Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

mickeyrat · November 2021

brianlux said:

mickeyrat said:

I fucking give up

Why, M? Because of a little thing like the end of Democracy?
Yeah, I get it. What we are living through is hard to fathom, even harder to deal with. Throwing one's hands up is mighty tempting. It might even be a good thing to do now and then. Just say, "Fuck it", and step back a while and not let it overwhelm and consume you.
You can always re-engage when ready.

phone issues.....

brianlux · November 2021

mickeyrat said:

brianlux said:

mickeyrat said:

I fucking give up

Why, M? Because of a little thing like the end of Democracy?
Yeah, I get it. What we are living through is hard to fathom, even harder to deal with. Throwing one's hands up is mighty tempting. It might even be a good thing to do now and then. Just say, "Fuck it", and step back a while and not let it overwhelm and consume you.
You can always re-engage when ready.

phone issues.....

Bummer! Need me to post the letter until it's fixed? Can do if you'd like.

mickeyrat · November 2021

November 23, 2021 (Tuesday)

On this date in 1876, William “Boss” Tweed, who had stolen between $25 and $200 million in his corrupt years at the head of New York City’s government and then fled to Spain to escape prison, was delivered up to authorities and sent back to jail.

One hundred and forty-five years later, the law is in the news again.

In Virginia today, a jury decided that the leaders of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017 violated state law by conspiring before the event “to intimidate, harass or harm.” The jury ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, five women and four men, including four people injured when James Fields rammed his car into protesters and killed 32-year-old protester Heather Heyer.

The plaintiffs sued five white nationalist organizations and 12 individual defendants, including prominent white supremacists Richard Spencer, Jason Kessler, and Christopher Cantwell, (known as the “Crying Nazi),” for engaging in a conspiracy to harm others. Over three weeks, the plaintiffs produced evidence that the defendants had talked of hitting protesters with cars at a party in Spencer’s apartment—known as the “Fash Loft” (short for fascist)—before the riot.

In their brief defense—their lawyers rested after a day and a half—the defendants tried to blame the deadly outcome of the riot on Fields alone and claimed their pre-event planning was just chatter amongst people who did not even know each other. Their talk of killing was just, as Spencer testified, “very juvenile and silly.” They said that they were simply exercising their First Amendment rights, that they acted in self defense, that the police should have kept the protesters apart, and that none of them knew Fields.

But the judge explained to the jury that a conspiracy did not require that the defendants committed violence themselves or even knew each other. It required only that they had the same goal and could foresee that violence would occur. Since it was a civil and not a criminal trial, they needed only to find “a preponderance of the evidence,” rather than guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” as in criminal trials.

The jury awarded the plaintiffs $26 million in damages. As Dahlia Lithwick noted in an article in Slate.com, this is no small thing, even though the defendants are unlikely to be able to pay. Fields is in prison for life for killing Heyer; Cantwell is serving a prison term for threatening to rape a man’s wife in front of their children unless the man gave Cantwell information he wanted about someone else. Spencer is also broke; his wife accused him of violent abuse before she left him. As Lithwick put it: “This isn’t about squeezing blood from a stone. It’s about widespread agreement that the stone sucks.”

Conspiracy is on other minds today as the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol issued subpoenas for three groups and associated individuals who were involved in the violence of that day. Proud Boy International, LLC, and its chair Henry “Enrique” Tarrio; the Oath Keepers and their president Elmer Stewart Rhodes; and 1st Amendment Praetorian, along with the organization chair Robert Patrick Lewis, all got subpoenas.

Committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said: “The Select Committee is seeking information from individuals and organizations reportedly involved with planning the attack, with the violent mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6th, or with efforts to overturn the results of the election. We believe the individuals and organizations we subpoenaed today have relevant information about how violence erupted at the Capitol and the preparation leading up to this violent attack.”

Roger Stone, whom the committee subpoenaed yesterday, is already fundraising off the demand, and Alex Jones, also subpoenaed, today said that he will plead the Fifth—the constitutional amendment that protects an American citizen from being “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”—because he “doesn’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison.”

Today Texas Senator Ted Cruz tried to turn the horrific killings in Waukesha, Wisconsin, into political points. On Sunday, a man fleeing another crime scene plowed his SUV into a Christmas parade, injuring at least 48 people and killing six, so far. With reference to the fact that suspect Darrell Brooks was out of custody on bail, Cruz tweeted: “Across the country, radical Leftists are releasing violent criminals from jail—with little or no bail—only to see them commit yet more violent crimes…. This horrific mass murder is the latest example. And it was fully preventable.”

Cruz’s tweet recalls the Willie Horton ad of 1988, when the George H. W. Bush campaign pinned on then–Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis responsibility for the weekend furlough of a murderer who raped a woman and assaulted a man while on furlough, despite the fact that the parole law had been passed by Dukakis’s Republican predecessor.

Today, as civil rights lawyer Scott Hechinger said: “There is no ‘bail reform’ in Wisconsin. There has been no significant change to bail laws in Wisconsin in a decade. Bail was set in this case. Yet still, prosecutors, police, & right wing politicians are convincing everyone ‘bail reform’ is to blame. And media amplifies the lie.”

In another piece of legal news, yesterday Attorney General Merrick Garland swore into office a new U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the office that oversees Manhattan and all the many financial transactions therein. The new U.S. attorney is Damian Williams. The son of Jamaican immigrants, Williams was educated at Harvard for college, the University of Cambridge for a master’s degree, and Yale Law School for law school. He is the first Black American to run the SDNY.

Williams clerked for Garland when the attorney general was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Garland presided at Williams’s investiture yesterday. He used the opportunity to remind the attorneys and staff of the SDNY that the Department of Justice keeps our country safe from enemies both foreign and domestic and protects civil rights as it was chartered to do in 1879.

Above all, the Justice Department upholds the rule of law. It must treat everyone alike, Garland said. There must not be “one rule for Democrats and another for Republicans; one rule for friends and another for foes; one rule for the powerful, another for the powerless; one rule for the rich, another for the poor; or different rules, depending upon one's race or ethnicity.”

In the two years that Tweed ran the city of New York unchallenged, he bought off opponents, extorted rivals, and pocketed millions from public contracts. He operated with impunity until members of his own party joined with reformers to replace his cronies and cut off Tweed’s access to funds. Voters turned against his gang, many of whom fled the country.

In November 1873, Tweed was found guilty of larceny and forgery, fined the equivalent of almost $300,000 in today’s money, and sentenced to a year in prison. Upon his release, the state sued him in civil court to recover $6 million he had embezzled. Unable to raise bail, Tweed escaped the country. Returned to the U.S on a warship in 1876, he died of pneumonia two years later in prison.

brianlux · November 2021

You did it, good job. Good letter, as usual as well.

mickeyrat · November 2021

November 24, 2021 (Wednesday)

The Biden administration has announced it will convene the first of two virtual “Summits for Democracy” on December 9 and 10, 2021. The gatherings will bring together leaders from 110 countries who work in government, civil society, and the private sector, to come up with an agenda to renew democratic government and work together to keep the ideals of democracy strong.

Authoritarianism is growing around the world, including in America, and the administration is hoping to create practical ideas and strong alliances to defend against authoritarianism, fight corruption, and promote human rights, all values central to democracy.

That this announcement comes at Thanksgiving is fitting, since Thanksgiving is rooted in a defense of democracy during the Civil War.

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 they won.

My best to you all for Thanksgiving 2021.

mickeyrat · November 2021

November 25, 2021 (Thursday)

I started these letters completely inadvertently on September 15, 2019, after I happened to see House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff's (D-CA) angry letter to then–acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire on September 13, noting that the committee knew a whistleblower had made a complaint and demanding that Maguire produce that complaint as required by law. As a political historian, I saw that for what it was: an accusation from a member of the legislative branch that someone in the executive branch had very clearly broken a specific law. That was huge, way different than the general complaints around at the time that, for example, then-president Trump must be violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution, an accusation that was vague enough that it was terribly hard to address.

Two days later, on September 15, a yellow jacket sting made me cancel my afternoon plans, and as I sat waiting to make sure I didn’t react badly to the sting, I used the time to write on my Facebook page where I had been posting once a week or so for years. I wrote about the history of the previous month and mentioned the issue of the missing whistleblower’s complaint. That post got swamped with people asking so many questions that I wrote another, and then another.

And so the Letters from an American were born.

Over the past two years, this has become a team project. While I do the legwork of explaining the politics of these crisis times, my heroic editors keep my writing clean and factual, Facebook moderators keep our online space respectful, and folks with a great sense of humor award medals in the commenting game.

But this project really belongs to you who read it. It was your voice that created the project, you who inspire me when I am so dead tired I fall asleep sitting up, and you who bring in related material and 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.

I am honored to be walking this road alongside all of you. You are smart, funny, kind, talented, insightful, creative, and principled.

And I am so very proud of what we are building together.

Thank you, for all of it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

mickeyrat · November 2021

November 26, 2021 (Friday)

On Wednesday, November 24, just before the Thanksgiving holiday, a jury found Gregory McMichael (65), his son Travis McMichael (35), and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan (52) guilty on 23 counts in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery on February 23, 2020, near Brunswick, in Glynn County, Georgia.

Ahmaud Marquez Arbery, 25, was a former high school football player who ran every day. On February 23, he was running through a primarily white neighborhood about two miles from his mother’s house when the McMichaels saw him go by. Gregory McMichael had retired from the Glynn County police force and had been an investigator for the Brunswick District Attorney’s office. He picked up a .357 Magnum revolver, Travis grabbed a shotgun, and they hopped into a pickup truck and followed Arbery. Bryan followed the McMichaels and recorded what happened next on his cellphone.

The video shows Arbery jogging toward a white truck with Gregory McMichael standing in the truck bed on a quiet, flat, somewhat rural looking street. Arbery moves to go to the right of the truck, and when he reaches the front, just out of sight, a shot fires. Arbery comes back into view on the left side of the truck and moves toward the left side of the road, where he begins to struggle with Travis McMichael, who is holding a shotgun. Two more shots and Arbery staggers to the middle of the road in front of the truck before falling forward.

Police responded to the scene after a call saying there were “shots fired and a male on the ground ‘bleeding out.’” Mr. Arbery died at 1:08.

Law enforcement officers arrived minutes later and found the McMichaels standing over Arbery’s body. Bryan was in his vehicle. The officers took the McMichaels in for questioning and called the office of the Brunswick district attorney, Jackie Johnson, to ask for legal advice. Assistants there told the officers that the McMichaels should not be arrested.

The police report of the incident, taken largely from an account by Gregory McMichael, said that Arbery had “violently attack[ed]” Travis McMichael and had been shot when the two men fought over a shotgun.

The assistants in Johnson’s office had also told the police officers that the office had a conflict of interest in the case and would need to bring in another prosecutor. Before he retired in 2019, Gregory McMichael had worked as an investigator in her office for more than 30 years. Phone records show he called Johnson shortly after the shooting.

When she heard of what had happened, Johnson immediately contacted George E. Barnhill, the district attorney for Georgia’s Waycross Judicial Circuit. Barnhill watched Bryan’s video and, the next morning, told Glynn County police that Georgia’s citizens arrest law enabled the men to chase Arbery and that they had shot him in self-defense. Glynn County commissioners blame Barnhill’s early advice to the police for delaying the case.

On February 27, Johnson officially recused herself from the case, and the next day, Georgia Attorney General Christopher M. Carr appointed Barnhill to prosecute the case. Carr did not know Barnhill had already reviewed evidence.

Arbery’s family protested Barnhill’s appointment, since Barnhill’s son works as an assistant district attorney in Johnson’s office.

By April 2, Barnhill acknowledged he had a conflict of interest in the case, and yet on April 3 he issued a letter to the Captain of the Glynn County Police Department saying that the McMichaels were within their rights to chase Arbery under Georgia’s law permitting citizen’s arrests, that they were legally allowed to carry guns, and that Travis McDaniel had fired the shotgun out of self defense. “We do not see grounds for an arrest of any of the three parties,” he wrote.

Barnhill officially recused himself on April 7. Carr said he should never have agreed to prosecute the case in the first place, and he began an investigation into Johnson, who had recommended Barnhill without disclosing that she had already had him talk to police about the case.

On April 13, Carr appointed Tom Durden, the district attorney for Liberty County, one county over from the Brunswick Judicial Circuit, to prosecute the case. “We don’t know anything about the case,” Durden told reporters. “We don’t have any preconceived idea about it.”

And there, things might have rested, much as they have so often rested in our nation’s long history when white men have killed Black men.

But in the weeks since the shooting, the community had become increasingly insistent on hearing answers. A local journalist for the daily Brunswick News named Larry Hobbs noted right away that police were not forthcoming about what had happened. He stayed on the story.

Arbery’s family and friends kept up pressure on the Glynn police department, which was already under investigation for corruption on a different matter, and on the prosecutors.

Their outrage went national on April 26, when the New York Times reported on the murder, noting that there had been no arrests.

Finally, on May 5, the case broke open. Apparently thinking that since Barnhill had found Bryan’s video exonerating, everyone else would, too, Gregory McMichael worked with lawyer Alan Tucker to take the video to a local radio station, which uploaded it for public viewing.

The station took it down two hours later, but not before a public outcry. Carr promptly asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to take over the case. Two days later, on May 7, 74 days after Arbery was killed, GBI officers arrested the McMichaels.

On May 11, the case was reassigned to Joyette M. Holmes at the Cobb County District Attorney’s office and transferred to Atlanta, about 270 miles away from Brunswick.

On May 21, 2020, Bryan was arrested.

And on Wednesday, November 24, after a 13-day trial, a jury with only one Black person found Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael, and William “Roddie” Bryan guilty of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit a felony. In February, they will face federal charges of committing hate crimes.

Also on Wednesday, Johnson turned herself in to officials after a grand jury indicted her for violating her oath of office and obstructing police, saying she used her position to discourage law enforcement officers from arresting the McMichaels.

Today, Cobb District Attorney Flynn D. Broady Jr. issued a statement claiming that the jury’s verdict “reflects a new direction for our communities, this State, and the nation, to denounce hate, division and intolerance and promote unity.” We must never forget our past, he said, but instead “understand our prior shortcomings and work to the goal enumerated in our founding documents, ‘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’ and may we add Justice. In order to do that it takes strength and courage, to demand the rights entitled to us by our Constitution and laws.”

Broady called out Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper Jones, and his father, Marcus Arbery, for their courage in insisting on justice for their son, and claimed “the citizens of this state and this nation stood with Wanda and Marcus and their family.”

That local Georgians refused to let Arbery’s case go, and that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation brought charges immediately as soon as they were brought into the case, and that an overwhelmingly white jury found the three men guilty all lend credence to Broady’s statement.

But there is one sticking point: if Gregory McMichael had not produced that video, it’s entirely possible that the crime and its coverup would never have been prosecuted.

mickeyrat · November 2021

November 27, 2021 (Saturday)

Today, Nate Cohn noted in the New York Times that the policies President Joe Biden and the Democrats are putting in place are hugely popular, and yet Biden’s own popularity numbers have dropped into the low 40s. It’s a weird disconnect that Cohn explains by suggesting that, above all, voters want “normalcy.”

Heaven knows that Biden, who took office in the midst of a pandemic that had crashed the economy and has had to deal with an unprecedented insurgency led by his predecessor, has not been able to provide normalcy.

In her own piece, journalist Magdi Semrau suggests that the media bears at least some of the responsibility for this disconnect, since it has given people a sense of the cost of Biden’s signature measures without specifying what’s in them, focused on negative information (negotiations are portrayed as “disarray,” for example), and ignored that Republicans have refused to participate in any lawmaking, choosing instead simply to be obstructionist. As Semrau puts it: "Democrats want to fix bridges, provide childcare and lower drug costs. Republicans don’t. These are political facts and voters should be aware of them."

To this I would add that Republican attacks on Democrats, which are simple and emotional, get far more traction and thus far more coverage in the mainstream press than the slow and successful navigation of our complicated world.

In illustration of the unequal weight between emotion and policymaking, Biden’s poll numbers took a major hit between mid-August and mid-September, dropping six points. That month saw the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was widely portrayed as a disaster at Biden’s hands that had badly hurt U.S. credibility. In fact, Biden inherited Trump’s deal with the Taliban under which the U.S. promised to withdraw from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, so long as the Taliban met several requirements, including that it stop killing U.S. soldiers.

When Biden took office, there were only 3500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, down from a high of 100,000 during the Obama administration. Biden had made no secret of his dislike of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and, faced with the problem of whether to honor Trump’s agreement or send troops back into the country, committed to complete the withdrawal, although he pushed back the date to September.

What he did not know, in part because Trump’s drawdown had taken so many intelligence officers out of the country, was that as soon as Trump’s administration cut the deal with the Taliban, Afghan troops began to make their own agreements to lay down their arms. The Biden administration appears to have been surprised by the sudden collapse of the Afghan government on August 15. As the Taliban took the capital city of Kabul, Afghans terrified by the Taliban takeover rushed to the Kabul airport, where an attack killed 13 U.S. military personnel who were trying to manage the crowd.

Republicans reacted to the mid-August chaos by calling for Biden’s impeachment, and the press compared the moment to the 1975 fall of Saigon. That coverage overshadowed the extraordinary fact that the U.S. airlifted more than 124,000 people, including about 6000 U.S. citizens, out of Afghanistan in the six weeks before the U.S. officially left. This is the largest airlift in U.S. history—the U.S. evacuated about 7000 out of Saigon—and evacuations have continued since, largely on chartered flights.

By comparison, in October 2019 under Trump, the U.S. simply left Northern Syria without helping former allies; the senior American diplomat in Syria, William V. Roebuck, later said the U.S. had “stood by and watched” an “intention-laced effort at ethnic cleansing.” And yet, that lack of evacuation received almost no coverage.

Complicating matters further, rather than agreeing that the withdrawal was a foreign policy disaster, many experts say that it helped U.S. credibility rather than hurt it. According to Graham Allison, the former dean of Harvard Kennedy School, “The anomaly was that we were there, not that we left.”

And yet, in mid-September, while 66% of the people in the U.S. supported leaving Afghanistan, 48% thought Biden “seriously mishandled” the situation.

Aside from getting the U.S. out of Afghanistan, is it true that Biden has not accomplished much?

Biden set out to prove that democracies could deliver for their people, and that the U.S. could, once again, lead the world. He promptly reentered the international agreements Trump had left, including the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization, and renewed those Trump had weakened, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Biden set out to lead the world in coronavirus vaccinations, making the U.S. the world’s largest donor of vaccines globally, although U.S. vaccinations, which started out fast, slowed significantly after Republicans began to turn supporters against them.

Under Biden, the U.S. has recovered economically from the pandemic faster than other nations that did not invest as heavily in stimulus. In March 2021, the Democrats passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan stimulus package to rebuild the economy, and it has worked spectacularly. Real gross domestic product growth this quarter is expected to be 5%, and the stock market has hit new highs, as did Black Friday sales yesterday. Two thirds of Americans are content with their household’s financial situation.

The pandemic tangled supply chains both because of shortages and because Americans have shifted spending away from restaurants and services and toward consumer goods. The Biden administration mobilized workers, industry leaders, and port managers to clear the freight piled on wharves. In the past three weeks, the number of containers sitting on docks is down 33%—and shipping prices are down 25%. Major retailers Walmart, Target, and Home Depot all say they have plenty of inventory on hand for the holiday season.

With more than 5.5 million new jobs created in ten months, unemployment claims are the lowest they have been since 1969, prompting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) office to tweet, “Armstrong Walks the Moon!... Wait, sorry! That’s a headline from the last year unemployment claims were this low.” Workers’ pay has jumped as much as 13% in certain industries, and there are openings across the labor market.

The American Rescue Plan started the reorientation of our government to address the needs of ordinary Americans rather than the wealthy who have dominated our policymaking since 1981. It provided more than $5 billion in rental assistance, for example, and expanded the Child Tax Credit, so that by the end of October, $66 billion had gone to more than 36 million households, cutting the child poverty rate in half.

Over the course of the summer, Biden negotiated an extraordinarily complicated infrastructure package, winning a $1.2 trillion bipartisan bill that will repair roads and bridges and provide broadband across the country, and getting the larger, $2.2 trillion Build Back Better bill through the House. Now before the Senate, the bill calls for universal pre-kindergarten, funding for child care and elder care, a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and protection against climate change.

Has the Biden administration accomplished anything? It has created a sea change in our country, rebuilding its strength by orienting the government away from the supply-side economics that led lawmakers to protect the interests of the wealthy, and toward the far more traditional focus on building the economy by supporting regular Americans.

mickeyrat · November 2021

November 28, 2021 (Sunday)

And, just like that, we are already in the last quiet days of fall.

And since the news was relatively quiet as well, I'll see you tomorrow.

mickeyrat · November 2021

November 29, 2021 (Monday)

Today’s news hit like a firehose, which is to be expected after the Thanksgiving holiday. This year, though, that normal firehose is intensified by the news of the new Omicron COVID variant that the World Health Organization has labeled a “variant of concern.”

Epidemiologists in South Africa first identified Omicron on Wednesday, November 24, but the variant did not necessarily originate there: South African doctors were simply the first to identify it. The variant has since been detected in at least 14 countries, including Canada, where doctors have already found five cases.

Former Food and Drug Administration head Dr. Scott Gottlieb told "Face the Nation" Sunday that Omicron is "almost definitely" already in the United States. President Joe Biden today urged Americans not to panic about the variant as scientists work to figure out how threatening it is, but absolutely to get vaccinated and to get booster shots. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, today urged everyone over 18 to get a booster shot. The Biden administration has restricted flights from 8 countries in southern Africa to buy time for more Americans to get vaccinated. It will not call for a return to lockdowns.

Upon announcement of Omicron, Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX), former White House physician for Trump, tweeted that the news was manufactured by Democrats to enable them to “push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election—but we're not going to let them!” he concluded.

There were no COVID-related deaths yesterday in New York City, where the vaccination rate is 90%. For adult Democrats the vaccination rate is about 90%, while the vaccination rate for adult Republicans hovers around 60%. Counties that went strongly for Trump have a death rate three times that of counties that voted heavily for Biden.

The Senate was back in session today after the Thanksgiving break. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is currently focused on several revenue measures. First, Congress needs to fund the government, which will run out of money on Friday after an earlier agreement with Republicans that extended funding to then and no further.

Second—and crucially important—Congress needs to raise the debt ceiling to pay for measures already passed. Although raising the debt ceiling will cover only measures for which Congress has already appropriated the money and not new ones, and although Republicans added $7.8 trillion to the debt during Trump’s term, Republicans now say they will not help to raise the ceiling and that the Democrats must do it on their own. If the ceiling is not raised, the country will default on its debt for the first time in history, which will do profound damage to the economy and our international standing.

Third, Congress needs to pass a defense authorization bill to fund the military. So far, this has always passed—although Trump tried to kill it last year—meaning that sometimes it can carry through other measures piggybacking on it.

Fourth is the Build Back Better Act that the House has already passed in tandem with the bipartisan infrastructure measure signed into law on November 15. Schumer told reporters that he wants to pass Biden’s popular social spending package by Christmas, expecting that it will ease inflation.

Congress’s focus on imperative fiscal measures means that the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act are not on the table this week.

This is problematic. Federal protection of our voting rights underpins everything else. On November 22, more than 150 political scientists signed an open letter to Congress warning that the opportunity to save our democracy is closing, and imploring it to pass the Freedom to Vote Act.

“If Congress fails to pass the Freedom to Vote Act,” the scholars wrote, “American democracy will be at critical risk. Not only could this failure undermine the minimum condition for electoral democracy—free and fair elections—but it would in turn likely result in an extended period of minority rule, which a majority of the country would reject as undemocratic and illegitimate. This would have grave consequences not only for our democracy, but for political order, economic prosperity, and the national security of the United States as well.”

The Freedom to Vote Act would standardize elections and make it easier to register and vote, and it would overturn the laws passed since January 2020 by Republican-dominated legislatures to replace nonpartisan election officials with partisans. It would also end partisan gerrymandering, stopping the extraordinary maps Republican-dominated states are creating to give themselves commanding majorities of their states’ legislatures and Congressional delegations regardless of what the voters want.

Protection of our elections is imperative as Trump and the Republican radicals in Republican-dominated states are cementing their hold on election systems, making it virtually impossible for Democrats to win.

In Michigan, for example, where courts, election officials, and the state senate all confirmed Biden’s 2020 win, Trump has endorsed candidates for attorney general and secretary of state—both of whom are crucial to election counting—as well as two congressional candidates and seven candidates for seats in the legislature. All of them have called for investigations into the 2020 election and changes to election laws; one has said that anyone engaged in “election fraud” should face a firing squad. “Michigan needs a new legislature,” Trump said. “The cowards there now are too spineless to investigate Election Fraud.”

In April 2021, Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight noted that “Of the 293 Republicans who were serving in the Senate or House on Jan. 20, 2017—the day of Trump’s inauguration—a full 132 (45 percent) are no longer in Congress or have announced their retirement or resignation.” Under pressure from the former president, the party continues to radicalize, with firebrands like Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Gosar gaining influence.

Republican leadership has refused to call out Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) for recent Islamophobic statements aimed at Boebert’s colleague Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) suggesting she was a terrorist. This, coming on top of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) support for Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) after he released a video illustrating himself killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and slashing at the president, indicates either that McCarthy has lost control of his caucus or is afraid of it, or both.

Recently, Salon columnist Chauncey DeVega conducted an interview with Miles Taylor, the chief of staff to Trump’s Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen who published a New York Times op-ed in 2018 as “Anonymous" claiming that he was part of a resistance movement in the Trump White House. Taylor told DeVega that Republican congresspeople are worried they will be attacked if they cross Trump. “I'm talking about former Cabinet secretaries, sitting members of Congress and others who personally confessed to me, ‘I don't think I can join you in rising up against this guy because I've got to worry about my family's safety.’” Taylor said. “I didn't anticipate how much I was going to hear that as a response. They would say to me, “Look, I’ve got kids and this is too crazy right now.”

But if Trump is permitted to hand over control over the machinery of our elections to his loyalists, today’s “crazy” is going to look quaint.

mickeyrat · December 2021

November 30, 2021 (Tuesday)

The U.S. economy is booming.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell testified today before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, saying that although the rise in COVID cases due to the Delta variant had slowed recovery, the gross domestic product is still on track to grow about 5% in 2021. According to Christine Romans, CNN’s chief business correspondent, the last time we had that kind of growth was under the Reagan administration forty years ago.

Unemployment is also down. The economy added 531,000 jobs in October, dropping the unemployment rate to 4.6 percent, the lowest rate since November 1969. The recovery is not even, though, with jobs harder to find for Black and Brown Americans than for White Americans.

Meanwhile, the American Rescue Plan is restoring the nation’s basic social safety net. According to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, food insecurity dropped 24% for families as a result of Biden’s Child Tax Credit, creating “a profound economic and moral victory for the country.”

Powell also noted that inflation is up, from the 2% level for which administrations aim to about 5%. He predicted that inflation will ease as supply chains smooth out and as the administration takes measures at its disposal.

In illustration of what sort of measures those might be, Biden released 50 million barrels of the nation’s oil reserves to combat the rising gas prices that have grabbed headlines. Other nations, including India, the United Kingdom, and China, released some of theirs as well, and the price of WTI Crude has dropped back to what it was in early September. That fix may very well be temporary as economic growth puts pressure on oil supplies.

The success of the Democrats’ measures illustrates the effectiveness of the “liberal consensus” of the years between World War II and the Reagan Revolution, when members of both parties believed the government should promote economic growth by supporting those at the demand side of the economy. That meant giving those just starting out access to resources which they would, in turn, reinvest in the economy, helping all to rise.

The Reagan years reversed this popular understanding as lawmakers claimed instead that the best way to nurture the economy was to focus on the “supply side”—those wealthy people who, officials argued, would invest their money in the economy and create jobs. To free up capital for those people, Republicans focused on cutting taxes.

But while that system never worked as promised, Republicans have come to believe that tax cuts are the most important way to expand the economy. With the American Rescue Plan helping the U.S. to recover from the economic crunch of the pandemic faster than other nations, and with the extraordinary numbers we’re now seeing, Biden’s plan has once again illustrated the power of supporting ordinary Americans.

And such legislation is popular, so popular that, right on cue, Republicans who voted against the American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan infrastructure bill are advertising its benefits to their constituents as if they were responsible for it. Representative Rob Wittman (R-VA) has a new ad out boasting that “Congressman Rob Wittman is Bringing Broadband to the Northern Neck.” “It’s the future,” the ad reads, and Wittman “has helped bring broadband to thousands of homes and businesses. And he will not stop until every Virginian is given an equal opportunity to connect to the future.”

Wittman voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

The headline-grabbing news today, though, came from investigations into the events surrounding the January 6 insurrection.

Early this morning, Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that multiple sources told him that Trump had called the “war room” at the Willard Hotel several times on January 5 to talk about how they could stop Congress from counting the certified ballots that would make Joe Biden president. The team at the Willard was led by lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Boris Epshteyn and Trump loyalist Steve Bannon. Trump called the lawyers separately from the others, trying to keep from jeopardizing claims of attorney-client privilege.

Although those at the war room have maintained that they were acting only on the wishes of state legislators who worried about voter fraud, reports of phone calls from the president challenge that position. Lowell wrote: “Trump’s remarks reveal a direct line from the White House and the command center at the Willard. The conversations also show Trump’s thoughts appear to be in line with the motivations of the pro-Trump mob that carried out the Capitol attack and halted Biden’s certification, until it was later ratified by Congress.”

After the story came out, Trump’s spokesperson said, “This is totally false,” but offered no more information.

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is looking into the Willard meetings. Today, though, it interviewed Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, the man who recorded a phone call with Trump as the then-president tried to get him to overturn the results of the election. Raffensperger testified for five hours.

Also today, Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, dropped his refusal to answer the January 6th committee’s subpoena and has begun to cooperate, providing records and agreeing to be interviewed. Meadows had refused to participate in the process, citing Trump’s order that he stay silent. But after a grand jury found Trump adviser Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress, and as the House considers charging former Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark, who came up with a scheme to overturn the election and who has also refused to answer a subpoena, with criminal contempt of Congress, Meadows has apparently reconsidered his position.

Former federal prosecutor and legal analyst Renato Mariotti notes that this is a good move on Meadows’s part because it means that any future refusals will go to court, not criminal prosecution. Meadows is the highest-ranking official to testify before the committee and has made it clear he continues to expect to keep mum about what he considers sensitive material. Still, his participation will indicate to others that they should tell their stories before someone else’s testimony makes their information worthless as a bargaining chip.

The House committee today voted to hold Clark in contempt of Congress and passed the resolution on to the full House. The committee wrote: “The Select Committee believes that Mr. Clark had conversations with others in the Federal Government, including Members of Congress, regarding efforts to delegitimize, disrupt, or overturn the election results in the weeks leading up to January 6th,” and it expects him to comply with the subpoena. It rejects Clark’s contention that his conversations with Trump were a “sacred trust” and wrote that Trump had not, in fact, tried to assert executive privilege over Clark’s testimony. The committee noted that “the willful refusal to comply with a congressional subpoena is punishable by a fine of up to $100,000 and imprisonment for up to 1 year.”

mickeyrat · December 2021

December 1, 2021 (Wednesday)

Today The Guardian broke the news that former president Donald Trump tested positive for COVID on September 26, 2020, days earlier than the White House admitted. A forthcoming book from former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has the story. Despite the positive test, Trump went forward with his public schedule, unmasked. He exposed the guests at a Rose Garden ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett, his nominee for the Supreme Court; it became a superspreader event that infected Chris Christie, Kellyanne Conway, and Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Mike Lee (R-UT). That night, Trump held a rally in Middletown, Pennsylvania.

The next day, Trump met with Gold Star families who lost a loved one in the military, posing for photographs. He later suggested he might have contracted the virus from the families, although he knew he had been infected at the time, and risked infecting others.

On September 28, Trump spoke in the Rose Garden from a lectern 10 feet away from everyone else, prompting Philip Bump of the Washington Post to ask a week later whether Trump had known then that he might have COVID.

On September 29, Trump went to his scheduled debate with Democratic candidate Joe Biden, arriving too late for testing. Chris Wallace of the Fox News Channel, who was the moderator at the debate, later said the event was relying on the “honor system.” Trump railed and snarled at Biden, who was close enough to him to have been in danger. Trump’s contingent refused to wear masks despite rules at the venue to do so. At least 11 people tested positive after the debate.

Trump continued to hold his normal schedule until 1 a.m. on October 2, when the White House announced he was sick.

As soon as today’s story broke, Trump’s spokesperson called it “Fake News.” Tonight on the strongly pro-Trump network Newsmax, Meadows echoed Trump and agreed the story was “fake news” and said that the positive test was “a false positive.”

Trump’s arrogance and disregard for others—and perhaps of his desire to infect Biden with a deadly virus— struck a blow at the principle that “all men are created equal.” The men who broke England’s North American colonies away from the monarchy insisted that no man had an inherent right to rule. They embraced a theory of government that says men are equal, that they have inherent rights, and that government is legitimate only if those it governs consent to it. Their vision excluded women and men of color, but their theory of a government based on equality is very different from the idea that some people have more rights than others.

The idea of a country based on equality means that no person should be able to disregard others’ interests in order to serve their own. It also means that the law must treat everyone equally and that lawmakers must govern in such a way that they win the support of a majority of those they govern.

By risking others’ lives without their knowledge or consent, Trump claimed the right to dominate them.

But now that Trump is no longer at the head of the government, the rule of law appears to be bearing down. Yesterday, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit appeared to reject Trump’s argument for blocking access of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol to official documents from his presidency.

The committee has already found Trump advisor Stephen K. Bannon in contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena; today it held former Department of Justice lawyer Jeffrey Clark in contempt for his refusal to testify but said it may reconsider if he shows up on Saturday.

Desperate to stay in the news and keep supporters angry, Trump on Sunday night called for a public debate of his long-debunked arguments that the election was stolen from him.

Today, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), the committee’s vice chair, responded with what sure sounds like a warning that Trump might soon be on the receiving end of a subpoena. She said: “[Trump] has recently suggested that he wants to debate members of this committee.” The committee’s investigation “is not a game,” Cheney said. “Any communications Mr. Trump has with this committee will be under oath and if he persists in lying then, he will be accountable under the laws of this great nation, and subject to criminal penalties for every false word he speaks.”

Equality was also at stake today before the Supreme Court as it held hearings over a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. This law directly attacks the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing the constitutional right to abortion. In the hearings, the right-wing justices on the court, especially Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, appear to be willing to uphold the Mississippi law.

Roe v. Wade was part of the dramatic expansion of civil rights after World War II, in which Republican-led Supreme Courts used the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to enable the federal government to overrule discriminatory state laws and protect individuals’ civil rights. It was on these grounds that the court protected Black and Brown rights, interracial marriage, access to birth control, religious freedom, gay rights, and so on.

Those who objected to such expanded equality insisted the court was indulging in “judicial activism” by overruling the state laws that preserved the power of white men. They worked to stack the court with “originalists” who would defer to the states. Now, finally, thanks to Trump’s three Supreme Court picks, the era of using the federal government to protect equality appears to be under deadly threat, although the laws that protect civil rights are popular: 58% of Americans want Roe v. Wade to stay in place, for example, while only 32% want it overturned.

Make no mistake: it is not just reproductive rights that are under siege. If the Supreme Court returns power to the states to legislate as they wish, any right currently protected by the federal government is at risk. Justice Sonya Sotomayor made the connection to the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom today when she was questioning a lawyer during the oral arguments: “The issue of when life begins… it’s still debated in religions. So when you say this is the only right that takes away a life, that’s a religious view, isn’t it?”

After 19 Republican-dominated states have passed election laws suppressing the vote and gerrymandering districts, a reactionary minority controls them. Although Biden won Wisconsin, for example, the state supreme court today left in place districts that likely will enable Republicans to control 60% of the legislative seats in the state (and 75% of the state’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives). Ending federal protections for civil rights means handing to these reactionaries power over the majority of us.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln deplored the state laws discriminating against Black Americans, as well as immigrants in the North and West. He challenged Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who said that discriminatory state laws—including laws that protected human enslavement—were just fine so long as those few men allowed to vote liked them.

“I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal, upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop?” Lincoln said. “If that Declaration is not the truth, let us get the statute-book in which we find it and tear it out….”

mickeyrat · December 2021

December 2, 2021 (Thursday)

Tonight both the House and the Senate passed a measure to fund the federal government until February 18, 2022. The new legislation will prevent a government shutdown. The measure passed the House by a vote of 221 to 212 with only one Republican, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, voting yes. “This government should be shut down,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said. “You want to know why it should be shut down? Because the people in here. The people in here cannot control themselves.”

In the Senate, some Republicans tried to load the measure up with a provision to end President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates, but an amendment that would have defunded vaccine mandates failed. Then the Senate passed the bill by a vote of 69–28. It now goes to Biden to be signed into law.

The news that Congress is willing to protect our finances reinforces the most effective weapon we have in the ongoing struggle to force Russia back from its threat to invade Ukraine. Russian president Vladimir Putin has built up military forces along Russia’s border with Ukraine in what Ukraine’s defense minister has called an attempt to test the unity of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a defensive military alliance designed to resist first Soviet and now Russian aggression.

Ukraine, which became independent from the old U.S.S.R. in 1991—December 2 is the anniversary of Poland and Canada becoming the first to recognize its independence, actually—is not part of NATO. It had begun the process of applying for membership in 2008, but in 2010, Russia-allied oligarch Viktor Yanukovych, whose campaign was being handled by Paul Manafort, won the presidency and turned the nation away from NATO and toward Russia.

In 2014, Ukrainians rose up and overthrew Yanukovych, who fled to Russia (thus putting Manafort out of a job and freeing him to run Trump’s 2016 campaign). Later that year, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea, prompting the U.S. economic sanctions that Putin desperately wants lifted. Ukraine’s interest in joining NATO jumped.

Now, Russia is amassing troops at the Ukraine border. While no one knows the end game, at the very least the Russian military presence is a threat aimed at keeping Ukraine from joining NATO. It is also likely aimed at elevating Putin’s visibility by getting a personal meeting with Biden. Trump’s deference to the Russian president enhanced his strength at home, and Biden’s refusal to treat him in the same way likely stings. If he can get Biden to sit down with him, cutting Ukraine out of the talks, it elevates him on the world stage, and thus at home.

Former president Trump had weakened NATO, but Biden has worked to strengthen it again. At the same time, Belarus’s recent forcing of migrants over the Polish border with Putin’s support has brought NATO countries closer together, while the autocratic actions of Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko are driving young people in Belarus to turn away from Russia and toward Europe. As Russia’s power in those states weakens, observers are focused on whether NATO would go to war to protect Ukraine.

Part of this discussion at home needs to be based on the understanding that U.S. military engagement appears to have changed recently. According to Airwars, which keeps tabs on violence in war zones, while Trump dramatically escalated the use of drones, President Biden has virtually stopped using them. Instead, it appears that the U.S. is trying to keep international peace through the country’s economic might.

New economic sanctions against Russia are already on the table. Yesterday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the former prime minister of Norway, told Reuters that ''we all made it very clear that there will be a high price to pay and sanctions is one of the options'' if Russia continues its aggression against Ukraine. “NATO Allies have demonstrated before and actually demonstrate now that we are able to impose a heavy economic cost on Russia…. [T]his can be economic sanctions, it can be financial sanctions, it can be political restrictions and also, as we saw after the illegal annexation of Crimea, that actually triggered the biggest reinforcement of NATO’s collective defence in a generation….”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken was pithier. After he and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov talked today in Stockholm, Blinken told reporters that there would be “serious consequences for Russian aggression toward Ukraine, including high-impact economic measures that we’ve refrained from taking in the past.” “We’ve been, will continue to be, very clear about those consequences,” he continued. “I think Moscow knows very well the universe of what’s possible.”

The struggle in Ukraine illustrates the deep connection between the strength of the U.S. economy and our national security—something to keep in mind when former president Trump calls for Republicans to refuse to lift the debt ceiling and force the country to default on our debts in order to try to kill the Democrats’ agenda.

At home, the threat to our democracy continues to become clearer. We have learned that Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows not only tried to use the Department of Justice to push false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, but also tried to get top national security officials at the FBI, Pentagon, National Security Council, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence to chase down allegations that, for example, China had hacked the election. Sources told Zachary Cohen, Paula Reid, and Sara Murray of CNN that Meadows didn’t necessarily believe the stories, but wanted to please Trump.

Today, in Texas, S.B. 1 went into effect, reducing access to voting. Passed in September, the law was a response to the false allegations that Democrats stole the 2020 election. It is designed to keep voters believed to be Democrats from the polls. It bans 24-hour voting and drive-through voting, makes it harder to vote by mail, lowers the penalty for illegal voting, and bans local measures to make it easier to vote.

But legal repercussions for participation in the Big Lie are beginning to mount. A federal judge in Michigan has ordered nine lawyers, led by Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood, to pay about $150,000 to Detroit and $22,000 to Michigan to cover the costs incurred when the lawyers launched a frivolous lawsuit in the so-called “Kraken” cases over the 2020 election. A federal judge in Colorado made a similar decision last week, ordering two lawyers who sued frivolously over the 2020 results to pay about $187,000 to the officials and companies they sued.

And today, two election workers from Fulton County, Georgia, the county on which Trump focused his attention in his quest to overturn the 2020 election there, sued the right-wing website The Gateway Pundit, along with publishers James and Joe Hoft, for repeatedly lying that the two women had helped to “steal” the election. The workers were forced to flee their homes for their own safety.

People will soon be able to hear at least some of the stories of the Big Lie for themselves. Today, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), the vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, announced that the committee will hold public hearings next year to lay out “exactly what happened every minute of the day on Jan. 6 here at the Capitol and at the White House and what led to that violent attack.”

mickeyrat · December 2021

December 3, 2021 (Friday)

Senate Republicans will not issue any sort of a platform before next year’s midterm elections. At a meeting of donors and lawmakers in mid-November, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that the Republican Party’s 2024 nominee would be responsible for deciding on an agenda. The Republican Senators in 2022 will simply attack the Democrats.

Rather than advancing any sort of a positive program, Republican Senators will be focusing on culture wars. Those have devolved to a point that Republicans are denying the legitimacy of any Democratic victory because, by their definition, Democrats are destroying the country. As Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said yesterday in a video from a parked car: “Joe Biden is a communist. And that’s what the Democrats are—they’re communists. A lot of people are swallowing down the word ‘socialist,’ but...they are communists.”

In fact, the Democratic Party advocates neither socialism nor communism. Socialism is a system of government in which the means of production are owned by the government and, through the government—theoretically—by the people. Communism is the final stage of that form of social organization. It abolishes private ownership of land, farms, and factories, giving control of all those things to the state, which, in turn, provides everyone with jobs, housing, education, and medical care.

Democrats are a far cry from calling for this system of government. What they are calling for is for us to maintain the system of government we have had in this country since 1933. In that year, under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the government began to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure projects that were too big or unprofitable for private industry. In the years after World War II, Republicans joined Democrats in advocating this system, which filed the sharp edges off unrestrained capitalism and stabilized the economy, preventing another depression.

On Tuesday, Representative Tim Ryan (D-OH) called out the political reality of today’s America. “What you’re seeing here before the United States Congress is two clear, different visions of America and where we want to go and what we want to do,” he said. He insisted that “a strong middle class” after World War II was key to our national prosperity. “Our greatest strength has been we reinvested into the United States. We reinvested into our communities. We invested in the technologies, and we dominated the industries: steel, glass, aerospace.” he said. He called out Republicans for their opposition to that reinvestment into America: “And now we're hearing from the other side, ‘Shut government down, don’t do anything. We don’t want to be an honest broker.’ Tyranny?” he said, “What are you people talking about? We’re talking about universal preschool, and they have it as a communist indoctrination of the American student. It’s insane…. We have to rebuild our country!”

The American horror of socialism came long before Russia’s 1917 Bolshevik Revolution tried to put socialism into practice. Americans began to worry about socialism in 1871, the year after the federal government started to protect Black male voting with the Fifteenth Amendment. Also in 1870, Congress had established the Department of Justice to guarantee that Black southerners could enjoy the rights former Confederates were trying to terrorize them out of. Suddenly, attacking their Black neighbors on the basis of race became unconstitutional, and the federal government began to prosecute those who did so.

In 1871, unreconstructed white southerners began to argue that they did not object to Black rights on racial grounds—which was unconstitutional—but objected rather on class grounds. They did not want Black men voting, they said, because formerly enslaved people were poor and were voting for leaders who promised them things like roads and hospitals. Those benefits could be paid for only with tax levies, and the only people in the South with property after the war were white. Thus, Black voting amounted to a redistribution of wealth from white men to Black people, who wanted something for nothing. ‘

Black voting was, one popular magazine insisted, “Socialism in South Carolina.”

After World War II, Americans of all parties rallied around the idea of using the government for the good of the majority. But the idea that Americans who want the government to work for the good of the community were “socialists” regained traction with the rise of Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Republicans under Reagan focused on slashing regulations and the social safety net.

But Americans continued to support an active government, and to keep those voters from power, Republicans in the 1990s began to insist that the only way Democrats won elections was through voter fraud. Those false allegations have metastasized until we are at a moment when Republicans refuse to believe that a majority of Americans would vote for a Democratic president.

Although Joe Biden won the 2020 election by a majority of more than 7 million votes and by a decisive margin of 306 to 232 in the Electoral College (the same margin Trump had called a “landslide” in 2016), Republicans are doubling down on the idea that the election must have been stolen and they must declare independence from the “socialist” government.

Yesterday, Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis called for a state military force that would not be “encumbered by the federal government.” National Guard units in Oklahoma have asked for, and been denied, exceptions to the Pentagon requirement that guard members must be vaccinated against COVID in order to participate in orders and to receive pay, and DeSantis has made his opposition to vaccine mandates his political cause. DeSantis has asked the state legislature for $3.5 million to train and equip 200 volunteers who would answer to him alone.

While other states have such forces for specific events, DeSantis simply says such a force in Florida would give him "the flexibility and the ability needed to respond to events in our state in the most effective way possible." At the same time, he has asked the legislature for $100 million for the state’s National Guard.

And yet, as Republicans around the country insist on the Big Lie, they are running up against reality, in the form of the legal system.

Today, John Eastman, the author of the Eastman memo outlining a plan to throw out Biden’s electors and thus throw the 2020 election to Trump, has told the January 6 committee that he will plead the Fifth when he testifies before the committee. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution protects U.S. citizens from self-incrimination. The Guardian revealed last week that Trump made phone calls to the so-called “war room” at the Willard Hotel before the January 6 insurrection and that Eastman was potentially associated with those calls.

“Dr. Eastman has a more than reasonable fear that any statements he makes pursuant to this subpoena will be used in an attempt to mount a criminal investigation against him,” his lawyer told the committee.

Yesterday, Jeffrey Clark, formerly a lawyer for the Department of Justice—one of those charged with enforcing the rule of law in this country—has told the committee that he, too, will plead the Fifth. Clark tried to involve the Justice Department itself in overruling the results of the 2020 election. Today he announced that he has a medical condition that will not allow him to testify before the January 6th committee tomorrow as planned.

The committee has postponed the deposition until December 16.

mickeyrat · December 2021

December 4, 2021 (Saturday)

There’s actually an interesting political story from today, and I cast around for hours wondering how to frame it so it was somewhat upbeat for the weekend.

And then I saw this image from my photographer friend Peter Ralston. It jumped out at me.

It’s called “Hang Together,” and Peter says: “A very simple photograph, made over in Port Clyde. Really not much to it, yet when I saw this I immediately thought of Benjamin Franklin’s observation at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Perfect for this fraught moment in our history.

On that note, I’m going to hand Peter the mic, and take an early night. I’ll see you tomorrow.

[Photo “Hang Together” by Peter Ralston]

mickeyrat · December 2021

December 5, 2021 (Sunday)

Speaking in Athens, Greece, yesterday, Pope Francis warned Americans, “We cannot avoid noting with concern how today, and not only in Europe, we are witnessing a retreat from democracy." He warned against politicians with "an obsessive quest for popularity, in a thirst for visibility, in a flurry of unrealistic promises,” and called for people around the world to turn away from authoritarianism, individualism, and indifference. Instead, they must rededicate themselves to the common good and strengthen democracy.

The pope’s public recognition of the rise of authoritarianism mirrored the increasing awareness here in the U.S. that our democracy is in crisis.

That dawning awareness seems to have been sparked by the December 1 oral arguments about abortion rights before the Supreme Court, when a majority of the current justices made it clear that the constitutional right to abortion many people believed was sacrosanct is likely to be taken away.

“They lied,” the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman wrote about the testimony of the Republican-appointed justices in their confirmation hearings. In those hearings, they indicated that they saw the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting the right to abortion as settled law, no matter what their own personal preferences might be. “They lied to Congress and to the country…. It was all a lie, a scam, a con,” Waldman wrote, “the assurances that they were blank slates committed to ‘originalism’ and ‘textualism,’ that they wouldn’t ‘legislate from the bench,’ that they have no agenda but merely a ‘judicial philosophy.’”

Also in the Washington Post, Dr. Melissa Murray, a New York University law professor who clerked for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, noted that Sotomayor recognized that her colleagues were “embracing a cataclysmic reordering of the reproductive rights landscape.”

Seeing what her colleagues were going to do, Sotomayor turned to “the American people themselves…suggesting that the court need not have the last word on abortion.” She was, Murray said, “alerting the people to the imminent threat to abortion rights in the hopes that, hearing her alarm, we might mobilize. Not with a Jan. 6–style insurrection but with the sort of grass-roots energy that once fueled the civil rights movement and other progressive social causes.” “The court will not save our rights,” Murray wrote, “But maybe we can save them ourselves.”

In fact, the reactionaries in the current-day Republican Party are a minority of the country. As David Atkins points out in the Washington Monthly, Republicans are operating from a position of weakness. In the United States, Democratic counties produce more than 70% of the nation’s gross domestic product (the total market value of goods and services produced). Democratic states fund the Republican-dominated states that complain about “socialism.” Eighty-three percent of Americans now live in cities, which tend to vote Democratic, and young people are overwhelmingly progressive.

The problem is this: “Democrats…need to win every single election from here to prevent the destruction of democracy, while Republicans only need to win one. And the American system is set up so that Republicans will win sooner or later, whether fairly or by cheating.” Atkins urges the American people to “start thinking about and planning for what ‘Break glass in case of emergency’ measures look like—because it’s more likely a matter of when, not if. It not only can happen here; it probably will happen here. Conservatives are guaranteed to make every attempt to turn America into the next Russia or Hungary. It will take coordinated, overlapping solidarity among both regular people and elites across various institutions to stop it.”

Laura Thornton, the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, lays out what American authoritarianism looks like and shows that it is already here. Focusing on Wisconsin, she deplores the statements of Senator Ron Johnson and Republican lawmakers who are openly demanding control over election management in the state.

“I spent more than two decades living and working overseas to advance democracy and credible elections—giving me plenty of opportunity to see the lengths to which autocrats will go to gain power,” Thornton writes. “Even so, the proposed Wisconsin power grab is shocking in its brazenness. If this occurred in any of the countries where the United States provides aid, it would immediately be called out as a threat to democracy. U.S. diplomats would be writing furious cables, and decision makers would be threatening to cut off the flow of assistance.”

How can we stop the march of authoritarianism? Thornton says that “it is up to us, the people. No party or leader will save us here. No foreign savior will shake us out of our stupor. Americans need to start caring about democracy enough to act on it…. Apathy is how democracies die. I’ve seen it.”

What does minority rule look like? It looks like individual liberty and violence to make others do what those in power want.

Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) grabbed attention today with a family Christmas picture in which seven people are brandishing guns, ostensibly to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. His tweeted caption read: “Merry Christmas! Ps. Santa, please bring ammo.” This can only be taken as a message: on Tuesday, a 15-year-old killed four classmates and wounded several others with a gun he received as a Christmas gift.

Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a move to proceed on a law expanding background checks for gun purchases, a bill the House passed in March. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said the measure was “hostile toward lawful gun owners and lawful firearms transactions,” and he blocked it.

Last night, in Washington, D.C., about 100 members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front marched to “reclaim America.” Patriot Front was known as Vanguard America until a man affiliated with it killed Heather Heyer at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Such people want to remake our nation as a white supremacist haven and know that this is their last chance.

But while the white supremacists who joined together in Charlottesville marched openly, with their faces uncovered, those people joining the Patriot Front last night wore masks. This is important. When the Ku Klux Klan terrorized people after the Civil War, they hid their faces with white hoods designed to look like the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers, knowing that if the federal government knew who they were, it would prosecute them. By the end of the nineteenth century, Euro-Americans did not hide their faces at public lynchings, knowing they represented the will of the moment. That the rioters from Charlottesville now cover their faces suggests that the white supremacy welcome among some circles in 2017 now needs to hide.

With the call of so many observers to defend American democracy from those who would replace it with authoritarianism, many are reaching backward to remember what things were like in the past, when politicians of different parties worked together for the nation. In the Philadelphia Inquirer today, Will Bunch reminded readers that before politicians fetishized guns and individualism, we used to rally around something called “the public good.”

brianlux · December 2021

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

Halifax2TheMax · December 2021

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

It’s too late, it’s happening here and the repubs are hell bent on it. If you think 2016-2020 was bad, just wait until 2022/2023 and 2024/2025. 74,222,958 ‘Muricans want a fascist, white nationalist ‘Murica. The first POOTWH term will look like child’s play.

static111 · December 2021

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

I feel like there isn't much I as an individual voter in a hard Red state can do, so in the words of Jim Morrison "i just wanna get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames"

brianlux · December 2021

Halifax2TheMax said:

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

It’s too late, it’s happening here and the repubs are hell bent on it. If you think 2016-2020 was bad, just wait until 2022/2023 and 2024/2025. 74,222,958 ‘Muricans want a fascist, white nationalist ‘Murica. The first POOTWH term will look like child’s play.

It is definitely too late if we don't show support for Democracy.

static111 said:

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

I feel like there isn't much I as an individual voter in a hard Red state can do, so in the words of Jim Morrison "i just wanna get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames"

You and I can do very little to make a difference, that is true. But if enough people vote for candidates who are pro-Democracy, write letters, call our congress people, we can at least make a dent. And if enough do this things, we can make change happen. The war in Vietnam is a good example. It took a long time and a lot of effort, but that was finally ended at least in part by the relentless voices of those of us who opposed it. Which is not to say we didn't also get our kicks- of that you can be sure!

static111 · December 2021

brianlux said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

It’s too late, it’s happening here and the repubs are hell bent on it. If you think 2016-2020 was bad, just wait until 2022/2023 and 2024/2025. 74,222,958 ‘Muricans want a fascist, white nationalist ‘Murica. The first POOTWH term will look like child’s play.

It is definitely too late if we don't show support for Democracy.

static111 said:

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

I feel like there isn't much I as an individual voter in a hard Red state can do, so in the words of Jim Morrison "i just wanna get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames"

You and I can do very little to make a difference, that is true. But if enough people vote for candidates who are pro-Democracy, write letters, call our congress people, we can at least make a dent. And if enough do this things, we can make change happen. The war in Vietnam is a good example. It took a long time and a lot of effort, but that was finally ended at least in part by the relentless voices of those of us who opposed it. Which is not to say we didn't also get our kicks- of that you can be sure!

That's assuming a majority of the voting public has the power to make those changes. It really looks like between the gerrymandered electoral system and a Senate favoring land occupied by conservative voters that the fix is in. It makes me sick, but I think we are past any amount of letter writing, thoughts and prayers or vote blue no matter who for any real difference to be made.

brianlux · December 2021

static111 said:

brianlux said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

It’s too late, it’s happening here and the repubs are hell bent on it. If you think 2016-2020 was bad, just wait until 2022/2023 and 2024/2025. 74,222,958 ‘Muricans want a fascist, white nationalist ‘Murica. The first POOTWH term will look like child’s play.

It is definitely too late if we don't show support for Democracy.

static111 said:

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

I feel like there isn't much I as an individual voter in a hard Red state can do, so in the words of Jim Morrison "i just wanna get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames"

You and I can do very little to make a difference, that is true. But if enough people vote for candidates who are pro-Democracy, write letters, call our congress people, we can at least make a dent. And if enough do this things, we can make change happen. The war in Vietnam is a good example. It took a long time and a lot of effort, but that was finally ended at least in part by the relentless voices of those of us who opposed it. Which is not to say we didn't also get our kicks- of that you can be sure!

That's assuming a majority of the voting public has the power to make those changes. It really looks like between the gerrymandered electoral system and a Senate favoring land occupied by conservative voters that the fix is in. It makes me sick, but I think we are past any amount of letter writing, thoughts and prayers or vote blue no matter who for any real difference to be made.

Ever here my spiel about Vaclav Havel's definition of "hope"? You must have.

mickeyrat · December 2021

December 6, 2021 (Monday)

On June 3, 2021, President Biden vowed to combat international corruption in order to protect democracy. [C]orruption threatens United States national security, economic equity, global antipoverty and development efforts, and democracy itself,” he said. “[B]y effectively preventing and countering corruption and demonstrating the advantages of transparent and accountable governance, we can secure a critical advantage for the United States and other democracies.”

Today, two days before the Biden administration will host the Summit for Democracy, a gathering of 110 countries to consider ways to strengthen democracy, it released a comprehensive strategy for countering corruption. In a Washington Post op-ed, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Samantha Power, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), focused on money laundering and tax evasion as the key tools of financial corruption that are eroding democracy.

The new strategy pulls together the Departments of State, Treasury, and Commerce, along with the USAID, to expose global financial shenanigans, hold corrupt actors to account, and protect journalists who dig into stories of corruption, the stories that often bring down corrupt autocrats (as Alexei Navalny did to undermine Vladimir Putin in Russia before Putin had him thrown into prison).

That latter point is significant, since tomorrow Biden will have a phone call with Putin about Russia’s troop buildup on its border with Ukraine. The release of this document before the call reinforces the message Biden is expected to deliver: if Russia invades Ukraine again, it will pay an enormous financial price through sanctions and exclusion from international financial markets.

In the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin points out that combating the rise of authoritarianism overseas is all well and good, but the administration ought to start at home. “[T]he Republican Party in the United States is conducting itself precisely as illiberal movements in other countries,” she writes, “seeking to corrupt our election system, limit access to the ballot, discredit the sanctity of elections and wink at violence. Unless defenders of democracy recognize and identify the party as the most serious threat to American democracy, we will be in a poor position to halt the advance of illiberalism.”

Indeed, in an interview on the Fox News Channel last night, former president Trump appeared to say that he fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017 to prevent his own removal from office. This sure sounds like the crime of obstruction of justice.

More currently, Trump’s venture into a media company is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The announcement that Trump Media and Technology group would merge with Digital World, a special purpose acquisition company (known as a SPAC), sent shares of Digital World up by as much as 1,657%, according to CNN Business (that number is not a typo). Little is known about Trump’s venture, and so far it hasn’t produced anything; it missed the November date by which it claimed it would release a preliminary product.

Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA) announced today he is retiring from Congress at the end of December to run Trump’s new media company. Nunes has been a staunch Trump loyalist. In California’s redistricting after the recent census meant it would lose a congressional seat, Nunes’s district was reshaped, making winning reelection look like an uphill battle. Announcing the deal, Trump called Nunes “a fighter and a leader…[who] understands that we must stop the liberal media and Big Tech from destroying the freedoms that make America great.” But that Nunes is going to work for Trump’s apparently dormant company suggests he does not have a lot of options.

This morning, Politico revealed the contents of a 36-page memo written by Colonel Earl Matthews of the D.C. National Guard to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. In the memo, Matthews called two Army generals “absolute and unmitigated liars” for their account of what happened on January 6. He says that General Charles Flynn, who served as deputy chief of staff for operations on January 6 and who is the brother of Michael Flynn, and Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt, the director of Army staff, would not authorize the deployment of the D.C. National Guard despite the pleas of then–Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund. In testimony before Congress, both men denied they had stood in the way of the deployment; Matthews says their very careful testimony was “willful deception of Congress.”

But not everyone is ignoring behavior that may be criminal. The January 6 committee has been gathering testimony, and we learned today that Marc Short, who was chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, is cooperating. Short has worked for Pence for years and objected fiercely to the Eastman memo demanding that Pence overturn the election. Short was with Pence on the day of January 6. According to CNN reporters Jamie Gangel, Michael Warren, and Ryan Nobles, several members of Pence’s inner circle in addition to Short are cooperating with the committee.

Also today, the Department of Justice sued the state of Texas for violating the Voting Rights Act, saying its aggressively gerrymandered new districts discriminate against minority voters. Ninety-five percent of Texas’s population growth in the past decade has come from Black, Latino, and Asian people, but the new maps dilute their voting power and strengthen that of white voters. Voting rights expert Ari Berman explains that the new maps mean that whites make up 40% of the population but control 60% of the districts, Latinos make up 39% of the population but control 20% of the districts, Blacks make up 12% of the population but control 2% of the districts, and Asians make up 5% of the population but control 0% of the districts.

brianlux · December 2021

static111 said:

brianlux said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

It’s too late, it’s happening here and the repubs are hell bent on it. If you think 2016-2020 was bad, just wait until 2022/2023 and 2024/2025. 74,222,958 ‘Muricans want a fascist, white nationalist ‘Murica. The first POOTWH term will look like child’s play.

It is definitely too late if we don't show support for Democracy.

static111 said:

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

I feel like there isn't much I as an individual voter in a hard Red state can do, so in the words of Jim Morrison "i just wanna get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames"

You and I can do very little to make a difference, that is true. But if enough people vote for candidates who are pro-Democracy, write letters, call our congress people, we can at least make a dent. And if enough do this things, we can make change happen. The war in Vietnam is a good example. It took a long time and a lot of effort, but that was finally ended at least in part by the relentless voices of those of us who opposed it. Which is not to say we didn't also get our kicks- of that you can be sure!

That's assuming a majority of the voting public has the power to make those changes. It really looks like between the gerrymandered electoral system and a Senate favoring land occupied by conservative voters that the fix is in. It makes me sick, but I think we are past any amount of letter writing, thoughts and prayers or vote blue no matter who for any real difference to be made.

See Heather's 12/6/21 letter above. There is hope.

static111 · December 2021

brianlux said:

static111 said:

brianlux said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

It’s too late, it’s happening here and the repubs are hell bent on it. If you think 2016-2020 was bad, just wait until 2022/2023 and 2024/2025. 74,222,958 ‘Muricans want a fascist, white nationalist ‘Murica. The first POOTWH term will look like child’s play.

It is definitely too late if we don't show support for Democracy.

static111 said:

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

I feel like there isn't much I as an individual voter in a hard Red state can do, so in the words of Jim Morrison "i just wanna get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames"

You and I can do very little to make a difference, that is true. But if enough people vote for candidates who are pro-Democracy, write letters, call our congress people, we can at least make a dent. And if enough do this things, we can make change happen. The war in Vietnam is a good example. It took a long time and a lot of effort, but that was finally ended at least in part by the relentless voices of those of us who opposed it. Which is not to say we didn't also get our kicks- of that you can be sure!

That's assuming a majority of the voting public has the power to make those changes. It really looks like between the gerrymandered electoral system and a Senate favoring land occupied by conservative voters that the fix is in. It makes me sick, but I think we are past any amount of letter writing, thoughts and prayers or vote blue no matter who for any real difference to be made.

See Heather's 12/6/21 letter above. There is hope.

I just read the letter. I hope something major is done before Rs take control of Congress back in the mid terms. If not it will be a long two lame duck years.

brianlux · December 2021

static111 said:

brianlux said:

static111 said:

brianlux said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

It’s too late, it’s happening here and the repubs are hell bent on it. If you think 2016-2020 was bad, just wait until 2022/2023 and 2024/2025. 74,222,958 ‘Muricans want a fascist, white nationalist ‘Murica. The first POOTWH term will look like child’s play.

It is definitely too late if we don't show support for Democracy.

static111 said:

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

I feel like there isn't much I as an individual voter in a hard Red state can do, so in the words of Jim Morrison "i just wanna get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames"

You and I can do very little to make a difference, that is true. But if enough people vote for candidates who are pro-Democracy, write letters, call our congress people, we can at least make a dent. And if enough do this things, we can make change happen. The war in Vietnam is a good example. It took a long time and a lot of effort, but that was finally ended at least in part by the relentless voices of those of us who opposed it. Which is not to say we didn't also get our kicks- of that you can be sure!

That's assuming a majority of the voting public has the power to make those changes. It really looks like between the gerrymandered electoral system and a Senate favoring land occupied by conservative voters that the fix is in. It makes me sick, but I think we are past any amount of letter writing, thoughts and prayers or vote blue no matter who for any real difference to be made.

See Heather's 12/6/21 letter above. There is hope.

I just read the letter. I hope something major is done before Rs take control of Congress back in the mid terms. If not it will be a long two lame duck years.

Yeah, the coming elections are unnerving. I can't even think about two more years of wacko Republican rule. But it is very possible.

static111 · December 2021

brianlux said:

static111 said:

brianlux said:

static111 said:

brianlux said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

It’s too late, it’s happening here and the repubs are hell bent on it. If you think 2016-2020 was bad, just wait until 2022/2023 and 2024/2025. 74,222,958 ‘Muricans want a fascist, white nationalist ‘Murica. The first POOTWH term will look like child’s play.

It is definitely too late if we don't show support for Democracy.

static111 said:

brianlux said:

I'm surprised this letter is getting any traction here. Where here on AMT is the concern for the loss of Democracy in the world? I must have missed it somewhere.

I feel like there isn't much I as an individual voter in a hard Red state can do, so in the words of Jim Morrison "i just wanna get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames"

You and I can do very little to make a difference, that is true. But if enough people vote for candidates who are pro-Democracy, write letters, call our congress people, we can at least make a dent. And if enough do this things, we can make change happen. The war in Vietnam is a good example. It took a long time and a lot of effort, but that was finally ended at least in part by the relentless voices of those of us who opposed it. Which is not to say we didn't also get our kicks- of that you can be sure!

That's assuming a majority of the voting public has the power to make those changes. It really looks like between the gerrymandered electoral system and a Senate favoring land occupied by conservative voters that the fix is in. It makes me sick, but I think we are past any amount of letter writing, thoughts and prayers or vote blue no matter who for any real difference to be made.

See Heather's 12/6/21 letter above. There is hope.

I just read the letter. I hope something major is done before Rs take control of Congress back in the mid terms. If not it will be a long two lame duck years.

Yeah, the coming elections are unnerving. I can't even think about two more years of wacko Republican rule. But it is very possible.

I was thinking that even if they broke the filibuster and passed the John Lewis voting rights act, there would just be challenges brought to the conservative supreme court that would probably lead to voter protections being overturned...In other words we are probably doomed. I will do what small work I can and continue to enjoy life until the darkness comes.

mickeyrat · December 2021

December 7, 2021 (Tuesday)

On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.

In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller sheltered the captain behind the ship’s conning tower. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower. Miller had not been trained to use the guns because, as a Black man in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to serve the white officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

That night, America declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America the next day, and four days later, on December 11, 1941, Italy and Germany both declared war on America. “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the mongrel Americans had been corrupted by Jews and “Negroes,” and could never conquer their own organized military machine.

The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought it would destroy democracy once and for all.

Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.

The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an "other" that their followers could hate.

Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany's Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.

America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were African American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Native Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.

The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t— but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.

Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?

Democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities—a mongrel population—the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.

But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and gradually they chipped away the laws that protected equality. Now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.

The once-grand Republican Party has been captured by the right wing. It has lined up behind former president Donald Trump and his cronies, its true believers refusing to accept that a majority of Americans turned Trump out of office in 2020 and replaced him with a Democrat, President Joe Biden. They insist that it is not possible for a Democrat to have been legitimately elected and blame “voter fraud” for the result, although repeated recounts and inspections have proved the vote counts were accurate.

Some Republican lawmakers evidently believe the Big Lie that Trump won in 2020; others are going along with it out of opportunism or fear, but they are not speaking out to counter the lies poisoning our democracy. Even after January 6, when insurgents stormed the U.S. Capitol and threatened the lives of our top lawmakers, 147 Republicans voted to challenge the election results. Now, 68% of Republicans think that Democrats “stole” the 2020 election.

Now, Republican lawmakers are silent as Republican-dominated legislatures in 19 states have passed 33 laws to make it harder for Black and Brown Americans, as well as others expected to back Democrats, to vote. Some of those states have taken the power to certify official votes away from nonpartisan officials and given it to Republicans. Had these laws been in place in 2020, Trump would almost certainly still be in office.

As we learn more about the events of January 6, it is clear that the former president and his inner circle corrupted the Department of Justice and possibly other parts of the government, launching a coup that came perilously close to success. And, as Barton Gellman details this week in The Atlantic, they are arranging the mechanics of our democracy to make sure that next time, they won’t fail. They will put in place an autocracy in which a powerful leader and his chosen loyalists make the rules under which the rest of us must live.

Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?

When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality—and he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the U.S.S. Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank within minutes, taking two thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it.

I hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the reactionaries will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.

Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.

mickeyrat · December 2021

December 8, 2021 (Wednesday)

Russia’s threat to push troops into Ukraine highlights Biden’s approach to foreign policy. Rather than issuing military threats, he has worked with European allies to put economic pressure on Russia. So far, it appears to be heading off the crisis.

“What I am doing is putting together what I believe…will be the most comprehensive and meaningful set of initiatives to make it very, very difficult for Mr. Putin to go ahead and do what people are worried he may do,” Biden said on December 3.

On December 6, the U.S. issued a comprehensive strategy for combating global corruption, including money laundering and attacks on journalists. In a two-hour video call the next day, Biden warned Putin “that the U.S. and our Allies would respond with strong economic and other measures in the event of military escalation.” Biden immediately informed leaders in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy about the call (Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on December 6).

Russia depends on petroleum exports and is currently waiting on approval from German regulators to start pumping gas through the $11 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic Sea. The U.S. says Germany has agreed to shut the pipeline down if Russia invades Ukraine. This puts pressure on Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who took over today when Angela Merkel stepped down, but the European Union is talking about permitting the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive branch, to sanction foreign countries without getting each country to sign on individually. Sanctions would go into effect unless a majority of the E.U. countries voted to lift them, imposing unity that would create a powerful economic weapon against Russia.

Meanwhile, Foreign Policy magazine’s national security reporter Jack Detsch tweeted yesterday that, according to Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, the U.S. is considering sanctions that could “[isolate] Russia completely from the global financial system.” That’s a threat to cut Russia out of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a banking cooperative in Brussels that facilitates financial transactions around the world. European leaders considered cutting Russia off from SWIFT after Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014 but decided against it because the effect on Russia would be so extreme: Russia relies on SWIFT to move its payment for petroleum exports.

SWIFT also makes sanctions effective. Since more than 40% of global transactions through SWIFT—and almost all oil purchases—take place in dollars, they are cleared through American banks. This means the U.S. can claim jurisdiction over them, giving the U.S. government financial and legal power to add muscle to foreign policy.

Blinken explained: “[O]ne country trying to tell another what its choices should be, including with whom it associates, that’s not an acceptable proposition. Changing the borders of another country by force, that’s not an acceptable proposition, because what that does is it undermines the entire international system, the rules-based order that we have invested in, we’ve been living by, and we think has done much to promote peace and security. And so if those basic principles go challenged and are allowed to happen with impunity, that’s going to undermine the entire system. That’s why this is…bigger even than Ukraine.”

He added that if we’re not leading, then “either someone else is likely to be, and probably not in a way that actually [advances] the interests and the values of the American people; or, maybe just as bad, no one is, and then you have a vacuum that tends to be filled by chaos and law of the jungle before it’s filled by anything else.”

And yet, Tucker Carlson and other Fox News Channel personalities are echoing Russian talking points, saying that Putin is building up troops near Ukraine simply because he “wants to keep his western border secure.” Since 2014, when Ukraine threw out a pro-Russian leader, it has swung toward Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), becoming a key U.S. ally. Carlson calls Ukraine’s interest in allying with Europe the U.S. “plan[ning] to control Ukraine no matter what.”

Back at home, today Washington Post reporters Beth Reinhard, Jacqueline Alemany, and Josh Dawsey reported that a fan of right-wing media personality Alex Jones put $650,000 into the organizations promoting and staging the January “Stop the Steal” event in Washington, D.C. Julie Fancelli is the 72-year-old daughter of the founder of the Publix grocery store chain and a Publix stockholder, and while she has expressed horror over the violence on January 6, the company wants to distance itself from her actions. It told the Washington Post: “We are deeply troubled by Ms. Fancelli’s involvement in the events that led to the tragic attack on the Capitol on January 6.”

That impulse to isolate key participants in the January 6 insurrection shows in the rush of more than 275 witnesses so far to testify before the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, while former Department of Justice lawyer Jeffrey Clark, who pushed the idea of voter fraud, and Trump loyalist Roger Stone say they will take the Fifth.

Yesterday, Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, refused to appear for a scheduled deposition. Instead he said he was willing to answer questions in writing, an ask that often suggests a person is hoping to avoid committing perjury. His lawyer complained that the committee wasn’t taking Meadows’s “executive privilege” defense seriously, and objected to “wide ranging subpoenas” to Meadows’s cell phone provider.

Neither Biden nor Trump has asserted executive privilege over Meadows’s testimony. Meadows and Trump adviser Stephen Bannon, who has been indicted for contempt of Congress for his own refusal to respond to a subpoena, say they want to hear the outcome of Trump’s assertion of executive privilege over subpoenaed records from the National Archives and Records Administration because it might change their defense. (Bannon was not a government official but a podcaster in January, undercutting his claim to be covered by executive privilege.)

“There is no legitimate legal basis for Mr. Meadows to refuse to cooperate with the Select Committee and answer questions about the documents he produced, the personal devices and accounts he used, the events he wrote about in his newly released book, and, among other things, his other public statements,” committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) responded. “The Select Committee is left with no choice but to advance contempt proceedings and recommend that the body in which Mr. Meadows once served refer him for criminal prosecution.”

Thompson’s letter outlined some of what Meadows has already shared with the committee, including “a November 6, 2020, text exchange with a Member of Congress apparently about appointing alternate electors as part of a plan that the Member acknowledged would be ‘highly controversial’ and to which Mr. Meadows apparently said, ‘I love it’; [and] an early January 2021 text message exchange between Mr. Meadows and an organizer of the January 6th rally on the Ellipse.”

In the material was also an email from November 7, 2020, “discussing the appointment of alternate slates of electors as part of a ‘direct and collateral attack’ after the election,” and an “email regarding a 38-page PowerPoint briefing titled ‘Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN’ that was to be provided ‘on the hill’; and, among others, a January 5, 2021 email about having the National Guard on standby.”

Thompson’s letter noted that the information came from Meadows’s personal cell phone and email address instead of his government accounts, raising the question of whether this information went to the National Archives as the law requires. He also noted that Meadows had withheld “several hundred” emails and “over 1000” text messages, claiming they were covered by executive privilege.

Wednesday night, Meadows sued House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and all nine members of the House January 6 committee in D.C.’s U.S. District Court to block both his subpoena and the one to his cell phone company, saying they were “overly broad and unduly burdensome.”

Committee vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) told CNN: “We look forward to litigating that.”

mickeyrat · December 2021

December 9, 2021 (Thursday)

The big news today is, once again, the economy. Indeed, it’s odd that the sort of numbers we're seeing across the country aren’t constant headline news, indicating, as they do, both a rapid economic recovery from the pandemic and the success of President Biden’s return to an economic policy that focuses on getting money into the hands of ordinary Americans.

In Washington Monthly, national economic consultant Robert J. Shapiro catalogued what he called the “extraordinary gains” of the past several months. “Over the first three quarters of this year, real GDP increased at a 7.8 percent annual rate—that’s adjusted for the current inflation,” he wrote. “The Federal Reserve expects real growth of 5.9 percent for all of 2021, followed by another 3.8 percent increase in 2022.” In contrast, the real GDP grew by an average rate of 2.2% every year and never actually reached 3% between 2000 and 2019. Reflecting this growth, the stock market is booming, with the S&P Index jumping 21.7% from January 20 to December 7, 2021.

He continues: Americans’ disposable income grew 3% (after inflation) from January to October; in the same period in 2019 the rate was 0.5% and in 2018 it was 1.7%. Personal savings rates climbed during the pandemic, enabling households to pay off debt and make new purchases. Since January, unemployment has fallen by a third. Wages, too, have climbed, although inflation, which appears to be tied to supply chain bottlenecks, is hurting poorer Americans. Economists currently think that inflation will ease as the bottlenecks clear.

"It’s a Biden boom,” the article is titled, “and no one has noticed yet.”

That boom will not be undercut by another fight over the debt ceiling, which is a cap on how much the Treasury can borrow. Congress originally adopted the debt ceiling in the early twentieth century to make borrowing easier by giving the Treasury leeway to borrow through whatever instruments it wished up to a certain amount. Now, though, Republicans have been threatening to hold the nation hostage, refusing to allow the Treasury to borrow to pay bills Congress has already run up, in order to prevent the Democrats from passing legislation. Forcing the nation to default on its debt would devastate both the U.S. economy and the world economy.

Today, in the Senate, 14 Republicans joined the Democrats in a complicated maneuver to avoid a filibuster and enable the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling by a simple majority vote. The Republicans were not actually voting to raise the debt ceiling, which they are eager to pin on the Democrats despite having added $7.8 trillion to the debt in the four years of the Trump presidency. They were agreeing not to stop Democrats from protecting the U.S. debt on their own.

Still, it seems significant that the Senate so easily created a carve-out for a measure in which the Republicans were interested, when there appears to be determination not to create carve-outs for the voting rights bills before the Senate.

Meanwhile, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol appears to be picking up momentum.

Today, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously agreed with the decision of a lower court, denying Trump’s request that the court stop the National Archives and Records Administration from releasing documents subpoenaed by the January 6th committee. The court gave Trump 14 days to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Also today, right-wing provocateur Ali Alexander testified before the January 6th committee for eight hours. Alexander had posted videos claiming that he had helped to plan the rallies in Washington, D.C., working with congressional representatives Mo Brooks (R-AL), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), and Andy Biggs (R-AZ); today Alexander claimed that he was completely uninvolved and was being accused because “[a]s a Black and Arab man, an American, it is common for people who look like me to be blamed for things we did not do." He said his videos had been taken out of context.

Kash Patel, a one-time aide to Representative Devin Nunes and a Trump loyalist, also testified for nearly five hours. On November 9, 2020, shortly after he lost the election, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper by tweet and installed Christopher Miller as acting secretary of defense. Trump named Patel as Miller’s chief of staff, but observers told Washington Post reporter David Ignatius that Patel was really the lead civilian at the Pentagon. In December 2020, Trump considered putting Patel at the head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Today the National Archives and Records Administration said that they are working with the lawyer for Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows to obtain presidential records that were not properly put into his official account. This news comes after the January 6th committee pointed out that some of the emails and texts Meadows supplied to it came from a personal account. It asked if those records had been properly forwarded to an official account and stored, as is required by law under the Presidential Records Act.

Evidently not.

Representative Liz Cheney today tweeted that the committee has met with nearly 300 witnesses and continues to collect testimony. It has received “exceptionally interesting and important documents”—including those from Meadows—and has now won against Trump in his executive privilege case. She says “[t]he investigation is firing on all cylinders,” and that the committee “will not let” Trump “hide what happened on January 6th and…delay and obstruct. The truth will come out.”

In his speech today at the Democracy Summit, Biden vowed to protect journalists around the world from persecution and to continue to fight for the passage of voting rights and election protection legislation. He mentioned by name the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would prevent voter suppression, make it easier to vote, and dismantle the 33 new restrictive elections laws that Republican-dominated legislatures in 19 states have passed.

“We should be making it easy for people to vote, not harder,” Biden said. “And that’s going to remain a priority for my administration until we get it done. Inaction is not an option.”

The House is doing its part. Today it passed the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which Adam Schiff (D-CA) introduced on September 21, 2021. This measure makes it faster and easier to enforce congressional subpoenas, stops abuse of the pardoning power, stops presidents from enriching themselves through the office, requires campaigns to disclose foreign contacts, and shores up the Hatch Act that keeps officials from using their offices to campaign. (The official name of the Hatch Act is “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities.”)

The measures in the bill are ones members of both parties have advocated for years, but since they are now perceived as a response to Trump’s norm-busting, only Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) got on board with all the Democrats to pass the measure by a vote of 220–208."

Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

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