Tuesday, March 21, 2023

RIGHT-WINGERS: ORDINARY CROWD CONTROL = THE DEATH OF AMERICA

It's quite possible that Donald Trump won't be arrested today. Fox News says the arrest will come next week, citing law enforcement sources -- people you'd imagine are fans of Fox and might be inclined to tell Fox the truth.

But yesterday, right-wingers began flipping out in response to a series of tweets from CBS's Robert Costa:


Charlie Kirk and Andy Ngo retweeted Costa's video. The headline at the Post Millennial was "BREAKING: NYPD Erects Barricades Outside Manhattan Courthouse Ahead of Potential Trump Arrest." At PJMedia, a post from Robert Spencer was headlined "It’s On: NYPD and Capitol Police Putting Up Barricades, Expecting Riots When Trump Is Arrested."

Spencer's commentary was as calm and measured as you'd expect from the founder of Jihad Watch:
America’s descent to banana republic status, with the ruling regime having its principal opponent arrested on bogus charges, may not happen on Tuesday, but it very much looks as if it is going to happen this week. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) was busy on Monday setting up steel barriers outside the Manhattan Criminal Court as if it fully expects (and may even be hoping for) patriots to come out in force to protest against the destruction of our free republic and the weaponization of our justice system as a tool of partisan politics. No one seems to be backing away from the brink.

... The Democrats, having spent decades hollowing out our Constitutional protections, are now planning on doing a victory dance upon their empty shell and casting any people who dare to protest in their next Reichstag Fire production....
"Casting any people who dare to protest in their next Reichstag Fire production"? All this over a few metal barricades?

Maybe the readers of these right-wing sites don't see anything like this in their rural and outer-ring-suburban hometowns, but steel barricades are a fairly common feature of city life, especially here in New York. If you're up front along the parade route for the St. Patrick's Day parade or when a local sports team wins a championship, you're leaning (or climbing) on one.


Left-wing demonstrations are routinely hemmed in by steel barricades. Here are some preventing demonstrators from getting too close to the site of the 2004 Republican convention, which was held in New York. If any right-wingers thought those barricades were a sign of the death of the Republic, they sure didn't say so at the time.


And steel barricades are used here for ordinary traffic control:


So relax, righties. The barricades will come down, and there'll still be an America when that happens.

Meanwhile, the right's other favorite presidential candidate appears to make metal barricades a regular part of his campaign stops, as The New York Times recently reported:
Suzy Barker, a native Iowan dressed in an orange-and-blue University of Florida hoodie, waited in a crowd of fellow Republicans on Friday morning to meet Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

... Mr. DeSantis — dressed in a dark blue suit with a light blue, open-collar shirt and black boots — stood on the opposite side of 10 metal bike racks separating him from the crowd.
And as the Daily Beast noted in a subsequent story:
The governor’s aversion to pressing the flesh, and his concern over the risk of unexpected interactions with the public, is already so well-known that early primary state players are working to DeSantis-proof their events in order to attract the flinty would-be candidate and his tight-knit team....

During his Iowa swing, DeSantis’ apparent use of bike racks to create space between himself and a crowd didn’t go unnoticed elsewhere. “If they want 50 bike racks, we’ll give them 50 bike racks,” a New Hampshire GOP lawmaker quipped to The Daily Beast.
If anyone on the right has a problem with this, I'm not aware of it.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:24 AM 0 comments

Monday, March 20, 2023

RESPONDING TO A QUESTION ABOUT TRUMP'S IMMINENT ARREST, DeSANTIS SAYS "SOROS" SIX TIMES BUT NEVER SAYS "TRUMP"

Under pressure from Donald Trump's campaign to speak out on Trump's imminent arrest, Ron DeSantis took a question on the subject from the very DeSantis-friendly Florida Standard at a news conference today. In his response, he spoke for three minutes and two seconds, received two ovations (!), and never uttered the name "Trump" -- while invoking George Soros six times:



The answer begins:
So I've seen rumors swirl. I have not seen any facts yet, and so I don't know what's going to happen. But I do know this: The Manhattan district attorney is a Soros-funded prosecutor, and so he, like other Soros-funded prosecutors, they weaponize their office to impose a political agenda on society at the expense of the rule of law and public safety.
DeSantis goes on to say:
I also think it's important to point out, when you're talkng about these Soros-funded prosecutors, yes, they may do a high-profile politicized prosecution, and that's bad, but the real victims are ordinary New Yorkers, ordinary Americans in all these different jurisdictions, that they get vicitimized every day because of the reckless political agenda that these Soros DAs bring to their job.
In fact, as Ronald Brownstein noted in The Atlantic last fall, research shows that "homicides over recent years increased less rapidly in cities with progressive prosecutors than in those with more traditional district attorneys." Also, "per capita murder rates in 2020 were 40 percent higher in states that voted for Donald Trump than in those that voted for President Joe Biden," and "eight of the 10 states with the highest per capita murder rates in 2020 have voted Republican in every presidential election in this century."

DeSantis continued:
The Soros district attorneys are a menace to society, and I'm just glad that I'm the only governor in the country that's actually removed one from office during my tenure.
DeSantis received a round of applause for this, as well as a second round of applause at the end of his response, which seems like something that should happen at a politician's press conference only in a dictatorship. DeSantis is referring to state attorney Andrew Warren, who sued DeSantis over his suspension and is now appealing the dismissal of that lawsuit.

The question asked by the Florida Standard reporter was whether DeSantis would intervene in a Trump arrest in Florida. When he finally addressed that question, he managed to say "Soros" one more time:
I have no interest in getting involved in some type of manufactured circus by some Soros DA.
So the key word is "Soros." Shockingly, however, in this answer at least, DeSantis didn't say "woke" even once.
Posted by Steve M. at 4:46 PM 0 comments

TRUMP'S IMMINENT ARREST UNITES PRO- AND ANTI-TRUMP REPUBLICANS ... AGAINST DEMOCRATS

Donald Trump says he'll be arrested tomorrow. Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire -- a Trump critic who was recently compared to John McCain in a Politico story, which referred to him as "Washington's favorite Republican" -- knows who the real enemy is: the Democrats.
“I think it’s building a lot of sympathy for the former president,” Sununu said of the possible arrest on CNN’s “State of the Union.” The governor said some Republicans he’d talked to who aren’t “big Trump supporters” expressed concern that the former president “was being attacked.”

“I just think that not just the media, but really, a lot of the Democrats have misplayed this in terms of building sympathy for the former president and it does drastically change the paradigm as we go into the ‘24 election,” Sununu said.
Mike Pence, who wants to run against Trump and who recently criticized him (behind closed doors), for which he's also receiving warm press coverage and comparisons to McCain, agrees with Sununu that the Democrats are the bad guys:
"I'm taken aback at the idea of indicting a former President of the United States, at a time when there's a crime wave in New York City, that -- the fact that the Manhattan DA thinks that indicting President Trump is his top priority, I think is, just tells you everything you need to know about the radical left in this country," Pence told [ABC's Jonathan] Karl.

"It just feels like a politically charged prosecution here. And I, for my part, I just feel like it's just not what the American people want to see."
Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump loyalist, agrees:


As do these folks:




At Popular Information, Judd Legum writes this about Trump's decision to announce his imminent arrest:
The strategy, it appears, is to drown out any discussion of his actual conduct by skipping right to the outrage about his arrest — even though Trump has not yet been arrested or charged. This approach involves convincing the public that his actions were unimportant and, therefore, any charges will be politically motivated.
Whether it's Trump's strategy or not, this approach also involves shifting attention to a different enemy: DA Bragg, along with the Democratic Party and the "radical leftists" who belong to it. It's the same approach we saw after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision was leaked: The real crisis, we were told, was not that the Supreme Court was about to take away a widely supported right that Americans had counted on for nearly half a century. It was that a liberal leaker -- Republicans assumed we'd all believe the leaker was a liberal -- had put a private document on public view and had thus endangered Supreme Court justices (or at least the Republican ones).

Republicans are good at this because they spend all their waking hours constructing and reinforcing narratives of Democratic perfidy. It's easy to fit any new event into these tales of evil.

Democrats just do stuff, and hope it will be well received based on the facts. Democrats' response to Republican narratives is usually to hope they'll simply go away on their own.

I understand that quite a few Democrats think this is the weakest of the many cases against Trump. But it wouldn't hurt to defend what Bragg is doing. The attacks won't stop.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:19 AM 0 comments

Sunday, March 19, 2023

THE PUDDING STORY WON'T HURT DeSANTIS'S CHANCES -- UNLESS ...

New York magazine's Margaret Hartmann is amused by the Ron DeSantis pudding story:
... Ron DeSantis has been hit with a food-related accusation so weird it may end his 2024 presidential bid before it officially starts. The Daily Beast reports that according to two sources, the Florida governor once ate chocolate pudding with three fingers:
The chatter over DeSantis’ public engagement has also surfaced past unflattering stories about his social skills—particularly, his propensity to devour food during meetings.

“He would sit in meetings and eat in front of people,” a former DeSantis staffer told The Daily Beast, “always like a starving animal who has never eaten before... getting shit everywhere.”

Enshrined in DeSantis lore is an episode from four years ago: During a private plane trip from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C., in March of 2019, DeSantis enjoyed a chocolate pudding dessert—by eating it with three of his fingers, according to two sources familiar with the incident.
Hartmann asks: Could this destroy DeSantis's presidential campaign? Maybe!
To be clear, I’m not saying that voters are going to hear this story and instantly decide they can’t vote for DeSantis. But I do think the image will lodge itself in people’s subconsciouses. Pretend you’re a GOP primary voter listening to the Florida governor touting his record on flouting public-health recommendations, harassing migrants, and ridding schools of “wokeness.” Sounds pretty good, right? Now picture those same ideas coming out of a man who’s been credibly accused of licking dessert from his paw like a cartoon bear. How do those talking points sound now?
But DeSantis admirers in the Republican electorate simply won't believe it. Republicans now proclaim that even well-sourced stories reported by multiple media outlets and backed by publicly accessible documents or videos are "fake news" if those stories conflict with right-wing beliefs and prejudices. So why would they believe this story?

But the report could hurt DeSantis -- if Donald Trump uses it as the basis for a nickname:

"Fingers."

Trump should start referring to the Florida governor as Ron "Fingers" DeSantis in his social media posts, especially now that he's back on Facebook and YouTube. He shouldn't explain why. He should just put the nickname out there and let Republican voters find out what it means.

If Trump alludes to the pudding story, then Republican voters will believe it -- or at least take it "seriously but not literally," which is the way they seemed to respond when Trump said that Ted Cruz's father was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. (Although I'm sure some voters GOP believed that literally.)

"Fingers" is a direct, unpretentious, blue-collar-sounding nickname. (I actually knew a "Fingers" when I was a kid -- a truck-driving colleague of my father's who had a mangled hand. When he died, the local paper put the nickname in his obituary.)

C'mon, Donnie. Do it. It's easier to spell than "DeSanctimonious."
Posted by Steve M. at 9:59 AM 0 comments

Saturday, March 18, 2023

A TRULY AWFUL POSSIBILITY FOR THE NO LABELS PRESIDENTIAL TICKET

Semafor's Benjy Sarlin is not worried about the possibility that a No Labels presidential campaign could elect Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis:


Yes, Kanye West was on the ballot in 2020 -- sort of.
On July 16, 2020, the [West] campaign filed a Statement of Candidacy with the Federal Election Commission. He entered the election after missing at least six states' deadlines to appear on the ballot as a third-party candidate....

West qualified for ballot access in 12 states.... The campaign sued for ballot access in five additional states (Arizona, Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia and West Virginia), and subsequently lost all appeals, gave up on four other states (Illinois, Montana, Missouri, and New Jersey), and missed the deadlines of a further 29 states, plus the District of Columbia.
Not only did West have limited ballot access, he barely campaigned. And he ran in a year when Democrats (and many swing voters) were desperate to defeat the incumbent Republican president.

There are elections in which Democratic and swing voters pull together because the GOP is in power and seems extremely unpalatable. In 2008, the desire to avoid a third GOP term after George W. Bush's disastrous second term overcame many Hillary Clinton voters' resentment of Barack Obama; in 2016, anti-Trump disgust led 81 million voters to rally around Joe Biden. But after Democrats have been in office for a while, it can be harder to prevent defections. That's what happened in 2000 (after eight years of Bill Clinton) and 2016 (after eight years of Obama): some progressive and moderate voters forgot how bad Republicans could be and helped another one to win.

It's not clear which kind of year 2024 will be. Is the memory of Trump's term fading, or will it still be fresh? If DeSantis is the nominee, will he seem like a break with Trumpism? We don't know what voters will think. I worry that they'll be complacent about the GOP, so I don't want a third-party candidate to peel off even one or two percent of the vote.

Who might be on a No Labels ticket? The Bulwark article Sarlin is criticizing offers some possibilities:
Fox News reports that No Labels is courting politicians like Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and Susan Collins as it seeks to build a so-called “unity ticket.”
One of the replies to Sarlin's tweet expresses skepticism about that last name:


Actually, it's not. In Maine in 2020, Biden won by 9 points -- and so did Collins. The evidence suggests that there were plenty of Biden-Collins ticket splitters.

It's possible that No Labels won't run a presidential campaign at all. It's also possible that No Labels will run a campaign with a ticket that doesn't have any big names.

I've predicted that the top of the ticket will go to former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, an anti-Trump Republican who's an honorary co-chair of No Labels. And if a Republican tops the ticket, I assume No Labels will want a Democrat in the VP slot.

My guess is that the Democrat could be New York's awful mayor, Eric Adams.

Why do I say this? The Bulwark piece has some information about the people who bankroll No Labels:
The leaders of No Labels may not be intending to elect Donald Trump or his Republican successor. But that could be the goal of some of their funders. While No Labels operates “dark money” PACs whose contributors are hidden, one of its backers has been billionaire Republican megadonor Nelson Peltz, a contributor to Georgia Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both defeated in 2020; election denier Sean Parnell, who was Trump’s original endorsed Senate candidate in Pennsylvania last year; Democrat-turned-Fox News contributor Tulsi Gabbard; and House Republican Majority Whip Steve Scalise. And the Daily Beast reported in 2018 that No Labels raised money from “recurring” megadonors including Trump supporter John Catsimatidis and Marc Rowan, a contributor to Lindsey Graham, Ron Johnson, and Mehmet Oz in the midterms.
(Emphasis added.)

Catsimatidis is the founder CEO of Gristedes, a successful New York-based supermarket chain that's made him a billionaire. He's also quite a fan of Adams, regularly praising him, chatting with him on the radio (Catsimatidis has a local radio show), and dining with him.


If No Labels goes through with this and can't get a nationally known "centrist" Democrat (or ex-Democrat) like Manchin or Sinema, Adams will probably do. He hangs out with Republicans. He used to be a registered Republican. He regularly challenges mainstream Democratic ideas. In the past month he's questioned the idea of separation of church and state, arguing that prayer in schools would end school gun violence. He's unpopular in his own city -- his job approval rating is 37%, according to a poll released in February -- yet he still attracts headlines like this:


And since he barely does anything as mayor, and wouldn't have to run for reelection until 2025, he'd probably be fine staying on the job and running for VP.

So that's my call: if there's a No Labels ticket, it will be Larry Hogan and Eric Adams. And even though the ticket will consist of a registered Republican and a faux Democrat, it could still peel off mostly moderate 2020 Biden voters. I hope it doesn't happen.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:18 PM 0 comments

WHY I DON'T THINK THERE'LL BE RIOTS ON TUESDAY

Donald Trump hasn't been interviewed on Fox News in months, but now rumors are flying, so here's Fox's lead story:


And Fox isn't just reporting the bare facts -- there's an extra twist:
Fox Corp. anchor John Roberts told viewers Friday afternoon that if Donald Trump is indicted he might be handcuffed....

“Same sources familiar with the planning said they will go over security preparations in and around the courthouse in lower Manhattan. Secret Service will take the lead in what they will allow or will not allow, the source cautioned, mentioning for instance, that the decision to handcuff the president, the former president, or not, they will set the tone and will escort him into the courtroom.”
Just when the Murdochs thought they were out, Trump pulls them back in. They want to rid themselves of him, but a possible indictment is even more exciting than a Florida social studies textbook with Rosa Parks identified as Black. Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley -- they can't compete. Not even Vivek "Bomb Mexico" Ramaswamy can compete.

Trump says he'll be arrested on Tuesday:



Maggie Haberman and her New York Times colleagues aren't sure about that:
Although prosecutors working for the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, have signaled that an indictment of Mr. Trump could be imminent, there was no immediate indication as to why the former president appeared confident that he would be arrested Tuesday. People with knowledge of the matter have said that at least one more witness is expected to testify in front of the grand jury, which could slightly delay any indictment.

Three people close to Mr. Trump said that the former president’s team had no specific knowledge about when an indictment might come or when an arrest could be anticipated. One of those people, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said that Mr. Trump’s advisers’ best guess was that it could happen around Tuesday, and that someone may have relayed that to him, but that they also had made clear to one another that they didn’t know a specific time frame.
Trump writes about this as if it were a leak to the media, but the media seems not to have known about this until Trump posted this message. On one hand, it's plausible that one of the many right-wingers in law enforcement would leak accurate information to Trump. However, I think it's more likely that Trump wants intimidating protests in advance of any arrest. But will he get them?

I don't think he will. There hasn't been anything like January 6 since January 6. The many arrests and convictions have scared the Trumpers.

Remember, these people are cowards. They might be true believers, but most of them aren't willing to declare war on the system they think has unfairly persecuted Trump if declaring war means putting their bodies on the line and accepting the possible consequences. They didn't go into the Capitol on January 6 believing that death or imprisonment would be a price worth paying for the cause. They went in because they thought they'd get away with it. They thought they'd accelerate the process of getting the election results reversed and the Establishment would back off.

I also think they won't riot on Tuesday because this isn't a last stand. Notice that they rioted in January 2021, not in November or December 2020. Until January 6, they assumed that the mighty Trump would find a way to beat the Deep State, so they didn't need to riot. I suspect that's how they'll feel about a Trump arrest: that it's early days and he'll beat the rap.

And what will happen to the polls in the event of an arrest? I assume Trump will get an immediate boost in the Republican nomination contest, though I think the uptick in his numbers will fade as more Republican voters decide he can't win the general election. However, I don't think the losses will exceed the gains. Six or eight weeks after the indictment, I think he'll be approximately where he is now in the primary polls. He'll slip in general election polls, but not enough for us to count him out. A second or third indictment might take him out of contention, but this alone won't do it.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:56 AM 0 comments

Friday, March 17, 2023

DAVID BROOKS ISN'T GOING TO GET HIS "NICE" REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE

In his column today, David Brooks acknowledges that the two front-runners in the race for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are sour, angry prophets of American doom. However, he thinks Republican voters could conceivably reject both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Why? Because successful Republican governors are so nice.
There are two different narratives running through the Republican Party right now. The first is the Trumpian populist narrative we’re all familiar with: American carnage ... the elites have betrayed us ... the left is destroying us ... I am your retribution.

On the other hand, Republican governors from places like Georgia, Virginia and New Hampshire often have a different story to tell. They are running growing, prospering states....

These different narratives yield different political messages. The bellicose populists put culture war issues front and center. The conservative governors certainly play the values card, especially when schools try to usurp the role of parents, but they are strongest when emphasizing pocketbook issues and quality of life issues.

Gov. Brian Kemp, for example, is making Georgia a hub for green manufacturing, attracting immense investments in electric vehicle technologies. In his inaugural address he vowed to make Georgia “the electric mobility capital of America.”
Well, that's nice -- most politicians (Trump excepted) try to sound positive and upbeat in inaugural addresses. But do we remember Brian Kemp's advertising from his first gubernatorial campaign in 2018? The brandishing of guns he said no one would take from him? The claim that he was ready to round up "criminal illegals" in his pickup truck?



Kemp's first ad of the 2024 campaign was a defiant defense of an "election reform" bill that enraged voting rights advocates all over the country and got the Major Leage Baseball all-star game pulled from Georgia:



Kemp ran on that election bill as well as on a six-week abortion ban and a law permitting Georgians to carry concealed weapons without a permit, and he attacked his Democratic opponent as a police defunder:


So please don't tell me Kemp is in an entirely different category from those nasty culture warriors DeSantis and Trump.

Brooks continues:
The two narratives also produce radically different emotional vibes. The Donald Trump/Tucker Carlson orbit is rife with indignation and fury. Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin and the previous Arizona governor, Doug Ducey, are warm, upbeat people who actually enjoy their fellow human beings.
Yes, but it's not clear whether any of these guys could win a Republican primary today. Youngkin won the gubernatorial nomination in 2021 because Virginia Republicans decided not to have a traditional primary, which quite possibly would have been won by a Trumpist lunatic. Sununu and Ducey were both recruited to run for the U.S. Senate in 2022, but both had alienated Trump and decided to run, presumably because it wasn't clear that they could win their primaries.

Also, Brooks writes about Youngkin as if culture war, particularly on the schools, was an incidental detail in his gubernatorial campaign rather than the centerpiece:



So who could win the nomination if Trump and DeSantis both falter, according to Brooks?
Maybe eyes turn to Tim Scott, an effective, optimistic senator from South Carolina.
You mean this non-culture warrior?
“Pretend you were our nation’s greatest enemy,” [Scott] told supporters. “Say you wanted a blueprint to ruin America. What would you put in it? First, you’d take aim at our patriotism. You’d amplify attention-seekers who say America is an evil country. Make it easy to get rich and famous by feeding the empty calories of anger to people who are starving for hope.”

“In other words, if you wanted to ruin America, you’d keep doing exactly what Joe Biden has let the far Left do to our country for the last two years,” he added.
Angry doomsayers own the party, whether or not David Brooks wants to believe it.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:08 PM 0 comments

DOES RON DeSANTIS BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION? SOME OF HIS MOST PROMINENT EDUCATION ALLIES DON'T.

Yesterday The New York Times reported that the state of Florida, which has already vetted math textbooks for "wokeness," is now in the process of examining textbooks in social science.
In the last few months, as part of the review process, a small army of state experts, teachers, parents and political activists have combed thousands of pages of text — not only evaluating academic content, but also flagging anything that could hint, for instance, at critical race theory.

A prominent conservative education group, whose members volunteered to review textbooks, objected to a slew of them, accusing publishers of “promoting their bias.” At least two publishers declined to participate altogether.
The process has textbook companies so intimidated that one submitted a version of a textbook in which Rosa Parks's race isn't mentioned.


Here's what the Times tells us about the "prominent conservative education group":
The Florida Citizens Alliance, a conservative group, has urged the state to reject 28 of the 38 textbooks that its volunteers reviewed, including more than a dozen by McGraw Hill, a major national publisher.

The alliance, whose co-founders served on Mr. DeSantis’s education advisory team during his transition to governor, has helped lead a sweeping effort to remove school library books deemed as inappropriate, including many with L.G.B.T.Q. characters. It trained dozens of volunteers to review social studies textbooks.

In a summary of its findings submitted to the state last month, the group complained that a McGraw Hill fifth-grade textbook, for example, mentioned slavery 189 times within a few chapters alone. Another objection: An eighth-grade book gave outsize attention to the “negative side” of the treatment of Native Americans, while failing to give a fuller account of their own acts of violence, such as the Jamestown Massacre of 1622, in which Powhatan warriors killed more than 300 English colonists.
But there's more to know. For starters, it should be noted that the Florida Citizens Alliance wasn't founded as an "education group" at all. As a 2017 Daily Beast story notes, it began primarily as a gun advocacy group, and its focus was switched to education in an effort to attract more members:
[Steve] Vernon, a retired IBM contracts negotiator and Marine Corps veteran, ... joined the Florida Citizens’ Alliance as a board member in 2012, initially inspired by the organization’s gun-rights advocacy. In fidelity to the IBM corporate ethos, Vernon and others in the Alliance recognized that the group wasn’t optimizing its potential appeal to the Florida citizenry, so they commissioned a team of consultants to evaluate the group’s strategy for obtaining new members.

“That’s when we decided we were a ‘Liberty Education’ organization,” Vernon said at his dining room table, reflecting on the organization’s decision to give up its laser focus on Second Amendment causes and begin promoting the teaching of conservative values to children. “Membership increased significantly when we started saying, ‘Look at what’s in our textbooks,’” Vernon said.
"Liberty education" means, among other things, challenging schoolbooks that present evolution and human-caused climate change as accepted fact.
In [a 2018] Education Week article, Keith Flaugh, listed as the FLCA Managing Director and self-described FLCA activist, is quoted as saying, “Man-made global warming [is] presented as fact when it is still very much a theory!” He’s also cited as remarking “Books that treat evolution as a proven science are discriminating and bully children and families against their religious beliefs.” According to his LinkedIn profile, Flaugh is a former IBM employee who says, “Ask your child or grandchild what they are being taught in our public schools? Man-made global warming is not proven, yet most of you will find our kids are being indoctrinated with the Progressive worldview.”
In 2018, Flaugh and the Florida Citizens Alliance unsuccessfully challenged science textbooks in Collier County, Florida, on these grounds:
Keith Flaugh, co-director of the Florida Citizens’ Alliance, a conservative group that is suing the school district over social studies textbooks adopted last year, wrote in his objection that there are “many very credible scientists” who have proved the impossibility of evolution.

Flaugh cited the following websites as sources for his pro-creationism stance: Godandscience.org; Creation.com; Christiananswers.net; and Conservapedia.com.
This might be a good time to point out that Flaugh is one of the two officers of the Alliance who were appointed to then-Governor-Elect Ron DeSantis's education advisory committee in 2018. (The other was Rick Stevens.) Which makes me wonder whether DeSantis would acknowledge that evolution is settled science. (I'm sure he'll declare himself a climate change denialist on the presidential campaign trail.)

The Alliance is also obsessed with "pornography" in schools.


Among the offending titles, according to the group: the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes, which the Alliance describes as “not age-appropriate for any grade level using public taxpayer dollars.” (The author of Angela's Ashes was Frank McCourt, who taught for fifteen years at New York City's Stuyvesant High School, which established a scholarship in his honor.) Also on the list: Kate Chopin's novel about infidelity, The Awakening, which is not pornographic or explicit and was published in 1899. (Give the Alliance credit for not limiting its censorship efforts to material about LGBTQ and non-white people.)

The Alliance is also upset when a textbook doesn't blame slavery in America on Muslims in Africa. From an Alliance report:


A few years back, on the Alliance's website, Keith Flaugh posted Pamela Geller's "Imposing Islam in Your Public School In Six Easy Steps," which portrays recommendations for accommodation of Islam in schools -- e.g., allowing Muslim students to take Islamic holy days off -- as indoctrination. Also available on the group's site: a post titled "The 14th, 15th, & 19th Amendments Were Unnecessary And Dangerous. Radical Thought? The Truth Quite Often Is." The author is KrisAnne Hall, an associate of the Oath Keepers, Ammon Bundy, and Mike Flynn who believes county sheriffs have the legal right to ignore federal law.

Now keep telling me that Ron DeSantis is less of a threat to America than Donald Trump.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:43 AM 0 comments

Thursday, March 16, 2023

A PREDICTION: JUDGE KACSMARYK WON'T BAN THE ABORTION PILL UNTIL AT LEAST APRIL 5

CNN's Tierney Sneed reports:
Over the course of about four hours of arguments, a federal judge in Texas asked questions [yesterday] that suggested he is seriously considering undoing the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a medication abortion drug and the agency’s moves to relax the rules around its use.

But the judge, US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, also indicated he was thinking through scenarios in which he could keep the drug’s 2000 approval intact while blocking other FDA rules.

Anti-abortion doctors and medical associations are seeking a preliminary injunction that would require the FDA to withdraw or suspend its approval of the drug, mifepristone, and that would block the agency’s more recent regulatory changes making the pills more accessible.
There's no real suspense here. Kacsmaryk is a Republican operative and will ban mifepristone because he can. The only question is when.
Kacsmaryk wrapped up the hearing without any explicit timeline for when he’ll rule, telling the parties he would issue an order and opinion “as soon as possible.”
I predict that he won't rule this month. In fact, he won't rule until at least April 5.

Why? Because there's an election in Wisconsin on April 4 that will decide the balance of that state's Supreme Court.
Dan Kelly, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, faces Democratic-backed Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County judge, on April 4. The winner will determine majority control of the court, with the fate of abortion access, legislative redistricting, voting rights, rules for elections and other major issues at stake.
Protasiewicz has made her support for abortion rights the centerpiece of her campaign. The Republican Party and its billionaire donors remember how the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs decision motivated Democratic voters in 2022, so they know that if mifepristone is banned nationwide before this Wisconsin election takes place, Protasiewicz is almost certain to win. And that would put the things they really care about -- such as maintaining Wisconsin's status as the most gerrymandered state in the union -- at risk. What matters to them is mostly the preservation of the plutocracy. A liberal majority on the state's Supreme Court would threaten the ongoing Republican project of diluting Democratic voting power. Eventually, pro-plutocrat laws, particularly those passed in the Scott Walker era, could be at risk. Gerrymandering also makes Wisconsin's delegation to the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly Republican despite the fact that it's a 50-50 swing state that just reelected a Democratic governor, almost elected a Democratic U.S. senator, and chose Joe Biden over Donald Trump in 2020.

Oh, and:
The [Wisconsin Supreme Court] came within one vote of overturning President Joe Biden’s win in the state in 2020....
Kelly was an adviser to the state GOP on election matters during and after the 2020 election. He was advising the party while the scheme to advance fake Trump electors was in the works. If he wins on April 4, he'd be in a position to help tip the state's electoral votes to the Republican candidate in 2024.

Protasiewicz is a strong candidate and is might win anyway, but the GOP doesn't want to make it any easier for her. So I expect Kacsmaryk to delay his ruling until after the polls close in Wisconsin.
Posted by Steve M. at 12:45 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, March 15, 2023

A REPUBLICAN CAN BE VERY EXTREME WITHOUT BEING TOO EXTREME TO WIN

I want to believe this about Ron DeSantis:


An idea echoed by David Frum:
DeSantis is a machine engineered to win the Republican presidential nomination. The hardware is a lightly updated version of donor-pleasing mechanics from the Paul Ryan era. The software is newer. DeSantis operates on the latest culture-war code: against vaccinations, against the diversity industry, against gay-themed books in school libraries. The packaging is even more up-to-the-minute. Older models—Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush—made some effort to appeal to moderates and independents. None of that from DeSantis. He refuses to even speak to media platforms not owned by Rupert Murdoch. His message to the rest of America is more of the finger-pointing disdain he showed last year for high-school students who wore masks when he visited a college.

The problem that Republicans confront with this newly engineered machine is this: Have they built themselves a one-stage rocket—one that achieves liftoff but never reaches escape velocity?
I want to believe that a candidate who has this much contempt for Americans who disagree with him couldn't possibly win the presidency. But then I remember 2016, when just such a candidate actually won the presidency. You'll remind me that Donald Trump lost the popular vote, and that he had the Russians, James Comey, and the email-obsessed mainstream media on his side. But then in 2020, after spending four years displaying the same contempt for voters outside his base, Trump got 11 million more votes than in 2016 and came within about 42,000 votes of a 269-269 Electoral College tie, which would have led to a vote in the House giving him a second term.

Frum notes that policies DeSantis supports have alienated voters even in his state, where he just won reelection in a 20-point landslide:
Florida Republicans will soon pass—and DeSantis pledged he would sign—a law banning abortion after six weeks. That bill is opposed by 57 percent of those surveyed even inside Florida. Another poll found that 75 percent of Floridians oppose the ban. It also showed that 77 percent oppose permitless concealed carry, which DeSantis supports, and that 61 percent disapprove of his call to ban the teaching of critical race theory as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion policies on college campuses. As the political strategist Simon Rosenberg noted: “Imagine how these play outside FL.”
But the evidence of the 2022 midterms is that even extremely offputting Republicans can be contenders. Herschel Walker got 48.5% of the vote in the Georgia Senate election, then got 48.6% in the runoff. Blake Masters got 46.5% of the vote in the Arizona Senate election. Kari Lake got 49.7% of the vote in the Arizona gubernatorial election.

Remember, the 2020 presidential election was a nail-biter despite the fact that Joe Biden won the popular vote by a 4-point, 7-million-vote margin. If Republicans are all but assured of winning Florida, Texas, and Ohio, even a 4-point popular-vote win might not be enough to guarantee Biden an Electoral College victory in 2024.

I can't predict how the 2024 election will play out. Biden might win because the GOP nominee seems too extreme to too many voters. But don't assume that DeSantis-level extremism guarantees defeat in the general election.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:01 PM 0 comments

RON DeSANTIS: AN ECHO, NOT A CHOICE?

Earlier this week, I was thinking about that Trump suck-up TV ad Ron DeSantis ran during the 2018 gubernatorial primary -- the one where he reads The Art of the Deal to one of his kids and "builds the wall" with another one:



The ad appears to have been effective -- DeSantis won the primary by 20 points, and he went on to win the general election. But for the moment, at least, it sent a message about DeSantis: Like Lindsey Graham or Mike Pence, he was a beta to Trump's alpha.

Since then, however, he's been trying to replace Trump as the president of red America. His strategy has been to be the right's biggest hero on issues that were ignored by Trump, or that weren't a focus of the right in the Trump years: critical race theory, trans youth, "wokeness." It's been working for DeSantis. He's seen by many on the right as the new boss. Even the ones who prefer Trump in 2024 seem to see DeSantis as America's future alpha authoritarian.

But DeSantis's Putin appeasement on the subject of Ukraine makes him look like a beta again. He looks like a follower of Trump, not a leader.

Maybe the base doesn't care. Maybe he'll just be seen as properly engaging in Correct Thinking, and no one will care that he's chasing Trump. Maybe Republican voters will pay more attention to the cutting-edge ways he's distinguishing himself from Trump and other GOP presidential hopefuls. (Will his state really pull the liquor license of the Hyatt Regency Miami because it hosted a Christmas-themed drag show, with children reportedly in attendance? Children were allowed to attend if accompanied by their parents, but DeSantis loves parental "freedom" until it becomes the freedom to do something DeSantis doesn't approve of.)

DeSantis may have seen this as just a box he had to check as he forges his own path to the nomination, but he's being potrayed as a follower, not a leader. We'll see how that plays out.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:43 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 14, 2023

TRUMP AND DeSANTIS AREN'T THE ONLY PUTIN POODLES IN THE POTENTIAL GOP PRESIDENTIAL FIELD

I'm sure you know about this:
Defending Ukraine against Russia’s invasion is not a vital U.S. interest, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said in a statement to Fox News made public Monday.

“While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” DeSantis said in response to a questionnaire about the war Fox News reporters posed to several declared and potential Republican presidential candidates.
NBC News says that DeSantis "broke with many in his party Monday." The New York Times says DeSantis "has sharply broken with Republicans who are determined to defend Ukraine against Russia’s invasion." The implication is that most of the party disagrees with DeSantis -- and Donald Trump -- on this subject.

But DeSantis and Trump aren't as out of sync with the party's presidential hopefuls as you'd think.

Questions about Ukraine were posed to quite a few declared and possible Republican presidential candidates. Tucker Carlson posted the responses on Twitter. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem -- a strong contender for the VP slot if Trump is the nominee -- sounded quite similar to the two front-runners:
Q: Is opposing Russia in Ukraine a vital American national strategic interest?

A: “The primary external threat to the United States in Communist China. Our opposition to Russia has heightened this threat for a number of reasons. One, it’s pushing Russia into an alliance with China – meaning Russia may soon draw from China’s large weapon arsenal. Two, we’re weakening our own military by sending weapons to a corrupt country. And three, we’re taking our eyes off the ball and allowing China to put favors in their bank. This should be Europe’s fight, not ours. We should not waste taxpayer dollars at the risk of nuclear war.”
Got that? Ukraine is "a corrupt country." This is "Europe's fight, not ours." To aid Ukraine is to "waste taxpayer dollars."

More from Noem:
Biden has this fantasy that he can do the same kind of thing to Russia that Ronald Reagan did to the Soviet Union; that, somehow, through American military weight, we’re going to bring Putin to his knees. His fantasy is wasting a lot of American money and killing too many people.

... We’ve already over-extended ourselves in our largesse to Ukraine. And the Ukrainian government is not made up of angels – they have a long history of corruption scandals, and recent news indicates that this issue is ongoing.

The federal government is closing in on $200 billion in aid to Ukraine. We haven’t spent that much to protect our border in the last 5 years combined. We must question whether we should prop up a corrupt regime to our own financial detriment.
Texas governor Greg Abbott probably isn't running for president, but he was sent the questionnaire, and he's also a skeptic:
President Biden’s blank check foreign policy in Ukraine has drawn nothing but ridicule and disdain from our adversaries and has diverted funding from essential needs in the United States. Throwing money at Ukraine with no accountability or objective is clearly failing. Worse is that President Biden’s approach to Ukraine has been at the expense of underfunding, or ignoring, priorities at home. Before he sends any more money or assets to Ukraine's border, he must enforce our immigration laws and secure our southern border.
Even Tim Scott, who's clearly supportive of aid to Ukraine, wants to sound like a skeptic:
You have Americans who are frustrated because of the lack of leadership on domestic issues that only exacerbates the situation we see today in Ukraine. Here's where we need the president to lead: what is our nation's vital interest in Ukraine? And it should start with degrading the Russian military is in our vital national interest. In addition to that, we are not going to simply degrade the Russian military. We are gonna have accountability for every single dollar spent. There is no such thing as a blank check. We are going to make sure that there's accountability.
And finally, I want to draw attention to the answer from one of the few declared candidates, Vivek Ramaswamy.

I realize that Ramaswamy is making no headway in the polls. I realize that he's probably running because he thinks a higher profile will make his future business endeavors and polemical books more successful. (His two previous books were Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam and Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence.) I take his candidacy seriously not because I expect him to win a lot of delegates -- I don't think he'll win any -- but because he's a frequent guest on Fox News. Fox and the right-wing plutocrat community undoubtedly want Ramaswamy on the debate stage in the hope that he'll attract votes to the GOP from the growing South Asian population in America. Apart from that, the 37-year-old Ramaswamy is just the kind of youngish finance bro Rupert Murdoch tries to appeal to at Fox and at his New York newspapers. And the fact that Ramaswamy regularly denounces the "climate religion" makes him especially appealing to plutocrats who want America to be yoked to a fossil fuel economy forever.

So what's Ramaswamy's take on Ukraine? Like Noem, he thinks this is Europe's fight, not ours:
The Europeans need to be the main upholders of European security. The Europeans, starting with the Germans, need to do more for themselves. Unfortunately, the Germans chose to ‘go green’ on energy, and so they’re looking to us to shoulder the load on Ukraine, as well as defense in general. We spend close to 4 percent of our GDP on defense, and the Germans spend barely over 1 percent. Ukraine is in their backyard, not ours. If the Germans and other European countries can’t or won’t produce their own energy, they should buy natural gas from Louisiana and Texas—and from Pennsylvania and my home state of Ohio....

Ukraine isn’t in the top five of American foreign policy priorities right now, and yet merely questioning whether the money we’ve spent on the war is being done effectively or perhaps even prolonging the war is seen as disloyal. We get accused by both Democrats and Republicans of being “Putin sympathizers.” The Washington uni-party and defense contractors want this conflict to go on forever; for the sake of the global economy and peace, we should be doing everything we can to end it tomorrow.
There's a widespread belief that the GOP's Ukraine war skeptics are isolationists, but they all call for at least a cold war with China, while Ramaswamy seems ready for war that isn't cold with both China and -- yes, really -- Mexico:
The main thing should be the main thing: focus on China. China wants the Ukraine war to last as long as possible to deplete Western military capacity before invading Taiwan. It’s working: we think we appear stronger by helping Ukraine, but we actually become weaker vis-à-vis China.

We’ve spent 20 years droning people in caves in the Middle East and Central Asia and have little to show for it. We should be taking out the people who have caused the death of more than 100,000 Americans every year–the Mexican drug cartels....

It’s time to secure our border before taking care of someone else’s. This would be an appropriate and morally justified use of military force: secure our southern border and annihilate the drug cartels responsible for countless American deaths on our own soil. We’ve discovered a big problem on our end—the weakness of our industrial base. I’m disturbed by reports that our aid to Ukraine has drained away munitions and other material that we could potentially need for our own defense.

There is opportunity cost in depleting these defense resources–especially in protecting our own soil and border from Mexican cartels or in the case of Communist China.
He's serious. He wants us to be ready for a shooting war with China, and also for a shooting war with Mexico, which makes him sound a lot like Lindsey Graham, Dan Crenshaw, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who've all recently raised the possibility of using the U.S. military in Mexico.

I'm old enough to remember the Reagan presidency and the terms of both George Bushes, so I strongly doubt that the same people who wanted liberals hanged for treason if we didn't want to fight the Contras or go to war with Saddam (twice) now sincerely oppose American interventionism of all kinds. I think they'll eagerly support a war if we oppose it and one of their heroes starts it. Republican Ukraine skeptics invariably bring up the border and China. That leads me to believe that Ramaswamy's pounding of the China and Mexico war drums is a preview of tomorrow's Republicanism today.
Posted by Steve M. at 3:13 PM 0 comments

BECAUSE THEY KNOW THEIR READERS HAVE NO IDEA HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS

I see that the right-wing press is doing another "partners at huge law firms are collectively responsible for everything bad done by any client of any partner" smear. This one is in the New York Post:
Democrat Jon Tester to rub elbows with SVB law firm partner at Palo Alto soiree
(According to the right-wing media, Republicans "attend fundraisers," but Democrats "rub elbows" at "soirees.")
Montana Sen. Jon Tester will rub elbows Monday night at a ritzy fundraiser with a partner from Silicon Valley Bank’s legal firm — three days after the California bank suffered the second-largest financial collapse in US history.
Was this lawyer an executive at Silicon Valley Bank? No. Was he personally responsible for the bank's legal strategy? No. He was just a partner at the bank's law firm -- which has 305 partners.
Michael J. Danaher, who represents many venture capital clients for Wilson, Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati....
So Danaher doesn't represent the bank -- he represents venture capital clients in tech. The Post assumes its readers think that's close enough for demonization.
... is hosting the 66-year-old Democrat at the posh event in Palo Alto, where donors have been asked to pay between $250 and $6,600 to attend.
$250! A king's ransom!
Executives from an array of venture-backed tech companies will also host Tester....

They include Jon Foster, a board member of the driverless, electric vehicle company Udelv....
But I thought right-wingers liked executives of electric vehicle companies! Or maybe they only like the one who's now a full-time social media troll.
Before its fall, Silicon Valley Bank had $209 billion in assets.
Here's the thing I don't understand about the right's "SVB failed because it was woke" messaging: If SVB's "wokeness" was so bad for business, how did the bank become successful in the first place? A week ago, it was the 16th-largest bank in America. Was it not "woke" until last Friday?
Douglas Clark, a managing partner at Wilson, Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati, lists SVB as a client.
Then we should certainly hang Michael Danaher and Jon Tester, right?
The firm also provided a guidance sheet for its wealthy list of international clients that may have been affected by SVB’s failure.
Omigod! These people told clients how to limit losses in the midst of a banking crisis! Is there no limit to their evil?
Wilson, Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati has worked on behalf of many investment banks and venture capital firms in the Silicon Valley region since its founding in 1961. Founder Larry Sonsini previously served on SVB’s board of directors in the mid-200s.
That's supposed to be the mid-2000s -- no, the founding partner wasn't advising SVB when the Goths were invading Thrace. But please note that Sosini joined SVB's board in 2003. Also note that Sosini is not Michael Danaher.
The law firm and SVB ... agreed last month to sponsor a fellowship “to address systemic racial, gender, and other underrepresentation in talent across the life sciences and biotech industry.”
What the Murdoch press wants you to believe is that companies that express a commitment to diversity inevitably fail, while all the good companies avoid that woke stuff like the plague. A couple of days ago, at the end of this post, I showed you some of the Fox Corporation's boasts about diversity. The New York Post isn't part of Fox Corporation -- it's part of Murdoch's other big firm, News Corp. Guess what, folks?


And, of course, we're told:
Reports on Monday showed that the head of risk management at SVB spearheaded several “woke” initiatives in recent years — a move some Republicans faulted the bank for pursuing instead of focusing on safe investments for depositors.
Actually, Jay Ersapah, the executive in question, was the head of risk management for SVB overseas. As a commenter here noted on Sunday, Ersapah was based in the U.K. and her work had nothing to do with the collapse of SVB in the U.S.:
SVB UK was legally and operationally a stand-alone entity from the U.S. arm. (SVB U.K. secured a U.K. banking license in 2012 but became a U.K. stand-alone bank in August 2022 and has 700 full-time employees.)
In Murdoch Land, they know SVB collapsed because it held too many low-yielding long-term Treasury bonds at a time of rising interest rates. But the right-wing media and the Republican Party don't rely on facts to win arguments. They create misperceptions, then rely on those misperceptions to set the terms of the debate among people who haven't managed to master the facts (i.e., most Americans). Being well informed is hard work. News organizations (and political parties) should help citizens understand what's happening in their world. The right-wing press and the GOP do nothing of the sort. They misinform and mislead, because that's what they think it takes to win.

The Post didn't invent the trick of blaming law firm partners for what clients do. It's an old favorite on the right. I told you in August about a "scoop" at The Federalist: that Hunter Biden is represented by a lawyer at a firm where Liz Cheney's husband is a partner. But he was one of 911 partners at the firm. Consumers of right-wing media don't understand how any of this works, and the people who report for the right-wing media want to keep it that way.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:04 AM 0 comments

Monday, March 13, 2023

IT'S SIMPLE, DEMOCRATS: STOP FIGHTING IN PUBLIC

This CNN story appeared yesterday. The headline seemed promising:
Democratic leaders want the party to stop its Kamala Harris pile-on ahead of 2024
Did it finally dawn on Democrats that public infighting makes the party look bad in the eyes of voters? Nahhh:
Elizabeth Warren has called twice to apologize. Over a month later, Kamala Harris hasn’t called back.

In a local Boston radio interview in late January, Warren was enthusiastic about President Joe Biden running for reelection but, asked if Biden should keep Harris as his running mate, she said, “I really want to defer to what makes Biden comfortable on his team.”

The incident and its aftermath, different details of which were described to CNN by multiple people close to the Massachusetts senator and people close to the vice president, has fed an ongoing breakdown of accusations and purported misunderstandings.

“Pretty insulting,” is how one person close to Harris described the feelings of many in the vice president’s office and in her wider orbit.
I'm not going to judge pass judgment on what Warren said -- maybe it was a deliberate slight, or maybe she didn't want to back Harris only to learn that Biden intended to replace her. Either way, I understand why Harris and her supporters would feel insulted, although I think a rapproachement ought to be possible.

But why is anyone talking about this to a CNN reporter?

Just shut up. Don't discuss this with the media. The only possible result is yet another "Democrats in disarray" story.

There's more. This:
“Right now, she seems to be an albatross,” fretted one state Democratic Party chair.
And this:
While Warren may not have meant to express doubts, the Zoom call organized by a onetime Biden Senate speechwriter and attended by Hollywood donors, executives and actors, including Helen Hunt, Ron Livingston and “Beverly Hills, 90210” star Gabrielle Carteris, was full of them.

Harris is a huge liability, they complained to former California Sen. Barbara Boxer, according to two people on the call. She would hurt Biden’s chances, because people will focus on her, given his age. How, one asked Boxer, do they get Biden to replace her?

Boxer – whom Harris succeeded in the Senate in 2016 – gave a muted response.

“If that’s how you feel, you should let Biden know,” Boxer told them, according to people on the call. Asked about the comments, Boxer told CNN, “I said it was the president’s choice.”
Nobody on the call should have said anything to a reporter. How hard is this to understand?

A version of the story is -- of course -- on the fromt page of the Fox News website, under the headline "Kamala Harris Won't Speak to Elizabeth Warren After 'Pretty Insulting' 2024 Snub: Report." This gives Fox the excuse to cite an earlier Fox story and repeat a disparaging quote from The New York Times:
Democrats have expressed concern over Harris's "basic political skills" in recent weeks ahead of a potential 2024 announcement.

Democratic fundraiser John Morgan told the New York Times in February that Harris' weakness as vice president will be "one of the most hard-hitting arguments against Biden."

"I can’t think of one thing she’s done except stay out of the way and stand beside him at certain ceremonies," he said.
Democrats, please: For the good of the party, don't contribute to stories like this. Starve them of oxygen. Keep your negative thoughts about fellow Democrats to yourself.
Posted by Steve M. at 2:25 PM 0 comments

Sunday, March 12, 2023

THE RIGHT'S ZOMBIE LIE ABOUT THE GEORGE FLOYD PROTESTS

The Guardian reports that Kevin McCarthy still intends to play stall ball on the release of the January 6 security videos:
The Republican speaker of the US House, Kevin McCarthy, said on Sunday he would “slowly roll out” to networks other than Fox News more than 40,000 hours of security footage from the January 6 attack on Congress.

“We will slowly roll out to every individual news agency,” McCarthy told Sunday Morning Futures, a show broadcast by Fox News. “They can come see the tapes as well. Let everyone see them to bring their own judgment.”

McCarthy has only let Fox News see the tapes so far, giving access to the primetime host Tucker Carlson.
It's disgraceful that our supine mainstream media hasn't been angrily demanding access to these tapes since the day we learned Carlson was getting exclusive access. McCarthy is normalizing the idea of selective access to information generated by public agencies, just in time for a possible second Donald Trump term or a first Ron DeSantis term.

McCarthy compounded the offense to democracy by trotting out a whataboutist lie about January 6 that just won't die:
McCarthy also wielded a common rightwing talking point, likening January 6 – a violent assault linked to nine deaths including law enforcement suicides – to protests for racial justice after the police murder of George Floyd in summer 2020 which sometimes turned violent.

McCarthy said: “Why did I watch federal courts, why did I watch cities burn, federal agencies or something, and nobody arrested there? I think we should have equal justice across this country.”
He was joined in this by a congresswoman who's becoming the next-gen Lindsey Graham -- Nancy Mace, a Republican who presents herself as a reasonable moderate rather than a Marjorie Taylor Greene-style frother, which means she's endlessly invited on Sunday talk shows, where, like Senator Graham, she trots out a lite version of dishonest right-wing talking points:
Nancy Mace, a relatively moderate Republican from South Carolina, tried to make the same point on CNN’s State of the Union.

... Mace [said]: “We saw very few arrests when there were attacks by ... members of Antifa and Black Lives Matter...."
McCarthy said there was "nobody arrested." Mace said there were "very few arrests." In fact:
A June 22, 2020, article from The Washington Post tallied over 14,000 arrests made since May 27. The Hill reported over 17,000 arrests had been made in the first two weeks of protests.
Most of the arrests were for minor offenses. However:
An Associated Press review of court documents in more than 300 federal cases stemming from the protests ... shows that dozens of people charged have been convicted of serious crimes and sent to prison.

The AP found that more than 120 defendants across the United States have pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial of federal crimes including rioting, arson and conspiracy. More than 70 defendants who’ve been sentenced so far have gotten an average of about 27 months behind bars. At least 10 received prison terms of five years or more.
McCarthy and Mace's voters don't know this because the right-wing media sources they rely on for news don't want them to know it.

By comparison:
At least 1,000 people so far have been arrested on charges related ot the Jan. 6, 2021, riot ...

About 518 people have pleaded guilty to federal crimes so far, the DOJ said....

Around one third of Capitol riot defendants have been charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding police during the attack, the DOJ said. About 420 defendants have already been adjudicated and sentenced for their criminal activity. Another 53 people were found guilty at trials, DOJ said.
It's true that most of the people arrested in the George Floyd protests faced minor charges:
... The Hill reported most of those protesters were booked not for violent crimes, but for low-level offenses such as violating curfews. Obstructing roadways and carrying open containers were other reasons for the arrests, as well as “failure to disperse.”
Right-wingers talk as if entire cities were burned to the ground in those protests. That's not true. However, there was quite a bit of damage as a result of those protests -- $2 billion worth, versus $2.88 million in financial losses in the Capitol riot.

But none of the George Floyd protests threatened our system of government. The Capitol rioters threatened to overturn a democratic election. Window-smashing knuckleheads in Portland might have done a lot of property damage, which is very bad, but the Capitol riot was far more of a threat to our nation.

Of course no one corrected McCarthy on Fox, but someone should have corrected Mace on CNN. And The Guardian should have pointed out that the two of them were wrong. This zombie lie needs to be challenged whenever it's told.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:37 PM 0 comments
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