, he pledged to swap out the Affordable Care Act for “something terrific,” details TBD. Over subsequent months and years, Trump boasted about the benefits of his plan. It would be cheaper yet somehow also more generous than Obamacare. It would be “so easy,” even though “nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” It would “take care of everybody,” even as it took literal care away from many.
You can’t make this stuff up. A good piece from Mark Sumner at DKos on some of the weirdness coming out of the Ukraine war these days: On Tuesday, Wagner Group CEO Yevgeny Prigozhin sat down for an interview with pro-Russian military blogger Konstantin Dolgov. Over the course of the discussion, the mercenary leader continued his barbed criticism of Russia’s military leadership, disparaged the sad state of the Russian army, and even seemed to suggest that a general revolt against the government of Vladimir Putin was right around the corner. In the wake of that widely viewed interview, Dolgov was fired from his position at a Russian propaganda network, but Prigozhin … goes on. In what may be one of the most inexplicable chapters of Russia’s labyrinthine political system, Prigozhin still hasn’t had a stairwell accident, an unfortunate illness, or a visit to an open window despite months of increasingly blatant disdain for everyone and everything involved with Putin’s personal war on Ukraine.
It’s very moving to go to the Normandy beaches and recall what happened there. We’re rapidly losing our collective memory of all that in America but it’s still very vivid in Europe.
Apparently, he been busy testifying. The New York Times reported this afternoon that he’s has appeared before Jack Smith’s Grand Jury: For months, people in Mr. Trump’s orbit have been puzzled by and wary about the low profile kept by Mr. Meadows in the investigations. As reports surfaced of one witness after another going into the grand jury or to be interviewed by federal investigators, Mr. Meadows has kept largely out of sight, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers believe he could be a significant witness in the inquiries. Mr. Trump himself has at times asked aides questions about how Mr. Meadows is doing, according to a person familiar with the remarks. Asked about the grand jury testimony, a lawyer for Mr. Meadows, George Terwilliger, said, “Without commenting on whether or not Mr. Meadows has testified before the grand jury or in any other proceeding, Mr. Meadows has maintained a commitment to tell the truth where he has a legal obligation to do so.” Mr. Meadows was a polarizing figure at the White House among some of Mr.
It’s heartbreaking. But you shouldn’t have to personally experience it to have some empathy for what these kids are going through. Treating children — any children — like pariahs and threatening them and their parents and doctors with jail is reprehensible. And maybe this fellow should reassess his assumptions about “the woke” in general.