Say it ain’t so The Washington Post reports that FBI agents argued with prosecutors over the Mar-a-Lago search saying that there was no need for a warrant after the president assured the DOJ that all the classified documents had been found back in June. Yeah, how did that turn out? Prosecutors argued that new evidence suggested Trump was knowingly concealing secret documents at his Palm Beach, Fla., home and urged the FBI to conduct a surprise raid at the property. But two senior FBI officials who would be in charge of leading the search resisted the plan as too combative and proposed instead to seek Trump’s permission to search his property, according to the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive investigation. Prosecutors ultimately prevailed in that dispute, one of several previously unreported clashes in a tense tug of war between two arms of the Justice Department over how aggressively to pursue a criminal investigation of a former president. The FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on Aug.
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Adam Serwer FTW : The way conservatives tell it, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a hive of anti-Trump villainy, filled with agents looking for any excuse to hound the former president with investigative witch hunts. But the thing to understand about Donald Trump’s legal troubles is that they exist not because federal agents are out to get him, but despite the fact that the FBI is full of Trump supporters who would really like to leave him alone. This morning, The Washington Post reported that FBI investigators clashed with federal prosecutors over the decision to search the former president’s residence, where highly classified documents were found despite Trump’s insistence that he had none.
Election deniers are embedded all over the place We’ve stopped talking about this. That’s a mistake. From TPM: Since losing their midterm elections, several election deniers have sought leadership positions within their state Republican parties, all part of a national play by Trump supporters and Big Lie enthusiasts to keep election denialism alive and well, while they seek more control over local elections. Two-thirds of the 345 election deniers who ran for office in 2022 won their races, according to a Brookings Institution study. But many, like former community college teacher Kristina Karamo, still lost, particularly in battleground states. Karamo was running to become Michigan’s secretary of state during last fall’s midterm elections. The Trump-endorsed nominee argued as part of her campaign platform that the state’s election systems were vulnerable to fraud. True to form, Karamo even filed a lawsuit ahead of the election to try to force Detroit voters to either show up to polls or pick up absentee ballots in person, a legal challenge inspired by claims from Dinesh D’Souza’s debunked propaganda film.
Here’s an interesting new wrinkle in the American First populism of the Republican Party. Some MAGA oxes are potentially being gored and they don’t like it: Donald Trump’s latest salvo in his trade war with China is raising hackles among fellow Republicans from farm states, a crucial voting bloc in the 2024 GOP primary. The former and would-be future president pitched a new proposal Monday to overhaul the U.S. trading relationship with Beijing, part of a wave of anti-China rhetoric surging through Washington in the wake of the Chinese spy balloon flap earlier this month. But while there is consensus within the GOP on taking a tough line, many rural Republicans were quick to reject Trump’s calls to slap new tariffs on Chinese goods — since Beijing targeted the U.S. farm economy during the former president’s last trade war with China. The rare pushback, in public and private, presents an early break with some representatives for one of his key constituencies: rural Americans.
Say it ain’t so! It looks like the hard right ideologue is making some big bucks for destroying America. nice work if you can get it. Heidi Pyzbla in Politico has an article entitled Dark money and special deals: How Leonard Leo and his friends benefited from his judicial activism: The Federalist Society co-chairman’s lifestyle took a lavish turn after he became Donald Trump’s adviser on judicial nominations. It should be shocking but really, at this point, it’s not. They’re all a bunch of crooks. These people aren’t getting rich from writing books or giving speeches or even sinecures on corporate boards. They’re getting rich because they have corrupted government in favor of the wealthy and their special causes: A network of political non-profits formed by judicial activist Leonard Leo moved at least $43 million to a new firm he is leading, raising questions about how his conservative legal movement is funded.
They did not They got Roe repealed. It took 50 years but they did it. Don’t think they’re any more ok with marriage equality: Nearly eight years after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage and several months after Congress codified gay nuptials, Iowa lawmakers proposed banning such unions in their state constitution. “In accordance with the laws of nature and nature’s God, the state of Iowa recognizes the definition of marriage to be the solemnized union between one human biological male and one human biological female,” the joint resolution, introduced Tuesday by eight Republican members of the Iowa House of Representatives, states. If the measure becomes law, it would conflict with the Supreme Court’s 2015 landmark decision to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide, Obergefell v. Hodges, coupled with Congress’ bipartisan passage of the Respect for Marriage Act late last year. Therefore, it is unclear that such a law could be enforceable, as federal law and the federal Constitution take precedence over state law. Iowa Rep.
It’s a silent COVID spring Fewer people at my grocery stores are wearing masks of any kind these days. The widely debated Cochrane review on masks made its brief ripple and faded. Except for the Chinese lab theory, the right largely has moved on to another set of culture war rants. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene would rather blather about fentanyl. And the 2020 election? Greene should be on a license plate. Gov. Wokety-woke DeWoke has moved on to … you know. But COVID has not moved on, writes Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic. It has just gotten quieter. It’s still adapting: Three years later, the coronavirus is still silently spreading—but the fear of its covertness again seems gone. Enthusiasm for masking and testing has plummeted; isolation recommendations have been pared down, and may soon entirely disappear. “We’re just not communicating about asymptomatic transmission anymore,” says Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and infection-prevention expert at George Mason University. “People think, What’s the point?
It’s a nice idea but really, why bother David Wallace Wells in the NY Times asks us to imagine what would have happened with the dialog around the origins of the pandemic if we could just all get along. It’s true that on a different planet we could imagine such a thing. Unfortunately we live on a planet where the right wing is batshit insane so reasonable dialog is impossible. Steve M makes the point well: But we can’t “imagine that none of this was presented … in partisan or nationalistic terms.” We can’t “imagine that Donald Trump had not been president and that nobody used the term ‘bioweapon'” — or, more memorably, the phrase “China virus,” a name Trump first endorsed on March 11, 2020, when COVID was barely a presence in much of the United States, and then used repeatedly in speeches and on Twitter. Right-wingers poisoned our COVID discourse from the start, the way they poison our discourse on so many other issues.
Raskin would never call them Banana Republicans Incivility is a reflex among MAGA Republicans, as are gun-toting implicit threats of violence and, as on January 6, the real deal. The GOP’s sneering use of Democrat Party has such a long history that at this point I wince whenever Democrats occasionally refer the the Democrat Party. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) decided to school Republican colleague Lauren Boebert on her use of it. The Associated Press reports that this old Republican shibboleth is “on the rise”: Purposely mispronouncing the formal name of the Democratic Party and equating it with political ideas that are not democratic goes beyond mere incivility, said Vanessa Beasley, an associate professor of communications at Vanderbilt University who studies presidential rhetoric. She said creating short-hand descriptions of people or groups is a way to dehumanize them. Nothing new about that, even if branding the left pedophiles to dehumanize them is. For any young-uns reading this, Lawrence B.
I spend a lot of my time thinking about global heating, where it’s often hard to be optimistic about the future. But there are some bright spots. In particular, there’s a good chance that 2023 will be the year that coal use finally begins a sustained decline, and relatedly the year the carbon dioxide emissions […]