Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

brianlux

I don't know if there is a god or what that god is but I will say this:  God bless Heather Cox Richardson.

mickeyrat

  November 5, 2023 (Sunday)

The Biden administration's use of the Federal Trade Commission to break up monopolies— suing Amazon, for example, on September 26—resurrects the nation’s traditional antitrust vision. By trying to weaken the economic power of large entities in order to restore competition, innovation, and the rights of workers and consumers, Biden officials are echoing the principles articulated by politicians of all political stripes in the early twentieth century. Those principles were in full flood during the presidential election that took place on November 5, 1912.

The progressive impulse grew in response to the rise of the business trusts that grew to control the economy in the 1880s, gathered steam in the 1890s as muckrakers like those writing for McClure’s Magazine explained in detail how a few well-connected men ran business and government in their own interests, and grew stronger as at least 303 firms disappeared in mergers every year between 1898 and 1902. The idea of restoring competition gained a champion in the White House in 1901 when Republican Theodore Roosevelt stepped into the office of the slain big-business defender William McKinley.

But Roosevelt quickly found that progressives had little luck passing bills to regulate business and protect ordinary Americans. House speaker Joseph G. “Uncle Joe” Cannon, a key member of the so-called Republican Old Guard who supported big business and ran the House with an iron fist, stood in the way. Roosevelt turned to litigation and executive orders to break up trusts and protect lands from industrial development.

When Roosevelt stepped aside in 1908 for his hand-picked successor, Willam Howard Taft, he warned the nation in his last message that the new conditions of industry had enabled corporations to become a “menace” and required that government regulate them to protect economic competition in general and workers in particular.

Roosevelt tried to stay out of Taft’s way by traveling to Africa to hunt big game (prompting banker J. P. Morgan to cheer on Roosevelt’s demise with his famous quip, “Let every lion do his duty”), leaving Cannon free to go on the attack. In February 1910 he gave a widely reprinted speech that called anyone supporting government regulation of business and protection of workers a wild-eyed radical.

But momentum for economic reform was gathering speed. Back in the U.S. a few months later, Roosevelt countered that if this were the case, President Abraham Lincoln was “a great radical…. To-day,” Roosevelt said, “many well-meaning men who have permitted themselves to fossilize, to become mere ultra-conservative reactionaries, to reject and oppose all progress, but who still pay a conventional and perfunctory homage to Lincoln’s memory, will do well to remember exactly what it was for which this great conservative leader of radicalism actually stood.”

Lincoln, Roosevelt said later that year in Osawatomie, Kansas, had stood against the special interests that had perverted government to their own ends and robbed hard workers of what they had earned. In Lincoln’s day the threat came from the Slave Power; in 1910 it came from business interests. The nation was currently governed by “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.”

Roosevelt demanded that the government restore an even economic playing field in the country, forcing businesses to operate transparently, submit to regulation, and stop funding political campaigns. He also called for graduated income taxes, inheritance taxes, the protection of national resources so industrialists could not strip them all from future generations, minimum wages, maximum hours of work, and better factory conditions.

Roosevelt was echoing the language that Democrats had embraced since 1884, when Grover Cleveland, whose base was in the urban areas of New York, won the White House. That message was not limited to politicians; indeed, it came from ordinary Americans of all stripes, including women, who could not vote but who had begun to exercise their power as consumers. They were more and more vocal, demanding an end to milk adulterated with chalk and formaldehyde, streets running with industrial pollution, and factories that overworked and maimed husbands and children.

Roosevelt added a Republican endorsement to that impulse, and momentum built. In 1910, voters gave control of the House to the Democrats, who backed an investigation into the power of bankers to direct the economy. In 1912 the House Committee on Banking and Currency under Arsène Pujo (D-LA) began to investigate the growing concentration of wealth in the economy.

Four major parties fielded presidential candidates in the election of 1912; all were progressives. The Republicans renominated President Taft, who during his first term had broken up more trusts even than Roosevelt had. Taft’s nomination prompted Roosevelt to run on a third-party Progressive ticket, where he warned Americans that the government had sold out to business and that “[we] stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

The Democrats nominated former college president and New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson, whose advisor, the jurist Louis Brandeis, called for restoring competition to the economy to protect the welfare of all the people. The American Socialist Party also fielded a candidate, Eugene V. Debs, who called for an ultimate end to capitalism and for workers to seize control of the government.

On November 5, 1912, voters elected Democrat Woodrow Wilson to the White House and gave the Democrats control of both chambers of Congress. Although he won only 42% of the popular vote, Wilson garnered 409 electoral votes to Roosevelt’s 107 and Taft’s 15. In an even more pointed message, the split in the Republican Party also led to the ouster of Uncle Joe Cannon from Congress.

In February 1913, a month before Wilson took office, the report of the Pujo Committee—so called even though an illness in Pujo’s family made him cede the chair to Hubert Stephens (D-MS)—showed that overlapping directorates and corporate boards had enabled a handful of men to control more than $22 billion in 112 corporations, where they stifled competition.

Although banks refused to cooperate with the investigation, the committee had learned enough to be “satisfied from the proofs submitted, even in the absence of data from the banks, that there is an established and well-defined identity and community of interest between a few leaders of finance, created and held together through stock ownership, interlocking directorates, partnership and joint account transactions, and other forms of domination of banks, trust companies, railroads, and public-service and industrial corporations, which has resulted in great and rapidly growing concentration of the control of money in the hands of these few men.”

Outraged, Americans got behind the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution establishing the power of the federal government to levy an income tax, which was ratified in February 1913. In December 1913, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, providing federal oversight of the country’s banking system. The following year it passed the Clayton Antitrust Act, which prohibited anticompetitive economic practices. And it established the Federal Trade Commission to prevent unfair methods of competition.

November 5, 1912, turned out to be a crucial day in the history of our country. But when the day dawned, it was not clear what the evening would bring. For their part, Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Kyler of Denison, Texas, were hedging their bets: when their newborn triplets arrived shortly before the election, they named the boys William Howard Taft Kyler, Theodore Roosevelt Kyler, and Woodrow Wilson Kyler.

mickeyrat

  November 6, 2023 (Monday)

Since taking office, the Biden administration has focused on using diplomacy in foreign affairs and has used it to solve global issues by strengthening regional partnerships.

On Friday, President Biden hosted the first leaders’ summit for the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP). Biden announced the creation of APEP in June 2022 to establish a forum positioned to improve the economies of countries in the western hemisphere, with the idea that stronger economies will be able to address economic inequality, bolster supply chains, and “restore faith in democracy by delivering for working people across the region.”

APEP is also designed to strengthen the Los Angeles Declaration for Migration and Protection that established a responsibility-sharing approach to addressing this era’s historic migration flows. Rather than working solely on getting Congress to pass legislation to fix the border—as Biden has urged since the beginning of his term—the administration has focused on the prosperity and security of the countries from which migrants come, so that they feel less pressure to leave.

The administration has worked hard to develop that strategy. Vice President Kamala Harris took the lead in “diplomatic efforts to address root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras,” and in July 2021 she released a report on strategies to slow migration from the region.

In June 2022, at the 9th Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, the administration helped to bring to reality a long-standing realization among many countries that migration must be addressed on a regional level rather than with patchwork attempts by individual nations. That’s when the U.S. got 21 governments to sign on to “a comprehensive response to irregular migration and forced displacement in the Western Hemisphere,” known as the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection.

The Biden administration has emphasized that it wants to work with the region, not dictate to it, and the leaders of APEP are working with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to fund improvements to infrastructure and train skilled workers and entrepreneurs. The IDB is an international financial institution, owned by 48 member states and headquartered in Washington, D.C., that provides development financing for Latin American and Caribbean countries.  

A senior administration official on a background call on Friday noted that “the APEP countries are collectively hosting the majority of refugees and migrants in the Western Hemisphere” and that “each has been significantly impacted by the historic flows in recent years.” The official said that President Biden deeply appreciates how regional partners have offered new legal status to millions of people displaced in the western hemisphere, and noted that APEP is part of stepping up to support those countries and create incentives for other countries to do the same.

“The bottom line is that President Biden believes that targeted economic investment in top refugee and migrant host countries is critical to stabilizing migration flows,” the official said.

Today the U.S. State Department announced nearly $485 million in additional humanitarian assistance to address the needs of refugees, migrants, and other vulnerable populations across the western hemisphere. It specified that the funding advanced the goals of the Los Angeles declaration and noted that the U.S. is “the largest single donor of humanitarian assistance for the Western Hemisphere,” providing more than $2.1 billion in humanitarian aid in the past two years.

“We are committed to working collaboratively with governments, civil society, international organizations, and other partners to help protect displaced persons and migrants in situations of vulnerability, to address the root causes of irregular migration and displacement, and to humanely manage migration in the Western Hemisphere,” the State Department said. “We urge other donors to help support the humanitarian response in the region.”

On November 11–17 the U.S. will host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco, where world leaders from 21 countries that border the Pacific Ocean, along with around 1,200 chief executive officers and about 20,000 other attendees, will meet to facilitate trade in the region. The APEC countries have almost 40% of the world’s population and support almost 50% of the world’s trade. They absorb more than 60% of U.S. exports, while the member states have invested an estimated $1.7 trillion in the U.S. and, as of 2020, employed 2.3 million U.S. workers.

The U.S. has hosted APEC this year, and Chinese president Xi Jinping is expected to attend this final event, where he will meet with Biden. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters: “Intense competition means intense diplomacy. That’s what you’re going to see.”

“[P]retty intensive negotiations with all sides relevant to this conflict” were what enabled 300 U.S. citizens, lawful residents, and their families to leave Gaza, according to Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser, on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. More remain as negotiations to gain the release of hostages continue.  

The administration’s focus on diplomacy and regional partnerships contrasts dramatically these days with Pakistan’s expulsion of as many as 1.7 million Afghan, Uyghur, and Rohingya refugees because leaders blame members of the refugee community for terrorist attacks. Some of the Afghans have been in Pakistan since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The Taliban, currently in control of Afghanistan though not the internationally recognized government of the country, is struggling to manage the influx of people who are being pushed back across the border.

In the U.S., in the face of House Republicans’ repeated votes on bills to slash funding far below the amounts Republican leadership agreed to in May as a condition for passing a bipartisan law to raise the debt ceiling and fund the government, the administration on October 30 issued a “statement of administration policy” insisting that the Republicans honor their agreement on funding for transportation, housing, and development.

On Friday the U.S. Department of Transportation announced an investment of more than $653 million to fund 41 port improvement projects across the nation. They are part of the work being done under the nearly $17 billion dedicated to ports and waterways in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, designed to strengthen supply chains, whose weaknesses we discovered the hard way during the pandemic.

This week the Republicans have before the House a bill to cut more than 64%—about a billion dollars—out of Amtrak, as well as other significant parts of the country’s passenger rail system. Most of the cuts would come from the heavily traveled northeast corridor, which carries about 800,000 people a day and serves the region that produces about 20% of the country’s gross domestic product.  

In contrast, President Biden today announced $16.4 billion in railroad investment from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in the northeast corridor. It will rebuild century-old tunnels and bridges and upgrade tracks, power systems, signals, stations, and other infrastructure, enabling higher speeds on the route and cutting delays.

Overall, the administration will invest $66 billion in passenger rail, the largest such investment since Congress founded Amtrak in 1971 under the Nixon administration.

In contrast to the slow, steady work of governance, we had today the pyrotechnics of former president Trump in Manhattan, where he testified in the civil trial in which Judge Arthur Engoron has already found that the Trump Organization, Donald Trump, the two oldest Trump sons, and two organization employees committed fraud. The trial is to determine damages.

Trump used his time on the stand to shout, accuse the judge and New York Attorney General Letitia James of engaging in a political persecution, and yell about how unfair the whole lawsuit is. Whether or not it will work—he hardly sounded like a strong man while he was complaining that the judge was being mean to him—he was playing to his political base.

mickeyrat

  November 7, 2023 (Tuesday)

Today was Election Day across the country. In a number of key state elections, voters rejected the extremism of MAGA Republicans and backed Democrats and Democratic policies.

Four of the most closely watched races were in Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania.

In Ohio, voters enshrined the right of individuals to make their own healthcare decisions, including the right to abortion, into the state constitution. Opponents of abortion rights have worked hard since the summer to stop the measure from passing, trying first to make it more difficult to amend the constitution—voters overwhelmingly rejected that measure in an August special election—then by blanketing the state with disinformation about the measure, including through official state websites and with ads by former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, and finally by dropping 26,000 voters from the rolls.

None of it worked. Voters protected the right to abortion. Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion in June 2022, voters in all seven state elections where the issue was on the ballot have fought back to protect abortion rights.

Today’s vote in Ohio, where the end of Roe v. Wade resurrected an extreme antiabortion bill, makes it eight.

Abortion was also on the ballot In Virginia, where the entire state legislature was up for grabs today. Republican governor Glenn Youngkin made it clear he wanted control of the legislature in order to push through a measure banning abortion after 15 weeks. This ploy was one Republicans were using to seem to soften their antiabortion stance, which has proven terribly unpopular. Youngkin was taking the idea out for a spin to see how it might play in a presidential election, perhaps with a hope of entering the Republican race for the presidential nomination as someone who could claim to have turned a blue state red.

It didn’t work. Voters recognized that it was disingenuous to call a 15-week limit a compromise on the abortion issue, since most serious birth defects are not detected until 20 weeks into a pregnancy.

Going into the election, Democrats held the state senate. But rather than giving Youngkin control over both houses of the state legislature, voters left Democrats in charge of the Senate and flipped the House of Delegates over to the Democrats. The Democrats are expected to elevate House minority leader Don Scott of Portsmouth to the speakership, making him the first Black House speaker in Virginia history.  

Virginia voters also elevated Delegate Danica Roem, the first known transgender delegate, to the state senate. At the same time, voters in Loudoun County, which had become a hot spot in the culture wars with attacks on LGBTQ+ individuals and with activists insisting the schools must not teach critical race theory, rejected that extremism and turned control of the school board over to those who championed diversity and equity.

In Kentucky, voters reelected Democratic governor Andy Beshear, who was running against Republican state attorney general Daniel Cameron. A defender of Kentucky’s abortion ban, Cameron was also the attorney general who declined to bring charges against the law enforcement officers who killed Breonna Taylor in her bed in 2020 after breaking into her apartment in a mistaken search for drugs.

In Pennsylvania, Democrat Daniel McCaffery won a supreme court seat, enabling the Democrats to increase their majority there. McCaffery positioned himself as a defender of abortion rights.

There will be more news about election results and what they tell us in the coming days. Tonight, though, political analyst Tom Bonier wrote: “My biggest takeaway from tonight: in '22 abortion rights had the biggest impact where it was literally on the ballot, less so when trying to draw the connection in candidate races. That has changed. Voters clearly made the connection that voting for GOP candidates=abortion bans.”

mickeyrat

  November 8, 2023 (Wednesday)

Yesterday was a bad day for extremism in the United States of America.

In Ohio, voters enshrined the right to abortion in the state constitution; in Kentucky, voters reelected Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, for another four-year term; in Pennsylvania, voters put Democrat Daniel McCaffery, who positioned himself as a defender of abortion rights, on the state supreme court; in Rhode Island, Gabe Amo, a former Biden staffer who emphasized his experience in the Biden White House, won an open seat in the House of Representatives to become Rhode Island’s first Black member of Congress; and nationwide, right-wing Moms4Liberty and anti-transgender-rights school board candidates tended to lose their races.

In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin campaigned hard to flip the state senate to the Republicans, telling voters that if his party had control of the whole government he would push through a measure banning abortion after 15 weeks. This has been a ploy advanced by Republicans to suggest they are moderating their stance on abortion, and Youngkin appeared to be trying out the argument as a basis for a run for the presidency.

But voters, who are still angry at the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which protected abortion rights until about 24 weeks, after fetal abnormalities are evident, rejected the suggestion they should settle for a smaller piece of what they feel has been taken from them by extremists on the Supreme Court.

Today, Youngkin indicated he will not run for president in 2024.  

The Democrats who won have prioritized good governance, including the protection of fundamental reproductive rights. In Kentucky, Beshear focused on record economic growth in the state—in his first term he secured almost $30 billion in private-sector investments in the economy, creating about 49,000 full-time jobs—and his able handling of emergencies, as well as his support for education and, crucially, reproductive rights.

In Virginia, Democrat Schuyler VanValkenburg beat incumbent Republican state senator Siobhan Dunnavant, the sponsor of a culture war “parents’ rights” law that was behind the removal of books from schools. While Dunnavant tried to convince voters that VanValkenburg, a high school history and government teacher, was in favor of showing pornography to high school students, he responded with a defense of teachers and an attack on book banning, reinforcing democratic principles. As Greg Sargent noted in the Washington Post, right-wing culture wars appear to be losing their potency as opponents emphasize American principles.

In Ohio, exit polls showed that Republicans as well as Democrats backed the protection of reproductive rights. As Katie Paris of the voter mobilization group Red Wine and Blue put it: “Reproductive freedom and democracy are not partisan issues.”

After such a rejection, a political party that supports democracy would accept its losses and rethink the message it was presenting to voters. But since the 1990s, far-right Republicans have insisted that election losses simply prove they have not moved far enough to the right.

That pattern was in full view today as front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination Donald Trump explained away Republican Daniel Cameron’s loss in Kentucky by blaming it on Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who MAGA Republicans insist is too moderate.

Cameron had tied himself closely to Trump, antiabortion, and the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor in her own home in a mistaken drug raid. Three days ago, Trump had said that Cameron had made “a huge surge” after Trump endorsed him and voters saw “he’s not really ‘a McConnell guy.’ They only try to label him that because he comes from the Great State of Kentucky.” Trump assured Cameron, “I will help you!”  

Now Trump blames McConnell. Right-wing podcast host Mark R. Levin echoed Trump when he told his 3.8 million followers on X that “RINOs have no winnable message.”

They are not alone in insisting that Republicans lost not because they are extremist but because they aren’t extremist enough. Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote that “Republicans are losing Republican voters because the base is fed up with weak Republicans who never do anything to actually stop the communist democrats…. The Republican Party is tone deaf and weak…. Republican voters are energized and can not wait to vote for President Trump…. [T]he Republican Party has only a short time to change their weak ways before they lose the base for years to come.”

It is worth remembering that just six days ago, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) called Greene a close friend and said he did not disagree with her on many issues.

Last night’s results highlight a key problem for the Republicans going into 2024. Their presumptive front-runner, former president Trump, is responsible for putting on the Supreme Court the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and is on video saying he thinks that women who get abortions must be punished. That position has made him a hero with the party’s evangelical base, including lawmakers such as House speaker Johnson. But it is demonstrably unpopular in the general voting population.

As writer Molly Jong-Fast said today: “Women don’t want to die for Mike Johnson’s religious beliefs.”

Within MAGA Republicans’ refusal to admit that their far-right positions are unpopular is a disdain for those voters who disagree with them. Journalist Karen Kasler, who covers the Ohio statehouse, reported the statement of Republican Senate president Matt Huffman in the wake of yesterday’s election loss. "This isn't the end,” he said. “It is really just the beginning of a revolving door of ballot campaigns to repeal or replace Issue 1."

Ohio House speaker Jason Stephens’s statement more explicitly rejected the decision of 56.62% of Ohio voters. “I remain steadfastly committed to protecting life, and that commitment is unwavering,” he said. “The legislature has multiple paths that we will explore to continue to protect innocent life. This is not the end of the conversation.”

Later today, 27 of the 67 Ohio House Republicans signed a statement taking a stand against the abortion measure approved yesterday and vowing to “do everything in our power” to stop it.

In a conversation on the right-wing cable show Newsmax, former senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) complained that young people turned out because there were “sexy things” on the ballot like abortion and marijuana. He warned: “[P]ure democracies are not the way to run a country.”

The sentiment that it is not important to let everyone vote appeared to be at work yesterday in Mississippi, where at least nine precincts in Democratic-leaning Hinds County ran out of ballots. The most populous county in the state, Hinds County is 70% Black and includes the city of Jackson, which is almost 83% Black. Officials rushed to print more ballots, but the lines ballooned. After a judge tried to remedy the situation by extending the voting hours in the county by an hour, the Republican Party of Mississippi fought that order.

Republican governor Tate Reeves won reelection.

There was, though, another blow to the Republicans yesterday: special counsel David Weiss, who has been investigating President Biden’s son Hunter for the past five years, undermined Republican conspiracy theories when he told the House Judiciary Committee that no one is interfering with his investigation and that he, alone, makes the decisions about it.

Earlier this year, House Republicans produced an IRS employee who claimed that Biden administration officials had pressured the IRS to back off from the investigation. Weiss made it clear that accusation was wrong. “At no time was I blocked, or otherwise prevented from pursuing charges or taking the steps necessary in the investigation by other United States Attorneys, the Tax Division or anyone else at the Department of Justice,” he told the committee.

Nonetheless, in the wake of yesterday’s damaging election results, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, Representative James Comer (R-KY), today issued subpoenas to Hunter Biden and the president’s brother James.

mickeyrat

  November 9, 2023 (Thursday)

The Republican-dominated House of Representatives remains unable to agree even to a way forward toward funding the United States government. This is a five-alarm fire.

The continuing resolution for funding the government Congress passed in September when then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) couldn’t pass appropriations bills runs out on November 17. If something is not done, and done quickly, the U.S. will face a shutdown over Thanksgiving. This will not only affect family gatherings and the holiday, it will hit Black Friday—which, as the busiest shopping day of the year, is what keeps a number of businesses afloat.

The problem with funding the government is the same problem that infects much else in the country today: far-right Republicans insist that their position is the only acceptable one. Even though the majority of the country opposes their view, they refuse to compromise. They want to gut the government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights.

To impose their will on the majority, they don’t have to understand issues, build coalitions, or figure out compromises. All they have to do is steadfastly vote no. If they can prevent the government from accomplishing anything, they will have achieved their goal.

Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) perfectly illustrated how much easier it is to destroy than to build today as he objected to the promotion of military leaders, one at a time. Democrats tried to bring up each promotion of career military personnel, many of whom have served this country for decades, by introducing them by name; Tuberville had only to say “I object” to prevent the Senate from taking up those promotions.

That refusal to budge from an extreme position weakens our military. It also weakens our democracy, as was apparent today in Michigan as Republican lawmakers joined an antiabortion group in suing to overturn a 2022 amendment to the state constitution protecting abortion rights. Voters approved that amendment with 57% of the vote in a process established by the state constitution, but the plaintiffs want to stop it from taking effect, claiming that by creating a new right, it disfranchises them and prevents the legislature from making laws. They could launch their own ballot initiative to replace the amendment they don’t like, but as that seems unlikely to pass, they are instead trying to block the measure the voters have said they want.

The decision of Ohio’s voters to protect abortion rights on Tuesday has prompted a similar disdain for democracy there. The vote for that state constitutional amendment was not close—56.6% to 43.4%—but Republican legislators immediately said they would work to find ways to stop the amendment from taking effect.

North Dakota state representative Brandon Prichard was much more explicit. Opposed to the measure, he wrote, “Direct democracy should not exist…. It would be an act of courage to ignore the results of the election….” According to James Bickerton of Newsweek, Prichard has previously called for Republican-dominated states to “put into code that Jesus Christ is King and dedicate their state to Him.”

Now that refusal to compromise threatens the U.S. government itself. It has been apparent that the Republicans were unable to agree on a funding plan even among themselves. On Tuesday, as Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo pointed out, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said Americans should just trust the Republicans. He told reporters: “I’m not going to tell you when we will bring [appropriations bills] to the floor, but it will be in time, how about that? Trust us: We’re working through the process in a way that I think that people will be proud of…. [M]any options…are on the table and we’ll be revealing what our plan is in short order.”

Today, although the House managed to vote on a series of extremist bills designed to signal to their base—lowering the salaries of government officials they dislike to $1 a year—the House Republicans had to pull the Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill after extremists loaded it with antiabortion language so they could not get the votes to pass it even through the Republican side of the aisle; earlier they had to pull the bill to fund Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and related agencies.

“We’re still dealing with the same divisions we always have had,” a House Republican told Sahil Kapur, Scott Wong, and Julie Tsirkin of NBC News. “We’re ungovernable.”

And then, after pulling the bill, Speaker Johnson adjourned the House until Monday. As Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) put it this afternoon: “We are just 8 days away from a devastating government shutdown—and instead of working in a bipartisan way to keep the government open, Speaker Johnson sent Congress home early for the weekend. This is completely unacceptable.”

Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) wrote: “The training wheels fell off for [Republican] leadership this week. They tried to pass two appropriations bills. They failed twice. The government shuts down in 8 days and [the House Republican Party] HAS NO PLAN. Instead, we voted on stupid stuff today like reducing the salary of [the] W[hite] H[ouse] Press Secretary to $1.”

The problem remains what it has been since the Republican Party took control of the House in 2021: far-right extremists refuse to agree to any budget that doesn’t slash government funding of popular programs, while less extremist Republicans recognize that such cuts would gut the government and horrify all but the most extreme voters. In any case, measures loaded with extremist wish lists will not pass the Senate; this is why appropriations bills are traditionally kept clean.

Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy hammered out just such an agreement with the administration in May 2023 for funding, but the extremists refuse to honor it. For their part, Democrats are holding firm on that agreement. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told NBC News correspondent Julie Tsirkin that “[a] clean continuing resolution at the fiscal year 2023 levels is the only way forward… We're asking for the status quo to keep the government open.”

The government budget isn’t the only casualty of the Republican chaos. The farm bill, which funds agricultural programs and food programs, must be renewed every five years. The measure authorized in 2018 expires this year, but extremists are eager to slash funding for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, formerly known as food stamps, endangering the passage of a measure farmers strongly support.

And today the Defense Department pleaded with Congress to pass the supplemental budget request President Biden made in August to fund Ukraine’s military needs in its war against
Russian aggression.

The Republican Party’s problem continues to be America’s problem, and it is getting bigger by the day.

mickeyrat

  November 10, 2023 (Friday)

For months now it has felt weirdly as if life in the United States of America is playing out on a split screen. That sense is very strong tonight.

On one side is a country that in the past three years has invested in its people more completely than in any era since the 1960s. The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act jump-started the U.S. economy after the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic; are rebuilding our roads, bridges, harbors, and internet infrastructure; have attracted $200 billion in private investment for chip manufacturing; and have invested billions in addressing the effects of climate change.

All of these changes need workers, and the economy emerged from the coronavirus pandemic with extraordinary growth that reached 4.9% in the last quarter and has seen record employment and dramatic wage gains. Median household wealth has grown by 37% since the pandemic, with wages growing faster at the bottom of the economy than at the top.

Yesterday, President Biden, in a buoyant mood, reflected this America when he congratulated members of the United Auto Workers in Belvidere, Illinois, for the strong contracts that came from negotiations with the nation’s three top automakers—Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors—thanks to the UAW workers’ 46-day graduated strike. The union demanded the automakers make up the ground that workers had ceded years ago when the plants were suffering.

The final contracts that emerged from long negotiations gave workers wage gains of 30% over the next four and a half years, better retirement security, more paid leave, commitments that automakers would create more union jobs, union coverage for workers at electric vehicle battery plants—the lack of that protection had been a key reason autoworkers had been skittish about electric vehicles—and a commitment from Stellantis to reopen the Jeep Cherokee plant in Belvidere that had been shuttered in February.

The UAW’s success is already affecting other automakers. As workers at non-union plants begin to explore unionization, Honda and Toyota have already announced wage hikes to match those in the new UAW contracts, and Subaru is hinting it will do the same.

Biden had worked hard to get the Belvidere plant reopened, and he joined the UAW picket line—the first president to do such a thing. He told the autoworkers that he ran for the presidency “to…bring back good-paying jobs that you can raise a family on, whether or not you went to college, and give working families more breathing room. And the way to do that is to invest in ourselves again, invest in America, invest in American workers.  And that’s exactly what we’ve done.”

In Belvidere, Biden and UAW president Shawn Fain cut a selfie video. In it, Biden says: “[Y]ou know, the middle class built this country, but unions built the middle class. And when unions do well, everybody does well. The economy does well.” Fain adds: “And this is what happens when working class people come together and stand together. Stand united. You know, one of the best things I’ve ever seen in my life was seeing a sitting U.S. president visit striking workers on the picket line. That goes a long way for showing where this president stands with working-class people.” Biden says: “Well, I want to tell you, from where I stood, you did a hell of a job, pal.” Fain answers: “Yep. Back at you.”

In contrast to this optimistic can-do vision that is making American lives better is the other side of the screen: that of former president Trump and the MAGA Republicans who have doubled down on supporting him.  

In Ohio, after voters on Tuesday approved an amendment to the state constitution protecting abortion rights, Republicans are calling the amendment “ambiguous” and trying to remove it from the jurisdiction of the courts. They want to make the legislature—which they dominate thanks to gerrymandering—the only body that can decide what the measure means. They are openly trying to override the decision of the voters.

In Washington, Republicans have empowered Christian extremist Mike Johnson (R-LA) to lead the House of Representatives as speaker, and today we learned that outside his office he displays a flag associated with the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) network that wants to place the United States government under the control of right-wing Christians. On January 6, 2021, rioters took these flags with them into the U.S. Capitol.

Johnson is also associated with a right-wing movement to call a convention of states to rewrite the Constitution.

In The Bulwark on Wednesday, A. B. Stoddard noted that the Republican Party’s surrender to its MAGA wing is nearly complete. Today, Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who is the third most powerful Republican in the House, illustrated that capitulation when she filed a five-page letter to the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct. Stefanik’s letter drew on an article from the right-wing Breitbart media outlet to accuse Judge Arthur Engoron and his principal law clerk of being partisan operatives. Engoron is presiding over the New York fraud trial of former president Trump and the Trump Organization.

Legal analyst Lisa Rubin noted that Stefanik’s position as a member of Congress shields her from Freedom of Information Act requests, meaning that journalists will be unable to uncover whether members of Trump’s legal defense worked with her to produce the letter. And while the mistrial motion that observers like Rubin expected to see Trump defenders produce could be dismissed quickly by Engoron himself, a complaint to the state’s judicial conduct commission will hang out there until the commission meets again.

Undermining their opponents through accusations of impropriety has been a mainstay of the Republicans since the 1990s, and it is a tactic Trump likes to use. In this case, it illustrates that Stefanik, an official who swore to defend the Constitution, has abandoned the defense of our legal system and is instead embracing Trump’s efforts to tear it down.

Meanwhile, the inability of the Republicans to figure out a way to fund the government has led the credit-rating agency Moody’s to downgrade the outlook for the credit rating of the United States today from “stable” to “negative.” Moody’s expressed concern about the fight over the debt limit last spring, the removal of House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and the rising threat of a government shutdown.

All of this plays into the hands of former president Donald Trump, who is eager to return to the White House. From there, he promises, he will take revenge on those he thinks have wronged him.

John Hendrickson of The Atlantic was at Trump’s political rally in Hialeah, Florida, on Wednesday, where the former president railed against those “coming into our country,” people he compared to “Hannibal Lecter,” a fictional serial killer who ate his victims. Trump said that under Biden, the U.S. has become “the dumping ground of the world,” and he attacked the “liars and leeches” who have been “sucking the life and blood” out of the country. He also attacked the “rotten, corrupt, and tyrannical establishment” of Washington, D.C.

Hendrickson called it a “dystopian, at times gothic speech [that] droned on for nearly 90 minutes.”

It was a sharp contrast to Biden’s speech in Belvidere.

“We have more to do, but we’re finally building an economy that works for the people—working people, the middle class—and, as a consequence, the entire country,” Biden said. “When I look out at all of you and the communities like Belvidere, I see real heroes of your story—you know, you and the American worker, you’re the American people.

“Because of you, I can honestly say—and I mean this from the bottom of my heart—I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s future than I am today…. Donald Trump often says…, ‘We are now a failing nation. We’re a nation in decline.’”

“But that’s not what I see,” Biden said. “I know this country. I know what we can do if folks are given half a chance. That’s why I’m so optimistic about our future. We just have to remember who we are. We are the United States of America. There is nothing beyond our capacity if we work together.”

mickeyrat

  November 11, 2023 (Saturday)

In 1918, at the end of four years of World War I’s devastation, leaders negotiated for the guns in Europe to fall silent once and for all on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was not technically the end of the war, which came with the Treaty of Versailles. Leaders signed that treaty on June 28, 1919, five years to the day after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand set off the conflict. But the armistice declared on November 11 held, and Armistice Day became popularly known as the day “The Great War,” which killed at least 40 million people, ended.

In November 1919, President Woodrow Wilson commemorated Armistice Day, saying that Americans would reflect on the anniversary of the armistice “with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…."

But Wilson was disappointed that the soldiers’ sacrifices had not changed the nation’s approach to international affairs. The Senate, under the leadership of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts—who had been determined to weaken Wilson as soon as the imperatives of the war had fallen away—refused to permit the United States to join the League of Nations, Wilson’s brainchild: a forum for countries to work out their differences with diplomacy, rather than resorting to bloodshed.

On November 10, 1923, just four years after he had established Armistice Day, former President Wilson spoke to the American people over the new medium of radio, giving the nation’s first live, nationwide broadcast.

“The anniversary of Armistice Day should stir us to a great exaltation of spirit,” he said, as Americans remembered that it was their example that had “by those early days of that never to be forgotten November, lifted the nations of the world to the lofty levels of vision and achievement upon which the great war for democracy and right was fought and won.”

But he lamented “the shameful fact that when victory was won,…chiefly by the indomitable spirit and ungrudging sacrifices of our own incomparable soldiers[,] we turned our backs upon our associates and refused to bear any responsible part in the administration of peace, or the firm and permanent establishment of the results of the war—won at so terrible a cost of life and treasure—and withdrew into a sullen and selfish isolation which is deeply ignoble because manifestly cowardly and dishonorable.”

Wilson said that a return to engagement with international affairs was “inevitable”; the U.S. eventually would have to take up its “true part in the affairs of the world.”

Congress didn’t want to hear it. In 1926 it passed a resolution noting that since November 11, 1918, “marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed,” the anniversary of that date “should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.”

In 1938, Congress made November 11 a legal holiday to be dedicated to world peace.

But neither the “war to end all wars” nor the commemorations of it, ended war.

Just three years after Congress made Armistice Day a holiday for peace, American armed forces were fighting a second world war, even more devastating than the first. The carnage of World War II gave power to the idea of trying to stop wars by establishing a rules-based international order. Rather than trying to push their own boundaries and interests whenever they could gain advantage, countries agreed to abide by a series of rules that promoted peace, economic cooperation, and security.

The new international system provided forums for countries to discuss their differences—like the United Nations, founded in 1945—and mechanisms for them to protect each other, like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949, which has a mutual defense pact that says any attack on a NATO country will be considered an attack on all of them.

In the years since, those agreements multiplied and were deepened and broadened to include more countries and more ties. While the U.S. and other countries sometimes fail to honor them, their central theory remains important: no country should be able to attack a neighbor, slaughter its people, and steal its lands at will. This concept preserved decades of relative peace compared to the horrors of the early twentieth century, but it is a concept that is currently under attack as autocrats increasingly reject the idea of a rules-based international order and claim the right to act however they wish.

In 1954, to honor the armed forces of wars after World War I, Congress amended the law creating Armistice Day by striking out the word “armistice” and putting “veterans” in its place. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a veteran who had served as the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and who had become a five-star general of the Army before his political career, later issued a proclamation asking Americans to observe Veterans Day:

“[L]et us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”

mickeyrat

  November 12, 2023 (Sunday)

Some love from the other side of the country tonight: sunset from San Francisco.

The best part of this book tour has been meeting so many new friends and seeing so many old ones. That part is going to continue for months to come, but I'm not unhappy that tonight I'm winging my way home for a spell.

Late flight so taking tonight off. Will see you tomorrow.

mickeyrat

  November 13, 2023 (Monday)

In a speech Saturday in Claremont, New Hampshire, and then in his Veterans Day greeting yesterday on social media, former president Trump echoed German Nazis.

“In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day [sic] we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Racists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream…. Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”    

The use of language referring to enemies as bugs or rodents has a long history in genocide because it dehumanizes opponents, making it easier to kill them. In the U.S. this concept is most commonly associated with Hitler and the Nazis, who often spoke of Jews as “vermin” and vowed to exterminate them.  

The parallel between MAGA Republicans’ plans and the Nazis had other echoes this weekend, as Trump’s speech came the same day that Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported that Trump and his people are planning to revive his travel ban, more popularly known as the “Muslim ban,” which refused entry to the U.S. by people from some majority-Muslim nations, and to reimpose the pandemic-era restrictions he used during the coronavirus pandemic to refuse asylum claims—it is not only legal to apply for asylum in the United States, but it is a guaranteed right under the Refugee Act of 1980—by claiming that immigrants bring infectious diseases like tuberculosis.

They plan mass deportations of unauthorized people in the U.S., rounding them up with specially deputized law enforcement officers and National Guard soldiers contributed by Republican-dominated states. Because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) doesn’t have the space for such numbers of people, Trump’s people plan to put them in “sprawling camps” while they wait to be expelled. Trump refers to this as “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

Trump’s people would screen visa applicants to eliminate those with ideas they consider undesirable, and would kick out those here temporarily for humanitarian reasons, including Afghans who came here after the 2021 Taliban takeover. Trump ally Steve Bannon and his likely attorney general, Mike Davis, expect to deport 10 million people.

Trump’s advisors also intend to challenge birthright citizenship, the principle that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen. This principle was established by the Fourteenth Amendment and acknowledged in the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark Supreme Court decision during a period when native-born Americans were persecuting immigrants from Asia. That hatred resulted in Wong Kim Ark, an American-born child of Chinese immigrants, being denied reentry to the U.S. after a visit to China. Wong sued, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court agreed. The children of immigrants to the U.S.—no matter how unpopular immigration was at the time—were U.S. citizens, entitled to all the rights and immunities of citizenship, and no act of Congress could overrule a constitutional amendment.

“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Trump immigration hardliner Stephen Miller told the New York Times reporters. “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

In addition to being illegal and unconstitutional, such plans to strip the nation of millions of workers would shatter the economy, sparking sky-high prices, especially of food.

For a long time, Trump’s increasingly fascist language hasn’t drawn much attention from the press, perhaps because the frequency of his outrageous statements has normalized them. When Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 referred to many Trump supporters as “deplorables,” a New York Times headline read: “Hillary Clinton Calls Many Trump Backers ‘Deplorables,’ and G.O.P.* Pounces.” Yet Trump’s threat to root out “vermin” at first drew a New York Times headline saying, “Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech in a Very Different Direction.” (This prompted Mark Jacobs of Stop the Presses to write his own headlines about disasters, including my favorite: “John Wilkes Booth Takes Visit to the Theater in a Very Different Direction.”)  
 
Finally, it seems, Trump’s explicit use of Nazi language, especially when coupled with his threats to establish camps, has woken up at least some headline writers. Forbes accurately headlined yesterday’s story: “Trump Compares Political Foes to ‘Vermin’ On Veterans Day—Echoing Nazi Propaganda.”
 
Republicans have refused to disavow Trump’s language. When Kristen Welker of Meet the Press asked Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel: “Are you comfortable with this language coming from the [Republican] frontrunner,” McDaniel answered: “I am not going to comment on candidates and their campaign messaging.” Others have remained silent.
 
Trump’s Veterans Day “vermin” statement set up his opponents as enemies of the country by blurring them together as “Communists, Marxists, Racists, and Radical Left Thugs.” Conflating liberals with the “Left” has been a common tactic in the U.S. right-wing movement since 1954, when L. Brent Bozell and William F. Buckley Jr. tried to demonize liberals—those Americans of all parties who wanted the government to regulate business, provide Social Security and basic welfare programs, fund roads and hospitals, and protect civil rights—as wannabe socialists.
 
In the United States there is a big difference between liberals and the political “Left.” Liberals believe in a society based in laws designed to protect the individual, arrived at by a government elected by the people. Political parties disagree about policy and work to change the laws, but they support the system itself. Most Americans, including Democrats and traditional Republicans, are liberals.

Both “the Left,” and the “Right” want to get rid of the system. Those on the Left believe that its creation was so warped either by wealth or by racism that it must be torn down and rebuilt. Those on the Right believe that most people don’t know what’s good for them, making democracy dangerous. They think the majority of people must be ruled by their betters, who will steer them toward productivity and religion. The political Left has never been powerful in the U.S.; the political Right has taken over the Republican Party.

The radical right pushes the idea that their opponents are “Radical Left Thugs” trying to tear down the system because they know liberal policies like Social Security, Medicare, environmental protection, reproductive rights, gun safety legislation, and so on, are actually quite popular. This weekend, for example, Trump once again took credit for signing into law the Veterans Choice health care act, which was actually sponsored by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and signed by President Barack Obama in 2014.

The Right’s draconian immigration policies ignore the reality that presidents since Ronald Reagan have repeatedly asked Congress to rewrite the nation’s immigration laws, only to have Republicans tank such measures to keep the hot button issue alive, knowing it turns out their voters. Both President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have begged Congress to fund more immigration courts and border security and to provide a path to citizenship for those brought to the U.S. as children. They, along with Vice President Kamala Harris, have tried to slow the influx of undocumented migrants by working to stabilize the countries from which such migrants primarily come.

Such a plan does not reflect “hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our country.” It reflects support for a system in which Congress, not a dictator, writes the laws.

A video ABC News published tonight from Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis’s plea deal makes the distinction between liberal democracy and a far-right dictatorship clear. In it, Ellis told prosecutors that former White House deputy chief of staff and social media coordinator Dan Scavino told her in December 2020 that Trump was simply not going to leave the White House, despite losing the presidential election.

When Ellis lamented that their election challenges had lost, Scavino allegedly answered: "'Well, we don't care, and we're not going to leave.” Ellis replied: “'What do you mean?” Scavino answered: “The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power." When Ellis responded “Well, it doesn't quite work that way, you realize?” he allegedly answered: “We don't care."

*The GOP, or Grand Old Party, is an old nickname for the Republican Party.

mickeyrat

  November 14, 2023 (Tuesday)

This evening, by a vote of 336 to 95, the House of Representatives passed a bill to fund the government. Pushed by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), the measure funds the government at current spending levels. Funding for different parts of the government will run out on two separate dates: January 19 and February 2. The measure does not include any funding for military aid to Israel or Ukraine.

Democrats provided most of the votes for the measure, which passed under a special rule that required two thirds of the House to agree to it. The Democrats provided 209 yes votes; the Republicans, 127. Two Democrats and 93 Republicans opposed it.

The Democratic House leadership, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Democratic Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA), and Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-CA) and Vice Chair Ted Lieu (D-CA), released a statement saying:

“From the very beginning of the Congress, House Democrats have made clear that we will always put people over politics and try to find common ground with our Republican colleagues wherever possible, while pushing back against Republican extremism whenever necessary.

“That is the framework through which we will evaluate all issues before us this Congress. We have consistently made clear that a government shutdown would hurt the economy, our national security and everyday Americans during a very fragile time and must be avoided. To that end, House Democrats have repeatedly articulated that any continuing resolution must be set at the fiscal year 2023 spending level, be devoid of harmful cuts and free of extreme right-wing policy riders. The continuing resolution before the House today meets [those] criteria and we will support it.”  

Just two Democrats opposed the measure. Ninety-three Republicans did.

Passing a continuing resolution at the same spending levels as fiscal year 2023 with the help of Democrats while much of his own party opposes it puts Johnson in the exact same place Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was in when eight extremists voted to oust him from the speakership: relying on Democratic votes to fund the government.

Far-right extremists were angry at Johnson and took an official stand against it. Now they are talking about retaliating against the speaker by holding up any further legislation in procedural votes so it cannot move forward, grinding the House to another halt. Johnson might have been trying to address that anger when he today endorsed former president Donald Trump for president in 2024, a move his predecessor McCarthy refused to make.  

But McCarthy supporters looked at Johnson getting a pass for the same deal that cost McCarthy his leadership and cried foul. Republican tempers ran hot on Capitol Hill today as Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) accused former speaker McCarthy of elbowing him in the kidney as McCarthy passed him in the House basement while Burchett was talking to NPR reporter Claudia Grisales. Clearly taken aback, Grisales tweeted: “Have NEVER seen this on Capitol Hill: While talking to [Burchett] after the GOP conference meeting, former [Speaker McCarthy] walked by with his detail and McCarthy shoved Burchett. Burchett lunged towards me. I thought it was a joke, it was not. And a chase ensued….” Burchett was one of the eight Republican representatives who voted to oust McCarthy from the speakership.  

In a House hearing of the Oversight Committee on the U.S. General Services Administration, chair James Comer (R-KY) angrily told Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), who was wearing a blue suit, that he looked like a Smurf (a small, blue cartoon character). Comer angrily defended himself from Moskowitz’s observation that Comer had lent the same amount of money to his own brother that President Biden lent to his brother James.

Comer has insisted without any proof that Biden’s loan was illicit; Moskowitz has repeatedly asked Comer to testify about his own loan. "That is bullsh*t," Comer said of Moskowitz’s observation that the American people would like to know more about his own loan. Moskowitz answered: "Your word means nothing, Mr. Chairman.... I think the American people have lots of questions, Mr. Chairman, and perhaps you should sit maybe for a deposition."

That was House Republicans today.

In the Senate, at a hearing of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Republican Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma tried to start a physical fight with one of the witnesses, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union Sean O'Brien. O’Brien had criticized Mullin on Twitter, and Mullin wanted to fight it out. O’Brien indicated he was more than ready. Mullin got up from his chair as if to begin, when Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), chair of the committee, yelled at him to sit back down. “You are a United States senator!” he shouted.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration today celebrated the drop of the inflation rate to zero for the month of October, meaning that prices did not rise at all between September and October. That flat month means the yearly inflation rate dropped to 3.2% for the past year. Much of that lower inflation rate reflects lower gasoline prices, which dropped 5% in October.

Under the Democratic administration, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which oversees the maintenance of fair business practices, has been much more aggressive about policing misconduct, and today it announced it filed 784 enforcement actions and claimed $4.95 billion in penalties in the fiscal year that ended in September. This financial recovery was the second highest in the history of the SEC, second only to last year’s amount of $6.4 billion.

The White House yesterday announced a new initiative on women’s health research designed to combat the fact that women’s health has been ill studied, leaving half the nation’s people suffering from poorly understood debilitating conditions such as endometriosis and fibroids, as well as being diagnosed or treated incorrectly for disorders such as cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and autoimmune disorders.

Today the White House issued the fifth national climate assessment, which showed a decline in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions despite the growth of the population and of the economy. The White House statement attributes this decline to efforts to mitigate emissions and the increasingly available low-emissions options. In the last decade, it noted, wind energy costs dropped 70% and solar energy costs dropped 90%. In 2020, 80% of new energy generation capacity came from clean energy. Climate change and related extreme weather events are rapidly intensifying, the administration warned, and will cost the U.S. at least $150 billion a year.

Reflecting that fact, Biden today announced more than $6 billion in investments to strengthen the electric grid, reduce flooding, support conservation, and advance environmental justice, as underserved communities bear the brunt of weather events. The money is coming primarily from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the  Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Inflation Reduction Act.

mickeyrat

  November 15, 2023 (Wednesday)

Extremist Republicans today shut down House business by refusing to pass a procedural vote to take up a spending bill, as they had threatened to do in retaliation for the passage yesterday of the continuing resolution to fund the government into the new year. This is the fourth time the extremists have defeated special rules in the House this year, and as deputy chief of staff for Representative Don Beyer (D-VA) Aaron Fritschner pointed out, their doing so is highly unusual. In the previous 20 years the House voted down no such measures at all.

Although they were in the middle of a 17-vote series, the Republicans then recessed the House until after Thanksgiving.

Members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus made it clear they are angry that their own demands are not being met. “We’re sending a shot across the bow,” caucus chair Scott Perry (R-PA) told reporters. “[W]e are done with the failure theater here.”

Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) angrily said to his colleagues: “One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did. One! Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides, ‘Well, I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats.’”

In contrast, the Democrats with the same slim majority in the last Congress passed a series of sweeping bills that are already changing the country. Today marks the second anniversary of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act that invested $1.2 trillion—$550 billion of it new spending—in roads, water systems, electrical grids, broadband, bridges, and so on.

So far, that act has seen the start of more than 37,000 projects across the country. Bridges, airports, and supply chain projects are underway, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. The Democrats today emphasized that they are delivering on the things that make people’s lives easier, and the White House listed a number of Republicans who voted against the measure only to boast of the benefits of the infrastructure investments to their constituents.

 “And,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a video in which he echoed the tagline of the administration: “the great news is, we’re just getting started.”

The investment in infrastructure is part of what has created a booming U.S. economy. Growth is far better in the U.S. than in Europe or China, where a property bubble and local government debts have led to deflation.

That economic strength is standing behind President Joe Biden in San Francisco, where he traveled yesterday for a summit of the 21 member economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum (APEC groups economies, not nations). APEC economies make up almost half of world trade and about 62% of global gross domestic product.

Today, Biden met with Chinese president Xi Jinping in a much anticipated second meeting since Biden took office. But even before today’s discussion, the two leaders announced a new climate agreement. The U.S. and China are the world’s two largest climate polluters, accounting for 38% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

China did not agree to phase out coal, which is the dirtiest fossil fuel, but both countries agreed to ramp up renewable energy capacity around the world and to reduce emissions in their power sectors overall. This is the first time China has agreed to cut emissions. In two weeks the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference will take place in Dubai. Observers hope the willingness of China and the U.S. to make this announcement, even with its limitations, will jump-start negotiations there.

Remarks by Biden and Xi before their meeting were cordial but tense. Biden emphasized that their “meetings have always been candid, straightforward, and useful,” telling Xi: “I value our conversation because I think it’s paramount that you and I understand each other clearly, leader to leader, with no misconceptions or miscommunication. We have to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict. And we also have to manage it responsibly—that competition.”

Xi responded that the China-U.S. relationship “is the most important bilateral relationship in the world,” and while it “has never been smooth sailing over the past 50 years and more…, it has kept moving forward amid twists and turns. For two large countries like China and the United States, turning their back on each other is not an option. It is unrealistic for one side to remodel the other, and conflict and confrontation has unbearable consequences for both sides.”   

In their four-hour meeting, the two leaders agreed to recommence military communications more than a year after China broke them off when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. The two countries also agreed to strengthen cooperation on stopping the flow of what are known as precursor chemicals—the chemicals needed to make street fentanyl—which are produced in China and shipped to drug operations primarily in Latin America. The U.S. has cracked down hard on that trade; additional Chinese cooperation will be welcome.

They agreed to continue to work together to address climate change, as well as to address the risks of artificial intelligence.

On the rest of their discussions, concerning Taiwan, human rights, the Middle East, and Ukraine, the two leaders “exchanged views,” according to the White House readout. Later in the day, meeting with business leaders who have grown nervous about investing in China, Xi assured them that China wants to be friends with the U.S., and “does not seek spheres of influence, and will not fight a cold or hot war with any country.”

In his remarks welcoming APEC leaders this evening, in the city of the famous Golden Gate Bridge, Biden emphasized the power of building bridges to span space and time, the past and the future. He spoke of connecting diverse communities: “All across the traditions, cultures, and languages, we find the common dreams we share for ourselves and for our children.”

Biden urged his audience to “take full advantage of this summit to make new connections and spark new partnerships, because every step we take to deepen our cooperation, to launch a new venture, to tackle the challenges that impact on all of us is a step toward realization of the enormous potential of our Asian Pacific future…, a future where our economics are strong, vibrant, and sustainable because our workers are empowered and protected; women and girls are full and equal participants in every aspect of our society; young people…can envision for themselves the lives and hope for unlimited possibilities.”

The strongest tools we have to meet this era’s challenges, he said, are “connection, cooperation, collective action, and common purpose. That’s why we’re all here.”  

Late tonight, by a vote of 87 to 11, the Senate passed the continuing resolution to fund the government into the new year. One Democrat and ten Republicans voted no.

mickeyrat

  November 16, 2023 (Thursday)

The summit of the leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies continued today in San Francisco, California.

Formed in 1989, APEC is made up of the economies of 21 nations around the Pacific Rim: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Chile, Peru, Russia, Vietnam, and the United States. Together, these economies make up about 62% of global gross domestic product and almost half of global trade.

David Sanger of the New York Times today noted an apparent shift in the power dynamic between President Joe Biden and Chinese president Xi Jinping, who met yesterday for a four-hour conversation. Earlier in his presidency, Xi was riding on a strong economy that overshadowed that of the U.S. and looked as if it would continue to do so. Then, Xi favored what was known as “wolf warrior” diplomacy: the aggressive defense of China’s national interests against what Chinese envoys portrayed as foreign hostility, especially that of the U.S.

Under that diplomatic regime, Xi emphasized that liberal democracy was too weak to face the twenty-first century. The speed and momentous questions of the new era called for strong leaders, he said. In early February 2022, Russia and China held a summit after which they pledged that the “[f]riendship between the two States has no limits.”

Things have changed.

The U.S. has emerged from the coronavirus pandemic with a historically strong economy, while China’s economy is reeling from a real estate bubble and deflation at the same time that government crackdowns have made foreign capital flee. This summer, Xi quietly sidelined Qin Gang, the foreign minister associated with wolf warrior diplomacy, and in October, he replaced Defense Minister General Li Shangfu, who is under U.S. sanctions for overseeing weapon purchases from Russia.

Indeed, China has also been quietly pushing back from its close embrace of Russia. Just weeks after their February 2022 declaration, Russia invaded Ukraine in an operation that Russian president Vladimir Putin almost certainly expected would be quick and successful, permitting Russia to seize key Ukrainian ports and land. Such a victory would have strengthened both Russia and China at the same time it weakened Europe, the United States, and their allies and partners.

Instead, Ukraine stood firm, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and allies and partners have stood behind the embattled country. As the war has stretched on, sanctions have cut into the Russian economy and Putin has had to cede power to Xi, accepting the Chinese yuan in exchange for Russian commodities, for example. This week, Alberto Nardelli of Bloomberg reported that the European Union is considering another round of sanctions, including a ban on the export of machine tools and machinery parts that enable Russia to make ammunition.

In a piece at the Center for European Policy Analysis today, Julia Davis, who monitors Russian media, noted that Russia lost an extraordinary 997,000 people between October 2020 and September 2021, even before the war began. Now it is so desperate to increase its population that its leadership claims to have stolen as many as 700,000 Ukrainian children and is urging women to have as many children as possible.  

Holly Ellyatt of CNBC noted that to the degree they even mentioned it, Russian media sniped at the Biden-Xi summit, but it was hard to miss that although Russian president Putin was not welcome to attend, Xi came and engaged in several high-level meetings, assuring potential investors that China wants to be friends with the U.S. Also hard to miss was Xi’s pointed comment that the China-U.S. relationship “is the most important bilateral relationship in the world.”

Going into this summit, then, the U.S. had the leverage to get agreements from China to crack down on the precursor chemicals that Chinese producers have been shipping to Latin America to make illegal fentanyl, restore military communications between the two countries now that Li has been replaced, and make promises about addressing climate change. Other large issues of trade and the independence of Taiwan will not be resolved so easily.

Still, it was a high point for President Biden, whose economic policies and careful investment in diplomatic alliances have helped to shift the power dynamic between the U.S. and two countries that were key geopolitical rivals when he took office. Now, both the U.S. and China appear to be making an effort to move forward on better terms. Indeed, Chinese media has shifted its tone about the U.S. and the APEC summit so quickly readers have expressed surprise.

Today, Biden emphasized “the unlimited potential of our partnerships…to realize a future that will benefit people not only in the Asia-Pacific region but the whole world,… [a] future where our prosperity is shared and is inclusive, where workers are empowered and their rights are respected, where our economies are sustainable and resilient.”

Biden and administration officials noted that companies from across the Asia-Pacific world have invested nearly $200 billion in the U.S. since Biden took office, creating tens of thousands of good jobs, while the U.S. has elevated its engagement with the region, holding bilateral talks, creating new initiatives and deepening economic partnerships.

Today, Biden and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo announced that the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, an economic forum established last year as a nonbinding replacement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership former president Trump abruptly pulled out of, had agreed on terms to set up an early warning system for disruptions to supply chains, cooperation on clean energy, and fighting corruption and tax evasion.

In a very different event in San Francisco today, a federal jury convicted David DePape, 43, of attempted kidnapping and assault on account of a federal official’s performance of official duties for his attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul with a hammer on October 28 of last year, fracturing his skull.

DePape’s lawyers did not contest the extensive evidence against him but tried to convince the jury that DePape did not commit a federal crime because he did not attack Pelosi on account of Representative Pelosi’s official position. Instead, they said, DePape had embraced the language of right-wing lawmakers and pundits and believed in a conspiracy theory that pedophile elites had taken over the country and were spreading lies about former president Donald Trump.

DePape told jurors he had come to conspiracy theories through Gamergate, a 2014–2015 misogynistic online campaign of harassment against women in the video game industry, which turned into attacks on feminism, diversity, and progressive ideas. Trump ally Steve Bannon talked of pulling together the Gamergate participants behind Trump and his politics.

Also today, a subcommittee of the House Ethics Committee set up to investigate allegations against Representative George Santos (R-NY) issued its report. The Republican-dominated committee found that Santos had lied about his background during his campaign and, furthermore, that he appears to be a serial liar. Those lies also “include numerous misrepresentations to the government and the public about his and his campaign’s financial activities.”

That is, the committee found, Santos defrauded his campaign donors, falsified his financial records, and used campaign money on beauty products, rent, luxury items from Hermes and Ferragamo, and purchases at the website Only Fans. The subcommittee recommended the Ethics Committee refer Santos to the Department of Justice, and “publicly condemn Representative Santos, whose conduct [is] beneath the dignity of the office” and who has “brought severe discredit upon the House.”

Santos says he will not run for reelection.

mickeyrat

  November 17, 2023 (Friday)

In an NPR piece yesterday, Bill Chappell noted that “the war between Israel and Hamas is being fought, in part, through disinformation and competing claims.”

Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s leadership team currently in Qatar, told Ben Hubbard and Maria Abi-Habib of the New York Times that Hamas’s goal in their attack of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists crossed from Gaza into Israel and tortured and killed about 1,200 people, taking another 240 hostage, was to make sure the region did not settle into a status quo that excluded the Palestinians.

In 2020 the Palestinians were excluded from discussions about the Abraham Accords negotiated by then-president Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner that normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain (and later Morocco). More recently, Saudi Arabia and Israel were in talks with the United States about normalizing relations.   

Al-Hayya told the reporters that in order to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Hamas leaders intended to commit “a great act” that Israel would respond to with fury. “[W]ithout a doubt, it was known that the reaction to this great act would be big,” al-Hayya said, but “[w]e had to tell people that the Palestinian cause would not die.”

“Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,” al-Hayya said. “This battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers,” he added. “It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.”

Hamas media adviser Taher El-Nounou told the reporters: “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us.”

Hamas could be pretty certain that Israel would retaliate with a heavy hand. The governing coalition that took power at the end of 2022 is a far-right coalition, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to hold that coalition together to stay in power, not least because he faces charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.   

Once it took power, Netanyahu’s government announced that expanding Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank was a priority, vowing to annex the occupied territory. It also endorsed discrimination against LGBTQ people and called for generous payments to ultra-Orthodox men so they could engage in religious study rather than work. It also tried to push through changes to the judicial system to give far more power to the government.

From January 7 until October 7, 2023, protesters turned out in the streets in huge numbers. With the attack, Israelis have come together until the crisis is resolved.

Netanyahu’s ability to stay in power depended in large part on his promises that he would keep Israelis safe. The events of October 7 on his watch—the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust—shattered that guarantee. Polls show that Israelis blame his government, and three quarters of them think he should resign. Sixty-four percent think the country should hold an election immediately after the war.

Immediately after the attack, on October 7, Netanyahu vowed “mighty vengeance” against Hamas, and Israeli airstrikes began to pound Gaza. On October 8, Israel formally declared war. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the country’s retaliation would “change the reality on the ground in Gaza for the next 50 years,” and on October 9 he announced “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed…. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

Israel and the U.S. have strong historic and economic ties: as Nicole Narea points out in Vox in a review of their history together, the U.S. has also traditionally seen Israel as an important strategic ally as it stabilizes the Middle East, helping to maintain the supply of Middle Eastern oil that the global economy needs. That strategic importance has only grown as the U.S. seeks to normalize ties around the region to form a united front against Iran.

For Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and other envoys, then, it appeared the first priority after the October 7 attack was to keep the conflict from spreading. Biden made it very clear that the U.S. would stand behind Israel should Iran, which backs Hamas, be considering moving in. He warned: “[T]o any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation, I have one word: Don’t.”

The movement of two U.S. carrier groups to the region appears so far to be helping to achieve that goal. While Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon and Yemen’s Houthis have fired missiles and drones at Israel since October 7, Iran’s leaders have said they will not join Hamas’s fight and are hoping only to use the conflict as leverage against the U.S.

Militias have fired at least 55 rocket and drone strikes at U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since October 7 without killing any U.S. soldiers. In retaliation, the U.S. has launched three airstrikes against militia installations in Syria, killing up to seven men (the military assesses there were not women or children in the vicinity) in the third strike on Sunday. The U.S. keeps roughly 900 troops in Syria and 2,500 troops in Iraq to work with local forces to prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State.

At the same time that Biden emphasized Israel’s right to respond to Hamas’s attack and demanded the return of the hostages, he also called for humanitarian aid to Gaza through Egypt and warned Netanyahu to stay within the laws of war.

Rounds of diplomacy by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who flew to Israel and Jordan initially on October 11 and has gone back repeatedly, as well as by Biden, who has both visited the region—his second trip to a war zone—and constantly worked the phones, and other envoys, started humanitarian convoys moving into Gaza with a single 20-truck convoy on October 21. By early November, over 100 trucks a day were entering Gaza, the number the United Nations says is the minimum needed. Yesterday the Israeli war cabinet agreed to allow two tankers of fuel a day into Gaza after the U.N. said it couldn’t deliver aid because it had run out of fuel.

The U.S. has insisted from the start that Israel’s military decisions must not go beyond the laws of war. Israeli officials say they are staying within the law, yet an estimated 11,000 civilians and Hamas fighters (the numbers are not separated out) have died. Gaza has been crushed into rubble by airstrikes, and more than a million people are homeless. That carnage has sparked protests around the world along with calls for a cease-fire, which Israel rejects.

It has also sparked extreme Islamophobia and antisemitism exacerbated by social media. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, Islamophobia inspired a Chicago man to stab a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy to death; more recently, antisemitism has jumped more than 900% on X (formerly Twitter). On Wednesday, Elon Musk agreed with a virulently antisemitic post on X. White House spokesperson Andrew Bates responded: “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans.” Advertisers, including IBM and Apple, announced they would no longer advertise on Musk’s platform.

While calling for humanitarian pauses in the fighting, the Biden administration has continued to focus on getting the hostages out and has rejected calls for a cease-fire, saying such a break would only allow Hamas to regroup. In The Atlantic on November 14, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who negotiated a 2012 cease-fire between Hamas and Israel only to see Hamas violate that agreement two years later, explained that cease-fires have only kicked the can down the road. “Israel’s policy since 2009 of containing rather than destroying Hamas has failed,” she said.  

Clinton called for the destruction of Hamas on the one hand and “a new strategy and new leadership” for Israel on the other. “Instead of the current ultra-right-wing government, it will need a government of national unity that’s rooted in the center of Israeli politics and can make the hard choices ahead,” she wrote.

Central to those choices is the long-neglected two-state solution that would establish a Palestinian state. Biden and Blinken and a number of Arab governments have backed the idea, but to many observers it seems impossible to pull off. Still, at the same time Clinton’s article appeared, King Abdullah II of Jordan published his own op-ed in the Washington Post titled: “A two-state solution would be a victory for our common humanity.”

“[L]et’s start with some basic reality,” he wrote. “The fact is that the thousands of victims across Israel, Gaza and the West Bank have been overwhelmingly civilians…. Leaders everywhere have the responsibility to face the full reality of this crisis, as ugly as it is. Only by anchoring ourselves to the concrete facts that have brought us to this point will we be able to change the increasingly dangerous direction of our world….

“If the status quo continues, the days ahead will be driven by an ongoing war of narratives over who is entitled to hate more and kill more. Sinister political agendas and ideologies will attempt to exploit religion. Extremism, vengeance and persecution will deepen not only in the region but also around the world…. It is up to responsible leaders to deliver results, starting now.”

mickeyrat

  November 18, 2023 (Saturday)

I didn't see much of the Fall in Maine this year because I've been seeing so much else of the country, but my friend Peter sent this image of last month's Hunter Moon to bring me a little bit of home.

Headed that direction myself in the morning.

Going to take the night off and rest up. I'll see you tomorrow.

[Image "Hunter Moon" by Peter Ralston.]

mickeyrat

  November 19, 2023 (Sunday)

For three hot days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, more than 150,000 soldiers from the armies of the United States of America and the Confederate States of America slashed at each other in the hills and through the fields around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

When the battered armies limped out of town after the brutal battle, they left scattered behind them more than seven thousand corpses in a town with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants. With the heat of a summer sun beating down, the townspeople had to get the dead soldiers into the ground as quickly as they possibly could, marking the hasty graves with nothing more than pencil on wooden boards.

A local lawyer, David Wills, who had huddled in his cellar with his family and their neighbors during the battle, called for the creation of a national cemetery in the town, where the bodies of the United States soldiers who had died in the battle could be interred with dignity. Officials agreed, and Wills and an organizing committee planned an elaborate dedication ceremony to be held a few weeks after workers began moving remains into the new national cemetery.

They invited state governors, members of Congress, and cabinet members to attend. To deliver the keynote address, they asked prominent orator Edward Everett, who wanted to do such extensive research into the battle that they had to move the ceremony to November 19, a later date than they had first contemplated.

And, almost as an afterthought, they asked President Abraham Lincoln to make a few appropriate remarks. While they probably thought he would not attend, or that if he came he would simply mouth a few platitudes and sit down, President Lincoln had something different in mind.

On November 19, 1863, about fifteen thousand people gathered in Gettysburg for the dedication ceremony. A program of music and prayers preceded Everett’s two-hour oration. Then, after another hymn, Lincoln stood up to speak. Packed in the midst of a sea of frock coats, he began. In his high-pitched voice, speaking slowly, he delivered a two-minute speech that redefined the nation.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln began. While the southern enslavers who were making war on the United States had stood firm on the Constitution’s protection of property—including their enslaved Black neighbors—Lincoln dated the nation from the Declaration of Independence.

The men who wrote the Declaration considered the “truths” they listed “self-evident”: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But Lincoln had no such confidence. By his time, the idea that all men were created equal was a “proposition,” and Americans of his day were “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Standing near where so many men had died four months before, Lincoln honored “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”

He noted that those “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated” the ground “far above our poor power to add or detract.”

“It is for us the living,” Lincoln said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He urged the men and women in the audience to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion” and to vow that “these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

[Image of President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, center-left, with his head tilted downward. Work is in the U.S. public domain, obtained here from Wikimedia Commons.]

mickeyrat

  November 20, 2023 (Monday)

Yesterday, David Roberts of the energy and politics newsletter Volts noted that a Washington Post article illustrated how right-wing extremism is accomplishing its goal of destroying faith in democracy. Examining how “in a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics,” the article revealed how right-wing extremism has sucked up so much media oxygen that people have tuned out, making them unaware that Biden and the Democrats are doing their best to deliver precisely what those in the article claim to want: compromise, access to abortion, affordable health care, and gun safety.

One person interviewed said, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.” Roberts points out that “both sides” are not extremists, but many Americans have no idea that the Democrats are actually trying to govern, including by reaching across the aisle. Roberts notes that the media focus on the right wing enables the right wing to define our politics. That, in turn, serves the radical right by destroying Americans’ faith in our democratic government.

Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele echoed that observation this morning when he wrote, “We need to stop the false equivalency BS between Biden and Trump. Only one acts with the intention to do real harm.”

Indeed, as David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo puts it, “the gathering storm of Trump 2.0 is upon us,” and Trump and his people are telling us exactly what a second Trump term would look like. Yesterday, Trump echoed his “vermin” post of the other day, saying: “2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!”   

Trump’s open swing toward authoritarianism should be disqualifying even for Republicans—can you imagine Ronald Reagan talking this way?—but MAGA Republicans are lining up behind him. Last week the Texas legislature passed a bill to seize immigration authority from the federal government in what is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, and yesterday, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that he was “proud to endorse” Trump for president because of his proposed border policies (which include the deportation of 10 million people).

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has also endorsed Trump, and on Friday he announced he was ordering the release of more than 40,000 hours of tapes from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, answering the demands of far-right congress members who insist the tapes will prove there was no such attack despite the conclusion of the House committee investigating the attack that Trump criminally conspired to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and refused to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol.

Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly spread a debunked conspiracy theory that one of the attackers shown in the tapes, Kevin Lyons, was actually a law enforcement officer hiding a badge. Lyons—who was not, in fact, a police officer—was carrying a vape and a photo he stole from then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and is now serving a 51-month prison sentence. (Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) tweeted: “Hey [Mike Lee]—heads up. A nutball conspiracy theorist appears to be posting from your account.”)

Both E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted yesterday that MAGA Republicans have no policies for addressing inflation or relations with China or gun safety; instead, they have coalesced only around the belief that officials in “the administrative state” thwarted Trump in his first term and that a second term will be about revenge on his enemies and smashing American liberalism.

MIke Davis, one of the men under consideration for attorney general, told a podcast host in September that he would “unleash hell on Washington, D.C.,” getting rid of career politicians, indicting President Joe Biden “and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden,” and helping pardon those found guilty of crimes associated with the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. “We’re gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing—anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents,” Davis said. “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”

In the Washington Post, Josh Dawsey talked to former Trump officials who do not believe Trump should be anywhere near the presidency, and yet they either fear for their safety if they oppose him or despair that nothing they say seems to matter. John F. Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, told Dawsey that it is beyond his comprehension that Trump has the support he does.

“I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up. It might even move the needle in the wrong direction. I think we’re in a dangerous zone in our country,” Kelly said.  

Part of the attraction of right-wing figures is they offer easy solutions to the complicated issues of the modern world. Argentina has inflation over 140%, and 40% of its people live in poverty. Yesterday, voters elected as president far-right libertarian Javier Milei, who is known as “El Loco” (The Madman). Milei wants to legalize the sale of organs, denies climate change, and wielded a chainsaw on the campaign trail to show he would cut down the state and “exterminate” inflation. Both Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, two far-right former presidents who launched attacks against their own governments, congratulated him.

In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took on the question of authoritarianism. Robert J. Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran, wrote to Eisenhower, asking him to cut through the confusion of the postwar years. “We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth,” Biggs wrote. Eisenhower responded at length. While unity was imperative in the military, he said, “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’”

Dictators, Eisenhower wrote, “make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.”

Once again, liberal democracy is under attack, but it is notable—to me, anyway, as I watch to see how the public conversation is changing—that more and more people are stepping up to defend it. In the New York Times today, legal scholar Cass Sunstein warned that “[o]n the left, some people insist that liberalism is exhausted and dying, and unable to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, corporate power and environmental degradation. On the right, some people think that liberalism is responsible for the collapse of traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority and widespread immorality.”

Sunstein went on to defend liberalism in a 34-point description, but his first point was the most important: “Liberals believe in six things,” he wrote: “freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy,” including fact-based debate and accountability of elected officials to the people.

Finally, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, who was a staunch advocate for the health and empowerment of marginalized people—and who embodied the principles Sunstein listed, though that’s not why I’m mentioning her—died yesterday at 96. “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” former President Jimmy Carter said in a statement.

More to the point, perhaps, considering the Carters’ profound humanity, is that when journalist Katie Couric once asked President Carter whether winning a Nobel Peace Prize or being elected president of the United States was the most exciting thing that ever happened to him, Carter answered: “When Rosalynn said she'd marry me—I think that’s the most exciting thing.”

mickeyrat

  November 21, 2023 (Tuesday)

Yesterday the United Auto Workers ratified their new contracts with General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis. The new contracts include wage increases of at least 25% over the next 4.5 years, cost of living increases, union coverage for electric battery plants, and the reopening of a closed plant. “These were just extraordinary wins, especially for those of us who’ve been studying strikes for decades,” Washington University labor expert Jake Rosenfeld told Jeanne Whalen of the Washington Post.

Union president Shawn Fain told Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, “It’s a sign of the times…. In the last 40 years…working class people went backwards continually…. There’s this massive chasm between the billionaire class and the working class and…when those things get out of balance, we need to turn it upside down. When 26 billionaires have as much wealth as half of humanity, that’s a crisis….”  

Fain said the automakers strike was “just the beginning…. Now, we take our strike muscle and our fighting spirit to the rest of the industries we represent, and to millions of nonunion workers ready to stand up and fight for a better way of life.”

President Joe Biden, who stood on the picket line with UAW members, congratulated both the auto workers and the companies for their good faith negotiations. “[W]hen unions do well, it lifts all workers,” he said. In the wake of the agreements between the UAW and the Big Three automakers, nonunion automakers who are eager to prevent unionization, including Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, and Subaru, also announced wage increases.

Following a tradition normalized in the 1980s, Biden also pardoned the turkeys Liberty and Bell yesterday, marking the unofficial start of the holiday season. The birds will move to the University of Minnesota’s College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences where they will become educational ambassadors for a state where turkey production provides more than $1 billion in economic activity and more than 26,000 jobs.

At the ceremony, Biden urged people to “give thanks for the gift that is our nation.” He offered special thanks to service members, with whom he and First Lady Jill Biden shared a Friendsgiving meal on Sunday.

Falling prices for travel and for the foods usually on a Thanksgiving table are news the White House is celebrating. Gas prices have dropped an average of $1.70 from their peak, airfares are down 13%, and car rental prices are down about 10% over the past year.

According to the American Farm Bureau, the price of an average Thanksgiving dinner has dropped by 4.5%. The cost of turkeys has dropped more than 5% from last year, when an avian flu epidemic meant nearly 58 million birds were slaughtered (this year, growers have lost about 4.6 million birds to the same cause). Whipping cream, cranberries, and pie crust have also dropped in price.

But plenty of grocery prices are still rising, and Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) has taken on the issue, documenting how “corporations are making record profits on the backs of American families.” In a public report, Casey noted that from July 2020 through July 2022, inflation rose by 14%, but corporate profits rose by 75%, five times as fast. A family making $68,000 a year in 2022 paid $6,740 in that period to “corporate executives and wealthy shareholders.” In 2023, that amount will be at least $3,546.

The report notes that the cost for chicken went up 20% in 2021 as Tyson Foods doubled their profits from the first quarter of 2021 to the first quarter of 2022; Tyson has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and restitution for “illegally conspiring to inflate chicken prices.” PepsiCo’s chief financial officer said in April 2023 that even though inflation was dropping, their prices would not. He said “consumers generally look at our products and say ‘you know what—they are worth paying a little bit more for.’”

President Biden has launched a campaign to push back on corporate profiteering, including cracking down on the practice of so-called junk fees—unexpected hidden costs for air travel, car rentals, credit cards, cable television, ticket sales, and so on. (The airline industry collected more than $6.7 billion last year in baggage fees, for example.)

But Tony Romm of the Washington Post explained on Sunday that corporate lobbyists are warring with the Biden administration to stop the crackdown. An airline lobbyist testified at a federal hearing in March that changing the policy would create “confusion and frustration” and that there have been “very few complaints” about the extra costs for bags. The same lobbying group told the Department of Transportation that the government had no data to “demonstrate substantial harm” to passengers. A lobbying group for advertising platforms including Facebook and Google agreed that the Federal Trade Commission had failed to present “sufficient empirical evidence” that junk fees are a problem.

Much of the fight over the relative power of ordinary Americans and corporations will play out in the courts. Those courts are themselves struggling over the role of money in their deliberations. After scandals in which it has become clear that Supreme Court justices—primarily Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, but a real estate deal of Neil Gorsuch’s has also been questioned—have accepted gifts from exceedingly wealthy Republican donors, the court on November 13 finally issued its own ethics guidelines.

That code of conduct echoes the obligations of judges in the rest of the U.S. court system, but it takes away the requirements for behavior imposed on the lower courts, and—crucially—it has no methods of enforcement. Legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick noted that the code appeared to be designed to assure the American people they were confused about the need for an ethics code. It appeared, Lithwick said, to be “principally drafted with the intention of instructing us that they still can’t be made to do anything.”

The Supreme Court has been packed with lawyers from the Federalist Society, established in the 1980s to push back on what its members believed was the judicial activism of federal judges who used the Fourteenth Amendment to defend civil rights in the states. Federalist Society lawyers were key to creating legal excuses for Trump to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election, and yet the society has never addressed how their people have turned into such extremists.

In the New York Times today, leading former Federalist Society lawyer George Conway, former judge J. Michael Luttig, and former representative Barbara Comstock (R-VA) called out both the Federalist Society for failing to respond to the crisis Trump represents, and “the growing crowd of grifters, frauds and con men willing to subvert the Constitution and long-established constitutional principles for the whims of political expediency.”

They announced a new organization to replace the corrupted Federalist Society, a significant move considering how entrenched that society has become in our justice system. The Society for the Rule of Law Institute, made up of conservative lawyers, will be “committed to the foundational constitutional principles we once all agreed upon: the primacy of American democracy, the sanctity of the Constitution and the rule of law, the independence of the courts, the inviolability of elections and mutual support among those tasked with the solemn responsibility of enforcing the laws of the United States.” The authors say that the new organization will provide a conservative voice for democracy and that they hope to work with much more deeply established progressive voices.

For now, the Biden administration continues to try to rebalance the economic playing field. Today the Treasury Department announced the largest settlements in history for violations of U.S. anti–money laundering laws and sanctions. Cryptocurrency giant Binance, which handles about 60% of the world’s virtual currency trading, settled over violations in transactions that laundered money for terrorists—including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al Qaeda, and ISIS—and other criminals, and violating sanctions, including those against Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the occupied Crimean region of Ukraine.

Binance will pay more than $4 billion in fines and penalties.

At the same time, the Justice Department obtained a guilty plea from Binance chief executive officer Changpeng Zhao, a Canadian national, for failing to maintain an effective anti–money laundering program. Zhao amassed more than $23 billion at the head of the company; he will pay $200 million in fines and step down. He could face as much as 10 years in prison, but his sentence will likely be less than 18 months.

U.S. officials say this is the biggest-ever corporate resolution that includes criminal charges for an executive.

mickeyrat

  November 22, 2023 (Wednesday)

“It all began so beautifully,” Lady Bird remembered. “After a drizzle in the morning, the sun came out bright and beautiful. We were going into Dallas.”

It was November 22, 1963, and President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy were visiting Texas. They were there, in the home state of Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, to try to heal a rift in the Democratic Party. The white supremacists who made up the base of the party's southern wing loathed the Kennedy administration’s support for Black rights.

That base had turned on Kennedy when he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had backed the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in fall 1962 saying that army veteran James Meredith had the right to enroll at the University of Mississippi, more commonly known as Ole Miss.   

When the Department of Justice ordered officials at Ole Miss to register Meredith, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett physically barred Meredith from entering the building and vowed to defend segregation and states’ rights.

So the Department of Justice detailed dozens of U.S. marshals to escort Meredith to the registrar and put more than 500 law enforcement officers on the campus. White supremacists rushed to meet them there and became increasingly violent. That night, Barnett told a radio audience: “We will never surrender!” The rioters destroyed property and, under cover of the darkness, fired at reporters and the federal marshals. They killed two men and wounded many others.

The riot ended when the president sent 20,000 troops to the campus. On October 1, Meredith became the first Black American to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

The Kennedys had made it clear that the federal government would stand behind civil rights, and white supremacists joined right-wing Republicans in insisting that their stance proved that the Kennedys were communists. Using a strong federal government to regulate business meant preventing a man from making all the money he could; protecting civil rights would take tax dollars from white Americans for the benefit of Black and Brown people. A bumper sticker produced during the Mississippi crisis warned that “the Castro Brothers”—equating the Kennedys with communist revolutionaries in Cuba—had gone to Ole Miss.

That conflation of Black rights and communism stoked such anger in the southern right wing that Kennedy felt obliged to travel to Dallas to try to mend some fences in the state Democratic Party.

On the morning of November 22, 1963, the Dallas Morning News contained a flyer saying the president was wanted for “treason” for “betraying the Constitution” and giving “support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.” Kennedy warned his wife that they were “heading into nut country today.”

But the motorcade through Dallas started out in a party atmosphere. At the head of the procession, the president and first lady waved from their car at the streets “lined with people—lots and lots of people—the children all smiling, placards, confetti, people waving from windows,” Lady Bird remembered. “There had been such a gala air,” she said, that when she heard three shots, “I thought it must be firecrackers or some sort of celebration.”

The Secret Service agents had no such moment of confusion. The cars sped forward, “terrifically fast—faster and faster,” according to Lady Bird, until they arrived at a hospital, which made Mrs. Johnson realize what had happened. “As we ground to a halt” and Secret Service agents began to pull them out of the cars, Lady Bird wrote, “I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw in the President’s car a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat…Mrs. Kennedy lying over the President’s body.”

As they waited for news of the president, LBJ asked Lady Bird to go find Mrs. Kennedy. Lady Bird recalled that Secret Service agents “began to lead me up one corridor, back stairs, and down another. Suddenly, I found myself face to face with Jackie in a small hall…outside the operating room. You always think of her—or someone like her—as being insulated, protected; she was quite alone. I don’t think I ever saw anyone so much alone in my life.”

After trying to comfort Mrs. Kennedy, Lady Bird went back to the room where her own husband was. It was there that Kennedy’s special assistant told them, “The President is dead,” just before journalist Malcolm Kilduff entered and addressed LBJ as “Mr. President.”

Officials wanted LBJ out of Dallas as quickly as possible and rushed the party to the airport. Looking out the car window, Lady Bird saw a flag already at half mast and later recalled, “[T]hat is when the enormity of what had happened first struck me.”

In the confusion—in addition to the murder of the president, no one knew how extensive the plot against the government was—the attorney general wanted LBJ sworn into office as quickly as possible. Already on the plane to return to Washington, D.C., the party waited for Judge Sarah Hughes, a Dallas federal judge. By the time Hughes arrived, so had Mrs. Kennedy and the coffin bearing her husband’s body. “[A]nd there in the very narrow confines of the plane—with Jackie on his left with her hair falling in her face, but very composed, and me on his right, Judge Hughes, with the Bible, in front of him and a cluster of Secret Service people and Congressmen we had known for a long time around him—Lyndon took the oath of office,” Lady Bird recalled.

As the plane traveled to Washington, D.C., Lady Bird went into the private presidential cabin to see Mrs. Kennedy, passing President Kennedy’s casket in the hallway.

Lady Bird later recalled: “I looked at her. Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked…with blood—her husband’s blood. She always wore gloves like she was used to them. I never could. Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights—exquisitely dressed and caked in blood. I asked her if I couldn’t get someone in to help her change and she said, ‘Oh, no. Perhaps later…but not right now.’”

“And then,” Lady Bird remembered, “with something—if, with a person that gentle, that dignified, you can say had an element of fierceness, she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’”

mickeyrat

 November 23, 2023 (Thursday)
 
Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday…but not for the reasons we generally remember.

The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers’ attacks on their Indigenous neighbors.

In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady's Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slave-holding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.

And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.

Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.
 
In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.
 
The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.
 
New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”
 
The next year, Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15 he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.
 
President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain.
 
In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.
 
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation. They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming. And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.

In 1863, November’s last Thursday fell on the 26th. On November 19, Lincoln delivered an address at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He reached back to the Declaration of Independence for the principles on which he called for Americans to rebuild the severed nation:

​​”Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln urged the crowd to take up the torch those who fought at Gettysburg had laid down. He called for them to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”
 
In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.
 
And in 1865, at least, they won.

mickeyrat

  November 24, 2023 (Friday)

For all that the news these days is faster and more furious than ever—and that much of it is horrifying—it is clear to me that those of us eager to protect our democracy are becoming a force to be reckoned with.

These Letters from an American began in September 2019 as a response to questions people asked about the confusion swirling around us. At the time, we had just heard about a whistleblower complaint that then–acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire was illegally withholding from Congress. Then–House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) had written an angry letter to Maguire demanding that he hand over the complaint, as the law required, and suggested the complaint was likely about an important figure in the Trump White House. We were all trying to piece together what on earth was going on.

Within days, we were in the midst of what would become the first impeachment of former president Trump for refusing to release money to Ukraine that Congress had appropriated to enable Ukraine to fight Russian occupation unless Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky helped Trump smear Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

We are now more than four years into these letters, and the contours of the national crisis we are facing are ever so much clearer than they were when we started.

But what has remained the same is that this project, along with the new book that grew from it, really belongs to you. While I do the legwork of trying to explain the politics of these turbulent times, and my heroic editors keep my writing clean and factual, it is your voices that inspire me when I am so dead tired I fall asleep sitting up. You bring in related material, ask questions, and correct my stupid errors.

Above all, it is you who are helping to model what we so desperately need in America: a respectful community based in facts, rather than in anger and partisanship, a community that can defend our democracy and carry it into a new era.

And we are only one community out of many dedicated to the same principles.

Until the past two months of travel across this country, I did not realize how deep and wide this movement has become.

One thing and another conspired to make my family have to put off our Thanksgiving until today, so I am a day late in telling you all how honored I am to be walking this road alongside all of you and how very proud I am of what we are building together.

Thank you, for all of it.

[Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images]

mickeyrat

  November 25, 2023 (Saturday)

The second exchange of hostages taken from Israel by Hamas on October 7, for prisoners held by Israel took place today. Hamas released thirteen Israelis and four Thais into the hands of the Red Cross at the Egyptian crossing into Gaza, and Israel dropped off nearly three dozen Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank.

In the first exchange, on Friday, Hamas released 24 of about 240 hostages it took during its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel: 13 Israeli women and children, along with 10 Thais and a Filipino who were working in Israel. In exchange, Israel released 24 imprisoned Palestinian women and 15 teenage boys. Israel holds more than 6000 Palestinians on grounds they are a security threat; on the list of 300 prisoners Israel is willing to release, most are awaiting trial. Less than a quarter have been convicted of a crime.

The hostage-prisoner exchanges are at the heart of a four-day truce finalized yesterday, on November 24, after five weeks of what a Biden administration official described as “extremely excruciating” negotiations between the leaders of Qatar, Egypt, and Israel, under the strong influence of the United States.

According to Ayman Mohyeldin, Anna Schecter, and Corky Siemaszko of NBC News, the U.S. and Qatar began to try to get the hostages released hours after the October 7 attack. But Israel was not willing to talk to Hamas, and Hamas officials maintained it had taken only about 70 Israeli soldiers and 50 women and children, saying they did not know where the rest of the missing captives were, although some, they said, had been kidnapped by individual Palestinian gangs.

When talks began, Israel wanted all the hostages released, but this was a nonstarter for Hamas leaders, who need hostages for their own bargaining power. Then Israeli airstrikes so pulverized Gaza that the Biden administration insisted on halts to the bombing so relief agencies could deliver food and aid, as well as the construction of humanitarian corridors to permit Palestinians in northern Gaza to travel to the south. Officials from Qatar, where many of Hamas’s leaders live, stepped in to broker talks.

Those talks began to gain headway when Israel gained more control of northern Gaza and began to negotiate through U.S., Qatari, and Egyptian officials for the release of women and children. Finally, yesterday a deal was hammered out that over the course of a four-day truce, Hamas would release at least 50 hostages and Israel would release 150 Palestinian prisoners, all women and children. More aid trucks are supposed to be allowed into Gaza, and Israel is supposed to stop drone surveillance flights over Gaza for six hours a day.

Israel has said it is willing to extend the truce an extra day for each additional 10 hostages freed.

Still, Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing supporters refused to agree to the terms of the truce until U.S. President Joe Biden pressured them to do so. “This deal was a Biden deal, not a Netanyahu deal,” a senior official in the Israeli government told the NBC reporters. Biden administration officials have been constantly engaged with the region’s leaders to help hammer out the agreement.

Yesterday, when the deal was finally firm, Biden spoke from Nantucket, where he and his family were celebrating Thanksgiving. “I have consistently pressed for a pause in the fighting for two reasons,” he said: “to accelerate and expand the humanitarian assistance going into Gaza and…to facilitate the release of hostages.”

Once again, he emphasized that “this cycle of violence in the Middle East” must end. And, once again, he called for “a two-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians can one day live side by side…with equal measure of freedom and dignity.” He told reporters, “There’s overwhelming interest—and I think most Arab nations know it—in coordinating with one another to change the dynamic in their region for a longer-term peace.” He noted that he was “working very closely with the Saudis and others…to bring peace to the region by having recognition of Israel and Israel’s right to exist” when Hamas attacked on October 7, a move Hamas leaders told reporters was intended to make sure the Palestinian cause did not get forgotten.  

While two Americans were released on October 20, no more Americans were released in these first two groups under the truce. Holding Americans keeps the U.S. deeply involved in the struggle, and since pressure from the U.S. is key to moderating the behavior of Israel’s right-wing coalition leadership under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, continuing to hold Americans provides leverage for Hamas.

Yesterday the United Nations delivered the largest convoy of aid, fuel, and cooking gas to Gaza that it has been able to since it started sending aid convoys into the war-torn area on October 21. Still, after seven weeks of fighting, far more is needed.

mickeyrat

  November 26, 2023 (Sunday)

A four-year-old dual Israeli-American citizen was among the 17 more hostages released by Hamas today. Israel released 39 Palestinian prisoners, all of whom were under 19 years old. Hamas has expressed interest in extending the truce; Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has echoed that interest so long as each day brings at least ten more hostages out of captivity. Officials from the U.S., Egypt, and Qatar continue to negotiate.

In the Washington Post today, reporters Steve Hendrix and Hazem Balousha put on the table the idea that both Netanyahu and Hamas “may be on the way out.” Such a circumstance would permit changes to the current political stalemate in the region, perhaps bringing closer the two-state solution for which officials around the world, including U.S. president Joe Biden, continue to push.

Israelis are furious that Netanyahu failed to prevent the October 7 attack, and seventy-five percent of them want him to resign or be replaced when the crisis ends. At the same time, Hendrix and Balousha write, Palestinians are angry enough at Gaza’s leadership to be willing to criticize Hamas.

Whether Hendrix and Balousha are right or wrong, it is significant that a U.S. newspaper is looking for a change of leadership in Israel as well as in Gaza. That sentiment echoes the statement of Netanyahu’s own mouthpiece, Israel Hayom, about a month ago. Begun by U.S. casino mogul Sheldon Adelson to promote Netanyahu’s ideas, the paper in early November said that Netanyahu should “lead us to victory and then go.”

Meanwhile, Iran-backed Houthi forces from Yemen fired two ballistic missiles at a U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS Mason, this evening, missing it by about ten nautical miles (which are slightly longer than miles on land), or eighteen and a half kilometers. Earlier in the day, the USS Mason and Japanese allies rescued a commercial vessel, the Central Park, when it came under attack by five pirates in the Gulf of Aden near Somalia. The USS Mason captured and arrested the attackers as they fled. The USS Mason is part of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group deployed to the region. Attacks on shipping in the area have increased since the October 7 attack. Last week, Yemeni Houthis seized a cargo ship linked to Israel.

As Congress prepares to get back to work after the Thanksgiving holiday, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today released a letter addressed to his colleagues outlining the work he intends to get done before the end of the year. He emphasized that he and the Democrats want bipartisan solutions and urged his colleagues to work with Republicans to isolate the Republican extremists whose demands have repeatedly derailed funding measures.

Top of Schumer’s list is funding the government. The continuing resolution that passed just before Thanksgiving extended funding deadlines to two future dates. The first of those is January 19, and Schumer noted that lawmakers had continued to work on those bills over the Thanksgiving holiday to make sure they pass.

Next on Schumer’s list is a bill to fund military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific region as well as humanitarian assistance for Palestinian civilians and money for U.S. border security, including funding for machines to detect illegal fentanyl and for more border agents and immigration courts. President Biden requested the supplemental aid package of about $105 billion back in October, but while the aid in it is popular among lawmakers, hard-right Republicans are insisting on tying aid for Ukraine to a replacement of the administration’s border policies with their own. Some are also suggesting that helping Ukraine is too expensive.

Schumer noted that U.S. aid to Ukraine is vital to its ability to continue to push back the Russian invasion, while Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has pointed out that money appropriated for Ukraine goes to the U.S. defense industry to build new equipment as older equipment that was close to the end of its useful life goes to Ukraine.

Foreign affairs writer Tom Nichols of The Atlantic explains that foreign aid is normally about 1% of the U.S. budget—$60 billion—and 18 months of funding for both the military and humanitarian aid in Ukraine have been about $75 billion. Israel usually gets about $3 billion; the new bill would add about $14 billion to that. (For comparison, Nichols points out that Americans last year spent about $181 billion on snacks and $115 billion on beer.)

Schumer reminded his colleagues that backing off from aid to Ukraine would serve the interests of Russian president Vladimir Putin; backing off from our engagement with the Indo-Pacific would serve the interests of China’s president Xi Jinping.

“The decisions we will have to make in the coming weeks on the aid package could determine the trajectory of democracy and the resilience of the transatlantic alliance for a generation,” Schumer wrote. “Giving Putin and Xi what they want would be a terrible, terrible mistake, and one that would come back to haunt us…. We cannot let partisan politics get in the way of defending democracy….”

Schumer said he would bring the measure up as soon as the week of December 4.

Schumer’s letter came the day after the annual day of remembrance of the 1932–1933 Holodomor famine in Ukraine, when the Soviet Union under leader Joseph Stalin starved 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians, seizing their grain and farms in an attempt to erase their national identity.

In a statement in remembrance of Holodomor yesterday, President Biden drew a parallel between the Holodomor of the 1930s and Russia’s war against Ukraine today, noting that “Ukraine’s agricultural infrastructure is once more being deliberately targeted” as Russia is “deliberately damaging fields and destroying Ukraine’s grain storage facilities and ports.” (Even so, Ukraine has managed to deliver more than 170,000 tons of grain to Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Yemen in the past year.)

“On this anniversary, we remember and honor all those, both past and present, who have endured such hardship and who continue still to fight against tyranny,” Biden said. “We also recommit ourselves to preventing suffering, protecting fundamental freedoms, and responding to human rights abuses whenever and wherever they occur. We stand united with Ukraine.”

On the Ukrainian remembrance day of Holodomor, Russia launched 75 drones at Kyiv, its largest drone strike against Ukraine since the start of its invasion in February 2022.

mickeyrat

  November 27, 2023 (Monday)

Today Hamas released 11 more hostages into Israel; in exchange, Israel released 33 Palestinians from prison. Both sides have agreed to extend the truce for two days and to continue the exchanges. Hamas has committed to releasing an additional 20 women and children, and if the past pattern holds, Israeli releases will be three times that number.

The four-day pause in fighting has permitted aid to Gaza to increase. Since the 21st of October, when the first aid trucks began to cross into Gaza, more than 2,000 trucks of aid and assistance have gone in.

Once the deal was secure, President Joe Biden issued a statement: “I have remained deeply engaged over the last few days to ensure that this deal—brokered and sustained through extensive U.S. mediation and diplomacy—can continue to deliver results.” He noted that more than 50 hostages have been released and that the U.S. “has led the humanitarian response into Gaza—building on years of work as the largest funder of humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people.”

In his third trip to the region since the October 7 attack, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Israel and the West Bank later this week. He is currently in Brussels for a meeting of foreign ministers in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and will go to the Middle East from there. The State Department says that, among other things, Blinken will “discuss the principles he outlined in Tokyo on November 8, tangible steps to further the creation of a future Palestinian state, and the need to prevent the conflict from widening.”

In that November 8 address, Blinken outlined the U.S. administration’s policy for the future of Gaza. “[K]ey elements,” he said, are “no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza—not now, not after the war. No use of Gaza as a platform for terrorism or other violent attacks. No reoccupation of Gaza after the conflict ends. No attempt to blockade or besiege Gaza. No reduction in the territory of Gaza. We must also ensure no terrorist threats can emanate from the West Bank.”

Blinken said that “the Palestinian people’s voices and aspirations” must be “at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza” and that “Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority” are U.S. requirements.

Gaza will need a “sustained mechanism for reconstruction,” Blinken said on November 8, “and a pathway to Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in states of their own, with equal measures of security, freedom, opportunity, and dignity.”

At home, the administration today announced nearly 30 new actions to strengthen the country’s supply chains, both because smoother supply chains should reduce consumer prices and because stronger supply chains should ensure that the U.S. doesn’t fall short of critical supplies, such as medicines.

On February 24, 2021, about a month after he took office, Biden established a task force across more than a dozen departments and agencies to figure out where supply chains were vulnerable. After research and analysis, as well as input from industry leaders, experts, and the public, the task force issued a 250-page report in June 2021.

Their recommendations, along with investments in key industries such as semiconductors and in infrastructure, helped to untangle the supply chains that remained snarled through 2021 (remember the 100 cargo ships waiting to dock in fall 2021? Now, two years later, there are fewer than 10). From October 2021 to October 2023, supply chain pressure, which is tracked by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, fell from near-record highs to a record low. That, in turn, has helped to lower inflation.

Now Biden has established a new White House Council on Supply Chain Resilience to make sure those supply chains stay strong. He will also use the Defense Production Act—a law from 1950 that requires companies to make a certain product deemed necessary to national defense in exchange for guarantees that the product will have a buyer—to make more essential medicines in the United States and to increase production of new clean energy technologies. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, one of the many government entities involved in supply chains, will invest $196 million to strengthen domestic food supply chains.

The country is also working with other countries on this issue: two weeks ago, Biden signed a  supply chain agreement with 13 countries in the Indo-Pacific that he said will enable the countries to identify supply chain bottlenecks “before they become the kind of full-scale disruptions we saw during the pandemic.”

Clearly staking out positions for the upcoming election, Biden in his explanation of his new supply chain policy warned that MAGA Republicans want to cut the recent investments in roads, bridges, the Internet, and so on, that have created so many new jobs in infrastructure and manufacturing. (Those measures are popular: House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) joined members of the Florida congressional delegation today to view an expansion project at the Sarasota Bradenton International Airport funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law although Johnson voted against it.)

“[T]hey want to go back to the ‘bad old days,’” Biden said, “when corporations looked around the world to find the cheapest labor they could find, to send the jobs overseas, and then import the products back to the United States. Now we’re building the products here and exporting products overseas.”
 
In contrast to the governance Democrats have been delivering, the Republicans appear to be doubling down on their grievances. Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, announced today the committee will hold another hearing on Thursday concerning “the federal government’s involvement in social media censorship, as well as the recent attacks on independent journalism and free expression.”

The idea that the federal government is silencing right-wing speech is an article of faith among MAGA Republicans, although their committee’s last hearing, eight months ago, turned up nothing. Thursday’s hearing will feature three witnesses, two of whom also testified in the last hearing.

MAGA Republicans might be keen to create distraction after Colorado District Judge Sarah B. Wallace found that Trump “engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021.” Wallace found that “Trump acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification.” She did not disqualify him from the ballot, but the decision will continue to move up through the court system.

Meanwhile, former president Trump appears to be getting nervous that former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is gaining momentum. On Saturday he showed up at the University of South Carolina–Clemson football game, South Carolina’s main football rivalry. As Isaac Bailey of The State wrote, that Trump felt he had to try to upstage Haley suggests not strength, but weakness. Indeed, while there were cheers for him, there were also boos.

Yesterday, on Face the Nation, Representative Ken Buck (R-CO), who is not running for reelection, went after Trump. “Everybody who thinks that the election was stolen or talks about the election being stolen is lying to America,” Buck said. “Everyone who makes the argument that January 6 was, you know, an unguided tour of the Capitol is lying to America. Everyone who says that the prisoners who are being prosecuted right now for their involvement in January 6, that they are somehow political prisoners or that they didn’t commit crimes, those folks are lying to America.”

As pressure on him increases, Trump is playing hard to his base, promising on Saturday, for example, that he was “seriously looking at alternatives” to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), more popularly known as Obamacare. He suggested the law should be overturned.

Democratic National Committee chair Jamie Harrison noted on social media that more than 40 million Americans depend on the ACA for their health insurance and that the law also protects as many as 135 million Americans with preexisting conditions from losing their health insurance.

mickeyrat

  November 28, 2023 (Tuesday)

On this fifth day of the pause in the fighting between Hamas and Israel, Hamas released 10 Israeli and dual-national hostages and two Thai nationals; Israel said it released another 30 Palestinians from imprisonment. An Israeli official told the Washington Post that they expect another two or three days of the pause and hostage-prisoner exchanges, “after which we either resume operations in Gaza or potentially reach a follow-on agreement.”

Central Intelligence Agency director William J. Burns arrived in the city of Doha, the capital of Qatar, today to meet with Qatar’s prime minister and Burns’s counterparts from Israel and Egypt: David Barnea, chief of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, and Abbas Kamel, director of Egyptian General Intelligence. They will discuss a broader deal for a longer truce between Israel and Hamas.

Also today, the U.S. airlifted more than 54,000 pounds of United Nations–provided medical supplies, food, and winter clothing to Egypt for delivery to Gaza. The administration took credit for the humanitarian aid transfers underway, noting that when Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel on October 16, Israeli policy was that it would shut Gaza off from water, fuel, and supplies until Hamas released all the hostages.

Blinken cut a deal for aid before Biden arrived two days later—the deal was a condition of his visit—and trucks began to travel into Gaza on October 21. Since then, deliveries have ramped up to 240 trucks a day of medicine, shelter, food, and supplies to keep infrastructure functioning. This is still not enough, an official told reporters: it is imperative to get commercial contractors back in service in Gaza. Fuel, which is crucial for purifying water to prevent disease, among other things, is also making it into Gaza, but not in the quantities required.

The pause in fighting has enabled supply deliveries to ramp up significantly. A White House official acknowledged that “from the President on down, we understand that what is getting in is nowhere near enough for normal life in Gaza, and we will continue to push for additional steps, including the restoration of the flow of commercial goods and additional basic services.”

Here at home, the 2024 presidential campaign is heating up. This morning, Katherine Faulders, Mike Levine, and Alexander Mallin of ABC News broke the story that former vice president Mike Pence had offered to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office new details about Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Pence allegedly said he had told Trump that they had lost the election, but Trump turned to those lawyers who would tell him otherwise.

Pence also allegedly decided—briefly—that he would not attend the January 6 counting of the electoral votes because it would be “too hurtful to my friend,” Trump. But his son, a Marine, later reminded him that they had both taken the same oath to “support and defend the Constitution,” making Pence reconsider his plan to avoid the ballot counting.

Also on the topic of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election was a story by Jamie Gangel, Jeremy Herb, and Elizabeth Stuart of CNN about a forthcoming book by former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY). The trio obtained an early copy of the book, which will be released on December 5, and say it outlines the many lawmakers and media figures who knew Trump had lost the election but lied about it.

“So strong is the lure of power that men and women who had once seemed reasonable and responsible were suddenly willing to violate their oath to the Constitution out of political expediency and loyalty to Donald Trump,” Cheney says. She notes that now-chair of the House Judiciary Committee Jim Jordan (R-OH) didn’t appear to care about rules or legal processes surrounding the election results. “The only thing that matters is winning,” he told her.

Cheney wrote of how she and then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi came to respect each other over their common defense of the Constitution, a nonpartisan stance that foreshadows her conclusion that Trump is dangerous to the country. “Every one of us—Republican, Democrat, Independent—must work and vote together to ensure that Donald Trump and those who have appeased, enabled, and collaborated with him are defeated,” she writes. “This is the cause of our time.”

Still, MAGA Republicans are defending the former president, in part by trying to launch an impeachment case against President Joe Biden. But that effort took a hit today. Representative Lisa McClain (R-MI), who sits on the House Oversight Committee that is out front on the impeachment effort, admitted on Fox Business that the committee has found no evidence that President Biden changed any policies after what Republicans claim was a bribe from China.

Also today, the lawyer for the president’s 53-year-old son Hunter responded to a subpoena from Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the Oversight Committee, for Hunter Biden’s testimony in what Republicans insist is business corruption (there is no evidence of such wrongdoing by either Hunter Biden or his father).

Although his lawyer noted that the committee appeared to be ignoring the business activities of the Trump family, whose members were actually in office whereas the younger Biden is a private citizen, he said that Biden agreed to testify, but that he would do so in a public hearing, not in the closed-door session Comer wanted.

“We have seen you use closed-door sessions to manipulate, even distort the facts and mislead the public,” Biden’s lawyer wrote, and indeed, Comer did not even attend the July closed-door deposition of Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer but nonetheless went on television to misrepresent Archer’s denial that Hunter Biden’s father was involved in the business. “If, as you claim, your efforts are important and involve issues that Americans should know about, then let the light shine on these proceedings,” the lawyer wrote.

Comer, whose previous hearings have tended to blow up in his face as well-prepared Democrats tear into the Republicans, rejected the idea of holding a hearing in public.

“Let me get this straight,” Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the committee, said. “After wailing and moaning for ten months about Hunter Biden and alluding to some vast unproven family conspiracy, after sending Hunter Biden a subpoena to appear and testify, Chairman Comer and the Oversight Republicans now reject his offer to appear before the full Committee and the eyes of the world and to answer any questions that they pose? What an epic humiliation for our colleagues and what a frank confession that they are simply not interested in the facts and have no confidence in their own case or the ability of their own Members to pursue it.

“After the miserable failure of their impeachment hearing in September, Chairman Comer has now apparently decided to avoid all Committee hearings where the public can actually see for itself the logical, rhetorical and factual contortions they have tied themselves up in," Raskin said. "The evidence has shown time and again President Biden has committed no wrongdoing, much less an impeachable offense. Chairman Comer’s insistence that Hunter Biden’s interview should happen behind closed doors proves it once again.  What the Republicans fear most is sunlight and the truth.”

MAGA Republican lawmakers’ defense of Trump ran into another snag today as Americans for Prosperity Action, an anti-Trump super PAC backed by billionaire Charles Koch, announced it was backing former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. A memo from AFP Action said Haley offers “the opportunity to turn the page on the current political era.”

The AFP Action endorsement is a window on the reaction of pro-business Republicans to the party’s recent shift to embrace Christian nationalism. Today’s party rejects small government and a market economy, which was the rallying cry of the Reagan Revolution, in favor of laws based on right-wing religious ideology. As Florida governor Ron DeSantis showed with his attack on Disney for supporting LGBTQ+ rights, this ideology would require businesses to ignore market forces and instead bow to the will of a strong government.

AFP Action stayed out of the presidential races of 2016 and 2020, but now, saying that Haley’s policies are close to AFP Action’s free-market ideology, it is taking a stand against the MAGA movement. Even if Haley doesn’t win the nomination—and that looks unlikely considering Trump’s commanding lead—weakening Trump so he is defeated in the general election would get rid of the MAGA base and enable libertarian-leaning business leaders to regain control of the Republican Party.

mickeyrat

  November 29, 2023 (Wednesday)

In the final exchange of hostages taken by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel under the current truce, Hamas released 16 people—10 Israelis and four Thai nationals, along with two Russian-Israeli women in a separate release—while Israel released 30 people from its jails.

Negotiators from Qatar, Egypt, Israel, and the U.S. are rushing to try to get another truce in place, even as far-right Israeli leaders are pressuring Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to restart the assault on Hamas. Far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir warned today that unless he does, Ben-Gvir's faction will leave the government coalition Netanyahu leads. “Stopping the war = breaking apart the government,” Ben-Gvir said.

Losing that faction would not overturn the government, but it would weaken Netanyahu enough that he could have to call elections. Netanyahu, who remains under indictment for bribery and fraud, is eager to stay in power, but recent polls show his popularity is perilously low: only 27% of Israelis in one recent poll said they would vote for him. Two members of his staff told Sheera Frenkel of the New York Times he wants to avoid an election at all costs.

Shortly after Ben-Gvir’s statement, Netanyahu said: “There is no situation in which we do not go back to fighting until the end.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Israel today with a different agenda than Netanyahu’s. “We'd like to see the pause extended because what it has enabled, first and foremost is hostages being released and being united with their families,” Blinken said. “It's also enabled us to surge humanitarian assistance into the people of Gaza who so desperately need it. So, its continuation, by definition means that more hostages would be coming home, more assistance would be getting in.”

The foreign ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization met today in Brussels, Belgium, where they met with Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba as part of the NATO-Ukraine Council. Before the meeting, Kuleba noted that Ukraine is “pretty much becoming a de facto NATO army, in terms of our technical capacity, management approaches and principles of running an army."

A statement by the NATO-Ukraine Council agreed that it was deepening the NATO-Ukraine relationship, vowing that allies would “continue their support for as long as it takes” and declaring, “A strong, independent Ukraine is vital for the stability of the Euro-Atlantic area.” In the statement, Ukraine also committed to reforming the government and security sector as it moves toward a future NATO membership.

David Andelman, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and CBS News who now writes Andelman Unleashed, noted today in CNN that President Biden has brought a very clear-eyed set of principles to foreign affairs, making him “one of the rare presidents who has accomplished something quite extraordinary: He has carefully defined and quite successfully defended democracy and democratic values before a host of existential challenges.”

In the Middle East he has defended Israel, which The Economist’s Democracy Index identifies as the only democracy in the Middle East and North Africa, while also trying to restrain the Israeli government and to get humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, all while (so far) keeping Iran and Hezbollah from spreading the conflict. Andelman also called out that Biden avoided the direct conflict with Russia that Russia's president Vladimir Putin so clearly wanted, supporting Ukraine but delaying its admission to NATO and ratcheting up military aid slowly enough that the U.S. did not get directly involved.

Biden is defending democracy where it has a foothold and can survive and then prosper, Andelman says, noting that he had little interest in continuing to send U.S. troops to Afghanistan, where it seemed clear democracy “never really took root.” Andelman writes, “Its ill-conceived and improbable ‘elections’ were little more than window dressing on a deeply flawed and corrupt kleptocracy that America had been backing with the bodies of thousands of its troops.”

Defending democracy “is something that makes [Biden] tick,” Andelman writes, “and remain appealing to others, as I’ve seen in so many parts of the world.”

The administration has also been crystal clear that its approach to governance at home is also designed to protect democracy by demonstrating that a democracy can do more for people than an authoritarian government, but in a speech at a campaign reception in Houston, Texas, Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledged that voters somehow don’t seem to understand that transformation.

Even as former president Trump threatened to use the government to silence press outlets he doesn't like, Harris noted the billions of dollars invested in infrastructure and clean energy, allowing the U.S. to be a global leader in new technologies; the cap of insulin at $35; rural broadband and the clean-up of lead pipes; and pointed out that all of the things the Democrats have accomplished are “incredibly popular with the American people.” The challenge, she noted, is getting people to understand these transformations, and which party is responsible for them.

“[T]here’s a duality to the nature of democracies,” Harris said. “On the one hand, …it is very much about strength—the strength that it gives individuals in terms of the protection of their rights and freedoms and liberties. When a democracy is intact, it is very strong in its capacity to lift the people up.” But, she added, “It is also very fragile. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it.”

Today the Democrats’ economic program got another boost with the news that the economy grew faster in the third quarter than previously reported, coming in at a blistering 5.2%, and that a record 200.4 million shoppers visited stores and websites on the five days after Thanksgiving, the traditional start of the holiday shopping period. That number reflects people’s confidence in their own finances, but also that the economy appears to be cooling and there are therefore bargains to be had.  

A new analysis by the Treasury Department shows that the Inflation Reduction Act, which puts money into climate change technologies, is delivering investment to communities that have benefited least from the economic growth of the past few decades. Today, President Joe Biden presented his case for his economic policy directly to one such community in the Colorado district of MAGA Republican mouthpiece Representative Lauren Boebert.

Biden visited CS Wind, the largest wind tower manufacturer in the world, which is expanding its operations in Pueblo, Colorado, thanks to the IRA. Boebert voted against the IRA, calling it “dangerous for America” and saying it was her “easiest no vote yet.” But the new $200 million expansion will create 850 new jobs, and CS Wind has already hired 500 new employees. And a solar project in the district will bring both power and as many as 250 jobs.

The White House listed the many projects underway in the district thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, including nearly $30.2 million to redesign and revitalize streets and $160 million for a 103-mile pipeline that will bring clean water from Pueblo to 50,000 people in southeastern Colorado. Boebert called the law “garbage” and “wasteful” and said it was “punishment for rural America.”

“President Biden made a commitment to be a President for all Americans, regardless of political party, and he’s kept that promise,” the White House said. “The Biden-Harris Administration will continue to deliver for workers and families in Colorado’s third congressional district and across the country—even if self-described MAGA Republicans like Representative Boebert put politics ahead of jobs and opportunities created by Bidenomics.“

Biden was even blunter. After listing the benefits the new laws have brought to Boebert’s district, he said: “She, along with every single Republican colleague, voted against the law that made these investments in jobs possible…. And then she voted to repeal key parts of this law, and she called this law a massive failure. You all know you’re part of a massive failure? Tell that to the 850 Coloradans who got new jobs.… It all sounds like a massive failure in thinking by the congresswoman and her colleagues.”

Halifax2TheMax

mickeyrat said:

  November 29, 2023 (Wednesday)

In the final exchange of hostages taken by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel under the current truce, Hamas released 16 people—10 Israelis and four Thai nationals, along with two Russian-Israeli women in a separate release—while Israel released 30 people from its jails.

Negotiators from Qatar, Egypt, Israel, and the U.S. are rushing to try to get another truce in place, even as far-right Israeli leaders are pressuring Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to restart the assault on Hamas. Far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir warned today that unless he does, Ben-Gvir's faction will leave the government coalition Netanyahu leads. “Stopping the war = breaking apart the government,” Ben-Gvir said.

Losing that faction would not overturn the government, but it would weaken Netanyahu enough that he could have to call elections. Netanyahu, who remains under indictment for bribery and fraud, is eager to stay in power, but recent polls show his popularity is perilously low: only 27% of Israelis in one recent poll said they would vote for him. Two members of his staff told Sheera Frenkel of the New York Times he wants to avoid an election at all costs.

Shortly after Ben-Gvir’s statement, Netanyahu said: “There is no situation in which we do not go back to fighting until the end.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Israel today with a different agenda than Netanyahu’s. “We'd like to see the pause extended because what it has enabled, first and foremost is hostages being released and being united with their families,” Blinken said. “It's also enabled us to surge humanitarian assistance into the people of Gaza who so desperately need it. So, its continuation, by definition means that more hostages would be coming home, more assistance would be getting in.”

The foreign ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization met today in Brussels, Belgium, where they met with Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba as part of the NATO-Ukraine Council. Before the meeting, Kuleba noted that Ukraine is “pretty much becoming a de facto NATO army, in terms of our technical capacity, management approaches and principles of running an army."

A statement by the NATO-Ukraine Council agreed that it was deepening the NATO-Ukraine relationship, vowing that allies would “continue their support for as long as it takes” and declaring, “A strong, independent Ukraine is vital for the stability of the Euro-Atlantic area.” In the statement, Ukraine also committed to reforming the government and security sector as it moves toward a future NATO membership.

David Andelman, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and CBS News who now writes Andelman Unleashed, noted today in CNN that President Biden has brought a very clear-eyed set of principles to foreign affairs, making him “one of the rare presidents who has accomplished something quite extraordinary: He has carefully defined and quite successfully defended democracy and democratic values before a host of existential challenges.”

In the Middle East he has defended Israel, which The Economist’s Democracy Index identifies as the only democracy in the Middle East and North Africa, while also trying to restrain the Israeli government and to get humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, all while (so far) keeping Iran and Hezbollah from spreading the conflict. Andelman also called out that Biden avoided the direct conflict with Russia that Russia's president Vladimir Putin so clearly wanted, supporting Ukraine but delaying its admission to NATO and ratcheting up military aid slowly enough that the U.S. did not get directly involved.

Biden is defending democracy where it has a foothold and can survive and then prosper, Andelman says, noting that he had little interest in continuing to send U.S. troops to Afghanistan, where it seemed clear democracy “never really took root.” Andelman writes, “Its ill-conceived and improbable ‘elections’ were little more than window dressing on a deeply flawed and corrupt kleptocracy that America had been backing with the bodies of thousands of its troops.”

Defending democracy “is something that makes [Biden] tick,” Andelman writes, “and remain appealing to others, as I’ve seen in so many parts of the world.”

The administration has also been crystal clear that its approach to governance at home is also designed to protect democracy by demonstrating that a democracy can do more for people than an authoritarian government, but in a speech at a campaign reception in Houston, Texas, Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledged that voters somehow don’t seem to understand that transformation.

Even as former president Trump threatened to use the government to silence press outlets he doesn't like, Harris noted the billions of dollars invested in infrastructure and clean energy, allowing the U.S. to be a global leader in new technologies; the cap of insulin at $35; rural broadband and the clean-up of lead pipes; and pointed out that all of the things the Democrats have accomplished are “incredibly popular with the American people.” The challenge, she noted, is getting people to understand these transformations, and which party is responsible for them.

“[T]here’s a duality to the nature of democracies,” Harris said. “On the one hand, …it is very much about strength—the strength that it gives individuals in terms of the protection of their rights and freedoms and liberties. When a democracy is intact, it is very strong in its capacity to lift the people up.” But, she added, “It is also very fragile. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it.”

Today the Democrats’ economic program got another boost with the news that the economy grew faster in the third quarter than previously reported, coming in at a blistering 5.2%, and that a record 200.4 million shoppers visited stores and websites on the five days after Thanksgiving, the traditional start of the holiday shopping period. That number reflects people’s confidence in their own finances, but also that the economy appears to be cooling and there are therefore bargains to be had.  

A new analysis by the Treasury Department shows that the Inflation Reduction Act, which puts money into climate change technologies, is delivering investment to communities that have benefited least from the economic growth of the past few decades. Today, President Joe Biden presented his case for his economic policy directly to one such community in the Colorado district of MAGA Republican mouthpiece Representative Lauren Boebert.

Biden visited CS Wind, the largest wind tower manufacturer in the world, which is expanding its operations in Pueblo, Colorado, thanks to the IRA. Boebert voted against the IRA, calling it “dangerous for America” and saying it was her “easiest no vote yet.” But the new $200 million expansion will create 850 new jobs, and CS Wind has already hired 500 new employees. And a solar project in the district will bring both power and as many as 250 jobs.

The White House listed the many projects underway in the district thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, including nearly $30.2 million to redesign and revitalize streets and $160 million for a 103-mile pipeline that will bring clean water from Pueblo to 50,000 people in southeastern Colorado. Boebert called the law “garbage” and “wasteful” and said it was “punishment for rural America.”

“President Biden made a commitment to be a President for all Americans, regardless of political party, and he’s kept that promise,” the White House said. “The Biden-Harris Administration will continue to deliver for workers and families in Colorado’s third congressional district and across the country—even if self-described MAGA Republicans like Representative Boebert put politics ahead of jobs and opportunities created by Bidenomics.“

Biden was even blunter. After listing the benefits the new laws have brought to Boebert’s district, he said: “She, along with every single Republican colleague, voted against the law that made these investments in jobs possible…. And then she voted to repeal key parts of this law, and she called this law a massive failure. You all know you’re part of a massive failure? Tell that to the 850 Coloradans who got new jobs.… It all sounds like a massive failure in thinking by the congresswoman and her colleagues.”

All part of the plan. Flood the zone with shit.

mickeyrat

 November 30, 2023 (Thursday)

Although the original truce deal between Hamas and Israel ended this morning, negotiations kept it going for another day. The extension was hard won after Hamas could not produce a list that had ten women and children on it, a condition of the deal. Israel rejected a list of seven living women and children and the bodies of three more Hamas claimed were killed by Israeli airstrikes. The Israeli government did agree to accept the two Israeli-Russian hostages who were released yesterday as part of Thursday’s list.

Israel has agreed to extend the truce so long as Hamas produces ten living women and children a day, but negotiators think that Hamas will not be able to meet that requirement much longer. When it cannot, Israel says it will recommence the war.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is currently in Israel for the fourth time since the October 7 attack, said today that he is there to work “to extend the pause so that we can continue to get more hostages out of Gaza and more assistance in.” After describing the pressing needs of the Palestinians in Gaza, he asserted that the government of Israel “agrees with the imperative of humanitarian assistance and the need to sustain it.”

Blinken noted that Israel “intends to resume its military operations against Hamas when Hamas stops releasing hostages,” and he said the United States agrees that “Israel has the right to do everything it can to ensure that the slaughter Hamas carried out on October 7th can never be repeated.” That means, he said, “Hamas cannot remain in control of Gaza,” and he pointed to an attack this morning on a Jerusalem bus stop, for which Hamas claimed responsibility, that killed three Israeli citizens and wounded at least six others, including two American citizens.

But, Blinken continued, “the way Israel defends itself matters. It’s imperative that Israel act in accordance with international humanitarian law and the laws of war, even when confronting a terrorist group that respects neither.” Blinken said that when he met today with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Israeli officials, “I made clear that before Israel resumes major military operations, it must put in place humanitarian civilian protection plans that minimize further casualties of innocent Palestinians.”

They must, he said, protect Gazans by designating places in central and southern Gaza where they are out of the line of fire. They must avoid more displacement of citizens in Gaza and allow those already displaced to return as soon as conditions permit. They must avoid further damage to “life-critical infrastructure, like hospitals, like power stations, like water facilities.”

Even though Hamas embeds itself with civilians, “Israel has…one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world,” Blinken said. “It is capable of neutralizing the threat posed by Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent men, women, and children. And it has an obligation to do so. Ultimately, that’s not just the right thing to do, it’s also in Israel’s security interest.”

Blinken said that Netanyahu and the members of the Israeli war cabinet “agreed with the need for this approach.” Blinken added that he had “underscored the imperative to the United States that the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale we saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the south. As I told the prime minister, intent matters, but so does the result.”

Blinken noted that Hamas, too, could defuse the situation. It could release the remaining hostages immediately, “stop using civilians as human shields and stop using civilian infrastructure to stage and launch terrorist attacks.” It “could lay down its arms, surrender the leaders who are responsible for the slaughter, the torture, the rapes of October 7th. Hamas could renounce its stated goal of eliminating Israel, killing Jews, and repeating the atrocities of October 7th again and again and again.”

He added that “everyone around the world who cares about protecting innocent civilians, innocent lives, should be calling on Hamas—indeed, demanding of Hamas—that it immediately stop its murderous acts of terror and deplorable use of innocent men, women, and children as human shields.”

Blinken reiterated that he had discussed with both Israel and Palestinian leaders in the West Bank the need to keep the conflict from spreading, “whether to the West Bank, to Israel’s northern border, or to the broader region.” To that end, he expressed “our deep concerns about steps that could escalate tensions in the West Bank, including extremist settler violence and proposals from parts of the Israeli coalition government to further expand settlements,” both key policies of the Netanyahu government. “I made clear our expectations about addressing these issues,” he said.

He clarified for a reporter that the U.S. is “looking to the Israeli Government to take some additional steps to really put a stop to this. And at the same time, we’re considering our own steps.”

Breaking the cycle of violence in order to ensure Israel’s security, he said, “demands improving the lives of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank in immediate, tangible ways, and providing them with a credible path toward their legitimate aspiration for statehood.” To a reporter’s question, Blinken answered that the administration does, in fact, hope to see a revitalized Palestinian Authority that can speak for the Palestinians.

This was an extraordinarily strong statement, delivered in Tel Aviv itself, and a far cry from Blinken’s usual diplomatic language, which was on display at a press opportunity with Israeli president Isaac Herzog before the two began their meeting. Herzog eulogized “a giant, a titan—Dr. Henry Kissinger,” expressing admiration for the former secretary of state, who died yesterday, and praising the “peaceful results” of his “great decisions…and processes” (likely referring to Kissinger’s work to end the 1973 Mideast war after Syria and Egypt attacked Israel).

But for all that Herzog and others praised Kissinger, his pragmatic view of diplomacy meant that he oversaw the coup that deposed popularly elected Chilean president Salvador Allende and replaced him with vicious right–wing dictator General Augusto Pinochet, prolonged the war in Vietnam, supported the secret bombing of Cambodia, and so on, becoming responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands and, for many people, becoming the face of American arrogance in foreign affairs, a legacy Biden’s State Department is still working to overcome.

Blinken answered: “Few people were better students of history—even fewer people did more to shape history—than Henry Kissinger.”

mickeyrat

  December 1, 2023 (Friday)

Former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, died today. Named to the court by President Ronald Reagan to honor a campaign promise, O’Connor was known as a pragmatist who paid attention to the real-world consequences of the court’s decisions and who was willing to rethink her positions.

Traditionally, this understanding of how court decisions affect lives has come from justices who have held elective office before their elevation, and O’Connor fit the bill: she served in the Arizona state senate for 5 years, eventually becoming majority leader. Since she stepped down in 2006, there have been no judges on the court with that elective experience, and the court has swung hard to the right.

For the sixth time in U.S. history, the House of Representatives today voted to expel one of its members, Representative George Santos (R-NY). Expulsion requires two thirds of the House. The resolution to expel Santos passed by a vote of 311 to 114, with 105 Republicans voting with all but four Democrats (two voted no and two voted present).

Representative Max Miller (R-OH) told his colleagues that Santos’s campaign had charged both Miller’s credit card and that of his mother for contributions that exceeded legal limits and of which they were both unaware. “You, sir, are a crook,” he told Santos.

But the top four members of the Republican leadership—Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN), and Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY)—and more than 100 other Republicans voted against expelling Santos, who is under criminal indictment and by whom a House Ethics Committee report suggested even more “uncharged and unlawful conduct.”

Santos was a reliable right-wing vote, and losing him will make the Republicans' majority even slimmer than it already was, suggesting that Republican leadership and much of the rank and file were more interested in power than concerned about criminal behavior among their conference.

“To hell with this place,” Santos said after the expulsion.   

The quest for power also showed up this week when a federal appeals court released secret text messages from Representative Scott Perry (R-PA) to other participants in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, revealing his frantic attempts to end the right of the American people to choose their president.

In that attempt, Perry communicated with Justice Department attorney Jeff Clark, Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, many of Trump’s lawyers, and numerous Pennsylvania state lawmakers including Doug Mastriano, none of whom contacted authorities about the attempt to overthrow our democratic system.  

Perry also contacted other Republican representatives, including Jody Hice (R-GA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Chip Roy (R-TX), and representative-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) about the effort. They didn’t alert anyone to the anti-democratic effort, either.

Stopped by a gag order from attacking the staff of Judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the fraud trial of the Trump Organization in Manhattan, former president Trump has turned to attacking Engoron’s family. Trump has alleged on social media that Engoron’s wife has been posting about him on social media, but she has not: the posts Trump has identified are not from her, although blog posts by far-right extremist Laura Loomer said they were.

Trump seems to be trying to get out from under the legal cases against him by threatening participants in the legal system and by delaying the trials until next year’s election. It is his position that if he wins the presidency in 2024, Trump’s lawyer told a judge in Georgia today, Trump cannot be tried as part of the racketeering case of those who tried to overturn the 2020 election until at least 2029.

In the Washington Post yesterday, neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan warned that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable,” and today in The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last agreed. He pointed to a conversation neoconservative thinker William Kristol had this week with journalist Jonathan Karl, in which Karl described a dystopian future painted not by Democrats but by former Trump employees: a government full of Trump loyalists who understand “that they are free to break the law because they will be pardoned” as Trump seeks retribution against those he sees as his enemies.

“The storm is coming,” Last warned readers. “The world looks normal right now, but it is not. Forces are in motion that will bring us to a point of national crisis one year from now.”

And yet, in Washington, D.C., the federal judge overseeing the case concerning Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election today rejected Trump’s request to throw the case out on the grounds that, as president, he had absolute immunity for anything he did while in office.

Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote that being president “does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass.” Trump’s “four-year service as Commander in Chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens,” she added.

Trump is not exactly going out of its way to attract voters, either. He has once again embraced the idea of getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. More than 40 million Americans get their health coverage under the ACA, and as many as one out of every two people too young for Medicare have a pre-existing health condition that, without the protection of the ACA, could make healthcare insurers discriminate against them.

Trump says he will replace the ACA with something better, but his advisors acknowledge that they have no plans to do more than chip away at the existing law.

President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders are calling attention to Trump’s threats against the ACA and today are touting that under Democratic governor Roy Cooper, North Carolina has become the 40th state to expand Medicaid under the ACA. This means that 600,000 North Carolinians are now eligible for healthcare coverage.

“Despite this progress, MAGA Republicans still want to get rid of the Affordable Care Act,” Biden said, “just like my predecessor tried and failed to do repeatedly.”

Other Republican leaders don’t seem terribly worried about attracting anyone but their base, either. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was in the news today for having written the foreword for and promoted a book that advanced conspiracy theories against Democrats and attacked poor voters as “unsophisticated and susceptible to government dependency.”

And perhaps even the base will be dismayed by news out of Florida, where the chair of the state Republican Party, Christian Ziegler, is under investigation for sexual battery and rape. Ziegler is married to Bridget Ziegler, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty; she has said public schools are “indoctrination centers for the radical left,” and that she wants to bring “religious values” into them.

The Florida Center for Government Accountability, which broke the story, calls the Zieglers “one of Florida’s top political power couples,” close to both governor Ron DeSantis and Trump.

mickeyrat

  December 2, 2023 (Saturday)

On Wednesday, November 29, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) delivered a landmark speech on American antisemitism, inspired by the fact that protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza after the October 7 attack by Hamas have descended into an embrace of Hamas’s stated goal of the complete destruction of Israel. From there it has, for some people, been a short step to attacking Jewish people in general.

“I feel compelled to speak because I am the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in America; in fact, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official ever in American history,” Schumer said. “And I have noticed a significant disparity between how Jewish people regard the rise of antisemitism, and how many of my non-Jewish friends regard it. To us, the Jewish people, the rise of antisemitism is a crisis—a five-alarm fire that must be extinguished. For so many other people of good will, it is merely a problem, a matter of concern. Today, I want to use my platform to explain why so many Jewish people see this problem as a crisis.”

Schumer anchored his speech in the long history of civil rights advocacy on the part of American Jews. In 1909, New York Jew Henry Moskowitz was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Jack Greenberg, whose family fled pogroms in Europe, served 23 years at the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund after its founder, famous Black jurist Thurgood Marshall, stepped down.

In 1958, in a speech to the American Jewish Congress, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “My people were brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid ourselves of bondage, but to make oppression of any people by others an impossibility.”

Five years later, the president of the American Jewish Congress, New Jersey rabbi Dr. Joachim Prinz, spoke before King at the March on Washington. “I speak to you as an American Jew,” he told the crowd. “As Americans we share the profound concern of millions of people about the shame and disgrace of inequality and injustice which make a mockery of the great American idea. As Jews we bring to this great demonstration, in which thousands of us proudly participate, a two-fold experience—one of the spirit and one of our history…. It…is not merely sympathy and compassion for the Black people of America that motivates us. It is above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience.”

It was that painful historic experience and an attempt to make oppression impossible that led Jewish activists to support the civil rights movement. In the Freedom Summer of 1964, half the civil rights workers who traveled to Mississippi were Jewish, including Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, murdered alongside Black activist James Chaney outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi.

That history of Jewish support for civil rights is written across the landscape of our country: the main bridge dominating the Boston skyline is named for civil rights worker Leonard P. Zakim in memory of his work to “build bridges of understanding between different ethnic, racial, and religious groups,” as his wife said at the bridge’s dedication.

In his speech, Schumer tied into that history, saying that “bigotry against one group of Americans is bigotry against all” and noting that he had worked to protect Asian-Americans and Arab-Americans, as well as to protect houses of worship for all religions from extremists. He also noted, at some length, that it is possible both to abhor Hamas and to deplore the destruction that has rained down on the Palestinian people.

But Schumer expressed dismay that as hatred toward American Jews is rising dangerously—the Anti-Defamation League estimates that antisemitic incidents have increased nearly 300 percent since October 7—some Americans, people that Jews believed were “ideological fellow travelers,” are celebrating the October 7 attack as an assault on “colonizers.”

“Not long ago,” Schumer said, “many of us marched together for Black and Brown lives, we stood against anti-Asian hatred, we protested bigotry against the LGBTQ community, we fought for reproductive justice out of the recognition that injustice against one oppressed group is injustice against all. But apparently, in the eyes of some, that principle does not extend to the Jewish people.”

“Many, if not most, Jewish Americans, including myself, support a two-state solution,” he said, “We disagree with Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and his administration’s encouragement of militant settlers in the West Bank, which has become a considerable obstacle to a two-state solution.” But “the most extreme rhetoric against Israel has emboldened antisemites who are attacking Jewish people simply because they are Jewish.”

These attacks, Schumer said, conjure up the history of millennia in which Jews were slaughtered. “[W]hen Jewish people hear chants like ‘From the river to the sea,’ a founding slogan of Hamas, a terrorist group that is not shy about their goal to eradicate the Jewish people, in Israel and around the globe, we are alarmed.”

“More than anything, we are worried—quite naturally, given the twists and turns of history—about where these actions and sentiments could eventually lead. Now, this is no intellectual exercise for us. For many Jewish people, it feels like a matter of survival, informed once again by history.”

“Can you understand why Jewish people feel isolated when we hear some praise Hamas and chant its vicious slogan?” Schumer asked. “Can you blame us for feeling vulnerable only 80 years after Hitler wiped out half of the Jewish population across the world while many countries turned their back? Can you appreciate the deep fear we have about what Hamas might do if left to their own devices? Because the long arc of Jewish history teaches us a lesson that is hard to forget: ultimately, that we are alone.”

Schumer begged the American people “of all creeds and backgrounds” to defend the “pluralistic, multiethnic democracy” that has enabled Jewish people in the United States “to flourish alongside so many other immigrant groups.”

He asked them to “learn the history of the Jewish people, who have been abandoned repeatedly by their fellow countrymen—left isolated and alone to combat antisemitism—with disastrous results,” and to “reject the illogical and antisemitic double standard that is once again being applied to the plight of Jewish victims and hostages, to some of the actions of the Israeli government, and even to the very existence of a Jewish state.”

Schumer asked all Americans “to understand why Jewish people defend Israel.” They do not “wish harm on Palestinians,” he said, but instead “fear a world where Israel is forced to tolerate the existence of groups like Hamas that want to wipe out all Jewish people from the planet. We fear a world where Israel, the place of refuge for Jewish people, will no longer exist. If there is no Israel,” he said, “there will be no place, no place for the Jewish people to go when they are persecuted in other countries.”

In view of history and of rising antisemitism, Jewish Americans are afraid of what the future might bring, Schumer said. “And perhaps worst of all,” he said, “many Jewish Americans feel alone to face all of this, abandoned by too many of our friends and allies in our greatest time of need.”

He implored “every person and every community and every institution to stand with Jewish Americans and denounce antisemitism in all of its forms.”

“We are stewards of the flames of liberty, tolerance, and equality that warm our American melting pot, and make it possible for Jewish Americans to prosper alongside Palestinian Americans, and every other immigrant group from all over the world,” he concluded.

“Are we a nation that can defy the regular course of human history, where the Jewish people have been ostracized, expelled, and massacred over and over again?” he asked. Then he answered his own question: “Yes. And I will do everything in my power—as Senate Majority Leader, as a Jewish American, as a citizen of a free society, as a human being—to make it happen.”

“Ken Y-hi Ratzon,” he concluded. “May it be his will.”

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